Driving Blind (17 page)

Kit Random lectured on:

“I can see what you think, you got faces like sieves. No, I’m not the Hoor of Babylon, nor the Tart from Le Petit Trianon, which, incidentally, is
not
a movie-house.
I am a traveling Jungle Gym, first cousin to a sideshow, never a beauty, almost a freak. But one day years back, I decided not to make
one
man sad but a
handful
happy! I found I was trying to win all the time, which is an error beyond most women’s imagination. If you make a man lose all the time, hell, he’ll go play golf or handball and lose
right
. At least he can add it
up!
So I started out, two years in Placerville, three in Tallahassee and Kankakee until I ran out of steam or my rolling stock rusted. What was my great secret? Not playing Parcheesi, or Uncle Wiggily says jump back three hops to the henhouse, no. It was
losing
. Don’t you
see?
I learned how to cheat and lose. Men
like
that. They know what you’re up to, sure, but pretend not to notice and the more you lose the more they love. Next thing you know you got ‘em bound head and foot with just plain old self-destruction pinochle or I’m-dead-send-flowers hopscotch. You can get a man to jump rope if you convince him he’s the greatest jumper since the Indian rope trick. So you go on losing and find you’ve won all along as the men tip their hat to you at breakfast, put down the stock-market quotes and
talk!

“Stop fidgeting! I’m almost out of gas. Will you get your halfway loved ones back? Mebbe. Mebbe not. A year from now I’ll check to see if you’ve watched and learned from my show-and-tell. I’ll give you the loan of those lost but now found souls and once a year after that bus back through to see if you’re losing proper in order to learn to laugh. Meanwhile, there’s nothing you can do, starting this very second. Now, consider I’ve
just fired off a gun. Go home. Bake pies. Make meatballs. But it won’t work. The pies will fall flat and the meatballs? Dead on arrival. Because you arm-wrestle them to the table and spoil men’s appetites. And don’t lock your doors. Let the poor beasts run. Like you’ve excused.”

“We’ve just begun to fight!” cried all three and then, confused at their echoes, almost fell down the porch stairs.

Well, that was the true end. There was no war, not even a battle or half a skirmish. Every time the ladies glanced around they found empty rooms and quietly shut on tiptoes front doors.

But what really scalded the cat and killed the dog was when three strange men showed up half-seen in the twilight one late afternoon and caused the wives to pull back, double-lock their doors, and peer through their lace curtains.

“Okay, open up!” the three men cried.

And hearing voices from today’s breakfast, the wives unlocked the doors to squint out.

“Henry Tiece?”

“Robert Joe Clements, what—?”

“William Ralph Cole, is that
you?
”

“Who the hell do you
think
it is!”

Their wives stood back to watch the almost hairless wonders pass.

“My God,” said Mrs. Tiece.

“What?” said Mrs. Clements.

“What have you done to your hair?”

“Nothing,” said all three husbands. “
She
did.”

The wives circled their relatives by marriage.

“I didn’t recognize you,” gasped Mrs. Tiece.

“You weren’t
supposed
to!”

And so said all the rest.

Adding, “How you
like
it?”

“It’s not the man I married,” they said.

“Damn tootin’!”

And at last, almost in chorus, though in separate houses:

“You going to change your
name
to fit the
haircut?
”

The last night of the month, Mr. Tiece was found in his upper-stairs bedroom packing a grip. Mrs. Tiece clutched a doorknob and held on. “Where you going?”

“Business.”

“Where?”

“A ways.”

“Going to be gone long?”

“Hard to say,” he said, packing a shirt.

“Two days?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

“Three days?”

“Where’s my blue necktie? The one with the white mice on it.”

“I never did like that necktie.”

“Would you mind finding the blue necktie with the white mice on it for me?”

She found it.

“Thank you.” He knotted it, watching himself in the
mirror. He brushed his hair and grimaced to see if he had brushed his teeth.

“
Four
days?” she asked.

“In all probability,” he said.

“A
week
then?” She smiled wildly.

“You can almost bet on it,” he said, examining his fingernails.

“Eat good meals now, not just quick sandwiches.”

“I promise.”

“Get plenty of sleep!”

“I’ll get plenty of sleep.”

“And be sure to phone every night. Have you got your stomach pills with you?”

“Won’t need the stomach pills.”

“You’ve
always
needed the stomach pills.” She ran to fetch them. “Now, you just take these stomach pills.”

He took and put them in his pocket. He picked up his two suitcases.

“And be sure and call me every night,” she said.

He went downstairs with her after.

“And don’t sit in any draughts.”

He kissed her on the brow, opened the front door, went out, shut the door.

At almost the same instant, so it couldn’t have been coincidence, Mr. Cole and Mr. Clements plunged, blind with life, off their front porches, risking broken legs or ankles to be free, and raced out to mid-street where they all but collided with Mr. Tiece.

They glanced at each other’s faces and luggage and in reverberative echoes cried:

“Where’re you going?”

“What’s
that?
”

“My suitcase.”

“My valise.”

“My overnight case!”

“Do you realize this is the first time we’ve met in the middle of the street since Halloween twenty years ago?”

“Hell, this
is
Halloween!”

“Yeah! For what? Trick or treat?”

“Let’s go see!”

And unerringly, with no chart, map, or menu, they turned with military abruptness and headlong sparked Kit Random’s yardwide cement with their heels.

In the next week the sounds that abounded in Kit Random’s abode might as well have been a saloon bowling alley. In just a handful of days, three various husbands visited at nine, ten, then ten after midnight, all with smiles like fake celluloid teeth hammered in place. The various wives checked their breaths for liquid sustenance but inhaled only tart doses of medicinal mint; the men wisely gargled mid-street before charging up to confront their fortress Europas.

As for the disdained and affronted wives, what culinary battlements did they rear up? What counterattacks ensued? And if small battles, or skirmishes, were fought, did victories follow?

The problem was that the husbands backing off and then headlong racing off let all of the hot air out of their houses. Only cold air remained, with three ladies
delivered out of ice floes, refrigerated in their corsets, stony of glance and smile that in delivering victuals to the table caused frost to gather on the silverware. Hot roast beef became tough icebox leftovers two minutes from the oven. As the husbands glanced sheepishly up from their now more infrequent meals, they were greeted with displays of glass eyes like those in the optician’s downtown window at midnight, and smiles that echoed fine porcelain when they opened and shut to let out what should have been laughter but was pure death rattle.

And then at last a night came when three dinners were laid on three tables by candlelight and no one came home and the candles snuffed out all by themselves, while across the way the sound of horseshoes clanking the stake or, if you really listened close, taffy being pulled, or Al Jolson singing, “Hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, I don’t mean New Orleans,” made the three wives count the cutlery, sharpen the knives, and drink Lydia Pinkham’s Female Remedy long before the sun was over the yardarm.

But the last straw that broke the camel herd was the men ducking through a whirlaround garden sprinkler one untimely hot autumn night and, seeing their wives in a nearby window, they yelled, “Come on
in
, the water’s
fine!
”

All three ladies gave the window a grand slam.

Which knocked
five
flowerpots off rails, skedaddled six cats, and had ten dogs howling at no-moon-in-the-sky halfway to dawn.

I
n a long life I have never had a driver’s license nor have I learned to drive. But some while back one night I dreamed that I was motoring along a country road with my inspirational Greek muse. She occupied the driver’s seat while I occupied the passenger’s place with a second, student’s, wheel.

I could not help but notice that she was driving, serenely, with a clean white blindfold over her eyes, while her hands barely touched the steering wheel.

And as she drove she whispered notions, concepts, ideas, immense truths, fabulous lies, which I hastened to jot down.

A time finally came, however, when, curious, I reached over and nabbed the edge of her blindfold to peer beneath.

Her eyes, like the eyes of an ancient statue, were rounded pure white marble. Sightless, they stared at the road ahead, which caused me, in panic, to seize
my
wheel and almost run us off the road.

“No, no,” she whispered. “Trust me. I know the way.”

“But I don’t,” I cried.

“It’s all right,” she whispered. “You don’t need to know. If you must touch the wheel, remember Hamlet’s advice, ‘Use all gently.’ Close your eyes. Now, quietly, reach out.”

I
did.
She
did. “There,
see?
” she whispered. “We’re almost there.”

We arrived. And all of the tales in this new book were finished and done.

“Night Train to Babylon” is an almost true story; I was nearly tossed off a train some years ago for interfering with a three-card monte scam. After that, I shut my mouth.

“That Old Dog Lying in the Dust” is an absolutely accurate detailing of an encounter I had with a Mexican border-town one-ring circus when I was twenty-four years old. A dear-sad evening I will remember to the end of my life.

“Nothing Changes” was triggered when one afternoon in the twilight stacks of Acres of Books in Long Beach I came upon a series of 1905 high school annuals in which (impossible) the faces of my own 1938 school chums seemed to appear again and again. Rushing from the stacks, I wrote the story.

“If MGM Is Killed, Who Gets the Lion?” is another variation on an amusing reality. During World War II MGM was camouflaged as the Hughes Aircraft Company,
while the Hughes Aircraft Company was disguised as MGM. How could I
not
describe the comedy?

Finally, “Driving Blind” is a remembrance of my acquaintance with a Human Fly who climbed building facades when I was twelve. You don’t find heroes like that by the dozen.

As you can see, when the Muse speaks, I shut my eyes and listen. In Paris once, I touch-typed in a dark room, no lights, and wrote 150 pages of a novel in seventeen nights without seeing what I put down. If that isn’t Driving Blind, what is?

Ray Bradbury

Los Angeles

April 8, 1997

“Wonderful … One vintage automobile
with a Grandmaster behind the wheel,
inviting you along for the ride
to see the world as he sees it …
It’s a world of farce, of horror, of fascination,
mixed with social commentary and wit …
Climb in for the ride of your life.
You’ll be surprised where you end up
as a blindfolded Bradbury barrels down
the road and opens your eyes.”
Oklahoma City Oklahoman

“Excellent … This new, big-hearted collection
is proof positive the creative juices still flow
freely through Bradbury’s veins.”
San Antonio Express-News

“Ray Bradbury is an old-fashioned romantic
who’s capable of imagining a dystopic
future. He can evoke nostalgia for a mythic,
golden past or raise goosebumps
with tales of horror.”
Chicago Tribune

“A preeminent storyteller …
an icon in American literature.”
Virginian Pilot

“Arresting … funny … shocking … outrageous …
After more than half a century of writing,
Bradbury still has some of the old magic.”
Philadelphia Inquirer

“One of our greatest contemporary writers …
A joyful book, full of sometimes eerie,
sometimes odd but always enjoyable tidbits
of life, past, present and future …
All a reader needs is a willing mind,
one that is free to wander
to unexplored territories and ponder the
‘what ifs’ and ‘whys’ of human existence.”
Flint Journal

“The twenty-one stories in Bradbury’s new
anthology are full of sweetness and humanity.
Despite bizarre actions and abstract twists,
all are grounded in the everyday.
Here are sketches, vignettes, strange tales,
colorful anecdotes, little tragedies,
hilarious lies and metaphysics too …
Bradbury excels at portraying
the robust textures of American speech.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)

“The muse must speak often to Bradbury.
Stories seem to fall like fantastic petals
from his fertile imagination.”
Kansas City Star

“Remarkable … intensely told …
The easiest book this year to read.”
Miami Herald

“Bradbury has a style all his own,
much imitated but never matched …
After writing stories for more than fifty years,
Bradbury has become more than pretty good
at it. He has become a master.”
Portland Oregonian

“
Driving Blind
[is] a sight for sore eyes.”
Sarasota Herald-Tribune

“If you’re looking for a wonderful
pick-up and put-down volume that doesn’t
let your mind put it down completely,
Ray Bradbury’s new collection will fit you
like a tailor-made suit. Here are stories
which bridge the gap between the writer
and the reader in a way that only Bradbury’s
eye can manage, seeing at an angle all the
oddities and everydays of life.”
Rockland Courier-Gazette

“A must … Bradbury returns in top form …
He paints vivid word pictures.”
Library Journal

“Bradbury is a master of prose
and a virtuoso of the perfect little
scene or scenario … There’s nobody like
Bradbury to evoke a mood:
nostalgia for a childhood long gone,
visceral fear of shadows and simple things.
And his stories are intensely human.”
Davis Enterprise

“Poignant … beguiling … well-crafted … Ray Bradbury weaves tales
of wistful wonder …
With
Driving Blind
, Bradbury is in
the driver’s seat again, with one eye cocked
to the past and another to the future …
Quite simply, he is one of the country’s
best short story writers.”
Columbus Dispatch