Free The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Page A

she says. ‘Looks so pale and thin,’ she says. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘he’s just gettin’ over an operation.’ ‘Is he gettin’ over it?’ she wants to know. ‘I heard it’s terminal,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where you heard that,’ I says. ‘Far as I know, he’s gettin’ along fine.’ ‘Well, I’m so glad to hear it,’ she says, and then she says, like it hasn’t been on her mind all the time, ‘Oh, Minnie,’ she says—who the hell ever give her the right to call me by my first name?—‘Minnie,’ she says, ‘if anything should happen to Mister Patterson and they don’t need you no more, I hope you’ll keep me in mind. It’s so hard to find reliable help,’ she says, ‘up here in the hills.’ Sittin’ there waitin’ for him to die. Jesus.”
    â€œThat’s callous,” Ruth said. “I can’t imagine people being so callous. Minnie, I wonder...”
    â€œ ‘Why don’t you try East Palo Alto?’ I ask her, and she says, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare ! Bring a black into the hills?’ she says. ‘It would make me nervous, just knowin’ they knew where we live.’ ‘Well, Mountain View or Sunnyvale then,’ I says. ‘There’s plenty people need work.’ But she don’t like that any better. ‘Chicanos?’ she says. ‘Right when La Raza is suin’ this town, right this very minute, tryin’ to push a lowcosthousingproject on us and break down our zoning? I’d be just every bit as nervous hirin’ a Chicano as I would a black.’ ‘Well, that’s too bad,’ I says to her, ‘because you know what my last name is? Garcia.’ That kind of scrambled her. ‘Oh, but you’re different,’ she tries to say. ‘I mean, you’re married to Mister Garcia but you’re not ... And you live in the hills, you’re a neighbor.’ ‘So was a lot of other Chicanos till you crowded them out,’ I says. Oh boy, that’s some kind of people. Nixon could of got his whole White House staff out of just one subdivision around here. I wish you could of seen them up there on the edge of that bank lookin’ down to where their front yard had slid.”
    â€œI wish we had,” Ruth said firmly. “I wish we had time to hear all about it. But we just haven’t got time, I’m afraid. We’re in a jam, Minnie. We’ve got people coming for lunch, and the power’s off. You know how that is. You can’t do anything. But we’ve got to, just the same. First thing, I guess you or Joe will have to bring in some buckets of water from the tank.”
    â€œWhy sure,” Minnie said. “Whyn’t you say? You just tell me what you need done. Oh... hey.” Her eyes were on me.
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    â€œI. forgot to tell you. But if you got company comin’, your culvert’s plugged up and there’s water runnin’ all down your road. I just barely made it up.”
    The light came on, dimmed to a glow, fluttered, and went out —some forlorn last kiss of broken wires off in the wet hills. Ruth said in her crisis voice, “I suppose you’ve got to see what you can do. Minnie’ll get me the water. But first bring me in two leaves for the table. Oh, damn, why didn’t we say we’d take them out somewhere?”
    â€œMaybe we couldn’t get out,” I said. “Maybe he can’t get in. Relax. We’ll make it.”
    â€œOh, relax!” Ruth said. When she gets into one of those states she resents any attempt to soothe her. Only last-ditch desperation is permissible.
    That was about eleven. Three quarters of an hour later I was still digging, blind with rain, my slicker threatening to lift me up like a hang glider, at the mound of leaves and gravel the flood-water had piled