Bradbury Stories (93 page)

“Most of it,” I said. “Come on.”

I walked to the door. The hunter sat there. At last, examining the fires lit in my face by my talking, he grunted, got up, walked over, and came outside with me.

I pointed at the curb. We looked together at the truck parked there.

“I've seen those before,” he said. “A truck like that, in a movie. Don't they hunt rhino from a truck like that? And lions and things like that? Or at least travel in them around Africa?”

“You remember right.”

“No lions around here,” he said. “No rhino, no water buffalo, nothing.”

“No?” I asked.

He didn't answer that.

I walked over and touched the open truck.

“You know what this is?”

“I'm playing dumb from here on,” said the hunter. “What is it?”

I stroked the fender for a long moment.

“A Time Machine,” I said.

His eyes widened and then narrowed and he sipped the beer he was carrying in one large hand. He nodded me on.

“A Time Machine,” I repeated.

“I heard you,” he said.

He walked out around the safari truck and stood in the street looking at it. He wouldn't look at me. He circled the truck one entire round and stood back on the curb and looked at the cap on the gas tank.

“What kind of mileage you get?” he said.

“I don't know yet.”

“You don't know anything,” he said.

“This is the first trip,” I said. “I won't know until it's over.”

“What do you fuel a thing like that with?” he said.

I was silent.

“What kind of stuff you put
in
?” he asked.

I could have said: Reading late at night, reading many nights over the years until almost morning, reading up in the mountains in the snow or reading at noon in Pamplona, or reading by the streams or out in a boat somewhere along the Florida coast. Or I could have said: All of us put our hands on this Machine, all of us thought about it and bought it and touched it and put our love in it and our remembering what his words did to us twenty years or twenty-five or thirty years ago. There's a lot of life and remembering and love put by here, and that's the gas and the fuel and the stuff or whatever you want to call it; the rain in Paris, the sun in Madrid, the snow in the high Alps, the smoke off the guns in the Tyrol, the shine of light off the Gulf Stream, the explosion of bombs or explosions of leaped fish, that's the gas and the fuel and the stuff here; I should have said that, I thought it, but I let it stay unsaid.

The hunter must have smelled my thought, for his eyes squinted up and, telepath that he was from long years in the forest, chewed over my thinking.

Then he walked over and did an unexpected thing. He reached out and . . .
touched
. . . my Machine.

He laid his hand on it and left it there, as if feeling for the life, and approving what he sensed beneath his hand. He stood that way for a long time.

Then he turned without a word, not looking at me, and went back into the bar and sat drinking alone, his back turned toward the door.

I didn't want to break the silence. It seemed a good time to go, to try.

I got in the truck and started the motor.

What kind of mileage? What kind of fuel? I thought. And drove away.

I kept on the road and didn't look right or left and I drove for what must have been an hour, first this direction and then that, part of the time my eyes shut for full seconds, taking a chance I might go off and get hurt or killed.

And then, just before noon, with the clouds over the sun, suddenly I knew it was all right.

I looked up at the hill and I almost yelled.

The grave was gone.

I drove down into a little hollow just then and on the road ahead, wandering along by himself, was an old man in a heavy sweater.

I idled the safari truck along until I was pacing him as he walked. I saw he was wearing steel-rimmed glasses and for a long moment we moved together, each ignoring the other until I called his name.

He hesitated, and then walked on.

I caught up with him in the truck and said again, “Papa.”

He stopped and waited.

I braked the car and sat there in the front seat.

“Papa,” I said.

He came over and stood near the door.

“Do I know you?”

“No. But I know you.”

He looked me in the eyes and studied my face and mouth. “Yes. I think you do.”

“I saw you on the road. I think I'm going your way. Want a lift?”

“It's good walking this time of day,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Let me tell you where I'm going,” I said.

He had started off but now stopped and, without looking at me, said, “Where?”

“A long way,” I said.

“It sounds long, the way you tell it. Can't you make it shorter?”

“No. A long way,” I said. “About two thousand six hundred days, give or take some days, and half an afternoon.”

He came back and looked into the car.

“Is that how far you're going?”

“That's how far.”

“In which direction? Ahead?”

“Don't you want to go ahead?”

He looked at the sky. “I don't know. I'm not sure.”

“It's not ahead,” I said. “It's back.”

His eyes took on a different color. It was a subtle shift, a flex, like a man stepping out from the shade of a tree into sunlight on a cloudy day.

“Back.”

“Somewhere between two thousand and three thousand days, split half a day, give or take an hour, borrow or loan a minute, haggle over a second,” I said.

“You really talk,” he said.

“Compulsive,” I said.

“You'd make a lousy writer,” he said. “I never knew a writer yet was a good talker.”

“That's my albatross,” I said.

“Back?” He weighed the word.

“I'm turning the car around,” I said. “And I'm going back down the road.”

“Not miles but days?”

“Not miles but days.”

“Is it that kind of car?”

“That's how it's built.”

“You're an inventor then?”

“A reader who happens to invent.”

“If the car works, that's some car you got there.”

“At your service,” I said.

“And when you get where you're going,” said the old man, putting his hand on the door and leaning and then, seeing what he had done, taking his hand away and standing taller to speak to me, “where will you be?”

“January 10, 1954.”

“That's quite a date,” he said.

“It is, it was. It can be more of a date.”

Without moving, his eyes took another step out into fuller light.

“And where will you be on that day?”

“Africa,” I said.

He was silent. His mouth did not work. His eyes did not shift.

“Not far from Nairobi,” I said.

He nodded, once, slowly.

“Africa, not far from Nairobi.”

I waited.

“And when we get there, if we go?” he said.

“I leave you there.”

“And then?”

“You stay there.”

“And then?”

“That's all.”

“That's all?”

“Forever,” I said.

The old man breathed out and in, and ran his hand over the edge of the doorsill.

“This car,” he said, “somewhere along the way does it turn into a plane?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Somewhere along the way do you turn into my pilot?”

“It could be. I've never done this before.”

“But you're willing to try?”

I nodded.

“Why?” he said, and leaned in and stared me directly in the face with a terrible, quietly wild intensity.
“Why?”

Old man, I thought, I can't tell you why. Don't ask me.

He withdrew, sensing he had gone too far.

“I didn't say that,” he said.

“You didn't say it,” I said.

“And when you bring the plane in for a forced landing,” he said, “will you land a little differently this time?”

“Different, yes.”

“A little harder?”

“I'll see what can be done.”

“And will I be thrown out but the rest of you okay?”

“The odds are in favor.”

He looked up at the hill where there was no grave. I looked at the same hill. And maybe he guessed the digging of it there.

He gazed back down the road at the mountains and the sea that could not be seen beyond the mountains and a continent beyond the sea. “That's a good day you're talking about.”

“The best.”

“And a good hour and a good second.”

“Really, nothing better.”

“Worth thinking about.”

His hand lay on the doorsill, not leaning, but testing, feeling, touching, tremulous, undecided. But his eyes came full into the light of African noon.

“Yes.”

“Yes?” I said.

“I think,” he said, “I'll grab a lift with you.”

I waited one heartbeat, then reached over and opened the door.

Silently he got in the front seat and sat there and quietly shut the door without slamming it. He sat there, very old and very tired. I waited. “Start her up,” he said.

I started the engine and gentled it.

“Turn her around,” he said.

I turned the car so it was going back on the road.

“Is this really,” he said, “that kind of car?”

“Really, that kind of car.”

He looked out at the land and the mountains and the distant house.

I waited, idling the motor.

“When we get there,” he said, “will you remember something . . .?”

“I'll try.”

“There's a mountain,” he said, and stopped and sat there, his mouth quiet, and he didn't go on.

But I went on for him. There is a mountain in Africa named Kilimanjaro, I thought. And on the western slope of that mountain was once found the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has ever explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

We will put you up on that same slope, I thought, on Kilimanjaro, near the leopard, and write your name and under it say nobody knew what he was doing here so high, but here he is. And write the date born and died, and go away down toward the hot summer grass and let mainly dark warriors and white hunters and swift okapis know the grave.

The old man shaded his eyes, looking at the road winding away over the hills. He nodded.

“Let's go,” he said.

“Yes, Papa,” I said.

And we motored away, myself at the wheel, going slow, and the old man beside me, and as we went down the first hill and topped the next, the sun came out full and the wind smelled of fire. We ran like a lion in the long grass. Rivers and streams flashed by. I wished we might stop for one hour and wade and fish and lie by the stream frying the fish and talking or not talking. But if we stopped we might never go on again. I gunned the engine. It made a great fierce wondrous animal's roar. The old man grinned.

“It's going to be a great day!” he shouted.

“A great day.”

Back on the road, I thought, How must it be now, and now, us disappearing? And now, us gone? And now, the road empty. Sun Valley quiet in the sun. What must it be, having us gone?

I had the car up to ninety.

We both yelled like boys.

After that I didn't know anything.

“By God,” said the old man, toward the end. “You know? I think we're . . .flying?”

B
ROKAW
.

What a name!

Listen to it bark, growl, yip, hear the bold proclamation of:

Immanuel Brokaw!

A fine name for the greatest psychiatrist who ever tread the waters of existence without capsizing.

Toss a pepper-ground Freud casebook in the air and all students sneezed:

Brokaw!

What ever happened to him?

One day, like a high-class vaudeville act, he vanished.

With the spotlight out, his miracles seemed in danger of reversal. Psychotic rabbits threatened to leap back into hats. Smokes were sucked back into loud-powder gun muzzles. We all waited.

Silence for ten years. And more silence.

Brokaw was lost, as if he had thrown himself with shouts of laughter into mid-Atlantic. For what? To plumb for Moby-Dick? To psychoanalyze that colorless fiend and see what he really had against Mad Ahab?

Who knows?

I last saw him running for a twilight plane, his wife and six Pomeranian dogs yapping far behind him on the dusky field.

“Good-bye forever!”

His happy cry seemed a joke. But I found men flaking his gold-leaf name from his office door next day, as his great fat-women couches were hustled out into the raw weather toward some Third Avenue auction.

So the giant who had been Gandhi-Moses-Christ-Buddha-Freud all layered in one incredible Armenian dessert had dropped through a hole in the clouds. To die? To live in secret?

Ten years later I rode on a California bus along the lovely shores of Newport.

The bus stopped. A man in his seventies bounced on, jingling silver into the coin box like manna. I glanced up from the rear of the bus and gasped.

“Brokaw! By the saints!”

And with or without sanctification, there he stood. Reared up like God manifest, bearded, benevolent, pontifical, erudite, merry, accepting, forgiving, messianic, tutorial, forever and eternal . . .

Immanuel Brokaw.

But not in a dark suit, no.

Instead, as if they were vestments of some proud new church, he wore:

Bermuda shorts. Black leather Mexican sandals. A Los Angeles Dodgers' baseball cap. French sunglasses. And . . .

The shirt! Ah God! The shirt!

A wild thing, all lush creeper and live flytrap undergrowth, all Pop-Op dilation and contraction, full flowered and crammed at every interstice and crosshatch with mythological beasts and symbols!