March Ginnah Howard The minute Bertie dragged the shampooer out of the closet to take to the Grumbach’s, the damn dogs started: Dart’s skinny little legs tore round and round the table, yip-yipping like a maniac, his toenails scratching at the linoleum; Hurley bounced on the back of the armchair, pulling down the chenille cover she’d just straightened. Even Delilah joined the hullabaloo, her beagle bawl adding to the clamor. “Pipe down,” she yelled. “Do we have to have a damned uproar every time I have to go someplace? YIP, YIP, YAP, you want to send me to the loony bin? Then who’d feed you?” The yowls dwindled. All three dogs regarded her. “Thank you,” she said. Leaning the shampooer against the sink, she scooped up Dart in one hand and Hurley in the other. “In you go,” she said as she stuck each of them in his crate. Their bulgy eyes bulged with indignation. “Yeah, I know, but look what happens if I leave you out. Fights, into the trash, mess and mayhem.” Delilah circled her beanbag chair and then plopped down, her graying muzzle coming to rest on her paw. “That’s right; not my sweet girl, Delilah. You know how to behave.” Bertie pushed a couple of logs into the stove and closed the damper a tad. Outside the day was gray and drizzly. The fifth month of winter, ye gods; you had to be some kind of a masochist to live in these hills. What could she have been thinking when she left Long Island to come here ten years ago? Another mistake. She opened the door to feel the temperature and that sent the two Chihuahuas into another fit, their shrill barks filling the cramped kitchen. “Cool it, I’m only going to the Grumbach’s,” but she yelled without conviction while she pulled on her heavy coat. She made one final check, stroked Delilah’s head, took up the shampooer and her cleaning bag and closed the door with her last shot, “Miserable as you are, you can count on my return.” Miserable: her brother’s term for Dart and Hurley. How can you keep those miserable excuses, those hairless little fiends? And she always gave him her standard reply: How she’d take her dogs for the company of most people any day. As her car pulled out of the driveway, she could still hear the faint sound of their yaps. The road was slippery. Oozy mud pulled at her wheels. She couldn’t decide which she hated more: March or November. She was glad the Grumbach’s was the only place she had to do today. If she could win the lottery,
Volume 13, Number 1
SPRING 2001
phoebe
77
March she and the beasties would be in Arizona in half a flash. Good-bye subzero nights and dark days. Good-bye Grumbachs, etc. Lottery or no, if the Grumbachs didn’t get the exterminator in, she was giving them notice next week. It’s either those rodents or me; take your pick. Cleaning house was getting her through since the lay off, but enough was enough. I am done, Ms. Grumbach, with mouse droppings. Little brown bracelets circling the lids of the canisters, speckling the silverware tray. Probably the granola. Every time she opened something, one of their calling cards greeted her. She was not emptying the stove drawer again. Have a Heart Traps indeed. But, Bertie, we couldn’t poison them; that would be too cruel. And so much bad karma. Artists! What on earth? She swung to the left and pumped the brakes. A rusty bucket of a truck was backed across the ditch into the woods, its front bumper hanging out about a foot in the road, her yellow NO TRESPASSING sign not five feet from its rear. The plates said New Jersey. She thought she saw a flash of orange back through the trees. Her trees. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. She parked as close to the edge as she could and swung the door open, wedging her right foot against it so it didn’t slam back at her again. She still had a dark bruise from where it bonked her on the shin a few days ago. She levered herself up out of the seat. Okay, okay, she was cutting back on the Little Debbies. Ever since she quit smoking, the pounds piled on. She glanced down at the mounds hilling her body: breasts, belly, thighs bulging beneath her sweat suit. More of me to love. Ha. As she stepped across the ditch, her foot got mired in the muddy bank. Of course. She saw no signs of movement in the woods now. She scraped the sides of her sneaker back and forth on the soggy leaves. Her heart was going and her eyes bumped against her lids. She knew her blood pressure was right up there. The poplars along the edge of the road were still bare, but as she moved further back, the pine woods got thicker. Darker. Maybe it wasn’t such a good plan to be going so far from the road. What was somebody from New Jersey doing in her woods in March anyway? She stopped and listened. From the direction of the beaver pond she heard the clank of metal. Right then she turned around and headed back toward her car. As she came up even with the truck, she listened hard again. Now everything was silent; not a sign of anyone. She peeked through the grimy back window of the battered truck cap and then through the side vents. The bed of the truck was mounded with junk: boxes jammed with tools and pots and clothes, a mattress, an old metal lawn chair, cans of asparagus. And all mixed in together. No order whatsoever. She studied the debris piled on the front seat: oily rags, maybe ten crushed Ritz Cracker boxes, wads of wire. Smooshed cigarette
March packages and banana peels in various stages of decay covered the floor and seat on the passenger side. Probably only one of them. One and maybe a monkey. Even through the glass, the stink of nicotine and rot made her want to pinch her nose. Something long and pink hung from the handle of the glove compartment. She pressed her forehead against the window. A naked Barbie doll, caught round the throat by a twisted shoe string, her blond hair shocked out from her scalp, her slim plastic arms stiff at her trim sides. The perfect cones of her breasts, her wide blue eyes aimed straight at the driver. Bertie hurried to her car. She pulled a flier of coupons for dog food from her purse and ripped a section off along the fold. She flattened the strip on the hood of her car and considered her message. In her most careful primer letters she wrote: You are on my property. Please note NO TRESPASSING signs. Please leave immediately or it will be necessary to contact the authorities. B. Barker. She added Thank you above her name. Then she stuck the paper under the truck windshield wiper. She copied down the license number and eased her station wagon away from the mucky edge. Without that stand of pines up ahead, she’d have been able to see from her big kitchen window what was going on along this part of the road. One thing for sure, if that truck wasn’t gone before dark, she was going to do something. At exactly five-fifteen she loaded her wood stove and got Dart and Hurley settled into their crates. Wonders of wonders they didn’t set up a holy racket. Maybe they sensed now was no time to be difficult. Delilah continued to snooze on the couch. A sudden puff of black smoke gushed from the stove pipe. She fanned at the smoke alarm with a dish towel for a few minutes. Otherwise it’d start shrieking; then the dogs would let loose. She smiled at her foresight. A tap of her nails along the pipe seams gave back the hollow flat tone of creosote buildup. Clean the stove pipe joined her list of have-to’s. Outside she double-locked both doors while she inventoried her options. But every time she got to the contact authorities section, her mission slogged to a stop. If the truck person was still encroaching, should she notify the town constable, the sheriff’s department, the state police or the county conservation officer? This was one of those rare times when she wished she had a man around the house. The only man, she told her brother, she was interested in putting up with was someone very rich and very old. Ha. But such a man would not be that useful in this situation. She shrugged and backed slowly out. Big piles of dirty snow melted and ran across her muddy driveway. The peeling blue paint under her kitchen window depressed her. She decided: if the truck was there, she’d go down and talk to Snuff Wilson. This was the kind of a town it was: where people were really called things
March like Thunder Merts, Hooty Ferguson, Buzzbuzz Blake, Snuff Wilson. To their face. She didn’t like Snuff Wilson; he didn’t like dogs. He enjoyed catching dogs running loose and taking them to the pound. People said he kept some kind of count on the sun visor of his truck. He always had a big wad of tobacco in his jaw. And he never spoke to his son again after his son dodged the draft. She started to whistle as she descended her hill. She’d know just as soon as she made the turn around the bend. Please let the truck be gone and the rest of this day be without aggravation. Goddamn, there it was. Hadn’t moved an inch. She slowed and rolled down the window. All she could hear was the burble of water in the ditch. She squinted her eyes and perused the woods. Nothing. She reached over and rummaged a reserve Little Debbie out of the glove compartment. She pulled back the wrapper and rehearsed: Mr. Wilson, since mid-morning there’s been a strange truck parked on my property. She pushed the last of the gooey cake into her mouth and headed for town. Constable Wilson, there’s a strangled Barbie doll... Wilson’s truck was round in back with the hood up, but there was no sign of Snuff’s lumpy physique. Bertie didn’t want to go poking about. She pushed the doorbell button. Through a crack in the yellowing curtain and down the dim hall, she saw someone shuffling back and forth in the kitchen. A woman. Snuff’s wife. With... big rollers stuck at random round her brain. Bertie pressed the button and held, but the bumpy head of the woman did not turn. Bertie’s scalp tingled with the memory of bristles pulling her hair and gouging into her scull every time she turned in her sleep. All so you could look good for some guy. And those girdles. And look what it got her: marriage at eighteen, right out of high school, both of them dumb as they come. Life in the fifties. And look at her now: forty-nine and vacuuming mouse doo out of cubbyholes, no benefits. At least there was no longer anybody looking in her refrigerator, analyzing the leftovers. She pressed her ear to the glass and leaned on the bell. Out of order. Just as she raised her knuckles to bang, a terrible vision came to her. The rusty truck backed into the woods, the yellow plastic No Trespass sign to the left, stapled to a big maple, and to the right... She searched her memory. To the right no sign... She dropped her hand and backed quietly off the rickety porch. She drove as fast as she dared, braking for the frost heaves that washboarded the blacktop and on her dirt road, bouncing in and out of the clay ruts cut by the flow of runoff. Let no one be around; let the note still be flapping under the wiper. In the distance the truck came into view, its front bumper no longer dangling in the road. The windshield was empty; nothing white dotted its blankness. A stack of stuff was piled on the ground below the open cap. Her face burned. If she saw someone, she’d have to get out and shuffle through an
March apology. She slowed, but could see no one moving about through the darkening trees. Tomorrow. The first sight of the guy and she’d have to stop. At least Snuff Wilson’s bell had been out of order; at least she’d said please twice in the note. She accelerated, checking her rear mirror one last time before she rounded the turn. Her gut told her this person with the holey truck full of junk and the lynched Barbie was her new neighbor. Someone had bought the five acre pie strip that wedged between her line and Grumbach’s. Bertie lifted the portable waxer into her truck. Of course the first thing her brother said was I told you you should’ve bought that land. Now you’ve got some chuck living next to you, lowering the value on your property. Oh sure, she told him, with all the money I save from my eight dollar an hour cleaning jobs. Maybe I should’ve taken a few thou from my CD’s or my sheltered annuity or sold off some stock. Presently she had a balance of $56.53 and her taxes were due. Bertie tossed the bag of traps across to the passenger seat. The clatter of wood made her wince; she didn’t relish playing executioner all morning. She would have preferred the distance of poison. Plus the damn things were a bitch to set. Still she figured in the two weeks the Grumbachs were away, she could get the situation under control. 10 traps x 4 mornings ‘ 40 mice. 40 mice ‘ how much bad karma? As Bertie passed the stand of pines, she steeled herself for how the site might have further deteriorated since the day before. She would never have dreamed that so much damage could have been done in only... this was Friday... in only seven days. The first morning, Saturday, the day after she left that note, she woke to the godawful whine of a chainsaw and by the time she went to town at three, just about every tree on the forward tip of the pie was down and the truck gone. Weird how she never ended up seeing her new neighbor. Coming and going he just never was around. This left her half-relieved and half-pissed off. She’d tried a few times to check him out through her kitchen window, using binoculars, but she couldn’t get a clear view through the pines. No one in town mentioned anything about the newcomer. By now an apology seemed irrelevant. Her fingers were shaking so much it was difficult to release the spring slowly enough not to dislodge the bar from the little hook that raised the peanut butter bait. She tried not to look at the accusing stain of red smearing the front of the trap. She had not realized how they’d look with their little hands, their pink palms, their oversized ears flopped to one side. If only they didn’t leave droppings everywhere, she now knew she could have granted them space. Her original plan had been to reuse the ten traps both weeks, to lift the metal bar from their necks without touching them and let them slide into a plastic bag. To dump that out each
March evening over the bank behind her house. A sneaky transporting of the evidence. But after the removal of the first five, the soft plop of their bodies into the bag, the reloading with peanut butter of the stained trap, she knew she didn’t have the stomach or heart to be in such close contact with what she was doing. All morning every time she turned off the buffer, she heard another snap, often followed by a desperate flopping sound of wood. Before she left she was going to re-evaluate the situation. She might have been willing to chance the karma, but the face-to-face of now was more than she was up to. Even using an exterminator as a go-between no longer felt okay. For the first time she understood Have a Heart traps, why her brother never spoke of Viet Nam. She took a quick run through the FM stations. Music to spring clean by. Spring. Ha! Up and down the dial, nothing but rinkadink garbage. Synthesizer smoo-smoo. Nothing that lifted you up. What she wanted was Patsy Kline doing “Crazy.” She settled on country and western and turned it loud enough to drowned out the sound of the traps. Only the big living room floor left to finish off the downstairs. Clear, vacuum, wash, and wax the right side today. Squatting slightly, Bertie took a deep breath and giving a karate yell lifted the front end of a heavy couch while she slid the edge of an old comforter beneath it with her foot. Then she eased it down and tipped the back side up to unroll the rest of the material under the rear legs. The art of moving heavy furniture solo. Sure her brother would’ve stopped by on his way to work and given her a hand. But the trade-off would have meant her having to hop to. Her having to lackey up to his every dictate. She scooched the couch slowly over to the opposite corner. Only the big roll top to go. She hoped she didn’t have to take out the drawers to get it on the blanket. Imagine where the Grumbachs would be if she did give notice. The Grumbachs were slobs. Creative, genius-type slobs. Right off the charts disorderly. Nice people, but slobs. Both of them from rich families. Used to being picked up after. Without her, in one week, everything that was In would be Out. They never closed a drawer or a door. Or picked up anything that dropped. Or put the new roll of toilet paper on the roller. Within a month the junk mail would have taken over the kitchen table and fungus would be half way up the shower curtain. Just as she breathed in to give the front of the desk a try, she stopped short and went to the big back window. My god. Black smoke. Huge puffs of yellow-black smoke billowed above the pines up the hill. That maniac had set the woods on fire. But how could that be in the wet of March? Or some kind of explosion. The dogs. Bertie turned off the radio and dialed the fire number. Some kind of big fire near 608, she said when someone came on the line. That’s all she knew, she told the voice and hung up the phone. Backing out of Grumbach’s she prayed and sent them messages of hope: I’m coming you beasties. I’m almost there. The trip up the road was a blur. She went as fast as she could, leaving the wheel loose enough to let the mud ruts work with her, ever mindful of the ditch.
March Let the smoke be coming from the neighbor’s. A brush pile. An engine fire. Matches in the gas tank. Boom, boom. But the next turn brought her past the old truck, empty, no one in sight, a cloud of smoke smudging the sky further up beyond the bend – right where her house had to be. She knew she should’ve dealt with that creosote. Please god. Please. Anything. Just let my babies be okay. Only a haze of smoke drifting above her roof now. She saw no flames. She tore the keys from the ignition and ran toward the front door, pulling her shirt up over her nose as she moved. Do both locks, go low, get the crates first, then Delilah. As she started up the steps she saw the door was open. The lower pane was smashed. “I’ve got your dogs,” a voice called through the haze. “They’re okay. Just your chimney. It’s out now.” Bertie started to cry and turned to search for the voice. By the apple trees she saw the crates and heard Delilah’s whimper. Then Delilah was in her arms and licking her face. Cradling her, Bertie bent to inspect Hurley and Dart, strangely quiet, huddled in their blankets. Trembling, wide eyes, but alive, breathing. “Oh thank god.” Then Bertie remembered. “And thank you,” she said, but there was no one there. “Wait,” she called, ducking under the bird feeders to catch the retreating figure of their rescuer. A black baseball cap pulled backwards over a ragged jut of dark hair, a torn field jacket and greasy jeans. Rubber boots. “Wait,” Bertie called again, falling further behind the agile jaunt of her neighbor. For that’s who this must be: her neighbor, the Barbie strangler. Something about that jog, the tilt of the body moving away from her. She stopped in surprise. “Why you aren’t a man,” she called through the trees. With that, her neighbor slowed down and turned a little. Breathing hard, Delilah wiggly and getting heavy beneath her coat, Bertie closed the gap. “You’re a woman.” Her neighbor grinned. A sooty grin of crooked teeth. “Not so it’s ever caused me much trouble,” she said. The scream of a siren. Hurley and Dart began to bark. Delilah let out a muffled howl. “Hurley and Dart yapping. I never thought that would be such sweet music.” “I shut the vents, closed the damper. Had to break the window.” “How can I thank you? My name’s Bertie Barker. But you know that from my...” Already the baseball cap was turned and moving away again. Bertie hollered over the siren and the dogs, :”Please I do want to in some way show how much I appreciate...”
March But this time there was no pause; her neighbor jumped the stone wall and disappeared through the pines. Now it seemed like every time Bertie came round the bend, her neighbor was worrying away at that desolate strip along the road: hauling rocks, chopping at the roots of stumps, burning brush. What on earth was her neighbor doing with all that fierce dawn-to-dark energy? Clearly this person had some goal, some driving vision. If Bertie could catch her neighbor’s eye, she slowed and waved, receiving a reluctant nod in response, a response that made it clear the neighbor was not wanting chit-chat, not longing for a visit from the Welcome Wagon. Maybe even a bit off the beam, more like a man than a woman, the Barbie doll, the sleeping with all that clutter of junk in the back of that old truck. Personal hygiene certainly not high on the list of concerns. Not on the list at all. Still each time she passed that always-moving figure, Bertie found herself more and more wanting to break through. After all, hadn’t this person saved her dogs, maybe even her house. The Saturday after the fire on her way out of the post office, Bertie ran into Dora Blake, a woman who had once been Mrs. Buzzbuzz Blake, but who had one day opened a realtor’s office next to the feed store and soon proved herself to be one shrewd cookie, able to grab and grub with the best of them. As good at it as a man, Bertie’s brother said. And about as shifty, Bertie thought. “Well, how are you and your neighbor getting along?” Dora asked. “Fine,” Bertie replied, not stopping, upping her got-places-to-go pace. She wanted information, but knew with Dora she’d have to give to get, and next thing she’d know, even a shrug of her shoulders would have been translated and sent the rounds from the Presbyterian women’s circle to the Grange to the emergency squad to the Eagle Tavern. “I’m the one who showed the land,” Dora said. “Oh,” a noncommittal, but polite Oh. No point being on Dora’s shit list. Bertie kept on leaning in the direction of her car. “So I know a thing or two,” Dora said. Bertie opened her car door and set her mail on the seat. Dora raised her finger and twirled it around by the side of her head. “A little, you know,” she said. “Seemed okay to me,” Bertie replied and smiling, she pulled herself behind the wheel. “Have a nice day,” she told Dora and closed her door. But she sure would have liked to at least found out her neighbor’s name. The following Tuesday when she was bringing the beasties back from their annual rabies shots at the firehouse, she almost swerved into the ditch gawking at some apparition jutting out of the ground right in the middle of her neighbor’s
March cleared space. What the hell? Even though she didn’t see her neighbor about, she felt she had to keep moving, not to appear too nosy, but all the while she was trying to put together enough pieces of the thing in her peripheral vision, her glances in the rear view mirror, to finally know what it was. A big cross, maybe six feel tall... with something yellow stuck on the top... styrofoam balls bonging out on upholstery springs... a silver stick, a baton lifted high on one side of the T... a purple and gold... one of those cheerleader things. As she made the turn, it came to her: not just something yellow, a blonde wig that looked like it’d been through an egg beater. My god, a Barbie scarecrow-in-progress. Her neighbor was putting in a garden. A big garden. “I want to borrow your rototiller to help my neighbor cultivate her garden,” Bertie told her brother. Bertie’s brother tightened his lips on the nails poking from his mouth and lowered his hammer. He gave her a long look. Then he shook his head and went back to tacking the chicken wire to the frame. “I know what you’re thinking, Bob,” Bertie said. Chuck. Whacko. Dyke. “I’m thinking that my new rototiller would last about five minutes rooting around in all those tree stumps,” he said. “What are you thinking?” Bertie put Dart and Hurley out in the new run her brother had built her for her birthday. Fifty. Half a century. Good lord. As she started round the corner of the house Dart and Hurley rushed the chicken wire, howling in protest at her departure. “Bark all that lovely April air right down into your little lungs, you ingrates,” she said. She fastened Delilah to the long lead that ran back and forth on the line between the two maples. Delilah preferred to be alone. Bertie laid the pickax and shovel she’d borrowed from her brother into the trunk. She took off her coat. It was that warm. She’d thought about involving the Grumbachs in the gardening project, enlisting their new little toy tractor, but somehow she couldn’t bear the thought of an all that do-goodie liberal cheer. They’d go gaga over the Barbie. What a wonderful sculpture, she could hear them saying. And she felt certain her neighbor would not feel comfortable with all that blah-blah. Anyway the Grumbachs weren’t scheduled to be back until Friday. On second thought Bertie lifted the tools out of the trunk and swung them up on her shoulder. She’d approach walking. She glanced down at the bulk beneath her sweatshirt. She could use the exercise. Melt a few of the Little Debbies down. Glimpse at least the faint outline of her former svelte self. Snag a rich widower. God she was tired of working. Being a kept woman ‘ how many questions on the leftovers? As Bertie rounded the bend, she saw them there in the clearing. Their garden. Barbie and her neighbor. Barbie was finished. Her baton sparkled in
March the sunlight, her pom-pom shaker blew in the breeze. What would the crows and bluejays make of those bobbing pink boobs? Bertie was just about to call a warning hello. Then she heard something. Her neighbor was squatting beside a string stretched straight between two stakes. She was placing something in the ground. She was singing. A lovely low chant. She was smiling. Bertie turned around and quietly retraced her steps. A way would come. Help jumping a dead battery one cold morning, a push out of the ditch. Maybe they’d get no farther than waves as she walked her dogs. So be it. The dogs heard her return. Hulloo. Hulloo. She shifted the pickax and shovel to her other shoulder. What would you be planing so early with the likelihood of a few light snows still to come. Certainly frosts. Peas. Snow peas. She and Charlie had a garden when they were first married. In back of that little garage apartment on Duncan Ave. She unhooked Delilah. “Don’t you go chasing something,” she told her. Delilah trailed her to the back of the house. There was a good flat stretch just below the dog run beyond the lilac bushes. Not too rocky. Full sun most of the day. She’d only do a few things: peas and later a few tomatoes, a couple rows of onions. Some lettuce. Spinach. If she couldn’t spade up enough herself, Bobby would rototill her a small patch maybe ten by twelve. Through the pines she heard the whine of a chain saw. She laughed. “What in god’s name do you think she’s up to now?” The dogs regarded her with their ears raised. Bertie leaned the shovel against a stump and brought the pickax down hard to mark the first corner. She stopped to breathe. She had never realized how far you could see from here. Across the valley patches of white glowed. Shad. Blooming again.