by Ray Bradbury
He listened to his wrist watch ticking, but with only a small part of his attention.
At last she laughed. “They were joking!”
He shook his head. He felt his head moving from left to right and from right to left, as slowly as everything else had happened. “No. They put a receiver on my truck today. They said, at the alert, if you’re working, dump your garbage anywhere. When we radio you, get in there and haul out the dead.”
Some water in the kitchen boiled over loudly. She let it boil for five seconds and then held the arm of the chair with one hand and got up and found the door and went out. The boiling sound stopped. She stood in the door and then walked back to where he still sat, not moving, his head in one position only.
“It’s all blueprinted out. They have squads, sergeants, captains, corporals, everything,” he said. “We even know where to bring the bodies.”
“So you’ve been thinking about it all day,” she said.
“All day since this morning. I thought: Maybe now I don’t want to be a garbage collector any more. It used to be Tom and me had fun with a kind of game. You got to do that. Garbage is bad. But if you work at it you can make a game. Tom and me did that. We watched people’s garbage. We saw what kind they had. Steak bones in rich houses, lettuce and orange peel in poor ones. Sure it’s silly, but a guy’s got to make his work as good as he can and worth while or why in hell do it? And you’re your own boss, in a way, on a truck. You get out early in the morning and it’s an outdoor job, anyway; you see the sun come up and you see the town get up, and that’s not bad at all. But now, today, all of a sudden it’s not the kind of job for me any more.”
His wife started to talk swiftly. She named a lot of things and she talked about a lot more, but before she got very far he cut gently across her talking. “I know, I know, the kids and school, our car, I know,” he said. “And bills and money and credit. But what about that farm Dad left us? Why can’t we move there, away from cities? I know a little about farming. We could stock up, hole in, have enough to live on for months if anything happened.”
She said nothing.
“Sure, all of our friends are here in town,” he went on reasonably. “And movies and shows and the kids’ friends, and….”
She took a deep breath. “Can’t we think it over a few more days?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid of that. I’m afraid if I think it over, about my truck and my new work, I’ll get used to it. And, oh Christ, it just doesn’t seem right a man, a human being, should ever let himself get used to any idea like that.”
She shook her head slovly, looking at the windows, the gray walls, the dark pictures on the walls. She tightened her hands. She started to open her mouth.
“I’ll think tonight,” he said. “I’ll stay up a while. By morning I’ll know what to do.”
“Be careful with the children. It wouldn’t be good, their knowing all this.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Let’s not talk any more, then. I’ll finish dinner!” She jumped up and put her hands to her face and then looked at her hands and at the sunlight in the windows. “Why, the kids’ll be home any minute.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
“You got to eat, you just got to keep on going.” She hurried off, leaving him alone in the middle of a room where not a breeze stirred the curtains, and only the gray ceiling hung over him with a lonely bulb unlit in it, like an old moon in a sky. He was quiet. He massaged his face with both hands. He got up and stood alone in the dining-room door and walked forward and felt himself sit down and remain seated in a dining-room chair. He saw his hands spread on the white tablecloth, open and empty.
“All afternoon,” he said, “I’ve thought.”
She moved through the kitchen, rattling silverware, crashing pans against the silence that was everywhere.
“Wondering,” he said, “if you put the bodies in the trucks lengthwise or endwise, with the heads on the right, or the feet on the right. Men and women together, or separated? Children in one truck, or mixed with men and women? Dogs in special trucks, or just let them lay? Wondering how many bodies one garbage truck can hold. And wondering if you stack them on top of each other and finally knowing you must just have to. I can’t figure it. I can’t work it out. I try. but there’s no guessing, no guessing at all how many you could stack in one single truck.”
He sat thinking of how it was late in the day at his work. with the truck full and the canvas pulled over the great bulk. of garbage so the bulk shaped the canvas in an uneven mound. And how it was if you suddenly pulled the canvas back and looked in. And for a few seconds you saw the white things like macaroni or noodles, only the white things were alive and boiling up, millions of them. And when the white things felt the hot sun on them they simmered down and burrowed and were gone in the lettuce and the old ground beef and the coffee grounds and the heads of white fish. After ten seconds of sunlight the white things that looked like noodles or macaroni were gone and the great bulk of garbage silent and not moving, and you drew the canvas over the bulk and looked at how the canvas folded unevenly over the hidden collection, and underneath you knew it was dark again, and things beginning to move as they must always move when things get dark again.
He was still sitting there in the empty room when the front door of the apartment burst wide. His son and daughter rushed in, laughing, and saw him sitting there, and stopped.
Their mother ran to the kitchen door, held to the edge of it quickly, and stared at her family. They saw her face and they heard her voice:
“Sit down, children, sit down!” She lifted one hand and pushed it toward them. “You’re just in time.”
Hail and Farewell
1953
But of course he was going away, there was nothing else to do, the time was up, the clock had run out, and he was going very far away indeed. His suitcase was packed, his shoes were shined, his hair was brushed, he had expressly washed behind his ears, and it remained only for him to go down the stairs, out the front door, and up the street to the small-town station where the train would make a stop for him alone. Then Fox Hill, Illinois, would be left far off in his past. And he would go on, perhaps to Iowa, perhaps to Kansas, perhaps even to California; a small boy twelve years old with a birth certificate in his valise to show he had been born forty-three years ago.
‘Willie!’ called a voice downstairs.
‘Yes!’ He hoisted his suitcase. In his bureau mirror he saw a face made of June dandelions and July apples and warm summer-morning milk. There, as always, was his look of the angel and the innocent, which might never, in the years of his life, change.
‘Almost time,’ called the woman’s voice.
‘All right!’ And he went down the stairs, grunting and smiling. In the living-room sat Anna and Steve, their clothes painfully neat.
‘Here I am!’ cried Willie in the parlor door.
Anna looked like she was going to cry. ‘Oh, good Lord, you can’t really be leaving us, can you, Willie?’
‘People are beginning to talk,’ said Willie quietly. I’ve been here three years now. But when people begin to talk, I know it’s time to put on my shoes and buy a railway ticket.’
‘It’s all so strange. I don’t understand. It’s so sudden,’ Anna said. ‘Willie, we’ll miss you.
‘I’ll write you every Christmas, so help me. Don’t you write me.’
Its been a great pleasure and satisfaction, said Steve, sitting there, his words the wrong size in his mouth. Its a shame it had to stop. Its a shame you had to tell us about yourself. Its an awful shame you cant stay on.
Youre the nicest folks I ever had, said Willie, four feet high, in no need of a shave, the sunlight on his face.
And then Anna did cry. Willie, Willie. And she sat down and looked as if she wanted to hold him but was afraid to hold him now; she looked at him with shock and amazement and her hands empty, not knowing what to do with him now.
They all went to the front door. Willie, wherere you going?
I dont know. I just start traveling. When I see a town that looks green and nice, I settle in.
Will you ever come back?
Yes, he said earnestly with his high voice. In about twenty years it should begin to show in my face. When it does, Im going to make a grand tour of all the mothers and fathers Ive ever had.
They stood on the cool summer porch, reluctant to say the last words.
Steve was looking steadily at an elm tree. How many other folksve you stayed with, Willie? How many adoptions?
Willie figured it, pleasantly enough. I guess its about five towns and five couples and over twenty years gone by since I started my tour.
Well, we cant holler, said Steve. Better tove had a son thirty-six months than none whatever.
Well, said Willie, and kissed Anna quickly, seized at his luggage, and was gone up the street in the green noon light, under the trees, a very young boy indeed, not looking back, running steadily.
he The boys were playing on the green park diamond when came by. He stood a little while among the oak-tree shadows, watching them hurl the white, snowy baseball into the warm summer air, saw the baseball shadow fly like a dark bird over the grass, saw their hands open in mouths to catch this swift piece of summer that now seemed most especially important to hold on to. The boys voices yelled. The ball lit on the grass near Willie.
Carrying the ball toward from under the shade trees, he thought of the last three years now spent to the penny, and the five years before that, and so on down the line to the year when he was really eleven and twelve and fourteen and the voices saying: Whats wrong with Willie, missus? Mrs. B., is Willie late a-growing? Willie, you smokin cigars lately? The echoes died in summer light and color. His mothers voice: ~Willies twenty-one today! And a thousand voices saying: Come back, son, when youre fifteen; then maybe well give you a job.
l-le stared at the baseball in his trembling hand, as if it were his life, an interminable ball of years strung around and around and around, but always leading back to his twelfth birthday. He heard the kids walking toward him; he felt them blot out the sun, and they were older, standing around him.
Willie! Where you goin? They kicked his suitcase.
How tall they stood in the sun. In the last few months it seemed the sun had passed a hand above their heads, and they were golden toffee pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him. It had started four months ago:
— Choose up sides! Who wants Willie?
Aw, Willies too little; we dont play with “kids.
And they raced ahead of him, drawn by the moon and the sun and the turning seasons of leaf and wind, and lie was twelve years old and not of them any more. And the other voices beginning again on the old, the dreadfully familiar, the cool refrain: Better feed that boy vitamins, Steve. Anna, does shortness run in your family? And the cold fist knocking at your heart again and knowing that the roots would have to be pulled up again after so many good years with the “folks.
Willie, where you goin?
He jerked his head. He was back among the towering, shadowing boys who milled around him like giants at a drinking fountain bending down.
Goin a few days visitin a cousin of mine.
Oh. There was a day, a year ago, when they would have cared very much indeed. But now there was only curiosity for his luggage, their enchantment with trains and trips and far places.
How about a game? said Willie.
They looked doubtful, but, considering the circumstances, nodded. lie dropped his bag and ran out; the white baseball was up in the sun, away to their burning white figures in the far meadow, up in the sun again, rushing, life coming and going in a pattern. Here, there! Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hanlon, Creek Bend, Wisconsin, 1932, the first couple, the first year! Here, there! Henry and Alice Boltz, Limeville, Iowa, 1935! The baseball flying. The Smiths, the Eatons, the Robinsons! 1939! 1945! Husband and wife, husband and wife, husband and wife, no children, no children! A knock on this door, a knock on that.
Pardon me. My name is William. I wonder if A sandwich? Come in, sit down. Where you from, son?
The sandwich, a tall glass of cold milk, the smiling, the nodding, the comfort able, leisurely talking.
Son, you look like you been traveling. You run off from somewhere?
No.
Boy, are you an orphan?
Another glass of milk.
We always wanted kids. It never worked out. Never knew why. One of those things. Well, well. fts getting late, son. Dont you think you better hit for home?
Got no home.
A boy like you? Not dry behind the ears? Your motherll be worried.
Got no borne and no folks anywhere in the world. I wonder if I wonder could I sleep here tonight?
Well, now, son, I dont just know. We never considered taking in said the husband.
We got chicken for supper tonight, said the wife, enough for extras, enough for company…
And the years turning and flying away, the voices, and the faces, and the people, and always the same first conversations. The voice of Emily Robinson, in her rocking chair, in summernight darkness, the last night he stayed with her, the night she discovered his secret, her voice saying:
I look at all the little childrens faces going by. And I sometimes think. What a shame, what a shame, that all these flowers have to be cut, all these bright fires have to be put out. What a shame these, all of these you see in schools or running by, have to get tall and unsightly and wrinkle and turn gray or get bald, and finally, all bone and wheeze, be dead and buried off away. When I hear them laugh I cant believe theyll ever go the road Im going. Yet here they come! I still remember Wordsworths poem:
When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Thats how I think of children, cruel as they sometimes are, mean as I know they can be, but not yet showing the meanness around their eyes or in their eyes, not yet full of tiredness. Theyre so eager for everything! I guess thats what I miss most in older folks, the eagerness gone nine times out of ten, the freshness gone, so much of the drive and life down the drain. I like to watch school let out each day. Its like someone threw a bunch of flowers out of the school front doors. How does it feel, Willie? How does it feel to be young forever? To look like a silver dime new from the mint? Are you happy? Are you as fine as you seem?
The baseball whizzed from the blue sky, stung his hand like a great pale insect. Nursing it, he hears his memory say:
1 worked with what I had. After my folks died, after I found I couldnt get mans work anywhere, I tried carnivals, but they only laughed. “Son, they said, “youre not a midget, and even if you are, you look like a boy! We want midgets with midgets laces! Sorry, son, sorry. So I left home, started out, thinking: What was I? A boy. I looked like a boy, sounded like a boy, so I might as well goon being a boy. No use lighting it. No use screaming. So what could I do? What job was handy? And then one day I saw this man in a restaurant looking at another mans pictures of his children. “Sure wish I had kids, he said. “Sure wish I had kids. He kept shaking his head. And me sitting a few seats away from him, a hamburger in my hands. I sat there, _frozen; _At that very instant I kne
w what my job would be for all the rest of my life. There was work for me, after all. Making lonely people happy. Keeping myself busy. Playing forever. I knew I had to play forever. Deliver a few papers, run a few errands, mow a few lawns, maybe. But hard work? No. All I had to do was be a mothers son and a fathers pride. I turned to the man down the counter from me. “I beg your pardon, I said. I smiled at him.
But, Willie, said Mrs Emily long ago, didnt you ever get lonely? Didnt you ever want things that grown-ups wanted?
I fought that out alone, said Willie. Im a boy, I told myself, Ill have to live in a boys world, read boys books, play boys games, cut myself off from everything else. I cant be both. I got to be only one thing young. And so I played that way. Oh, it wasnt easy. There were times He lapsed into silence.
And the family you lived with, they never knew?
No. Telling them would have spoiled everything. I told them I was a runaway; I let them cheek through official channels, police. Then, when there was no record, let them put in to adopt me. That was best of all; as long as they never guessed. But then, after three years, or five years, they guessed, or a traveling man came through, or a carnival man saw me, and it was over. It always had to end.
And youre very happy and its nice being a child for over forty years?
Its a living, as they say; and when you make other people happy, then youre almost happy too. I got my job to do and I do it.
He threw the baseball one last time and broke the reverie. Then he was running to seize his luggage. Tom, Bill, Jamie, Bob, Sam their names moved on his lips. They were embarrassed at his shaking hands.
After all, Willie, it aint as if youre going to China or Timbuktu. ~
Thats right, isnt it? Willie did not move.
