‘It’s been a long time,’ he said quietly.
We walked along in the twilight.
‘A long time,’ he said, ‘waitin’ on that station platform.’
‘You?’ I said.
‘Me.’ He nodded in the tree shadows.
‘Were you waiting for someone at the station?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You.’
‘Me?’ The surprise must have shown in my voice. ‘But why…? You never saw me before in your life.’
‘Did I say I did? I just said I was waitin’.’
We were on the edge of town now. He had turned and I had turned with him along the darkening riverbank toward the trestle where the night trains ran over going east, going west, but stopping rare few times.
‘You want to know anything about me?’ I asked suddenly. ‘You the sheriff?’
‘No, not the sheriff. And no, I don’t want to know nothin’ about you.’ He put his hands in his pockets. The sun was set now. The air was suddenly cool. ‘I’m just surprised you’re here at last, is all.’
‘Surprised?’
‘Surprised,’ he said, ‘and…pleased.’
I stopped abruptly and looked straight at him.
‘How long have you been sitting on that station platform?’
‘Twenty years, give or take a few.’
I knew he was telling the truth; his voice was as easy and quiet as the river.
‘Waiting for me?’ I said.
‘Or someone like you,’ he said.
We walked on in the growing dark.
‘How you like our town?’
‘Nice, quiet,’ I said.
‘Nice, quiet.’ He nodded. ‘Like the people?’
‘People look nice and quiet.’
‘They are,’ he said. ‘Nice, quiet.’
I was ready to turn back but the old man kept talking and in order to listen and be polite I had to walk with him in the vaster darkness, the tides of field and meadow beyond town.
‘Yes,’ said the old man, ‘the day I retired, twenty years ago, I sat down on that station platform and there I been, sittin’, doin’ nothin’, waitin’ for somethin’ to happen, I didn’t know what, I didn’t know, I couldn’t say. But when it finally happened, I’d know it, I’d look at it and say, Yes, sir, that’s what I was waitin’ for. Train wreck? No. Old woman friend come back to town after fifty years? No. No. It’s hard to say. Someone. Somethin’. And it seems to have somethin’ to do with you. I wish I could say—’
‘Why don’t you try?’ I said.
The stars were coming out. We walked on.
‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘you know much about your own insides?’
‘You mean my stomach or you mean psychologically?’
‘That’s the word. I mean your head, your brain, you know much about that?’
The grass whispered under my feet. ‘A little.’
‘You hate many people in your time?’
‘Some.’
‘We all do. It’s normal enough to hate, ain’t it, and not only hate but, while we don’t talk about it, don’t we sometimes want to hit people who hurt us, even kill them?’
‘Hardly a week passes we don’t get that feeling,’ I said, ‘and put it away.’
‘We put away all our lives,’ he said. ‘The town says thus and so, Mom and Dad say this and that, the law says such and such. So you put away one killin’ and another and two more after that. By the time you’re my age, you got lots of that kind of stuff between your ears. And unless you went to war, nothin’ ever happened to get rid of it.’
‘Some men trapshoot or hunt ducks,’ I said. ‘Some men box or wrestle.’
‘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 cave men 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 someplace 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, plowed 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 toward me as I leaned toward 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 sun-baked face and his sun-bleached 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, toward 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.
All Summer in a Day
‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘Now?’
‘Soon.’
‘Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?’
‘Look, look; see for yourself!’
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
‘It’s stopping, it’s stopping!’
‘Yes, yes!’
Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could never remember a time when there wasn’t rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.
All day yesterday they had read in class about the sun. About how like a lemon it was, and how hot. And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it:
I think the sun is a flower,
That blooms for just one hour.
That was Margot’s poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.
‘Aw, you didn’t write that!’ protested one of the boys.
‘I did,’ said Margot. ‘I did.’
‘William!’ said the teacher.
But that was yesterday. Now the rain was slackening, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.
‘Where’s teacher?’
‘She’ll be back.’
‘She’d better hurry, we’ll miss it!’
They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes.
Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.
‘What’re you looking at?’ said William.
Margot said nothing.
‘Speak when you’re spoken to.’ He gave her a shove. But she did not move; rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else.
They edged away from her, they would not look at her. She felt them go away. And this was because she would play no games with them in the echoing tunnels of the underground city. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the drenched windows.
And then, of course, the biggest crime of all was that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the sun and the way the sun was and the sky was when she was four in Ohio. And they, they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out and had long since forgotten the color and heat of it and the way it really was. But Margot remembered.
‘It’s like a penny,’ she said once, eyes closed.
‘No, it’s not!’ the children cried.
‘It’s like a fire,’ she said, ‘in the stove.’
‘You’re lying, you don’t remember!’ cried the children.
But she remembered and stood quietly apart from all of them and watched the patterning windows. And once, a month ago, she had refused to shower in the school shower rooms, had clutched her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming the water mustn’t touch her head. So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away.
There was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year; it seemed vital to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of thousands of dollars to her family. And so, the children hated her for all these reasons of big and little consequence. They hated her pale snow face, her waiting silence, her thinness, and her possible future.
‘Get away!’ The boy gave her another push. ‘What’re you waiting for?’
Then, for the first time, she turned and looked at him. And what she was waiting for was in her eyes.
‘Well, don’t wait around here!’ cried the boy savagely. ‘You won’t see nothing!’
Her lips moved.
‘Nothing!’ he cried. ‘It was all a joke, wasn’t it?’ He turned to the other children. ‘Nothing’s happening today. Is it?’
They all blinked at him and then, understanding, laughed and shook their heads. ‘Nothing, nothing!’
‘Oh, but,’ Margot whispered, her eyes helpless. ‘But this is the day, the scientists predict, they say, they know, the sun…’
‘All a joke!’ said the boy, and seized her roughly. ‘Hey, everyone, let’s put her in a closet before teacher comes!’
‘No,’ said Margot, falling back.
They surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the
door. They stood looking at the door and saw it tremble from her beating and throwing herself against it. They heard her muffled cries. Then, smiling, they turned and went out and back down the tunnel, just as the teacher arrived.
‘Ready, children?’ She glanced at her watch.
‘Yes!’ said everyone.
‘Are we all here?’
‘Yes!’
The rain slackened still more.
They crowded to the huge door.
The rain stopped.
It was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a peaceful tropical slide which did not move or tremor. The world ground to a standstill. The silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing altogether. The children put their hands to their ears. They stood apart. The door slid back and the smell of the silent, waiting world came in to them.
The sun came out.
It was the color of flaming bronze and it was very large. And the sky around it was a blazing blue tile color. And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, released from their spell, rushed out, yelling, into the springtime.
‘Now, don’t go too far,’ called the teacher after them. ‘You’ve only two hours, you know. You wouldn’t want to get caught out!’
But they were running and turning their faces up to the sky and feeling the sun on their cheeks like a warm iron; they were taking off their jackets and letting the sun burn their arms.
‘Oh, it’s better than the sun lamps, isn’t it?’
‘Much, much better!’
They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never stopped growing, tumultuously, even as you watched it. It was a nest of octopi, clustering up great arms of fleshlike weed, wavering, flowering in this brief spring. It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink, and it was the color of the moon.