Bradbury Stories (69 page)

“Nor does anyone!” The man smelled like a lion house. His thin arms hung over and down between them, nervously tying and untying an invisible string. He moved as if there were nests of burning hair under each armpit. “Day like today, all hell breaks loose inside your head. Lucifer was born on a day like this, in a wilderness like this,” said the man. “With just fire and flame and smoke everywhere,” said the man. “And everything so hot you can't touch it, and people not wanting to be touched,” said the man.

He gave a nudge to her elbow, a nudge to the boy.

They jumped a mile.

“You see?” The man smiled. “Day like today, you get to thinking lots of things.” He smiled. “Ain't this the summer when the seventeen-year locusts are supposed to come back like pure holocaust? Simple but multitudinous plagues?”

“Don't know!” Neva drove fast, staring ahead.

“This
is
the summer. Holocaust just around the bend. I'm thinking so swift it hurts my eyeballs, cracks my head. I'm liable to explode in a fireball with just plain disconnected thought. Why—why—why—”

Neva swallowed hard. Doug held his breath.

Quite suddenly they were terrified. For the man simply idled on with his talk, looking at the shimmering green fire trees that burned by on both sides, sniffing the rich hot dust that flailed up around the tin car, his voice neither high nor low, but steady and calm now in describing his life:

“Yes, sir, there's more to the world than people appreciate. If there can be seventeen-year locusts, why not seventeen-year people? Ever
thought
of that?”

“Never did,” said someone.

Probably me, thought Doug, for his mouth had moved like a mouse.

“Or how about twenty-four-year people, or fifty-seven-year people? I mean, we're all so used to people growing up, marrying, having kids, we never stop to think maybe there's other ways for people coming into the world, maybe like locusts, once in a while, who can tell, one hot day, middle of summer!”

“Who can tell?” There was the mouse again. Doug's lips trembled.

“And who's to say there ain't genetic evil in the world?” asked the man of the sun, glaring right up at it without blinking.

“
What
kind of evil?” asked Neva.

“Genetic, ma'am. In the blood, that is to say. People born evil, growed evil, died evil, no changes all the way down the line.”

“Whew!” said Douglas. “You mean people who start out mean and stay
at
it?”

“You got the sum, boy. Why not? If there are people everyone thinks are angel-fine from their first sweet breath to their last pure declaration, why not sheer orneriness from January first to December, three hundred sixty-five days later?”

“I never thought of that,” said the mouse.

“Think,” said the man.
“Think.”

They thought for above five seconds.

“Now,” said the man, squinting one eye at the cool lake five miles ahead, his other eye shut into darkness and ruminating on coal-bins of fact there, “listen. What if the intense heat, I mean the really hot hot heat of a month like this, week like this, day like today, just baked the Ornery Man right out of the river mud. Been there buried in the mud for forty-seven years, like a damn larva, waiting to be born. And he shook himself awake and looked around, full grown, and climbed out of the hot mud into the world and said, ‘I think I'll eat me some summer.'”

“How's that again?”

“Eat me some summer, boy, summer, ma'am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain't they a whole dinner? Look at that field of wheat, ain't that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there's breakfast. Tarpaper on top that house, there's lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that's dinner wine, drink it all!”

“I'm thirsty, all right,” said Doug.

“Thirsty, hell, boy, thirst don't begin to describe the state of a man, come to think about him, come to talk, who's been waiting in the hot mud thirty years and is born but to die in one day! Thirst! Ye Gods! Your ignorance is complete.”

“Well,” said Doug.

“Well,” said the man. “Not only thirst but hunger. Hunger. Look around. Not only eat the trees and then the flowers blazing by the roads but then the white-hot panting dogs. There's one. There's another! And all the cats in the country. There's two, just passed three! And then just glutton-happy begin to why, why not, begin to get around to, let me tell you, how's this strike you, eat people? I mean—people! Fried, cooked, boiled, and parboiled people. Sunburned beauties of people. Old men, young. Old ladies' hats and then old ladies under their hats and then young ladies' scarves and young ladies, and then young boys' swim-trunks, by God, and young boys, elbows, ankles, ears, toes, and eyebrows! Eyebrows, by God, men, women, boys, ladies, dogs, fill up the menu, sharpen your teeth, lick your lips, dinner's
on
!”

“Wait!” someone cried.

Not me, thought Doug. I said nothing.

“Hold on!” someone yelled.

It was Neva.

He saw her knee fly up as if by intuition and down as if by finalized gumption.

Stomp! went her heel on the floor.

The car braked. Neva had the door open, pointing, shouting, pointing, shouting, her mouth flapping, one hand seized out to grab the man's shirt and rip it.

“Out! Get out!”

“
Here
, ma'am?” The man was astonished.

“Here, here, here, out, out, out!”

“But, ma'am . . .!”

“Out, or you're finished, through!” cried Neva, wildly. “I got a load of Bibles in the back trunk, a pistol with a silver bullet here under the steering wheel. A box of crucifixes under the seat! A wooden stake taped to the axle, with a hammer. I got holy water in the carburetor, blessed before it boiled early this morning at three churches on the way: St. Matthew's Catholic, the Green Town Baptist, and the Zion City High Episcopal. The steam from that will get you alone. Following us, one mile behind, and due to arrive in one minute, is the Reverend Bishop Kelly from Chicago. Up at the lake is Father Rooney from Milwaukee, and Doug, why, Doug here has in his back pocket at this minute one sprig of wolfsbane and two chunks of mandrake root. Out! out! out!”

“Why, ma'am,” cried the man. “I
am
!”

And he was.

He landed and fell rolling in the road.

Neva banged the car into full flight.

Behind, the man picked himself up and yelled, “You must be nuts. You must be crazy. Nuts. Crazy.”

“
I'm
nuts?
I'm
crazy?” said Neva, and hooted. “Boy!”

“. . . nuts . . . crazy . . .” The voice faded.

Douglas looked back and saw the man shaking his fist, then ripping off his shirt and hurling it to the gravel and jumping big puffs of white-hot dust out of it with his bare feet.

The car exploded, rushed, raced, banged pell-mell ahead, his aunt ferociously glued to the hot wheel, until the little sweating figure of the talking man was lost in sun-drenched marshland and burning air. At last Doug exhaled:

“Neva, I never heard you talk like that before.”

“And never will again, Doug.”

“Was what you said
true
?”

“Not a word.”

“You lied, I mean, you
lied
?”

“I lied.” Neva blinked. “Do you think
he
was lying, too?”

“I don't know.”

“All I know is sometimes it takes a lie to kill a lie, Doug. This time, anyway. Don't let it become customary.”

“No, ma'am.” He began to laugh. “Say the thing about mandrake root again. Say the thing about wolfsbane in my pocket. Say it about a pistol with a silver bullet, say it.”

She said it. They both began to laugh.

Whooping and shouting, they went away in their tin-bucket-junking car over the gravel ruts and humps, her saying, him listening, eyes squeezed shut, roaring, snickering, raving.

They didn't stop laughing until they hit the water in their bathing suits and came up all smiles.

The sun stood hot in the middle of the sky and they dog-paddled happily for five minutes before they began to really swim in the menthol-cool waves.

Only at dusk when the sun was suddenly gone and the shadows moved out from the trees did they remember that now they had to go
back
down that lonely road through all the dark places and past that empty swamp to get to town.

They stood by the car and looked down that long road. Doug swallowed hard.

“
Nothing
can happen to us going home.”

“Nothing.”

“Jump!”

They hit the seats and Neva kicked the starter like it was a dead dog and they were off.

They drove along under plum-colored trees and among velvet purple hills.

And nothing happened.

They drove along a wide raw gravel road that was turning the color of plums and smelled the warm-cool air that was like lilacs and looked at each other, waiting.

And nothing happened.

Neva began at last to hum under her breath.

The road was empty.

And then it was not empty.

Neva laughed. Douglas squinted and laughed with her.

For there was a small boy, nine years old maybe, dressed in a vanilla-white summer suit, with white shoes and a white tie and his face pink and scrubbed, waiting by the side of the road. He waved.

Neva braked the car.

“Going in to town?” called the boy, cheerily. “Got lost. Folks at a picnic, left without me. Sure glad you came along. It's
spooky
out here.”

“Climb in!”

The boy climbed and they were off, the boy in the back seat, and Doug and Neva up front glancing at him, laughing, and then getting quiet.

The small boy kept silent for a long while behind them, sitting straight upright and clean and bright and fresh and new in his white suit.

And they drove along the empty road under a sky that was dark now with a few stars and the wind getting cool.

And at last the boy spoke and said something that Doug didn't hear but he saw Neva stiffen and her face grow as pale as the ice cream from which the small boy's suit was cut.

“What?” asked Doug, glancing back.

The small boy stared directly at him, not blinking, and his mouth moved all to itself as if it were separate from his face.

The car's engine missed fire and died.

They were slowing to a dead stop.

Doug saw Neva kicking and fiddling at the gas and the starter. But most of all he heard the small boy say, in the new and permanent silence:

“Have either of you ever wondered—”

The boy took a breath and finished:

“—if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world?”

“C
HARLIE
! W
HERE YOU GOING
?”

Members of the rocket crew, passing, called.

Charles Willis did not answer.

He took the vacuum tube down through the friendly humming bowels of the spaceship. He fell, thinking: This is the grand hour.

“Chuck! Where traveling?” someone called.

To meet someone dead but alive, cold but warm, forever untouchable but reaching out somehow to touch.

“Idiot! Fool!”

The voice echoed. He smiled.

Then he saw Clive, his best friend, drifting up in the opposite chute. He averted his gaze, but Clive sang out through his seashell ear-pack radio:

“I want to see you!”

“Later!” Willis said.

“I
know
where you're going. Stupid!”

And Clive was gone up away while Willis fell softly down, his hands trembling.

His boots touched surface. On the instant he suffered renewed delight.

He walked down through the hidden machineries of the rocket. Lord, he thought, crazy. Here we are one hundred days gone away from the Earth in Space, and, this very hour, most of the crew, in fever, dialing their aphrodisiac animatronic devices that touched and hummed to them in their shut clamshell beds. While, what do
I
do? he thought.
This
.

He moved to peer into a small storage pit.

There, in an eternal dusk, sat the old man.

“Sir,” he said, and waited.

“Shaw,” he whispered. “Oh, Mr. George Bernard Shaw.”

The old man's eyes sprang wide as if he had swallowed an Idea.

He seized his bony knees and gave a sharp cry of laughter.

“By God, I
do
accept it
all
!”

“Accept
what
, Mr. Shaw?”

Mr. Shaw flashed his bright blue gaze upon Charles Willis.

“The Universe!
It
thinks, therefore I
am
! So I had
best
accept, eh? Sit.”

Willis sat in the shadowed areaway, clasping his knees and his own warm delight with being here again.

“Shall I read your mind, young Willis, and tell you what you've been up to since last we conversed?”

“
Can
you read minds, Mr. Shaw?”

“No, thank God. Wouldn't it be awful if I were not only the cuneiform-tablet robot of Geroge Bernard Shaw, but could also scan your head-bumps and spell your dreams? Unbearable.”

“You already
are
, Mr. Shaw.”

“
Touché!
Well, now.” The old man raked his reddish beard with his thin fingers, then poked Willis gently in the ribs. “How is it you are the only one aboard this starship who ever visits me?”

“Well, sir, you see—”

The young man's cheeks burned themselves to full blossom.

“Ah, yes, I do see,” said Shaw. “Up through the honeycomb of the ship, all the happy male bees in their hives with their syrupy wind-up soft-singing nimble-nibbling toys, their bright female puppets.”

“Mostly
dumb
.”

“Ah, well. It was not always thus. On my last trip the Captain wished to play Scrabble using only names of characters, concepts and ideas from my plays. Now, strange boy, why do
you
squat here with this hideous old ego? Have you no need for that soft and gentle company abovestairs?”