Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07

by Twice Twenty-two (v2. 1)

  The lower half of her body changed itself from white to very pale blue, from very pale blue to pale green, from pale green to emerald green, to moss and lime green, to scintillas and sequins all dark green, all flowing away in a fount, a curve, a rush of light and dark, to end in a lacy fan, a spread of foam and jewel on the sand. The two halves of this creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman, woman of a whiteness made of cream-water and clear sky merged with that half which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home. The woman was the sea, the sea was woman. There was no flaw or seam, no wrinkle or stitch; the illusion, if illusion it was, held perfectly together and the blood from one moved into and through and mingled with what must have been the ice waters of the other.

  "I wanted to run get help." The first boy seemed not to want to raise his voice. "But Skip said she was dead and there's no help for that. Is she?"

  "She was never alive," said Chico. "Sure," he went on, feeling their eyes on him suddenly. "It's something left over from a movie studio. Liquid rubber skinned over a steel frame. A prop, a dummy."

  "Oh, no, it's real!"

  "We'll find a label somewhere," said Chico. "Here."

  "Don't!" cried the first boy.

  "Hell." Chico touched the body to turn it, and stopped. He knelt there, his face changing.

  "What's the matter?" asked Tom.

  Chico took his hand away and looked at it. "I was wrong." His voice faded.

  Tom took the woman's wrist. "There's a pulse."

  "You're feeling your own heartbeat."

  "I just don't know . . . maybe . . . maybe ..."

  The woman was there and her upper body was all moon pearl and tidal cream and her lower body all slithering ancient green-black coins that slid upon themselves in the shift of wind and water.

  "There's a trick somewhere!" cried Chico, suddenly.

  "No. No!" Just as suddenly Tom burst out in laughter. "No trick! My God, my God, I feel great! I haven't felt so great since I was a kid!"

  They walked slowly around her. A wave touched her white hand so the fingers faintly softly waved. The gesture was that of someone asking for another and another wave to come in and lift the fingers and then the wrist and then the arm and then the head and finally the body and take all of them together back down out to sea.

  "Tom." Chico's mouth opened and closed. "Why don't you go get our truck?"

  Tom didn't move.

  "You hear me?" said Chico.

  "Yes, but—"

  "But what? We could sell this somewhere, I don't know—the university, that aquarium at Seal Beach or . . . well, hell, why couldn't we just set up a place? Look." He shook Tom's arm. "Drive to the pier. Buy us three hundred pounds of chipped ice. When you take anything out of the water you need ice, don't you?"

  "I never thought."

  "Think about it! Get moving!"

  "I don't know, Chico."

  "What you mean? She's real, isn't she?" He turned to the boys. *'You say she's real, don't you? Well, then, what are we waiting for?"

  "Chico," said Tom. "You better go get the ice yourself."

  "Someone's got to stay and make sure she don't go back out with the tide!"

  "Chico," said Tom. "I don't know how to explain. I don't want to get that ice for you."

  "I'll go myself, then. Look, boys, build the sand up here to keep the waves back. I'll give you five bucks apiece. Hop to it!"

  The sides of the boys' faces were bronze-pink from the sun which was touching the horizon now. Their eyes were a bronze color looking at Chico.

  "My God!" said Chico. "This is better than finding ambergris!" He ran to the top of the nearest dune, called, "Get to work!" and was gone.

  Now Tom and the two boys were left with the lonely woman by the North Rock and the sun was one-fourth of the way below the western horizon. The sand and the woman were pink-gold.

  "Just a little line," whispered the second boy. He drew his fingernail along under his own chin, gently. He nodded to the woman, Tom bent again to see the faint line under either side of her firm white chin, the small, almost invisible line where the gills were or had been and were now almost sealed shut, invisible.

  He looked at the face and the great strands of hair spread out in a lyre on the shore.

  "She's beautiful," he said.

  The boys nodded without knowing it.

  Behind them, a gull leaped up quickly from the dunes. The boys gasped and turned to stare.

  Tom felt himself trembling. He saw the boys were trembling too. A car horn hooted. Their eyes blinked, suddenly afraid. They looked up toward the highway.

  A wave poured about the body, framing it in a clear white pool of water.

  Tom nodded the boys to one side.

  The wave moved the body an inch in and two inches out toward the sea.

  The next wave came and moved the body two inches in and six inches out toward the sea.

  "But—" said the first boy.

  Tom shook his head.

  The third wave lifted the body two feet down toward the sea. The wave after that drifted the body another foot down the shingles and the next three moved it six feet down.

  The first boy cried out and ran after it.

  Tom reached him and held his arm. The boy looked helpless and afraid and sad.

  For a moment there were no more waves. Tom looked at the woman, thinking, she's true, she's real, she's mine . . . but . . . she's dead. Or will be if she stays here.

  "We can't let her go," said the first boy. "We can't, we just can't!"

  The other boy stepped between the woman and the sea. "What would we do with her?" he wanted to know, looking at Tom, "if we kept her?"

  The first boy tried to think. "We could—we could—" He stopped and shook his head. "Oh, my Gosh."

  The second boy stepped out of the way and left a path from the woman to the sea.

  The next wave was a big one. It came in and went out and the sand was empty. The whiteness was gone and the black diamonds and the great threads of the harp.

  They stood by the edge of the sea, looking out, the man and the two boys, until they heard the truck driving up on the dunes behind them.

  The last of the sun was gone.

  They heard footsteps running on the dunes and someone yelling.

  They drove back down the darkening beach in the light truck with the big treaded tires in silence. The two boys sat in the rear on the bags of chipped ice. After a long while, Chico began to swear steadily, half to himself, spitting out the window.

  "Three hundred pounds of ice. Three hundred pounds of ice! What do I do with it now? And I'm soaked to the skin, soaked! You didn't even move when I jumped in and swam out to look around! Idiot, idiot! You haven't changed! Like every other time, like always, you do nothing, nothing, just stand there, stand there, do nothing, nothing, just stare!"

  "And what did you do, I ask, what?" said Tom, in a tired voice, looking ahead. "The same as you always did, just the same, no different, no different at all. You should've seen yourself."

  They dropped the boys off at their beach house. The youngest spoke in a voice you could hardly hear against the wind. "Gosh, nobody'11 ever believe ..."

  The two men drove down the coast and parked.

  Chico sat for two or three minutes waiting for his fists to relax on his lap, and then he snorted.

  "Hell. I guess things turn out for the best." He took a deep breath. "It just came to me. Funny. Twenty, thirty years from now, middle of the night, our phone'll ring. It'll be one of those two boys, grown-up, calling long-distance from a bar somewhere. Middle of the night, them calling to ask one question. It's true, isn't it? they'll say. It did happen, didn't it? Back in 1958, it really happened to us? And we'll sit there on the edge of the bed, middle of the night, saying. Sure, boy, sure, it really happened to us in 1958. And they'll say, Thanks, and we'll say, Don't mentio
n it, any old time. And we'll all say good night. And maybe they won't call again for a couple of years."

  The two men sat on their front-porch steps in the dark.

  "Tom?"

  "What?"

  Chico waited a moment.

  "Tom, next week—you're not going away."

  It was not a question but a quiet statement.

  Tom thought about it, his cigarette dead in his fingers. And he knew that now he could never go away. For tomorrow and the day after the day after that he would walk down and go swimming there in all the green and white fires and the dark caverns in the hollows under the strange waves. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  "Yes, Chico. I'm staying here,"

  Now the silver looking glasses advanced in a crumpling line all along the coast from a thousand miles north to a thousand miles south. The mirrors did not reflect so much as one building or one tree or one highway or one car or even one man himself.

  The mirrors reflected only the quiet moon and then shattered into a billion bits of glass that spread out in a glaze on the shore. Then the sea was dark awhile, preparing another line of mirrors to rear up and surprise the two men who sat there for a long time never once blinking their eyes, waiting.

  21 THE STRAWBERRY WINDOW

  In his dream he was shutting the front door with its strawberry windows and lemon windows and windows like white clouds and windows like clear water in a country stream. Two dozen panes squared round the one big pane, colored of fruit wines and gelatins and cool water ices. He remembered his father holding him up as a child. "Look!" And through the green glass the world was emerald, moss, and summer mint. "Look!" The lilac pane made livid grapes of all the passersby. And at last the strawberry glass perpetually bathed the town in roseate warmth, carpeted the world in pink sunrise, and made the cut lawn seem imported from some Persian rug bazaar. The strawberry window, best of all, cured people of their paleness, warmed the cold rain, and set the blowing, shifting February snows afire.

  "Yes, yes! There—!"

  He awoke.

  He heard his boys talking before he was fully out of his dream and he lay in the dark now, listening to the sad sound their talk made, like the wind blowing the white sea=bottoms into the blue hills, and then he remembered.

  We're on Mars, he thought.

  "What?" His wife cried out in her sleep.

  He hadn't realized he had spoken; he lay as still as he possibly could. But now, with a strange kind of numb reality, he saw his wife rise to haunt the room, her pale face staring through the small, high windows of their quonset hut at the clear but unfamiliar stars.

  "Carrie," he whispered.

  She did not hear.

  "Carrie," he whispered. "There's something I want to tell you. For a month now I've been wanting to say . . . tomorrow . . . tomorrow morning, there's going to be . . ."

  But his wife sat all to herself in the blue starlight and would not look at him.

  If only the sun stayed up, he thought, if only there was no night. For during the day he nailed the settlement town together, the boys were in school, and Carrie had cleaning, gardening, cooking to do. But when the sun was gone and their hands were empty of flowers or hammers and nails and arithmetics, their memories, like night birds, came home in the dark.

  His wife moved, a slight turn of her head.

  "Bob," she said at last, "I want to go home."

  "Carrie!"

  "This isn't home," she said.

  He saw that her eyes were wet and brimming. "Carrie, hold on awhile."

  "I've got no fingernails from holding on now!"

  As if she still moved in her sleep, she opened her bureau drawers and took out layers of handkerchiefs, shirts, underclothing, and put it all on top of the bureau, not seeing it, letting her fingers touch and bring it out and put it down. The routine was long familiar now. She would talk and put things out and stand quietly awhile, and then later put all the things away and come, dry-faced, back to bed and dreams. He was afraid that some night she would empty every drawer and reach for the few ancient suitcases against the wall.

  "Bob . . ." Her voice was not bitter, but soft, featureless, and as uncolored as the moonlight that showed what she was doing. "So many nights for six months I've talked this way; I'm ashamed. You work hard building houses in town. A man who works so hard shouldn't have to listen to a wife gone sad on him. But there's nothing to do but talk it out. It's the little things I miss most of all. I don't know—silly things. Our front-porch swing. The wicker rocking chair, summer nights. Looking at the people walk or ride by those evenings, back in Ohio. Our black upright piano, out of tune. My Swedish cut glass. Our parlor furniture— oh, it was like a herd of elephants, I know, and all of it old. And the Chinese hanging crystals that hit when the wind blew. And talking to neighbors there on the front porch, July nights. All those crazy, silly things . . . they're not important. But it seems those are things that come to mind around three in the morning. I'm sorry."

  "Don't be," he said. "Mars is a far place. It smells funny, looks funny, and feels funny. I think to myself nights too. We came from a nice town."

  "It was green," she said. "In the spring and summer. And yellow and red in the fall. And ours was a nice house; my, it was old, eighty-ninety years or so. Used to hear the house talking at night, whispering away. All the dry wood, the banisters, the front porch, the sills. Wherever you touched, it talked to you. Every room a different way. And when you had the whole house talking, it was a family around you in the dark, putting you to sleep. No other house, the kind they build nowadays, can be the same. A lot of people have got to go through and live in a house to make it mellow down all over. This place here, now, this hut, it doesn't know I'm in it, doesn't care if I live or die. It makes a noise like tin, and tin's cold. It's got no pores for the years to sink in. It's got no cellar for you to put things away for next year and the year after that. It's got no attic where you keep things from last year and all the other years before you were born. If we only had a little bit up here that was familiar, Bob, then we could make room for all that's Strange. But when everything, every single thing is strange, then it takes forever to make things familiar."

  He nodded in the dark. "There's nothing you say that I haven't thought."

  She was looking at the moonlight where it lay upon the suitcases against the wall. He saw her move her hand down toward them.

  "Carrie!"

  "What?"

  He swung his legs out of bed. "Carrie, I've done a crazy damn-fool thing. All these months I heard you dreaming away, scared, and the boys at night and the wind, and Mars out there, the sea-bottoms and all, and . . ." He stopped and swallowed. "You got to understand what I did and why I did it. All the money we had in the bank a month ago, all the money we saved for ten years, I spent."

  "Bob!"

  "I threw it away, Carrie, I swear, I threw it away on nothing. It was going to be a surprise. But now, tonight, there you are, and there are those damned suitcases on the floor and ..."

  "Bob," she said, turning around. "You mean we've gone through all this, on Mars, putting away extra money every week, only to have you bum it up in a few hours?"

  "I don't know," he said. "I'm a crazy fool. Look, it's not long till morning. We'll get up early. I'll take you down to see what I've done. I don't want to tell you, I want you to see. And if it's no go, then, well, there's always those suitcases and the rocket to Earth four times a week."

  She did not move. "Bob, Bob," she murmured.

  "Don't say any more," he said.

  "Bob, Bob . . ." She shook her head slowly, unbelievingly. He turned away and lay back down on his own side of the bed, and she sat on the other side, and for a moment did not he down, but only sat looking at the bureau where her handkerchiefs and jewelry and clothing lay ready in neat stacks where she had left them.

  Outside a wind the color of moonlight stirred up the sleeping dust and powdered the air.

  At last she lay back, but said not
hing more and was a cold weight in the bed, staring down the long tunnel of night toward the faintest sign of morning.

  They got up in the very first fight and moved in the small quonset hut without a sound. It was a pantomime prolonged almost to the time when someone might scream at the silence, as the mother and father and the boys washed and dressed and ate a quiet breakfast of toast and fruit juice and coffee, with no one looking directly at anyone and everyone watching someone in the reflective surfaces of toaster, glassware, or cutlery, where all their faces were melted out of shape and made terribly alien in the early hour. Then, at last, they opened the quonset door and let in the air that blew across the cold blue-white Martian seas, where only the sand tides dissolved and shifted and made ghost patterns, and they stepped out under a raw and staring cold sky and began their walk toward a town, which seemed no more than a motion-picture set far on ahead of them on a vast, empty stage.

  "What part of town are we going to?" asked Carrie.

  "The rocket depot," he said. "But before we get there, I've a lot to say."

  The boys slowed down and moved behind their parents, listening. The father gazed ahead, and not once in all the time he was talking did he look at his wife or sons to see how they were taking all that he said.

  "I believe in Mars," he began quietly. "I guess I believe some day it'll belong to us. We'll nail it down. We've settle in. We won't turn tail and run. It came to me one day a year ago, right after we first arrived. Why did we come? I asked myself. Because, I said, because. It's the same thing with the salmon every year. The salmon don't know why they go where they go, but they go, anyway. Up rivers they don't remember, up streams, jumping waterfalls, but finally making it to where they propagate and die, and the whole thing starts again. Call it racial memory, instinct, call it nothing, but there it is. And here we are."