Dog War (11 page)

“You could keep a John Crow inside here,” Precious muttered, trying vainly to clear her brain of the flying debris of unruly adjectives as it strained to cope with the magnificence underfoot, “and he wouldn’t even know he was in a house.”

“Oh, really,” said Mannish. “And what is a John Crow, if I-may ask?”

“Dat what we call buzzard in Jamaica,” Precious said lamely, conscious that in her cowed state she was perilously close to misspeaking. “He could fly around inside all day and never miss de outdoors. But, of course,” she added to make it clear that she was no ornithological fool, “John Crow wouldn’t be happy inside without dead body to eat.”

“It is a big house,” Mannish conceded coolly. “And although the mistress is an animal lover, as you can tell from these pictures on the walls, I do not believe she would consent to an interior buzzard.”

“I only mean to say,” Precious stumbled, “dat de house big. It well big.”

Her own quarters, discreetly in the rear of the mansion, consisted of a spacious bedroom furnished with a dresser and side tables with a telephone. Her sitting room sported a color television and a radio, her bathroom an enormous marble tub. Above her bed hung pictures of what Precious at first thought were rats, but Mannish said were mink.

“I trust that you will be comfortable here,” Mannish murmured, discreetly leaving her to unpack and settle.

A few minutes later she heard him drive away in the Rolls Royce.

She unpacked and tentatively applied the whip to mansion rump. She stripped the pictures off the walls and stacked them neatly in a bottom drawer. Mink or no mink, they still resembled brown rat to her, and she would not stomach rat picture hanging over her head. She moved a chair from one corner to another and rearranged the sofa and side table in her sitting room. These were only tiny shifts, but they showed her as a woman accustomed to rulership over house.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, catching her breath, when the phone on the table began to bark like a watchdog at a postman. Stupefied, Precious stared as it barked once, then twice, then a third time, before it dawned on her that the bark was a kind of demented American ring. She picked up the phone and timidly whispered, “Hello?” and an accented voice asked, “Is Mannish there, please?”

Precious said he was not and the voice chuckled even though she’d said nothing funny and asked her please to tell Mannish that his cousin called. She replaced the receiver on the cradle and took an awed breath.

“Me God! A barking phone. What will dey think of next?”

When Mannish returned Precious mentioned the barking phone and the message from the cousin. Mannish explained that all the phones in the house were specially made to bark, some to “Bow wow,” others to “Woof woof” or “Arf arf.” Hers, as she had no doubt found out, was an “Arf arf” poodle phone. Precious wondered if she could throw a switch on the phone to remove the poodle and restore a normal ring, but Mannish said no, all the phones in the house were designed to bark.

“All de phones bark?” Precious repeated.

“Every one, without exception,” Mannish confirmed.

“Phone not supposed to bark,” Jamaican Jesus warned in the back of her head.

During her first days of mansion life Precious was as idle as a pickpocket among nudists.

She had thought she would be working her fingers to the bone cleaning out mansion, but a maid service came in that very next morning and left every room sparkling and smelling like a freshly sprayed armpit. That same afternoon the yard work was done by a grinning Chinyman who rode his mower over the lawn, clipped the bushes, sprayed the roses, and edged the circular driveway. When he was finished the outdoors looked as though the Chinyman had shrink-wrapped it in cellophane. Later, two strapping young men with chemicals arrived and made the pool sparkle. Moreover, Precious soon discovered that with the mistress away not a soul visited the mansion. She did not even have to cook since all Mannish wanted to do every night for dinner was to drive out in the Rolls Royce and buy hamburgers.

Mannish had nothing for her to do. He himself had nothing to do. Every morning he woke up at around 10 o’clock and pointed the satellite dish at the heavens and tapped into an Indian program, which he settled before the television to watch as he drank breakfast tea. When Precious asked him what she should do, he waved airily and said that she should get accustomed to the house and achieve peace of mind, for they were on holiday until the mistress and Riccardo returned. When the mistress returned Precious would have plenty to do, not to worry.

But she could not help but worry, for without regular household duties she felt out of place like a puss at high tea.

She wandered into the gardens to pick flowers and felt foreign. She sat on the edge of the furry lawn abutting the intracoastal canal and felt alien. People riding past in motorboats and yachts stared at her and made her feel peculiar. Sitting on the deck around the pool, she felt as unwelcome as urban bullfrog. She would drift back into the house, hoping to chat with Mannish, to find him engrossed in his Indian program where everyone spoke incomprehensible Coolie. She would sometimes sit down nearby and watch, but the sound of nothing but Coolie talk soon made her feel so queasy that she would have to retire to the bathroom.

But the bathroom awed her. The living room cowed her. The kitchen humbled her. The barking phones made her heart jump. And everywhere she stepped, animal pictures gawked at her from the walls.

Three days this bullying went on, with mansion doing its best to prove that it was the belly and she the tapeworm.

Precious began retreating under her bed to think.

She was hiding there on this third evening, asking herself what she could do to keep from being cowed by mansion, when it struck her that what she needed was a cobweb.

To find and clean out a cobweb would prove that mansion was human with a dirty batty. She felt giddy at the prospect of the wiping that must surely follow.

But where would she find a cobweb inside a sparkling mansion? She squirted out from under the bed and set out on a cobweb hunt.

Through twenty-one of the twenty-two bedrooms she stalked, searching diligently for a cobweb. From room to room she went, crouching under bed and looking behind toilet. There was no cobweb to be found. Finally, she came to the last unsearched room and found the door mysteriously bolted.

Disappointed, she slunk back into the cavernous drawing room to find Mannish curled up in a stupor on the couch, still watching Indian program.

Returning to her room, Precious briefly considered smuggling a cobweb from Shirley’s house before deciding that a CIA cobweb would not give the satisfaction of one directly from mansion’s own nasty batty.

Her head aswirl with thoughts and schemes, she then did what any Christian woman in her position would do: She said a prayer asking Jesus (the Jamaican) please to deliver unto her a cobweb.

And Jesus heard.

For within the hour, as she was preparing to brush her teeth, she spotted a minuscule cobweb dangling from the toilet lockoff valve near the floor.

With a noisy hallelujah, she jumped up, pulled on her bathrobe, and rushed into the living room to find Mannish dozing on the couch. She roused him indignantly, announcing that she wished him to witness what nastiness she had found in her bathroom, and the poor Indian chauffeur, groggy after hours of watching television, shambled after her into the bathroom, where he stared with thickening stupefaction as she-pointed to a frail strand of glossy cobweb dangling from the lock-off valve seconds before attacking it with domestic viciousness.

Mannish peered at her as she wiped triumphantly, and after a long embarrassing pause during which he recalled the name of the continent his foot presently walked on, he finally summoned up the presence of mind to mutter respectfully, “You are the cleanest woman I have ever met in my entire life.”

Precious slept that night the refreshing sleep of the innocent. And when she awoke next morning, she was impossibly pleased with herself.

Mansion had a dirty batty; she had wiped it.

Her rulership was now established.

But there was still nothing to do. She began to seriously wonder why she had been hired. Then it hit her. A man who would employ a woman for $250 a week with all found and give her nothing to do could only be out for one thing. One night she would wake up out of a deep sleep to find the Indian wriggling naked atop her slumbering belly, bawling for moonlight pumpum.

Naturally she would thump him down and chuck him straight out the door.

She pondered further. If only Mannish were not a sneaky Coolie, she would certainly find him attractive. But she would never forget how a Coolie boy with whom she had been playing the fishing-in-drawers game had once dropped a sand crab down her panties. The crab had seized the rim of her pumpum with its claw, and Precious had had to hurriedly rip off her panties before the beast mistook itself and went scuttling down the wrong hide-out hole, exposing her to medical mortification before the village nurse.

Now that it was clearer to her why she had been hired, she felt considerably better. She looked forward to the moment when moody Mannish would make his move so she could box his face, clear the air between them, and set events into motion. Night after night as she settled into her bed with a sigh, she could even feel the tingle in her palm from smiting Coolie cheek. Some nights she even lay in bed and practiced boxing down a Coolie on the tiled floor.

But after the third week when he failed to make his move, Precious became testy and quarrelsome, wondering again what she had done to earn the lovely room with a private bath in the back of the house, and if the brute had gone to all this trouble just for a little pum-pum, why he wasn’t man enough to come and beg for it honorably instead of sneaking around like a chartered accountant?

If it was one thing Precious couldn’t stand, it was man circling her like crow, especially after getting used to forthright Brutus who, during his frisky years, would sometimes vulgarly jump right out of his tent flap like he was at a Revival meeting. But Mannish made no move and did not come creeping into her bedroom at night, and during daylight hours was as polite as church usher during collection. All he did was watch television and gobble down hamburgers. All she did was loll about the house, doing a little occasional feather-dusting and fixing the odd sandwich. And nearly every night she phoned up Shirley and the grandchildren and pretended to be busy and happy with mansion life, while all along she was wondering what on earth she was doing to earn her money.

She did savor a quiet satisfaction, however, from inviting Shirley and the family to visit her at the mansion, with Mannish’s permission, and one Sunday afternoon they arrived when the chauffeur was discreetly away, and she drew respectful “Oohs” and “Aahs” out of them as she led them on a tour through the household splendor. Shirley asked question after question, pawed brocade fabric and felt up crystal bauble, while the two children were so impressed with the barking phones that they suspended their usual monkeyshines and acted as if they were in a museum.

“This is America for you, Mummy!” Shirley marvelled in a hushed voice. “Only four months in America, and already you living in a mansion complete with swimming pool and barking phone!”

“She’s only the maid, Shirley,” Henry grumbled, shuffling surlily behind them.

“Shut up about maid!” Shirley snapped at him over her shoulder. “She still living in a mansion! Where your mansion?”

“I am not a maid,” Precious corrected Henry primly. “My title is factotum.”

“See!” Shirley crowed. “She’s factotum, not maid. Congratulations, you hear, Mummy! I knew you would do well in America.”

And she waved her hand with a lavish sweep that deposited all the mansion glory that unfolded around them at her mummy’s immigrant feet. Precious beamed with inexpressible pleasure.

After the family had gone home, Precious retreated wearily into her own rooms to savor the glow of melting-pot triumph. Theophilus glowered disapprovingly at her from the dresser, and since there was a chance sneaky Mannish might come tiptoeing into her room tonight, Precious thought it best to spare her dead husband the trauma of witnessing Coolie romancing.

She turned his portrait gently so Theophilus could glower to his heart’s content at the wall and went to bed wondering if tonight was the night she would wake up to find a Coolie eelet wriggling atop her bellybutton.

Then suddenly the holiday was over, and nearly four weeks of getting fat in a mansion crashed to an abrupt end.

One evening she suddenly found that all traces of meat had mysteriously disappeared from the refrigerator and the pantry, which now bulged sanctimoniously with cheese, beans, yogurt, and green leafy vegetables. She went looking for Mannish and found him before the television, gourmandizing a giant hamburger. When she asked him, pray, what happened to the ham in the refrigerator, Mannish sheepishly explained that the mistress was a vegetarian who went berserk at the sight of meat, and that he was enjoying his last hamburger since she was returning tomorrow in her private jet and until she left would starve him on nothing but beans and cheese and dairy products.

“I always become constipated on such a diet,” he said gloomily. Then, waving the hamburger defiantly, he added, “This is possibly my last dead cow on the premises for two or three months.”

“Dead cow?”

“That is what the mistress calls hamburgers,” he said grumpily, chomping shamelessly on the carcass wedged in a sesame seed bun. Precious reflected inwardly that if a woman wanted to call a hamburger a dead cow, that was her prerogative no matter what any carping Coolie said. What she found utterly baffling was that the mistress would be arriving in her own personal jet plane without media coverage. You would think that such a wonder would merit at least as much attention as a mass murder.

Wiping his mouth, Mannish interrupted her daydream by saying that he hoped everything was spick and span for the mistress’s arrival. Precious assured him that everything was most certainly spick and span.