by Ray Bradbury
He had slapped her!
All over a gift from Jules. All over a blue candle. Helen Marcott tried to think clearly. She was seeing Eldridge concisely for the first time.
She was still crying, thinking about her disillusionment in Eldridge, when she struck a match. Carefully she set the candle on the table next to herself and lit it.
She paused. The candle looked so peaceful and contented.
Helen Marcott picked up the letter Jules had thoughtfully enclosed. How gentle, how nice of him.
She read the letter over again, taking in every word.
* * * *
“Darling Helen: A little remembrance to show that there are no hard feelings. This is a prayer candle. To bring good fortune and happiness to the one you love, light the candle in the evening and, three times, repeat the name of your beloved.
With fond memories,
Jules.”
Helen Marcott brushed away the tears. She turned to the flaming candlestick. Her gentle breath touched the flame, three times, quietly, fervently, longingly, as she said: “Jules—Jules—Jules—”
The candle flame flickered.
THE DUCKER
This was first published in the winter 1943 issue of Weird Tales, and reprinted the next year Weird Tales (Canada). “The Ducker” was also anthologized in the British anthology, Weird Legacies (1977), and became the forerunner for “Bang! You’re Dead!,” another short story featuring protagonist Johnny Choir which came out in 1944.
* * * *
The transport was loaded, ready to leave at midnight. Feet shuffled up long wooden gangplanks. A lot of songs were being sung. A lot of silent goodbyes were being said to New York Harbour. Military insignia flashed in the loading lights….
Johnny Choir wasn’t afraid. His khaki-clad arms trembled with excitement and uncertainty, but he wasn’t afraid. He held onto the railing and thought. The thinking came down over him like a bright shell, cutting out the soldiers, the transport, the noise. He thought about the days that had slipped by him.
A few years before—
Days in the green park, down by the creek, under the shady oaks and elms, near the grey-planked benches and the bright flowers. The kids, he among them, came like an adolescent avalanche down the tall hillsides, yelling, laughing, tumbling.
Sometimes they’d have carven hunks of wood with clothes-pins from the wash-line for triggers; rubber bands, snapped and flicked through the summer air, for ammunition. Sometimes they’d have cap-guns, exploding pointedly at one another. And most of the time when they couldn’t afford powder-caps, they just pointed their dime revolvers at one another and shouted:
“Bang! You’re dead.”
“Bang-bang—I gotcha!”
It wasn’t simple as all that, though. Arguments rose, quick, hot, short, and over in a minute.
“Bang, I gotcha!”
“Aw, you missed me a mile! Boom! There, I got you!”
“Oh, no you didn’t either! How could you get me? You were shot. You were dead. You couldn’t shoot me.”
“I already said you missed me. I ducked.”
“Aw, you can’t duck a bullet. I pointed right at you.”
“I still ducked.”
“Nuts. You always say that, Johnny. You don’t play right. You’re shot. You gotta lay down!”
“But I’m the sergeant—I can’t die.”
“Well, I’m better than a sergeant. I’m a captain.”
“If you are a captain, then I’m a general!”
“I’m a major-general!”
“I quit. You don’t play fair.”
The eternal wrangling for position, the bloody noses and hoarse name-calling, the promised retribution of “I’ll tell my Dad on you”. All of it a part and parcel of being a wild horseling of eleven, with the bit out of your bucked-toothed mouth all during June and July and August.
* * * *
And only in autumn did the parents ride out after you and the other fiery colts, to rope you and brand you behind the ears with soap and water and chuck you off to that corral with the red-brick walls and the rusty bell in the tower….
That wasn’t so long ago. Just—seven years.
He was still a kid inside. His body had grown, stretched, towered, tanned its skin, hardened its muscle, darkened its tawny shock of long hair, tightened its lines around jaw and eyes, thickened fingers and knuckles, but the brain didn’t feel as if it had grown in sympathy with the rest. It was still green; full of tall lush oaks and elms in summer; a creek ran through it, and the kids climbed around on its convolutions shouting, “This way, gang—we’ll take a short-cut and head them off at Dead Man’s Gulch!”
Boat whistles blew their tops. Manhattan’s metal buildings tossed back an echo of them. Gangplanks clattered up and away. Men’s voices shouted.
Johnny Choir was aware of it, suddenly. His wild, quick thoughts were stampeded by the reality of the ship nosing out into the harbour. He felt his hands trembling on the cold iron rail. Some of the boys sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” They made a lot of warm noise.
“Come out of it, Choir,” someone said. Eddie Smith came and brushed Johnny Choir’s elbow. “Penny for your thoughts.”
Johnny looked at all that dark, glittering water. “Why ain’t I in 4-F?” he said simply.
Eddie Smith looked at the water, too, and laughed. “Why?”
Johnny Choir said, “I’m only a kid. I’m ten years old. I like ice-cream cones and candy bars and roller skates. I want my mama.”
Smith rubbed his small white chin.
“You got the most distorted sense of humour, Choir. So help me. You say all you got to say with the perfect dead-pan expression. Someone else might think you were serious….”
Johnny spit slowly over the side, experimentally, to see how long it would take the spit to reach the water. Not long. Then he tried to watch where it landed to see how long he could still see it. Not long, either.
Smith said, “Here we go. Don’t know where, but we’re going. Maybe England, maybe Africa, maybe Who Knows?”
“Do—do those other guys play fair, Private Smith?”
“Huh?”
Johnny Choir gestured. “If you shoot those other guys over there, then they got to fall down, don’t they?”
“Hell, yes. But, why—”
“And they can’t shoot back if they get shot first.”
“That’s a basic fact of war. You shoot the other guy first, he’s out of the fight. Now, why are you—”
“That’s all right then,” said Johnny Choir. His stomach eased down soft and nice inside him. Resting light and smooth, his hands didn’t twitch on the rail any more.
“As long as that is a basic rule, Private Smith, then I got nothing to be afraid of. I’ll play. I’ll play war good.”
Smith stared at Johnny.
“If you play war like you talk war, it’s gonna be a funny kind of war, I’ll say so.”
The sound of the boat whistle hit against the clouds. The ship cut out of New York Harbour under the stars.
And Johnny Choir slept like a teddy-bear all that night….
* * * *
The African landing was warm, fast, simple, uneventful. Johnny lugged his equipment in his big easy-swinging hands, found his assigned company truck and the long hot delivery inland from Casablanca began. He sat tallest in his row, facing another row of friends in the rear of the truck. They bounced, jiggled, laughed, smoked, joked all along the way, and it was quite a bit of fun.
One thing Johnny Choir noticed was how nice the officers were to one another. None of the officers stomped their feet and cried, “I want to be general or I won’t play!,” “I want to be captain or I won’t play!” They took orders, gave orders, rescinded orders and
asked for orders in a crisp military fashion that seemed, to Johnny, to be the finest bit of play acting ever. It seemed a hard thing to act that way all the time, but they did. Johnny admired them for it and never questioned their right to give him orders. Whenever he didn’t know what to do, they told him. They were helpful. Heck. They were okay. Not like in the old days when everybody argued about who was going to be general or sergeant or corporal.
Johnny said nothing of his thoughts to anyone. Whenever he had time he just kept them and mulled them over. It was so bewildering. This was the biggest game he had ever played—uniforms, bigger guns and everything and—
The long dusty trip inland over jolting roads and glorified cowpaths was little more than bumps, shouts and sweat to Johnny Choir. This didn’t smell like Africa. It smelled like sun, wind, rain, mud, heat, sweat, cigarettes, trucks, oil, gasoline. Universal odours that denied all the Dark menace of the old geography book Africa. He looked hard but he didn’t see any coloured men with juju paint on their black faces. The rest of the time he was too engrossed spooning food into his mouth, and coming down the hash-line for second helpings.
It was one hot noon one hundred miles from the Tunisian border, with Johnny just finishing his lunch, when a German Stuka fell out of the sun, coming right for Johnny. It spit bullets.
Johnny stood there and watched it. Tin plates, eating utensils, helmets clattered, shining, on the hard-packed sand as the other company members scattered, yelling, and dug their noses into ditches and behind boulders, behind trucks and jeeps.
Johnny stood there grinning the kind of grin you always use when you look straight at the sun. Someone yelled, “Choir, duck!”
The dive bomber strafed, slugging, punching. Johnny stood straight up with his spoon raised to his mouth. Little pocks exploded dust into a showered line a few feet to one side of him. He watched the line tiptoe instantly by him and go spattering on a few yards before the Stuka lifted gilded wings and went away.
Johnny watched it out of sight.
Eddie Smith peered over the edge of a jeep. “Choir, you nut. Why didn’t you get behind the truck?”
Johnny ate again. “That guy couldn’t hit the side of a barn-door with a bucket of paint.”
Smith looked at him as if he were a Saint in a niche in a church. “You’re either the bravest guy I know or the dumbest.”
“I guess maybe I’m brave,” said Johnny though his voice sounded a bit uncertain, as if he couldn’t make up his mind yet.
Smith snorted. “Hell. The way you talk.”
* * * *
The inland movement continued. Rommel was entrenched at Mareth and the British 8th was drawing up, readying its heavy artillery for a barrage that, rumour had it, would start in approximately five days. The long queue of trucks reached the Tunisian border, ground over and up into hill country….
The Afrika Korps had stormed through Kasserine Pass almost to the border of Tunisia, and now they were retreating back toward Gafsa.
“That’s swell,” was all Johnny Choir would say. “That’s the way it should be.”
Choir’s infantry moved up at long last for their first engagement. Their first look at the way the enemy ran, fell down, got up or stayed down for a longer interval, flew, shot, yelled or just plain vanished in a cumulus of dust.
A certain laughing tenseness went through the members of his unit. Johnny felt it and couldn’t figure it out. But he pretended to be tense, too, once in a while. It was fun. He didn’t smoke the cigarettes offered him.
“They make me choke,” he explained.
Now the orders were given. American units, coming down onto Tunisian plain, would drive toward Gafsa. Johnny Choir was going with them in his role as buck private.
Instructions were barked out, maps were supplied to company commanders, tank groups, anti-tank half-tracks, artillery, infantry.
The air arm swung, shining hard, overhead. Johnny thought they looked mighty pretty.
Things started exploding. The hot plainland was running over with a lethal tide of snipers’ shots, machine-gun fire, artillery blasts. And Johnny Choir ran along behind a screen of advancing tanks with Eddie Smith about ten yards ahead of him.
“Keep your head down, Johnny. Don’t stand so straight!”
“I’ll be all right,” Johnny panted. “You get on. I’m fine.”
“Just keep that big head of yours low, that’s all!”
They ran. Johnny sucked breath out and in. It felt like a fire-eater must feel when he takes a mouth of flame. The African air was burning like alcohol gas fumes. It seared your throat and your lungs.
They ran. Stumbling over lakes of pebbles and up sudden hillocks. They hadn’t caught up with the contact fighting in full yet. Men were running everywhere, khaki ants scuttling over hot burned grass. Running everywhere. Johnny saw a couple of them fall down and stay down.
“Oh, they don’t know how,” was his comment to himself.
The stones, skittering underfoot, were just like that scatter of bright pebbles in the old dry creek at Fox River, Illinois. That sky was the Illinois sky, burned blue-back and shimmering. He thrust his wet body forward with big leaps. Green, high, broad, strangely verdant in the midst of this swelter, a hill came into his vision. Any minute now the “kids” would come yelling down the side of that hill….
Gun fire broke out from that hill like the rash of some flaming disease. Artillery cut loose, from behind the hill. Shells curved down in an arced wail. Where they struck they lifted the earth and gave it the bumps, the bumps, the bumps! Johnny laughed.
The thrill of it got inside Johnny Choir. His feet pounding, his ear-drums pressured by the gonging of his blood in his head, his long arms swinging easy, holding his automatic rifle—
A shell came down out of the hot sky, buried its nose thirty feet from Johnny Choir and blew outward with fire, rock, shrapnel, force.
Johnny leaped wide.
“Missed me! Missed me!”
He jumped forward, one foot pounding right after the other.
“Keep your head down, Johnny! Drop, Johnny!” Smith yelled.
Another shell. Another explosion. More shrapnel.
Only twenty-five feet away this time. Johnny felt the mighty force, wind, thrust and power of it. He shouted, “Missed again! I fooled ya! Missed again!” and ran on.
Thirty seconds later he realized he was alone. The other men had flopped on their faces to dig in, because the tanks that had protected them had to swerve and go around the hill. It was too steep for climbing with a tank. And without tank protection the men dug in. The shells were singing all around.
* * * *
Johnny Choir was alone and he liked it. By Gosh, he’d capture that whole darned hill himself. If the others wanted to tag behind, then he’d have all the fun himself.
Two hundred yards ahead of him a machine-gun was nested and chattering. Noise and fire came out like the stream from a powerful garden hose. It whipped and sprayed. Ricochets filled the warm, shivering air of the slope.
Choir ran. He ran, laughing. Opening his big mouth, showing his teeth, he jerked to a stop, aimed, fired, laughed, and ran on again.
Machine-guns talked. A bullet line knitted the earth together in an idiot’s crochet all around Johnny.
He danced and zigzagged and ran and danced and zigzagged again. Every few seconds he’d yell, “You missed me!” or “I ducked that one!” and then he’d pound like some special kind of new tank up the slope, swinging his gun.
He stopped. He aimed. He fired.
“Bang! I gotcha!” he cried.
A German fell down in the gun nest.
He ran again. Bullets swept down in a solid, withering wall. Johnny slipped through it, like an actor slipping through grey curtains, quiet, easy, calm.
“Missed me! Mi
ssed me, missed me! I ducked, I ducked!”
He was so far ahead of the others now that he could barely see them. Stumbling further, he fired three shots. “Gotcha! And you, and you! All three of you!”
Three Germans fell. Johnny cried out delightedly. Sweat glossed his cheeks, his blue eyes were bright, hot as the sky.
Bullets cascaded. Bullets flowed, slithered, ripped the stones over, around, about, under, behind him. He danced. He zigzagged. He laughed.
He ducked.
The first German gun nest was silent. Johnny started for the second one. Way off somewhere he heard a hoarse voice shouting, “Come back, Johnny, you damn fool! Come back!” Eddie Smith’s voice.
But there was so much noise he couldn’t be sure.
He saw the expression on the faces of the four Germans who operated the machine-gun farther up the hill. Their faces were pale under their desert tan, drawn tight and wild, their mouths open, their eyes wide.
They pointed their gun straight at him and cut loose.
“Missed me!”
An artillery shell from over the hill whistled down and landed thirty feet away.
Johnny catapulted himself. “Close! But not close enough!”
Two of the Germans broke, ran from the nest, yelling crazy words. The other two clung to the gun, white faced, pouring lead at Johnny.
Johnny shot them.
He let the other two go. He didn’t want to shoot them in the back. He sat down and rested in the machine-gun nest and waited for the rest of his unit to catch up to him.
He watched the Americans pop up like jack-in-the-boxes all along the base of the hill and come running.
* * * *
In about three minutes Eddie Smith came stumbling into the nest. His face was full of the same look that the Germans had had on their faces. He yelled at Johnny. He grabbed him and pawed him and looked him over.
“Johnny!” he cried. “Johnny, you’re all right, you’re not hit!”
Johnny thought that was a funny thing to say. “Heck no,” replied, Johnny, “I told you I’d be all right.”
