Bradbury Stories (123 page)

“Looks like you finished the job,” said Willy.

“Paint stores ran out of paint three times the first week.” Antonelli surveyed the town with pride. “The painting could only last so long, of course, unless you start painting hedges and spraying grass blades one by one. Now that the attics and cellars are cleaned out, too, our fire is seeping off into, well, women canning fruit again, making tomato pickles, raspberry, strawberry preserves. Basement shelves are loaded. Big church doings, too. Organized bowling, night donkey baseball, box socials, beer busts. Music shop sold five hundred ukeleles, two hundred and twelve steel guitars, four hundred and sixty ocarinas and kazoos in four weeks. I'm studying trombone. Mac, there, the flute. Band Concerts Thursday and Sunday nights. Hand-crank ice-cream machines? Bert Tyson's sold two hundred last week alone. Twenty-eight days, Willie, Twenty-eights Days That Shook the World!”

Willy Bersinger and Samuel Fitts sat there, trying to imagine and feel the shock, the crushing blow.

“Twenty-eight days, the barbershop jammed with men getting shaved twice a day so they can sit and stare at customers like they might
say
something,” said Antonelli, shaving Willy now. “Once, remember, before TV, barbers were supposed to be great talkers. Well, this month it took us one whole week to warm up, get the rust out. Now we're spouting fourteen to the dozen. No quality, but our quantity is ferocious. When you came in you heard the commotion. Oh, it'll simmer down when we get used to the great Oblivion.”

“Is
that
what everyone calls it?”

“It sure looked that way to most of us, there for a while.”

Willy Bersinger laughed quietly and shook his head. “Now I know why you didn't want me to start lecturing when I walked in that door.”

Of course, thought Willy, why didn't I see it right off? Four short weeks ago the wilderness fell on this town and shook it good and scared it plenty. Because of the sunspots, all the towns in all the Western world have had enough silence to last them ten years. And here I come by with another dose of silence, my easy talk about deserts and nights with no moon and only stars and just the little sound of the sand blowing along the empty river bottoms. No telling what might have happened if Antonelli hadn't shut me up. I see me, tarred and feathered, leaving town.

“Antonelli,” he said aloud. “Thanks.”

“For nothing,” said Antonelli. He picked up his comb and shears. “Now, short on the sides, long in back?”

“Long on the sides,” said Willy Bersinger, closing his eyes again, “short in back.”

An hour later Willy and Samuel climbed back into their jalopy, which someone, they never knew who, had washed and polished while they were in the barbershop.

“Doom.” Samuel handed over a small sack of gold dust. “With a capital D.”

“Keep it.” Willy sat, thoughtful, behind the wheel. “Let's take this money and hit out for Phoenix, Tucson, Kansas City, why not? Right now we're a surplus commodity around here. We won't be welcome again until those little sets begin to herringbone and dance and sing. Sure as hell, if we stay, we'll open our traps and the gila monsters and chicken hawks and the wilderness will slip out and make us trouble.”

Willy squinted at the highway straight ahead.

“Pearl of the Orient, that's what he said. Can you imagine that dirty old town, Chicago, all painted up fresh and new as a babe in the morning light? We just got to go see Chicago, by God!”

He started the car, let it idle, and looked at the town.

“Man survives,” he murmured. “Man endures. Too bad we missed the big change. It must have been a fierce thing, a time of trials and testings. Samuel, I don't recall, do you? What have
we
ever seen on TV?”

“Saw a woman wrestle a bear two falls out of three, one night.”

“Who won?”

“Damned if I know. She—”

But then the jalopy moved and took Willy Bersinger and Samuel Fitts with it, their hair cut, oiled and neat on their sweet-smelling skulls, their cheeks pink-shaven, their fingernails flashing the sun. They sailed under clipped green, fresh-watered trees, through flowered lanes, past daffodil-, lilac-, violet-, rose- and peppermint-colored houses on the dustless road.

“Pearl of the Orient, here we come!”

A perfumed dog with permanented hair ran out, nipped their tires and barked, until they were gone away and completely out of sight.

T
HE MAN STAGGERED THROUGH THE FLUNG-WIDE DOORS
of Heber Finn's pub as if struck by lightning. Reeling, blood on his face, coat, and torn pants, his moan froze every customer at the bar. For a time you heard only the soft foam popping in the lacy mugs, as the customers turned, some faces pale, some pink, some veined and wattle-red. Every eyelid down the line gave a blink.

The stranger swayed in his ruined clothes, eyes wide, lips trembling. The drinkers clenched their fist. Yes! they cried, silently—go on, man! what
happened
?

The stranger leaned far out on the air.

“Collision,” he whispered. “Collision on the road.”

Then, chopped at the knees, he fell.

“Collision!” A dozen men rushed at the body.

“Kelly!” Heber Finn vaulted the bar. “Get to the road! Mind the victim; easy does it! Joe, run for the Doc!”

“Wait!” said a quiet voice.

From the private stall at the dark end of the pub, the cubby where a philosopher might brood, a dark man blinked out at the crowd.

“Doc!” cried Heber Finn. “It's you!”

Doctor and men hustled out into the night.

“Collision . . .” The man on the floor twitched his lips.

“Softly, boys.” Heber Finn and two others gentled the victim atop the bar. He looked handsome as death on the fine inlaid wood with the prismed mirror making him two dread calamities for the price of one.

Outside on the steps, the crowd halted, shocked as if an ocean had sunk Ireland in the dusk and now bulked all about them. Fog in fifty-foot rollers and breakers put out the moon and stars. Blinking, cursing, the men leaped out to vanish in the deeps.

Behind, in the bright doorframe, a young man stood. He was neither red enough nor pale enough of face, nor dark enough or light enough in spirit to be Irish, and so must be American. He was. That established, it follows he dreaded interfering with what seemed village ritual. Since arriving in Ireland, he could not shake the feeling that at all times he was living stage center of the Abbey Theatre. Now, not knowing his lines, he could only stare after the rushing men.

“But,” he protested weakly, “I didn't hear any cars on the road.”

“You did not!” said an old man almost pridefully. Arthritis limited him to the top step where he teetered, shouting at the white tides where his friends had submerged. “Try the crossroad, boys! That's where it most often does!”

“The crossroad!” Far and near, footsteps rang.

“Nor,” said the American, “did I hear a collision.”

The old man snorted with contempt. “Ah, we don't be great ones for commotion, nor great crashing sounds. But collision you'll see if you step on out there. Walk, now, don't run! It's the devil's own night. Running blind you might hit into Kelly, beyond, who's a great one for running just to squash his lungs. Or you might head on with Feeney, too drunk to find any road, never mind what's
on
it! You got a torch, a flash? Blind you'll be, but use it. Walk now, you
hear
?”

The American groped through the fog to his car, found his flashlight, and, immersed in the night beyond Heber Finn's, made direction by the heavy clubbing of shoes and a rally of voices ahead. A hundred yards off in eternity the men approached, grunting whispers: “Easy now!” “Ah, the shameful blight!” “Hold on, don't jiggle him!”

The American was flung aside by a steaming lump of men who swept suddenly from the fog, bearing atop themselves a crumpled object. He glimpsed a bloodstained and livid face high up there, then someone cracked his flashlight down.

By instinct, sensing the far whiskey-colored light of Heber Finn's, the catafalque surged on toward that fixed and familiar harbor.

Behind came dim shapes and a chilling insect rattle.

“Who's that!” cried the American.

“Us, with the vehicles,” someone husked. “You might say—we got the collision.”

The flashlight fixed them. The American gasped. A moment later, the battery failed.

But not before he had seen two village lads jogging along with no trouble at all, easily, lightly, toting under their arms two ancient black bicycles minus front and tail lights.

“What . . . ?” said the American.

But the lads trotted off, the accident with them. The fog closed in. The American stood abandoned on an empty road, his flashlight dead in his hand.

By the time he opened the door at Heber Finn's, both “bodies” as they called them, had been stretched on the bar.

“We got the bodies on the bar,” said the old man, turning as the American entered.

And there was the crowd lined up not for drinks, but blocking the way so the Doc had to shove sidewise from one to another of these relics of blind driving by night on the misty roads.

“One's Pat Nolan,” whispered the old man. “Not working at the moment. The other's Mr. Peevey from Meynooth, in candy and cigarettes mostly.” Raising his voice, “Are they dead now, Doc?”

“Ah, be still, won't you?” The Doc resembled a sculptor troubled at finding some way to finish up two full-length marble statues at once. “Here, let's put one victim on the floor!”

“The floor's a tomb,” said Heber Finn. “He'll catch his death down there. Best leave him up where the warm air gathers from our talk.”

“But,” said the American quietly, confused, “I've never heard of an accident like this in all my life. Are you sure there were absolutely no cars? Only these two men on their
bikes
?”

“Only!” The old man shouted. “Great God, man, a fellow working up a drizzling sweat can pump along at sixty kilometers. With a long downhill glide his bike hits ninety or ninety-five! So here they come, these two, no front or tail lights—”

“Isn't there a law against that?”

“To hell with government interference! So here the two come, no lights, flying home from one town to the next. Thrashing like Sin Himself's at their behinds! Both going opposite ways but both on the same side of the road. Always ride the wrong side of the road, it's safer, they say. But look on these lads, fair destroyed by all that official palaver. Why? Don't you see? One remembered it, but the other didn't! Better if the officials kept their mouths shut! For here the two be, dying.”

“Dying?” The American stared.

“Well, think on it, man! What stands between two able-bodied hell-bent fellas jumping along the path from Kilcock to Meynooth? Fog! Fog is all! Only fog to keep their skulls from bashing together. Why, look when two chaps hit at a cross like that, it's like a strike in bowling alleys, tenpins flying! Bang! There go your friends, nine feet up, heads together like dear chums met, flailing the air, their bikes clenched like two tomcats. Then they all fall down and just lay there, feeling around for the Dark Angel.”

“Surely these men won't—”

“Oh, won't they? Why, last year alone in all the Free State no night passed some soul did not meet in fatal collision with another!”

“You mean to say over three hundred Irish bicyclists die every year, hitting each other?”

“God's truth and a pity.”

“I never ride my bike nights.” Heber Finn eyed the bodies. “I walk.”

“But still then the damn bikes run you down!” said the old man. “Awheel or afoot, some idiot's always panting up Doom the other way. They'd sooner split you down the seam than wave hello. Oh, the brave men I've seen ruined or half-ruined or worse, and headaches their lifetimes after.” The old man trembled his eyelids shut. “You might almost think, mightn't you, that human beings was not made to handle such delicate instruments of power.”

“Three hundred dead each year.” The American seemed dazed.

“And that don't count the ‘walking wounded' by the thousands every fortnight who, cursing, throw their bikes in the bog forever and take government pensions to salve their all-but-murdered bodies.”

“Should we stand here talking?” The American gestured helplessly toward the victims. “Is there a hospital?”

“On a night with no moon,” Heber Finn continued, “best walk out through the middle of fields and be damned to the evil roads! That's how I have survived into this my fifth decade.”

“Ah . . .” The men stirred restlessly.

The Doc, sensing he had withheld information too long, feeling his audience drift away, now snatched their attention back by straightening up briskly and exhaling.

“Well!”

The pub quickened into silence.

“This chap here—” The Doc pointed. “Bruises, lacerations, and agonizing backaches for two weeks running. As for the other lad, however—” And here the Doc let himself scowl for a long moment at the paler one there looking rouged, waxed, and ready for final rites. “Concussion.”

“Concussion!”

The quiet wind rose and fell in the silence.

“He'll survive if we run him quick now to Meynooth Clinic. So whose car will volunteer?”

The crowd turned as a staring body toward the American. He felt the gentle shift as he was drawn from outside the ritual to its deep and innermost core. He flushed, remembering the front of Heber Finn's pub, where seventeen bicycles and one automobile were parked at this moment. Quickly, he nodded.

“There! A volunteer, lads! Quick now, hustle this boy—gently!—to our good friend's vehicle!”

The men reached out to lift the body, but froze when the American coughed. They saw him circle his hand to all, and tip his cupped fingers to his lips. They gasped in soft surprise. The gesture was not done when drinks foamed down the bar.