nextOnce In Old Santa MonicaOne evening in July I was walking the dog. It had been a scorching day, and very smoggy. First Stage Alert all after noon. Now, at eleven, it was tolerable, though still hot: the air was smoke?singed and tasted bitter because there had been no rain for seven months?yet another drought year in Southern California. Sirens whooped a few blocks away on the boulevards north and south, fire engines hooted, and the hot night's din roared every where. It was, however, relatively quiet down the dark side streets. From one of the little frame cottages built in the early decades of this century, a faint voice called. I stopped. A cat perhaps? But it had called to me, I thought. In the faint street light filtering through the cedars the house appeared to be a forest green faded with age, the color of stagnant algae staining a swampy pool, streaked with the black tars that drip from our skies. The grass of the lawn was dead in patches and rank with dried mustard weed. The cottage was surrounded by huge clumps of spiky agave cactus. It was a woman's, or child's, voice, calling to me for help. The dog crouched, whining. I went in. The place was cobwebby, layered with stale dust, filled with a fetid, desiccated air, as though not a window had been opened in many years. It had the sour taste of newspapers that have crumbled over a lifetime into microscopic flakes that float about, clogging, gagging the throat. A house, I thought, like Miss Haversham's, though I wasn't aware of having had any great expectations. I walked through the empty, cluttered parlor and stopped. From the back there came the piteous voice again: an old woman's quaver. She was crying to me for help. I went down the fusty hall to her bedroom where I found the poor thing lying all helpless on the floor. I lifted her in my arms. She weighed no more than a child. Her skin was scaly and dry as a serpent's. Her hair was tangled sour and clotted, and she had dry sores on her cheeks. Her dark eyes were luminous in their shadowed hollows, lit by feverish points, and her lips were stretched and chapped over her dry protruding dentures. A sack of bones she seemed when I had laid her out on her huge rats' nest of a bed, and she moaned a little in pain and hunger, her arthritic hands barely able to hold the glass of water I fetched to her mouth. Two diamonds were set in her huge old earlobes, sparkling in the dim glow from a little crimson lamp on her night table. On her knobbly fingers she wore a ruby ring, a great star sapphire, and a lustrous pearl the size of a cherry. I opened the shutters, though she feared the draft, and I let in what weak, hot air there was outside. She was grateful then. Her voice was cracked and hoarse, and yet piped like a child's too. Hardly a voice at all, but a miaowing and a rasping. "Are you married, young man?" I have gray hair, I said, and a wife. "Children too?" She gave me those, I said, and the dog. "Then you are a happy man," she said, coughing again as she sipped the water. Yes, I answered. "Well then, remember what I say. What you predict comes true." Of course, I said. She closed her eyes, slitted them rather, and leaned back against the headboard, her long jaw thrust forward, the waxy teeth protruding even further so that she whistled and clacked. "Don't be too sure!" she said. I told her I'd call the social services people when I got back home. And I did that. A few weeks afterward, I saw a realtor's sign on the lawn. In two months, nothing remained: the bulldozer came and razed her house into a mound of splinters in an hour; the trucks came and carted it all away by noon. Three months later there was an apartment building with twenty units and a swimming pool and sauna on the site, fresh new bluegrass on the lawn out front, and the realtor's pennants advertising vacancies. Within two weeks those were gone, and the garage below filled with Jaguars, Stingrays, Cobras and the like. The drought broke: we had November rains washing our city clean again. A lawyer's letter came in December. She'd left me everything. When the estate was finally settled, there would be a quarter of a million. A small fortune for us. A week later, another letter came: her distant relatives were suing: they had been displaced by me: I was an interloper. They claimed that I had dared to trespass; that I had found the old creature dying and forced her to write me into her Will. That I was a criminal, a fraud. That I was the usurper. And that I would never have dared to enter her bedroom if I'd been a happy man. Of course I explained to the Probate Court that I was only an innocent. That I had done a mere kindness one late evening, called out of my way. That her own family had left her there on the floor of that midden to rot. That I never expected thanks for doing what is right, let alone , let alone the property and a fortune. The verdict came in the spring: Not Proven. next |