“Whew-ee!” heaved Bubber. “Damn ’f that woman can’t talk d’ spots off d’ dice.”
“No lie. I ain’t got my breath back yet—jes’ listenin’ to ’uh.”
“Yea—and you tellin’ ’uh she could ride back with us if she wanted.”
“Who?”
“You?”
“When?”
“Didn’ you stop and tell ’uh to come on, less go—we was finished?”
“Oh yea. But I swear I thought I was talkin’ to you. Y’all look like sisters. If you and her didn’ have d’ same grandaddy, somebody played a awful dirty joke on y’ both.”
The inevitable quarrel ensued, and this somewhat took their minds off Bess’s unusual jogtrot. If the trip out had been slow, the trip back was endless. For out of all that had reached his ears, Shine remembered only one part of Arabella Fuller’s dyspneic discourse, and this hummed in his mind as persistent and unvarying as the rumble of Bess’s innards:
“Go where, chile? Back to town with y’all? Deed I’ll have to stay out hyeh mos’ another week packin’ things f’ the winter. Y’all go right ahead, though—Linda’s there and I done told ’er where to tell y’all to put ev’ything—”
Linda living alone in the house with Fred Merrit, toper and dickty.
A piano is a malicious thing, the temporary dwelling of some evil spirit that follows you from one instrument to the next. Sooner or later that spirit catches you off guard and, using the instrument as its weapon, swiftly, viciously strikes. Either it gets you then and there or is itself permanently defeated.
Every man who enters this work thereby invites this pursuit. Both Jinx and Bubber had escaped for a time, but finally each had been caught. Bubber had lost a part of one foot. Jinx’s elbow had been crushed, leaving a permanent deformity. These injuries, however, did not materially hamper their work, and so Jinx and Bubber considered themselves fortunate; for, as the superstition had it, they now enjoyed immunity.
Shine had so far gone without a scratch, had never been caught off guard. It was Jinx and Bubber’s belief that he would probably go on escaping. What chance did any piano have at a steel man lined with cast-iron? Shine was just as hard toward things as toward people, no more vulnerable in the one case than the other, and though ordinarily he could afford to be more generous and genial than most men, who dared not thus risk imposition, still in a pinch he was known to be more unyielding than bedrock. Nothing fazed Shine. “Remember how he held on to that piano the day the roof broke?”
But today for the first time Shine’s preoccupation put him quite off guard; and so today his evil pursuer struck.
The piano was an elderly upright which Merrit kept because it had been his first luxury. It was to go to the front room on the third floor of the house, a room which had been set apart as a remote and private playground—a combination of den, poker room and too-bad-party resort. The instrument stood alone and sullen at the edge of the cluttered sidewalk, aloof, superior, apart, permitting the lesser pieces to go first.
Shine likewise aloof and apart, refused to enter the house with the others. He saw Linda only once, when first she gave Jinx admittance, and although he did not allow himself to make frank observations, he was aware from many a covert glance that the girl had withdrawn into the inner regions, evidently as intent upon avoiding him as was he upon avoiding her.
The time soon came, however, when all but the piano had been removed. Shine’s active participation had so far consisted only in handing things down from the van. Now he must direct the hoisting and so lend a more active hand.
It was now that his brooding inadvertence combined with his recently assumed recklessness to make him do an unprecedented thing. During his two years of working with Jinx and Bubber he had not once trusted either of them to anchor hoisting tackle. But now, instead of going to the roof of the house to anchor the tackle himself, he ordered Bubber to do so in his place. He’d be damned if Linda should think he was trying to see her.
“Well—what the hell’s holdin’ y’?” he inquired as Bubber hesitated, doubting that he had heard aright. Bubber turned slowly, shaking his head and meditating aloud:
“When that boogy gits evil he gits so evil. They’s so damn much of ’im.”
“Then come down and unsash that winder,” Shine commanded balefully, “and stand by to pull in, see?”
Jinx would have followed to check up on his confrère’s technic, but Shine halted him to give further orders.
“You keep them flat feet o’ yours right on the sidewalk and hold on to this guide rope. I’ll do the pullin’. When Squatty pulls in up there you can go up and help him take it down.”
So it was arranged, and presently Bubber, directed to the roof by the red-hottest mamma that had ever smiled upon him, was casting about for anchorage. A cylindrical airduct presented itself as the most likely object to use; it was well away from the front ledge of the roof; giving good purchase, it was of ample height and diameter, and it was apparently constructed of heavy cast-iron, cold, black, and shiny. As a matter of fact it was made of glazed mortar and had a hidden joint just below the roof.
To this duct Bubber made his major attachments, using many windings of line and an intricate system of knots; and for double security he carried the line ten feet further rearward to a chimney and around this wound the rest of it, fastening it uncompromisingly with a second complex of knots. When he tossed his tackle line over the edge, it was with
