Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2 Read online

  The husband and wife climbed from the car.

  ‘Did you ever try to invent that machine?’

  ‘It was so very long ago. I had forgotten until today. And today I was thinking, we could make use of it, we are in need of it. What a shame I never tried to put it all together. Someday some other man will do it.’

  ‘Someday,’ said John Webb.

  ‘It has been a pleasure talking with you,’ said the old man. ‘God go with you.’

  ‘Adiós, Señor Garcia,’ they said.

  The car drove slowly away, steaming. They stood watching it go, for a full minute. Then, without speaking, the husband reached over and took his wife’s hand.

  They entered the small town of Colonia on foot. They walked past the little shops – the butcher shop, the photographer’s. People stopped and looked at them as they went by and did not stop looking at them as long as they were in sight. Every few seconds, as he walked, Webb put up his hand to touch the holster hidden under his coat, secretly, tentatively, like someone feeling for a tiny boil that is growing and growing every hour and every hour …

  The patio of the Hotel Esposa was cool as a grotto under a blue waterfall. In it caged birds sang, and footsteps echoed like small rifle shots, clear and smooth.

  ‘Remember? We stopped here years ago,’ said Webb, helping his wife up the steps. They stood in the cool grotto, glad of the blue shade.

  ‘Señor Esposa,’ said John Webb, when a fat man came forward from the desk, squinting at them. ‘Do you remember me – John Webb? Five years ago – we played cards one night.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Señor Esposa bowed to the wife and shook hands briefly. There was an uncomfortable silence.

  Webb cleared his throat. ‘We’ve had a bit of trouble, señor. Could we have a room for tonight only?’

  ‘Your money is always good here.’

  ‘You mean you’ll actually give us a room? We’ll be glad to pay in advance. Lord, we need the rest. But, more than that, we need gas.’

  Leonora picked at her husband’s arm. ‘Remember? We haven’t a car anymore.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ He fell silent for a moment and then sighed. ‘Well. Never mind the gas. Is there a bus out of here for the Capital soon?’

  ‘All will be attended to, in time,’ said the manager nervously. ‘This way.’

  As they were climbing the stairs they heard a noise. Looking out they saw their car riding around and around the plaza, eight times, loaded with men who were shouting and singing and hanging on to the front fenders, laughing. Children and dogs ran after the car.

  ‘I would like to own a car like that,’ said Señor Esposa.

  He poured a little cool wine for the three of them, standing in the room on the third floor of the Esposa Hotel.

  ‘To “change,”’ said Señor Esposa.

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  They drank. Señor Esposa licked his lips and wiped them on his coat sleeve. ‘We are always surprised and saddened to see the world change. It is insane, they have run out on us, you say. It is unbelievable. And now, well – you are safe for the night. Shower and have a good supper. I won’t be able to keep you more than one night, to repay you for your kindness to me five years ago.’

  ‘And tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow? Do not take any bus to the Capital, please. There are riots in the streets there. A few people from the North have been killed. It is nothing. It will pass in a few days. But you must be careful until those few days pass and the blood cools. There are many wicked people taking advantage of this day, señor. For forty-eight hours anyway, under the guise of a great resurgence of nationalism, these people will try to gain power. Selfishness and patriotism, señor; today I cannot tell one from the other. So – you must hide. That is a problem. The town will know you are here in another few hours. This might be dangerous to my hotel. I cannot say.’

  ‘We understand. It’s good of you to help this much.’

  ‘If you need anything, call me.’ Señor Esposa drank the rest of the wine in his glass. ‘Finish the bottle,’ he said.

  The fireworks began at nine that evening. First one skyrocket then another soared into the dark sky and burst out upon the winds, building architectures of flame. Each skyrocket, at the top of its ride, cracked open and let out a formation of streamers in red and white flame that made something like the dome of a beautiful cathedral.

  Leonora and John Webb stood by the open window in their unlit room, watching and listening. As the hour latened, more people streamed into town from every road and path and began to roam, arm in arm, around the plaza, singing, barking like dogs, crowing like roosters, and then falling down on the tile sidewalks, sitting there, laughing, their heads thrown back, while the skyrockets burst explosive colors on the tilted faces. A brass band began to thump and wheeze.

  ‘So here we are,’ said John Webb, ‘after a few hundred years of living high. So this is what’s left of our white supremacy – you and I in a dark room in a hotel three hundred miles inside a celebrating country.’

  ‘You’ve got to see their side of it.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen it ever since I was that high. In a way, I’m glad they’re happy. God knows they’ve waited long enough to be. But I wonder how long that happiness will last. Now that the scapegoat is gone, who will they blame for oppression, who will be as handy and as obvious and as guilty as you and I and the man who lived in this room before us?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We were so convenient. The man who rented this room last month, he was convenient, he stood out. He made loud jokes about the natives’ siestas. He refused to learn even a smattering of Spanish. Let them learn English, by God, and speak like men, he said. And he drank too much and whored too much with this country’s women.’ He broke off and moved back from the window. He stared at the room.

  The furniture, he thought. Where he put his dirty shoes upon the sofa, where he burned holes in the carpet with cigarettes; the wet spot on the wall near the bed, God knows what or how he did that. The chairs scarred and kicked. It wasn’t his hotel or his room; it was borrowed, it meant nothing. So this son-of-a-bitch went around the country for the past one hundred years, a traveling commercial, a Chamber of Commerce, and now here we are, enough like him to be his brother and sister, and there they are down there on the night of the Butlers’ Ball. They don’t know, or if they know they won’t think of it, that tomorrow they’ll be just as poor, just as oppressed as ever, that the whole machine will only have shifted into another gear.

  Now the band had stopped playing below; a man had leaped up, shouting, on the bandstand. There was a flash of machetes in the air and the brown gleam of half-naked bodies.

  The man on the bandstand faced the hotel and looked up at the dark room where John and Leonora Webb now stood back out of the intermittent flares.

  The man shouted.

  ‘What does he say?’ asked Leonora.

  John Webb translated: ‘“It is now a free world,” he says.’

  The man yelled.

  John Webb translated again. ‘He says, “We are free!”’

  The man lifted himself on his toes and made a motion of breaking manacles. ‘He says, “No one owns us, no one in all the world.”’

  The crowd roared and the band began to play, and while it was playing, the man on the grandstand stood glaring up at the room window, with all of the hatred of the universe in his eyes.

  During the night there were fights and pummelings and voices lifted, arguments and shots fired. John Webb lay awake and heard the voice of Señor Esposa below, reasoning, talking quietly, firmly. And then the fading away of the tumult, the last rockets in the sky, the last breakings of bottles on the cobbles.

  At five in the morning the air was warming into a new day. There was the softest of taps on the bedroom door.

  ‘It is me, it is Esposa,’ said a voice.

  John Webb hesitated, half-dressed, numbed on his feet from lack of sleep, then open
ed the door.

  ‘What a night, what a night!’ said Señor Esposa, coming in, shaking his head, laughing gently. ‘Did you hear that noise? Yes? They tried to come up here to your room. I prevented this.’

  ‘Thank you’ said Leonora, still in bed, turned to the wall.

  ‘They were all old friends. I made an agreement with them, anyway. They were drunk enough and happy enough so they agreed to wait. I am to make a proposition to you two.’ Suddenly he seemed embarrassed. He moved to the window. ‘Everyone is sleeping late. A few are up. A few men. See them there on the far side of the plaza?’

  John Webb looked out at the plaza. He saw the brown men talking quietly there about the weather, the world, the sun, this town, and perhaps the wine.

  ‘Señor, have you ever been hungry in your life?’

  ‘For a day, once.’

  ‘Only for a day. Have you always had a house to live in and a car to drive?’

  ‘Until yesterday.’

  ‘Were you ever without a job?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Did all of your brothers and sisters live to be twenty-one years old?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘Even I,’ said Señor Esposa, ‘even I hate you a little bit now. For I have been without a home. I have been hungry. I have three brothers and one sister buried in that graveyard on the hill beyond the town, all dead of tuberculosis before they were nine years old.’

  Señor Esposa glanced at the men in the plaza. ‘Now, I am no longer hungry or poor, I have a car, I am alive. But I am one in a thousand. What can you say to them out there today?’

  ‘I’ll try to think of something.’

  ‘Long ago I stopped trying. Señor, we have always been a minority, we white people. I am Spanish, but I was born here. They tolerate me.’

  ‘We have never let ourselves think about our being a minority,’ said Webb, ‘and now it’s hard to get used to the fact.’

  ‘You have behaved beautifully.’

  ‘Is that a virtue?’

  ‘In the bull ring, yes; in war, yes; in anything like this, most assuredly yes. You do not complain, you do not make excuses. You do not run and make a spectacle of yourself. I think you are both very brave.’

  The hotel manager sat down, slowly, helplessly.

  ‘I’ve come to offer you the chance to settle down,’ he said.

  ‘We wanted to move on, if possible.’

  The manager shrugged. ‘Your car is stolen, I can do nothing to get it back. You cannot leave town. Remain then and accept my offer of a position in my hotel.’

  ‘You don’t think there is any way for us to travel?’

  ‘It might be twenty days, señor, or twenty years. You cannot exist without money, food, lodging. Consider my hotel and the work I can give you.’

  The manager arose and walked unhappily to the door and stood by the chair, touching Webb’s coat, which was draped over it.

  ‘What’s the job?’ asked Webb.

  ‘In the kitchen,’ said the manager, and looked away.

  John Webb sat on the bed and said nothing. His wife did not move.

  Señor Esposa said, ‘It is the best I can do. What more can you ask of me? Last night, those others down in the plaza wanted both of you. Did you see the machetes? I bargained with them. You were lucky. I told them you would be employed in my hotel for the next twenty years, that you were my employees and deserve my protection!’

  ‘You said that!’

  ‘Señor, señor, be thankful! Consider! Where will you go? The jungle? You will be dead in two hours from the snakes. Then can you walk five hundred miles to a capital which will not welcome you? No – you must face the reality.’ Señor Esposa opened the door. ‘I offer you an honest job and you will be paid the standard wages of two pesos a day, plus meals. Would you rather be with me, or out in the plaza at noon with our friends? Consider.’

  The door was shut. Señor Esposa was gone.

  Webb stood looking at the door for a long while.

  Then he walked to the chair and fumbled with the holster under the draped white shirt. The holster was empty. He held it in his hands and blinked at its emptiness and looked again at the door through which Señor Esposa had just passed. He went over and sat down on the bed beside his wife. He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms and kissed her, and they lay there, watching the room get brighter with the new day.

  At eleven o’clock in the morning, with the great doors on the windows of their room flung back, they began to dress. There were soap, towels, shaving equipment, even perfume in the bathroom, provided by Mr Esposa.

  John Webb shaved and dressed carefully.

  At eleven-thirty he turned on the small radio near their bed. You could usually get New York or Cleveland or Houston on such a radio. But the air was silent. John Webb turned the radio off.

  ‘There’s nothing to go back to – nothing to go back for – nothing.’

  His wife sat on a chair near the door, looking at the wall.

  ‘We could stay here and work,’ he said.

  She stirred at last. ‘No. We couldn’t do that, not really. Could we?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘There’s no way we could do that. We’re being consistent, anyway; spoiled, but consistent.’

  He thought a moment. ‘We could make for the jungle.’

  ‘I don’t think we can move from the hotel without being seen. We don’t want to try to escape and be caught. It would be far worse that way.’

  He nodded.

  They both sat a moment.

  ‘It might not be too bad, working here,’ he said.

  ‘What would we be living for? Everyone’s dead – your father, mine, your mother, mine, your brothers, mine, all our friends, everything gone, everything we understood.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Or if we took the job, one day soon one of the men would touch me and you’d go after him, you know you would. Or someone would do something to you, and I’d do something.’

  He nodded again.

  They sat for fifteen minutes, talking quietly. Then, at last, he picked up the telephone and ticked the cradle with his finger.

  ‘Bueno,’ said a voice on the other end.

  ‘Señor Esposa?’

  ‘Sí.’

  ‘Señor Esposa,’ he paused and licked his lips, ‘tell your friends we will be leaving the hotel at noon.’

  The phone did not immediately reply. Then with a sigh Señor Esposa said, ‘As you wish. You are sure—?’

  The phone was silent for a full minute. Then it was picked up again and the manager said quietly, ‘My friends say they will be waiting for you on the far side of the plaza.’

  ‘We will meet them there,’ said John Webb.

  ‘And señor—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do not hate me, do not hate us.’

  ‘I don’t hate anybody.’

  ‘It is a bad world, señor. None of us know how we got here or what we are doing. These men don’t know what they are mad at, except they are mad. Forgive them and do not hate them.’

  ‘I don’t hate them or you.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Perhaps the man on the far end of the telephone wire was crying. There was no way to tell. There were great lapses in his talking, in his breathing. After a while he said, ‘We don’t know why we do anything. Men hit each other for no reason except they are unhappy. Remember that. I am your friend. I would help you if I could. But I cannot. It would be me against the town. Good-bye, señor.’ He hung up.

  John Webb sat in the chair with his hand on the silent phone. It was a moment before he glanced up. It was a moment before his eyes focused on an object immediately before him. When he saw it clearly, he still did not move, but sat regarding it, until a look of immensely tired irony appeared on his mouth. ‘Look here,’ he said at last.

  Leonora followed his motion, his pointing.

  They both sat looking at his cigarette which, neglected on
the rim of the table while he telephoned, had burned down so that now it had charred a black hole in the clean surface of the wood.

  It was noon, with the sun directly over them, pinning their shadows under them as they started down the steps of the Hotel Esposa. Behind them, the birds fluted in their bamboo cages, and water ran in a little fountain bath. They were as neat as they could get, their faces and hands washed, their nails clean, their shoes polished.

  Across the plaza two hundred yards away stood a small group of men, in the shade of a store-front overhang. Some of the men were natives from the jungle area, with machetes gleaming at their sides. They were all facing the plaza.

  John Webb looked at them for a long while. That isn’t everyone, he thought, that isn’t the whole country. That’s only the surface. That’s only the thin skin over the flesh. It’s not the body at all. Just the shell of an egg. Remember the crowds back home, the mobs, the riots? Always the same, there or here. A few mad faces up front, and the quiet ones far back, not taking part, letting things go, not wanting to be in it. The majority not moving. And so the few, the handful, take over and move for them.

  His eyes did not blink. If we could break through that shell – God knows it’s thin! he thought. If we could talk our way through that mob and get to the quiet people beyond.… Can I do it? Can I say the right things? Can I keep my voice down?

  He fumbled in his pockets and brought out a rumpled cigarette package and some matches.

  I can try, he thought. How would the old man in the Ford have done it? I’ll try to do it his way. When we get across the plaza, I’ll start talking, I’ll whisper if necessary. And if we move slowly through the mob, we might just possibly find our way to the other people and we’ll be on high ground and we’ll be safe.