When the young man had gone, the old man had a few more words in him. “Good-bye, Mr. J Middleton Little,” he said to the ceiling. “God be with you, sir.”
The jet took off, and J, peering out, reflected that the earth was a darned big place and might not be so easy to render all-over uninhabitable as some folks supposed. Of course, what did he know? And how would the earth look to a few thousand chosen people waiting on the moon, homesick in Babylon? Terrible ideal Impossible, of course. But so sad!
J was very tired after his miserable night and his long wait in the airport. He advised himself to cut this out and relax. So he composed his limbs for a nap, with a flash of an old feeling. If one went to sleep on one of these contraptions, the plane might crash. One was obliged to will these things to stay up in the air, although, of course, one never said so. But today seemed different. The big bird, born of the restless ingenuity of man, mated with his deep desire, slipped easily along the sky, and any man (or feeble old crone for that matter) could fly today. All it took was money. So much for wonders.
And didn’t man keep chewing off another and then another piece of the unknown, digesting it, fearing it no more, only needing to fear what man might do with his knowledge? Yet God kept letting man in on more and more of his secrets, so (J thought) all this must be okay with God.
Here, now. J had thought about God on two days in a row. Well, like they say, no atheists in foxholes. J suddenly skipped all the way back, whizzing past college, the Army, adolescence. He began to repeat aloud, although not loudly, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” As he closed his eyes, he was smiling—to remember that he had once been a child—never mind how long ago.
The man in the next seat got up. He looked nervously down at J’s face, just an ordinary face, a longish jaw, a curly kind of mouth, a straight nose that nevertheless did not draw its straight line quite in the center. Eyelids down over the not very blue, but not quite gray, eyes. One visible, pink, jug-handled ear, silvering hair, neither all gray nor all brown. Pleasant enough looking fellow. Not handsome, not ugly.
The passenger said to the stewardess, “Say, who is he? Some kind of nut or something?”
“Well, well, well!” J’s elbow was jogged; the high-pitched voice was in his very ear. He woke, blinking, and there in the seat beside him was none other than the obnoxious Goodrick.
“How are you, Mr. Little? Long time no see! Heh, heh. What a coincidence, eh?”
“Oh! Hi,” said J weakly. “Excuse me. I must have really conked out.”
“Sorry if I woke you,” said the man, showing those large teeth in which he was almost certainly lying. “Just now spotted you. California, here we come, eh?”
Befogged and bewildered, J looked out the window, but the cloud floor told him nothing about where he was. He looked at his watch. “We must be pretty close to the border, at that.”
“We’ll be starting down around about San Berdoo,” said his neighbor. “Fantastic, isn’t it?”
“Oh, you get used to it,” J muttered, running his hands over his face and head.
“In the hospital long, Mr. Little?”
“No, no,” said J. He didn’t feel like going over his story again, not to this man. A thought came to him. What if Goodrick were to mention Noah’s Ark? J turned to look at him. “Are you a Californian, Mr. Goodrick?” he asked, turning the tables, becoming the inquirer.
“Oh, I dunno,” said Goodrick. “You are, eh?” No table had turned.
“How’s the baby?” said J suddenly.
“Pardon me?”
J kept still and watched the other man’s wits scramble for the reference. “Oh, oh,” he said. “Heh, heh. I didn’t know for a minute … Not my baby, you see. Oh, fine. Eight pounds.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Oh, a boy, naturally. I put in my order with the Man Upstairs for a nephew. Heh, heh.”
(If God has any sense at all, fumed J, He wouldn’t take orders from this bumptious idiot!)
“Enjoy yourself with your bedfellow? Heh, heh,” said Goodrick. “Your roomfellow, I should say.”
“Your friend, you mean? Very pleasant company.”
“You a literary man?”
“What?”
“I understand you had a literary discussion with my friend.”
“Although I was brought up in a literate household,” said J stuffily, “I’m not a literary man.”
“Well, he said you were a bit of a bourgeois bore,” said Goodrick, “but I thought the way you referred to that quotation was pretty cute.”
J feared he was turning red. He said, staccato, “You’ve just lost me, Mr. Goodrick.”
“Oh, now, come on, Mr. Little. You’ve got to realize that I know who that was. Barkis? Heh, heh. Why, I’ve known Doctor Ambrose Willing for years. Used to work under him at one time. Fact is, he fired me. Heh, heh.”
J turned his face toward the window.
“Surprisingly literary, wouldn’t you say, for what he is?” said Goodrick, disagreeably close to J’s ear.
But the phrase that pounded through J’s head was “Barkis is willin’. Barkis is willin’.”
“And he’d be interested, you thought, in the word ‘silence’?” said Goodrick, and J’s heart jumped.
He covered this by shrinking away with an offended arching of his neck and saying, “Do you mind not shouting in my ear? There is nothing the matter with my hearing.”
“Went to school, myself,” said Goodrick calmly. “The rest is silence?”
J simply stared at him.
“Last word of Sweet Prince Hamlet, wasn’t it? Silence, eh?”
The only thing J felt was fury. This man had no right to sit there and needle J Little and be so right about J Little’s miserable ineptitude. He said huffily, “Are you sure you want to conduct a conversation with a bourgeois bore like me?”
“Oh, now,” said Goodrick, flashing his teeth, “the great man may have felt grumpy because he’d been indiscreet. He told me, of course. Fabulous, eh? What he’s been up to?”
But J saw the trap. “No point trying to tell me what he’s been up to. I never got more than a C-minus in a science course in my life.” He shrugged and looked out the window.
“You must have understood some of it,” said Goodrick coaxingly in a moment.
“Some of what?” said J impatiently. “I can’t seem to follow you, Mr. Goodrick. I’d appreciate it if you’d clue me in a little better.”
“Maybe I should,” said Goodrick. “Normally I prefer to work undercover, that being my job.”
“I don’t believe it!” burst J.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re so obviously nosey. And pretty crude about it if I may say so.”
“That’s right,” said Goodrick, who was nibbling at his thumb from time to time. “That’s the way I operate. I found out long ago that if you ask a blunt question, you’re going to get an answer … even if not a word is said.” His grin was infuriating.
“For whom,” J said coldly, “if you don’t mind a blunt question, do you work undercover?”
“Government,” said Goodrick. “Ours, naturally. U.S.A.”
J simply did not believe this. He didn’t want to, for one thing. But he said, “Okay, what do you want to know from me?”
“It’s a security problem,” said Goodrick. “Doctor Ambrose Willing has got a head full of secrets. So the point is how sick is he? Did he seem rational? What did you talk about?”
“I am no diagnostician to know how sick he is,” J said. “I deduced that he was in the hospital because he wasn’t well. Listen,” J was very angry, “it so happens that hospitals have this buddy system. So he and I happened to get put in together. So we happened to get onto the works of William Shakespeare. Is that all right with you? And the U.S.A.?”
“Not a literary man, you say?” said Goodrick, who had a maddening way of paying no attention
to insults. “What is your field?”
“I’m in office management,” snapped J. “Business. And if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to mind my business. I don’t know a damned thing about science, or medicine, either. You woke me up, and I’m tired.”
“Bad night?” said Goodrick quickly.
J shut his eyes.
“By the way,” said Goodrick slyly, “how come you mention science? Did I say that?”
J, by a mighty effort, kept his mouth shut.
A voice said gruffly, “My seat, d’ya mind? We’re losing altitude.” J opened his eyes, and there stood his former seatmate in the aisle.
“Oh, oh,” said Goodrick. “This your seat? Sorry, fella. Well, I’ll be seeing you, Mr. Little. Maybe in Burbank. Nice to talk to you.” He flashed his teeth and scrambled away.
J leaned back, fuming. Some coincidence! Pretty damn fishy! But how could Goodrick have managed to get on this plane deliberately? Well, he had spoken of J at the hospital desk, as J recalled. Could have got J’s full name and so forth there. How else could he know Burbank? And J, himself, had told his departure time. What if Goodrick had called a lot of airlines (in that phone booth?) and so found out which flight? Would they have told him? Sure, they would have told him, one way or another, if he’d lied in his big fat teeth and said he was J M. Little. Oh, he could have found out, all right.
J was feeling terrible now about his attempt at being cryptic. Goofed that up pretty good, he had. Now, now. Was he believing that all this was important enough for Goodrick to have gone to all that trouble?
He began to try on for size serious belief in the tale of the voyage of the chosen few. But some knowledge of his own rose up. J did understand something about money, after all, and to build … or even to learn how to build … such an Ark would cost more money than there was.
Then the old man was loopy, and the government might well be worried that he had a room-mate, even for one night. True, the old man had told J not to trust this Goodrick, but if the old man was loopy … J didn’t want to obstruct the providence of his government, of course, and just because he found this Goodrick so obnoxious.…
He could see the so-and-so standing in the aisle talking to the stewardess. Goodrick’s head was half-turned; J saw him in profile. Now what was that glimpse, something foreign and yet familiar? A certain flattening? J couldn’t believe that so flamboyant a character could be an undercover man!
He was going in circles; a disbelief in the one man kept kicking him around to a disbelief in the other when suddenly he found his foot upon a rock.
J, himself, had given his word. Okay. He had not told one syllable he had overheard, and he would not, simply because he had said he would not. And that was that. Whew! J stretched and looked out the window.
A suspicion crept softly into his mind. What if the old man hadn’t been crazy, but a projected voyage of an Ark to the moon was not the secret? Well, if so, J would have to keep the secret, just the same. Although no Noah, he. Now Noah had been a good man, he mused, whatever that was. Noah had taken his family, his own, his seed. It was all just a myth, of course. J understood that you mustn’t take those old tales for literal history. Yet you must, at the same time, consider them to be profound truths of some sort.
The clouds shredded suddenly. J could see through to the earth. He could see a cluster of buildings down there on the land, looking like a bug, with tentacles of roads reaching out. Once upon a time, myth said, the Lord had sent a flood. Maybe the Lord was beginning to think of man as a disease on his beautiful earth. A parasite, cells multiplying, spreading destruction, spoiling, and growing faster and faster the more it grew—until one day the earth might die of its cancer, man. A cancer always suicides. J shivered.
He fastened his seat belt and watched as they lumbered in on a long slant toward the enormous sore of the metropolis. A really bad patch of scale it made, spreading, spreading, pulling down the mountains, dirtying the air and sea.
J squeezed his eyes shut; when he opened them, his perspective had shifted.
He had always enjoyed flying into Los Angeles at night. He liked to spot some tract of dwellings with its streetlamps contained in its own tight design, like a pearl brooch on the dark, the kind he remembered on his grandmother’s gowns. Even by day, as now, he liked to watch the car-corpuscles moving in the city’s veins. And see backyards with their lids off. Sometimes the blue-green flecks of swimming pools, like a burst of broken plaster chips, thrown down among a fuzz of trees. Sometimes rows of tiny pens that walled in trash. The parking lots in their flat and ugly symmetry. And here and there a thrusting up of shining buildings.
CHAPTER 4
Sunday Afternoon
Having shuffled off the plane, J soon picked out from the crowd the familiar flip of Sophia’s hand. He was very glad to see her, but he did not embrace her with as much shameless affection as he felt because he could see that Goodrick was watching them.
He had a flash of retrospective recognition; well, J thought indignantly, if Goodrick has got any yellow blood mixed in, he must be the most damned scrutable Oriental spy that ever was!
“You look all right,” said his wife accusingly. “How do you feel?”
“Augh,” J shrugged, meaning not bad, not good. They began to walk.
“Do you want to go straight to Doctor Lodge, J? Even on Sunday I’m sure …”
“No, no. Why should I give him time and a half to tell me the same thing? You by yourself?”
“The girls are kindly getting supper for the multitude,” said Sophia. “Win’s riding herd on the Little kids. My mother is there.”
“Oh?” He guided her step and stepped beside her on the moving stairs.
“I wanted to see how you were,” said Sophia. “And anyhow, I like airports.”
J was feeling something of a brand on his brow—a man with secrets he must not tell, followed by a spy. But worse … a man very much afraid of his own wife. He had better not even think about it; Sophia could read his slightest shift of mood.
But the angle of his own vision was somehow changed. He was seeing Mr. and Mrs. J M. Little through the eyes of a spying stranger. A whole series of overlapping images from other years went fading out; he saw Sophia as she was.
In the latter stretch of her forties Sophia was rather handsome. She was tall with good legs and ankles. Her waist was not as slim as a girl’s waist, but she was full-breasted and held herself high, and her figure was not dumpy. Her soft black hair was well-threaded with gray, and she wore it folded over itself in some mysterious way at the back and puffed up on top. Her best feature was the manner in which her large brown eyes were set into her face, where the skin around them had crumpled in a way that J personally found very attractive.
“Now, I want to know,” she said, taking his arm as they set out down the tiled tunnel, “exactly what happened to you.”
So he began to tell her all over again, putting in details, as the state of the weather, the make of the car, the name of the woman (Evangeline Burns), and what she had been wearing at the time. To all of this Sophia listened like a Desdemona. J did not say too much about the hospital except that he was sure glad to be out of that dump.
“But, J,” she said, frowning a little as the door to the luggage place opened magically before them, “if they couldn’t find anything wrong, why did they make you stay there all night?”
“For observation,” said J gloomily. “Although as far as I know (and I should know), nobody so much as peeked in at the door. So much for observation.”
“Was it a private room?”
“No, no,” said J. He reached into his pocket for the check he had almost forgotten. “So this morning I settled for a little something. Here.”
Sophia read it and frowned. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars?” (J was trying to spot that Goodrick. He wasn’t around. No luggage, eh? Hah!) “It doesn’t seem like very much,” his wife was saying.
“Oh, well, price of a suit and a little
extra. What does it matter?”
“J, you seem … You’re not worried about anything, are you?”
He rubbed his face. “No, no. I’m just kind of beat. Didn’t sleep worth a darn.” (He beat down his memory of the reason.)
“Then I’m sorry the mob is there.”
“No, no. Be glad to see them.” J pretended that he had seen his suitcase in the mass. (He was going to have to take hold of himself. He couldn’t afford to be stabbed by the shocking thought that Sophia would have no seat to the moon. Aw, come on, knock it off! There’s nothing in it.)
When he had found his bag and turned back to her, she was holding out the check. “Tell you what,” said J impulsively, “why don’t you spend it?”
“Does it count as income? Is it taxable?” Sophia was the household budgeteer. She understood about money, too, on her own scale.
“I don’t think so. Not worth worrying about. Go ahead. Blow it in.”
“Humph,” said Sophia gravely. It was an old family custom to pronounce “humph” as spelled. She tucked the check into her handbag without saying thank you. The family often did not. Thanks were usually given by a display of pleasure in the gift. All of them were used to assuming that the giver had wished to please.
They went outside, and there was Goodrick, just getting into a taxi. He waved, teeth gleaming.
“Who’s that?” said Sophia.
“Fellow on the plane,” said J so gloomily that she asked no more. They crossed to the parking lot. He tossed his bag into the back of his Oldsmobile. He was feeling shaky now that the spy was gone. “Want to drive?” he said to her.
“I will,” she said so quickly that he knew she had not expected to drive going home. Sophia drove well, a little tensely, perhaps. She maneuvered out of the lot, wended the way to the San Diego Freeway going north. Once on it, she slipped into the pace smoothly.
J gazed at the cars, the cars, the cars, tearing along at 68 miles per hour and in phase as if they had rehearsed this like a water ballet. At the tons of expensive machinery, running on millions of dollars’ worth of road and carrying so few human persons that the whole lot of them could have walked sedately on a three-foot sidewalk and not jostled an elbow. It was absurd. Absurd? Well, what was it but man paring down space with the knife of speed?
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