way
and Lottie yelled at me from the porch, "The fire's out! And it's
flooded. Hurry up!"

Trouble, hah! That was just the beginning.

* * * * *

Lottie is as cute a little ex-waitress as ever flipped the suds off a
glass of beer, but she just ain't mechanically minded. The day Uncle
Alphonse died and left us $2500 and I went out and bought a kitchen
and shed full of appliances for her, that was a sad day, all right.
She has lived a fearful life ever since, too proud of her dishwasher
and automatic this and that to consider selling them, but scared stiff
of the noises they make and the vibrations and all the mysterious
dials and lights, etc.

So this Friday afternoon when the oil-burner blew out from the high
wind, she got terrified, sent the kids over to their grandmother's in
a cab and sat for two hours trying to make up her mind whether to call
the fire department or the plumber.

Meanwhile, this blasted oil stove was overflowing into the fire pot.

"Well, turn it off!" I yelled. "I'll be in right away!"

I ducked into the garage and got a big handful of rags and a hunk of
string and a short stick. This I have been through before. I went in
and kissed her pretty white face, and a couple of worry lines
disappeared.

"Get me a pan or something," I said and started dismantling the front
of the heater.

These gravity-flow oil heaters weren't built to make it easy to drain
off excess oil. There's a brass plug at the inlet, but no one in
history has been able to stir one, the oil man told me. I weigh 200
pounds stripped, but all I ever did was ruin a tool trying.

The only way to get out the oil was to open the front, stuff rags down
through the narrow fire slot, sop up the stuff and fish out the rags
with the string tied around one end of the bundle. Then you wring out
the rags with your bare hands into a pan.

"Hey, Lottie," I yelled, "this is your roaster! It'll be hard to
clean out the oil smell!"

But, of course, it was too late. I had squeezed a half-pint of oil
into it already. So I went on dunking and wringing and thinking how
lousy my cigarettes were going to taste all evening and feeling glad
that I delivered beer instead of oil for a living.

* * * * *

I got the stove bailed out and lit with only one serious blast of soot
out the "Light Here" hole. Then I dumped the oil out in the alley and
set the roaster pan in the sink. Lottie w