The Day it Rained Forever (10 page)

He laughed triumphantly. He stared once more at ‘it'. What was left of the woman form changed before his eyes, like melting wax. He reshaped it into something new.

The garden wall trembled. A vacuum cylinder was hissing up through the tube. Mr Grill was coming. Roby would have to hurry or his plan would be ruined.

Roby ran to the spheroid, peered in. Simple controls. Just enough room for his small body – if the plan worked. It had to to work. It would work!

The garden trembled with the approaching thunder of the cylinder. Roby laughed. To hell with Mr Grill. To hell with this island.

He thrust himself into the ship. There was much he could learn, it would come in time. He was just on the skirt of knowledge now, but that little knowledge had saved his life, and now it would do even more.

A voice cried out behind him. A familiar voice. So familiar that it made Roby shudder. Roby heard small-boy feet crash the underbrush. Small feet on a small body. A small voice pleading.

Roby grasped the ship controls. Escape. Complete and unsuspected. Simple. Wonderful. Grill would never know.

The sphere door slammed. Motion.

The star, Roby inside, rose on the summer sky.

Mr Grill stepped out of the seal in the garden wall. He looked around for Roby. Sunlight struck him warmly in the face as he hurried down the path.

There! There was Roby. In the clearing ahead of him. Little Roby Morrison staring at the sky, making fists, crying out to nobody. At least Grill could see nobody about.

‘Hello, Roby,' called Grill.

The boy jerked at the sound. He wavered – in colour, density, and quality. Grill blinked, decided it was only the sun.

‘I'm not Roby!' cried the child. ‘Roby escaped! He left me to take his place, to fool you so you wouldn't hunt for him! He fooled me, too!' screamed the child, nastily, sobbing. ‘No, no, don't
look
at me! Don't think that I'm Roby, you'll make it worse! You came expecting to find him, and you found me and made me into Roby! You're moulding me and I'll never,
never
change, now! Oh, God!'

‘Come now, Roby –'

‘Roby'll never come back. I'll
always
be him. I was a rubber ball, a woman, a Sandman. But, believe me, I'm only malleable atoms, that's all. Let me go!'

Grill backed up slowly. His smile was sick.

‘I'm a referent. I'm
not
a label!' cried the child.

‘Yes, yes, I understand. Now, now, Roby, Roby, you just wait right there, right there now, while I, while I, while I call the Psycho-Ward.'

Moments later, a corps of assistants ran through the garden.

‘Damn you all!' screamed the child, kicking. ‘God damn you!'

‘Tut,' declared Grill quietly, as they forced the child into the vac-cylinder. ‘You're using a label for which there is no referent!'

The cylinder sucked them away.

A star blinked on the summer sky and vanished.

I
N
the sun, the headboard was like a fountain, tossing up plumes of clear light. It was carved with lions and gargoyles and bearded goats. It was an awe-inspiring object even at midnight, as Antonio sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes, and put his large calloused hand out to touch its shimmering harp. Then he rolled over into this fabulous machine for dreaming, and he lay breathing heavily, his eyes beginning to close.

‘Every night,' his wife's voice said, ‘we sleep in the mouth of a calliope.'

Her complaint shocked him. He lay a long while before daring to reach up his hard-tipped fingers to stroke the cold metal of the intricate headboard, the threads of this lyre that had sung many wild and beautiful songs down the years.

‘This is no calliope,' he said.

‘It cries like one,' Maria said. ‘A billion people on this world tonight have beds. Why, I ask the saints, not us?'

‘This,' said Antonio gently, ‘is a bed.' He plucked a little tune on the imitation brass harp behind his head. To his ears it was Santa Lucia.

‘This bed has humps like a herd of camels was under it.'

‘Now, Mama,' Antonio said. He called her Mama when she was mad, though they had no children. ‘You were never this way,' he went on, ‘until five months ago when Mrs Brancozzi downstairs bought her new bed.'

Maria said wistfully, ‘Mrs Brancozzi's bed. It's like snow. It's all flat and white and smooth.'

‘I don't want any damn snow, all flat and white and smooth! These springs – feel them!' he cried angrily. ‘They know me. They recognize that this hour of night I lie
thus
, at two o'clock,
so
! Three o'clock
this
way, four o'clock
that
. We are like a tumbling act, we've worked together for years, and know all the holds and falls.'

Maria sighed and said, ‘Sometimes, I dream we're in the taffy machine at Bartole's candy store.'

‘This bed,' he announced to the darkness, ‘served our family before Garibaldi! From this wellspring alone came precincts of honest voters, a squad of clean-saluting Army men, two confectioners, a barber, four second-leads for
Il Trovatore
and
Rigoletto
, and two geniuses so complex they never
could
decide what to do in their lifetime! Not to forget enough beautiful women to provide ballrooms with their finest decoration. A cornucopia of plenty, this bed! A veritable harvesting machine!'

‘We have been married two years,' she said, with dreadful control over her voice. ‘Where are
our
second-leads for
Rigoletto
, our geniuses, our ballroom decorations?'

‘Patience, Mama.'

‘Don't call me Mama! While this bed is busy favouring you all night, never once has it done for me. Not even so much as a baby
girl
!'

He sat up. ‘You've let these women in this tenement ruin you with their dollar-down, dollar-a-week talk. Has Mrs Brancozzi children? Her and her new bed that she's had for five months?'

‘No! But
soon
! Mrs Brancozzi says … and her bed, so beautiful.'

He slammed himself down and yanked the covers over him. The bed screamed like all the Furies rushing through the night sky, fading away towards the dawn.

The moon changed the shape of the window pattern on the floor. Antonio awoke. Maria was not beside him.

He got up and went to peer through the half-open door of the bathroom. His wife stood at the mirror looking at her tired face.

‘I don't feel well,' she said.

‘We argued.' He put out his hand to pat her. ‘I'm sorry. We'll think it over. About the bed, I mean. We'll see how the money goes. And if you're not well tomorrow, see the doctor, eh? Now, come back to bed.'

At noon the next day, Antonio walked from the lumber-yard to a window where stood fine new beds with their covers invitingly turned back.

‘I,' he whispered to himself, ‘am a beast.'

He checked his watch. Maria, at this time, would be going to the doctor's. She had been like cold milk this morning; he had told her to go. He walked on to the candy-store window and watched the taffy machine folding and threading and pulling. Does taffy scream? he wondered. Perhaps, but so high we cannot hear it. He laughed. Then, in the stretched taffy, he saw Maria. Frowning, he turned and walked back to the furniture store. No. Yes. No. Yes! He pressed his nose to the icy window. Bed, he thought, you in there, new bed, do you
know
me? Will you be kind to my back, nights?

He took out his wallet, slowly, and peered at the money. He sighed, gazed for a long time at that flat marble-top, that unfamiliar enemy, that new bed. Then, shoulders sagging, he walked into the store, his money held loosely in his hand.

‘Maria!' He ran up the steps two at a time. It was nine o'clock at night and he had managed to beg off in the middle of his overtime at the lumber-yard to rush home. He rushed through the open doorway smiling.

The apartment was empty.

‘Ah,' he said disappointedly. He laid the receipt for the new bed on top of the bureau where Maria might see it when she entered. On those few evenings when he worked late she visited with any one of several neighbours downstairs.

I'll go find her, he thought, and stopped. No. I want to tell her alone, I'll wait. He sat on the bed. ‘Old bed,' he said, ‘goodbye to you. I am very sorry.' He patted the brass lions nervously. He paced the floor. Come
on
, Maria. He imagined her smile.

He listened for her quick running on the stair, but he heard only a slow, measured tread. He thought: That's not my Maria, slow like that, no.

The doorknob turned.

‘Maria!'

‘You're early!' She smiled happily at him. Did she guess? Was it written on his face? ‘I've been downstairs,' she cried, ‘telling everyone!'

‘Telling everyone?'

‘The doctor! I saw the doctor!'

‘The doctor?' He looked bewildered. ‘And?'

‘And, Papa,
and
–'

‘Do you mean – Papa?'

‘Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa!'

‘Oh,' he said, gently, ‘you walked so carefully on the stairs.'

He took hold of her, but not too tight, and he kissed her cheeks, and he shut his eyes and he yelled. Then he had to wake a few neighbours and tell them, shake them, tell them again. There had to be a little wine and a careful waltz around, an embracing, a trembling, a kissing of brow, eyelids, nose, lips, temples, ears, hair, chin – and then it was past midnight.

‘A miracle,' he sighed.

They were alone in their room again, the air warm from the people who had been there a minute before, laughing, talking. But now they were alone again.

Turning out the light, he saw the receipt on the bureau. Stunned, he tried to decide in what subtle and delicious way to break this additional news to her.

Maria sat upon her side of the bed in the dark, hypnotized with wonder. She moved her hands as if her body was a strange doll, taken apart, and now to be put back together again, limb by limb, her motions as slow as if she lived beneath a warm sea at midnight. Now, at last, careful not to break herself, she lay back, upon the pillow.

‘Maria, I have something to tell you.'

‘Yes?' she said faintly.

‘Now that you are as you are,' he squeezed her hand, ‘you deserve the comfort, the rest, the beauty of a new bed.'

She did not cry out happily or turn to him or seize him. Her silence was a thinking silence.

He was forced to continue. ‘This bed is nothing but a pipe organ, a calliope.'

‘It is a bed,' she said.

‘A herd of camels sleep under it.'

‘No,' she said quietly, ‘from it will come precincts of honest voters, captains enough for
three
armies, two ballerinas, a famous lawyer, a very tall policeman, and seven basso profundos, altos, and sopranos.'

He squinted across the dimly lighted room at the receipt upon the bureau. He touched the worn mattress under him. The springs moved softly to recognize each limb, each tired muscle, each aching bone.

He sighed. ‘I never argue with you, little one.'

‘Mama,' she said.

‘Mama,' he said.

And then as he closed his eyes and drew the covers to his chest and lay in the darkness by the great fountain, in the sight of a jury of fierce metal lions and amber goats and smiling gargoyles, he listened. And he heard it. It was very far away at first, very tentative, but it came clearer as he listened.

Softly, her arm back over her head, Maria's finger-tips began to tap a little dance on the gleaming harp strings, on the shimmering brass pipes of the ancient bed. The music was – yes, of course: Santa Lucia! His lips moved to it in a warm whisper. Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia!

It was very beautiful.

C
ROSSING
the continental United States by night, by day, on the train, you flash past town after wilderness town where nobody ever gets off. Or rather, no person who doesn't
belong
, no person who hasn't roots in these country graveyards ever bothers to visit their lonely stations or attend their lonely views.

I spoke of this to a fellow-passenger, another salesman like myself, on the Chicago-Los Angeles train as we crossed Iowa.

‘True,' he said. ‘People get off in Chicago, everyone gets off there. People get off in New York, get off in Boston, get off in L.A. People who don't live there go there to see and come back to tell. But what tourist ever just got off at Fox Hill, Nebraska, to
look
at it? You? Me? No! I don't know anyone, got no business there, it's no health resort, so why bother?'

‘Wouldn't it be a fascinating change,' I said, ‘some year to plan a really different vacation? Pick some village lost on the plains where you don't know a soul and go there for the hell of it?'

‘You'd be bored stiff.'

‘I'm not bored, thinking of it!' I peered out of the window. ‘What's the next town coming up on this line?'

‘Rampart Junction.'

I smiled. ‘Sounds good. I might get off there.'

‘You're a liar and a fool. What you want? Adventure? Romance? Go ahead, jump off the train. Ten seconds later you'll call yourself an idiot, grab a taxi and race us to the next town.'

‘Maybe.'

I watched telephone poles flick by, flick by, flick by. Far ahead I could see the first faint outlines of a town.

‘But I don't think so,' I heard myself say.

The salesman across from me looked faintly surprised.

For slowly, very slowly, I was rising to stand. I reached for my hat. I saw my hand fumble for my one suitcase. I was surprised, myself.

‘Hold on!' said the salesman. ‘What're you doing?'

The train rounded a curve suddenly. I swayed. Far ahead, I saw one church spire, a deep forest, a field of summer wheat.