Bradbury Stories (104 page)

“Son of a bitch!” He dusted himself off and stood out of the car, almost crying with rage.

He looked at the silent, empty road. “We'll never catch them now, never, never.” As far as he could see there was nothing but bundles and stacks and more bundles neatly placed like little abandoned shrines in the late day, in the warm-blowing wind.

Teece and Grandpa came walking tiredly back to the hardware store an hour later. The men were still sitting there, listening, and watching the sky. Just as Teece sat down and eased his tight shoes off someone cried, “Look!”

“I'll be
damned
if I will,” said Teece.

But the others looked. And they saw the golden bobbins rising in the sky, far away. Leaving flame behind, they vanished.

In the cotton fields the wind blew idly among the snow clusters. In still farther meadows the watermelons lay, unfingerprinted, striped like tortoise cats lying in the sun.

The men on the porch sat down, looked at each other, looked at the yellow rope piled neat on the store shelves, glanced at the gun shells glinting shiny brass in their cartons, saw the silver pistols and long black metal shotguns hung high and quiet in the shadows. Somebody put a straw in his mouth. Someone else drew a figure in the dust.

Finally Samuel Teece held his empty shoe up in triumph, turned it over, stared at it, and said, “Did you notice? Right up to the very last, by God, he said ‘Mister'!”

“A
LIVE
!”

“Dead!”

“Alive in New England, damn it.”

“Died twenty years ago!”

“Pass the hat, I'll go myself and bring back his head!”

That's how the talk went that night. A stranger set it off with his mouthings about Dudley Stone dead. Alive! we cried. And shouldn't we know? Weren't we the last frail remnants of those who had burned incense and read his books by the light of blazing intellectual votives in the twenties?

The
Dudley Stone. That magnificent stylist, that proudest of literary lions. Surely you recall the head-pounding, the cliff-jumping, the whistlings of doom that followed on his writing his publishers this note:

SIRS
: Today, aged 30, I retire from the field, renounce writing, burn all my effects, toss my latest manuscript on the dump, cry hail and fare thee well. Yrs., affect.

Dudley Stone

Earthquakes and avalanches, in that order.

“Why?”
we asked ourselves, meeting down the years.

In fine soap-opera fashion we debated if it was women caused him to hurl his literary future away. Was it the Bottle. Or Horses that outran him and stopped a fine pacer in his prime?

We freely admitted to one and all, that were Stone writing now, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck would be buried in his lava. All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.

“Why?”

That question forever lived with those of us who had seen the glints of genius in his piebald works.

One night a few weeks ago, musing off the erosion of the years, finding each others' faces somewhat more pouched and our hairs more conspicuously in absence, we became enraged over the typical citizen's ignorance of Dudley Stone.

At least, we muttered, Thomas Wolfe had had a full measure of success before he seized his nose and jumped off the rim of Eternity. At least the critics gathered to stare after his plunge into darkness as after a meteor that made much fire in its passing. But who now remembered Dudley Stone, his coteries, his frenzied followers of the twenties?

“Pass the hat,” I said. “I'll travel three hundred miles, grab Dudley Stone by the pants and say: ‘Look here, Mr. Stone, why did you let us down so badly? Why haven't you written a book in twenty-five years?'”

The hat was lined with cash; I sent a telegram and took a train.

I do not know what I expected. Perhaps to find a doddering and frail praying mantis, whisping about the station, blown by seawinds, a chalk-white ghost who would husk at me with the voices of grass and reeds blown in the night. I clenched my knees in agony as my train chuffed into the station. I let myself down into a lonely country-side, a mile from the sea, like a man foolishly insane, wondering why I had come so far.

On a bulletin board in front of the boarded-up ticket office I found a cluster of announcements, inches thick, pasted and nailed one upon another for uncountable years. Leafing under, peeling away anthropological layers of printed tissue I found what I wanted. Dudley Stone for alderman, Dudley Stone for Sheriff, Dudley Stone for Mayor! On up through the years his photograph, bleached by sun and rain, faintly recognizable, asked for ever more responsible positions in the life of this world near the sea. I stood reading them.

“Hey!”

And Dudley Stone plunged across the station platform behind me suddenly. “Is that you, Mr. Douglas!” I whirled to confront this great architecture of a man, big but not in the least fat, his legs huge pistons thrusting him on, a bright flower in his lapel, a bright tie at his neck. He crushed my hand, looked down upon me like Michelangelo's God creating Adam with a mighty touch. His face was the face of those illustrated North Winds and South Winds that blow hot and cold in ancient mariners' charts. It was the face that symbolizes the sun in Egyptian carvings, ablaze with life!

My God! I thought. And this is the man who hasn't written in twenty-odd years. Impossible. He's so alive it's sinful. I can hear his
heartbeat
!

I must have stood with my eyes very wide to let the look of him cram in upon my startled senses.

“You thought you'd find Marley's Ghost,” he laughed. “Admit it.”

“I—”

“My wife's waiting with a New England boiled dinner, we've plenty of ale and stout. I like the ring of those words. To
ale
is not to sicken, but to revive the flagging spirit. A tricky word, that. And
stout
? There's a nice ruddy sound to it. Stout!” A great golden watch bounced on his vestfront, hung in bright chains. He vised my elbow and charmed me along, a magician well on his way back to his cave with a luckless rabbit. “Glad to see you! I suppose you've come, as the others came, to ask the same question, eh! Well, this time I'll tell everything!”

My heart jumped. “Wonderful!”

Behind the empty station sat an open-top 1927-vintage Model-T Ford. “Fresh air. Drive at twilight like this, you get all the fields, the grass, the flowers, coming at you in the wind. I hope you're not one of those who tiptoe around shutting windows! Our house is like the top of a mesa. We let the weather do our broom-work. Hop in!”

Ten minutes later we swung off the highway onto a drive that had not been leveled or filled in years. Stone drove straight on over the pits and bumps, smiling steadily. Bang! We shuddered the last few yards to a wild, unpainted two-story house. The car was allowed to gasp itself away into mortal silence.

“Do you want the truth?” Stone turned to look me in the face and hold my shoulder with an earnest hand. “I was murdered by a man with a gun twenty-five years ago almost to this very day.”

I sat staring after him as he leaped from the car. He was solid as a ton of rock, no ghost to him, but yet I knew that somehow the truth was in what he had told me before firing himself like a cannon at the house.

“This is my wife, and this is the house, and that is our supper waiting for us! Look at our view. Windows on three sides of the living room, a view of the sea, the shore, the meadows. We nail the windows open three out of four seasons. I swear you get a smell of limes here midsummer, and something from Antarctica, ammonia and ice cream, come December. Sit down! Lena, isn't it
nice
having him here?”

“I hope you like New England boiled dinner,” said Lena, now here, now there, a tall, firmly-built woman, the sun in the East, Father Christmas' daughter, a bright lamp of a face that lit our table as she dealt out the heavy useful dishes made to stand the pound of giants' fists. The cutlery was solid enough to take a lion's teeth. A great whiff of steam rose up, through which we gladly descended, sinners into Hell. I saw the seconds-plate skim by three times and felt the ballast gather in my chest, my throat, and at last my ears. Dudley Stone poured me a brew he had made from wild Concords that had cried for mercy, he said. The wine bottle, empty, had its green glass mouth blown softly by Stone, who summoned out a rhythmic one-note tune that was quickly done.

“Well, I've kept you waiting long enough,” he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself. “I'll tell you about my murder. I've never told anyone before; believe me. Do you know John Oatis Kendall?”

“A minor writer in the twenties, wasn't he?” I said. “A few books. Burned out by '31. Died last week.”

“God rest him.” Mr. Stone lapsed into a special brief melancholy from which he revived as he began to speak again.

“Yes. John Oatis Kendall, burned out by the year 1931, a writer of great potentialities.”

“Not as great as yours,” I said, quickly.

“Well, just wait. We were boys together, John Oatis and I, born where the shade of an oak tree touched my house in the morning and his house at night, swam every creek in the world together, got sick on sour apples and cigarettes together, saw the same lights in the same blond hair of the same young girl together, and in our late teens went out to kick Fate in the stomach and get beat on the head together. We both did fair, and then
I
better and still better as the years ran. If his first book got one good notice, mine got six, if I got one bad notice, he got a dozen. We were like two friends on a train which the public has uncoupled. There went John Oatis on the caboose, left behind, crying out, ‘Save me! You're leaving me in Tank Town, Ohio; we're on the same track!' And the conductor saying, ‘Yes, but not the same
train
!' And myself yelling, ‘
I
believe in you, John, be of good heart, I'll come back for you!' And the caboose dwindling behind with its red and green lamps like cherry and lime pops shining in the dark and we yelling our friendship to each other: ‘John, old man!' ‘Dudley, old pal!' while John Oatis went out on a dark siding behind a tin baling-shed at midnight and my engine, with all the flag-wavers and brass bands, boiled on toward dawn.”

Dudley Stone paused and noticed my look of general confusion.

“All this to lead up to my murder,” he said. “For it was John Oatis Kendall who, in 1930, traded a few old clothes and some remaindered copies of his books for a gun and came out to this house and this room.”

“He really meant to kill you?”

“Meant to, hell! He did! Bang! Have some more wine? That's better.”

A strawberry shortcake was set upon the table by Mrs. Stone, while he enjoyed my gibbering suspense. Stone sliced it into three huge chunks and served it around, fixing me with his kindly approximation of the Wedding Guest's eye.

“There he sat, John Oatis, in that chair where you sit now. Behind him, outside, in the smokehouse, seventeen hams; in our wine cellars, five hundred bottles of the best; beyond the window open country, the elegant sea in full lace; overhead a moon like a dish of cool cream, everywhere the full panoply of spring, and Lena across the table, too, a willow tree in the wind, laughing at everything I said or did not choose to say, both of us thirty, mind you, thirty years old, life our magnificent carousel, our fingers playing full chords, my books selling well, fan mail pouring upon us in crisp white founts, horses in the stables for moonlight rides to coves where either we or the sea might whisper all we wished in the night. And John Oatis seated there where you sit now, quietly taking the little blue gun from his pocket.”

“I laughed, thinking it was a cigar lighter of some sort,” said his wife.

“But John Oatis said quite seriously: ‘I'm going to kill you, Mr. Stone.'”

“What did you do?”

“Do? I sat there, stunned, riven; I heard a terrible slam! the coffin lid in my face! I heard coal down a black chute; dirt on my buried door. They say all your
past
hurtles by at such times. Nonsense. The
future
does. You see your face a bloody porridge. You sit there until your fumbling mouth can say, ‘But why, John, what have I
done
to you?'

“‘Done!' he cried.

“And his eye skimmed along the vast bookshelf and the handsome brigade of books drawn stiffly to attention there with my name on each blazing like a panther's eye in the Moroccan blackness. ‘Done!' he cried, mortally. And his hand itched the revolver in a sweat. ‘Now, John,' I cautioned. ‘What do you want?'

“‘One thing more than anything else in the world,' he said, ‘to kill you and be famous. Get my name in headlines. Be famous as you are famous. Be known for a lifetime and beyond as the man who killed Dudley Stone!'

“‘You can't mean that!'

“‘I do. I'll be very famous. Far more famous than I am today, in your shadow. Oh, listen here, no one in the world knows how to hate like a writer does. God, how I love your work and God, how I hate you because you write so well. Amazing ambivalence. But I can't take it anymore, not being able to write as you do, so I'll take my fame the easy way. I'll cut you off before you reach your prime. They say your next book will be your very finest, your most brilliant!'

“‘They exaggerate.'

“‘My guess is they're right!' he said.

“I looked beyond him to Lena who sat in her chair, frightened, but not frightened enough to scream or run and spoil the scene so it might end inadvertently.

“‘Calm,' I said. ‘Calmness. Sit there, John. I ask only one minute. Then pull the trigger.'