Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (50 page)

‘We run about screaming, making enemies.’ Foxe swallowed and glanced away from her. ‘We make people want to see us—gone—sick—dead, even. People want to hit us, knock us down, shoot us. It’s all unconscious, though. You
see
?’

God, it’s hot in here, he thought. If there were only one window open. Just one. Just one window open.

Mrs Shrike’s eyes were widening, as if to allow in everything he said.

‘Some people are not only accident-prones, which means they want to punish themselves physically, for some crime, usually a petty immorality they think they’ve long forgotten. But their subconscious puts them in
dangerous situations, makes them jaywalk, makes them—’ He hesitated and the sweat dripped from his chin. ‘Makes them ignore frayed electric cords over bathtubs—they’re potential victims. It is marked on their faces, hidden like—like tattoos, you might say, on the inner rather than the outer skin. A murderer passing one of these accident-prones, these wishersafter-death, would see the invisible markings, turn, and follow them, instinctively, to the nearest alley. With luck, a potential victim might not happen to cross the tracks of a potential murderer for fifty years. Then—one afternoon—fate! These people, these death-prones, touch all the wrong nerves in passing strangers; they brush the murder in all our breasts.’

Mrs Shrike mashed her cigarette in a dirty saucer, very slowly.

Foxe shifted his cane from one trembling hand to the other. ‘So it was that a year ago we decided to try to find people who needed help. These are always the people who don’t even know they need help, who’d never dream of going to a psychiatrist. At first, I said, we’ll make dry runs. Shaw was always against it, save as a hobby, a harmless little quiet thing between ourselves. I suppose you’d say I’m a fool. Well, we’ve just completed a year of dry runs. We watched two men, studied their environmental factors, their work, marriages, at a discreet distance. None of our business, you say? But each time, the men came to a bad end. One killed in a bar-room. Another pushed out a window. A woman we studied, run down by a streetcar. Coincidence? What about that old man accidentally poisoned? Didn’t turn on the bathroom light one night. What was there in his mind that wouldn’t let him turn the light on? What made him move in the dark and drink medicine in the dark and die in the hospital next day, protesting he wanted nothing but to live? Evidence, evidence, we have it, we have it. Two dozen cases. Coffins nailed to a good half of them in that little time. No more dry runs; it’s time for action, preventative use of data. Time to work
with
people, make friends before the undertaker slips in the side door.’

Mrs Shrike stood as if he had struck her on the head, quite suddenly, with a large weight. Then just her blurred lips moved. ‘And you came
here
?’

‘Well—’

‘You’ve been watching
me
?’

‘We only—’

‘Following
me
?’

‘In order to—’

‘Get out!’ she said.

‘We can—’

‘Get out!’ she said.

‘If you’ll only listen—’

‘Oh, I
said
this would happen,’ whispered Shaw, shutting his eyes.

‘Dirty old men, get out!’ she shouted.

‘There’s no money involved.’

‘I’ll throw you out, I’ll throw you out!’ she shrieked, clenching her fists, gritting her teeth. Her face colored insanely. ‘Who are you, dirty old grandmas, coming her, spying, you old cranks!’ she yelled. She seized the straw hat from Mr Foxe’s head; he cried out: she tore the lining from it, cursing. ‘Get out, get out, get out, get out!’ She hurled it to the floor. She crunched one heel through the middle. She kicked it. ‘Get out, get out!’

‘Oh, but you
need
us!’ Foxe stared in dismay at the hat as she swore at him in a language that turned corners, blazing, that flew in the air like great searing torches. The woman knew every language and every word in every language. She spoke with fire and alcohol and smoke.

‘Who do you think you are? God? God and the Holy Ghost, passing on people, snooping, prying, you old jerks, you old dirty-minded grandmas! You, you—’ She gave them further names, names that forced them toward the door in shock, recoiling. She gave them a long vile list of names without pausing for breath. Then she stopped, gasped, trembled, heaved in a great suction of air, and started a further list of ten dozen even viler names.

‘See here!’ said Foxe, stiffening.

Shaw was out the door, pleading with his partner to come along, it was over and done, it was as he expected, they were fools, they were everything she said they were, oh, how embarrassing!

‘Old maid!’ shouted the woman.

‘I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue.’

‘Old maid, old maid!’

Somehow this was worse than all the really vile names.

Foxe swayed, his mouth clapped open, shut, open, shut.

‘Old woman!’ she cried. ‘Woman, woman, woman!’

He was in a blazing yellow jungle. The room was drowned in fire, it clenched upon him, the furniture seemed to shift and whirl about, the sunlight shot through the rammed-shut windows, firing the dust, which leaped up from the rug in angry sparks when a fly buzzed a crazy spiral from nowhere; her mouth, a feral red thing, licked the air with all the obscenities collected just behind it in a lifetime, and beyond her on the baked brown wallpaper the thermometer said ninety-two, and he looked again and it said ninety-two, and still the woman screamed like the wheels of a train scraping around a vast iron curve of track; fingernails down a blackboard, and steel across marble. ‘Old maid! Old maid! Old maid!’

Foxe drew his arm back, cane clenched in fist, very high, and struck.

‘No!’ cried Shaw in the doorway.

But the woman had slipped and fallen aside, gibbering, clawing the floor. Foxe stood over her with a look of positive disbelief on his face. He looked at his arm and his wrist and his hand and his fingers, each in turn,
through a great invisible glaring hot wall of crystal that enclosed him. He looked at the cane as if it was an easily seen and incredible exclamation point come out of nowhere to the center of the room. His mouth stayed open, the dust fell in silent embers, dead. He felt the blood drop from his face as if a small door had banged wide into his stomach. ‘I—’

She frothed.

Scrabbling about, every part of her seemed a separate animal. Her arms and legs, her hands, her head, each was a lopped-off bit of some creature wild to return to itself, but blind to the proper way of making that return. Her mouth still gushed out her sickness with words and sounds that were not even faintly words. It had been in her a long time, a long long time. Foxe looked upon her, in a state of shock, himself. Before today, she had spat her venom out, here, there, another place. Now he had loosed the flood of a lifetime and he felt in danger of drowning here. He sensed someone pulling him by his coat. He saw the door sills pass on either side. He heard the cane fall and rattle like a thin bone far away from his hand, which seemed to have been stung by some terrible unseen wasp. And then he was out, walking mechanically, down through the burning tenement, between the scorched walls. Her voice crashed like a guillotine down the stair. ‘Get out! Get out! Get
out
!’

Fading like the wail of a person dropped down an open well into darkness.

At the bottom of the last flight, near the street door. Foxe turned himself loose from this other man here, and for a long moment leaned against the wall, his eyes wet, able to do nothing but moan. His hands, while he did this, moved in the air to find the lost cane, moved on his head, touched at his moist eyelids, amazed, and fluttered away. They sat on the bottom hall step for ten minutes in silence, drawing sanity into their lungs with every shuddering breath. Finally Mr Foxe looked over at Mr Shaw, who had been staring at him in wonder and fright for the full ten minutes.

‘Did you
see
what I did? Oh, oh, that was close. Close. Close.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m a fool. That poor, poor woman. She was right.’

‘There’s nothing to be done.’

‘I see that now. It had to fall on me.’

‘Here, wipe your face. That’s better.’

‘Do you think she’ll tell Mr Shrike about us?’

‘No, no.’

‘Do you think we could—’

‘Talk to
him
?’

They considered this and shook their heads. They opened the front door to a gush of furnace heat and were almost knocked down by a huge man who strode between them.

‘Look where you’re going!’ he cried.

They turned and watched the man move ponderously, in fiery darkness, one step at a time, up into the tenement house, a creature with the ribs of a mastodon and the head of an unshorn lion, with great beefed arms, irritably hairy, painfully sunburnt. The face they had seen briefly as he shouldered past was a sweating, raw, sunblistered pork face, salt droplets under the red eyes, dripping from the chin; great smears of perspiration stained the man’s armpits, coloring his tee-shirt to the waist.

They shut the tenement door gently.

‘That’s him,’ said Mr Foxe. ‘That’s the husband.’

They stood in the little store across from the tenement. It was five-thirty, the sun tilting down the sky, the shadows the color of hot summer grapes under the rare few trees and in the alleys.

‘What was it, hanging out of the husband’s back pocket?’

‘Longshoreman’s hook. Steel. Sharp, heavy-looking. Like those claws one-armed men used to wear on the end of their stumps, years ago.’

Mr Foxe did not speak.

‘What’s the temperature?’ asked Mr Foxe, a minute later, as if he were too tired to turn his head to look.

‘Store thermometer still reads ninety-two. Ninety-two right on the nose.’

Foxe sat on a packing crate, making the least motion to hold an orange soda bottle in his fingers. ‘Cool off,’ he said. ‘Yes, I need an orange pop very much, right now.’

They sat there in the furnace, looking up at one special tenement window for a long time, waiting, waiting…

Martin knew it was autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees. In dark clock-springs of hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acorn-husk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from freshcut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees. Dog jumped. Showers of brittle fern, blackberry vine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted. No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!

‘Here, boy, here!’

And Dog settled to warm Martin’s body with all the bonfires and subtle burnings of the season, to fill the room with soft or heavy, wet or dry odors of far-traveling. In spring, he smelled of lilac, iris, lawn-mowered grass; in summer, ice-cream-mustached, he came pungent with firecracker, Roman candle, pinwheel, baked by the sun. But autumn! Autumn!

‘Dog, what’s it like outside?’

And lying there, Dog told as he always told. Lying there, Martin found autumn as in the old days before sickness bleached him white on his bed. Here was his contact, his carry-all, the quick-moving part of himself he sent with a yell to run and return, circle and scent, collect and deliver the time and texture of worlds in town, country, by creek, river, lake, downcellar, up-attic, in closet or coal-bin. Ten dozen times a day he was gifted with sunflower seed, cinder-path, milkweed, horse-chestnut, or full flamesmell of pumpkin. Through the loomings of the universe Dog shuttled: the design was hid in his pelt. Put out your hand, it was there…

‘And where did you go this morning?’

But he knew without hearing where Dog had rattled down hills where autumn lay in cereal crispness, where children lay in funeral pyres, in rustling heaps, the leaf-buried but watchful dead, as Dog and the world blew by. Martin trembled as his fingers searched the thick fur, read the long journey. Through stubbled fields, over glitters of ravine creek, down
marbled spread of cemetery yard, into woods. In the great season of spices and rare incense, now Martin ran through his emissary, around, about, and home!

The bedroom door opened.

‘That dog of yours is in trouble again.’

Mother brought in a tray of fruit salad, cocoa, and toast, her blue eyes snapping.

‘Mother…’

‘Always digging places. Dug a hole in Miss Tarkin’s garden this morning. She’s spittin’ mad. That’s the fourth hole he’s dug there this week.’

‘Maybe he’s looking for something.’

‘Fiddlesticks, he’s too darned curious. If he doesn’t behave he’ll be locked up.’

Martin looked at this woman as if she were a stranger. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t do that! How would I learn anything? How would I find things out if Dog didn’t tell me?’

Mom’s voice was quieter. ‘Is that what he does—tell you things?’

‘There’s nothing I don’t know when he goes out and around and back,
nothing
I can’t find out from him!’

They both sat looking at Dog and the dry strewings of mold and seed over the quilt.

‘Well, if he’ll just stop digging where he shouldn’t, he can run all he wants,’ said Mother.

‘Here, boy, here!’

And Martin snapped a tin note to the dog’s collar:

MY OWNER IS MARTIN SMITH—TEN YEARS OLD—
SICK IN BED—VISITORS WELCOME
.

Dog barked. Mother opened the downstairs door and let him out.

Martin sat listening.

Far off and away you could hear Dog run in the quiet autumn rain that was falling now. You could hear the barking-jingling fade, rise, fade again as he cut down alley, over lawn, to fetch back Mr Holloway and the oiled metallic smell of the delicate snowflake-interiored watches he repaired in his home shop. Or maybe he would bring Mr Jacobs, the grocer, whose clothes were rich with lettuce, celery, tomatoes, and the secret tinned and hidden smell of the red demons stamped on cans of deviled ham. Mr Jacobs and his unseen pink-meat devils waved often from the yard below. Or Dog brought Mr Jackson, Mrs Gillespie, Mr Smith, Mrs Holmes,
any
friend or near-friend, encountered, cornered, begged, worried, and at last shepherded home for lunch, or tea-and-biscuits.

Now, listening, Martin heard Dog below, with footsteps moving in a light rain behind him. The downstairs bell rang, Mom opened the door, light voices murmured. Martin sat forward, face shining. The stair treads creaked. A young woman’s voice laughed quietly. Miss Haight, of course, his teacher from school!

The bedroom door sprang open.

Martin had company.

Morning, afternoon, evening, dawn and dusk, sun and moon circled with Dog, who faithfully reported temperatures of turf and air, color of earth and tree, consistency of mist or rain, but—most important of all—brought back again and again and again—Miss Haight.

On Saturday, Sunday and Monday she baked Martin orange-iced cupcakes, brought him library books about dinosaurs and cave men. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday somehow he beat her at dominoes, somehow she lost at checkers, and soon, she cried, he’d defeat her handsomely at chess. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday they talked and never stopped talking, and she was so young and laughing and handsome and her hair was a soft, shining brown like the season outside the window, and she walked clear, clean and quick, a heartbeat warm in the bitter afternoon when he heard it. Above all, she had the secret of signs, and could read and interpret Dog and the symbols she searched out and plucked forth from his coat with her miraculous fingers. Eyes shut, softly laughing, in a gypsy’s voice, she divined the world from the treasures in her hands.

And on Monday afternoon, Miss Haight was dead.

Martin sat up in bed, slowly.

‘Dead?’ he whispered.

Dead, said his mother, yes, dead, killed in an auto accident a mile out of town. Dead, yes, dead, which meant cold to Martin, which meant silence and whiteness and winter come long before its time. Dead, silent, cold, white. The thoughts circled round, blew down, and settled in whispers.

Martin held Dog, thinking; turned to the wall. The lady with the autumncolored hair. The lady with the laughter that was very gentle and never made fun and the eyes that watched your mouth to see everything you ever said. The-other-half-of-autumn-lady, who told what was left untold by Dog, about the world. The heartbeat at the still center of gray afternoon. The heartbeat fading…

‘Mom? What do they do in the graveyard, Mom, under the ground? Just lay there?’

‘
Lie
there.’

‘Lie there? Is that
all
they do? It doesn’t sound like much fun.’

‘For goodness sake, it’s not made out to be fun.’

‘Why don’t they jump up and run around once in a while if they get tired lying there? God’s pretty silly—’

‘Martin!’

‘Well, you’d think He’d treat people better than to tell them to lie still for keeps. That’s impossible. Nobody can do it! I tried once. Dog tries. I tell him. “Dead Dog!” He plays dead awhile, then gets sick and tired and wags his tail or opens one eye and looks at me, bored. Boy, I bet sometimes those graveyard people do the same, huh, Dog?’

Dog barked.

‘Be still with that kind of talk!’ said Mother.

Martin looked off into space.

‘Bet that’s exactly what they do,’ he said.

Autumn burnt the trees bare and ran Dog still farther around, fording creek, prowling graveyard as was his custom, and back in the dusk to fire off volleys of barking that shook windows wherever he turned.

In the late last days of October, Dog began to act as if the wind had changed and blew from a strange country. He stood quivering on the porch below. He whined, his eyes fixed at the empty land beyond town. He brought no visitors for Martin. He stood for hours each day, as if leashed, trembling, then shot away straight, as if someone had called. Each night he returned later, with no one following. Each night, Martin sank deeper and deeper in his pillow.

‘Well, people are busy,’ said Mother. ‘They haven’t time to notice the tag Dog carries. Or they mean to come visit, but forget.’

But there was more to it than that. There was the fevered shining in Dog’s eyes, and his whimpering tic late at night, in some private dream. His shivering in the dark, under the bed. The way he sometimes stood half the night, looking at Martin as if some great and impossible secret was his and he knew no way to tell it save by savagely thumping his tail, or turning in endless circles, never to lie down, spinning and spinning again.

On October thirtieth, Dog ran out and didn’t come back at all, even when after supper Martin heard his parents call and call. The hour grew late, the streets and sidewalks stood empty, the air moved cold about the house and there was nothing, nothing.

Long after midnight, Martin lay watching the world beyond the cool, clear glass windows. Now there was not even autumn, for there was no Dog to fetch it in. There would be no winter, for who could bring the snow to melt in your hands? Father? Mother? No, not the same. They couldn’t play the game with its special secrets and rules, its sounds and pantomimes. No more seasons. No more time. The go-between, the emissary, was lost to the wild throngings of civilization, poisoned, stolen, hit by a car, left somewhere in a culvert…

Sobbing, Martin turned his face to his pillow. The world was a picture under glass, untouchable. The world was dead.

Martin twisted in bed and in three days the last Hallowe’en pumpkins were rotting in trash cans, papier-mâché skulls and witches were burnt on bonfires, and ghosts were stacked on shelves with other linens until next year.

To Martin, Hallowe’en had been nothing more than one evening when tin horns cried off in the cold autumn stars, children blew like goblin leaves along the flinty walks, flinging their heads, or cabbages, at porches, soap-writing names or similar magic symbols on icy windows. All of it as distant, unfathomable, and nightmarish as a pupper show seen from so many miles away that there is no sound or meaning.

For three days in November, Martin watched alternate light and shadow sift across his ceiling. The fire-pageant was over forever; autumn lay in cold ashes. Martin sank deeper, yet deeper in white marble layers of bed, motionless, listening always listening…

Friday evening, his parents kissed him goodnight and walked out of the house into the hushed cathedral weather toward a motion-picture show. Miss Tarkin from next door stayed on in the parlor below until Martin called down he was sleepy, then took her knitting off home.

In silence, Martin lay following the great move of stars down a clear and moonlit sky, remembering nights such as this when he’d spanned the town with Dog ahead, behind, around about, tracking the green-plush ravine, lapping slumbrous streams gone milky with the fullness of the moon, leaping cemetery tombstones while whispering the marble names; on, quickly on, through shaved meadows where the only motion was the off-on quivering of stars, to streets where shadows would not stand aside for you but crowded all the sidewalks for mile on mile. Run now run! chasing, being chased by bitter smoke, fog, mist, wind, ghost of mind, fright of memory; home, safe, sound, snug-warm, asleep…

Nine o’clock.

Chime. The drowsy clock in the deep stairwell below. Chime.

Dog, come home, and run the world with you. Dog, bring a thistle with frost on it, or bring nothing else but the wind. Dog, where
are
you? Oh, listen, now, I’ll call.

Martin held his breath.

Way off somewhere—a sound.

Martin rose up, trembling.

There, again—the sound.

So small a sound, like a sharp needle-point brushing the sky long miles and many miles away.

The dreamy echo of a dog—barking.

The sound of a dog crossing fields and farms, dirt roads and rabbit paths, running, running, letting out great barks of steam, cracking the night. The sound of a circling dog which came and went, lifted and faded, opened up, shut in, moved forward, went back, as if the animal were kept by someone on a fantastically long chain. As if the dog were running and someone whistled under the chestnut trees, in mold-shadow, tar-shadow, moon-shadow, walking, and the dog circled back and sprang out again toward home.

Dog! Martin thought. Oh Dog, come home, boy! Listen, oh, listen, where you
been
? Come on, boy, make tracks!

Five, ten, fifteen minutes; near, very near, the bark, the sound. Martin cried out, thrust his feet from the bed, leaned to the window. Dog! Listen, boy! Dog! Dog! He said it over and over. Dog! Dog! Wicked Dog, run off and gone all these days! Bad Dog, good Dog, home, boy, hurry, and bring what you can!

Near now, near, up the street, barking, to knock clapboard housefronts with sound, whirl iron cocks on rooftops in the moon, firing off volleys—Dog! now at the door below…

Martin shivered.

Should he run—let Dog in, or wait for Mom and Dad? Wait? Oh, God, wait? But what if Dog ran off again? No, he’d go down, snatch the door wide, yell, grab Dog in, and run upstairs so fast, laughing, crying, holding tight, that…

Dog stopped barking.

Hey! Martin almost broke the window, jerking to it.

Silence. As if someone had told Dog to hush now, hush, hush.

A full minute passed. Martin clenched his fists.

Below, a faint whimpering.

Then, slowly, the downstairs front door opened. Someone was kind enough to have opened the door for Dog. Of course! Dog had brought Mr Jacobs or Mr Gillespie or Miss Tarkin, or…

The downstairs door shut.

Dog raced upstairs, whining, flung himself on the bed.

‘Dog, Dog, where’ve you
been
, what’ve you
done
! Dog, Dog!’

And he crushed Dog hard and long to himself, weeping. Dog, Dog. He laughed and shouted. Dog! But after a moment he stopped laughing and crying, suddenly.

He pulled back away. He held the animal and looked at him, eyes widening.

The odor coming from Dog was different.

It was a smell of strange earth. It was a smell of night within night, the smell of digging down deep in shadow through earth that had lain cheek by jowl with things that were long hidden and decayed. A stinking and
rancid soil fell away in clods of dissolution from Dog’s muzzle and paws. He had dug deep. He had dug very deep indeed. That
was
it, wasn’t it? wasn’t it?
wasn’t
it!