Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (28 page)

“I only spoke with her the once. Her regular domestic was sick and so the agency sent me over for the day. She was drinking, drinking quite a lot, and she told me just to dust, didn’t want to hear no vacuum. And then she asked me did I like doing this kind of work, was I married, did I have kids, you know, personal things like that that are not really that personal. And then she asked me was I happy and I said, ‘I guess.’

“She said her life was sad and I said that was too bad.

“She said her life was just full of
despairs
.

“Despairs . . . That was how she said it and I tell you, I never forgot that, because that is sad slapped thick on top of sad . . . It made me want to just pick her up and hold her, ’cause what she was was just a sad little white girl.

“But I couldn’t do that now, could I? So I clucked my tongue and I think I said something that most likely did not help her at all.”

—Mattie Pearl Yates

T
ried to kill herself.

Did not.

Alcohol. Drugs. Psychiatry.

The Trinity for the Salvation of the Twentieth Century Soul.

Bangs President Jack Kennedy.

Who didn’t?

Alcohol. Drugs. Psychiatry.

Tried to kill herself.

Did not.

Moved into modest house she’d bought in Brentwood, L.A.

N
embutal.

Chloral hydrate.

Vodka.

August 4, 1962

Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom

Los Angeles

Marilyn Monroe

A corpse

For a moment

An aura

Norma Jeane walks

into the theater

Becomes

Light

About “Light”

I was fourteen or fifteen, reading like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil set loose at the Olde Country Book Buffet, and couldn’t help noting that too many artists and writers died young and often not well. Then Ray Bradbury came along on this glutton’s word menu and showed me with his “Forever and the Earth” that no, Thomas Wolfe did not have to
stay dead
—not when we needed him.

Years later when the story of Marilyn Monroe seized me—she was “the saddest woman in the world,” said her short-term husband Arthur Miller—I set out to give her something a little better than what foolish choices, DNA tics, and the Wheel of Cosmic Fortune handed her. This is my third Marilyn story. There will likely be more in the future. Perhaps one day I’ll get it completely right.

But for now, I’ll borrow Mr. Stan Laurel’s derby and tip it to his very good friend and advocate Mr. Ray Douglas Bradbury: He showed me the way.

—Mort Castle

CONJURE

Alice Hoffman

I
t was August, when the crickets sang slowly and the past lingered in bright pools of glorious light, even though it would soon be gone, the way summer was all but over, yet the heat was still on the rise. The weather had been extreme that month: days of drenching rain, sudden showers of hail, temperatures passing record highs. Local children whispered that an angel had fallen to earth in a thunderstorm. There were roving groups who swore they had found signs. Footprints in the grass, black feathers, a campfire in the woods behind the high school where there were sparks of shimmering ash. One neighborhood boy vowed that he had seen a man in a black cloak rise above the earth and walk on air, and although no one believed his account, mothers began to keep their children home. They locked the doors, called in the dogs, kept the lights on after dusk.

No one cut through the field anymore, except for Abbey and Cate, best friends, who at age sixteen were too old to be kept home and far too sure of themselves to be afraid of a story. They had jobs at the town pool as swim counselors, and late in the afternoons they walked home together, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, making their way through the pale heat, their long hair scented with chlorine. Usually they stopped at the library, where Cate would wait outside, dreamy-eyed, while Abbey ran in to find a new book, which would get her through the night. She’d had trouble sleeping lately, and books were her antidote to the darkness of these late-August nights. She had the distinct impression that something was beginning and something was ending; there were just so many days like this left to them. Before they knew it, time would speed up and the future would appear on a street corner or in a park, and there they’d be, grown women who’d forgotten how long a summer could last.

The librarian, Mrs. Fanning, often had a stack of books waiting for Abbey, and choosing the right one had become a sacred ritual. On this day Abbey returned
Great Expectations
and took up Ray Bradbury’s
Something Wicked This Way Comes
.

“Excellent choice,” Mrs. Fanning said, pleased. “By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes. The title comes from
Macbeth
, Act IV.”

“Do you believe people are wicked?” Abbey asked.

Outside the world was green, shifting in the dappled light. Cate was sitting on the steps, head thrown back, basking in the last of the sun. If Abbey tried to talk about her worries with her friend, Cate would admonish her. “You think too much!”

“Certainly some people are,” Mrs. Fanning said. “But there’d be no interesting novels without them, would there?”

In a fiction it was possible to discern the wicked from the pure of heart. Roses withered when devious individuals passed by; blackthorns grew about them. But such clues were not as evident in real life. “Judge a person the same way you judge a book,” Mrs. Fanning suggested. “A search for beauty and truth, a gut response to what feels a lie. Intuition.” She seemed quite sure of herself. “Imagination.”

Abbey began reading on the way home from the library, acting out all the parts. She concentrated so deeply on the words on the page that she stumbled over shifts in the concrete sidewalk.

“You live in books.” Cate grinned.

“I would if I could,” Abbey admitted.

“What’s the good of that?” Cate sighed, for she yearned for real life. She wanted adventure, one-of-a-kind experiences. She was suddenly beautiful and there were teenage boys who followed her around town, just as suddenly in love with her, though they were still too young to say so. She confided that her plan was to leave town after high school graduation, find her way to California, see every bit of the coast. She’d study butterflies in Monterey, sharks in San Diego. She had a fearless nature, which was why Abbey both admired her and was concerned for her at the same time. They were nearly home, but Cate lagged behind, gazing over at the field, the one wild piece of land left in town.

“What would you do if you saw an angel?” she asked in a low voice.

They stood together on the corner, where they met every morning.

“There’s no such thing,” Abbey said. “Not around here.”

“If there was.” Cate squinted to see into the distance. “Seriously.”

“I’d write about him,” Abbey said.

As for Cate, they both knew she’d fly away, triumphant and distant in the arms of an angel.

I
t was Cate who insisted they take the shortcut the following afternoon, forsaking the library, so they might walk through the field where the angel was said to be.

“How many times do you get to search for an angel?” she teased, running off before Abbey could say that if there was such a thing, perhaps it wasn’t meant to be a sight for human eyes, that the very brightness of such a creature might burn and blind anyone who gazed upon him. Cate had already climbed the fence that separated the path from the field, and Abbey had no choice but to follow, up and over the fence, leaping clumsily onto the ground. The books she’d meant to return to the library weighed down her backpack. Cate grinned and pointed to a dark splotch on the ground. It was only a single feather in the tall grass beside the creek, but when Cate ran to grab it, Abbey felt a hollow chill. The water in the creek was green, slow-moving, and swirls of insects rose from it. They used to swim here when they were younger, practicing the backstroke and the butterfly.

Cate ran back, her hair flying out behind her. She held up the feather. “We’re definitely on the right path.” She elbowed Abbey, then nodded to a willow tree. A young man in a black coat was gazing at them. Abbey took a step back. He was wearing leather gloves though the weather was fine.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid?” Cate teased. “He’s probably Bobby Marcus’s cousin.”

Bobby Marcus was their twelve-year-old neighbor who’d told everyone that his cousin from Los Angeles was spending a few weeks with them, and that he slept all day and was out all night. Not that there was anywhere to go in their town in the evenings, only the Blue Note Bar and Grill, where some of their fathers stopped on the way home from work.

Dusk was falling down among the trees. The swirls of insects above the creek turned blue in the murky air. The young man had long dark hair and an easy gait. He had dramatic features, gray, light-filled eyes. He looked a few years older than the girls, perhaps nineteen. He was making his way through the tall grass, approaching as if he knew them and was meant to speak to them, as if he’d been sent to them on this evening in August. Most people were now at home, sitting down to dinner, and Abbey’s mother would be watching from the door. She worried about her daughter, who spent so much time alone. She’d be even more concerned if she knew that there were nights when Abbey climbed out her bedroom window so that she could amble through town in the dark. Abbey had never even told Cate that she climbed out her window on restless nights, her feet landing in the ivy. Sometimes she went to sit on the stone steps of the library, wondering about the world beyond their town; other times she came to this very field and read by moonlight, savoring her aloneness. Now she wasn’t certain she’d come back here again. The edges of the grass were sullen and plumy in the shifting light.

Cate went forward. The young man in the black coat had clearly been drawn to her luminous beauty. He had a slow, winning smile, which he aimed at her. Abbey saw that his boots were covered with a layer of gray ash and that the fabric of his coat was frayed.

“I’ll bet you’re Bobby Marcus’s cousin,” Cate said as they approached each other. If Abbey didn’t know any better, she’d think her friend was flirting.

“That’s me.” He said his name was Lowell. He grinned broadly when Abbey gazed at his gloves. “I’ve been chopping wood,” he explained. “I’ve been camping here all summer. I can’t bring myself to sleep under a roof. “

Abbey had never seen him here on the nights when she’d come to read in the grass. She wondered if angels lied, or if that was only the territory of men.

Lowell offered them a drink. “I’m being sociable and you should be too. Whatever your parents say, you’re old enough for a beer.”

His invitation seemed more like a challenge. All the same they followed him through the grass to his campsite. “We’re only being polite,” Cate assured Abbey when she hesitated. “He’s right—we’re old enough.”

There was a pot for boiling water, a sleeping bag, a small canvas tent, a small axe.

“For chopping wood,” he said to Abbey, throwing down his gloves.

There was no stack of firewood, only some boughs from a twisted bramble tree. Abbey imagined he wasn’t a practiced camper, that he was a city boy who couldn’t even read a map of the stars. When Lowell reached out to get them some beers that he kept cooling in a fishing net in the creek, Abbey spied a black dog tattooed on his wrist. She felt a tightness in her throat, but she sipped at the cold beer, sharing a bottle with Cate. The girls sat close together on a log, and Abbey thought she could feel her friend’s heart beating alongside her own. The more beer the girls drank, the more Lowell talked. He told them about California, how beautiful it was, how the sky stretched on forever, how the night smelled of gardenias. He was a handsome young man, with a graceful way of speaking, and by the time he was done, California seemed like the promised land, a heaven all its own.

“That’s where I’m going,” Cate said.

“I knew that was what you wanted.” Lowell laughed. Abbey noticed that he seemed impressed by his own observations, the sort of man who had learned a lot about women in his lifetime and was quick to put these lessons to use. “I could see it in your future.”

Cate laughed, flattered, lowering her eyes. She was demure in a way Abbey had never known her to be. “You don’t even know me,” she said to Lowell, as if she wanted him to.

“You don’t believe me?” Lowell shifted over to sit beside Cate, his leg against hers. “I know you real well. I can see everything that’s going to happen to you.”

Abbey tugged on Cate’s sleeve. The intuition Mrs. Fanning had referred to felt slick, as if oil was pooling around them, dark and unstoppable. This late in August, time was already shifting, the light disappearing before anyone expected it to. “We have to go,” she urged.

“Keep me a secret,” Lowell said. He leaned close to Cate when he spoke, his breath moving the strands of her hair. His gray eyes were half closed, as if he was in the middle of a dream and that dream included Cate and her future. “I’d hate to be chased out and forced to sleep under a roof.”

Cate promised they would make up a story; they’d say they’d stayed late to practice their lifesaving techniques at the pool. In the darkening light, the ends of Cate’s hair looked faintly green, tinted by chlorine; perhaps the lie she intended to tell had turned her hair this color, or perhaps it was only the fading of the day that made it seem so.

Lowell walked them to the edge of the field. Abbey went first because she knew where the briars were; Cate came next, with Lowell following. Right before they stepped out of the tall grass, Abbey turned to see him kiss her friend. By then, it was dark.

T
hat night Abbey climbed out her window. She kept her shoes under the porch steps, but tonight she went barefoot. She made her way through town, as she always did. Usually the darkened houses brought her a sort of comfort, but tonight the silence rattled her; she could feel it hitting against her bones. She stopped at the edge of the field. She thought she saw him beneath the tree, wearing his black coat and his gloves. She didn’t see an angel but a man, waiting for something, twisting the future into rope of his own devising. Abbey had that same chilled feeling she’d had when she’d first spied him. She turned and ran, feeling the threat he cast until she reached her corner. She went past her own house and sneaked into the Marcuses’ yard. She threw a pebble at the window. She threw another and another, and finally Bobby appeared.

He opened the window and leaned out, confused. “Are you crazy?” he whispered, waving his arms at her. “Go away.”

“Where’s your cousin?” Abbey wanted to know.

“He went back to California,” Bobby said. “My parents kicked him out.”

He shut his window, not wanting to say more, but Abbey sat down at the Marcuses’ picnic table to wait. After a while Bobby came out. He was only twelve, and Abbey had babysat for him once or twice, a fact he hated to be reminded of whenever she teased him, recalling how he used to cry to get his way. He was wearing a raincoat over his pajamas.

“Why’d they kick him out?” Abbey asked.

Bobby shrugged.

“There must have been a reason.”

Bobby’s parents were both teachers at the high school, warm-hearted, reasonable people.

“He was inappropriate,” Bobby said.

Abbey felt that chill. “Meaning?”

When Bobby clammed up, Abbey grabbed his arm and twisted. She was stronger than she appeared, perhaps from carrying stacks of books home from the library.

“Hey!” Bobby pulled away. “Okay. Fine. He said he could see the future.”

“They kicked him out for that?”

“Well, they thought he was crazy. I mean he went on and on about it, like he was cursing us or something. He wasn’t like that when he first came here. He sat with my mother for hours in the kitchen; he cut the lawn. Then he snapped and started saying he knew our fate and that we deserved everything we got.”