Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (19 page)

 
          
 
"I haven't it in me any more to wait, but
I'll be here."

 
          
 
He moved toward the door, then stopped and
looked at me as if surprised by some new question that had come into his mind.

 
          
 
"Anna," he said, "if all this
had happened forty, fifty years ago, would you have gone away with me then?
Would you really have me?"

 
          
 
I did not answer.

 
          
 
"Anna?" he asked.

 
          
 
After a long while I said, "There are
some questions that should never be asked."

 
          
 
Because, I went on, thinking, there can be no
answers. Looking down the years toward the lake, I could not remember, so I
could not say, whether we could have ever been happy. Perhaps even as a child,
sensing the impossible in Roger, I had clenched the impossible, and therefore
the rare, to my hearty simply because it was impossible and rare. He was a
sprig of farewell summer pressed in an old book, to be taken out, turned over,
admired, once a year, but more than that? Who could say? Surely not I, so long,
so late in the day. Life is questions, not answers.

 
          
 
Roger had come very close to read my face, my
mind, while I thought all this. What he saw there made him look away, close his
eyes, then take my hand and press it to his cheek.

 
          
 
"I'll be back. I swear I will!"

 
          
 
Outside the door he stood bewildered for a
moment in the moonlight, looking at the world and all its directions, east,
west, north, south, like a child out of school for his first summer not knowing
which way to go first, just breathing, just listening, just seeing.

 
          
 
"Don't hurry!" I said fervently.
"Oh, God, whatever you do, please, enjoy yourself, don't hurry!"

 
          
 
I saw him run off toward the limousine near
the cottage where I was supposed to rap in the morning and where I would get no
answer. But I knew that I would not go to the cottage and that I'd keep the
maids from going there because the old lady had given orders not to be
bothered.

           
 
That would give Roger the chance, the start he
needed. In a week or two or three, I might call the police. Then if they met
Roger coming back on the boat from all those wild places, it wouldn't matter.

 
          
 
Police? Perhaps not even them. Perhaps she
died of a heart attack and poor Roger only thinks he killed her and now proudly
sails off into the world, his pride not allowing him to know that only her own
self-made death released him.

 
          
 
But then again, if at last all the murder he
had put away for seventy years had forced him tonight to lay hands on and kill
the hideous turkey, I could not find it in my heart to weep for her but only
for the great time it had taken to act out the sentence.

 
          
 
The road is silent. An hour has passed since
the limousine roared away down the road.

 
          
 
Now I have just put out the lights and stand
alone in the pavilion looking out at the shining lake where in another century,
under another sun, a small boy with an old face was first touched to play tag
with me and now, very late, had tagged me back, had kissed my hand and run
away, and this time myself, stunned, not following.

 
          
 
Many things I do not know, tonight.

 
          
 
But one thing I'm sure of.

 
          
 
I do not hate Roger Harrison any more.

 
          
 
On a day neither too mellow nor too tart, too
hot nor too cold, the ancient tin lizzie came over the desert hill traveling at
commotion speed. The vibration of the various armored parts of the car caused
road-runners to spurt up in floury bursts of dust. Gila monsters, lazy displays
of Indian jewelry, took themselves out of the way. Like an infestation, the
Ford clamored and dinned away into the deeps of the wilderness.

 
          
 
In the front seat, squinting back, Old Will
Bantlin shouted, "Turn off!"

 
          
 
Bob Greenhill spun-swung the lizzie off behind
a billboard. Instantly both men turned. Both peered over the crumpled top of
their car, praying to the dust they had wheeled up on the air.

 
          
 
"Lay down! Lay low! Please ..."

 
          
 
And the dust blew slowly down. Just in time.

 
          
 
"Duck!"

 
          
 
A motorcycle, looking as if it had burned
through all nine rings of hell, thundered by. Hunched over its oily handlebars,
a hurricane figure, a man with a creased and most unpleasant face, goggled and
sun-deviled, leaned on the wind. Roaring bike and man flung away down the road.

 
          
 
The two old men sat up in their lizzie,
exhaling.

 
          
 
"So long, Ned Hopper," said Bob
Greenhill.

 
          
 
"Why?" said Will Bantlin.
"Why's he always tailing us?"

 
          
 
"Willy-William, talk sense," said
Greenhill. "We're his luck, his Judas goats. Why should he let us go, when
trailing us around the land makes him rich and happy and us poor and
wise?"

 
          
 
The two men looked at each other, half in,
half out of their smiles. What the world hadn't done to them, thinking about it
had. They had enjoyed thirty years of nonviolence together, in their case
meaning nonwork. "I feel a harvest coming on," Will would say, and
they'd clear out of town before the wheat ripened. Or, "Those apples are
ready to fall!" So they'd stand back about three hundred miles so as not
to get hit on the head.

 
          
 
Now Bob Greenhill slowly let the car, in a
magnificent controlled detonation, drift back out on the road.

 
          
 
"Willy, friend, don't be
discouraged."

 
          
 
"I've been through 'discouraged,' "
said Will. "I'm knee deep in 'accepting.' "

 
          
 
"Accepting what?"

 
          
 
"Finding a treasure chest of canned fish
one day and no can opener. Finding a thousand can openers next day and no
fish."

 
          
 
Bob Greenhill listened to the motor talking to
itself like an old man under the hood, sounding like sleepless nights and rusty
bones and well-worn dreams.

 
          
 
"Our bad luck can't last forever,
Willy."

 
          
 
"No, but it sure tries. You and me sell
ties and who's across the street ten cents cheaper?"

 
          
 
"Ned Hopper."

 
          
 
"We strike gold in Tonopah and who
registers the claim first?"

 
          
 
"Old Ned."

 
          
 
"Haven't we done him a lifetime of
favors? Aren't we overdue for something just ours, that never winds up
his?"

 
          
 
"Time's ripe, Willy," said Robert,
driving calmly. "Trouble is, you, me, Ned never really decided what we
wanted. We've run through all the. ghost towns, see something, grab. Ned sees
and grabs, too. He don't want it, he just wants it because we want it. He keeps
it 'till we're out of sight, then tears it up and hang-dogs after us for more
litter. The day we really know what we want is the day Ned gets scared of us
and runs off forever. Ah, hell." Bob Greenhill breathed the clear
fresh-water air running in morning streams over the windshield. "It's good
anyway. That sky. Those hills. The desert and . . ."

 
          
 
His voice faded.

 
          
 
Will Bantlin glanced over. “What's
wrong?"

 
          
 
"For some reason . . ." Bob
Greenhill's eyes rolled, his leathery hands turned the wheel slow, "we got
to . . . pull off . . . the road.'*

 
          
 
The lizzie bumped on the dirt shoulder. They
drove down in a dusty wash and up out and suddenly along a dry peninsula of
land overlooking the desert. Bob Greenhill, looking hypnotized, put out his
hand to turn the ignition key. The old man under the hood stopped complaining about
the insomnia and slept.

 
          
 
"Now, why did you do that?" asked
Will Bantlm.

 
          
 
Bob Greenhill gazed at the wheel in his
suddenly intuitive hands. "Seemed as if I had to. Why?" He blinked
up. He let his bones settle and his eyes grow lazy. "Maybe only to look at
the land out there. Good. All of it been here a billion years."

 
          
 
"Except for that city," said Will
Bantlin.

 
          
 
"City?" said Bob.

 
          
 
He turned to look and the desert was there and
the distant hills the color of lions, and far out beyond, suspended in a sea of
warm morning sand and light, was a kind of floating image, a hasty sketch of a
city.

 
          
 
"That can't be Phoenix," said Bob
Greenhill. "Phoenix is ninety miles off. No other big place around."

 
          
 
Will Bantlin rumpled the map on his knees,
searching.

 
          
 
"No. No other town."

 
          
 
"It's coming clearer!" cried Bob
Greenhill, suddenly.

 
          
 
They both stood absolutely straight up in the
car and stared over the dusty windshield, the wind whining softly over their
craggy faces.

 
          
 
"Why, you know what that is, Bob? A
mirage! Sure, that's it! Light rays just right, atmosphere, sky, temperature.
City's the other side of the horizon somewhere. Look how it jumps, fades in and
out. It's reflected against that sky up there like a mirror and comes down here
where we can see it! A mirage, by Gosh!"

 
          
 
"That big!”

 
          
 
Bob Greenhill measured the city as it grew
taller, clearer in a shift of wind, a soft far whirlabout of sand.

 
          
 
"The granddaddy of them all! That's not
Phoenix. Not Santa Fe or Alamagordo, no. Let's see. It's not Kansas City—"

 
          
 
"That's too far off, anyway."

 
          
 
"Yeah, but look at those buildings. Big!
Tallest in the country. Only one place like that in the world."

 
          
 
"You don't mean—New York?"

 
          
 
Will Bantlin nodded slowly and they both stood
in the silence looking out at the mirage. And the city was tall and shining now
and almost perfect in the early-morning light.

 
          
 
"Oh, my," said Bob, after a long
while. "That's fine."

 
          
 
"It is," said Will.

           
 
"But," said Will, a moment later,
whispering, as if afraid the city might hear, "what's it doing three
thousand miles from home, here in the middle of Nowhere, Arizona?"

 
          
 
Bob Greenhill gazed and spoke. "Willy,
friend, never question nature. It just sits there and minds its knitting. Radio
waves, rainbows, northern lights, all that, heck, let's just say a great big
picture got took of New York City and is being developed here, three thousand
miles away on a mom when we need cheering, just for us."

 
          
 
"Not just us." Will peered over the
side of the car. "Look!"

 
          
 
There in the floury dust lay innumerable
crosshatchings, diagonals, fascinating symbols printed out in a quiet tapestry.

 
          
 
"Tire marks," said Bob Greenhill.
"Hundreds of them. Thousands. Lots of cars pulled off here."

 
          
 
"For what. Bob?" Will Bantlin leaped
from the car, landed on the earth, tromped it, turned on it, knelt to touch it
with a swift and suddenly trembling hand. "For what, for what? To see the
mirage? Yes, sir! To see the mirage!"

 
          
 
"So?"

 
          
 
"Boy, howdy!" Will stood up,
thrummed his voice like a motor. "Brrrummm!" He turned an imaginary
wheel. He ran along a tire track. "Brrrummm! Eeeee! Brakes on! Robert-Bob,
you know what we got here?! Look east! Look west. This is the only point in
miles you can pull off the highway and sit and stare your eyes out!"

 
          
 
"Sure, it's nice people have an eye for
beauty—"

 
          
 
"Beauty, my socks! Who owns this
land?"

 
          
 
"The state, I reckon."

 
          
 
"You reckon wrong! You and me! We set up
camp, register a claim, improve the property, and the law reads it's ours. Right?"

 
          
 
"Hold on!" Bob Greenhill was staring
out at the desert and the strange city there. "You mean you want to . .
homestead a mirage?"

 
          
 
"Right, by zingo! Homestead a
mirage!"

 
          
 
Robert Greenhill stood down and wandered
around the car looking at the tire-treaded earth.

 
          
 
"Can we do that?"

 
          
 
"Do it? Excuse my dust!”

 
          
 
In an instant Will Bantlin was pounding tent
pegs into the soil, stringing twine.

 
          
 
"From here to here, and here to here,
it's a gold mine, we pan it, it's a cow, we milk it, it's a lakeful of money,
we swim in it!"

 
          
 
Rummaging in the car, he heaved out cases and
brought forth a large cardboard which had once advertised cheap cravats. This,
reversed, he painted over with a brush and began lettering.

 
          
 
"Willy," said his friend,
"nobody's going to pay to see any darned old—"

 
          
 
"Mirage? Put up a fence, tell folks they
can't see a thing, and that's just their itch. There!"

 
          
 
He held up the sign.

 
          
 
SECRET VIEW MIRAGE—THE MYSTERIOUS CITY

 
          
 
25 per car. Motorbikes a dime,

 
          
 
"Here comes a car. Watch!"

 
          
 
“William—"

 
          
 
But Will, running, lifted the sign.

 
          
 
"Hey! Look! Hey!"

 
          
 
The car roared past, a bull ignoring the
matador. , Bob shut his eyes so as not to see Will's smile wiped away.