Serenade - James M. Cain [14]
Well, I said she ran up to the doer, but that wasn't quite right. There wasn't any door. Maybe you never saw an Indian hut, so I better tell you what it looks like. You can start with the colored shanties down near the railroad track in New Orleans, and then, when you've got them clearly in mind, you can imagine they're the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and that the Mexican hut is a shanty standing beside it. There's no walls, or roofs, or anything like you're used to seeing. There's four sides made of sticks, stuck down in the ground and wattled together with twigs, about as high as a man's head. In the middle of the front side is a break, and that's the door. The chinks between the twigs are filled up a little bit with mud. Just plain mud, smeared on there and most of it falling off. And on top is a thatch of grass, or palmetto, or whatever grows up on the hill, and that's all. There's no windows, no floor, no furniture, no pictures of the Grand Canyon hanging on the walls, no hay-grain-and-feed calendars back of the clock, with a portrait of a cowgirl on top of a horse. They've got no need for calendars, because in the first place they couldn't figure out what the writing was for, and in the second place they don't care what day it is. And they've got no need for a clock, because they don't care what time it is. All I'm trying to say is, there's nothing in there but a dirt floor, and the mats they sleep on, and down near the door, the fire where they do their cooking.
So that was where she came from, and she ran in there, barefooted like they were, and began to laugh and talk, and pat a dog that showed up in a minute, and act like any other girl that's come home after a trip to the city. It went on quite a while, but the clouds weren't hanging any higher, and I began to get nervous. "Listen, this is all very well, but how about the viveres?"
"Yes, yes. Mamma have buy very good estoff."
"Fine, but let's get it aboard."
It seemed to be stored in the other hut, the one that nobody was living in. Papa ducked in there and began to carry out iron plates for cooking tortillas, machetes, pots, and jars and such stuff. One or two of them were copper, but most of them were pottery, and Mexican pottery means the worst pottery in the world. Then Mamma showed up with baskets of black beans, rice, ground corn, and eggs. I stowed the stuff in the rumble seat, shoving the pots in first. But pretty soon it was chock up to the top, and, when I came to the baskets I had to lash them to the side with some twine that they had so they rode the running board. Some of the stuff, like the charcoal, wasn't even in baskets. It was done up in bundles. I lashed that too. The eggs I finally found a place for in back, on top of her hatbox. Each egg was wrapped in cornhusk, and I figured they would ride all right there and not break.
Then Papa came grinning out with a bundle, bigger than he was, of brand-new mats, all rolled up and tied. I couldn't figure out why they were so nuts about mats, but later I found out. He mussed up my whole rumble seat by dragging out the mat she had brought, unrolling his pile, rolling out her mat with the others and tying them up again. Then he lashed them to the side on top of the charcoal. I stood on the fender, grabbed the top and rocked the car. The twine broke and the mats fell out in the dirt. He laughed over that. They got a funny sense of humor. Then he got a wise look on his face, like he knew how to fix