by Ray Bradbury
“Did you ever try to be great?”
“Jesus!”
“Well, did you?”
“Try what? Being artist, writer, painter, dancer?”
“You should have picked one.”
“That’s what she said. But I was busy at wild parties in Malibu or Laguna. She still hung on, and there she is, a whipped cur.”
“She doesn’t look whipped to me.”
“No? Wait there.”
I watched him through the bar-room window as he ordered another Dubonnet and made a phone call. When he came back out he said, “Just talked to Lorenzo di Medici. Know anything about the Medicis?”
“Venice, right? Formed the first banking systems? Friend of Botticelli. Enemy of Savonarola?”
“Sorry I asked. That was one of his great-great-grandsons, just asked me to live in his Manhattan penthouse in September. Secretarial work. A little light housekeeping. Thursdays off. Weekends on Fire Island.”
“You going to accept?”
“She can’t follow me there. Come on!”
Sonny walked off.
I looked at the woman across the street. Half an hour of rain had made her older.
I stepped off the curb. That did it. She turned away in a fresh downpour.
Summer was over.
Of course you can’t tell in Los Angeles. No sooner do you think it’s finished than it comes back full-blast for Thanksgiving, or spoils Halloween with 98 degrees instead of rain, or a strange hot Christmas morn with snow melted that never fell, and New Year’s Eve a Fourth of July.
Anyway, summer was over, not because of season’s change but just people going away, packing their grips, stashing photographs, ready to vanish in a war that was clearing its throat just beyond the ocean. You could tell summer was over in the voices of your lost and never quite found friends, whose names, if they had some, stuck in your throat. Nobody said goodbye or farewell, it was just so long, see you, with a deep sad sound to it. We all knew that whatever bus or trolley we took, we might never come back.
With the park empty on a final Saturday night, I walked Sonny to his streetcar. Just before it arrived, Sonny, not looking at me, said, “You coming along?”
“Where?” I said.
“To my place, silly.”
“It’s the first time you ever asked.”
“Well, I’m asking now. Hurry up. I’m going away.”
I looked at his profile, the pale flesh drawn over the hidden cheeks and nose and moonlit brow. He felt me examining him and turned his head to really look at me, like a discovery, for the first time.
“Thanks a lot.” I hesitated and had to shift my gaze. “Thanks, but I don’t think so, Sonny.”
Sonny gasped.
“I’ll be damned, rejected by a Martian!”
“Is that what I am?”
“Yes, yes,” Sonny laughed. “But someday you’ll marry another Martian and raise a dozen kids for John Carter, Warlord of Mars.”
I nodded weakly. “I think you’re right.”
“I am. Well, here goes, home to a lonely bed and off to the Medicis mañana. Sure you won’t change your mind?”
“Thanks.”
The trolley had stopped. He climbed up and looked down at me and the park and the city skyline, as if drinking it in, trying to remember it all.
“Sonny,” I said, on impulse.
He fixed me with his liquid gaze.
“God bless,” I murmured.
“I sure as hell hope so.” And the trolley was moving with him in the open doorway, giving one last wave of his cigarette holder and an uplift of his slender chin.
“How does that song go?” he called. And the streetcar was lost in thunders. “‘Tangerine’? Johnny Mercer’s song. All the rage that year. ‘Tangerine,’” said my waiter back in another year, his face a blank on which memory wrote itself. “That strange guy, Sonny? Had a nice sweet soprano. God, I can hear him now. And the laughter. I think that was why we all followed him. No money, no jobs, no love life. Just Saturday nights to stay busy. So he sang and laughed and we followed. Sonny and ‘Tangerine.’ ‘Tangerine’ and Sonny.”
The waiter stopped, embarrassed.
I finished my wine. “What,” I said at last, “what ever happened to Tangerine?”
The waiter shook his head but then hesitated and shut his eyes for a moment. “Hey. Hold on. Right after the war, in 1947, I bumped into one of those crazies, the old gang. He said he had heard, didn’t know for a fact, probably true, Sonny had killed himself.”
I wished my glass was full but it was empty.
“On his birthday?” I said.
“What?”
“Did he die on his thirtieth birthday?”
“How did you know that? Yeah. Shot himself.”
“Thank God it was just a gun,” I said at last.
“Beg pardon?”
“Nothing, Ramón. Nothing.”
The waiter backed off to go get my bill, then paused.
“That song he was always singing. What were the words?”
I waited to see if he might still remember. But it didn’t show in his face.
The music rose in my head. And all the old words, right on to the end.
“Don’t ask me,” I said.
WITH SMILES AS WIDE AS SUMMER
“Hey … hey … wait for me!”
The call, the echo. The call, the echo, fading.
With apple-thudding bare feet, the boys of summer ran away.
William Smith kept running. Not because he could catch anyone but because he could not admit his feet were slower than his wish, his legs shorter than his goal.
Yelling, he plunged down the ravine at the heart of Green Town, seeking friendships hid in empty tree houses blowing their burlap-bag door curtains in the wind. Searching caves dug in raw earth, he found only burnt marshmallow fires. Wading the creek, even crayfish saw his shadow, smelled his need, and scuttled back in milk-sand explosions.
“All right, you guys! Someday I’ll be older than you! Then, watch out!”
“… Watch out …” said the bottomless tunnel under Elm Street.
Will slumped. Every summer—much running, no catching. Nowhere in all the town was there a boy who threw a shadow just his size. He was six. Half the people he knew were three, which was so far down you couldn’t see it. The other half were nine, which was so far up, snow fell there all the year. Running after nines he had to worry about escaping the threes. It was a sad game at both ends. Now, seated on a rock, he wept.
“Who wants them? Not me, no sir! Not me!”
But then, a long way off in the noon heat, he heard a great commotion of games and frolics. Slowly, curiously, he stood up. Moving along the creek bank in shadow, he climbed a small hill, crawled under some bushes, and peered down.
There, in a small meadow at the center of the ravine, were nine summer boys, playing.
Circling, they knocked the echoes with their voices, plunged, rolled over, spun, jigged, shook themselves, raced off, hurtled back, leapt high, mad with summer light and heat, unable to stop just being alive.
They did not see William, so he had time to recall where he had seen each before. This one he remembered from a house on Elm, that one from a shoe shop on Maple, a third had last been seen leaning against a mailbox near the Elite Theater. Nameless, all nine of them, gloriously frisky, nutty with their games.
And, miracle of miracles, they were all his age!
“Hey!” cried Will.
The frolic ceased. The boys unscrambled. All gazed, some blinked at him. Some looked to set the panic off. Panting, they waited for Will to speak.
“May—” he asked quietly, “—may I play?”
They peered at him with their shining honey-warm molasses-brown eyes. Their smiles, the white smiles pinned to their faces, were wide as all of summer.
Will threw a stick far over the ravine.
“There!”
The boys, answering with their own sound, bolted off.
Their furious romp kicked up vast sunlit clouds of dust.
One trotted back. The stick was in his smiling mouth. He laid it at Will’s feet with a bow.
“Thank you,” said Will.
The other boys ran, danced, waiting for a throw. Looking, Will thought, cats are girls, I always knew that. But dogs, just look! All summer ahead, us here together, and dogs are nothing but—boys!
The boys barked. The boys smiled.
“You’re my friends, right? We’ll meet every day, right?”
They wagged their tails. They whined.
“Do like I say, and—bones and biscuits!”
The boys shivered.
“Biscuits and bones!”
He hurled the stick ten million miles out. The summer boys ran and he thought, No matter if they have pups, dogs are boys, no other animal in the whole world so much like me, Dad, Gramps. And suddenly he ran yipping, barking, fell on their dance-ground, pummeled their dusty earth, leapt their wet tree stumps. Then in a great yelling swoop they rocked off, all ten, toward wilderness country.
Under a wooden rail trestle, they froze.
A train like steel God in his wrath flashed over, along, above, away, unraveling, swift-shimmering, gone. His voice knocked forth a sweet dust in their bones.
They stood up on the empty tracks where a thousand tarbabies had melted to pools at noon. Their eyes cried with light. His summer friends showed their pink, loosely tied cravat tongues to each other.
Over them, a vast power-line tower hurled its flaming blue wires north and south in dazzles of solid electric insect-hum.
Climbing half up the tower, Will gasped.
The boys were gone!
Will shouted Hey! Boys retorted Bark!
They had trotted over to lave themselves in vast pools of butterfly shadow beneath a tree that had summoned them with the sound of the wind in its drowsy leaves. Legs out in all directions, stomachs pressed to earth, awash in green shade, they fired another cap-pistol roll of barks from their automatic throats.
“Charge!” Will slid down and off.
The boys unbathed themselves from shadow, tossed amber water-beads to telegraph pole with crisp salute of leg, then in a running march, saluting all along the way, they headed for the real lake.
There the boys dog-paddled out, the boys dog-paddled in through the great silence. A mystery lay on the shore in foam whispers and sky color which they waded through to lie on the fried sand, baking.
And lying there, Will guessed this was the best summer of his life. One like this might never happen again. For these summer-happy friends, yes, next summer and the one after that they would lie like this in water as cool or sun as hot. But next year Will, being older, might have new real friends to keep him home, fence him, draw him away from this fine sprawling, aimless time of no clocks, no beginning, no end, on these lonely sands with his unschooled and silently accepting friends. These boys, eternal children, would run forever on the rim of the world, as long as the world turned round. He did not see himself running with them anywhere beyond tomorrow.
But then at last, while his friends saluted trees, William rose and imitated his team with style and flourish. His name was writ in amber water on the sand.
“I feel sorry for girls.” He looped the two l’s, made low hills of the m, and dotted the two i’s in his name.
The summer boys barked and scratched idle scatters of sand over the wet signature. Then proud as a gang of calligraphers, all ran into town, and with the sun tilted over his house, at long last he went up the porch steps and looked back at his independent volunteers, these tramp bum excursionists, who stood in a rough cluster on the lawn.
“This is my place, see? Tomorrow, more of the same!”
Will, in the door, felt the easy weight of the tennis shoes in one hand, warm-relaxed, and life slung in his other hand, no weight at all to palm, to bone, to whorl of thumb and fingers. He knew he smelled of dog. But then, they smelled of boy.
“Go on! S’long!”
An imaginary rabbit pelted by. In wild pretense, the team, a riot, a tumult, scurried off.
“Tomorrow!” cried Will.
And the day after and the day after that.
He watched their smiles, as wide as summer, shadow away under the trees.
Then, bearing his own smile as easily as the shoes in one hand, and life in the other, he took his happiness back through and into the cool dark pantry, where, picking and choosing, he gave it gifts.
TIME INTERVENING
Very late on this night, the old man came from his house with a flashlight in his hand and asked of the little boys the object of their frolic. The little boys gave no answer, but tumbled on in the leaves.
The old man went into his house and sat down and worried. It was three in the morning. He saw his own pale, small hands trembling on his knees. He was all joints and angles, and his face, reflected above the mantel, was no more than a pale cloud of breath exhaled upon the mirror.
The children laughed softly outside, in the leaf piles.
He switched out his flashlight quietly and sat in the dark. Why he should be bothered in any way by playing children he could not know. But it was late for them to be out, at three in the morning, playing. He was very cold.
There was a sound of a key in the door and the old man arose to go see who could possibly be coming into his house. The front door opened and a young man entered with a young woman. They were looking at each other softly and tenderly, holding hands, and the old man stared at them and cried, “What are you doing in my house?”
The young man and the young woman replied, “What are you doing in our house? Here now, old man, get on out!” And the young man took the old man by the elbow, searched him to see if he had stolen anything, and shoved him out the door and closed and locked it.
“This is my house. You can’t lock me out!” The old man beat at the door, then stood back in the dark morning air and looked up at the lights shining in the warm windows and rooms upstairs and then, with a motion of shadows, going out. The old man walked down the street and came back and still the small boys rolled in the icy morning leaves, not seeing him.
He stood before the house as he watched the lights turned on and turned off more than a few thousand times as he counted softly under his breath.
A boy of about fourteen ran up to the house, a football in his hand, and opened the door without unlocking it and went in. The door closed.
Half an hour later, with the morning wind rising, the old man saw a car pull up and a plump woman get out with a little boy three years old. As they walked across the wet lawn the woman looked at the old man and said, “Is that you, Mr. Terle?”
“Yes,” said the old man automatically, for somehow he didn’t wish to frighten her. But it was a lie. He knew he was not Mr. Terle at all. Mr. Terle lived down the street.
The lights glowed on and off a thousand more times.
The children rustled softly in the leaves.
A seventeen-year-old boy bounded across the street, smelling faintly of the smudged lipstick on his cheek, almost knocked the old man down, cried, “Sorry!” and leaped up the porch steps and went in.
The old man stood there with the town lying asleep on all sides of him; the unlit windows, the breathing rooms, the stars all through the trees, liberally caught and held on winter branches, like so much snow suspended glittering on the cold air.
“That’s my house; who are all those people going in and out?” the old man cried to the wrestling children.
The wind blew, shaking the empty trees.
In the year which was 1923 the house was dark. A car drove up before it; the mother stepped from the car with her son William, who was three. William looked at the dusky morning world and saw his house and as he felt his mother lead him toward the house he heard her say, “Is that you, Mr. Terle?” and in the shadows by the great wind-filled oak tree an old man stood and replied, “Yes.” The door closed.
In the year which was
1934 William came running in the summer night, feeling the football cradled in his hands, feeling the murky night street pass under his running feet, along the sidewalk. He smelled, rather than saw, an old man as he ran past. Neither of them spoke. And so, on into the house.
In the year 1937 William ran with antelope boundings across the street, a smell of lipstick on his face, a smell of someone young and fresh upon his cheeks; all thoughts of love and deep night. He almost knocked the stranger down, cried, “Sorry!” and ran to open the front door.
In the year 1947 a car stopped before the house, William relaxed, his wife beside him. He wore a fine tweed suit, it was late, he was tired, they both smelled faintly of too many drinks offered and accepted. For a moment they both heard the wind in the trees. They got out of the car and let themselves into the house with a key. An old man came from the living room and cried, “What are you doing in my house?”
“What are you doing in our house?” said William. “Here now, old man, get on out.” And William, feeling faintly sick in his stomach, for there was something about the old man that made him feel cold, searched the old man and pushed him out the door and closed and locked it. From outside the old man cried, “This is my house. You can’t lock me out!”
They went up to bed and turned out the lights.
In the year 1928 William and the other small boys wrestled on the lawn, waiting for the time when they would leave to watch the circus come chuffing into the pale-dawn railroad station on the blue metal tracks. In the leaves they lay and laughed and kicked and fought. An old man with a flashlight came across the lawn. “Why are you playing here on my lawn at this time of morning?” asked the old man.
“Who are you?” replied William, looking up a moment from the tangle.
The old man stood over the tumbling children a long moment. Then he dropped his flash. “Oh, my dear boy, I know now, now I know!” He bent to touch the boy. “I am you and you are me. I love you, my dear boy, with all of my heart! Let me tell you what will happen to you in the years to come! If you knew! My name is William—so is yours! And all these people going into the house, they are William, they are you, they are me!” The old man shivered. “Oh, all the long years and time passing!”
