Книга - The Machineries of Joy

The Machineries of Joy
Ray Douglas Bradbury


One of Ray Bradbury’s classic short story collections, available in ebook for the first time.In this book you will meet: a Hollywood monster-maker whose Tyrannosaurus Rex suddenly becomes alarmingly lifelike; a boy who raises giant mushrooms in his cellar – until the mushrooms begin to raise him; a corpse who supports his wife and family; a circus fat lady whose midget husband has tattooed every inch of her mammoth body with fantastically intricate designs.Plus seventeen other amazing tales by Ray Bradbury, master of fantastic fiction, author of the Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451.









THE MACHINERIES OF JOY

SHORT STORIES BY


Ray Bradbury









Copyright (#ulink_a2695724-2fef-588e-bd53-ba9869e638b9)


HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

“The Machineries of Joy,” “The Illustrated Woman,” “A Miracle of Rare Device,” “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” “The Vacation,” and “The Life Work of Juan Díaz” were originally published in Playboy. Copyright © 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc.

“Some Live like Lazarus” was originally published in Playboy as “Very Late in the Evening.” Copyright © 1960 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc.

“The Anthem Sprinters” was originally published in Playboy as “The Queen’s Own Evaders.” Copyright © 1963 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc.

“The Drummer Boy of Shiloh” was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post. Copyright © 1960 by the Curtis Publishing Company.

“The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge” was originally published as “The Beggar on the Dublin Bridge” in the Saturday Evening Post. Copyright © 1961 by the Curtis Publishing Company.

“And the Sailor, Home from the Sea” was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post as “Forever Voyage.” Copyright © 1960 by the Curtis Publishing Company.

“Tyrannosaurus Rex” was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post as “The Prehistoric Producer.” Copyright © 1962 by the Curtis Publishing Company.

“Death and the Maiden” and “To the Chicago Abyss” were originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 1960, 1963 by Mercury Press, Inc.

Cover design by Mike Topping.

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780007539833

Version: 2014–07–18


For Ramona,

who cried when she heard

that the Hound of the

Baskervilles was dead …

For Susan,

who snorted at the same news …

For Bettina,

who laughed …

And for Alexandra,

who told everyone to

just get out of the way …

This book, dear daughters,

with four different kinds

of love, for you.




Table of Contents


Cover (#u33578e22-6599-53f2-a9d2-444caf076c77)

Title Page (#u3f8c920d-59da-5bc4-a470-18f9effe5ef7)

Dedication (#u298110d6-643d-5e7a-9256-d3fe58481021)

The Machineries of Joy (#ulink_d1493d1a-f0bc-51bc-b53c-9beac6554994)

The One Who Waits (#ulink_b7aa9496-4d43-5f8b-9274-0e6114f8b069)

Tyrannosaurus Rex (#ulink_8eca56a2-2bf4-587e-87df-8ee38f2a66dc)

The Vacation (#ulink_c41ef97f-dd5c-50dc-be89-6a48bcd039e7)

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh (#ulink_271ed52e-08e9-52aa-9f7b-31fc1515be96)

Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar! (#ulink_215afe58-5c28-51fc-b0db-a5b2aa03b0c2)

Almost the End of the World (#litres_trial_promo)

Perhaps we are Going Away (#litres_trial_promo)

And the Sailor, Home from the Sea (#litres_trial_promo)

El Día de Muerte (#litres_trial_promo)

The Illustrated Woman (#litres_trial_promo)

Some Live Like Lazarus (#litres_trial_promo)

A Miracle of Rare Device (#litres_trial_promo)

And So Died Riabouchinska (#litres_trial_promo)

The Beggar on O’connell Bridge (#litres_trial_promo)

Death and the Maiden (#litres_trial_promo)

A Flight of Ravens (#litres_trial_promo)

The Best of all Possible Worlds (#litres_trial_promo)

The Lifework of Juan Díaz (#litres_trial_promo)

To the Chicago Abyss (#litres_trial_promo)

The Anthem Sprinters (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#ulink_3e9bfa28-dd9a-57c3-a3ce-3fd07191875c)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


“Somewhere,” said Father Vittorini, “did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate these Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes. are we not God’s Machineries of Joy?”

“If Blake said that,” said Father Brian, “he never lived in Dublin.”




The Machineries of Joy (#ulink_b811bcbf-2f8c-5819-a8bb-a1415a09a984)


Father Brian delayed going below to breakfast because he thought he heard Father Vittorini down there, laughing. Vittorini, as usual, was dining alone. So who was there to laugh with, or at?

Us, thought Father Brian, that’s who.

He listened again.

Across the hall Father Kelly too was hiding, or meditating, rather, in his room.

They never let Vittorini finish breakfast, no, they always managed to join him as he chewed his last bit of toast. Otherwise they could not have borne their guilt through the day.

Still, that was laughter, was it not, belowstairs? Father Vittorini had ferreted out something in the morning Times. Or, worse, had he stayed up half the night with the unholy ghost, that television set which stood in the entry like an unwelcome guest, one foot in whimsy, the other in the doldrums? And, his mind bleached by the electronic beast, was Vittorini now planning some bright fine new devilment, the cogs wheeling in his soundless mind, seated and deliberately fasting, hoping to lure them down curious at the sound of his Italian humors?

“Ah, God.” Father Brian sighed and fingered the envelope he had prepared the previous night. He had tucked it in his coat as a protective measure should he decide to hand it to Pastor Sheldon. Would Father Vittorini detect it through the cloth with his quick dark X-ray vision?

Father Brian pressed his hand firmly along his lapel to squash any merest outline of his request for transferral to another parish.

“Here goes.”

And, breathing a prayer, Father Brian went downstairs.

“Ah, Father Brian!”

Vittorini looked up from his still full cereal bowl. The brute had not even so much as sugared his corn flakes yet.

Father Brian felt as if he had stepped into an empty elevator shaft.

Impulsively he put out a hand to save himself. It touched the top of the television set. The set was warm. He could not help saying, “Did you have a seance here last night?”

“I sat up with the set, yes.”

“Sat up is right!” snorted Father Brian. “One does sit up, doesn’t one, with the sick, or the dead? I used to be handy with the ouija board myself. There was more brains in that.” He turned from the electrical moron to survey Vittorini. “And did you hear far cries and banshee wails from, what is it? Canaveral?”

“They called off the shot at three A.M.”

“And you here now, looking daisy-fresh.” Father Brian advanced, shaking his head. “What’s true is not always what’s fair.”

Vittorini now vigorously doused his flakes with milk. “But you, Father Brian, you look as if you made the grand tour of Hell during the night.”

Fortunately, at this point Father Kelly entered. He froze when he too saw how little along Vittorini was with his fortifiers. He muttered to both priests, seated himself, and glanced over at the perturbed Father Brian.

“True, William, you look half gone. Insomnia?”

“A touch.”

Father Kelly eyed both men, his head to one side. “What goes on here? Did something happen while I was out last night?”

“We had a small discussion,” said Father Brian, toying with the dread flakes of corn.

“Small discussion!” said Father Vittorini. He might have laughed, but caught himself and said simply, “The Irish priest is worried by the Italian Pope.”

“Now, Father Vittorini,” said Kelly.

“Let him run on,” said Father Brian.

“Thank you for your permission,” said Vittorini, very politely and with a friendly nod. “Il Papa is a constant source of reverent irritation to at least some if not all of the Irish clergy. Why not a pope named Nolan? Why not a green instead of a red hat? Why not, for that matter, move Saint Peter’s Cathedral to Cork or Dublin, come the twenty-fifth century?”

“I hope nobody said that,” said Father Kelly.

“I am an angry man,” said Father Brian. “In my anger I might have inferred it.”

“Angry, why? And inferred for what reason?”

“Did you hear what he just said about the twenty-fifth century?” asked Father Brian. “Well, it’s when Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers fly in through the baptistry transom that yours truly hunts for the exits.”

Father Kelly sighed. “Ah, God, is it that joke again?”

Father Brian felt the blood burn his cheeks, but fought to send it back to cooler regions of his body.

“Joke? It’s off and beyond that. For a month now it’s Canaveral this and trajectories and astronauts that. You’d think it was Fourth of July, he’s up half each night with the rockets. I mean, now, what kind of life is it, from midnight on, carousing about the entryway with that Medusa machine which freezes your intellect if ever you stare at it? I cannot sleep for feeling the whole rectory will blast off any minute.”

“Yes, yes,” said Father Kelly. “But what’s all this about the Pope?” “Not the new one, the one before the last,” said Brian wearily. “Show him the clipping, Father Vittorini.” Vittorini hesitated. “Show it,” insisted Brian, firmly.

Father Vittorini brought forth a small press clipping and put it on the table.

Upside down, even, Father Brian could read the bad news: “POPE BLESSES ASSAULT ON SPACE.”

Father Kelly reached one finger out to touch the cutting gingerly. He intoned the news story half aloud, underlining each word with his fingernail:

CASTEL GANDOLFO, ITALY, SEPT. 20.—Pope Pius XII gave his blessing today to mankind’s efforts to conquer space.

The Pontiff told delegates to the International Astronautical Congress, “God has no intention of setting a limit to the efforts of man to conquer space.”

The 400 delegates to the 22-nation congress were received by the Pope at his summer residence here.

“This Astronautic Congress has become one of great importance at this time of man’s exploration of outer space,” the Pope said. “It should concern all humanity.… Man has to make the effort to put himself in new orientation with God and his universe.”

Father Kelly’s voice trailed off.

“When did this story appear?”

“In 1956.”

“That long back?” Father Kelly laid the thing down. “I didn’t read it.”

“It seems,” said Father Brian, “you and I, Father, don’t read much of anything.”

“Anyone could overlook it,” said Kelly. “It’s a teeny-weeny article.”

“With a very large idea in it,” added Father Vittorini, his good humor prevailing.

“The point is—”

“The point is,” said Vittorini, “when first I spoke of this piece, grave doubts were cast on my veracity. Now we see I have cleaved close by the truth.”

“Sure,” said Father Brian quickly, “but as our poet William Blake put it, ‘A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.’”

“Yes.” Vittorini relaxed further into his amiability. “And didn’t Blake also write

He who doubts from what he sees,

Will ne’er believe, do what you please.

If the Sun and Moon should doubt

They’d immediately go out.

Most appropriate,” added the Italian priest, “for the Space Age.”

Father Brian stared at the outrageous man.

“I’ll thank you not to quote our Blake at us.”

“Your Blake?” said the slender pale man with the softly glowing dark hair. “Strange, I’d always thought him English.”

“The poetry of Blake,” said Father Brian, “was always a great comfort to my mother. It was she told me there was Irish blood on his maternal side.”

“I will graciously accept that,” said Father Vittorini. “But back to the newspaper story. Now that we’ve found it, it seems a good time to do some research on Pius the Twelfth’s encyclical.”

Father Brian’s wariness, which was a second set of nerves under his skin, prickled alert.

“What encyclical is that?”

“Why, the one on space travel.”

“He didn’t do that?”

“He did.”

“On space travel, a special encyclical?”

“A special one.”

Both Irish priests were near onto being flung back in their chairs by the blast.

Father Vittorini made the picky motions of a man cleaning up after a detonation, finding lint on his coat sleeve, a crumb or two of toast on the tablecloth.

“Wasn’t it enough,” said Brian, in a dying voice, “he shook hands with the astronaut bunch and told them well done and all that, but he had to go on and write at length about it?”

“It was not enough,” said Father Vittorini. “He wished, I hear, to comment further on the problems of life on other worlds, and its effect on Christian thinking.”

Each of these words, precisely spoken, drove the two other men farther back in their chairs.

“You hear?” said Father Brian. “You haven’t read it yourself yet?”

“No, but I intend—”

“You intend everything and mean worse. Sometimes, Father Vittorini, you do not talk, and I hate to say this, like a priest of the Mother Church at all.”

“I talk,” replied Vittorini, “like an Italian priest somehow caught and trying to preserve surface tension treading an ecclesiastical bog where I am outnumbered by a great herd of clerics named Shaughnessy and Nulty and Flannery that mill and stampede like caribou or bison every time I so much as whisper ‘papal bull.’”

“There is no doubt in my mind”—and here Father Brian squinted off in the general direction of the Vatican, itself—“that it was you, if you could’ve been there, might’ve put the Holy Father up to this whole space-travel monkeyshines.”

“I?”

“You! It’s you, is it not, certainly not us, that lugs in the magazines by the carload with the rocket ships on the shiny covers and the filthy green monsters with six eyes and seventeen gadgets chasing after half-draped females on some moon or other? You I hear late nights doing the countdowns from ten, nine, eight on down to one, in tandem with the beast TV, so we lie aching for the dread concussions to knock the fillings from our teeth. Between one Italian here and another at Castel Gandolfo, may God forgive me, you’ve managed to depress the entire Irish clergy!”

“Peace,” said Father Kelly at last, “both of you.”

“And peace it is, one way or another I’ll have it,” said Father Brian, taking the envelope from his pocket.

“Put that away,” said Father Kelly, sensing what must be in the envelope.

“Please give this to Pastor Sheldon for me.”

Father Brian rose heavily and peered about to find the door and some way out of the room. He was suddenly gone.

“Now see what you’ve done!” said Father Kelly.

Father Vittorini, truly shocked, had stopped eating. “But, Father, all along I thought it was an amiable squabble, with him putting on and me putting on, him playing it loud and me soft.”

“Well, you’ve played it too long, and the blasted fun turned serious!” said Kelly. “Ah, you don’t know William like I do. You’ve really torn him.”

“I’ll do my best to mend—”

“You’ll mend the seat of your pants! Get out of the way, this is my job now.” Father Kelly grabbed the envelope off the table and held it up to the light, “The X ray of a poor man’s soul. Ah, God.”

He hurried upstairs. “Father Brian?” he called. He slowed. “Father?” He tapped at the door. “William?”

In the breakfast room, alone once more, Father Vittorini remembered the last few flakes in his mouth. They now had no taste. It took him a long slow while to get them down.

It was only after lunch that Father Kelly cornered Father Brian in the dreary little garden behind the rectory and handed back the envelope.

“Willy, I want you to tear this up. I won’t have you quitting in the middle of the game. How long has all this gone on between you two?”

Father Brian sighed and held but did not rip the envelope. “It sort of crept upon us. It was me at first spelling the Irish writers and him pronouncing the Italian operas. Then me describing the Book of Kells in Dublin and him touring me through the Renaissance. Thank God for small favors, he didn’t discover the papal encyclical on the blasted space traveling sooner, or I’d have transferred myself to a monkery where the fathers keep silence as a vow. But even there, I fear, he’d follow and count down the Canaveral blastoffs in sign language. What a Devil’s advocate that man would make!”

“Father!”

“I’ll do penance for that later. It’s just this dark otter, this seal, he frolics with Church dogma as if it was a candy-striped bouncy ball. It’s all very well to have seals cavorting, but I say don’t mix them with the true fanatics, such as you and me! Excuse the pride, Father, but there does seem to be a variation on the true theme every time you get them piccolo players in amongst us harpers, and don’t you agree?”

“What an enigma, Will. We of the Church should be examples for others on how to get along.”

“Has anyone told Father Vittorini that? Let’s face it, the Italians are the Rotary of the Church. You couldn’t have trusted one of them to stay sober during the Last Supper.”

“I wonder if we Irish could?” mused Father Kelly.

“We’d wait until it was over, at least!”

“Well, now, are we priests or barbers? Do we stand here splitting hairs, or do we shave Vittorini close with his own razor? William, have you no plan?”

“Perhaps to call in a Baptist to mediate.”

“Be off with your Baptist! Have you researched the encyclical?”

“The encyclical?”

“Have you let grass grow since breakfast between your toes? You have! Let’s read that space-travel edict! Memorize it, get it pat, then counterattack the rocket man in his own territory! This way, to the library. What is it the youngsters cry these days? Five, four, three, two, one, blast off?”

“Or the rough equivalent.”

“Well, say the rough equivalent, then, man. And follow me!”

They met Pastor Sheldon, going into the library as he was coming out.

“It’s no use,” said the pastor, smiling, as he examined the fever in their faces. “You won’t find it in there.”

“Won’t find what in there?” Father Brian saw the pastor looking at the letter which was still glued to his fingers, and hid it away, fast. “Won’t find what, sir?”

“A rocket ship is a trifle too large for our small quarters,” said the pastor in a poor try at the enigmatic.

“Has the Italian bent your ear, then?” cried Father Kelly in dismay.

“No, but echoes have a way of ricocheting about the place. I came to do some checking myself.”

“Then,” gasped Brian with relief, “you’re on our side?”

Pastor Sheldon’s eyes became somewhat sad. “Is there a side to this, Fathers?”

They all moved into the little library room, where Father Brian and Father Kelly sat uncomfortably on the edges of the hard chairs. Pastor Sheldon remained standing, watchful of their discomfort.

“Now. Why are you afraid of Father Vittorini?”

“Afraid?” Father Brian seemed surprised at the word and cried softly, “It’s more like angry.”

“One leads to the other,” admitted Kelly. He continued, “You see, Pastor, it’s mostly a small town in Tuscany shunting stones at Meynooth, which is, as you know, a few miles out from Dublin.”

“I’m Irish,” said the pastor, patiently.

“So you are, Pastor, and all the more reason we can’t figure your great calm in this disaster,” said Father Brian.

“I’m California Irish,” said the pastor.

He let this sink in. When it had gone to the bottom, Father Brian groaned miserably. “Ah. We forgot.”

And he looked at the pastor and saw there the recent dark, the tan complexion of one who walked with his face like a sunflower to the sky, even here in Chicago, taking what little light and heat he could to sustain his color and being. Here stood a man with the figure, still, of a badminton and tennis player under his tunic, and with the firm lean hands of the handball expert. In the pulpit, by the look of his arms moving in the air, you could see him swimming under warm California skies.

Father Kelly let forth one sound of laughter.

“Oh, the gentle ironies, the simple fates. Father Brian, here is our Baptist!”

“Baptist?” asked Pastor Sheldon.

“No offense, Pastor, but we were off to find a mediator, and here you are, an Irishman from California, who has known the wintry blows of Illinois so short a time, you’ve still the look of rolled lawns and January sunburn. We, we were born and raised as lumps in Cork and Kilcock, Pastor. Twenty years in Hollywood would not thaw us out. And now, well, they do say, don’t they, that California is much …” here he paused, “like Italy?”

“I see where you’re driving,” mumbled Father Brian.

Pastor Sheldon nodded, his face both warm and gently sad. “My blood is like your own. But the climate I was shaped in is like Rome’s. So you see, Father Brian, when I asked are there any sides, I spoke from my heart.”

“Irish yet not Irish,” mourned Father Brian. “Almost but not quite Italian. Oh, the world’s played tricks with our flesh.”

“Only if we let it, William, Patrick.”

Both men started a bit at the sound of their Christian names.

“You still haven’t answered: Why are you afraid?”

Father Brian watched his hands fumble like two bewildered wrestlers for a moment. “Why, it’s because just when we get things settled on Earth, just when it looks like victory’s in sight, the Church on a good footing, along comes Father Vittorini—”

“Forgive me, Father,” said the pastor. “Along comes reality. Along comes space, time, entropy, progress, along come a million things, always. Father Vittorini didn’t invent space travel.”

“No, but he makes a good thing of it. With him ‘everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.’ Well, no matter. I’ll stash my shillelagh if he’ll put away his rockets.”

“No, let’s leave them out in the open,” replied the pastor. “Best not to hide violence or special forms of travel. Best to work with them. Why don’t we climb in that rocket, Father, and learn from it?”

“Learn what? That most of the things we’ve taught in the past on Earth don’t fit out there on Mars or Venus or wherever in hell Vittorini would push us? Drive Adam and Eve out of some new Garden, on Jupiter, with our very own rocket fires? Or worse, find there’s no Eden, no Adam, no Eve, no damned Apple nor Serpent, no Fall, no Original Sin, no Annunciation, no Birth, no Son, you go on with the list, no nothing at all! on one blasted world tailing another? Is that what we must learn, Pastor?”

“If need be, yes,” said Pastor Sheldon. “It’s the Lord’s space and the Lord’s worlds in space, Father. We must not try to take our cathedrals with us, when all we need is an overnight case. The Church can be packed in a box no larger than is needed for the articles of the Mass, as much as these hands can carry. Allow Father Vittorini this, the people of the southern climes learned long ago to build in wax which melts and takes its shape in harmony with the motion and need of man. William, William, if you insist on building in hard ice, it will shatter when we break the sound barrier or melt and leave you nothing in the fire of the rocket blast.”

“That,” said Father Brian, “is a hard thing to learn at fifty years, Pastor.”

“But learn, I know you will,” said the pastor, touching his shoulder. “I set you a task: to make peace with the Italian priest. Find some way tonight for a meeting of minds. Sweat at it, Father. And, first off, since our library is meager, hunt for and find the space encyclical, so we’ll know what we’re yelling about.”

A moment later the pastor was gone.

Father Brian listened to the dying sound of those swift feet—as if a white ball were flying high in the sweet blue air and the pastor were hurrying in for a fine volley.

“Irish but not Irish,” he said. “Almost but not quite Italian. And now what are we, Patrick?”

“I begin to wonder,” was the reply.

And they went away to a larger library wherein might be hid the grander thoughts of a Pope on a bigger space.

A long while after supper that night, in fact almost at bedtime, Father Kelly, sent on his mission, moved about the rectory tapping on doors and whispering.

Shortly before ten o’clock, Father Vittorini came down the stairs and gasped with surprise.

Father Brian, at the unused fireplace, warming himself at the small gas heater which stood on the hearth, did not turn for a moment.

A space had been cleared and the brute television set moved forward into a circle of four chairs, amongst which stood two small taborettes on which stood two bottles and four glasses. Father Brian had done it all, allowing Kelly to do nothing. Now he turned, for Kelly and Pastor Sheldon were arriving.

The pastor stood in the entryway and surveyed the room. “Splendid.” He paused and added, “I think. Let me see now …” He read the label on one bottle. “Father Vittorini is to sit here.”

“By the Irish Moss?” asked Vittorini.

“The same,” said Father Brian.

Vittorini, much pleased, sat.

“And the rest of us will sit by the Lachryma Christi, I take it?” said the pastor.

“An Italian drink, Pastor.”

“I think I’ve heard of it,” said the pastor, and sat.

“Here.” Father Brian hurried over and, without looking at Vittorini, poured his glass a good way up with the Moss. “An Irish transfusion.”

“Allow me.” Vittorini nodded his thanks and arose, in turn, to pour the others’ drinks. “The tears of Christ and the sunlight of Italy,” he said. “And now, before we drink, I have something to say.”

The others waited, looking at him.

“The papal encyclical on space travel,” he said at last, “does not exist.”

“We discovered that,” said Kelly, “a few hours ago.”

“Forgive me, Fathers,” said Vittorini. “I am like the fisherman on the bank who, seeing fish, throws out more bait. I suspected, all along, there was no encyclical. But every time it was brought up, about town, I heard so many priests from Dublin deny it existed, I came to think it must! They would not go check the item, for they feared it existed. I would not, in my pride, do research, for I feared it did not exist. So Roman pride or Cork pride, it’s all the same. I shall go on retreat soon and be silent for a week, Pastor, and do penance.”

“Good, Father, good.” Pastor Sheldon rose. “Now I’ve a small announcement. A new priest arrives here next month. I’ve thought long on it. The man is Italian, born and raised in Montreal.”

Vittorini closed one eye and tried to picture this man to himself.

“If the Church must be all things to all people,” said the pastor, “I am intrigued with the thought of hot blood raised in a cold climate, as this new Italian was, even as I find it fascinating to consider myself, cold blood raised in California. We’ve needed another Italian here to shake things up, and this Latin looks to be the sort will shake even Father Vittorini. Now will someone offer a toast?”

“May I, Pastor?” Father Vittorini rose again, smiling gently, his eyes darkly aglow, looking at this one and now that of the three. He raised his glass. “Somewhere did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate those Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God’s Machineries of Joy?”

“If Blake said that,” said Father Brian, “I take it all back. He never lived in Dublin!”

All laughed together.

Vittorini drank the Irish Moss and was duly speechless.

The others drank the Italian wine and grew mellow, and in his mellowness Father Brian cried softly, “Vittorini, now, will you, unholy as it is, tune on the ghost?”

“Channel Nine?”

“Nine it is!”

And while Vittorini dialed the knobs Father Brian mused over his drink, “Did Blake really say that?”

“The fact is, Father,” said Vittorini, bent to the phantoms coming and going on the screen, “he might have, if he’d lived today. I wrote it down myself tonight.”

All watched the Italian with some awe. Then the TV gave a hum and came clear, showing a rocket, a long way off, getting ready.

“The machineries of joy,” said Father Brian. “Is that one of them you’re tuning in? And is that another sitting there, the rocket on its stand?”

“It could be, tonight,” murmured Vittorini. “If the thing goes up, and a man in it, all around the world, and him still alive, and us with him, though we just sit here. That would be joyful indeed.”

The rocket was getting ready, and Father Brian shut his eyes for a moment. Forgive me, Jesus, he thought, forgive an old man his prides, and forgive Vittorini his spites, and help me to understand what I see here tonight, and let me stay awake if need be, in good humor, until dawn, and let the thing go well, going up and coming down, and think of the man in that contraption, Jesus, think of and be with him. And help me, God, when the summer is young, for, sure as fate on Fourth of July evening there will be Vittorini and the kids from around the block, on the rectory lawn, lighting sky-rockets. All them there watching the sky, like the morn of the Redemption, and help me, O Lord, to be as those children before the great night of time and void where you abide. And help me to walk forward, Lord, to light the next rocket Independence Night, and stand with the Latin father, my face suffused with that same look of the delighted child in the face of the burning glories you put near our hand and bid us savor.

He opened his eyes.

Voices from far Canaveral were crying in a wind of time. Strange phantom powers loomed upon the screen. He was drinking the last of the wine when someone touched his elbow gently.

“Father,” said Vittorini, near. “Fasten your seat belt.”

“I will,” said Father Brian. “I will. And many thanks.”

He sat back in his chair. He closed his eyes. He waited for the thunder. He waited for the fire. He waited for the concussion and the voice that would teach a silly, a strange, a wild and miraculous thing:

How to count back, ever backward … to zero.




The One Who Waits (#ulink_0787b35f-dc19-5443-9a5d-0be455eec8ae)


I live in a well. I live like smoke in the well. Like vapor in a stone throat. I don’t move. I don’t do anything but wait. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when I don’t know? I cannot. I am simply waiting. I am mist and moonlight and memory. I am sad and I am old. Sometimes I fall like rain into the well. Spider webs are startled into forming where my rain falls fast, on the water surface. I wait in cool silence and there will be a day when I no longer wait.

Now it is morning. I hear a great thunder. I smell fire from a distance. I hear a metal crashing. I wait. I listen.

Voices. Far away.

“All right!”

One voice. An alien voice. An alien tongue I cannot know. No word is familiar. I listen.

“Send the men out!”

A crunching in crystal sands.

“Mars! So this is it!”

“Where’s the flag?”

“Here, sir.”

“Good, good.”

The sun is high in the blue sky and its golden rays fill the well and I hang like a flower pollen, invisible and misting in the warm light.

Voices.

“In the name of the Government of Earth, I proclaim this to be the Martian Territory, to be equally divided among the member nations.”

What are they saying? I turn in the sun, like a wheel, invisible and lazy, golden and tireless.

“What’s over here?”

“A well!”

“No!”

“Come on. Yes!”

The approach of warmth. Three objects bend over the well mouth, and my coolness rises to the objects.

“Great!”

“Think it’s good water?”

“We’ll see.”

“Someone get a lab test bottle and a dropline.”

“I will!”

A sound of running. The return.

“Here we are.”

I wait.

“Let it down. Easy.”

Glass shines, above, coming down on a slow line.

The water ripples softly as the glass touches and fills. I rise in the warm air toward the well mouth.

“Here we are. You want to test this water, Regent?”

“Let’s have it.”

“What a beautiful well. Look at that construction. How old you think it is?”

“God knows. When we landed in that other town yesterday Smith said there hasn’t been life on Mars in ten thousand years.”

“Imagine.”

“How is it, Regent? The water.”

“Pure as silver. Have a glass.”

The sound of water in the hot sunlight. Now I hover like a dust, a cinnamon, upon the soft wind.

“What’s the matter, Jones?”

“I don’t know. Got a terrible headache. All of a sudden.”

“Did you drink the water yet?”

“No, I haven’t. It’s not that. I was just bending over the well and all of a sudden my head split. I feel better now.”

Now I know who I am.

My name is Stephen Leonard Jones and I am twenty-five years old and I have just come in a rocket from a planet called Earth and I am standing with my good friends Regent and Shaw by an old well on the planet Mars.

I look down at my golden fingers, tan and strong. I look at my long legs and at my silver uniform and at my friends.

“What’s wrong, Jones?” they say.

“Nothing,” I say, looking at them. “Nothing at all.”

The food is good. It has been ten thousand years since food. It touches the tongue in a fine way and the wine with the food is warming. I listen to the sound of voices. I make words that I do not understand but somehow understand. I test the air.

“What’s the matter, Jones?”

I tilt this head of mine and rest my hands holding the silver utensils of eating. I feel everything.

“What do you mean?” this voice, this new thing of mine, says.

“You keep breathing funny. Coughing,” says the other man.

I pronounce exactly. “Maybe a little cold coming on.”

“Check with the doc later.”

I nod my head and it is good to nod. It is good to do several things after ten thousand years. It is good to breathe the air and it is good to feel the sun in the flesh deep and going deeper and it is good to feel the structure of ivory, the fine skeleton hidden in the warming flesh, and it is good to hear sounds much clearer and more immediate than they were in the stone deepness of a well. I sit enchanted.

“Come out of it, Jones. Snap to it. We got to move!”

“Yes,” I say, hypnotized with the way the word forms like water on the tongue and falls with slow beauty out into the air.

I walk and it is good walking. I stand high and it is a long way to the ground when I look down from my eyes and my head. It is like living on a fine cliff and being happy there.

Regent stands by the stone well, looking down. The others have gone murmuring to the silver ship from which they came.

I feel the fingers of my hand and the smile of my mouth.

“It is deep,” I say.

“Yes.”

“It is called a Soul Well.”

Regent raises his head and looks at me. “How do you know that?”

“Doesn’t it look like one?”

“I never heard of a Soul Well.”

“A place where waiting things, things that once had flesh, wait and wait,” I say, touching his arm.

The sand is fire and the ship is silver fire in the hotness of the day and the heat is good to feel. The sound of my feet in the hard sand. I listen. The sound of the wind and the sun burning the valleys. I smell the smell of the rocket boiling in the noon. I stand below the port.

“Where’s Regent?” someone says.

“I saw him by the well,” I reply.

One of them runs toward the well. I am beginning to tremble. A fine shivering tremble, hidden deep, but becoming very strong. And for the first time I hear it, as if it too were hidden in a well. A voice calling deep within me, tiny and afraid. And the voice cries, Let me go, let me go, and there is a feeling as if something is trying to get free, a pounding of labyrinthine doors, a rushing down dark corridors and up passages, echoing and screaming.

“Regent’s in the well!”

The men are running, all five of them. I run with them but now I am sick and the trembling is violent.

“He must have fallen. Jones, you were here with him. Did you see? Jones? Well, speak up, man.”

“What’s wrong, Jones?”

I fall to my knees, the trembling is so bad.

“He’s sick. Here, help me with him.”

“The sun.”

“No, not the sun,” I murmur.

They stretch me out and the seizures come and go like earthquakes and the deep hidden voice in me cries, This is Jones, this is me, that’s not him, that’s not him, don’t believe him, let me out, let me out! And I look up at the bent figures and my eyelids flicker. They touch my wrists.

“His heart is acting up.”

I close my eyes. The screaming stops. The shivering ceases.

I rise, as in a cool well, released.

“He’s dead,” says someone.

“Jones is dead.”

“From what?”

“Shock, it looks like.”

“What kind of shock?” I say, and my name is Sessions and my lips move crisply, and I am the captain of these men. I stand among them and I am looking down at a body which lies cooling on the sands. I clap both hands to my head.

“Captain!”

“It’s nothing,” I say, crying out. “Just a headache. I’ll be all right. There. There,” I whisper. “It’s all right now.”

“We’d better get out of the sun, sir.”

“Yes,” I say, looking down at Jones. “We should never have come. Mars doesn’t want us.”

We carry the body back to the rocket with us, and a new voice is calling deep in me to be let out.

Help, help. Far down in the moist earthen-works of the body. Help, help! in red fathoms, echoing and pleading.

The trembling starts much sooner this time. The control is less steady.

“Captain, you’d better get in out of the sun, you don’t look too well, sir.”

“Yes,” I say. “Help,” I say.

“What, sir?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said ‘Help,’ sir.”

“Did I, Matthews, did I?”

The body is laid out in the shadow of the rocket and the voice screams in the deep underwater catacombs of bone and crimson tide. My hands jerk. My mouth splits and is parched. My nostrils fasten wide. My eyes roll. Help, help, oh help, don’t, don’t, let me out, don’t, don’t.

“Don’t,” I say.

“What, sir?”

“Never mind,” I say. “I’ve got to get free,” I say. I clap my hand to my mouth.

“How’s that, sir?” cries Matthews.

“Get inside, all of you, go back to Earth!” I shout.

A gun is in my hand. I lift it.

“Don’t, sir!”

An explosion. Shadows run. The screaming is cut off. There is a whistling sound of falling through space.

After ten thousand years, how good to die. How good to feel the sudden coolness, the relaxation. How good to be like a hand within a glove that stretches out and grows wonderfully cold in the hot sand. Oh, the quiet and the loveliness of gathering, darkening death. But one cannot linger on.

A crack, a snap.

“Good God, he’s killed himself!” I cry, and open my eyes and there is the captain lying against the rocket, his skull split by a bullet, his eyes wide, his tongue protruding between his white teeth. Blood runs from his head. I bend to him and touch him. “The fool,” I say. “Why did he do that?”

The men are horrified. They stand over the two dead men and turn their heads to see the Martian sands and the distant well where Regent lies lolling in deep waters. A croaking comes out of their dry lips, a whimpering, a childish protest against this awful dream.

The men turn to me.

After a long while, one of them says, “That makes you captain, Matthews.”

“I know,” I say slowly.

“Only six of us left.”

“Good God, it happened so quick!”

“I don’t want to stay here, let’s get out!”

The men clamor. I go to them and touch them now, with a confidence which almost sings in me. “Listen,” I say, and touch their elbows or their arms or their hands.

We all fall silent.

We are one.

No, no, no, no, no, no! Inner voices crying, deep down and gone into prisons beneath exteriors.

We are looking at each other. We are Samuel Matthews and Raymond Moses and William Spaulding and Charles Evans and Forrest Cole and John Summers, and we say nothing but look upon each other and our white faces and shaking hands.

We turn, as one, and look at the well.

“Now,” we say.

No, no, six voices scream, hidden and layered down and stored forever.

Our feet walk in the sand and it is as if a great hand with twelve fingers were moving across the hot sea bottom.

We bend to the well, looking down. From the cool depths six faces peer back up at us.

One by one we bend until our balance is gone, and one by one drop into the mouth and down through cool darkness into the cold waters.

The sun sets. The stars wheel upon the night sky. Far out, there is a wink of light. Another rocket coming, leaving red marks on space.

I live in a well. I live like smoke in a well. Like vapor in a stone throat. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when even I don’t know? I cannot.

I am simply waiting.




Tyrannosaurus Rex (#ulink_a50d1e8d-9f2c-556c-90ec-5a0b2f187047)


He opened a door on darkness. A voice cried, “Shut it!” It was like a blow in the face. He jumped through. The door banged. He cursed himself quietly. The voice, with dreadful patience, intoned, “Jesus. You Terwilliger?”

“Yes,” said Terwilliger. A faint ghost of screen haunted the dark theater wall to his right. To his left, a cigarette wove fiery arcs in the air as someone’s lips talked swiftly around it.

“You’re five minutes late!”

Don’t make it sound like five years, thought Terwilliger.

“Shove your film in the projection room door. Let’s move.”

Terwilliger squinted.

He made out five vast loge seats that exhaled, breathed heavily as amplitudes of executive life shifted, leaning toward the middle loge where, almost in darkness, a little boy sat smoking.

No, thought Terwilliger, not a boy. That’s him. Joe Clarence. Clarence the Great.

For now the tiny mouth snapped like a puppet’s, blowing smoke. “Well?”

Terwilliger stumbled back to hand the film to the projectionist, who made a lewd gesture toward the loges, winked at Terwilliger and slammed the booth door.

“Jesus,” sighed the tiny voice. A buzzer buzzed. “Roll it, projection!”

Terwilliger probed the nearest loge, struck flesh, pulled back and stood biting his lips.

Music leaped from the screen. His film appeared in a storm of drums:

TYRANNOSAURUS REX: The Thunder Lizard.

Photographed in stop-motion animation with miniatures created by John Terwilliger. A study in life-forms on Earth one billion years before Christ.

Faint ironic applause came softly patting from the baby hands in the middle loge.

Terwilliger shut his eyes. New music jerked him alert. The last titles faded into a world of primeval sun, mist, poisonous rain and lush wilderness. Morning fogs were strewn along eternal seacoasts where immense flying dreams and dreams of nightmare scythed the wind. Huge triangles of bone and rancid skin, of diamond eye and crusted tooth, pterodactyls, the kites of destruction, plunged, struck prey, and skimmed away, meat and screams in their scissor mouths.

Terwilliger gazed, fascinated.

In the jungle foliage now, shiverings, creepings, insect jitterings, antennae twitchings, slime locked in oily fatted slime, armor skinned to armor, in sun glade and shadow moved the reptilian inhabitors of Terwilliger’s mad remembrance of vengeance given flesh and panic taking wing.

Brontosaur, stegosaur, triceratops. How easily the clumsy tonnages of name fell from one’s lips.

The great brutes swung like ugly machineries of war and dissolution through moss ravines, crushing a thousand flowers at one footfall, snouting the mist, ripping the sky in half with one shriek.

My beauties, thought Terwilliger, my little lovelies. All liquid latex, rubber sponge, ball-socketed steel articulature; all night-dreamed, clay-molded, warped and welded, riveted and slapped to life by hand. No bigger than my fist, half of them; the rest no larger than this head they sprang from.

“Good Lord,” said a soft admiring voice in the dark.

Step by step, frame by frame of film, stop motion by stop motion, he, Terwilliger, had run his beasts through their postures, moved each a fraction of an inch, photographed them, moved them another hair, photographed them, for hours and days and months. Now these rare images, this eight hundred scant feet of film, rushed through the projector.

And lo! he thought. I’ll never get used to it. Look! They come alive!

Rubber, steel, clay, reptilian latex sheath, glass eye, porcelain fang, all ambles, trundles, strides in terrible prides through continents as yet unmanned, by seas as yet unsalted, a billion years lost away. They do breathe. They do smite air with thunders. Oh, uncanny!

I feel, thought Terwilliger, quite simply, that there stands my Garden, and these my animal creations which I love on this Sixth Day, and tomorrow, the Seventh, I must rest.

“Lord,” said the soft voice again.

Terwilliger almost answered, “Yes?”

“This is beautiful footage, Mr. Clarence,” the voice went on.

“Maybe,” said the man with a boy’s voice.

“Incredible animation.”

“I’ve seen better,” said Clarence the Great.

Terwilliger stiffened. He turned from the screen where his friends lumbered into oblivion, from butcheries wrought on architectural scales. For the first time he examined his possible employers.

“Beautiful stuff.”

This praise came from an old man who sat to himself far across the theater, his head lifted forward in amaze toward that ancient life.

“It’s jerky. Look there!” The strange boy in the middle loge half rose, pointing with the cigarette in his mouth. “Hey, was that a bad shot. You see?”

“Yes,” said the old man, tired suddenly, fading back in his chair. “I see.”

Terwilliger crammed his hotness down upon a suffocation of swiftly moving blood.

“Jerky,” said Joe Clarence.

White light, quick numerals, darkness; the music cut, the monsters vanished.

“Glad that’s over.” Joe Clarence exhaled. “Almost lunchtime. Throw on the next reel, Walter! That’s all, Terwilliger.” Silence. “Terwilliger?” Silence. “Is that dumb bunny still here?”

“Here.” Terwilliger ground his fists on his hips.

“Oh,” said Joe Clarence. “It’s not bad. But don’t get ideas about money. A dozen guys came here yesterday to show stuff as good or better than yours, tests for our new film, Prehistoric Monster. Leave your bid in an envelope with my secretary. Same door out as you came in. Walter, what the hell you waiting for? Roll the next one!”

In darkness, Terwilliger barked his shins on a chair, groped for and found the door handle, gripped it tight, tight.

Behind him the screen exploded: an avalanche fell in great flourings of stone, whole cities of granite, immense edifices of marble piled, broke and flooded down. In this thunder, he heard voices from the week ahead:

“We’ll pay you one thousand dollars, Terwilliger.”

“But I need a thousand for my equipment alone!”

“Look, we’re giving you a break. Take it or leave it!”

With the thunder dying, he knew he would take, and he knew he would hate it.

Only when the avalanche had drained off to silence behind him and his own blood had raced to the inevitable decision and stalled in his heart, did Terwilliger pull the immensely weighted door wide to step forth into the terrible raw light of day.

Fuse flexible spine to sinuous neck, pivot neck to death’s-head skull, hinge jaw from hollow cheek, glue plastic sponge over lubricated skeleton, slip snake-pebbled skin over sponge, meld seams with fire, then rear upright triumphant in a world where insanity wakes but to look on madness—Tyrannosaurus Rexl

The Creator’s hands glided down out of arc-light sun. They placed the granuled monster in false green summer wilds, they waded it in broths of teeming bacterial life. Planted in serene terror, the lizard machine basked. From the blind heavens the Creator’s voice hummed, vibrating the Garden with the old and monotonous tune about the footbone connected to the … anklebone, anklebone connected to the … legbone, legbone connected to the … kneebone, kneebone connected to the …

A door burst wide.

Joe Clarence ran in very much like an entire Cub Scout pack. He looked wildly around as if no one were there.

“My God!” he cried. “Aren’t you set up yet? This costs me money!”

“No,” said Terwilliger dryly. “No matter how much time I take, I get paid the same.”

Joe Clarence approached in a series of quick starts and stops. “Well, shake a leg. And make it real horrible.”

Terwilliger was on his knees beside the miniature jungle set. His eyes were on a straight level with his producer’s as he said, “How many feet of blood and gore would you like?”

“Two thousand feet of each!” Clarence laughed in a kind of gasping stutter. “Let’s look.” He grabbed the lizard.

“Careful!”

“Careful?” Clarence turned the ugly beast in careless and non-loving hands. “It’s my monster, ain’t it? The contract—”

“The contract says you use this model for exploitation advertising, but the animal reverts to me after the film’s in release.”

“Holy cow.” Clarence waved the monster. “That’s wrong. We just signed the contracts four days ago—”

“It feels like four years.” Terwilliger rubbed his eyes. “I’ve been up two nights without sleep finishing this beast so we can start shooting.”

Clarence brushed this aside. “To hell with the contract. What a slimy trick. It’s my monster. You and your agent give me heart attacks. Heart attacks about money, heart attacks about equipment, heart attacks about—”

“This camera you gave me is ancient.”

“So if it breaks, fix it; you got hands? The challenge of the shoestring operation is using the old brain instead of cash. Getting back to the point, this monster, it should’ve been specified in the deal, is my baby.”

“I never let anyone own the things I make,” said Terwilliger honestly. “I put too much time and affection in them.”

“Hell, okay, so we give you fifty bucks extra for the beast, and throw in all this camera equipment free when the film’s done, right? Then you start your own company. Compete with me, get even with me, right, using my own machines!” Clarence laughed.

“If they don’t fall apart first,” observed Terwilliger.

“Another thing.” Clarence put the creature on the floor and walked around it. “I don’t like the way this monster shapes up.”

“You don’t like what?” Terwilliger almost yelled.

“His expression. Needs more fire, more … goombah. More mazash!”

“Mazash?”

“The old bimbo! Bug the eyes more. Flex the nostrils. Shine the teeth. Fork the tongue sharper. You can do it! Uh, the monster ain’t mine, huh?”

“Mine.” Terwilliger arose.

His belt buckle was now on a line with Joe Clarence’s eyes. The producer stared at the bright buckle almost hypnotically for a moment.

“God damn the goddam lawyers!”

He broke for the door.

“Work!”

The monster hit the door a split second after it slammed shut.

Terwilliger kept his hand poised in the air from his overhand throw. Then his shoulders sagged. He went to pick up his beauty. He twisted off its head, skinned the latex flesh off the skull, placed the skull on a pedestal and, painstakingly, with clay, began to reshape the prehistoric face.

“A little goombah,” he muttered. “A touch of mazash.”

They ran the first film test on the animated monster a week later.

When it was over, Clarence sat in darkness and nodded imperceptibly.

“Better. But … more horrorific, bloodcurdling. Let’s scare the hell out of Aunt Jane. Back to the drawing board!”

“I’m a week behind schedule now,” Terwilliger protested. “You keep coming in, change this, change that, you say, so I change it, one day the tail’s all wrong, next day it’s the claws—”

“You’ll find a way to make me happy,” said Clarence. “Get in there and fight the old aesthetic fight!”

At the end of the month they ran the second test.

“A near miss! Close!” said Clarence. “The face is just almost right. Try again, Terwilliger!”

Terwilliger went back. He animated the dinosaur’s mouth so that it said obscene things which only a lip reader might catch, while the rest of the audience thought the beast was only shrieking. Then he got the clay and worked until 3A.M. on the awful face.

“That’s it!” cried Clarence in the projection room the next week. “Perfect! Now that’s what I call a monster!”

He leaned toward the old man, his lawyer, Mr. Glass, and Maury Poole, his production assistant.

“You like my creature?” He beamed.

Terwilliger, slumped in the back row, his skeleton as long as the monsters he built, could feel the old lawyer shrug.

“You seen one monster, you seen ‘em all.”

“Sure, sure, but this one’s special!” shouted Clarence happily. “Even I got to admit Terwilliger’s a genius!”

They all turned back to watch the beast on the screen, in a titanic waltz, throw its razor tail wide in a vicious harvesting that cut grass and clipped flowers. The beast paused now to gaze pensively off into mists, gnawing a red bone.

“That monster,” said Mr. Glass at last, squinting. “He sure looks familiar.”

“Familiar?” Terwilliger stirred, alert.

“It’s got such a look,” drawled Mr. Glass in the dark, “I couldn’t forget, from someplace.”

“Natural Museum exhibits?”

“No, no.”

“Maybe,” laughed Clarence, “you read a book once, Glass?”

“Funny …” Glass, unperturbed, cocked his head, closed one eye. “Like detectives, I don’t forget a face. But, that Tyrannosaurus Rex—where before did I meet him?”

“Who cares?” Clarence sprinted. “He’s great. And all because I booted Terwilliger’s behind to make him do it right. Come on, Maury!”

When the door shut, Mr. Glass turned to gaze steadily at Terwilliger. Not taking his eyes away, he called softly to the projectionist, “Walt? Walter? Could you favor us with that beast again?”

“Sure thing.”

Terwilliger shifted uncomfortably, aware of some bleak force gathering in blackness, in the sharp light that shot forth once more to ricochet terror off the screen.

“Yeah. Sure,” mused Mr. Glass. “I almost remember. I almost know him. But … who?”

The brute, as if answering, turned and for a disdainful moment stared across one hundred thousand million years at two small men hidden in a small dark room. The tyrant machine named itself in thunder.

Mr. Glass quickened forward, as if to cup his ear.

Darkness swallowed all.

With the film half finished, in the tenth week, Clarence summoned thirty of the office staff, technicians and a few friends to see a rough cut of the picture.

The film had been running fifteen minutes when a gasp ran through the small audience.

Clarence glanced swiftly about.

Mr. Glass, next to him, stiffened.

Terwilliger, scenting danger, lingered near the exit, not knowing why; his nervousness was compulsive and intuitive. Hand on the door, he watched.

Another gasp ran through the crowd.

Someone laughed quietly. A woman secretary giggled. Then there was instantaneous silence.

For Joe Clarence had jumped to his feet.

His tiny figure sliced across the light on the screen. For a moment, two images gesticulated in the dark: Tyrannosaurus, ripping the leg from a Pteranodon, and Clarence, yelling, jumping forward as if to grapple with these fantastic wrestlers.

“Stop! Freeze it right there!”

The film stopped. The image held.

“What’s wrong?” asked Mr. Glass.

“Wrong?” Clarence crept up on the image. He thrust his baby hand to the screen, stabbed the tyrant jaw, the lizard eye, the fangs, the brow, then turned blindly to the projector light so that reptilian flesh was printed on his furious cheeks. “What goes? What is this?”

“Only a monster, Chief.”

“Monster, hell!” Clarence pounded the screen with his tiny fist. “That’s me!”

Half the people leaned forward, half the people fell back, two people jumped up, one of them Mr. Glass, who fumbled for his other spectacles, flexed his eyes and moaned, “So that’s where I saw him before!”

“That’s where you what?”

Mr. Glass shook his head, eyes shut. “That face, I knew it was familiar.”

A wind blew in the room.

Everyone turned. The door stood open.

Terwilliger was gone.

They found Terwilliger in his animation studio cleaning out his desk, dumping everything into a large cardboard box, the Tyrannosaurus machine-toy model under his arm. He looked up as the mob swirled in, Clarence at the head.

“What did I do to deserve this!” he cried.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Clarence.”

“You’re sorry?! Didn’t I pay you well?”

“No, as a matter of fact.”

“I took you to lunches—”

“Once. I picked up the tab.”

“I gave you dinner at home, you swam in my pool, and now this! You’re fired!”

“You can’t fire me, Mr. Clarence. I’ve worked the last week free and overtime, you forgot my check—”

“You’re fired anyway, oh, you’re really fired! You’re blackballed in Hollywood. Mr. Glass!” He whirled to find the old man. “Sue him!”

“There is nothing,” said Terwilliger, not looking up any more, just looking down, packing, keeping in motion, “nothing you can sue me for. Money? You never paid enough to save on. A house? Could never afford that. A wife? I’ve worked for people like you all my life. So wives are out. I’m an unencumbered man. There’s nothing you can do to me. If you attach my dinosaurs, I’ll just go hole up in a small town somewhere, get me a can of latex rubber, some clay from the river, some old steel pipe, and make new monsters. I’ll buy stock film raw and cheap. I’ve got an old beat-up stop-motion camera. Take that away, and I’ll build one with my own hands. I can do anything. And that’s why you’ll never hurt me again.”

“You’re fired!” cried Clarence. “Look at me. Don’t look away. You’re fired! You’re fired!”

“Mr. Clarence,” said Mr. Glass, quietly, edging forward. “Let me talk to him just a moment”

“So talk to him!” said Clarence. “What’s the use? He just stands there with that monster under his arm and the goddam thing looks like me, so get out of the way!”

Clarence stormed out the door. The others followed.

Mr. Glass shut the door, walked over to the window and looked out at the absolutely clear twilight sky.

“I wish it would rain,” he said. “That’s one thing about California I can’t forgive. It never really lets go and cries. Right now, what wouldn’t I give for a little something from that sky? A bolt of lightning, even.”

He stood silent, and Terwilliger slowed in his packing. Mr. Glass sagged down into a chair and doodled on a pad with a pencil, talking sadly, half aloud, to himself.

“Six reels of film shot, pretty good reels, half the film done, three hundred thousand dollars down the drain, hail and farewell. Out the window all the jobs. Who feeds the starving mouths of boys and girls? Who will face the stockholders? Who chucks the Bank of America under the chin? Anyone for Russian roulette?”

He turned to watch Terwilliger snap the locks on a briefcase.

“What hath God wrought?”

Terwilliger, looking down at his hands, turning them over to examine their texture, said, “I didn’t know I was doing it, I swear. It came out in my fingers. It was all subconscious. My fingers do everything for me. They did this.”

“Better the fingers had come in my office and taken me direct by the throat,” said Glass. “I was never one for slow motion. The Keystone Kops, at triple speed, was my idea of living, or dying. To think a rubber monster has stepped on us all. We are now so much tomato mush, ripe for canning!”

“Don’t make me feel any guiltier than I feel,” said Terwilliger.

“What do you want, I should take you dancing?”

“It’s just,” cried Terwilliger. “He kept at me. Do this. Do that. Do it the other way. Turn it inside out, upside down, he said. I swallowed my bile. I was angry all the time. Without knowing, I must’ve changed the face. But right up till five minutes ago, when Mr. Clarence yelled, I didn’t see it. I’ll take all the blame.”

“No,” sighed Mr. Glass, “we should all have seen. Maybe we did and couldn’t admit. Maybe we did and laughed all night in our sleep, when we couldn’t hear. So where are we now? Mr. Clarence, he’s got investments he can’t throw out. You got your career from this day forward, for better or worse, you can’t throw out. Mr. Clarence right now is aching to be convinced it was all some horrible dream. Part of his ache, ninety-nine per cent, is in his wallet. If you could put one per cent of your time in the next hour convincing him of what I’m going to tell you next, tomorrow morning there will be no orphan children staring out of the want ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. If you would go tell him—”

“Tell me what?”

Joe Clarence, returned, stood in the door, his cheeks still inflamed.

“What he just told me.” Mr. Glass turned calmly. “A touching story.”

“I’m listening!” said Clarence.

“Mr. Clarence.” The old lawyer weighed his words carefully. “This film you just saw is Mr. Terwilliger’s solemn and silent tribute to you.”

“It’s what?” shouted Clarence.

Both men, Clarence and Terwilliger, dropped their jaws.

The old lawyer gazed only at the wall and in a shy voice said, “Shall I go on?”

The animator closed his jaw. “If you want to.”

“This film—” the lawyer arose and pointed in a single motion toward the projection room—“was done from a feeling of honor and friendship for you, Joe Clarence. Behind your desk, an unsung hero of the motion picture industry, unknown, unseen, you sweat out your lonely little life while who gets the glory? The stars. How often does a man in Atawanda Springs, Idaho, tell his wife, ‘Say, I was thinking the other night about Joe Clarence—a great producer, that man’? How often? Should I tell? Never! So Terwilliger brooded. How could he present the real Clarence to the world? The dinosaur is there; boom! it hits him! This is it! he thought, the very thing to strike terror to the world, here’s a lonely, proud, wonderful, awful symbol of independence, power, strength, shrewd animal cunning, the true democrat, the individual brought to its peak, all thunder and big lightning. Dinosaur: Joe Clarence. Joe Clarence: Dinosaur. Man embodied in Tyrant Lizard!”

Mr. Glass sat down, panting quietly.

Terwilliger said nothing.

Clarence moved at last, walked across the room, circled Glass slowly, then came to stand in front of Terwilliger, his face pale. His eyes were uneasy, shifting up along Terwilliger’s tall skeleton frame.

“You said that?” he asked faintly.

Terwilliger swallowed.

“To me he said it. He’s shy,” said Mr. Glass. “You ever hear him say much, ever talk back, swear? anything? He likes people, he can’t say. But, immortalize them? That he can do!”

“Immortalize?” said Clarence.

“What else?” said the old man. “Like a statue, only moving. Years from now people will say, ‘Remember that film, The Monster from the Pleistocene?’ And people will say, ‘Sure! why?’ ‘Because,’ the others say, ‘it was the one monster, the one brute, in all Hollywood history had real guts, real personality. And why is this? Because one genius had enough imagination to base the creature on a real-life, hard-hitting, fast-thinking businessman of A-one caliber.’ You’re one with history, Mr. Clarence. Film libraries will carry you in good supply. Cinema societies will ask for you. How lucky can you get? Nothing like this will ever happen to Immanuel Glass, a lawyer. Every day for the next two hundred, five hundred years, you’ll be starring somewhere in the world!”

“Every day?” asked Clarence softly. “For the next—”

“Eight hundred, even; why not?”

“I never thought of that.”

“Think of it!”

Clarence walked over to the window and looked out at the Hollywood Hills, and nodded at last.

“My God, Terwilliger,” he said. “You really like me that much?”

“It’s hard to put in words,” said Terwilliger, with difficulty.

“So do we finish the mighty spectacle?” asked Glass. “Starring the tyrant terror striding the earth and making all quake before him, none other than Mr. Joseph J. Clarence?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Clarence wandered off, stunned, to the door, where he said, “You know? I always wanted to be an actor!”

Then he went quietly out into the hall and shut the door.

Terwilliger and Glass collided at the desk, both clawing at a drawer.

“Age before beauty,” said the lawyer, and quickly pulled forth a bottle of whiskey.

At midnight on the night of the first preview of Monster from the Stone Age, Mr. Glass came back to the studio, where everyone was gathering for a celebration, and found Terwilliger seated alone in his office, his dinosaur on his lap.

“You weren’t there?” asked Mr. Glass.

“I couldn’t face it. Was there a riot?”

“A riot? The preview cards are all superdandy extra plus! A lovelier monster nobody saw before! So now we’re talking sequels! Joe Clarence as the Tyrant Lizard in Return of the Stone Age Monster, Joe Clarence and/or Tyrannosaurus Rex in, maybe, Beast from the Old Country—”

The phone rang. Terwilliger got it.

“Terwilliger, this is Clarence! Be there in five minutes! We’ve done it! Your animal! Great! Is he mine now? I mean, to hell with the contract, as a favor, can I have him for the mantel?”

“Mr. Clarence, the monster’s yours.”

“Better than an Oscar! So long!”

Terwilliger stared at the dead phone.

“God bless us all, said Tiny Tim. He’s laughing, almost hysterical with relief.”

“So maybe I know why,” said Mr. Glass. “A little girl, after the preview, asked him for an autograph.”

“An autograph?”

“Right there in the street. Made him sign. First autograph he ever gave in his life. He laughed all the while he wrote his name. Somebody knew him. There he was, in front of the theater, big as life, Rex Himself, so sign the name. So he did.”

“Wait a minute,” said Terwilliger slowly, pouring drinks. “That little girl …?”

“My youngest daughter,” said Glass. “So who knows? And who will tell?”

They drank.

“Not me,” said Terwilliger.

Then, carrying the rubber dinosaur between them, and bringing the whisky, they went to stand by the studio gate, waiting for the limousines to arrive all lights, horns and annunciations.




The Vacation (#ulink_e5a38d74-ad9f-5bc8-be50-53eae19c8d9a)


It was a day as fresh as grass growing up and clouds going over and butterflies coming down can make it. It was a day compounded from silences of bee and flower and ocean and land, which were not silences at all, but motions, stirs, flutters, risings, fallings, each in its own time and matchless rhythm. The land did not move, but moved. The sea was not still, yet was still. Paradox flowed into paradox, stillness mixed with stillness, sound with sound. The flowers vibrated and the bees fell in separate and small showers of golden rain on the clover. The seas of hill and the seas of ocean were divided, each from the other’s motion, by a railroad track, empty, compounded of rust and iron marrow, a track on which, quite obviously, no train had run in many years. Thirty miles north it swirled on away to further mists of distance, thirty miles south it tunneled islands of cloud-shadow that changed their continental positions on the sides of far mountains as you watched.

Now, suddenly, the railroad track began to tremble.

A blackbird, standing on the rail, felt a rhythm grow faintly, miles away, like a heart beginning to beat.

The blackbird leaped up over the sea.

The rail continued to vibrate softly until, at long last, around a curve and along the shore came a small workman’s handcar, its two-cylinder engine popping and spluttering in the great silence.

On top of this small four-wheeled car, on a double-sided bench facing in two directions and with a little surrey roof above for shade, sat a man, his wife and their small seven-year-old son. As the handcar traveled through lonely stretch after lonely stretch, the wind whipped their eyes and blew their hair, but they did not look back but only ahead. Sometimes they looked eagerly as a curve unwound itself, sometimes with great sadness, but always watchful, ready for the next scene.

As they hit a level straightaway, the machine engine gasped and stopped abruptly. In the now crushing silence, it seemed that the quiet of earth, sky and sea itself, by its friction, brought the car to a wheeling halt.

“Out of gas.”

The man, sighing, reached for the extra can in the small storage bin and began to pour it into the tank.

His wife and son sat quietly looking at the sea, listening to the muted thunder, the whisper, the drawing back of huge tapestries of sand, gravel, green weed, and foam.

“Isn’t the sea nice?” said the woman.

“I like it,” said the boy.

“Shall we picnic here, while we’re at it?”

The man focused some binoculars on the green peninsula ahead.

“Might as well. The rails have rusted badly. There’s a break ahead. We may have to wait while I set a few back in place.”

“As many as there are,” said the boy, “we’ll have picnics!”

The woman tried to smile at this, then turned her grave attention to the man. “How far have we come today?”

“Not ninety miles.” The man still peered through the glasses, squinting. “I don’t like to go farther than that any one day, anyway. If you rush, there’s no time to see. We’ll reach Monterey day after tomorrow, Palo Alto the next day, if you want.”

The woman removed her great shadowing straw hat, which had been tied over her golden hair with a bright yellow ribbon, and stood perspiring faintly, away from the machine. They had ridden so steadily on the shuddering rail car that the motion was sewn into their bodies. Now, with the stopping, they felt odd, on the verge of unraveling.

“Let’s eat!”

The boy ran the wicker lunch basket down to the shore.

The boy and the woman were already seated by a spread table-cloth when the man came down to them, dressed in his business suit and vest and tie and hat as if he expected to meet someone along the way. As he dealt out the sandwiches and exhumed the pickles from their cool green Mason jars, he began to loosen his tie and unbutton his vest, always looking around as if he should be careful and ready to button up again.

“Are we all alone, Papa?” said the boy, eating.

“Yes.”

“No one else, anywhere?”

“No one else.”

“Were there people before?”

“Why do you keep asking that? It wasn’t that long ago. Just a few months. You remember.”

“Almost. If I try hard, then I don’t remember at all.” The boy let a handful of sand fall through his fingers. “Were there as many people as there is sand here on the beach? What happened to them?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, and it was true.

They had wakened one morning and the world was empty. The neighbors’ clothesline was still strung with blowing white wash, cars gleamed in front of other 7-A.M. cottages, but there were no farewells, the city did not hum with its mighty arterial traffics, phones did not alarm themselves, children did not wail in sunflower wildernesses.

Only the night before, he and his wife had been sitting on the front porch when the evening paper was delivered, and, not even daring to open the headlines out, he had said, “I wonder when He will get tired of us and just rub us all out?”

“It has gone pretty far,” she said. “On and on. We’re such fools, aren’t we?”

“Wouldn’t it be nice—” he lit his pipe and puffed it—“if we woke tomorrow and everyone in the world was gone and everything was starting over?” He sat smoking, the paper folded in his hand, his head resting back on the chair.

“If you could press a button right now and make it happen, would you?”

“I think I would,” he said. “Nothing violent. Just have everyone vanish off the face of the earth. Just leave the land and the sea and the growing things, like flowers and grass and fruit trees. And the animals, of course, let them stay. Everything except man, who hunts when he isn’t hungry, eats when full, and is mean when no one’s bothered him.”

“Naturally, we would be left.” She smiled quietly.

“I’d like that,” he mused. “All of time ahead. The longest summer vacation in history. And us out for the longest picnic-basket lunch in memory. Just you, me and Jim. No commuting. No keeping up with the Joneses. Not even a car. I’d like to find another way of traveling, an older way. Then, a hamper full of sandwiches, three bottles of pop, pick up supplies where you need them from empty grocery stores in empty towns, and summertime forever up ahead …”

They sat a long while on the porch in silence, the newspaper folded between them.

At last she opened her mouth.

“Wouldn’t we be lonely?” she said.

So that’s how it was the morning of the new world. They had awakened to the soft sounds of an earth that was now no more than a meadow, and the cities of the earth sinking back into seas of saber-grass, marigold, marguerite and morning-glory. They had taken it with remarkable calm at first, perhaps because they had not liked the city for so many years, and had had so many friends who were not truly friends, and had lived a boxed and separate life of their own within a mechanical hive.

The husband arose and looked out the window and observed very calmly, as if it were a weather condition, “Everyone’s gone,” knowing this just by the sounds the city had ceased to make.

They took their time over breakfast, for the boy was still asleep, and then the husband sat back and said, “Now I must plan what to do.”

“Do? Why … why, you’ll go to work, of course.”

“You still don’t believe it, do you?” He laughed. “That I won’t be rushing off each day at eight-ten, that Jim won’t go to school again ever. School’s out for all of us! No more pencils, no more books, no more boss’s sassy looks! We’re let out, darling, and we’ll never come back to the silly damn dull routines. Come on!”

And he had walked her through the still and empty city streets.

“They didn’t die,” he said. “They just … went away.”

“What about the other cities?”

He went to an outdoor phone booth and dialed Chicago, then New York, then San Francisco.

Silence. Silence. Silence.

“That’s it,” he said, replacing the receiver.

“I feel guilty,” she said. “Them gone and us here. And … I feel happy. Why? I should be unhappy.”

“Should you? It’s no tragedy. They weren’t tortured or blasted or burned. They went easily and they didn’t know. And now we owe nothing to no one. Our only responsibility is being happy. Thirty more years of happiness, wouldn’t that be good?”

“But … then we must have more children!”

“To repopulate the world?” He shook his head slowly, calmly. “No. Let Jim be the last. After he’s grown and gone let the horses and cows and ground squirrels and garden spiders have the world. They’ll get on. And someday some other species that can combine a natural happiness with a natural curiosity will build cities that won’t even look like cities to us, and survive. Right now, let’s go pack a basket, wake Jim, and get going on that long thirty-year summer vacation. I’ll beat you to the house!”

He took a sledge hammer from the small rail car, and while he worked alone for half an hour fixing the rusted rails into place the woman and the boy ran along the shore. They came back with dripping shells, a dozen or more, and some beautiful pink pebbles, and sat and the boy took school from the mother, doing homework on a pad with a pencil for a time, and then at high noon the man came down, his coat off, his tie thrown aside, and they drank orange pop, watching the bubbles surge up, glutting, inside the bottles. It was quiet. They listened to the sun tune the old iron rails. The smell of hot tar on the ties moved about them in the salt wind, as the husband tapped his atlas map lightly and gently.

“We’ll go to Sacramento next month, May, then work up toward Seattle. Should make that by July first, July’s a good month in Washington, then back down as the weather cools, to Yellowstone, a few miles a day, hunt here, fish there …”

The boy, bored, moved away to throw sticks into the sea and wade out like a dog to retrieve them.

The man went on: “Winter in Tucson, then, part of the winter, moving toward Florida, up the coast in the spring, and maybe New York by June. Two years from now, Chicago in the summer. Winter, three years from now, what about Mexico City? Anywhere the rails lead us, anywhere at all, and if we come to an old offshoot rail line we don’t know anything about, what the hell, we’ll just take it, go down it, to see where it goes. And some year, by God, we’ll boat down the Mississippi, always wanted to do that. Enough to last us a lifetime. And that’s just how long I want to take to do it all …”

His voice faded. He started to fumble the map shut, but, before he could move, a bright thing fell through the air and hit the paper. It rolled off into the sand and made a wet lump.

His wife glanced at the wet place in the sand and then swiftly searched his face. His solemn eyes were too bright. And down one cheek was a track of wetness.

She gasped. She took his hand and held it, tight.

He clenched her hand very hard, his eyes shut now, and slowly he said, with difficulty, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we went to sleep tonight and in the night, somehow, it all came back. All the foolishness, all the noise, all the hate, all the terrible things, all the nightmares, all the wicked people and stupid children, all the mess, all the smallness, all the confusion, all the hope, all the need, all the love. Wouldn’t it be nice.”

She waited and nodded her head once.

Then both of them started.

For standing between them, they knew not for how long, was their son, an empty pop bottle in one hand.

The boy’s face was pale. With his free hand he reached out to touch his father’s cheek, where the single tear had made its track.

“You,” he said. “Oh, Dad, you. You haven’t anyone to play with, either.”

The wife started to speak.

The husband moved to take the boy’s hand.

The boy jerked back. “Silly! Oh, silly! Silly fools! Oh, you dumb, dumb!” And, whirling, he rushed down to the ocean and stood there crying loudly.

The wife rose to follow, but the husband stopped her.

“No. Let him.”

And then they both grew cold and quiet. For the boy, below on the shore, crying steadily, now was writing on a piece of paper and stuffing it in the pop bottle and ramming the tin cap back on and taking the bottle and giving it a great glittering heave up in the air and out into the tidal sea.

What, thought the wife, what did he write on the note? What’s in the bottle?

The bottle moved out in the waves.

The boy stopped crying.

After a long while he walked up the shore, to stand looking at his parents. His face was neither bright nor dark, alive nor dead, ready nor resigned; it seemed a curious mixture that simply made do with time, weather and these people. They looked at him and beyond to the bay, where the bottle containing the scribbled note was almost out of sight now, shining in the waves.

Did he write what we wanted? thought the woman, did he write what he heard us just wish, just say?

Or did he write something for only himself, she wondered, that tomorrow he might wake and find himself alone in an empty world, no one around, no man, no woman, no father, no mother, no fool grownups with fool wishes, so he could trudge up to the railroad tracks and take the handcar motoring, a solitary boy, across the continental wilderness, on eternal voyages and picnics?

Is that what he wrote in the note?

Which?

She searched his colorless eyes, could not read the answer; dared not ask.

Gull shadows sailed over and kited their faces with sudden passing coolness.

“Time to go,” someone said.

They loaded the wicker basket onto the rail car. The woman tied her large bonnet securely in place with its yellow ribbon, they set the boy’s pail of shells on the floorboards, then the husband put on his tie, his vest, his coat, his hat, and they all sat on the benches of the car looking out at the sea where the bottled note was far out, blinking, on the horizon.

“Is asking enough?” said the boy. “Does wishing work?”

“Sometimes … too well.”

“It depends on what you ask for.”

The boy nodded, his eyes far away.

They looked back at where they had come from, and then ahead to where they were going.

“Goodbye, place,” said the boy, and waved.

The car rolled down the rusty rails. The sound of it dwindled, faded. The man, the woman, the boy dwindled with it in distance, among the hills.

After they were gone, the rail trembled faintly for two minutes, and ceased. A flake of rust fell. A flower nodded.

The sea was very loud.




The Drummer Boy of Shiloh (#ulink_94c2f966-70b2-55bb-a882-7ae3f1547d00)


In the April night, more than once, blossoms fell from the orchard trees and lit with rustling taps on the drumskin. At midnight a peach stone left miraculously on a branch through winter, flicked by a bird, fell swift and unseen, struck once, like panic, which jerked the boy upright. In silence he listened to his own heart ruffle away, away, at last gone from his ears and back in his chest again.

After that, he turned the drum on its side, where its great lunar face peered at him whenever he opened his eyes.

His face, alert or at rest, was solemn. It was indeed a solemn time and a solemn night for a boy just turned fourteen in the peach field near the Owl Creek not far from the church at Shiloh.

“… thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three …”

Unable to see, he stopped counting.

Beyond the thirty-three familiar shadows, forty thousand men, exhausted by nervous expectation, unable to sleep for romantic dreams of battles yet unfought, lay crazily askew in their uniforms. A mile yet farther on, another army was strewn helter-skelter, turning slow, basting themselves with the thought of what they would do when the time came: a leap, a yell, a blind plunge their strategy, raw youth their protection and benediction.

Now and again the boy heard a vast wind come up, that gently stirred the air. But he knew what it was, the army here, the army there, whispering to itself in the dark. Some men talking to others, others murmuring to themselves, and all so quiet it was like a natural element arisen from south or north with the motion of the earth toward dawn.

What the men whispered the boy could only guess, and he guessed that it was: Me, I’m the one, I’m the one of all the rest won’t die. I’ll live through it. I’ll go home. The band will play. And I’ll be there to hear it.

Yes, thought the boy, that’s all very well for them, they can give as good as they get!

For with the careless bones of the young men harvested by night and bindled around campfires were the similarly strewn steel bones of their rifles, with bayonets fixed like eternal lightning lost in the orchard grass.

Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two sticks to beat it, and no shield.

There wasn’t a man-boy on this ground tonight did not have a shield he cast, riveted or carved himself on his way to his first attack, compounded of remote but nonetheless firm and fiery family devotion, flag-blown patriotism and cocksure immortality strengthened by the touchstone of very real gunpowder, ramrod, minnieball and flint. But without these last the boy felt his family move yet farther off away in the dark, as if one of those great prairie-burning trains had chanted them away never to return, leaving him with this drum which was worse than a toy in the game to be played tomorrow or some day much too soon.

The boy turned on his side. A moth brushed his face, but it was peach blossom. A peach blossom flicked him, but it was a moth. Nothing stayed put. Nothing had a name. Nothing was as it once was.

If he lay very still, when the dawn came up and the soldiers put on their bravery with their caps, perhaps they might go away, the war with them, and not notice him lying small here, no more than a toy himself.

“Well, by God, now,” said a voice.

The boy shut up his eyes, to hide inside himself, but it was too late. Someone, walking by in the night, stood over him.

“Well,” said the voice quietly, “here’s a soldier crying before the fight. Good. Get it over. Won’t be time once it all starts.”

And the voice was about to move on when the boy, startled, touched the drum at his elbow. The man above, hearing this, stopped. The boy could feel his eyes, sense him slowly bending near. A hand must have come down out of the night, for there was a little rat-tat as the fingernails brushed and the man’s breath fanned his face.

“Why, it’s the drummer boy, isn’t it?”

The boy nodded, not knowing if his nod was seen. “Sir, is that you?” he said.

“I assume it is.” The man’s knees cracked as he bent still closer.

He smelled as all fathers should smell, of salt sweat, ginger tobacco, horse and boot leather, and the earth he walked upon. He had many eyes. No, not eyes, brass buttons that watched the boy.

He could only be, and was, the General.

“What’s your name, boy?” he asked.

“Joby,” whispered the boy, starting to sit up.

“All right, Joby, don’t stir.” A hand pressed his chest gently, and the boy relaxed. “How long you been with us, Joby?”

“Three weeks, sir.”

“Run off from home or joined legitimately, boy?”

Silence.

“Damn-fool question,” said the General. “Do you shave yet, boy? Even more of a damn-fool. There’s your cheek, fell right off the tree overhead. And the others here not much older. Raw, raw, damn raw, the lot of you. You ready for tomorrow or the next day, Joby?”

“I think so, sir.”

“You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night.”

“You, sir?”

“God’s truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, and the war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that’s not how it’s going to be. And maybe that’s why I cried.”

“Yes, sir,” said Joby.

The General must have taken out a cigar now, for the dark was suddenly filled with the Indian smell of tobacco unlit as yet, but chewed as the man thought what next to say.

“It’s going to be a crazy time,” said the General. “Counting both sides, there’s a hundred thousand men, give or take a few thousand out there tonight, not one as can spit a sparrow off a tree, or knows a horse clod from a minnieball. Stand up, bare the breast, ask to be a target, thank them and sit down, that’s us, that’s them. We should turn tail and train four months, they should do the same. But here we are, taken with spring fever and thinking it blood lust, taking our sulphur with cannons instead of with molasses as it should be, going to be a hero, going to live forever. And I can see all of them over there nodding agreement, save the other way around. It’s wrong, boy, it’s wrong as a head put on hind side front and a man marching backward through life. It will be a double massacre if one of their itchy generals decides to picnic his lads on our grass. More innocents will get shot out of pure Cherokee enthusiasm than ever got shot before. Owl Creek was full of boys splashing around in the noonday sun just a few hours ago. I fear it will be full of boys again, just floating, at sundown tomorrow, not caring where the tide takes them.”

The General stopped and made a little pile of winter leaves and twigs in the darkness, as if he might at any moment strike fire to them to see his way through the coming days when the sun might not show its face because of what was happening here and just beyond.

The boy watched the hand stirring the leaves and opened his lips to say something, but did not say it. The General heard the boy’s breath and spoke himself.

“Why am I telling you this? That’s what you wanted to ask, eh? Well, when you got a bunch of wild horses on a loose rein somewhere, somehow you got to bring order, rein them in. These lads, fresh out of the milkshed, don’t know what I know, and I can’t tell them: men actually die, in war. So each is his own army. I got to make one army of them. And for that, boy, I need you.”

“Me!” The boy’s lips barely twitched.

“Now, boy,” said the General quietly, “you are the heart of the army. Think of that. You’re the heart of the army. Listen, now.”

And, lying there, Joby listened.

And the General spoke on.

If he, Joby, beat slow tomorrow, the heart would beat slow in the men. They would lag by the wayside. They would drowse in the fields on their muskets. They would sleep forever, after that, in those same fields, their hearts slowed by a drummer boy and stopped by enemy lead.

But if he beat a sure, steady, ever faster rhythm, then, then their knees would come up in a long line down over that hill, one knee after the other, like a wave on the ocean shore! Had he seen the ocean ever? Seen the waves rolling in like a well-ordered cavalry charge to the sand? Well, that was it, that’s what he wanted, that’s what was needed! Joby was his right hand and his left. He gave the orders, but Joby set the pace!

So bring the right knee up and the right foot out and the left knee up and the left foot out. One following the other in good time, in brisk time. Move the blood up the body and make the head proud and the spine stiff and the jaw resolute. Focus the eye and set the teeth, flare the nostrils and tighten the hands, put steel armor all over the men, for blood moving fast in them does indeed make men feel as if they’d put on steel. He must keep at it, at it! Long and steady, steady and long! Then, even though shot or torn, those wounds got in hot blood—in blood he’d helped stir—would feel less pain. If their blood was cold, it would be more than slaughter, it would be murderous nightmare and pain best not told and no one to guess.

The General spoke and stopped, letting his breath slack off. Then, after a moment, he said, “So there you are, that’s it. Will you do that, boy? Do you know now you’re general of the army when the General’s left behind?”

The boy nodded mutely.

“You’ll run them through for me then, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. And, God willing, many nights from tonight, many years from now, when you’re as old or far much older than me, when they ask you what you did in this awful time, you will tell them—one part humble and one part proud—‘I was the drummer boy at the battle of Owl Creek,’ or the Tennessee River, or maybe they’ll just name it after the church there. ‘I was the drummer boy at Shiloh.’ Good grief, that has a beat and sound to it fitting for Mr. Long-fellow. ‘I was the drummer boy at Shiloh.’ Who will ever hear those words and not know you, boy, or what you thought this night, or what you’ll think tomorrow or the next day when we must get up on our legs and move!”

The general stood up. “Well, then. God bless you, boy. Good night.”

“Good night, sir.”

And, tobacco, brass, boot polish, salt sweat and leather, the man moved away through the grass.

Joby lay for a moment, staring but unable to see where the man had gone.

He swallowed. He wiped his eyes. He cleared his throat. He settled himself. Then, at last, very slowly and firmly, he turned the drum so that it faced up toward the sky.

He lay next to it, his arm around it, feeling the tremor, the touch, the muted thunder as, all the rest of the April night in the year 1862, near the Tennessee River, not far from the Owl Creek, very close to the church named Shiloh, the peach blossoms fell on the drum.




Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar! (#ulink_864e911f-1bd5-53b1-b412-4f48d7a87eb8)


Hugh Fortnum woke to Saturday’s commotions and lay, eyes shut, savoring each in its turn.

Below, bacon in a skillet; Cynthia waking him with fine cookings instead of cries.

Across the hall, Tom actually taking a shower.

Far off in the bumblebee dragonfly light, whose voice was already damning the weather, the time, and the tides? Mrs. Goodbody? Yes. That Christian giantess, six foot tall with her shoes off, the gardener extraordinary, the octogenarian dietitian and town philosopher.

He rose, unhooked the screen and leaned out to hear her cry, “There! Take that! This’ll fix you! Hah!”

“Happy Saturday, Mrs. Goodbodyl”

The old woman froze in clouds of bug spray pumped from an immense gun.

“Nonsense!” she shouted. “With these fiends and pests to watch for?”

“What kind this time?” called Fortnum.

“I don’t want to shout it to the jaybirds, but”—she glanced suspiciously around—“what would you say if I told you I was the first line of defense concerning flying saucers?”

“Fine,” replied Fortnum. “There’ll be rockets between the worlds any year now.”

“There already are!” She pumped, aiming the spray under the hedge. “There! Take that!”

He pulled his head back in from the fresh day, somehow not as high-spirited as his first response had indicated. Poor soul, Mrs. Goodbody. Always the essence of reason. And now what? Old age?

The doorbell rang.

He grabbed his robe and was half down the stairs when he heard a voice say, “Special delivery. Fortnum?” and saw Cynthia turn from the front door, a small packet in her hand.

“Special-delivery airmail for your son.”

Tom was downstairs like a centipede.

“Wow! That must be from the Great Bayou Novelty Greenhouse!”

“I wish I were as excited about ordinary mail,” observed Fortnum.

“Ordinary?!” Tom ripped the cord and paper wildly. “Don’t you read the back pages of Popular Mechanics? Well, here they are!”

Everyone peered into the small open box.

“Here,” said Fortnum, “what are?”

“The Sylvan Glade Jumbo-Giant Guaranteed Growth Raise-Them-in-Your-Cellar-for-Big-Profit Mushrooms!”

“Oh, of course,” said Fortnum. “How silly of me.”

Cynthia squinted. “Those little teeny bits?”

“‘Fabulous growth in twenty-four hours,’” Tom quoted from memory. “ ‘Plant them in your cellar …’ ”

Fortnum and wife exchanged glances.

“Well,” she admitted, “it’s better than frogs and green snakes.”

“Sure is!” Tom ran.

“Oh, Tom,” said Fortnum lightly.

Tom paused at the cellar door.

“Tom,” said his father. “Next time, fourth-class mail would do fine.”

“Heck,” said Tom. “They must’ve made a mistake, thought I was some rich company. Airmail special, who can afford that?”

The cellar door slammed.

Fortnum, bemused, scanned the wrapper a moment then dropped it into the wastebasket. On his way to the kitchen, he opened the cellar door.

Tom was already on his knees, digging with a hand rake in the dirt.

He felt his wife beside him, breathing softly, looking down into the cool dimness.

“Those are mushrooms, I hope. Not … toadstools?”

Fortnum laughed. “Happy harvest, farmer!”

Tom glanced up and waved.

Fortnum shut the door, took his wife’s arm and walked her out to the kitchen, feeling fine.

Toward noon, Fortnum was driving toward the nearest market when he saw Roger Willis, a fellow Rotarian and a teacher of biology at the town high school, waving urgently from the sidewalk.

Fortnum pulled his car up and opened the door.

“Hi, Roger, give you a lift?”

Willis responded all too eagerly, jumping in and slamming the door.

“Just the man I want to see. I’ve put off calling for days. Could you play psychiatrist for five minutes, God help you?”

Fortnum examined his friend for a moment as he drove quietly on.

“God help you, yes. Shoot.”

Willis sat back and studied his fingernails. “Let’s just drive a moment. There. Okay. Here’s what I want to say: Something’s wrong with the world.”

Fortnum laughed easily. “Hasn’t there always been?”

“No, no, I mean … something strange—something unseen—is happening.”

“Mrs. Goodbody,” said Fortnum, half to himself, and stopped.

“Mrs. Goodbody?”

“This morning, gave me a talk on flying saucers.”

“No.” Willis bit the knuckle of his forefinger nervously. “Nothing like saucers. At least, I don’t think. Tell me, what exactly is intuition?”

“The conscious recognition of something that’s been subconscious for a long time. But don’t quote this amateur psychologist!” He laughed again.

“Good, good!” Willis turned, his face lighting. He readjusted himself in the seat. “That’s it! Over a long period, things gather, right? All of a sudden, you have to spit, but you don’t remember saliva collecting. Your hands are dirty, but you don’t know how they got that way. Dust falls on you everyday and you don’t feel it. But when you get enough dust collected up, there it is, you see and name it. That’s intuition, as far as I’m concerned. Well, what kind of dust has been falling on me? A few meteors in the sky at night? funny weather just before dawn? I don’t know. Certain colors, smells, the way the house creaks at three in the morning? Hair prickling on my arms? All I know is, the damn dust has collected. Quite suddenly I know.”

“Yes,” said Fortnum, disquieted. “But what is it you know?”

Willis looked at his hands in his lap. “I’m afraid. I’m not afraid. Then I’m afraid again, in the middle of the day. Doctor’s checked me. I’m A-one. No family problems. Joe’s a fine boy, a good son. Dorothy? She’s remarkable. With her I’m not afraid of growing old or dying.”

“Lucky man.”

“But beyond my luck now. Scared stiff, really, for myself, my family; even right now, for you.”

“Me?” said Fortnum.

They had stopped now by an empty lot near the market. There was a moment of great stillness, in which Fortnum turned to survey his friend. Willis’ voice had suddenly made him cold.

“I’m afraid for everybody,” said Willis. “Your friends, mine, and their friends, on out of sight. Pretty silly, eh?”

Willis opened the door, got out and peered in at Fortnum.

Fortnum felt he had to speak. “Well, what do we do about it?”

Willis looked up at the sun burning blind in the sky. “Be aware,” he said slowly. “Watch everything for a few days.”

“Everything?”

“We don’t use half what God gave us, ten per cent of the time. We ought to hear more, feel more, smell more, taste more. Maybe there’s something wrong with the way the wind blows these weeds there in the lot. Maybe it’s the sun up on those telephone wires or the cicadas singing in the elm trees. If only we could stop, look, listen, a few days, a few nights, and compare notes. Tell me to shut up then, and I will.”





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