Bradbury Stories (122 page)

She lay listening. They both thought they heard running footsteps on the street, a key to the door. William Latting went to the hall and looked down the stairs but saw nothing.

In the year 1937, coming to the door, William saw a man in a dressing gown at the top of the stairs, looking down, with a cigarette in his hand. “That
you
, Dad?” No answer. The man sighed and went back into some room. William went to the kitchen to raid the ice-box.

The children wrestled in the soft, dark leaves of morning.

William Latting said, “Listen.”

He and his wife listened.

“It's the old man,” said William, “crying.”

“Why should he be crying?”

“I don't know. Why does anybody cry? Maybe he's unhappy.”

“If he's still there in the morning,” said his wife in the dim room, “call the police.”

William Latting went away from the window, put out his cigarette, and lay in the bed, his eyes closed. “No,” he said quietly. “I won't call the police. Not for him, I won't.”

“Why not?”

His voice was certain. “I wouldn't want to do that. I just wouldn't.”

They both lay there and faintly there was a sound of crying and the wind blew and William Latting knew that all he had to do if he wanted to watch the boys wrestling in the icy leaves of morning would be to reach out with his hand and lift the shade and look, and there they would be, far below, wrestling and wrestling, as dawn came pale in the Eastern sky.

S
IGHTING
R
OCK
J
UNCTION
, A
RIZONA, AT NOON
on August 22, 1967, Willy Bersinger let his miner's boot rest easy on the jalopy's accelerator and talked quietly to his partner, Samuel Fitts.

“Yes, sir, Samuel, it's great hitting town. After a couple of months out at the Penny Dreadful Mine, a jukebox looks like a stained-glass window to me. We need the town; without it, we might wake some morning and find ourselves all jerked beef and petrified rock. And then, of course, the town needs us, too.”

“How's that?” asked Samuel Fitts.

“Well, we bring things into town that it hasn't got—mountains, creeks, desert night, stars, things like that . . .”

And it was true, thought Willy, driving along. Set a man 'way out in the strange lands and he fills with wellsprings of silence. Silence of sagebrush, or a mountain lion purring like a warm beehive at noon. Silence of the river shallows deep in the canyons. All this a man takes in. Opening his mouth, in town, he breathes it out.

“Oh, how I love to climb into that old barbershop chair,” Willy admitted, “and see all those city men lined up under the naked-lady calendars, staring back at me, waiting while I chew over my philosophy of rocks and mirages and the kind of Time that just sits out there in the hills waiting for man to go away. I exhale—and that wilderness settles in a fine dust on the customers. Oh, it's nice, me talking, soft and easy, up and down, on and on . . .”

In his mind he saw the customers' eyes strike fire. Someday they would yell and rabbit for the hills, leaving families and time-clock civilization behind.

“It's good to feel wanted,” said Willy. “You and me, Samuel, are basic necessities for those city-dwelling folks. Gangway, Rock Junction!”

And with a tremulous tin whistling they steamed across city limits into awe and wonder.

They had driven perhaps a hundred feet through town when Willy kicked the brakes. A great shower of rust flakes sifted from the jalopy fenders. The car stood cowering in the road.

“Something's wrong,” said Willy. He squinted his lynx eyes this way and that. He snuffed his huge nose. “You feel it? You smell it?”

“Sure,” said Samuel, uneasily, “but what?”

Willy scowled. “You ever see a sky-blue cigar-store Indian?”

“Never did.”

“There's one over there. Ever see a pink dog kennel, an orange outhouse, a lilac-colored birdbath? There, there, and over there!”

Both men had risen slowly now to stand on the creaking floorboards.

“Samuel,” whispered Willy, “the whole damn shooting match, every kindling pile, porch rail, gewgaw gingerbread, fence, fireplug, garbage truck, the
whole blasted town
, look at it! It was painted just an hour ago!”

“No!” said Samuel Fitts.

But there stood the band pavilion, the Baptist church, the firehouse, the Oddfellows' orphanage, the railroad depot, the county jail, the cat hospital and all the bungalows, cottages, greenhouses, gazebos, shop signs, mailboxes, telephone poles and trashbins, around and in between, and they all blazed with corn yellow, crab-apple greens, circus reds. From water tank to tabernacle, each building looked as if God had jigsawed it, colored it and set it out to dry a moment ago.

Not only that, but where weeds had always been, now cabbages, green onions, and lettuce crammed every yard, crowds of curious sunflowers clocked the noon sky, and pansies lay under unnumbered trees cool as summer puppies, their great damp eyes peering over rolled lawns mint-green as Irish travel posters. To top it all, ten boys, faces scrubbed, hair brilliantined, shirts, pants and tennis shoes clean as chunks of snow, raced by.

“The town,” said Willy, watching them run, “has gone mad. Mystery. Mystery everywhere. Samuel, what kind of tyrant's come to power? What law was passed that keeps boys clean, drives people to paint every toothpick, every geranium pot? Smell that smell? There's fresh wallpaper in all those houses! Doom in some horrible shape has tried and tested these people. Human nature doesn't just get this picky perfect overnight. I'll bet all the gold I panned last month those attics, those cellars are cleaned out, all shipshape. I'll bet you a real Thing fell on this town.”

“Why, I can almost hear the cherubim singing in the Garden,” Samuel protested. “How you figure Doom? Shake my hand, put 'er there. I'll bet and take your money!”

The jalopy swerved around a corner through a wind that smelled of turpentine and whitewash. Samuel threw out a gum wrapper, snorting. He was somewhat surprised at what happened next. An old man in new overalls, with mirror-bright shoes, ran out into the street, grabbed the crumpled gum wrapper and shook his fist after the departing jalopy.

“Doom . . .” Samuel Fitts looked back, his voice fading. “Well, . . .the bet
still
stands.”

They opened the door upon a barbershop teeming with customers whose hair had already been cut and oiled, whose faces were shaved close and pink, yet who sat waiting to vault back into the chairs where three barbers flourished their shears and combs. A stock-market uproar filled the room as customers and barbers all talked at once.

When Willy and Samuel entered, the uproar ceased instantly. It was if they had fired a shotgun blast through the door.

“Sam . . .Willy . . .”

In the silence some of the sitting men stood up and some of the standing men sat down, slowly, staring.

“Samuel,” said Willy out of the corner of his mouth, “I feel like the Red Death standing here.” Aloud he said, “Howdy! Here I am to finish my lecture on the Interesting Flora and Fauna of the Great American Desert, and—”

“No!”

Antonelli, the head barber, rushed frantically at Willy, seized his arm, clapped his hand over Willy's mouth like a snuffer on a candle. “Willy,” he whispered, looking apprehensively over his shoulder at his customers. “Promise me one thing: buy a needle and thread, sew up your lips. Silence, man, if you value your life!”

Willy and Samuel felt themselves hurried forward. Two already neat customers leaped out of the barber chairs without being asked. As they stepped into the chairs, the two miners glimpsed their own images in the flyspecked mirror.

“Samuel, there we are! Look! Compare!”

“Why,” said Samuel, blinking, “we're the only men in all Rock Junction who really
need
a shave and a haircut.”

“Strangers!” Antonelli laid them out in the chairs as if to anesthetize them quickly. “You don't know what strangers you are!”

“Why, we've only been gone a couple of months—” A steaming towel inundated Willy's face; he subsided with muffled cries. In steaming darkness he heard Antonelli's low and urgent voice.

“We'll fix you to look like everyone else. Not that the way you look is dangerous, no, but the kind of talk you miners talk might upset folks at a time like this.”

“Time like this, hell!” Willy lifted the seething towel. One bleary eye fixed Antonelli. “What's wrong with Rock Junction?”

“Not just Rock Junction.” Antonelli gazed off at some incredible dream beyond the horizon. “Phoenix, Tucson, Denver. All the cities in America! My wife and I are going as tourists to Chicago next week. Imagine Chicago all painted and clean and new. The Pearl of the Orient, they call it! Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo, the same! All because—well, get up now, walk over and switch on that television set against the wall.”

Willy handed Antonelli the steaming towel, walked over. switched on the television set, listened to it hum, fiddled with the dials and waited. White snow drifted down the screen.

“Try the radio now,” said Antonelli.

Willy felt everyone watch as he twisted the radio dial from station to station.

“Hell,” he said at last, “both your television and radio are broken.”

“No,” said Antonelli simply.

Willy lay back down in the chair and closed his eyes.

Antonelli leaned forward, breathing hard.

“Listen,” he said.

“Imagine four weeks ago, a late Saturday morning, women and children staring at clowns and magicians on TV. In beauty shops, women staring at TV fashions. In the barbershop and hardware stores, men staring at baseball or trout fishing. Everybody everywhere in the civilized world staring. No sound, no motion, except on the little black-and-white screens.

“And then, in the middle of all that staring . . .”

Antonelli paused to lift up one corner of the broiling cloth.

“Sunspots on the sun,” he said.

Willy stiffened.

“Biggest damn sunspots in the history of mortal man,” said Antonelli. “Whole damn world flooded with electricity. Wiped every TV screen clean as a whistle, leaving nothing, and, after that, more nothing.”

His voice was remote as the voice of a man describing an arctic landscape. He lathered Willy's face, not looking at what he was doing. Willy peered across the barbershop at the soft snow falling down and down that humming screen in an eternal winter. He could almost hear the rabbit thumping of all the hearts in the shop.

Antonelli continued his funeral oration.

“It took us all that first day to realize what had happened. Two hours after that first sunspot storm hit, every TV repairman in the United States was on the road. Everyone figured it was just their own set. With the radios conked out, too, it was only that night, when newsboys, like in the old days, ran headlines through the streets, that we got the shock about the sunspots maybe going on—for the rest of our lives!”

The customers murmured.

Antonelli's hand, holding the razor, shook. He had to wait.

“All that blankness, that empty stuff falling down, falling down inside our television sets, oh, I tell you, it gave everyone the willies. It was like a good friend who talks to you in your front room and suddenly shuts up and lies there, pale, and you know he's dead and you begin to turn cold yourself.

“That first night, there was a run on the town's movie houses. Films weren't much, but it was like the Oddfellows' Ball downtown till midnight. Drugstores fizzed up two hundred vanilla, three hundred chocolate sodas that first night of the Calamity. But you can't buy movies and sodas every night. What then? Phone your in-laws for canasta or Parcheesi?”

“Might as well,” observed Willy, “blow your brains out.”

“Sure, but people had to get out of their haunted houses. Walking through their parlors was like whistling past a graveyard. All that silence . . .”

Willy sat up a little. “Speaking of silence—”

“On the third night,” said Antonelli quickly, “we were all still in shock. We were saved from outright lunacy by one woman. Somewhere in this town this woman strolled out of the house, and came back a minute later. In one hand she held a paintbrush. And in the other—”

“A bucket of paint,” said Willy.

Everyone smiled, seeing how well he understood.

“If those psychologists ever strike off gold medals, they should pin one on that woman and every woman like her in every little town who saved our world from coming to an end. Those women who instinctively wandered in at twilight and brought us the miracle cure.”

Willy imagined it. There were the glaring fathers and the scowling sons slumped by their dead TV sets waiting for the damn things to shout Ball One, or Strike Two! And then they looked up from their wake and there in the twilight saw the fair women of great purpose and dignity standing and waiting with brushes and paint. And a glorious light kindled their cheeks and eyes. . . .

“Lord, it spread like wildfire!” said Antonelli. “House to house, city to city. Jigsaw-puzzle craze, 1932, yo-yo craze, 1928, were nothing compared with the Everybody Do Everything Craze that blew this town to smithereens and glued it back again. Men everywhere slapped paint on anything that stood still ten seconds; men everywhere climbed steeples, straddled fences, fell off roofs and ladders by the hundreds. Women painted cupboards, closets; kids painted Tinkertoys, wagons, kites. If they hadn't kept busy, you could have built a wall around this town, renamed it Babbling Brooks. All towns, everywhere, the same, where people had forgotten how to waggle their jaws, make their own talk. I tell you, men were moving in mindless circles, dazed, until their wives shoved a brush into their hands and pointed them toward the nearest unpainted wall!”