Bradbury Stories (7 page)

“And never were pretty?”

“Never.”

“Never in a million trillion years?” The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o'clock on a summer afternoon.

“Never,” said Mrs. Bentley, “in a million trillion years.”

T
HE RAW CARCASSES, HUNG IN THE SUNLIGHT
, rushed at them, vibrated with heat and red color in the green jungle air, and were gone. The stench of rotting flesh gushed through the car windows, and Leonora Webb quickly pressed the button that whispered her door window up.

“Good Lord,” she said, “those open-air butcher shops.”

The smell was still in the car, a smell of war and horror.

“Did you see the flies?” she asked.

“When you buy any kind of meat in those markets,” John Webb said, “you slap the beef with your hand. The flies lift from the meat so you can get a look at it.”

He turned the car around a lush bend in the green rain-jungle road.

“Do you think they'll let us into Juatala when we get there?”

“I don't know.”

“Watch out!”

He saw the bright things in the road too late, tried to swerve, but hit them. There was a terrible sighing from the right front tire, the car heaved about and sank to a stop. He opened his side of the car and stepped out. The jungle was hot and silent and the highway empty, very empty and quiet at noon.

He walked to the front of the car and bent, all the while checking his revolver in its underarm holster.

Leonora's window gleamed down. “Is the tire hurt much?”

“Ruined, utterly ruined!” He picked up the bright thing that had stabbed and slashed the tire.

“Pieces of a broken machete,” he said, “placed in adobe holders pointing toward our car wheels. We're lucky it didn't get
all
our tires.”

“But
why
?”

“You know as well as I.” He nodded to the newspaper beside her, at the date, the headlines:

OCTOBER 4TH, 1963: UNITED STATES,

EUROPE SILENT!

THE RADIOS OF THE U.S.A. AND EUROPE ARE DEAD.

THERE IS A GREAT SILENCE. THE WAR HAS SPENT ITSELF.

It is believed that most of the population of the United States is dead. It is believed that most of Europe, Russia, and Siberia is equally decimated. The day of the white people of the earth is over and finished.

“It all came so fast,” said Webb. “One week we're on another tour, a grand vacation from home. The next week—this.”

They both looked away from the black headlines to the jungle.

The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.

“Be careful, Jack.”

He pressed two buttons. An automatic lift under the front wheels hissed and hung the car in the air. He jammed a key nervously into the right wheel plate. The tire, frame and all, with a sucking pop, bounced from the wheel. It was a matter of seconds to lock the spare in place and roll the shattered tire back to the luggage compartment. He had his gun out while he did all this.

“Don't stand in the open, please, Jack.”

“So it's starting already.” He felt his hair burning hot on his skull. “News travels fast.”

“For God's sake,” said Leonora. “They can
hear
you!”

He stared at the jungle.

“I know you're in there!”

“Jack!”

He aimed at the silent jungle. “I see you!” He fired four, five times, quickly, wildly.

The jungle ate the bullets with hardly a quiver, a brief slit sound like torn silk where the bullets bored and vanished into a million acres of green leaves, trees, silence, and moist earth. The brief echo of the shots died. Only the car muttered its exhaust behind Webb. He walked around the car, got in, and shut the door and locked it.

He reloaded the gun, sitting in the front seat. Then they drove away from the place.

They drove steadily.

“Did you see anyone?”

“No. You?”

She shook her head.

“You're going too fast.”

He slowed only in time. As they rounded a curve another clump of the bright flashing objects filled the right side of the road. He swerved to the left and passed.

“Sons-of-bitches!”

“They're not sons-of-bitches, they're just people who never had a car like this or anything at all.”

Something ticked across the windowpane.

There was a streak of colorless liquid on the glass.

Leonora glanced up. “Is it going to rain?”

“No, an insect hit the pane.”

Another tick.

“Are you sure that was an insect?”

Tick, tick, tick.

“Shut the window!” he said, speeding up.

Something fell in her lap.

She looked down at it. He reached over to touch the thing. “Quick!”

She pressed the button. The window snapped up.

Then she examined her lap again.

The tiny blowgun dart glistened there.

“Don't get any of the liquid on you,” he said. “Wrap it in your handkerchief—we'll throw it away later.”

He had the car up to sixty miles an hour.

“If we hit another road block, we're done.”

“This is a local thing,” he said. “We'll drive out of it.”

The panes were ticking all the time. A shower of things blew at the window and fell away in their speed.

“Why,” said Leonora Webb, “they don't even
know
us!”

“I only wish they did.” He gripped the wheel. “It's hard to kill people you know. But not hard to kill strangers.”

“I don't want to die,” she said simply, sitting there.

He put his hand inside his coat. “If anything happens to me, my gun is here. Use it, for God's sake, and don't waste time.”

She moved over close to him and they drove seventy-five miles an hour down a straight stretch in the jungle road, saying nothing.

With the windows up, the heat was oven-thick in the car.

“It's so silly,” she said, at last. “Putting the knives in the road. Trying to hit us with the blowguns. How could they know that the next car along would be driven by white people?”

“Don't ask them to be that logical,” he said. “A car is a car. It's big, it's rich. The money in one car would last them a lifetime. And anyway, if you road-block a car, chances are you'll get either an American tourist or a rich Spaniard, comparatively speaking, whose ancestors should have behaved better. And if you happen to road-block another Indian, hell, all you do is go out and help him change tires.”

“What time is it?” she asked.

For the thousandth time he glanced at his empty wrist. Without expression or surprise, he fished in his coat pocket for the glistening gold watch with the silent sweep hand. A year ago he had seen a native stare at this watch and stare at it and stare at it with almost a hunger. Then the native had examined him, not scowling, not hating, not sad or happy; nothing except puzzled.

He had taken the watch off that day and never worn it since.

“Noon,” he said.

Noon.

The border lay ahead. They saw it and both cried out at once. They pulled up, smiling, not knowing they smiled. . . .

John Webb leaned out the window, started gesturing to the guard at the border station, caught himself, and got out of his car. He walked ahead to the station where three young men, very short, in lumpy uniforms, stood talking. They did not look up at Webb, who stopped before them. They continued conversing in Spanish, ignoring him.

“I beg your pardon,” said John Webb at last. “Can we pass over the border into Juatala?”

One of the men turned for a moment. “Sorry,
señor
.”

The three men talked again.

“You don't understand,” said Webb, touching the first man's elbow. “We've
got
to get through.”

The man shook his head. “Passports are no longer good. Why should you want to leave our country, anyway?”

“It was announced on the radio. All Americans to leave the country, immediately.”

“Ah,
sí, sí
.” All three soldiers nodded and leered at each other with shining eyes.

“Or be fined or imprisoned, or both,” said Webb.

“We could let you over the border, but Juatala would give you twenty-four hours to leave, also. If you don't believe me, listen!” The guard turned and called across the border, “Aye, there! Aye!”

In the hot sun, forty yards distant, a pacing man turned, his rifle in his arms.

“Aye there, Paco, you want these two people?”

“No,
gracias—gracias
, no,” replied the man, smiling.

“You see?” said the guard, turning to John Webb.

All of the soldiers laughed together.

“I have money,” said Webb.

The men stopped laughing.

The first guard stepped up to John Webb and his face was now not relaxed or easy; it was like brown stone.

“Yes,” he said. “They always have money. I know. They come here and they think money will do everything. But what is money? It is only a promise,
señor
. This I know from books. And when somebody no longer likes your promise, what then?”

“I will give you anything you ask.”

“Will you?” The guard turned to his friends. “He will give me
anything
I ask.” To Webb: “It was a joke.
We
were always a joke to you, weren't we?”

“No.”

“
Mañana
, you laughed at us;
mañana
, you laughed at our siestas and our
mañanas
, didn't you?”

“Not me. Someone else.”

“Yes, you.”

“I've never been to this particular station before.”

“I know you, anyway. Run here, do this, do that. Oh, here's a peso, buy yourself a house. Run over there, do this, do that.”

“It wasn't me.”

“He looked like you, anyway.”

They stood in the sun with their shadows dark under them, and the perspiration coloring their armpits. The soldier moved closer to John Webb. “I don't have to do anything for you anymore.”

“You never had to before. I never asked it.”

“You're trembling,
señor
.”

“I'm all right. It's the sun.”

“How much money have you got?” asked the guard.

“A thousand pesos to let us through, and a thousand for the other man over there.”

The guard turned again. “Will a thousand pesos be enough?”

“No,” said the other guard. “Tell him to report us!”

“Yes,” said the guard, back to Webb again. “Report me. Get me fired. I was fired once, years ago, by you.”

“It was someone else.”

“Take my name. It is Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl. Go on now.”

“I see.”

“No, you don't see,” said Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl. “Now give me two thousand pesos.”

John Webb took out his wallet and handed over the money. Carlos Rodriguez Ysotl licked his thumb and counted the money slowly under the blue glazed sky of his country as noon deepened and sweat arose from hidden sources and people breathed and panted above their shadows.

“Two thousand pesos.” He folded it and put it in his pocket quietly. “Now turn your car around and head for another border.”

“Hold on now, damn it!”

The guard looked at him. “Turn your car.”

They stood a long time that way, with the sun blazing on the rifle in the guard's hands, not speaking. And then John Webb turned and walked slowly, one hand to his face, back to the car and slid into the front seat.

“What're we going to do?” said Leonora.

“Rot. Or try to reach Porto Bello.”

“But we need gas and our spare fixed. And going back over those highways . . . This time they might drop logs, and—”

“I know, I know.” He rubbed his eyes and sat for a moment with his head in his hands. “We're alone, my God, we're alone. Remember how safe we used to feel? How safe? We registered in all the big towns with the American Consuls. Remember how the joke went? ‘Everywhere you go you can hear the rustle of the eagle's wings!' Or was it the sound of paper money? I forget. Jesus, Jesus, the world got empty awfully quick. Who do I call on now?”

She waited a moment and then said, “I guess just me. That's not much.”

He put his arm around her. “You've been swell. No hysterics, nothing.”

“Tonight maybe I'll be screaming, when we're in bed, if we ever find a bed again. It's been a million miles since breakfast.”

He kissed her, twice, on her dry mouth. Then he sat slowly back. “First thing is to try to find gas. If we can get that, we're ready to head for Porto Bello.”

The three soldiers were talking and joking as they drove away.

After they had been driving a minute, he began to laugh quietly.

“What were you thinking?” asked his wife.

“I remember an old spiritual. It goes like this:

“I remember that,” she said.

“It's an appropriate song right now,” he said. “I'd sing the whole thing for you if I could remember it all. And if I felt like singing.”

He put his foot harder to the accelerator.

They stopped at a gas station and after a minute, when the attendant did not appear, John Webb honked the horn. Then, appalled, he snapped his hand away from the horn-ring, looking at it as if it were the hand of a leper.

“I shouldn't have done that.”

The attendant appeared in the shadowy doorway of the gas station. Two other men appeared behind him.