Bradbury Stories (82 page)

“How about a hot dog and a Coke?”

Bug, I thought without turning. And that's who it was, standing on the Walk of Stars with his feet planted on Mary Pickford and Ricardo Cortez just behind and Jimmy Stewart just ahead. Bug had taken off some hair and put on some weight, but it
was
Bug and I was overjoyed, perhaps too much, and showed it, for he seemed embarrassed at my enthusiasm. I saw then that his suit was not half new enough and his shirt frayed, but his tie was neatly tied and he shook my hand off and we popped into a place where we stood and had that hot dog and that Coke.

“Still going to be the world's greatest writer?” said Bug.

“Working at it,” I said.

“You'll get there,” said Bug and smiled, meaning it. “You were always good.”

“So were you,” I said.

That seemed to pain him slightly, for he stopped chewing for a moment and took a swig of Coke. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I surely
was
.”

“God,” I said, “I can still remember the day I saw all those trophies for the first time. What a family! Whatever—?”

Before I could finish asking, he gave the answer.

“Put 'em in storage, some. Some wound up with my first wife. Goodwill got the rest.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, and truly was.

Bug looked at me steadily. “How come
you're
sorry?”

“Hell, I dunno,” I said. “It's just, they seemed such a part of you. I haven't thought of you often the last few years or so, to be honest, but when I do, there you are knee-deep in all those cups and mugs in your front room, out in the kitchen, hell, in your
garage
!”

“I'll be damned,” said Bug. “What a memory you got.”

We finished our Cokes and it was almost time to go. I couldn't help myself, even seeing that Bug had fleshed himself out over the years.

“When—” I started to say, and stopped.

“When what?” said Bug.

“When,” I said with difficulty, “when was the last time you danced?”

“Years,” said Bug.

“But how long ago?”

“Ten years. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Yeah, twenty. I don't dance anymore.”

“I don't believe that. Bug not dance? Nuts.”

“Truth. Gave my fancy night-out shoes to the Goodwill, too. Can't dance in your socks.”

“
Can
, and barefoot, too!”

Bug had to laugh at that. “You're really something. Well, it's been nice.” He started edging toward the door. “Take care, genius—”

“Not so fast.” I walked him out into the light and he was looking both ways as if there were heavy traffic. “You know one thing I never saw and wanted to see? You bragged about it, said you took three hundred ordinary girls out on the dance floor and turned them into Ginger Rogers inside three minutes. But I only saw you once at that aud-call in '38, so I don't believe you.”

“What?” said Bug. “You saw the trophies!”

“You could have had those made up,” I pursued, looking at his wrinkled suit and frayed shirt cuffs. “Anyone can go in a trophy shop and buy a cup and have his name put on it!”

“You think I did that?” cried Bug.

“I think that, yes!”

Bug glanced out in the street and back at me and back in the street and back to me, trying to decide which way to run or push or shout.

“What's got into you?” said Bug. “Why're you talking like that?”

“God, I don't know,” I admitted. “It's just, we might not meet again and I'll never have the chance, or you to prove it. I'd like, after all this time, to see what you talked about. I'd love to see you dance again, Bug.”

“Naw,” said Bug. “I've forgotten how.”

“Don't hand me that. You may have forgotten, but the rest of you knows how. Bet you could go down to the Ambassador Hotel this afternoon, they still have tea dances there, and clear the floor, just like you said. After you're out there nobody else dances, they all stop and look at you and her just like thirty years ago.”

“No,” said Bug, backing away but coming back. “No, no.”

“Pick a stranger, any girl, any woman, out of the crowd, lead her out, hold her in your arms and just skim her around as if you were on ice and dream her to Paradise.”

“If you write like that, you'll never sell,” said Bug.

“Bet you, Bug.”

“I don't bet.”

“All right, then. Bet you you can't. Bet you, By God, that you've lost your stuff!”

“Now, hold on,” said Bug.

“I mean it. Lost your stuff forever, for good. Bet you. Wanna bet?”

Bug's eyes took on a peculiar shine and his face was flushed. “How much?”

“Fifty bucks!”

“I don't have—”

“Thirty bucks, then. Twenty! You can afford to lose that,
can't
you?”

“Who says I'd lose, dammit?”

“
I
say. Twenty. Is it a deal?”

“You're throwing your money away.”

“No, I'm a sure winner, because you can't dance worth shoats and shinola!”

“Where's your money?” cried Bug, incensed now.

“Here!”

“Where's your car!?”

“I don't own a car. Never learned to drive. Where's yours?”

“Sold it! Jesus, no cars. How do we get to the tea dance!?”

We got. We grabbed a cab and I paid and, before Bug could relent, dragged him through the hotel lobby and into the ballroom. It was a nice summer afternoon, so nice that the room was filled with mostly middle-aged men and their wives, a few younger ones with their girlfriends, and some kids out of college who looked out of place, embarrassed by the mostly old-folks music out of another time. We got the last table and when Bug opened his mouth for one last protest, I put a straw in it and helped him nurse a margarita.

“Why are you
doing
this?” he protested again.

“Because you were just one of one hundred sixty-five close friends!” I said.

“We were never friends,” said Bug.

“Well, today, anyway. There's ‘Moonlight Serenade.' Always liked that, never danced myself, clumsy fool. On your feet, Bug!”

He was on his feet, swaying.

“Who do you pick?” I said. “You cut in on a couple? Or there's a few wallflowers over there, a tableful of women. I dare you to pick the least likely and give her lessons, yes?”

That did it. Casting me a glance of the purest scorn, he charged off half into the pretty teatime dresses and immaculate men, searching around until his eyes lit on a table where a woman of indeterminate age sat, hands folded, face thin and sickly pale, half hidden under a wide-brimmed hat, looking as if she were waiting for someone who never came.

That
one, I thought.

Bug glanced from her to me. I nodded. And in a moment he was bowing at her table and a conversation ensued. It seemed she didn't dance, didn't know
how
to dance, didn't
want
to dance. Ah, yes, he seemed to be saying. Ah,
no
, she seemed to reply. Bug turned, holding her hand, and gave me a long stare and a wink. Then, without looking at her, he raised her by her hand and arm and out, with a seamless glide, onto the floor.

What can I say, how can I tell? Bug, long ago, had never bragged, but only told the truth. Once he got hold of a girl, she was weightless. By the time he had whisked and whirled and glided her once around the floor, she almost took off, it seemed he had to hold her down, she was pure gossamer, the closest thing to a hummingbird held in the hand so you cannot feel its weight but only sense its heartbeat sounding to your touch, and there she went out and around and back, with Bug guiding and moving, enticing and retreating, and not fifty anymore, no, but eighteen, his body remembering what his mind thought it had long forgotten, for his body was free of the earth now, too. He carried himself, as he carried her, with that careless insouciance of a lover who knows what will happen in the next hour and the night soon following.

And it happened, just like he said. Within a minute, a minute and a half at most, the dance floor cleared. As Bug and his stranger lady whirled by with a glance, every couple on the floor stood still. The bandleader almost forgot to keep time with his baton, and the members of the orchestra, in a similar trance, leaned forward over their instruments to see Bug and his new love whirl and turn without touching the floor.

When the “Serenade” ended, there was a moment of stillness and then an explosion of applause. Bug pretended it was all for the lady, and helped her curtsy and took her to her table, where she sat, eyes shut, not believing what had happened. By that time Bug was on the floor again, with one of the wives he borrowed from the nearest table. This time, no one even went out on the floor. Bug and the borrowed wife filled it around and around, and this time even Bug's eyes were shut.

I got up and put twenty dollars on the table where he might find it. After all, he
had
won the bet, hadn't he?

Why had I done it? Well, I couldn't very well have left him out in the middle of the high school auditorium aisle dancing
alone
, could I?

On my way out I looked back. Bug saw me and waved, his eyes as brimmed full as mine. Someone passing whispered, “Hey, come on,
lookit
this guy!”

God, I thought, he'll be dancing all night.

Me, I could only walk.

And I went out and walked until I was fifty again and the sun was going down and the low June fog was coming in early over old Los Angeles.

That night, just before going to sleep, I wished that in the morning when Bug woke up he would find the floor around his bed covered with trophies.

Or at the very least he would turn and find a quiet and understanding trophy with her head on his pillow, near enough to touch.

A
T EIGHT THIRTY THAT NIGHT
he heard the sharp crack from the theater down the hall.

Backfire, he thought. No. Gun.

A moment later he heard the great lift and drop of voices like an ocean surprised by a landfall which stopped it dead. A door banged. Feet ran.

An usher burst through his office door, glanced swiftly about as if blind, his face pale, his mouth trying words that would not come.

“Lincoln . . . Lincoln . . .”

Bayes glanced up from his desk.

“What about Lincoln?”

“He . . . he's been
shot
.”

“Good joke. Now—”

“Shot. Don't you understand? Shot. Really shot. For the second time, shot!”

The usher wandered out, holding to the wall.

Bayes felt himself rise. “Oh, for Christ—”

And he was running and passed the usher who, feeling him pass, began to run with him.

“No, no,” said Bayes. “It didn't happen. It didn't. It couldn't. It didn't, couldn't . . .”

“Shot,” said the usher.

As they made the corridor turn, the theater doors exploded wide and a crowd that had turned mob shouted or yelled or screamed or stunned simply said, “Where is he?” “There!” “Is that him?” “Where?” “Who did it?” “He did?
Him?
” “Hold him!” “Watch out!” “Stop!”

Two security guards stumbled to view, pushed, pulled, twisted now this way and that, and between them a man who struggled to heave back from the bodies, the grasping hands and now the upflung and downfell fists. People snatched, pecked, pummeled, beat at him with packages or frail sun parasols which splintered like kites in a great storm. Women turned in dazed circles seeking lost friends, whimpering. Men, crying out, shoved them aside to squirm through to the center of the push and thrust and backward-pumping guards and the assaulted man who now masked his cut face with splayed fingers.

“Oh God, God.” Bayes froze, beginning to believe. He stared upon the scene. Then he sprang forward. “This way! Back inside! Clear off! Here! Here!”

And somehow the mob was breached, a door cracked wide to shove flesh through, then slammed.

Outside, the mob hammered, threatening damnations and scourges unheard of by living men. The whole theater structure quaked with their muted wails, cries and estimates of doom.

Bayes stared a long moment at the shaken and twisted doorknobs, the chattering locks, then over to the guards and the man slumped between them.

Bayes leaped back suddenly, as if an even fresher truth had exploded there in the aisle.

Dimly, he felt his left shoe kick something which spun skittering like a rat chasing its tail along the carpeting under the seats. He bent to let his blind hand search, grope, find the still-half-warm pistol which, looked at but disbelieved, he shoved in his coat pocket as he backed down the aisle. It was a full half minute before he forced himself to turn and face the inevitable stage and that figure in the center of the stage.

Abraham Lincoln sat in his carved highback chair, his head bent forward at an unfamiliar angle. Eyes flexed wide, he gazed upon nothing. His large hands rested gently on the chair arms, as if he might momentarily shift weight, rise, and declare this sad emergency at an end.

Moving as under a tide of cold water, Bayes mounted the steps.

“Lights, dammit! Give us more lights!”

Somewhere, an unseen technician remembered what switches were for. A kind of dawn grew in the dim place.

Bayes, on the platform, circled the occupant of the chair, and stopped.

Yes. There it was. A neat bullet hole at the base of the skull, behind the left ear.

“Sic semper tyrannis,”
a voice murmured somewhere.

Bayes jerked his head up.

The assassin, seated now in the last row of the theater, face down but sensing Bayes' preoccupation with Lincoln, spoke to the floor, to himself:

“Sic—”

He stopped. For there was an outraged stir above him. One security guard's fist flew up, as if the man had nothing to do with it. The fist, urgent to itself, was on its way down to silence the killer when—