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?’
‘Si.’
‘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 hands 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 burnt 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.
Leonora moved beside him. She was so fresh, so well groomed in spite of everything, so new in all this oldness, so startling, that his mind flinched and jerked. He found himself staring at her as if she’d betrayed him by her salt-whiteness, her wonderfully brushed hair and her cleanly manicured nails and her bright-red mouth.
Standing on the bottom step, Webb lit a cigarette, took two or three long drags on it, tossed it down, stepped on it, kicked the flattened butt into the street, and said, ‘Here we go.’
They stepped down and started around the far side of the plaza, past the few shops that were still open. They walked quietly.
‘Perhaps they’ll be decent to us.’
‘We can hope so.’
They passed a photographic shop.
‘It’s another day. Anything can happen. I believe that. No – I don’t really believe it. I’m only talking. I’ve got to talk or I wouldn’t be able to walk,’ she said.
They passed a candy shop.
‘Keep talking, then.’
‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘This can’t be happening to us! Are we the last ones in the world?’
‘Maybe next to the last.’
They approached an open-air carnecería.
God! he thought. How the horizons narrowed, how they came in. A year ago there weren’t four directions, there were a million for us. Yesterday they got down to four; we could go to Juatala, Porto Bello, San Juan Clementas, or Brioconbria. We were satisfied to have our car. Then when we couldn’t get gas, we were satisfied to have our clothes, then when they took our clothes, we were satisfied to have a place to sleep. Each pleasure they took away left us with one other creature comfort to hold on to. Did you see how we let go of one thing and clutched another so quickly? I guess that’s human. So they took away everything. There’s nothing left. Except us. It all boils down to just you and me walking along here, and thinking too goddamn much for my own good. And what counts in the end is whether they can take you away from me or me away from you, Lee, and I don’t think they can do that. They’ve got everything else and I don’t blame them. But they can’t really do anything else to us now. When you strip all the clothes away and the doodads, you have two human beings who were either happy or unhappy together, and we have no complaints.
‘Walk slowly,’ said John Webb.
‘I am.’
‘Not too slowly, to look reluctant. Not too fast, to look as if you want to get it over with. Don’t give them the satisfaction, Lee, don’t give them a damn bit.’
‘I won’t.’
They walked. ‘Don’t even touch me,’ he said, quietly. ‘Don’t even h
old my hand.’
‘Oh, please!’
‘No, not even that.’
He moved away a few inches and kept walking steadily. His eyes were straight ahead and their pace was regular.
‘I’m beginning to cry, Jack.’
‘Goddamn it!’ he said, measuredly, between his teeth, not looking aside. ‘Stop it! Do you want me to run? Is that what you want – do you want me to take you and run into the jungle, and let them hunt us, is that what you want, goddamn it, do you want me to fall down in the street here and grovel and scream; shut up, let’s do this right, don’t give them anything!’
They walked on.
‘All right,’ she said, hands tight, her head coming up. ‘I’m not crying now. I won’t cry.’
‘Good, damn it, that’s good.’
And still, strangely, they were not past the carnecería. The vision of red horror was on their left as they paced steadily forward on the hot tile sidewalk. The things that hung from hooks looked like brutalities and sins, like bad consciences, evil dreams, like gored flags and slaughtered promises. The redness, oh, the hanging, evil-smelling wetness and redness, the hooked and hung-high carcasses, unfamiliar, unfamiliar.
As he passed the shop, something made John Webb strike out a hand. He slapped it smartly against a strung-up side of beef. A mantle of blue buzzing flies lifted angrily and swirled in a bright cone over the meat.
Leonora said, looking ahead, walking, ‘They’re all strangers! I don’t know any of them. I wish I knew even one of them. I wish even one of them knew me!’
They walked on past the carnecería. The side of beef, red and irritable-looking, swung in the hot sunlight after they passed.
The flies came down in a feeding cloak to cover the meat, once it had stopped swinging.
The Strawberry Window
IN his dream he was shutting the front door with its strawberry windows and lemon windows and windows like white clouds and windows like clear water in a country stream. Two dozen panes squared round the one big pane, coloured of fruit wines and gelatins and cool water-ices. He remembered his father holding him up as a child. ‘Look!’ And through the green glass the world was emerald, moss, and summer mint. ‘Look!’ The lilac pane made Concord grapes of all the passers by. And at last the strawberry glass perpetually bathed the town in roseate warmth, carpeted the world in pink sunrise, and made the cut lawn seem imported from some Persian rug bazaar. The strawberry window, best of all, cured people of their paleness, warmed the cold rain, and set the blowing, shifting February snows afire.
‘Ah!’
He awoke.
He heard his boys talking before he was fully out of his dream and he lay in the dark now, listening to the sad sound their talk made, like the wind blowing the white sea-bottoms in the blue bills; and then he remembered.
We’re on Mars, he thought.
‘What?’ His wife cried out in her sleep.
He hadn’t realized he had spoken; he lay as still as he possibly could. But now, with a strange kind of numb reality he saw his wife rise to haunt the room, her pale face staring through the small, high windows of their quonset hut at the clear but unfamiliar stars.
‘Carrie,’ he whispered.
She did not hear.
‘Carrie,’ he whispered. ‘There’s something I want to tell you. For a month now I’ve been wanting to say … tomorrow … tomorrow morning, there’s going to be …’
But his wife sat all to herself in the blue starlight and would not look at him.
He closed his eyes tight.
If only the sun stayed up, he thought, if only there was no night. For during the day, he nailed the settlement town together, the boys were in school, and Carrie had cleaning, gardening, cooking to do. But when the sun was gone and their hands were empty of flowers or hammers and nails and arithmetics, their memories, like night birds, came home in the dark. You heard them rustle the black roof like the first rain of a new season of endless rains. You woke to the cool pattering, which was not rain, but only the slow dipping down, the flicking, brushing, touching, the whispered flight and glide of remembering towards dawn.
His wife moved, a slight turn of her head.
‘Will,’ she said at last, ‘I want to go home.’
‘Carrie!’
‘This isn’t home,’ she said.
He saw that her eyes were wet and brimming. ‘Carrie, hold on awhile.’
‘I’ve got no fingernails from holding on now!’
As if she still moved in her sleep, she opened her bureau drawers and took out layers of handkerchiefs, shirts, underclothing and put it all on top of the bureau, not seeing it, letting her fingers touch and bring it out and put it down. The routine was long familiar now. She would talk and put things out and stand quietly awhile, and then later put all the things away and come, dry-faced, back to bed and dreams. He was afraid that some night she would empty every drawer, and reach for the few ancient suitcases against the wall.
‘Will …’ Her voice was not bitter, but soft, featureless, and as uncoloured as the moonlight that showed what she was doing. ‘So many nights for six months I’ve talked this way; I’m ashamed. You work hard building houses in town. A man who works so hard shouldn’t have to listen to a wife gone sad on him. But there’s nothing to do but talk it out. It’s the little things I miss most of all. I don’t know – silly things. Our front porch swing. The wicker rocking-chair, summer nights. Looking at the people walk or ride by those evenings, back in Ohio. Our black upright piano, out of tune. My Swedish cut glass. Our parlour furniture – oh, it was like a herd of elephants, I know, and all of it old. And the Chinese hanging crystals that hit when the wind blew. And talking to neighbours there on the front porch, July nights. All those crazy, silly things … they’re not important. But it seems those are things that come to mind around three in the morning. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘Mars is a far place. It smells funny, looks funny, and feels funny. I think to myself nights, too. We came from a nice town.’
‘It was green,’ she said. ‘In the spring and summer. And yellow and red in the fall. And ours was a nice house; my, it was old, eighty-ninety years or so. Used to hear the house talking at night, whispering away. All the dry wood, the banisters, the front porch, the sills. Wherever you touched, it talked to you. Every room a different way. And when you had the whole house talking, it was a family around you in the dark, putting you to sleep. No other house, the kind they build nowadays, can be the same. A lot of people have got to go through and live in a house to make it mellow down all over. This place here, now, this hut, it doesn’t know I’m in it, doesn’t care if I live or die. It makes a noise like tin, and tin’s cold. It’s got no pores for the years to sink in. It’s got no cellar for you to put things away for next year and the year after that. It’s got no attic where you keep things from last year and all the other years before you were born; and without an attic, you’ve got no past. If we only had a little bit up here that was familiar, Will, then we could make room for all that’s strange. But when everything, every single thing is strange, then it takes forever to make things familiar.’
He nodded in the dark. ‘There’s nothing: you say that I haven’t thought.’
She was looking at the moonlight where it lay upon the suitcases against the wall. He saw her move her hand down towards them.
‘Carrie!’
‘What?’
He swung his legs out of bed. ‘Carrie, I’ve done a crazy dam-fool thing. All these months I heard you dreaming away, scared, and the boys at night and the wind, and Mars out there, the sea-bottoms and all, and …’ He stopped and swallowed. ‘You got to understand what I did and why I did it. All the money we had in the bank a month ago, all the money we saved for ten years, I spent.’
‘Will!’
‘I threw it away, Carrie, I swear, I threw it away on nothing. It was going to be a surprise. But now, tonight, there you are, and there are those damned suitcases on the
floor and …’
‘Will,’ she said, turning around. ‘You mean we’ve gone through all this, on Mars, putting away extra money every week, only to have you burn it up in a few hours?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m a crazy fool. Look, it’s not long till morning. We’ll get up early. I’ll take you down to see what I’ve done. I don’t want to tell you, I want you to see. And if it’s no go, then, well, there’s always those suitcases and the rocket to Earth four times a week.’
She did not move. ‘Will, Will,’ she murmured.
‘Don’t say any more,’ he said.
‘Will, Will …’ She shook her head slowly, unbelievingly. He turned away and lay back down on his own side of the bed, and she sat on the other side, and for a moment did not lie down, but only sat looking at the bureau where her handkerchiefs and jewellery and clothing lay ready in neat stacks where she had left them. Outside a wind the colour of moonlight stirred up the sleeping dust and powdered the air.
At last she lay back, but said nothing more and was a cold weight in the bed, staring down the long tunnel of night towards the faintest sign of morning.
They got up in the very first light and moved in the small quonset hut without a sound. It was a pantomime prolonged almost to the time when someone might scream at the silence, as the mother and father and the boys washed and dressed and ate a quiet breakfast of toast and fruit-juice and coffee, with no one looking directly at anyone and everyone watching someone in the reflective surfaces of toaster, glassware, or cutlery, where all their faces were melted out of shape and made terribly alien in the early hour. Then, at last, they opened the quonset door and let in the air that blew across the cold blue-white Martian seas, where only the sand tides dissolved and shifted and made ghost patterns, and they stepped out under a raw and staring cold sky and began their walk towards a town, which seemed no more than a motion-picture set far on ahead of them on a vast, empty stage.