Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (117 page)

He was quieted. ‘You’ll pay?’

‘Yes.’ She was dressing quickly now, in slacks and jacket. ‘In fact, I’ve been meaning to bring this up for some time. I’m giving all the money to you from now on. There’s no need of my keeping my profits separate from yours, as it has been. I’ll turn it over to you tomorrow.’

‘I don’t ask that,’ he said, quickly.

‘I insist. It all goes to you.’

What I’m doing, of course, is unloading your gun, she thought. Taking your weapon away from you. Now you won’t be able to extract the money from me, piece by piece, bit by painful bit. You’ll have to find another way to bother me.

‘I—’ he said.

‘No, let’s not talk about it. It’s yours.’

‘It’s only to teach you a lesson. You’ve a bad temper,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d control it if you had to forfeit something.’

‘Oh, I just
live
for money,’ she said.

‘I don’t want all of it.’

‘Come on now.’ She was weary. She opened the door and listened. The neighbors hadn’t heard, or if they had, they paid no attention. The lights of the waiting taxi illuminated the front patio.

They walked out through the cool moonlit night. She walked ahead of him for the first time in years.

Parícutin was a river of gold that night. A distant murmuring river of molten ore going down to some dead lava sea, to some volcanic black shore. Time and again if you held your breath, stilled your heart within you, you could hear the lava pushing rocks down the mountain in tumblings and roarings, faintly, faintly. Above the crater were red vapors and red light. Gentle brown and gray clouds arose suddenly as coronets or halos
or puffs from the interior, their undersides washed in pink, their tops dark and ominous, without a sound.

The husband and the wife stood on the opposite mountain, in the sharp cold, the horses behind them. In a wooden hut nearby, the scientific observers were lighting oil lamps, cooking their evening meal, boiling rich coffee, talking in whispers because of the clear, night-explosive air. It was very far away from everything else in the world.

On the way up the mountain, after the long taxi drive from Uruapan, over moon-dreaming hills of ashen snow, through dry stick villages, under the cold clear stars, jounced in the taxi like dice in a gambling-tumbler, both of them had tried to make a better thing of it. They had arrived at a campfire on a sort of sea bottom. About the campfire were solemn men and small dark boys, and a company of seven other Americans, all men, in riding breeches, talking in loud voices under the soundless sky. The horses were brought forth and mounted. They proceeded across the lava river. She talked to the other Yankees and they responded. They joked together. After a while of this, the husband rode on ahead.

Now, they stood together, watching the lava wash down the dark cone summit.

He wouldn’t speak.

‘What’s wrong now?’ she asked.

He looked straight ahead, the lava glow reflected in his eyes. ‘You could have ridden with me. I thought we came to Mexico to see things together. And now you talk to those damned Texans.’

‘I felt lonely. We haven’t seen any people from the States for eight weeks. I like the days in Mexico, but I don’t like the nights. I just wanted someone to talk to.’

‘You wanted to tell them you’re a writer.’

‘That’s unfair.’

‘You’re always telling people you’re a writer, and how good you are, and you’ve just sold a story to a large-circulation magazine and that’s how you got the money to come here to Mexico.’

‘One of them asked me what I did, and I told him. Damn right I’m proud of my work. I’ve waited ten years to sell some damn thing.’

He studied her in the light from the fire mountain and at last he said, ‘You know, before coming up here tonight. I thought about that damned typewriter of yours and almost tossed it into the river.’

‘You didn’t!’

‘No, but I locked it in the car. I’m tired of it and the way you’ve ruined the whole trip. You’re not with me, you’re with yourself, you’re the one who counts, you and that damned machine, you and Mexico, you and your reactions, you and your inspiration, you and your nervous sensitivity, and you and your aloneness. I knew you’d act this way tonight,
just as sure as there was a First Coming! I’m tired of your running back from every excursion we make to sit at that machine and bang away at all hours. This is a vacation.’

‘I haven’t touched the typewriter in a week, because it bothered you.’

‘Well, don’t touch it for another week or a month, don’t touch it until we get home. Your damned inspiration can wait!’

I should never have said I’d give him all the money, she thought. I should never have taken that weapon from him, it kept him away from my real life, the writing and the machine. And now I’ve thrown off the protective cloak of money and he’s searched for a new weapon and he’s gotten to the true thing—to the
machine
! Oh Christ!

Suddenly, without thinking, with the rage in her again, she pushed him ahead of her. She didn’t do it violently. She just gave him a push. Once, twice, three times. She didn’t hurt him. It was just a gesture of pushing away. She wanted to strike him, throw him off a cliff, perhaps, but instead she gave these three pushes, to indicate her hostility and the end of talking. Then they stood separately, while behind them the horses moved their hoofs softly, and the night air grew colder and their breath hissed in white plumes on the air, and in the scientists’ cabin the coffee bubbled on the blue gas jet and the rich fumes permeated the moonlit heights.

After an hour, as the first dim furnacings of the sun came in the cold East, they mounted their horses for the trip down through growing light, toward the buried city and the buried church under the lava flow. Crossing the flow, she thought, Why doesn’t his horse fall, why isn’t he thrown onto those jagged lava rocks, why? But nothing happened. They rode on. The sun rose red.

They slept until one in the afternoon. She was dressed and sitting on the bed waiting for him to waken for half an hour before he stirred and rolled over, needing a shave, very pale with tiredness.

‘I’ve got a sore throat,’ was the first thing he said.

She didn’t speak.

‘You shouldn’t have thrown water on me,’ he said.

She got up and walked to the door and put her hand on the knob.

‘I want you to stay here,’ he said. ‘We’re going to stay here in Uruapan three or four more days.’

At last she said. ‘I thought we were going on to Guadalajara.’

‘Don’t be a tourist. You ruined that trip to the volcano for us. I want to go back up tomorrow or the next day. Go look at the sky.’

She went out to look at the sky. It was clear and blue. She reported this. ‘The volcano dies down, sometimes for a week. We can’t afford to wait a week for it to boom again.’

‘Yes, we can. We will. And you’ll pay for the taxi to take us up there and do the trip over and do it right and enjoy it.’

‘Do you think we can ever enjoy it now?’ she asked.

‘If it’s the last thing we do, we’ll enjoy it.’

‘You insist, do you?’

‘We’ll wait until the sky is full of smoke and go back up.’

‘I’m going out to buy a paper.’ She shut the door and walked into the town.

She walked down the fresh-washed streets and looked in the shining windows and smelled that amazingly clear air and felt very good, except for the tremoring, the continual tremoring in her stomach. At last, with a hollowness roaring in her chest, she went to a man standing beside a taxi.

‘
Señor
,’ she said.

‘Yes?’ said the man.

She felt her heart stop beating. Then it began to thump again and she went on: ‘How much would you charge to drive me to Morelia?’

‘Ninety pesos,
señora
.’

‘And I can get the train in Morelia?’

‘There is a train
here, señora
.’

‘Yes, but there are reasons why I don’t want to
wait
for it here.’

‘I will drive you, then, to Morelia.’

‘Come along, there are a few things I must do.’

The taxi was left in front of the Hotel de Las Flores. She walked in, alone, and once more looked at the lovely garden with its many flowers, and listened to the girl playing the strange blue-colored piano, and this time the song was the ‘Moonlight Sonata.’ She smelled the sharp crystalline air and shook her head, eyes closed, hands at her sides. She put her hand to the door, opened it softly.

Why today? she wondered. Why not some other day in the last five years? Why have I waited, why have I hung around? Because. A thousand becauses. Because you always hoped things would start again the way they were the first year. Because there were times, less frequent now, when he was splendid for days, even weeks, when you were both feeling well and the world was green and bright blue. There were times, like yesterday, for a moment, when he opened the armor-plate and showed her the fear beneath it and the small loneliness of himself and said, ‘I need and love you, don’t ever go away, I’m afraid without you.’ Because sometimes it had seemed good to cry together, to make up, and the inevitible goodness of the night and the day following their making up. Because he was handsome. Because she had been alone all year every year until she met him. Because she didn’t want to be alone again, but now knew that it would be better to be alone than be this way because only last night
he destroyed the typewriter; not physically, no, but with thoughts and words. And he might as well have picked her up bodily and thrown her from the river bridge.

She could not feel her hand on the door. It was as if ten thousand volts of electricity had numbed all of her body. She could not feel her feet on the tiled floor. Her face was gone, her mind was gone.

He lay asleep, his back turned. The room was greenly dim. Quickly, soundlessly, she put on her coat and checked her purse. The clothes and typewriter were of no importance now. Everything was a hollowing roar. Everything was like a waterfall leaping into clear emptiness. There was no striking, no impact, just a clear water falling into a hollow and then another hollow, followed by an emptiness.

She stood by the bed and looked at the man there, the familiar black hair on the nape of his neck, the sleeping profile. The form stirred. ‘What?’ he asked, still asleep.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing. And nothing.’

She went out and shut the door.

The taxi sped out of town at an incredible rate, making a great noise, and all the pink walls and blue walls fled past and people jumped out of the way and there were some few cars which almost exploded upon them, and there went most of the town and there went the hotel and that man sleeping in the hotel and there went—

Nothing.

The taxi motor died.

No, no, thought Marie, oh God, no, no, no.

The car must start again.

The taxi driver leaped out, glaring at God in his Heaven, and ripped open the hood and looked as if he might strangle the iron guts of the car with his clawing hands, his face smiling a pure sweet smile of incredible hatred, and then he turned to Marie and forced himself to shrug, putting away his hate and accepting the Will of God.

‘I will walk you to the bus station,’ he said.

No, her eyes said. No, her mouth almost said. Joseph will wake and run and find me still here and drag me back. No.

‘I will carry your bag,
señora
,’ the taxi driver said, and walked off with it, and had to come back and find her still there, motionless, saying no, no, to no one, and helped her out and showed her where to walk.

The bus was in the square and the Indians were getting into it, some silently and with a slow, certain dignity, and some chattering like birds and shoving bundles, children, chickens’ baskets, and pigs in ahead of them. The driver wore a uniform that had not been pressed or laundered in twenty years, and he was leaning out the window shouting and laughing
with people outside, as Marie stepped up into the interior of hot smoke and burning grease from the engine, the smell of gasoline and oil, the smell of wet chickens, wet children, sweating men and damp women, old upholstery which was down to the skeleton, and oily leather. She found a seat in the rear and felt the eyes follow her and her suitcase, and she was thinking: I’m going away, at last I’m going away. I’m free. I’ll never see him again in my life, I’m free, I’m free.

She almost laughed.

The bus started and all of the people in it shook and swayed and cried out and smiled, and the land of Mexico seemed to whirl about outside the window, like a dream undecided whether to stay or go, and then the greenness passed away, and the town, and there was the Hotel de Las Flores with its open patio, and there, incredibly, hands in pockets, standing in the open door but looking at the sky and the volcano smoke, was Joseph, paying no attention to the bus or her and she was going away from him, he was growing remote already, his figure was dwindling like someone falling down a mine shaft, silently, without a scream. Now, before she had even the decency or inclination to wave, he was no larger than a boy, then a child, then a baby, in distance, in size, then gone around a corner, with the engine thundering, someone playing upon a guitar up front in the bus, and Marie, straining to look back, as if she might penetrate walls, trees, and distances, for another view of the man standing so quietly watching the blue sky.

At last, her neck tired, she turned and folded her hands and examined what she had won for herself. A whole lifetime loomed suddenly ahead, as quickly as the turns and whirls of the highway brought her suddenly to edges of cliffs, and each bend of the road, even as the years, could not be seen ahead. For a moment it was simply good to lie back here, head upon jouncing seat rest, and contemplate quietness. To know nothing, to think nothing, to feel nothing, to be as nearly dead for a moment as one could be, with the eyes closed, the heart unheard, no special temperature to the body, to wait for life to come get her rather than to seek, at least for an hour. Let the bus take her to the train, the train to the plane, the plane to the city, and the city to her friends, and then, like a stone dropped into a cement mixer, let that life in the city do with her as it would, she flowing along in the mix and solidifying in any new pattern that seemed best.