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Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2
Ray Douglas Bradbury


A scintillating collection of stories from the master of science fiction.Since the beginning of his career in the 1940s, Ray Bradbury has become synonymous with great science fiction from the pulp comic books of his early work to his adaptations for television, stage and screen and most notably for his masterpiece, ‘Fahrenheit 451’.Bradbury has done a rare thing; to capture both the popular and literary imagination. Within these pages the reader will be transported to foreign and extraordinary worlds, become transfixed by visions of the past, present, and future and be left humbled and inspired by one of most absorbing and engaging writers of this century, and the last.This is the second of two volumes offering the very best of his short stories including 'The Garbage Collector', ‘The Machineries of Joy’ and ‘The Toynbee Convector’.









Ray Bradbury Stories


Volume 2









Copyright (#ulink_e76192ef-be0d-5af2-9ab3-def0a85084ea)


HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

A hardcover edition of this book was first published in the USA in 2003 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Copyright © 2003 by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Additional Copyright Information (#litres_trial_promo) constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

Most of the stories in this book were previously published in the UK in the following: The Illustrated Man, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1952, and then by Grafton 1977, Flamingo Modern Classics 1995, Voyager Classics 2002, The Martian Chronicles, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1951 under the title Silver Locusts, Corgi 1956, Grafton 1977 publication also entitled Silver Locusts, published by Flamingo 1995; R is for Rocket, first published in Great Britain by Rupert-Hart Davis Ltd 1968; Machineries of Joy, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1966, and by Grafton 1977; S is for Space, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1968; Twice 22 (comprised of stories from Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy) first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1953; Fahrenheit 451, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1954 and by Grafton 1976, by Flamingo 1993, and by Voyager Classics 2001; I Sing the Body Electric! first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1970, Corgi 1971, and Grafton 1991; Dandelion Wine, published by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1957, Corgi 1965 and Grafton 1977; Long After Midnight first published in Great Britain by Hart-Davis MacGibbon 1977; October Country (containing some stories published in Dark Carnival) first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1953, New English Library 1963.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007280582

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007497690

Version 2016-08-18




Dedication (#ulink_b859b7eb-8de6-53c2-891a-fd23d24d7e25)


WITH LOVE TO MY THREE SAMUELS:

Number One, in the past,

SAMUEL HINKSTON BRADBURY, my grandfather.

Number Two, in the present,

SAMUEL HANDLEMAN, my grandson.

Number Three, in the future,

SAM WELLER, who is writing my life.




Contents


Cover (#u1236d9ab-82f1-5c42-ac0f-074ada116f6a)

Title Page (#u10c38477-5a99-519f-b9cb-2d86614a79c1)

Copyright (#uc1aa25c9-8abe-52f6-8d00-750be2795670)

Dedication (#u7be53ae3-5508-57a8-b823-33c8c87763ec)

Introduction (#u4d200d47-d1fd-57c0-a58b-0a408a45c244)

The Whole Town’s Sleeping (#u3c4c6f0d-7bd9-5e94-991e-587214ae07e5)

The Rocket (#u6818a2cd-8a67-5115-8a76-6e3c7c4765e0)

Season of Disbelief (#ucec716b9-bb9d-50e0-bcd1-48e3d5045016)

And the Rock Cried Out (#u811c9fd9-d8d2-549a-83d3-a24eb2451444)

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh (#u8be1ef4a-1d35-50e9-9546-7c252088f91a)

The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge (#u243fd480-b29a-5d04-a1b1-3fd092c295c5)

The Flying Machine (#uc38f6d90-e392-546f-b736-7ac9f13a69ce)

Heavy-Set (#uee7d781a-4040-545b-b035-6703fb7ac0ac)

The First Night of Lent (#u92cec584-cb98-52f8-8884-8372bbca3005)

Lafayette, Farewell (#u7e5cbc6c-74d0-5214-9610-d779a59d5c43)

Remember Sascha? (#u93c6e37a-5308-5c9b-bed3-c21b801f41ce)

Junior (#u20ad3db7-279d-500e-b9c5-ff3222c0fcfd)

That Woman on the Lawn (#u3ec3d5de-1017-5f8a-ae27-6f4ed0e0074f)

February 1999: Ylla (#u7ab9d485-585a-5173-a804-c0008085dce0)

Banshee (#u22ffc73b-3b1e-506b-8445-5defaab9bd13)

One for His Lordship, and One for the Road! (#ucf8960a1-07f4-535d-a2d0-1fa596dc1004)

The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair (#u34d5e96f-863c-55c6-ae4c-f9394397b825)

Unterderseaboat Doktor (#uab3d6ba9-432e-5129-868f-d4c23444d0e1)

Another Fine Mess (#u5289501f-e4d6-5eae-9f4f-774cc2941645)

The Dwarf (#ua090b990-b8ca-5fd9-809b-0f7ad32c163c)

A Wild Night in Galway (#u9cf65b31-b31a-52b6-afc7-379218975b60)

The Wind (#u693d66ac-4a1a-5b9f-9dae-d040dbea8308)

No News, or What Killed the Dog? (#litres_trial_promo)

A Little Journey (#litres_trial_promo)

Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine (#litres_trial_promo)

The Garbage Collector (#litres_trial_promo)

The Visitor (#litres_trial_promo)

The Man (#litres_trial_promo)

Henry the Ninth (#litres_trial_promo)

The Messiah (#litres_trial_promo)

Bang! You’re Dead! (#litres_trial_promo)

Darling Adolf (#litres_trial_promo)

The Beautiful Shave (#litres_trial_promo)

Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy (#litres_trial_promo)

I See You Never (#litres_trial_promo)

The Exiles (#litres_trial_promo)

At Midnight, in the Month of June (#litres_trial_promo)

The Witch Door (#litres_trial_promo)

The Watchers (#litres_trial_promo)

2004–05: The Naming of Names (#litres_trial_promo)

Hopscotch (#litres_trial_promo)

The Illustrated Man (#litres_trial_promo)

The Dead Man (#litres_trial_promo)

June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright (#litres_trial_promo)

The Burning Man (#litres_trial_promo)

G.B.S. – Mark V (#litres_trial_promo)

A Blade of Grass (#litres_trial_promo)

The Sound of Summer Running (#litres_trial_promo)

And the Sailor, Home from the Sea (#litres_trial_promo)

The Lonely Ones (#litres_trial_promo)

The Finnegan (#litres_trial_promo)

On the Orient, North (#litres_trial_promo)

The Smiling People (#litres_trial_promo)

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl (#litres_trial_promo)

Bug (#litres_trial_promo)

Downwind from Gettysburg (#litres_trial_promo)

Time in Thy Flight (#litres_trial_promo)

Changeling (#litres_trial_promo)

The Dragon (#litres_trial_promo)

Let’s Play ‘Poison’ (#litres_trial_promo)

The Cold Wind and the Warm (#litres_trial_promo)

The Meadow (#litres_trial_promo)

The Kilimanjaro Device (#litres_trial_promo)

The Man in the Rorschach Shirt (#litres_trial_promo)

Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned (#litres_trial_promo)

The Pedestrian (#litres_trial_promo)

Trapdoor (#litres_trial_promo)

The Swan (#litres_trial_promo)

The Sea Shell (#litres_trial_promo)

Once More, Legato (#litres_trial_promo)

June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air (#litres_trial_promo)

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Numbers! (#litres_trial_promo)

April 2005: Usher II (#litres_trial_promo)

The Square Pegs (#litres_trial_promo)

The Trolley (#litres_trial_promo)

The Smile (#litres_trial_promo)

The Miracles of Jamie (#litres_trial_promo)

A Far-away Guitar (#litres_trial_promo)

The Cistern (#litres_trial_promo)

The Machineries of Joy (#litres_trial_promo)

Bright Phoenix (#litres_trial_promo)

The Wish (#litres_trial_promo)

The Lifework of Juan Díaz (#litres_trial_promo)

Time Intervening/Interim (#litres_trial_promo)

Almost the End of the World (#litres_trial_promo)

The Great Collision of Monday Last (#litres_trial_promo)

The Poems (#litres_trial_promo)

April 2026: The Long Years (#litres_trial_promo)

Icarus Montgolfier Wright (#litres_trial_promo)

Death and the Maiden (#litres_trial_promo)

Zero Hour (#litres_trial_promo)

The Toynbee Convector (#litres_trial_promo)

Forever and the Earth (#litres_trial_promo)

The Handler (#litres_trial_promo)

Getting Through Sunday Somehow (#litres_trial_promo)

The Pumpernickel (#litres_trial_promo)

Last Rites (#litres_trial_promo)

The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse (#litres_trial_promo)

All on a Summer’s Night (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)

Additional Copyright Information (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Introduction (#ulink_6c39ff5c-e637-5db8-ad9d-54eaf57e6647)


It is hard for me to believe that in one lifetime I have written so many stories.

But on the other hand I often wonder what other writers do with their time.

Writing, for me, is akin to breathing. It is not something I plan or schedule; it’s something I just do. All the stories collected in this book seized on me at the strangest hours, compelling me to head for my typewriter and put them down on paper before they went away.

A good example of this is ‘Banshee.’ When I was working for John Huston in Ireland on the screenplay of Moby Dick, we spent many late evenings, sitting around the fire, drinking Irish whiskey, which I did not much care for, but only drank because he loved it. And sometimes Huston would pause in the middle of drinking and talking and close his eyes to listen to the wind wailing outside the house. Then his eyes would snap open and he would point a finger at me and cry that the banshees were out in the Irish weather and maybe I should go outdoors and see if it was true and bring them in.

He did this so often to scare me that it lodged in my mind and when I got home to America I finally wrote a story in response to his antics.

‘The Toynbee Convector’ was born because of my reaction to the bombardment of despair we so frequently find in our newspaper headlines and television reportage, and the feeling of imminent doom in a society that has triumphed over circumstances again and again, but fails to look back and realize where it has come from, and what it has achieved.

One day, overcome with this feeling, I had to do something about it and so created a character to speak my thoughts.

‘The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair’ comes from a lifetime of the affection I have for this wonderful team.

When I arrived in Ireland many years ago I opened the Irish Times and discovered therein a small ad, which read:

TODAYONE TIME ONLY!A BENEFIT FOR THE IRISH ORPHANSLAUREL & HARDYIN PERSON!

I ran down to the theater and was fortunate enough to purchase the last available ticket, front row center! The curtain went up and those dear men performed the most wonderful scenes from their greatest films. I sat there in joy and amazement, with tears rolling down my cheeks.

When I got home I looked back on all this and remembered an occasion when a friend of mine took me to the stairs up which Laurel and Hardy had carried the piano box, only to be chased down the hill by it. My story had to follow.

‘The Pedestrian’ was a precursor to Fahrenheit 451. I had dinner with a friend fifty-five years ago and after dining we decided to take a walk along Wilshire Boulevard. Within minutes we were stopped by a police car. The policeman asked us what we were doing. I replied, ‘Putting one foot in front of the other,’ which was the wrong answer. The policeman looked at me suspiciously because, after all, the sidewalks were empty: nobody in the whole city of Los Angeles was using them as a walkway.

I went home, sorely irritated at being stopped for simply walking – a natural, human activity – and wrote a story about a pedestrian in the future who is arrested and executed for doing just that.

A few months later I took that pedestrian for a walk in the night, had him turn a corner and meet a young girl named Clarisse McClellan. Nine days later, Fahrenheit 451 was born as a short novella called ‘The Firemen.’

‘The Garbage Collector’ was inspired by my reaction to a newspaper item that appeared in the Los Angeles newspapers in early 1952, when the mayor announced that if an atomic bomb fell on Los Angeles, the resulting bodies would be picked up by garbage collectors. I was so inflamed by this remark that I sat down and wrote the story, fueled by my outrage.

‘By the Numbers!’ has its roots in reality. At one time, many years ago, I went, on occasional afternoons, to swim at the Ambassador Hotel pool with friends. The man in charge of that pool was a strict disciplinarian and used to stand his young son by the edge of the pool and give him all sorts of rigid instructions about life. Watching this ongoing lecture, day after day, I could not help but think that at some future time the son would react violently. Brooding at this seemingly unavoidable scenario, I sat down and wrote the story.

‘Lafayette, Farewell’ is based on a real and tragic tale told to me by a cinematographer who lived next door to Maggie and me for many years. Occasionally he came over to my house to visit with me and have a glass of wine. He told me how, way back in time, during the last months of World War I in 1918, he had been a member of the Lafayette Escadrille. As we talked, tears streamed down his face as he remembered shooting down German bi-planes; the faces of the doomed, handsome young men still haunted him after all those years. I could do nothing but offer my services as a storywriter to try to help him in the middle of his haunting.

At home, later that night, I wrote a letter to a friend of mine in Paris and said I had the most wonderful experience that afternoon of hearing the crowds of Mexico City over the telephone. As I wrote the letter to my friend it turned into a short story about an old man who listens to far places with long distance calls.

‘The Sound of Summer Running’ began with a bang. I was on a bus crossing Westwood Village when a young boy jumped on the bus, jammed his money in the box, ran down the aisle, and threw himself into a seat across from me. I looked at him with great admiration thinking, my god, if I had that much energy I could write a short story every day, three poems each night, and a novel by the end of the month. I looked down at his feet and saw there the reason for his vitality: a pair of wonderful bright new tennis shoes. And I suddenly remembered those special days of my growing up years – the beginning of every summer – when my father would take me down to the shoe store and buy me a new pair of tennis shoes, which gave me back the energy of the world. I could hardly wait to get home to sit down and write a story about a boy whose main desire is to own a pair of tennis shoes so he can run through summer.

‘The Great Collision of Monday Last’ was caused by my picking up a copy of the Irish Times in Dublin and reading the terrible fact that during the year 1953, 375 bike riders had been killed in Ireland. I thought, how amazing. We rarely read anything like that at home; it was always people dying in car accidents. Investigating further I discovered the reason. There were tens of thousands of bicycles all over Ireland; people going 40 or 50 miles an hour and colliding head on, so that when their heads struck, they sustained serious skull injuries. I thought: Nobody in the world knows this! Maybe I should write a short story about it. Which is what I did.

‘The Drummer Boy of Shiloh’ had its genesis in an obituary in the Los Angeles Times concerning a bit player in motion pictures named Olin Howland. I’d seen him in scores of films over the years and now I was reading his death notice, which mentioned the fact that his grandfather had been the drummer boy at Shiloh. Those words were so magical, so evocative, so sad, that I was shocked into going immediately to my typewriter and putting those words down. This short story followed within the next hour.

‘Darling Adolf’ was caused very simply. Crossing a Universal Studios lot one afternoon I encountered a movie extra dressed in a Nazi uniform and wearing a Hitler mustache. I wondered what might happen to him wandering around the studio or out in the street, what kind of reaction there might be to a person who resembles Hitler. The story was written that night.

I’ve never been in charge of my stories, they’ve always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I’ve followed the advice I’ve shared with other writers over the years: Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

Over a period of more than sixty years I’ve jumped off many cliffs and struggled wildly on my typewriter to finish a story so as to make a soft landing. And, during the last few years I’ve looked back at the time when I was a teenager standing on a street corner, selling newspapers, and writing every day, not realizing how terrible my efforts were. Why did I do it, why did I keep jumping off those cliffs?

The answer is an immense cliché: Love.

I was so busy rushing headlong into the future, loving libraries and books and authors with all my heart and soul, was so consumed with becoming myself that I simply didn’t notice that I was short, homely, and untalented. Perhaps, in some corner of my mind, I did know. But I persisted – the need to write, to create, coursed like blood through my body, and still does.

I always dreamed of someday going into a library and looking up and seeing a book of mine leaning against the shoulder of L. Frank Baum or Edgar Rice Burroughs, and down below my other heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne. My wild love for them and their worlds, and for others like Somerset Maugham and John Steinbeck kept me so invigorated with passion that I could not see that I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame in their grand company.

But as the years passed I slipped my skins, one by one, and finally became a short story writer, an essayist, a poet, and a playwright. It took all those years to leave my other selves behind, but love was the thing that called me on.

Within this collection you will find representative tales from the many years of my long career. For all those years and for that great love that has kept me going, I am deeply grateful. My eyes fill with tears as I review the table of contents of this volume – all my dear, dear friends – the monsters and angels of my imagination.

Here they all are. A grand collection. I hope you will agree.

Ray Bradbury

DECEMBER 2002




The Whole Town’s Sleeping (#ulink_f6f9a953-47d1-566b-ac75-d52f9699da24)


The courthouse clock chimed seven times. The echoes of the chimes faded.

Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.

In the drugstore fans whispered in the high ceiling. In the rococo shade of porches, a few invisible people sat. Cigars glowed pink, on occasion. Screen doors whined their springs and slammed. On the purple bricks of the summer-night streets, Douglas Spaulding ran; dogs and boys followed after.

‘Hi, Miss Lavinia!’

The boys loped away. Waving after them quietly, Lavinia Nebbs sat all alone with a tall cool lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, sipping, waiting.

‘Here I am, Lavinia.’

She turned and there was Francine, all in snow white, at the bottom steps of the porch, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus.

Lavinia Nebbs locked her front door and, leaving her lemonade glass half empty on the porch, said, ‘It’s a fine night for the movie.’

They walked down the street.

‘Where you going, girls?’ cried Miss Fern and Miss Roberta from their porch over the way.

Lavinia called back through the soft ocean of darkness: ‘To the Elite Theater to see CHARLIE CHAPLIN!’

‘Won’t catch us out on no night like this,’ wailed Miss Fern. ‘Not with the Lonely One strangling women. Lock ourselves up in our closet with a gun.’

‘Oh, bosh!’ Lavinia heard the old women’s door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not unpleasant sense of invasion.

‘Lavinia, you don’t believe all that about the Lonely One, do you?’

‘Those women like to see their tongues dance.’

‘Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell’s disappeared.…’

‘Hattie McDollis was a silly girl, walked off with a traveling man, I bet.’

‘But the others, all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say.’

They stood upon the edge of the ravine that cut the town half in two. Behind them were the lit houses and music, ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies and dark.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t go to the show tonight,’ said Francine. ‘The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don’t like that ravine. Look at it, will you!’

Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse, of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands. And always the black dynamo humming, with sparkles like great electricity where fireflies moved on the air.

‘It won’t be me coming back through this old ravine tonight late, so darned late; it’ll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over the bridge and maybe the Lonely One there.’

‘Bosh!’ said Lavinia Nebbs.

‘It’ll be you alone on the path, listening to your shoes, not me. You all alone on the way back to your house. Lavinia, don’t you get lonely living in that house?’

‘Old maids love to live alone.’ Lavinia pointed at the hot shadowy path leading down into the dark. ‘Let’s take the short cut.’

‘I’m afraid!’

‘It’s early. Lonely One won’t be out till late.’ Lavinia took the other’s arm and led her down and down the crooked path into the cricket warmth and frog sound and mosquito-delicate silence. They brushed through summer-scorched grass, burs prickling at their bare ankles.

‘Let’s run!’ gasped Francine.

‘No!’

They turned a curve in the path – and there it was.

In the singing deep night, in the shade of warm trees, as if she had laid herself out to enjoy the soft stars and the easy wind, her hands at either side of her like the oars of a delicate craft, lay Elizabeth Ramsell!

Francine screamed.

‘Don’t scream!’ Lavinia put out her hands to hold onto Francine, who was whimpering and choking. ‘Don’t! Don’t!’

The woman lay as if she had floated there, her face moonlit, her eyes wide and like flint, her tongue sticking from her mouth.

‘She’s dead!’ said Francine. ‘Oh, she’s dead, dead! She’s dead!’

Lavinia stood in the middle of a thousand warm shadows with the crickets screaming and the frogs loud.

‘We’d better get the police,’ she said at last.

Hold me, Lavinia, hold me, I’m cold, oh, I’ve never been so cold in all my life!’

Lavinia held Francine and the policemen were brushing through the crackling grass, flashlights ducked about, voices mingled, and the night grew toward eight-thirty.

‘It’s like December. I need a sweater,’ said Francine, eyes shut, against Lavinia.

The policeman said, ‘I guess you can go now, ladies. You might drop by the station tomorrow for a little more questioning.’

Lavinia and Francine walked away from the police and the sheet over the delicate thing upon the ravine grass.

Lavinia felt her heart going loudly in her and she was cold, too, with a February cold; there were bits of sudden snow all over her flesh, and the moon washed her brittle fingers whiter, and she remembered doing all the talking while Francine just sobbed against her.

A voice called from far off, ‘You want an escort, ladies?’

‘No, we’ll make it,’ said Lavinia to nobody, and they walked on. They walked through the nuzzling, whispering ravine, the ravine of whispers and clicks, the little world of investigation growing small behind them with its lights and voices.

‘I’ve never seen a dead person before,’ said Francine.

Lavinia examined her watch as if it was a thousand miles away on an arm and wrist grown impossibly distant. ‘It’s only eight-thirty. We’ll pick up Helen and get on to the show.’

‘The show!’ Francine jerked.

‘It’s what we need. We’ve got to forget this. It’s not good to remember. If we went home now we’d remember. We’ll go to the show as if nothing happened.’

‘Lavinia, you don’t mean it!’

‘I never meant anything more in my life. We need to laugh now and forget.’

‘But Elizabeth’s back there – your friend, my friend—’

‘We can’t help her; we can only help ourselves. Come on.’

They started up the ravine side, on the stony path, in the dark. And suddenly there, barring their way, standing very still in one spot, not seeing them, but looking on down at the moving lights and the body and listening to the official voices, was Douglas Spaulding.

He stood there, white as a mushroom, with his hands at his sides, staring down into the ravine.

‘Get home!’ cried Francine.

He did not hear.

‘You!’ shrieked Francine. ‘Get home, get out of this place, you hear? Get home, get home, get home!’

Douglas jerked his head, stared at them as if they were not there. His mouth moved. He gave a bleating sound. Then, silently, he whirled about and ran. He ran silently up the distant hills into the warm darkness.

Francine sobbed and cried again and, doing this, walked on with Lavinia Nebbs.

‘There you are! I thought you ladies’d never come!’ Helen Greer stood tapping her foot atop her porch steps. ‘You’re only an hour late, that’s all. What happened?’

‘We—’ started Francine.

Lavinia clutched her arm tight. ‘There was a commotion. Somebody found Elizabeth Ramsell in the ravine.’

‘Dead? Was she – dead?’

Lavinia nodded. Helen gasped and put her hand to her throat. ‘Who found her?’

Lavinia held Francine’s wrist firmly. ‘We don’t know.’

The three young women stood in the summer night looking at each other. ‘I’ve got a notion to go in the house and lock the doors,’ said Helen at last.

But finally she went to get a sweater, for though it was still warm, she, too, complained of the sudden winter night. While she was gone Francine whispered frantically, ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’

‘Why upset her?’ said Lavinia. ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s plenty of time.’

The three women moved along the street under the black trees, past suddenly locked houses. How soon the news had spread outward from the ravine, from house to house, porch to porch, telephone to telephone. Now, passing, the three women felt eyes looking out at them from curtained windows as locks rattled into place. How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists, the night of running children suddenly veered from their games and put away behind glass, behind wood, the popsicles in melting puddles of lime and strawberry where they fell when the children were scooped indoors. Strange the hot rooms with the sweating people pressed tightly back into them behind the bronze knobs and knockers. Baseball bats and balls lay upon the unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn, white-chalk game of hopscotch lay on the broiled, steamed sidewalk. It was as if someone had predicted freezing weather a moment ago.

‘We’re crazy being out on a night like this,’ said Helen.

‘Lonely One won’t kill three ladies,’ said Lavinia. ‘There’s safety in numbers. And besides, it’s too soon. The killings always come a month separated.’

A shadow fell across their terrified faces. A figure loomed behind a tree. As if someone had struck an organ a terrible blow with his fist, the three women gave off a scream, in three different shrill notes.

‘Got you!’ roared a voice. The man plunged at them. He came into the light, laughing. He leaned against a tree, pointing at the ladies weakly, laughing again.

‘Hey! I’m the Lonely One!’ said Frank Dillon.

‘Frank Dillon!’

‘Frank!’

‘Frank,’ said Lavinia, ‘if you ever do a childish thing like that again, may someone riddle you with bullets!’

‘What a thing to do!’

Francine began to cry hysterically.

Frank Dillon stopped smiling. ‘Say, I’m sorry.’

‘Go away!’ said Lavinia. ‘Haven’t you heard about Elizabeth Ramsell – found dead in the ravine? You running around scaring women! Don’t speak to us again!’

‘Aw, now—’

They moved. He moved to follow.

‘Stay right there, Mr Lonely One, and scare yourself. Go take a look at Elizabeth Ramsell’s face and see if it’s funny. Good night!’ Lavinia took the other two on along the street of trees and stars, Francine holding a kerchief to her face.

‘Francine, it was only a joke.’ Helen turned to Lavinia. ‘Why’s she crying so hard?’

‘We’ll tell you when we get downtown. We’re going to the show no matter what! Enough’s enough. Come on now, get your money ready, we’re almost there!’

The drugstore was a small pool of sluggish air which the great wooden fans stirred in tides of arnica and tonic and soda-smell out onto the brick streets.

‘I need a nickel’s worth of green peppermint chews,’ said Lavinia to the druggist. His face was set and pale, like all the faces they had seen on the half-empty streets. ‘For eating in the show,’ said Lavinia as the druggist weighed out a nickel’s worth of the green candy with a silver shovel.

‘You sure look pretty tonight, ladies. You looked cool this afternoon, Miss Lavinia, when you was in for a chocolate soda. So cool and nice that someone asked after you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Man sitting at the counter – watched you walk out. Said to me, “Say, who’s that?” Why, that’s Lavinia Nebbs, prettiest maiden lady in town, I said. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “Where does she live?”’ Here the druggist paused uncomfortably.

‘You didn’t!’ said Francine. ‘You didn’t give him her address, I hope? You didn’t!’

‘I guess I didn’t think. I said, “Oh, over on Park Street, you know, near the ravine.” A casual remark. But now, tonight, them finding the body, I heard a minute ago, I thought, My God, what’ve I done!’ He handed over the package, much too full.

‘You fool!’ cried Francine, and tears were in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry. Course, maybe it was nothing.’

Lavinia stood with the three people looking at her, staring at her. She felt nothing. Except, perhaps, the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat. She held out her money automatically.

‘There’s no charge on those peppermints,’ said the druggist, turning to shuffle some papers.

‘Well, I know what I’m going to do right now!’ Helen stalked out of the drugshop. ‘I’m calling a taxi to take us all home. I’ll be no part of a hunting party for you, Lavinia. That man was up to no good. Asking about you. You want to be dead in the ravine next?’

‘It was just a man,’ said Lavinia, turning in a slow circle to look at the town.

‘So is Frank Dillon a man, but maybe he’s the Lonely One.’

Francine hadn’t come out with them, they noticed, and turning, they found her arriving. ‘I made him give me a description – the druggist. I made him tell what the man looked like. A stranger,’ she said, ‘in a dark suit. Sort of pale and thin.’

‘We’re all overwrought,’ said Lavinia. ‘I simply won’t take a taxi if you get one. If I’m the next victim, let me be the next. There’s all too little excitement in life, especially for a maiden lady thirty-three years old, so don’t you mind if I enjoy it. Anyway it’s silly; I’m not beautiful.’

‘Oh, but you are, Lavinia; you’re the loveliest lady in town, now that Elizabeth is—’ Francine stopped. ‘You keep men off at a distance. If you’d only relax, you’d been married years ago!’

‘Stop sniveling, Francine! Here’s the theater box office, I’m paying forty-one cents to see Charlie Chaplin. If you two want a taxi, go on. I’ll sit alone and go home alone.’

‘Lavinia, you’re crazy; we can’t let you do that—’

They entered the theater.

The first showing was over, intermission was on, and the dim auditorium was sparsely populated. The three ladies sat halfway down front, in the smell of ancient brass polish, and watched the manager step through the worn red velvet curtains to make an announcement.

‘The police have asked us to close early tonight so everyone can be out at a decent hour. Therefore we are cutting our short subjects and running our feature again immediately. The show will be over at eleven. Everyone is advised to go straight home. Don’t linger on the streets.’

‘That means us, Lavinia!’ whispered Francine.

The lights went out. The screen leaped to life.

‘Lavinia,’ whispered Helen.

‘What?’

‘As we came in, a man in a dark suit, across the street, crossed over. He just walked down the aisle and is sitting in the row behind us.’

‘Oh, Helen!’

‘Right behind us?’

One by one the three women turned to look.

They saw a white face there, flickering with unholy light from the silver screen. It seemed to be all men’s faces hovering there in the dark.

‘I’m going to get the manager!’ Helen was gone up the aisle. ‘Stop the film! Lights!’

‘Helen, come back!’ cried Lavinia, rising.

They tapped their empty soda glasses down, each with a vanilla mustache on their upper lip, which they found with their tongues, laughing.

‘You see how silly?’ said Lavinia. ‘All that riot for nothing. How embarrassing.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen faintly.

The clock said eleven-thirty now. They had come out of the dark theater, away from the fluttering rush of men and women hurrying everywhere, nowhere, on the street while laughing at Helen. Helen was trying to laugh at herself.

‘Helen, when you ran up that aisle crying, “Lights!” I thought I’d die! That poor man!’

‘The theater manager’s brother from Racine!’

‘I apologized,’ said Helen, looking up at the great fan still whirling, whirling the warm late night air, stirring, restirring the smells of vanilla, raspberry, peppermint and Lysol.

‘We shouldn’t have stopped for these sodas. The police warned—’

‘Oh, bosh the police,’ laughed Lavinia. ‘I’m not afraid of anything. The Lonely One is a million miles away now. He won’t be back for weeks and the police’ll get him then, just wait. Wasn’t the film wonderful?’

‘Closing up, ladies.’ The druggist switched off the lights in the cool white-tiled silence.

Outside, the streets were swept clean and empty of cars or trucks or people. Bright lights still burned in the small store windows where the warm wax dummies lifted pink wax hands fired with blue-white diamond rings, or flourished orange wax legs to reveal hosiery. The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters.

‘Do you suppose if we screamed they’d do anything?’

‘Who?’

‘The dummies, the window people.’

‘Oh, Francine.’

‘Well …’

There were a thousand people in the windows, stiff and silent, and three people on the street, the echoes following like gunshots from store fronts across the way when they tapped their heels on the baked pavement.

A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzed like a dying insect, as they passed.

Baked and white, the long avenues lay ahead. Blowing and tall in a wind that touched only their leafy summits, the trees stood on either side of the three small women. Seen from the courthouse peak, they appeared like three thistles far away.

‘First, we’ll walk you home, Francine.’

‘No, I’ll walk you home.’

‘Don’t be silly. You live way out at Electric Park. If you walked me home you’d have to come back across the ravine alone, yourself. And if so much as a leaf fell on you, you’d drop dead.’

Francine said, ‘I can stay the night at your house. You’re the pretty one!’

And so they walked, they drifted like three prim clothes forms over a moonlit sea of lawn and concrete, Lavinia watching the black trees flit by each side of her, listening to the voices of her friends murmuring, trying to laugh; and the night seemed to quicken, they seemed to run while walking slowly, everything seemed fast and the color of hot snow.

‘Let’s sing,’ said Lavinia.

They sang, ‘Shine On, Shine On, Harvest Moon …’

They sang sweetly and quietly, arm in arm, not looking back. They felt the hot sidewalk cooling underfoot, moving, moving.

‘Listen!’ said Lavinia.

They listened to the summer night. The summer-night crickets and the far-off tone of the courthouse clock making it eleven forty-five.

‘Listen!’

Lavinia listened. A porch swing creaked in the dark and there was Mr Terle, not saying anything to anybody, alone on his swing, having a last cigar. They saw the pink ash swinging gently to and fro.

Now the lights were going, going, gone. The little house lights and big house lights and yellow lights and green hurricane lights, the candles and oil lamps and porch lights, and everything felt locked up in brass and iron and steel, everything, thought Lavinia, is boxed and locked and wrapped and shaded. She imagined the people in their moonlit beds. And their breathing in the summer-night rooms, safe and together. And here we are, thought Lavinia, our footsteps on along the baked summer evening sidewalk. And above us the lonely street lights shining down, making a drunken shadow.

‘Here’s your house, Francine. Good night.’

‘Lavinia, Helen, stay here tonight. It’s late, almost midnight now. You can sleep in the parlor. I’ll make hot chocolate – it’ll be such fun!’ Francine was holding them both now, close to her.

‘No, thanks,’ said Lavinia.

And Francine began to cry.

‘Oh, not again, Francine,’ said Lavinia.

‘I don’t want you dead,’ sobbed Francine, the tears running straight down her cheeks. ‘You’re so fine and nice, I want you alive. Please, oh, please!’

‘Francine, I didn’t know how much this has done to you. I promise I’ll phone when I get home.’

‘Oh, will you?’

‘And tell you I’m safe, yes. And tomorrow we’ll have a picnic lunch at Electric Park. With ham sandwiches I’ll make myself, how’s that? You’ll see, I’ll live forever!’

‘You’ll phone, then?’

‘I promised, didn’t I?’

‘Good night, good night!’ Rushing upstairs, Francine whisked behind a door, which slammed to be snap-bolted tight on the instant.

‘Now,’ said Lavinia to Helen, ‘I’ll walk you home.’

The courthouse clock struck the hour. The sounds blew across a town that was empty, emptier than it had ever been. Over empty streets and empty lots and empty lawns the sound faded.

‘Nine, ten, eleven, twelve,’ counted Lavinia, with Helen on her arm.

‘Don’t you feel funny?’ asked Helen.

‘How do you mean?’

‘When you think of us being out here on the sidewalks, under the trees, and all those people safe behind locked doors, lying in their beds. We’re practically the only walking people out in the open in a thousand miles, I bet.’

The sound of the deep warm dark ravine came near.

In a minute they stood before Helen’s house, looking at each other for a long time. The wind blew the odor of cut grass between them. The moon was sinking in a sky that was beginning to cloud. ‘I don’t suppose it’s any use asking you to stay, Lavinia?’

‘I’ll be going on.’

‘Sometimes—’

‘Sometimes what?’

‘Sometimes I think people want to die. You’ve acted odd all evening.’

‘I’m just not afraid,’ said Lavinia. ‘And I’m curious, I suppose. And I’m using my head. Logically, the Lonely One can’t be around. The police and all.’

‘The police are home with their covers up over their ears.’

‘Let’s just say I’m enjoying myself, precariously, but safely. If there was any real chance of anything happening to me, I’d stay here with you, you can be sure of that.’

‘Maybe part of you doesn’t want to live anymore.’

‘You and Francine. Honestly!’

‘I feel so guilty. I’ll be drinking some hot cocoa just as you reach the ravine bottom and walk on the bridge.’

‘Drink a cup for me. Good night.’

Lavinia Nebbs walked alone down the midnight street, down the late summer-night silence. She saw houses with the dark windows and far away she heard a dog barking. In five minutes, she thought, I’ll be safe at home. In five minutes I’ll be phoning silly little Francine. I’ll—’

She heard the man’s voice.

A man’s voice singing far away among the trees.

‘Oh, give me a June night, the moonlight and you …’

She walked a little faster.

The voice sang, ‘In my arms … with all your charms …’

Down the street in the dim moonlight a man walked slowly and casually along.

I can run knock on one of these doors, thought Lavinia, if I must.

‘Oh, give me a June night,’ sang the man, and he carried a long club in his hand. ‘The moonlight and you. Well, look who’s here! What a time of night for you to be out, Miss Nebbs!’

‘Officer Kennedy!’

And that’s who it was, of course.

‘I’d better see you home!’

‘Thanks, I’ll make it.’

‘But you live across the ravine.…’

Yes, she thought, but I won’t walk through the ravine with any man, not even an officer. How do I know who the Lonely One is? ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ll hurry.’

‘I’ll wait right here,’ he said. ‘If you need any help, give a yell. Voices carry good here. I’ll come running.’

‘Thank you.’

She went on, leaving him under a light, humming to himself, alone.

Here I am, she thought.

The ravine.

She stood on the edge of the one hundred and thirteen steps that went down the steep hill and then across the bridge seventy yards and up the hills leading to Park Street. And only one lantern to see by. Three minutes from now, she thought, I’ll be putting my key in my house door. Nothing can happen in just one hundred eighty seconds.

She started down the long dark-green steps into the deep ravine.

‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten steps,’ she counted in a whisper.

She felt she was running, but she was not running.

‘Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty steps,’ she breathed.

‘One fifth of the way!’ she announced to herself.

The ravine was deep, black and black, black! And the world was gone behind, the world of safe people in bed, the locked doors, the town, the drugstore, the theater, the lights, everything was gone. Only the ravine existed and lived, black and huge, about her.

‘Nothing’s happened, has it? No one around, is there? Twenty-four, twenty-five steps. Remember that old ghost story you told each other when you were children?’

She listened to her shoes on the steps.

‘The story about the dark man coming in your house and you upstairs in bed. And now he’s at the first step coming up to your room. And now he’s at the second step. And now he’s at the third step and the fourth step and the fifth! Oh, how you used to laugh and scream at that story! And now the horrid dark man’s at the twelfth step and now he’s opening the door of your room and now he’s standing by your bed. “I GOT YOU!”’

She screamed. It was like nothing she’d ever heard, that scream. She had never screamed that loud in her life. She stopped, she froze, she clung to the wooden banister. Her heart exploded in her. The sound of the terrified beating filled the universe.

‘There, there!’ she screamed to herself. ‘At the bottom of the steps. A man, under the light! No, now he’s gone! He was waiting there!’

She listened.

Silence.

The bridge was empty.

Nothing, she thought, holding her heart. Nothing. Fool! That story I told myself. How silly. What shall I do?

Her heartbeats faded.

Shall I call the officer – did he hear me scream?

She listened. Nothing. Nothing.

I’ll go the rest of the way. That silly story.

She began again, counting the steps.

‘Thirty-five, thirty-six, careful, don’t fall. Oh, I am a fool. Thirty-seven steps, thirty-eight, nine and forty, and two makes forty-two – almost halfway.’

She froze again.

Wait, she told herself.

She took a step. There was an echo.

She took another step.

Another echo. Another step, just a fraction of a moment later.

‘Someone’s following me,’ she whispered to the ravine, to the black crickets and dark-green hidden frogs and the black stream. ‘Someone’s on the steps behind me. I don’t dare turn around.’

Another step, another echo.

‘Every time I take a step, they take one.’

A step and an echo.

Weakly she asked of the ravine, ‘Officer Kennedy, is that you?’

The crickets were still.

The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a change, all of the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion; leaf, shrub, star, and meadow grass ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbs’s heart. And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way station, a single traveler reading a dim newspaper under a solitary naked bulb, might raise up his head, listen, and think, What’s that? and decide, Only a woodchuck, surely, beating on a hollow log. But it was Lavinia Nebbs, it was most surely the heart of Lavinia Nebbs.

Silence. A summer-night silence which lay for a thousand miles, which covered the earth like a white and shadowy sea.

Faster, faster! She went down the steps.

Run!

She heard music. In a mad way, in a silly way, she heard the great surge of music that pounded at her, and she realized as she ran, as she ran in panic and terror, that some part of her mind was dramatizing, borrowing from the turbulent musical score of some private drama, and the music was rushing and pushing her now, higher and higher, faster, faster, plummeting and scurrying, down, and down into the pit of the ravine.

Only a little way, she prayed. One hundred eight, nine, one hundred ten steps! The bottom! Now, run! Across the bridge!

She told her legs what to do, her arms, her body, her terror; she advised all parts of herself in this white and terrible moment, over the roaring creek waters, on the hollow, thudding, swaying almost alive, resilient bridge planks she ran, followed by the wild footsteps behind, behind, with the music following, too, the music shrieking and babbling.

He’s following, don’t turn, don’t look, if you see him, you’ll not be able to move, you’ll be so frightened. Just run, run!

She ran across the bridge.

Oh, God, God, please, please let me get up the hill! Now up the path, now between the hills, oh God, it’s dark, and everything so far away. If I screamed now it wouldn’t help; I can’t scream anyway. Here’s the top of the path, here’s the street, oh, God, please let me be safe, if I get home safe I’ll never go out alone; I was a fool, let me admit it, I was a fool, I didn’t know what terror was, but if you let me get home from this I’ll never go without Helen or Francine again! Here’s the street. Across the street!

She crossed the street and rushed up the sidewalk.

Oh God, the porch! My house! Oh God, please give me time to get inside and lock the door and I’ll be safe!

And there – silly thing to notice – why did she notice, instantly, no time, no time – but there it was anyway, flashing by – there on the porch rail, the half-filled glass of lemonade she had abandoned a long time, a year, half an evening ago! The lemonade glass sitting calmly, imperturbably there on the rail … and …

She heard her clumsy feet on the porch and listened and felt her hands scrabbling and ripping at the lock with the key. She heard her heart. She heard her inner voice screaming.

The key fit.

Unlock the door, quick, quick!

The door opened.

Now, inside. Slam it!

She slammed the door.

‘Now lock it, bar it, lock it!’ she gasped wretchedly.

‘Lock it, tight, tight!’

The door was locked and bolted tight.

The music stopped. She listened to her heart again and the sound of it diminishing into silence.

Home! Oh God, safe at home! Safe, safe and safe at home! She slumped against the door. Safe, safe. Listen. Not a sound. Safe, safe, oh thank God, safe at home. I’ll never go out at night again. I’ll stay home. I won’t go over that ravine again ever. Safe, oh safe, safe home, so good, so good, safe! Safe inside, the door locked. Wait.

Look out the window.

She looked.

Why, there’s no one there at all! Nobody. There was nobody following me at all. Nobody running after me. She got her breath and almost laughed at herself. It stands to reason. If a man had been following me, he’d have caught me! I’m not a fast runner.… There’s no one on the porch or in the yard. How silly of me. I wasn’t running from anything. That ravine’s as safe as anyplace. Just the same, it’s nice to be home. Home’s the really good warm place, the only place to be.

She put her hand out to the light switch and stopped.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘What, what?’

Behind her in the living room, someone cleared his throat.




The Rocket (#ulink_763472ae-a4ea-56a7-93b7-bbb36c57a140)


Many nights Fiorello Bodoni would awaken to hear the rockets sighing in the dark sky. He would tiptoe from bed, certain that his kind wife was dreaming, to let himself out into the night air. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river. For a silent moment he would let his heart soar alone into space, following the rockets.

Now, this very night, he stood half naked in the darkness, watching the fire fountains murmuring in the air. The rockets on their long wild way to Mars and Saturn and Venus!

‘Well, well, Bodoni.’

Bodoni started.

On a milk crate, by the silent river, sat an old man who also watched the rockets through the midnight hush.

‘Oh, it’s you, Bramante!’

‘Do you come out every night, Bodoni?’

‘Only for the air.’

‘So? I prefer the rockets myself,’ said old Bramante. ‘I was a boy when they started. Eighty years ago, and I’ve never been on one yet.’

‘I will ride up in one someday,’ said Bodoni.

‘Fool!’ cried Bramante. ‘You’ll never go. This is a rich man’s world.’ He shook his gray head, remembering. ‘When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters: THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE! Science, Comfort, and New Things for All! Ha! Eighty years. The Future becomes Now! Do we fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us.’

‘Perhaps my sons—’ said Bodoni.

‘No, nor their sons!’ the old man shouted. ‘It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!’

Bodoni hesitated. ‘Old man, I’ve saved three thousand dollars. It took me six years to save it. For my business, to invest in machinery. But every night for a month now I’ve been awake. I hear the rockets. I think. And tonight I’ve made up my mind. One of us will fly to Mars!’ His eyes were shining and dark.

‘Idiot,’ snapped Bramante. ‘How will you choose? Who will go? If you go, your wife will hate you, for you will be just a bit nearer God, in space. When you tell your amazing trip to her, over the years, won’t bitterness gnaw at her?’

‘No, no!’

‘Yes! And your children? Will their lives be filled with the memory of Papa, who flew to Mars while they stayed here? What a senseless task you will set your boys. They will think of the rocket all their lives. They will lie awake. They will be sick with wanting it. Just as you are sick now. They will want to die if they cannot go. Don’t set that goal, I warn you. Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junkyard, not up to the stars.’

‘But—’

‘Suppose your wife went? How would you feel, knowing she had seen and you had not? She would become holy. You would think of throwing her in the river. No, Bodoni, buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces.’

The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.

‘Good night,’ said Bodoni.

‘Sleep well,’ said the other.

When the toast jumped from its silver box, Bodoni almost screamed. The night had been sleepless. Among his nervous children, beside his mountainous wife, Bodoni had twisted and stared at nothing. Bramante was right. Better to invest the money. Why save it when only one of the family could ride the rocket, while the others remained to melt in frustration?

‘Fiorello, eat your toast,’ said his wife, Maria.

‘My throat is shriveled,’ said Bodoni.

The children rushed in, the three boys fighting over a toy rocket, the two girls carrying dolls which duplicated the inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and Neptune, green mannequins with three yellow eyes and twelve fingers.

‘I saw the Venus rocket!’ cried Paolo.

‘It took off, whoosh!’ hissed Antonello.

‘Children!’ shouted Bodoni, hands to his ears.

They stared at him. He seldom shouted.

Bodoni arose. ‘Listen, all of you,’ he said. ‘I have enough money to take one of us on the Mars rocket.’

Everyone yelled.

‘You understand?’ he asked. ‘Only one of us. Who?’

‘Me, me, me!’ cried the children.

‘You,’ said Maria.

‘You,’ said Bodoni to her.

They all fell silent.

The children reconsidered. ‘Let Lorenzo go – he’s oldest.’

‘Let Miriamne go – she’s a girl!’

‘Think what you would see,’ said Bodoni’s wife to him. But her eyes were strange. Her voice shook. ‘The meteors, like fish. The universe. The Moon. Someone should go who could tell it well on returning. You have a way with words.’

‘Nonsense. So have you,’ he objected.

Everyone trembled.

‘Here,’ said Bodoni unhappily. From a broom he broke straws of various lengths. ‘The short straw wins.’ He held out his tight fist. ‘Choose.’

Solemnly each took his turn.

‘Long straw.’

‘Long straw.’

Another.

‘Long straw.’

The children finished. The room was quiet.

Two straws remained. Bodoni felt his heart ache in him. ‘Now,’ he whispered. ‘Maria.’

She drew.

‘The short straw,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ sighed Lorenzo, half happy, half sad. ‘Mama goes to Mars.’

Bodoni tried to smile. ‘Congratulations. I will buy your ticket today.’

‘Wait, Fiorello—’

‘You can leave next week,’ he murmured.

She saw the sad eyes of her children upon her, with the smiles beneath their straight, large noses. She returned the straw slowly to her husband. ‘I cannot go to Mars.’

‘But why not?’

‘I will be busy with another child.’

‘What!’

She would not look at him. ‘It wouldn’t do for me to travel in my condition.’

He took her elbow. ‘Is this the truth?’

‘Draw again. Start over.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ he said incredulously.

‘I didn’t remember.’

‘Maria, Maria,’ he whispered, patting her face. He turned to the children. ‘Draw again.’

Paolo immediately drew the short straw.

‘I go to Mars!’ He danced wildly. ‘Thank you, Father!’

The other children edged away. ‘That’s swell, Paolo.’

Paolo stopped smiling to examine his parents and his brothers and sisters. ‘I can go, can’t I?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ll like me when I come back?’

‘Of course.’

Paolo studied the precious broomstraw on his trembling hand and shook his head. He threw it away. ‘I forgot. School starts. I can’t go. Draw again.’

But no one would draw. A full sadness lay on them.

‘None of us will go,’ said Lorenzo.

‘That’s best,’ said Maria.

‘Bramante was right,’ said Bodoni.

With his breakfast curdled within him, Fiorello Bodoni worked in his junkyard, ripping metal, melting it, pouring out usable ingots. His equipment flaked apart; competition had kept him on the insane edge of poverty for twenty years.

It was a very bad morning.

In the afternoon a man entered the junkyard and called up to Bodoni on his wrecking machine. ‘Hey, Bodoni, I got some metal for you!’

‘What is it, Mr Mathews?’ asked Bodoni, listlessly.

‘A rocket ship. What’s wrong? Don’t you want it?’

‘Yes, yes!’ He seized the man’s arm, and stopped, bewildered.

‘Of course,’ said Mathews, ‘it’s only a mockup. You know. When they plan a rocket they build a full-scale model first, of aluminum. You might make a small profit boiling her down. Let you have her for two thousand—’

Bodoni dropped his hand. ‘I haven’t the money.’

‘Sorry. Thought I’d help you. Last time we talked you said how everyone outbid you on junk. Thought I’d slip this to you on the q.t. Well—’

‘I need new equipment. I saved money for that.’

‘I understand.’

‘If I bought your rocket, I wouldn’t even be able to melt it down. My aluminum furnace broke down last week—’

‘Sure.’

‘I couldn’t possibly use the rocket if I bought it from you.’

‘I know.’

Bodoni blinked and shut his eyes. He opened them and looked at Mr Mathews. ‘But I am a great fool. I will take my money from the bank and give it to you.’

‘But if you can’t melt the rocket down—’

‘Deliver it,’ said Bodoni.

‘All right, if you say so. Tonight?’

‘Tonight,’ said Bodoni, ‘would be fine. Yes, I would like to have a rocket ship tonight.’

There was a moon. The rocket was white and big in the junkyard. It held the whiteness of the moon and the blueness of the stars. Bodoni looked at it and loved all of it. He wanted to pet it and lie against it, pressing it with his cheek, telling it all the secret wants of his heart.

He stared up at it. ‘You are all mine,’ he said. ‘Even if you never move or spit fire, and just sit there and rust for fifty years, you are mine.’

The rocket smelled of time and distance. It was like walking into a clock. It was finished with Swiss delicacy. One might wear it on one’s watch fob. ‘I might even sleep here tonight,’ Bodoni whispered excitedly.

He sat in the pilot’s seat.

He touched a lever.

He hummed in his shut mouth, his eyes closed.

The humming grew louder, louder, higher, higher, wilder, stranger, more exhilarating, trembling in him and leaning him forward and pulling him and the ship in a roaring silence and in a kind of metal screaming, while his fists flew over the controls, and his shut eyes quivered, and the sound grew and grew until it was a fire, a strength, a lifting and a pushing of power that threatened to tear him in half. He gasped. He hummed again and again, and did not stop, for it could not be stopped, it could only go on, his eyes tighter, his heart furious. ‘Taking off!’ he screamed. The jolting concussion! The thunder! ‘The Moon!’ he cried, eyes blind, tight. ‘The meteors!’ The silent rush in volcanic light. ‘Mars. Oh, yes! Mars! Mars!’

He fell back, exhausted and panting. His shaking hands came loose of the controls and his head tilted wildly. He sat for a long time, breathing out and in, his heart slowing.

Slowly, slowly, he opened his eyes.

The junkyard was still there.

He sat motionless. He looked at the heaped piles of metal for a minute, his eyes never leaving them. Then, leaping up, he kicked the levers. ‘Take off, blast you!’

The ship was silent.

‘I’ll show you!’ he cried.

Out in the night air, stumbling, he started the fierce motor of his terrible wrecking machine and advanced upon the rocket. He maneuvered the massive weights into the moonlit sky. He readied his trembling hands to plunge the weights, to smash, to rip apart this insolently false dream, this silly thing for which he had paid his money, which would not move, which would not do his bidding. ‘I’ll teach you!’ he shouted.

But his hand stayed.

The silver rocket lay in the light of the Moon. And beyond the rocket stood the yellow lights of his home, a block away, burning warmly. He heard the family radio playing some distant music. He sat for half an hour considering the rocket and the house lights, and his eyes narrowed and grew wide. He stepped down from the wrecking machine and began to walk, and as he walked he began to laugh, and when he reached the back door of his house he took a deep breath and called, ‘Maria, Maria, start packing. We’re going to Mars!’

‘Oh!’

‘Ah!’

‘I can’t believe it!’

‘You will, you will.’

The children balanced in the windy yard, under the glowing rocket, not touching it yet. They started to cry.

Maria looked at her husband. ‘What have you done?’ she said. ‘Taken our money for this? It will never fly.’

‘It will fly,’ he said, looking at it.

‘Rocket ships cost millions. Have you millions?’

‘It will fly,’ he repeated steadily. ‘Now, go to the house, all of you. I have phone calls to make, work to do. Tomorrow we leave! Tell no one, understand? It is a secret.’

The children edged off from the rocket, stumbling. He saw their small, feverish faces in the house windows, far away.

Maria had not moved. ‘You have ruined us,’ she said. ‘Our money used for this – this thing. When it should have been spent on equipment.’

‘You will see,’ he said.

Without a word she turned away.

‘God help me,’ he whispered, and started to work.

Through the midnight hours trucks arrived, packages were delivered, and Bodoni, smiling, exhausted his bank account. With blowtorch and metal stripping he assaulted the rocket, added, took away, worked fiery magics and secret insults upon it. He bolted nine ancient automobile motors into the rocket’s empty engine room. Then he welded the engine room shut, so none could see his hidden labor.

At dawn he entered the kitchen. ‘Maria,’ he said, ‘I’m ready for breakfast.’

She would not speak to him.

At sunset he called to the children. ‘We’re ready! Come on!’ The house was silent.

‘I’ve locked them in the closet,’ said Maria.

‘What do you mean?’ he demanded.

‘You’ll be killed in that rocket,’ she said. ‘What kind of rocket can you buy for two thousand dollars? A bad one!’

‘Listen to me, Maria.’

‘It will blow up. Anyway, you are no pilot.’

‘Nevertheless, I can fly this ship. I have fixed it.’

‘You have gone mad,’ she said.

‘Where is the key to the closet?’

‘I have it here.’

He put out his hand. ‘Give it to me.’

She handed it to him. ‘You will kill them.’

‘No, no.’

‘Yes, you will. I feel it.’

He stood before her. ‘You won’t come along?’

‘I’ll stay here,’ she said.

‘You will understand; you will see then,’ he said, and smiled. He unlocked the closet. ‘Come, children. Follow your father.’

‘Good-bye, good-bye, Mama!’

She stayed in the kitchen window, looking out at them, very straight and silent.

At the door of the rocket the father said, ‘Children, this is a swift rocket. We will be gone only a short while. You must come back to school, and I to my business.’ He took each of their hands in turn. ‘Listen. This rocket is very old and will fly only one more journey. It will not fly again. This will be the one trip of your life. Keep your eyes wide.’

‘Yes, Papa.’

‘Listen, keep your ears clean. Smell the smells of a rocket. Feel. Remember. So when you return you will talk of it all the rest of your lives.’

‘Yes, Papa.’

The ship was quiet as a stopped clock. The airlock hissed shut behind them. He strapped them all, like tiny mummies, into rubber hammocks. ‘Ready? he called.

‘Ready!’ all replied.

‘Blast-off!’ He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming. ‘We’re moving! We’re off! Look!’

‘Here comes the Moon!’

The moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. ‘There’s Earth!’ ‘There’s Mars!’

The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.

‘Good,’ whispered Bodoni, alone.

He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.

He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into the inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?

No. Bodoni smiled.

All about the quivering rocket lay the junkyard.

Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junkyard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junkyard, manufacturing a magic dream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.

Maria stood in the kitchen window.

He waved to her and smiled.

He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.

The sun was rising.

Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion in the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars come up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.

He awoke.

Red Mars floated near the rocket.

‘Papa!’ The children thrashed to be free.

Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.

At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.

‘We are home,’ said Bodoni.

They walked across the junkyard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing. Perhaps they knew what he had done. Perhaps they guessed his wonderful magic trick. But if they knew, if they guessed, they never said. Now they only laughed and ran.

‘I have ham and eggs for all of you,’ said Maria, at the kitchen door.

‘Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!’

‘Yes,’ she said.

At bedtime the children gathered before Bodoni. ‘We want to thank you, Papa.’

‘It was nothing.’

‘We will remember it for always, Papa. We will never forget.’

Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. ‘What’s this?’ he cried.

‘You’re the best father in the world,’ she whispered.

‘Why?’

‘Now I see,’ she said. ‘I understand.’

She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. ‘Is it a very lovely journey?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?’

‘Just a little one, perhaps,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night,’ said Fiorello Bodoni.




Season of Disbelief (#ulink_3b952cc2-83a9-5b64-a796-d04e4fb11189)


How it began with the children, old Mrs Bentley never knew. She often saw them, like moths and monkeys, at the grocer’s, among the cabbages and hung bananas, and she smiled at them and they smiled back. Mrs Bentley watched them making footprints in winter snow, filling their lungs with autumn smoke, shaking down blizzards of spring apple-blossoms, but felt no fear of them. As for herself, her house was in extreme good order, everything set to its station, the floors briskly swept, the foods neatly tinned, the hatpins thrust through cushions, and the drawers of her bedroom bureaus crisply filled with the paraphernalia of years.

Mrs Bentley was a saver. She saved tickets, old theater programs, bits of lace, scarves, rail transfers; all the tags and tokens of existence.

‘I’ve a stack of records,’ she often said. ‘Here’s Caruso. That was in 1916, in New York; I was sixty and John was still alive. Here’s June Moon, 1924, I think, right after John died.’

That was the huge regret of her life, in a way. The one thing she had most enjoyed touching and listening to and looking at she hadn’t saved. John was far out in the meadow country, dated and boxed and hidden under grasses, and nothing remained of him but his high silk hat and his cane and his good suit in the closet. So much of the rest of him had been devoured by moths.

But what she could keep she had kept. Her pink-flowered dresses crushed among moth balls in vast black trunks, and cut-glass dishes from her childhood – she had brought them all when she moved to this town five years ago. Her husband had owned rental property in a number of towns, and, like a yellow ivory chess piece, she had moved and sold one after another, until now she was here in a strange town, left with only the trunks and furniture, dark and ugly, crouched about her like the creatures of a primordial zoo.

The thing about the children happened in the middle of summer. Mrs Bentley, coming out to water the ivy upon her front porch, saw two cool-colored sprawling girls and a small boy lying on her lawn, enjoying the immense prickling of the grass.

At the very moment Mrs Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wineglasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun.

Mrs Bentley called, ‘Would you like some? Here!’ The ice-cream wagon stopped and she exchanged money for pieces of the original Ice Age. The children thanked her with snow in their mouths, their eyes darting from her buttoned-up shoes to her white hair.

‘Don’t you want a bite?’ said the boy.

‘No, child. I’m old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won’t thaw me,’ laughed Mrs Bentley.

They carried the miniature glaciers up and sat, three in a row, on the shady porch glider.

‘I’m Alice, she’s Jane, and that’s Tom Spaulding.’

‘How nice. And I’m Mrs Bentley. They called me Helen.’

They stared at her.

‘Don’t you believe they called me Helen?’ said the old lady.

‘I didn’t know old ladies had first names,’ said Tom, blinking.

Mrs Bentley laughed dryly.

‘You never hear them used, he means,’ said Jane.

‘My dear, when you are as old as I, they won’t call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. It’s always “Mrs” young people don’t like to call you “Helen.” It seems much too flip.’

‘How old are you?’ asked Alice.

‘I remember the pterodactyl.’ Mrs Bentley smiled.

‘No, but how old?’

‘Seventy-two.’

They gave their cold sweets an extra long suck, deliberating.

‘That’s old,’ said Tom.

‘I don’t feel any different now than when I was your age,’ said the old lady.

‘Our age?’

‘Yes. Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice.’

They did not speak.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’ Jane got up.

‘Oh, you don’t have to go so soon, I hope. You haven’t finished eating.… Is something the matter?’

‘My mother says it isn’t nice to fib,’ said Jane.

‘Of course it isn’t. It’s very bad,’ agreed Mrs Bentley.

‘And not to listen to fibs.’

‘Who was fibbing to you, Jane?’

Jane looked at her and then glanced nervously away. ‘You were.’

‘I?’ Mrs Bentley laughed and put her withered claw to her small bosom. ‘About what?’

‘About your age. About being a little girl.’

Mrs Bentley stiffened. ‘But I was, many years ago, a little girl just like you.’

‘Come on, Alice, Tom.’

‘Just a moment,’ said Mrs Bentley. ‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jane. ‘No.’

‘But how ridiculous! It’s perfectly obvious. Everyone was young once!’

‘Not you,’ whispered Jane, eyes down, almost to herself. Her empty ice stick had fallen in a vanilla puddle on the porch floor.

‘But of course I was eight, nine, ten years old, like all of you.’

The two girls gave a short, quickly-sealed-up laugh.

Mrs Bentley’s eyes glittered. ‘Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year-olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.’

The two girls laughed. Tom looked uneasy.

‘You’re joking with us,’ giggled Jane. ‘You weren’t really ten ever, were you, Mrs Bentley?’

‘You run on home!’ the woman cried suddenly, for she could not stand their eyes. ‘I won’t have you laughing.’

‘And your name’s not really Helen?’

‘Of course it’s Helen!’

‘Good-bye,’ said the two girls, giggling away across the lawn under the seas of shade, Tom followed them slowly. ‘Thanks for the ice cream!’

‘Once I played hopscotch!’ Mrs Bentley cried after them, but they were gone.

Mrs Bentley spent the rest of the day slamming teakettles about, loudly preparing a meager lunch, and from time to time going to the front door, hoping to catch those insolent fiends on their laughing excursions through the late day. But if they had appeared, what could she say to them, why should she worry about them?

‘The idea!’ said Mrs Bentley to her dainty, rose-clustered teacup. ‘No one ever doubted I was a girl before. What a silly, horrible thing to do. I don’t mind being old – not really – but I do resent having my childhood taken away from me.’

She could see the children racing off under the cavernous trees with her youth in their frosty fingers, invisible as air.

After supper, for no reason at all, with a senseless certainty of motion, she watched her own hands, like a pair of ghostly gloves at a séance, gather together certain items in a perfumed kerchief. Then she went to her front porch and stood there stiffly for half an hour.

As suddenly as night birds the children flew by, and Mrs Bentley’s voice brought them to a fluttering rest.

‘Yes, Mrs Bentley?’

‘Come up on this porch!’ she commanded them, and the girls climbed the steps, Tom trailing after.

‘Yes, Mrs Bentley?’ They thumped the ‘Mrs’ like a bass piano chord, extra heavily, as if that were her first name.

‘I’ve some treasures to show you.’ She opened the perfumed kerchief and peered into it as if she herself might be surprised. She drew forth a hair comb, very small and delicate, its rim twinkling with rhinestones.

‘I wore this when I was nine,’ she said.

Jane turned it in her hand and said, ‘How nice.’

‘Let’s see!’ cried Alice.

‘And here is a tiny ring I wore when I was eight,’ said Mrs Bentley. ‘It doesn’t fit my finger now. You look through it and see the Tower of Pisa ready to fall.’

‘Let’s see it lean!’ The girls passed it back and forth between them until Jane fitted it to her hand. ‘Why, it’s just my size!’ she exclaimed.

‘And the comb fits my head!’ gasped Alice.

Mrs Bentley produced some jackstones. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I once played with these.’

She threw them. They made a constellation on the porch.

‘And here!’ In triumph she flashed her trump card, a postal picture of herself when she was seven years old, in a dress like a yellow butterfly, with her golden curls and blown blue-glass eyes and angelic pouting lips.

‘Who’s this little girl?’ asked Jane.

‘It’s me!’

The two girls held onto it.

‘But it doesn’t look like you,’ said Jane simply. ‘Anybody could get a picture like this, somewhere.’

They looked at her for a long moment.

‘Any more pictures, Mrs Bentley?’ asked Alice. ‘Of you, later? You got a picture of you at fifteen, and one at twenty, and one at forty and fifty?’

The girls chortled.

‘I don’t have to show you anything!’ said Mrs Bentley.

‘Then we don’t have to believe you,’ replied Jane.

‘But this picture proves I was young!’

‘That’s some other little girl, like us. You borrowed it.’

‘I was married!’

‘Where’s Mr Bentley?’

‘He’s been gone a long time. If he were here, he’d tell you how young and pretty I was when I was twenty-two.’

‘But he’s not here and he can’t tell, so what does that prove?’

‘I have a marriage certificate.’

‘You could have borrowed that, too. Only way I’ll believe you were ever young’—Jane shut her eyes to emphasize how sure she was of herself—‘is if you have someone say they saw you when you were ten.’

‘Thousands of people saw me but they’re dead, you little fool—or ill, in other towns. I don’t know a soul here, just moved here a few years ago, so no one saw me young.’

‘Well, there you are!’ Jane blinked at her companions. ‘Nobody saw her!’

‘Listen!’ Mrs Bentley seized the girl’s wrist. ‘You must take these things on faith. Someday you’ll be as old as I. People will say the same. “Oh, no,” they’ll say, “those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds!” One day you’ll be like me!’

‘No, we won’t!’ said the girls. ‘Will we?’ they asked one another.

‘Wait and see!’ said Mrs Bentley.

And to herself she thought, Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.

‘Your mother,’ she said to Jane. ‘Haven’t you noticed, over the years, the change?’

‘No,’ said Jane. ‘She’s always the same.’

And that was true. You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you. And she felt like a woman who has been on a roaring black train for seventy-two years, landing at last upon the rail platform and everyone crying: ‘Helen Bentley, is that you?’

‘I guess we better go home,’ said Jane. ‘Thanks for the ring. It just fits me.’

‘Thanks for the comb. It’s fine.’

‘Thanks for the picture of the little girl.’

‘Come back – you can’t have those!’ Mrs Bentley shouted as they raced down the steps. ‘They’re mine!’

‘Don’t!’ said Tom, following the girls. ‘Give them back!’

‘No, she stole them! They belonged to some other little girl. She stole them. Thanks!’ cried Alice.

So no matter how she called after them, the girls were gone, like moths through darkness.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom, on the lawn, looking up at Mrs Bentley. He went away.

They took my ring and my comb and my picture, thought Mrs Bentley, trembling there on the steps. Oh, I’m empty, empty; it’s part of my life.

She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, ‘Does it really belong to me?’

Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.

A night wind blew in the room. The white curtain fluttered against a dark cane, which had leaned against the wall near the other bric-a-brac for many years. The cane trembled and fell out into a patch of moonlight, with a soft thud. Its gold ferrule glittered. It was her husband’s opera cane. It seemed as if he were pointing it at her, as he often had, using his soft, sad, reasonable voice when they, upon rare occasions, disagreed.

‘Those children are right,’ he would have said. ‘They stole nothing from you, my dear. These things don’t belong to you here, you now. They belonged to her, that other you, so long ago.’

Oh, thought Mrs Bentley. And then, as though an ancient phonograph record had been set hissing under a steel needle, she remembered a conversation she had once had with Mr Bentley – Mr Bentley, so prim, a pink carnation in his whisk-broomed lapel, saying, ‘My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You’re always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They’ll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.’

But Mrs Bentley had stubbornly kept them.

‘It won’t work,’ Mr Bentley continued, sipping his tea. ‘No matter how hard you try to be what you once were you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.’

It had been one of the few, but gentle, disputes of their quiet marriage. He had never approved of her bric-a-brackery. ‘Be what you are, bury what you are not,’ he had said. ‘Ticket stubs are trickery. Saving things is a magic trick, with mirrors.’

If he were alive tonight, what would he say?

‘You’re saving cocoons.’ That’s what he’d say. ‘Corsets, in a way, you can never fit again. So why save them? You can’t really prove you were ever young. Pictures? No, they lie. You’re not the picture.’

‘Affidavits?’

‘No, my dear, you’re not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You’re not these trunks of junk and dust. You’re only you, here, now – the present you.’

Mrs Bentley nodded at the memory, breathing easier.

‘Yes, I see. I see.’

The gold-ferruled cane lay silently on the moonlit rug.

‘In the morning,’ she said to it, ‘I will do something final about this, and settle down to being only me, and nobody else from any other year. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’

She slept.…

The morning was bright and green, and there at her door, bumping softly on the screen, were the two girls. ‘Got any more to give us, Mrs Bentley? More of the little girl’s things?’

She led them down the hall to the library.

‘Take this.’ She gave Jane the dress in which she had played the mandarin’s daughter at fifteen. ‘And this, and this.’ A kaleidoscope, a magnifying glass. ‘Pick anything you want,’ said Mrs Bentley. ‘Books, skates, dolls, everything – they’re yours.’

‘Ours?’

‘Only yours. And will you help me with a little work in the next hour? I’m building a big fire in my back yard. I’m emptying the trunks, throwing out this trash for the trashman. It doesn’t belong to me. Nothing ever belongs to anybody.’

‘We’ll help,’ they said.

Mrs Bentley led the procession to the back yard, arms full, a box of matches in her hand.

So the rest of the summer you could see the two little girls and Tom like wrens on a wire, on Mrs Bentley’s front porch, waiting. And when the silvery chimes of the icicle man were heard, the front door opened, Mrs Bentley floated out with her hand deep down the gullet of her silver-mouthed purse, and for half an hour you could see them there on the porch, the children and the old lady putting coldness into warmness, eating chocolate icicles, laughing. At last they were good friends.

‘How old are you, Mrs Bentley?’

‘Seventy-two.’

‘How old were you fifty years ago?’

‘Seventy-two.’

‘You weren’t ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these?’

‘No.?’

‘Have you got a first name?’

‘My name is Mrs Bentley.’

‘And you’ve always lived in this one house?’

‘Always.’

‘And never were pretty?’

‘Never.’

‘Never in a million trillion years?’ The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o’clock on a summer afternoon.

‘Never,’ said Mrs Bentley, ‘in a million trillion years.’




And the Rock Cried Out (#ulink_5031267f-4f8c-5d32-b3f7-f5d60f3ca819)


The raw carcasses, hung in the sunlight, rushed at them, vibrated with heat and red color in the green jungle air, and were gone. The stench of rotting flesh gushed through the car windows, and Leonora Webb quickly pressed the button that whispered her door window up.

‘Good Lord,’ she said, ‘those open-air butcher shops.’

The smell was still in the car, a smell of war and horror.

‘Did you see the flies?’ she asked.

‘When you buy any kind of meat in those markets,’ John Webb said, ‘you slap the beef with your hand. The flies lift from the meat so you can get a look at it.’

He turned the car around a lush bend in the green rain-jungle road.

‘Do you think they’ll let us into Juatala when we get there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Watch out!’

He saw the bright things in the road too late, tried to swerve, but hit them. There was a terrible sighing from the right front tire, the car heaved about and sank to a stop. He opened his side of the car and stepped out. The jungle was hot and silent and the highway empty, very empty and quiet at noon.

He walked to the front of the car and bent, all the while checking his revolver in its underarm holster.

Leonora’s window gleamed down. ‘Is the tire hurt much?’

‘Ruined, utterly ruined!’ He picked up the bright thing that had stabbed and slashed the tire.

‘Pieces of a broken machete,’ he said, ‘placed in adobe holders pointing toward our car wheels. We’re lucky it didn’t get all our tires.’

‘But why?’

‘You know as well as I.’ He nodded to the newspaper beside her, at the date, the headlines:

OCTOBER 4th, 1963: UNITED STATES, Europe SILENT!

THE RADIOS OF THE U.S.A. AND EUROPE ARE DEAD. THERE IS A GREAT SILENCE. THE WAR HAS SPENT ITSELF.

It is believed that most of the population of the United States is dead. It is believed that most of Europe, Russia, and Siberia is equally decimated. The day of the white people of the earth is over and finished.

‘It all came so fast,’ said Webb. ‘One week we’re on another tour, a grand vacation from home. The next week – this.’

They both looked away from the black headlines to the jungle.

The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.

‘Be careful, Jack.’

He pressed two buttons. An automatic lift under the front wheels hissed and hung the car in the air. He jammed a key nervously into the right wheel plate. The tire, frame and all, with a sucking pop, bounced from the wheel. It was a matter of seconds to lock the spare in place and roll the shattered tire back to the luggage compartment. He had his gun out while he did all this.

‘Don’t stand in the open, please, Jack.’

‘So it’s starting already.’ He felt his hair burning hot on his skull. ‘News travels fast.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Leonora. ‘They can hear you!’

He stared at the jungle.

‘I know you’re in there!’

‘Jack!’

He aimed at the silent jungle. ‘I see you!’ He fired four, five times, quickly, wildly.

The jungle ate the bullets with hardly a quiver, a brief slit sound like torn silk where the bullets bored and vanished into a million acres of green leaves, trees, silence, and moist earth. The brief echo of the shots died. Only the car muttered its exhaust behind Webb. He walked around the car, got in, and shut the door and locked it.

He reloaded the gun, sitting in the front seat. Then they drove away from the place.

They drove steadily.

‘Did you see anyone?’

‘No. You?’

She shook her head.

‘You’re going too fast.’

He slowed only in time. As they rounded a curve another clump of the bright flashing objects filled the right side of the road. He swerved to the left and passed.

‘Sons-of-bitches!’

‘They’re not sons-of-bitches, they’re just people who never had a car like this or anything at all.’

Something ticked across the windowpane.

There was a streak of colorless liquid on the glass.

Leonora glanced up. ‘Is it going to rain?’

‘No, an insect hit the pane.’

Another tick.

‘Are you sure that was an insect?’

Tick, tick, tick.

‘Shut the window!’ he said, speeding up.

Something fell in her lap.

She looked down at it. He reached over to touch the thing. ‘Quick!’

She pressed the button. The window snapped up.

Then she examined her lap again.

The tiny blowgun dart glistened there.

‘Don’t get any of the liquid on you,’ he said. ‘Wrap it in your handkerchief – we’ll throw it away later.’

He had the car up to sixty miles an hour.

‘If we hit another road block, we’re done.’

‘This is a local thing,’ he said. ‘We’ll drive out of it.’

The panes were ticking all the time. A shower of things blew at the window and fell away in their speed.

‘Why,’ said Leonora Webb, ‘they don’t even know us!’

‘I only wish they did.’ He gripped the wheel. ‘It’s hard to kill people you know. But not hard to kill strangers.’

‘I don’t want to die,’ she said simply, sitting there.

He put his hand inside his coat. ‘If anything happens to me, my gun is here. Use it, for God’s sake, and don’t waste time.’

She moved over close to him and they drove seventy-five miles an hour down a straight stretch in the jungle road, saying nothing.

With the windows up, the heat was oven-thick in the car.

‘It’s so silly,’ she said, at last. ‘Putting the knives in the road. Trying to hit us with the blowguns. How could they know that the next car along would be driven by white people?’

‘Don’t ask them to be that logical,’ he said. ‘A car is a car. It’s big, it’s rich. The money in one car would last them a lifetime. And anyway, if you road-block a car, chances are you’ll get either an American tourist or a rich Spaniard, comparatively speaking, whose ancestors should have behaved better. And if you happen to road-block another Indian, hell, all you do is go out and help him change tires.’

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

For the thousandth time he glanced at his empty wrist. Without expression or surprise, he fished in his coat pocket for the glistening gold watch with the silent sweep hand. A year ago he had seen a native stare at this watch and stare at it and stare at it with almost a hunger. Then the native had examined him, not scowling, not hating, not sad or happy; nothing except puzzled.

He had taken the watch off that day and never worn it since.

‘Noon,’ he said.

Noon.

The border lay ahead. They saw it and both cried out at once. They pulled up, smiling, not knowing they smiled.…

John Webb leaned out the window, started gesturing to the guard at the border station, caught himself, and got out of his car. He walked ahead to the station where three young men, very short, in lumpy uniforms, stood talking. They did not look up at Webb, who stopped before them. They continued conversing in Spanish, ignoring him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said John Webb at last. ‘Can we pass over the border into Juatala?’

One of the men turned for a moment. ‘Sorry, señor.’

The three men talked again.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Webb, touching the first man’s elbow. ‘We’ve got to get through.’

The man shook his head. ‘Passports are no longer good. Why should you want to leave our country, anyway?’

‘It was announced on the radio. All Americans to leave the country, immediately.’

‘Ah, sí, sí.’ All three soldiers nodded and leered at each other with shining eyes.

‘Or be fined or imprisoned, or both,’ said Webb.

‘We could let you over the border, but Juatala would give you twenty-four hours to leave, also. If you don’t believe me, listen!’ The guard turned and called across the border, ‘Aye, there! Aye!’

In the hot sun, forty yards distant, a pacing man turned, his rifle in his arms.

‘Aye there, Paco, you want these two people?’

‘No, gracias – gracias, no,’ replied the man, smiling.

‘You see?’ said the guard, turning to John Webb.

All of the soldiers laughed together.

‘I have money,’ said Webb.

The men stopped laughing.

The first guard stepped up to John Webb and his face was now not relaxed or easy; it was like brown stone.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They always have money. I know. They come here and they think money will do everything. But what is money? It is only a promise, señor. This I know from books. And when somebody no longer likes your promise, what then?’

‘I will give you anything you ask.’

‘Will you?’ The guard turned to his friends. ‘He will give me anything I ask.’ To Webb: ‘It was a joke. We were always a joke to you, weren’t we?’

‘No.’

‘Mañana, you laughed at us; mañana, you laughed at our siestas and our mañanas, didn’t you?’

‘Not me. Someone else.’

‘Yes, you.’

‘I’ve never been to this particular station before.’

‘I know you, anyway. Run here, do this, do that. Oh, here’s a peso, buy yourself a house. Run over there, do this, do that.’

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘He looked like you, anyway.’

They stood in the sun with their shadows dark under them, and the perspiration coloring their armpits. The soldier moved closer to John Webb. ‘I don’t have to do anything for you anymore.’

‘You never had to before. I never asked it.’

‘You’re trembling, señor.’

‘I’m all right. It’s the sun.’

‘How much money have you got?’ asked the guard.

‘A thousand pesos to let us through, and a thousand for the other man over there.’

The guard turned again. ‘Will a thousand pesos be enough?’

‘No,’ said the other guard. ‘Tell him to report us!’

‘Yes,’ said the guard, back to Webb again. ‘Report me. Get me fired. I was fired once, years ago, by you.’

‘It was someone else.’

‘Take my name. It is Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl. Go on now.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t see,’ said Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl. ‘Now give me two thousand pesos.’

John Webb took out his wallet and handed over the money. Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl licked his thumb and counted the money slowly under the blue glazed sky of his country as noon deepened and sweat arose from hidden sources and people breathed and panted above their shadows.

‘Two thousand pesos.’ He folded it and put it in his pocket quietly. ‘Now turn your car around and head for another border.’

‘Hold on now, damn it!’

The guard looked at him. ‘Turn your car.’

They stood a long time that way, with the sun blazing on the rifle in the guard’s hands, not speaking. And then John Webb turned and walked slowly, one hand to his face, back to the car and slid into the front seat.

‘What’re we going to do?’ said Leonora.

‘Rot. Or try to reach Porto Bello.’

‘But we need gas and our spare fixed. And going back over those highways … This time they might drop logs, and—’

‘I know, I know.’ He rubbed his eyes and sat for a moment with his head in his hands. ‘We’re alone, my God, we’re alone. Remember how safe we used to feel? How safe? We registered in all the big towns with the American Consuls. Remember how the joke went? “Everywhere you go you can hear the rustle of the eagle’s wings!” Or was it the sound of paper money? I forget. Jesus, Jesus, the world got empty awfully quick. Who do I call on now?’

She waited a moment and then said, ‘I guess just me. That’s not much.’

He put his arm around her. ‘You’ve been swell. No hysterics, nothing.’

‘Tonight maybe I’ll be screaming, when we’re in bed, if we ever find a bed again. It’s been a million miles since breakfast.’

He kissed her, twice, on her dry mouth. Then he sat slowly back. ‘First thing is to try to find gas. If we can get that, we’re ready to head for Porto Bello.’

The three soldiers were talking and joking as they drove away.

After they had been driving a minute, he began to laugh quietly.

‘What were you thinking?’ asked his wife.

‘I remember an old spiritual. It goes like this:

‘“I went to the Rock to hide my face And the Rock cried out, ‘No Hiding Place, There’s no Hiding Place down here.’” ’

‘I remember that,’ she said.

‘It’s an appropriate song right now,’ he said. ‘I’d sing the whole thing for you if I could remember it all. And if I felt like singing.’

He put his foot harder to the accelerator.

They stopped at a gas station and after a minute, when the attendant did not appear, John Webb honked the horn. Then, appalled, he snapped his hand away from the horn-ring, looking at it as if it were the hand of a leper.

‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

The attendant appeared in the shadowy doorway of the gas station. Two other men appeared behind him.

The three men came out and walked around the car, looking at it, touching it, feeling it.

Their faces were like burned copper in the daylight. They touched the resilient tires, they sniffed the rich new smell of the metal and upholstery.

‘Señor,’ said the gas attendant at last.

‘We’d like to buy some gas, please.’

‘We are all out of gas, señor.’

‘But your tank reads full. I see the gas in the glass container up there.’

‘We are all out of gas,’ said the man.

‘I’ll give you ten pesos a gallon!’

‘Gracias, no.’

‘We haven’t enough gas to get anywhere from here.’ Webb checked the gauge. ‘Not even a quarter gallon left. We’d better leave the car here and go into town and see what we can do there.’

‘I’ll watch the car for you, señor,’ said the station attendant. ‘If you leave the keys.’

‘We can’t do that!’ said Leonora. ‘Can we?’

‘I don’t see what choice we have. We can stall it on the road and leave it to anyone who comes along, or leave it with this man.’

‘That’s better,’ said the man.

They climbed out of the car and stood looking at it.

‘It was a beautiful car,’ said John Webb.

‘Very beautiful,’ said the man, his hand out for the keys. ‘I will take good care of it, señor.’

‘But, Jack—’

She opened the back door and started to take out the luggage. Over her shoulder, he saw the bright travel stickers, the storm of color that had descended upon and covered the worn leather now after years of travel, after years of the best hotels in two dozen countries.

She tugged at the valises, perspiring, and he stopped her hands and they stood gasping there for a moment, in the open door of the car, looking at these fine rich suitcases, inside which were the beautiful tweeds and woolens and silks of their lives and living, the forty-dollar-an-ounce perfumes and the cool dark furs and the silvery golf shafts. Twenty years were packed into each of the cases; twenty years and four dozen parts they had played in Rio, in Paris, in Rome and Shanghai, but the part they played most frequently and best of all was the rich and buoyant, amazingly happy Webbs, the smiling people, the ones who could make that rarely balanced martini known as the Sahara.

‘We can’t carry it all into town,’ he said. ‘We’ll come back for it later. Later.’

‘But …’

He silenced her by turning her away and starting her off down the road.

‘But we can’t leave it there, we can’t leave all our luggage and we can’t leave our car! Oh look here now, I’ll roll up the windows and lock myself in the car, while you go for the gas, why not?’ she said.

He stopped and glanced back at the three men standing by the car, which blazed in the yellow sun. Their eyes were shining and looking at the woman.

‘There’s your answer,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

‘But you just don’t walk off and leave a four-thousand-dollar automobile!’ she cried.

He moved her along, holding her elbow firmly and with quiet decision. ‘A car is to travel in. When it’s not traveling, it’s useless. Right now, we’ve got to travel; that’s everything. The car isn’t worth a dime without gas in it. A pair of good strong legs is worth a hundred cars, if you use the legs. We’ve just begun to toss things overboard. We’ll keep dropping ballast until there’s nothing left to heave but our hides.’

He let her go. She was walking steadily now, and she fell into step with him. ‘It’s so strange. So strange. I haven’t walked like this in years.’ She watched the motion of her feet beneath her, she watched the road pass by, she watched the jungle moving to either side, she watched her husband striding quickly along, until she seemed hypnotized by the steady rhythm. ‘But I guess you can learn anything over again,’ she said, at last.

The sun moved in the sky and they moved for a long while on the hot road. When he was quite ready, the husband began to think aloud. ‘You know, in a way, I think it’s good to be down to essentials. Now instead of worrying over a dozen damned things, it’s just two items – you and me.’

‘Watch it, here comes a car – we’d better …’

They half turned, yelled, and jumped. They fell away from the highway and lay watching the automobile hurtle past at seventy miles an hour. Voices sang, men laughed, men shouted, waving. The car sped away into the dust and vanished around a curve, blaring its double horns again and again.

He helped her up and they stood in the quiet road.

‘Did you see it?’

They watched the dust settle slowly.

‘I hope they remember to change the oil and check the battery, at least. I hope they think to put water in the radiator,’ she said, and paused. ‘They were singing, weren’t they?’

He nodded. They stood blinking at the great dust cloud filtering down like yellow pollen upon their heads and arms. He saw a few bright splashes flick from her eyelids when she blinked.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘After all, it was only a machine.’

‘I loved it.’

‘We’re always loving everything too much.’

Walking, they passed a shattered wine bottle which steamed freshly as they stepped over it.

They were not far from the town, walking single file, the wife ahead, the husband following, looking at their feet as they walked, when a sound of tin and steam and bubbling water made them turn and look at the road behind them. An old man in a 1929 Ford drove along the road at a moderate speed. The car’s fenders were gone, and the sun had flaked and burned the paint badly, but he rode in the seat with a great deal of quiet dignity, his face a thoughtful darkness under a dirty Panama hat, and when he saw the two people he drew the car up, steaming, the engine joggling under the hood, and opened the squealing door as he said, ‘This is no day for walking.’

‘Thank you,’ they said.

‘It is nothing.’ The old man wore an ancient yellowed white summer suit, with a rather greasy tie knotted loosely at his wrinkled throat. He helped the lady into the rear seat with a gracious bow of his head. ‘Let us men sit up front,’ he suggested, and the husband sat up front and the car moved off in trembling vapors.

‘Well. My name is Garcia.’

There were introductions and noddings.

‘Your car broke down? You are on your way for help?’ said Señor Garcia.

‘Yes.’

‘Then let me drive you and a mechanic back out,’ offered the old man.

They thanked him and kindly turned the offer aside and he made it once again, but upon finding that his interest and concern caused them embarrassment, he very politely turned to another subject.

He touched a small stack of folded newspapers on his lap.

‘Do you read the papers? Of course, you do. But do you read them as I read them? I rather doubt that you have come upon my system. No, it was not exactly myself that came upon it; the system was forced upon me. But now I know what a clever thing it has turned out to be. I always get the newspapers a week late. All of us, those who are interested, get the papers a week late, from the Capital. And this circumstance makes for a man being a clear-thinking man. You are very careful with your thinking when you pick up a week-old paper.’

The husband and wife asked him to continue.

‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘I remember once, when I lived in the Capital for a month and bought the paper fresh each day, I went wild with love, anger, irritation, frustration; all of the passions boiled in me. I was young. I exploded at everything I saw. But then I saw what I was doing: I was believing what I read. Have you noticed? You believe a paper printed on the very day you buy it? This has happened but only an hour ago, you think! It must be true.’ He shook his head. ‘So I learned to stand back away and let the paper age and mellow. Back here, in Colonia, I saw the headlines diminish to nothing. The week-old paper – why, you can spit on it if you wish. It is like a woman you once loved, but you now see, a few days later, she is not quite what you thought. She has rather a plain face. She is no deeper than a cup of water.’

He steered the car gently, his hands upon the wheel as upon the heads of his good children, with care and affection. ‘So here I am, returning to my home to read my weekly papers, to peek sideways at them, to toy with them.’ He spread one on his knee, glancing down to it on occasion as he drove. ‘How white this paper is, like the mind of a child that is an idiot, poor thing, all blank. You can put anything into an empty place like that. Here, do you see? This paper speaks and says that the light-skinned people of the world are dead. Now that is a very silly thing to say. At this very moment, there are probably millions upon millions of white men and women eating their noon meals or their suppers. The earth trembles, a town collapses, people run from the town, screaming, All is lost! In the next village, the population wonders what all of the shouting is about, since they have had a most splendid night’s repose. Ah, ah, what a sly world it is. People do not see how sly it is. It is either night or day to them. Rumor flies. This very afternoon all of the little villages upon this highway, behind us and ahead of us, are in carnival. The white man is dead, the rumors say, and yet here I come into the town with two very lively ones. I hope you don’t mind my speaking in this way? If I do not talk to you I would then be talking to this engine up in the front, which makes a great noise speaking back.’

They were at the edge of town.

‘Please,’ said John Webb, ‘it wouldn’t be wise for you to be seen with us today. We’ll get out here.’

The old man stopped his car reluctantly and said, ‘You are most kind and thoughtful of me.’ He turned to look at the lovely wife.

‘When I was a young man I was very full of wildness and ideas. I read all of the books from France by a man named Jules Verne. I see you know his name. But at night I many times thought I must be an inventor. That is all gone by; I never did what I thought I might do. But I remember clearly that one of the machines I wished to put together was a machine that would help every man, for an hour, to be like any other man. The machine was full of colors and smells and it had film in it, like a theater, and the machine was like a coffin. You lay in it. And you touched a button. And for an hour you could be one of those Eskimos in the cold wind up there, or you could be an Arab gentleman on a horse. Everything a New York man felt, you could feel. Everything a man from Sweden smelled, you could smell. Everything a man from China tasted, your tongue knew. The machine was like another man – do you see what I was after? And by touching many of the buttons, each time you got into my machine, you could be a white man or a yellow man or a Negrito. You could be a child or a woman, even, if you wished to be very funny.’

The husband and wife climbed from the car.

‘Did you ever try to invent that machine?’

‘It was so very long ago. I had forgotten until today. And today I was thinking, we could make use of it, we are in need of it. What a shame I never tried to put it all together. Someday some other man will do it.’

‘Someday,’ said John Webb.

‘It has been a pleasure talking with you,’ said the old man. ‘God go with you.’

‘Adiós, Señor Garcia,’ they said.

The car drove slowly away, steaming. They stood watching it go, for a full minute. Then, without speaking, the husband reached over and took his wife’s hand.

They entered the small town of Colonia on foot. They walked past the little shops – the butcher shop, the photographer’s. People stopped and looked at them as they went by and did not stop looking at them as long as they were in sight. Every few seconds, as he walked, Webb put up his hand to touch the holster hidden under his coat, secretly, tentatively, like someone feeling for a tiny boil that is growing and growing every hour and every hour …

The patio of the Hotel Esposa was cool as a grotto under a blue waterfall. In it caged birds sang, and footsteps echoed like small rifle shots, clear and smooth.

‘Remember? We stopped here years ago,’ said Webb, helping his wife up the steps. They stood in the cool grotto, glad of the blue shade.

‘Señor Esposa,’ said John Webb, when a fat man came forward from the desk, squinting at them. ‘Do you remember me – John Webb? Five years ago – we played cards one night.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Señor Esposa bowed to the wife and shook hands briefly. There was an uncomfortable silence.

Webb cleared his throat. ‘We’ve had a bit of trouble, señor. Could we have a room for tonight only?’

‘Your money is always good here.’

‘You mean you’ll actually give us a room? We’ll be glad to pay in advance. Lord, we need the rest. But, more than that, we need gas.’

Leonora picked at her husband’s arm. ‘Remember? We haven’t a car anymore.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ He fell silent for a moment and then sighed. ‘Well. Never mind the gas. Is there a bus out of here for the Capital soon?’

‘All will be attended to, in time,’ said the manager nervously. ‘This way.’

As they were climbing the stairs they heard a noise. Looking out they saw their car riding around and around the plaza, eight times, loaded with men who were shouting and singing and hanging on to the front fenders, laughing. Children and dogs ran after the car.

‘I would like to own a car like that,’ said Señor Esposa.

He poured a little cool wine for the three of them, standing in the room on the third floor of the Esposa Hotel.

‘To “change,”’ said Señor Esposa.

‘I’ll drink to that.’

They drank. Señor Esposa licked his lips and wiped them on his coat sleeve. ‘We are always surprised and saddened to see the world change. It is insane, they have run out on us, you say. It is unbelievable. And now, well – you are safe for the night. Shower and have a good supper. I won’t be able to keep you more than one night, to repay you for your kindness to me five years ago.’

‘And tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow? Do not take any bus to the Capital, please. There are riots in the streets there. A few people from the North have been killed. It is nothing. It will pass in a few days. But you must be careful until those few days pass and the blood cools. There are many wicked people taking advantage of this day, señor. For forty-eight hours anyway, under the guise of a great resurgence of nationalism, these people will try to gain power. Selfishness and patriotism, señor; today I cannot tell one from the other. So – you must hide. That is a problem. The town will know you are here in another few hours. This might be dangerous to my hotel. I cannot say.’

‘We understand. It’s good of you to help this much.’

‘If you need anything, call me.’ Señor Esposa drank the rest of the wine in his glass. ‘Finish the bottle,’ he said.

The fireworks began at nine that evening. First one skyrocket then another soared into the dark sky and burst out upon the winds, building architectures of flame. Each skyrocket, at the top of its ride, cracked open and let out a formation of streamers in red and white flame that made something like the dome of a beautiful cathedral.

Leonora and John Webb stood by the open window in their unlit room, watching and listening. As the hour latened, more people streamed into town from every road and path and began to roam, arm in arm, around the plaza, singing, barking like dogs, crowing like roosters, and then falling down on the tile sidewalks, sitting there, laughing, their heads thrown back, while the skyrockets burst explosive colors on the tilted faces. A brass band began to thump and wheeze.

‘So here we are,’ said John Webb, ‘after a few hundred years of living high. So this is what’s left of our white supremacy – you and I in a dark room in a hotel three hundred miles inside a celebrating country.’

‘You’ve got to see their side of it.’

‘Oh, I’ve seen it ever since I was that high. In a way, I’m glad they’re happy. God knows they’ve waited long enough to be. But I wonder how long that happiness will last. Now that the scapegoat is gone, who will they blame for oppression, who will be as handy and as obvious and as guilty as you and I and the man who lived in this room before us?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We were so convenient. The man who rented this room last month, he was convenient, he stood out. He made loud jokes about the natives’ siestas. He refused to learn even a smattering of Spanish. Let them learn English, by God, and speak like men, he said. And he drank too much and whored too much with this country’s women.’ He broke off and moved back from the window. He stared at the room.

The furniture, he thought. Where he put his dirty shoes upon the sofa, where he burned holes in the carpet with cigarettes; the wet spot on the wall near the bed, God knows what or how he did that. The chairs scarred and kicked. It wasn’t his hotel or his room; it was borrowed, it meant nothing. So this son-of-a-bitch went around the country for the past one hundred years, a traveling commercial, a Chamber of Commerce, and now here we are, enough like him to be his brother and sister, and there they are down there on the night of the Butlers’ Ball. They don’t know, or if they know they won’t think of it, that tomorrow they’ll be just as poor, just as oppressed as ever, that the whole machine will only have shifted into another gear.

Now the band had stopped playing below; a man had leaped up, shouting, on the bandstand. There was a flash of machetes in the air and the brown gleam of half-naked bodies.

The man on the bandstand faced the hotel and looked up at the dark room where John and Leonora Webb now stood back out of the intermittent flares.

The man shouted.

‘What does he say?’ asked Leonora.

John Webb translated: ‘“It is now a free world,” he says.’

The man yelled.

John Webb translated again. ‘He says, “We are free!”’

The man lifted himself on his toes and made a motion of breaking manacles. ‘He says, “No one owns us, no one in all the world.”’

The crowd roared and the band began to play, and while it was playing, the man on the grandstand stood glaring up at the room window, with all of the hatred of the universe in his eyes.

During the night there were fights and pummelings and voices lifted, arguments and shots fired. John Webb lay awake and heard the voice of Señor Esposa below, reasoning, talking quietly, firmly. And then the fading away of the tumult, the last rockets in the sky, the last breakings of bottles on the cobbles.

At five in the morning the air was warming into a new day. There was the softest of taps on the bedroom door.

‘It is me, it is Esposa,’ said a voice.

John Webb hesitated, half-dressed, numbed on his feet from lack of sleep, then opened the door.

‘What a night, what a night!’ said Señor Esposa, coming in, shaking his head, laughing gently. ‘Did you hear that noise? Yes? They tried to come up here to your room. I prevented this.’

‘Thank you’ said Leonora, still in bed, turned to the wall.

‘They were all old friends. I made an agreement with them, anyway. They were drunk enough and happy enough so they agreed to wait. I am to make a proposition to you two.’ Suddenly he seemed embarrassed. He moved to the window. ‘Everyone is sleeping late. A few are up. A few men. See them there on the far side of the plaza?’

John Webb looked out at the plaza. He saw the brown men talking quietly there about the weather, the world, the sun, this town, and perhaps the wine.

‘Señor, have you ever been hungry in your life?’

‘For a day, once.’

‘Only for a day. Have you always had a house to live in and a car to drive?’

‘Until yesterday.’

‘Were you ever without a job?’

‘Never.’

‘Did all of your brothers and sisters live to be twenty-one years old?’

‘All of them.’

‘Even I,’ said Señor Esposa, ‘even I hate you a little bit now. For I have been without a home. I have been hungry. I have three brothers and one sister buried in that graveyard on the hill beyond the town, all dead of tuberculosis before they were nine years old.’

Señor Esposa glanced at the men in the plaza. ‘Now, I am no longer hungry or poor, I have a car, I am alive. But I am one in a thousand. What can you say to them out there today?’

‘I’ll try to think of something.’

‘Long ago I stopped trying. Señor, we have always been a minority, we white people. I am Spanish, but I was born here. They tolerate me.’

‘We have never let ourselves think about our being a minority,’ said Webb, ‘and now it’s hard to get used to the fact.’

‘You have behaved beautifully.’

‘Is that a virtue?’

‘In the bull ring, yes; in war, yes; in anything like this, most assuredly yes. You do not complain, you do not make excuses. You do not run and make a spectacle of yourself. I think you are both very brave.’

The hotel manager sat down, slowly, helplessly.

‘I’ve come to offer you the chance to settle down,’ he said.

‘We wanted to move on, if possible.’

The manager shrugged. ‘Your car is stolen, I can do nothing to get it back. You cannot leave town. Remain then and accept my offer of a position in my hotel.’

‘You don’t think there is any way for us to travel?’

‘It might be twenty days, señor, or twenty years. You cannot exist without money, food, lodging. Consider my hotel and the work I can give you.’

The manager arose and walked unhappily to the door and stood by the chair, touching Webb’s coat, which was draped over it.

‘What’s the job?’ asked Webb.

‘In the kitchen,’ said the manager, and looked away.

John Webb sat on the bed and said nothing. His wife did not move.

Señor Esposa said, ‘It is the best I can do. What more can you ask of me? Last night, those others down in the plaza wanted both of you. Did you see the machetes? I bargained with them. You were lucky. I told them you would be employed in my hotel for the next twenty years, that you were my employees and deserve my protection!’

‘You said that!’

‘Señor, señor, be thankful! Consider! Where will you go? The jungle? You will be dead in two hours from the snakes. Then can you walk five hundred miles to a capital which will not welcome you? No – you must face the reality.’ Señor Esposa opened the door. ‘I offer you an honest job and you will be paid the standard wages of two pesos a day, plus meals. Would you rather be with me, or out in the plaza at noon with our friends? Consider.’

The door was shut. Señor Esposa was gone.

Webb stood looking at the door for a long while.

Then he walked to the chair and fumbled with the holster under the draped white shirt. The holster was empty. He held it in his hands and blinked at its emptiness and looked again at the door through which Señor Esposa had just passed. He went over and sat down on the bed beside his wife. He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms and kissed her, and they lay there, watching the room get brighter with the new day.

At eleven o’clock in the morning, with the great doors on the windows of their room flung back, they began to dress. There were soap, towels, shaving equipment, even perfume in the bathroom, provided by Mr Esposa.

John Webb shaved and dressed carefully.

At eleven-thirty he turned on the small radio near their bed. You could usually get New York or Cleveland or Houston on such a radio. But the air was silent. John Webb turned the radio off.

‘There’s nothing to go back to – nothing to go back for – nothing.’

His wife sat on a chair near the door, looking at the wall.

‘We could stay here and work,’ he said.

She stirred at last. ‘No. We couldn’t do that, not really. Could we?’

‘No, I guess not.’

‘There’s no way we could do that. We’re being consistent, anyway; spoiled, but consistent.’

He thought a moment. ‘We could make for the jungle.’

‘I don’t think we can move from the hotel without being seen. We don’t want to try to escape and be caught. It would be far worse that way.’

He nodded.

They both sat a moment.

‘It might not be too bad, working here,’ he said.

‘What would we be living for? Everyone’s dead – your father, mine, your mother, mine, your brothers, mine, all our friends, everything gone, everything we understood.’

He nodded.

‘Or if we took the job, one day soon one of the men would touch me and you’d go after him, you know you would. Or someone would do something to you, and I’d do something.’

He nodded again.

They sat for fifteen minutes, talking quietly. Then, at last, he picked up the telephone and ticked the cradle with his finger.

‘Bueno,’ said a voice on the other end.

‘Señor Esposa?’

‘Sí.’

‘Señor Esposa,’ he paused and licked his lips, ‘tell your friends we will be leaving the hotel at noon.’

The phone did not immediately reply. Then with a sigh Señor Esposa said, ‘As you wish. You are sure—?’

The phone was silent for a full minute. Then it was picked up again and the manager said quietly, ‘My friends say they will be waiting for you on the far side of the plaza.’

‘We will meet them there,’ said John Webb.

‘And señor—’

‘Yes.’

‘Do not hate me, do not hate us.’

‘I don’t hate anybody.’

‘It is a bad world, señor. None of us know how we got here or what we are doing. These men don’t know what they are mad at, except they are mad. Forgive them and do not hate them.’

‘I don’t hate them or you.’

‘Thank you, thank you.’ Perhaps the man on the far end of the telephone wire was crying. There was no way to tell. There were great lapses in his talking, in his breathing. After a while he said, ‘We don’t know why we do anything. Men hit each other for no reason except they are unhappy. Remember that. I am your friend. I would help you if I could. But I cannot. It would be me against the town. Good-bye, señor.’ He hung up.

John Webb sat in the chair with his hand on the silent phone. It was a moment before he glanced up. It was a moment before his eyes focused on an object immediately before him. When he saw it clearly, he still did not move, but sat regarding it, until a look of immensely tired irony appeared on his mouth. ‘Look here,’ he said at last.

Leonora followed his motion, his pointing.

They both sat looking at his cigarette which, neglected on the rim of the table while he telephoned, had burned down so that now it had charred a black hole in the clean surface of the wood.

It was noon, with the sun directly over them, pinning their shadows under them as they started down the steps of the Hotel Esposa. Behind them, the birds fluted in their bamboo cages, and water ran in a little fountain bath. They were as neat as they could get, their faces and hands washed, their nails clean, their shoes polished.

Across the plaza two hundred yards away stood a small group of men, in the shade of a store-front overhang. Some of the men were natives from the jungle area, with machetes gleaming at their sides. They were all facing the plaza.

John Webb looked at them for a long while. That isn’t everyone, he thought, that isn’t the whole country. That’s only the surface. That’s only the thin skin over the flesh. It’s not the body at all. Just the shell of an egg. Remember the crowds back home, the mobs, the riots? Always the same, there or here. A few mad faces up front, and the quiet ones far back, not taking part, letting things go, not wanting to be in it. The majority not moving. And so the few, the handful, take over and move for them.

His eyes did not blink. If we could break through that shell – God knows it’s thin! he thought. If we could talk our way through that mob and get to the quiet people beyond.… Can I do it? Can I say the right things? Can I keep my voice down?

He fumbled in his pockets and brought out a rumpled cigarette package and some matches.

I can try, he thought. How would the old man in the Ford have done it? I’ll try to do it his way. When we get across the plaza, I’ll start talking, I’ll whisper if necessary. And if we move slowly through the mob, we might just possibly find our way to the other people and we’ll be on high ground and we’ll be safe.

Leonora moved beside him. She was so fresh, so well groomed in spite of everything, so new in all this oldness, so startling, that his mind flinched and jerked. He found himself staring at her as if she’d betrayed him by her salt-whiteness, her wonderfully brushed hair and her cleanly manicured nails and her bright-red mouth.

Standing on the bottom step, Webb lit a cigarette, took two or three long drags on it, tossed it down, stepped on it, kicked the flattened butt into the street, and said, ‘Here we go.’

They stepped down and started around the far side of the plaza, past the few shops that were still open. They walked quietly.

‘Perhaps they’ll be decent to us.’

‘We can hope so.’

They passed a photographic shop.

‘It’s another day. Anything can happen. I believe that. No – I don’t really believe it. I’m only talking. I’ve got to talk or I wouldn’t be able to walk,’ she said.

They passed a candy shop.

‘Keep talking, then.’

‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘This can’t be happening to us! Are we the last ones in the world?’

‘Maybe next to the last.’

They approached an open air carnecería.

God! he thought. How the horizons narrowed, how they came in. A year ago there weren’t four directions, there were a million for us. Yesterday they got down to four; we could go to Juatala, Porto Bello, San Juan Clementas, or Brioconbria. We were satisfied to have our car. Then when we couldn’t get gas, we were satisfied to have our clothes, then when they took our clothes, we were satisfied to have a place to sleep. Each pleasure they took away left us with one other creature comfort to hold on to. Did you see how we let go of one thing and clutched another so quickly? I guess that’s human. So they took away everything. There’s nothing left. Except us. It all boils down to just you and me walking along here, and thinking too goddamn much for my own good. And what counts in the end is whether they can take you away from me or me away from you, Lee, and I don’t think they can do that. They’ve got everything else and I don’t blame them. But they can’t really do anything else to us now. When you strip all the clothes away and the doodads, you have two human beings who were either happy or unhappy together, and we have no complaints.

‘Walk slowly,’ said John Webb.

‘I am.’

‘Not too slowly, to look reluctant. Not too fast, to look as if you want to get it over with. Don’t give them the satisfaction, Lee, don’t give them a damn bit.’

‘I won’t.’

They walked. ‘Don’t even touch me,’ he said, quietly. ‘Don’t even hold my hand.’

‘Oh, please!’

‘No, not even that.’

He moved away a few inches and kept walking steadily. His eyes were straight ahead and their pace was regular.

‘I’m beginning to cry, Jack.’

‘Goddamn it!’ he said, measuredly, between his teeth, not looking aside. ‘Stop it! Do you want me to run? Is that what you want – do you want me to take you and run into the jungle, and let them hunt us, is that what you want, goddamn it, do you want me to fall down in the street here and grovel and scream, shut up, let’s do this right, don’t give them anything!’

‘All right,’ she said, hands tight, her head coming up. ‘I’m not crying now. I won’t cry.’

‘Good, damn it, that’s good.’

And still, strangely, they were not past the carnecería. The vision of red horror was on their left as they paced steadily forward on the hot tile sidewalk. The things that hung from hooks looked like brutalities and sins, like bad consciences, evil dreams, like gored flags and slaughtered promises. The redness, oh, the hanging, evil-smelling wetness and redness, the hooked and hung-high carcasses, unfamiliar, unfamiliar.

As he passed the shop, something made John Webb strike out a hand. He slapped it smartly against a strung-up side of beef. A mantle of blue buzzing flies lifted angrily and swirled in a bright cone over the meat.

Leonora said, looking ahead, walking, ‘They’re all strangers! I don’t know any of them. I wish I knew even one of them. I wish even one of them knew me!’

They walked on past the carnecería. The side of beef, red and irritable-looking, swung in the hot sunlight after they passed.

The flies came down in a feeding cloak to cover the meat, once it had stopped swinging.




The Drummer Boy of Shiloh (#ulink_fd6120c5-a09d-5d94-8d15-85f63f96ca7d)


In the April night, more than once, blossoms fell from the orchard trees and lit with rustling taps on the drumskin. At midnight a peach stone left miraculously on a branch through winter, flicked by a bird, fell swift and unseen, struck once, like panic, which jerked the boy upright. In silence he listened to his own heart ruffle away, away, at last gone from his ears and back in his chest again.

After that, he turned the drum on its side, where its great lunar face peered at him whenever he opened his eyes.

His face, alert or at rest, was solemn. It was indeed a solemn time and a solemn night for a boy just turned fourteen in the peach field near the Owl Creek not far from the church at Shiloh.

‘… thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three …’

Unable to see, he stopped counting.

Beyond the thirty-three familiar shadows, forty thousand men, exhausted by nervous expectation, unable to sleep for romantic dreams of battles yet unfought, lay crazily askew in their uniforms. A mile yet farther on, another army was strewn helter-skelter, turning slow, basting themselves with the thought of what they would do when the time came: a leap, a yell, a blind plunge their strategy, raw youth their protection and benediction.

Now and again the boy heard a vast wind come up, that gently stirred the air. But he knew what it was, the army here, the army there, whispering to itself in the dark. Some men talking to others, others murmuring to themselves, and all so quiet it was like a natural element arisen from south or north with the motion of the earth toward dawn.

What the men whispered the boy could only guess, and he guessed that it was: Me, I’m the one, I’m the one of all the rest won’t die. I’ll live through it. I’ll go home. The band will play. And I’ll be there to hear it.

Yes, thought the boy, that’s all very well for them, they can give as good as they get!

For with the careless bones of the young men harvested by night and bindled around campfires were the similarly strewn steel bones of their rifles, with bayonets fixed like eternal lightning lost in the orchard grass.

Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two sticks to beat it, and no shield.

There wasn’t a man-boy on this ground tonight did not have a shield he cast, riveted or carved himself on his way to his first attack, compounded of remote but nonetheless firm and fiery family devotion, flag-blown patriotism and cocksure immortality strengthened by the touchstone of very real gunpowder, ramrod, miniéball and flint. But without these last the boy felt his family move yet farther off away in the dark, as if one of those great prairie-burning trains had chanted them away never to return, leaving him with this drum which was worse than a toy in the game to be played tomorrow or some day much too soon.

The boy turned on his side. A moth brushed his face, but it was peach blossom. A peach blossom flicked him, but it was a moth. Nothing stayed put. Nothing had a name. Nothing was as it once was.

If he lay very still, when the dawn came up and the soldiers put on their bravery with their caps, perhaps they might go away, the war with them, and not notice him lying small here, no more than a toy himself.

‘Well, by God, now,’ said a voice.

The boy shut up his eyes, to hide inside himself, but it was too late. Someone, walking by in the night, stood over him.

‘Well,’ said the voice quietly, ‘here’s a soldier crying before the fight. Good. Get it over. Won’t be time once it all starts.’

And the voice was about to move on when the boy, startled, touched the drum at his elbow. The man above, hearing this, stopped. The boy could feel his eyes, sense him slowly bending near. A hand must have come down out of the night, for there was a little rat-tat as the fingernails brushed and the man’s breath fanned his face.

‘Why, it’s the drummer boy, isn’t it?’

The boy nodded, not knowing if his nod was seen. ‘Sir, is that you?’ he said.

‘I assume it is.’ The man’s knees cracked as he bent still closer.

He smelled as all fathers should smell, of salt sweat, ginger tobacco, horse and boot leather, and the earth he walked upon. He had many eyes. No, not eyes, brass buttons that watched the boy.

He could only be, and was, the General.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ he asked.

‘Joby,’ whispered the boy, starting to sit up.

‘All right, Joby, don’t stir.’ A hand pressed his chest gently, and the boy relaxed. ‘How long you been with us, Joby?’

‘Three weeks, sir.’

‘Run off from home or joined legitimately, boy?’

Silence.

‘Damn-fool question,’ said the General. ‘Do you shave yet, boy? Even more of a damn-fool. There’s your cheek, fell right off the tree overhead. And the others here not much older. Raw, raw, damn raw, the lot of you. You ready for tomorrow or the next day, Joby?’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night.’

‘You, sir?’

‘God’s truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, and the war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that’s not how it’s going to be. And maybe that’s why I cried.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Joby.

The General must have taken out a cigar now, for the dark was suddenly filled with the Indian smell of tobacco unlit as yet, but chewed as the man thought what next to say.

‘It’s going to be a crazy time,’ said the General. ‘Counting both sides, there’s a hundred thousand men, give or take a few thousand out there tonight, not one as can spit a sparrow off a tree, or knows a horse clod from a miniéball. Stand up, bare the breast, ask to be a target, thank them and sit down, that’s us, that’s them. We should turn tail and train four months, they should do the same. But here we are, taken with spring fever and thinking it blood lust, taking our sulfur with cannons instead of with molasses as it should be, going to be a hero, going to live forever. And I can see all of them over there nodding agreement, save the other way around. It’s wrong, boy, it’s wrong as a head put on hind side front and a man marching backward through life. It will be a double massacre if one of their itchy generals decides to picnic his lads on our grass. More innocents will get shot out of pure Cherokee enthusiasm than ever got shot before. Owl Creek was full of boys splashing around in the noonday sun just a few hours ago. I fear it will be full of boys again, just floating, at sundown tomorrow, not caring where the tide takes them.’

The General stopped and made a little pile of winter leaves and twigs in the darkness, as if he might at any moment strike fire to them to see his way through the coming days when the sun might not show its face because of what was happening here and just beyond.

The boy watched the hand stirring the leaves and opened his lips to say something, but did not say it. The General heard the boy’s breath and spoke himself.

‘Why am I telling you this? That’s what you wanted to ask, eh? Well, when you got a bunch of wild horses on a loose rein somewhere, somehow you got to bring order, rein them in. These lads, fresh out of the milkshed, don’t know what I know, and I can’t tell them: men actually die, in war. So each is his own army. I got to make one army of them. And for that, boy, I need you.’

‘Me!’ The boy’s lips barely twitched.

‘Now, boy,’ said the General quietly, ‘you are the heart of the army. Think of that. You’re the heart of the army. Listen, now.’

And, lying there, Joby listened.

And the General spoke on.

If he, Joby, beat slow tomorrow, the heart would beat slow in the men. They would lag by the wayside. They would drowse in the fields on their muskets. They would sleep forever, after that, in those same fields, their hearts slowed by a drummer boy and stopped by enemy lead.

But if he beat a sure, steady, ever faster rhythm, then, then their knees would come up in a long line down over that hill, one knee after the other, like a wave on the ocean shore! Had he seen the ocean ever? Seen the waves rolling in like a well-ordered cavalry charge to the sand? Well, that was it, that’s what he wanted, that’s what was needed! Joby was his right hand and his left. He gave the orders, but Joby set the pace!

So bring the right knee up and the right foot out and the left knee up and the left foot out. One following the other in good time, in brisk time. Move the blood up the body and make the head proud and the spine stiff and the jaw resolute. Focus the eye and set the teeth, flare the nostrils and tighten the hands, put steel armor all over the men, for blood moving fast in them does indeed make men feel as if they’d put on steel. He must keep at it, at it! Long and steady, steady and long! Then, even though shot or torn, those wounds got in hot blood – in blood he’d helped stir – would feel less pain. If their blood was cold, it would be more than slaughter, it would be murderous nightmare and pain best not told and no one to guess.

The General spoke and stopped, letting his breath slack off. Then, after a moment, he said, ‘So there you are, that’s it. Will you do that, boy? Do you know now you’re general of the army when the General’s left behind?’

The boy nodded mutely.

‘You’ll run them through for me then, boy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. And, God willing, many nights from tonight, many years from now, when you’re as old or far much older than me, when they ask you what you did in this awful time, you will tell them – one part humble and one part proud—“I was the drummer boy at the battle of Owl Creek,” or the Tennessee River, or maybe they’ll just name it after the church there. “I was the drummer boy at Shiloh.” Good grief, that has a beat and sound to it fitting for Mr Longfellow. “I was the drummer boy at Shiloh.” Who will ever hear those words and not know you, boy, or what you thought this night, or what you’ll think tomorrow or the next day when we must get up on our legs and move?’

The General stood up. ‘Well, then. God bless you, boy. Good night.’

‘Good night, sir.’

And, tobacco, brass, boot polish, salt sweat and leather, the man moved away through the grass.

Joby lay for a moment, staring but unable to see where the man had gone.

He swallowed. He wiped his eyes. He cleared his throat. He settled himself. Then, at last, very slowly and firmly, he turned the drum so that it faced up toward the sky.

He lay next to it, his arm around it, feeling the tremor, the touch, the muted thunder as, all the rest of the April night in the year 1862, near the Tennessee River, not far from the Owl Creek, very close to the church named Shiloh, the peach blossoms fell on the drum.




The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge (#ulink_087b094b-8486-53aa-918c-c61f904ec5b2)


‘A fool,’ I said. ‘That’s what I am.’

‘Why?’ asked my wife. ‘What for?’

I brooded by our third-floor hotel window. On the Dublin street below, a man passed, his face to the lamplight.

‘Him,’ I muttered. ‘Two days ago …’

Two days ago, as I was walking along, someone had hissed at me from the hotel alley. ‘Sir, it’s important! Sir!’

I turned into the shadow. This little man, in the direst tones, said, ‘I’ve a job in Belfast if I just had a pound for the train fare!’

I hesitated.

‘A most important job!’ he went on swiftly. ‘Pays well! I’ll – I’ll mail you back the loan! Just give me your name and hotel.’

He knew me for a tourist. It was too late, his promise to pay had moved me. The pound note crackled in my hand, being worked free from several others.

The man’s eye skimmed like a shadowing hawk.

‘And if I had two pounds, why, I could eat on the way.’

I uncrumpled two bills.

‘And three pounds would bring the wife, not leave her here alone.’

I unleafed a third.

‘Ah, hell!’ cried the man. ‘Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city, and let me get to the job, for sure!’

What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, in and out, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.

‘Lord thank you, bless you, sir!’

He ran, my five pounds with him.

I was half in the hotel before I realized that, for all his vows, he had not recorded my name.

‘Gah!’ I cried then.

‘Gah!’ I cried now, my wife behind me, at the window.

For there, passing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights ago.

‘Oh, I know him,’ said my wife. ‘He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway.’

‘Did you give it to him?’

‘No,’ said my wife simply.

Then the worst thing happened. The demon far down on the sidewalk glanced up, saw us and damn if he didn’t wave!

I had to stop myself from waving back. A sickly grin played on my lips.

‘It’s got so I hate to leave the hotel,’ I said.

‘It’s cold out, all right.’ My wife was putting on her coat.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not the cold. Them.’

And we looked again from the window.

There was the cobbled Dublin street with the night wind blowing in a fine soot along one way to Trinity College, another to St. Stephen’s Green. Across by the sweetshop two men stood mummified in the shadows. On the corner a single man, hands deep in his pockets, felt for his entombed bones, a muzzle of ice for a beard. Farther up, in a doorway, was a bundle of old newspapers that would stir like a pack of mice and wish you the time of evening if you walked by. Below, by the hotel entrance, stood a feverish hothouse rose of a woman with a mysterious bundle.

‘Oh, the beggars,’ said my wife.

‘No, not just “oh, the beggars,”’ I said, ‘but oh, the people in the streets, who somehow became beggars.’

‘It looks like a motion picture. All of them waiting down there in the dark for the hero to come out.’

‘The hero,’ I said. ‘That’s me, damn it.’

My wife peered at me. ‘You’re not afraid of them?’

‘Yes, no. Hell. It’s that woman with the bundle who’s worst. She’s a force of nature, she is. Assaults you with her poverty. As for the others – well, it’s a big chess game for me now. We’ve been in Dublin what, eight weeks? Eight weeks I’ve sat up here with my typewriter, studying their off hours and on. When they take a coffee break I take one, run for the sweetshop, the bookstore, the Olympia Theatre. If I time it right, there’s no handout, no my wanting to trot them into the barbershop or the kitchen. I know every secret exit in the hotel.’

‘Lord,’ said my wife, ‘you sound driven.’

‘I am. But most of all by that beggar on O’Connell Bridge!’

‘Which one?’

‘Which one indeed. He’s a wonder, a terror. I hate him, I love him. To see is to disbelieve him. Come on.’

The elevator, which had haunted its untidy shaft for a hundred years, came wafting skyward, dragging its ungodly chains and dread intestines after. The door exhaled open. The lift groaned as if we had trod its stomach. In a great protestation of ennui, the ghost sank back toward earth, us in it.

On the way my wife said, ‘If you held your face right, the beggars wouldn’t bother you.’

‘My face,’ I explained patiently, ‘is my face. It’s from Apple Dumpling, Wisconsin, Sarsaparilla, Maine. “Kind to Dogs” is writ on my brow for all to read. Let the street be empty, then let me step out and there’s a strikers’ march of freeloaders leaping out of manholes for miles around.’

‘If,’ my wife went on, ‘you could just learn to look over, around or through those people, stare them down.’ She mused. ‘Shall I show you how to handle them?’

‘All right, show me! We’re here!’

I flung the elevator door wide and we advanced through the Royal Hibernian Hotel lobby to squint out at the sooty night.

‘Jesus come and get me,’ I murmured. ‘There they are, their heads up, their eyes on fire. They smell apple pie already.’

‘Meet me down by the bookstore in two minutes,’ said my wife.

‘Watch.’

‘Wait!’ I cried.

But she was out the door, down the steps and on the sidewalk.

I watched, nose pressed to the glass pane.

The beggars on one corner, the other, across from, in front of, the hotel, leaned toward my wife. Their eyes glowed.

My wife looked calmly at them all for a long moment.

The beggars hesitated, creaking, I was sure, in their shoes. Then their bones settled. Their mouths collapsed. Their eyes snuffed out. Their heads sank down.

The wind blew.

With a tat-tat like a small drum, my wife’s shoes went briskly away, fading.

From below, in the Buttery, I heard music and laughter. I’ll run down, I thought, and slug in a quick one. Then, bravery resurgent …

Hell, I thought, and swung the door wide.

The effect was much as if someone had struck a great Mongolian bronze gong once.

I thought I heard a tremendous insuck of breath.

Then I heard shoe leather flinting the cobbles in sparks. The men came running, fireflies sprinkling the bricks under their hobnailed shoes. I saw hands waving. Mouths opened on smiles like old pianos.

Far down the street, at the bookshop, my wife waited, her back turned. But that third eye in the back of her head must have caught the scene: Columbus greeted by Indians, Saint Francis amidst his squirrel friends with a bag of nuts. For a terrific moment I felt like a pope on St. Peter’s balcony with a tumult, or at the very least the Timultys, below.

I was not half down the steps when the woman charged up, thrusting the unwrapped bundle at me.

‘Ah, see the poor child!’ she wailed.

I stared at the baby.

The baby stared back.

God in heaven, did or did not the shrewd thing wink at me?

I’ve gone mad, I thought; the babe’s eyes are shut. She’s filled it with beer to keep it warm and on display.

My hands, my coins, blurred among them.

‘Praise be!’

‘The child thanks you, sir!’

‘Ah, sure. There’s only a few of us left!’

I broke through them and beyond, still running. Defeated, I could have scuffed slowly the rest of the way, my resolve so much putty in my mouth, but no, on I rushed, thinking, The baby is real, isn’t it? Not a prop? No. I had heard it cry, often. Blast her, I thought, she pinches it when she sees Okeemogo, Iowa, coming. Cynic, I cried silently, and answered, No – coward.

My wife, without turning, saw my reflection in the bookshop window and nodded.

I stood getting my breath, brooding at my own image: the summer eyes, the ebullient and defenseless mouth.

‘All right, say it.’ I sighed. ‘It’s the way I hold my face.’

‘I love the way you hold your face.’ She took my arm. ‘I wish I could do it, too.’

I looked back as one of the beggars strolled off in the blowing dark with my shillings.

‘“There’s only a few of us left,”’ I said aloud. ‘What did he mean, saying that?’

‘“There’s only a few of us left.”’ My wife stared into the shadows. ‘Is that what he said?’

‘It’s something to think about. A few of what? Left where?’

The street was empty now. It was starting to rain.

‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘let me show you the even bigger mystery, the man who provokes me to strange wild rages, then calms me to delight. Solve him and you solve all the beggars that ever were.’

‘On O’Connell Bridge?’ asked my wife.

‘On O’Connell Bridge,’ I said.

And we walked on down in the gently misting rain.

Halfway to the bridge, as we were examining some fine Irish crystal in a window, a woman with a shawl over her head plucked at my elbow.

‘Destroyed!’ The woman sobbed. ‘My poor sister. Cancer, the doctor said, her dead in a month! And me with mouths to feed! Ah, God, if you had just a penny!’

I felt my wife’s arm tighten to mine.

I looked at the woman, split as always, one half saying, ‘A penny is all she asks!’, the other half doubting: ‘Clever woman, she knows that by her underasking you’ll overpay!’, and hating myself for the battle of halves.

I gasped. ‘You’re …’

‘I’m what, sir?’

Why, I thought, you’re the woman who was just back by the hotel with the bundled baby!

‘I’m sick!’ She hid in shadow. ‘Sick with crying for the half dead!’

You’ve stashed the baby somewhere, I thought, and put on a green instead of a gray shawl and run the long way around to cut us off here.

‘Cancer …’ One bell in her tower, and she knew how to toll it. ‘Cancer …’

My wife cut across it. ‘Beg pardon, but aren’t you the same woman we just met at our hotel?’

The woman and I were both shocked at this rank insubordination. It wasn’t done!

The woman’s face crumpled. I peered close. And yes, by God, it was a different face. I could not but admire her. She knew, sensed, had learned what actors know, sense, learn: that by thrusting, yelling, all fiery-lipped arrogance one moment, you are one character; and by sinking, giving way, crumpling the mouth and eyes, in pitiful collapse, you are another. The same woman, yes, but the same face and role? Quite obviously no.

She gave me a last blow beneath the belt. ‘Cancer.’

I flinched.

It was a brief tussle then, a kind of disengagement from one woman and an engagement with the other. The wife lost my arm and the woman found my cash. As if she were on roller skates, she whisked around the corner, sobbing happily.

‘Lord!’ In awe, I watched her go. ‘She’s studied Stanislavsky. In one book he says that squinting one eye and twitching one lip to the side will disguise you. I wonder if she has nerve enough to be at the hotel when we go back?’

‘I wonder,’ said my wife, ‘when my husband will stop admiring and start criticizing such Abbey Theatre acting as that.’

‘But what if it were true? Everything she said? And she’s lived with it so long she can’t cry anymore, and so has to play-act in order to survive? What if?’

‘It can’t be true,’ said my wife slowly. ‘I just won’t believe it.’

But that single bell was still tolling somewhere in the chimney-smoking dark.

‘Now,’ said my wife, ‘here’s where we turn for O’Connell Bridge, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

That corner was probably empty in the falling rain for a long time after we were gone.

There stood the graystone bridge bearing the great O’Connell’s name, and there the River Liffey rolling cold gray waters under, and even from a block off I heard faint singing. My mind spun in a great leap back to December.

‘Christmas,’ I murmured, ‘is the best time of all in Dublin.’

For beggars, I meant, but left it unsaid.

For in the week before Christmas the Dublin streets teem with raven flocks of children herded by schoolmasters or nuns. They cluster in doorways, peer from theater lobbies, jostle in alleys, ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen’ on their lips, ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’ in their eyes, tambourines in hand, snowflakes shaping a collar of grace about their tender necks. It is singing everywhere and anywhere in Dublin on such nights, and there was no night my wife and I did not walk down along Grafton Street to hear ‘Away in a Manger’ being sung to the queue outside the cinema or ‘Deck the Halls’ in front of the Four Provinces pub. In all, we counted in Christ’s season one night half a hundred bands of convent girls or public-school boys lacing the cold air and weaving great treadles of song up, down, over and across from end to end of Dublin. Like walking in snowfall, you could not walk among them and not be touched. The sweet beggars, I called them, who gave in turn for what you gave as you went your way.

Given such example, even the most dilapidated beggars of Dublin washed their hands, mended their torn smiles, borrowed banjos or bought a fiddle and killed a cat. They even gathered for four-part harmonies. How could they stay silent when half the world was singing and the other half, idled on the tuneful river, was paying dearly, gladly, for just another chorus?

So Christmas was best for all; the beggars worked – off key, it’s true, but there they were, one time in the year, busy.

But Christmas was over, the licorice-suited children back in their aviaries, and the beggars of the town, shut and glad for the silence, returned to their workless ways. All save the beggars on O’Connell Bridge, who, all through the year, most of them, tried to give as good as they got.

‘They have their self-respect,’ I said, walking my wife. ‘I’m glad this first man here strums a guitar, the next one a fiddle. And there, now, by God, in the very center of the bridge!’

‘The man we’re looking for?’

‘That’s him. Squeezing the concertina. It’s all right to look. Or I think it is.’

‘What do you mean, you think it is? He’s blind, isn’t he?’

These raw words shocked me, as if my wife had said something indecent.

The rain fell gently, softly upon graystoned Dublin, graystoned riverbank, gray lava-flowing river.

‘That’s the trouble,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t know.’

And we both, in passing, looked at the man standing there in the very middle of O’Connell Bridge.

He was a man of no great height, a bandy statue swiped from some country garden perhaps, and his clothes, like the clothes of most in Ireland, too often laundered by the weather, and his hair too often grayed by the smoking air, and his cheeks sooted with beard, and a nest or two of witless hair in each cupped ear, and the blushing cheeks of a man who has stood too long in the cold and drunk too much in the pub so as to stand too long in the cold again. Dark glasses covered his eyes, and there was no telling what lay behind. I had begun to wonder, weeks back, if his sight prowled me along, damning my guilty speed, or if only his ears caught the passing of a harried conscience. There was that awful fear I might seize, in passing, the glasses from his nose. But I feared much more the abyss I might find, into which my senses, in one terrible roar, might tumble. Best not to know if civet’s orb or interstellar space gaped behind the smoked panes.

But, even more, there was a special reason why I could not let the man be.

In the rain and wind and snow, for two solid months, I had seen him standing here with no cap or hat on his head.

He was the only man in all of Dublin I saw in the downpours and drizzles who stood by the hour alone with the drench mizzling his ears, threading his ash-red hair, plastering it over his skull, rivuleting his eyebrows, and purling over the coal-black insect lenses of the glasses on his rain-pearled nose.

Down through the greaves of his cheeks, the lines about his mouth, and off his chin, like a storm on a gargoyle’s flint, the weather ran. His sharp chin shot the guzzle in a steady fauceting off in the air, down his tweed scarf and locomotive-colored coat.

‘Why doesn’t he wear a hat?’ I said suddenly.

‘Why,’ said my wife, ‘maybe he hasn’t got one.’

‘He must have one,’ I said.

‘Keep your voice down.’

‘He’s got to have one,’ I said, quieter.

‘Maybe he can’t afford one.’

‘Nobody’s that poor, even in Dublin. Everyone has a cap at least!’

‘Well, maybe he has bills to pay, someone sick.’

‘But to stand out for weeks, months, in the rain, and not so much as flinch or turn his head, ignore the rain, it’s beyond understanding.’ I shook my head. ‘I can only think it’s a trick. That must be it. Like the others, this is his way of getting sympathy, of making you cold and miserable as himself as you go by, so you’ll give him more.’

‘I bet you’re sorry you said that already,’ said my wife.

‘I am. I am.’ For even under my cap the rain was running off my nose. ‘Sweet God in heaven, what’s the answer?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘No.’ I was even more afraid of that.

Then the last thing happened, the thing that went with his standing bareheaded in the cold rain.

For a moment, while we had been talking at some distance, he had been silent. Now, as if the weather had freshened him to life, he gave his concertina a great mash. From the folding, unfolding snake box he squeezed a series of asthmatic notes which were no preparation for what followed.

He opened his mouth. He sang.

The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over O’Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quiver, not a flaw, anywhere in it. The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free.

‘Oh,’ said my wife, ‘how lovely.’

‘Lovely.’ I nodded.

We listened while he sang the full irony of Dublin’s Fair City where it rains twelve inches a month the winter through, followed by the white-wine clarity of Kathleen Mavourneen, Macushlah, and all the other tired lads, lasses, lakes, hills, past glories, present miseries, but all somehow revived and moving about young and freshly painted in the light spring, suddenly-not-winter rain. If he breathed at all, it must have been through his ears, so smooth the line, so steady the putting forth of word following round belled word.

‘Why,’ said my wife, ‘he could be on the stage.’

‘Maybe he was once.’

‘Oh, he’s too good to be standing here.’

‘I’ve thought that often.’

My wife fumbled with her purse. I looked from her to the singing man, the rain falling on his bare head, streaming through his shellacked hair, trembling on his ear lobes. My wife had her purse open.

And then, the strange perversity. Before my wife could move toward him, I took her elbow and led her down the other side of the bridge. She pulled back for a moment, giving me a look, then came along.

As we went away along the bank of the Liffey, he started a new song, one we had heard often in Ireland. Glancing back, I saw him, head proud, black glasses taking the pour, mouth open, and the fine voice clear:

‘I’ll be glad when you’re deadin your grave, old man,Be glad when you’re deadin your grave, old man.Be glad when you’re dead,Flowers over your head,And then I’ll marry the journeyman.…’

It is only later, looking back, that you see that while you were doing all the other things in your life, working on an article concerning one part of Ireland in your rain-battered hotel, taking your wife to dinner, wandering in the museums, you also had an eye beyond to the street and those who served themselves who only stood to wait.

The beggars of Dublin, who bothers to wonder on them, look, see, know, understand? Yet the outer shell of the eye sees and the inner shell of the mind records, and yourself, caught between, ignores the rare service these two halves of a bright sense are up to.

So I did and did not concern myself with beggars. So I did run from them or walk to meet them, by turn. So I heard but did not hear, considered but did not consider:

‘There’s only a few of us left!’

One day I was sure the stone gargoyle man taking his daily shower on O’Connell Bridge while he sang Irish opera was not blind. And the next his head to me was a cup of darkness.

One afternoon I found myself lingering before a tweed shop near O’Connell Bridge, staring in, staring in at a stack of good thick burly caps. I did not need another cap, I had a life’s supply collected in a suitcase, yet in I went to pay out money for a fine warm brown-colored cap which I turned round and round in my hands, in a strange trance.

‘Sir,’ said the clerk. ‘That cap is a seven. I would guess your head, sir, at a seven and one half.’

‘This will fit me. This will fit me.’ I stuffed the cap into my pocket.

‘Let me get you a sack, sir—’

‘No!’ Hot-cheeked, suddenly suspicious of what I was up to, I fled.

There was the bridge in the soft rain. All I need do now was walk over –

In the middle of the bridge, my singing man was not there.

In his place stood an old man and woman cranking a great piano-box hurdy-gurdy which ratcheted and coughed like a coffee grinder eating glass and stone, giving forth no melody but a grand and melancholy sort of iron indigestion.

I waited for the tune, if tune it was, to finish. I kneaded the new tweed cap in my sweaty fist while the hurdy-gurdy prickled, spanged and thumped.

‘Be damned to ya!’ the old man and old woman, furious with their job, seemed to say, their faces thunderous pale, their eyes red-hot in the rain. ‘Pay us! Listen! But we’ll give you no tune! Make up your own!’ their mute lips said.

And standing there on the spot where the beggar always sang without his cap, I thought, Why don’t they take one fiftieth of the money they make each month and have the thing tuned? If I were cranking the box, I’d want a tune, at least for myself! If you were cranking the box, I answered. But you’re not. And it’s obvious they hate the begging job, who’d blame them, and want no part of giving back a familiar song as recompense.

How different from my capless friend.

My friend?

I blinked with surprise, then stepped forward and nodded.

‘Beg pardon. The man with the concertina …’

The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.

‘Ah?’

‘The man with no cap in the rain.’

‘Ah, him!’ snapped the woman.

‘He’s not here today?’

‘Do you see him?’ cried the woman.

She started cranking the infernal device.

I put a penny in the tin cup.

She peered at me as if I’d spit in the cup.

I put in another penny. She stopped.

‘Do you know where he is?’ I asked.

‘Sick. In bed. The damn cold! We heard him go off, coughing.’

‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘No!’

‘Do you know his name?’

‘Now, who would know that!’

I stood there, feeling directionless, thinking of the man somewhere off in the town, alone. I looked at the new cap foolishly.

The two old people were watching me uneasily.

I put a last shilling in the cup.

‘He’ll be all right,’ I said, not to them, but to someone, hopefully, myself.

The woman heaved the crank. The bucketing machine let loose a fall of glass and junk in its hideous interior.

‘The tune,’ I said, numbly. ‘What is it?’

‘You’re deaf!’ snapped the woman. ‘It’s the national anthem! Do you mind removing your cap?’

I showed her the new cap in my hand.

She glared up. ‘Your cap, man, your cap!’

‘Oh!’ Flushing, I seized the old cap from my head.

Now I had a cap in each hand.

The woman cranked. The ‘music’ played. The rain hit my brow, my eyelids, my mouth.

On the far side of the bridge I stopped for the hard, the slow decision: which cap to try on my drenched skull?

During the next week I passed the bridge often, but there was always just the old couple there with their pandemonium device, or no one there at all.

On the last day of our visit, my wife started to pack the new tweed cap away with my others, in the suitcase.

‘Thanks, no.’ I took it from her. ‘Let’s keep it out, on the mantel, please. There.’

That night the hotel manager brought a farewell bottle to our room. The talk was long and good, the hour grew late, there was a fire like an orange lion on the hearth, big and lively, and brandy in the glasses, and silence for a moment in the room, perhaps because quite suddenly we found silence falling in great soft flakes past our high windows.

The manager, glass in hand, watched the continual lace, then looked down at the midnight stones and at last said, under his breath, ‘“There’s only a few of us left.”’

I glanced at my wife, and she at me.

The manager caught us.

‘Do you know him, then? Has he said it to you?’

‘Yes. But what does the phrase mean?’

The manager watched all those figures down there standing in the shadows and sipped his drink.

‘Once I thought he meant he fought in the Troubles and there’s just a few of the I.R.A. left. But no. Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that also. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren’t many “human beings” left who look, see what they look at, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running here, jumping there, there’s no time to study one another. But I guess that’s bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.’

He half turned from the window.

‘So you know There’s Only a Few of Us Left, do you?’

My wife and I nodded.

‘Then do you know the woman with the baby?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And the one with the cancer?’

‘Yes,’ said my wife.

‘And the man who needs train fare to Cork?’

‘Belfast,’ said I.

‘Galway,’ said my wife.

The manager smiled sadly and turned back to the window.

‘What about the couple with the piano that plays no tune?’

‘Has it ever?’ I asked.

‘Not since I was a boy.’

The manager’s face was shadowed now.

‘Do you know the beggar on O’Connell Bridge?’

‘Which one?’ I said.

But I knew which one, for I was looking at the cap there on the mantel.

‘Did you see the paper today?’ asked the manager.

‘No.’

‘There’s just the item, bottom half of pagefive, Irish Times. It seems he just got tired. And he threw his concertina over into the River Liffey. And he jumped after it.’

He was back, then, yesterday! I thought. And I didn’t pass by!

‘The poor bastard.’ The manager laughed with a hollow exhalation. ‘What a funny, horrid way to die. That damn silly concertina – I hate them, don’t you? – wheezing on its way down, like a sick cat, and the man falling after. I laugh and I’m ashamed of laughing. Well. They didn’t find the body. They’re still looking.’

‘Oh, God!’ I cried, getting up. ‘Oh, damn!’

The manager watched me carefully now, surprised at my concern.

‘You couldn’t help it.’

‘I could! I never gave him a penny, not one, ever! Did you?’

‘Come to think of it, no.’

‘But you’re worse than I am!’ I protested. ‘I’ve seen you around town, shoveling out pennies hand over fist. Why, why not to him?’

‘I guess I thought he was overdoing it.’

‘Hell, yes!’ I was at the window now, too, staring down through the falling snow. ‘I thought his bare head was a trick to make me feel sorry. Damn, after a while you think everything’s a trick! I used to pass there winter nights with the rain thick and him there singing and he made me feel so cold I hated his guts. I wonder how many other people felt cold and hated him because he did that to them? So instead of getting money, he got nothing in his cup. I lumped him with the rest. But maybe he was one of the legitimate ones, the new poor just starting out this winter, not a beggar ever before, so you hock your clothes to feed a stomach and wind up a man in the rain without a hat.’

The snow was falling fast now, erasing the lamps and the statues in the shadows of the lamps below.

‘How do you tell the difference between them?’ I asked. ‘How can you judge which is honest, which isn’t?’

‘The fact is,’ said the manager quietly, ‘you can’t. There’s no difference between them. Some have been at it longer than others, and have gone shrewd, forgotten how it all started a long time ago. On a Saturday they had food. On a Sunday they didn’t. On a Monday they asked for credit. On a Tuesday they borrowed their first match. Thursday a cigarette. And a few Fridays later they found themselves, God knows how, in front of a place called the Royal Hibernian Hotel. They couldn’t tell you what happened or why. One thing’s sure though: they’re hanging to the cliff by their fingernails. Poor bastard, someone must’ve stomped on that man’s hands on O’Connell Bridge and he just gave up the ghost and went over. So what does it prove? You cannot stare them down or look away from them. You cannot run and hide from them. You can only give to them all. If you start drawing lines, someone gets hurt. I’m sorry now I didn’t give that blind singer a shilling each time I passed. Well. Well. Let us console ourselves, hope it wasn’t money but something at home or in his past did him in. There’s no way to find out. The paper lists no name.’

Snow fell silently across our sight. Below, the dark shapes waited. It was hard to tell whether snow was making sheep of the wolves or sheep of the sheep, gently manteling their shoulders, their backs, their hats and shawls.

A moment later, going down in the haunted night elevator, I found the new tweed cap in my hand.

Coatless, in my shirtsleeves, I stepped out into the night.

I gave the cap to the first man who came. I never knew if it fit. What money I had in my pockets was soon gone.

Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.

What’s it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy?

Do they even know I’m HERE?




The Flying Machine (#ulink_2c739820-7c39-51f0-ac50-cb981e9a668d)


In the year A.D. 400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad.

Early on the morning of the first day of the first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, ‘Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a miracle!’

‘Yes,’ said the Emperor, ‘the air is sweet this morning.’

‘No, no, a miracle!’ said the servant, bowing quickly.

‘And this tea is good in my mouth, surely that is a miracle.’

‘No, no, Your Excellency.’

‘Let me guess then – the sun has risen and a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue. That now is the finest of all miracles.’

‘Excellency, a man is flying!’

‘What?’ The Emperor stopped his fan.

‘I saw him in the air, a man flying with wings. I heard a voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up there he was, a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo, colored like the sun and the grass.’

‘It is early,’ said the Emperor, ‘and you have just wakened from a dream.’

‘It is early, but I have seen what I have seen! Come, and you will see it too.’

‘Sit down with me here,’ said the Emperor. ‘Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to prepare myself for the sight.’

They drank tea.

‘Please,’ said the servant at last, ‘or he will be gone.’

The Emperor rose thoughtfully. ‘Now you may show me what you have seen.’

They walked into a garden, across a meadow of grass, over a small bridge, through a grove of trees, and up a tiny hill.

‘There!’ said the servant.

The Emperor looked into the sky.

And in the sky, laughing so high that you could hardly hear him laugh, was a man; and the man was clothed in bright papers and reeds to make wings and a beautiful yellow tail, and he was soaring all about like the largest bird in a universe of birds, like a new dragon in a land of ancient dragons.

The man called down to them from high in the cool winds of morning, ‘I fly, I fly!’

The servant waved to him. ‘Yes, yes!’

The Emperor Yuan did not move. Instead he looked at the Great Wall of China now taking shape out of the farthest mist in the green hills, that splendid snake of stones which writhed with majesty across the entire land. That wonderful wall which had protected them for a timeless time from enemy hordes and preserved peace for years without number. He saw the town, nestled to itself by a river and a road and a hill, beginning to waken.

‘Tell me,’ he said to his servant, ‘has anyone else seen this flying man?’

‘I am the only one, Excellency,’ said the servant, smiling at the sky, waving.

The Emperor watched the heavens another minute and then said, ‘Call him down to me.’

‘Ho, come down, come down! The Emperor wishes to see you!’ called the servant, hands cupped to his shouting mouth.

The Emperor glanced in all directions while the flying man soared down the morning wind. He saw a farmer, early in his fields, watching the sky, and he noted where the farmer stood.

The flying man alit with a rustle of paper and a creak of bamboo reeds. He came proudly to the Emperor, clumsy in his rig, at last bowing before the old man.

‘What have you done?’ demanded the Emperor.

‘I have flown in the sky, Your Excellency,’ replied the man.

‘What have you done?’ said the Emperor again.

‘I have just told you!’ cried the flier.

‘You have told me nothing at all.’ The Emperor reached out a thin hand to touch the pretty paper and the birdlike keel of the apparatus. It smelled cool, of the wind.

‘Is it not beautiful, Excellency?’

‘Yes, too beautiful.’

‘It is the only one in the world!’ smiled the man. ‘And I am the inventor.’

‘The only one in the world?’

‘I swear it!’

‘Who else knows of this?’

‘No one. Not even my wife, who would think me mad with the sun. She thought I was making a kite. I rose in the night and walked to the cliffs far away. And when the morning breezes blew and the sun rose, I gathered my courage, Excellency, and leaped from the cliff. I flew! But my wife does not know of it.’

‘Well for her, then,’ said the Emperor. ‘Come along.’

They walked back to the great house. The sun was full in the sky now, and the smell of the grass was refreshing. The Emperor, the servant, and the flier paused within the huge garden.

The Emperor clapped his hands. ‘Ho, guards!’

The guards came running.

‘Hold this man.’

The guards seized the flier.

‘Call the executioner,’ said the Emperor.

‘What’s this!’ cried the flier, bewildered. ‘What have I done?’ He began to weep, so that the beautiful paper apparatus rustled.

‘Here is the man who has made a certain machine,’ said the Emperor, ‘and yet asks us what he has created. He does not know himself. It is only necessary that he create, without knowing why he has done so, or what this thing will do.’

The executioner came running with a sharp silver ax. He stood with his naked, large-muscled arms ready, his face covered with a serene white mask.

‘One moment,’ said the Emperor. He turned to a nearby table upon which sat a machine that he himself had created. The Emperor took a tiny golden key from his own neck. He fitted this key to the tiny, delicate machine and wound it up. Then he set the machine going.

The machine was a garden of metal and jewels. Set in motion, birds sang in tiny metal trees, wolves walked through miniature forests, and tiny people ran in and out of sun and shadow, fanning themselves with miniature fans, listening to the tiny emerald birds, and standing by impossibly small but tinkling fountains.

‘Is it not beautiful?’ said the Emperor. ‘If you asked me what I have done here, I could answer you well. I have made birds sing, I have made forests murmur, I have set people to walking in this woodland, enjoying the leaves and shadows and songs. That is what I have done.’

‘But, oh, Emperor!’ pleaded the flier, on his knees, the tears pouring down his face. ‘I have done a similar thing! I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even seen it, beyond the hills, from my high place. And I have soared like a bird; oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, there like a fan, the way the sky smells in the morning! And how free one feels! That is beautiful, Emperor, that is beautiful too!’

‘Yes,’ said the Emperor sadly, ‘I know it must be true. For I felt my heart move with you in the air and I wondered: What is it like? How does it feel? How do the distant pools look from so high? And how my houses and servants? Like ants? And how the distant towns not yet awake?’

‘Then spare me!’

‘But there are times,’ said the Emperor, more sadly still, ‘when one must lose a little beauty if one is to keep what little beauty one already has. I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man.’

‘What man?’

‘Some other man who, seeing you, will build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this. But the other man will have an evil face and an evil heart, and the beauty will be gone. It is this man I fear.’

‘Why? Why?’

‘Who is to say that someday just such a man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?’ said the Emperor.

No one moved or said a word.

‘Off with his head,’ said the Emperor.

The executioner whirled his silver ax.

‘Burn the kite and the inventor’s body and bury their ashes together,’ said the Emperor.

The servants retreated to obey.

The Emperor turned to his hand-servant, who had seen the man flying. ‘Hold your tongue. It was all a dream, a most sorrowful and beautiful dream. And that farmer in the distant field who also saw, tell him it would pay him to consider it only a vision. If ever the word passes around, you and the farmer die within the hour.’

‘You are merciful, Emperor.’

‘No, not merciful,’ said the old man. Beyond the garden wall he saw the guards burning the beautiful machine of paper and reeds that smelled of the morning wind. He saw the dark smoke climb into the sky. ‘No, only very much bewildered and afraid.’ He saw the guards digging a tiny pit wherein to bury the ashes. ‘What is the life of one man against those of a million others? I must take solace from that thought.’

He took the key from its chain about his neck and once more wound up the beautiful miniature garden. He stood looking out across the land at the Great Wall, the peaceful town, the green fields, the rivers and streams. He sighed. The tiny garden whirred its hidden and delicate machinery and set itself in motion; tiny people walked in forests, tiny foxes loped through sun-speckled glades in beautiful shining pelts, and among the tiny trees flew little bits of high song and bright blue and yellow color, flying, flying, flying in that small sky.

‘Oh,’ said the Emperor, closing his eyes, ‘look at the birds, look at the birds!’




Heavy-Set (#ulink_4283c84f-901c-5923-afab-17be6edf1b7e)


The woman stepped to the kitchen window and looked out.

There in the twilight yard a man stood surrounded by barbells and dumbbells and dark iron weights of all kinds and slung jump ropes and elastic and coiled-spring exercisers. He wore a sweat suit and tennis shoes and said nothing to no one as he simply stood in the darkening world and did not know she watched.

This was her son, and everyone called him Heavy-Set.

Heavy-Set squeezed the little bunched, coiled springs in his big fists. They were lost in his fingers, like magic tricks; then they reappeared. He crushed them. They vanished. He let them go. They came back.

He did this for ten minutes, otherwise motionless.

Then he bent down and hoisted up the one-hundred-pound barbells, noiselessly, not breathing. He motioned it a number of times over his head, then abandoned it and went into the open garage among the various surfboards he had cut out and glued together and sanded and painted and waxed, and there he punched a punching bag easily, swiftly, steadily, until his curly golden hair got moist. Then he stopped and filled his lungs until his chest measured fifty inches and stood eyes closed, seeing himself in an invisible mirror poised and tremendous, two hundred and twenty muscled pounds, tanned by the sun, salted by the sea wind and his own sweat.

He exhaled. He opened his eyes.

He walked into the house, into the kitchen and did not look at his mother, this woman, and opened the refrigerator and let the arctic cold steam him while he drank a quart of milk straight out of the carton, never putting it down, just gulping and swallowing. Then he sat down at the kitchen table to fondle and examine the Hallowe’en pumpkins.

He had gone out earlier in the day and bought the pumpkins and carved most of them and did a fine job: they were beauties and he was proud of them. Now, looking childlike in the kitchen, he started carving the last of them. You would never suspect he was thirty years old, he still moved so swiftly, so quietly, for a large action like hitting a wave with an uptilted and outthrust board, or here with the small action of a knife, giving sight to a Hallowe’en eye. The electric light bulb filled the summer wildness of his hair, but revealed no emotion, except this one intent purpose of carving, on his face. There was all muscle in him, and no fat, and that muscle waited behind every move of the knife.

His mother came and went on personal errands around the house and then came to stand and look at him and the pumpkins and smile. She was used to him. She heard him every night drubbing the punching bag outside, or squeezing the little metal springs in his hands or grunting as he lifted his world of weights and held it in balance on his strangely quiet shoulders. She was used to all these sounds even as she knew the ocean coming in on the shore beyond the cottage and laying itself out flat and shining on the sand. Even as she was used, by now, to hearing Heavy-Set each night on the phone saying he was tired to girls and said no, no he had to wax the car tonight or do his exercises to the eighteen-year-old boys who called.

She cleared her throat. ‘Was the dinner good tonight?’

‘Sure,’ he said.

‘I had to get special steak. I bought the asparagus fresh.’

‘It was good,’ he said.

‘I’m glad you liked it, I always like to have you like it.’

‘Sure,’ he said, working.

‘What time is the party?’

‘Seven thirty.’ He finished the last of the smile on the pumpkin and sat back. ‘If they all show up, they might not show up, I bought two jugs of cider.’

He got up and moved into his bedroom, quietly massive, his shoulders filling the door and beyond. In the room, in the half-dark, he made the strange pantomime of a man seriously and silently wrestling an invisible opponent as he got into his costume. He came to the door of the living room a minute later licking a gigantic peppermint-striped lollipop. He wore a pair of short black pants, a little boy’s shirt with ruff collar, and a Buster Brown hat. He licked the lollipop and said, ‘I’m the mean little kid!’ and the woman who had been watching him laughed. He walked with an exaggerated little child’s walk, licking the huge lollipop, all around the room while she laughed at him and he said things and pretended to be leading a big dog on a rope. ‘You’ll be the life of the party!’ the woman cried, pink-faced and exhausted. He was laughing now, also.

The phone rang.

He toddled out to answer it in the bedroom. He talked for a long time and his mother heard him say ‘Oh for gosh sakes’ several times and finally he came slowly and massively into the living room looking stubborn. ‘What’s wrong?’ she wanted to know. ‘Aw,’ he said, ‘half the guys aren’t showing up at the party. They got other dates. That was Tommy calling. He’s got a date with a girl from somewhere. Good grief.’ ‘There’ll be enough,’ said his mother. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘There’ll be enough for a party,’ she said. ‘You go on.’ ‘I ought to throw the pumpkins in the garbage,’ he said, scowling. ‘Well you just go on and have a good time,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been out in weeks.’

Silence.

He stood there twisting the huge lollipop as big as his head, turning it in his large muscular fingers. He looked as if at any moment now he would do what he did other nights. Some nights he pressed himself up and down on the ground with his arms and some nights he played a game of basketball with himself and scored himself, team against team, black against white, in the backyard. Some nights he stood around like this and then suddenly vanished and you saw him way out in the ocean swimming long and strong and quiet as a seal under the full moon or you could not see him those nights the moon was gone and only the stars lay over the water but you heard him there, on occasion, a faint splash as he went under and stayed under a long time and came up, or he went out some times with his surfboard as smooth as a girl’s cheeks, sandpapered to a softness, and came riding in, huge and alone on a white and ghastly wave that creamed along the shore and touched the sands with the surfboard as he stepped off like a visitor from another world and stood for a long while holding the soft smooth surfboard in the moonlight, a quiet man and a vast tombstone-shaped thing held there with no writing on it. In all the nights like that in the past years, he had taken a girl out three times one week and she ate a lot and every time he saw her she said Let’s eat and so one night he drove her up to a restaurant and opened the car door and helped her out and got back in and said There’s the restaurant. So long. And drove off. And went back to swimming way out, alone. Much later, another time, a girl was half an hour late getting ready and he never spoke to her again.

Thinking all this, remembering all this, his mother looked at him now.

‘Don’t stand there,’ she said. ‘You make me nervous.’

‘Well,’ he said, resentfully.

‘Go on!’ she cried. But she didn’t cry it strong enough. Even to herself her voice sounded faint. And she did not know if her voice was just naturally faint or if she made it that way.

She might as well have been talking about winter coming; everything she said had a lonely sound. And she heard the words again from her own mouth, with no force: ‘Go on!’

He went into the kitchen. ‘I guess there’ll be enough guys there,’ he said.

‘Sure, there will,’ she said, smiling again. She always smiled again. Sometimes when she talked to him, night after night, she looked as if she were lifting weights, too. When he walked through the rooms she looked like she was doing the walking for him. And when he sat brooding, as he often did, she looked around for something to do which might be burn the toast or overfire the steak. She made a short barking faint and stifled laugh now, ‘Get out, have a good time.’ But the echoes of it moved around in the house as if it were already empty and cold and he should come back in the door. Her lips moved: ‘Fly away.’

He snatched up the cider and the pumpkins and hurried them out to his car. It was a new car and had been new and unused for almost a year. He polished it and jiggered with the motor or lay underneath it for hours messing with all the junk underneath or just sat in the front seat glancing over the strength and health magazines, but rarely drove it. He put the cider and the cut pumpkins proudly in on the front seat, and by this time he was thinking of the possible good time tonight so he did a little child’s stagger as if he might drop everything, and his mother laughed. He licked his lollipop again, jumped into the car, backed it out of the gravel drive, swerved it around down by the ocean, not looking out at this woman, and drove off along the shore road. She stood in the yard watching the car go away. Leonard, my son, she thought.

It was seven fifteen and very dark now; already the children were fluttering along the sidewalks in white ghost sheets and zinc-oxide masks, ringing bells, screaming, lumpy paper sacks banging their knees as they ran.

Leonard, she thought.

They didn’t call him Leonard, they called him Heavy-Set and Sammy, which was short for Samson. They called him Butch and they called him Atlas and Hercules. At the beach you always saw the high-school boys around him feeling his biceps as if he was a new sports car, testing him, admiring him. He walked golden among them. Each year it was that way. And then the eighteen-year-old ones got to be nineteen and didn’t come around so often, and then twenty and very rarely, and then twenty-one and never again, just gone, and suddenly there were new eighteen year olds to replace them, yes, always the new ones to stand where the others had stood in the sun, while the older ones went on somewhere to something and somebody.

Leonard, my good boy, she thought. We go to shows on Saturday nights. He works on the high power lines all day, up in the sky, alone, and sleeps alone in his room at night, and never reads a book or a paper or listens to a radio or plays a record, and this year he’ll be thirty-one. And just where, in all the years, did the thing happen that put him up on that pole alone and working out alone every night? Certainly there had been enough women, here and there, now and then, through his life. Little scrubby ones, of course, fools, yes, by the look of them, but women, or girls, rather, and none worth glancing at a second time. Still, when a boy gets past thirty …? She sighed. Why even as recent as last night the phone had rung. Heavy-Set had answered it, and she could fill in the unheard half of the conversation because she had heard thousands like it in a dozen years:

‘Sammy, this is Christine.’ A woman’s voice. ‘What you doing?’

His little golden eyelashes flickered and his brow furrowed, alert and wary. ‘Why?’

‘Tom, Lu, and I are going to a show, want to come along?’

‘It better be good!’ he cried, indignantly.

She named it.

‘That!’ He snorted.

‘It’s a good film,’ she said.

‘Not that one,’ he said. ‘Besides, I haven’t shaved yet today.’

‘You can shave in five minutes.’

‘I need a bath, and it’d take a long time.’

A long time, thought his mother, he was in the bathroom two hours today. He combs his hair two dozen times, musses it, combs it again, talking to himself.

‘Okay for you.’ The woman’s voice on the phone. ‘You going to the beach this week?’

‘Saturday,’ he said, before he thought.

‘See you there, then,’ she said.

‘I meant Sunday,’ he said, quickly.

‘I could change it to Sunday,’ she replied.

‘If I can make it,’ he said, even more quickly. ‘Things go wrong with my car.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Samson. So long.’

And he had stood there for a long time, turning the silent phone in his hand.

Well, his mother thought, he’s having a good time now. A good Hallowe’en party, with all the apples he took along, tied on strings, and the apples, untied, to bob for in a tub of water, and the boxes of candy, the sweet corn kernels that really taste like autumn. He’s running around looking like the bad little boy, she thought, licking his lollipop, everyone shouting, blowing horns, laughing, dancing.

At eight, and again at eight thirty and nine she went to the screen door and looked out and could almost hear the party a long way off at the dark beach, the sounds of it blowing on the wind crisp and furious and wild, and wished she could be there at the little shack out over the waves on the pier, everyone whirling about in costumes, and all the pumpkins cut each a different way and a contest for the best homemade mask or makeup job, and too much popcorn to eat and—

She held to the screen door knob, her face pink and excited and suddenly realized the children had stopped coming to beg at the door. Hallowe’en, for the neighborhood kids anyway, was over.

She went to look out into the backyard.

The house and yard were too quiet. It was strange not hearing the basketball volley on the gravel or the steady bumble of the punching bag taking a beating. Or the little tweezing sound of the hand-squeezers.

What if, she thought, he found someone tonight, found someone down there, and just never came back, never came home. No telephone call. No letter, that was the way it could be. No word. Just go off away and never come back again. What if? What if?

No! she thought, there’s no one, no one there, no one anywhere. There’s just this place. This is the only place.

But her heart was beating fast and she had to sit down.

The wind blew softly from the shore.

She turned on the radio but could not hear it.

Now, she thought, they’re not doing anything except playing blind man’s buff, yes, that’s it, blind tag, and after that they’ll just be—

She gasped and jumped.

The windows had exploded with raw light.

The gravel spurted in a machine-gun spray as the car jolted in, braked, and stopped, motor gunning. The lights went off in the yard. But the motor still gunned up, idled, gunned up, idled.

She could see the dark figure in the front seat of the car, not moving, staring straight ahead.

‘You—’ she started to say, and opened the back screen door. She found a smile on her mouth. She stopped it. Her heart was slowing now. She made herself frown.

He shut off the motor. She waited. He climbed out of the car and threw the pumpkins in the garbage can and slammed the lid.

‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Why are you home so early—?’

‘Nothing.’ He brushed by her with the two gallons of cider intact. He set them on the kitchen sink.

‘But it’s not ten yet—’

‘That’s right.’ He went into the bedroom and sat down in the dark.

She waited five minutes. She always waited five minutes. He wanted her to come ask, he’d be mad if she didn’t, so finally she went and looked into the dark bedroom.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘Oh, they all stood around,’ he said. ‘They just stood around like a bunch of fools and didn’t do anything.’

‘What a shame.’

‘They just stood around like dumb fools.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame.’

‘I tried to get them to do something, but they just stood around. Only eight of them showed up, eight out of twenty, eight, and me the only one in costume. I tell you. The only one. What a bunch of fools.’

‘After all your trouble, too.’

‘They had their girls and they just stood around with them and wouldn’t do anything, no games, nothing. Some of them went off with the girls,’ he said, in the dark, seated, not looking at her. ‘They went off up the beach and didn’t come back. Honest to gosh.’ He stood now, huge, and leaned against the wall, looking all disproportioned in the short trousers. He had forgotten the child’s hat was on his head. He suddenly remembered it and took it off and threw it on the floor. ‘I tried to kid them. I played with a toy dog and did some other stuff but nobody did anything. I felt like a fool the only one there dressed like this, and them all different, and only eight out of twenty there, and most of them gone in half an hour. Vi was there. She tried to get me to walk up the beach, too. I was mad by then. I was really mad. I said no thanks. And here I am. You can have the lollipop. Where did I put it? Pour the cider down the sink, drink it, I don’t care.’

She had not moved so much as an inch in all the time he talked. She opened her mouth.

The telephone rang.

‘If that’s them, I’m not home.’

‘You’d better answer it,’ she said.

He grabbed the phone and whipped off the receiver.

‘Sammy?’ said a loud high clear voice. He was holding the receiver out on the air, glaring at it in the dark. ‘That you?’ He grunted. ‘This is Bob.’ The eighteen-year-old voice rushed on. ‘Glad you’re home. In a big rush, but – what about that game tomorrow?’

‘What game?’

‘What game? For cri-yi, you’re kidding. Notre Dame and S.C.!’

‘Oh, football.’

‘Don’t say oh football like that, you talked it, you played it up, you said—’

‘That’s no game,’ he said, not looking at the telephone, the receiver, the woman, the wall, nothing.

‘You mean you’re not going? Heavy-Set, it won’t be a game without you!’

‘I got to water the lawn, polish the car—’

‘You can do that Sunday!’

‘Besides, I think my uncle’s coming over to see me. So long.’

He hung up and walked out past his mother into the yard. She heard the sounds of him out there as she got ready for bed.

He must have drubbed the punching bag until three in the morning. Three, she thought, wide awake, listening to the concussions. He’s always stopped at twelve, before.

At three thirty he came into the house.

She heard him just standing outside her door.

He did nothing else except stand there in the dark, breathing.

She had a feeling he still had the little boy suit on. But she didn’t want to know if this were true.

After a long while the door swung slowly open.

He came into her dark room and lay down on the bed, next to her, not touching her. She pretended to be asleep.

He lay face up and rigid.

She could not see him. But she felt the bed shake as if he were laughing. She could hear no sound coming from him, so she could not be sure.

And then she heard the squeaking sounds of the little steel springs being crushed and uncrushed, crushed and uncrushed in his fists.

She wanted to sit up and scream for him to throw those awful noisy things away. She wanted to slap them out of his fingers.

But then, she thought, what would he do with his hands? What could he put in them? What would he, yes, what would he do with his hands?

So she did the only thing she could do, she held her breath, shut her eyes, listened, and prayed, O God, let it go on, let him keep squeezing those things, let him keep squeezing those things, let him, let him, oh let, let him, let him keep squeezing … let … let …

It was like lying in bed with a great dark cricket.

And a long time before dawn.




The First Night of Lent (#ulink_2bfeccdb-2af6-519c-85a5-6085acffdb50)


So you want to know all the whys and wherefores of the Irish? What shapes them to their Dooms and runs them on their way? you ask. Well, listen, then. For though I’ve known but a single Irishman in all my life, I knew him, without pause, for one hundred and forty-four consecutive nights. Stand close; perhaps in him you’ll see that entire race which marches out of the rains but to vanish through the mists; hold on, here they come! Look out, there they go!

This Irishman, his name was Nick.

During the autumn of 1953, I began a screenplay in Dublin, and each afternoon a hired cab drove me thirty miles out from the River Liffey to the huge gray Georgian country house where my producer-director rode to hounds. There, we discussed my eight pages of daily script through the long fall, winter, and early spring evenings. Then, each midnight, ready to turn back to the Irish Sea and the Royal Hibernian Hotel, I’d wake the operator in the Kilcock village exchange and have her put me through to the warmest, if totally unheated, spot in town.

‘Heber Finn’s pub?’ I’d shout, once connected. ‘Is Nick there? Could you send him along here, please?’

My mind’s eye saw them, the local boys, lined up, peering over the barricade at that freckled mirror so like a frozen winter pond and themselves discovered all drowned and deep under that lovely ice. Amid all their jostlings and their now-here’s-a-secret-in-a-stage-whisper commotion stood Nick, my village driver, his quietness abounding. I heard Heber Finn sing out from the phone. I heard Nick start up and reply:

‘Just look at me, headin’ for the door!’

Early on, I learned that ‘headin’ for the door’ was no nerve-shattering process that might affront dignity or destroy the fine filigree of any argument being woven with great and breathless beauty at Heber Finn’s. It was, rather, a gradual disengagement, a leaning of the bulk so one’s gravity was diplomatically shifted toward that far empty side of the public room where the door, shunned by all, stood neglected. Meantime, a dozen conversational warps and woofs must be ticked, tied, and labeled so next morn, with hoarse cries of recognition, patterns might be seized and the shuttle thrown with no pause for breath or thought.

Timing it, I figured the long part of Nick’s midnight journey – the length of Heber Finn’s – took half an hour. The short part – from Finn’s to the house where I waited – took but five minutes.

So it was on the night before the first night of Lent. I called. I waited.

And at last, down through the night forest, thrashed the 1931 Chevrolet, peat-turf colored on top like Nick. Car and driver gasped, sighed, wheezed softly, easily, gently as they nudged into the courtyard and I groped down the front steps under a moonless but brightly starred sky.

I peered through the car window at unstirred dark; the dashboard had been dead these many years.

‘Nick …?’

‘None other,’ he whispered secretly. ‘And ain’t it a fine warm evenin’?’

The temperature was fifty. But, Nick’d been no nearer Rome than the Tipperary shore line; so weather was relative.

‘A fine warm evening.’ I climbed up front and gave the squealing door its absolutely compulsory, rust-splintering slam. ‘Nick, how’ve you been since?’

‘Ah.’ He let the car bulk and grind itself down the forest path. ‘I got me health. Ain’t that all-and-everything with Lent comin’ on tomorra?’

‘Lent,’ I mused. ‘What will you give up for Lent, Nick?’

‘I been turnin’ it over.’ Nick sucked his cigarette suddenly; the pink, lined mask of his face blinked off the smoke. ‘And why not these terrible things ya see in me mouth? Dear as gold-fillin’s, and a dread congestor of the lungs they be. Put it all down, add ’em up, and ya got a sick loss by the year’s turnin’, ya know. So ya’ll not find these filthy creatures in me face again the whole time of Lent, and, who knows, after!’

‘Bravo!’ said I, a non-smoker.

‘Bravo, says I to meself,’ wheezed Nick, one eye flinched with smoke.

‘Good luck,’ I said.

‘I’ll need it,’ whispered Nick, ‘with the Sin’s own habit to be broke.’

And we moved with firm control, with thoughtful shift of weight, down and around a turfy hollow and through a mist and into Dublin at thirty-one easy miles an hour.

Bear with me while I stress it: Nick was the most careful driver in all God’s world, including any sane, small, quiet, butter-and-milk producing country you name.

Above all, Nick stands innocent and sainted when compared to those motorists who key that small switch marked paranoia each time they fuse themselves to their bucket seats in Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Paris. Also, to those blind men who, forsaking tin cups and canes, but still wearing their Hollywood dark-glasses, laugh insanely down the Via Veneto, shaking brake-drum lining like carnival serpentine out their race-car windows. Consider the Roman ruins; surely they are the wreckage strewn and left by those motor-biking otters who, all night beneath your hotel window, shriek down dark Roman alleys, Christians hell-bent for the Colosseum lion pits.

Nick, now. See his easy hands loving the wheel in a slow clocklike turning as soft and silent as winter constellations snow down the sky. Listen to his mist-breathing voice all night-quiet as he charms the road, his foot a tenderly benevolent pat on the whispering accelerator, never a mile under thirty, never two miles over. Nick, Nick, and his steady boat gentling a mild sweet lake where all Time slumbers. Look, compare. And bind such a man to you with summer grasses, gift him with silver, shake his hand warmly at each journey’s end.

‘Good night, Nick,’ I said at the hotel. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘God willing,’ whispered Nick.

And he drove softly away.

Let twenty-three hours of sleep, breakfast, lunch, supper, late night-cap pass. Let hours of writing bad script into fair script fade to peat mist and rain, and there I come again, another midnight, out of that Georgian mansion, its door throwing a warm hearth of color before me as I tread down the steps to feel Braille-wise in fog for the car I know hulks there; I hear its enlarged and asthmatic heart gasping in the blind air, and Nick coughing his ‘gold by the ounce is not more precious’ cough.

‘Ah, there you are, sir!’ said Nick.

And I climbed in the sociable front seat and gave the door its slam. ‘Nick,’ I said, smiling.

And then the impossible happened. The car jerked as if shot from the blazing mouth of a cannon, roared, took off, bounced, skidded, then cast itself in full, stoning ricochet down the path among shattered bushes and writhing shadows. I snatched my knees as my head hit the car top four times.

Nick! I almost shouted. Nick!

Visions of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris, jumped through my mind. I gazed in frank dismay at the speedometer. Eighty, ninety, one hundred kilometers; we shot out a great blast of gravel behind and hit the main road, rocked over a bridge and slid down in the midnight streets of Kilcock. No sooner in than out of town at one hundred ten kilometers, I felt all Ireland’s grass put down its ears when we, with a yell, jumped over a rise.

Nick! I thought, and turned, and there he sat, only one thing the same. On his lips a cigarette burned, blinding first one eye, then the other.

But the rest of Nick, behind the cigarette, was changed as if the Adversary himself had squeezed and molded and fired him with a dark hand. There he was, whirling the wheel round-about, over-around; here we frenzied under trestles, out of tunnels, here knocked crossroad signs spinning like weathercocks in whirlwinds.

Nick’s face; the wisdom was drained from it, the eyes neither gentle nor philosophical, the mouth neither tolerant, nor at peace. It was a face washed raw, a scalded, peeled potato, a face more like a blinding searchlight raking its steady and meaningless glare ahead while his quick hands snaked and bit and bit the wheel again to lean us round curves and jump us off cliff after cliff of night.

It’s not Nick, I thought, it’s his brother. Or a dire thing’s come in his life, some destroying affliction or blow, a family sorrow or sickness, yes, that’s the answer.

And then Nick spoke, and his voice, it was changed too. Gone was the mellow peat bog, the moist sod, the warm fire in out of the cold rain, gone the gentle grass. Now the voice fairly cracked at me, a clarion, a trumpet, all iron and tin.

‘Well, how ya been since!’ Nick shouted. ‘How is it with ya!’ he cried.

And the car, it too had suffered violence. It protested the change, yes, for it was an old and much-beaten thing that had done its time and now only wished to stroll along, like a crusty beggar toward sea and sky, careful of its breath and bones. But Nick would have none of that, and cadged the wreck on as if thundering toward Hell, there to warm his cold hands at some special blaze. Nick leaned, the car leaned; great livid gases blew out in fireworks from the exhaust. Nick’s frame, my frame, the car’s frame, all together, were wracked and shuddered and ticked wildly.

My sanity was saved from being torn clean off the bone by a simple act. My eyes, seeking the cause of our plaguing flight, ran over the man blazing here like a sheet of ignited vapor from the Abyss, and laid hands to the answering clue.

‘Nick,’ I gasped, ‘it’s the first night of Lent!’

‘So?’ Nick said, surprised.

‘So,’ I said, ‘remembering your Lenten promise, why’s that cigarette in your mouth?’

Nick did not know what I meant for a moment. Then he cast his eyes down, saw the jiggling smoke, and shrugged.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I give up the other.’

And suddenly it all came clear.

The other one hundred forty-odd nights, at the door of the old Georgian house I had accepted from my employer a fiery douse of scotch or bourbon or some-such drink ‘against the chill.’ Then, breathing summer wheat or barley or oats or whatever from my scorched and charcoaled mouth, I had walked out to a cab where sat a man who, during all the long evenings’ wait for me to phone for his services, had lived in Heber Finn’s pub.

Fool! I thought, how could you have forgotten this!

And there in Heber Finn’s, during the long hours of lacy talk that was like planting and bringing to crop a garden among busy men, each contributing his seed or flower, and wielding the implements, their tongues, and the raised, foam-hived glasses, their own hands softly curled about the dear drinks, there Nick had taken into himself a mellowness.

And that mellowness had distilled itself down in a slow rain that damped his smoldering nerves and put the wilderness fires in every limb of him out. Those same showers laved his face to leave the tidal marks of wisdom, the lines of Plato and Aeschylus there. The harvest mellowness colored his cheeks, warmed his eyes soft, lowered his voice to a husking mist, and spread in his chest to slow his heart to a gentle jog trot. It rained out his arms to loosen his hard-mouthed hands on the shuddering wheel and sit him with grace and ease in his horse-hair saddle as he gentled us through the fogs that kept us and Dublin apart.

And with the malt on my own tongue, fluming up my sinus with burning vapors, I had never detected the scent of any spirits on my old friend here.

‘Ah,’ said Nick again. ‘Yes; I give up the other.’

The last bit of jigsaw fell in place.

Tonight, the first night of Lent.

Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Nick was sober.

All those other one hundred and forty-odd nights, Nick hadn’t been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.

Oh, who really knows the Irish, say I, and which half of them is which? Nick? – who is Nick? – and what in the world is he? Which Nick’s the real Nick, the one that everyone knows?

I will not think on it!

There is only one Nick for me. The one that Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her summer-grain-colored pubs astir and advance with the wind in the wheat and barley by night, you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as you roll by. That’s Nick to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands. If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I’d point on down the road and tell where you turn to Heber Finn’s.

The first night of Lent, and before you count nine, we’re in Dublin! I’m out of the cab and it’s puttering there at the curb and I lean in to put my money in the hands of my driver. Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly urging in the world, I look into that fine man’s raw, strange, torchlike face.

‘Nick,’ I said.

‘Sir!’ he shouted.

‘Do me a favor,’ I said.

‘Anything!’ he shouted.

‘Take this extra money,’ I said, ‘and buy the biggest bottle of Irish moss you can find. And just before you pick me up tomorrow night, Nick, drink it down, drink it all. Will you do that, Nick? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do that?’

He thought on it, and the very thought damped down the ruinous blaze in his face.

‘Ya make it terrible hard on me,’ he said.

I forced his fingers shut on the money. At last he put it in his pocket and faced silently ahead.

‘Good night, Nick,’ I said. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘God willing,’ said Nick.

And he drove away.




Lafayette, Farewell (#ulink_224a0c2b-c8cd-56f5-b817-9eebeb315d50)


There was a tap on the door, the bell was not rung, so I knew who it was. The tapping used to happen once a week, but in the past few weeks it came every other day. I shut my eyes, said a prayer, and opened the door.

Bill Westerleigh was there, looking at me, tears streaming down his cheeks.

‘Is this my house or yours?’ he said.

It was an old joke now. Several times a year he wandered off, an eighty-nine-year-old man, to get lost within a few blocks. He had quit driving years ago because he had wound up thirty miles out of Los Angeles instead of at the center where we were. His best journey nowadays was from next door, where he lived with his wondrously warm and understanding wife, to here, where he tapped, entered, and wept. ‘Is this your house or mine?’ he said, reversing the order.

‘Mi casa es su casa.’ I quoted the old Spanish saying.

‘And thank God for that!’

I led the way to the sherry bottle and glasses in the parlor and poured two glasses while Bill settled in an easy chair across from me. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose on a handkerchief which he then folded neatly and put back in his breast pocket.

‘Here’s to you, buster.’ He waved his sherry glass. ‘The sky is full of ’em. I hope you come back. If not, we’ll drop a black wreath where we think your crate fell.’

I drank and was warmed by the drink and then looked a long while at Bill.

‘The Escadrille been buzzing you again?’ I asked.

‘Every night, right after midnight. Every morning now. And, the last week, noons. I try not to come over. I tried for three days.’

‘I know. I missed you.’

‘Kind of you to say, son. You have a good heart. But I know I’m a pest, when I have my clear moments. Right now I’m clear and I drink your hospitable health.’

He emptied his glass and I refilled it.

‘You want to talk about it?’

‘You sound just like a psychiatrist friend of mine. Not that I ever went to one, he was just a friend. Great thing about coming over here is it’s free, and sherry to boot.’ He eyed his drink pensively. ‘It’s a terrible thing to be haunted by ghosts.’

‘We all have them. That’s where Shakespeare was so bright. He taught himself, taught us, taught psychiatrists. Don’t do bad, he said, or your ghosts will get you. The old remembrance, the conscience which doth make cowards and scare midnight men, will rise up and cry, Hamlet, remember me, Macbeth, you’re marked, Lady Macbeth, you, too! Richard the Third, beware, we walk the dawn camp at your shoulder and our shrouds are stiff with blood.’

‘God, you talk purty.’ Bill shook his head. ‘Nice living next door to a writer. When I need a dose of poetry, here you are.’

‘I tend to lecture. It bores my friends.’

‘Not me, dear buster, not me. But you’re right. I mean, what we were talking about. Ghosts.’

He put his sherry down and then held to the arms of his easy chair, as if it were the edges of a cockpit.

‘I fly all the time now. It’s nineteen eighteen more than it’s nineteen eighty-seven. It’s France more than it’s the US of A. I’m up there with the old Lafayette. I’m on the ground near Paris with Rickenbacker. And there, just as the sun goes down, is the Red Baron. I’ve had quite a life, haven’t I, Sam?’

It was his affectionate mode to call me by six or seven assorted names. I loved them all. I nodded.

‘I’m going to do your story someday,’ I said. ‘It’s not every writer whose neighbor was part of the Escadrille and flew and fought against von Richthofen.’

‘You couldn’t write it, dear Ralph, you wouldn’t know what to say.’

‘I might surprise you.’

‘You might, by God, you might. Did I ever show you the picture of myself and the whole Lafayette Escadrille team lined up by our junky biplane the summer of “eighteen”?’

‘No,’ I lied, ‘let me see.’

He pulled a small photo from his wallet and tossed it across to me. I had seen it a hundred times but it was a wonder and a delight.

‘That’s me, in the middle left, the short guy with the dumb smile next to Rickenbacker.’ Bill reached to point.

I looked at all the dead men, for most were long dead now, and there was Bill, twenty years old and lark-happy, and all the other young, young, oh, dear God, young men lined up, arms around each other, or one arm down holding helmet and goggles, and behind them a French 7–1 biplane, and beyond, the flat airfield somewhere near the Western Front. Sounds of flying came out of the damned picture. They always did, when I held it. And sounds of wind and birds. It was like a miniature TV screen. At any moment I expected the Lafayette Escadrille to burst into action, spin, run, and take off into that absolutely clear and endless sky. At that very moment in time, in the photo, the Red Baron still lived in the clouds; he would be there forever now and never land, which was right and good, for we wanted him to stay there always, that’s how boys and men feel.

‘God, I love showing you things.’ Bill broke the spell. ‘You’re so damned appreciative. I wish I had had you around when I was making films at MGM.’

That was the other part of William (Bill) Westerleigh. From fighting and photographing the Western Front half a mile up, he had moved on, when he got back to the States. From the Eastman labs in New York, he had drifted to some flimsy film studios in Chicago, where Gloria Swanson had once starred, to Hollywood and MGM. From MGM he had shipped to Africa to camera-shoot lions and the Watusi for King Solomon’s Mines. Around the world’s studios, there was no one he didn’t know or who didn’t know him. He had been principal cameraman on some two hundred films, and there were two bright gold Academy Oscars on his mantel next door.

‘I’m sorry I grew up so long after you,’ I said. ‘Where’s that photo of you and Rickenbacker alone? And the one signed by von Richthofen.’

‘You don’t want to see them, buster.’

‘Like hell I don’t!’

He unfolded his wallet and gently held out the picture of the two of them, himself and Captain Eddie, and the single snap of von Richthofen in full uniform, and signed in ink below.

‘All gone,’ said Bill. ‘Most of ’em. Just one or two, and me left. And it won’t be long’ – he paused—‘before there’s not even me.’

And suddenly again, the tears began to come out of his eyes and roll down and off his nose.

I refilled his glass.

He drank it and said:

‘The thing is, I’m not afraid of dying. I’m just afraid of dying and going to hell!’

‘You’re not going there, Bill,’ I said.

‘Yes, I am!’ he cried out, almost indignantly, eyes blazing, tears streaming around his gulping mouth. ‘For what I did, what I can never be forgiven for!’

I waited a moment. ‘What was that, Bill?’ I asked quietly.

‘All those young boys I killed, all those young men I destroyed, all those beautiful people I murdered.’

‘You never did that, Bill,’ I said.

‘Yes! I did! In the sky, dammit, in the air over France, over Germany, so long ago, but Jesus, there they are every night now, alive again, flying, waving, yelling, laughing like boys, until I fire my guns between the propellers and their wings catch fire and spin down. Sometimes they wave to me, okay! as they fall. Sometimes they curse. But, Jesus, every night, every morning now, the last month, they never leave. Oh, those beautiful boys, those lovely young men, those fine faces, the great shining and loving eyes, and down they go. And I did it. And I’ll burn in hell for it!’

‘You will not, I repeat not, burn in hell,’ I said.

‘Give me another drink and shut up,’ said Bill. ‘What do you know about who burns and who doesn’t? Are you Catholic? No. Are you Baptist? Baptists burn more slowly. There. Thanks.’

I had filled his glass. He gave it a sip, the drink for his mouth meeting the stuff from his eyes.

‘William.’ I sat back and filled my own glass. ‘No one burns in hell for war. War’s that way.’

‘We’ll all burn,’ said Bill.

‘Bill, at this very moment, in Germany, there’s a man your age, bothered with the same dreams, crying in his beer, remembering too much.’

‘As well they should! They’ll burn, he’ll burn too, remembering my friends, the lovely boys who got themselves screwed into the ground when their propellers chewed the way. Don’t you see? They didn’t know. I didn’t know. No one told them, no one told us!’

‘What?’

‘What war was. Christ, we didn’t know it would come after us, find us, so late in time. We thought it was all over; that we had a way to forget, put it off, bury it. Our officers didn’t say. Maybe they just didn’t know. None of us did. No one guessed that one day, in old age, the graves would bust wide, and all those lovely faces come up, and the whole war with ’em! How could we guess that? How could we know? But now the time’s here, and the skies are full, and the ships just won’t come down, unless they burn. And the young men won’t stop waving at me at three in the morning unless I kill them all over again. Jesus Christ. It’s so terrible. It’s so sad. How do I save them? What do I do to go back and say, Christ, I’m sorry, it should never have happened, someone should have warned us when we were happy: war’s not just dying, it’s remembering and remembering late as well as soon. I wish them well. How do I say that, what’s the next move?’

‘There is no move,’ I said quietly. ‘Just sit here with a friend and have another drink. I can’t think of anything to do. I wish I could.…’

Bill fiddled with his glass, turning it round and round.

‘Let me tell you, then,’ he whispered. ‘Tonight, maybe tomorrow night’s the last time you’ll ever see me. Hear me out.’

He leaned forward, gazing up at the high ceiling and then out the window where storm clouds were being gathered by wind.

‘They’ve been landing in our backyards, the last few nights. You wouldn’t have heard. Parachutes make sounds like kites, soft kind of whispers. The parachutes come down on our back lawns. Other nights, the bodies, without parachutes. The good nights are the quiet ones when you just hear the silk and the threads on the clouds. The bad ones are when you hear a hundred and eighty pounds of aviator hit the grass. Then you can’t sleep. Last night, a dozen things hit the bushes near my bedroom window. I looked up in the clouds tonight and they were full of planes and smoke. Can you make them stop? Do you believe me?’

‘That’s the one thing; I do believe.’

He sighed, a deep sigh that released his soul.

‘Thank God! But what do I do next?’

‘Have you,’ I asked, ‘tried talking to them? I mean,’ I said, ‘have you asked for their forgiveness?’

‘Would they listen? Would they forgive? My God,’ he said. ‘Of course! Why not? Will you come with me? Your backyard. No trees for them to get strung up in. Christ, or on your porch.…’

‘The porch, I think.’

I opened the living room French doors and stepped out. It was a calm evening with only touches of wind motioning the trees and changing the clouds.

Bill was behind me, a bit unsteady on his feet, a hopeful grin, part panic, on his face.

I looked at the sky and the rising moon.

‘Nothing out here,’ I said.

‘Oh, Christ, yes, there is. Look,’ he said. ‘No, wait. Listen.’

I stood turning white cold, wondering why I waited, and listened.

‘Do we stand out in the middle of your garden, where they can see us? You don’t have to if you don’t want.’

‘Hell,’ I lied. ‘I’m not afraid.’ I lifted my glass. ‘To the Lafayette Escadrille?’ I said.

‘No, no!’ cried Bill, alarmed. ‘Not tonight. They mustn’t hear that. To them, Doug. Them.’ He motioned his glass at the sky where the clouds flew over in squadrons and the moon was a round, white, tombstone world.

‘To von Richthofen, and the beautiful sad young men.’

I repeated his words in a whisper.

And then we drank, lifting our empty glasses so the clouds and the moon and the silent sky could see.

‘I’m ready,’ said Bill, ‘if they want to come get me now. Better to die out here than go in and hear them landing every night and every night in their parachutes and no sleep until dawn when the last silk folds in on itself and the bottle’s empty. Stand right over there, son. That’s it. Just half in the shadow. Now.’

I moved back and we waited.

‘What’ll I say to them?’ he asked.

‘God, Bill,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. They’re not my friends.’

‘They weren’t mine, either. More’s the pity. I thought they were the enemy. Christ, isn’t that a dumb stupid halfass word. The enemy! As if such a thing ever really happened in the world. Sure, maybe the bully that chased and beat you up in the schoolyard, or the guy who took your girl and laughed at you. But them, those beauties, up in the clouds on summer days or autumn afternoons? No, no!’

He moved farther out on the porch.

‘All right,’ he whispered. ‘Here I am.’

And he leaned way out, and opened his arms as if to embrace the night air.

‘Come on! What you waiting for!’

He shut his eyes.

‘Your turn,’ he cried. ‘My God, you got to hear, you got to come. You beautiful bastards, here!’

And he tilted his head back as if to welcome a dark rain.

‘Are they coming?’ he whispered aside, eyes clenched.

‘No.’

Bill lifted his old face into the air and stared upward, willing the clouds to shift and change and become something more than clouds.

‘Damn it!’ he cried, at last. ‘I killed you all. Forgive me or come kill me!’ And a final angry burst. ‘Forgive me. I’m sorry!’

The force of his voice was enough to push me completely back into shadows. Maybe that did it. Maybe Bill, standing like a small statue in the middle of my garden, made the clouds shift and the wind blow south instead of north. We both heard, a long way off, an immense whisper.

‘Yes!’ cried Bill, and to me, aside, eyes shut, teeth clenched, ‘You hear!?’

We heard another sound, closer now, like great flowers or blossoms lifted off spring trees and run along the sky.

‘There,’ whispered Bill.

The clouds seemed to form a lid and make a vast silken shape which dropped in serene silence upon the land. It made a shadow that crossed the town and hid the houses and at last reached our garden and shadowed the grass and put out the light of the moon and then hid Bill from my sight.

‘Yes! They’re coming,’ cried Bill. ‘Feel them? One, two, a dozen! Oh, God, yes.’

And all around, in the dark, I thought I heard apples and plums and peaches falling from unseen trees, the sound of boots hitting my lawn, and the sound of pillows striking the grass like bodies, and the swarming of tapestries of white silk or smoke flung across the disturbed air.

‘Bill!’

‘No!’ he yelled. ‘I’m okay! They’re all around. Get back! Yes!’

There was a tumult in the garden. The hedges shivered with propeller wind. The grass lay down its nap. A tin watering can blew across the yard. Birds were flung from trees. Dogs all around the block yelped. A siren, from another war, sounded ten miles away. A storm had arrived, and was that thunder or field artillery?

And one last time, I heard Bill say, almost quietly, ‘I didn’t know, oh, God, I didn’t know what I was doing.’ And a final fading sound of ‘Please.’

And the rain fell briefly to mix with the tears on his face.

And the rain stopped and the wind was still.

‘Well.’ He wiped his eyes, and blew his nose on his big hankie, and looked at the hankie as if it were the map of France. ‘It’s time to go. Do you think I’ll get lost again?’

‘If you do, come here.’

‘Sure.’ He moved across the lawn, his eyes clear. ‘How much do I owe you, Sigmund?’

‘Only this,’ I said.

I gave him a hug. He walked out to the street. I followed to watch.

When he got to the corner, he seemed to be confused. He turned to his right, then his left. I waited and then called gently:

‘To your left, Bill.’

‘God bless you, buster!’ he said, and waved.

He turned and went into his house.

They found him a month later, wandering two miles from home. A month after that he was in the hospital, in France all the time now, and Rickenbacker in the bed to his right and von Richthofen in the cot to his left.

The day after his funeral the Oscar arrived, carried by his wife, to place on my mantel, with a single red rose beside it, and the picture of von Richthofen, and the other picture of the gang lined up in the summer of ’18 and the wind blowing out of the picture and the buzz of planes. And the sound of young men laughing as if they might go on forever.

Sometimes I come down at three in the morning when I can’t sleep and I stand looking at Bill and his friends. And sentimental sap that I am, I wave a glass of sherry at them.

‘Farewell, Lafayette,’ I say. ‘Lafayette, farewell.’

And they all laugh as if it were the grandest joke that they ever heard.




Remember Sascha? (#ulink_732401fd-c7f5-5911-b0e3-33d833184205)


Remember? Why, how could they forget? Although they knew him for only a little while, years later his name would arise and they would smile or even laugh and reach out to hold hands, remembering.

Sascha. What a tender, witty comrade, what a sly, hidden individual, what a child of talent; teller of tales, bon vivant, late-night companion, ever-present illumination on foggy noons.

Sascha!

He, whom they had never seen, to whom they spoke often at three A.M. in their small bedroom, away from friends who might roll their eyeballs under their lids, doubting their sanity, hearing his name.

Well, then, who and what was Sascha, and where did they meet or perhaps only dream him, and who were they?

Quickly: they were Maggie and Douglas Spaulding and they lived by the loud sea and the warm sand and the rickety bridges over the almost dead canals of Venice, California. Though lacking money in the bank or Goodwill furniture in their tiny two-room apartment, they were incredibly happy. He was a writer, and she worked to support him while he finished the great American novel.

Their routine was: she would arrive home each night from downtown Los Angeles and he would have hamburgers waiting or they would walk down the beach to eat hot dogs, spend ten or twenty cents in the Penny Arcade, go home, make love, go to sleep, and repeat the whole wondrous routine the next night: hot dogs, Penny Arcade, love, sleep, work, etc. It was all glorious in that year of being very young and in love; therefore it would go on forever …

Until he appeared.

The nameless one. For then he had no name. He had threatened to arrive a few months after their marriage to destroy their economy and scare off the novel, but then he had melted away, leaving only his echo of a threat.

But now the true collision loomed.

One night over a ham omelet with a bottle of cheap red and the conversation loping quietly, leaning on the card table and promising each other grander and more ebullient futures, Maggie suddenly said, ‘I feel faint.’

‘What?’ said Douglas Spaulding.

‘I’ve felt funny all day. And I was sick, a little bit, this morning.’

‘Oh, my God.’ He rose and came around the card table and took her head in his hands and pressed her brow against his side, and looked down at the beautiful part in her hair, suddenly smiling.

‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me that Sascha is back?’

‘Sascha! Who’s that?’

‘When he arrives, he’ll tell us.’

‘Where did that name come from?’

‘Don’t know. It’s been in my mind all year.’

‘Sascha?’ She pressed his hands to her cheeks, laughing.

‘Sascha!’

‘Call the doctor tomorrow,’ he said.

‘The doctor says Sascha has moved in for light housekeeping,’ she said over the phone the next day.

‘Great!’ He stopped. ‘I guess.’ He considered their bank deposits. ‘No. First thoughts count. Great! When do we meet the Martian invader?’

‘October. He’s infinitesimal now, tiny, I can barely hear his voice. But now that he has a name, I hear it. He promises to grow, if we take care.’

‘The Fabulous Invalid! Shall I stock up on carrots, spinach, broccoli for what date?’

‘Halloween.’

‘Impossible!’

‘True!’

‘People will claim we planned him and my vampire book to arrive that week, things that go bump and cry in the night.’

‘Oh, Sascha will surely do that! Happy?’

‘Frightened, yes, but happy, Lord, yes. Come home, Mrs Rabbit, and bring him along!’

It must be explained that Maggie and Douglas Spaulding were best described as crazed romantics. Long before the interior christening of Sascha, they, loving Laurel and Hardy, had called each other Stan and Ollie. The machines, the dustbusters and can openers around the apartment, had names, as did various parts of their anatomy, revealed to no one.

So Sascha, as an entity, a presence growing toward friendship, was not unusual. And when he actually began to speak up, they were not surprised. The gentle demands of their marriage, with love as currency instead of cash, made it inevitable.

Someday, they said, if they owned a car, it too would be named.

They spoke on that and a dozen score of things late at night. When hyperventilating about life, they propped themselves up on their pillows as if the future might happen right now. They waited, anticipating, in séance, for the silent small offspring to speak his first words before dawn.

‘I love our lives,’ said Maggie, lying there, ‘all the games. I hope it never stops. You’re not like other men, who drink beer and talk poker. Dear God, I wonder, how many other marriages play like us?’

‘No one, nowhere. Remember?’

‘What?’

He lay back to trace his memory on the ceiling.

‘The day we were married—’

‘Yes!’

‘Our friends driving and dropping us off here and we walked down to the drugstore by the pier and bought a tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes, big bucks, for our honeymoon …? One red toothbrush, one green, to decorate our empty bathroom. And on the way back along the beach, holding hands, suddenly, behind us, two little girls and a boy followed us and sang:

‘Happy marriage day to you,Happy marriage day to you.Happy marriage day, happy marriage day,Happy marriage day to you …’

She sang it now, quietly. He chimed in, remembering how they had blushed with pleasure at the children’s voices, but walked on, feeling ridiculous but happy and wonderful.

‘How did they guess? Did we look married?’

‘It wasn’t our clothes! Our faces, don’t you think? Smiles that made our jaws ache. We were exploding. They got the concussion.’

‘Those dear children. I can still hear their voices.’

‘And so here we are, seventeen months later.’ He put his arm around her and gazed at their future on the dark ceiling.

‘And here I am,’ a voice murmured.

‘Who?’ Douglas said.

‘Me,’ the voice whispered. ‘Sascha.’

Douglas looked down at his wife’s mouth, which had barely trembled.

‘So, at last, you’ve decided to speak?’ said Douglas.

‘Yes,’ came the whisper.

‘We wondered,’ said Douglas, ‘when we would hear from you.’ He squeezed his wife gently.

‘It’s time,’ the voice murmured. ‘So here I am.’

‘Welcome, Sascha,’ both said.

‘Why didn’t you talk sooner?’ asked Douglas Spaulding.

‘I wasn’t sure that you liked me,’ the voice whispered.

‘Why would you think that?’

‘First I was, then I wasn’t. Once I was only a name. Remember, last year, I was ready to come and stay. Scared you.’

‘We were broke,’ said Douglas quietly. ‘And nervous.’

‘What’s so scary about life?’ said Sascha. Maggie’s lips twitched. ‘It’s that other thing. Not being, ever. Not being wanted.’

‘On the contrary.’ Douglas Spaulding moved down on his pillow so he could watch his wife’s profile, her eyes shut, but her mouth breathing softly. ‘We love you. But last year it was bad timing. Understand?’

‘No,’ whispered Sascha. ‘I only understand you didn’t want me. And now you do. I should leave.’

‘But you just got here!’

‘Here I go, anyway.’

‘Don’t, Sascha! Stay!’

‘Good-bye.’ The small voice faded. ‘Oh, good-bye.’

And then silence.

Maggie opened her eyes with quiet panic.

‘Sascha’s gone,’ she said.

‘He can’t be!’

The room was still.

‘Can’t be,’ he said. ‘It’s only a game.’

‘More than a game. Oh, God, I feel cold. Hold me.’

He moved to hug her.

‘It’s okay.’

‘No. I had the funniest feeling just now, as if he were real.’

‘He is. He’s not gone.’

‘Unless we do something. Help me.’

‘Help?’ He held her even tighter, then shut his eyes, and at last called:

‘Sascha?’

Silence.

‘I know you’re there. You can’t hide.’

His hand moved to where Sascha might be.

‘Listen. Say something. Don’t scare us, Sascha. We don’t want to be scared or scare you. We need each other. We three against the world. Sascha?’

Silence.

‘Well?’ whispered Douglas.

Maggie breathed in and out.

They waited.

‘Yes?’

There was a soft flutter, the merest exhalation on the night air.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re back!’ both cried.

Another silence.

‘Welcome?’ asked Sascha.

‘Welcome!’ both said.

And that night passed and the next day and the night and day after that, until there were many days, but especially midnights when he dared to declare himself, pipe opinions, grow stronger and firmer and longer in half-heard declarations, as they lay in anticipatory awareness, now she moving her lips, now he taking over, both open as warm, live ventriloquists’ mouthpieces. The small voice shifted from one tongue to the other, with soft bouts of laughter at how ridiculous but loving it all seemed, never knowing what Sascha might say next, but letting him speak on until dawn and a smiling sleep.

‘What’s this about Halloween?’ he asked, somewhere in the sixth month.

‘Halloween?’ both wondered.

‘Isn’t that a death holiday?’ Sascha murmured.

‘Well, yes …’

‘I’m not sure I want to be born on a night like that.’

‘Well, what night would you like to be born on?’

Silence as Sascha floated a while.

‘Guy Fawkes,’ he finally whispered.

‘Guy Fawkes??!!’

‘That’s mainly fireworks, gunpowder plots, Houses of Parliament, yes? Please to remember the fifth of November?’

‘Do you think you could wait until then?’

‘I could try. I don’t think I want to start out with skulls and bones. Gunpowder’s more like it. I could write about that.’

‘Will you be a writer, then?’

‘Get me a typewriter and a ream of paper.’

‘And keep us awake with the typing?’

‘Pen, pencil, and pad, then?’

‘Done!’

So it was agreed and the nights passed into weeks and the weeks leaned from summer into the first days of autumn and his voice grew stronger, as did the sound of his heart and the small commotions of his limbs. Sometimes as Maggie slept, his voice would stir her awake and she would reach up to touch her mouth, where the surprise of his dreaming came forth.

‘There, there, Sascha. Rest now. Sleep.’

‘Sleep,’ he whispered drowsily, ‘sleep.’ And faded away.

‘Pork chops, please, for supper.’

‘No pickles with ice cream?’ both said, almost at once.

‘Pork chops,’ he said, and more days passed and more dawns arose and he said: ‘Hamburgers!’

‘For breakfast?’

‘With onions,’ he said.

October stood still for one day and then …

Halloween departed.

‘Thanks,’ said Sascha, ‘for helping me past that. What’s up ahead in five nights?’

‘Guy Fawkes!’

‘Ah, yes!’ he cried.

And at one minute after midnight five days later, Maggie got up, wandered to the bathroom, and wandered back, stunned.

‘Dear,’ she said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Douglas Spaulding turned over, half awake. ‘Yes?’

‘What day is it?’ whispered Sascha.

‘Guy Fawkes, at last. So?’

‘I don’t feel well,’ said Sascha. ‘Or, no, I feel fine. Full of pep. Ready to go. It’s time to say good-bye. Or is it hello? What do I mean?’

‘Spit it out.’

‘Are there neighbors who said, no matter when, they’d take us to the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘Call the neighbors,’ said Sascha.

They called the neighbors.

At the hospital, Douglas kissed his wife’s brow and listened.

‘It’s been nice,’ said Sascha.

‘Only the best.’

‘We won’t talk again. Good-bye,’ said Sascha.

‘Good-bye,’ both said.

At dawn there was a small clear cry somewhere.

Not long after, Douglas entered his wife’s hospital room. She looked at him and said, ‘Sascha’s gone.’

‘I know,’ he said quietly.

‘But he left word and someone else is here. Look.’

He approached the bed as she pulled back a coverlet.

‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

He looked down at a small pink face and eyes that for a brief moment flickered bright blue and then shut.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

‘Your daughter. Meet Alexandra.’

‘Hello, Alexandra,’ he said.

‘And do you know what the nickname for Alexandra is?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Sascha,’ she said.

He touched the small cheek very gently.

‘Hello, Sascha,’ he said.




Junior (#ulink_4ffa8473-a471-577a-9505-a049fd5c6cf5)


It was on the morning of October 1 that Albert Beam, aged eighty-two, woke to find an incredible thing had happened, if not in the night, miraculously at dawn.

He witnessed a warm and peculiar rise two-thirds of the way down the bed, under the covers. At first he thought he had drawn up one knee to ease a cramp, but then, blinking, he realized—

It was his old friend, Albert, Junior.

Or just Junior, as some frolicsome girl had dubbed it, how long, oh God … some sixty years ago!

And Junior was alive, well, and freshly alert.

Hallo, thought Albert Beam, Senior, to the scene, that’s the first time he’s waked before me since July 1970.

July 1970!

He stared. And the more he stared and mused, the more Junior blushed unseen; all resolute, a true beauty.

Well, thought Albert Beam, I’ll just wait for him to go away.

He shut his eyes and waited, but nothing happened. Or rather, it continued to happen. Junior did not go away. He lingered, hopeful for some new life.

Hold on! thought Albert Beam. It can’t be.

He sat bolt upright, his eyes popped wide, his breath like a fever in his mouth.

‘Are you going to stay?’ he cried down at his old and now bravely obedient friend.

Yes! he thought he heard a small voice say.

For as a young man, he and his trampoline companions had often enjoyed Charlie McCarthy talks with Junior, who was garrulous and piped up with outrageously witty things. Ventriloquism, amidst Phys. Ed. II, was one of Albert Beam’s most engaging talents.

Which meant that Junior was talented, too.

Yes! the small voice seemed to whisper. Yes!

Albert Beam bolted from bed. He was halfway through his personal phonebook when he realized all the old numbers still drifted behind his left ear. He dialed three of them, furiously, voice cracking.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello!’

‘Hello!’

From this island of old age now he called across a cold sea toward a summer shore. There, three women answered. Still reasonably young, trapped between fifty and sixty, they gasped, crowed and hooted when Albert Beam stunned them with the news:

‘Emily, you won’t believe—’

‘Cora, a miracle!’

‘Elizabeth, Junior’s back.’

‘Lazarus has returned!’

‘Drop everything!’

‘Hurry over!’

‘Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!’

He dropped the phone, suddenly fearful that after all the alarums and excursions, this Most Precious Member of the Hot-Dog Midnight Dancing-Under-the-Table Club might dismantle. He shuddered to think that Cape Canaveral’s rockets would fall apart before the admiring crowd could arrive to gape in awe.

Such was not the case.

Junior, steadfast, stayed on, frightful in demeanor, a wonder to behold.

Albert Beam, ninety-five percent mummy, five percent jaunty peacock lad, raced about his mansion in his starkers, drinking coffee to give Junior courage and shock himself awake, and when he heard the various cars careen up the drive, threw on a hasty robe. With hair in wild disarray he rushed to let in three girls who were not girls, nor maids, and almost ladies.

But before he could throw the door wide, they were storming it with jackhammers, or so it seemed, their enthusiasm was so manic.

They burst through, almost heaving him to the floor, and waltzed him backward into the parlor.

One had once been a redhead, the next a blond, the third a brunette. Now, with various rinses and tints obscuring past colors false and real, each a bit more out of breath than the next, they laughed and giggled as they carried Albert Beam along through his house. And whether they were flushed with merriment or blushed at the thought of the antique miracle they were about to witness, who could say? They were scarcely dressed, themselves, having hurled themselves into dressing-gowns in order to race here and confront Lazarus triumphant in the tomb!

‘Albert, is it true?’

‘No joke?’

‘You once pinched our legs, now are you pulling them?!’

‘Chums!’

Albert Beam shook his head and smiled a great warm smile, sensing a similar smile on the hidden countenance of his Pet, his Pal, his Buddy, his Friend. Lazarus, impatient, jogged in place.

‘No jokes. No lies. Ladies, sit!’

The women rushed to collapse in chairs and turn their rosy faces and July Fourth eyes full on the old moon rocket expert, waiting for countdown.

Albert Beam took hold of the edges of his now purposely elusive bathrobe, while his eyes moved tenderly from face to face.

‘Emily, Cora, Elizabeth,’ he said, gently, ‘how special you were, are, and will always be.’

‘Albert, dear Albert, we’re dying with curiosity!’

‘A moment, please,’ he murmured. ‘I need to – remember.’

And in the quiet moment, each gazed at the other, and suddenly saw the obvious; something never spoken of in their early afternoon lives, but which now loomed with the passing years.

The simple fact was that none of them had ever grown up.

They had used each other to stay in kindergarten, or at the most, fourth grade, forever.

Which meant endless champagne noon lunches, and prolonged late night foxtrot/waltzes that sank down in nibblings of ears and founderings in grass.

None had ever married, none had ever conceived of the notion of children, much less conceived them, so none had raised any family save the one gathered here, and they had not so much raised each other as prolonged an infancy and lingered an adolescence. They had responded only to the jolly or wild weathers of their souls and their genetic dispositions.

‘Listen, dear, dear, ladies,’ whispered Albert Beam.

They continued to stare at each other’s masks with a sort of fevered benevolence. For it had suddenly struck them that while they had been busy making each other happy they had made no one else unhappy!

It was something to sense that by some miracle they’d given each other only minor wounds and those long since healed, for here they were, forty years on, still friends in remembrance of three loves.

‘Friends,’ thought Albert Beam aloud. ‘That’s what we are. Friends!’

Because, many years ago, as each beauty departed his life on good terms, another had arrived on better. It was the exquisite precision with which he had clocked them through his existence that made them aware of their specialness as women unafraid and so never jealous.

They beamed at one another.

What a thoughtful and ingenious man, to have made them absolutely and completely happy before he sailed on to founder in old age.

‘Come, Albert, my dear,’ said Cora.

‘The matinée crowd’s here,’ said Emily.

‘Where’s Hamlet?’

‘Ready?’ said Albert Beam. ‘Get set?’

He hesitated in the final moment, since it was to be his last annunciation or manifestation or whatever before he vanished into the halls of history.

With trembling fingers that tried to remember the difference between zippers and buttons, he took hold of the bathrobe curtains on the theater, as ’twere.

At which instant a most peculiar loud hum bumbled beneath his pressed lips.

The ladies popped their eyes and smartened up, leaning forward.

For it was that grand moment when the Warner Brothers logo vanished from the screen and the names and titles flashed forth in a fountain of brass and strings by Steiner or Korngold.

Was it a symphonic surge from Dark Victory or The Adventures of Robin Hood that trembled the old man’s lips?

Was it the score from Elizabeth and Essex, Now, Voyager or The Petrified Forest?

Petrified forest!? Albert Beam’s lips cracked with the joke of it. How fitting for him, for Junior!

The music rose high, higher, highest, and exploded from his mouth.

‘Ta-tah!’ sang Albert Beam.

He flung wide the curtain.

The ladies cried out in sweet alarms.

For there, starring in the last act of Revelations, was Albert Beam the Second.

Or perhaps, justifiably proud, Junior!

Unseen in years, he was an orchard of beauty and sweet Eden’s Garden, all to himself.

Was he both Apple and Snake?

He was!

Scenes from Krakatoa, the Explosion that Rocked the World teemed through the ladies’ sugar-plum minds. Lines like ‘Only God Can Make a Tree’ leaped forth from old poems. Cora seemed to recall the score from Last Days of Pompeii, Elizabeth the music from Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Emily, suddenly shocked back into 1927, babbled the inane words to ‘Lucky Lindy … Spirit of St. Louis, high, stay aloft … we’re with you …!’

The musical trio quieted into a sort of twilight-in-mid-morning-holy-hour, a time for veneration and loving regard. It almost seemed that a wondrous illumination sprang forth from the Source, the Shrine at which they gathered as motionless worshippers, praying that the moment would be prolonged by their silent alleluias.

And it was prolonged.

Albert Beam and Junior stood as one before the throng, a large smile on the old man’s face, a smaller one on Junior’s.

Time-travel shadowed the ladies’ faces.

Each remembered Monte Carlo or Paris or Rome or splash-dancing the Plaza Hotel fount that night centuries ago with Scott and Zelda. Suns and moons rose and set in their eyes and there was no jealousy, only lives long lost but brought back and encircled in this moment.

‘Well,’ everyone whispered, at last.

One by one, each of the three pal-friends stepped forward to kiss Albert Beam lightly on the cheek and smile up at him and then down at the Royal Son, that most Precious Member who deserved to be patted, but was not, in this moment, touched.

The three Grecian maids, the retired Furies, the ancient vest porch goddesses, stepped back a way to line up for a final view-halloo.

And the weeping began.

First Emily, then Cora, then Elizabeth, as all summoned back some midnight collision of young fools who somehow survived the crash.

Albert Beam stood amidst the rising salt sea, until the tears also ran free from his eyes.

And whether they were tears of somber remembrance for a past that was not a golden pavane, or celebratory wails for a present most salubrious and enchanting, none could say. They wept and stood about, not knowing what to do with their hands.

Until at last, like small children peering in mirrors to catch the strangeness and mystery of weeping, they ducked under to look at each other’s sobs.

They saw each other’s eyeglasses spattered with wet salt stars from the tips of their eyelashes.

‘Oh, hah!’

And the whole damned popcorn machine exploded into wild laughter.

‘Oh, heee!’

They turned in circles with the bends. They stomped their feet to get the barks and hoots of hilarity out. They became weak as children at four o’clock tea, that silly hour when anything said is the funniest crack in all the world and the bones collapse and you wander in dazed circles to fall and writhe in ecstasies of mirth on the floor.

Which is what now happened. The ladies let gravity yank them down to flag their hair on the parquetry, their last tears flung like bright comets from their eyes as they rolled and gasped, stranded on a morning beach.

‘Gods! Oh! Ah!’ The old man could not stand it. Their earthquake shook and broke him. He saw, in this final moment, that his pal, his dear and precious Junior, had at last in all the shouts and snorts and happy cries melted away like a snow memory and was now a ghost.

And Albert Beam grabbed his knees, sneezed out a great laugh of recognition at the general shape, size and ridiculousness of birthday-suit humans on an indecipherable earth, and fell.

He squirmed amidst the ladies, chuckling, flailing for air. They dared not look at each other for fear of merciless heart attacks from the seal barks and elephant trumpetings that echoed from their lips.

Waiting for their mirth to let go, they at last sat up to rearrange their hair, their smiles, their breathing and their glances.

‘Dear me, oh, dear, dear,’ moaned the old man, with a last gasp of relief. ‘Wasn’t that the best ever, the finest, the loveliest time we have ever had anytime, anywhere, in all the great years?’

All nodded ‘yes.’

‘But,’ said practical Emily, straightening her face, ‘drama’s done. Tea’s cold. Time to go.’

And they gathered to lift the old tentbones of the ancient warrior, and he stood among his dear ones in a glorious warm silence as they clothed him in his robe and guided him to the front door.

‘Why?’ wondered the old man. ‘Why? Why did Junior return on this day?’

‘Silly!’ cried Emily. ‘It’s your birthday!’

‘Well, happy me! Yes, yes.’ He mused. ‘Well, do you imagine, maybe, next year, and the next, will I be gifted the same?’

‘Well,’ said Cora.

‘We—’

‘Not in this lifetime,’ said Emily, tenderly.

‘Good-bye, dear Albert, fine Junior,’ said each.

‘Thanks for all of my life,’ said the old man.

He waved and they were gone, down the drive and off into the fine fair morning.

He waited for a long while and then addressed himself to his old pal, his good friend, his now sleeping forever companion.

‘Come on, Fido, here, boy, time for our pre-lunch nap. And, who knows, with luck we may dream wild dreams until tea!’

And, my God, he thought he heard the small voice cry, then won’t we be famished!?

‘We will!’

And the old man, half-asleep on his feet, and Junior already dreaming, fell flat forward into a bed with three warm and laughing ghosts …

And so slept.




That Woman on the Lawn (#ulink_8f49e722-fdd6-562f-a377-5959a0a8fbbe)


Very late at night he heard the weeping on the lawn in front of his house. It was the sound of a woman crying. By its sound he knew it was not a girl or a mature woman, but the crying of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. It went on, then faded and stopped, and again started up, now moving this way or that on the late-summer wind.

He lay in bed listening to it until it made his eyes fill with tears. He turned over, shut his eyes, let the tears fall, but could not stop the sound. Why should a young woman be weeping long after midnight out there?

He sat up and the weeping stopped.

At the window, he looked down. The lawn was empty but covered with dew. There was a trail of footsteps across the lawn to the middle where someone had stood turning, and another trail going off toward the garden around the house.

The moon stood full in the sky and filled the lawn with its light, but there was no more sadness and only the footprints there.

He stepped back from the window, suddenly chilled, and went down to heat and drink a cup of chocolate.

He did not think of the weeping again until dusk the next day, and even then thought that it must be some woman from a house nearby, unhappy with life, perhaps locked out and in need of a place to let her sadness go.

Yet …?

As the twilight deepened, coming home he found himself hurrying from the bus, at a steady pace which astonished him. Why, why all this?

Idiot, he thought. A woman unseen weeps under your window, and here at sunset the next day, you almost run.

Yes, he thought, but her voice!

Was it beautiful, then?

No. Only familiar.

Where had he heard such a voice before, wordless in crying?

Who could he ask, living in an empty house from which his parents had vanished long ago?

He turned in at his front lawn and stood still, his eyes shadowed.

What had he expected? That whoever she was would be waiting here? Was he that lonely that a single voice long after midnight roused all his senses?

No. Simply put: he must know who the crying woman was.

And he was certain she would return tonight as he slept.

He went to bed at eleven, and awoke at three, panicked that he had missed a miracle. Lightning had destroyed a nearby town or an earthquake had shaken half the world to dust, and he had slept through it!

Fool! he thought, and slung back the covers and moved to the window, to see that indeed he had overslept.

For there on the lawn were the delicate footprints.

And he hadn’t even heard the weeping!

He would have gone out to kneel in the grass, but at that moment a police car motored slowly by, looking at nothing and the night.

How could he run to prowl, to probe, to touch the grass if that car came by again? What doing? Picking clover blossoms? Weeding dandelions? What, what?

His bones cracked with indecision. He would go down, he would not.

Already the memory of that terrible weeping faded the more he tried to make it clear. If he missed her one more night, the memory itself might be gone.

Behind him, in his room, the alarm clock rang.

Damn! he thought. What time did I set it for?

He shut off the alarm and sat on his bed, rocking gently, waiting, eyes shut, listening.

The wind shifted. The tree just outside the window whispered and stirred.

He opened his eyes and leaned forward. From far off, coming near, and now down below, the quiet sound of a woman weeping.

She had come back to his lawn and was not forever lost. Be very quiet, he thought.

And the sounds she made came up on the wind through the blowing curtains into his room.

Careful now. Careful but quick.

He moved to the window and looked down.

In the middle of the lawn she stood and wept, her hair long and dark on her shoulders, her face bright with tears.

And there was something in the way her hands trembled at her sides, the way her hair moved quietly in the wind, that shook him so that he almost fell.

He knew her and yet did not. He had seen her before, but had never seen.

Turn your head, he thought.

Almost as if hearing this, the young woman sank to her knees to half kneel on the grass, letting the wind comb her hair, head down and weeping so steadily and bitterly that he wanted to cry out: Oh, no! It kills my heart!

And as if she had heard, quite suddenly her head lifted, her weeping grew less as she looked up at the moon, so that he saw her face.

And it was indeed a face seen somewhere once, but where?

A tear fell. She blinked.

It was like the blinking of a camera and a picture taken.

‘God save me!’ he whispered. ‘No!’

He whirled and stumbled toward the closet to seize down an avalanche of boxes and albums. In the dark he scrabbled, then pulled on the closet light, tossed aside six albums until finally, dragging another forth and riffling pages, he gave a cry, stopped, and held a photo close, then turned and moved blindly to the window.

There he stared down at the lawn and then at the photograph, very old, very yellowed with age.

Yes, yes, the same! The image struck his eyes and then his heart. His whole body shook, made an immense pulsation, as he leaned at the album, leaned on the window frame, and almost shouted:

You! How dare you come back! How dare you be young! How dare you be what? A girl untouched, wandering late on my lawn!? You were never that young! Never! Damn, oh, damn your warm blood, damn your wild soul!

But this he did not shout or say.

For something in his eyes, like a beacon, must have flashed.

The crying of the young woman on the lawn stopped.

She looked up.

At which instant the album fell from his fingers, through the burst-wide screen, and down like a dark bird fluttering to strike the earth.

The young woman gave a muted cry, whirled, and ran.

‘No, no!’ he cried aloud. ‘I didn’t mean – come back!’

He was down the stairs and out on the porch in a matter of seconds. The door slammed behind him like a gunshot. The explosion nailed him to the rail, half down to the lawn, where there was nothing to be seen but footprints. Either way, up the street lay empty sidewalks and shadows under trees. A radio played off in an upstairs window in a house behind trees. A car passed, murmuring, at a far intersection.

‘Wait,’ he whispered. ‘Come back. I shouldn’t have said—’

He stopped. He had said nothing, but only thought it. But his outrage, his jealousy?

She had felt that. She had somehow heard. And now …?

She’ll never come back, he thought. Oh God!

He sat on the porch steps for a while, quietly biting his knuckle.

At three in the morning, in bed, he thought he heard a sigh and soft footsteps in grass, and waited. The photo album lay closed on the floor. Even though it lay shut, he could see and know her face. And it was utterly impossible, utterly insane.

His last thought before sleep was: ghost.

The strangest ghost that ever walked.

The ghost of someone dead.

The ghost of someone who died very old.

But somehow come back not as her old self.

But a ghost that was somehow young.

Weren’t ghosts always, when they returned, the same age as when they died?

No.

Not this one anyway.

‘Why …?’ he whispered.

And dream took over the whisper.

One night passed and then another and another, and there was nothing on the lawn but the light of a moon that changed its face from outright stare to half grimace.

He waited.

The first night a more than ordinarily casual cat crossed the yard at two A.M.

The second night a dog trotted by, wearing his tongue half out of his mouth like a loosely tied red cravat, smiling at trees.

The third night a spider spent from twelve-twenty-five until four A.M. building a baroque clockface on the air between lawn and trees, which a bird broke in passing at dawn.

He slept most of Sunday and awoke with a fever that was not an illness at dusk.

Late in the twilight of the fifth day, the color of the sky somehow promised her return, as did the way the wind leaned against the trees and the look of the moon when it finally rose to set the scene.

‘All right,’ he said, half aloud. ‘Now.’

But at midnight, nothing.

‘Come on,’ he whispered.

One o’clock, nothing.

You must, he thought.

No, you will.

He slept for ten minutes and woke suddenly at two-ten, knowing that when he went to the window—

She would be there.

She was.

At first, he didn’t see her, and groaned, and then, in the shadow of the great oak far out on the edge of the lawn, he saw something move, and one foot came out, and she took a step and stood very still.

He held his breath, quieted his heart, told himself to turn, walk, and take each step down with precision, numbering them, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, moving in darkness with no rush, six, five, four, and at last one. He opened the front screen door with only a whisper, and was on the porch without frightening what might be out beyond waiting for him.

Quietly, he moved down the porch steps to the edge of the lawn, like one who stands on the rim of a pond. Out in the center of that pond, the young woman stood, trapped like someone on thin ice that might at any moment break and drop her through.

She did not see him. And then …

She did a thing that was a signal. Tonight her hair was fixed in a knot at the back of her head. She lifted her white arms in a gesture and with one touch of her fingers, a touch of snow, loosened her hair.

It fell in a dark banner, to blow and repattern itself across her shoulders, which trembled with their shadows.

The wind stirred her hair in the night and moved it about her face and on her uplifted hands.

The shadows laid down by the moon under every tree leaned as if called by the motion.

The entire world shifted in its sleep.

The wind blew as the young woman waited.

But no footsteps sounded along the white sidewalks. No front doors opened far down the street. No windows were raised. No motion caused front porches to creak and shift.

He took another step out onto the small meadow of night.

‘Who are you –?’ she gasped, and stepped back.

‘No, no,’ he said softly. ‘It’s all right.’

Another trembling had taken over her body. Where before it had been some hope, some anticipation, now it was fear. One hand stopped her hair from blowing; the other half shielded her face.

‘I’ll stand right here,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’

She waited a long while, staring at him until her shoulders relaxed and the lines around her mouth vanished. Her whole body sensed the truth of his words.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘I don’t either.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What am I doing here?’

‘You came to meet someone,’ he said.

‘Did I?’

The town clock struck three in the morning far away. She listened to it, her face shadowed by the sound.

‘But it’s so late. People don’t walk around late on front lawns!’

‘They do if they must,’ he said.

‘But why?’

‘Maybe we can find out, if we talk.’

‘About what, what?!’

‘About why you’re here. If we talk long enough, we may know. I know why I’m here, of course. I heard you crying.’

‘Oh, I’m so ashamed.’

‘Don’t be. Why are people ashamed of tears? I cry often. Then I start laughing. But the crying must come first. Go ahead.’

‘What a strange man you are.’

Her hand fell away from her hair. Her other hand moved away so her face was illuminated by a small and growing curiosity.

‘I thought I was the only one who knew about crying,’ she said.

‘Everyone thinks that. It’s one of those little secrets we keep from each other. Show me a serious man and I’ll show you a man who has never wept. Show me a madman and I’ll show you a man who dried his tears a long time ago. Go ahead.’

‘I think I’m done,’ she said.

‘Any time, start over.’

She burst out a tiny laugh. ‘Oh, you are strange. Who are you?’

‘We’ll come to that.’

She peered across the lawn at his hands, his face, his mouth, and then at his eyes.

‘Oh, I know you. But from where?!’

‘That would spoil it. You wouldn’t believe, anyway.’

‘I would!’

Now it was his turn to laugh quietly. ‘You’re very young.’

‘No, nineteen! Ancient!’

‘Girls, by the time they go from twelve to nineteen, are full of years, yes. I don’t know; but it must be so. Now, please, why are you out here in the middle of the night?’

‘I—’ She shut her eyes to think in on it. ‘I’m waiting.’

‘Yes?’

‘And I’m sad.’

‘It’s the waiting that makes you sad, yes?’

‘I think, no, yes, no.’

‘And you don’t quite know what you’re waiting for?’

‘Oh, I wish I could be sure. All of me’s waiting. I don’t know, all of me. I don’t understand. I’m impossible!’

‘No, you’re everyone that ever grew up too fast and wanted too much. I think girls, women, like you have slipped out at night since time began. If it wasn’t here in Green Town, it was in Cairo or Alexandria or Rome or Paris in summer, anywhere there was a private place and late hours and no one to see, so they just rose up and out, as if someone had called their name—’

‘I was called, yes! That’s it! Someone did call my name! It’s true. How did you know? Was it you!’

‘No. But someone we both know. You’ll know his name when you go back to bed tonight, wherever that is.’

‘Why, in that house, behind you,’ she said. ‘That’s my house. I was born in it.’

‘Well’ – he laughed—‘so was I.’

‘You? How can that be? Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Anyway, you heard someone calling. You had to come out—’

‘I did. Many nights now. But, always, no one’s here. They must be there, or why would I hear them?’

‘One day there’ll be someone to fit the voice.’

‘Oh, don’t joke with me!’

‘I’m not. Believe. There will be. That’s what all those other women heard in other years and places, middle of summer, dead of winter, go out and risk cold, stand warm in snow banks, and listen and look for strange footprints on the midnight snow, and only an old dog trotting by, all smiles. Damn, damn.’

‘Oh, yes, damn, damn.’ And her smile showed for a moment, even as the moon came out of the clouds and went away. ‘Isn’t it silly?’

‘No. Men do the same. They take long walks when they’re sixteen, seventeen. They don’t stand on lawns, waiting, no. But, my God, how they walk! Miles and miles from midnight until dawn and come home exhausted and explode and die in bed.’

‘What a shame that those who stand and wait and those who walk all night can’t—’

‘Meet?’

‘Yes; don’t you think it’s a shame?’

‘They do, finally.’

‘Oh, no, I shall never meet anyone. I’m old and ugly and terrible and I don’t know how many nights I’ve heard that voice making me come here and there’s nothing and I just want to die.’

‘Oh, lovely young girl,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t die. The cavalry is on its way. You will be saved.’

There was such certainty in his voice that it made her glance up again, for she had been looking at her hands and her own soul in her hands.

‘You know, don’t you?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You truly know? You tell the truth?’

‘Swear to God, swear by all that’s living.’

‘Tell me more!’

‘There’s little more to tell.’

‘Tell me!’

‘Everything will be all right with you. Some night soon, or some day, someone will call and they’ll really be there when you come to find. The game will be over.’

‘Hide-and-seek, you mean? But it’s gone on too long!’

‘It’s almost over, Marie.’

‘You know my name!’

He stopped, confused. He had not meant to speak it.

‘How did you know, who are you?’ she demanded.

‘When you get back to sleep tonight, you’ll know. If we say too much, you’ll disappear, or I’ll disappear. I’m not quite sure which of us is real or which is a ghost.’

‘Not me! Oh, surely not me. I can feel myself. I’m here. Why, look!’ And she showed him the remainder of her tears brushed from her eyelids and held on her palms.

‘Oh, that’s real, all right. Well, then, dear young woman, I must be the visitor. I come to tell you it will all go right. Do you believe in special ghosts?’

‘Are you special?’

‘One of us is. Or maybe both. The ghost of young love or the ghost of the unborn.’

‘Is that what I am, you are?’

‘Paradoxes aren’t easy to explain.’

‘Then, depending on how you look at it, you’re impossible, and so am I.’

‘If it makes it easier, just think I’m not really here. Do you believe in ghosts?’

‘I think I do.’

‘It comes to me to imagine, then, that there are special ghosts in the world. Not ghosts of dead people. But ghosts of want and need, or I guess you might say desire.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, have you ever lain in bed late afternoons, late nights and dreamed something so much, awake, you felt your soul jump out of your body as if something had yanked a long, pure white sheet straight out the window? You want something so much, your soul leaps out and follows, my God, fast?’

‘Why … yes. Yes!’

‘Boys do that, men do that. When I was twelve I read Burroughs’ Mars novels. John Carter used to stand under the stars, hold up his arms to Mars, and ask to be taken. And Mars grabbed his soul, yanked him like an aching tooth across space, and landed him in dead Martian seas. That’s boys, that’s men.’

‘And girls, women?’

‘They dream, yes. And their ghosts come out of their bodies. Living ghosts. Living wants. Living needs.’

‘And go to stand on lawns in the middle of winter nights?’

‘That’s about it.’

‘Am I a ghost, then?’

‘Yes, the ghost of wanting so much it kills but doesn’t kill you, shakes and almost breaks you.’

‘And you?’

‘I must be the answer-ghost.’

‘The answer-ghost. What a funny name!’

‘Yes. But you’ve asked and I know the answer.’

‘Tell me!’

‘All right, the answer is this, young girl, young woman. The time of waiting is almost over. Your time of despair will soon be through. Very soon, now, a voice will call and when you come out, both of you, your ghost of want and your body with it, there will be a man to go with the voice that calls.’

‘Oh, please don’t tell me that if it isn’t true!’ Her voice trembled. Tears flashed again in her eyes. She half raised her arms again in defense.

‘I wouldn’t dream to hurt you. I only came to tell.’

The town clock struck again in the deep morning.

‘It’s late,’ she said.

‘Very late. Get along, now.’

‘Is that all you’re going to say?’

‘You don’t need to know any more.’

The last echoes of the great clock faded.

‘How strange,’ she murmured. ‘The ghost of a question, the ghost of an answer.’

‘What better ghosts can there be?’

‘None that I ever heard of. We’re twins.’

‘Far nearer than you think.’

She took a step, looked down, and gasped with delight. ‘Look, oh, look. I can move!’

‘Yes.’

‘What was it you said, boys walk all night, miles and miles?’

‘Yes.’

‘I could go back in, but I can’t sleep now. I must walk, too.’

‘Do that,’ he said gently.

‘But where shall I go?’

‘Why,’ he said, and he suddenly knew. He knew where to send her and was suddenly angry with himself for knowing, angry with her for asking. A burst of jealousy welled in him. He wanted to race down the street to a certain house where a certain young man lived in another year and break the window, burn the roof. And yet, oh, yet, if he did that!?

‘Yes?’ she said, for he had kept her waiting.

Now, he thought, you must tell her. There’s no escape.

For if you don’t tell her, angry fool, you yourself will never be born.

A wild laugh burst from his mouth, a laugh that accepted the entire night and time and all his crazed thinking.

‘So you want to know where to go?’ he said at last.

‘Oh, yes!’

He nodded his head. ‘Up to that corner, four blocks to the right, one block to the left.’

She repeated it quickly. ‘And the final number?!’

‘Eleven Green Park.’

‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ She ran a few steps, then stopped, bewildered. Her hands were helpless at her throat. Her mouth trembled. ‘Silly. I hate to leave.’

‘Why?’

‘Why, because … I’m afraid I’ll never see you again!’

‘You will. Three years from now.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I won’t look quite the same. But it’ll be me. And you’ll know me forever.’

‘Oh, I’m glad for that. Your face is familiar. I somehow know you well.’

She began to walk slowly, looking over at him as he stood near the porch of the house.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ve saved my life.’

‘And my own along with it.’

The shadows of a tree fell across her face, touched her cheeks, moved in her eyes.

‘Oh, Lord! Girls lie in bed nights listing the names for their future children. Silly. Joe. John. Christopher. Samuel. Stephen. And right now, Will.’ She touched the gentle rise of her stomach, then lifted her hand out halfway to point to him in the night. ‘Is your name Will?’

‘Yes.’

Tears absolutely burst from her eyes.

He wept with her.

‘Oh, that’s fine, fine,’ she said at last. ‘I can go now. I won’t be out here on the lawn anymore. Thank God, thank you. Good night.’

She went away into the shadows across the lawn and along the sidewalk down the street. At the far corner he saw her turn and wave and walk away.

‘Good night,’ he said quietly.

I am not born yet, he thought, or she has been dead many years, which is it? which?

The moon sailed into clouds.

The motion touched him to step, walk, go up the porch stairs, wait, look out at the lawn, go inside, shut the door.

A wind shook the trees.

The moon came out again and looked upon a lawn where two sets of footprints, one going one way, one going another in the dew, slowly, slowly, as the night continued, vanished.

By the time the moon had gone down the sky there was only an empty lawn and no sign, and much dew.

The great town clock struck six in the morning. Fire showed in the east. A cock crowed.




February 1999: Ylla (#ulink_823aa82b-1d97-5cc5-997c-c5a7b7979390)


They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.

Mr and Mrs K had lived by the dead sea for twenty years, and their ancestors had lived in the same house, which turned and followed the sun, flower-like, for ten centuries.

Mr and Mrs K were not old. They had the fair, brownish skin of the true Martian, the yellow coin eyes, the soft musical voices. Once they had liked painting pictures with chemical fire, swimming in the canals in the seasons when the wine trees filled them with green liquors, and talking into the dawn together by the blue phosphorous portraits in the speaking room.

They were not happy now.

This morning Mrs K stood between the pillars, listening to the desert sands heat, melt into yellow wax, and seemingly run on the horizon.

Something was going to happen.

She waited.

She watched the blue sky of Mars as if it might at any moment grip in on itself, contract, and expel a shining miracle down upon the sand.

Nothing happened.

Tired of waiting, she walked through the misting pillars. A gentle rain sprang from the fluted pillar tops, cooling the scorched air, falling gently on her. On hot days it was like walking in a creek. The floors of the house glittered with cool streams. In the distance she heard her husband playing his book steadily, his fingers never tired of the old songs. Quietly she wished he might one day again spend as much time holding and touching her like a little harp as he did his incredible books.

But no. She shook her head, an imperceptible, forgiving shrug. Her eyelids closed softly down upon her golden eyes. Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.

She lay back in a chair that moved to take her shape even as she moved. She closed her eyes tightly and nervously.

The dream occurred.

Her brown fingers trembled, came up, grasped at the air. A moment later she sat up, startled, gasping.

She glanced about swiftly, as if expecting someone there before her. She seemed disappointed; the space between the pillars was empty.

Her husband appeared in a triangular door. ‘Did you call?’ he asked irritably.

‘No!’ she cried.

‘I thought I heard you cry out.’

‘Did I? I was almost asleep and had a dream!’

‘In the daytime? You don’t often do that.’

She sat as if struck in the face by the dream. ‘How strange, how very strange,’ she murmured. ‘The dream.’

‘Oh?’ He evidently wished to return to his book.

‘I dreamed about a man.’

‘A man?’

‘A tall man, six feet one inch tall.’

‘How absurd; a giant, a misshapen giant.’

‘Somehow’ – she tried the words – ‘he looked all right. In spite of being tall. And he had – oh, I know you’ll think it silly – he had blue eyes!’

‘Blue eyes! Gods!’ cried Mr K. ‘What’ll you dream next? I suppose he had black hair?’

‘How did you guess?’ She was excited.

‘I picked the most unlikely color,’ he replied coldly.

‘Well, black it was!’ she cried. ‘And he had a very white skin; oh, he was most unusual! He was dressed in a strange uniform and he came down out of the sky and spoke pleasantly to me.’ She smiled.

‘Out of the sky; what nonsense!’

‘He came in a metal thing that glittered in the sun,’ she remembered. She closed her eyes to shape it again. ‘I dreamed there was the sky and something sparkled like a coin thrown into the air, and suddenly it grew large and fell down softly to land, a long silver craft, round and alien. And a door opened in the side of the silver object and this tall man stepped out.’

‘If you worked harder you wouldn’t have these silly dreams.’

‘I rather enjoyed it,’ she replied, lying back. ‘I never suspected myself of such an imagination. Black hair, blue eyes, and white skin! What a strange man, and yet – quite handsome.’

‘Wishful thinking.’

‘You’re unkind. I didn’t think him up on purpose; he just came in my mind while I drowsed. It wasn’t like a dream. It was so unexpected and different. He looked at me and he said, “I’ve come from the third planet in my ship. My name is Nathaniel York—”’

‘A stupid name; it’s no name at all,’ objected the husband.

‘Of course it’s stupid, because it’s a dream,’ she explained softly. ‘And he said, “This is the first trip across space. There are only two of us in our ship, myself and my friend Bert.”’

‘Another stupid name.’

‘And he said, “We’re from a city on Earth; that’s the name of our planet,”’ continued Mrs K. ‘That’s what he said. “Earth” was the name he spoke. And he used another language. Somehow I understood him. With my mind. Telepathy, I suppose.’

Mr K turned away. She stopped him with a word. ‘Yll?’ she called quietly. ‘Do you ever wonder if – well, if there are people living on the third planet?’

‘The third planet is incapable of supporting life,’ stated the husband patiently. ‘Our scientists have said there’s far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.’

‘But wouldn’t it be fascinating if there were people? And they traveled through space in some sort of ship?’

‘Really, Ylla, you know how I hate this emotional wailing. Let’s get on with our work.’

It was late in the day when she began singing the song as she moved among the whispering pillars of rain. She sang it over and over again.

‘What’s that song?’ snapped her husband at last, walking in to sit at the fire table.

‘I don’t know.’ She looked up, surprised at herself. She put her hand to her mouth, unbelieving. The sun was setting. The house was closing itself in, like a giant flower, with the passing of light. A wind blew among the pillars; the fire table bubbled its fierce pool of silver lava. The wind stirred her russet hair, crooning softly in her ears. She stood silently looking out into the great sallow distances of sea bottom, as if recalling something, her yellow eyes soft and moist. ‘“Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine,”’ she sang, softly, quietly, slowly. ‘“Or leave a kiss within the cup, and I’ll not ask for wine.”’ She hummed now, moving her hands in the wind ever so lightly, her eyes shut. She finished the song.

It was very beautiful.

‘Never heard that song before. Did you compose it?’ he inquired, his eyes sharp.

‘No. Yes. No, I don’t know, really!’ She hesitated wildly. ‘I don’t even know what the words are; they’re another language!’

‘What language?’

She dropped portions of meat numbly into the simmering lava. ‘I don’t know.’ She drew the meat forth a moment later, cooked, served on a plate for him. ‘It’s just a crazy thing I made up, I guess. I don’t know why.’

He said nothing. He watched her drown meats in the hissing fire pool. The sun was gone. Slowly, slowly the night came in to fill the room, swallowing the pillars and both of them, like a dark wine poured to the ceiling. Only the silver lava’s glow lit their faces.

She hummed the strange song again.

Instantly he leaped from his chair and stalked angrily from the room.

Later, in isolation, he finished supper.

When he arose he stretched, glanced at her, and suggested, yawning, ‘Let’s take the flame birds to town tonight to see an entertainment.’

‘You don’t mean it?’ she said. ‘Are you feeling well?’

‘What’s so strange about that?’

‘But we haven’t gone for an entertainment in six months!’

‘I think it’s a good idea.’

‘Suddenly you’re so solicitous,’ she said.

‘Don’t talk that way,’ he replied peevishly. ‘Do you or do you not want to go?’

She looked out at the pale desert. The twin white moons were rising. Cool water ran softly about her toes. She began to tremble just the least bit. She wanted very much to sit quietly here, soundless, not moving until this thing occurred, this thing expected all day, this thing that could not occur but might. A drift of song brushed through her mind.

‘I—’

‘Do you good,’ he urged. ‘Come along now.’

‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Some other night.’

‘Here’s your scarf.’ He handed her a vial. ‘We haven’t gone anywhere in months.’

‘Except you, twice a week to Xi City.’ She wouldn’t look at him.

‘Business,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ She whispered to herself.

From the vial a liquid poured, turned to blue mist, settled about her neck, quivering.

The flame birds waited, like a bed of coals, glowing on the cool smooth sands. The white canopy ballooned on the night wind, flapping softly, tied by a thousand green ribbons to the birds.

Ylla laid herself back in the canopy and, at a word from her husband, the birds leaped, burning, toward the dark sky. The ribbons tautened, the canopy lifted. The sand slid whining under; the blue hills drifted by, drifted by, leaving their home behind, the raining pillars, the caged flowers, the singing books, the whispering floor creeks. She did not look at her husband. She heard him crying out to the birds as they rose higher, like ten thousand hot sparkles, so many red-yellow fireworks in the heavens, tugging the canopy like a flower petal, burning through the wind.

She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.

She watched only the sky.

The husband spoke.

She watched the sky.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘What?’

He exhaled. ‘You might pay attention.’

‘I was thinking.’

‘I never thought you were a nature lover, but you’re certainly interested in the sky tonight,’ he said.

‘It’s very beautiful.’

‘I was figuring,’ said the husband slowly. ‘I thought I’d call Hulle tonight. I’d like to talk to him about us spending some time, oh, only a week or so, in the Blue Mountains. It’s just an idea—’

‘The Blue Mountains!’ She held to the canopy rim with one hand, turning swiftly toward him.

‘Oh, it’s just a suggestion.’

‘When do you want to go?’ she asked, trembling.

‘I thought we might leave tomorrow morning. You know, an early start and all that,’ he said very casually.

‘But we never go this early in the year!’

‘Just this once, I thought—’ He smiled. ‘Do us good to get away. Some peace and quiet. You know. You haven’t anything else planned? We’ll go, won’t we?’

She took a breath, waited, and then replied, ‘No.’

‘What?’ His cry startled the birds. The canopy jerked.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s settled. I won’t go.’

He looked at her. They did not speak after that. She turned away. The birds flew on, ten thousand firebrands down the wind.

In the dawn the sun, through the crystal pillars, melted the fog that supported Ylla as she slept. All night she had hung above the floor, buoyed by the soft carpeting of mist that poured from the walls when she lay down to rest. All night she had slept on this silent river, like a boat upon a soundless tide. Now the fog burned away, the mist level lowered until she was deposited upon the shore of wakening.

She opened her eyes.

Her husband stood over her. He looked as if he had stood there for hours, watching. She did not know why, but she could not look him in the face.

‘You’ve been dreaming again!’ he said. ‘You spoke out and kept me awake. I really think you should see a doctor.’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘You talked a lot in your sleep!’

‘Did I?’ She started up.

Dawn was cold in the room. A gray light filled her as she lay there.

‘What was your dream?’

She had to think a moment to remember. ‘The ship. It came from the sky again, landed, and the tall man stepped out and talked with me, telling me little jokes, laughing, and it was pleasant.’

Mr K touched a pillar. Founts of warm water leaped up, steaming; the chill vanished from the room. Mr K’s face was impassive.

‘And then,’ she said, ‘this man, who said his strange name was Nathaniel York, told me I was beautiful and – and kissed me.’

‘Ha!’ cried the husband, turning violently away, his jaw working.

‘It’s only a dream.’ She was amused.

‘Keep your silly, feminine dreams to yourself!’

‘You’re acting like a child.’ She lapsed back upon the few remaining remnants of chemical mist. After a moment she laughed softly. ‘I thought of some more of the dream,’ she confessed.

‘Well, what is it, what is it?’ he shouted.

‘Yll, you’re so bad-tempered.’

‘Tell me!’ he demanded. ‘You can’t keep secrets from me!’ His face was dark and rigid as he stood over her.

‘I’ve never seen you this way,’ she replied, half shocked, half entertained. ‘All that happened was this Nathaniel York person told me – well, he told me that he’d take me away into his ship, into the sky with him, and take me back to his planet with him. It’s really quite ridiculous.’

‘Ridiculous, is it!’ he almost screamed. ‘You should have heard yourself, fawning on him, talking to him, singing with him, oh gods, all night; you should have heard yourself!’

‘Yll!’

‘When’s he landing? Where’s he coming down with his damned ship?’

‘Yll, lower your voice.’

‘Voice be damned!’ He bent stiffly over her. ‘And in this dream’ – he seized her wrist –’didn’t the ship land over in Green Valley, didn’t it? Answer me!’

‘Why, yes—’

‘And it landed this afternoon, didn’t it?’ he kept at her.

‘Yes, yes, I think so, yes, but only in a dream!’

‘Well’ – he flung her hand away stiffly – ‘it’s good you’re truthful! I heard every word you said in your sleep. You mentioned the valley and the time.’ Breathing hard, he walked between the pillars like a man blinded by a lightning bolt. Slowly his breath returned. She watched him as if he were quite insane. She arose finally and went to him. ‘Yll,’ she whispered.

‘I’m all right.’

‘You’re sick.’

‘No.’ He forced a tired smile. ‘Just childish. Forgive me, darling.’ He gave her a rough pat. ‘Too much work lately. I’m sorry. I think I’ll lie down awhile—’

‘You were so excited.’

‘I’m all right now. Fine.’ He exhaled. ‘Let’s forget it. Say, I heard a joke about Uel yesterday, I meant to tell you. What do you say you fix breakfast, I’ll tell the joke, and let’s not talk about all this.’

‘It was only a dream.’

‘Of course.’ He kissed her cheek mechanically. ‘Only a dream.’

At noon the sun was high and hot and the hills shimmered in the light.

‘Aren’t you going to town?’ asked Ylla.

‘Town?’ He raised his brows faintly.

‘This is the day you always go.’ She adjusted a flower cage on its pedestal. The flowers stirred, opening their hungry yellow mouths.

He closed his book. ‘No. It’s too hot, and it’s late.’

‘Oh.’ She finished her task and moved toward the door.

‘Well, I’ll be back soon.’

‘Wait a minute! Where are you going?’

She was in the door swiftly. ‘Over to Pao’s. She invited me!’

‘Today?’

‘I haven’t seen her in a long time. It’s only a little way.’

‘Over in Green Valley, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, just a walk, not far, I thought I’d—’ She hurried.

‘I’m sorry, really sorry,’ he said, running to fetch her back, looking very concerned about his forgetfulness. ‘It slipped my mind. I invited Dr Nlle out this afternoon.’

‘Dr Nlle!’ She edged toward the door.

He caught her elbow and drew her steadily in. ‘Yes.’

‘But Pao—’

‘Pao can wait, Ylla. We must entertain Nlle.’

‘Just for a few minutes—’

‘No, Ylla.’

‘No?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Besides, it’s a terribly long walk to Pao’s. All the way over through Green Valley and then past the big canal and down, isn’t it? And it’ll be very, very hot, and Dr Nlle would be delighted to see you. Well?’

She did not answer. She wanted to break and run. She wanted to cry out. But she only sat in the chair, turning her fingers over slowly, staring at them expressionlessly, trapped.

‘Ylla?’ he murmured. ‘You will be here, won’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said after a long time. ‘I’ll be here.’

‘All afternoon?’

Her voice was dull. ‘All afternoon.’

Late in the day Dr Nlle had not put in an appearance. Ylla’s husband did not seem overly surprised. When it was quite late he murmured something, went to a closet, and drew forth an evil weapon, a long yellowish tube ending in a bellows and a trigger. He turned, and upon his face was a mask, hammered from silver metal, expressionless, the mask that he always wore when he wished to hide his feelings, the mask which curved and hollowed so exquisitely to his thin cheeks and chin and brow. The mask glinted, and he held the evil weapon in his hands, considering it. It hummed constantly, an insect hum. From it hordes of golden bees could be flung out with a high shriek. Golden, horrid bees that stung, poisoned, and fell lifeless, like seeds on the sand.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘What?’ He listened to the bellows, to the evil hum. ‘If Dr Nlle is late, I’ll be damned if I’ll wait. I’m going out to hunt a bit. I’ll be back. You be sure to stay right here now, won’t you?’ The silver mask glimmered.

‘Yes.’

‘And tell Dr Nlle I’ll return. Just hunting.’

The triangular door closed. His footsteps faded down the hill.

She watched him walking through the sunlight until he was gone. Then she resumed her tasks with the magnetic dusts and the new fruits to be plucked from the crystal walls. She worked with energy and dispatch, but on occasion a numbness took hold of her and she caught herself singing that odd and memorable song and looking out beyond the crystal pillars at the sky.

She held her breath and stood very still, waiting.

It was coming nearer.

At any moment it might happen.

It was like those days when you heard a thunderstorm coming and there was the waiting silence and then the faintest pressure of the atmosphere as the climate blew over the land in shifts and shadows and vapors. And the change pressed at your ears and you were suspended in the waiting time of the coming storm. You began to tremble. The sky was stained and colored; the clouds were thickened; the mountains took on an iron taint. The caged flowers blew with faint sighs of warning. You felt your hair stir softly. Somewhere in the house the voice-clock sang, ‘Time, time, time, time …’ ever so gently, no more than water tapping on velvet.

And then the storm. The electric illumination, the engulfments of dark wash and sounding black fell down, shutting in, forever.

That’s how it was now. A storm gathered, yet the sky was clear. Lightning was expected, yet there was no cloud.

Ylla moved through the breathless summer house. Lightning would strike from the sky any instant; there would be a thunderclap, a boll of smoke, a silence, footsteps on the path, a rap on the crystalline door, and her running to answer …

Crazy Ylla! she scoffed. Why think these wild things with your idle mind?

And then it happened.

There was a warmth as of a great fire passing in the air. A whirling, rushing sound. A gleam in the sky, of metal.

Ylla cried out.

Running through the pillars, she flung wide a door. She faced the hills. But by this time there was nothing.

She was about to race down the hill when she stopped herself. She was supposed to stay here, go nowhere. The doctor was coming to visit, and her husband would be angry if she ran off.

She waited in the door, breathing rapidly, her hand out.

She strained to see over toward Green Valley, but saw nothing.

Silly woman. She went inside. You and your imagination, she thought. That was nothing but a bird, a leaf, the wind, or a fish in the canal. Sit down. Rest.

She sat down.

A shot sounded.

Very clearly, sharply, the sound of the evil insect weapon.

Her body jerked with it.

It came from a long way off. One shot. The swift humming distant bees. One shot. And then a second shot, precise and cold, and far away.

Her body winced again and for some reason she started up, screaming, and screaming, and never wanting to stop screaming. She ran violently through the house and once more threw wide the door.

The echoes were dying away, away.

Gone.

She waited in the yard, her face pale, for five minutes.

Finally, with slow steps, her head down, she wandered about the pillared rooms, laying her hand to things, her lips quivering, until finally she sat alone in the darkening wine room, waiting. She began to wipe an amber glass with the hem of her scarf.

And then, from far off, the sound of footsteps crunching on the thin, small rocks.

She rose up to stand in the center of the quiet room. The glass fell from her fingers, smashing to bits.

The footsteps hesitated outside the door.

Should she speak? Should she cry out, ‘Come in, oh, come in’?

She went forward a few paces.

The footsteps walked up the ramp. A hand twisted the door latch.

She smiled at the door.

The door opened. She stopped smiling.

It was her husband. His silver mask glowed dully.

He entered the room and looked at her for only a moment. Then he snapped the weapon bellows open, cracked out two dead bees, heard them spat on the floor as they fell, stepped on them, and placed the empty bellows gun in the corner of the room as Ylla bent down and tried, over and over, with no success, to pick up the pieces of the shattered glass. ‘What were you doing?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said with his back turned. He removed the mask.

‘But the gun – I heard you fire it. Twice.’

‘Just hunting. Once in a while you like to hunt. Did Dr Nlle arrive?’

‘No.’

‘Wait a minute.’ He snapped his fingers disgustedly. ‘Why, I remember now. He was supposed to visit us tomorrow afternoon. How stupid of me.’

They sat down to eat. She looked at her food and did not move her hands. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, not looking up from dipping his meat in the bubbling lava.

‘I don’t know. I’m not hungry,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know; I’m just not.’

The wind was rising across the sky; the sun was going down. The room was small and suddenly cold.

‘I’ve been trying to remember,’ she said in the silent room, across from her cold, erect, golden-eyed husband.

‘Remember what?’ He sipped his wine.

‘That song. That fine and beautiful song.’ She closed her eyes and hummed, but it was not the song. ‘I’ve forgotten it. And, somehow, I don’t want to forget it. It’s something I want always to remember.’ She moved her hands as if the rhythm might help her to remember all of it. Then she lay back in her chair. ‘I can’t remember.’ She began to cry.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know, but I can’t help it. I’m sad and I don’t know why, I cry and I don’t know why, but I’m crying.’

Her head was in her hands; her shoulders moved again and again.

‘You’ll be all right tomorrow,’ he said.

She did not look up at him; she looked only at the empty desert and the very bright stars coming out now on the black sky, and far away there was a sound of wind rising and canal waters stirring cold in the long canals. She shut her eyes, trembling.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right tomorrow.’




Banshee (#ulink_e730deb3-eb7a-52a6-9e13-6e17d724f662)


It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if that city died in the night, no one would know.

I paid my driver and watched the taxi turn to go back to the living city, leaving me alone with twenty pages of final screenplay in my pocket, and my film director employer waiting inside. I stood in the midnight silence, breathing in Ireland and breathing out the damp coal mines in my soul.

Then, I knocked.

The door flew wide almost instantly. John Hampton was there, shoving a glass of sherry into my hand and hauling me in.

‘Good God, kid, you got me curious. Get that coat off. Give me the script. Finished it, eh? So you say. You got me curious. Glad you called from Dublin. The house is empty. Clara’s in Paris with the kids. We’ll have a good read, knock the hell out of your scenes, drink a bottle, be in bed by two and – what’s that?’

The door still stood open. John took a step, tilted his head, closed his eyes, listened.

The wind rustled beyond in the meadows. It made a sound in the clouds like someone turning back the covers of a vast bed.

I listened.

There was the softest moan and sob from somewhere off in the dark fields.

Eyes still shut, John whispered, ‘You know what that is, kid?’

‘What?’

‘Tell you later. Jump.’

With the door slammed, he turned about and, the grand lord of the empty manor, strode ahead of me in his hacking coat, drill slacks, polished half-boots, his hair, as always, windblown from swimming upstream or down with strange women in unfamiliar beds.

Planting himself on the library hearth, he gave me one of those beacon flashes of laugh, the teeth that beckoned like a lighthouse beam swift and gone, as he traded me a second sherry for the screenplay, which he had to seize from my hand.

‘Let’s see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm, has birthed. Sit. Drink. Watch.’

He stood astride the hearthstones, warming his backside, leafing my manuscript pages, conscious of me drinking my sherry much too fast, shutting my eyes each time he let a pagedrop and flutter to the carpet. When he finished he let the last pagesail, lit a small cigarillo and puffed it, staring at the ceiling, making me wait.

‘You son of a bitch,’ he said at last, exhaling. ‘It’s good. Damn you to hell, kid. It’s good!’

My entire skeleton collapsed within me. I had not expected such a midriff blow of praise.

‘It needs a little cutting, of course!’

My skeleton reassembled itself.

‘Of course,’ I said.

He bent to gather the pages like a great loping chimpanzee and turned. I felt he wanted to hurl them into the fire. He watched the flames and gripped the pages.

‘Someday, kid,’ he said quietly, ‘you must teach me to write.’

He was relaxing now, accepting the inevitable, full of true admiration.

‘Someday,’ I said, laughing, ‘you must teach me to direct.’

‘The Beast will be our film, son. Quite a team.’

He arose and came to clink glasses with me.

‘Quite a team we are!’ He changed gears. ‘How are the wife and kids?’

‘They’re waiting for me in Sicily where it’s warm.’

‘We’ll get you to them, and sun, straight off! I—’

He froze dramatically, cocked his head, and listened.

‘Hey, what goes on—’ he whispered.

I turned and waited.

This time, outside the great old house, there was the merest thread of sound, like someone running a fingernail over the paint, or someone sliding down out of the dry reach of a tree. Then there was the softest exhalation of a moan, followed by something like a sob.

John leaned in a starkly dramatic pose, like a statue in a stage pantomime, his mouth wide, as if to allow sounds entry to the inner ear. His eyes now unlocked to become as huge as hen’s eggs with pretended alarm.

‘Shall I tell you what that sound is, kid? A banshee!’

‘A what?’ I cried.

‘Banshee!’ he intoned. ‘The ghosts of old women who haunt the roads an hour before someone dies. That’s what that sound was!’ He stepped to the window, raised the shade, and peered out. ‘Sh! Maybe it means – us!’

‘Cut it out, John!’ I laughed, quietly.

‘No, kid, no.’ He fixed his gaze far into the darkness, savoring his melodrama. ‘I lived here ten years. Death’s out there. The banshee always knows! Where were we?’

He broke the spell as simply as that, strode back to the hearth and blinked at my script as if it were a brand new puzzle.

‘You ever figure, Doug, how much The Beast is like me? The hero plowing the seas, plowing women left and right, off round the world and no stops? Maybe that’s why I’m doing it. You ever wonder how many women I’ve had? Hundreds! I—’

He stopped, for my lines on the pagehad shut him again. His face took fire as my words sank in.

‘Brilliant!’

I waited, uncertainly.

‘No, not that!’ He threw my script aside to seize a copy of the London Times off the mantel. ‘This! A brilliant review of your new book of stories!’

‘What?’ I jumped.

‘Easy, kid. I’ll read this grand review to you! You’ll love it. Terrific!’

My heart took water and sank. I could see another joke coming on or, worse, the truth disguised as a joke.

‘Listen!’

John lifted the Times and read, like Ahab, from the holy text.

‘“Douglas Rogers’s stories may well be the huge success of American literature—”’ John stopped and gave me an innocent blink. ‘How you like it so far, kid?’

‘Continue, John,’ I mourned. I slugged my sherry back. It was a toss of doom that slid down to meet a collapse of will.

‘“—but here in London,”’ John intoned, “‘we ask more from our tellers of tales. Attempting to emulate the ideas of Kipling, the style of Maugham, the wit of Waugh, Rogers drowns somewhere in mid-Atlantic. This is ramshackle stuff, mostly bad shades of superior scribes. Douglas Rogers, go home!”’

I leaped up and ran, but John with a lazy flip of his underhand, tossed the Times into the fire where it flapped like a dying bird and swiftly died in flame and roaring sparks.

Imbalanced, staring down, I was wild to grab that damned paper out, but finally glad the thing was lost.

John studied my face, happily. My face boiled, my teeth ground shut. My hand, stuck to the mantel, was a cold rock fist.

Tears burst from my eyes, since words could not burst from my aching mouth.

‘What’s wrong, kid?’ John peered at me with true curiosity, like a monkey edging up to another sick beast in its cage. ‘You feeling poorly?’

‘John, for Christ’s sake!’ I burst out. ‘Did you have to do that!’

I kicked at the fire, making the logs tumble and a great firefly wheel of sparks gush up the flue.

‘Why, Doug, I didn’t think—’

‘Like hell you didn’t!’ I blazed, turning to glare at him with tear-splintered eyes. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Hell, nothing, Doug. It was a fine review, great! I just added a few lines, to get your goat!’

‘I’ll never know now!’ I cried. ‘Look!’

I gave the ashes a final, scattering kick.

‘You can buy a copy in Dublin tomorrow, Doug. You’ll see. They love you. God, I just didn’t want you to get a big head, right. The joke’s over. Isn’t it enough, dear son, that you have just written the finest scenes you ever wrote in your life for your truly great screenplay?’ John put his arm around my shoulder.

That was John: kick you in the tripes, then pour on the wild sweet honey by the larder ton.

‘Know what your problem is, Doug?’ He shoved yet another sherry in my trembling fingers. ‘Eh?’

‘What?’ I gasped, like a sniveling kid, revived and wanting to laugh again. ‘What?’

‘The thing is, Doug—’ John made his face radiant. His eyes fastened to mine like Svengali’s. ‘You don’t love me half as much as I love you!’

‘Come on, John—’

‘No, kid, I mean it. God, son, I’d kill for you. You’re the greatest living writer in the world, and I love you, heart and soul. Because of that, I thought you could take a little leg-pull. I see that I was wrong—’

‘No, John,’ I protested, hating myself, for now he was making me apologize. ‘It’s all right.’

‘I’m sorry, kid, truly sorry—’

‘Shut up!’ I gasped a laugh. ‘I still love you. I—’

‘That’s a boy! Now—’ John spun about, brisked his palms together, and shuffled and reshuffled the script pages like a cardsharp. ‘Let’s spend an hour cutting this brilliant, superb scene of yours and—’

For the third time that night, the tone and color of his mood changed.

‘Hist!’ he cried. Eyes squinted, he swayed in the middle of the room, like a dead man underwater. ‘Doug, you hear?’

The wind trembled the house. A long fingernail scraped an attic pane. A mourning whisper of cloud washed the moon.

‘Banshees.’ John nodded, head bent, waiting. He glanced up, abruptly. ‘Doug? Run out and see.’

‘Like hell I will.’

‘No, go on out,’ John urged. ‘This has been a night of misconceptions, kid. You doubt me, you doubt it. Get my overcoat, in the hall. Jump!’

He jerked the hall closet door wide and yanked out his great tweed overcoat which smelled of tobacco and fine whiskey. Clutching it in his two monkey hands, he beckoned it like a bullfighter’s cape. ‘Huh, toro! Hah!’

‘John,’ I sighed, wearily.

‘Or are you a coward, Doug, are you yellow? You—’

For this, the fourth, time, we both heard a moan, a cry, a fading murmur beyond the wintry front door.

‘It’s waiting, kid!’ said John, triumphantly. ‘Get out there. Run for the team!’

I was in the coat, anointed by tobacco scent and booze as John buttoned me up with royal dignity, grabbed my ears, kissed my brow.

‘I’ll be in the stands, kid, cheering you on. I’d go with you, but banshees are shy. Bless you, son, and if you don’t come back – I loved you like a son!’

‘Jesus,’ I exhaled, and flung the door wide.

But suddenly John leaped between me and the cold blowing moonlight.

‘Don’t go out there, kid. I’ve changed my mind! If you got killed—’

‘John,’ I shook his hands away. ‘You want me out there. You’ve probably got Kelly, your stable girl, out there now, making noises for your big laugh—’

‘Doug!’ he cried in that mock-insult serious way he had, eyes wide, as he grasped my shoulders. ‘I swear to God!’

‘John,’ I said, half-angry, half-amused, ‘so long.’

I ran out the door to immediate regrets. He slammed and locked the portal. Was he laughing? Seconds later, I saw his silhouette at the library window, sherry glass in hand, peering out at this night theater of which he was both director and hilarious audience.

I spun with a quiet curse, hunched my shoulders in Caesar’s cloak, ignored two dozen stab wounds given me by the wind, and stomped down along the gravel drive.

I’ll give it a fast ten minutes, I thought, worry John, turn his joke inside out, stagger back in, shirt torn and bloody, with some fake tale of my own. Yes, by God, that was the trick—

I stopped.

For in a small grove of trees below, I thought I saw something like a large paper kite blossom and blow away among the hedges.

Clouds sailed over an almost full moon, and ran islands of dark to cover me.

Then there it was again, farther on, as if a whole cluster of flowers were suddenly torn free to snow away along the colorless path. At the same moment, there was the merest catch of a sob, the merest door-hinge of a moan.

I flinched, pulled back, then glanced up at the house.

There was John’s face, of course, grinning like a pumpkin in the window, sipping sherry, toast-warm and at ease.

‘Ohh,’ a voice wailed somewhere. ‘… God.…’

It was then that I saw the woman.

She stood leaning against a tree, dressed in a long, moon-colored dress over which she wore a hip-length heavy woollen shawl that had a life of its own, rippling and winging out and hovering with the weather.

She seemed not to see me or if she did, did not care; I could not frighten her, nothing in the world would ever frighten her again. Everything poured out of her steady and unflinching gaze toward the house, that window, the library, and the silhouette of the man in the window.

She had a face of snow, cut from that white cool marble that makes the finest Irish women; a long swan neck, a generous if quivering mouth, and eyes a soft and luminous green. So beautiful were those eyes, and her profile against the blown tree branches, that something in me turned, agonized, and died. I felt that killing wrench men feel when beauty passes and will not pass again. You want to cry out: Stay. I love you. But you do not speak. And the summer walks away in her flesh, never to return.

But now the beautiful woman, staring only at that window in the far house, spoke.

‘Is he in there?’ she said.

‘What?’ I heard myself say.

‘Is that him?’ she wondered. ‘The beast,’ she said, with quiet fury. ‘The monster. Himself.’

‘I don’t—’

‘The great animal,’ she went on, ‘that walks on two legs. He stays. All others go. He wipes his hands on flesh; girls are his napkins, women his midnight lunch. He keeps them stashed in cellar vintages and knows their years but not their names. Sweet Jesus, and is that him?’

I looked where she looked, at the shadow in the window, far off across the croquet lawn.

And I thought of my director in Paris, in Rome, in New York, in Hollywood, and the millraces of women I had seen John tread, feet printing their skins, a dark Christ on a warm sea. A picnic of women danced on tables, eager for applause and John, on his way out, saying, ‘Dear, lend me a fiver. That beggar by the door kills my heart—’

I watched this young woman, her dark hair stirred by the night wind, and asked:

‘Who should he be?’

‘Him,’ she said. ‘Him that lives there and loved me and now does not.’ She shut her eyes to let the tears fall.

‘He doesn’t live there anymore,’ I said.

‘He does!’ She whirled, as if she might strike or spit. ‘Why do you lie?’

‘Listen.’ I looked at the new but somehow old snow in her face. ‘That was another time.’

‘No, there’s only now!’ She made as if to rush for the house. ‘And I love him still, so much I’d kill for it, and myself lost at the end!’

‘What’s his name?’ I stood in her way. ‘His name?’

‘Why, Will, of course. Willie. William.’

She moved. I raised my arms and shook my head.

‘There’s only a Johnny there now. A John.’

‘You lie! I feel him there. His name’s changed, but it’s him. Look! Feel!’

She put her hands up to touch on the wind toward the house, and I turned and sensed with her and it was another year, it was a time between. The wind said so, as did the night and the glow in that great window where the shadow stayed.

‘That’s him!’

‘A friend of mine,’ I said, gently.

‘No friend of anyone, ever!’

I tried to look through her eyes and thought: my God, has it always been this way, forever some man in that house, forty, eighty, a hundred years ago! Not the same man, no, but all dark twins, and this lost girl on the road, with snow in her arms for love, and frost in her heart for comfort, and nothing to do but whisper and croon and mourn and sob until the sound of her weeping stilled at sunrise but to start again with the rising of the moon.

‘That’s my friend in there,’ I said, again.

‘If that be true,’ she whispered fiercely, ‘then you are my enemy!’

I looked down the road where the wind blew dust through the graveyard gates.

‘Go back where you came from,’ I said.

She looked at the same road and the same dust, and her voice faded. ‘Is there to be no peace, then?’ she mourned. ‘Must I walk here, year on year, and no comeuppance?’

‘If the man in there,’ I said, ‘was really your Will, your William, what would you have me do?’

‘Send him out to me,’ she said, quietly.

‘What would you do with him?’

‘Lie down with him,’ she murmured, ‘and ne’er get up again. He would be kept like a stone in a cold river.’

‘Ah,’ I said, and nodded.

‘Will you ask him, then, to be sent?’

‘No. For he’s not yours. Much like. Near similar. And breakfasts on girls and wipes his mouth on their silks, one century called this, another that.’

‘And no love in him, ever?’

‘He says the word like fishermen toss their nets in the sea,’ I said.

‘Ah, Christ, and I’m caught!’ And here she gave such a cry that the shadow came to the window in the great house across the lawn. ‘I’ll stay here the rest of the night,’ she said. ‘Surely he will feel me here, his heart will melt, no matter what his name or how deviled his soul. What year is this? How long have I been waiting?’

‘I won’t tell you,’ I said. ‘The news would crack your heart.’

She turned and truly looked at me. ‘Are you one of the good ones, then, the gentle men who never lie and never hurt and never have to hide? Sweet God, I wish I’d known you first!’

The wind rose, the sound of it rose in her throat. A clock struck somewhere far across the country in the sleeping town.

‘I must go in,’ I said. I took a breath. ‘Is there no way for me to give you rest?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘for it was not you that cut the nerve.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘You don’t. But you try. Much thanks for that. Get in. You’ll catch your death.’

‘And you—?’

‘Ha!’ she cried. ‘I’ve long since caught mine. It will not catch again. Get!’

I gladly went. For I was full of the cold night and the white moon, old time, and her. The wind blew me up the grassy knoll. At the door, I turned. She was still there on the milky road, her shawl straight out on the weather, one hand upraised.

‘Hurry,’ I thought I heard her whisper, ‘tell him he’s needed!’

I rammed the door, slammed into the house, fell across the hall, my heart a bombardment, my image in the great hall mirror a shock of colorless lightning.

John was in the library drinking yet another sherry, and poured me some. ‘Someday,’ he said, ‘you’ll learn to take anything I say with more than a grain of salt. Jesus, look at you! Ice cold. Drink that down. Here’s another to go after it!’

I drank, he poured, I drank. ‘Was it all a joke, then?’

‘What else?’ John laughed, then stopped.

The croon was outside the house again, the merest fingernail of mourn, as the moon scraped down the roof.

‘There’s your banshee,’ I said, looking at my drink, unable to move.

‘Sure, kid, sure, unh-huh,’ said John. ‘Drink your drink, Doug, and I’ll read you that great review of your book from the London Times again.’

‘You burned it, John.’

‘Sure, kid, but I recall it all as if it were this morn. Drink up.’

‘John,’ I said, staring into the fire, looking at the hearth where the ashes of the burned paper blew in a great breath. ‘Does … did … that review really exist?’

‘My God, of course, sure, yes. Actually.…’ Here he paused and gave it great imaginative concern. ‘The Times knew my love for you, Doug, and asked me to review your book.’ John reached his long arm over to refill my glass. ‘I did it. Under an assumed name, of course, now ain’t that swell of me? But I had to be fair, Doug, had to be fair. So I wrote what I truly felt were the good things, the not-so-good things in your book. Criticized it just the way I would when you hand in a lousy screenplay scene and I make you do it over. Now ain’t that A-one double absolutely square of me? Eh?’

He leaned at me. He put his hand on my chin and lifted it and gazed long and sweetly into my eyes.

‘You’re not upset?’

‘No,’ I said, but my voice broke.

‘By God, now, if you aren’t. Sorry. A joke, kid, only a joke.’ And here he gave me a friendly punch on the arm.

Slight as it was, it was a sledgehammer striking home.

‘I wish you hadn’t made it up, the joke, I wish the article was real,’ I said.

‘So do I, kid. You look bad. I—’

The wind moved around the house. The windows stirred and whispered.

Quite suddenly I said, for no reason that I knew:

‘The banshee. It’s out there.’

‘That was a joke, Doug. You got to watch out for me.’

‘No,’ I said, looking at the window. ‘It’s there.’

John laughed. ‘You saw it, did you?’

‘It’s a young and lovely woman with a shawl on a cold night. A young woman with long black hair and great green eyes and a complexion like snow and a proud Phoenician prow of a nose. Sound like anyone you ever in your life knew, John?’

‘Thousands.’ John laughed more quietly now, looking to see the weight of my joke. ‘Hell—’

‘She’s waiting for you,’ I said. ‘Down at the bottom of the drive.’

John glanced, uncertainly, at the window.

‘That was the sound we heard,’ I said. ‘She described you or someone like you. Called you Willy, Will, William. But I knew it was you.’

John mused. ‘Young, you say, and beautiful, and out there right this moment …?’

‘The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’

‘Not carrying a knife—?’

‘Unarmed.’

John exhaled. ‘Well, then, I think I should just go out there and have a chat with her, eh, don’t you think?’

‘She’s waiting.’

He moved toward the front door.

‘Put on your coat, it’s a cold night,’ I said.

He was putting on his coat when we heard the sound from outside, very clear this time. The wail and then the sob and then the wail.

‘God,’ said John, his hand on the doorknob, not wanting to show the white feather in front of me. ‘She’s really there.’

He forced himself to turn the knob and open the door. The wind sighed in, bringing another faint wail with it.

John stood in the cold weather, peering down that long walk into the dark.

‘Wait!’ I cried, at the last moment.

John waited.

‘There’s one thing I haven’t told you,’ I said. ‘She’s out there, all right. And she’s walking. But … she’s dead.’

‘I’m not afraid,’ said John.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am. You’ll never come back. Much as I hate you right now, I can’t let you go. Shut the door, John.’

The sob again, and then the wail.

‘Shut the door.’

I reached over to knock his hand off the brass doorknob, but he held tight, cocked his head, looked at me and sighed.

‘You’re really good, kid. Almost as good as me. I’m putting you in my next film. You’ll be a star.’

Then he turned, stepped out into the cold night, and shut the door, quietly.

I waited until I heard his steps on the gravel path, then locked the door, and hurried through the house, putting out the lights. As I passed through the library, the wind mourned down the chimney and scattered the dark ashes of the London Times across the hearth.

I stood blinking at the ashes for a long moment, then shook myself, ran upstairs two at a time, banged open my tower room door, slammed it, undressed, and was in bed with the covers over my head when a town clock, far away, sounded one in the deep morning.

And my room was so high, so lost in the house and the sky, that no matter who or what tapped or knocked or banged at the door below, whispering and then begging and then screaming—

Who could possibly hear?




One for His Lordship, and One for the Road! (#ulink_13b6b147-2637-568f-a9b4-5138de64f691)


Someone’s born, and it may take the best part of a day for the news to ferment, percolate, or otherwise circumnavigate across the Irish meadows to the nearest town, and the nearest pub, which is Heeber Finn’s.

But let someone die, and a whole symphonic band lifts in the fields and hills. The grand ta-ta slams across country to ricochet off the pub slates and shake the drinkers to calamitous cries for: more!

So it was this hot summer day. The pub was no sooner opened, aired, and mobbed than Finn, at the door, saw a dust flurry up the road.

‘That’s Doone,’ muttered Finn.

Doone was the local anthem sprinter, fast at getting out of cinemas ahead of the damned national tune, and swift at bringing news.

‘And the news is bad,’ murmured Finn. ‘It’s that fast he’s running!’

‘Ha!’ cried Doone, as he leaped across the sill. ‘It’s done, and he’s dead!’

The mob at the bar turned.

Doone enjoyed his moment of triumph, making them wait.

‘Ah, God, here’s a drink. Maybe that’ll make you talk!’

Finn shoved a glass in Doone’s waiting paw. Doone wet his whistle and arranged the facts.

‘Himself,’ he gasped, at last. ‘Lord Kilgotten. Dead. And not an hour past!’

‘Ah, God,’ said one and all, quietly. ‘Bless the old man. A sweet nature. A dear chap.’

For Lord Kilgotten had wandered their fields, pastures, barns, and this bar all the years of their lives. His departure was like the Normans rowing back to France or the damned Brits pulling out of Bombay.

‘A fine man,’ said Finn, drinking to the memory, ‘even though he did spend two weeks a year in London.’

‘How old was he?’ asked Brannigan. ‘Eighty-five? Eighty-eight? We thought we might have buried him long since.’

‘Men like that,’ said Doone, ‘God has to hit with an axe to scare them off the place. Paris, now, we thought that might have slain him, years past, but no. Drink, that should have drowned him, but he swam for the shore, no, no. It was that teeny bolt of lightning in the field’s midst, an hour ago, and him under the tree picking strawberries with his nineteen-year-old secretary lady.’

‘Jesus,’ said Finn. ‘There’s no strawberries this time of year. It was her hit him with a bolt of fever. Burned to a crisp!’

That fired off a twenty-one-gun salute of laughs that hushed itself down when they considered the subject and more townsfolk arrived to breathe the air and bless himself.

‘I wonder,’ mused Heeber Finn, at last, in a voice that would make the Valhalla gods sit still at table, and not scratch, ‘I wonder. What’s to become of all that wine? The wine, that is, which Lord Kilgotten has stashed in barrels and bins, by the quarts and the tons, by the scores and precious thousands in his cellars and attics, and, who knows, under his bed?’

‘Aye,’ said everyone, stunned, suddenly remembering. ‘Aye. Sure. What?’

‘It has been left, no doubt, to some damn Yank driftabout cousin or nephew, corrupted by Rome, driven mad by Paris, who’ll jet in tomorrow, who’ll seize and drink, grab and run, and Kilcock and us left beggared and buggered on the road behind!’ said Doone, all in one breath.

‘Aye.’ Their voices, like muffled dark velvet drums, marched toward the night. ‘Aye.’

‘There are no relatives!’ said Finn. ‘No dumb Yank nephews or dimwit nieces falling out of gondolas in Venice, but swimming this way. I have made it my business to know.’

Finn waited. It was his moment now. All stared. All leaned to hear his mighty proclamation.

‘Why not, I been thinking, if Kilgotten, by God, left all ten thousand bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux to the citizens of the loveliest town in Eire? To us!’

There was an antic uproar of comment on this, cut across when the front doorflaps burst wide and Finn’s wife, who rarely visited the sty, stepped in, glared around and snapped.

‘Funeral’s in an hour!’

‘An hour?’ cried Finn. ‘Why, he’s only just cold—’

‘Noon’s the time,’ said the wife, growing taller the more she looked at this dreadful tribe. ‘The doc and the priest have just come from the Place. Quick funerals was his lordship’s will. “Uncivilized,” said Father Kelly, “and no hole dug.” “But there is!” said the Doc. “Hanrahan was supposed to die yesterday but took on a fit of mean and survived the night. I treated and treated him, but the man persists! Meanwhile, there’s his hole, unfilled. Kilgotten can have it, dirt and headstone.” All’s invited. Move your bums!’

The double-wing doors whiffled shut. The mystic woman was gone.

‘A funeral!’ cried Doone, prepared to sprint.

‘No!’ Finn beamed. ‘Get out. Pub’s closed. A wake!’

‘Even Christ,’ gasped Doone, mopping the sweat from his brow, ‘wouldn’t climb down off the cross to walk on a day like this.’

‘The heat,’ said Mulligan, ‘is intolerable.’

Coats off, they trudged up the hill, past the Kilgotten gatehouse, to encounter the town priest, Father Padraic Kelly, doing the same. He had all but his collar off, and was beet faced in the bargain.

‘It’s hell’s own day,’ he agreed, ‘none of us will keep!’

‘Why all the rush?’ said Finn, matching fiery stride for stride with the holy man. ‘I smell a rat. What’s up?’

‘Aye,’ said the priest. ‘There was a secret codicil in the will—’

‘I knew it!’ said Finn.

‘What?’ asked the crowd, fermenting close behind in the sun.

‘It would have caused a riot if it got out,’ was all Father Kelly would say, his eyes on the graveyard gates. ‘You’ll find out at the penultimate moment.’

‘Is that the moment before or the moment after the end, Father?’ asked Doone, innocently.

‘Ah, you’re so dumb you’re pitiful,’ sighed the priest. ‘Get your ass through that gate. Don’t fall in the hole!’

Doone did just that. The others followed, their faces assuming a darker tone as they passed through. The sun, as if to observe this, moved behind a cloud, and a sweet breeze came up for some moment of relief.

‘There’s the hole.’ The priest nodded. ‘Line up on both sides of the path, for God’s sake, and fix your ties, if you have some, and check your flies, above all. Let’s run a nice show for Kilgotten, and here he comes!’

And here, indeed, came Lord Kilgotten, in a box carried on the planks of one of his farm wagons, a simple good soul to be sure, and behind that wagon, a procession of other vehicles, cars, trucks that stretched half down the hill in the now once more piercing light.

‘What a procession!’ cried Finn.

‘I never seen the like!’ cried Doone.

‘Shut up,’ said the priest, politely.

‘My God,’ said Finn. ‘Do you see the coffin?’

‘We see, Finn, we see!’ gasped all.

For the coffin, trundling by, was beautifully wrought, finely nailed together with silver and gold nails, but the special strange wood of it?

Plankings from wine-crates, staves from boxes that had sailed from France only to collide and sink in Lord Kilgotten’s cellars!

A storm of exhalations swept the men from Finn’s pub. They toppled on their heels. They seized each other’s elbows.

‘You know the words, Finn,’ whispered Doone. ‘Tell us the names!’

Finn eyed the coffin made of vintage shipping crates, and at last exhaled:

‘Pull out my tongue and jump on it. Look! There’s Château Lafite Rothschild, nineteen seventy. Château-neuf du Pape, “sixty-eight! Upside down, that label, Le Corton! Downside up: La Lagune! What style, my God, what class! I wouldn’t so much mind being buried in burned-stamp-labeled wood like that, myself!’

‘I wonder,’ mused Doone, ‘can he read the labels from inside?’

‘Put a sock in it,’ muttered the priest. ‘Here comes the rest!’

If the body in the box was not enough to pull clouds over the sun, this second arrival caused an even greater ripple of uneasiness to oil the sweating men.

‘It was as if,’ Doone recalled, later, ‘someone had slipped, fallen in the grave, broken an ankle, and spoiled the whole afternoon!’

For the last part of the procession was a series of cars and trucks ramshackle-loaded with French vineyard crates, and finally a great old brewery wagon from early Guinness days, drawn by a team of proud white horses, draped in black, and sweating with the surprise they drew behind.

‘I will be damned,’ said Finn. ‘Lord Kilgotten’s brought his own wake with him!’

‘Hurrah!’ was the cry. ‘What a dear soul.’

‘He must’ve known the day would ignite a nun, or kindle a priest, and our tongues on our chests!’

‘Gangway! Let it pass!’

The men stood aside as all the wagons, carrying strange labels from southern France and northern Italy, making tidal sounds of bulked liquids, lumbered into the churchyard.

‘Someday,’ whispered Doone, ‘we must raise a statue to Kilgotten, a philosopher of friends!’

‘Pull up your socks,’ said the priest. ‘It’s too soon to tell. For here comes something worse than an undertaker!’

‘What could be worse?’

With the last of the wine wagons drawn up about the grave, a single man strode up the road, hat on, coat buttoned, cuffs properly shot, shoes polished against all reason, mustache waxed and cool, unmelted, a prim case like a lady’s purse tucked under his clenched arm, and about him an air of the ice house, a thing fresh born from a snowy vault, tongue like an icicle, stare like a frozen pond.

‘Jesus,’ said Finn.

‘It’s a lawyer!’ said Doone.

All stood aside.

The lawyer, for that is what it was, strode past like Moses as the Red Sea obeyed, or King Louis on a stroll, or the haughtiest tart on Piccadilly: choose one.

‘It’s Kilgotten’s law,’ hissed Muldoon. ‘I seen him stalking Dublin like the Apocalypse. With a lie for a name: Clement! Half-ass Irish, full-ass Briton. The worst!’

‘What can be worse than death?’ someone whispered.

‘We,’ murmured the priest, ‘shall soon see.’

‘Gentlemen!’

A voice called. The mob turned.

Lawyer Clement, at the rim of the grave, took the prim briefcase from under his arm, opened it, and drew forth a symboled and ribboned document, the beauty of which bugged the eye and rammed and sank the heart.

‘Before the obsequies,’ he said. ‘Before Father Kelly orates, I have a message, this codicil in Lord Kilgotten’s will, which I shall read aloud.’

‘I bet it’s the eleventh Commandment,’ murmured the priest, eyes down.

‘What would the eleventh Commandment be?’ asked Doone, scowling.

‘Why not: “THOU SHALT SHUT UP AND LISTEN”’ said the priest. ‘Ssh.’

For the lawyer was reading from his ribboned document and his voice floated on the hot summer wind, like this:

‘“And whereas my wines are the finest—”’

‘They are that!’ said Finn.

‘“—and whereas the greatest labels from across the world fill my cellars, and whereas the people of this town, Kilcock, do not appreciate such things, but prefer the – er – hard stuff …”’

‘Who says?!’ cried Doone.

‘Back in your ditch,’ warned the priest, sotto voce.

‘“I do hereby proclaim and pronounce,”’ read the lawyer, with a great smarmy smirk of satisfaction, ‘“that contrary to the old adage, a man can indeed take it with him. And I so order, write, and sign this codicil to my last will and testament in what might well be the final month of my life.” Signed, William, Lord Kilgotten. Last month, on the seventh.’

The lawyer stopped, folded the paper and stood, eyes shut, waiting for the thunderclap that would follow the lightning bolt.

‘Does that mean,’ asked Doone, wincing, ‘that the lord intends to—?’

Someone pulled a cork out of a bottle.

It was like a fusillade that shot all the men in their tracks.

It was only, of course, the good lawyer Clement, at the rim of the damned grave, corkscrewing and yanking open the plug from a bottle of La Vieille Ferme ’73!

‘Is this the wake, then?’ Doone laughed, nervously.

‘It is not,’ mourned the priest.

With a smile of summer satisfaction, Clement, the lawyer, poured the wine, glug by glug, down into the grave, over the wine-carton box in which Lord Kilgotten’s thirsty bones were hid.

‘Hold on! He’s gone mad! Grab the bottle! No!’

There was a vast explosion, like that from the crowd’s throat that has just seen its soccer champion slain midfield!

‘Wait! My God!’

‘Quick. Run get the lord!’

‘Dumb,’ muttered Finn. ‘His lordship’s in that box, and his wine is in the grave!’

Stunned by this unbelievable calamity, the mob could only stare as the last of the first bottle cascaded down into the holy earth.

Clement handed the bottle to Doone, and uncorked a second.

‘Now, wait just one moment!’ cried the voice of the Day of Judgment.

And it was, of course, Father Kelly, who stepped forth, bringing his higher law with him.

‘Do you mean to say,’ cried the priest, his cheeks blazing, his eyes smoldering with bright sun, ‘you are going to dispense all that stuff in Kilgotten’s pit?’

‘That,’ said the lawyer, ‘is my intent.’

He began to pour the second bottle. But the priest stiff-armed him, to tilt the wine back.

‘And do you mean for us to just stand and watch your blasphemy?!’

‘At a wake, yes, that would be the polite thing to do.’ The lawyer moved to pour again.

‘Just hold it, right there!’ The priest stared around, up, down, at his friends from the pub, at Finn their spiritual leader, at the sky where God hid, at the earth where Kilgotten lay playing Mum’s the Word, and at last at lawyer Clement and his damned, ribboned codicil. ‘Beware, man, you are provoking civil strife!’

‘Yah!’ cried everyone, atilt on the air, fists at their sides, grinding and ungrinding invisible rocks.

‘What year is this wine?’ Ignoring them, Clement calmly eyed the label in his hands. ‘Le Corton. Nineteen-seventy. The best wine in the finest year. Excellent.’ He stepped free of the priest and let the wine spill.

‘Do something!’ shouted Doone. ‘Have you no curse handy?’

‘Priests do not curse,’ said Father Kelly. ‘But, Finn, Doone, Hannahan, Burke. Jump! Knock heads.’

The priest marched off and the men rushed after to knock their heads in a bent-down ring and a great whisper with the father. In the midst of the conference the priest stood up to see what Clement was doing. The lawyer was on his third bottle.

‘Quick!’ cried Doone. ‘He’ll waste the lot!’

A fourth cork popped, to another outcry from Finn’s team, the Thirsty Warriors, as they would later dub themselves.

‘Finn!’ the priest was heard to say, deep in the heads-together, ‘you’re a genius!’

‘I am!’ agreed Finn, and the huddle broke and the priest hustled back to the grave.

‘Would you mind, sir,’ he said, grabbing the bottle out of the lawyer’s grip, ‘reading one last time, that damned codicil?’

‘Pleasure.’ And it was. The lawyer’s smile flashed as he fluttered the ribbons and snapped the will.

‘“—that contrary to the old adage, a man can indeed take it with him—”’

He finished and folded the paper, and tried another smile, which worked to his own satisfaction, at least. He reached for the bottle confiscated by the priest.

‘Hold on.’ Father Kelly stepped back. He gave a look to the crowd who waited on each fine word. ‘Let me ask you a question, Mr Lawyer, sir. Does it anywhere say there just how the wine is to get into the grave?’

‘Into the grave is into the grave,’ said the lawyer.

‘As long as it finally gets there, that’s the important thing, do we agree?’ asked the priest, with a strange smile.

‘I can pour it over my shoulder, or toss it in the air,’ said the lawyer, ‘as long as it lights to either side or atop the coffin, when it comes down, all’s well.’

‘Good!’ exclaimed the priest. ‘Men! One squad here. One battalion over there. Line up! Doone!’

‘Sir?’

‘Spread the rations. Jump!’

‘Sir!’ Doone jumped.

To a great uproar of men bustling and lining up.

‘I,’ said the lawyer, ‘am going to find the police!’

‘Which is me,’ said a man at the far side of the mob, ‘Officer Bannion. Your complaint?’

Stunned, lawyer Clement could only blink and at last in a squashed voice, bleat: ‘I’m leaving.’

‘You’ll not make it past the gate alive,’ said Doone, cheerily.

‘I,’ said the lawyer, ‘am staying. But—’

‘But?’ inquired Father Kelly, as the corks were pulled and the corkscrew flashed brightly along the line.

‘You go against the letter of the law!’

‘No,’ explained the priest, calmly, ‘we but shift the punctuation, cross new t’s, dot new i’s.’

‘Tenshun!’ cried Finn, for all was in readiness.

On both sides of the grave, the men waited, each with a full bottle of vintage Château Lafite Rothschild or Le Corton or Chianti.

‘Do we drink it all?’ asked Doone.

‘Shut your gab,’ observed the priest. He eyed the sky. ‘Oh, Lord.’ The men bowed their heads and grabbed off their caps. ‘Lord, for what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful. And thank you, Lord, for the genius of Heeber Finn, who thought of this—’

‘Aye,’ said all, gently.

‘Twas nothin’,’ said Finn, blushing.

‘And bless this wine, which may circumnavigate along the way, but finally wind up where it should be going. And if today and tonight won’t do, and all the stuff not drunk, bless us as we return each night until the deed is done and the soul of the wine’s at rest.’

‘Ah, you do speak dear,’ murmured Doone.

‘Sh!’ hissed all.

‘And in the spirit of this time, Lord, should we not ask our good lawyer friend Clement, in the fullness of his heart, to join with us?’

Someone slipped a bottle of the best in the lawyer’s hands. He seized it, lest it should break.

‘And finally, Lord, bless the old Lord Kilgotten, whose years of saving-up now help us in this hour of putting-away. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ said all.

‘Tenshun!’ cried Finn.

The men stiffened and lifted their bottles.

‘One for his lordship,’ said the priest.

‘And,’ added Finn, ‘one for the road!’

There was a dear sound of drinking and, years later, Doone remembered, a glad sound of laughter from the box in the grave.

‘It’s all right,’ said the priest, in amaze.

‘Yes.’ The lawyer nodded, having heard. ‘It’s all right.’




The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair (#ulink_fc651fa0-2096-5a70-bbda-98dba5410550)


He called her Stanley, she called him Ollie.

That was the beginning, that was the end, of what we will call the Laurel and Hardy love affair.

She was twenty-five, he was thirty-two when they met at one of those dumb cocktail parties where everyone wonders what they are doing there. But no one goes home, so everyone drinks too much and lies about how grand a late afternoon it all was.

They did not, as often happens, see each other across a crowded room, and if there was romantic music to background their collision, it couldn’t be heard. For everyone was talking at one person and staring at someone else.

They were, in fact, ricocheting through a forest of people, but finding no shade trees. He was on his way for a needed drink, she was eluding a love-sick stranger, when they locked paths in the exact center of the fruitless mob. They dodged left and right a few times, then laughed and he, on impulse, seized his tie and twiddled it at her, wiggling his fingers. Instantly, smiling, she lifted her hand to pull the top of her hair into a frowzy tassel, blinking and looking as if she had been struck on the head.

‘Stan!’ he cried, in recognition.

‘Ollie!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Why don’t you do something to help me!’ he exclaimed, making wide fat gestures.

They grabbed each other’s arms, laughing again.

‘I—’ she said, and her face brightened even more. ‘I – I know the exact place, not two miles from here, where Laurel and Hardy, in nineteen thirty, carried that piano crate up and down one hundred and fifty steps!’

‘Well,’ he cried, ‘let’s get out of here!’

His car door slammed, his car engine roared.

Los Angeles raced by in late afternoon sunlight.

He braked the car where she told him to park. ‘Here!’

‘I can’t believe it,’ he murmured, not moving. He peered around at the sunset sky. Lights were coming on all across Los Angeles, down the hill. He nodded. ‘Are those the steps?’

‘All one hundred and fifty of them.’ She climbed out of the open-topped car. ‘Come on, Ollie.’

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘Stan.’

They walked over to the bottom of yet another hill and gazed up along the steep incline of concrete steps toward the sky. The faintest touch of wetness rimmed his eyes. She was quick to pretend not to notice, but she took his elbow. Her voice was wonderfully quiet:

‘Go on up,’ she said. ‘Go on. Go.’

She gave him a tender push.

He started up the steps, counting, and with each half-whispered count, his voice took on an extra decibel of joy. By the time he reached fifty-seven he was a boy playing a wondrous old-new game, and he was lost in time, and whether he was carrying the piano up the hill or whether it was chasing him down, he could not say.

‘Hold it!’ he heard her call, far away, ‘right there!’

He held still, swaying on step fifty-eight, smiling wildly, as if accompanied by proper ghosts, and turned.

‘Okay,’ she called, ‘now come back down.’

He started down, color in his cheeks and a peculiar suffering of happiness in his chest. He could hear the piano following now.

‘Hold it right there!’

She had a camera in her hands. Seeing it, his right hand flew instinctively to his tie to flutter it on the evening air.

‘Now, me!’ she shouted, and raced up to hand him the camera. And he marched down and looked up and there she was, doing the thin shrug and the puzzled and hopeless face of Stan baffled by life but loving it all. He clicked the shutter, wanting to stay here forever.

She came slowly down the steps and peered into his face.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘you’re crying.’

She placed her thumbs under his eyes to press the tears away. She tasted the result. ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Real tears.’

He looked at her eyes, which were almost as wet as his.

‘Another fine mess you’ve got us in,’ he said.

‘Oh, Ollie,’ she said.

‘Oh, Stan,’ he said.

He kissed her, gently.

And then he said:

‘Are we going to know each other forever?’

‘Forever,’ she said.

And that was how the long love affair began.

They had real names, of course, but those don’t matter, for Laurel and Hardy always seemed the best thing to call themselves.

For the simple fact was that she was fifteen pounds underweight and he was always trying to get her to add a few pounds. And he was twenty pounds overweight and she was always trying to get him to take off more than his shoes. But it never worked and was finally a joke, the best kind, which wound up being:

‘You’re Stan, no two ways about it, and I’m Ollie, let’s face it. And, oh God, dear young woman, let’s enjoy the mess, the wonderful mess, all the while we’re in!’

It was, then, while it lasted, and it lasted some while, a French parfait, an American perfection, a wildness from which they would never recover to the end of their lives.

From that twilight hour on the piano stairs on, their days were long, heedless, and full of that amazing laughter that paces the beginning and the run-along rush of any great love affair. They only stopped laughing long enough to kiss and only stopped kissing long enough to laugh at how odd and miraculous it was to find themselves with no clothes to wear in the middle of a bed as vast as life and as beautiful as morning.

And sitting there in the middle of warm whiteness, he shut his eyes and shook his head and declared, pompously:

‘I have nothing to say!’

‘Yes, you do!’ she cried. ‘Say it!’

And he said it and they fell off the edge of the earth.

Their first year was pure myth and fable, which would grow outsize when remembered thirty years on. They went to see new films and old films, but mainly Stan and Ollie. They memorized all the best scenes and shouted them back and forth as they drove around midnight Los Angeles. He spoiled her by treating her childhood growing up in Hollywood as very special, and she spoiled him by pretending that his yesteryear on roller skates out front of the studios was not in the past but right now.

She proved it one night. On a whim she asked where he had roller-skated as a boy and collided with W. C. Fields. Where had he asked Fields for his autograph, and where was it that Fields signed the book, handed it back, and cried, ‘There you are, you little son-of-a-bitch!’

‘Drive me there,’ she said.

And at ten o’clock that night they got out of the car in front of Paramount Studio and he pointed to the pavement near the gate and said, ‘He stood there,’ and she gathered him in her arms and kissed him and said, gently, ‘Now where was it you had your picture taken with Marlene Dietrich?’

He walked her fifty feet across the street from the studio. ‘In the late afternoon sun,’ he said, ‘Marlene stood here.’ And she kissed him again, longer this time, and the moon rising like an obvious magic trick, filling the street in front of the empty studio. She let her soul flow over into him like a tipped fountain, and he received it and gave it back and was glad.

‘Now,’ she said, quietly, ‘where was it you saw Fred Astaire in nineteen thirty-five and Ronald Colman in nineteen thirty-seven and Jean Harlow in nineteen thirty-six?’

And he drove her to those three different places all around Hollywood until midnight and they stood and she kissed him as if it would never end.

And that was the first year. And during that year they went up and down those long piano steps at least once a month and had champagne picnics halfway up, and discovered an incredible thing:

‘I think it’s our mouths,’ he said. ‘Until I met you, I never knew I had a mouth. Yours is the most amazing in the world, and it makes me feel as if mine were amazing, too. Were you ever really kissed before I kissed you?’

‘Never!’

‘Nor was I. To have lived this long and not known mouths.’

‘Dear mouth,’ she said, ‘shut up and kiss.’

But then at the end of the first year they discovered an even more incredible thing. He worked at an advertising agency and was nailed in one place. She worked at a travel agency and would soon be flying everywhere. Both were astonished they had never noticed before. But now that Vesuvius had erupted and the fiery dust was beginning to settle, they sat and looked at each other one night and she said, faintly:

‘Good-bye …’

‘What?’ he asked.

‘I can see good-bye coming,’ she said.

He looked at her face and it was not sad like Stan in the films, but just sad like herself.

‘I feel like the ending of that Hemingway novel where two people ride along in the late day and say how it would be if they could go on forever but they know now they won’t,’ she said.

‘Stan,’ he said, ‘this is no Hemingway novel and this can’t be the end of the world. You’ll never leave me.’

But it was a question, not a declaration and suddenly she moved and he blinked at her and said:

‘What are you doing down there?’

‘Nut,’ she said, ‘I’m kneeling on the floor and I’m asking for your hand. Marry me, Ollie. Come away with me to France. I’ve got a new job in Paris. No, don’t say anything. Shut up. No one has to know I’ve got the money this year and will support you while you write the great American novel—’

‘But—’ he said.

‘You’ve got your portable typewriter, a ream of paper, and me. Say it, Ollie, will you come? Hell, don’t marry me, we’ll live in sin, but fly with me, yes?’

‘And watch us go to hell in a year and bury us forever?’

‘Are you that afraid, Ollie? Don’t you believe in me or you or anything? God, why are men such cowards, and why the hell do you have such thin skins and are afraid of a woman like a ladder to lean on. Listen, I’ve got things to do and you’re coming with me. I can’t leave you here, you’ll fall down those damn stairs. But if I have to, I will. I want everything now, not tomorrow. That means you, Paris, and my job. Your novel will take time, but you’ll do it. Now, do you do it here and feel sorry for yourself, or do we live in a cold-water walk-up flat in the Latin Quarter a long way off from here? This is my one and only offer, Ollie. I’ve never proposed before, I won’t ever propose again, it’s hard on my knees. Well?’

‘Have we had this conversation before?’ he said.

‘A dozen times in the last year, but you never listened, you were hopeless.’

‘No, in love and helpless.’

‘You’ve got one minute to make up your mind. Sixty seconds.’ She was staring at her wristwatch.

‘Get up off the floor,’ he said, embarrassed.

‘If I do, it’s out the door and gone,’ she said. ‘Forty-nine seconds to go, Ollie.’

‘Stan,’ he groaned.

‘Thirty,’ she read her watch. ‘Twenty. I’ve got one knee off the floor. Ten. I’m beginning to get the other knee up. Five. One.’

And she was standing on her feet.

‘What brought this on?’ he asked.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I am heading for the door. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve thought about it more than I dared even notice. We are very special wondrous people, Ollie, and I don’t think our like will ever come again in the world, at least not to us, or I’m lying to myself and I probably am. But I must go and you are free to come along, but can’t face it or don’t know it. And now—’ she reached out. ‘My hand is on the door and—’

‘And?’ he said, quietly.

‘I’m crying,’ she said.

He started to get up but she shook her head.

‘No, don’t. If you touch me I’ll cave in, and to hell with that. I’m going. But once a year will be forbearance day, or forgiveness day or whatever in hell you want to call it. Once a year I’ll show up at our flight of steps, no piano, same hour, same time as that night when we first went there and if you’re there to meet me I’ll kidnap you or you me, but don’t bring along and show me your damn bank balance or give me any of your lip.’

‘Stan,’ he said.

‘My God,’ she mourned.

‘What?’

‘This door is heavy. I can’t move it.’ She wept. ‘There. It’s moving. There.’ She wept more. ‘I’m gone.’

The door shut.

‘Stan!’ He ran to the door and grabbed the knob. It was wet. He raised his fingers to his mouth and tasted the salt, then opened the door.

The hall was already empty. The air where she had passed was just coming back together. Thunder threatened when the two halves met. There was a promise of rain.

He went back to the steps on October 4 every year for three years, but she wasn’t there. And then he forgot for two years but in the autumn of the sixth year, he remembered and went back in the late sunlight and walked up the stairs because he saw something halfway up and it was a bottle of good champagne with a ribbon and a note on it, delivered by someone, and the note read:

‘Ollie, dear Ollie. Date remembered. But in Paris. Mouth’s not the same, but happily married. Love. Stan.’

And after that, every October he simply did not go to visit the stairs. The sound of that piano rushing down that hillside, he knew, would catch him and take him along to where he did not know.

And that was the end, or almost the end, of the Laurel and Hardy love affair.

There was, by amiable accident, a final meeting.

Traveling through France fifteen years later, he was walking on the Champs Elysées at twilight one afternoon with his wife and two daughters, when he saw this handsome woman coming the other way, escorted by a very sober-looking older man and a very handsome dark-haired boy of twelve, obviously her son.

As they passed, the same smile lit both their faces in the same instant.

He twiddled his necktie at her.

She tousled her hair at him.

They did not stop. They kept going. But he heard her call back along the Champs Elysées, the last words he would ever hear her say:

‘Another fine mess you’ve got us in!’ And then she added the old, the familiar name by which he had gone in the years of their love.

And she was gone and his daughters and wife looked at him and one daughter said, ‘Did that lady call you Ollie?’

‘What lady?’ he said.

‘Dad,’ said the other daughter, leaning in to peer at his face. ‘You’re crying.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you are. Isn’t he, Mom?’

‘Your papa,’ said his wife, ‘as you well know, cries at telephone books.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘just one hundred and fifty steps and a piano. Remind me to show you girls, someday.’

They walked on and he turned and looked back a final time. The woman with her husband and son turned at that very moment. Maybe he saw her mouth pantomime the words, So long, Ollie. Maybe he didn’t. He felt his own mouth move, in silence: So long, Stan.

And they walked in opposite directions along the Champs Elysées in the late light of an October sun.




Unterderseaboat Doktor (#ulink_1c2523ff-7b29-535a-880d-60f97e899c9a)


The incredible event occurred during my third visit to Gustav Von Seyfertitz, my foreign psychoanalyst.

I should have guessed at the strange explosion before it came.

After all, my alienist, truly alien, had the coincidental name, Von Seyfertitz, of the tall, lean, aquiline, menacing, and therefore beautiful actor who played the high priest in the 1935 film She.

In She, the wondrous villain waved his skeleton fingers, hurled insults, summoned sulfured flames, destroyed slaves, and knocked the world into earthquakes.

After that, ‘At Liberty,’ he could be seen riding the Hollywood Boulevard trolley cars as calm as a mummy, as quiet as an unwired telephone pole.

Where was I? Ah, yes!

It was my third visit to my psychiatrist. He had called that day and cried, ‘Douglas, you stupid goddamn son of a bitch, it’s time for beddy-bye!’

Beddy-bye was, of course, his couch of pain and humiliation where I lay writhing in agonies of assumed Jewish guilt and Northern Baptist stress as he from time to time muttered, ‘A fruitcake remark!’ or ‘Dumb!’ or ‘If you ever do that again, I’ll kill you!’

As you can see, Gustav Von Seyfertitz was a most unusual mine specialist. Mine? Yes. Our problems are land mines in our heads. Step on them! Shock-troop therapy, he once called it, searching for words. ‘Blitzkrieg?’ I offered.

‘Ja!’ He grinned his shark grin. ‘That’s it!’

Again, this was my third visit to his strange, metallic-looking room with a most odd series of locks on a roundish door. Suddenly, as I was maundering and treading dark waters, I heard his spine stiffen behind me. He gasped a great death rattle, sucked air, and blew it out in a yell that curled and bleached my hair:

‘Dive! Dive!’

I dove.

Thinking that the room might be struck by a titanic iceberg, I fell, to scuttle beneath the lion-claw-footed couch.

‘Dive!’ cried the old man.

‘Dive?’ I whispered, and looked up.

To see a submarine periscope, all polished brass, slide up to vanish in the ceiling.

Gustav Von Seyfertitz stood pretending not to notice me, the sweat-oiled leather couch, or the vanished brass machine. Very calmly, in the fashion of Conrad Veidt in Casablanca, or Erich Von Stroheim, the manservant in Sunset Boulevard … he …

… lit a cigarette and let two calligraphic dragon plumes of smoke write themselves (his initials?) on the air.

‘You were saying?’ he said.

‘No.’ I stayed on the floor. ‘You were saying. Dive?’

‘I did not say that,’ he purred.

‘Beg pardon, you said, very clearly – Dive!’

‘Not possible.’ He exhaled two more scrolled dragon plumes. ‘You hallucinate. Why do you stare at the ceiling?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘unless I am further hallucinating, buried in that valve lock up there is a nine-foot length of German Leica brass periscope!’

‘This boy is incredible, listen to him,’ muttered Von Seyfertitz to his alter ego, which was always a third person in the room when he analyzed. When he was not busy exhaling his disgust with me, he tossed asides at himself. ‘How many martinis did you have at lunch?’

‘Don’t hand me that, Von Seyfertitz. I know the difference between a sex symbol and a periscope. That ceiling, one minute ago, swallowed a long brass pipe, yes!?’

Von Seyfertitz glanced at his large, one-pound-size Christmas watch, saw that I still had thirty minutes to go, sighed, threw his cigarette down, squashed it with a polished boot, then clicked his heels.

Have you ever heard the whack when a real pro like Jack Nicklaus hits a ball? Bamm. A hand grenade!

That was the sound my Germanic friend’s boots made as he knocked them together in a salute.

Crrrack!

‘Gustav Mannerheim Auschlitz Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, at your service!’ He lowered his voice. ‘Unterderseaboat—’

I thought he might say ‘Doktor.’ But:

‘Unterderseaboat Captain!’

I scrambled off the floor.

Another crrrack and—

The periscope slid calmly down out of the ceiling, the most beautiful Freudian cigar I had ever seen.

‘No!’ I gasped.

‘Have I ever lied to you?’

‘Many times!’

‘But’ – he shrugged—‘little white ones.’

He stepped to the periscope, slapped two handles in place, slammed one eye shut, and crammed the other angrily against the viewpiece, turning the periscope in a slow roundabout of the room, the couch, and me.

‘Fire one,’ he ordered.

I almost heard the torpedo leave its tube.

‘Fire two!’ he said.

And a second soundless and invisible bomb motored on its way to infinity.

Struck midships, I sank to the couch.

‘You, you!’ I said mindlessly. ‘It!’ I pointed at the brass machine. ‘This!’ I touched the couch. ‘Why?’

‘Sit down,’ said Von Seyfertitz.

‘I am.’

‘Lie down.’

‘I’d rather not,’ I said uneasily.

Von Seyfertitz turned the periscope so its topmost eye, raked at an angle, glared at me. It had an uncanny resemblance, in its glassy coldness, to his own fierce hawk’s gaze.

His voice, from behind the periscope, echoed.

‘So you want to know, eh, how Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, suffered to leave the cold ocean depths, depart his dear North Sea ship, flee his destroyed and beaten fatherland, to become the Unterderseaboat Doktor—’

‘Now that you mention—’

‘I never mention! I declare. And my declarations are sea-battle commands.’

‘So I noticed …’

‘Shut up. Sit back—’

‘Not just now …’ I said uneasily.

His heels knocked as he let his right hand spider to his top coat pocket and slip forth yet a fourth eye with which to fasten me: a bright, thin monocle which he screwed into his stare as if decupping a boiled egg. I winced. For now the monocle was part of his glare and regarded me with cold fire.

‘Why the monocle?’ I said.

‘Idiot! It is to cover my good eye so that neither eye can see and my intuition is free to work!’

‘Oh,’ I said.

And he began his monologue. And as he talked I realized his need had been pent up, capped, for years, so he talked on and on, forgetting me.

And it was during this monologue that a strange thing occurred. I rose slowly to my feet as the Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz circled, his long, slim cigar printing smoke cumuli on the air, which he read like white Rorschach blots.

With each implantation of his foot, a word came out, and then another, in a sort of plodding grammar. Sometimes he stopped and stood poised with one leg raised and one word stopped in his mouth, to be turned on his tongue and examined. Then the shoe went down, the noun slid forth and the verb and object in good time.

Until at last, circling, I found myself in a chair, stunned, for I saw:

Herr Doktor Von Seyfertitz stretched on his couch, his long spider fingers laced on his chest.

‘It has been no easy thing to come forth on land,’ he sibilated. ‘Some days I was the jellyfish, frozen. Others, the shore-strewn octopi, at least with tentacles, or the crayfish sucked back into my skull. But I have built my spine, year on year, and now I walk among the land men and survive.’

He paused to take a trembling breath, then continued:

‘I moved in stages from the depths to a houseboat, to a wharf bungalow, to a shore-tent and then back to a canal in a city and at last to New York, an island surrounded by water, eh? But where, where, in all this, I wondered, would a submarine commander find his place, his work, his mad love and activity?

‘It was one afternoon in a building with the world’s longest elevator that it struck me like a hand grenade in the ganglion. Going down, down, down, other people crushed around me, and the numbers descending and the floors whizzing by the glass windows, rushing by flicker-flash, flicker-flash, conscious, subconscious, id, ego-id, life, death, lust, kill, lust, dark, light, plummeting, falling, ninety, eighty, fifty, lower depths, high exhilaration, id, ego, id, until this shout blazed from my raw throat in a great all-accepting, panic-manic shriek:

‘“Dive! Dive!”’

‘I remember,’ I said.

‘“Dive!” I screamed so loudly that my fellow passengers, in shock, peed merrily. Among stunned faces, I stepped out of the lift to find one-sixteenth of an inch of pee on the floor. “Have a nice day!” I said, jubilant with self-discovery, then ran to self-employment, to hang a shingle and next my periscope, carried from the mutilated, divested, castrated unterderseaboat all these years. Too stupid to see in it my psychological future and my final downfall, my beautiful artifact, the brass genitalia of psychotic research, the Von Seyfertitz Mark Nine Periscope!’

‘That’s quite a story,’ I said.

‘Damn right,’ snorted the alienist, eyes shut. ‘And more than half of it true. Did you listen? What have you learned?’

‘That more submarine captains should become psychiatrists.’

‘So? I have often wondered: did Nemo really die when his submarine was destroyed? Or did he run off to become my great-grandfather and were his psychological bacteria passed along until I came into the world, thinking to command the ghostlike mechanisms that haunt the under-tides, to wind up with the fifty-minute vaudeville routine in this sad, psychotic city?’

I got up and touched the fabulous brass symbol that hung like a scientific stalactite in mid-ceiling.

‘May I look?’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you.’ He only half heard me, lying in the midst of his depression as in a dark cloud.

‘It’s only a periscope—’

‘But a good cigar is a smoke.’

I remembered Sigmund Freud’s quote about cigars, laughed, and touched the periscope again.

‘Don’t!’ he said.

‘Well, you don’t actually use this for anything, do you? It’s just a remembrance of your past, from your last sub, yes?’

‘You think that?’ He sighed. ‘Look!’

I hesitated, then pasted one eye to the viewer, shut the other, and cried:

‘Oh, Jesus!’

‘I warned you!’ said Von Seyfertitz.

For they were there.

Enough nightmares to paper a thousand cinema screens. Enough phantoms to haunt ten thousand castle walls. Enough panics to shake forty cities into ruin.

My God, I thought, he could sell the film rights to this worldwide!

The first psychological kaleidoscope in history.

And in the instant another thought came: how much of that stuff in there is me? Or Von Seyfertitz? Or both? Are these strange shapes my maundering daymares, sneezed out in the past weeks? When I talked, eyes shut, did my mouth spray invisible founts of small beasts which, caught in the periscope chambers, grew outsize? Like the microscopic photos of those germs that hide in eyebrows and pores, magnified a million times to become elephants on Scientific American covers? Are these images from other lost souls trapped on that couch and caught in the submarine device, or leftovers from my eyelashes and psyche?

‘It’s worth millions!’ I cried. ‘Do you know what this is!?’

‘Collected spiders, Gila monsters, trips to the Moon without gossamer wings, iguanas, toads out of bad sisters’ mouths, diamonds out of good fairies’ ears, crippled shadow dancers from Bali, cut-string puppets from Geppetto’s attic, little-boy statues that pee white wine, sexual trapeze performers’ allez-oop, obscene finger-pantomimes, evil clown faces, gargoyles that talk when it rains and whisper when the wind rises, basement bins full of poisoned honey, dragonflies that sew up every fourteen-year-old’s orifices to keep them neat until they rip the sutures, aged eighteen. Towers with mad witches, garrets with mummies for lumber—’

He ran out of steam.

‘You get the general drift.’

‘Nuts,’ I said. ‘You’re bored. I could get you a five-million-dollar deal with Amalgamated Fruitcakes Inc. and the Sigmund F. Dreamboats, split three ways!’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Von Seyfertitz. ‘I am keeping myself busy, busy, so I won’t remember all the people I torpedoed, sank, drowned mid-Atlantic in 1944. I am not in the Amalgamated Fruitcake Cinema business. I only wish to keep myself occupied by paring fingernails, cleaning earwax, and erasing inkblots from odd beanbags like you. If I stop, I will fly apart. That periscope contains all and everything I have seen and known in the past forty years of observing pecans, cashews, and almonds. By staring at them I lose my own terrible life lost in the tides. If you won my periscope in some shoddy fly-by-night Hollywood strip poker, I would sink three times in my waterbed, never to be seen again. Have I shown you my waterbed? Three times as large as any pool. I do eighty laps asleep each night. Sometimes forty when I catnap noons. To answer your millionfold offer, no.’

And suddenly he shivered all over. His hands clutched at his heart.

‘My God!’ he shouted.

Too late, he was realizing he had let me step into his mind and life. Now he was on his feet, between me and the periscope, staring at it and me, as if we were both terrors.

‘You saw nothing in that! Nothing at all!’

‘I did!’

‘You lie! How could you be such a liar? Do you know what would happen if this got out, if you ran around making accusations—?

‘My God,’ he raved on, ‘if the world knew, if someone said—’ His words gummed shut in his mouth as if he were tasting the truth of what he said, as if he saw me for the first time and I was a gun fired full in his face. ‘I would be … laughed out of the city. Such a goddamn ridiculous … hey, wait a minute. You!’

It was as if he had slipped a devil mask over his face. His eyes grew wide. His mouth gaped.

I examined his face and saw murder. I sidled toward the door.

‘You wouldn’t say anything to anyone?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘How come you suddenly know everything about me?’

‘You told me!’

‘Yes,’ he admitted, dazed, looking around for a weapon.

‘Wait.’

‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d rather not.’

And I was out the door and down the hall, my knees jumping to knock my jaw.

‘Come back!’ cried Von Seyfertitz, behind me. ‘I must kill you!’

‘I was afraid of that!’

I reached the elevator first and by a miracle it flung wide its doors when I banged the Down button. I jumped in.

‘Say good-bye!’ cried Von Seyfertitz, raising his fist as if it held a bomb.

‘Good-bye!’ I said. The doors slammed.

I did not see Von Seyfertitz again for a year.

Meanwhile, I dined out often, not without guilt, telling friends, and strangers on street corners, of my collision with a submarine commander become phrenologist (he who feels your skull to count the beans).

So with my giving one shake of the ripe fruit tree, nuts fell. Overnight they brimmed the Baron’s lap to flood his bank account. His Grand Slam will be recalled at century’s end: appearances on Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, and Geraldo in one single cyclonic afternoon, with interchangeable hyperboles, positive-negative-positive every hour. There were Von Seyfertitz laser games and duplicates of his submarine periscope sold at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. With the superinducement of a half-million dollars, he force-fed and easily sold a bad book. Duplicates of the animalcules, lurks, and curious critters trapped in his brass viewer arose in pop-up coloring books, paste-on tattoos, and inkpad rubber-stamp nighmares at Beasts-R-Us.

I had hoped that all this would cause him to forgive and forget. No.

One noon a year and a month later, my doorbell rang and there stood Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, tears streaming down his cheeks.

‘How come I didn’t kill you that day?’ he mourned.

‘You didn’t catch me,’ I said.

‘Oh, ja. That was it.’

I looked into the old man’s rain-washed, tear-ravened face and said, ‘Who died?’

‘Me. Or is it I? Ah, to hell with it: me. You see before you,’ he grieved, ‘a creature who suffers from the Rumpelstiltskin Syndrome!’

‘Rumpel—’

‘—stiltskin! Two halves with a rip from chin to fly. Yank my forelock, go ahead! Watch me fall apart at the seam. Like zipping a psychotic zipper, I fall, two Herr Doktor Admirals for the sick price of one. And which is the Doktor who heals and which the sellout best-seller Admiral? It takes two mirrors to tell. Not to mention the smoke!’

He stopped and looked around, holding his head together with his hands.

‘Can you see the crack? Am I splitting again to become this crazy sailor who desires richness and fame, being sieved through the hands of crazed ladies with ruptured libidos? Suffering catfish, I call them! But take their money, spit, and spend! You should have such a year. Don’t laugh.’

‘I’m not laughing.’

‘Then cheer up while I finish. Can I lie down? Is that a couch? Too short. What do I do with my legs?’

‘Sit sidesaddle.’

Von Seyfertitz laid himself out with his legs draped over one side. ‘Hey, not bad. Sit behind. Don’t look over my shoulder. Avert your gaze. Neither smirk nor pull long faces as I get out the crazy-glue and paste Rumpel back with Stiltskin, the name of my next book, God help me. Damn you to hell, you and your damned periscope!’

‘Not mine. Yours. You wanted me to discover it that day. I suppose you had been whispering Dive, Dive, for years to patients, half asleep. But you couldn’t resist the loudest scream ever: Dive! That was your captain speaking, wanting fame and money enough to chock a horse show.’

‘God,’ murmured Von Seyfertitz, ‘how I hate it when you’re honest. Feeling better already. How much do I owe you?’

He arose.

‘Now we go kill the monsters instead of you.’

‘Monsters?’

‘At my office. If we can get in past the lunatics.’

‘You have lunatics outside as well as in, now?’

‘Have I ever lied to you?’

‘Often. But,’ I added, ‘little white ones.’

‘Come,’ he said.

We got out of the elevator to be confronted by a long line of worshipers and supplicants. There must have been seventy people strung out between the elevator and the Baron’s door, waiting with copies of books by Madame Blavatsky, Krishnamurti, and Shirley MacLaine under their arms. There was a roar like a suddenly opened furnace door when they saw the Baron. We beat it on the double and got inside his office before anyone could surge to follow.

‘See what you have done to me!’ Von Seyfertitz pointed.

The office walls were covered with expensive teak paneling. The desk was from Napoleon’s age, an exquisite Empire piece worth at least fifty thousand dollars. The couch was the best soft leather I had ever seen, and the two pictures on the wall were originals – a Renoir and a Monet. My God, millions! I thought.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘The beasts, you said. You’ll kill them, not me?’

The old man wiped his eyes with the back of one hand, then made a fist.

‘Yes!’ he cried, stepping up to the fine periscope, which reflected his face, madly distorted, in its elongated shape. ‘Like this. Thus and so!’

And before I could prevent, he gave the brass machine a terrific slap with his hand and then a blow and another blow and another, with both fists, cursing. Then he grabbed the periscope as if it were the neck of a spoiled child and throttled and shook it.

I cannot say what I heard in that instant. Perhaps real sounds, perhaps imagined temblors, like a glacier cracking in the spring, or icicles in midnight. Perhaps it was a sound like a great kite breaking its skeleton in the wind and collapsing in folds of tissue. Maybe I thought I heard a vast breath insucked, a cloud dissolving up inside itself. Or did I sense clock machineries spun so wildly they smoked off their foundations and fell like brass snowflakes?

I put my eye to the periscope.

I looked in upon—

Nothing.

It was just a brass tube with some crystal lenses and a view of an empty couch.

No more.

I seized the viewpiece and tried to screw it into some new focus on a far place and some dream bacteria that might fibrillate across an unimaginable horizon.

But the couch remained only a couch, and the wall beyond looked back at me with its great blank face.

Von Seyfertitz leaned forward and a tear ran off the tip of his nose to fall on one rusted fist.

‘Are they dead?’ he whispered.

‘Gone.’

‘Good, they deserved to die. Now I can return to some kind of normal, sane world.’

And with each word his voice fell deeper within his throat, his chest, his soul, until it, like the vaporous haunts within the peri-kaleidoscope, melted into silence.

He clenched his fists together in a fierce clasp of prayer, like one who beseeches God to deliver him from plagues. And whether he was once again praying for my death, eyes shut, or whether he simply wished me gone with the visions within the brass device, I could not say.

I only knew that my gossip had done a terrible and irrevocable thing. Me and my wild enthusiasm for a psychological future and the fame of this incredible captain from beneath Nemo’s tidal seas.

‘Gone,’ murmured Gustav Von Seyfertitz, Baron Woldstein, whispered for the last time. ‘Gone.’

That was almost the end.

I went around a month later. The landlord reluctantly let me look over the premises, mostly because I hinted that I might be renting.

We stood in the middle of the empty room where I could see the dent marks where the couch had once stood.

I looked up at the ceiling. It was empty.

‘What’s wrong?’ said the landlord. ‘Didn’t they fix it so you can’t see? Damn fool Baron made a damn big hole up into the office above. Rented that, too, but never used it for anything I knew of. There was just that big damn hole he left when he went away.’

I sighed with relief.

‘Nothing left upstairs?’

‘Nothing.’

I looked up at the perfectly blank ceiling.

‘Nice job of repair,’ I said.

‘Thank God,’ said the landlord.

What, I often wonder, ever happened to Gustav Von Seyfertitz? Did he move to Vienna, to take up residence, perhaps, in or near dear Sigmund’s very own address? Does he live in Rio, aerating fellow Unterderseaboat Captains who can’t sleep for seasickness, roiling on their waterbeds under the shadow of the Andes Cross? Or is he in South Pasadena, within striking distance of the fruit larder nut farms disguised as film studios?

I cannot guess.

All I know is that some nights in the year, oh, once or twice, in a deep sleep I hear this terrible shout, his cry,

‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’

And wake to find myself, sweating, far under my bed.




Another Fine Mess (#ulink_b7788ada-647f-53c5-857c-6b3e29f49076)


The sounds began in the middle of summer in the middle of the night.

Bella Winters sat up in bed about three A.M. and listened and then lay back down. Ten minutes later she heard the sounds again, out in the night, down the hill.

Bella Winters lived in a first-floor apartment on top of Vendome Heights, near Effie Street in Los Angeles, and had lived there now for only a few days, so it was all new to her, this old house on an old street with an old staircase, made of concrete, climbing steeply straight up from the lowlands below, one hundred and twenty steps, count them. And right now …

‘Someone’s on the steps,’ said Bella to herself.

‘What?’ said her husband, Sam, in his sleep.

‘There are some men out on the steps,’ said Bella. ‘Talking, yelling, not fighting, but almost. I heard them last night, too, and the night before, but …’

‘What?’ Sam muttered.

‘Shh, go to sleep. I’ll look.’

She got out of bed in the dark and went to the window, and yes, two men were indeed talking out there, grunting, groaning, now loud, now soft. And there was another noise, a kind of bumping, sliding, thumping, like a huge object being carted up the hill.

‘No one could be moving in at this hour of the night, could they?’ asked Bella of the darkness, the window, and herself.

‘No,’ murmured Sam.

‘It sounds like …’

‘Like what?’ asked Sam, fully awake now.

‘Like two men moving—’

‘Moving what, for God’s sake?’

‘Moving a piano. Up those steps.’

‘At three in the morning?’

‘A piano and two men. Just listen.’

The husband sat up, blinking, alert.

Far off, in the middle of the hill, there was a kind of harping strum, the noise a piano makes when suddenly thumped and its harp strings hum.

‘There, did you hear?’

‘Jesus, you’re right. But why would anyone steal—’

‘They’re not stealing, they’re delivering.’

‘A piano?’

‘I didn’t make the rules, Sam. Go out and ask. No, don’t; I will.’

And she wrapped herself in her robe and was out the door and on the sidewalk.

‘Bella,’ Sam whispered fiercely behind the porch screen.

‘Crazy.’

‘So what can happen at night to a woman fifty-five, fat, and ugly?’ she wondered.

Sam did not answer.

She moved quietly to the rim of the hill. Somewhere down there she could hear the two men wrestling with a huge object. The piano on occasion gave a strumming hum and fell silent. Occasionally one of the men yelled or gave orders.

‘The voices,’ said Bella. ‘I know them from somewhere,’ she whispered and moved in utter dark on stairs that were only a long pale ribbon going down, as a voice echoed:

‘Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.’

Bella froze. Where have I heard that voice, she wondered, a million times!

‘Hello,’ she called.

She moved, counting the steps, and stopped.

And there was no one there.

Suddenly she was very cold. There was nowhere for the strangers to have gone to. The hill was steep and a long way down and a long way up, and they had been burdened with an upright piano, hadn’t they?

How come I know upright? she thought. I only heard. But – yes, upright! Not only that, but inside a box!

She turned slowly and as she went back up the steps, one by one, slowly, slowly, the voices began to sound again, below, as if, disturbed, they had waited for her to go away.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded one voice.

‘I was just—’ said the other.

‘Give me that!’ cried the first voice.

That other voice, thought Bella, I know that, too. And I know what’s going to be said next!

‘Now,’ said the echo far down the hill in the night, ‘just don’t stand there, help me!’

‘Yes!’ Bella closed her eyes and swallowed hard and half fell to sit on the steps, getting her breath back as black-and-white pictures flashed in her head. Suddenly it was 1929 and she was very small, in a theater with dark and light pictures looming above the first row where she sat, transfixed, and then laughing, and then transfixed and laughing again.

She opened her eyes. The two voices were still down there, a faint wrestle and echo in the night, despairing and thumping each other with their hard derby hats.

Zelda, thought Bella Winters. I’ll call Zelda. She knows everything. She’ll tell me what this is. Zelda, yes!

Inside, she dialed Z and E and L and D and A before she saw what she had done and started over. The phone rang a long while until Zelda’s voice, angry with sleep, spoke half-way across L.A.

‘Zelda, this is Bella!’

‘Sam just died?’

‘No, no, I’m sorry—’

‘You’re sorry?’

‘Zelda, I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but …’

‘Go ahead, be crazy.’

‘Zelda, in the old days when they made films around L.A., they used lots of places, right? Like Venice, Ocean Park …’

‘Chaplin did, Langdon did, Harold Lloyd, sure.’

‘Laurel and Hardy?’

‘What?’

‘Laurel and Hardy, did they use lots of locations?’

‘Palms, they used Palms lots, Culver City Main Street, Effie Street.’

‘Effie Street!’

‘Don’t yell, Bella.’

‘Did you say Effie Street?’

‘Sure, and God, it’s three in the morning!’

‘Right at the top of Effie Street!?’

‘Hey, yeah, the stairs. Everyone knows them. That’s where the music box chased Hardy downhill and ran over him.’

‘Sure, Zelda, sure! Oh, God, Zelda, if you could see, hear, what I hear!’

Zelda was suddenly wide awake on the line. ‘What’s going on?You serious?’

‘Oh, God, yes. On the steps just now, and last night and the night before maybe, I heard, I hear – two men hauling a – a piano up the hill.’

‘Someone’s pulling your leg!’

‘No, no, they’re there. I go out and there’s nothing. But the steps are haunted, Zelda! One voice says: “Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.” You got to hear that man’s voice!’

‘You’re drunk and doing this because you know I’m a nut for them.’

‘No, no. Come, Zelda. Listen. Tell!’

Maybe half an hour later, Bella heard the old tin lizzie rattle up the alley behind the apartments. It was a car, Zelda in her joy at visiting silent-movie theaters, had bought to lug herself around in while she wrote about the past, always the past, and steaming into Cecil B. DeMille’s old place or circling Harold Lloyd’s nation-state, or cranking and banging around the Universal backlot, paying her respects to the Phantom’s opera stage, or sitting on Ma and Pa Kettle’s porch chewing a sandwich lunch. That was Zelda, who once wrote in a silent country in a silent time for Silver Screen.

Zelda lumbered across the front porch, a huge body with legs as big as the Bernini columns in front of St. Peter’s in Rome, and a face like a harvest moon.

On that round face now was suspicion, cynicism, skepticism, in equal pie-parts. But when she saw Bella’s pale stare she cried:

‘Bella!’

‘You see I’m not lying!’ said Bella.

‘I see!’

‘Keep your voice down, Zelda. Oh, it’s scary and strange, terrible and nice. So come on.’

And the two women edged along the walk to the rim of the old hill near the old steps in old Hollywood, and suddenly as they moved they felt time take a half turn around them and it was another year, because nothing had changed, all the buildings were the way they were in 1928 and the hills beyond like they were in 1926 and the steps, just the way they were when the cement was poured in 1921.

‘Listen, Zelda. There!’

And Zelda listened and at first there was only a creaking of wheels down in the dark, like crickets, and then a moan of wood and a hum of piano strings, and then one voice lamenting about this job, and the other voice claiming he had nothing to do with it, and then the thumps as two derby hats fell, and an exasperated voice announced:

‘Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.’

Zelda, stunned, almost toppled off the hill. She held tight to Bella’s arm as tears brimmed in her eyes.

‘It’s a trick. Someone’s got a tape recorder or—’

‘No, I checked. Nothing but the steps, Zelda, the steps!’

Tears rolled down Zelda’s plump cheeks.

‘Oh, God, that is his voice! I’m the expert, I’m the mad fanatic, Bella. That’s Ollie. And that other voice, Stan! And you’re not nuts after all!’

The voices below rose and fell and one cried: ‘Why don’t you do something to help me?’

Zelda moaned. ‘Oh, God, it’s so beautiful.’

‘What does it mean?’ asked Bella. ‘Why are they here? Are they really ghosts, and why would ghosts climb this hill every night, pushing that music box, night after night, tell me, Zelda, why?’

Zelda peered down the hill and shut her eyes for a moment to think. ‘Why do any ghosts go anywhere? Retribution? Revenge? No, not those two. Love maybe’s the reason, lost loves or something. Yes?’

Bella let her heart pound once or twice and then said, ‘Maybe nobody told them.’

‘Told them what?’

‘Or maybe they were told a lot but still didn’t believe, because maybe in their old years things got bad, I mean they were sick, and sometimes when you’re sick you forget.’

‘Forget what?’

‘How much we loved them.’

‘They knew!’

‘Did they? Sure, we told each other, but maybe not enough of us ever wrote or waved when they passed and just yelled “Love!” you think?’

‘Hell, Bella, they’re on TV every night!’

‘Yeah, but that don’t count. Has anyone, since they left us, come here to these steps and said? Maybe those voices down there, ghosts or whatever, have been here every night for years, pushing that music box, and nobody thought, or tried, to just whisper or yell all the love we had all the years. Why not?’

‘Why not?’ Zelda stared down into the long darkness where perhaps shadows moved and maybe a piano lurched clumsily among the shadows. ‘You’re right.’

‘If I’m right,’ said Bella, ‘and you say so, there’s only one thing to do—’

‘You mean you and me?’

‘Who else? Quiet. Come on.’

They moved down a step. In the same instant lights came on around them, in a window here, another there. A screen door opened somewhere and angry words shot out into the night:

‘Hey, what’s going on?’

‘Pipe down!’

‘You know what time it is?’

‘My God,’ Bella whispered, ‘everyone else hears now!’

‘No, no.’ Zelda looked around wildly. ‘They’ll spoil everything!’

‘I’m calling the cops!’ A window slammed.

‘God,’ said Bella, ‘if the cops come—’

‘What?’

‘It’ll be all wrong. If anyone’s going to tell them to take it easy, pipe down, it’s gotta be us. We care, don’t we?’

‘God, yes, but—’

‘No buts. Grab on. Here we go.’

The two voices murmured below and the piano tuned itself with hiccups of sound as they edged down another step and another, their mouths dry, hearts hammering, and the night so dark they could see only the faint streetlight at the stair bottom, the single street illumination so far away it was sad being there all by itself, waiting for shadows to move.

More windows slammed up, more screen doors opened. At any moment there would be an avalanche of protest, incredible outcries, perhaps shots fired, and all this gone forever.

Thinking this, the women trembled and held tight, as if to pummel each other to speak against the rage.

‘Say something, Zelda, quick.’

‘What?’

‘Anything! They’ll get hurt if we don’t—’

‘They?’

‘You know what I mean. Save them.’

‘Okay. Jesus!’ Zelda froze, clamped her eyes shut to find the words, then opened her eyes and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Louder.’

‘Hello,’ Zelda called softly, then loudly.

Shapes rustled in the dark below. One of the voices rose while the other fell and the piano strummed its hidden harp strings.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Zelda called.

‘That’s good. Go on.’

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Zelda called, braver now. ‘Don’t listen to those others yelling. We won’t hurt you. It’s just us. I’m Zelda, you wouldn’t remember, and this here is Bella, and we’ve known you forever, or since we were kids, and we love you. It’s late, but we thought you should know. We’ve loved you ever since you were in the desert or on that boat with ghosts or trying to sell Christmas trees door-to-door or in that traffic where you tore the headlights off cars, and we still love you, right, Bella?’

The night below was darkness, waiting.

Zelda punched Bella’s arm.

‘Yes!’ Bella cried, ‘what she said. We love you.’

‘We can’t think of anything else to say.’

‘But it’s enough, yes?’ Bella leaned forward anxiously. ‘It’s enough?’

A night wind stirred the leaves and grass around the stairs and the shadows below that had stopped moving with the music box suspended between them as they looked up and up at the two women, who suddenly began to cry. First tears fell from Bella’s cheeks, and when Zelda sensed them, she let fall her own.

‘So now,’ said Zelda, amazed that she could form words but managed to speak anyway, ‘we want you to know, you don’t have to come back anymore. You don’t have to climb the hill every night, waiting. For what we said just now is it, isn’t it? I mean you wanted to hear it here on this hill, with those steps, and that piano, yes, that’s the whole thing, it had to be that, didn’t it? So now here we are and there you are and it’s said. So rest, dear friends.’

‘Oh, there, Ollie,’ added Bella in a sad, sad whisper. ‘Oh, Stan, Stanley.’

The piano, hidden in the dark, softly hummed its wires and creaked its ancient wood.

And then the most incredible thing happened. There was a series of shouts and then a huge banging crash as the music box, in the dark, rocketed down the hill, skittering on the steps, playing chords where it hit, swerving, rushing, and ahead of it, running, the two shapes pursued by the musical beast, yelling, tripping, shouting, warning the Fates, crying out to the gods, down and down, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred steps.

And half down the steps, hearing, feeling, shouting, crying themselves, and now laughing and holding to each other, the two women alone in the night wildly clutching, grasping, trying to see, almost sure that they did see, the three things ricocheting off and away, the two shadows rushing, one fat, one thin, and the piano blundering after, discordant and mindless, until they reached the street, where, instantly, the one overhead streetlamp died as if struck, and the shadows floundered on, pursued by the musical beast.

And the two women, abandoned, looked down, exhausted with laughing until they wept and weeping until they laughed, until suddenly Zelda got a terrible look on her face as if shot.

‘My God!’ she shouted in panic, reaching out. ‘Wait. We didn’t mean, we don’t want – don’t go forever! Sure, go, so the neighbors here sleep. But once a year, you hear? Once a year, one night a year from tonight, and every year after that, come back. It shouldn’t bother anyone so much. But we got to tell you all over again, huh? Come back and bring the box with you, and we’ll be here waiting, won’t we, Bella?’

‘Waiting, yes.’

There was a long silence from the steps leading down into an old black-and-white, silent Los Angeles.

‘You think they heard?’

They listened.

And from somewhere far off and down, there was the faintest explosion like the engine of an old jalopy knocking itself to life, and then the merest whisper of a lunatic music from a dark theater when they were very young. It faded.

After a long while they climbed back up the steps, dabbing at their eyes with wet Kleenex. Then they turned for a final time to stare down into the night.

‘You know something?’ said Zelda. ‘I think they heard.’




The Dwarf (#ulink_5c4c4441-3aac-5b5a-b9ae-d039b213f9cf)


Aimee watched the sky, quietly.

Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.

Two customers had passed through an hour before. Those two lonely people were now in the roller coaster, screaming murderously as it plummeted down the blazing night, around one emptiness after another.

Aimee moved slowly across the strand, a few worn wooden hoopla rings sticking to her wet hands. She stopped behind the ticket booth that fronted the MIRROR MAZE. She saw herself grossly misrepresented in three rippled mirrors outside the Maze. A thousand tired replicas of herself dissolved in the corridor beyond, hot images among so much clear coolness.

She stepped inside the ticket booth and stood looking a long while at Ralph Banghart’s thin neck. He clenched an unlit cigar between his long uneven yellow teeth as he laid out a battered game of solitaire on the ticket shelf.

When the roller coaster wailed and fell in its terrible avalanche again, she was reminded to speak.

‘What kind of people go up in roller coasters?’

Ralph Banghart worked his cigar a full thirty seconds. ‘People wanna die. That rollie coaster’s the handiest thing to dying there is.’ He sat listening to the faint sound of rifle shots from the shooting gallery. ‘This whole damn carny business’s crazy. For instance, that dwarf. You seen him? Every night, pays his dime, runs in the Mirror Maze all the way back through to Screwy Louie’s Room. You should see this little runt head back there. My God!’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Aimee, remembering. ‘I always wonder what it’s like to be a dwarf. I always feel sorry when I see him.’

‘I could play him like an accordion.’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘My Lord.’ Ralph patted her thigh with a free hand. ‘The way you carry on about guys you never even met.’ He shook his head and chuckled. ‘Him and his secret. Only he don’t know I know, see? Boy howdy!’

‘It’s a hot night.’ She twitched the large wooden hoops nervously on her damp fingers.

‘Don’t change the subject. He’ll be here, rain or shine.’

Aimee shifted her weight.

Ralph seized her elbow. ‘Hey! You ain’t mad? You wanna see that dwarf, don’t you? Sh!’ Ralph turned. ‘Here he comes now!’

The Dwarf’s hand, hairy and dark, appeared all by itself reaching up into the booth window with a silver dime. An invisible person called, ‘One!’ in a high, child’s voice.

Involuntarily, Aimee bent forward.

The Dwarf looked up at her, resembling nothing more than a dark-eyed, dark-haired, ugly man who has been locked in a winepress, squeezed and wadded down and down, fold on fold, agony on agony, until a bleached, outraged mass is left, the face bloated shapelessly, a face you know must stare wide-eyed and awake at two and three and four o’clock in the morning, lying flat in bed, only the body asleep.

Ralph tore a yellow ticket in half. ‘One!’

The Dwarf, as if frightened by an approaching storm, pulled his black coat-lapels tightly about his throat and waddled swiftly. A moment later, ten thousand lost and wandering dwarfs wriggled between the mirror flats, like frantic dark beetles, and vanished.

‘Quick!’

Ralph squeezed Aimee along a dark passage behind the mirrors. She felt him pat her all the way back through the tunnel to a thin partition with a peekhole.

‘This is rich,’ he chuckled. ‘Go on – look.’

Aimee hesitated, then put her face to the partition.

‘You see him?’ Ralph whispered.

Aimee felt her heart beating. A full minute passed.

There stood the Dwarf in the middle of the small blue room. His eyes were shut. He wasn’t ready to open them yet. Now, now he opened his eyelids and looked at a large mirror set before him. And what he saw in the mirror made him smile. He winked, he pirouetted, he stood sidewise, he waved, he bowed, he did a little clumsy dance.

And the mirror repeated each motion with long, thin arms, with a tall, tall body, with a huge wink and an enormous repetition of the dance, ending in a gigantic bow!

‘Every night the same thing,’ whispered Ralph in Aimee’s ear. ‘Ain’t that rich?’

Aimee turned her head and looked at Ralph steadily out of her motionless face, for a long time, and she said nothing. Then, as if she could not help herself, she moved her head slowly and very slowly back to stare once more through the opening. She held her breath. She felt her eyes begin to water.

Ralph nudged her, whispering.

‘Hey, what’s the little gink doin’ now?’

They were drinking coffee and not looking at each other in the ticket booth half an hour later, when the Dwarf came out of the mirrors. He took his hat off and started to approach the booth, when he saw Aimee and hurried away.

‘He wanted something,’ said Aimee.

‘Yeah.’ Ralph squashed out his cigarette, idly. ‘I know what, too. But he hasn’t got the nerve to ask. One night in this squeaky little voice he says, “I bet those mirrors are expensive.” Well, I played dumb. I said yeah they were. He sort of looked at me, waiting, and when I didn’t say any more, he went home, but next night he said, “I bet those mirrors cost fifty, a hundred bucks.” I bet they do, I said. I laid me out a hand of solitaire.’

‘Ralph,’ she said.

He glanced up. ‘Why you look at me that way?’

‘Ralph,’ she said, ‘why don’t you sell him one of your extra ones?’

‘Look, Aimee, do I tell you how to run your hoop circus?’

‘How much do those mirrors cost?’

‘I can get ’em secondhand for thirty-five bucks.’

‘Why don’t you tell him where he can buy one, then?’

‘Aimee, you’re not smart.’ He laid his hand on her knee. She moved her knee away. ‘Even if I told him where to go, you think he’d buy one? Not on your life. And why? He’s self-conscious. Why, if he even knew I knew he was flirtin’ around in front of that mirror in Screwy Louie’s Room, he’d never come back. He plays like he’s goin’ through the Maze to get lost, like everybody else. Pretends like he don’t care about that special room. Always waits for business to turn bad, late nights, so he has that room to himself. What he does for entertainment on nights when business is good, God knows. No, sir, he wouldn’t dare go buy a mirror anywhere. He ain’t got no friends, and even if he did he couldn’t ask him to buy him a thing like that. Pride, by God, pride. Only reason he even mentioned it to me is I’m practically the only guy he knows. Besides, look at him – he ain’t got enough to buy a mirror like those. He might be savin’ up, but where in hell in the world today can a dwarf work? Dime a dozen, drug on the market, outside of circuses.’

‘I feel awful. I feel sad.’ Aimee sat staring at the empty boardwalk. ‘Where does he live?’

‘Flytrap down on the waterfront. The Ganghes Arms. Why?’

‘I’m madly in love with him, if you must know.’

He grinned around his cigar. ‘Aimee,’ he said. ‘You and your very funny jokes.’

A warm night, a hot morning, and a blazing noon. The sea was a sheet of burning tinsel and glass.

Aimee came walking, in the locked-up carnival alleys out over the warm sea, keeping in the shade, half a dozen sun-bleached magazines under her arm. She opened a flaking door. The world of Giants far away, an ugly rumor beyond the garden wall. Poor mama, papa! They meant only the best for me. They kept me, like a porcelain vase, small and treasured, to themselves, in our ant world, our beehive rooms, our microscopic library, our land of beetle-sized doors and moth windows. Only now do I see the magnificent size of my parents’ psychosis! They must have dreamed they would live forever, keeping me like a butterfly under glass. But first father died, and then fire ate up the little house, the wasp’s nest, and every postage-stamp mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff!

‘It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, “I want you to meet the little woman!”’

Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she handed it to Ralph. ‘You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It’s all right. But don’t you see? That little man. That little man.’

Ralph tossed the magazine aside and lit a cigarette lazily. ‘I like Westerns better.’

‘Ralph, you got to read it. He needs someone to tell him how good he is and keep him writing.’

Ralph looked at her, his head to one side. ‘And guess who’s going to do it? Well, well, ain’t we just the Savior’s right hand?’

‘I won’t listen!’

‘Use your head, damn it! You go busting in on him he’ll think you’re handing him pity. He’ll chase you screamin’ outa his room.’

She sat down, thinking about it slowly, trying to turn it over and see it from every side. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Oh, it’s not just pity, Ralph, honest. But maybe it’d look like it to him. I’ve got to be awful careful.’

He shook her shoulder back and forth, pinching softly, with his fingers. ‘Hell, hell, lay off him, is all I ask; you’ll get nothing but trouble for your dough. God, Aimee, I never seen you so hepped on anything. Look, you and me, let’s make it a day, take a lunch, get us some gas, and just drive on down the coast as far as we can drive; swim, have supper, see a good show in some little town – to hell with the carnival, how about it? A damn nice day and no worries. I been savin’ a coupla bucks.’

‘It’s because I know he’s different,’ she said, looking off into darkness. ‘It’s because he’s something we can never be – you and me and all the rest of us here on the pier. It’s so funny, so funny. Life fixed him so he’s good for nothing but carny shows, yet there he is on the land. And life made us so we wouldn’t have to work in the carny shows, but here we are, anyway, way out here at sea on the pier. Sometimes it seems a million miles to shore. How come, Ralph, that we got the bodies, but he’s got the brains and can think things we’ll never even guess?’

‘You haven’t even been listening to me!’ said Ralph.

She sat with him standing over her, his voice far away. Her eyes were half shut and her hands were in her lap, twitching.

‘I don’t like that shrewd look you’re getting on,’ he said, finally.

She opened her purse slowly and took out a small roll of bills and started counting. ‘Thirty-five, forty dollars. There. I’m going to phone Billie Fine and have him send out one of those tall-type mirrors to Mr Bigelow at the Ganghes Arms. Yes, I am!’

‘What!’

‘Think how wonderful for him, Ralph, having one in his own room any time he wants it. Can I use your phone?’

‘Go ahead, be nutty.’

Ralph turned quickly and walked off down the tunnel. A door slammed.

Aimee waited, then after a while put her hands to the phone and began to dial, with painful slowness. She paused between numbers, holding her breath, shutting her eyes, thinking how it might seem to be small in the world, and then one day someone sends a special mirror by. A mirror for your room where you can hide away with the big reflection of yourself, shining, and write stories and stories, never going out into the world unless you had to. How might it be then, alone, with the wonderful illusion all in one piece in the room. Would it make you happy or sad, would it help your writing or hurt it? She shook her head back and forth, back and forth. At least this way there would be no one to look down at you. Night after night, perhaps rising secretly at three in the cold morning, you could wink and dance around and smile and wave at yourself, so tall, so tall, so very fine and tall in the bright looking-glass.

A telephone voice said, ‘Billie Fine’s.’

‘Oh, Billie!’ she cried.

Night came in over the pier. The ocean lay dark and loud under the planks. Ralph sat cold and waxen in his glass coffin, laying out the cards, his eyes fixed, his mouth stiff. At his elbow, a growing pyramid of burned cigarette butts grew larger. When Aimee walked along under the hot red and blue bulbs, smiling, waving, he did not stop setting the cards down slow and very slow. ‘Hi, Ralph!’ she said.

‘How’s the love affair?’ he asked, drinking from a dirty glass of iced water. ‘How’s Charlie Boyer, or is it Cary Grant?’

‘I just went and bought me a new hat,’ she said, smiling. ‘Gosh, I feel good! You know why? Billie Fine’s sending a mirror out tomorrow! Can’t you just see the nice little guy’s face?’

‘I’m not so hot at imagining.’

‘Oh, Lord, you’d think I was going to marry him or something.’

‘Why not? Carry him around in a suitcase. People say, Where’s your husband? all you do is open your bag, yell, Here he is! Like a silver cornet. Take him outa his case any old hour, play a tune, stash him away. Keep a little sandbox for him on the back porch.’

‘I was feeling so good,’ she said.

‘Benevolent is the word.’ Ralph did not look at her, his mouth tight. ‘Ben-eve-o-lent. I suppose this all comes from me watching him through that knothole, getting my kicks? That why you sent the mirror? People like you run around with tambourines, taking the joy out of my life.’

‘Remind me not to come to your place for drinks anymore. I’d rather go with no people at all than mean people.’

Ralph exhaled a deep breath. ‘Aimee, Aimee. Don’t you know you can’t help that guy? He’s bats. And this crazy thing of yours is like saying, Go ahead, be batty, I’ll help you, pal.’

‘Once in a lifetime anyway, it’s nice to make a mistake if you think it’ll do somebody some good,’ she said.

‘God deliver me from do-gooders, Aimee.’

‘Shut up, shut up!’ she cried, and then said nothing more.

He let the silence lie awhile, and then got up, putting his finger-printed glass aside. ‘Mind the booth for me?’

‘Sure. Why?’

She saw ten thousand cold white images of him stalking down the glassy corridors, between mirrors, his mouth straight and his fingers working themselves.

She sat in the booth for a full minute and then suddenly shivered. A small clock ticked in the booth and she turned the deck of cards over, one by one, waiting. She heard a hammer pounding and knocking and pounding again, far away inside the Maze; a silence, more waiting, and then ten thousand images folding and refolding and dissolving, Ralph striding, looking out at ten thousand images of her in the booth. She heard his quiet laughter as he came down the ramp.

‘Well, what’s put you in such a good mood?’ she asked, suspiciously.

‘Aimee,’ he said carelessly, ‘we shouldn’t quarrel. You say tomorrow Billie’s sending that mirror to Mr Big’s?’

‘You’re not going to try anything funny?’

‘Me?’ He moved her out of the booth and took over the cards, humming, his eyes bright. ‘Not me, oh no, not me.’ He did not look at her, but started quickly to slap out the cards. She stood behind him. Her right eye began to twitch a little. She folded and unfolded her arms. A minute ticked by. The only sound was the ocean under the night pier, Ralph breathing in the heat, the soft ruffle of the cards. The sky over the pier was hot and thick with clouds. Out at sea, faint glows of lightning were beginning to show.

‘Ralph,’ she said at last.

‘Relax, Aimee,’ he said.

‘About that trip you wanted to take down the coast—’

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Maybe next month. Maybe next year. Old Ralph Banghart’s a patient guy. I’m not worried, Aimee. Look.’ He held up a hand. ‘I’m calm.’

She waited for a roll of thunder at sea to fade away.

‘I just don’t want you mad, is all. I just don’t want anything bad to happen, promise me.’

The wind, now warm, now cool, blew along the pier. There was a smell of rain in the wind. The clock ticked. Aimee began to perspire heavily, watching the cards move and move. Distantly, you could hear targets being hit and the sound of the pistols at the shooting gallery.

And then, there he was.

Waddling along the lonely concourse, under the insect bulbs, his face twisted and dark, every movement an effort. From a long way down the pier he came, with Aimee watching. She wanted to say to him, This is your last night, the last time you’ll have to embarrass yourself by coming here, the last time you’ll have to put up with being watched by Ralph, even in secret. She wished she could cry out and laugh and say it right in front of Ralph. But she said nothing.

‘Hello, hello!’ shouted Ralph. ‘It’s free, on the house, tonight! Special for old customers!’

The Dwarf looked up, startled, his little black eyes darting and swimming in confusion. His mouth formed the word thanks and he turned, one hand to his neck, pulling his tiny lapels tight up about his convulsing throat, the other hand clenching the silver dime secretly. Looking back, he gave a little nod, and then scores of dozens of compressed and tortured faces, burned a strange dark color by the lights, wandered in the glass corridors.

‘Ralph,’ Aimee took his elbow. ‘What’s going on?’

He grinned. ‘I’m being benevolent, Aimee, benevolent.’

‘Ralph,’ she said.

‘Sh,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

They waited in the booth in the long warm silence.

Then, a long way off, muffled, there was a scream.

‘Ralph!’ said Aimee.

‘Listen, listen!’ he said.

There was another scream, and another and still another, and a threshing and a pounding and a breaking, a rushing around and through the Maze. There, there, wildly colliding and ricocheting, from mirror to mirror, shrieking hysterically and sobbing, tears on his face, mouth gasped open, came Mr Bigelow. He fell out in the blazing night air, glanced about wildly, wailed, and ran off down the pier.

‘Ralph, what happened?’

Ralph sat laughing and slapping at his thighs.

She slapped his face. ‘What’d you do?’

He didn’t quite stop laughing. ‘Come on. I’ll show you!’

And then she was in the Maze, rushed from white-hot mirror to mirror, seeing her lipstick all red fire a thousand times repeated on down a burning silver cavern where strange hysterical women much like herself followed a quick-moving, smiling man. ‘Come on!’ he cried. And they broke free into a dust-smelling tiny room.

‘Ralph!’ she said.

They both stood on the threshold of the little room where the Dwarf had come every night for a year. They both stood where the Dwarf had stood each night, before opening his eyes to see the miraculous image in front of him.

Aimee shuffled slowly, one hand out, into the dim room.

The mirror had been changed.

This new mirror made even tall people little and dark and twisted smaller as you moved forward.

And Aimee stood before it thinking and thinking that if it made big people small, standing here, God, what would it do to a dwarf, a tiny dwarf, a dark dwarf, a startled and lonely dwarf?

She turned and almost fell. Ralph stood looking at her. ‘Ralph,’ she said. ‘God, why did you do it?’

‘Aimee, come back!’

She ran out through the mirrors, crying. Staring with blurred eyes, it was hard to find the way, but she found it. She stood blinking at the empty pier, started to run one way, then another, then still another, then stopped. Ralph came up behind her, talking, but it was like a voice heard behind a wall late at night, remote and foreign.

‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said.

Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr Kelly from the shooting gallery. ‘Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol from my place, loaded, run off before I’d get a hand on him! You help me find him?’

And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.

Aimee rocked back and forth and took a step.

‘Aimee, where you going?’

She looked at Ralph as if they had just turned a corner, strangers passing, and bumped into each other. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘I’m going to help search.’

‘You won’t be able to do nothing.’

‘I got to try anyway. Oh God, Ralph, this is all my fault! I shouldn’t have phoned Billie Fine! I shouldn’t’ve ordered a mirror and got you so mad you did this! It’s me should’ve gone to Mr Big, not a crazy thing like I bought! I’m going to find him if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.’

Swinging about slowly, her cheeks wet, she saw the quivery mirrors that stood in front of the Maze, Ralph’s reflection was in one of them. She could not take her eyes away from the image; it held her in a cool and trembling fascination, with her mouth open.

‘Aimee, what’s wrong? What’re you—’

He sensed where she was looking and twisted about to see what was going on. His eyes widened.

He scowled at the blazing mirror.

A horrid, ugly little man, two feet high, with a pale, squashed face under an ancient straw hat, scowled back at him. Ralph stood there glaring at himself, his hands at his sides.

Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.




A Wild Night in Galway (#ulink_688862ed-95bc-55af-a229-db357f58b71e)


We were far out at the tip of Ireland, in Galway, where the weather strikes from its bleak quarters in the Atlantic with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain. You go to bed sad and wake in the middle of the night thinking you heard someone cry, thinking you yourself were weeping, and feel your face and find it dry. Then you look at the window and turn over, sadder still, and fumble about for your dripping sleep and try to get it back on.

We were out, as I said, in Galway, which is gray stone with green beards on it, a rock town, and the sea coming in and the rain falling down; and we had been there a month solid working with our film director on a script which was, with immense irony, to be shot in the warm yellow sun of Mexico sometime in January. The pages of the script were full of fiery bulls and hot tropical flowers and burning eyes, and I typed it with chopped-off frozen fingers in my gray hotel room where the food was criminal’s gruel and the weather a beast at the window.

On the thirty-first night, a knock at the door, at seven. The door opened, my film director stepped nervously in.

‘Let’s get the hell out and find some wild life in Ireland and forget this damn rain,’ he said, all in a rush.

‘What rain?’ I said, sucking my fingers to get the ice out. ‘The concussion here under the roof is so steady I’m shellshocked and have quite forgot the stuff’s coming down!’

‘Four weeks here and you’re talking Irish,’ said the director.

‘Hand me my clay pipe,’ I said. And we ran from the room.

‘Where?’ said I.

‘Heber Finn’s pub,’ said he.

And we blew along the stony street in the dark that rocked gently as a boat on the black flood because of the tilty-dancing streetlights above which made the shadows tear and fly, uneasy.

Then, sweating rain, faces pearled, we struck through the pub doors, and it was warm as a sheepfold because there were the townsmen pressed in a great compost heap at the bar and Heber Finn yelling jokes and foaming up drinks.

‘Heber Finn,’ cried the director, ‘we’re here for a wild night!’

‘A wild night we’ll make it,’ said Heber Finn, and in a moment a slug of poteen was burning lace patterns in our stomachs, to let new light in.

I exhaled fire. ‘That’s a start,’ I said.

We had another and listened to the rollicking jests and the jokes that were less than half clean, or so we guessed, for the brogue made it difficult, and the whiskey poured on the brogue and thus combined made it double-difficult. But we knew when to laugh, because when a joke was finished the men hit their knees and then hit us. They’d give their limbs a great smack and then bang us on the arm or thump us in the chest.

As our breath exploded, we’d shape the explosion to hilarity and squeeze our eyes tight. Tears ran down our cheeks not from joy but from the exquisite torture of the drink scalding our throats. Thus pressed like shy flowers in a huge warm-moldy book, the director and I lingered on, waiting for some vast event.

At last my director’s patience thinned. ‘Heber Finn,’ he called across the seethe, ‘it’s been wild so far, all right, but we want it wilder, I mean, the biggest night Ireland ever saw!’

Whereupon Heber Finn whipped off his apron, shrugged his meat-cleaver shoulders into a tweed coat, jumped up in the air, slid down inside his raincoat, slung on his beardy cap, and thrust us at the door.

‘Nail everything down till I get back,’ he advised his crew. ‘I’m taking these gents to the damnedest evening ever. Little do they know what waits for them out there.’

He opened the door and pointed. The wind threw half a ton of ice water on him. Taking this as no more than an additional spur to rhetoric, Heber Finn, not wiping his face, added in a roar, ‘Out with you! On! Here we go!’

‘Do you think we should?’ I said, doubtful now that things seemed really on the move.

‘What do you mean?’ cried the director. ‘What do you want to do? Go freeze in your room? Rewrite that scene you did so lousily today?’

‘No, no,’ I said, and slung on my own cap.

I was first outside thinking, I’ve a wife and three loud but lovely children, what am I doing here, eight thousand miles gone from them, on the dark side of God’s remembrance? Do I really want to do this?

Then, like Ahab, I thought on my bed, a damp box with its pale cool winding-sheets and the window dripping next to it like a conscience: all night through. I groaned. I opened the door of Heber Finn’s car, took my legs apart to get in, and we shot down the town like a ball in a bowling alley.

Heber Finn at the wheel talked fierce, half hilarity, half sobering King Lear.

‘A wild night, is it? You’ll have the grandest night ever,’ he said. ‘You’d never guess, would you, to walk through Ireland, so much could go on under the skin?’

‘I knew there must be an outlet somewhere,’ I yelled.

The speedometer was up to fifty miles an hour. Stone walls raced by on the right, stone walls raced by on the left. It was raining the entire dark sky down on the entire dark land.

‘Outlet indeed!’ said Heber Finn. ‘If the Church knew, but it don’t! Or then maybe it does, but figures – the poor craythurs – and lets us be!’

‘Where, what—?’

‘You’ll see!’ said Heber Finn.

The speedometer read sixty. My stomach was stone like the stone walls rushing left and right. Does the car have brakes? I wondered. Death on an Irish road, I thought, a wreck, and before anyone found us strewn we’d melt away in the pounding rain and be part of the turf by morn. What’s death anyway? Better than hotel food.

‘Can’t we go a bit faster?’ I asked.

‘It’s done,’ said Heber Finn, and made it seventy.

‘That will do it, nicely,’ I said in a faint voice, wondering what lay ahead. Behind all the slate-stone weeping walls of Ireland, what happened? Beneath the rain-drenched sod, the flinty rock, at the numbed core of living, was there one small seed of fire which, fanned, might break volcanoes free and boil the rains to steam?

Was there then somewhere a Baghdad harem, nests awriggle and aslither with silk and tassel the absolutely perfect tint of women unadorned? Somewhere in this drizzling land were there hearth-fleshed peach-fuzz Renoir ladies bright as lamps you could hold your hands out to and warm your palms? We passed a church. No. We passed a convent. No. We passed a village slouched under its old men’s thatch. No. Stone walls to left. Stone walls to right. No. Yet …

I glanced over at Heber Finn. We could have switched off our lights and driven by the steady piercing beams of his forward-directed eyes snatching at the dark, flicking away the rain.

Wife, I thought to myself, children, forgive me for what I do this night, terrible as it might be, for this is Ireland in the rain of an ungodly time and way out in Galway where the dead must go to die.

The brakes were hit. We slid a good ninety feet, my nose mashed on the windscreen. Heber Finn was out of the car.

‘We’re here.’ He sounded like a man drowning deep in the rain.

I looked left. Stone walls. I looked right. Stone walls.

‘Where is it?’ I shouted.

‘Where, indeed.’ He pointed, mysteriously. ‘There.’

I saw a hole in the wall, a tiny gate flung wide.

The director and I followed at a plunge. We saw other cars in the dark now, and many bikes. But not a light anywhere. A secret, I thought, oh, it must be wild to be this secret. What am I doing here? I yanked my cap lower. Rain crawled down my neck.

Through the hole in the wall we stumbled, Heber Finn clenching our elbows. ‘Here,’ he husked, ‘stand here. It’ll be a moment. Swig on this to keep your blood high.’

I felt a flask knock my fingers. I got the fire into my boilers and let the steam up the flues.

‘It’s a lovely rain,’ I said.

‘The man’s mad,’ said Heber Finn, and drank after the director, a shadow among shadows in the dark.

I squinted about. I had an impression of a midnight sea upon which men like little boats passed on the murmurous tides. Heads down, muttering, in twos and threes, a hundred men stirred out beyond.

It has an unholy air – Good God, what’s it all about? I asked myself, incredibly curious now.

‘Heber Finn—?’ said the director.

‘Wait,’ whispered Heber Finn. ‘This is it!’

What did I expect? Perhaps some scene like those old movies where innocent sailing ships suddenly flap down cabin walls and guns appear like magic to fire on the foe. Or a farmhouse falls apart like a cereal box, Long Tom rears up to blast a projectile five hundred miles to target Paris.

So here, maybe, I thought, the stones will spill away each from the others, the walls of that house will curtain back, rosy lights will flash forth, and from a monstrous cannon six, a dozen, ten dozen pink pearly women, not dwarf-Irish but willowy-French, will be shot out over the heads and down into the waving arms of the grateful multitude. Benison indeed! What’s more – manna!

The lights came on. I blinked.

For I saw the entire unholy thing. There it was, laid out for me under the drizzling rain.

The lights came on. The men quickened, turned, gathered, us with them.

A mechanical rabbit popped out of a little box at the far end of the stony yard and ran. Eight dogs, let free from gates, yelping, ran after in a great circle. There was not one shout or murmur from the crowd of men. Their heads turned slowly, watching.

The rain rained down on the illuminated scene. The rain fell upon tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and thin noses. The rain beat on hunched shoulders. I stared. The rabbit ran. The dogs ran. At the finish, the rabbit popped into its electric hatch. The dogs collided into each other, barking. The lights went out.

In the dark, I turned to stare at the director as I knew he must be turning to stare at me.

I was thankful for the dark, the rain, so Heber Finn could not see our faces.

‘Come on, now,’ he shouted, ‘place your bets!’

We were back in Galway, speeding, at ten o’clock. The rain was still raining, the wind was still blowing. The highway was a river working to erase the stone beneath as we drew up in a great tidal spray before my hotel.

‘Well, now,’ said Heber Finn, not looking at us, but at the windscreen wiper beating, palpitating there. ‘Well.’

The director and I had bet on five races and had lost between us two or three pounds. It worried Heber Finn.

‘I won a great deal,’ he said, ‘and some of it I put down in your names. That last race, I swear to God, I bet and won for all of us. Let me pay you.’

‘No, Heber Finn, thanks,’ I said, my numb lips moving.

He took my hand and pressed two shillings into it. I didn’t fight him. ‘That’s better,’ he said.

Wringing out his cap in the hotel lobby my director looked at me and said, ‘It was a wild Irish night, wasn’t it?’

‘A wild night,’ I said. He left.

I hated to go up to my room. So I sat for another hour in the reading lounge of the damp hotel and took the traveler’s privilege, a glass and a bottle provided by the dazed hall porter.

I sat alone, listening to the rain and the rain on the cold hotel roof, thinking of Ahab’s coffin-bed waiting for me up there under the drumbeat weather.

I thought of the only warm thing in the hotel, in the town, in all the land of Eire this night, the script in my typewriter this moment, with its sun of Mexico, its hot winds blowing from the Pacific, its mellow papayas, its yellow lemons, its fiery sand, and its women with dark charcoal-burning eyes.

And I thought of the darkness beyond the town, the light flashing on, the electric rabbit running, the dogs running, and the rabbit gone, and the light going out, and the rain falling down on the dank shoulders and the soaked caps, and trickling off the noses and seeping through the tweeds.

Going upstairs I glanced through a streaming window. There, riding by under a streetlight, was a man on a bicycle. He was terribly drunk, for the bike weaved back and forth across the road. He kept pumping on unsteadily, blearily. I watched him ride off into the raining dark.

Then I went on up to die in my room.




The Wind (#ulink_892ff81e-761a-5ae8-9755-aa60804cf401)


The phone rang at five-thirty that evening. It was December, and long since dark as Thompson picked up the phone.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Herb?’

‘Oh, it’s you, Allin.’

‘Is your wife home, Herb?’

‘Sure. Why?’

‘Damn it.’

Herb Thompson held the receiver quietly. ‘What’s up? You sound funny.’

‘I wanted you to come over tonight.’

‘We’re having company.’

‘I wanted you to spend the night. When’s your wife going away?’

‘That’s next week,’ said Thompson. ‘She’ll be in Ohio for about nine days. Her mother’s sick. I’ll come over then.’

‘I wish you could come over tonight.’

‘Wish I could. Company and all, my wife’d kill me.’

‘I wish you could come over.’

‘What’s it? the wind again?’

‘Oh, no. No.’

‘Is it the wind?’ asked Thompson.

The voice on the phone hesitated. ‘Yeah. Yeah, it’s the wind.’

‘It’s a clear night, there’s not much wind.’

‘There’s enough. It comes in the window and blows the curtains a little bit. Just enough to tell me.’

‘Look, why don’t you come and spend the night here?’ said Herb Thompson looking around the lighted hall.

‘Oh, no. It’s too late for that. It might catch me on the way over. It’s a damned long distance. I wouldn’t dare, but thanks, anyway. It’s thirty miles, but thanks.’

‘Take a sleeping-tablet.’

‘I’ve been standing in the door for the past hour, Herb. I can see it building up in the west. There are some clouds there and I saw one of them kind of rip apart. There’s a wind coming, all right.’

‘Well, you just take a nice sleeping-tablet. And call me anytime you want to call. Later this evening if you want.’

‘Any time?’ said the voice on the phone.

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll do that, but I wish you could come out. Yet I wouldn’t want you hurt. You’re my best friend and I wouldn’t want that. Maybe it’s best I face this thing alone. I’m sorry I bother you.’

‘Hell, what’s a friend for? Tell you what you do, sit down and get some writing done this evening,’ said Herb. Thompson, shifting from one foot to the other in the hall. ‘You’ll forget about the Himalayas and the Valley of the Winds and this preoccupation of yours with storms and hurricanes. Get another chapter done on your next travel book.’

‘I might do that. Maybe I will, I don’t know. Maybe I will. I might do that. Thanks a lot for letting me bother you.’

‘Thanks, hell. Get off the line, now, you. My wife’s calling me to dinner.’

Herb Thompson hung up.

He went and sat down at the supper table and his wife sat across from him. ‘Was that Allin?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘Him and his winds that blow up and winds that blow down and winds that blow hot and blow cold,’ she said, handing him his plate heaped with food.

‘He did have a time in the Himalayas, during the war,’ said Herb Thompson.

‘You don’t believe what he said about that valley, do you?’

‘It makes a good story.’

‘Climbing around, climbing up things. Why do men climb mountains and scare themselves?’

‘It was snowing,’ said Herb Thompson.

‘Was it?’

‘And raining and hailing and blowing all at once, in that valley. Allin’s told me a dozen times. He tells it well. He was up pretty high. Clouds, and all. The valley made a noise.’

‘I bet it did,’ she said.

‘Like a lot of winds instead of just one. Winds from all over the world.’ He took a bite. ‘So says Allin.’

‘He shouldn’t have gone there and looked, in the first place,’ she said. ‘You go poking around and first thing you know you get ideas. Winds start getting angry at you for intruding, and they follow you.’

‘Don’t joke, he’s my best friend,’ snapped Herb Thompson.

‘It’s all so silly!’

‘Nevertheless he’s been through a lot. That storm in Bombay, later, and the typhoon off New Guinea two months after that. And that time, in Cornwall.’

‘I have no sympathy for a man who continually runs into wind storms and hurricanes, and then gets a persecution complex because of it.’

The phone rang just then.

‘Don’t answer it,’ she said.

‘Maybe it’s important.’

‘It’s only Allin, again.’

They sat there and the phone rang nine times and they didn’t answer. Finally, it quieted. They finished dinner. Out in the kitchen, the window curtains gently moved in the small breeze from a slightly opened window.

The phone rang again.

‘I can’t let it ring,’ he said, and answered it. ‘Oh, hello, Allin.’

‘Herb! It’s here! It got here!’

‘You’re too near the phone, back up a little.’

‘I stood in the open door and waited for it. I saw it coming down the highway, shaking all the trees, one by one, until it shook the trees just outside the house and it dived down toward the door and I slammed the door in its face!’

Thompson didn’t say anything. He couldn’t think of anything to say, his wife was watching him in the hall door.

‘How interesting,’ he said, at last.

‘It’s all around the house, Herb. I can’t get out now, I can’t do anything. But I fooled it, I let it think it had me, and just as it came down to get me I slammed and locked the door! I was ready for it, I’ve been getting ready for weeks.’

‘Have you, now; tell me about it, Allin, old man.’ Herb Thompson played it jovially into the phone, while his wife looked on and his neck began to sweat.

‘It began six weeks ago.…’

‘Oh, yes? Well, well.’

‘… I thought I had it licked. I thought it had given up following and trying to get me. But it was just waiting. Six weeks ago I heard the wind laughing and whispering around the corners of my house, out here. Just for an hour or so, not very long, not very loud. Then it went away.’

Thompson nodded into the phone. ‘Glad to hear it, glad to hear it.’ His wife stared at him.

‘It came back, the next night. It slammed the shutters and kicked sparks out of the chimney. It came back five nights in a row, a little stronger each time. When I opened the front door, it came in at me and tried to pull me out, but it wasn’t strong enough. Tonight it is.’

‘Glad to hear you’re feeling better,’ said Thompson.

‘I’m not better, what’s wrong with you? Is your wife listening to us?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, I see. I know I sound like a fool.’

‘Not at all. Go on.’

Thompson’s wife went back into the kitchen. He relaxed. He sat down on a little chair near the phone. ‘Go on, Allin, get it out of you, you’ll sleep better.’

‘It’s all around the house now, like a great big vacuum machine nuzzling at all the gables. It’s knocking the trees around.’

‘That’s funny, there’s no wind here. Allin.’

‘Of course not, it doesn’t care about you, only about me.’

‘I guess that’s one way to explain it.’

‘It’s a killer, Herb, the biggest damnedest prehistoric killer that ever hunted prey. A big sniffling hound, trying to smell me out, find me. It pushes its big cold nose up to the house, taking air, and when it finds me in the parlor it drives its pressure there, and when I’m in the kitchen it goes there. It’s trying to get in the windows, now, but I had them reinforced and I put new hinges on the doors, and bolts. It’s a strong house. They built them strong in the old days. I’ve got all the lights in the house on, now. The house is all lighted up, bright. The wind followed me from room to room, looking through all the windows, when I switched them on. Oh!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It just snatched off the front screen door!’

‘I wish you’d come over here and spend the night, Allin.’

‘I can’t! God, I can’t leave the house. I can’t do anything. I know this wind. Lord, it’s big and it’s clever. I tried to light a cigarette a moment ago, and a little draft sucked the match out. The wind likes to play games, it likes to taunt me, it’s taking its time with me; it’s got all night. And now! God, right now, one of my old travel books, on the library table, I wish you could see it. A little breeze from God knows what small hole in the house, the little breeze is – blowing the pages one by one. I wish you could see it. There’s my introduction. Do you remember the introduction to my book on Tibet, Herb?’

‘Yes.’

‘This book is dedicated to those who lost the game of elements, written by one who has seen, but who has always escaped.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘The lights have gone out!’

The phone crackled.

‘The power lines just went down. Are you there, Herb?’

‘I still hear you.’

‘The wind doesn’t like all that light in my house, it tore the power lines down. The telephone will probably go next. Oh, it’s a real party, me and the wind, I tell you! Just a second.’

‘Allin?’ A silence. Herb leaned against the mouthpiece. His wife glanced in from the kitchen. Herb Thompson waited. ‘Allin?’

‘I’m back,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘There was a draft from the door and I shoved some wadding under it to keep it from blowing on my feet. I’m glad you didn’t come out after all, Herb, I wouldn’t want you in this mess. There! It just broke one of the living room windows and a regular gale is in the house, knocking pictures off the wall! Do you hear it?’

Herb Thompson listened. There was a wild sirening on the phone and a whistling and banging. Allin shouted over it. ‘Do you hear it?’

Herb Thompson swallowed dryly. ‘I hear it.’

‘It wants me alive, Herb. It doesn’t dare knock the house down in one fell blow. That’d kill me. It wants me alive, so it can pull me apart, finger by finger. It wants what’s inside me. My mind, my brain. It wants my life-power, my psychic force, my ego. It wants intellect.’

‘My wife’s calling me, Allin. I have to go wipe the dishes.’

‘It’s a big cloud of vapors, winds from all over the world. The same wind that ripped the Celebes a year ago, the same pampero that killed in Argentina, the typhoon that fed on Hawaii, the hurricane that knocked the coast of Africa early this year. It’s part of all those storms I escaped. It followed me from the Himalayas because it didn’t want me to know what I know about the Valley of the Winds where it gathers and plans its destruction. Something, a long time ago, gave it a start in the direction of life. I know its feeding grounds, I know where it is born and where parts of it expire. For that reason, it hates me; and my books that tell how to defeat it. It doesn’t want me preaching anymore. It wants to incorporate me into its huge body, to give it knowledge. It wants me on its own side!’

‘I have to hang up, Allin, my wife—’

‘What?’ A pause, the blowing of the wind in the phone, distantly. ‘What did you say?’

‘Call me back in about an hour, Allin.’

He hung up.

He went out to wipe the dishes. His wife looked at him and he looked at the dishes, rubbing them with a towel.

‘What’s it like out tonight?’ he said.

‘Nice. Not very chilly. Stars,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing.’

The phone rang three times in the next hour. At eight o’clock the company arrived, Stoddard and his wife. They sat around until eight-thirty talking and then got out and set up the card table and began to play Gin.

Herb Thompson shuffled the cards over and over, with a clittering, shuttering effect and clapped them out, one at a time before the three other players. Talk went back and forth. He lit a cigar and made it into a fine gray ash at the tip, and adjusted his cards in his hand and on occasion lifted his head and listened. There was no sound outside the house. His wife saw him do this, and he cut it out immediately, and discarded a Jack of Clubs.

He puffed slowly on his cigar and they all talked quietly with occasional small eruptions of laughter, and the clock in the hall sweetly chimed nine o’clock.

‘Here we all are,’ said Herb Thompson, taking his cigar out and looking at it reflectively. ‘And life is sure funny.’

‘Eh?’ said Mr Stoddard.

‘Nothing, except here we are, living our lives, and some place else on earth a billion other people live their lives.’

‘That’s a rather obvious statement.’

‘Life,’ he put his cigar back in his lips, ‘is a lonely thing. Even with married people. Sometimes when you’re in a person’s arms you feel a million miles away from them.’

‘I like that,’ said his wife.

‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he explained, not with haste; because he felt no guilt, he took his time. ‘I mean we all believe what we believe and live our own little lives while other people live entirely different ones. I mean, we sit here in this room while a thousand people are dying. Some of cancer, some of pneumonia, some of tuberculosis. I imagine someone in the United States is dying right now in a wrecked car.’

‘This isn’t very stimulating conversation,’ said his wife.

‘I mean to say, we all live and don’t think about how other people think or live their lives or die. We wait until death comes to us. What I mean is here we sit, on our self-assured butt-bones, while, thirty miles away, in a big old house, completely surrounded by night and God-knows-what, one of the finest guys who ever lived is—’

‘Herb!’

He puffed and chewed on his cigar and stared blindly at his cards. ‘Sorry.’ He blinked rapidly and bit his cigar. ‘Is it my turn?’

‘It’s your turn.’

The playing went around the table, with a flittering of cards, murmurs, conversation. Herb Thompson sank lower into his chair and began to look ill.

The phone rang. Thompson jumped and ran to it and jerked it off the hook.

‘Herb! I’ve been calling and calling. What’s it like at your house, Herb?’

‘What do you mean, what’s it like?’

‘Has the company come?’

‘Hell, yes, it has—’

‘Are you talking and laughing and playing cards?’

‘Christ, yes, but what has that got to do with—’

‘Are you smoking your ten-cent cigar?’

‘God damn it, yes, but …’

‘Swell,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘That sure is swell. I wish I could be there. I wish I didn’t know the things I know. I wish lots of things.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘So far, so good. I’m locked in the kitchen now. Part of the front wall of the house blew in. But I planned my retreat. When the kitchen door gives, I’m heading for the cellar. If I’m lucky I may hold out there until morning. It’ll have to tear the whole damned house down to get to me, and the cellar floor is pretty solid. I have a shovel and I may dig – deeper.…’

It sounded like a lot of other voices on the phone.

‘What’s that?’ Herb Thompson demanded, cold, shivering.

‘That?’ asked the voice on the phone. ‘Those are the voices of twelve thousand killed by a typhoon, seven thousand killed by a hurricane, three thousand buried by a cyclone. Am I boring you? That’s what the wind is. It’s a lot of people dead. The wind killed them, took their minds to give itself intelligence. It took all their voices and made them into one voice. All those millions of people killed in the past ten thousand years, tortured and run from continent to continent on the backs and in the bellies of monsoons and whirlwinds. Oh Christ, what a poem you could write about it!’

The phone echoed and rang with voices and shouts and whinings.

‘Come on back, Herb,’ called his wife from the card table.

‘That’s how the wind gets more intelligent each year, it adds to itself, body by body, life by life, death by death.’

‘We’re waiting for you, Herb,’ called his wife.

‘Damn it!’ He turned, almost snarling. ‘Wait just a moment, won’t you!’ Back to the phone. ‘Allin, if you want me to come out there now, I will! I should have come earlier …’

‘Wouldn’t think of it. This is a grudge fight, wouldn’t do to have you in it now. I’d better hang up. The kitchen door looks bad; I’ll have to get in the cellar.’

‘Call me back, later?’

‘Maybe, if I’m lucky. I don’t think I’ll make it. I slipped away and escaped so many times, but I think it has me now. I hope I haven’t bothered you too much, Herb.’

‘You haven’t bothered anyone, damn it. Call me back.’

‘I’ll try.…’

Herb Thompson went back to the card game. His wife glared at him. ‘How’s Allin, your friend?’ she asked. ‘Is he sober?’

‘He’s never taken a drink in his life,’ said Thompson, sullenly, sitting down. ‘I should have gone out there hours ago.’

‘But he’s called every night for six weeks and you’ve been out there at least ten nights to stay with him and nothing was wrong.’

‘He needs help. He might hurt himself.’

‘You were just out there, two nights ago, you can’t always be running after him.’

‘First thing in the morning I’ll move him into a sanatorium. Didn’t want to. He seems so reasonable otherwise.’

At ten-thirty coffee was served. Herb Thompson drank his slowly, looking at the phone. I wonder if he’s in the cellar now, he thought.

Herb Thompson walked to the phone, called long-distance, gave the number.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the operator. ‘The lines are down in that district. When the lines are repaired, we will put your call through.’

‘Then the telephone lines are down!’ cried Thompson. He let the phone drop. Turning, he slammed open the closet door, pulled out his coat. ‘Oh Lord,’ he said. ‘Oh, Lord, Lord,’ he said, to his amazed guests and his wife with the coffee urn in her hand. ‘Herb!’ she cried. ‘I’ve got to get out there!’ he said, slipping into his coat.




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