Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09

by The Small Assassin (v2. 1)

  I called her name. A dozen times I called it.

  “Tally! Tally! Oh, Tally!”

  You really expect answers to your calling when you are young. You feel that whatever you may think can be real. And some times maybe that is not so wrong.

  I thought of Tally, swimming out into the water last May, with her pigtails trailing, blond. She went laughing, and the sun was on her small twelve-year-old shoulders. I thought of the water settling quiet, of the life guard leaping into it, of Tally’s mother screaming, and of how Tally never came out. . . .

  The life guard tried to persuade her to come out, but she did not. He came back with only bits of water-weed in his big-knuckled fingers, and Tally was gone. She would not sit across from me at school any longer, or chase indoor balls on the brick streets on summer nights. She had gone too far out, and the lake would not let her return.

  And now in the lonely autumn when the sky was huge and the water was huge and the beach was so very long, I had come down for the last time, alone.

  I called her name again and again. Tally, oh, Tally!

  The wind blew so very softly over my ears, the way wind blows over the mouths of sea-shells to set them whispering. The water rose, embraced my chest, then my knees, up and down, one way and another, sucking under my heels.

  “Tally! Come back, Tally!”

  I was only twelve. But I know how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that is no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long autumn days of the years past when I had carried her books home from school.

  Tally!

  I called her name for the last time. I shivered. I felt water on my face and did not know how it got there. The waves had not splashed that high.

  Turning, I retreated to the sand and stood there for half an hour, hoping for one glimpse, one sign, one little bit of Tally to remember. Then, I knelt and built a sand castle, shaping it fine, building it as Tally and I had built so many of them. But this time, I only built half of it. Then I got up.

  “Tally, if you hear me, come in and build the rest.”

  I walked off toward that far-away speck that was Mama. The water came in, blended the sand-castle circle by circle, mashing it down little by little into the original smoothness.

  Silently, I walked along the shore.

  Far away, a merry-go-round jangled faintly, but it was only the wind.

  The next day, I went away on the train.

  A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it. It forgets the cornlands of Illinois, the rivers of childhood, the bridges, the lakes, the valleys, the cottages, the hurts and the joys. It spreads them out behind and they drop back of a horizon.

  I lengthened my bones, put flesh on them, changed my young mind for an older one, threw away clothes as they no longer fitted, shifted from grammar to high-school, to college. And then there was a young woman in Sacramento. I knew her for a time, and we were married. By the time I was twenty-two, I had almost forgotten what the East was like.

  Margaret suggested that our delayed honeymoon be taken back in that direction.

  Like a memory, a train works both ways. A train can bring rushing back all those things you left behind so many years before.

  Lake Bluff, population 10,000, came up over the sky. Margaret looked so handsome in her fine new clothes. She watched me as I felt my old world gather me back into its living. She held my arm as the train slid into Bluff Station and our baggage was escorted out.

  So many years, and the things they do to people’s faces and bodies. When we walked through the town together I saw no one I recognized. There were faces with echoes in them. Echoes of hikes on ravine trails. Faces with small laughter in them from closed grammar schools and swinging on metal-linked swings and going up and down on teeter-totters. But I didn’t speak. I walked and looked and filled up inside with all those memories, like leaves stacked for autumn burning.

  We stayed on two weeks in all, revisiting all the places together. The days were happy. I thought I loved Margaret well. At least I thought I did.

  It was on one of the last days that we walked down by the shore. It was not quite as late in the year as that day so many years before, but the first evidences of desertion were coming upon the beach. People were thinning out, several of the hot-dog stands had been shuttered and nailed, and the wind, as always, waited there to sing for us.

  I almost saw Mama sitting on the sand as she used to sit. I had that feeling again of wanting to be alone. But I could not force myself to speak of this to Margaret. I only held onto her and waited.

  It got late in the day. Most of the children had gone home and only a few men and women remained basking in the windy sun.

  The life-guard boat pulled up on the shore. The life guard stepped out of it, slowly, with something in his arms.

  I froze there. I held my breath and I felt small, only twelve years old, very little, very infinitesimal and afraid. The wind howled. I could not see Margaret. I could see only the beach, the life guard slowly emerging from the boat with a gray sack in his hands, not very heavy, and his face almost as gray and lined.

  “Stay here, Margaret,” I said. I don’t know why I said it.

  “But, why?”

  “Just stay here, that’s all—”

  I walked slowly down the sand to where the life guard stood. He looked at me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  The life guard kept looking at me for a long time and he couldn’t speak. He put the gray sack on the sand, and water whispered wet up around it and went back.

  “What is it?” I insisted.

  “Strange,” said the life guard, quietly.

  I waited.

  “Strange,” he said, softly. “Strangest thing I ever saw. She’s been dead a long time.”

  I repeated his words.

  He nodded. “Ten years, I’d say. There haven’t been any children drowned here this year. There were twelve children drowned here since 1933, but we found all of them before a few hours had passed. All except one, I remember. This body here, why it must be ten years in the water. It’s not—pleasant.”

  I stared at the gray sack in his arms. “Open it,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. The wind was louder.

  He fumbled with the sack.

  “Hurry, man, open it!” I cried.

  “I better not do that,” he said. Then perhaps he saw the way my face must have looked. “She was such a little girl—”

  He opened it only part way. That was enough.

  The beach was deserted. There was only the sky and the wind and the water and the autumn coming on lonely. I looked down at her there.

  I said something over and over. A name. The life guard looked at me. “Where did you find her?” I asked.

  “Down the beach, that way, in the shallow water. It’s a long, long time for her, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yes, it is. Oh God, yes it is.”

  I thought: people grow. I have grown. But she has not changed. She is still small. She is still young. Death does not permit growth or change. She still has golden hair. She will be forever young and I will love her forever, oh God, I will love her forever.

  The life guard tied up the sack again.

  Down the beach, a few moments later, I walked by myself. I stopped, and looked down at something. This is where the life guard found her, I said to myself.

  There, at the water’s edge, lay a sand castle, only half-built. Just like Tally and I used to build them. She half and I half.

  I looked at it. I knelt beside the sand castle and saw the small prints of feet coming in from the lake and going back out to the lake again and not returning.

  Then—I knew.

  “I’ll help you finish it,” I said.

  I did. I built the rest
of it up very slowly, then I arose and turned away and walked off, so as not to watch it crumble in the waves, as all things crumble.

  I walked back up the beach to where a strange woman named Margaret was waiting for me, smiling. . . .

  THE CROWD

  Mr. Spallner put his hands over his face.

  There was the feeling of movement in space, the beautifully tortured scream, the impact and tumbling of the car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy, and him hurled out of it. Then—silence.

  The crowd came running. Faintly, where he lay, he heard them running. He could tell their ages and their sizes by the sound of their numerous feet over the summer grass and on the lined pavement, and over the asphalt street, and picking through the cluttered bricks to where his car hung half into the night sky, still spinning its wheels with a senseless centrifuge.

  Where the crowd came from he didn’t know. He struggled to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon him, hung over him like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees. They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a moondial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing any more ever.

  How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere.

  A siren. A police voice. Movement. Blood trickled from his lips and he was being moved into an ambulance. Someone said, “Is he dead?” And someone else said, “No, he’s not dead.” And a third person said, “He won’t die, he’s not going to die.” And he saw the faces of the crowd beyond him in the night, and he knew by their expressions that he wouldn’t die. And that was strange. He saw a man’s face, thin, bright, pale; the man swallowed and bit his lips, very sick. There was a small woman, too, with red hair and too much red on her cheeks and lips. And a little boy with a freckled face. Others’ faces. An old man with a wrinkled upper lip, an old woman, with a mole upon her chin. They had all come from—where? Houses, cars, alleys, from the immediate and the accident-shocked world. Out of alleys and out of hotels and out of streetcars and seemingly out of nothing they came.

  The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. He couldn’t put his finger on it. They were far worse than this machine-made thing that happened to him now.

  The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in. That crowd that always came so fast, so strangely fast, to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man’s agony by their frank curiosity.

  The ambulance drove off. He sank back and their faces still stared into his face, even with his eyes shut.

  The car wheels spun in his mind for days. One wheel, four wheels, spinning, spinning, and whirring, around and around.

  He knew it was wrong. Something wrong with the wheels and the whole accident and the running of feet and the curiosity. The crowd faces mixed and spun into the wild rotation of the wheels.

  He awoke.

  Sunlight, a hospital room, a hand taking his pulse.

  “How do you feel?” asked the doctor.

  The wheels faded away. Mr. Spallner looked around.

  “Fine—I guess.”

  He tried to find words. About the accident. “Doctor?”

  “Yes?”

  “That crowd—was it last night?”

  “Two days ago. You’ve been here since Thursday. You’re all right, though. You’re doing fine. Don’t try and get up.”

  “That crowd. Something about wheels, too. Do accidents make people, well, a—little off?”

  “Temporarily, sometimes.”

  He lay staring up at the doctor. “Does it hurt your time sense?”

  “Panic sometimes does.”

  “Makes a minute seem like an hour, or maybe an hour seem like a minute?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me tell you then.” He felt the bed under him, the sunlight on his face. “You’ll think I’m crazy. I was driving too fast, I know. I’m sorry now. I jumped the curb and hit that wall. I was hurt and numb, I know, but I still remember things. Mostly—the crowd.” He waited a moment and then decided to go on, for he suddenly knew what it was that bothered him. “The crowd got there too quickly. Thirty seconds after the smash they were all standing over me and staring at me . . . it’s not right they should run that fast, so late at night. . . .”

  “You only think it was thirty seconds,” said the doctor. “It was probably three or four minutes. Your senses—”

  “Yeah, I know—my senses, the accident. But I was conscious! I remember one thing that puts it all together and makes it funny, God, so damned funny. The wheels of my car, upside down. The wheels were still spinning when the crowd got there!”

  The doctor smiled.

  The man in bed went on. “I’m positive! The wheels were spinning and spinning fast—the front wheels! Wheels don’t spin very long, friction cuts them down. And these were really spinning!”

  ’You’re confused,” said the doctor.

  “I’m not confused. That street was empty. Not a soul in sight. And then the accident and the wheels still spinning and all those faces over me, quick, in no time. And the way they looked down at me, I knew I wouldn’t die. . . .”

  “Simple shock,” said the doctor, walking away into the sunlight.

  They released him from the hospital two weeks later. He rode home in a taxi. People had come to visit him during his two weeks on his back, and to all of them he had told his story, the accident, the spinning wheels, the crowd. They had all laughed with him concerning it, and passed it off.

  He leaned forward and tapped on the taxi window.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The cabbie looked back. “Sorry, boss. This is one helluva town to drive in. Got an accident up ahead. Want me to detour?”

  “Yes. No. No! Wait. Go ahead. Let’s—let’s take a look.”

  The cab moved forward, honking.

  “Funny damn thing,” said the cabbie. “Hey, you! Get that fleatrap out the way!” Quieter, “Funny thing—more damn people. Nosy people.”

  Mr. Spallner looked down and watched his fingers tremble on his knee. “You noticed that, too?”

  “Sure,” said the cabbie. “All the time. There’s always a crowd. You’d think it was their own mother got killed.”

  “They come running awfully fast,” said the man in the back of the cab.

  “Same way with a fire or an explosion. Nobody around. Boom. Lotsa people around. I dunno.”

  “Ever seen an accident—at night?”

  The cabbie nodded. “Sure. Don’t make no difference. There’s always a crowd.”

  The wreck came in view. A body lay on the pavement. You knew there was a body even if you couldn’t see it. Because of the crowd. The crowd with its back toward him as he sat in the rear of the cab. With its back toward him. He opened the window and almost started to yell. But he didn’t have the nerve. If he yelled they might turn around.

  And he was afraid to see their faces.

  “I seem to have a penchant for accidents,” he said, in his office. It was late afternoon. His friend sat across the desk from him, listening. “I got out of the hospital this morning and first thing on the way home, we detoured around a wreck.”

  “Things run in cycles,” said Morgan.

  “Let me tell you about my accident.”

  “I’ve heard it. Heard it all.”

  “But it was funny, you must admit.”

  “I must admit. Now how about a drink?”

  They talked on for half an hour or more. All the while they talked, at the back of Spallner’s brain a small watch ticked, a watch that never needed winding. It was the memory of a few little things. Wheels and faces.

  At about five-thirty there was a hard metal noise in the
street. Morgan nodded and looked out and down. “What’d I tell you? Cycles. A truck and a cream-colored Cadillac. Yes, yes.”

  Spallner walked to the window. He was very cold and as he stood there, he looked at his watch, at the small minute hand. One two three four five seconds—people running—eight nine ten eleven twelve—from all over, people came running—fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen seconds—more people, more cars, more horns blowing. Curiously distant, Spallner looked upon the scene as an explosion in reverse, the fragments of the detonation sucked back to the point of impulsion. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one seconds and the crowd was there. Spallner made a gesture down at them, wordless.

  The crowd had gathered so fast.

  He saw a woman’s body a moment before the crowd swallowed it up.

  Morgan said, “You look lousy. Here. Finish your drink.”

  “I’m all right, I’m all right. Let me alone. I’m all right. Can you see those people? Can you see any of them? I wish we could see them closer.”

  Morgan cried out, “Where in hell are you going?”

  Spallner was out the door, Morgan after him, and down the stairs, as rapidly as possible. “Come along, and hurry.”

  “Take it easy, you’re not a well man!”

  They walked out on to the street. Spallner pushed his way forward. He thought he saw a red-haired woman with too much red color on her cheeks and lips.

  “There!” He turned wildly to Morgan. “Did you see her?”

  “See who?”

  “Damn it; she’s gone. The crowd closed in!”

  The crowd was all around, breathing and looking and shuffling and mixing and mumbling and getting in the way when he tried to shove through. Evidently the red-haired woman had seen him coming and run off.

  He saw another familiar face! A little freckled boy. But there are many freckled boys in the world. And, anyway, it was no use, before Spallner reached him, this little boy ran away and vanished among the people.