Bradbury Stories (50 page)

They stood looking down into the empty stadium where the wind prowled a few newspapers like ghosts on the vast concrete floor.

Then, suddenly, they gasped.

Far up at the very top of the stadium a small figure had appeared.

The director quickened, half rose, then forced himself to sit back down.

The small figure, against the last light of the day, seemed to be having difficulty walking. It leaned to one side, and held one arm up against its side, like a wounded bird.

The figure hesitated, waited.

“Come on,” whispered the director.

The figure turned and was about to flee.

“Adolf, no!” hissed the director.

Instinctively, he snapped one of his hands to the sound-effects tape deck, his other hand to the music.

The military band began to play softly.

The “crowd” began to murmur and stir.

Adolf, far above, froze.

The music played higher. The director touched a control knob. The crowd mumbled louder.

Adolf turned back to squint down into the half-seen stadium. Now he must be seeing the flags. And now the few torches. And now the waiting platform with the microphones, two
dozen
of them!
one
of them real.

The band came up in full brass.

Adolf took one step forward.

The crowd roared.

Christ, thought the director, looking at his hands, which were now suddenly hard fists and now again just fingers leaping on the controls, all to themselves. Christ, what do I do with him when I get him down here? What,
what
?

And then, just as insanely, the thought came. Crud. You're a director. And that's
him
. And this
is
Nuremberg.

So . . .?

Adolf took a second step down. Slowly his hand came up in a stiff salute.

The crowd went wild.

Adolf never stopped after that. He limped, he tried to march with pomp, but the fact was he limped down the hundreds of steps until he reached the floor of the stadium. There he straightened his cap, brushed his tunic, resaluted the roaring emptiness, and came gimping across two hundred yards of empty ground toward the waiting platform.

The crowd kept up its tumult. The band responded with a vast heartbeat of brass and drum.

Darling Adolf passed within twenty feet of the lower stands where the director sat fiddling with the tape-deck dials. The director crouched down. But there was no need. Summoned by the
“Sieg Heils”
and the fanfare of trumpets and brass, Der Führer was drawn inevitably toward that dais where destiny awaited him. He was walking taller now and though his uniform was rumpled and the swastika emblem torn, and his mustache moth-eaten and his hair wild, it was the old Leader all right, it was him.

The old producer sat up straight and watched. He whispered. He pointed.

Far above, at the top of the stadium, three more men had stepped into view.

My God, thought the director, that's the team. The men who grabbed Adolf.

A man with bushy eyebrows, a fat man, and a man like a wounded chimpanzee.

Jesus. The director blinked. Goebbels. Göring. Hess. Three actors at liberty. Three half-ass kidnapers staring down at . . .

Adolf Hitler climbing up on the small podium by the fake microphones and the real one under the blowing torches which bloomed and blossomed and guttered and smoked on the cold October wind under the sprig of lily-horns which lifted in four directions.

Adolf lifted his chin. That did it. The crowd went absolutely mad. Which is to say, the director's hand, sensing the hunger, went mad, twitched the volume high so the air was riven and torn and shattered again and again and again with
“Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!”

Above, high on the stadium rim, the three watching figures lifted their arms in salute to their Führer.

Adolf lowered his chin. The sounds of the crowd faded. Only the torch flames whispered.

Adolf made his speech.

He must have yelled and chanted and brayed and sputtered and whispered hoarsely and wrung his hands and beat the podium with his fist and plunged his fist at the sky and shut his eyes and shrieked like a disemboweled trumpet for ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour as the sun vanished beyond the earth and the three other men up on the stadium rim watched and listened and the producer and the director waited and watched. He shouted things about the whole world and he yelled things about Germany and he shrieked things about himself and he dammed this and blamed that and praised yet a third, until at last he began to repeat, and repeat the same words over and over as if he had reached the end of a record inside himself and the needle was fastened to a circle track which hissed and hiccuped, hiccuped and hissed, and then faded away at last into a silence where you could only hear his heavy breathing, which broke at last into a sob and he stood with his head bent while the others now could not look at him but looked only at their shoes or the sky or the way the wind blew dust across the field. The flags fluttered. The single torch bent and lifted and twisted itself again and talked under its breath.

At last, Adolf raised his head to finish his speech.

“Now I must speak of them.”

He nodded up to the top of the stadium where the three men stood against the sky.

“They are nuts. I am nuts, too. But at least I know I am nuts. I told them: crazy, you are crazy. Mad, you are mad. And now, my own craziness, my own madness, well, it has run itself down. I am tired.

“So now, what? I give the world back to you. I had it for a small while here today. But now you must keep it and keep it better than I would. To each of you I give the world, but you must promise, each of you to keep your own part and work with it. So there. Take it.”

He made a motion with his free hand to the empty seats, as if all the world were in his fingers and at last he were letting it go.

The crowd murmured, stirred, but said nothing loud.

The flags softly tongued the air. The flames squatted on themselves and smoked.

Adolf pressed his fingers onto his eyeballs as if suddenly seized with a blinding headache. Without looking over at the director or the producer, he said, quietly:

“Time to go?”

The director nodded.

Adolf limped off the podium and came to stand below where the old man and the younger director sat.

“Go ahead, if you want, again, hit me.”

The director sat and looked at him. At last he shook his head.

“Do we finish the film?” asked Adolf.

The director looked at the producer. The old man shrugged and could find nothing to say.

“Ah, well,” said the actor. “Anyway, the madness is over, the fever has dropped. I have
made
my speech at Nuremberg. God, look at those idiots up there. Idiots!” he called suddenly at the stands. Then back to the director, “Can you think? They wanted to hold me for ransom. I told them what fools they were. Now I'll go tell them again. I had to get away from them. I couldn't stand their stupid talk. I had to come here and be my own fool in my own way for the last time. Well . . .”

He limped off across the empty field, calling back quietly:

“I'll be in your car outside, waiting. If you want, I am yours for the final scenes. If not, no, and that ends it.”

The director and the producer waited until Adolf had climbed to the top of the stadium. They could hear his voice drift down, cursing those other three, the man with the bushy eyebrows, the fat man, and the ugly chimpanzee, calling them many things, waving his hands. The three backed off and went away, gone.

Adolf stood alone high in the cold October air.

The director gave him a final lift of the sound volume. The crowd, obedient, banged out a last
“Sieg Heil.”

Adolf lifted his free hand, not into a salute, but some sort of old, easy, half-collapsed mid-Atlantic wave. Then he was gone, too.

The sunlight went with him. The sky was no longer blood-colored. The wind blew dust and want ads from a German paper across the stadium floor.

“Son of a bitch,” muttered the old man. “Let's get out of here.”

They left the torches to burn and the flags to blow, but shut off the sound equipment.

“Wish I'd brought a record of ‘Yankee Doodle' to march us out of here,” said the director.

“Who needs records. We'll whistle. Why not?”

“Why not!”

He held the old man's elbow going up the stairs in the dusk, but it was only halfway up, they had the guts to try to whistle.

And then it was suddenly so funny they couldn't finish the tune.

H
E CAME INTO TOWN RIDING FAST
and firing his guns at the blue sky. He shot a chicken in the dust and kicked it around, using his horse as a mauler, and then, reloading and yelling, his three-week beard red and irritable in the sunlight, he rode on to the Saloon where he tethered his horse and carried his guns, still hot, into the bar where he glared at his own sunburned image in the mirror and yelled for a glass and a bottle.

The bartender slid them over the edge of the bar and went away.

The men along the bar moved down to the free lunch at the far end, and conversation withered.

“What in hell's wrong with everyone?!” cried Mr. James Malone. “Talk, laugh, everyone. Go on, now, or I'll shoot your damn eyebrows off!”

Everyone began to talk and laugh.

“That's better,” said James Malone, drinking his drinks one upon another.

He rammed the wing doors of the Saloon wide and in the resulting wind stomped out like an elephant into the afternoon street where other men were riding up from the mines or the mountains and tying their horses to the worn hitching poles.

The barber shop was directly across the street.

Before crossing to it, he rechecked his bright blue pistols and snuffed at them with his red nose, saying Ah! at the scent of gunpowder. Then he saw a tin can in the talcumy dust and shot it three times ahead of him as he strode laughing, and the horses all along the street jumped nervously and flickered their ears. Reloading again, he kicked the barber shop door wide and confronted a full house. The four barber chairs were full of lathered customers, waiting with magazines in their hands, and the mirrors behind them repeated the comfort and the creamy lather and the pantomime of efficient barbers.

Along the wall on a bench sat six other men waiting to be cleansed of the mountain and the desert.

“Have a seat,” said one of the barbers, glancing up.

“I sure will,” said Mr. James Malone, and pointed his pistol at the first chair. “Get out of there, mister, or I'll sew you right back into the upholstery.”

The man's eyes were startled, then angry, then apprehensive in turn above his creamy mask, but after a long hesitation, he levered himself up with difficulty, swiped the white stuff off his chin with the apron, flung the apron to the floor, and walked over to shove in and sit with the other waiting men.

James Malone snorted at this, laughed, jounced into the black leather chair, and cocked his two pistols.

“I
never
have to wait,” he said to no one and everyone at once. His gaze wandered over their heads and touched on the ceiling. “If you live right, you don't have to wait for anything. You ought to know that by now!”

The men looked at the floor. The barber cleared his throat and put an apron over Jamie Malone. The pistols stuck up, making white tents underneath. There was a sharp click as he knocked the pistols together, just to let everyone know they were there, and pointed.

“Give me the works,” he said to the barber, not looking at him. “A shave first, I feel itchy and mean, then a haircut. You men there, starting on the right, tell jokes. Make 'em good jokes. I want entertainment while I'm being shorn. Ain't been entertained in months. You, there, mister, you start.”

The man who had been evicted from his comfortable chair unfroze himself slowly and rolled his eyes at the other men and talked as if someone had hit him in the mouth.

“I knew a gent once who . . .” he said, and word by word, white-faced, he launched himself into a tale. “That gent, he . . .”

To the barber, James Malone now said, “Listen, you, I want a shave, I want a beautiful shave. But I got a fine-skinned face and it's a pretty face with the beard off, and I been in the mountains for a long time and I had no luck with gold-panning, so I'm feeling mean. I just want to warn you of one little thing. If you so much as nick my face once with your straight razor, I'll kill you. You hear that? I mean I'll kill you. If you so much as bring one little speck of blood to the surface, I'll plug you clean through the heart. You hear?”

The barber nodded quietly. The barber shop was silent. Nobody was telling jokes or laughing.

“Not one drop of blood, not one little cut, mind you,” repeated Mr. James Malone, “or you'll be dead on the floor a second later.”

“I'm a married man,” said the barber.

“I don't give a damn if you're a Mormon with six wives and fifty-seven children. You're dead if you scratch me once.”

“I happen to have two children,” said the barber. “A fine little girl and a boy.”

“Don't hand me any of that,” said Malone, settling back, closing his eyes. “Start.”

The barber began to get the hot towels ready. He put them on James Malone's face, and under them the man cursed and yelled and waved his pistols under the white apron. When the hot towels came off and the hot lather was put on his beard, James Malone still chewed on his profanity and threats, and the men waiting sat white-faced and stiff with the pistols pointing at them. The other barbers had almost stopped moving and stood like statues by their customers in the chairs, and the barber shop was cold for a summer day.

“What's wrong with the stories?” snapped James Malone. “All right, then sing. You four there, sing something like ‘My Darling Clementine.' Start it up. You heard me.”