Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

‘Rot. Or try to reach Porto Bello.’

‘But we need gas and our spare fixed. And going back over those highways … This time they might drop logs, and—’

‘I know, I know.’ He rubbed his eyes and sat for a moment with his head in his hands. ‘We’re alone, my God, we’re alone. Remember how safe we used to feel? How safe? We registered in all the big towns with the American Consuls. Remember how the joke went? “Everywhere you go you can hear the rustle of the eagle’s wings!” Or was it the sound of paper money? I forget. Jesus, Jesus, the world got empty awfully quick. Who do I call on now?’

She waited a moment and then said, ‘I guess just me. That’s not much.’

He put his arm around her. ‘You’ve been swell. No hysterics, nothing.’

‘Tonight maybe I’ll be screaming, when we’re in bed, if we ever find a bed again. It’s been a million miles since breakfast.’

He kissed her, twice, on her dry mouth. Then he sat slowly back. ‘First thing is to try to find gas. If we can get that, we’re ready to head for Porto Bello.’

The three soldiers were talking and joking as they drove away.

After they had been driving a minute, he began to laugh quietly.

‘What were you thinking?’ asked his wife.

‘I remember an old spiritual. It goes like this:

‘“I went to the Rock to hide my face And the Rock cried out, ‘No Hiding Place, There’s no Hiding Place down here.’” ’

‘I remember that,’ she said.

‘It’s an appropriate song right now,’ he said. ‘I’d sing the whole thing for you if I could remember it all. And if I felt like singing.’

He put his foot harder to the accelerator.

They stopped at a gas station and after a minute, when the attendant did not appear, John Webb honked the horn. Then, appalled, he snapped his hand away from the horn-ring, looking at it as if it were the hand of a leper.

‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

The attendant appeared in the shadowy doorway of the gas station. Two other men appeared behind him.

The three men came out and walked around the car, looking at it, touching it, feeling it.

Their faces were like burned copper in the daylight. They touched the resilient tires, they sniffed the rich new smell of the metal and upholstery.

‘Señor,’ said the gas attendant at last.

‘We’d like to buy some gas, please.’

‘We are all out of gas, señor.’

‘But your tank reads full. I see the gas in the glass container up there.’

‘We are all out of gas,’ said the man.

‘I’ll give you ten pesos a gallon!’

‘Gracias, no.’

‘We haven’t enough gas to get anywhere from here.’ Webb checked the gauge. ‘Not even a quarter gallon left. We’d better leave the car here and go into town and see what we can do there.’

‘I’ll watch the car for you, señor,’ said the station attendant. ‘If you leave the keys.’

‘We can’t do that!’ said Leonora. ‘Can we?’

‘I don’t see what choice we have. We can stall it on the road and leave it to anyone who comes along, or leave it with this man.’

‘That’s better,’ said the man.

They climbed out of the car and stood looking at it.

‘It was a beautiful car,’ said John Webb.

‘Very beautiful,’ said the man, his hand out for the keys. ‘I will take good care of it, señor.’

‘But, Jack—’

She opened the back door and started to take out the luggage. Over her shoulder, he saw the bright travel stickers, the storm of color that had descended upon and covered the worn leather now after years of travel, after years of the best hotels in two dozen countries.

She tugged at the valises, perspiring, and he stopped her hands and they stood gasping there for a moment, in the open door of the car, looking at these fine rich suitcases, inside which were the beautiful tweeds and woolens and silks of their lives and living, the forty-dollar-an-ounce perfumes and the cool dark furs and the silvery golf shafts. Twenty years were packed into each of the cases; twenty years and four dozen parts they had played in Rio, in Paris, in Rome and Shanghai, but the part they played most frequently and best of all was the rich and buoyant, amazingly happy Webbs, the smiling people, the ones who could make that rarely balanced martini known as the Sahara.

‘We can’t carry it all into town,’ he said. ‘We’ll come back for it later. Later.’

‘But …’

He silenced her by turning her away and starting her off down the road.

‘But we can’t leave it there, we can’t leave all our luggage and we can’t leave our car! Oh look here now, I’ll roll up the windows and lock myself in the car, while you go for the gas, why not?’ she said.

He stopped and glanced back at the three men standing by the car, which blazed in the yellow sun. Their eyes were shining and looking at the woman.

‘There’s your answer,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

‘But you just don’t walk off and leave a four-thousand-dollar automobile!’ she cried.

He moved her along, holding her elbow firmly and with quiet decision. ‘A car is to travel in. When it’s not traveling, it’s useless. Right now, we’ve got to travel; that’s everything. The car isn’t worth a dime without gas in it. A pair of good strong legs is worth a hundred cars, if you use the legs. We’ve just begun to toss things overboard. We’ll keep dropping ballast until there’s nothing left to heave but our hides.’

He let her go. She was walking steadily now, and she fell into step with him. ‘It’s so strange. So strange. I haven’t walked like this in years.’ She watched the motion of her feet beneath her, she watched the road pass by, she watched the jungle moving to either side, she watched her husband striding quickly along, until she seemed hypnotized by the steady rhythm. ‘But I guess you can learn anything over again,’ she said, at last.

The sun moved in the sky and they moved for a long while on the hot road. When he was quite ready, the husband began to think aloud. ‘You know, in a way, I think it’s good to be down to essentials. Now instead of worrying over a dozen damned things, it’s just two items – you and me.’

‘Watch it, here comes a car – we’d better …’

They half turned, yelled, and jumped. They fell away from the highway and lay watching the automobile hurtle past at seventy miles an hour. Voices sang, men laughed, men shouted, waving. The car sped away into the dust and vanished around a curve, blaring its double horns again and again.

He helped her up and they stood in the quiet road.

‘Did you see it?’

They watched the dust settle slowly.

‘I hope they remember to change the oil and check the battery, at least. I hope they think to put water in the radiator,’ she said, and paused. ‘They were singing, weren’t they?’

He nodded. They stood blinking at the great dust cloud filtering down like yellow pollen upon their heads and arms. He saw a few bright splashes flick from her eyelids when she blinked.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘After all, it was only a machine.’

‘I loved it.’

‘We’re always loving everything too much.’

Walking, they passed a shattered wine bottle which steamed freshly as they stepped over it.

They were not far from the town, walking single file, the wife ahead, the husband following, looking at their feet as they walked, when a sound of tin and steam and bubbling water made them turn and look at the road behind them. An old man in a 1929 Ford drove along the road at a moderate speed. The car’s fenders were gone, and the sun had flaked and burned the paint badly, but he rode in the seat with a great deal of quiet dignity, his face a thoughtful darkness under a dirty Panama hat, and when he saw the two people he drew the car up, steaming, the engine joggling under the hood, and opened the squealing door as he said, ‘This is no day for walking.’

‘Thank you,’ they said.

‘It is nothing.’ The old man wore an ancient yellowed white summer suit, with a rather greasy tie knotted loosely at his wrinkled throat. He helped the lady into the rear seat with a gracious bow of his head. ‘Let us men sit up front,’ he suggested, and the husband sat up front and the car moved off in trembling vapors.

‘Well. My name is Garcia.’

There were introductions and noddings.

‘Your car broke down? You are on your way for help?’ said Señor Garcia.

‘Yes.’

‘Then let me drive you and a mechanic back out,’ offered the old man.

They thanked him and kindly turned the offer aside and he made it once again, but upon finding that his interest and concern caused them embarrassment, he very politely turned to another subject.

He touched a small stack of folded newspapers on his lap.

‘Do you read the papers? Of course, you do. But do you read them as I read them? I rather doubt that you have come upon my system. No, it was not exactly myself that came upon it; the system was forced upon me. But now I know what a clever thing it has turned out to be. I always get the newspapers a week late. All of us, those who are interested, get the papers a week late, from the Capital. And this circumstance makes for a man being a clear-thinking man. You are very careful with your thinking when you pick up a week-old paper.’

The husband and wife asked him to continue.

‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘I remember once, when I lived in the Capital for a month and bought the paper fresh each day, I went wild with love, anger, irritation, frustration; all of the passions boiled in me. I was young. I exploded at everything I saw. But then I saw what I was doing: I was believing what I read. Have you noticed? You believe a paper printed on the very day you buy it? This has happened but only an hour ago, you think! It must be true.’ He shook his head. ‘So I learned to stand back away and let the paper age and mellow. Back here, in Colonia, I saw the headlines diminish to nothing. The week-old paper – why, you can spit on it if you wish. It is like a woman you once loved, but you now see, a few days later, she is not quite what you thought. She has rather a plain face. She is no deeper than a cup of water.’

He steered the car gently, his hands upon the wheel as upon the heads of his good children, with care and affection. ‘So here I am, returning to my home to read my weekly papers, to peek sideways at them, to toy with them.’ He spread one on his knee, glancing down to it on occasion as he drove. ‘How white this paper is, like the mind of a child that is an idiot, poor thing, all blank. You can put anything into an empty place like that. Here, do you see? This paper speaks and says that the light-skinned people of the world are dead. Now that is a very silly thing to say. At this very moment, there are probably millions upon millions of white men and women eating their noon meals or their suppers. The earth trembles, a town collapses, people run from the town, screaming, All is lost! In the next village, the population wonders what all of the shouting is about, since they have had a most splendid night’s repose. Ah, ah, what a sly world it is. People do not see how sly it is. It is either night or day to them. Rumor flies. This very afternoon all of the little villages upon this highway, behind us and ahead of us, are in carnival. The white man is dead, the rumors say, and yet here I come into the town with two very lively ones. I hope you don’t mind my speaking in this way? If I do not talk to you I would then be talking to this engine up in the front, which makes a great noise speaking back.’

They were at the edge of town.

‘Please,’ said John Webb, ‘it wouldn’t be wise for you to be seen with us today. We’ll get out here.’

The old man stopped his car reluctantly and said, ‘You are most kind and thoughtful of me.’ He turned to look at the lovely wife.

‘When I was a young man I was very full of wildness and ideas. I read all of the books from France by a man named Jules Verne. I see you know his name. But at night I many times thought I must be an inventor. That is all gone by; I never did what I thought I might do. But I remember clearly that one of the machines I wished to put together was a machine that would help every man, for an hour, to be like any other man. The machine was full of colors and smells and it had film in it, like a theater, and the machine was like a coffin. You lay in it. And you touched a button. And for an hour you could be one of those Eskimos in the cold wind up there, or you could be an Arab gentleman on a horse. Everything a New York man felt, you could feel. Everything a man from Sweden smelled, you could smell. Everything a man from China tasted, your tongue knew. The machine was like another man – do you see what I was after? And by touching many of the buttons, each time you got into my machine, you could be a white man or a yellow man or a Negrito. You could be a child or a woman, even, if you wished to be very funny.’

The husband and wife climbed from the car.

‘Did you ever try to invent that machine?’

‘It was so very long ago. I had forgotten until today. And today I was thinking, we could make use of it, we are in need of it. What a shame I never tried to put it all together. Someday some other man will do it.’

‘Someday,’ said John Webb.

‘It has been a pleasure talking with you,’ said the old man. ‘God go with you.’

‘Adiós, Señor Garcia,’ they said.

The car drove slowly away, steaming. They stood watching it go, for a full minute. Then, without speaking, the husband reached over and took his wife’s hand.

They entered the small town of Colonia on foot. They walked past the little shops – the butcher shop, the photographer’s. People stopped and looked at them as they went by and did not stop looking at them as long as they were in sight. Every few seconds, as he walked, Webb put up his hand to touch the holster hidden under his coat, secretly, tentatively, like someone feeling for a tiny boil that is growing and growing every hour and every hour …

The patio of the Hotel Esposa was cool as a grotto under a blue waterfall. In it caged birds sang, and footsteps echoed like small rifle shots, clear and smooth.

‘Remember? We stopped here years ago,’ said Webb, helping his wife up the steps. They stood in the cool grotto, glad of the blue shade.

‘Señor Esposa,’ said John Webb, when a fat man came forward from the desk, squinting at them. ‘Do you remember me – John Webb? Five years ago – we played cards one night.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Señor Esposa bowed to the wife and shook hands briefly. There was an uncomfortable silence.

Webb cleared his throat. ‘We’ve had a bit of trouble, señor. Could we have a room for tonight only?’

‘Your money is always good here.’

‘You mean you’ll actually give us a room? We’ll be glad to pay in advance. Lord, we need the rest. But, more than that, we need gas.’

Leonora picked at her husband’s arm. ‘Remember? We haven’t a car anymore.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ He fell silent for a moment and then sighed. ‘Well. Never mind the gas. Is there a bus out of here for the Capital soon?’

‘All will be attended to, in time,’ said the manager nervously. ‘This way.’

As they were climbing the stairs they heard a noise. Looking out they saw their car riding around and around the plaza, eight times, loaded with men who were shouting and singing and hanging on to the front fenders, laughing. Children and dogs ran after the car.

‘I would like to own a car like that,’ said Señor Esposa.

He poured a little cool wine for the three of them, standing in the room on the third floor of the Esposa Hotel.

‘To “change,”’ said Señor Esposa.

‘I’ll drink to that.’

They drank. Señor Esposa licked his lips and wiped them on his coat sleeve. ‘We are always surprised and saddened to see the world change. It is insane, they have run out on us, you say. It is unbelievable. And now, well – you are safe for the night. Shower and have a good supper. I won’t be able to keep you more than one night, to repay you for your kindness to me five years ago.’

‘And tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow? Do not take any bus to the Capital, please. There are riots in the streets there. A few people from the North have been killed. It is nothing. It will pass in a few days. But you must be careful until those few days pass and the blood cools. There are many wicked people taking advantage of this day, señor. For forty-eight hours anyway, under the guise of a great resurgence of nationalism, these people will try to gain power. Selfishness and patriotism, señor; today I cannot tell one from the other. So – you must hide. That is a problem. The town will know you are here in another few hours. This might be dangerous to my hotel. I cannot say.’

‘We understand. It’s good of you to help this much.’

‘If you need anything, call me.’ Señor Esposa drank the rest of the wine in his glass. ‘Finish the bottle,’ he said.

The fireworks began at nine that evening. First one skyrocket then another soared into the dark sky and burst out upon the winds, building architectures of flame. Each skyrocket, at the top of its ride, cracked open and let out a formation of streamers in red and white flame that made something like the dome of a beautiful cathedral.

Leonora and John Webb stood by the open window in their unlit room, watching and listening. As the hour latened, more people streamed into town from every road and path and began to roam, arm in arm, around the plaza, singing, barking like dogs, crowing like roosters, and then falling down on the tile sidewalks, sitting there, laughing, their heads thrown back, while the skyrockets burst explosive colors on the tilted faces. A brass band began to thump and wheeze.

‘So here we are,’ said John Webb, ‘after a few hundred years of living high. So this is what’s left of our white supremacy – you and I in a dark room in a hotel three hundred miles inside a celebrating country.’

‘You’ve got to see their side of it.’

‘Oh, I’ve seen it ever since I was that high. In a way, I’m glad they’re happy. God knows they’ve waited long enough to be. But I wonder how long that happiness will last. Now that the scapegoat is gone, who will they blame for oppression, who will be as handy and as obvious and as guilty as you and I and the man who lived in this room before us?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We were so convenient. The man who rented this room last month, he was convenient, he stood out. He made loud jokes about the natives’ siestas. He refused to learn even a smattering of Spanish. Let them learn English, by God, and speak like men, he said. And he drank too much and whored too much with this country’s women.’ He broke off and moved back from the window. He stared at the room.

The furniture, he thought. Where he put his dirty shoes upon the sofa, where he burned holes in the carpet with cigarettes; the wet spot on the wall near the bed, God knows what or how he did that. The chairs scarred and kicked. It wasn’t his hotel or his room; it was borrowed, it meant nothing. So this son-of-a-bitch went around the country for the past one hundred years, a traveling commercial, a Chamber of Commerce, and now here we are, enough like him to be his brother and sister, and there they are down there on the night of the Butlers’ Ball. They don’t know, or if they know they won’t think of it, that tomorrow they’ll be just as poor, just as oppressed as ever, that the whole machine will only have shifted into another gear.

Now the band had stopped playing below; a man had leaped up, shouting, on the bandstand. There was a flash of machetes in the air and the brown gleam of half-naked bodies.

The man on the bandstand faced the hotel and looked up at the dark room where John and Leonora Webb now stood back out of the intermittent flares.

The man shouted.

‘What does he say?’ asked Leonora.

John Webb translated: ‘“It is now a free world,” he says.’

The man yelled.

John Webb translated again. ‘He says, “We are free!”’

The man lifted himself on his toes and made a motion of breaking manacles. ‘He says, “No one owns us, no one in all the world.”’

The crowd roared and the band began to play, and while it was playing, the man on the grandstand stood glaring up at the room window, with all of the hatred of the universe in his eyes.

During the night there were fights and pummelings and voices lifted, arguments and shots fired. John Webb lay awake and heard the voice of Señor Esposa below, reasoning, talking quietly, firmly. And then the fading away of the tumult, the last rockets in the sky, the last breakings of bottles on the cobbles.

At five in the morning the air was warming into a new day. There was the softest of taps on the bedroom door.

‘It is me, it is Esposa,’ said a voice.

John Webb hesitated, half-dressed, numbed on his feet from lack of sleep, then opened the door.

‘What a night, what a night!’ said Señor Esposa, coming in, shaking his head, laughing gently. ‘Did you hear that noise? Yes? They tried to come up here to your room. I prevented this.’

‘Thank you’ said Leonora, still in bed, turned to the wall.

‘They were all old friends. I made an agreement with them, anyway. They were drunk enough and happy enough so they agreed to wait. I am to make a proposition to you two.’ Suddenly he seemed embarrassed. He moved to the window. ‘Everyone is sleeping late. A few are up. A few men. See them there on the far side of the plaza?’

John Webb looked out at the plaza. He saw the brown men talking quietly there about the weather, the world, the sun, this town, and perhaps the wine.

‘Señor, have you ever been hungry in your life?’

‘For a day, once.’

‘Only for a day. Have you always had a house to live in and a car to drive?’

‘Until yesterday.’

‘Were you ever without a job?’

‘Never.’

‘Did all of your brothers and sisters live to be twenty-one years old?’

‘All of them.’

‘Even I,’ said Señor Esposa, ‘even I hate you a little bit now. For I have been without a home. I have been hungry. I have three brothers and one sister buried in that graveyard on the hill beyond the town, all dead of tuberculosis before they were nine years old.’

Señor Esposa glanced at the men in the plaza. ‘Now, I am no longer hungry or poor, I have a car, I am alive. But I am one in a thousand. What can you say to them out there today?’

‘I’ll try to think of something.’

‘Long ago I stopped trying. Señor, we have always been a minority, we white people. I am Spanish, but I was born here. They tolerate me.’

‘We have never let ourselves think about our being a minority,’ said Webb, ‘and now it’s hard to get used to the fact.’

‘You have behaved beautifully.’

‘Is that a virtue?’

‘In the bull ring, yes; in war, yes; in anything like this, most assuredly yes. You do not complain, you do not make excuses. You do not run and make a spectacle of yourself. I think you are both very brave.’

The hotel manager sat down, slowly, helplessly.

‘I’ve come to offer you the chance to settle down,’ he said.

‘We wanted to move on, if possible.’

The manager shrugged. ‘Your car is stolen, I can do nothing to get it back. You cannot leave town. Remain then and accept my offer of a position in my hotel.’

‘You don’t think there is any way for us to travel?’

‘It might be twenty days, señor, or twenty years. You cannot exist without money, food, lodging. Consider my hotel and the work I can give you.’

The manager arose and walked unhappily to the door and stood by the chair, touching Webb’s coat, which was draped over it.

‘What’s the job?’ asked Webb.

‘In the kitchen,’ said the manager, and looked away.