“Once in a lifetime anyway, it’s nice to make a mistake if you think it’ll do somebody some good,” she said.
“God deliver me from do-gooders, Aimee.”
“Shut up, shut up!” she cried, and then said nothing more.
He let the silence lie awhile, and then got up, putting his finger-printed glass aside. “Mind the booth for me?”
“Sure. Why?”
She saw ten thousand cold white images of him stalking down the glassy corridors, between mirrors, his mouth straight and his fingers working themselves.
She sat in the booth for a full minute and then suddenly shivered. A small clock ticked in the booth and she turned the deck of cards over, one by one, waiting. She heard a hammer pounding and knocking and pounding again, far away inside the Maze; a silence, more waiting, and then ten thousand images folding and refolding and dissolving, Ralph striding, looking out at ten thousand images of her in the booth. She heard his quiet laughter as he came down the ramp.
“Well, what’s put you in such a good mood?” she asked, suspiciously.
“Aimee,” he said carelessly, “we shouldn’t quarrel. You say tomorrow Billie’s sending that mirror to Mr. Big’s?”
“You’re not going to try anything funny?”
“Me?” He moved her out of the booth and took over the cards, humming, his eyes bright. “Not me, oh no, not me.” He did not look at her, but started quickly to slap out the cards. She stood behind him. Her right eye began to twitch a little. She folded and unfolded her arms. A minute ticked by. The only sound was the ocean under the night pier, Ralph breathing in the heat, the soft ruffle of the cards. The sky over the pier was hot and thick with clouds. Out at sea, faint glows of lightning were beginning to show.
“Ralph,” she said at last.
“Relax, Aimee,” he said.
“About that trip you wanted to take down the coast—”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe next month. Maybe next year. Old Ralph Banghart’s a patient guy. I’m not worried, Aimee. Look.” He held up a hand. “I’m calm.”
She waited for a roll of thunder at sea to fade away.
“I just don’t want you mad, is all. I just don’t want anything bad to happen, promise me.”
The wind, now warm, now cool, blew along the pier. There was a smell of rain in the wind. The clock ticked. Aimee began to perspire heavily, watching the cards move and move. Distantly, you could hear targets being hit and the sound of the pistols at the shooting gallery.
And then, there he was.
Waddling along the lonely concourse, under the insect bulbs, his face twisted and dark, every movement an effort. From a long way down the pier he came, with Aimee watching. She wanted to say to him, This is your last night, the last time you’ll have to embarrass yourself by coming here, the last time you’ll have to put up with being watched by Ralph, even in secret. She wished she could cry out and laugh and say it right in front of Ralph. But she said nothing.
“Hello, hello!” shouted Ralph. “It’s free, on the house, tonight! Special for old customers!”
The Dwarf looked up, startled, his little black eyes darting and swimming in confusion. His mouth formed the word thanks and he turned, one hand to his neck, pulling his tiny lapels tight up about his convulsing throat, the other hand clenching the silver dime secretly. Looking back, he gave a little nod, and then scores of dozens of compressed and tortured faces, burned a strange dark color by the lights, wandered in the glass corridors.
“Ralph,” Aimee took his elbow. “What’s going on?”
He grinned. “I’m being benevolent, Aimee, benevolent.”
“Ralph,” she said.
“Sh,” he said. “Listen.”
They waited in the booth in the long warm silence.
Then, a long way off, muffled, there was a scream.
“Ralph!” said Aimee.
“Listen, listen!” he said.
There was another scream, and another and still another, and a threshing and a pounding and a breaking, a rushing around and through the Maze. There, there, wildly colliding and ricocheting, from mirror to mirror, shrieking hysterically and sobbing, tears on his face, mouth gasped open, came Mr. Bigelow. He fell out in the blazing night air, glanced about wildly, wailed, and ran off down the pier.
“Ralph, what happened?”
Ralph sat laughing and slapping at his thighs.
She slapped his face. “What’d you do?”
He didn’t quite stop laughing. “Come on. I’ll show you!”
And then she was in the Maze, rushed from white-hot mirror to mirror, seeing her lipstick all red fire a thousand times repeated on down a burning silver cavern where strange hysterical women much like herself followed a quick-moving, smiling man. “Come on!” he cried. And they broke free into a dust-smelling tiny room.
“Ralph!” she said.
They both stood on the threshold of the little room where the Dwarf had come every night for a year. They both stood where the Dwarf had stood each night, before opening his eyes to see the miraculous image in front of him.
Aimee shuffled slowly, one hand out, into the dim room.
The mirror had been changed.
This new mirror made even tall people little and dark and twisted smaller as you moved forward.
And Aimee stood before it thinking and thinking that if it made big people small, standing here, God, what would it do to a dwarf, a tiny dwarf, a dark dwarf, a startled and lonely dwarf?
She turned and almost fell. Ralph stood looking at her. “Ralph,” she said. “God, why did you do it?”
“Aimee, come back!”
She ran out through the mirrors, crying. Staring with blurred eyes, it was hard to find the way, but she found it. She stood blinking at the empty pier, started to run one way, then another, then still another, then stopped.
Ralph came up behind her, talking, but it was like a voice heard behind a wall late at night, remote and foreign.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said.
Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr. Kelly from the shooting gallery. “Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol from my place, loaded, run off before I’d get a hand on him! You help me find him?”
And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.
Aimee rocked back and forth and took a step.
“Aimee, where you going?”
She looked at Ralph as if they had just turned a corner, strangers passing, and bumped into each other. “I guess,” she said, “I’m going to help search.”
“You won’t be able to do nothing.”
“I got to try anyway. Oh God, Ralph, this is all my fault! I shouldn’t have phoned Billie Fine! I shouldn’t’ve ordered a mirror and got you so mad you did this! It’s me should’ve gone to Mr. Big, not a crazy thing like I bought! I’m going to find him if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.”
Swinging about slowly, her cheeks wet, she saw the quivery mirrors that stood in front of the Maze, Ralph’s reflection was in one of them. She could not take her eyes away from the image; it held her in a cool and trembling fascination, with her mouth open.
“Aimee, what’s wrong? What’re you—”
He sensed where she was looking and twisted about to see what was going on. His eyes widened.
He scowled at the blazing mirror.
A horrid, ugly little man, two feet high, with a pale, squashed face under an ancient straw hat, scowled back at him. Ralph stood there glaring at himself, his hands at his sides.
Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.
A WILD NIGHT IN GALWAY
WE WERE FAR OUT AT THE TIP OF IRELAND, in Galway, where the weather strikes from its bleak quarters in the
Atlantic with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain. You go to bed sad and wake in the middle of the night thinking you heard someone cry, thinking you yourself were weeping, and feel your face and find it dry. Then you look at the window and turn over, sadder still, and fumble about for your dripping sleep and try to get it back on.
We were out, as I said, in Galway, which is gray stone with green beards on it, a rock town, and the sea coming in and the rain falling down; and we had been there a month solid working with our film director on a script which was, with immense irony, to be shot in the warm yellow sun of Mexico sometime in January. The pages of the script were full of fiery bulls and hot tropical flowers and burning eyes, and I typed it with chopped-off frozen fingers in my gray hotel room where the food was criminal’s gruel and the weather a beast at the window.
On the thirty-first night, a knock at the door, at seven. The door opened, my film director stepped nervously in.
“Let’s get the hell out and find some wild life in Ireland and forget this damn rain,” he said, all in a rush.
“What rain?” I said, sucking my fingers to get the ice out. “The concussion here under the roof is so steady I’m shellshocked and have quite forgot the stuff’s coming down!”
“Four weeks here and you’re talking Irish,” said the director.
“Hand me my clay pipe,” I said. And we ran from the room.
“Where?” said I.
“Heber Finn’s pub,” said he.
And we blew along the stony street in the dark that rocked gently as a boat on the black flood because of the tilty-dancing streetlights above which made the shadows tear and fly, uneasy.
Then, sweating rain, faces pearled, we struck through the pub doors, and it was warm as a sheepfold because there were the townsmen pressed in a great compost heap at the bar and Heber Finn yelling jokes and foaming up drinks.
“Heber Finn,” cried the director, “we’re here for a wild night!”
“A wild night we’ll make it,” said Heber Finn, and in a moment a slug of poteen was burning lace patterns in our stomachs, to let new light in.
I exhaled fire. “That’s a start,” I said.
We had another and listened to the rollicking jests and the jokes that were less than half clean, or so we guessed, for the brogue made it difficult, and the whiskey poured on the brogue and thus combined made it double-difficult. But we knew when to laugh, because when a joke was finished the men hit their knees and then hit us. They’d give their limbs a great smack and then bang us on the arm or thump us in the chest.
As our breath exploded, we’d shape the explosion to hilarity and squeeze our eyes tight. Tears ran down our cheeks not from joy but from the exquisite torture of the drink scalding our throats. Thus pressed like shy flowers in a huge warm-moldy book, the director and I lingered on, waiting for some vast event.
At last my director’s patience thinned. “Heber Finn,” he called across the seethe, “it’s been wild so far, all right, but we want it wilder, I mean, the biggest night Ireland ever saw!”
Whereupon Heber Finn whipped off his apron, shrugged his meat-cleaver shoulders into a tweed coat, jumped up in the air, slid down inside his raincoat, slung on his beardy cap, and thrust us at the door.
“Nail everything down till I get back,” he advised his crew. “I’m taking these gents to the damnedest evening ever. Little do they know what waits for them out there.”
He opened the door and pointed. The wind threw half a ton of ice water on him. Taking this as no more than an additional spur to rhetoric, Heber Finn, not wiping his face, added in a roar, “Out with you! On! Here we go!”
“Do you think we should?” I said, doubtful now that things seemed really on the move.
“What do you mean?” cried the director. “What do you want to do? Go freeze in your room? Rewrite that scene you did so lousily today?”
“No, no,” I said, and slung on my own cap.
I was first outside thinking, I’ve a wife and three loud but lovely children, what am I doing here, eight thousand miles gone from them, on the dark side of God’s remembrance? Do I really want to do this?
Then, like Ahab, I thought on my bed, a damp box with its pale cool winding-sheets and the window dripping next to it like a conscience: all night through. I groaned. I opened the door of Heber Finn’s car, took my legs apart to get in, and we shot down the town like a ball in a bowling alley.
Heber Finn at the wheel talked fierce, half hilarity, half sobering King Lear.
“A wild night, is it? You’ll have the grandest night ever,” he said. “You’d never guess, would you, to walk through Ireland, so much could go on under the skin?”
“I knew there must be an outlet somewhere,” I yelled.
The speedometer was up to fifty miles an hour. Stone walls raced by on the right, stone walls raced by on the left. It was raining the entire dark sky down on the entire dark land.
“Outlet indeed!” said Heber Finn. “If the Church knew, but it don’t! Or then maybe it does, but figures—the poor craythurs—and lets us be!”
“Where, what—?”
“You’ll see!” said Heber Finn.
The speedometer read sixty. My stomach was stone like the stone walls rushing left and right. Does the car have brakes? I wondered. Death on an Irish road, I thought, a wreck, and before anyone found us strewn we’d melt away in the pounding rain and be part of the turf by morn. What’s death anyway? Better than hotel food.
“Can’t we go a bit faster?” I asked.
“It’s done,” said Heber Finn, and made it seventy.
“That will do it, nicely,” I said in a faint voice, wondering what lay ahead. Behind all the slate-stone weeping walls of Ireland, what happened? Beneath the rain-drenched sod, the flinty rock, at the numbed core of living, was there one small seed of fire which, fanned, might break volcanoes free and boil the rains to steam?
Was there then somewhere a Baghdad harem, nests awriggle and aslither with silk and tassel the absolutely perfect tint of women unadorned? Somewhere in this drizzling land were there hearth-fleshed peach-fuzz Renoir ladies bright as lamps you could hold your hands out to and warm your palms? We passed a church. No. We passed a convent. No. We passed a village slouched under its old men’s thatch. No. Stone walls to left. Stone walls to right. No. Yet . . .
I glanced over at Heber Finn. We could have switched off our lights and driven by the steady piercing beams of his forward-directed eyes snatching at the dark, flicking away the rain.
Wife, I thought to myself, children, forgive me for what I do this night, terrible as it might be, for this is Ireland in the rain of an ungodly time and way out in Galway where the dead must go to die.
The brakes were hit. We slid a good ninety feet, my nose mashed on the windscreen. Heber Finn was out of the car.
“We’re here.” He sounded like a man drowning deep in the rain.
I looked left. Stone walls. I looked right. Stone walls.
“Where is it?” I shouted.
“Where, indeed.” He pointed, mysteriously. “There.”
I saw a hole in the wall, a tiny gate flung wide.
The director and I followed at a plunge. We saw other cars in the dark now, and many bikes. But not a light anywhere. A secret, I thought, oh, it must be wild to be this secret. What am I doing here? I yanked my cap lower. Rain crawled down my neck.
Through the hole in the wall we stumbled, Heber Finn clenching our elbows. “Here,” he husked, “stand here. It’ll be a moment. Swig on this to keep your blood high.”
I felt a flask knock my fingers. I got the fire into my boilers and let the steam up the flues.
“It’s a lovely rain,” I said.
“The man’s mad,” said Heber Finn, and drank after the director, a shadow among shadows in the dark.
I squinted about. I had an impression of a midnight sea upon which men like little boats passed on the murmurous tides. Heads down, muttering, in twos and
threes, a hundred men stirred out beyond.
It has an unholy air—Good God, what’s it all about? I asked myself, incredibly curious now.
“Heber Finn—?” said the director.
“Wait,” whispered Heber Finn. “This is it!”
What did I expect? Perhaps some scene like those old movies where innocent sailing ships suddenly flap down cabin walls and guns appear like magic to fire on the foe. Or a farmhouse falls apart like a cereal box, Long Tom rears up to blast a projectile five hundred miles to target Paris.
So here, maybe, I thought, the stones will spill away each from the others, the walls of that house will curtain back, rosy lights will flash forth, and from a monstrous cannon six, a dozen, ten dozen pink pearly women, not dwarf-Irish but willowy-French, will be shot out over the heads and down into the waving arms of the grateful multitude. Benison indeed! What’s more—manna!
The lights came on. I blinked.
For I saw the entire unholy thing. There it was, laid out for me under the drizzling rain.
The lights came on. The men quickened, turned, gathered, us with them.
A mechanical rabbit popped out of a little box at the far end of the stony yard and ran. Eight dogs, let free from gates, yelping, ran after in a great circle. There was not one shout or murmur from the crowd of men. Their heads turned slowly, watching.
The rain rained down on the illuminated scene. The rain fell upon tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and thin noses. The rain beat on hunched shoulders. I stared. The rabbit ran. The dogs ran. At the finish, the rabbit popped into its electric hatch. The dogs collided into each other, barking. The lights went out.
In the dark, I turned to stare at the director as I knew he must be turning to stare at me.
I was thankful for the dark, the rain, so Heber Finn could not see our faces.
“Come on, now,” he shouted, “place your bets!”
We were back in Galway, speeding, at ten o’clock. The rain was still raining, the wind was still blowing. The highway was a river working to erase the stone beneath as we drew up in a great tidal spray before my hotel.