I Sing the Body Electric Page 7

  We inhaled and exhaled.

  Dad turned slowly at last and walked away. At the screen door he looked back and his eyes were blinking rapidly. He did not put his hand up to his eyes, but they were wet and bright and nervous. Then he went out the door and down the steps and between the old bungalows, his hands deep in his pockets.

  My brother and I were still staring at that egg, when the landlady closed the lid, carefully, rose, and went to the door. We followed, silent.

  Outside, we found Dad standing in the last of the sun and the first of the moon by the wire fence. We all looked over at ten thousand chickens veering this way and that in tides, suddenly panicked by wind or startled by cloud shadows or dogs barking off on the prairie, or a lone car moving on the hot-tar road.

  "There," said our landlady. "There she is."

  She pointed at the sea of rambling fowl.

  We saw thousands of chickens hustling, heard thousands of bird voices suddenly raised, suddenly dying away.

  "There's my pet, there's my precious. See?"

  She held her hand steady, moving it slowly to point to one particular hen among the ten thousand. And somewhere in all the flurry ...

  "Isn't she grand?" said our landlady.

  I looked, I stood on tiptoe. I squinted. I stared wildly.

  "There! I think--!" cried my brother.

  "The white one." supplied our landlady, "with ginger flecks."

  I looked at her. Her face was very serene. She knew her hen. She knew the look of her love. Even if we could not find and see, the hen was there, like the world and the sky, a small fact in much that was large.

  "There." said my brother, and stopped, confused. "No, there. No, wait ... over there!"

  "Yeah," I said. "I see him!"

  "Her, you dimwit!"

  "Her!" I said.

  And for a brief moment I thought I did see one chicken among many, one grand bird whiter than the rest, plumper than the rest, happier than the rest, faster, more frolicsome and somehow strutting proud. It was as if the sea of creatures parted before our Bible gaze to show us, alone among island shadows of moon on warm grass, a single bird transfixed for an instant before a final dog bark and a rifle shot from a passing car exhaust panicked and scattered the fowls. The hen was gone.

  "You saw?" asked the landlady, holding to the wire fence, searching for her love lost in the rivering hens.

  "Yes." I could not see my father's face, whether it was serious or if he gave a dry smile to himself. "I saw."

  He and mother walked back to our bungalow.

  But the landlady and Skip and I stayed on at the fence not saying anything, not even pointing anymore, for at least another ten minutes.

  Then it was time for bed.

  I lay there wide awake with Skip. For I remembered all the other nights when Dad and Mom talked and we liked to listen to them talk about grown-up things and grown-up places. Mother asking concerned and Dad answering final and very sure and calm and quiet. Pot of Gold, End of Rainbow. I didn't believe in that. Land of Milk and Honey. I didn't believe in that. We had traveled far and seen too much for me to believe ... but ...

  Someday My Ship Will Come in ...

  I believed that.

  Whenever I heard Dad say it, tears welled in my eyes. I had seen such ships on Lake Michigan summer morns coming in from festivals across the water full of merry people, confetti on the air, horns blowing, and in my private dream, projected on my bedroom wall through countless nights, there we stood on the dock, Mom, Dad, Skip, and I! and the ship huge, snow-white, coming in with millionaires on her upper decks tossing not confetti but greenbacks and gold coins down in a clattering rain all around, so we danced to catch and dodge and cry Ouch! when hit about the ears by especially fierce coins or laughed when licked by a snow flurry of cash ...

  Mom asked about it. Dad answered. And in the night. Skip and I went down in the same dream to wait on a dock.

  And this night here, lying in bed, after a long while I said, "Dad? What does it mean?"

  "What does what mean?" said Dad, way over there in the dark with Mom.

  "The message on the egg. Does it mean the Ship? It'll come in soon?"

  There was a long silence.

  "Yes," said Dad. "That's what it means. Go to sleep, Doug."

  "Yes, sir."

  And, weeping tears, I turned away.

  We drove out of Amarillo at six the next morning in order to beat the heat, and for the first hour out we didn't say anything because we weren't awake, and for the second hour we said nothing because we were thinking about the night before. And then at last Dad's coffee started perking in him and he said:

  "Ten thousand."

  We waited for him to go on and he did, shaking his head slowly:

  "Ten thousand dumb chickens. And one of them, out of nowhere, takes it to mind to scribble us a note."

  "Dad," said Mom.

  And her voice by its inflection said, You don't really believe?

  "Yeah, Dad," said my brother in the same voice, with the same faint criticism.

  "It's something to think about," said Dad, his eyes just on the road, riding easy, his hands on the wheel not gripping tight, steering our small raft over the desert. Just beyond the hill was another hill and beyond that another hill, but just beyond that...?

  Mother looked over at Dad's face and hadn't the heart to say his name in just that way right now. She looked back at the road and said so we could barely hear it:

  "How did it go again?"

  Dad took us around a long turn in the desert highway toward White Sands, and then he cleared his throat and cleared a space on the sky ahead as he drove and said, remembering:

  "Rest in Peace. Prosperity Is Near."

  I let another mile go by before I said, "How much ... unh. How much ... an egg like that worth, Dad?"

  "There's no putting a human price on a thing like that," he said, not looking back, just driving for the horizon, just going on. "Boy, you can't set a price on an egg like that, laid by an inspired chicken at the Inspired Chicken Motel. Years from now, that's what we'll call it. The Inspired Chicken Motel."

  We drove on at an even forty miles an hour into the heat and dust of day-after-tomorrow.

  My brother didn't hit me, I didn't hit my brother, carefully, secretly, until just before noon when we got out to water the flowers by the side of the road.

  Downwind from Gellysburg

  At eight thirty that night he heard the sharp crack from the theater down the hall.

  Backfire, he thought. No. Gun.

  A moment later he heard the great lift and drop of voices like an ocean surprised by a landfall which stopped it dead. A door banged. Feet ran.

  An usher burst through his office door, glanced swiftly about as if blind, his face pale, his mouth trying words that would not come.

  "Lincoln ... Lincoln..."

  Bayes glanced up from his desk.

  "What about Lincoln?"

  "He ... he's been shot."

  "Good joke. Now--"

  "Shot. Don't you understand? Shot. Really shot. For the second time, shot!"

  The usher wandered out, holding to the wall.

  Bayes felt himself rise. "Oh, for Christ--"

  And he was running and passed the usher who, feeling him pass, began to run with him.

  "No, no," said Bayes. "It didn't happen. It didn't. It couldn't. It didn't, couldn't..."

  "Shot," said the usher.

  As they made the corridor turn, the theater doors exploded wide and a crowd that had turned mob shouted or yelled or screamed or stunned simply said, "Where is he?" "There!" "Is that him?" "Where?" "Who did it?" "He did? Him?" "Hold him!" "Watch out!" "Stop!"

  Two security guards stumbled to view, pushed, pulled, twisted now this way and that, and between them a man who struggled to heave back from the bodies, the grasping hands and now the upflung and downfell fists. People snatched, pecked, pummeled, beat at him with packages or frail sun parasols which splintered l
ike kites in a great storm. Women turned in dazed circles seeking lost friends, whimpering. Men, crying out, shoved them aside to squirm through to the center of the push and thrust and backward-pumping guards and the assaulted man who now masked his cut face with splayed fingers.

  "Oh God, God." Bayes froze, beginning to believe. He stared upon the scene. Then he sprang forward. "This way! Back inside! Clear off! Here! Here!"

  And somehow the mob was breached, a door cracked wide to shove flesh through, then slammed.

  Outside, the mob hammered, threatening damnations and scourges unheard of by living men. The whole theatre structure quaked with their muted wails, cries and estimates of doom.

  Bayes stared a long moment at the shaken and twisted door-knobs, the chattering locks, then over to the guards and the man slumped between them.

  Bayes leaped back suddenly, as if an even fresher truth had exploded there in the aisle.

  Dimly, he felt his left shoe kick something which spun skittering like a rat chasing its tail along the carpeting under the seats. He bent to let his blind hand search, grope, find the still-half-warm pistol which, looked at but disbelieved, he shoved in his coat pocket as he backed down the aisle. It was a full half minute before he forced himself to turn and face the inevitable stage and that figure in the center of the stage.

  Abraham Lincoln sat in his carved highback chair, his head bent forward at an unfamiliar angle. Eyes flexed wide, he gazed upon nothing. His large hands rested gently on the chair arms, as if he might momentarily shift weight, rise, and declare this sad emergency at an end.

  Moving as under a tide of cold water, Bayes mounted the steps.

  "Lights, dammit! Give us more lights!"

  Somewhere, an unseen technician remembered what switches were for. A kind of dawn grew in the dim place.

  Bayes, on the platform, circled the occupant of the chair, and stopped.

  Yes. There it was. A neat bullet hole at the base of the skull, behind the left ear.

  "Sic semper tyrannis," a voice murmured somewhere.

  Bayes jerked his head up.

  The assassin, seated now in the last row of the theatre, face down but sensing Bayes' preoccupation with Lincoln, spoke to the floor, to himself: "Sic--"

  He stopped. For there was an outraged stir above him. One security guard's fist flew up, as if the man had nothing to do with it. The fist, urgent to itself, was on its way down to silence the killer when--

  "Stop!" said Bayes.

  The fist paused halfway, then withdrew to be nursed by the guard with mixtures of anger and frustration.

  None, thought Bayes, I believe none of it. Not that man, not the guards and not ... he turned to again see the bullet hole in the skull of the slain leader.

  From the hole a slow trickle of machinery oil dripped.

  From Mr. Lincoln's mouth, a similar slow exudation of liquid moved down over the chin and whiskers to rain drop by drop upon his tie and shirt.

  Bayes knelt and put his ear to the figure's chest.

  Faintly within there was the whine and hum of wheels, cogs, and circuitries still intact but malfunctioning.

  For some reason this sound reared him to his feet in alarm.

  "Phipps...!?"

  The guards blinked with incomprehension.

  Bayes snapped his fingers. "Is Phipps coming in tonight? Oh God, he mustn't see this! Head him off! Tell him there's an emergency, yes, emergency at the machine plant in Glendale! Move!"

  One of the guards hurried out the door.

  And watching him run, Bayes thought, please, God, keep Phipps home, keep him off...

  Strange, at such a time, not your own life but the lives of others flashed by.

  Remember ... that day five years past when Phipps first slung his blueprints, his paintings, his watercolors out on a table and announced his Grand Plan? And how they had all stared at the plans and then up at him and gasped: Lincoln?

  Yes! Phipps had laughed like a father just come from a church where some sweet high vision in some strange Annunciation has promised him a most peculiar son.

  Lincoln. That was the idea. Lincoln born again.

  And Phipps? He would both engender and nurture this fabulous ever-ready giant robot child.

  Wouldn't it be fine ... if they could stand in the meadow fields of Gettysburg, listen, learn, see, hone the edge of their razor souls, and live?

  Bayes circled the slumped figure in the chair and, circling, numbered the days and remembered years.

  Phipps, holding up a cocktail glass one night, like a lens that simultaneously proportions out the light of the past and the illumination of the future: "I have always wanted to do a film on Gettysburg and the vast crowd there and far away out at the edge of that sun-drowsed impatient lost thick crowd, a farmer and his son trying so hard to hear, not hearing, trying to catch the wind-blown words from the tall speaker there on the distant stand, that gaunt man in the stovepipe hat who now takes off his hat, looks in it as to his soul rummaged there on scribbled letterbacks and begins to speak.

  "And this farmer, in order to get his son up out of the crush, why, he hefts the boy up to sit upon his shoulders. There the boy, nine years old, a frail encumbrance, becomes ears to the man, for the man indeed cannot hear nor see but only guess what the President is speaking far across a sea of people there at Gettysburg and the President's voice is high and drifts now clear, now gone, seized and dispersed by contesting breeze and wind. And there have been too many speakers before him and the crowd all crumpled wool and sweat, all mindless stockyard squirm and jostled elbow, and the farmer talks up to his son on his shoulders in a yearning whisper: What? What's he say? And the boy, tilting his head, leaning his peach-fuzz ear to the wind, replies: "'Fourscore and seven years ...'"

  "Yes?"

  "'... ago, our fathers brought forth ...'"

  "Yes, yes!?"

  "'... on this continent ...'"

  "Eh?"

  "Continent! 'A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are...'

  "And so it goes, the wind leaning against the frail words, the far man uttering, the farmer never tiring of his sweet burden of son and the son obedient cupping and catching and telling it all down in a fierce good whisper and the father hearing the broken bits and some parts missing and some whole but all fine somehow to the end...

  "'... of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.'

  "The boy stops whispering.

  "It is done.

  "And the crowd disperses to the four directions. And Gettysburg is history.

  "And for a long time the father cannot bring himself to ease his translator of the wind down to set him on the earth, but the boy, changed, comes down at last..."

  Bayes sat looking at Phipps.

  Phipps slugged down his drink, suddenly chagrined at his own expansiveness, then snorted: "I'll never make that film. But I will make this!"

  And that was the moment he pulled forth and unfolded the blueprints of the Phipps Eveready Salem, Illinois, and Springfield Ghost Machine, the Lincoln mechanical, the electro-oil-lubricated plastic India-rubber perfect-motioned and outspoken dream.

  Phipps and his born-full-tall-at-birth Lincoln. Lincoln. Summoned live from the grave of technology, fathered by a romantic, drawn by need, slapped to life by small lightnings, given voice by an unknown actor, to be placed there to live forever in this far southwest corner of old-new America! Phipps and Lincoln.

  And that was the day, yes, of the first wild bursts of laughter which Phipps ignored by simply saying, "We must, oh we must, stand all of us, downwind from Gettysburg. It's the only hearing place."

  And he shared out his pride amongst them. This man he gave armatures, to that the splendid skull, another must trap the Ouija-spirit voice and sounding word, yet others must grow the precious skin, hair, and fingerprints. Yes, even Lincoln's touch must be borrowed, copied, the same!

  Derision then was their style of life.<
br />
  Abe would never really speak, they all knew that, nor move. It would all be summed and written off with taxes as a loss.

  But as the months lengthened into years, their outcries of hilarity turned to accepting smiles and stunned wild grins. They were a gang of boys caught up in some furtive but irritably joyous mortuary society who met midnights in marble vaults to disperse through graveyards at dawn.

  The Lincoln Resurrection Brigade yeasted full and prospered. Instead of one mad fool, a dozen maniacs fell to rifling old mummy-dust news-files, begging and then pilfering death masks, burying and then digging up new plastic bones.

  Some toured the Civil War battlefields in hopes that history, borne on some morning wind, might whip their coats like flags. Some prowled the October fields of Salem, starched brown with farewell summer, sniffing airs, pricking ears, alert for some lank lawyer's unrecorded voice, anxious for echoes, pleading their case.

  And none more anxious nor paternal-proud worrying than Phipps until the month when the robot was spread out on delivery tables, there to be ball and socketed, voice box locked in, rubber eyelids peeled back to sink therein the deep sad eyes which, gazing out, had seen too much. The generous ears were appended that might hear only time lost. The large-knuckled hands were hung like pendulums to guess that time. And then upon the tall man's nakedness they shucked on suiting, buttoned buttons, fixed his tie, a gathering of tailors, no, Disciples now on a bright and glorious Easter mom and them on Jerusalem's hills ready to roll aside the rock and stand Him forth at their cry.

  And in the last hour of the last day Phipps had locked them all out as he finished the final touches on the recumbent flesh and spirit and at last opened the door and, not literally, no, but in some metaphoric sense, asked them to hoist him on their shoulders a last time.

  And in silence watched as Phipps called across the old battlefield and beyond, saying the tomb was not his place; arise.

  And Lincoln, deep in his cool Springfield marbled keep, turned in his slumbers and dreamed himself awake.

  And rose up.

  And spoke.

  A phone rang.

  Bayes jerked.

  The memories fell away.

  The theater phone on one far stage wall buzzed.

  Oh, God, he thought, and ran to lift the phone.

  "Bayes? This is Phipps. Buck just called and told me to get over there! Said something about Lincoln--"