The Little Mice
“They’re very odd,” I said. “The little Mexican couple.”
“How do you mean?” asked my wife.
“Never a sound,” I said. “Listen.”
Ours was a house deep back in among tenements, to which another half house had been added. When my wife and I purchased the house, we rented the additional quarters which lay walled up against one side of our parlor. Now, listening at this particular wall, we heard our hearts beat.
“I know they’re home,” I whispered. “But in the three years they’ve lived here I’ve never heard a dropped pan, a spoken word, or the sound of a light switch. Good God, what are they doing in there?”
“I’d never thought,” said my wife. “It is peculiar.”
“Only one light on, that same dim little blue twenty-five-watt bulb they burn in their parlor. If you walk by and peer in their front door, there he is, sitting in his armchair, not saying a word, his hands in his lap. There she is, sitting in the other armchair, looking at him, saying nothing. They don’t move.”
“At first glance I always think they’re not home,” said my wife. “Their parlor’s so dark. But if you stare long enough, your eyes get used to it and you can make them out, sitting there.”
“Some day,” I said, “I’m going to run in, turn on their lights, and yell! My God, if I can’t stand their silence, how can they? They can talk, can’t they?”
“When he pays the rent each month, he says hello.”
“What else?”
“Good-by.”
I shook my head. “When we meet in the alley he smiles and runs.”
My wife and I sat down for an evening of reading, the radio, and talk. “Do they have a radio?”
“No radio, television, telephone. Not a book, magazine, or paper in their house.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Don’t get so excited.”
“I know, but you can’t sit in a dark room two or three years and not speak, not listen to a radio, not read or even eat, can you? I’ve never smelled a steak or an egg frying. Damn it, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard them go to bed!”
“They’re doing it to mystify us, dear.”
“They’re succeeding!”
I went for a walk around the block. It was a nice summer evening. Returning, I glanced idly in their front door. The dark silence was there, and the heavy shapes, sitting, and the little blue light burning. I stood a long time, finishing my cigarette. It was only in turning to go that I saw him in the doorway, looking out with his bland, plump face. He didn’t move. He just stood there, watching me.
“Evening,” I said.
Silence. After a moment, he turned, moving away into the dark room.
In the morning, the little Mexican left the house at seven o’clock, alone, hurrying down the alley, observing the same silence he kept in his rooms. She followed at eight o’clock, walking carefully, all lumpy under her dark coat, a black hat balanced on her frizzy, beauty-parlor hair. They had gone to work this way, remote and silent, for years.
“Where do they work?” I asked at breakfast.
“He’s a blast-furnace man at U.S. Steel here. She sews in a dress loft somewhere.”
“That’s hard work.”
I typed a few pages of my novel, read, idled; typed some more. At five in the afternoon I saw the little Mexican woman come home, unlock her door, hurry inside, hook the screen, and lock the door tight.
He arrived at six sharp in a rush. Once on their back porch, however, he became infinitely patient. Quietly, raking his hand over the screen, lightly, like a fat mouse scrabbling, he waited. At last she let him in. I did not see their mouths move.
Not a sound during suppertime. No frying. No rattle of dishes. Nothing.
I saw the small blue lamp go on.
“That’s how he is,” said my wife, “when he pays the rent. Raps so quietly I don’t hear. I just happen to glance out the window and there he is. God knows how long he’s waited, standing, sort of ‘nibbling’ at the door.”
Two nights later, on a beautiful July evening, the little Mexican man came out on the back porch and looked at me, working in the garden and said, “You’re crazy!” He turned to my wife. “You’re crazy too!” He waved his plump hand quietly. “I don’t like you. Too much noise. I don’t like you. You’re crazy.”
He went back into his little house.
August, September, October, November. The “mice,” as we now referred to them, lay quietly in their dark nest. Once my wife gave him some old magazines with his rent receipt. He accepted these politely, with a smile and a bow, but no word. An hour later she saw him put the magazines in the yard incinerator and strike a match.
The next day he paid the rent three months in advance, no doubt figuring that he would only have to see us up close once every twelve weeks. When I saw him on the street he crossed quickly to the other side to greet an imaginary friend. She, similarly, ran by me, smiling wildly, bewildered, nodding. I never got nearer than twenty yards to her. If there was plumbing to be fixed in their house, they went silently forth on their own, not telling us, and brought back a plumber who worked, it seemed, with a flashlight.
“God damnedest thing,” he told me when I saw him in the alley. “Damn fool place there hasn’t got any light bulbs in the sockets. When I asked where they all were, damn it, they just smiled at me!”
I lay at night thinking about the little mice. Where were they from? Mexico, yes. What part? A farm, a small village, somewhere by a river? Certainly no city or town. But a place where there were stars and the normal lights and darknesses, the goings and comings of the moon and the sun they had known the better part of their lives. Yet here they were, far, far away from home, in an impossible city, he sweating out the hell of blast furnaces all day, she bent to jittering needles in a sewing loft. They came home then to this block, through a loud city, avoided clanging streetcars and saloons that screamed like red parrots along their way. Through a million shriekings they ran back to their parlor, their blue light, their comfortable chairs, and their silence. I often thought of this. Late at night I felt if I put out my hand, in the dark of my own bedroom, I might feel adobe and hear a cricket and a river running by under the moon and someone singing softly to a faint guitar.
Late one December evening the next-door tenement burned. Flames roared at the sky, bricks fell in avalanches, and sparks littered the roof where the quiet mice lived.
I pounded their door.
“Fire!” I cried. “Fire!”
They sat motionless in their blue-lighted room.
I pounded violently. “You hear? Fire!”
The fire engines arrived. They gushed water into the tenement. More bricks fell. Four of them smashed holes in the little house. I climbed to the roof, extinguished the small fires there, and scrambled down, my face dirty and my hands cut. The door to the little house opened. The quiet little Mexican and his wife stood in the doorway, solid and unmoved.
“Let me in!” I cried. “There’s a hole in your roof; some sparks may have fallen in your bedroom!”
I pulled the door wide, pushed past them.
“No!” the little man grunted.
“Ah!” the little woman ran in a circle like a broken toy.
I was inside with a flashlight. The little man seized my arm.
I smelled his breath.
And then my flashlight shot through the rooms of their house. Light sparkled on a hundred wine bottles standing in the hall, two hundred bottles shelved in the kitchen, six dozen along the parlor wallboards, more of the same on bedroom bureaus and in closets. I do not know if I was more impressed with the hole in the bedroom ceiling or the endless glitter of so many bottles. I lost count. It was like an invasion of gigantic shining beetles, struck dead, deposited, and left by some ancient disease.
In the bedroom I felt the little man and woman behind me in the doorway. I heard their loud breathing and I could feel their eyes. I raised the beam of my
flashlight away from the glittering bottles, I focused it carefully, and for the rest of my visit, on the hole in the yellow ceiling.
The little woman began to cry. She cried softly. Nobody moved.
The next morning they left.
Before we even knew they were going, they were half down the alley at 6 A.M., carrying their luggage, which was light enough to be entirely empty. I tried to stop them. I talked to them. They were old friends, I said. Nothing had changed, I said. They had nothing to do with the fire, I said, or the roof. They were innocent bystanders, I insisted! I would fix the roof myself, no charge, no charge to them! But they did not look at me. They looked at the house and at the open end of the alley ahead of them while I talked. Then, when I stopped they nodded to the alley as if agreeing that it was time to go, and walked off, and then began to run, it seemed, away from me, toward the street where there were streetcars and buses and automobiles and many loud avenues stretching in a maze. They hurried proudly, though, heads up, not looking back.
It was only by accident I ever met them again. At Christmas time, one evening, I saw the little man running quietly along the twilight street ahead of me. On a personal whim I followed. When he turned, I turned. At last, five blocks away from our old neighborhood, he scratched quietly at the door of a little white house. I saw the door open, shut, and lock him in. As night settled over the tenement city, a small light burned like blue mist in the tiny living room as I passed. I thought I saw, but probably imagined, two silhouettes there, he on his side of the room in his own particular chair, and she on her side of the room, sitting, sitting in the dark, and one or two bottles beginning to collect on the floor behind the chairs, and not a sound, not a sound between them. Only the silence.
I did not go up and knock. I strolled by. I walked on along the avenue, listening to the parrot cafés scream. I bought a newspaper, a magazine, and a quarter-edition book. Then I went home to where all the lights were lit and there was warm food upon the table.
The Shore Line at Sunset
Tom, knee-deep in the waves, a piece of driftwood in his hand, listened.
The house, up toward the Coast Highway in the late afternoon, was silent. The sounds of closets being rummaged, suitcase locks snapping, vases being smashed, and of a final door crashing shut, all had faded away.
Chico, standing on the pale sand, flourished his wire strainer to shake out a harvest of lost coins. After a moment, without glancing at Tom, he said, “Let her go.”
So it was every year. For a week or a month, their house would have music swelling from the windows, there would be new geraniums potted on the porch rail, new paint on the doors and steps. The clothes on the wire line changed from harlequin pants to sheath dresses to handmade Mexican frocks like white waves breaking behind the house. Inside, the paintings on the walls shifted from imitation Matisse to pseudo-Italian Renaissance. Sometimes, looking up, he would see a woman drying her hair like a bright yellow flag on the wind. Sometimes the flag was black or red. Sometimes the woman was tall, sometimes short, against the sky. But there was never more than one woman at a time. And, at last, a day like today came …
Tom placed his driftwood on the growing pile near where Chico sifted the billion footprints left by people long vanished from their holidays.
“Chico. What are we doing here?”
“Living the life of Reilly, boy!”
“I don’t feel like Reilly, Chico.”
“Work at it, boy!”
Tom saw the house a month from now, the flowerpots blowing dust, the walls hung with empty squares, only sand carpeting the floors. The rooms would echo like shells in the wind. And all night every night bedded in separate rooms he and Chico would hear a tide falling away and away down a long shore, leaving no trace.
Tom nodded, imperceptibly. Once a year he himself brought a nice girl here, knowing she was right at last and that in no time they would be married. But his women always stole silently away before dawn, feeling they had been mistaken for someone else, not being able to play the part. Chico’s friends left like vacuum cleaners, with a terrific drag, roar, rush, leaving no lint unturned, no clam unprized of its pearl, taking their purses with them like toy dogs which Chico had petted as he opened their jaws to count their teeth.
“That’s four women so far this year.”
“Okay, referee.” Chico grinned. “Show me the way to the showers.”
“Chico—” Tom bit his lower lip, then went on. “I been thinking. Why don’t we split up?”
Chico just looked at him.
“I mean,” said Tom, quickly, “maybe we’d have better luck, alone.”
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” said Chico slowly, gripping the strainer in his big fists before him. “Look here, boy, don’t you know the facts? You and me, we’ll be here come the year 2000. A couple of crazy dumb old gooney-birds drying their bones in the sun. Nothing’s ever going to happen to us now, Tom, it’s too late. Get that through your head and shut up.”
Tom swallowed and looked steadily at the other man. “I’m thinking of leaving—next week.”
“Shut up, shut up, and get to work!”
Chico gave the sand an angry showering rake that tilled him forty-three cents in dimes, pennies, and nickels. He stared blindly at the coins shimmering down the wires like a pinball game all afire.
Tom did not move, holding his breath.
They both seemed to be waiting for something.
The something happened.
“Hey … hey … hey …”
From a long way off down the coast a voice called.
The two men turned slowly.
“Hey … hey … oh, hey …!”
A boy was running, yelling, waving, along the shore two hundred yards away. There was something in his voice that made Tom feel suddenly cold. He held onto his own arms, waiting.
“Hey!”
The boy pulled up, gasping, pointing back along the shore.
“A woman, a funny woman, by the North Rock!”
“A woman!” The words exploded from Chico’s mouth and he began to laugh. “Oh, no, no!”
“What you mean, a ‘funny’ woman?” asked Tom.
“I don’t know,” cried the boy, his eyes wide. “You got to come see! Awful funny!”
“You mean ‘drowned’?”
“Maybe! She came out of the water, she’s lying on the shore, you got to see, yourself … funny …” The boy’s voice died. He gazed off north again. “She’s got a fish’s tail.”
Chico laughed. “Not before supper, please.”
“Please!” cried the boy, dancing now. “No lie! Oh, hurry!”
He ran off, sensed he was not followed, and looked back in dismay.
Tom felt his lips move. “Boy wouldn’t run this far for a joke, would he, Chico?”
“People have run further for less.”
Tom started walking. “All right, son.”
“Thanks, mister, oh thanks!”
The boy ran. Twenty yards up the coast, Tom looked back. Behind him, Chico squinted, shrugged, dusted his hands wearily, and followed.
They moved north along the twilight beach, their skin weathered in tiny folds about their burnt pale eyes, looking younger for their hair cut close to the skull so you could not see the grey. There was a fair wind and the ocean rose and fell with prolonged concussions.
“What,” said Tom, “what if we get to North Rock and it’s true? The ocean has washed some thing up?”
But before Chico could answer, Tom was gone, his mind racing down coasts littered with horseshoe crabs, sand dollars, starfish, kelp, and stone. From all the times he’d talked on what lives in the sea, the names returned with the breathing fall of waves. Argonauts, they whispered, codlings, pollacks, houndfish, tautog, tench, sea elephant, they whispered, gillings, flounders, and beluga, the white whale, and grampus, the sea dog … always you thought how these must look from their deep-sounding names. Perhaps you would never in your life see them rise from the
salt meadows beyond the safe limits of the shore, but they were there, and their names, with a thousand others, made pictures. And you looked and wished you were a frigate-bird that might fly nine thousand miles around to return some year with the full size of the ocean in your head.
“Oh, quick!” The boy had run back to peer in Tom’s face. “It might be gone!”
“Keep your shirt on, boy,” said Chico.
They came around the North Rock. A second boy stood there, looking down.
Perhaps from the corner of his eye, Tom saw something on the sand that made him hesitate to look straight at it, but fix instead on the face of the boy standing there. The boy was pale and he seemed not to breathe. On occasion he remembered to take a breath, his eyes focused, but the more they saw there on the sand the more they took time off from focusing and turned blank and looked stunned. When the ocean came in over his tennis shoes, he did not move or notice.
Tom glanced away from the boy to the sand.
And Tom’s face, in the next moment, became the face of the boy. His hands assumed the same curl at his sides and his mouth moved to open and stay half open and his eyes, which were light in color, seemed to bleach still more with so much looking.
The setting sun was ten minutes above the sea.
“A big wave came in and went out,” said the first boy, “and here she was.”
They looked at the woman lying there.
Her hair was very long and it lay on the beach like the threads of an immense harp. The water stroked along the threads and floated them up and let them down, each time in a different fan and silhouette. The hair must have been five or six feet long and now it was strewn on the hard wet sand and it was the color of limes.
Her face …
The men bent half down in wonder.
Her face was white sand sculpture, with a few water drops shimmering on it like summer rain upon a cream-colored rose. Her face was that moon which when seen by day is pale and unbelievable in the blue sky. It was milk-marble veined with faint violet in the temples. The eyelids, closed down upon the eyes, were powdered with a faint water color, as if the eyes beneath gazed through the fragile tissue of the lids and saw them standing there above her, looking down and looking down. The mouth was a pale flushed sea-rose, full and closed upon itself. And her neck was slender and white and her breasts were small and white, now covered, uncovered, covered, uncovered in the flow of water, the ebb of water, the flow, the ebb, the flow. And the breasts were flushed at their tips, and her body was startlingly white, almost an illumination, a white-green lightning against the sand. And as the water shifted her, her skin glinted like the surface of a pearl.