One Fearful Yellow Eye (24 page)

I saw the red post all right. The bus didn't even hesitate. It rolled on by I looked up the muddy rutted road and, half-obscured by a knoll, I saw what had to be the house, set way back, two stories, steep, swaybacked roof, stingy little windows and not many of them, clapboards painted a dirty gray white. Two shutters crooked, one missing. A cheerless and isolated place.

Once well past it I dropped back and kept the bus just barely in sight. I tried to figure it out.

Okay, the procedure would be to slow down, maybe look up the road to see if the kids were coming on the run. Stop and blow the horn maybe. So the driver knew they weren't going to be there. So I'd better know what he'd been told.

Seven miles further, at the big central school complex, I found out the driver was a she, a brawny, likely, and clear-eyed lass in ski pants, mackinaw, and stocking cap, with shoulders like Arnold Palmer.

"Excuse me," I said, with my best civil-service smile and patronizing manner. "District survey. A little spot check on percentage of equipment utilization. Hope you didn't get nervous to have me following you."

"Nervous? What about?"

I glanced at Susan's map and put it away. "My route sheet shows that your first stop on Depue
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Road is a mile from the corner. Five children. Farley."

''Got on at Shottlehausters'. Four. One's sick. Oldest. High school senior."

"Got on where?"

She raised her voice as though addressing the deaf, and enunciated more clearly.

"Shottlehausters'. Shottlehausters'. The big place on 26 three mile afore Farley's. They're staying there a time."

"Oh. I see: Thank you."

"Don't mention it."

So I went back a lot faster than I had come. I guessed that when she said three mile she meant three mile. But she had been wrong. It was three miles and one half of a tenth of a mile to the giant wine-red mailbox, "Shottlehauster" lettered in white in elegant script to a broad gravel drive, a long low white ranch-style house, and, beyond, the quonset equipment shed, white barns, triple silo standing against the wide march of rich and pampered farmland. I turned in, parked and got out, hesitating over whether to go to the front of the house or the back. I could hear a loud twanging and thumping of folk-rock. A bakery truck was parked at an angle near the back entrance. Darling Bakery. "Fresh as a Stolen Kiss." "Darling Bread is Triple Enriched." Bright blue and lemon yellow decor.

At this time of day the back door would be more customary I decided, for a hardworking credit bureau fellow. To get to the back door I had to pass the kitchen windows. In the dingy morning the fluorescents were all on, bright enough so that it was like glancing through the tied-back cafe curtains into a stage set, the floor level in there maybe three feet higher than the level of the gravel driveway. I would say I was opposite that first window frozen in midstride for a second and a half. It took half a second to figure out what I was looking at, and half a second of confirming it, and half a second to get my direction reversed and get out of the way.

The Darling Bread Boy was bellied up to a long efficient counter top. Blue work shirt to match his truck. "Darling" embroidered in an arc across chunk shoulders. But the "a" and the "r" in

"Darling" were covered by two gigantic vertical fuzzy pink caterpillars. Then beyond the edge of the center island in the kitchen I saw the lady feet in fuzzy white socks, clamped and locked together, pressing quite neatly the tail of the blue shirt against his butt. Saw one hairy straining leg with his trousers puddled around the ankle. Caterpillars became her sweatered forearms, her hands hooked back over the hanging-on place of the trapezius muscles, as though trying to chin herself. And over the Bread Boy shoulder was her effortful jouncing bouncing face, eyes squinched tight shut, mouth raw, like indeed with the struggle to chin herself on that horizontal bar of muscle. The twangity-thump of country git-ar with electronic assist came from the truck radio (paternalistic bakery management) and from the kitchen radio in unison, and for a oouple of micro-seconds before I sorted the scene out I had thought he was attempting a crude, vulgar, unskilled version of some contemporary dance. But it was busy old rub-a-dub-dub, humpety-rump, dumpety-bump, with the counter-topped farm wife all wedged and braced.

I fled bemused to my rental. The idling truck made little pops and puffs of exhaust smoke.

Where the hell did they think they were? Westport? Bucks County? Didn't they know this was the heartland of America? Didn't she know Jack LaLanne was the only acceptable morning exercise for the busy housewife?

I started the car engine and put the automatic shift into drive and kept my foot on the brake pedal. I wondered if maybe it was the architecture which had debauched her. I could not conceive of it happening in the traditional old farm kitchens. But she could see slightly glossier versions of her own fluorescence, stainless steel, ceramic island, rubber tile, pastel enamels, warm wood paneling in the Hollywood product on both Big Screen and home tube, so there she was on the set, and she had to say the lines, but after you said the lines enough times All of a sudden you'd get interrupted by something a little more direct than a commercial message from your sponsor. But it didn't count too much because it was as unreal sort of as a giant hand coming up out of the suds, or a washer going up like an elevator, or a nut riding a horse through the back yard and turning everything radiant white.

The instant Darling Boy came trotting into view I started ahead so that he could be certain he had glimpsed my arrival. Chunky redhead with a freckly, good-natured, clenched-fist face, carrying cheerfully wrapped bakery items in his big blue aluminum home-delivery basket. He gave me a glance, a happy morning nod and grin, and swung aboard his service van and rolled on out, a thousand loud guitars fading down the road, but still playing faintly inside the house.

The incident had decided me in favor of the front door. Storm door, then a big white front door with a narrow insert of vertical glass. Brass knocker shaped like the American eagle. Brass and pearl bell button which, when pushed, set off the biggest and most complicated chime set in the Sears catalogue. When it had played through to its finish, faintly heard through the doors, I felt like applauding. I waited and then thumbed them into encore, and when the presentation number was half over I saw her coming toward the door, patting her hair, hitching at her clothes, giving that sucked-in bite that goes with fresh lipstick.

She opened the door inward, pushed the storm door open six inches and with a cheery smile, said, "You want Harry, he had to go up to Moline again early, but he ought to be home by supper."

She was weathering the downslope of the thirties very nicely, a small sturdy woman with a wide face, pretty eyes, network of grin wrinkles, mop of curly dark hair with a first touch of white ones over her ears. Fuzzy pink sweater, denim ranch pants in stretch fabric. White moccasins, white sox. A shapely and durable figure, breasts rather small and abrupt under the pink fuzz.

"You're Mrs. Shottlehauster?"

"Yes, but honest to Betsy, if you're selling something I just haven't got the time, and you can believe it."

"I'm not selling anything, and you can believe it. I'm trying to get a credit report on some people named Farley on Depue Road, and I'm not having much luck. I found out their kids know your kids. I don't want to bother you, but if you could spare just a minute or two to answer some questions..."

"Heck, I can spare time for that. You come right on in, Mr..."

"McGee: Travis McGee, ma'am."

"Well, I'm Mildred Shottlehauster," she said, leading me through the entrance hallway into a twolevel living room decorated in too many colors and patterns, and too densely populated
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with furniture, some of it good, and most of it borax.

"You sit right there and be comfortable," she said. "We've got those four Farley kids staying with us, and I certainly would like to know how long, not that they're any special problem or anything. I've got my six, and once you get up to six I guess it doesn't make too much difference if you have six or ten. And they're really good kids. They're almost too meek and quiet and polite. They make mine seem like wild Indians or something. Mine are sixteen, fourteen, twelve, eleven, eight and seven so... "

"I'd never believe it, Mrs. S."

"Well thank you, kind sir, she said. Anyhoo, the Farley children seem to fit right in and actually there's less fighting and squabbling when they're here. Harry and I. are just doing the neighborly thing. Monday night it was, just on toward dark, you remember how raw and nasty it was, Mr.

Farley came to the door and wouldn't come in. He hemmed and hawed and said that his wife had to go to Chicago, and Susan, the oldest-a perfectly darling girl she'd gone off to join her mother and he suddenly found out he had to go on a business trip for a few days and he didn't want to leave the other four alone and could we give them bed and board for a few days. He said he could pay for it. Well, we forgave him for offering money for a neighborly deed because... well, that family is right off the city streets and they can't be expected to know how we do things here in the country. When we said he certainly could bring them over, he said they were out in the truck, and so they were, chilled to the very bone. They came shivering in with their little bags and bundles of clothes and toothbrushes. I must confess I had qualms about my pack getting too friendly with those kids when they first came here. I mean they are sort of underprivileged, and you don't know what nasty tricks and habits children can pick up in the slums, and pass along, do you? It was last August my Bruce came racing home to tell me some family named Farley had moved into the old Duggins place. It's been empty three years since old Sam died, and he must have been older than God, and his only kin a sister in Seattle who couldn't care less, and nobody knew she'd even put it up for rent with that Country Estate Agency over in Princeton, but it's plain to see it's the kind of run-down place you could get for practically nothing, not like when you're nearer the city and they get picked up for vacation houses and so on. But you can believe it, those Farley kids, Freda and Julian and Freddy and Tommy, they're dandy kids. What did you want to ask me? Oops, I've got to go check the pies. I got stuck again. Four cherry pies for the Mission Aid supper and my dang oven thermostat is screwjee. Would you like some coffee, Mr. McGee? It's on the stove. Come on along."

I followed her out toward the whomping of the music, and she twisted the dial down to background size with a single expert tweak as she went by the radio. "I caught the coffee thing from Harry," she said. "He was in the Navy, so it's always on the fire, grind our own beans, never let it begin to bubble, like some people are about wine, I guess." And as she spoke she deftly assembled tall white cup and saucer, poured it steaming rich, slid it into position at the end of the center island which was a breakfast bar, put sugar and cream within reach. She went over and stood at her eye-level wall oven, all copper and chrome, and peered in through the glass front at her pies.

"The only way I'm going to be able to tell is from the color of the crust. Lousy thermostat. Hey, want a cinnamon pecan roll? The bakery just delivered fresh, and they're the special this week."

She poured coffee for herself, got out the butter and the rolls, and sat around the corner of the bar end of the island at my left.

"Marvelous coffee, Mrs. Shottlehauster."

"Specialty of the house, thank you kind sir," she said. "What is it the Farleys want to buy?"

"I don't know. We're a service organization and we work for a lot of different client companies.

The point is are they a good credit risk up to such and such an amount."

She munched slowly, frowning. The pad of muscle at the corner of her jaw bulged with each bite.

There was a flake of cooked sugar on her narrow underlip and, her tongue slipped cleverly out and hooked it in. "I like to try to be fair to everybody. So I just couldn't say. It just depends on how much they can put into the spring planting, if they know what to plant, if they know how to go about getting help from the county agent and the state, if they're all willing to work like Arabian slaves.... I just don't know, honestly. Mr. Farley is well-spoken. You can tell he's had some advantages. I tried to be neighborly, and so did a couple of other women, but we spread the word that nobody else need waste their time. I stopped there last September and didn't even get invited in. They just stared at me, and I had the idea they were laughing at me somehow. You know? She's a big heavy woman, coarse-looking, and I don't want to hurt their chances, but she smelled like a brewery, and it was a hot day and she wasn't... properly covered up. I guess that kind of thing doesn't mean much on a credit report."

"It's very helpful, really."

"I've been noticing what a wonderful tan you've got, Mr. McGee."

"I just got transferred up here from the Southwest. We get moved around a lot."

"I guess you must think I'm some kind of a nut; inviting you in and all, and being absolutely all alone here until the bus brings the kids back, but I've got a sixth sense about people, and there's a 16-gauge automatic shotgun standing, in the corner there by the front door and you wouldn't have gotten a foot over the doorstep if I hadn't known right off you were perfectly all right, if I hadn't known I could trust you."

"I do appreciate that."

She smiled at me, and her pretty eyes had a slightly glazed look and they seemed to go in and out of focus. Her hand shook as she lifted the coffee cup. As she put it down she took a high quick shallow breath, shuddered, and her tongue hooked at crumbs that weren't there. Under the brightness of the artificial daylight I saw a little sheen of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. A gentle sweet steam seemed to be rising from her. She hitched her hips on the stool and said in a huskier tone, "Since my littlest one started school and Harry took to being away politicking here and there, these winter days do seem to get awful long for an outgoing-type person like me."