Houseng Problem

I stepped back, saw the hand-truck coming, and made a neat waltz turn to get out of its way. The boy with the hand-truck swerved, the cylinders began to fall out, and I took an unbalanced waltz step that ended with my smacking my thighs against the edge of the cradle and doing a neat, suicidal half-somersault. When I landed, I was jammed into the metal cradle, looking at the planer as it zoomed down on me. I’ve never in my life seen anything move so fast.

It was all over before I knew it. I was struggling to bounce myself out, men were yelling, the planer was bellowing with bloodthirsty iii-

umph, and the cylinder heads were rolling around underfoot all over the place. Then there was the crackling, tortured crash of gears and cams going to pieces. The planer stopped. My heart started.

After Pd changed my clothes, I waited for Jackie to knock off. Rolling home on the bus, I told her about it. “Pure dumb luck. Or else a mir­acle. One of those cylinders bounced into the planer in just the right place. The planer’s a mess, but I’m not. I think we ought to write a note of thanks to our—uh—tenants.”

Jackie nodded with profound conviction. “It’s the luck they pay their rent in, Eddie. I’m glad they paid in advance, too!”

“Except that I’m off the payroll till the planer’s fixed,” I said.

We went home through a storm. We could hear a banging in Mr. Henchard’s room, louder than any noise that had ever come from the bird cage. We rushed upstairs and found the casement window had come open. I closed it. The cretonne cover had been half blown off the cage, and I started to pull it back in place. Jackie was beside me. We looked at the tiny house; my hand didn’t complete its gesture.

The TO LET sign had been removed from the door. The chimney was smoking greasily. The blinds were tightly down, as usual, but there were other changes.

There was a small smell of cooking—scorned beef and skunk cabbage, I thought wildly. Unmistakably it came from the pixie house. On the formerly immaculate porch was a slopping-over garbage can, and a minuscule orange crate with unwashed, atom-sized tin cans and what were indubitably empty liquor bottles. There was a milk bottle by the door, too, filled with a biliously lavender liquid. It hadn’t been taken in yet, nor had the morning paper. It was certainly a different paper. The lurid size of the headlines indicated that it was a yellow tabloid.

A clothesline, without any clothes hanging on it at the moment, had been tacked up from one pillar of the porch to a corner of the house.

I jerked down the cover, and fled after Jackie into the kitchen. “My God!” I said.

‘We should have asked for references,” she gasped. “Those aren’t our tenants!”

“Not the tenants we used to have,” I agreed. “I mean the ones Mr. Henchard used to have. Did you see that garbage pail on the porch!”

“And the clothesline,” Jackie added. “How—how sloppy.”

“Jukes, Kallikaks and Jeeter Lesters. This isn’t Tobacco Road.”

Jackie gulped. “Mr. Henchard said they wouldn’t be back, you know.”

“Yeah, but, well—”

She nodded slowly, as though beginning to understand. I said, “Give.”

“I don’t know. Only Mr. Henchard said the Little Folk wanted a quiet, respectable neighborhood. And we drove them out. I’ll bet we gave the bird cage—the location—a bad reputation. The better-class pixies won’t live there. It’s—oh, dear—maybe it’s a slum.”

“You’re very nuts,” I said.

“I’m not. It must be that. Mr. Henchard said as much. He told us he’d have to build a new house. Desirable tenants won’t move into a bad neighborhood. We’ve got sloppy pixies, that’s all.”

My mouth opened. I stared at her.

“Uh-huh. The tenement type. I’ll bet they keep a pixilated goat in the kitchen,” Jackie babbled.

“Well,” I said, “we’re not going to stand for it. I’ll evict ‘em. I—I’ll pour water down their chimney. Where’s the teakettle’?”

Jackie grabbed me. “No, you don’t! We can’t evict them, Eddie. We mustn’t. They pay their rent,” she said.

And then I remembered. “The planer—”

“Just that,” Jackie emphasized, digging her fingers into my biceps. “You’d have been killed today if you hadn’t had some extra good luck. Those pixies may be sloppy, but they pay their rent.”

I got the angle. “Mr. Henchard’s luck worked differently, though. Remember when he kicked that rock down the beach steps, and they started to cave in? Me, I do it the hard way. I fall in the planer, sure, and a cylinder bounces after me and stops the machine but I’ll be out of a job till the planer’s fixed. Nothing like that ever happened to Mr. Henchard.”

“He had a better class of tenant,” Jackie explained, with a wild gleam in her eye. “If Mr. Henchard had fallen in the planer, a fuse would have blown, I’ll bet. Our tenants are sloppy pixies, so we get sloppy luck.”

“They stay,” I said. ‘We own a slum. Let’s get out of here and go down to Terry’s for a drink.”