Bradbury Stories (113 page)

But when he chinned up to Billiard, Jamie got cold feet and decided to wait a day or two longer for meditation. There was no use rushing things, so he let Billiard go free. Boy, Billiard didn't know how lucky he was at such times, Jamie clucked to himself.

One Tuesday, Jamie carried Ingrid's books home. She lived in a small cottage not far from the Santa Catalina foothills. Together they walked in peaceful content, needing no words. They even held hands for a while.

Turning about a clump of prickly pears, they came face to face with Billiard Cunningham.

He stood with his big feet planted across the path, plump fists on his hips, staring at Ingrid with appreciative eyes. Everybody stood still, and Billiard said:

“I'll carry your books, Ingrid. Here.”

He reached to take them from Jamie.

Jamie fell back a step. “Oh, no, you don't,” he said.

“Oh, yes, I do,” retorted Billiard.

“Like heck you do,” said Jamie.

“Like heck I don't,” exclaimed Billiard, and snatched again, knocking the books into the dust.

Ingrid yelled, then said, “Look here, you can both carry my books. Half and half. That'll settle it.”

Billiard shook his head.

“All or nothing,” he leered.

Jamie looked back at him.

“Nothing, then!” he shouted.

He summoned up his powers like wrathful storm clouds; lightning crackled hot in each fist. What matter if Billiard loomed four inches taller and some several broader? The fury-wrath lived in Jamie; he would knock Billiard senseless with one clean bolt—maybe two.

There was no room for stuttering fear now; Jamie was cauterized clean of it by a great rage. He pulled away back and let Billiard have it on the chin.

“Jamie!” screamed Ingrid.

The only miracle after that was how Jamie got out of it with his life.

Dad poured Epsom salts into a dishpan of hot water, stirred it firmly, and said, “You oughta known better, darn your hide. Your mother sick an' you comin' home all banged up this way.”

Dad made a leathery motion of one brown hand. His eyes were bedded in crinkles and lines, and his mustache was pepper-gray and sparse, as was his hair.

“I didn't know Ma was very sick anymore,” said Jamie.

“Women don't talk much,” said Dad, dryly. He soaked a towel in steaming Epsom salts and wrung it out. He held Jamie's beaten profile and swabbed it. Jamie whimpered. “Hold still,” said Dad. “How you expect me to fix that cut if you don't hold still, darn it.”

“What's going on out there?” Mother's voice asked from the bedroom, real tired and soft.

“Nothing,” said Dad, wringing out the towel again. “Don't you fret. Jamie just fell and cut his lip, that's all.”

“Oh, Jamie,” said Mother.

“I'm okay, Ma,” said Jamie. The warm towel helped to normalize things. He tried not to think of the fight. It made bad thinking. There were memories of flailing arms, himself pinned down, Billiard whooping with delight and beating downward while Ingrid, crying real tears, threw her books, screaming, at his back.

And then Jamie staggered home alone, sobbing bitterly.

“Oh, Dad,” he said now. “It didn't work.” He meant his physical miracle on Billiard. “It didn't work.”

“What didn't work?” said Dad, applying liniment to bruises.

“Oh, nothing. Nothing.” Jamie licked his swollen lip and began to calm down. After all, you can't have a perfect batting average. Even the Lord made mistakes. And—Jamie grinned suddenly—yes, yes, he had
meant
to lose the fight! Yes, he had. Wouldn't Ingrid love him all the more for having fought and lost just for her?

Sure. That was the answer. It was just a reversed miracle, that was all!

“Jamie,” Mother called him.

He went in to see her.

With one thing and another, including Epsom salts and a great resurgence of faith in himself because Ingrid loved him now more than ever, Jamie went through the rest of the week without much pain.

He walked Ingrid home, and Billiard didn't bother him again. Billiard played after-school baseball, which was a greater attraction than Ingrid—the sudden sport interest being induced indirectly by telepathy via Jamie, Jamie decided.

Thursday, Ma looked worse. She bleached out to a pallid trembling and a pale coughing. Dad looked scared. Jamie spent less time trying to make things come out wonderful in school and thought more and more of curing Ma.

Friday night, walking alone from Ingrid's house, Jamie watched telegraph poles swing by him very slowly. He thought, If I get to the next telegraph pole before that car behind me reaches me, Mama will be all well.

Jamie walked casually, not looking back, ears itching, legs wanting to run to make the wish come true.

The telegraph pole approached. So did the car behind.

Jamie whistled cautiously. The car was coming too fast!

Jamie jumped past the pole just in time; the car roared by.

There now. Mama would be all well again.

He walked along some more.

Forget about her. Forget about wishes and things, he told himself. But it was tempting, like a hot pie on a windowsill. He had to touch it. He couldn't leave it be, oh, no. He looked ahead on the road and behind on the road.

“I bet I can get down to Schabold's ranch gate before another car comes and do it walking easy,” he declared to the sky. “And that will make Mama well all the quicker.”

At this moment, in a traitorous, mechanical action, a car jumped over the low hill behind him and roared forward.

Jamie walked fast, then began to run.

I bet I can get down to Schabold's gate, I bet I can—

Feet up, feet down.

He stumbled.

He fell into the ditch, his books fluttering about like dry, white birds. When he got up, sucking his lips, the gate was only twenty yards farther on.

The car motored by him in a large cloud of dust.

“I take it back, I take it back,” cried Jamie. “I take it back, what I said, I didn't mean it.”

With a sudden bleat of terror, he ran for home. It was all his fault,
all
his fault!

The doctor's car stood in front of the house.

Through the window, Mama looked sicker. The doctor closed up his little black bag and looked at Dad a long time with strange lights in his little black eyes.

Jamie ran out onto the desert to walk alone. He did not cry. He was paralyzed, and he walked like an iron child, hating himself, blundering into the dry riverbed, kicking at prickly pears and stumbling again and again.

Hours later, with the first stars, he came home to find Dad standing beside Mama's bed and Mama not saying much—just lying there like fallen snow, so quiet. Dad tightened his jaw, screwed up his eyes, caved in his chest, and put his head down.

Jamie took up a station at the end of the bed and stared at Mama, shouting instructions in his mind to her.

Get well, get well, Ma, get well, you'll be all right, sure you'll be fine, I command it, you'll be fine, you'll be swell, you just get up and dance around, we need you, Dad and I do, wouldn't be good without you, get well, Ma, get well, Ma. Get well!

The fierce energy lashed out from him silently, wrapping, cuddling her and beating into her sickness, tendering her heart. Jamie felt glorified in his warm power.

She
would
get well. She
must
! Why, it was silly to think any other way. Ma just wasn't the dying sort.

Dad moved suddenly. It was a stiff movement with a jerking of breath. He held Mama's wrists so hard he might have broken them. He lay against her breasts sounding the heart and Jamie screamed inside.

Ma, don't, Ma, don't, oh, Ma, please don't give up.

Dad got up, swaying.

She was dead.

Inside the walls of Jericho that was Jamie's mind, a thought went screaming about in one last drive of power: Yes, she's dead, all right, so she is dead, so what if she is dead? Bring her back to life again, yes, make her live again, Lazarus, come forth, Lazarus, Lazarus, come forth from the tomb, Lazarus, come forth.

He must have been babbling aloud, for Dad turned and glared at him in old, ancient horror and struck him bluntly across the mouth to shut him up.

Jamie sank against the bed, mouthing into the cold blankets, and the walls of Jericho crumbled and fell down about him.

Jamie returned to school a week later. He did not stride into the schoolyard with his old assurance; he did not bend imperiously at the fountain; nor did he pass his tests with anything more than a grade of seventy-five.

The children wondered what had happened to him. He was never quite the same.

They did not know that Jamie had given up his role. He could not tell them. They did not know what they had lost.

O
LD
M
ISS
B
IDWELL USED TO SIT
with a lemonade glass in her hand in her squeaking rocker on the porch of her house on Saint James Street every summer night from seven until nine. At nine, you could hear the front door tap shut, the brass key turn in the lock, the blinds rustle down, and the lights click out.

Her routine varied in no detail; she lived alone with a house full of rococo pictures, a dusty library, a yellow-mouthed piano, and a music box which, when she wound it up and set it going, prickled the air like the bubbles from lemon soda pop. Miss Bidwell had a nod for everyone walking by, and it was interesting that her house had no front steps leading up to its wooden porch. No front steps, and no back steps. For Miss Bidwell hadn't left her house in forty years. In the year 1911, she had had the back and the front steps completely torn down and the porches railed in.

In the autumn—the closing-up, the nailing-in, the hiding-away time—she would have one last lemonade on her cooling, bleak porch; then she would carry her wicker chair inside, and no one would see her again until the next spring.

“There she goes,” said Mr. Widmer, the grocer, pointing with the red apple in his hand. “Take a good look at her.” He tapped the wall calendar. “Nine o'clock of an evening in the month of September, the day after Labor Day.”

Several customers peered over at Miss Bidwell's house. There was the old lady, looking around for a final time; then she went inside.

“Won't see her again until May first,” said Mr. Widmer. “There's a trapdoor in her kitchen wall. I unlock that trapdoor and shove the groceries in. There's an envelope there, with money in it and a list of the things she wants. I never see her.”

“What's she do all winter?”

“Only the Lord knows. She's had a 'phone for forty years and never used it.”

Miss Bidwell's house was dark.

Mr. Widmer bit into his apple, enjoying its crisp succulence. “Forty years ago, she had the front steps taken away.”

“Why? Folks die?”

“They died before that.”

“Husband or children die?”

“Never had no children nor husband. She held hands with a young man who had all kinds of notions about traveling. They were going to be married. He used to sit and play the guitar and sing to her on that porch. One day he just went to the railway station and bought one ticket for Arizona, California, and China.”

“That's a long time for a woman to carry a torch.”

They laughed quietly and solemnly, for it was a sad admission they had made.

“Suppose she'll
ever
come out?”

“When you're
seventy
? All I do every year is wait for the first of May. If she don't come out on the porch that day and set up her chair, I'll know for sure she's dead. Then I'll 'phone the police.”

“Good night,” said everyone, and left Mr. Widmer alone in the gray light of his grocery shop.

Mr. Widmer put on his coat and listened to the whining of the wind grow stronger. Yes, every year. And every year at this time he'd watched the old woman become more of an old woman. She was as remote as one of those barometers where the woman comes out for fair weather and the man appears for bad. But what a broken instrument, with only the woman coming out and coming out alone, and never a man at all, for bad or for better. How many thousands of July and August nights had he seen her there, beyond her moat of green grass which was as impassable as a crocodile stream? Forty years of small-town nights. How much might they weigh if put to the scale? A feather to himself, but how much to
her
?

Mr. Widmer was putting on his hat when he saw the man.

The man came along the street, on the other side: an old man, dim in the light of the single corner street lamp. He was looking at all the house numbers, and when he came to the corner house, number 11, he stopped and looked at the lightless windows.

“It couldn't be,” said Mr. Widmer. He turned out the light and stood in the warm grocery smell of his shop, watching the old man through the plate glass. “Not after this much time.” He shook his head. It was much more than ridiculous, for hadn't he felt his heart quicken at least once a day, every day, for four decades whenever he saw a man pass or pause by Miss Bidwell's? Every man in the history of the town who so much as tied a shoelace in front of her locked house had been a source of wonder to Mr. Widmer.

“Are
you
the young man who ran off and left our Miss Bidwell?” he cried to himself.

Once, thirty years ago, white apron flapping, he had run across the brick street to confront a young man. “Well, so you came back!”

“What?” the young man said.

“Aren't you Mr. Robert Farr, the one who brought her red carnations and played the guitar and sang?”

“The name's Corley,” and the young man drew forth silk samples to display and sell.

As the years passed, Mr. Widmer had become frightened about one thing: Suppose Mr. Farr
did
come back some day, how was he to be recognized? In his mind, Mr. Widmer remembered the man as striding and young and very clean-faced. But forty years could peel a man away and dry his bones and tighten his flesh into a fine, acid etching. Perhaps some day Mr. Farr might return, like a hound to old trials, and, because of Mr. Widmer's negligence, think the house locked and buried deep in another century, and go away, never the wiser. Perhaps it had happened
already
!