NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
I went back to follow up with Diddlie on the subject of neighborhood tensions she mentioned the other day. She was still cleaning up. The ceiling had fallen into her living room, and a young friend was there to help. The roof had been leaking slowly for over a year, but no one could find the source and a small damp stain in the living room ceiling had stopped expanding since the last rain leaving a egg-shaped patch of dry discoloration. That is where the ceiling gave way when the large oak branch crashed through the roof letting rain into the attic last night.
I thought Diddlie had left me alone in the living room after inviting me in and being called away. Then I notice Mr. Liddell over by the fireplace. Her husband’s books have been stored in the attic for years. They have also been absorbing drips over the months when the roof was leaking. An avalanche of papier-mâché had fallen through near the chimney and covered her TV and stereo while she was doing laundry. Now a promontory in the gray glacier of pulp reaches the carpet from the hearth, and the carpet is stained with wet absorbed from the deluge. The pulp is a combination of French literature and Heathkit manuals. I can still see evidence of Beaudelaire on the TV screen and there, intact, the cover of Balzac’s Louis Lambert. The TV is on but the volume is low. A few bits of printed paper are still stuck to the screen, but there are not enough of the poet’s printed words to hide that lurid image of a man in a commercial selling a cure for erectile dysfunction. More poetic fragments are stuck to the top of the stereo receiver, but wiped off the knob of the tuner. Heathkit, and splintered wood has demolished some figurines on the mantelpiece, and disintegrating wet pages of schematic diagrams have dripped on to the hearth.
Mr. Liddell is quietly examining the mass of pulp around him with his twitching pink nose. He straightens his long ears and tracks pulp across the deep blue carpet and then disappears into the kitchen. I can hear a young voice in the kitchen addressing him informally as “Liddy”.
Then the young voice shouts: “Mom! Who’s that guy in the yard?”
I notice a gray parrot on the mantelpiece. It has been so silent and still up to now, I don’t notice it amid the confusion until it walks over a fallen candlestick which rolls under its feet and falls to the floor once the parrot is clear. The parrot starts fluttering and then beats its wings furiously without taking off.
Diddlie responds to the young voice in a muffled shout from somewhere beyond the kitchen:
“Don’t you remember? It’s Mr. Fawkes. It’s the 5th isn’t it? He’s due any time now.”
“Who’s that?”
“Robin! Can you check on the guy outside please” Diddlie shouted again.
A busty young woman in sweats bounces out of the hall and across the living room past me towards the mantelpiece and looks out the window, saying “Hi, I’m Robin.” She turns to look at the bird and down at Mr. Liddell’s tracks, and follows them back into the kitchen.
Robin’s voice is higher and younger than Diddlie’s. “Keep Liddy out of the living room” she tells the boy in the kitchen.
“OK Mom: Who’s that guy in the yard; see him over there?”
“You know, you met him last week.”
“No, this guy looks different. You mean the guy with the fireworks in his trunk right?”
“He has a van not a car. What trunk? What fireworks?”
“The guy had a roof rack too, and he told me he threw his back out stretching to reach something.”
“Mr. Fawkes is quite alright, just look at him lifting that box. What are you talking about?”
“Never mind. Let me go see.”
“I am expecting Mr. Fawkes. Is that him? Has he remembered the wetvac and fans?”, asked Diddlie sounding closer than before.
Robin appears again from the kitchen, saying over her shoulder as she comes into the living room: “Yes it’s okay.”
“What’s that about fireworks?” It’s Diddlie, now apparently in the hall.
“I don’t know what he means. What do you mean about ….”
A door slams, and I can’t hear the rest. There is no answer to the question. It seems the boy has gone outside. The young woman then introduces herself more formally. She pushes back her wavy brown hair saying “Hi I am Robin Roost”, and tells me she is Diddlie’s God-daughter and has come over with her son to help.
The parrot on the mantelpiece starts beating its wings. Robin explains “That’s the Red Queen. Who let her out I wonder?”
I can’t see any cage, and the bird looks gray not red, but I can hear Robin addressing the bird: “You’l have to flap harder than that to get anywhere!”
The Red Queen beats the air even harder, as if she understands, releasing a red feather from under the grey ones, and takes a long hop across the room to land on a standard lamp. The shade can’t take the queen’s weight and falls at a sharp angle to the vertical lamp with the fabric jammed against the bulb. The red Queen struggles to regain her footing tearing the fabric with her claws, as Mr. Fawkes walks in wearing brown riding boots and jodhpurs under a duster, long, brown and Australian, that swings open as he moves. He walks over to the parrot and whistles at it.
“Off to bed!” screams the bird like a bad tempered parent. Mr. Fawkes keeps whistling at the parrot and she repeats herself sharply at full volume. “You haven’t got a hope” says the bird in a jeering tone, and starts repeating “Hope Hope Hope Hope” like a faulty old-fashioned record player.
I see Mr. Fawkes has a yellow towel over one shoulder. He lowers his shoulder as near to the bird as he can get and coaxes it onto the towel. It moves on to his shoulder and starts flapping and hitting him in the head as he steps back slowly and carefully away from the lamp to get room to maneuver. Mr.Fawkes takes the beating stoically and expertly flips the towel over the red queen bringing it off his shoulder and into his long-fingered hands, in front of him, as a neatly wrapped yellow bundle.
“That takes care of her.” Mr. Fawkes shows a jowl stretching smile at the top of his long neck. He goes back into the hall with small red and gray feathers tangled in his thinning brown hair.
Robin says “Thanks Mr. Fawkes” as the front door bangs again drowning out another faint voice from outside. She tells me that Jake’s prompt action in the storm last night prevented further inundation by pulped literature and schematic diagrams. He went up to his eighth floor greenhouse and observation post to watch the storm and heard the branch breaking off, hitting Diddlie’s roof.
When he saw what had happened seven floors below, he went straight to Diddlie’s door but got no answer when he knocked and rang. “He had those Urban something or other people here within minutes,” Robin tells me confidentially. “Those guys did a temporary fix that saved us from further disaster.”
Diddlie comes in asking Robin to phone the insurance rep and refusing my offers of help, lets me out the kitchen door. The front is blocked by Mr. Fawkes’ cleaning and drying operations. I walk out the back door and around the house to get to the street through the car port. There is a rabbit hutch in the carport supported on two saw horses with a long board nailed across the top. “Mr Liddell” is burned into wood in large block capitals and underneath in smaller lower case print, “Rabbit in Residence.” Two pink plastic flamingos, each with a single long stiff wire for legs, have fallen onto the remains of a croquet set. Their long curving hollow plastic necks are hooked together as if in a kiss. The wheeled stand has topped over and broken. Colorful balls have rolled out of a jumble of mallets hoops, and flamingos onto the driveway. I pick up a few balls and put them back under the car port.
