Free The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Page B

over the entrance to the culvert. Water pouring down against the pile was being deflected out into the road, to go sheeting down the asphalt toward the bottom, where a lake had covered the area between the eucalyptus trees. That culvert was obviously clogged too.
    My feet were wet, my pants were soaked to the thighs. As usual, my hands had gone into their Raynaud’s syndrome spasm in the cold and were white to the second joints of the fingers. For all that, the adobe mixed with leaves was so impossible to shovel that I finally had to get down and dig at the mass with my hands. Eventually I moved something that counted. The bottom fell out, the stream of water dove downward with a slurp, and across the road I heard the plug of mud and leaves shoot out into the gully. So. Emergency dealt with. I cope, therefore I am. I washed my numb hands in muddy ice water and stood up to shove them between the buttons of my slicker and into my armpits for warming. Then I heard a car at the foot of the hill.
    It had already eased through the lake down there. Now, shifted down, it started fast up the road on which water was still sheeting, not yet cleared by my clearing of the culvert. It threw a bow wave like a power boat—a BMW, I saw, two people in it, blonde hair on the right, black behind the wheel, two faces staring out through the sweeping wiper blades. Césare and company, a half hour early. Ruth would be so pleased.
    Leaning on my shovel, I stood aside, my face fixed for humorous comment, intending to wave them on when they slowed, with shouted assurances that I would be with them in a few minutes. But at the last moment something in the set of Césare’s head and neck told me that he was not pausing in any downpour on any flooded hill for any workman in a muddy slicker leaning on a muddy shovel. I just had time to swing around as they passed. The splash drenched the back of my slicker and the unprotected back of my neck.
    Almost contemplatively, assuring myself that I still had a half hour before my guests were due, I went on down to the bottom and cleared the culvert there to ease and drain the lake. Leaving the shovel in case further emergencies developed, I came back up the road littered with leaves, broken branches, and rocks loosened from above. To maintain feelings appropriate to a host, I did not allow myself to dwell on the State Department’s exchange-of-persons program, nor yet on the volatile and romantic Italian temperament. Instead, I counted the steps it took me from the bottom culvert to the middle one—one hundred twelve—and from the middle one to the top—one hundred seventy-one. Two hundred eighty-three altogether.
    Unseen, I got past the entrance and around to the bedroom door. But when I had peeled off my soaked and muddied clothes and stepped into the bathroom, my finger on the switch produced no light, and in the shower my turning of the knob gave rise to no more than a weak little old man’s jet followed by a dribble. While I tried to get clean under that, I elaborated a fantasy in which I called Dr. Ben Alexander and had him come to examine the prostate of my plumbing system.
    Finally I got half clean, though my hands continued numb, and at twelve-forty, only ten minutes after they had been invited for, but forty after their arrival, I went in to my guests. Things had obviously been a little strained in there. Ruth, who has a lot of doomed-queen, avenger-queen expressions, sometimes Medea, sometimes Clytemnestra, sometimes Lady Macbeth, gave me one that was more like Cassandra or Mary Queen of Scots. She was just handing a drink, probably the second or third, to Césare, who was peering out at the drowned hills and being reminded, not for the first time if my intuition was right, of Umbria.
    Césare rushed to embrace me, crying to his gods that he had not recognized me on the hill. “How could I know? I saw you there, I thought, ‘Poor devil, what some people