A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories Page 13

  The lower half of her body changed itself from white to very pale blue, from very pale blue to pale green, from pale green to emerald green, to moss and lime green, to scintillas and sequins all dark green, all flowing away in a fount, a curve, a rush of light and dark, to end in a lacy fan, a spread of foam and jewel on the sand. The two halves of this creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman, woman of a whiteness made of cream-water and clear sky merged with that half which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home. The woman was the sea, and the sea was woman. There was no flaw or seam, no wrinkle or stitch; the illusion, if illusion it was, held perfectly together and the blood from one moved into and through and mingled with what must have been the ice waters of the other.

  “I wanted to run get help.” The first boy seemed not to want to raise his voice. “But Skip said she was dead and there’s no help for that. Is she?”

  “She was never alive,” said Chico. “Sure,” he went on, feeling their eyes on him suddenly. “It’s something left over from a movie studio. Liquid rubber skinned over a steel frame. A prop, a dummy.”

  “Oh, no, it’s real!”

  “We’ll find a label somewhere,” said Chico. “Here.”

  “Don’t!” cried the first boy.

  “Hell.” Chico touched the body to turn it, and stopped. He knelt there, his face changing.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Tom.

  Chico took his hand away and looked at it. “I was wrong.” His voice faded.

  Tom took the woman’s wrist. “There’s a pulse.”

  “You’re feeling your own heartbeat.”

  “I just don’t know … maybe … maybe …”

  The woman was there and her upper body was all moon pearl and tidal cream and her lower body all slithering ancient green-black coins that slid upon themselves in the shift of wind and water.

  “There’s a trick somewhere!” cried Chico, suddenly.

  “No. No!” Just as suddenly Tom burst out in laughter. “No trick! My God, my God, I feel great! I haven’t felt so great since I was a kid!”

  They walked slowly around her. A wave touched her white hand so the fingers faintly softly waved. The gesture was that of someone asking for another and another wave to come in and lift the fingers and then the wrist and then the arm and then the head and finally the body and take all of them together back down out to sea.

  “Tom.” Chico’s mouth opened and closed. “Why don’t you go get our truck?”

  Tom didn’t move.

  “You hear me?” said Chico.

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what? We could sell this somewhere, I don’t know—the university, that aquarium at Seal Beach or … well, hell, why couldn’t we just set up a place? Look.” He shook Tom’s arm. “Drive to the pier. Buy us three hundred pounds of chipped ice. When you take anything out of the water you need ice, don’t you?”

  “I never thought.”

  “Think about it! Get moving!”

  “I don’t know, Chico.”

  “What you mean? She’s real, isn’t she?” He turned to the boys. “You say she’s real, don’t you? Well, then, what are we waiting for?”

  “Chico,” said Tom. “You better go get the ice yourself.”

  “Someone’s got to stay and make sure she don’t go back out with the tide!”

  “Chico,” said Tom. “I don’t know how to explain. I don’t want to get that ice for you.”

  “I’ll go myself, then. Look, boys, build the sand up here to keep the waves back. I’ll give you five bucks apiece. Hop to it!”

  The sides of the boys’ faces were bronze-pink from the sun which was touching the horizon now. Their eyes were a bronze color looking at Chico.

  “My God!” said Chico. “This is better than finding ambergris!” He ran to the top of the nearest dune, called, “Get to work!” and was gone.

  Now Tom and the two boys were left with the lonely woman by the North Rock and the sun was one-fourth of the way below the western horizon. The sand and the woman were pink-gold.

  “Just a little line,” whispered the second boy. He drew his fingernail along under his own chin, gently. He nodded to the woman. Tom bent again to see the faint line under either side of her firm white chin, the small, almost invisible line where the gills were or had been and were now almost sealed shut, invisible.

  He looked at the face and the great strands of hair spread out in a lyre on the shore.

  “She’s beautiful,” he said.

  The boys nodded without knowing it.

  Behind them, a gull leaped up quickly from the dunes. The boys gasped and turned to stare.

  Tom felt himself trembling. He saw the boys were trembling too. A car horn hooted. Their eyes blinked, suddenly afraid. They looked up toward the highway.

  A wave poured about the body, framing it in a clear white pool of water.

  Tom nodded the boys to one side.

  The wave moved the body an inch in and two inches out toward the sea.

  The next wave came and moved the body two inches in and six inches out toward the sea.

  “But—” said the first boy.

  Tom shook his head.

  The third wave lifted the body two feet down toward the sea. The wave after that drifted the body another foot down the shingles and the next three moved it six feet down.

  The first boy cried out and ran after it.

  Tom reached him and held his arm. The boy looked helpless and afraid and sad.

  For a moment there were no more waves. Tom looked at the woman, thinking, she’s true, she’s real, she’s mine … but … she’s dead. Or will be if she stays here.

  “We can’t let her go,” said the first boy. “We can’t, we just can’t!”

  The other boy stepped between the woman and the sea. “What would we do with her?” he wanted to know, looking at Tom, “if we kept her?”

  The first boy tried to think. “We could—we could—” He stopped and shook his head. “Oh, my Gosh.”

  The second boy stepped out of the way and left a path from the woman to the sea.

  The next wave was a big one. It came in and went out and the sand was empty. The whiteness was gone and the black diamonds and the great threads of the harp.

  They stood by the edge of the sea, looking out, the man and the two boys, until they heard the truck driving up on the dunes behind them.

  The last of the sun was gone.

  They heard footsteps running on the dunes and someone yelling.

  They drove back down the darkening beach in the light truck with the big treaded tires in silence. The two boys sat in the rear on the bags of chipped ice. After a long while, Chico began to swear steadily, half to himself, spitting out the window.

  “Three hundred pounds of ice. Three hundred pounds of ice! What do I do with it now? And I’m soaked to the skin, soaked! You didn’t even move when I jumped in and swam out to look around! Idiot, idiot! You haven’t changed! Like every other time, like always, you do nothing, nothing, just stand there, stand there, do nothing, nothing, just stare!”

  “And what did you do, I ask, what?” said Tom, in a tired voice, looking ahead. “The same as you always did, just the same, no different, no different at all. You should’ve seen yourself.”

  They dropped the boys off at their beach house. The youngest spoke in a voice you could hardly hear against the wind. “Gosh, nobody’ll ever believe …”

  The two men drove down the coast and parked.

  Chico sat for two or three minutes waiting for his fists to relax on his lap, and then he snorted.

  “Hell. I guess things turn out for the best.” He took a deep breath. “It just came to me. Funny. Twenty, thirty years from now, middle of the night, our phone’ll ring. It’ll be one of those two boys, grown-up, calling long-distance from a bar somewhere. Middle of the night, them calling to
ask one question. It’s true, isn’t it? they’ll say. It did happen, didn’t it? Back in 1958, it really happened to us? And we’ll sit there on the edge of the bed, middle of the night, saying, Sure, boy, sure, it really happened to us in 1958. And they’ll say, Thanks, and we’ll say, Don’t mention it, any old time. And we’ll all say good night. And maybe they won’t call again for a couple of years.”

  The two men sat on their front-porch steps in the dark.

  “Tom?”

  “What?”

  Chico waited a moment.

  “Tom, next week—you’re not going away.”

  It was not a question but a quiet statement.

  Tom thought about it, his cigarette dead in his fingers. And he knew that now he could never go away. For tomorrow and the day after the day after that he would walk down and go swimming there in all the green and white fires and the dark caverns in the hollows under the strange waves. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  “Yes, Chico. I’m staying here.”

  Now the silver looking glasses advanced in a crumpling line all along the coast from a thousand miles north to a thousand miles south. The mirrors did not reflect so much as one building or one tree or one highway or one car or even one man himself. The mirrors reflected only the quiet moon and then shattered into a billion bits of glass that spread out in a glaze on the shore. Then the sea was dark awhile, preparing another line of mirrors to rear up and surprise the two men who sat there for a long time never once blinking their eyes, waiting.

  The Day It Rained Forever

  The hotel stood like a hollowed dry bone under the very center of the desert sky where the sun burned the roof all day. All night, the memory of the sun stirred in every room like the ghost of an old forest fire. Long after dusk, since light meant heat, the hotel lights stayed off. The inhabitants of the hotel preferred to feel their way blind through the halls in their never-ending search for cool air.

  This one particular evening Mr. Terle, the proprietor, and his only boarders, Mr. Smith and Mr. Fremley, who looked and smelled like two ancient rags of cured tobacco, stayed late on the long veranda. In their creaking glockenspiel rockers they gasped back and forth in the dark, trying to rock up a wind.

  “Mr. Terle …? Wouldn’t it be really nice … someday…if you could buy … air conditioning…?”

  Mr. Terle coasted awhile, eyes shut.

  “Got no money for such things, Mr. Smith.”

  The two old boarders flushed; they hadn’t paid a bill now in twenty-one years.

  Much later Mr. Fremley sighed a grievous sigh. “Why, why don’t we all just quit, pick up, get outa here, move to a decent city? Stop this swelterin’ and fryin’ and sweatin’.”

  “Who’d buy a dead hotel in a ghost town?” said Mr. Terle quietly. “No. No, we’ll just set here and wait, wait for that great day, January 29.”

  Slowly, all three men stopped rocking.

  January 29.

  The one day in all the year when it really let go and rained.

  “Won’t wait long.” Mr. Smith tilted his gold railroad watch like the warm summer moon in his palm. “Two hours and nine minutes from now it’ll be January 29. But I don’t see nary a cloud in ten thousand miles.”

  “It’s rained every January 29 since I was born!” Mr. Terle stopped, surprised at his own loud voice. “If it’s a day late this year, I won’t pull God’s shirttail.”

  Mr. Fremley swallowed hard and looked from east to west across the desert toward the hills. “I wonder … will there ever be a gold rush hereabouts again?”

  “No gold,” said Mr. Smith. “And what’s more, I’ll make you a bet—no rain. No rain tomorrow or the day after the day after tomorrow. No rain all the rest of this year.”

  The three old men sat staring at the big sun-yellowed moon that burned a hole in the high stillness.

  After a long while, painfully, they began to rock again.

  The first hot morning breezes curled the calendar pages like a dried snake skin against the flaking hotel front.

  The three men, thumbing their suspenders up over their hat rack shoulders, came barefoot downstairs to blink out at that idiot sky.

  “January 29 …”

  “Not a drop of mercy there.”

  “Day’s young.”

  “I’m not.” Mr. Fremley turned and went away.

  It took him five minutes to find his way up through the delirious hallways to his hot, freshly baked bed.

  At noon, Mr. Terle peered in.

  “Mr. Fremley …?”

  “Damn desert cactus, that’s us!” gasped Mr. Fremley, lying there, his face looking as if at any moment it might fall away in a blazing dust on the raw plank floor. “But even the best damn cactus got to have just a sip of water before it goes back to another year of the same damn furnace. I tell you I won’t move again, I’ll lie here an’ die if I don’t hear more than birds pattin’ around up on that roof!”

  “Keep your prayers simple and your umbrella handy,” said Mr. Terle and tiptoed away.

  At dusk, on the hollow roof a faint pattering sounded.

  Mr. Fremley’s voice sang out mournfully from his bed.

  “Mr. Terle, that ain’t rain! That’s you with the garden hose sprinklin’ well water on the roof! Thanks for tryin’, but cut it out, now.”

  The pattering sound stopped. There was a sigh from the yard below.

  Coming around the side of the hotel a moment later, Mr. Terle saw the calendar fly out and down in the dust.

  “Damn January 29!” cried a voice. “Twelve more months! Have to wait twelve more months, now!”

  Mr. Smith was standing there in the doorway. He stepped inside and brought out two dilapidated suitcases and thumped them on the porch.

  “Mr. Smith!” cried Mr. Terle. “You can’t leave after thirty years!”

  “They say it rains twenty days a month in Ireland,” said Mr. Smith. “I’ll get a job there and run around with my hat off and my mouth open.”

  “You can’t go!” Mr. Terle tried frantically to think of something; he snapped his fingers. “You owe me nine thousand dollars rent!”

  Mr. Smith recoiled; his eyes got a look of tender and unexpected hurt in them.

  “I’m sorry.” Mr. Terle looked away. “I didn’t mean that. Look now—you just head for Seattle. Pours two inches a week there. Pay me when you can, or never. But do me a favor: wait till midnight. It’s cooler then, anyhow. Get you a good night’s walk toward the city.”

  “Nothin’ll happen between now and midnight.”

  “You got to have faith. When everything else is gone, you got to believe a thing’ll happen. Just stand here with me, you don’t have to sit, just stand here and think of rain. That’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.”

  On the desert sudden little whirlwinds of dust twisted up, sifted down. Mr. Smith’s eyes scanned the sunset horizon.

  “What do I think? Rain, oh you rain, come along here? Stuff like that?”

  “Anything. Anything at all!”

  Mr. Smith stood for a long time between his two mangy suitcases and did not move. Five, six minutes ticked by. There was no sound, save the two men’s breathing in the dusk.

  Then at last, very firmly, Mr. Smith stooped to grasp the luggage handles.

  Just then, Mr. Terle blinked. He leaned forward, cupping his hand to his ear.

  Mr. Smith froze, his hands still on the luggage.

  From away among the hills, a murmur, a soft and tremulous rumble.

  “Storm coming!” hissed Mr. Terle.

  The sound grew louder; a kind of whitish cloud rose up from the hills.

  Mr. Smith stood tall on tiptoe.

  Upstairs Mr. Fremley sat up like Lazarus.

  Mr. Terle’s eyes grew wider and yet wider to take hold of what was coming. He held to the porch rail like the captain of a calm-foundered vessel feeling the first stir of some tropic breeze that smelled of lime and the ice-cool white meat of coconut. The smallest wind stro
ked over his aching nostrils as over the flues of a white-hot chimney.

  “There!” cried Mr. Terle. “There!”

  And over the last hill, shaking out feathers of fiery dust, came the cloud, the thunder, the racketing storm.

  Over the hill the first car to pass in twenty days flung itself down the valley with a shriek, a thud, and a wail.

  Mr. Terle did not dare to look at Mr. Smith.

  Mr. Smith looked up, thinking of Mr. Fremley in his room.

  Mr. Fremley, at the window, looked down and saw the car expire and die in front of the hotel.

  For the sound that the car made was curiously final. It had come a very long way on blazing sulphur roads, across salt flats abandoned ten million years ago by the shingling off of waters. Now, with wire-ravelings like cannibal hair sprung up from seams, with a great eyelid of canvas top thrown back and melted to spearmint gum over the rear seat, the auto, a Kissel car, vintage 1924, gave a final shuddering as if to expel its ghost upon the air.

  The old woman in the front seat of the car waited patiently, looking in at the three men and the hotel as if to say, Forgive me, my friend is ill; I’ve known him a long while, and now I must see him through his final hour. So she just sat in the car waiting for the faint convulsions to cease and for the great relaxation of all the bones which signifies that the final process is over. She must have sat a full half minute longer listening to her car, and there was something so peaceful about her that Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith leaned slowly toward her. At last she looked at them with a grave smile and raised her hand.

  Mr. Fremley was surprised to see his hand go out the window above, and wave back to her.