Houseng Problem

was pulling into the gas station down the slope, and Mr. Henchard broke into a run.

He caught the bus, all right, but only after he’d fallen flat on his face.

I put my arm around Jackie.

“Oh, gosh,” she said. “His bad luck’s working already.”

“Not bad,” I pointed out. “Just normal. When you rent a little house to pixies, you get a lot of extra good luck.”

We sat in silence, watching each other. Finally without saying a word, we went into Mr. Henchard’s vacated room. The bird cage was still there. So was the house. So was the TO LET sign.

“Let’s go to Terry’s,” I said.

We stayed later than usual. Anybody would have thought we didn’t want to go home because we lived in a haunted house. Except that in our case the exact opposite was true. Our house wasn’t haunted any more. It was horribly, desolately, coldly vacant.

I didn’t say anything till we’d crossed the highway, climbed the slope, and unlocked our front door. We went, I don’t know why, for a final look at the empty house. The cover was back on the cage, where I’d replaced it, but—thump, rustle, pop! The house was tenanted again!

We backed out and closed the door before we breathed.

“No,” Jackie said. “We mustn’t look. We mustn’t ever, ever, look un­der that cover.”

“Never,” I said. “Who do you suppose . . .“

We caught a very faint murmur of what seemed to be boisterous sing­ing. That was fine. The happier they were, the longer they’d stay. When we went to bed, I dreamed that I was drinking beer with Rip Van Winkle and the dwarfs. I drank ‘em all under the table.

It was unimportant that the next morning was rainy. We were con­vinced that bright yellow sunlight was blazing in through the windows. I sang under the shower. Jackie burbled inarticulately and joyously. We didn’t open Mr. Henchard’s door.

“Maybe they want to sleep late,” I said.

It’s always noisy in the machine-shop, and a hand-truckload of rough cylinder casings going past doesn’t increase the din noticeably. At three o’clock that afternoon, one of the boys was rolling the stuff along to­ward the storeroom, and I didn’t hear it or see it until I’d stepped back from my planer, cocking my eye at its adjustment.

Those big planers are minor juggernauts. They have to be bedded in concrete, in heavy thigh-high cradles on which a heavily weighted metal monster—the planer itself—slides back and forth.

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.”

We buttoned our raincoats and departed, breathing the fresh, wet air. The storm was slashing down as furiously as ever. I’d forgotten my flashlight, but I didn’t want to go back for it. We headed down the slope, toward Terry’s faintly visible lights.

It was dark. We couldn’t see much through the storm. Probably that was why we didn’t notice the bus until it was bearing down on us, headlights almost invisible in the dimout.

I started to pull Jackie aside, out of the way, but my foot slipped

on the wet concrete, and we took a nosedive. I felt Jackie’s body hurtle against me, and the next moment we