The Toynbee Convector (8 page)

“Will, his left leg, move! Tom, the right leg,
hup
! Philip, right arm, John, the left! Fling! Me for his flimsy turkey-bone body! Ready? Set!”

“Heave!”

“Double-time. Run!”

Grandpa ran.

But he didn’t run across the aisle, he ran down it, gasping, eyes bright. “Wait!” cried the Greek chorus. “The lady’s back there! Someone trip him! Who’s got his legs? Will? Tom!”

Grandpa flung the vestibule door wide, leaped out on the windy platform and was about to hurl himself out into a meadow of swiftly flashing sunflowers when:

“Freeze! Statues!” said the chorus stuffed in his mouth. And statue he became on the backside of the swiftly vanishing train.

A moment later, spun about, Grandpa found himself back inside. As the train rocketed around a curve, he sat on the young lady’s hands.

“Excuse,” Grandpa leaped up, “me—”

“Excused.” The lady rearranged her sat-on hands.

“No trouble, please, no, no!” Grandpa collapsed on the seat across from her, eyes clammed shut. “Damn! hell! Statues, everyone! Bats, back in the belfry! Damn!”

The cousins grinned and melted the wax in his ears.

“Remember,” hissed Grandpa behind his teeth, “you’re young in there, I’m a mummy out here!”
“But—” sighed the chamber quartet fiddling behind his lids—”well act to make you young!” He felt them light a fuse in his stomach, a bomb in his chest.

“No!”

Grandpa yanked a cord in the dark. A trapdoor popped wide. The cousins fell down into a rich and endless maze of color and remembrance. Three-dimensional shapes as rich and almost as warm as the girl across the aisle. The cousins fell, shouting.

“Watch it!”

“I’m lost!”

“Tom?”

“I’m somewhere in Wisconsin! How’d I get
here
?”

“I’m on a Hudson River boat. William?”

Far off, William called: “London. My God! Newspapers say the date’s August twenty-second, nineteen hundred!”

“Can’t be! Cecy?!”

“Not Cecy! Me!” said Grandpa, everywhere at once. “You’re still between my ears, dammit, and using my other times and places as guest towels. Mind your head, the ceilings are low!”
“Ah ha,” said William. “And is this the Grand Canyon I gaze upon, or a wrinkle in your nut?”

“Grand Canyon,” said Grandpa. “Nineteen twenty-one.”

“A woman!” cried Tom, “stands before me!”

And indeed the woman was beautiful in the spring, two hundred years ago. Grandpa recalled no name. She had only been someone passing as he hunted wild straw berries on a summer noon.

Tom reached out toward the beautiful memory.

“Get away!” shouted Grandpa.

And the girl’s face, in the light summer air, flew apart She drifted away, away, vanishing down the road, and at last gone.

“Damn and blast!” cried Tom.

The other cousins were in a rampage, opening doors, running paths, raising windows. “Look! Oh, my gosh! Look!” they all shouted. The memories lay side by side, neat as sardines a million deep, a million wide. Put by in seconds, minutes, hours. Here a dark girl brushing her hair. Here the same girl walking, running, or asleep. All her actions kept in honey-combs the color of her summer cheeks. The bright flash of her smile. You could pick her up, turn her round, send her away, call her back. All you had to say was Italy, 1797, and she danced through a warm pavilion, or swam in moonlit waters.

“Grandfatherl Does Grandma know about her?”

“There
must
be other women!”

“Thousands!” cried Grandpa.

Grandpa flung back a lid. “Here!”

A thousand women wandered through a department store.

“Well done, Grandpa!”

From ear to ear, Grandpa felt the rummaging and racing over mountains, scoured deserts, down alleys, through cities.

Until John seized one lone and lovely lady by the arm.

He caught a woman by the hand.

“Stop!” Grandpa rose up with a roar. The people on the train stared at him.

“Got you!” said John.

The beautiful woman turned.

“Fool!” snarled Grandpa.

The lovely woman’s flesh burned away. The upraised chin grew gaunt, the cheeks hollow, the eyes sank in wrinkles.

John drew back. “Grandmother, it’s
you
!”

“Cecy!” Grandpa was trembling violently. “Stash John in a bird, a stone, a well! Anywhere, but not in my damn fool head! Now!”

“Out you go, John!” said Cecy.

And John vanished.

Into a robin singing on a pole that flashed by the train window.

Grandmother stood withered in darkness. Grandpa’s gentle inward gaze touched her again, to reclothe her younger flesh. New color poured into her eyes, cheeks, and hair. He hid her safely away in a nameless and far-off orchard.

Grandpa opened his eyes.

Sunlight sprang in on the last three cousins.

The young woman still sat across the aisle.

Grandfather shut his eyes again but it was too late. The cousins rose up behind his gaze. “We’re fools!” said Tom. “Why bother with old times! New is right
there
! That girl! Yes?”

“Yes!” whispered Cecy. “Listen! I’ll put Grandpa’s mind over in
her
body. Then bring her mind over to hide in Grandpa’s head! Grandpa’s body will sit here straight as a ramrod, and inside it well all be acrobats, gymnasts! fiends! The conductor will pass, never guessing! Grandpa will sit here. His head full of wild laughter, unclothed mobs while his real mind will be trapped over there in that fine girl’s head! What fun in the middle of a train coach on a hot afternoon, with nobody knowing.”

“Yes!” said everyone at once.

“No,” said Grandpa, and pulled forth two white tab lets from his pocket and swallowed them.

“Stop him!” shouted William.

“Drat!” said Cecy. “It was such a fine, lovely, wicked plan.”

“Good night, everybody,” said Grandpa. The medicine was working. “And you—” he said, looking with gentle sleepiness at the young lady across the aisle. “You have just been rescued from a fete, young lady, worse than ten thousand deaths.”

“Beg pardon?” The young lady blinked.

“Innocence, continue in thy innocence,” said Grand pa, and fell asleep.

The train pulled into Cranamockett at six o’clock. Only then was John allowed back from his exile in the head of that robin on a fence miles behind.

There were absolutely no relatives in Cranamockett willing to take in the cousins. At the end of three days, Grandfather rode the train back to Illinois, the cousins still in him, like peach stones. And there they stayed, each in a different territory of Grandpa’s sun-or-moonlit attic keep.

Tom took residence in a remembrance of 1840 in Vienna with a crazed actress, William lived in Lake County with a flaxen-haired Swede of some indefinite years, while John shuttled from fleshpot to fleshpot, ‘Frisco, Berlin, Paris, appearing, on occasion, as a wicked glitter in Grandpa’s eyes. Philip, on the other hand, locked himself deep in a potato-bin cellar, where he read all the books Grandpa ever read.

But on some nights Grandpa edges over under the covers toward Grandma.

“You!” she cries. “At your age! Git!” she screams.

And she beats and beats and beats him until, laughing in five voices, Grandpa gives up, fells back, and pretends to sleep, alert with five kinds of alertness, for another try.

The Last Circus

Red Tongue Jurgis (we called him that because he ate candy red-hots all the time) stood under my window one cold October morning and yelled at the metal weathercock on top of our house. I put my head out the window and blew steam. “Hi, Red Tongue!”

“Jiggers!” he said. “Come on! The circus!”

Three minutes later I ran out of the house polishing two apples on my knee. Red tongue was dancing to keep warm. We agreed that the last one to reach the train yard was a damnfool old man.

Eating apples, we ran through the silent town.

We stood by the rails in the dark train yard and listened to them humming. Far away in the cold dark morning country, we knew, the circus was coming. The sound of it was in the rails, trembling. I put my ear down to hear it traveling. “Gosh,” I said.

And then, there was the locomotive charging on us with fire and tight and a sound like a black storm, clouds following it. Out of boxcars red and green lanterns swung and in the boxcars were snorts and screams and yells. Elephants stepped down and cages rolled and everything mixed around until, in the first tight, the animals and men were marching, Red Tongue and I with them, through the town, out to tine meadowlands where every grass blade was a white crystal and every bush rained if you touched it.

“Just think, RX,” I said. “One minute there’s nothing there but land. And now look at it.”

We looked. The big tent bloomed out like one of those Japanese flowers in cold water. Lights flashed on. In half an hour there were pancakes frying somewhere and people laughing.

We stood looking at everything. I put my hand on my chest and felt my heart thumping my fingers like those trick shop palpitators you buy for two bits. All I wanted to do was look and smell.

“Home for breakfast!” cried RT and knocked me down so he got a head start running. “Tuck your tongue in and wash your face,” said Mom, looking up from her kitchen stove.

“Pancakes!” I said, amazed at her intuition.

“How was the circus?” Father lowered his newspaper and looked over it at me.

“Swell,” I said. “Boy!”

I washed my face in cold tap water and scraped my chair out just as Mom set the pancakes down. She handed me the syrup jug. “Float them,” she said.

While I was chewing, Father adjusted the paper in his hands and sighed. “I don’t know what it’s coming to.”
“You shouldn’t read the paper in the morning,” Mom said. “It ruins your digestion.”

“Look at this,” cried Father, flicking the paper with his finger. “Germ warfare, atom bomb, hydrogen bomb. That’s all you read!”

“Personally,” said Mother, “I’ve a big washing this week.”

Father frowned. “That’s what’s wrong with the world; people on a powder keg doing their wash.” He sat up and leaned forward. “Why it says here this morning, they’ve got a new atom bomb that would wipe Chicago clean off the map. And as for our town—nothing left but a smudge. The thing I keep thinking is it’s a darn shame.”

“What?” I asked.

“Here we’ve taken a million years to get where we are. We build towns and build cities out of nothing. Why, a hundred years ago, this town wasn’t nowhere to be seen.

Took a lot of time and sweat and trouble, and now we’ve got it all one brick on another and what happens?
BANG
!”

“It won’t happen to us, I bet,” I said.

“No?” Father snorted. “Why not?”

“It just couldn’t” I said.

“You two leave oft” Mom nodded at me. “You’re too young to understand.” She nodded at Pop. “You’re old enough to know better.” We ate in silence. Then I said to Pop, “What was it like before this town was here?”

“Nothing at all. Just the lake and the hills is all.”

“Indians?”

“Not many around here. Just empty woods and hills is all.”
“Pass the syrup,” said Mom.

* * *

“Whambo!” cried RT “I’m an atom bomb! Boom!”

We were waiting in line at the Elite theater. It was the biggest day of the year. We had lugged pop all morning at the circus to earn show tickets. Now, in the afternoon, we were seeing cowboys and Indians on the movie screen, and, this evening, the circus itself! We felt rich and we laughed all the time. RT kept squinting through his atomic ring, yelling, “Whoom! You’re dis integrated!”

Cowboys chased Indians across the screen. Half an hour later the Indians chased the cowboys back the other way. After everybody was tired of stomping, the cartoon came on, and then a newsreel.

“Look, the atom bomb!” RT settled down for the first time. The big gray cloud lifted on the screen, blew apart, battleships and cruisers burst open and rain fell.

RT held my arm tight, staring up at the burning whiteness. “Ain’t that something, Doug, ain’t it?” He jabbed my ribs.

“It’s a whooperdoo, all right,” I said, jabbing him back, giggling. “Wish I had an atom bomb! Blooie, there goes the school!”

“Bam! Goodbye Clara Holmquist!”

“Bang! There goes Officer O’Rourkel”

* * *

For supper there were Swedish meatballs* hot buns, Boston beans and green salad. Father looked very serious and strange and tried to bring up some important scientific facts he had read in a magazine, but Mom shook her head.

I watched Fop. “You feeling okay, Pop?”

“I’m going to cancel our paper subscription,” said Mom. “You’re worrying yourself right into ulcers. You hear me, Dad?”

“Boy,” I said, “did I see
film
! The atom bomb blew up a whole battleship down at the Elite.”

Father dropped his fork and stared at me. “Sometimes, Douglas, you have the uncanny ability to say just the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

I saw Mother squinting at me to catch my eye. “It’s late,” she said. “You’d better run on to the circus.”

As I was getting my hat and coat I heard Father say in a low and thoughtful voice, “How would it be to sell the business? You know, we’ve always wanted to travel; go to Mexico maybe. A small town. Settle down.”

“You’re talking like a child,” whispered Mother. “I won’t hear you carry on this way.”
“I know it’s foolish. Don’t mind me. But you’re right; better cancel the paper.”

A wind was blowing the trees half over and the stars were all out and the circus lay in the country hills, in the meadow, like a big toadstool. Red Tongue and I had popcorn in one hand, taffy in the other, and cotton candy on our chins. “Lookit my beard!” Red Tongue shouted. Everybody was talking and pushing under the bright light bulbs and a man smacked a canvas with a bamboo cane and shouted about The Skeleton, The Blubber Lady, The Illustrated Man, The Seal Boy, while RT and I jostled through to the lady who tore our tickets in half.

We balanced our way up to sit on the slat seats just when the bass drums exploded and the jeweled elephants lumbered out, and from then on there were hot searchlights, men shooting from fiery howitzers, ladies hung by their white teeth imitating butterflies high up in the clouds of cigarette smoke while trapeze men rode back and forth among the ropes and poles, and lions trotted softly around the sawdust-floored cage while the trainer in white pants shot smoke and flame at them from a silver pistol. “Look!” RT and I cried, blinking here, gaping there, chuckling,
oohing
,
aahing
, amazed, incredulous, surprised, and entertained, out of breath, eyes wide, mouths open. Chariots roared around the track, clowns jumped from burning hotels, grew hair, changed from giants to midgets in a steam box. The band crashed and tooted and hooted and everywhere was color and warmth and sequins shining and the crowd thundering.