Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (115 page)

‘What week, when?’

‘My twelfth birthday fell that week in summer, think of it! Victoria still queen and me in a turf-hut out by Galway strolling the shore for food to be picked up from the tides, and the weather so sweet you almost turned sad with the taste of it, for you knew it would soon go away.

‘And in the middle of the great fair weather along the road by the shore one noon came this tinker’s caravan carrying their dark gypsy people to set up camp by the sea.

‘There was a mother, a father, and a girl in that caravan, and this boy who came running down by the sea alone, perhaps in need of company, for there I was with nothing to do, and in need of strangers myself.

‘Here he came running. And I shall not forget my first sight of him from that day till they drop me in the earth. He—

‘Ah God, I’m a failure with words! Stop everything. I must go further back.

‘A circus came to Dublin. I visited the sideshows of pinheads and dwarfs and terrible small midgets and fat women and skeleton men. Seeing a crowd about one last exhibit, I thought this must be the most horrible of all. I edged over to look at this final terror! And what did I see? The crowd was drawn to nothing more nor less than: a little girl of some six years, so fair, so beautiful, so cream-white of cheek, so blue of eye, so golden of hair, so quiet in her manner that in the midst of this fleshy holocaust she called attention. By saying nothing her shout of beauty stopped the show. All
had
to come to her to get well again. For it was a sick menagerie and she the only sweet lovely Doc about to give us back life.

‘Well, that girl in the sideshow was as wonderful a surprise as this boy come running down the beach like a young horse.

‘He was not dark like his parents.

‘His hair was all gold curls and bits of sun. He was cut out of bronze by the light, and what wasn’t bronze was copper. Impossible, but it seemed that this boy of twelve, like myself, had been born on that very day, he looked that new and fresh. And in his face were these bright brown eyes, the eyes of an animal that has run a long way, pursued, along the shorelines of the world.

‘He pulled up and the first thing he said to me was laughter. He was glad to be alive, and announced that by the sound he made. I must have laughed in turn, for his spirit was catching. He shoved out his brown hand. I hesitated. He gestured impatiently and grabbed my hand.

‘My God, after all these years I remember what we said: ‘Isn’t it funny?’ he said.

‘I didn’t ask
what
was funny. I
knew
. He said his name was Jo. I said my name was Tim. And there we were, two boys on the beach and the universe a good rare joke between us.

‘He looked at me with his great round full copper eyes, and laughed out his breath and I thought: He has chewed hay! his breath smells of grass: and suddenly I was giddy. The smell stunned me. Jesus God. I thought, reeling, I’m drunk, and
why
? I’ve nipped Dad’s booze, but God, what’s
this
? Drunk by noon, hit by the sun, giddy from what? the sweet mash caught in a strange boy’s teeth? No, no!

‘Then Jo looked straight at me and said. “There isn’t much time.”

‘“Much time?” I asked.

‘“Why,” said Jo, “for us to be friends. We are,
aren’t
we?”

‘He breathed the smell of mown fields upon me.

‘Jesus God, I wanted to cry, Yes! And almost fell down, but staggered back as if he had hit me a friend’s hit. And my mouth opened and shut and I said, “Why is there so little time?”

‘“Because,” said Jo, “we’ll only be here six days, seven at the most, then on down and around Eire. I’ll never see you again in my life. So we’ll just have to pack a lot of things in a few days, won’t we, Tim?”

‘“Six days? That’s no time at all!” I protested, and wondered why I found myself suddenly destroyed, left destitute on the shore. A thing had not begun, but already I sorrowed after its death.

‘“A day here, a week there, a month somewhere else,” said Jo. “I must live very quickly, Tim. I have no friends that last. Only what I remember. So, wherever I go, I say to my new friends, quick, do this, do that, let us make many happenings, a long list, so you will remember me when I am gone, and I you, and say: That was a friend. So, let’s begin. There!”

‘And Jo tagged me and ran.

‘I ran after him, laughing, for wasn’t it silly, me headlong after a stranger boy unknown five minutes before? We must’ve run a mile down that long summer beach before he let me catch him. I thought I might pummel him for making me run so far for nothing, for something, for God knew what! But when we tumbled to earth and I pinned him down, all he did was spring his breath in one gasp up at me, one breath, and I leaped back and shook my head and sat staring at him, as if I’d plunged wet hands in an open electric socket. He laughed to see me fall away, to see me scurry and sit in wonder. “O, Tim,” he said, “we
shall
be friends.”

‘You know the dread long cold weather, most months, of Ireland? Well, this week of my twelfth birthday, it was summer each day and every day for the seven days named by Jo as the limit which would be no more days. We walked the shore, and that’s all there was, the simple thing of us upon the shore, and building castles or climbing hills to fight wars among the mounds. We found an old round tower and yelled up and down from it. But mostly it was walking, our arms about each other like twins born in a tangle, never cut free by knife or lightning. I inhaled, he exhaled. Then he breathed and I was the sweet chorus. We talked, far through the nights on the sand, until our parents came seeking the lost who had found they knew not what. Lured home, I slept beside him, or him me, and talked and laughed, Jesus, laughed, till dawn. Then out again we roared until the earth swung up to hit our backs. We found ourselves laid out with sweet hilarity, eyes tight, gripped to each other’s shaking, and the laugh jumped free like one silver trout following another. God, I bathed in his laughter as he bathed in mine, until we were weak as if love had put us to the slaughter and exhaustions. We panted then like
pups in hot summer, empty of laughing, and sleepy with friendship. And the weather for that week was blue and gold, no clouds, no rain, and a wind that smelled of apples, but no, only that boy’s wild breath.

‘It crossed my mind, long after, if ever an old man could bathe again in that summer fount, the wild spout of breathing that sprang from his nostrils and gasped from his mouth, why one might peel off a score of years, one would be young, how might the flesh resist?

‘But the laughter is gone and the boy gone into a man lost somewhere in the world, and here I am two lifetimes later, speaking of it for the first time. For who was there to tell? From my twelfth birthday week, and the gift of friendship, to this, who might I tell of that shore and that summer and the two of us walking all tangled in our arms and lives and life as perfect as the letter
o
, a damned great circle of rare weather, lovely talk, and us certain we’d live forever, never die, and be good friends.

‘And at the end of the week, he left.

‘He was wise for his years. He didn’t say good-by. All of a sudden, the tinker’s cart was gone.

‘I shouted along the shore. A long way off. I saw the caravan go over a hill. But then his wisdom spoke to me. Don’t catch. Let go. Weep now, my own wisdom said. And I wept.

‘I wept for three days and on the fourth grew very still. I did not go down to the shore again for many months. And in all the years that have passed, never have I known such a thing again. I have had a good life, a fine wife, good children, and you, boy, Tom, you. But as sure as I sit here, never after that was I so agonized, mad, and crazy wild. Never did drink make me as drunk. Never did I cry so hard again. Why, Tom? Why do I say this, and what was it? Back so far in innocence, back in the time when I had nobody, and knew nothing. How is it I remember him when all else slips away? When often I cannot remember your dear grandmother’s face, God forgive me, why does his face come back on the shore by the sea? Why do I see us fall again and the earth reach up to take the wild young horses driven mad by too much sweet grass in a line of days that never end?’

The old man grew silent. After a moment, he added. ‘The better part of wisdom, they say, is what’s left unsaid. I’ll say no more. I don’t even know why I’ve said all
this
.’

Tom lay in the dark. ‘
I
know.’

‘Do you, lad?’ asked the old man. ‘Well, tell me. Someday.’

‘Someday,’ said Tom. ‘I will.’

They listened to the rain touch at the windows.

‘Are you happy, Tom?’

‘You asked that before, sir.’

‘I ask again. Are you happy?’

‘Yes.’

Silence.

‘Is it summertime on the shore. Tom? Is it the magic seven days? Are you drunk?’

Tom did not answer for a long while, and then said nothing but, ‘Grandda,’ and then moved his head once in a nod.

The old man lay back in the chair. He might have said. This will pass. He might have said. It will not last. He might have said many things. Instead he said, ‘Tom?’

‘Sir?’

‘Ah Jesus!’ shouted the old man suddenly. ‘Christ, God Almighty! Damn it to hell!’ Then the old man stopped and his breathing grew quiet. ‘There. It’s a maniac night. I had to let out one last yell. I just had to, boy.’

And at last they slept, with the rain falling fast.

With the first light of dawn, the old man dressed with careful quietness, picked up his valise, and bent to touch the sleeping young man’s cheek with the palm of one hand.

‘Tom, good-by,’ he whispered.

Moving down the dim stairwell toward the steadily beating rain, he found Tom’s friend waiting at the foot of the stairs.

‘Frank! You haven’t been down here
all night
?’

‘No, no. Mr Kelly,’ said Frank, quickly. ‘I stayed at a friend’s.’

The old man turned to look up the dark stairwell as if he could see the room and Tom in it warm asleep.

‘Gah…!’ Something almost a growl stirred in his throat and subsided. He shifted uneasily and looked back down at the dawn kindled on this young man’s face, this one who had painted a picture that hung above the fireplace in the room above.

‘The damn night is over,’ said the old man. ‘So if you’ll just stand aside—’

‘Sir.’

The old man took one step down and burst out:

‘Listen! If you hurt Tom, in any way ever, why, Jesus. I’ll break you across my knee! You
hear
?’

Frank held out his hand. ‘Don’t worry.’

The old man looked at the hand as if he had never seen one before. He sighed.

‘Ah, damn it to hell, Frank, Tom’s friend, so young you’re destruction to the eyes. Get away!’

They shook hands.

‘Jesus, that’s a hard grip,’ said the old man, surprised.

Then he was gone, as if the rain had hustled him off in its own multitudinous running.

The young man shut the upstairs door and stood for a moment looking at the figure on the bed and at last went over and as if by instinct put his hand down to the exact same spot where the old man had printed his hand in farewell not five minutes before. He touched the summer cheek.

In his sleep, Tom smiled the smile of his father’s father, and called the old man, deep in a dream, by name.

He called him twice.

And then he slept quietly.

They moved into the Hotel de Las Flores on a hot green afternoon in late October. The inner patio was blazing with red and yellow and white flowers, like flames, which lit their small room. The husband was tall and blackhaired and pale and looked as if he had driven ten thousand miles in his sleep; he walked through the tile patio, carrying a few blankets, he threw himself on the small bed of the small room with an exhausted sigh and lay there. While he closed his eyes, his wife, about twenty-four, with yellow hair and horn-rim glasses, smiling at the manager, Mr Gonzales, hurried in and out from the room to the car. First she carried two suitcases, then a typewriter, thanking Mr Gonzales, but steadily refusing his help. And then she carried in a huge packet of Mexican masks they had picked up in the lake town of Pátzcuaro, and then out to the car again and again for more small cases and packages, and even an extra tire which they were afraid some native might roll off down the cobbled street during the night. Her face pink from the exertion, she hummed as she locked the car, checked the windows, and ran back to the room where her husband lay, eyes closed, on one of the twin beds.

‘Good God,’ he said, without opening his eyes, ‘this is one hell of a bed. Feel it. I told you to pick one with a Simmons mattress.’ He gave the bed a weary slap. ‘It’s as hard as a rock.’

‘I don’t speak Spanish,’ said the wife, standing there, beginning to look bewildered. ‘You should have come in and talked to the landlord yourself.’

‘Look,’ he said, opening his gray eyes just a little and turning his head. ‘I’ve done all the driving on this trip. You just sit there and look at the scenery. You’re supposed to handle the money, the lodgings, the gas and oil, and all that. This is the second place we’ve hit where you got hard beds.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, still standing, beginning to fidget.

‘I like to at least sleep nights, that’s all I ask.’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘Didn’t you even
feel
the beds?’

‘They looked all right.’

‘You’ve got to feel them.’ He slapped the bed and punched it at his side.

The woman turned to her own bed and sat on it, experimentally. ‘It feels all right to me.’

‘Well, it isn’t.’

‘Maybe my bed is softer.’

He rolled over tiredly and reached out to punch the other bed. ‘You can have this one if you want,’ she said, trying to smile.

‘That’s hard, too,’ he said, sighing, and fell back and closed his eyes again.

No one spoke, but the room was turning cold, while outside the flowers blazed in the green shrubs and the sky was immensely blue. Finally, she rose and grabbed the typewriter and suitcase and turned toward the door.

‘Where’re you going?’ he said.

‘Back out to the car,’ she said. ‘We’re going to find another place.’

‘Put it down,’ said the man. ‘I’m tired.’

‘We’ll find another place.’

‘Sit down, we’ll stay here tonight, my God, and move tomorrow.’

She looked at all the boxes and crates and luggage, the clothes, and the tire, her eyes flickering. She put the typewriter down.

‘Damn it!’ she cried, suddenly. ‘You can have the mattress off my bed. I’ll sleep on the springs.’

He said nothing.

‘You can have the mattress off my bed,’ she said. ‘Only don’t talk about it. Here!’ She pulled the blanket off and yanked at the mattress.

‘That might be better,’ he said, opening his eyes, seriously.

‘You can have both mattresses, my God, I can sleep on a bed of nails!’ she cried. ‘Only stop yapping.’

‘I’ll manage.’ He turned his head away. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to you.’

‘It’d be plenty fair just for you to keep quiet about the bed; it’s not that hard, good God, you’ll sleep if you’re tired. Jesus God, Joseph!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ said Joseph. ‘Why don’t you go find out about Parícutin volcano?’

‘I’ll go in a minute.’ She stood there, her face red.

‘Find out what the rates are for a taxi out there and a horse up the mountain to see it, and look at the sky; if the sky’s blue that means the volcano isn’t erupting today, and don’t let them gyp you.’

‘I guess I can do that.’

She opened the door and stepped out and shut the door and
Señor
Gonzales was there. Was everything all right? he wished to know.

She walked past the town windows, and smelled the soft charcoal air. Beyond the town all of the sky was blue except north (or east or west, she couldn’t be certain) where the huge broiling black cloud rose up from the terrible volcano. She looked at it with a small tremoring inside. Then she sought out a large fat taxi driver and the arguments began. The price started at sixty pesos and dwindled rapidly, with expressions of mournful defeat upon the buck-toothed fat man’s face, to thirty-seven pesos. So! He was to come at three tomorrow afternoon, did he understand? That would give them time to drive out through the gray snows of land where the flaking lava ash had fallen to make a great dusty winter for mile after mile, and arrive at the volcano as the sun was setting. Was this very clear?

‘Si, señora, ésta es muy claro, si!’

‘
Bueno
.’ She gave him their hotel room number and bade him good-by.

She idled into little lacquer shops, alone; she opened the little lacquer boxes and sniffed the sharp scent of camphor wood and cedar and cinnamon. She watched the craftsmen, enchanted, razor blades flashing in the sun, cutting the flowery scrolls and filling these patterns with red and blue color. The town flowed about her like a silent slow river and she immersed herself in it, smiling all of the time, and not even knowing she smiled.

Suddenly she looked at her watch. She’d been gone half an hour. A look of panic crossed her face. She ran a few steps and then slowed to a walk again, shrugging.

As she walked in through the tiled cool corridors, under the silvery tin candelabra on the adobe walls, a caged bird fluted high and sweet, and a girl with long soft dark hair sat at a piano painted sky blue and played a Chopin nocturne.

She looked at the windows of their room, the shades pulled down. Three o’clock of a fresh afternoon. She saw a soft-drinks box at the end of the patio and bought four bottles of Coke. Smiling, she opened the door to their room.

‘It certainly took you long enough,’ he said, turned on his side toward the wall.

‘We leave tomorrow afternoon at three,’ she said.

‘How much?’

She smiled at his back, the bottles cold in her arms. ‘Only thirty-seven pesos.’

‘Twenty pesos would have done it. You can’t let these Mexicans take advantage of you.’

‘I’m richer than they are; if anyone
deserves
being taken advantage of, it’s us.’

‘That’s not the idea. They
like
to bargain.’

‘I feel like a bitch, doing it.’

‘The guide book says they double their price and expect you to halve it.’

‘Let’s not quibble over a dollar.’

‘A dollar is a dollar.’

‘I’ll pay the dollar from my own money,’ she said. ‘I brought some cold drinks—do you want one?’

‘What’ve you got?’ He sat up in bed.

‘Cokes.’

‘Well, you know I don’t like Cokes much; take two of those back, will you, and get some Orange Crush?’

‘Please?’ she said, standing there.

‘Please,’ he said, looking at her. ‘Is the volcano active?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ask?’

‘No, I looked at the sky. Plenty of smoke.’

‘You should have asked.’

‘The damn sky is just exploding with it.’

‘But how do we know it’s good tomorrow?’

‘We don’t know. If it’s not, we put it off.’

‘I guess that’s right.’ He lay down again.

She brought back two bottles of Orange Crush.

‘It’s not very cold,’ he said, drinking it.

They had supper in the patio: sizzling steak, green peas, a plate of Spanish rice, a little wine, and spiced peaches for dessert.

As he napkined his mouth, he said, casually, ‘Oh, I meant to tell you. I’ve checked your figures on what I owe you for the last six days, from Mexico City to here. You say I owe you one hundred twenty-five pesos, or about twenty-five American dollars, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I make it I owe you only twenty-two.’

‘I don’t think that’s possible,’ she said, still working on her spiced peaches with a spoon.

‘I added the figures twice.’

‘So did I.’

‘I think you added them wrong.’

‘Perhaps I did.’ She jarred the chair back suddenly. ‘Let’s go check.’

In the room, the notebook lay open under the lighted lamp. They checked the figures together. ‘You see,’ said he, quietly. ‘You’re three dollars off. How did that happen?’

‘It just happened, I’m sorry.’

‘You’re one hell of a bookkeeper.’

‘I do my best.’

‘Which isn’t very good. I thought you could take a little responsibility.’

‘I try damned hard.’

‘You forgot to check the air in the tires, you get hard beds, you lose things, you lost a key in Acapulco, to the car trunk, you lost the air-pressure gauge, and you can’t keep books. I have to drive—’

‘I know, I know, you have to drive all day, and you’re tired, and you just got over a strep infection in Mexico City, and you’re afraid it’ll come back and you want to take it easy on your heart, and the least I could do is to keep my nose clean and the arithmetic neat. I know it all by heart. I’m only a writer, and I admit I’ve got big feet.’

‘You won’t make a very good writer this way,’ he said. ‘It’s such a simple thing, addition.’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose!’ she cried, throwing the pencil down. ‘Hell! I wish I
had
cheated you now. I wish I’d done a lot of things now. I wish I’d lost that air-pressure gauge on purpose. I’d have some pleasure in thinking about it and knowing I did it to spite you, anyway. I wish I’d picked these beds for their hard mattresses, then I could laugh in my sleep tonight, thinking how hard they are for you to sleep on. I wish I’d done
that
on purpose. And now I wish I’d thought to fix the books. I could enjoy laughing about that, too.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ he said, as to a child.

‘I’ll be God damned if I’ll keep my voice down.’

‘All I want to know now is how much money you have in the kitty.’

She put her trembling hands in her purse and brought out all the money. When he counted it, there was five dollars missing.

‘Not only do you keep poor books, overcharging me on some item or other, but now there’s five dollars gone from the kitty,’ he said. ‘Where’d it go?’

‘I don’t know. I must have forgotten to put it down, or if I did, I didn’t say what for. Good God, I don’t want to add this damned list again. I’ll pay what’s missing out of my own allowance to keep everyone happy. Here’s five dollars! Now, let’s go out for some air, it’s hot in here.’

She jerked the door wide and she trembled with a rage all out of proportion to the facts. She was hot and shaking and stiff and she knew her face was very red and her eyes bright, and when
Señor
Gonzales bowed to them and wished them a good evening, she had to smile stiffly in return.

‘Here,’ said her husband, handing her the room key. ‘And don’t, for God’s sake, lose it.’

The band was playing in the green
zócalo
. It hooted and blared and tooted and screamed up on the bronze-scrolled bandstand. The square was bloomed full with people and color, men and boys walking one way around the block, on the pink and blue tiles, women and girls walking the other way, flirting their dark olive eyes at one another, men holding each other’s elbows and talking earnestly between meetings, women and girls twined
like ropes of flowers, sweetly scented, blowing in a summer night wind over the cooling tile designs, whispering, past the vendors of cold drinks and tamales and enchiladas. The band precipitated ‘Yankee Doodle’ once, to the delight of the blonde woman with the horn-rim glasses, who smiled wildly and turned to her husband. Then the band hooted ‘La Cumparsita’ and ‘La Paloma Azul,’ and she felt a good warmth and began to sing a little, under her breath.

‘Don’t act like a tourist,’ said her husband.

‘I’m just enjoying myself.’

‘Don’t be a damned fool, is all I ask.’

A vendor of silver trinkets shuffled by. ‘
Señor?
’

Joseph looked them over, while the band played, and held up one bracelet, very intricate, very exquisite. ‘How much?’

‘
Veinte pesos, señor
.’

‘Ho ho,’ said the husband, smiling. ‘I’ll give you five for it,’ in Spanish.

‘Five,’ replied the man in Spanish. ‘I would starve.’

‘Don’t bargain with him,’ said the wife.

‘Keep out of this,’ said the husband, smiling. To the vendor. ‘Five pesos,
señor
.’

‘No, no, I would lose money. My last price is ten pesos.’

‘Perhaps I could give you six,’ said the husband. ‘No more than that.’

The vendor hesitated in a kind of numbed panic as the husband tossed the bracelet back on the red velvet tray and turned away. ‘I am no longer interested. Good night.’

‘
Señor!
Six pesos, it is yours!’

The husband laughed. ‘Give him six pesos, darling.’

She stiffly drew forth her wallet and gave the vendor some peso bills. The man went away. ‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ she said.

‘Satisfied?’ Smiling, he flipped the bracelet in the palm of his pale hand. ‘For a dollar and twenty-five cents I buy a bracelet that sells for thirty dollars in the States!’

‘I have something to confess,’ she said. ‘I gave that man ten pesos.’

‘What!’ The husband stopped laughing.

‘I put a five-peso note in with those one-peso bills. Don’t worry, I’ll take it out of my own money. It won’t go on the bill I present you at the end of the week.’

He said nothing, but dropped the bracelet in his pocket. He looked at the band thundering into the last bars of ‘
Ay, Jalisco
.’ Then he said, ‘You’re a fool. You’d let these people take all your money.’

It was her turn to step away a bit and not reply. She felt rather good. She listened to the music.