“Jim!”
They listened to the rain, the soft envelopment of the world in the velvet clearness of falling water, the whispers in deep grass, evoking odors of old, wet wood and leaves that had lain a hundred years, moldering and sweet.
Then they heard another sound. Above and inside the hollow warm darkness of the tree was a constant humming, like someone in a kitchen, far away, baking and crusting pies contentedly, dipping in sweet sugars and snowing in baking powders, someone in a warm, dim, summer-rainy kitchen making a vast supply of food, happy at it, humming between lips over it.
“Bees, Jim, up there! Bees!”
“Shh!”
Up the channel of moist, warm hollow they saw little yellow flickers. Now the last bees, wettened, were hurrying home from whatever pasture or meadow or field they had covered, dipping by Vinia and Jim, vanishing up the warm flue of summer into hollow dark.
“They won’t bother us. Just stand still.”
Jim tightened his arms; Vinia tightened hers. She could smell his breath with the wild tart grapes still on it. And the harder the rain drummed on the tree, the tighter they held, laughing, at last quietly letting their laughter drain away into the sound of the bees home from the far fields. And for a moment, Vinia thought that she and Jim might be caught by a sudden drop of great masses of honey from above, sealing them into this tree forever, enchanted, in amber, to be seen by anyone in the next thousand years who strolled by, while the weather of all ages rained and thundered and turned green outside the tree.
It was so warm, so safe, so protected here, the world did not exist, there was raining silence, in the sunless, forested day.
“Vinia,” whispered Jim, after a while. “May I now?”
His face was very large, near her, larger than any face she had ever seen.
“Yes,” she said.
He kissed her.
The rain poured hard on the tree for a full minute while everything was cold outside and everything was tree-warmth and hidden away inside.
It was a very sweet kiss. It was very friendly and comfortably warm and it tasted like apricots and fresh apples and as water tastes when you rise at night and walk into a dark, warm summer kitchen and drink from a cool tin cup. She had never imagined that a kiss could be so sweet and immensely tender and careful of her. He held her not as he had held her a moment before, hard, to protect her from the green rain weather, but he held her now as if she were a porcelain clock, very carefully and with consideration. His eyes were closed and the lashes were glistening dark; she saw this in the instant she opened her eyes and closed them again.
The rain stopped.
It was a moment before the new silence shocked them into an awareness of the climate beyond their world. Now there was nothing but the suspension of water in all the intricate branches of the forest. Clouds moved away to show the blue sky in great quilted patches.
They looked out at the change with some dismay. They waited for the rain to come back, to keep them, by necessity, in this hollow tree for another minute or an hour. But the sun appeared, shining through upon everything, making the scene quite commonplace again.
They stepped from the hollow tree slowly and stood with their hands out, balancing, finding their way, it seemed, in these woods where the water was drying fast on every limb and leaf.
“I think we’d better start walking,” said Vinia. “That way.”
They walked off into the summer afternoon.
They crossed the town limits at sunset and walked hand in hand in the last glowing of the summer day. They had talked very little the rest of the afternoon, and now as they turned down one street after another, they looked at the passing sidewalk under their feet.
“Vinia,” he said at last. “Do you think this is the beginning of something?”
“Oh, gosh, Jim, I don’t know.”
“Do you think maybe we’re in love?”
“Oh, I don’t know that either!”
They passed down into the ravine and over the bridge and up the other side to her street.
“Do you think we’ll ever be married?”
“It’s too early to tell, isn’t it?” she said.
“I guess you’re right.” He bit his lip. “Will we go walking again soon?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s wait and see, Jim.”
The house was dark, her parents not home yet. They stood on her porch and she shook his hand gravely.
“Thanks, Jim, for a really fine day,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
They stood there.
Then he turned and walked down the steps and across the dark lawn. At the far edge of lawn he stopped in the shadows and said, “Good night.”
He was almost out of sight, running, when she, in turn, said good night.
In the middle of the night, a sound wakened her.
She half sat up in bed, trying to hear it again. The folks were home, everything was locked and secure, but it hadn’t been them. No, this was a special sound. And lying there, looking out at the summer night that had, not long ago, been a summer day, she heard the sound again, and it was a sound of hollowing warmth and moist bark and empty, tunneled tree, the rain outside but comfortable dryness and secretness inside, and it was the sound of bees come home from distant fields, moving upward in the flue of summer into wonderful darkness.
And this sound, she realized, putting her hand up in the summer-night room to touch it, was coming from her drowsy, half-smiling mouth.
Which made her sit bolt upright, and very quietly move downstairs, out through the door, onto the porch, and across the wet-grass lawn to the sidewalk, where the crazed hopscotch chalked itself way off into the future.
Her bare feet hit the first numbers, leaving moist prints up to 10 and 12, thumping, until she stopped at 16, staring down at 17, hesitating, swaying. Then she gritted her teeth, made fists, reared back, and . . .
Jumped right in the middle of the square 17.
She stood there for a long moment, eyes shut, seeing how it felt.
Then she ran upstairs and lay out on the bed and touched her mouth to see if a summer afternoon was breathing out of it, and listening for that drowsy hum, the golden sound, and it was there.
And it was this sound, eventually, which sang her to sleep.
THE ILLUSTRATED MAN
“HEY, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN!”
A calliope screamed, and Mr. William Philippus Phelps stood, arms folded, high on the summer-night platform, a crowd unto himself.
He was an entire civilization. In the Main Country, his chest, the Vasties lived—nipple-eyed dragons swirling over his fleshpot, his almost feminine breasts. His navel was the mouth of a slit-eyed monster—an obscene, in-sucked mouth, toothless as a witch. And there were secret caves where Darklings lurked, his armpits, adrip with slow subterranean liquors, where the Darklings, eyes jealously ablaze, peered out through rank creeper and hanging vine.
Mr. William Philippus Phelps leered down from his freak platform with a thousand peacock eyes. Across the sawdust meadow he saw his wife, Lisabeth, far away, ripping tickets in half, staring at the silver belt buckles of passing men.
Mr. William Philippus Phelps’ hands were tattooed roses. At the sight of his wife’s interest, the roses shriveled, as with the passing of sunlight.
A year before, when he had led Lisabeth to the marriage bureau to watch her work her name in ink, slowly, on the form, his skin had been pure and white and clean. He glanced down at himself in sudden horror. Now he was like a great painted canvas, shaken in the night wind! How had it happened? Where had it all begun?
It had started with the arguments, and then the flesh, and then the pictures. They had fought deep into the summer nights, she like a brass trumpet forever blaring at him. And he had gone out to eat five thousand steaming hot dogs, ten million hamburgers, and a forest of green onions, and to drink vast red seas of orange juice. Peppermint candy formed his brontosaur bones, the ham
burgers shaped his balloon flesh, and strawberry pop pumped in and out of his heart valves sickeningly, until he weighed three hundred pounds.
“William Philippus Phelps,” Lisabeth said to him in the eleventh month of their marriage, “you’re dumb and fat.”
That was the day the carnival boss handed him the blue envelope. “Sorry, Phelps. You’re no good to me with all that gut on you.”
“Wasn’t I always your best tent man, boss?”
“Once. Not anymore. Now you sit, you don’t get the work out.”
“Let me be your Fat Man.”
“I got a Fat Man. Dime a dozen.” The boss eyed him up and down. “Tell you what, though. We ain’t had a Tattooed Man since Gallery Smith died last year. . . .”
That had been a month ago. Four short weeks. From someone, he had learned of a tattoo artist far out in the rolling Wisconsin country, an old woman, they said, who knew her trade. If he took the dirt road and turned right at the river and then left . . .
He had walked out across a yellow meadow, which was crisp from the sun. Red flowers blew and bent in the wind as he walked, and he came to the old shack, which looked as if it had stood in a million rains.
Inside the door was a silent, bare room, and in the center of the bare room sat an ancient woman.
Her eyes were stitched with red resin-thread. Her nose was sealed with black wax-twine. Her ears were sewn, too, as if a darning-needle dragonfly had stitched all her senses shut. She sat, not moving, in the vacant room. Dust lay in a yellow flour all about, unfootprinted in many weeks; if she had moved it would have shown, but she had not moved. Her hands touched each other like thin, rusted instruments. Her feet were naked and obscene as rain rubbers, and near them sat vials of tattoo milk—red, lightning-blue, brown, cat-yellow. She was a thing sewn tight into whispers and silence.
Only her mouth moved, unsewn: “Come in. Sit down. I’m lonely here.”
He did not obey.
“You came for the pictures,” she said in a high voice. “I have a picture to show you first.”
She tapped a blind finger to her thrust-out palm. “See!” she cried.
It was a tattoo-portrait of William Philippus Phelps.
“Me!” he said.
Her cry stopped him at the door. “Don’t run.”
He held to the edges of the door, his back to her. “That’s me, that’s me on your hand!”
“It’s been there fifty years.” She stroked it like a cat, over and over.
He turned. “It’s an old tattoo.” He drew slowly nearer. He edged forward and bent to blink at it. He put out a trembling finger to brush the picture. “Old. That’s impossible! You don’t know me. I don’t know you. Your eyes, all sewed shut.”
“I’ve been waiting for you.” she said. “And many people.” She displayed her arms and legs, like the spindles of an antique chair. “I have pictures on me of people who have already come here to see me. And there are other pictures of other people who are coming to see me in the next one hundred years. And you, you have come.”
“How do you know it’s me? You can’t see!”
“You feel like the lions, the elephants, and the tigers to me. Unbutton your shirt. You need me. Don’t be afraid. My needles are as clean as a doctor’s fingers. When I’m finished with illustrating you, I’ll wait for someone else to walk along out here and find me. And someday, a hundred summers from now, perhaps, I’ll just go lie down in the forest under some white mushrooms, and in the spring you won’t find anything but a small blue cornflower. . . .”
He began to unbutton his sleeves.
“I know the Deep Past and the Clear Present and the even Deeper Future,” she whispered, eyes knotted into blindness, face lifted to this unseen man. “It is on my flesh. I will paint it on yours, too. You will be the only real illustrated Man in the universe. I’ll give you special pictures you will never forget. Pictures of the Future on your skin.”
She pricked him with a needle.
He ran back to the carnival that night in a drunken terror and elation. Oh, how quickly the old dust-witch had stitched him with color and design. At the end of a long afternoon of being bitten by a silver snake, his body was alive with portraiture. He looked as if he had dropped and been crushed between the steel rollers of a print press, and come out like an incredible rotogravure. He was clothed in a garment of trolls and scarlet dinosaurs.
“Look!” he cried to Lisabeth. She glanced up from her cosmetics table as he tore his shirt away. He stood in the naked bulb-light of their car-trailer, expanding his impossible chest. Here, the Tremblies, half-maiden, half-goat, leaping when his biceps flexed. Here, the Country of Lost Souls, his chins. In so many accordion pleats of fat, numerous small scorpions, beetles, and mice were crushed, held, hid, darting into view, vanishing, as he raised or lowered his chins.
“My God,” said Lisabeth. “My husband’s a freak.”
She ran from the trailer and he was left alone to pose before the mirror. Why had he done it? To have a job, yes, but, most of all, to cover the fat that had larded itself impossibly over his bones. To hide the fat under a layer of color and fantasy, to hide it from his wife, but most of all from himself.
He thought of the old woman’s last words. She had needled him two special tattoos, one on his chest, another for his back, which she would not let him see. She covered each with cloth and adhesive.
“You are not to look at these two,” she had said.
“Why?”
“Later, you may look. The Future is in these pictures. You can’t look now or it may spoil them. They are not quite finished. I put ink on your flesh, and the sweat of you forms the rest of the picture, the Future—your sweat and your thought.” Her empty mouth grinned. “Next Saturday night, you may advertise! The Big Unveiling! Come see the Illustrated Man unveil his picture! You can make money in that way. You can charge admission to the Unveiling, like to an art gallery. Tell them you have a picture that even you never have seen, that nobody has seen yet. The most unusual picture ever painted. Almost alive. And it tells the Future. Roll the drums and blow the trumpets. And you can stand there and unveil at the Big Unveiling.”
“That’s a good idea,” he said.
“But only unveil the picture on your chest,” she said. “That is first. You must save the picture on your back, under the adhesive, for the following week. Understand?”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” she said. “If you walk with these pictures on you, I will be repaid with my own satisfaction. I will sit here for the next two weeks and think how clever my pictures are, for I make them fit each man himself and what is inside him. Now, walk out of this house and never come back. Good-bye.”
“Hey! The Big Unveiling!”
The red signs blew in the night wind: NO ORDINARY TATTOOED MAN! THIS ONE IS “ILLUSTRATED”! GREATER THAN MICHELANGELO! TONIGHT! ADMISSION 10 CENTS!
Now the hour had come. Saturday night, the crowd stirring their animal feet in the hot sawdust.
“In one minute—” the carny boss pointed his cardboard megaphone—“in the tent immediately to my rear, we will unveil the Mysterious Portrait upon the Illustrated Man’s chest! Next Saturday night, the same hour, same location, we’ll unveil the Picture upon the Illustrated Man’s back! Bring your friends!”
There was a stuttering roll of drums.
Mr. William Philippus Phelps jumped back and vanished; the crowd poured into the tent, and, once inside, found him re-established upon another platform, the band brassing out a jig-time melody.
He looked for his wife and saw her, lost in the crowd, like a stranger, come to watch a freakish thing, a look of contemptuous curiosity upon her face. For, after all, he was her husband, this was a thing she didn’t know about him herself. It gave him a feeling of great height and warmness and light to find himself the center of the jangling universe, the carnival world, for one night. Even the other freaks—the Skeleton, the Seal Boy, the Yoga, the Magician, and the
Balloon—were scattered through the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the great moment!”
A trumpet flourish, a hum of drumsticks on tight cowhide.
Mr. William Philippus Phelps let his cape fall. Dinosaurs, trolls, and half-women-half-snakes writhed on his skin in the stark light.
Ah, murmured the crowd, for surely there had never been a tattooed man like this! The beast eyes seemed to take red fire and blue fire, blinking and twisting. The roses on his fingers seemed to expel a sweet pink bouquet. The Tyrannosaurus rex reared up along his leg, and the sound of the brass trumpet in the hot tent heavens was a prehistoric cry from the red monster throat. Mr. William Philippus Phelps was a museum jolted to life. Fish swam in seas of electric-blue ink. Fountains sparkled under yellow suns. Ancient buildings stood in meadows of harvest wheat. Rockets burned across spaces of muscle and flesh. The slightest inhalation of his breath threatened to make chaos of the entire printed universe. He seemed afire, the creatures flinching from the flame, drawing back from the great heat of his pride, as he expanded under the audience’s rapt contemplation.
The carny boss laid his fingers to the adhesive. The audience rushed forward, silent in the oven vastness of the night tent.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet!” cried the carny boss.
The adhesive ripped free.
There was an instant in which nothing happened. An instant in which the Illustrated Man thought that the Unveiling was a terrible and irrevocable failure.
But then the audience gave a low moan.
The carny boss drew back, his eyes fixed.
Far out at the edge of the crowd, a woman, after a moment, began to cry, began to sob, and did not stop.
Slowly, the Illustrated Man looked down at his naked chest and stomach.
The thing that he saw made the roses on his hands discolor and die. All of his creatures seemed to wither, turn inward, shrivel with the arctic coldness that pumped from his heart outward to freeze and destroy them. He stood trembling. His hands floated up to touch that incredible picture, which lived, moved and shivered with life. It was like gazing into a small room, seeing a thing of someone else’s life so intimate, so impossible that one could not believe and one could not long stand to watch without turning away.