Free The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

as this we know better than to interrupt her show. As when on some hot mountain road a traveler hears the rumblings under the hood, and watches the temperature needle climb past the red and out of sight, and stops and opens the hood, and with handkerchief around hand makes darting stabs at the radiator cap to open it a little, but not too much, so the Allstons gave greetings to their cleaning lady, and waited for the jets of steam.
    She kicked off her muddy shoes, she stripped off her raincoat and revealed the white nurse’s nylon that gives her status as a professional and imparts a touch of class to the establishments she is willing to assist. Rumbling with phlegmy laughter, squinting against imaginary smoke from the cigarette that had been quenched in her run from car to door, she slid in stocking feet to the kitchen wastebasket and with a wet thumb and finger dropped the disintegrating cigarette in among the garbage.
    â€œYou know what I see on my way over? Ha- hal Them creeps! Lessee if their zoning laws’ll take care of that onel”
    Them creeps are the junior executives and computer programmers who occupy the new subdivisions. It is Minnie’s contention, with which in the main I agree, that they have ruined the hills by imposing their one-acre, one-house rigidities on land that used to be lived on comfortably by people who respected it. This morning, after waiting an hour while her husband Art dried out her wet distributor, she came over the hill past one of the new tracts just in time to see one of the bulldozed shelves let go its hold and slide smoothly down into the creek, leaving the aghast residents staring from the rain-swept edge of what had once been their front yard.
    â€œFence, trees, part of the lawn, the whole business,” Minnie said. “I thought of callin’ Art, and then I thought, What the hell, let ’em apply to Town Hall. You know, Mister Allston, if it was you, or the Pattersons, or somebody decent, Art’d be over in a minute to help. Jeez, it use to be a lot different around here. Everybody helped everybody else, everybody went to the same Christmas and New Year parties, there wasn’t any difference except some people had a bigger house and maybe a couple horses in the pasture. And you knew people, you’d see things goin’ on. Now everybody’s behind a chain-link fence, you never see anybody even mowin’ his lawn. But you’ll see this guy for a while, you can look right in his parlor window. I wisht it would happen to the rest of them. Them creeps with their subdivisions and their tax hikes and their zoning! My God, you can’t even build a henhouse without a permit—can’t even keep hens, for hell’s sake. Got to tie up your dog, can’t do this, can’t do that, can’t keep horses because the neighbors object to all them flies. Then that same woman and her phony husband that have sunk all they got, and a lot more, in this place they’ve made too expensive for anybody to afford it, they go on down to Town Hall twice a month and pass some more laws so their fancy address won’t get hurt by dogs and chickens and cluster housing and black people and Chicanos and students and hippies and federallyfinancedlowerincomehousing, all one word. That’s their real scare. Honest to God, they cross themselves when they say it.”
    Ruth, with her unburned wrist holding up her bangs and her mouth in a rictus, said, “Yes. Well.”
    Minnie stowed her shoes and raincoat in the broom closet and stood up, grunting. “Might as well work in stocking feet, so’s I won’t mess up your floors. God, them people. You know what one of ‘em said to me the other day—Mrs. Barnes, you know her? One of them white tennis dress ones with her legs naked clear to her behind? Runs into me on the road and stops me to ask about Mr. Patterson. Knows I work there. ‘Mister Patterson don’t look well,’