Down Hill Water

Down load Part Five

Watch out for Frank

            "Pretty easy alright," Molly agreed.  "I kinda like sex though."
            "Oh I do too, but there is more to life out there."  Francine glanced into the parlor, and then back to Molly.  "If it was just up to men, the population explosion would be twice as bad.  Sometimes I think they just want to make more babies so there will be someone else to order around and do the work they should be doing in the first place."  She laughed out loud at the thought of all the men lying around giving orders to each other, and none of them doing a thing.  "I mean shit, look at them out there.  All five of them, sucked into that stupid box full of wires, like it was something holy.  I'll bet there's a million things they could be doing that would be more useful."
            Molly laughed, took a bite of her cake and washed it down with a sip of coffee.  "You're a hard woman, Francine, but you're right.  We do most of the work in this world, and always have.  And you know, I think this liberation thing we're pushing, is only going to make it so we do all the work, even the stuff they won't let us do now."
            "Yeah that's probably true," Francine agreed,  "but in a few years, or however long it takes, we'll have them where we want them."
            "Where's that?"  Molly asked.
            "We women will have done everything for long enough that they won't know how to do anything anymore," she explained,  "and then we'll have them at our mercy.  Then they can have their food and sex, but only at our giving.  We could even keep them penned up like cows, and just let them out when we want them for our own pleasures. . . ."
            "You know, I think I saw a science-fiction movie one time kinda like that," Molly interrupted.  "It was some other planet, where the women did just what you're saying.  They kept the men in slavery and just did whatever they liked with them."
            "In some ways, it's a little like that now," Francine said with a chuckle.  Men are so dense and they have such one-track minds, that you can get them to do most anything you want.  All you have to do is waive a little food or sex in front of them, and they're putty.  You know they say they're the stronger sex, but that kinda depends on how you define stronger, I'd think."
            Molly gave out a little snort that was a cross between a laugh and a question mark, and leaned back in her chair.  "I wonder why we had so much trouble with our ex-husbands then?  Did we just fuck up, or were they both just odd-balls that couldn't be trained?"
            "Yeah, I don't know," Francine pondered.  We probably did something wrong.  I sure wouldn't want to admit my ex was special or anything.  He was just an asshole, but see, if we ran the show, we could just dispense with all the assholes, and we would only have to deal with the ones we could manipulate."
            "It sounds too easy," Molly said.  "What would we do with all the assholes?  There's a hell of a lot of them, I think."
            "Oh, I don't know."  She paused for a moment and then looking out the window and thinking of Effie lying stretched out comfortably on the couch, she continued.  "Well shit!  We could just feed them to the hogs, at least then they wouldn't pile up in the corners and stink."  She laughed and finished her coffee.  "Hey!  You want to see the rest of the house.  It isn't much, but it is kind of a cool old place."
            "Sure," she answered.
            They both got up, and Francine went toward the parlor, pausing at the door.  As Molly came up beside her, she pointed into the room, where Ellis, and Dave, and the others sat glued to the television, and spoke softly.  "This little nest is where the animals hang out most of the time."  She swung around toward the bathroom, took a couple of steps and turning back to face Molly, she added, "That is when they're not making a mess somewhere else."  She reached the bathroom and went in.  "Here's the bathroom.  It's a pigsty, but at least it works . . so far.  They say it freezes up when it gets really cold out.  In fact, all the water in the place is supposed to freeze when it gets cold."
            "You mean it gets colder than it is now around here?"  Molly asked.
            "Oh yeah!  It's probably about twenty or better out there now.  Shit, it can get twenty below if it wants to," Francine explained walking deeper into the room and pointing to an outside door set between two multi-paned windows.  "Look at this, a door outside into the garden.  Well, it could be a garden if you wanted it to be.  Right now it's just an area with a bunch of junk and old boards lying around.  I saw it just before it snowed, covering all that shit up.  It really could be kinda nice in the spring to have a door out of the bath and into a flower garden, but now all it does is make this room colder."
            "You mean it gets twenty degrees below zero here?"  Molly asked again.
            "It sure can.  I haven't been here that long, but it did last year.  In fact, it got that cold for about a week, before it warmed up to somewhere around zero for another week.  Here, let me show you my favorite room."  She walked past Molly, and leaving the bathroom, she turned through another door only a few feet away.
            Molly followed, and found herself in a poorly lit room about twelve feet square.  It was full up to the waist with a sundry of things.  There seemed to be several pieces of furniture, hidden under piles of clothes, books, cardboard boxes full of everything imaginable, and much more.  There was barely space left for two people to be in the room.  The little clearing in which they stood was right in front of the record player.  There were records, in and out of their album covers, lying on top of the mess anywhere that could be reached from this, the only place to stand.  There were two large windows with curtains lowered on adjacent walls and a door that led to the upstairs next to the doorway they had come in by.
            "This is my favorite room in the house," Francine said as she put an album on the record player.  "It's a mess now, but I think I'm going to haul all this shit out of here and clean it up.  I know where I can borrow a sewing machine, and maybe I can make some new clothes."
            This made Molly think of her own sewing machine back in San Diego.  She had left it, along with most of her belongings in the house where she and Frank had lived.  "Yeah, it would make a nice sewing room, or anything else for that matter, if you can ever get all this stuff out of here.  I'll bet it's nice and bright when you open those curtains."
            The needle hit the record with a little scratch and then there was the sound of drums, a guitar, and presently the clear shrill voice of Jefferson Airplane's, Grace Slick.  Francine reached over, turned the sound down to where she thought it wouldn't disturb the boys in the other room, and turned to Molly.  "Let's go upstairs and I'll show you John's and my room," she said going through the narrow doorway that led up the steep stairs.  The stairway was dark like a mineshaft and each tread squeaked in turn as they stepped on them.  At the top, Francine opened a door and light flowed down the stairs as if they were about to enter something special, or a magic world, instead of the dingy upper floor of an old farmhouse.  There was a short hallway that ran perpendicular to where they had entered and a doorway at either end of the hall.  Both doors were open and revealed small, but bright rooms.
            "That's Duncan's room," Francine said pointing to a mass of tangled clothes and books drooling out of a doorway to the right, "and this is my room, or John's and mine, anyway."  She took a couple of steps and entered a neatly kept bedroom with a large wrought iron bed sticking out from one wall like a squared off peninsula.  Francine had decorated as best she could with the little she had to work with, and there was a poster and several pictures stuck to the walls, along with an ancient looking tapestry, portraying peasants harvesting a field of grain, that covered the remainder of the wall that held the door.  There was also an oak press-back chair sitting next to a nightstand near the bed.
            "Cool old tapestry," Molly remarked, as it caught the sweep of her eye, moving around the room.
            "That's the only thing I saved from the fire, except a few clothes," Francine said, reaching over and touching the tapestry.
            "That must be awful to just lose everything like that," Molly sympathized.
            "It is.  You don't realize how much stuff you have until something like that happens.  I had collected a lot of really neat stuff.  I had a collection of teacups.  Some of them were real old and valuable, and they were just burned up.  All I could find of them were a bunch of broken chunks of pottery.  There wasn't one of them left.  I also had a lot of nice clothes, and they're gone.  I'm going to have to replace some of them if I'm ever going to find a job.  Can you imagine going in for a job interview looking like this."  She chuckled a little at the thought.  "It does make it easy to get dressed in the morning though.  You don't have to spend a lot time deciding what to wear.  You just put on whatever's lying there from the night before.  Oh, it's not really that bad.  People have given me a few old clothes, and I shouldn't complain.  I haven't froze yet, at least."
            "I know it's not the same thing, because I did it to myself, but I suppose that everything I left at home when I left Frank, is gone forever.  He'll just throw it out or give it to one of his girlfriends."
            Francine looked sharply at her.  A sad countenance spread over Molly's face as she recalled all the times she had wrestled with the knowledge of Frank's wanderings.  "You mean he messed around on the side as well as being such an asshole?"
            "Yeah, it was just one more thing to make me feel worthless.  God, it took a long time to figure out what a bunch of shit that was.  I'm still trying to get out from under that one."  Molly paused, looked around the room again, and then at Francine.  "Well, you know how that goes.  You've been through it too."
            "Sorta," Francine said, nodding her head, "but Paul, that was his name, only messed around once, I guess, that I knew about anyway, and then he just split with her and left me right on the spot.  I think he only knew her for about a week or so when he left.  That must have been a real whirlwind relationship, I'd think.  It must have been fun for them I guess though."  She looked at Molly and smiled.  "I wouldn't mind having an affair like that, with all your juices flowing in every direction, overriding good sense."  She paused again briefly and her smile faded.  "Oh, I don't know.  It probably would end in a big mess, but it would be fun for a while.  It looks like you and Ellis could be in the middle of a nice hot one right now."
            Molly nodded and blushed.  "Yeah, I guess we're kinda in heat alright, and if it wasn't for all the outside forces, we might even be able to make something out of it.  You never know though, it might be the outside forces that keep it warm.  If it wasn't for them, our whole relationship might fold up.  The whole damn thing is so confusing right now, I just don't know what I'm doing really.  I sure do like Ellis though."
            "Don't give up.  Things are going to get better, for both of us, I hope."  Francine turned to leave the room.  "Well let me show you the rest of the place."
            Molly followed her out of the room, down the stairs and into the kitchen.  "You better grab your coat for the rest of the tour," Francine said reaching for her own coat that hung on a nail by the back door, "it's cold as hell in the back part of the house."
            They both put on their coats and went out through the back porch to where Fred and Ellis slept.  The door into the back of the house squeaked loudly as they opened it, and the dim weight of the room fell upon them.  The room appeared to Molly as if it had never been painted, and it appeared to Francine as if it had never been cleaned.  They may have both been right.  The dingy wooden walls and ceiling showed no signs of paint, but instead, looked like those rustic old boards from an ancient barn.  There were cobwebs hanging in the corners and an abandon wasp's nest attached to the ceiling near an empty light socket in the center of the room.  The floor, although it had been cleared of the large objects that one would be likely to trip over, had not been swept since the last ice age, and the accumulation of dust and dirt had begun to form a slight hill that seemed to roll up at one end of the room near the stairs.  Fred, in his passage to and from his room, had trod a path through the center of this geological rise in the elevation of the floor.
            "This is Ellis' room, or den, or whatever you'd call it," Francine said as she reached the far side of the room and turned to survey the hovel.  There's no electricity or heat out here, and you can see how much house cleaning goes on.  Actually, Fred and Ellis are less messy than John and Duncan, but I think it's just because they have this God-awful hole out here, and it fills their needs for that kind of thing."  She turned to head up the stairs.  "Here let's look upstairs, if we dare.  I haven't been up there for a while.  God only knows what we'll find."  Francine tromped up the narrow stairs with Molly behind her.
            When they reached the top, they were confronted, first, by a cardboard box of books, about two feet square, right in the middle of the doorway into Fred's room, and second by a large pile of what appeared to be clothing that seemed to crawl out from under his bed, across the floor and had begun to work it's way toward the stairs.  The walls were completely bare of anything but the wooden boards that mostly separated the room from the outside.  There were several gaps in these boards that had been stuffed with an item or two of clothing to keep most of the wind from blowing in, and both the windows were broken and had been covered with clear, but foggy plastic to prevent the weather from coming directly into the room at will.  For furniture, there was nothing more than a bed, which in itself, was little more than a frame, springs, and a lumpy stained mattress with a sleeping bag thrown on top,  There was also an old nail keg sitting next to the bed with a kerosene lantern perched on several books that had somehow managed to work their way up off the floor.
            Molly stood in the doorway with the box of books and surveyed the interior of the room.  "God, this looks like a documentary movie about poverty or something," she finally said.  "Whatever that is coming out from under the bed, looks like it might be alive."
            "I'll bet if it was warmer, it would smell alive too," Francine said, "or maybe like it used to be alive.  Pretty amazing, huh.  I can't believe anyone would live like this, but it must be good enough for Fred.  Other than this, he's really pretty normal.  Had enough?" she said as she noticed Molly pulling away from the doorway and back toward the stairs.