The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories

  Even in the heat of the day, he felt the slimy coldness of the swamp reaching out for him and he shrank back from it, knowing as he did that he could not face it. Despite all the brave words he had mouthed, all his resolution, he would not dare to face it. It was too big for a man to fight—it was too green and greedy.

  He hunkered in upon himself, trying to compress himself into a ball of comfort, although he was aware that there was no comfort. There never would be comfort, for now he’d failed himself.

  In a little while, he thought, he’d have to get up from where he crouched and go down to the huts. And once he went down there, he knew he would be lost, that he would become one with those others who likewise could not face the swamp. He would live out his life there, fishing for some food, chopping a little wood, caring for the sick, and sitting listless in the sun.

  He felt a flare of anger at the system which would sentence a man to such a life as that and he cursed the robots, knowing as he cursed that they were not the ones who were responsible. The robots were a symbol only of the health law situation.

  They had been made the physicians and the surgeons to the human race because they were quick as well as steady, because their judgment was unfrayed by any flicker of emotion, because they were as dedicated as the best of human doctors ever had been, because they were tireless and unthinking of themselves.

  And that was well and good. But the human race, as it always did, had gone overboard. It had made the robot not only the good and faithful doctor, but it had made him guardian and czar of human health, and in doing this had concocted a metallic ogre.

  Would there ever be a day, he wondered, when humans would be done for good and all with its goblins and its ogres?

  The anger faded out and he crouched dispirited and afraid and all alone beside the black waters of the swamp.

  A coward, he told himself. And there was a bitter taste inside his brain and a weakness in his belly.

  Get up, he told himself. Get up and go down to the huts.

  But he didn’t. He stayed, as if there might be some sort of reprieve, as if he might be hoping that from some unknown and unprobed source he might dredge up the necessary courage to walk into the swamp.

  But the hope, he knew, was a hollow hope.

  He had come to the end of hope. Ten years ago he could have done it. But not now. He’d lost too much along the way.

  He heard the footsteps behind him and threw a look across his shoulders.

  It was Kitty.

  She squatted down beside him.

  “Eric is getting the stuff together,” she told him. “He’ll be along in a little while.”

  “The stuff?”

  “Food. A couple of machetes. Some rope.”

  “But I don’t understand.”

  “He was just waiting for someone who had the guts to tackle it. He figures that you have. He always said one man didn’t have a chance, but maybe two men had. Two men, helping one another, just might have a chance.”

  “But he told me…”

  “Sure. I know what he told you. What I told you, too. And even in the face of that, you never wavered. That is how we knew.”

  “We?”

  “Of course,” said Kitty. “The three of us. I am going, too.”

  It took the swamp four days to beat the first of them.

  Curiously, it was Eric, the youngest and the strongest.

  He stumbled as they walked along a narrow ridge of land, flanked by tangled brush on one hand, by a morass on the other.

  Alden, who was following, helped him to his feet, but he could not stand. He staggered for a step or two, then collapsed again.

  “Just a little rest,” Eric panted. “Just a little rest and then I’ll be able to go on.”

  He crawled, with Alden helping, to a patch of shade, lay flat upon his back, a limp figure of a man.

  Kitty sat beside him and stroked his hair back from his forehead.

  “Maybe you should build a fire,” she said to Alden. “Something hot may help him. All of us could use a bit of something.”

  Alden turned off the ridge and plunged into the brush. The footing was soft and soggy and in places he sank in muck half way to his knees.

  He found a small dead tree and pulled branches off it. The fire, he knew, must be small, and of wood that was entirely dry, for any sign of smoke might alert the patrol that flew above the swamp.

  Back on the ridge again, he used a machete to slice some shavings off a piece of wood and stacked it all with care. It must start on one match, for they had few matches.

  Kitty came and knelt beside him, watching.

  “Eric is asleep,” she said. “And it’s not just tuckered out. I think he has a fever.”

  “It’s the middle of the afternoon,” said Alden. “We’ll stay here until morning. He may feel better, then. Some extra rest may put him on his feet.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “We’ll stay another day,” he said. “The three of us together. That’s what we said back there. We would stick together.”

  She put out a hand and laid it on his arm.

  “I was sure you’d say that,” she said. “Eric was so sure and he was so right. He said you were the man he had been waiting for.”

  Alden shook his head. “It’s not only Eric,” he declared. “It’s not only us. It’s those others back there. Remember how they helped us? They gave us food, even when it meant they might go a bit more hungry. They gave us two fishhooks out of the six they had. One of them copied the map that Doc had carried. They fixed up a pair of shoes for me because they said I wasn’t used to going without shoes. And they all came to see us off and watched until we were out of sight.”

  He paused and looked at her.

  “It’s not just us,” he said. “It’s all of us…all of us in Limbo.”

  She put up a hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes.

  “Did anyone,” he asked her, “ever tell you that you are beautiful?”

  She made a grimace. “Long ago,” she said. “But not for years. Life had been too hard. But once, I guess, you could have said that I was beautiful.”

  She made a fluttery motion with her hands. “Light the fire,” she told him. “Then go and catch some fish. Laying over this way, we’ll need the food.”

  Alden woke at the first faint edge of dawn and lay staring out across the inky water that looked, in the first flush of day, like a floor of black enamel that had just been painted and had not dried as yet, with the shine of wetness showing here and there. A great awkward bird launched itself off a dead tree stub and flapped ungracefully down to skim above the water so that little ripples ran in the black enamel.

  Stiffly, Alden sat up. His bones ached from the dampness and he was stiff with the chill of night.

  A short distance away, Kitty lay curled into a ball, still sleeping. He glanced toward the spot where Eric had been sleeping when he himself had gone to bed, and there was no one there.

  Startled, he leaped to his feet.

  “Eric!” he called.

  There was no answer.

  “Eric!” he shouted again.

  Kitty uncoiled and sat up.

  “He’s gone,” said Alden. “I just woke up and he wasn’t there.”

  He walked over to where the man had been lying and the imprint of his body still was in the grass.

  He bent to examine the ground and brushed his hand across it. Some of the blades of grass yielded to his touch; they were beginning to spring back, to stand erect again. Eric, he knew, had not left just a little while ago. He had been gone—for how long, for an hour, for two hours or more?

  Kitty rose and came to stand beside him.

  Alden got to his feet and faced her.

  “He was sleeping when I looked at him before I went to sleep,”
he said. “Muttering in his sleep, but sleeping. He still had a fever.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “one of us should have sat up to watch him. But he seemed to be all right. And we were all tired.”

  Alden looked up and down the ridge. There was nothing to be seen, no sign of the missing man.

  “He might have wandered off,” he said. “Woke up, delirious. He might just have taken off.”

  And if that were the situation, they might never find him. He might have fallen into a pool of water, or become trapped in muck or quicksand. He might be lying somewhere, exhausted with his effort, very quietly dying.

  Alden walked off the ridge into the heavy brush that grew out of the muck. Carefully, he scouted up and down the ridge and there was no sign that anyone, except himself the afternoon before, had come off the ridge. And there would have been some sign, for when one stepped into the muck, he went in to his ankles, in places halfway to his knees.

  Mosquitoes and other insects buzzed about him maddeningly as he floundered through the brush and somewhere far off a bird was making chunking sounds.

  He stopped to rest and regain his breath, waving his hands about his face to clear the air of insects.

  The chunking still kept on and now there was another sound. He listened for the second sound to be repeated.

  “Alden,” came the cry again, so faint he barely heard it.

  He plunged out of the brush back onto the ridge. The cry had come from the way that they had traveled on the day before.

  “Alden!” And now he knew that it was Kitty, and not Eric, calling.

  Awkwardly, he galloped down the ridge toward the sound.

  Kitty was crouched at the edge of a thirty-foot stretch of open water, where the ridge had broken and let the water in.

  He stopped beside her and looked down. She was pointing at a footprint—a footprint heading the wrong way. It lay beside other footprints heading in the opposite direction, the footprints that they had made in the mud as they came along the ridge the day before.

  “We didn’t stop,” said Kitty. “We kept right on. That can’t be one of ours. You weren’t down here, were you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then it must be Eric.”

  “You stay here,” he said.

  He plunged into the water and waded across and on the other edge the tracks were going out—tracks heading back the way that they had come.

  He stopped and shouted.

  “Eric! Eric! Eric!”

  He waited for an answer. There was nothing.

  A mile farther on, he came to the great morass they had crossed the day before—the mile or more of muck and water that had eaten at their strength. And here, on the muddy edge, the tracks went into the sea of sucking mud and water and disappeared from sight.

  He crouched on the shore and peered across the water, interspersed by hummocks that were poison green in the early light. There was no sign of life or movement. Once a fish (perhaps not a fish, perhaps only something) broke the water for an instant, sending out a circle of ripples. But that was all there was.

  Heavily, he turned back.

  Kitty still crouched beside the water’s edge.

  He shook his head at her.

  “He went back,” he said. “I don’t see how he could have. He was weak and…”

  “Determination,” Kitty said. “And, perhaps, devotion, too.”

  “Devotion?”

  “Don’t you see,” she said. “He knew that he was sick. He knew he couldn’t make it. And he knew that we’d stay with him.”

  “But that’s what we all agreed,” said Alden.

  Kitty shook her head. “He wouldn’t have it that way. He is giving us a chance.”

  “No!” yelled Alden. “I won’t let him do it. I’m going back and find him.”

  “Across that last stretch of swamp?” asked Kitty.

  Alden nodded. “Probably he was just able to make it. He more than likely is holed up on the other side somewhere.”

  “And what if he didn’t make it? What if he never got across?”

  “Then I won’t find him, of course. But I have to try.”

  “What I’m worried about,” said Kitty, “is what you’d do if you did find him. What would you do about him? What would you say to him?”

  “I’d bring him back,” said Alden, “or I’d stay with him.”

  She lifted her face and tears were standing in her eyes. “You’d give him back his gift,” she said. “You’d throw it in his face. You’d make this last great gesture of his mean absolutely nothing.”

  She looked at Alden. “You could do that?” she asked. “He has done a fine and decent thing. Thinking, perhaps, that it’s the last chance he’ll have for decency. And you wouldn’t let him keep it?”

  Alden shook his head.

  “He’d do as much for you,” she said. “He’d let you keep that final decency.”

  On the morning of the eighth day, Kitty moaned and tossed with fever. The day before had been a sunlit nightmare of mud and saw grass, of terrible heat, of snakes and mosquitoes, of waning hope and a mounting fear that stirred sluggishly in the middle of one’s gut.

  It had been crazy for them to try it, Alden thought, crazy from the very start—three people who had no right to try it, too out of condition, too ill-equipped, and in his case, at least, too old to try a thing like this. To cross forty miles of swamp took youth and strength, and all that any of the three of them had to qualify had been determination. Perhaps, he thought, a misplaced determination, each of them driven by something which, more than likely, they did not understand.

  Why, he wondered, had Kitty and Eric wished to escape from Limbo?

  It was something they had never talked about. Although perhaps they would have if there had been a lot of talk. But there had never been. There had been no time or breath for talk.

  For, he realized now, there was no real escape. You could escape the swamp, but you could not flee from Limbo. For you became a part of Limbo. Once in Limbo and there was no place left for you in the outside world.

  Had it been a gesture only, he wondered—a gesture of defiance. Like that foolish, noble gesture of Eric’s in leaving them when he had fallen ill.

  And the question of their decision back there came to haunt him once again.

  All he had to do, even in the glare of noonday sun, was to shut his eyes and see it all again—a starving, helpless, dying man who had crawled off the path and hidden in a clump of tangled underbrush so he could not be found even if one, or both, of his companions should come seeking him. There were flies crawling on his face and he dare not (or could not?) raise a hand to brush them off. There was a gaunt, black bird sitting on a dead tree stump, waiting patiently, and there was an alligator that lay in the water watching and there were many crawling, creeping, hopping creatures swarming in the grass and in the stunted brush.

  The vision never changed; it was a fixed and terrible vision painted in a single stroke by imagination, which then had walked away and let it stand in all its garish detail.

  Now it was Kitty, lying there and moaning through clenched teeth—an old and useless woman as he was an old and useless man. Kitty, with her lined face and her straggly hair and the terrible gauntness of her, but still possessed of that haunting sense of eternal youth somehow trapped tight inside her body.

  He should go, he thought, and get some water. Bathe her face and arms with it, force some down her throat. But the water was scarcely fit to drink. It was old and stagnant and it stank of rotted vegetation and it had the taste of ancient dead things one tried hard not to visualize.

  He went over to the small pack that belonged to Kitty and from it he took the battered and fire-blackened sauce pan that was the one utensil they had brought along.

  Picking his way carefully down the tiny i
sland on which they’d spent the night, he approached the water’s edge and scouted watchfully along it, seeking for a place where the water might appear a bit less poisonous. Although that, he knew, was foolishness; the water was the same no matter where one looked.

  It was bitter water in a bitter swamp that had fought them for seven days, that had sought to trap them and had tried to hold them back, that had bit and stung them and tried to drive them crazy, that had waited, knowing there would come a slip or some misstep or fall that would put them at its mercy.

  He shivered, thinking of it. This was the first time, he realized, that he had thought of it. He had never thought of it before; he had merely fought it. All his energy had been directed toward getting over that yard of ground ahead, and after that, another yard of ground.

  Time had lost its meaning, measured only in a man’s endurance. Distance had come to have no significance, for it stretched on every side. There would always be that distance; there would be no end to it.

  It had been a murderous seven days and the first two of them he had known he could not make it, that there was not another day left in him. But each day there had been another day left in him and he’d made each day to its bitter end.

  Of the three of them, he thought, he was the only one who still was on his feet. And another funny thing: He knew now that he had another day left in him, that he had many other days left in him. He could keep on forever, if it took forever. Now the swamp could never stop him. Somewhere in that terrible, tangled greenness he had found a hidden strength and had gotten second wind.

  Why should this be, he wondered. What was that inner strength? From what source had it come?

  Was it, perhaps, because his purpose had been strong?

  And once again he stood at the window, wondering if there’d be a butterfly this time or if the butterfly were only a certain part of childhood. But never questioning for a moment that the magic still was there, that it had been so strong and shining that thirty years could not have tarnished it.

  So he had gone outside and had sat beneath the tree as he had sat that day when he was a child, with his hands held out, palms up, and the strange card laid across one palm. He could feel the edge of magic and could smell the new freshness of the air, but it was not right, for there were no yellow leaves falling down the sky.