Dandelion Wine (25 page)

“It's all right,” whispered Great-grandma, as the dream floated her. “Like everything else in this life, it's fitting.”

And the sea moved her back down the shore.

“A
ghost!” cried Tom.

“No,” said a voice. “Just me.”

The ghastly light flowed into the dark apple-scented bedroom. A quart-size Mason jar, seemingly suspended upon space, flickered many twilight-colored flakes of light on and off. In this pallid illumination Douglas's eyes shone pale and solemn. He was so tan his face and hands were dissolved in darkness and his nightgown seemed a disembodied spirit.

“My gosh!” hissed Tom. “Two dozen, three dozen fireflies!”

“Shh, for cry-yi!”

“What you got 'em for?”

“We got caught reading nights with flashlights under our sheets, right? So, nobody'll suspect an old jar of fireflies; folks'll think it's just a night museum.”

“Doug, you're a genius!”

But Doug did not answer. Very gravely he placed the intermittently signaling light source upon the night table and picked up his pencil and began to write large and long on his tablet. With the fireflies burning, dying, burning, dying, and his eyes glinting with three dozen fugitive bits of pale green color, he block printed for ten and then twenty minutes, aligning and realigning, writing and rewriting the facts that he had gathered all too swiftly during the season. Tom watched, hypnotized by the small bonfire of insects leaping and furling within the jar, until he froze, sleeping, raised on elbow, while Douglas wrote on. He summed it all up on a final page:

 

YOU CAN
'
T DEPEND ON
THINGS
BECAUSE
…

 

… like machines, for instance, they fall apart or rust or rot, or maybe never get finished at all … or wind up in garages …

 

… like tennis shoes, you can only run so far, so fast, and then the earth's got you again …

 

… like trolleys. Trolleys, big as they are, always come to the end of the line …

YOU CAN
'
T DEPEND ON
PEOPLE
BECAUSE
…

 

… they go away.

… strangers die.

… people you know fairly well die.

… friends die.

… people
murder
people, like in books.

… your own folks can die.

 

So … !

He held onto a double fistful of breath, let it hiss out slow, grabbed more breath, and let it whisper through his tight-gritted teeth.

SO. He finished in huge heavily blocked capitals.

 

SO IF TROLLEYS AND RUNABOUTS AND FRIENDS AND NEAR FRIENDS CAN GO AWAY FOR A WHILE OR GO AWAY FOREVER, OR RUST, OR FALL APART OR DIE, AND IF PEOPLE CAN BE MURDERED, AND IF SOMEONE LIKE GREAT-GRANDMA, WHO WAS GOING TO LIVE FOREVER, CAN DIE … IF ALL OF THIS IS TRUE … THEN … I, DOUGLAS SPAULDING, SOME DAY … MUST …

 

But the fireflies, as if extinguished by his somber thoughts, had softly turned themselves off.

I can't write any more, anyway, thought Douglas. I won't write any more. I won't, I won't finish it tonight.

He looked over at Tom asleep on his upraised elbow and hand. He touched Tom's wrist and Tom collapsed into a sighing ruin, back upon the bed.

Douglas picked up the Mason jar with the cold dark lumps in it and the cool lights flicked on again, as if given life by his hand. He lifted the Mason jar to where it shone fitfully on his summing-up. The final words waited to be written. But he went instead to the window and pushed the screen frame out. He unscrewed the top of the jar and tilted the fireflies in a pale shower of sparks down the windless night. They found their wings and flew away.

Douglas watched them go. They departed like the pale fragments of a final twilight in the history of a dying world. They went like the few remaining shreds of warm hope from his hand. They left his face and his body and the space inside his body to darkness. They left him empty as the Mason jar which now, without knowing that he did so, he took back into bed with him, when he tried to sleep....

T
here she sat in her glass coffin, night after night, her body melted by the carnival blaze of summer, frozen in the ghost winds of winter, waiting with her sickle smile and carved, hooked, and wax-poured nose hovering above her pale pink and wrinkled wax hands poised forever above the ancient fanned-out deck of cards. The Tarot Witch. A delicious name. The Tarot Witch. You thrust a penny in the silver slot and far away below, behind, inside, machinery groaned and cogged, levers stroked, wheels spun. And in her case the witch raised up her glittery face to blind you with a single needle stare. Her implacable left hand moved down to stroke and fritter enigmatic tarot-card skulls, devils, hanging men, hermits, cardinals and clowns, while her head hung close to delve your misery or murder, hope or health, your rebirths each morning and death's renewals by night. Then she spidered a calligrapher's pen across the back of a single card and let it titter down the chute into your hands. Whereupon the witch, with a last veiled glimmer of her eyes, froze back in her eternal caul for weeks, months, years, awaiting the next copper penny to revive her from oblivion. Now, waxen dead, she suffered the two boys' approach.

Douglas fingerprinted the glass.

“There she is.”

“It's a wax dummy,” said Tom. “Why do you want me to see her?”

“All the time asking why!” yelled Douglas. “Because,
that's
why, because!”

Because … the arcade lights dimmed … because …

One day you discover you are alive.

Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight!

You laugh, you dance around, you shout.

But, not long after, the sun goes out. Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon.

At the cowboy matinee last Saturday a man had dropped down dead on the white-hot screen. Douglas had cried out. For years he had seen billions of cowboys shot, hung, burned, destroyed. But now, this one particular man …

He'll never walk, run, sit, laugh, cry, won't do anything ever, thought Douglas. Now he's turning cold. Douglas's teeth chattered, his heart pumped sludge in his chest. He shut his eyes and let the convulsion shake him.

He had to get away from these other boys because they weren't thinking about death, they just laughed and yelled at the dead man as if he still lived. Douglas and the dead man were on a boat pulling away, with all the others left behind on the bright shore, running, jumping, hilarious with motion, not knowing that the boat, the dead man and Douglas were going, going, and now gone into darkness. Weeping, Douglas ran to the lemon-smelling men's room where, sick, it seemed a fire hydrant churned three times from his throat.

And waiting for the sickness to pass he thought: All the people I know who died this summer! Colonel Freeleigh, dead! I didn't know it before; why? Great-grandma, dead, too. Really-truly. Not only that but … He paused. Me! No, they can't kill me! Yes, said a voice, yes, any time they want to they can, no matter how you kick or scream, they just put a big hand over you and you're still.... I don't want to die! Douglas screamed, without a sound. You'll have to anyway, said the voice, you'll have to anyway....

The sunlight outside the theater blazed down upon unreal street, unreal buildings, and people moving slowly, as if under a bright and heavy ocean of pure burning gas and him thinking that now, now at last he must go home and finish out the final line in his nickel tablet: SOME DAY, I, DOUGLAS SPAULDING, MUST DIE....

It had taken him ten minutes to get up enough courage to cross the street, his heart slowing, and there was the arcade and he saw the strange wax witch back where she had always hidden in cool dusty shadow with the Fates and Furies tucked under her fingernails. A car passing flashed an explosion of light through the arcade, jumping the shadows, making it seem that the wax woman nodded swiftly for him to enter.

And he had gone in at the witch's summoning and come forth five minutes later, certain of survival. Now, he must show Tom....

“She looks almost alive,” said Tom.

“She
is
alive. I'll show you.”

He shoved a penny in the slot.

Nothing happened.

Douglas yelled across the arcade at Mr. Black, the proprietor, seated on an upended soda-pop crate uncorking and taking a swig from a three-quarters empty bottle of brown-yellow liquid.

“Hey, something's wrong with the witch!”

Mr. Black shuffled over, his eyes half closed, his breath sharp and strong. “Something's wrong with the pinball, wrong with the peep show, wrong with the E
LECTROCUTE
Y
OURSELF FOR A
P
ENNY
machine.” He struck the case. “Hey, in there! Come alive!” The witch sat unperturbed. “Costs me more to fix her each month than she earns.” Mr. Black reached behind the case and hung a sign “O
UT OF
O
RDER
” over her face. “She ain't the only thing's out of order. Me, you, this town, this country, the whole world! To hell with it!” He shook his fist at the woman. “The junk heap for you, you hear me, the junk heap!” He walked off and plunged himself down on the soda-pop crate to feel the coins in his money apron again, like it was his stomach giving him pain.

“She just can't—oh, she can't be out of order,” said Douglas, stricken.

“She's old,” said Tom. “Grandpa says she was here when he was a boy and before. So it's bound to be some day she'd konk out and …”

“Come on now,” whispered Douglas. “Oh, please, please, write so Tom can see!”

He shoved another coin stealthily into the machine. “Please …”

The boys pressed the glass, their breath made cumulus clouds on the pane.

Then, deep inside the box, a whisper, a whir.

And slowly, the witch's head rose up and looked at the boys and there was something in her eyes that froze them as her hand began to scrabble almost frantically back and forth upon the tarots, to pause, hurry on, return. Her head bent down, one hand came to rest and a shuddering shook the machine as the other hand wrote, paused, wrote, and stopped at last with a paroxysm so violent the glass in the case chimed. The witch's face bent in a rigid mechanical misery, almost fisted into a ball. Then the machinery gasped and a single cog slipped and a tiny tarot card tickled down the flue into Douglas's cupped hands.

“She's alive! She's working again!”

“What's the card say, Doug?”

“It's the same one she wrote for me last Saturday! Listen …”

And Douglas read:

 

“Hey, nonny no!

Men are fools that wish to die!

Is't not fine to dance and sing

When the bells of death do ring?

Is't not fine to swim in wine,

And turn upon the toe,

And sing Hey, nonny no!

When the winds blow and the seas flow?

Hey, nonny no!”

 

“Is that
all
it says?” said Tom.

“At the bottom is a message: ‘PREDICTION: A long life and a lively one.'”

“That's more like it! Now how about one for me?”

Tom put his coin in. The witch shuddered. A card fell into his hand.

“Last one off the premises is the witch's behind,” said Tom calmly.

They ran out so fast, the proprietor gasped and clutched forty-five copper pennies in one fist, thirty-six in the other.

 

O
utside in the glare of the uneasy street lights Douglas and Tom made a terrible discovery.

The tarot card was empty, there was no message.

“That can't be!”

“Don't get excited, Doug. It's just a plain old card; we only lost a penny.”

“It's not just a plain old card, it's more than a penny, it's life and death.”

Under the fluttering moth light in the street Douglas's face was milky as he stared at the card and turned it, rustling, trying somehow to put words on it.

“She ran out of ink.”

“She
never
runs out of ink!”

He looked at Mr. Black sitting there finishing off his bottle and cursing, not knowing how lucky he was, living in the arcade. Please, he thought, don't let the arcade fall apart, too. Bad enough that friends disappeared, people were killed and buried in the real world, but let the arcade run along the way it was, please, please....