Face on the Wall (32 page)

They stood silently at one side, watching the swing of the grappling jaws and the rocking rotation of the massive counterweight. Delicately, as if he were reaching out his hand, the operator opened the grapple over the corner of the kitchen wall and closed it again, biting off a chunk of Annie's kitchen cabinets. A forgotten tin of sardines shot up in the air. A section of the ceiling caved in and collapsed.

Annie, Homer and Mary huddled inside Flimnap's wooden shelter. “Come on out, you guys,” shouted Wally Feather.

“Come out, come out!” cried Trudy Tuck.

“Get out of there, you people,” shouted Bob Gast, his voice trembling. “Come on out, I mean it.”

“Mrs. Kelly,” screamed Charlene, “get out, get out!”

“We're, not leaving,” roared Homer. He put one arm around Annie and the other around Mary. Together they crouched under Flimnap's wooden roof as the teeth of the grappling machine bit down and tore at joists and rafters with a grinding racket of splintering wood.

“Oh, God,” muttered Mary, “there goes the kitchen.”

“It's okay,” whispered Annie, as the corner post went down and the east window buckled out of its frame. “Let him, let him. It's okay.”

“Christ,” muttered Homer, wondering what demonic forces in his life had led inevitably to this crisis, what tendencies ingrained in him since childhood. What ghastly flaw in his character pointed directly to this moment when he would find himself crouching inside a collapsing building? Good Lord, what was Annie doing? She was jumping up, standing out from under the sheltering wooden roof to look up at her painted wall. “Come back, you idiot,” cried Homer. “You'll get yourself killed.”

She couldn't hear him, she wasn't listening. She was staring at her wall.

So far it seemed all right. There were no cracks. The lifesize figures were nearly hidden under plaster dust, but they were intact. The ghostly ship on her painted horizon was still afloat. Under a white film the Owl and the Pussy-cat still rowed their boat serenely.

As the grappling machine rolled back over the heap of wreckage and swiveled on its massive turntable, Annie crawled into Flimnap's house again and said shakily, “It's okay so far.”

Robert Gast was in torment. Once again he yelled at the three fools who had holed up in his doomed house: “Get out, you morons, get out of there!”

“Morons!” echoed Charlene, screaming at the top of her lungs.

The machine groaned forward. Minnie and Trudy, Henry and Lily, Perry and Wally shouted, “No!”

“You're witnesses,” yelled Gast, his voice cracking in a high shriek. “If anything happens, it's their fault. I won't be held responsible.”

But he would be held responsible, and he knew it. Terrified, he watched as the grappling jaw yawned and gulped down another piece of roof. The south end of the kitchen was gone, the bedroom, the bathroom. Homer, Mary and Annie huddled under their wooden umbrella as another piece of the ceiling collapsed. Their friends screamed at them, “Come out, come out!” But they bowed their heads and hunched their shoulders and hung on.

Gast had endured enough. He shouted at the driver to stop.

“No, no, Daddy,” cried Charlene, snatching at his arm, battering his chest with her fists. The fate of her Olympic pool hung in the balance, with its turquoise water, its red-and-blue deck chairs and colorful jungle plants.

The wrecking machine shivered a couple of times, then clanked to a stop and fell silent.

Chapter 48

Set a man to watch all night,

Watch all night, watch all night!

Set a man to watch all night,

My fair lady!

Mother Goose rhyme

“I
f we can't leave, we can at least make ourselves comfortable.” Mary made a list of all the things they were going to need, like sleeping bags, blankets, bottled water, and a microwave oven.

Homer shook his head. “A microwave won't do us much good without electricity.”

“Oh, we've got to have electricity.” Mary grinned and poked him in the chest. “Go out and get us some electricity, Homer.”

Fortunately, Flimnap O'Dougherty turned up just then. “Oh, God, Flimnap,” said Annie, looking up at him from the dark cave of the wooden shelter he had detached from the back of his truck, “where have you been?”

For once he didn't dodge the question. He knelt on the gritty floor and said softly, “The fact is, I don't like cameras very well.”

“I see,” murmured Annie, although she didn't see.

The trouble was, the cameras were more and more in evidence. The story about Annie's refusal to move out of a condemned house had gripped the imagination of the newspaper-reading, television-watching nation. Some people sided with Annie, who was painting some sort of mural on the wall of a rented house and couldn't bear to see it destroyed. Others were all for legality. “It's her own fault. It's not her house. Why would any sensible person paint a picture on the wall of a rented house?”

So there were more newspeople every day. Fortunately, the lay of the land and the shape of the house provided protection. Annie's friends could rattle the knocker of her front door and slip inside, but everybody else had to watch from the driveway. The wrecked south side of Annie's house was shut off on one side by a vast thorny patch of blackberries, and on the other by the fence and padlocked gate that had been erected by the Gasts. Far away, across the cornfield, Annie and her friends could see Baker Bridge Road, where the traffic came and went, looking like Matchbox cars, but immediately below her small front yard there was a bristling wilderness.

“They can't get through
that
,” gloated Mary Kelly, who had tried it. “It's like the hedge of thorns around Sleeping Beauty's castle.”

It was true that Flimnap O'Dougherty did not like cameras. He came and went with care, appearing after nightfall or early in the morning, doing an odd job or two, then vanishing.

With his usual skill he solved the problem of electric power. He sent Homer out to buy an adapter for the cigarette lighter in Annie's car, then ran a long wire through the front door to a lamp with a bent silk shade. The lamp shone down on a card table belonging to Henrietta Willsey. Wally Feather was a camping enthusiast in his spare time, and he produced a pop-up tent. Mary brought over a television set, and Flimnap soon had it glowing in the dark hollow of the shelter. Then, ever the practical handyman, he built an old-fashioned privy in the bushes and provided it with a garden fork and spade.

The problem of guard duty was taken care of by Lily Coombs, the creator of pretty arrangements of dried flowers. Lily worked out a schedule. She soon had all her time slots filled with stalwart defenders of Fortress Annie. Homer and Mary came and went, taking their turns.

And then, for a while, things settled down. Life was bizarre, but a routine developed. Before long a weird normalcy prevailed in Annie's ruined house.

And it wasn't just her friends who cheered her on. It was the images on her wall. They were still there, wraithlike under their coating of white dust, looming figures presiding over Annie's ramshackle domestic arrangements. They belonged to her, they needed her, they must not be allowed to die. “It's amazing,” said Mary to Homer, “the way Annie hangs on. Tough, that girl is tough. We've got to back her all the way.”

So it was a standoff. For the moment, Robert Cast was stumped. He had succeeded in destroying three-quarters of Annie's house (which was not really her house at all). But the north side remained intact, because the goddamned woman had put her body in the way. It was an absurd emotional gesture, but it meant going back to law.

“Don't talk to
me
about it,” said Roberta, throwing up her hands. “Talk to Sprocket.”

“Oh, God, Roberta.”

“Hurry up, Daddy,” insisted Charlene. “We've got to schedule the pool company early, or they won't come until next year.”

“Honestly, Charlene,” moaned her father, “sometimes I wonder if we should really go through with it. It's become such a big deal.”

Charlene fixed him with her eye. “Dad-
DY?”

“Well, all right, all right. Okay, I know.”

Harassed by cameras and inquisitive reporters, Gast bought himself a toupee. It sat on the top of his head like a doily, making a sharp curve too low over his face. On television he looked pale and frightened. His protestations of perfect legality were unheard. All the sympathy went to Annie
COURAGEOUS ARTIST
DEFIES
WRECKINC MACHINE
, that was the gist of the reporting, and Gast resented it.

And how strange, the way they wrote about her all the time but never showed a picture of Anna Swann in the flesh.

“Get her,” said Harvey Broadstairs, executive editor of the
Boston Globe.
“It's insane, all that stuff about her on page one, and no picture.”

Seven staff photographers were crowded around his desk. Tim Foley said, “How about the back flap of one of her children's books?”

“No picture,” said Broadstairs. “We tried her publisher, but they're out of business. Big takeover. You guys have got to do something. I don't care what you do, but come back with a picture of Anna Swann.”

Behind the seven photographers pressing up against the executive editor's desk there was an eighth. Bertha Rugg was crowded out. She couldn't squeeze between the hips of the young women and the shoulders of the young men. She stood in the back and listened with all her might.

Chapter 49