Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (70 page)

George and Alice Smith detrained at Biarritz one summer noon and in an hour had run through their hotel onto the beach into the ocean and back out to bake upon the sand.

To see George Smith sprawled burning there, you’d think him only a tourist flown fresh as iced lettuce to Europe and soon to be transshipped home. But here was a man who loved art more than life itself.

‘There…’ George Smith sighed. Another ounce of perspiration trickled down his chest. Boil out the Ohio tap water, he thought, then drink down the best Bordeaux. Silt your blood with rich French sediment so you’ll see with native eyes!

Why? Why eat, breathe, drink everything French? So that, given time, he might really begin to understand the genius of one man.

His mouth moved, forming a name.

‘George?’ His wife loomed over him. ‘I know what you’ve been thinking, I can read your lips.’

He lay perfectly still, waiting.

‘And?’

‘Picasso,’ she said.

He winced. Someday she would learn to pronounce that name.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Relax. I know you heard the rumor this morning, but you should see your eyes—your tic is back. All right, Picasso’s here, down the coast a few miles away, visiting friends in some small fishing town. But you must forget it or our vacation’s ruined.’

‘I wish I’d never heard the rumor,’ he said honestly.

‘If only,’ she said, ‘you liked other painters.’

Others? Yes, there were others. He could breakfast most congenially on Caravaggio still lifes of autumn pears and midnight plums. For lunch: those fire-squirting, thick-wormed Van Gogh sunflowers, those blooms a blind man might read with one rush of scorched fingers down fiery canvas. But the great feast? The paintings he saved his palate for? There, filling the
horizon like Neptune risen, crowned with limeweed, alabaster, coral, paintbrushes clenched like tridents in horn-nailed fists, and with fist-tail vast enough to fluke summer showers out over all Gibraltar—who else but the creator of
Girl Before a Mirror
and
Guernica?

‘Alice,’ he said patiently, ‘how can I explain? Coming down on the train, I thought, Good Lord, it’s
all
Picasso country!’

But was it really? he wondered. The sky, the land, the people, the flushed pink bricks here, scrolled electric-blue ironwork balconies there, a mandolin ripe as a fruit in some man’s thousand fingerprinting hands, billboard tatters blowing like confetti in night winds—how much was Picasso, how much George Smith staring round the world with wild Picasso eyes? He despaired of answering. That old man had distilled turpentines and linseed oil so thoroughly through George Smith that they shaped his being, all Blue Period at twilight, all Rose Period at dawn.

‘I keep thinking,’ he said aloud, ‘if we saved our money…’

‘We’ll never have five thousand dollars.’

‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But it’s nice thinking we might bring it off someday. Wouldn’t it be great to just step up to him, say “Pablo, here’s five thousand! Give us the sea, the sand, that sky, or any old thing you want, we’ll be happy…”’

After a moment his wife touched his arm.

‘I think you’d better go in the water now,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d better do just that.’

White fire showered up when he cut the water.

During the afternoon George Smith came out, and went into the ocean with the vast spilling motions of now warm, now cool people who at last, with the sun’s decline, their bodies all lobster colors and colors of broiled squab and guinea hen, trudged for their wedding-cake hotels.

The beach lay deserted for endless mile on mile save for two people. One was George Smith, towel over shoulder, out for a last devotional.

Far along the shore another shorter, square-cut man walked alone in the tranquil weather. He was deeper-tanned, his close-shaven head dyed almost mahogany by the sun, and his eyes were clear and bright as water in his face.

So the shore-line stage was set, and in a few minutes the two men would meet. And once again Fate fixed the scales for shocks and surprises, arrivals and departures. And all the while these two solitary strollers did not for a moment think on coincidence, that unswum stream which lingers at man’s elbow with every crowd in every town. Nor did they ponder the fact that if man dares dip into that stream he grabs a wonder in each hand. Like most, they shrugged at such folly and stayed well up the bank lest Fate should shove them in.

The stranger stood alone. Glancing about, he saw his aloneness, saw
the waters of the lovely bay, saw the sun sliding down the late colors of the day, and then, half turning, spied a small wooden object on the sand. It was no more than the slender stick from a lime ice cream delicacy long since melted away. Smiling, he picked the stick up. With another glance around to reinsure his solitude, the man stooped again and, holding the stick gently, with light sweeps of his hand began to do the one thing in all the world he knew best how to do.

He began to draw incredible figures along the sand.

He sketched one figure and then moved over and, still looking down, completely focused on his work now, drew a second and a third figure, and after that a fourth and a fifth and a sixth.

George Smith, printing the shoreline with his feet, gazed here, gazed there, and then saw the man ahead. George Smith, drawing nearer, saw that the man, deeply tanned, was bending down. Nearer yet, and it was obvious what the man was up to. George Smith chuckled. Of course, of course…Alone on the beach this man—how old? sixty-five? seventy?—was scribbling and doodling away. How the sand flew! How the wild portraits flung themselves out there on the shore! How…

George Smith took one more step and stopped, very still.

The stranger was drawing and drawing and did not seem to sense that anyone stood immediately behind him and the world of his drawings in the sand. By now he was so deeply enchanted with his solitudinous creation that depth bombs set off in the bay might not have stopped his flying hand nor turned him round.

George Smith looked down at the sand. And after a long while, looking, he began to tremble.

For there on the flat shore were pictures of Grecian lions and Mediterranean goats and maidens with flesh of sand like powdered gold and satyrs piping on hand-carved horns and children dancing, strewing flowers along and along the beach with lambs gamboling after, and musicians skipping to their harps and lyres and unicorns racing youths toward distant meadows, woodlands, ruined temples, and volcanoes. Along the shore in a never-broken line, the hand, the wooden stylus of this man, bent down in fever and raining perspiration, scribbled, ribboned, looped around over and up, across, in, out, stitched, whispered, stayed, then hurried on as if this traveling bacchanal must flourish to its end before the sun was put out by the sea. Twenty, thirty yards or more the nymphs and dryads and summer founts sprang up in unraveled hieroglyphs. And the sand in the dying light was the color of molten copper on which was now slashed a message that any man in any time might read and savor down the years. Everything whirled and poised in its own wind and gravity. Now wine was being crushed from under the grape-blooded feet of dancing vintners’ daughters, now steaming seas gave birth to coin-sheathed
monsters while flowered kites strewed scent on blowing clouds…now…now…now…

The artist stopped.

George Smith drew back and stood away.

The artist glanced up, surprised to find someone so near. Then he simply stood there, looking from George Smith to his own creations flung like idle footprints down the way. He smiled at last and shrugged as if to say, Look what I’ve done; see what a child? You will forgive me, won’t you? One day or another we are all fools…You too, perhaps? So allow an old fool this, eh? Good! Good!

But George Smith could only look at the little man with the sun-dark skin and the clear sharp eyes and say the man’s name once, in a whisper, to himself.

They stood thus for perhaps another five seconds. George Smith staring at the sand-frieze, and the artist watching George Smith with amused curiosity. George Smith opened his mouth, closed it, put out his hand, took it back. He stepped toward the pictures, stepped away. Then he moved along the line of figures, like a man viewing a precious series of marbles cast up from some ancient ruin on the shore. His eyes did not blink, his hand wanted to touch but did not dare to touch. He wanted to run but did not run.

He looked suddenly at the hotel. Run, yes! Run! What? Grab a shovel, dig, excavate, save a chunk of this all-too-crumbling sand? Find a repairman, race him back here with plaster of Paris to cast a mold of some small fragile part of these? No, no. Silly, silly. Or…? His eyes flicked to his hotel window. The camera! Run, get it, get back, and hurry along the shore, clicking, changing film, clicking, until…

George Smith whirled to face the sun. It burned faintly on his face; his eyes were two small fires from it. The sun was half underwater, and as he watched it sank the rest of the way in a matter of seconds.

The artist had drawn nearer and now was gazing into George Smith’s face with great friendliness, as if he were guessing every thought. Now he was nodding his head in a little bow. Now the ice cream stick had fallen casually from his fingers. Now he was saying good night, good night. Now he was gone, walking back down the beach toward the south.

George Smith stood looking after him. After a full minute he did the only thing he could possibly do. He started at the beginning of the fantastic frieze of satyrs and fauns and wine-dipped maidens and prancing unicorns and piping youths and he walked slowly along the shore. He walked a long way, looking down at the free-running bacchanal. And when he came to the end of the animals and men he turned around and started back in the other direction, just staring down as if he had lost something and did
not quite know where to find it. He kept on doing this until there was no more light in the sky or on the sand to see by.

He sat down at the supper table.

‘You’re late,’ said his wife. ‘I just had to come down alone. I’m ravenous.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said.

‘Anything interesting happen on your walk?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You look funny; George, you didn’t swim out too far, did you, and almost drown? I can tell by your face. You
did
swim out too far, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said, watching him closely. ‘Don’t ever do that again. Now—what’ll you have?’

He picked up the menu and started to read it and stopped suddenly.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked his wife.

He turned his head and shut his eyes for a moment.

‘Listen.’

She listened.

‘I don’t hear anything,’ she said.

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. What is it?’

‘Just the tide,’ he said after a while, sitting there, his eyes still shut. ‘Just the tide coming in.’

The hotel stood like a hollowed dry bone under the very center of the desert sky where the sun burned the roof all day. All night, the memory of the sun stirred in every room like the ghost of an old forest fire. Long after dusk, since light meant heat, the hotel lights stayed off. The inhabitants of the hotel preferred to feel their way blind through the halls in their never-ending search for cool air.

This one particular evening Mr Terle, the proprietor, and his only boarders, Mr Smith and Mr Fremley, who looked and smelled like two ancient rags of cured tobacco, stayed late on the long veranda. In their creaking glockenspiel rockers they gasped back and forth in the dark, trying to rock up a wind.

‘Mr Terle…? Wouldn’t it be
really
nice…someday…if you could buy…air conditioning…?’

Mr Terle coasted awhile, eyes shut.

‘Got no money for such things, Mr Smith.’

The two old boarders flushed; they hadn’t paid a bill now in twentyone years.

Much later Mr Fremley sighed a grievous sigh. ‘Why, why don’t we all just quit, pick up, get outa here, move to a decent city? Stop this swelterin’ and fryin’ and sweatin’.’

‘Who’d buy a dead hotel in a ghost town?’ said Mr Terle quietly. ‘No. No, we’ll just set here and wait, wait for that great day, January 29.’

Slowly, all three men stopped rocking.

January 29.

The one day in all the year when it really let go and rained.

‘Won’t wait long.’ Mr Smith tilted his gold railroad watch like the warm summer moon in his palm. ‘Two hours and nine minutes from now it’ll
be
January 29. But I don’t see nary a cloud in ten thousand miles.’

‘It’s rained every January 29 since I was born!’ Mr Terle stopped,
surprised at his own loud voice. ‘If it’s a day late this year, I won’t pull God’s shirttail.’

Mr Fremley swallowed hard and looked from east to west across the desert toward the hills. ‘I wonder…will there ever be a gold rush hereabouts again?’

‘No gold,’ said Mr Smith. ‘And what’s more, I’ll make you a bet—no rain. No rain tomorrow or the day after the day after tomorrow. No rain all the rest of this year.’

The three old men sat staring at the big sun-yellowed moon that burned a hole in the high stillness.

After a long while, painfully, they began to rock again.

The first hot morning breezes curled the calendar pages like a dried snake skin against the flaking hotel front.

The three men, thumbing their suspenders up over their hat-rack shoulders, came barefoot downstairs to blink out at that idiot sky.

‘January 29…’

‘Not a drop of mercy there.’

‘Day’s young.’

‘
I’m
not.’ Mr Fremley turned and went away.

It took him five minutes to find his way up through the delirious hallways to his hot, freshly baked bed.

At noon, Mr Terle peered in.

‘Mr Fremley…?’

‘Damn desert cactus, that’s us!’ gasped Mr Fremley, lying there, his face looking as if at any moment it might fall away in a blazing dust on the raw plank floor. ‘But even the best damn cactus got to have just a sip of water before it goes back to another year of the same damn furnace. I tell you I won’t move again, I’ll lie here and die if I don’t hear more than birds pattin’ around up on that roof!’

‘Keep your prayers simple and your umbrella handy,’ said Mr Terle and tiptoed away.

At dusk, on the hollow roof a faint pattering sounded.

Mr Fremley’s voice sang out mournfully from his bed.

‘Mr Terle, that ain’t rain! That’s you with the garden hose sprinklin’ well water on the roof! Thanks for tryin’, but cut it out, now.’

The pattering sound stopped. There was a sigh from the yard below.

Coming around the side of the hotel a moment later, Mr Terle saw the calendar fly out and down in the dust.

‘Damn January 29!’ cried a voice. ‘Twelve more months! Have to wait twelve more months, now!’

Mr Smith was standing there in the doorway. He stepped inside and brought out two dilapidated suitcases and thumped them on the porch.

‘Mr Smith!’ cried Mr Terle. ‘You can’t leave after thirty years!’

‘They say it rains twenty days a month in Ireland,’ said Mr Smith. ‘I’ll get a job there and run around with my hat off and my mouth open.’

‘You can’t go!’ Mr Terle tried frantically to think of something; he snapped his fingers. ‘You owe me nine thousand dollars rent!’

Mr Smith recoiled; his eyes got a look of tender and unexpected hurt in them.

‘I’m sorry.’ Mr Terle looked away. ‘I didn’t mean that. Look now—you just head for Seattle. Pours two inches a week there. Pay me when you can, or never. But do me a favor: wait till midnight. It’s cooler then, anyhow. Get you a good night’s walk toward the city.’

‘Nothin’ll happen between now and midnight.’

‘You got to have faith. When everything else is gone, you got to believe a thing’ll happen. Just stand here with me, you don’t have to sit, just stand here and think of rain. That’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.’

On the desert sudden little whirlwinds of dust twisted up, sifted down. Mr Smith’s eyes scanned the sunset horizon.

‘What do I think? Rain, oh you rain, come along here? Stuff like that?’

‘Anything. Anything at all!’

Mr Smith stood for a long time between his two mangy suitcases and did not move. Five, six minutes ticked by. There was no sound, save the two men’s breathing in the dusk.

Then at last, very firmly, Mr Smith stooped to grasp the luggage handles.

Just then, Mr Terle blinked. He leaned forward, cupping his hand to his ear.

Mr Smith froze, his hands still on the luggage.

From away among the hills, a murmur, a soft and tremulous rumble.

‘Storm coming!’ hissed Mr Terle.

The sound grew louder; a kind of whitish cloud rose up from the hills.

Mr Smith stood tall on tiptoe.

Upstairs Mr Fremley sat up like Lazarus.

Mr Terle’s eyes grew wider and yet wider to take hold of what was coming. He held to the porch rail like the captain of a calm-foundered vessel feeling the first stir of some tropic breeze that smelled of lime and the ice-cool white meat of coconut. The smallest wind stroked over his aching nostrils as over the flues of a white-hot chimney.

‘There!’ cried Mr Terle. ‘There!’

And over the last hill, shaking out feathers of fiery dust, came the cloud, the thunder, the racketing storm.

Over the hill the first car to pass in twenty days flung itself down the valley with a shriek, a thud, and a wail.

Mr Terle did not dare to look at Mr Smith.

Mr Smith looked up, thinking of Mr Fremley in his room.

Mr Fremley, at the window, looked down and saw the car expire and die in front of the hotel.

For the sound that the car made was curiously final. It had come a very long way on blazing sulphur roads, across salt flats abandoned ten million years ago by the shingling off of waters. Now, with wire-ravelings like cannibal hair sprung up from seams, with a great eyelid of canvas top thrown back and melted to spearmint gum over the rear seat, the auto, a Kissel car, vintage 1924, gave a final shuddering as if to expel its ghost upon the air.

The old woman in the front seat of the car waited patiently, looking in at the three men and the hotel as if to say, Forgive me, my friend is ill; I’ve known him a long while, and now I must see him through his final hour. So she just sat in the car waiting for the faint convulsions to cease and for the great relaxation of all the bones which signifies that the final process is over. She must have sat a full half minute longer listening to her car, and there was something so peaceful about her that Mr Terle and Mr Smith leaned slowly toward her. At last she looked at them with a grave smile and raised her hand.

Mr Fremley was surprised to see his hand go out the window, above, and wave back to her.

On the porch Mr Smith murmured, ‘Strange. It’s not a storm. And I’m not disappointed. How come?’

But Mr Terle was down the path and to the car.

‘We thought you were…that is…’ He trailed off. ‘Terle’s my name, Joe Terle.’

She took his hand and looked at him with absolutely clear and unclouded light blue eyes like water that has melted from snow a thousand miles off and come a long way, purified by wind and sun.

‘Miss Blanche Hillgood,’ she said, quietly. ‘Graduate of the Grinnell College, unmarried teacher of music, thirty years high-school glee club and student orchestra conductor, Green City, Iowa, twenty years private teacher of piano, harp, and voice, one month retired and living on a pension and now, taking my roots with me, on my way to California.’

‘Miss Hillgood, you don’t look to be going anywhere from here.’

‘I had a feeling about that.’ She watched the two men circle the car cautiously. She sat like a child on the lap of a rheumatic grandfather, undecided. ‘Is there nothing we can do?’

‘Make a fence of the wheels, dinner gong of the brake drums, the rest’ll make a fine rock garden.’

Mr Fremley shouted from the sky. ‘Dead? I say, is the car dead? I can
feel
it from here! Well—it’s way past time for supper!’

Mr Terle put out his hand. ‘Miss Hillgood, that there is Joe Terle’s Desert Hotel, open twenty-six hours a day. Gila monsters and road runners please
register before going upstairs. Get you a night’s sleep, free, we’ll knock our Ford off its blocks and drive you to the city come morning.’

She let herself be helped from the car. The machine groaned as if in protest at her going. She shut the door carefully with a soft click.

‘One friend gone, but the other still with me. Mr Terle, could you please bring her in out of the weather?’

‘Her, ma’am?’

‘Forgive me, I never think of things but what they’re people. The car was a man, I suppose, because it took me places. But a harp, now, don’t you agree, is female?’

She nodded to the rear seat of the car. There, tilted against the sky like an ancient scrolled leather ship prow cleaving the wind, stood a case which towered above any driver who might sit up in front and sail the desert calms or the city traffics.

‘Mr Smith,’ said Mr Terle, ‘lend a hand.’

They untied the huge case and hoisted it gingerly out between them.

‘What you got there?’ cried Mr Fremley from above.

Mr Smith stumbled. Miss Hillgood gasped. The case shifted in the two men’s arms.

From within the case came a faint musical humming.

Mr Fremley, above, heard. It was all the answer he needed. Mouth open, he watched the lady and the two men and their boxed friend sway and vanish in the cavernous porch below.

‘Watch out!’ said Mr Smith. ‘Some damn fool left his luggage here—’ He stopped. ‘Some damn fool?
Me!
’

The two men looked at each other. They were not perspiring any more. A wind had come up from somewhere, a gentle wind that fanned their shirt collars and flapped the strewn calendar gently in the dust.

‘
My
luggage…’ said Mr Smith.

Then they all went inside.

‘More wine, Miss Hillgood? Ain’t had wine on the table in years.’

‘Just a touch, if you please.’

They sat by the light of a single candle which made the room an oven and struck fire from the good silverware and the uncracked plates as they talked and drank warm wine and ate.

‘Miss Hillgood, get on with your life.’

‘All my life,’ she said, ‘I’ve been so busy running from Beethoven to Bach to Brahms, I never noticed I was twenty-nine. Next time I looked up I was forty. Yesterday, seventy-one. Oh, there were men; but they’d given up singing at ten and given up flying when they were twelve. I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn’t stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their blood. I
never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their black business suits, you could hear them roll by like funeral wagons.’

‘So you flew away?’

‘Just in my mind, Mr Terle. It’s taken sixty years to make the final break. All that time I grabbed on to piccolos and flutes and violins because they make streams in the air, you know, like streams and rivers on the ground. I rode every tributary and tried every fresh-water wind from Handel on down to a whole slew of Strausses. It’s been the far way around that’s brought me here.’

‘How’d you finally make up your mind to leave?’ asked Mr Smith.

‘I looked around last week and said. “Why, look, you’ve been flying
alone
!” No one in all Green City really cares
if
you fly or how high you go. It’s always, “Fine, Blanche,” or “Thanks for the recital at the PTA tea, Miss H.” But no one really listening. And when I talked a long time ago about Chicago or New York, folks swatted me and laughed. “Why be a little frog in a big pond when you can be the biggest frog in all Green City!” So I stayed on, while the folks who gave me advice moved away or died or both. The rest had wax in their ears. Just last week I shook myself and said. “Hold on! Since when do
frogs
have wings?”’

‘So now you’re headin’ west?’ said Mr Terle.

‘Maybe to play in pictures or in that orchestra under the stars. But somewhere I just must play at last for someone who’ll hear and really listen…’

They sat there in the warm dark. She was finished, she had said it all now, foolish or not—and she moved back quietly in her chair.

Upstairs someone coughed.

Miss Hillgood heard, and rose.

It took Mr Fremley a moment to ungum his eyelids and make out the shape of the woman bending down to place the tray by his rumpled bed.

‘What you all talkin’ about down there just now?’

‘I’ll come back later and tell you word for word,’ said Miss Hillgood. ‘Eat now. The salad’s fine.’ She moved to leave the room.

He said, quickly, ‘You goin’ to stay?’

She stopped half out the door and tried to trace the expression on his sweating face in the dark. He, in turn, could not see her mouth or eyes. She stood a moment longer, silently, then went on down the stairs.

‘She must not’ve heard me,’ said Mr Fremley.

But he knew she had heard.