“You know you can’t take everything with you, Grandpa,” a kindly voice pointed out. “There’s simply not enough room where you’re going.”
“I know that,” he replied, as he started painstakingly wrapping up one of the chess pieces on the table beside his recliner chair. “But I’d like to take as many keepsakes with me as I can.”
“Well, surely you don’t need to take that chess set with you,” said his granddaughter. “I’ve never seen you play even a single game with it.”
“I think I played once, maybe when I was a boy,” said the Old Man.
“But not anymore,” she noted.
“No, not anymore,” he agreed. “Not in a long, long time.”
“Then why take it? Besides, one of the pieces is missing.”
He paused, looking at the bishop he held in his hand for a long moment. “I’ve taken it with me everyplace I’ve ever lived.”
“But why?” she persisted.
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “And until I do know, I suppose I’d better keep taking it along.”
“Maybe I’ll ask Miss Juniper why you keep it,” said the girl. “She knows everything.”
“Who is Miss Juniper?” asked the Old Man.
“My playmate.”
“Funny name for a playmate. Have I met her?”
“Only I can see her.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Didn’t you ever have a playmate like that?”
The Old Man shrugged. “I suppose I must have.”
“What was his name?”
“Damned if I know,” he said as he began wrapping again.
With that comment, Mr. Paloobi felt the newfound tie between them start to dissipate. The Old Man’s thoughts of the distant past began to vanish, his mind moved on to other things, and Mr. Paloobi felt the solidity of the bench starting to form beneath him again, as the coldness of the mist surrounded him once more.
He missed the Boy who had become the Old Man, missed him desperately, and painful as it was, he let his mind drift back to their last day together.
The Boy’s interests were expanding apace with his intellect. He had less time for games of make-believe, even for chess. There were entire days when Mr. Paloobi was never summoned to the here and now. He didn’t know what he had done wrong, but the Boy seemed content, indeed happier than ever, so he uttered no complaints. Besides, he knew somehow that they would do no good.
The Boy sat before his tray. His parents were out for the evening (some things never changed), and he separated the meal from force of habit, placing the greens and the nonchocolate dessert on a plastic plate, then pushing it to the other side of the empty table before rearranging his own plate.
“Could you please pass a spoon?”
The boy looked up to see Mr. Paloobi on the other side of the chess set, sitting on the little rickety chair that had broken countless times under the gentle giant’s weight over the years, yet was always undamaged when the boy woke up the next morning.
Smiling, Mr. Paloobi reached out a furry paw, squeezing the boy’s hand gently when he accepted the spoon. Then, instead of eating in quiet companionship as they usually did, the Boy spoke excitedly about his excursion to the planetarium the next morning.
After dinner the Boy pulled out an astronomy book he’d been given for his birthday, and they lay together on the floor, holding the book over their heads as they pointed out all the stellar constellations they remembered.
Then, just before bedtime, they played their first game of chess in a month, the Boy successfully protecting his king from the evil queen with one of his bold knights, their movements mirroring the story Mr. Paloobi had told when they first met. When the boy hopped into bed that night, the knight was still clasped tightly in his hand.
Rather than listen to a bedtime story, he told Mr. Paloobi about his day at school. His teacher had started to give him some extra work, so he was no longer bored in class, and he could now boast that he had four friends, not counting Mr. Paloobi. He had just started discussing the possibility of a camping trip with his friends when he noticed the sad smile on the Mr. Paloobi’s face.
“You know I can’t come, don’t you?” asked Mr. Paloobi gently.
“I know,” said the Boy, quietly.
“Perhaps we had better talk about it.”
There was no response.
“Are you all right?” asked Mr. Paloobi.
Still no response.
He waved a huge hand in front of the Boy’s open eyes. They didn’t blink.
He spent another few minutes trying to get the Boy to react, to acknowledge that he was there. He was still trying when he was pulled inexorably back to the bench.
When the Boy woke up in the morning, he was no longer holding the knight in his hand.
Mr. Paloobi sighed, uncomfortably shifting his weight so that he wouldn’t wake Lionel, who had rolled over sometime during his ruminations of the past and now lay curled up against his side. The benchwarmer smiled wryly to himself. If anyone could see them, they’d probably do quite a double take: an impeccably dressed man who looked like a bear, and a four-hundred-pound lion who looked like an oversized tabby cat.
He found Lionel’s nearness comforting, his remarks amusing. But even after seventy years, Lionel’s friendship couldn’t fill the void the Boy’s absence had made in his life. His two brief excursions with new charges seemed like failed job interviews. He felt lonely and incomplete.
And suddenly he knew that someone else felt the same.
He just had time to rub Lionel’s head apologetically before he was called forth from the bench once more, hearing the discontented rumble of his feline friend as he left the limbo in which he had lived for so long.
The Old Man was having a difficult time of it. Yesterday he had forgotten his granddaughter’s name—just for a moment, mind you; just once. And when the nurse had walked in, young and pretty, immaculate in her white outfit, he’d momentarily thought it was his wife, remarked that he didn’t remember the white dress, and asked when she had bought it.
But he’d known who the nurse was when she came by with his dinner. She’d asked if she could turn the television on for him, and he’d thanked her and asked if it was time for Maverick yet. She had explained gently that Maverick wasn’t on this week, and had left the set tuned to some mindless comedy with a bunch of actors he couldn’t recognize.
The Old Man knew that these were just momentary glitches, but he also knew that the very best way to keep an aging mind sharp was to give it puzzles and problems to solve. He looked around the room for something to occupy him. It would have to be quiet; his wife was three months pregnant with their first child and he didn’t want to wake her.
He got up and walked to a dresser, pulling open the top drawer. There was the first letter he’d ever earned, for making the baseball team. He ran his hand over it proudly. If he worked hard enough, maybe next year he could be a starter.
He heard a feminine laugh from somewhere beyond his door. He shook his head. Colleen was getting to be such a pretty girl these days. He still felt awkward and tongue-tied from time to time, but at least now he knew why.
He rummaged further, and then he came to the chess set. It had been a while since he’d played—maybe a week, maybe even a little longer.
He sat down at the same table he took his meals at, opened the board, and began painstakingly placing ivory and ebony pieces on it.
It took him a long time, because he had trouble remembering the specific placement of the pieces, but he was determined to get it right. When it was finally set up, he sat back with a satisfied smile on his wrinkled, grizzled face.
Then, suddenly, something on the board caught his attention. Or, rather, the lack of something. He leaned forward, frowning, as he realized that there was a piece missing. He stared intently at the chessboard, knowing that it was significant for some reason, but not quite certain why.
A furry hand reached across the table, gently placing a k
night on the empty square where it belonged.
The Old Man looked up to see a man with warm, friendly eyes sitting across the table from him. He might have trouble recalling faces and names now, but he could never forget those bearlike features.
“So are we going to play a game?” asked Mr. Paloobi.
The Old Man smiled happily. “Welcome back.” He reached into his pocket, then stretched his hand across the table. “Have a piece of chocolate before my queen conquers your kingdom.”
And they spent the night playing chess, nibbling on chocolate, and talking about things that were of great import to very young boys and very old men.
It is said that friendship never dies. Case in point: Mr. Paloobi—a lonely being who has finally entered the game again after riding the bench for seven long decades in . . . the Twilight Zone.
Sometimes life’s highway insists on taking an unsuspected curve. Meet Miss Geraldine Purdy, en route to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, named after a game show. And don’t forget the “Miss.” Miss Purdy has always lived the game of life by the rules. Is it possible she’ll die that way?
T
he irregular Chihuahuan Desert sprawled over the surface of the map. Red and blue road lines made a varicose-veined jumble on the paper landscape. The knotted, dusty fingers of the Jarila, San Andres, and auxiliary mountain ranges fanned north from White Sands Missile Range, which nestled in the desert’s ocher outline like the soft, padded palm of a gigantic hand.
Geraldine Purdy bent over the map spread across the front seat of her 1956 Ford Victoria sedan and squinted sun-blinded eyes in the car’s heavy interior shade.
Now, she encouraged herself. Here’s where I am now. Her narrow, joint-swollen forefinger tapped a dot at the eastern edge of the map’s pale palm imprint, so like a hand opening to greet, or entrap, her.
“Green Tree, New Mexico, indeed.” She snorted aloud, gazing through her parked car’s tinted window at the weathered wooden houses surrounding a cheap café-tavern with one hot-red gas pump in front of it.
She’d seen the last “green tree” early that morning, when she’d left Roswell, twenty miles behind her down U.S. Highway 70. Why, Roswell was an oasis compared to this dusty speck upon the face of the earth.
Miss Purdy calmed her irritability, and sighed. She’d planned this trip for a long time, and she was going through with it, come hell or . . .
She giggled wickedly as her finger traced a red line westward to her destination. Come hell or . . . Truth or Consequences. Silly name! She’d liked the original one. Hot Springs. So much more natural. So appropriate. How strange that it had been fifteen years since her niece’s letters had begun arriving postmarked with that absurd new town name, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
She’d heard the story from her niece when it happened in 1950.
Host Ralph Edwards—of This Is Your Life TV fame later—had a radio program called Truth or Consequences. Mr. Edwards promised to broadcast the program from the first town that renamed itself after the show for the next fifty years. Hot Springs jumped at the bait and Ralph Edwards came to what New Mexicans now called “T or C” with a lot of hoopla—beauty contest, parade, and stage show. Edwards was out as host of the show by 1954, but the silly thing continued. She’d noticed only recently that Truth or Consequences was on TV now, hosted by some fly-by-night appropriately named Bob Barker.
Miss Purdy carefully refolded her fragile old map into a long rectangle and fanned herself with it, glancing again at the endless sandy terrain scarred by calloused mounds of cracked red earth. Far away, the low mountains looked olive drab from the scraggly mesquite bushes barnacled to their rocky sides.
She sighed again, delicately lifting short gray bangs from her damp forehead, and replaced the map in her glove compartment. With a choking lurch, the dusty black Ford leaped forward from the road’s gritty shoulder. It crawled like some shiny desert beetle onto the smooth black asphalt that snaked through the ocher sands ahead.
Green Tree disappeared behind her. The Ford cruised along at fifty miles an hour, five below the speed limit. Dry desert air flowed in through the rolled-down windows, stirring the short sleeves of Miss Purdy’s beige printed voile dress and gently pushing up the brim of her cream-colored straw hat.
Stillness surrounded her. The entire desert seemed petrified, although she knew it was bustling with hidden buggy and snaky life.
I am the only person alive here, thought Miss Purdy, and the only sound in this wide desert is the whoosh of the wind against my little black car that’s spinning along to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
She leaned back in the sticky vinyl seat and lifted her chin to the pale, hot horizon of bleached sky and dusty earth beyond her insect-crusted windshield. She smiled triumphantly and tingled down to her toes. The speedometer swung up to fifty-five.
My name is Geraldine Purdy and I am the only thing alive, and back in Roswell the library air-conditioning has broken down again and all the books, the stacks and stacks of books, are moldering and rotting and turning to dust and I don’t care!
After all, why should she care? The library was no longer her concern. A round gold watch pinned to her left shoulder through the thin dress fabric and sturdy slip and brassiere straps proved that.
MISS G. PURDY was etched on the back in fine, old-fashioned script; 44 YEARS OF SELFLESS SERVICE.
Forty-four years of rubber-stamping books—Melville, Faulkner, Tom Jones (the naughty one), Tom Sawyer (the often censored one). Always changing the number of the day, or the month, or the year. Never thinking beyond three weeks at a time.
Then, unexpectedly, someone had stamped Miss Purdy herself—due to be returned and shelved.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. Not the fault of the library board, certainly, those suit-coated solons who’d never failed to refer to her as “Our Miss Purdy.” They hadn’t done it.
Nor had Miss Purdy herself, who hadn’t even noticed that her hair had grown gray, what with always looking at the books, their call numbers, and the library cards as they passed from her hand to the waiting hands on the other side of the desk, her desk.
No, it was time that had canceled Miss Purdy’s circulation.
She smiled. How clever to think of herself as a book. She envisioned herself listed in neat Roman type in some huge bibliography: “Miss Geraldine Purdy, pub. 1900; hardcover and fine print; copyright expired, 1966; unavailable in paperback.”
Not that she was bitter. Oh, no. She understood. She welcomed a change of scene. The library had become too much for her, infested with giggling gaggles of gum-chewing teenagers. She knew they called her “Old Pruney.”
Anyway, her sister Hatty’s girl, Evelyn, had long urged her to move to Hot Spri . . . to Truth or Consequences. So she had retired in ceremony, with a sheet cake and Hawaiian Punch reception. She bought the lovely gray suitcase set that now rested in the trunk and on the backseat, and left her small apartment on East Bland Street to begin a new life.
“There’s a small garden, Aunt Gerry,” Evelyn had written in her galloping scrawl, “that I really don’t have time to tend. You’ll find plenty to do, with the kids growing like weeds and me with a million errands to do. Naturally, we wouldn’t expect you to work for us, or anything, but we know you wouldn’t want to be bored to death by having nothing to do, either.”
Poor Evelyn. Miss Purdy wondered how she really felt about her aunt coming to live with her family, though she had insisted. It was hard to tell.
The sun was almost directly over the car now, and Miss Purdy felt hungry. Only two miles to Tularosa, a sign said. She should find someplace decent to eat there. The growing outline of the town buildings shimmered in the noonday sun. Even the asphalt highway seemed about to melt, glittering as if wet where the road dipped.
Miss Purdy obediently slowed her Ford to thirty miles per hour at Tularosa’s city limits, but her heart quickened unreasonably when she spotted a lonely silhouette standing on the road’s sandy sh
oulder.
A hitchhiker.
How disagreeable! His very presence was so demanding. The landscape seemed to slide by in slow motion now, the hitchhiker’s figure growing larger and clearer.
He wore blue jeans and a wrinkled white T-shirt. A duffel bag slumped at his tennis-shoed feet. He stood there in traditional hitchhiker’s pose—arm and thumb crookedly extended—curly blond hair matted to his tanned forehead. His eyes squinted into the sun with an expression of hopeful cynicism.
His pose reminded Miss Purdy of that awful Marlon Brando in a movie she’d never seen, The Wild One, leering at passing women from that motorcycle that was cocked on its stand like his leather billed cap tilted above his sneering, smart-alecky face. Nasty boy. That Brando person had been even less appetizing in a film she had seen, A Streetcar Named Blaze, or something. Nasty film too.
As her car drew abreast, the hitchhiker’s young, knowing face loomed in the passenger window, his squint drawn out to a leer as she drove past.
His face hung there for an agonizing instant.
Miss Purdy stared straight ahead, spasmodically pressing her foot down on the gas pedal, and finally felt him sucked behind her for good.
The heat still wove around her, a suffocating blanket. She released the breath she discovered she’d been holding. In the rearview mirror, she watched the figure diminish behind the dust of her acceleration. Finally, it bent to hoist the duffel bag and started walking along the shoulder of the road.
Oh! Her bangs were unpleasantly pasted to her forehead now, even as her hands loosened on the steering wheel. Tularosa streets flickered by. She was almost out of town before she spied a small café with an Air Conditioned sign in the window. The black Ford hesitated before pulling to the curb. Miss Purdy gathered her purse, gloves, and road map, then got out and locked the car.
Twilight Zone Anthology Page 9
