Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (11 page)

 
          
“Honestly,”
he said, out of patience.

 
          
“Please,”
she said.

 
          
“Why
should I promise anything so ridiculous?” he said. “You’ll be fine tomorrow.
And besides, if you died, you’d look very pretty in the catacomb standing
between Mr. Grimace and Mr. Gape, with a sprig of morning-glory in your hair.”
And he laughed sincerely.

 
          
Silence.
She lay there in the dark.

 
          
“Don’t
you think you’ll look pretty there?” he asked, laughingly, behind the door.

 
          
She
said nothing in the dark room.

 
          
“
Don’t
you?” he said.

 
          
Somebody
walked down below in the plaza, faintly, fading away.

 
          
“Eh?”
he asked her, brushing his teeth.

 
          
She
lay there, staring up at the ceiling, her breast rising and falling faster,
faster, faster, the air going in and out, in and out her nostrils, a little
trickle of blood coming from her clenched lips. Her eyes were very
wide,
her hands blindly constricted the bedclothes.

 
          
“Eh?”
he said again behind the door.

 
          
She
said nothing.

 
          
“Sure,”
he talked to himself. “Pretty as hell,” he murmured, under the flow of tap
water. He rinsed his mouth. “Sure,” he said.

 
          
Nothing from her in the bed.

 
          
“Women
are funny,” he said to himself in the mirror.

 
          
She
lay in the bed.

 
          
“Sure,”
he said. He gargled with some antiseptic, spat it down the drain. “You’ll be
all right in the morning,” he said.

 
          
Not
a word from her.

 
          
“We’ll
get the car fixed.”

 
          
She
didn’t say anything.

 
          
“Be
morning before you know it.” He was screwing caps on things now, putting
freshener on his face. “And the car fixed tomorrow, maybe, at the very latest
the next day. You won’t mind another night here, will you?”

 
          
She
didn’t answer.

 
          
“
Will
you?” he asked.

 
          
No
reply.

 
          
The
light blinked out under the bathroom door.

 
          
“Marie?”

 
          
He
opened the door.

 
          
“Asleep?”

 
          
She
lay with eyes wide, breasts moving up and down.

 
          
“Asleep,”
he said. “Well, good night, lady.”

 
          
He
climbed into his bed. “Tired,” he said.

 
          
No
reply.

 
          
“Tired,”
he said.

 
          
The
wind tossed the lights outside; the room was oblong and black and he was in his
bed dozing already.

 
          
She
lay, eyes wide, the watch ticking on her wrist, breasts moving up and down.

 
          
It
was a fine day coming through the Tropic of Cancer. The automobile pushed along
the turning road leaving the jungle country behind, heading for the
United States
, roaring between the green hills, taking
every turn, leaving behind a faint vanishing trail of exhaust smoke. And inside
the shiny automobile sat Joseph with his pink, healthy face and his Panama hat,
and a little camera cradled on his lap as he drove; a swathe of black silk
pinned around the left upper arm of his tan coat. He watched the country slide
by and absent-mindedly made a gesture to the seat beside him, and stopped. He
broke into a little sheepish smile and turned once more to the window of his
car, humming a tuneless tune, his right hand slowly reaching over to touch the
seat beside
him .
 . .

 
          
Which was empty.

 
          
T
he wave shut me off from the world, from the
birds in the sky, the children on the beach, my mother on the shore. There was
a moment of green silence. Then the wave gave me back to the sky, the sand, the
children yelling. I came out of the lake and the world was waiting for me,
having hardly moved since I went away.

 
          
I
ran up on the beach.

 
          
Mama
swabbed me with a furry towel. “Stand there and dry,” she said.

 
          
I
stood there, watching the sun take away the water beads on my arms. I replaced
them with goose-pimples.

 
          
“My,
there’s a wind,” said Mama. “Put on your sweater.”

 
          
“
Wait’ll
I watch my goose-bumps,” I said.

 
          
“Harold,”
said Mama.

 
          
I
put the sweater on and watched the waves come up and fall down on the beach.
But not clumsily.
On purpose, with a green
sort of elegance.
Even a drunken man could not collapse with such
elegance as those waves.

 
          
It
was September.
In the last days when things are getting sad
for no reason.
The beach was so long and lonely with only about six
people on it. The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made
them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn
come along the endless shore.

 
          
All
of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing
in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like
nailing summer into a series of coffins. One by one the places slammed their
covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand,
blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. It got so that
now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and
Donald and
Delaus
Arnold’s feet, down by the water
curve.

 
          
Sand
blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with
canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing
teeth, galloping on.
With only the wind for music, slipping
through canvas.

 
          
I
stood there. Everyone else was in school. I was not. Tomorrow I would be on my
way west across the
United States
on a train. Mom and I had come to the beach
for one last brief moment.

 
          
There
was something about the loneliness that made me want to get away by myself.
“Mama, I want to run up the beach
aways
,” I said.

 
          
“All
right, but
hurry
back, and don’t go near the water.”

 
          
I
ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running,
arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind.
Like wings.

 
          
Mama
withdrew into the distance, sitting. Soon she was only a brown speck and I was
all alone.

 
          
Being
alone is
a newness
to a twelve-year-old child. He is
so used to people about. The only way he can be alone is in his mind. There are
so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has
to run off down a beach, even if it’s only in his head, to get by himself in
his own world.

 
          
So
now I was really alone.

 
          
I
went down to the water and let it cool up to my stomach. Always before, with
the crowd, I hadn’t dared to look, to come to this spot and search around in
the water and call a certain name. But now—

 
          
Water
is like a magician.
Sawing you in half.
It feels as if
you were cut in two, part of you, the lower part, sugar, melting, dissolving
away. Cool water, and once in a while a very elegantly stumbling wave that fell
with a flourish of lace.

 
          
I
called her name. A dozen times I called it.

 
          
“Tally!
Tally! Oh, Tally!”

 
          
You
really expect answers to your calling when you are young. You feel that
whatever you may think can be real. And some times maybe that is not so wrong.

 
          
I
thought of Tally, swimming out into the water last May, with her pigtails
trailing, blond. She went laughing, and the sun was on her small
twelve-year-old shoulders. I thought of the water settling quiet, of the life
guard leaping into it, of Tally’s mother screaming, and of how Tally never came
out. . . .

 
          
The
life guard tried to persuade her to come out, but she did not. He came back with
only bits of water-weed in his big-knuckled fingers, and Tally was gone. She
would not sit across from me at school any longer, or chase indoor balls on the
brick streets on summer nights. She had gone too far out, and the lake would
not let her return.

 
          
And
now in the lonely autumn when the sky was huge and the water was huge and the
beach was so very long, I had come down for the last time, alone.

 
          
I
called her name again and again. Tally, oh, Tally!

 
          
The
wind blew so very softly over my ears, the way wind blows over the mouths of
sea-shells to set them whispering. The water rose, embraced my chest, then my
knees, up and down, one way and another, sucking under my heels.

 
          
“Tally!
Come back, Tally!”

 
          
I
was only twelve. But I know how much I loved her. It was that love that comes
before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that is no
more bad
than wind and sea and sand lying side by side
forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the
humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long autumn days
of the years past when I had carried her books home from school.

 
          
Tally!

 
          
I
called her name for the last time. I shivered. I felt water on my face and did
not know how it got there. The waves had not splashed that high.

 
          
Turning,
I retreated to the sand and stood there for half an hour, hoping for one
glimpse, one sign, one little bit of Tally to remember. Then, I knelt and built
a sand castle, shaping it fine, building it as Tally and I had built so many of
them. But this time, I only built half of it. Then I got up.

 
          
“Tally,
if you hear me, come in and
build
the rest.”

 
          
I
walked off toward that far-away speck that was Mama. The water came in, blended
the sand-castle circle by circle, mashing it down little by little into the
original smoothness.

 
          
Silently,
I walked along the shore.

 
          
Far
away, a merry-go-round jangled faintly, but it was only the wind.

 
          
The
next day, I went away on the train.

 
          
A
train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it. It forgets the
cornlands
of
Illinois
, the rivers of childhood, the bridges, the
lakes, the valleys, the cottages, the hurts and the joys. It spreads them out
behind and they drop back of a horizon.

 
          
I
lengthened my bones, put flesh on them, changed my young mind for an older one,
threw away clothes as they no longer fitted, shifted from grammar to
high-school, to college. And then there was a young woman in
Sacramento
. I knew her for a time, and we were
married. By the time I was twenty-two, I had almost forgotten what the East was
like.

 
          
Margaret
suggested that our delayed honeymoon be taken back in that direction.

 
          
Like
a memory, a train works both ways. A train can bring rushing back all those
things you left behind so many years before.

 
          
Lake
Bluff
, population 10,000, came up over the sky.
Margaret looked so handsome in her fine new clothes. She watched me as I felt
my old world gather me back into its living. She held my arm as the train slid
into Bluff Station and our baggage was escorted out.

 
          
So
many years, and the things they do to people’s faces and bodies. When we walked
through the town together I saw no one I recognized. There were faces with
echoes in them.
Echoes of hikes on ravine trails.
Faces with small laughter in them from closed grammar schools and
swinging on metal-linked swings and going up and down on teeter-totters.
But I didn’t speak. I walked and looked and filled up inside with all those
memories, like leaves stacked for autumn burning.

 
          
We
stayed on two weeks in all, revisiting all the places together. The days were
happy. I thought I loved Margaret well. At least I thought I did.

 
          
It
was on one of the last days that we walked down by the shore. It was not quite
as late in the year as that day so many years before, but the first evidences
of desertion were coming upon the beach. People were thinning out, several of
the hot-dog stands had been shuttered and nailed, and the wind, as always,
waited there to sing for us.

 
          
I
almost saw Mama sitting on the sand as she used to sit. I had that feeling
again of wanting to be alone. But I could not force myself to speak of this to
Margaret. I only held onto her and waited.

 
          
It
got late in the day. Most of the children had gone home and only a few men and
women remained basking in the windy sun.

 
          
The
life-guard boat pulled up on the shore. The life guard stepped out of it,
slowly, with something in his arms.

 
          
I
froze there. I held my breath and I felt small, only twelve years old, very
little, very infinitesimal and afraid. The wind howled. I could not see
Margaret. I could see only the beach, the life guard slowly emerging from the
boat with a gray sack in his hands, not very heavy, and his face almost as gray
and lined.

 
          
“Stay
here, Margaret,” I said. I don’t know why I said it.

 
          
“But, why?”

 
          
“Just
stay here, that’s all—”

 
          
I
walked slowly down the sand to where the life guard stood. He looked at me.

 
          
“What
is it?” I asked.

 
          
The
life guard kept looking at me for a long time and he couldn’t speak. He put the
gray sack on the sand, and water whispered wet up around it and went back.

 
          
“What
is it?” I insisted.

 
          
“Strange,”
said the life guard, quietly.

 
          
I
waited.

 
          
“Strange,”
he said, softly. “Strangest thing I ever saw. She’s been dead a long time.”

 
          
I
repeated his words.