Dandelion Wine (23 page)

"No!" said Douglas, sitting there, looking down. "NO!"

The big man toppled on the rim of the hill, gasping. "You just thank God it wasn't you I did that to!" He moved unsteadily away, falling once, getting up, talking to himself, laughing, swearing, then gone.

Douglas sat on the edge of the ravine and wept. After a long while he blew his nose. He looked at Tom.

"Tom, it's late. Dad'll be out walking, looking for us. We should've been home an hour ago. Run back along Washington Street, get Dad and bring him here."

"You're not going down in that ravine?"

"She's city property now, on the trash dump, and nobody cares what happens, not even Mr. Black. Tell Dad what he's coming here for and he don't have to be seen coming home with me and her. I'll take her the back way around and nobody'll ever know."

"She won't be no good to you now, her machinery all busted."

"We can't leave her out in the rain, don't you see, Tom?"

"Sure."

Tom moved slowly off.

Douglas let himself down the hill, walking in piles of cinder and old paper and tin cans. Halfway down he stopped and listened. He peered at the multicolored dimness, the great landslide below. "Mme. Tarot?" he almost whispered. "Mme. Tarot?"

At the bottom of the hill in the moonlight he thought he saw her white wax hand move. It was a piece of white paper blowing. But he went toward it anyway....

The town dock struck midnight The house Lights around were mostly turned out. In the workshop garage the two boys and the man stood back from the witch, who now sat, rearranged and at peace, in an old wicker chair before an oilcloth-covered card table, upon which were spread, in fantastic fans of popes and clowns and cardinals and deaths and suns and comets, the tarot cards upon which one wax hand touched.

Father was speaking.

"... know how it is. When I was a boy, when the circus left town I ran around collecting a million posters. Later it was breeding rabbits, and magic. I built illusions in the attic and couldn't get them out." He nodded to the witch. "Oh, I remember she told my fortune once, thirty years ago. Well, clean her up good, then come in to bed. We'll build her a special case Saturday." He moved out the garage door but stopped when Douglas spoke softly.

"Dad. Thanks. Thanks for the walk home. Thanks."

"Heck," said Father, and was gone.

The two boys left alone with the witch looked at each other. "Gosh, right down the main street we go, all four of us, you, me, Dad, the witch! Dad's one in a million!"

"Tomorrow," said Douglas, "I go down and buy the rest of the machine from Mr. Black, for ten bucks, or he'll throw it out."

"Sure." Tom looked at the old woman there in the wicker chair. "Boy she sure looks alive. I wonder what's inside."

"Little tiny bird bones. All that's left of Mme. Tarot after Napoleon--"

"No machinery at all? Why don't we just cut her open and see?"

"Plenty of time for that, Tom."

"When?"

"Well, in a year, two years, when I'm fourteen or fifteen, then's the time to do it. Right now I don't want to know nothing except she's here. And tomorrow I get to work on the spells to let her escape forever. Some night you'll hear that a strange, beautiful Italian girl was seen downtown in a summer dress, buying a ticket for the East and everyone saw her at the station and saw her on the train as it pulled out and everyone said she was the prettiest girl they ever saw, and when you hear that, Tom--and believe me, the news will get around fast! nobody knowing where she came from or where she went--then you'll know I worked the spell and set her free. And then, as I said, a year, two years from now, on that night when that train pulls out, it'll be the time when we can cut through the wax. With her gone, you're liable to find nothing but little cogs and wheels and stuff inside her. That's how it is."

Douglas picked up the witch's hand and moved it over the dance of life, the frolic of bone-white death, the dates and dooms, the fates and follies, tapping, touching, whispering her worn-down fingernails. Her face tilted with some secret equilibrium and looked at the boys and the eyes flashed bright in the raw bulb light, unblinking.

"Tell your fortune, Tom?" asked Douglas quietly.

"Sure."

A card fell from the witch's voluminous sleeve.

"Tom, you see that? A card, hidden away, and now she throws it out at us!" Douglas held the card to the light. "It's blank. I'll put it in a matchbox full of chemicals during the night. Tomorrow we'll open the box and there the message'll be!"

"What'll it say?"

Douglas closed his eyes the better to see the words.

"It'll say,'Thanks from your humble servant and grateful friend, Mme. Floristan Mariani Tarot, the Chiromancer, Soul Healer, and Deep-Down Diviner of Fates and Furies.' "

Tom laughed and shook his brother's arm.

"Go on, Doug, what else, what else?"

"Let me see ... And it'll say,'Hey nonny no! ... is't not fine to dance and sing? ... when the bells of death do ring ... and turn upon the toe ... and sing Hey nonny no!' And it'll say,'Tom and Douglas Spaulding, everything you wish for, all your life through, you'll get...' And it'll say that we'll live forever, you and me, Tom, we'll live forever... ."

"All that on just this one card?"

"All that, every single bit of it, Tom."

In the light of the electric bulb they bent, the two boys' heads down, the witch's head down, staring and staring at the beautiful blank but promising white card, their bright eyes sensing each and every incredibly hidden word that would soon rise up from pale oblivion.

"Hey," said Tom in the softest of voices.

And Douglas repeated in a glorious whisper, "Hey ..."

Faintly, the voice chanted under the fiery green trees at noon.

"... nine, ten, eleven, twelve.. ."

Douglas moved slowly across the lawn. "Tom, what you counting?"

"... thirteen, fourteen, shut up, sixteen, seventeen, cicadas, eighteen, nineteen...!"

"Cicadas?"

"Oh hell!" Tom unsqueezed his eyes. "Hell, hell, hell!"

"Better not let people hear you swearing."

"Hell, hell, hell is a place!" Tom cried. "Now I got to start all over. I was counting the times the cicadas buzz every fifteen seconds." He held up his two dollar watch. "You time it, then add thirty-nine and you get the temperature at that very moment." He looked at the watch, one eye shut, tilted his head and whispered again, "One, two, three ...!"

Douglas turned his head slowly, listening. Somewhere in the burning bone-colored sky a great copper wire was strummed and shaken. Again and again the piercing metallic vibrations, like charges of raw electricity, fell in paralyzing shocks from the stunned trees.

"Seven!" counted Tom. "Eight."

Douglas walked slowly up the porch steps. Painfully he peered into the hall. He stayed there a moment, then slowly he stepped back out on the porch and called weakly to Tom. "It's exactly eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit."

"-twenty-seven, twenty-eight--"

"Hey, Tom you hear me?"

"I hear you--thirty, thirty-one! Get away! Two, three thirty-four!"

"You can stop counting now, right inside on that old thermometer it's eighty-seven and going up, without the help of no katydids."

"Cicadas! Thirty-nine, forty! Not katydids! Forty-two!"

"Eighty-seven degrees, I thought you'd like to know.

"Forty-five, that's inside, not outside! Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one! Fifty-two, fifty-three! Fifty-three plus thirty-nine is--ninety-two degrees!"

"Who says?"

"I say! Not eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit! But ninety-two degrees Spaulding!"

"You and who else?"

Tom jumped up and stood red-faced, staring at the sun. "Me and the cicadas, that's who! Me and the cicadas! You're out-numbered! Ninety-two, ninety-two, ninety-two degrees Spaulding, by gosh!"

They both stood looking at the merciless unclouded sky like a camera that has broken and stares, shutter wide, at a motionless and stricken town dying in a fiery sweat.

Douglas shut his eyes and saw two idiot suns dancing on the reverse side of the pinkly translucent lids.

"One... two... three.. ."

Douglas felt his lips move.

"... four... five... six..."

This time the cicadas sang even faster.

From noontime to sundown, from midnight to sunrise, one man, one horse, and one wagon were known to all twenty-six thousand three hundred forty-nine inhabitants of Green Town, Illinois.

In the middle of the day, for no reason quickly apparent, children would stop still and say:

"Here comes Mr. Jonas!"

"Here comes Ned!"

"Here comes the wagon!"

Older folks might peer north or south, east or west and see no sign of the man named Jonas, the horse named Ned, or the wagon which was a Conestoga of the kind that bucked the prairie tides to beach on the wilderness.

But then if you borrowed the ear of a dog and tuned it high and stretched it taut you could hear, miles and miles across the town a singing like a rabbi in the lost lands, a Moslem in a tower. Always, Mr. Jonas's voice went clear before him so people had a half an hour, an hour, to prepare for his arrival. And by the time his wagon appeared, the curbs were lined by children, as for a parade.

So here came the wagon and on its high board seat under a persimmon-colored umbrella, the reins like a stream of water in his gentle hands, was Mr. Jonas, singing.

"Junk! Junk! No, sir, not Junk! Junk! Junk! No, ma'am, not Junk! Bricabracs, brickbats! Knitting needles, knick-knacks! Kickshaws! Curies! Camisoles! Cameos! But... Junk! Junk! No, sir, not ... Junk!"

As anyone could tell who had heard the songs Mr. Jonas made up as he passed, he was no ordinary junkman. To all appearances, yes, the way he dressed in tatters of moss-corduroy and the felt cap on his head, covered with old presidential campaign buttons going back before Manila Bay. But he was unusual in this way: not only did he tread the sunlight, but often you could see him and his horse swimming along the moonlit streets, circling and recircling by night the islands, the blocks where all the people lived he had known all of his life. And in that wagon he carried things he had picked up here and there and carried for a day or a week or a year until someone wanted and needed them. Then all they had to say was, "I want that clock," or "How about the mattress?" And Jonas would hand it over, take no money, and drive away, considering the words for another tune.

So it happened that often he was the only man alive in all Green Town at three in the morning and often people with headaches, seeing him amble by with his moon-shimmered horse, would run out to see if by chance he had aspirin, which he did. More than once he had delivered babies at four in the morning and only then had people noticed how incredibly clean his hands and fingernails were--the hands of a rich man who had another life somewhere they could not guess. Sometimes he would drive people to work downtown, or sometimes, when men could not sleep, go up on their porch and bring cigars and sit with them and smoke and talk until dawn.

Whoever he was or whatever he was and no matter how different and crazy he seemed, he was not crazy. As he himself had often explained gently, he had tired of business in Chicago many years before and looked around for a way to spend the rest of his life. Couldn't stand churches, though he appreciated their ideas, and having a tendency toward preaching and decanting knowledge, he bought the horse and wagon and set out to spend the rest of his life seeing to it that one part of town had a chance to pick over what the other part of town had cast off. He looked upon himself as a kind of process, like osmosis, that made various cultures within the city limits available one to another. He could not stand waste, for he knew that one man's junk is another man's luxury.

So adults, and especially children, clambered up to peer over into the vast treasure horde in the back of the wagon.

"Now, remember," said Mr. Jonas, "you can have what you want if you really want it. The test is, ask yourself, Do I want it with all my heart? Could I live through the day without it? If you figure to be dead by sundown, grab the darned thing and run. I'll be happy to let you have whatever it is."

And the children searched the vast heaps of parchments and brocades and bolts of wallpaper and marble ash trays and vests and roller skates and great fat overstuffed chairs and end tables and crystal chandeliers. For a while you just heard whispering and rattling and tinkling. Mr. Jonas watched, comfortably puffing on his pipe, and the children knew he watched. Sometimes their hands reached out for a game of checkers or a string of beads or an old chair, and just as they touched it they looked up and there were Mr. Jonas's eyes gently questioning them. And they pulled their hand away and looked further on. Until at last each of them put their hand on a single item and left it there. Their faces came up and this time their faces were so bright Mr. Jonas had to laugh. He put up his hand as if to fend off the brightness of their faces from his eyes. He covered his eyes for a moment. When he did this, the children yelled their thanks, grabbed their roller skates or clay tiles or bumbershoots and, dropping off, ran.

And the children came back in a moment with something of their own in their hands, a doll or a game they had grown tired of, something the fun had gone out of, like the flavor from gum, and now it was time for it to pass on to some other part of town where, seen for the first time, it would be revivified and would revivify others. These tokens of exchange were shyly dropped over the rim of the wagon down into unseen riches and then the wagon was trundling on, flickering light on its great spindling sunflower wheels and Mr.. Jonas singing again...

"Junk! Junk! No, sir, not Junk! No, ma'am, not Junk!"

until he was out of sight and only the dogs, in the shadow pools under trees, heard the rabbi in the wilderness, and twitched their tails ...

"...junk..." Fading. "... junk..." A whisper. "... junk ..."Gone. And the dogs asleep.

The sidewalks were haunted by dust ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up, swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice on the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strollers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning.