Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

John Webb sat on the bed and said nothing. His wife did not move.

Señor Esposa said, ‘It is the best I can do. What more can you ask of me? Last night, those others down in the plaza wanted both of you. Did you see the machetes? I bargained with them. You were lucky. I told them you would be employed in my hotel for the next twenty years, that you were my employees and deserve my protection!’

‘You said that!’

‘Señor, señor, be thankful! Consider! Where will you go? The jungle? You will be dead in two hours from the snakes. Then can you walk five hundred miles to a capital which will not welcome you? No – you must face the reality.’ Señor Esposa opened the door. ‘I offer you an honest job and you will be paid the standard wages of two pesos a day, plus meals. Would you rather be with me, or out in the plaza at noon with our friends? Consider.’

The door was shut. Señor Esposa was gone.

Webb stood looking at the door for a long while.

Then he walked to the chair and fumbled with the holster under the draped white shirt. The holster was empty. He held it in his hands and blinked at its emptiness and looked again at the door through which Señor Esposa had just passed. He went over and sat down on the bed beside his wife. He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms and kissed her, and they lay there, watching the room get brighter with the new day.

At eleven o’clock in the morning, with the great doors on the windows of their room flung back, they began to dress. There were soap, towels, shaving equipment, even perfume in the bathroom, provided by Mr Esposa.

John Webb shaved and dressed carefully.

At eleven-thirty he turned on the small radio near their bed. You could usually get New York or Cleveland or Houston on such a radio. But the air was silent. John Webb turned the radio off.

‘There’s nothing to go back to – nothing to go back for – nothing.’

His wife sat on a chair near the door, looking at the wall.

‘We could stay here and work,’ he said.

She stirred at last. ‘No. We couldn’t do that, not really. Could we?’

‘No, I guess not.’

‘There’s no way we could do that. We’re being consistent, anyway; spoiled, but consistent.’

He thought a moment. ‘We could make for the jungle.’

‘I don’t think we can move from the hotel without being seen. We don’t want to try to escape and be caught. It would be far worse that way.’

He nodded.

They both sat a moment.

‘It might not be too bad, working here,’ he said.

‘What would we be living for? Everyone’s dead – your father, mine, your mother, mine, your brothers, mine, all our friends, everything gone, everything we understood.’

He nodded.

‘Or if we took the job, one day soon one of the men would touch me and you’d go after him, you know you would. Or someone would do something to you, and I’d do something.’

He nodded again.

They sat for fifteen minutes, talking quietly. Then, at last, he picked up the telephone and ticked the cradle with his finger.

‘Bueno,’ said a voice on the other end.

‘Señor Esposa?’

‘Sí.’

‘Señor Esposa,’ he paused and licked his lips, ‘tell your friends we will be leaving the hotel at noon.’

The phone did not immediately reply. Then with a sigh Señor Esposa said, ‘As you wish. You are sure—?’

The phone was silent for a full minute. Then it was picked up again and the manager said quietly, ‘My friends say they will be waiting for you on the far side of the plaza.’

‘We will meet them there,’ said John Webb.

‘And señor—’

‘Yes.’

‘Do not hate me, do not hate us.’

‘I don’t hate anybody.’

‘It is a bad world, señor. None of us know how we got here or what we are doing. These men don’t know what they are mad at, except they are mad. Forgive them and do not hate them.’

‘I don’t hate them or you.’

‘Thank you, thank you.’ Perhaps the man on the far end of the telephone wire was crying. There was no way to tell. There were great lapses in his talking, in his breathing. After a while he said, ‘We don’t know why we do anything. Men hit each other for no reason except they are unhappy. Remember that. I am your friend. I would help you if I could. But I cannot. It would be me against the town. Good-bye, señor.’ He hung up.

John Webb sat in the chair with his hand on the silent phone. It was a moment before he glanced up. It was a moment before his eyes focused on an object immediately before him. When he saw it clearly, he still did not move, but sat regarding it, until a look of immensely tired irony appeared on his mouth. ‘Look here,’ he said at last.

Leonora followed his motion, his pointing.

They both sat looking at his cigarette which, neglected on the rim of the table while he telephoned, had burned down so that now it had charred a black hole in the clean surface of the wood.

It was noon, with the sun directly over them, pinning their shadows under them as they started down the steps of the Hotel Esposa. Behind them, the birds fluted in their bamboo cages, and water ran in a little fountain bath. They were as neat as they could get, their faces and hands washed, their nails clean, their shoes polished.

Across the plaza two hundred yards away stood a small group of men, in the shade of a store-front overhang. Some of the men were natives from the jungle area, with machetes gleaming at their sides. They were all facing the plaza.

John Webb looked at them for a long while. That isn’t everyone, he thought, that isn’t the whole country. That’s only the surface. That’s only the thin skin over the flesh. It’s not the body at all. Just the shell of an egg. Remember the crowds back home, the mobs, the riots? Always the same, there or here. A few mad faces up front, and the quiet ones far back, not taking part, letting things go, not wanting to be in it. The majority not moving. And so the few, the handful, take over and move for them.

His eyes did not blink. If we could break through that shell – God knows it’s thin! he thought. If we could talk our way through that mob and get to the quiet people beyond.… Can I do it? Can I say the right things? Can I keep my voice down?

He fumbled in his pockets and brought out a rumpled cigarette package and some matches.

I can try, he thought. How would the old man in the Ford have done it? I’ll try to do it his way. When we get across the plaza, I’ll start talking, I’ll whisper if necessary. And if we move slowly through the mob, we might just possibly find our way to the other people and we’ll be on high ground and we’ll be safe.

Leonora moved beside him. She was so fresh, so well groomed in spite of everything, so new in all this oldness, so startling, that his mind flinched and jerked. He found himself staring at her as if she’d betrayed him by her salt-whiteness, her wonderfully brushed hair and her cleanly manicured nails and her bright-red mouth.

Standing on the bottom step, Webb lit a cigarette, took two or three long drags on it, tossed it down, stepped on it, kicked the flattened butt into the street, and said, ‘Here we go.’

They stepped down and started around the far side of the plaza, past the few shops that were still open. They walked quietly.

‘Perhaps they’ll be decent to us.’

‘We can hope so.’

They passed a photographic shop.

‘It’s another day. Anything can happen. I believe that. No – I don’t really believe it. I’m only talking. I’ve got to talk or I wouldn’t be able to walk,’ she said.

They passed a candy shop.

‘Keep talking, then.’

‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘This can’t be happening to us! Are we the last ones in the world?’

‘Maybe next to the last.’

They approached an open air carnecería.

God! he thought. How the horizons narrowed, how they came in. A year ago there weren’t four directions, there were a million for us. Yesterday they got down to four; we could go to Juatala, Porto Bello, San Juan Clementas, or Brioconbria. We were satisfied to have our car. Then when we couldn’t get gas, we were satisfied to have our clothes, then when they took our clothes, we were satisfied to have a place to sleep. Each pleasure they took away left us with one other creature comfort to hold on to. Did you see how we let go of one thing and clutched another so quickly? I guess that’s human. So they took away everything. There’s nothing left. Except us. It all boils down to just you and me walking along here, and thinking too goddamn much for my own good. And what counts in the end is whether they can take you away from me or me away from you, Lee, and I don’t think they can do that. They’ve got everything else and I don’t blame them. But they can’t really do anything else to us now. When you strip all the clothes away and the doodads, you have two human beings who were either happy or unhappy together, and we have no complaints.

‘Walk slowly,’ said John Webb.

‘I am.’

‘Not too slowly, to look reluctant. Not too fast, to look as if you want to get it over with. Don’t give them the satisfaction, Lee, don’t give them a damn bit.’

‘I won’t.’

They walked. ‘Don’t even touch me,’ he said, quietly. ‘Don’t even hold my hand.’

‘Oh, please!’

‘No, not even that.’

He moved away a few inches and kept walking steadily. His eyes were straight ahead and their pace was regular.

‘I’m beginning to cry, Jack.’

‘Goddamn it!’ he said, measuredly, between his teeth, not looking aside. ‘Stop it! Do you want me to run? Is that what you want – do you want me to take you and run into the jungle, and let them hunt us, is that what you want, goddamn it, do you want me to fall down in the street here and grovel and scream, shut up, let’s do this right, don’t give them anything!’

‘All right,’ she said, hands tight, her head coming up. ‘I’m not crying now. I won’t cry.’

‘Good, damn it, that’s good.’

And still, strangely, they were not past the carnecería. The vision of red horror was on their left as they paced steadily forward on the hot tile sidewalk. The things that hung from hooks looked like brutalities and sins, like bad consciences, evil dreams, like gored flags and slaughtered promises. The redness, oh, the hanging, evil-smelling wetness and redness, the hooked and hung-high carcasses, unfamiliar, unfamiliar.

As he passed the shop, something made John Webb strike out a hand. He slapped it smartly against a strung-up side of beef. A mantle of blue buzzing flies lifted angrily and swirled in a bright cone over the meat.

Leonora said, looking ahead, walking, ‘They’re all strangers! I don’t know any of them. I wish I knew even one of them. I wish even one of them knew me!’

They walked on past the carnecería. The side of beef, red and irritable-looking, swung in the hot sunlight after they passed.

The flies came down in a feeding cloak to cover the meat, once it had stopped swinging.

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh

In the April night, more than once, blossoms fell from the orchard trees and lit with rustling taps on the drumskin. At midnight a peach stone left miraculously on a branch through winter, flicked by a bird, fell swift and unseen, struck once, like panic, which jerked the boy upright. In silence he listened to his own heart ruffle away, away, at last gone from his ears and back in his chest again.

After that, he turned the drum on its side, where its great lunar face peered at him whenever he opened his eyes.

His face, alert or at rest, was solemn. It was indeed a solemn time and a solemn night for a boy just turned fourteen in the peach field near the Owl Creek not far from the church at Shiloh.

‘… thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three …’

Unable to see, he stopped counting.

Beyond the thirty-three familiar shadows, forty thousand men, exhausted by nervous expectation, unable to sleep for romantic dreams of battles yet unfought, lay crazily askew in their uniforms. A mile yet farther on, another army was strewn helter-skelter, turning slow, basting themselves with the thought of what they would do when the time came: a leap, a yell, a blind plunge their strategy, raw youth their protection and benediction.

Now and again the boy heard a vast wind come up, that gently stirred the air. But he knew what it was, the army here, the army there, whispering to itself in the dark. Some men talking to others, others murmuring to themselves, and all so quiet it was like a natural element arisen from south or north with the motion of the earth toward dawn.

What the men whispered the boy could only guess, and he guessed that it was: Me, I’m the one, I’m the one of all the rest won’t die. I’ll live through it. I’ll go home. The band will play. And I’ll be there to hear it.

Yes, thought the boy, that’s all very well for them, they can give as good as they get!

For with the careless bones of the young men harvested by night and bindled around campfires were the similarly strewn steel bones of their rifles, with bayonets fixed like eternal lightning lost in the orchard grass.

Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two sticks to beat it, and no shield.

There wasn’t a man-boy on this ground tonight did not have a shield he cast, riveted or carved himself on his way to his first attack, compounded of remote but nonetheless firm and fiery family devotion, flag-blown patriotism and cocksure immortality strengthened by the touchstone of very real gunpowder, ramrod, miniéball and flint. But without these last the boy felt his family move yet farther off away in the dark, as if one of those great prairie-burning trains had chanted them away never to return, leaving him with this drum which was worse than a toy in the game to be played tomorrow or some day much too soon.

The boy turned on his side. A moth brushed his face, but it was peach blossom. A peach blossom flicked him, but it was a moth. Nothing stayed put. Nothing had a name. Nothing was as it once was.

If he lay very still, when the dawn came up and the soldiers put on their bravery with their caps, perhaps they might go away, the war with them, and not notice him lying small here, no more than a toy himself.

‘Well, by God, now,’ said a voice.

The boy shut up his eyes, to hide inside himself, but it was too late. Someone, walking by in the night, stood over him.

‘Well,’ said the voice quietly, ‘here’s a soldier crying before the fight. Good. Get it over. Won’t be time once it all starts.’

And the voice was about to move on when the boy, startled, touched the drum at his elbow. The man above, hearing this, stopped. The boy could feel his eyes, sense him slowly bending near. A hand must have come down out of the night, for there was a little rat-tat as the fingernails brushed and the man’s breath fanned his face.

‘Why, it’s the drummer boy, isn’t it?’

The boy nodded, not knowing if his nod was seen. ‘Sir, is that you?’ he said.

‘I assume it is.’ The man’s knees cracked as he bent still closer.

He smelled as all fathers should smell, of salt sweat, ginger tobacco, horse and boot leather, and the earth he walked upon. He had many eyes. No, not eyes, brass buttons that watched the boy.

He could only be, and was, the General.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ he asked.

‘Joby,’ whispered the boy, starting to sit up.

‘All right, Joby, don’t stir.’ A hand pressed his chest gently, and the boy relaxed. ‘How long you been with us, Joby?’

‘Three weeks, sir.’

‘Run off from home or joined legitimately, boy?’

Silence.

‘Damn-fool question,’ said the General. ‘Do you shave yet, boy? Even more of a damn-fool. There’s your cheek, fell right off the tree overhead. And the others here not much older. Raw, raw, damn raw, the lot of you. You ready for tomorrow or the next day, Joby?’

‘I think so, sir.’

‘You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night.’

‘You, sir?’

‘God’s truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, and the war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that’s not how it’s going to be. And maybe that’s why I cried.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Joby.

The General must have taken out a cigar now, for the dark was suddenly filled with the Indian smell of tobacco unlit as yet, but chewed as the man thought what next to say.

‘It’s going to be a crazy time,’ said the General. ‘Counting both sides, there’s a hundred thousand men, give or take a few thousand out there tonight, not one as can spit a sparrow off a tree, or knows a horse clod from a miniéball. Stand up, bare the breast, ask to be a target, thank them and sit down, that’s us, that’s them. We should turn tail and train four months, they should do the same. But here we are, taken with spring fever and thinking it blood lust, taking our sulfur with cannons instead of with molasses as it should be, going to be a hero, going to live forever. And I can see all of them over there nodding agreement, save the other way around. It’s wrong, boy, it’s wrong as a head put on hind side front and a man marching backward through life. It will be a double massacre if one of their itchy generals decides to picnic his lads on our grass. More innocents will get shot out of pure Cherokee enthusiasm than ever got shot before. Owl Creek was full of boys splashing around in the noonday sun just a few hours ago. I fear it will be full of boys again, just floating, at sundown tomorrow, not caring where the tide takes them.’

The General stopped and made a little pile of winter leaves and twigs in the darkness, as if he might at any moment strike fire to them to see his way through the coming days when the sun might not show its face because of what was happening here and just beyond.

The boy watched the hand stirring the leaves and opened his lips to say something, but did not say it. The General heard the boy’s breath and spoke himself.

‘Why am I telling you this? That’s what you wanted to ask, eh? Well, when you got a bunch of wild horses on a loose rein somewhere, somehow you got to bring order, rein them in. These lads, fresh out of the milkshed, don’t know what I know, and I can’t tell them: men actually die, in war. So each is his own army. I got to make one army of them. And for that, boy, I need you.’

‘Me!’ The boy’s lips barely twitched.

‘Now, boy,’ said the General quietly, ‘you are the heart of the army. Think of that. You’re the heart of the army. Listen, now.’

And, lying there, Joby listened.

And the General spoke on.

If he, Joby, beat slow tomorrow, the heart would beat slow in the men. They would lag by the wayside. They would drowse in the fields on their muskets. They would sleep forever, after that, in those same fields, their hearts slowed by a drummer boy and stopped by enemy lead.

But if he beat a sure, steady, ever faster rhythm, then, then their knees would come up in a long line down over that hill, one knee after the other, like a wave on the ocean shore! Had he seen the ocean ever? Seen the waves rolling in like a well-ordered cavalry charge to the sand? Well, that was it, that’s what he wanted, that’s what was needed! Joby was his right hand and his left. He gave the orders, but Joby set the pace!

So bring the right knee up and the right foot out and the left knee up and the left foot out. One following the other in good time, in brisk time. Move the blood up the body and make the head proud and the spine stiff and the jaw resolute. Focus the eye and set the teeth, flare the nostrils and tighten the hands, put steel armor all over the men, for blood moving fast in them does indeed make men feel as if they’d put on steel. He must keep at it, at it! Long and steady, steady and long! Then, even though shot or torn, those wounds got in hot blood – in blood he’d helped stir – would feel less pain. If their blood was cold, it would be more than slaughter, it would be murderous nightmare and pain best not told and no one to guess.

The General spoke and stopped, letting his breath slack off. Then, after a moment, he said, ‘So there you are, that’s it. Will you do that, boy? Do you know now you’re general of the army when the General’s left behind?’

The boy nodded mutely.

‘You’ll run them through for me then, boy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. And, God willing, many nights from tonight, many years from now, when you’re as old or far much older than me, when they ask you what you did in this awful time, you will tell them – one part humble and one part proud—“I was the drummer boy at the battle of Owl Creek,” or the Tennessee River, or maybe they’ll just name it after the church there. “I was the drummer boy at Shiloh.” Good grief, that has a beat and sound to it fitting for Mr Longfellow. “I was the drummer boy at Shiloh.” Who will ever hear those words and not know you, boy, or what you thought this night, or what you’ll think tomorrow or the next day when we must get up on our legs and move?’

The General stood up. ‘Well, then. God bless you, boy. Good night.’

‘Good night, sir.’

And, tobacco, brass, boot polish, salt sweat and leather, the man moved away through the grass.

Joby lay for a moment, staring but unable to see where the man had gone.

He swallowed. He wiped his eyes. He cleared his throat. He settled himself. Then, at last, very slowly and firmly, he turned the drum so that it faced up toward the sky.

He lay next to it, his arm around it, feeling the tremor, the touch, the muted thunder as, all the rest of the April night in the year 1862, near the Tennessee River, not far from the Owl Creek, very close to the church named Shiloh, the peach blossoms fell on the drum.

The Beggar on O’Connell Bridge

‘A fool,’ I said. ‘That’s what I am.’

‘Why?’ asked my wife. ‘What for?’

I brooded by our third-floor hotel window. On the Dublin street below, a man passed, his face to the lamplight.

‘Him,’ I muttered. ‘Two days ago …’

Two days ago, as I was walking along, someone had hissed at me from the hotel alley. ‘Sir, it’s important! Sir!’

I turned into the shadow. This little man, in the direst tones, said, ‘I’ve a job in Belfast if I just had a pound for the train fare!’

I hesitated.

‘A most important job!’ he went on swiftly. ‘Pays well! I’ll – I’ll mail you back the loan! Just give me your name and hotel.’

He knew me for a tourist. It was too late, his promise to pay had moved me. The pound note crackled in my hand, being worked free from several others.

The man’s eye skimmed like a shadowing hawk.

‘And if I had two pounds, why, I could eat on the way.’

I uncrumpled two bills.

‘And three pounds would bring the wife, not leave her here alone.’

I unleafed a third.

‘Ah, hell!’ cried the man. ‘Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city, and let me get to the job, for sure!’

What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, in and out, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.

‘Lord thank you, bless you, sir!’

He ran, my five pounds with him.

I was half in the hotel before I realized that, for all his vows, he had not recorded my name.

‘Gah!’ I cried then.

‘Gah!’ I cried now, my wife behind me, at the window.

For there, passing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights ago.

‘Oh, I know him,’ said my wife. ‘He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway.’