Quicker Than the Eye (18 page)

"Are you forgotten?" a voice asked.

"Unborn," the pale man replied.

"Never remembered?"

“Only. Only in. France."

"Wrote nothing at all?"

"Not worthy."

"Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don't look. 
Feel."

"Tombstones."

"With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but the day after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name on each."

"It will not be."

"Is. 
Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?"

"Red Death."

    "The Fall of-"                        -

    "Usher!"

    "Pit?"

    "Pendulum!"

"Tell-tale?"

"Heart! 
My 
heart. Heart!"

"Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor." "Silly."

"Repeat: Montresor, for the love of God." "For the love of God, Montresor'."

"Do you see this label?"

"I see!"

"Read the date."

"Nineteen ninety-four. No such date."

"Again, and the name of the wine."

"Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!"

"Yes! Now shake your head. Make the fool’s-cap bells ring. Here's mortar for the last brick. Quickly. I'm here to bury you alive with books. When death comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?"

"Requiescat in pace?"

"Say it again."

"Requiescat in pace!"

The Time Wind roared, the room emptied. Nurses ran in, summoned by laughter, and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.

"What's he 
saying?" 
someone cried.

In Paris, an hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St. Elmo's fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread at a street corner, a turnabout of wind like an invisible carousel, and then footfalls up a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked out upon cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his room.

The shadow of a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light from the window revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The single word that the mouth said was:

"Oscar?"

They drove into green Sunday-morning country, away from the hot aluminum city, and watched as the sky was set free and moved over them like a lake they had never known was there, amazingly blue and with white breakers above them as they traveled.

Clarence Travers slowed the car and felt the cool wind move over his face with the smell of cut grass. He reached over to grasp his wife's hand and glanced at his son and daughter in the backseat, not fighting, at least for this moment, as the car moved through one quiet beauty after another in what might be a Sunday so lush and green it would never end.

"Thank God we're doing this," said Cecelia Travers. "It's been a million years since we got away." He felt her hand hug his and then relax completely. "when I think of all those ladies dropping dead from the heat at the cocktail parry this afternoon, 
welt"

"Well, indeed," said Clarence Travers. "Onward!"

He pressed the gas pedal and they moved faster. Their progress out of the city had been mildly hysterical, with cars shrieking and shoving them toward islands of wilderness praying for picnics that might not be found. Seeing that he had put the car in the fast lane, he slowed to gradually move himself and his family through the banshee traffic until they were idling along at an almost reasonable fifty miles an hour. The scents of flowers and trees that blew in the window made his move worthwhile. He laughed at nothing at all and said:

“Sometimes, when I get this far out, I think let's just keep driving, never go back to the damned city."

"Let's drive a hundred miles," shouted his son.

"A thousand!" cried his daughter.

"A thousand!" said Clarence Travers. "But one slow mile at a time." And then said, softly, “Hey!”

And as suddenly as if they had dreamed it up, the lost highway came into view. "Wonderful!" said Mr. Clarence Travers.

"What?" asked the children.

"Look!" said Clarence Travers, leaning over his wife, pointing. "That's the 
Old 
road. The one they used a long time ago."

"That?" 
said his wife.

"It's awfully small," said his son.

"Well, there weren't many cars then, they didn't need much."

"It looks like a big snake," said his daughter.

"Yeah, the old roads used to twist and turn, all right. Remember?"

Cecelia Travers nodded. The car had slowed and they gazed over at that narrow concrete strip with the green grass buckling it gently here or there and sprays of wildflowers nestling up close to either side and the morning sunlight coming down through the high elms and maples and oaks that led the way toward the forest.

"I know it like the nose on my face," said Clarence Travers. "How would you like to ride on it?"

"Oh, Clarence, now

"I 
mean 
it."

"Oh, Daddy, 
could 
we?"

"All right, we'll do it," he said decisively.

"We can't!" said Cecelia Travers. "It's probably against the law. It can't be safe."

But before his wife could finish, he turned off the freeway and let all the swift cars rush on while he drove, smiling at each bump, down over a small ditch, toward the old road.

"Clarence, please! we'll be arrested!"

"For going ten miles an hour on a highway nobody uses anymore? Let's not kick over any beehives, it's too nice a day. I'll buy you all soda pops if you behave."

They reached the old road.

"See how simple? Now which way, kids?"

"That way, 
that 
way!"

"Easy as pie!"

And he let the car take them away on the old highway, the great white-gray boa constrictor that lashed now slowly this way in green moss-velvet meadows, looped over gentle hills, and lowered itself majestically into caves of moist-smelling trees, through the odor of cricks and spring mud and crystal water that rustled like sheets of cellophane over small stone falls. They drove slow enough to see the waterspiders' enigmatic etchings on quiet pools behind dams of last October's leaves.

"Daddy, what are those?"

"What, the water-skaters? No one has ever caught one. You wait and wait and put your hand out and bang! The spider's gone. They're the first things in life you can't grab onto. The list gets bigger as you grow old, so start small. Don't believe in them. They're not really there."

"It's fun 
thinking 
they are."

“You have just stated a deep philosophical truth. Now, drive on, Mr. Travers.” And obeying his own command with good humor, he drove on.

And they came to a forest that had been like November all through the winter and now, reluctantly, was putting out green flags to welcome the season. Butterflies in great tosses of confetti leaped from the deeps of the forest to ramble drunkenly on the air, their thousand torn shadows following over grass and water.

"Let's go back now," said Cecelia Travers.

"Aw, Mom," said the son and daughter.

"Why?" said Clarence Travers. "My God, how many kids back in that damned hot town can say they drove on a road 
nobody else 
has used in years? Not 
one! 
Not one with a father brave enough to cross a little grass to take the old way. Right?"

Mrs. Travers lapsed into silence.

"Right there," said Clarence Travers, "over that hill, the highway turns left, then right, then left again, an S curve, and another S. Wait and see."

"Left."

"Right."

"Left."

"An S curve."

The car purred.

"Another 
S!"

"Just like you 
said!"

"Look." Clarence Travers pointed. A hundred yards across the way from them, the freeway suddenly appeared for a few yards before it vanished, screaming behind stacks of playing-card billboards. Clarence Travers stared fixedly at it and the grass between it and this shadowed path, this silent place like the bottom of an old stream where tides used to come but came no more, where the wind ran through nights making the old sound of far traffic.

"You know something," said the wife. "That freeway over there scares me."

"Can we drive home on this old road instead, Dad?" said the son.

"I wish we could."

"I've always been scared," said the wife, watching that other traffic roaring by, gone before it arrived.

"We're 
all 
afraid," said Clarence Travers. "But you pay your money and take your chance. 
Well?"

His wife sighed. "Damn, get back on that dreadful thing."

"Not quite yet," said Clarence Travers and drove to reach a small, very small village, all quite unexpected, a settlement no more than a dozen white clapboard houses mossed under giant trees, dreaming in a green tide of water and leaf-shadow, with wind shaking the rocking chairs on weathered porches and dogs sleeping in the cool nap of grass-carpeting at noon, and a small general store with a dirty red gas pump out front.

They drew up there and got out and stood, unreal in the sudden lack of motion, not quite accepting these houses lost in the wilderness.

The door to the general store squealed open and an old man stepped out, blinked at them, and said, "Say, did you folks just come down that old road?"

Clarence Travers avoided his wife's accusing eyes. "Yes, sir.

"No one on that road in twenty years."

"We were out for a lark," said Mr. Travers. "And found a peacock," he added.

“A sparrow,“ said his wife.

"The freeway passed us by, a mile over there, if you want it," said the old man. "When the new road opened, this town just died on the vine. We got nothing here now but people like me. That is: old."

"Looks like there'd be places here to rent."

"Mister, just walk in, knock out the bats, stomp the spiders, and any place is yours for thirty bucks a month. I own the whole town."

"Oh, we're not 
really 
interested," said Cecelia Travers.

"Didn't think you 
would 
be," said the old man. "Too far out from the city, too far off the freeway. And that dirt road there slops over when it rains, all muck and mud. And, heck, it's against the law to use that path. Not that they ever patrol it." The old man snorted, shaking his head. "And not that I'll turn you in. But it gave me a nice start just now to see you coming down that rut. J had to give a quick look at my calendar, by God, and make sure it wasn't 1929!"

Lord, I remember, thought Clarence Travers. This is Fox Hill. A thousand people lived here. I was a kid, we passed through on summer nights. We used to stop here 
late late, 
and me sleeping in the backseat in the moonlight. My grandmother and grandfather in back with me. It's nice to sleep in a car driving late and the road all white, watching the stars turn as you take the curves, listening to the grown-ups' voices underwater, remote, talking, talking, laughing, murmuring, whispering. My father driving, so stolid. Just to be driving in the summer dark, up along the lake to the Dunes, where the poison ivy grew out on the lonely beach and the wind stayed all the time and never went away. And us driving by that lonely graveyard place of sand and moonlight and poison ivy and the waves tumbling in like dusty ash on the shore, the lake pounding like a locomotive on the sand, coming and going. And me crumpled down and smelling Grandmother's wind-cooled coat and the voices comforting and blanketing me with their solidity and their always-will-be-here sounds that would go on forever, myself always young and us always riding on a summer night in our old Kissel with the side flaps down. And stopping here at nine or ten for Pistachio and Tutti-frutti ice cream that tasted, faintly, beautifully, of gasoline. All of us licking and biting the cones and smelling the gasoline and driving on, sleepy and snug, toward home, Green Town, thirty years ago.

He caught himself and said:

"About these houses, would it be much trouble fixing them up?" He squinted at the old man.

"Well, yes and no, most of 'em over fifty years old, lots of dust. You could buy one off me for ten thousand, a real bargain now, you'll admit. If you were an artist, now, a painter, or something like that."

"I write copy in an advertising firm."

"Write stories, too, no doubt? Well, now, you get a writer out here, quiet, no neighbors, you'd do lots of writing."

Cecelia Travers stood silently between the old man and her husband. Clarence Travers did not look at her, but looked at the cinders around the porch of the general store. "I imagine I 
could 
work here."

"Sure," said the old man.

"I've often thought," said Mr. Travers, "it's time we got away from the city and took it a little easy."

"Sure," said the old man.

Mrs. Travers said nothing but searched in her purse and took out a minor.

"Would you like some drinks?" asked Clarence Travers with exaggerated concern. "Three Orange Crushes, make it four," he told the old man. The old man moved inside the store, which smelled of nails and crackers and dust.

When the old man was gone, Mr. Travers turned to his wife, and his eyes were shining. "We've always wanted to do it! Let's!"

"Do 
what?" 
she said.

"Move out here, snap decision, why not? Why? We've promised ourselves every year: get away from the noise, the confusion, so the kids'd have a place to play. And . .

“Good grief" the wife cried.

The old man moved inside the store, coughing. "Ridiculous." She lowered her voice. "We've got the apartment paid up, you've got a fine job, the kids have school with friends, I belong to some fine clubs. And we've just spent a bundle redecorating. We-"

"Listen," he said, as if she were really listening. " None of that's important. Out here, we can breathe. Back in town, hell, 
you 
complain ...”

"Just to have something to 
complain 
about."

"Your clubs can't be that important."

"It's not clubs, it's 
friends!"

"How many would care if we dropped dead tomorrow?" he said. "If I got hit in that traffic, how many thousand cars would run over me before one stopped to see if I was a man or dog left in the road?"

"Your job . . ." she started to say.

"My God, ten years ago we said, in two more years we'll have enough money to quit and write my novel! But each year we've said 
next 
year! and next year and 
next 
year!"

"We've 
had 
fun, haven't we?"

"Sure! Subways are fun, buses are fun, martinis and drunken friends are fun. Advertising? Yeah! But I've 
used 
all
 
the fun there is! I want to 
write 
about what I've seen now, and there's no better place than this. Look at that house over there! Can't you just see me in the front window banging the hell out of my typewriter?"

"Stop hyperventilating!"

"Hyperventilate? God, I'd jump for joy to quit. I've gone as far as I can go. Come on, Cecelia, let's get back some of the spunk in our marriage, take a chance!"

"The children

"We'd 
love 
it here!" said the son.

"I 
think," 
said the daughter.

"I'm not getting any younger," said Clarence Travers.

"Nor am I," she said, touching his arm. "But we can't play hopscotch now. When the children leave, yes, we'll think about it."

"Children, hopscotch, my God, I'll take my typewriter to the grave!"

"It won't be long. We-"

The shop door squealed open again and whether the old man had been standing in the screen shadow for the last minute, there was no telling. It did not show in his face. He stepped out with four lukewarm bottles of Orange Crush in his rust-spotted hands.

"Here you are," he said.

Clarence and Cecelia Travers turned to stare at him as if he were a stranger come out to bring them drinks. They smiled and took the bottles.

The four of them stood drinking the soda pop in the warm sunlight. The summer wind blew through the grottoes of trees in the old, shady town. It was like being in a great green church, a cathedral, the trees so high that the people and cottages were lost far down below. All night long you would imagine those trees rustling Their leaves like an ocean on an unending shore. God, thought Clarence Travers, you could really sleep here, the sleep of the dead and the peace-fill-of-heart.