Dandelion Wine (13 page)

“Thanks, I
will
have some iced tea.” You could hear the cool liquid shock his stomach, in the silence. Then he turned his gaze upon the old ladies like a doctor with a small light, looking into their eyes and nostrils and mouths. “Ladies, I know you're both vigorous. You
look
it. Eighty years”—he snapped his fingers—“mean nothing to you! But there are times, mind, when you're so busy, busy, you need a friend indeed, a friend in need, and
that
is the two-seater Green Machine.”

He fixed his bright, stuffed-fox, green-glass-eyed gaze upon that wonderful merchandise. It stood, smelling new, in the hot sunlight, waiting for them, a parlor chair comfortably put to wheels.

“Quiet as a swan's feather.” They felt him breathe softly in their faces. “Listen.” They listened. “The storage batteries are fully charged and ready now! Listen! Not a tremor, not a sound. Electric, ladies. You recharge it every night in your garage.”

“It couldn't—that is—” The younger sister gulped some iced tea. “It couldn't electrocute us accidently?”

“Perish the thought!”

He vaulted to the machine again, his teeth like those you saw in dental windows, alone, grimacing at you, as you passed by late at night.

“Tea parties!” He waltzed the runabout in a circle. “Bridge clubs. Soirees. Galas. Luncheons. Birthday gatherings! D.A.R. breakfasts.” He purred away as if running off forever. He returned in a rubber-tired hush. “Gold Star Mother suppers.” He sat primly, corseted by his supple characterization of a woman. “Easy steering. Silent, elegant arrivals and departures. No license needed. On hot days—take the breeze. Ah …” He glided by the porch, head back, eyes closed deliciously, hair tousling in the wind thus cleanly sliced through.

He trudged reverently up the porch stairs, hat in hand, turning to gaze at the trial model as at the altar of a familiar church. “Ladies,” he said softly, “twenty-five dollars down. Ten dollars a month, for two years.”

Fern was first down the steps onto the double seat. She sat apprehensively. Her hand itched. She raised it. She dared tweak the rubber bulb horn.

A seal barked.

Roberta, on the porch, screamed hilariously and leaned over the railing.

The salesman joined their hilarity. He escorted the older sister down the steps, roaring, at the same time taking out his pen and searching in his straw hat for some piece of paper or other.

 

“A
nd so we bought it!” remembered Miss Roberta, in the attic, horrified at their nerve. “We should've been warned! Always
did
think it looked like a little car off the carnival roller coaster!”

“Well,” said Fern defensively, “my hip's bothered me for years, and you always get tired walking. It seemed so refined, so regal. Like in the old days when women wore hoop skirts. They
sailed
! The Green Machine sailed
so
quietly.”

Like an excursion boat, wonderfully easy to steer, a baton handle you twitched with your hand, so.

Oh, that glorious and enchanted first week—the magical afternoons of golden light, humming through the shady town on a dreaming, timeless river, seated stiffly, smiling at passing acquaintances, sedately purring out their wrinkled claws at every turn, squeezing a hoarse cry from the black rubber horn at intersections, sometimes letting Douglas or Tom Spaulding or any of the other boys who trotted, chatting, alongside, hitch a little ride. Fifteen slow and pleasurable miles an hour top speed. They came and went through the summer sunlight and shadow, their faces freckled and stained by passing trees, going and coming like an ancient, wheeled vision.

“And then,” whispered Fern, “this afternoon! Oh, this afternoon!”

“It was an accident.”

“But we ran away, and that's criminal!”

This noon. The smell of the leather cushions under their bodies, the gray perfume smell of their own sachets trailing back as they moved in their silent Green Machine through the small, languorous town.

It happened quickly. Rolling soft onto the sidewalk at noon, because the streets were blistering and fiery, and the only shade was under the lawn trees, they had glided to a blind corner, bulbing their throaty horn. Suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box, Mister Quartermain had tottered from nowhere!

“Look out!” screamed Miss Fern.

“Look out!” screamed Miss Roberta.

“Look out!” cried Mister Quartermain.

The two women grabbed each other instead of the steering stick.

There was a terrible thud. The Green Machine sailed on in the hot daylight, under the shady chestnut trees, past the ripening apple trees. Looking back only once, the two old ladies' eyes filled with faded horror.

The old man lay on the sidewalk, silent.

“And here we are,” mourned Miss Fern in the darkening attic. “Oh, why didn't we stop! Why did we run away?”

“Shh!” They both listened.

The rapping downstairs came again.

When it stopped they saw a boy cross the lawn in the dim light. “Just Douglas Spaulding come for a ride again.” They both sighed.

The hours passed; the sun was going down.

“We've been up here all afternoon,” said Roberta tiredly. “We can't stay in the attic three weeks hiding till everybody forgets.”

“We'd starve.”

“What'll we do, then? Do you think anyone saw and followed us?” They looked at each other.

“No. Nobody saw.”

The town was silent, all the tiny houses putting on lights. There was a smell of watered grass and cooking suppers from below.

“Time to put on the meat,” said Miss Fern. “Frank'll be coming home in ten minutes.”

“Do we dare go down?”

“Frank'd call the police if he found the house empty. That'd make things worse.”

The sun went swiftly. Now they were only two moving things in the musty blackness. “Do you,” wondered Miss Fern, “think he's dead?”

“Mister Quartermain?”

A pause. “Yes.”

Roberta hesitated. “We'll check the evening paper.”

They opened the attic door and looked carefully at the steps leading down. “Oh, if Frank hears about this, he'll take our Green Machine away from us, and it's
so
lovely and nice riding and getting the cool wind and seeing the town.”

“We won't tell him.”

“Won't we?”

They helped each other down the creaking stairs to the second floor, stopping to listen.... In the kitchen they peered at the pantry, peeked out windows with frightened eyes, and finally set to work frying hamburger on the stove. After five minutes of working silence Fern looked sadly over at Roberta and said, “I've been thinking. We're old and feeble and don't like to admit it. We're dangerous. We owe a debt to society for running off—”

“And—?” A kind of silence fell on the frying in the kitchen as the two sisters faced each other, nothing in their hands.

“I think that”—Fern stared at the wall for a long time— “we shouldn't drive the Green Machine ever again.”

Roberta picked up a plate and held it in her thin hand. “Not—ever?” she said.

“No.”

“But,” said Roberta, “we don't have to—to get rid of it, do we? We
can
keep it, can't we?”

Fern considered this. “Yes, I guess we can keep it.”

“At least that'll be something. I'll go out now and disconnect the batteries.”

Roberta was leaving just as Frank, their younger brother, only fifty-six years, entered.

“Hi, sisters!” he cried.

Roberta brushed past him without a word and walked out into the summer dusk. Frank was carrying a newspaper which Fern immediately snatched from him. Trembling, she looked it through and through, and sighing, gave it back to him.

“Saw Doug Spaulding outside just now. Said he had a message for you. Said for you not to worry—he saw everything and everything's all right. What did he mean by that?”

“I'm sure I wouldn't know.” Fern turned her back and searched for her handkerchief.

“Oh well, these kids.” Frank looked at his sister's back for a long moment, then shrugged.

“Supper almost ready?” he asked pleasantly.

“Yes.” Fern set the kitchen table.

There was a bulbing cry from outside. Once, twice, three times—far away.

“What's that?” Frank peered through the kitchen window into the dusk. “What's Roberta up to? Look at her out there, sitting in the Green Machine, poking the rubber horn!”

Once, twice more, in the dusk, softly, like some kind of mournful animal, the bulbing sound was pinched out.

“What's got into
her
?” demanded Frank.

“You just leave her alone!” screamed Fern._

Frank looked surprised.

A moment later Roberta entered quietly, without looking at anyone, and they all sat down to supper.

T
he first light on the roof outside; very early morning. The leaves on all the trees tremble with a soft awakening to any breeze the dawn may offer. And then, far off, around a curve of silver track, comes the trolley, balanced on four small steel-blue wheels, and it is painted the color of tangerines. Epaulets of shimmery brass cover it and pipings of gold; and its chrome bell bings if the ancient motorman taps it with a wrinkled shoe. The numerals on the trolley's front and sides are bright as lemons. Within, its seats prickle with cool green moss. Something like a buggy whip flings up from its roof to brush the spider thread high in the passing trees from which it takes its juice. From every window blows an incense, the all-pervasive blue and secret smell of summer storms and lightning.

Down the long elm-shadowed streets the trolley moves along, the motorman's gray-gloved hand touched gently, timelessly, to the levered controls.

 

A
t noon the motorman stopped his car in the middle of the block and leaned out. “Hey!”

And Douglas and Charlie and Tom and all the boys and girls on the block saw the gray glove waving, and dropped from trees and left skip ropes in white snakes on lawns, to run and sit in the green plush seats, and there was no charge. Mr. Tridden, the conductor, kept his glove over the mouth of the money box as he moved the trolley on down the shady block, calling.

“Hey!” said Charlie. “Where are we going?”

“Last ride,” said Mr. Tridden, eyes on the high electric wire ahead. “No more trolley. Bus starts to run tomorrow. Going to retire me with a pension, they are. So—a free ride for everyone! Watch out!”

He ricocheted the brass handle, the trolley groaned and swung round an endless green curve, and all the time in the world held still, as if only the children and Mr. Tridden and his miraculous machine were riding an endless river, away.

“Last day?” asked Douglas, stunned. “They can't
do
that! It's bad enough the Green Machine is gone, locked up in the garage, and no arguments. And bad enough my new tennis shoes are getting old and slowing down! How'll I get around? But … But … They
can't
take off the trolley! Why,” said Douglas, “no matter how you look at it, a bus ain't a trolley. Don't make the same kind of noise. Don't have tracks or wires, don't throw sparks, don't pour sand on the tracks, don't have the same colors, don't have a bell, don't let down a step like a trolley does!”

“Hey, that's right,” said Charlie. “I always get a kick watching a trolley let down the step, like an accordion.”

“Sure,” said Douglas.

And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman's Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.

“Here's where we turn around,” said Charlie.

“Here's where you're wrong!” Mr. Tridden snapped the emergency generator switch. “Now!”

The trolley, with a bump and a sailing glide, swept past the city limits, turned off the street, and swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools. Here and there creek waters flushed the tracks and sun filtered through trees like green glass. They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers past abandoned way stations empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a summer country, while Douglas talked.

“Why, just the
smell
of a trolley, that's different. I been on Chicago buses; they smell funny.”

“Trolleys are too slow,” said Mr. Tridden. “Going to put busses on. Busses for people and busses for school.”

The trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that emptied into a silent lake where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into termite dust.