‘And some don’t. I’m talkin’ about them that don’t. Me. All my life I’ve been saltin’ down those bodies, puttin’ ’em away on ice in my head. Sometimes you get mad at a town and the people in it for makin’ you put things aside like that. You like the old cavemen who just gave a hell of a yell and whanged someone on the head with a club.’
‘Which all leads up to …?’
‘Which all leads up to: everybody’d like to do one killin’ in his life, to sort of work off that big load of stuff, all those killin’s in his mind he never did have the guts to do. And once in a while a man has a chance. Someone runs in front of his car and he forgets the brakes and keeps goin’. Nobody can prove nothin’ with that sort of thing. The man don’t even tell himself he did it. He just didn’t get his foot on the brake in time. But you know and I know what really happened, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
The town was far away now. We moved over a small stream on a wooden bridge, just near the railway embankment.
‘Now,’ said the old man, looking at the water, ‘the only kind of killin’ worth doin’ is the one where nobody can guess who did it or why they did it or who they did it to, right? Well, I got this idea maybe twenty years ago. I don’t think about it every day or every week. Sometimes months go by, but the idea’s this: only one train stops here each day, sometimes not even that. Now, if you wanted to kill someone you’d have to wait, wouldn’t you, for years and years, until a complete and actual stranger came to your town, a stranger who got off the train for no reason, a man nobody knows and who don’t know nobody in the town. Then, and only then, I thought, sittin’ there on the station chair, you could just go up and when nobody’s around, kill him and throw him in the river. He’d be found miles downstream. Maybe he’d never be found. Nobody would ever think to come to Rampart Junction to find him. He wasn’t goin’ there. He was on his way some place else. There, that’s my whole idea. And I’d know that man the minute he got off the train. Know him, just as clear …’
I had stopped walking. It was dark. The moon would not be up for an hour.
‘Would you?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. I saw the motion of his head looking at the stars. ‘Well, I’ve talked enough.’ He sidled close and touched my elbow. His hand was feverish, as if he had held it to a stove before touching me. His other hand, his right hand, was hidden, tight and bunched, in his pocket. ‘I’ve talked enough.’
Something screamed.
I jerked my head.
Above, a fast-flying night-express razored along the unseen tracks, flourished light on hill, forest, farm, town dwellings, field, ditch, meadow, ploughed earth, and water, then, raving high, cut off away, shrieking, gone. The rails trembled for a little while after that. Then, silence.
The old man and I stood looking at each other in the dark. His left hand was still holding my elbow. His other hand was still hidden.
‘May I say something?’ I said, at last.
The old man nodded.
‘About myself,’ I said. I had to stop. I could hardly breathe. I forced myself to go on. ‘It’s funny. I’ve often thought the same way as you. Sure, just today, going cross-country, I thought, how perfect, how perfect, how really perfect it could be. Business has been bad for me, lately. Wife sick. Good friend died last week. War in the world. Full of boils, myself. It would do me a world of good –’
‘What?’ the old man said, his hand on my arm.
‘To get off this train in a small town,’ I said, ‘where nobody knows me, with this gun under my arm, and find someone and kill them and bury them and go back down to the station and get on and go home and nobody the wiser and nobody ever to know who did it, ever. Perfect, I thought, a perfect crime. And I got off the train.’
We stood there in the dark for another minute, staring at each other. Perhaps we were listening to each other’s hearts beating very fast, very fast indeed.
The world turned under me. I clenched my fists. I wanted to fall. I wanted to scream, like the train.
For suddenly I saw that all the things I had just said were not lies put forth to save my life.
All the things I had just said to this man were true.
And now I knew why I had stepped from the train and walked up through this town. I knew what I had been looking for.
I heard the old man breathing hard and fast. His hand was tight on my arm as if he might fall. His teeth were clenched. He leaned towards me as I leaned towards him. There was a terrible silent moment of immense strain as before an explosion.
He forced himself to speak at last. It was the voice of a man crushed by a monstrous burden.
‘How do I know you got a gun under your arm?’
‘You don’t know.’ My voice was blurred. ‘You can’t be sure.’
He waited. I thought he was going to faint.
‘That’s how it is?’ he said.
‘That’s how it is,’ I said.
He shut his eyes tight. He shut his mouth tight.
After another five seconds, very slowly, heavily, he managed to take his hand away from my own immensely heavy arm. He looked down at his right hand then, and took it, empty, out of his pocket.
Slowly, with great weight, we turned away from each other and started walking blind, completely blind, in the dark.
The midnight PASSENGER TO BE PICKED UP flare sputtered on the tracks. Only when the train was pulling out of the station did I lean from the open Pullman door and look back.
The old man was seated there with his chair tilted against the station wall, with his faded blue pants and shirt and his sunbaked face and his sunbleached eyes. He did not glance at me as the train slid past. He was gazing east along the empty rails where tomorrow or the next day or the day after the day after that, a train, some train, any train, might fly by here, might slow, might stop. His face was fixed, his eyes were blindly frozen, towards the east. He looked a hundred years old.
The train wailed.
Suddenly old myself, I leaned out, squinting.
Now the darkness that had brought us together stood between. The old man, the station, the town, the forest, were lost in the night.
For an hour I stood in the roaring blast staring back at all that darkness.
Icarus Montgolfier Wright
HE lay on his bed and the wind blew through the window over his ears and over his half-opened mouth so it whispered to him in his dream. It was like the wind of time hollowing the Delphic caves to say what must be said of yesterday, today, tomorrow. Sometimes one voice gave a shout far off away, sometimes two, a dozen, an entire race of men cried out through his mouth, but their words were always the same:
‘Look, look, we’ve done it!’
For suddenly he, they, one or many, were flung in the dream, and flew. The air spread in a soft warm sea where he swam, disbelieving.
‘Look, look! It’s done!’
But he didn’t ask the world to watch, he was only shocking his senses wide to see, taste, smell, touch the air, the wind, the rising moon. He swam alone in the sky. The heavy earth was gone.
But wait, he thought, wait now!
Tonight – what night is this?
The night before, of course. The night before the first flight of a rocket to the Moon. Beyond this room on the baked desert floor one hundred yards away the rocket waits for me.
Well, does it now? Is there really a rocket?
Hold on! he thought, and twisted, turned, sweating, eyes tight, to the wall, the fierce whisper in his teeth. Be certain-sure ! You, now, who are you?
Me? he thought. My name?
Jedediah Prentiss, born 1938, college graduate 1959, licensed rocket pilot, 1965. Jedediah Prentiss … Jedediah Prentiss….
The wind whistled his name away! He grabbed for it, yelling.
Then, gone quiet, he waited for the wind to bring his name back. He waited a long while, and there was only silence, and then after a thousand heartbeats, he felt motion.
Th
e sky opened out like a soft blue flower. The Aegean Sea stirred soft white fans through a distant wine-coloured surf.
In the wash of the waves on the shore, he heard his name.
Icarus.
And again in a breathing whisper.
Icarus.
Someone shook his arm and it was his father saying his name and shaking away the night. And he himself lay small, half-turned to the window and the shore below and the deep sky, feeling the first wind of morning ruffle the golden feathers bedded in amber wax lying by the side of his cot. Golden wings stirred half-alive in his father’s arms, and the faint down on his own shoulders quilled trembling as he looked at these wings and beyond them to the cliff.
‘Father, how’s the wind?’
‘Enough for me, but never enough for you….’
‘Father, don’t worry. The wings seem clumsy, now, but my bones in the feathers will make them strong, my blood in the wax will make it live!’
‘My blood, my bones, too, remember; each man lends his flesh to his children, asking that they tend it well. Promise you’ll not go high, Icarus. The sun, or my son, the heat of one, the fever of the other, could melt these wings. Take care!’
And they carried the splendid golden wings into the morning and heard them whisper in their arms, whisper his name or a name or some name that blew, spun, and settled like a feather on the soft air.
Montgolfier.
His hands touched fiery rope, bright linen, stitched thread gone hot as summer. His hands fed wool and straw to a breathing flame.
Montgolfier.
And his eye soared up along the swell and sway, the oceanic tug and pull, the immensely wafted silver pear still filling with the shimmering tidal airs channelled up from the blaze. Silent as a god tilted slumbering above French countryside, this delicate linen envelope, this swelling sac of oven-baked air would soon pluck itself free. Draughting upward to blue worlds of silence, his mind and his brother’s mind would sail with it, muted, serene among island clouds where uncivilized lightnings slept. Into that uncharted gulf and abyss where no bird-song or shout of man could follow, the balloon would hush itself. So cast adrift, he, Montgolfier, and all men, might hear the unmeasured breathing of God and the cathedral tread of eternity.
‘Ah …’ He moved, the crowd moved, shadowed by the warm balloon. ‘Everything’s ready, everything’s right….’
Right. His lips twitched in his dream. Right. Hiss, whisper, flutter, rush. Right.
From his father’s hands a toy jumped to the ceiling, whirled in its own wind, suspended, while he and his brother stared to see it flicker, rustle, whistle, heard it murmuring their names.
Wright.
Whispering: wind, sky, cloud, space, wing, fly .,.
‘Wilbur, Orville? Look; how’s that?’
Ah. In his sleep, his mouth sighed.
The toy helicopter hummed, bumped the ceiling, murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk; murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk. Whispered eagle, whispered raven, and at last, fluttering to their hands with a susurrance, a wash of blowing weather from summers yet to come, with a last whir and exhalation, whispered hawk.
Dreaming, he smiled.
He saw the clouds rush down the Aegean sky.
He felt the balloon sway drunkenly, its great bulk ready for the clear running wind.
He felt the sand hiss up the Atlantic shelves from the soft dunes that might save him if he, a fledgling bird, should fall. The framework struts hummed and chorded like a harp and himself caught up in its music.
Beyond this room he felt the primed rocket glide on the desert field, its fire-wings folded, its fire-breath kept, held ready to speak for three billion men. In a moment he would wake and walk slowly out to that rocket.
And stand on the rim of the cliff.
Stand cool in the shadow of the warm balloon.
Stand whipped by tidal sands drummed over Kitty Hawk.
And sheathe his boy’s wrists, arms, hands, fingers with golden wings in golden wax.
And touch for a final time the captured breath of man, the warm gasp of awe and wonder siphoned and sewn to lift their dreams.
And spark the gasoline engine.
And take his father’s hand and wish him well with his own wings, flexed and ready, here on the precipice.
Then whirl and jump.
Then cut the cords to free the great balloon.
Then rev the motor, prop the plane on air.
And crack the switch, to fire the rocket fuse.
And together in a single leap, swim, rush, flail, jump, sail, and glide, upturned to sun, moon, stars, they would go above Atlantic, Mediterranean; over country, wilderness, city, town; in gaseous silence, riffling feather, rattle-drum frame, in volcanic eruption, in timid, sputtering roar; in start, jar, hesitation, then steady ascension, beautifully held, wondrously transported, they would laugh and cry each his own name to himself. Or shout the names of others unborn or others long dead and blown away by the wine wind or the salt wind or the silent hush of balloon wind or the wind of chemical fire. Each feeling the bright feathers stir and bud deep-buried and thrusting to burst from their riven shoulder-blades! Each leaving behind the echo of their flying, a sound to encircle, recircle the earth in the winds and “speak again in other years to the sons of the sons of their sons, asleep but hearing the restless midnight sky.
Up, yet further up, higher, higher! A spring tide, a summer flood, an unending river of wings!
A bell rang softly.
No, he whispered, I’ll wake in a moment. Wait …
The Aegean slid away below the window, gone; the Atlantic dunes, the French countryside, dissolved down to New Mexico desert. In his room near his cot stirred no plumes in golden wax. Outside, no wind-sculpted pear, no trapdrum butterfly machine. Outside only a rocket, a combustible dream, waiting for the friction of his hand to set it off.
In the last moment of sleep, someone asked his name.
Quietly, he gave the answer as he had heard it during the hours from midnight on.
‘Icarus Montgolfier Wright.’
He repeated it slowly so the questioner might remember the order and spelling down to the last incredible letter.
‘Icarus Montgolfier Wright.
‘Born: nine hundred years before Christ. Grammar school: Paris, 1783. High school, college: Kitty Hawk, 1903. Graduation from Earth to Moon: this day, God willing, 1 August 1970. Death and burial, with luck, on Mars, summer 1999 in the Year of Our Lord.’
Then he let himself drift awake.
Moments later, crossing the desert tarmac, he heard someone shouting again and again and again.
And if no one was there or if someone was there behind him, he could not tell. And whether it was one voice or many, young or old, near or very far away, rising or falling, whispering or shouting to him all three of his brave new names, he could not tell, either. He did not turn to see.
For the wind was slowly rising and he let it take hold and blow him all the rest of the way across the desert to the rocket which stood waiting there.
Almost the End of the World
SIGHTING ROCK Junction, Arizona, at noon on 22 August 1961, Willy Bersinger let his miner’s boot rest easy on the jalopy’s accelerator and talked quietly to his partner, Samuel Fitts.
‘Yes, sir, Samuel, it’s great hitting town. After a couple of months out at the Penny Dreadful Mine, a juke-box looks like a stained-glass window to me. We need the town; without it, we might wake some morning and find ourselves all jerked beef and petrified rock. And then, of course, the town needs us, too.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Samuel Fitts.
‘Well, we bring things into the town that it hasn’t got – mountains, creeks, desert night, stars, things like that….’
And it was true, thought Willy, driving along. Set a man way out in the strange lands and he fills with wellsprings of silence. Silence of sagebrush, or a mountain lion purring like a warm beehive at noon. Silence of the river
shallows deep in the canyons. All this a man takes in. Opening his mouth, in town, he breathes it out.
‘Oh, how I love to climb in that old barber-shop chair,’ Willy admitted. ‘And see all those city men lined up under the naked-lady calendars staring back at me, waiting while I chew over my philosophy of rocks and mirages and the kind of Time that just sits out there in the hills waiting for Man to go away. I exhale – and that wilderness settles in a fine dust on the customers. Oh, it’s nice, me talking, soft and easy, up and down, on and on….’
In his mind he saw the customers’ eyes strike fire. Some day they would yell and rabbit for the hills, leaving families and time-clock civilization behind.
‘It’s good to feel wanted,’ said Willy. ‘You and me, Samuel, are basic necessities for those city-dwelling folks. Gangway, Rock Junction!’
And with a tremulous tin whistling they steamed across city limits into awe and wonder.
They had driven perhaps a hundred feet through town when Willy kicked the brakes. A great shower of rust flakes sifted from the jalopy fenders. The car stood cowering in the road.
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Willy. He squinted his lynx eyes this way and that. He snuffed his huge nose. ‘You feel it? You smell it?’
‘Sure,’ said Samuel, uneasily, ‘but, what …?’
Willy scowled. ‘You ever see a sky-blue cigar-store Indian?’
‘Never did.’
‘There’s one over there. Ever see a pink dog-kennel, an orange out-house, a lilac-coloured bird-bath? There, there, and over there!’
Both men had risen slowly now to stand on the creaking floorboards.
‘Samuel,’ whispered Willy. ‘The whole damn shooting match, every kindling pile, porch-rail, gewgaw gingerbread, fence, fireplug, garbage truck, the whole blasted town, look at it! It was painted just an hour ago!’
‘No!’ said Samuel Fitts.
But there stood the band pavilion, the Baptist church, the firehouse, the Oddfellows’ orphanage, the railroad depot, the county jail, the cat hospital and all the bungalows, cottages, greenhouses, gazebos, shop-signs, mailboxes, telephone poles, and trash-bins, around and in between, and they all blazed with corn yellow, crab-apple greens, circus reds. From water-tank to tabernacle, each building looked as if God had jig-sawed it, coloured it, and set it out to dry a moment ago.