“Here,” whispered Conway. “Do they ever meet?”
“Never. Sometimes.”
“Where?”
“The bait must home where the carnivores roam, right? They don’t want to meet. The wires suffice for nightmare fevers, their barks so high just hyena laptop lapdogs hear. Listen.”
A bedlam choir drowned in static. Yes, yes. More! Oh, yes, yes. More!
“Like them apples?” Smith cut in. “Fresh off Eden’s tree. Sold by the Snake. Midnight park rentals. You will not be driven forth! Drop coins for virtual garden beds.”
“Stop!” said Conway.
“Stop? Taffy-pulling your ravenous groin? Lunch, mañana? If you can creep or crawl to weep thanks to this sinner friend?”
“Kill you,” said Conway.
“I’ll duck faster than you shoot. Jump back on line. Be a torn party favor. Ciao!”
Click! He was gone. The storm of fevers poured in, firing his brain. More heavy breathing. He glanced up.
The wall was lit by the wild fire in his cheeks.
He let the phone fall to lie gasping unspeakable raw things as he staggered toward bed, the flames in his face lighting the floor.
He lay down with whispers and clenched his eyelids and in a moment of sleeping dream heard, far off, the clang of a metal storm drain manhole lid, lifted and slid. He blinked and jerked his head to stare across into the outer room.
Where Norma stood, the telephone thrust to her ear, eyes shut in pain as her color melted and she swayed, breathless, listening, listening.
He lifted up to call but in that instant she seized the cord and, eyes still shut, yanked the whispers out of the wall.
Sleepwalking, she glided toward the bathroom door. With no light he heard her shake and spill the aspirin bottle. The tablets rained in the toilet. The bottle fell to the floor. She flushed three times and turning, walked to stand by the bed for a moment, then lift the blanket and climb in.
After a long moment, he felt her hand touch his elbow. After another moment she whispered. Whispered!
“You awake?”
He nodded in the dark.
“Well,” she whispered. “Now.”
He waited.
“Come over,” she whispered, “on my side of the bed.”
AUTUMN AFTERNOON
“It’s a very sad time of year to be cleaning out the attic,” said Miss Elizabeth Simmons. “I don’t like October. I don’t like the way the trees get empty. And the sky always looks like the sun has bleached it out.” She stood hesitantly at the bottom of the attic stairs, her gray head moving from side to side, her pale gray eyes uncertain. “But no matter what you do, here comes October,” she said. “So tear September off the calendar!”
“Can I have September?” Juliet, the small niece with the soft brown hair, held the torn calendar month in her hands.
“I don’t know what you’ll do with it,” said Miss Elizabeth Simmons.
“It isn’t really over, it’ll never be over.” The little girl held the paper up. “I know what happened on every day of it.”
“It was over before it began.” Miss Elizabeth Simmons puckered her lips and her gray eyes grew remote. “I don’t remember a thing that happened.”
“On Monday I roller-skated at Chessman Park, on Tuesday I had chocolate cake at Patricia Ann’s, on Wednesday I got eighty-nine in spelling at school.” Juliet put the calendar in her blouse. “That was this week. Last week I caught crayfish in the creek, swung on a vine, hurt my hand on a nail, and fell off a fence. That takes me up until last Friday.”
“Well, it’s good somebody’s doing something,” said Elizabeth Simmons.
“And I’ll remember today,” said Juliet. “Because it was the day the oak leaves started to turn all red and yellow.”
“You just run and play,” said the old woman. “I’ve got this job to do in the attic.”
She was breathing hard when she climbed into the musty garret. “I meant to do this last spring,” she murmured. “And here it is coming on winter and I don’t want to go through all that snow thinking about this load of stuff up here.” She peered about in the attic gloom, saw the huge brown trunks, the spiderwebs, the old newspapers. There was a smell of ancient wooden beams.
She opened a dirty window that looked out on the apple trees far below. The scent of autumn came in, cool and sharp.
“Look out below!” cried Miss Elizabeth Simmons, and began heaving old magazines and yellow newspapers down into the yard. “Lots better than lugging it downstairs,” she gasped, shoving armloads of junk out the window.
Old wire-framed dressmaker’s dummies fell careening down, pursued by silent parrot cages and riffling encyclopedias. A faint dust rose in the air and her heart went giddy so she had to find her way over to sit on a trunk, laughing breathlessly at her own inadequacy.
“My lands! Good grief!” she cried. “How it does pile up. What’s this?”
She seized a box of clippings, cutouts, and obituaries, dumped them out on the trunk top, and pawed through. There were three neat small bundles of old calendar pages clipped together.
“Some more of Juliet’s nonsense,” she sniffed. “Honestly, that child! Calendars, calendars, saving calendars.”
She picked up one page and it said OCTOBER 1887. Across its front were exclamation marks, red lines under certain days, and childish scribbles: “This was a special day!” or “A wonderful sunset!”
She turned the calendar page over with suddenly stiffening fingers. In the dim light her head bent down and her tired eyes squinted to read what was written on the back: “Elizabeth Simmons, aged ten, grammar school, low fifth.”
She turned the faded pages in her cold hands and stared. She examined the dates, the years, the exclamation marks and red circles around each extraordinary time. Slowly her brows drew together. Then her eyes turned blank. Silently she lay back where she sat on the trunk, her eyes gazing out at the autumn sky. Her hands dropped away, leaving the calendar pages yellowed and faded in her lap.
July 8, 1889, with a red circle around it. What had happened that day?
August 28, 1892; a blue exclamation point. Why? Days, months, and years of marks and circles, on and on!
She closed her eyes. Her breathing came swiftly in and out of her mouth. Below on the parched autumn lawn, Juliet ran, singing.
Miss Elizabeth Simmons roused herself after a time, and moved slowly to the window. For a long while she looked down at Juliet playing among the red and yellow trees. Then she cleared her throat and called, “Juliet!”
“Oh, Aunt Elizabeth, you look so funny up there in the attic!”
“Juliet. Juliet, I want you to do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Darling, I want you to throw away that nasty old piece of calendar you’re saving.”
“Why?” Juliet blinked up at her.
“Because, dear, I don’t want you saving them anymore,” said the old woman. “It’ll just make you feel bad later.”
“When later? And how? My gosh!” Juliet shouted. “I’ve got to keep every week, every month! There’s so much happening I never want to forget.”
Miss Elizabeth gazed down and the small round face peered up through the apple tree branches. Finally, Miss Elizabeth sighed. “All right.” She looked away. She tossed the box down through the autumn air to thump on the ground. “I guess I can’t stop you collecting if you must.”
“Oh, thank you, Auntie, thanks!” Juliet pressed her hand to her shirt pocket where the entire month of September was stashed. “I’ll never ever forget a day like today. I’ll always remember, always!”
Miss Elizabeth looked down through the autumn branches that stirred in the quiet wind. “Of course you will, child,” she said at last. “Of course you will.”
WHERE ALL IS EMPTINESS THERE IS ROOM TO MOVE
The Jeep came down an empty road into an empty town beside a shoreline that was empty and a vast bay dotted with half-sunken ships stretched as far as one
could see. Along the shore was a dockyard in which stood silent buildings with broken windows and huge prehistoric-looking lifters and movers, frozen somewhere back in time. For now the iron limbs and pincers and chains shook in the wind and dropped rust on the empty dock timbers where no rats ran and no cats pursued.
There was an emptiness to the entire scene that caused the young driver to slow his Jeep and gaze about at the motionless machinery and the shoreline on which not one wave arrived nor another followed.
The sky was empty, too, for with no surf or creatures within the surf to be seized, the gulls had long since sailed north of this silence, the tombstone buildings, and the dead ironworks.
The very silence of the place braked the Jeep still more so that it seemed underwater, drifting across a plaza where a population had left at dawn without disturbing the air or promising return.
“My God,” the young man in the Jeep whispered. “It’s really dead.”
The Jeep stopped at last in front of a building on which a sign read GOMEZ/BAR. Some flags, with the colors of Mexico, rippled softly, the only motion.
The young driver got out of the Jeep slowly and was moving toward the bar when a tall man of some few years stepped forth, his hair a great white bush over his black scowl, the huge bulk of his body clad in the all-white of a bartender, a clean white towel draped over his left arm, a wineglass in the other hand. He stood scowling at the Jeep as if it were an affront and then lifted his scowl to the young man and slowly held out the glass.
“No one ever comes here,” he said, in a deep guttural tone.
“So it seems,” said the young man uneasily.
“No one has come here in sixty years.”
“I can see that.” The young man directed his gaze to the shoreline, the docks, the sea, and the air with no gulls.
“You did not expect to find anyone.” It was a statement, not a question.
“No one,” said the younger man. “But here you are.”
“Why not? Since 1932 the town is my town, the harbor my harbor. This plaza mine. This, this is my place. Why? Out there in the harbor, it happened, years ago.”
“The sandbar?”
“It came. It settled. Some ships did not escape. You see? They are rusting.”
“Couldn’t they clear the sandbar away?”
“They tried. This was Mexico’s biggest port, with great dreams. They had an opera house. See the shops, the gilt and the tile. They all departed.”
“So sand has more value than gold,” said the young man.
“Yes. A little sand makes a great mountain.”
“Does no one live here?”
“This one.” The big man shrugged. “Gomez.”
“Señor Gomez.” The young man nodded.
“James Clayton.”
“James Clayton.”
He motioned with the wineglass.
James Clayton turned silently to scan the plaza, the town, the flat sea.
“This then is Santo Domingo?”
“Call it what you will.”
“El Silencio says more. Abandonado, the world’s largest tomb. A place of ghosts.”
“All of those.”
“The Lonely Place. I have rarely known such loneliness. At the edge of town tears filled my eyes. I remembered an American graveyard in France years ago. I doubt ghosts, but I felt crushed. The air above the tombs took my breath. My heart almost stopped. I got out. This,” he nodded, “is the same. Except, none are buried here.”
“Only the Past,” said Gomez.
“And the Past can’t hurt you.”
“It is always trying. Well.”
Gomez looked as if he might empty the wineglass. James Clayton took the glass and said, “Tequila?”
“What else would a man offer?”
“No man that I know. Gracias.”
“Let it shoot you. Put your head back—now!”
The young man did this, blushed and gasped. “I’m shot!”
“Let us kill you again.”
Gomez backed into the bar. James Clayton stepped out of the sun.
Inside was a long bar, not the longest bar in the world like that one in Tijuana where ninety men could share murders, bark laughs, order fusillades, and die but to wake, eyeing their strange selves in the flyspecked mirrors. No, it was merely a bar of some seventy feet, well polished, and laid out with long stacks of newspapers from other years. Above these, glass chimes of crystal hung upside down, and against the mirrors stood squadrons of liquor, of all colors, waiting like soldiers, while beyond, filling the room, stood two dozen white-clothed tables on which lay bright cutlery and a few candles, lit though it was noon. Behind the bar now, Gomez set out another assassin’s tequila, a slow or abrupt suicide, if the young man wished. The young man wished, staring at the empty tables and chairs, the shining silverware, the lit candles.
“You were expecting someone?”
“I do expect,” said Gomez. “Someday they will come. God says. He has never lied.”
“When was your last meal served? Excuse me,” said James Clayton.
“The menu will say.”
Sipping his tequila, Clayton picked up a menu and read:
“Cinco de Mayo, my God, May 1932! That was the last dinner?”
“Just so,” said Gomez. “After the funeral for this dead town, the last woman left. The women had waited for the last man to leave. With the men gone there was no profit in staying. The hotel rooms across the way are full of butterfly wings, dresses for late dinners or the opera. Do you see that place across the plaza with golden gods and goddesses on top? Gilt, of course, or they would have been taken. In that opera the night before departure, Carmen sang, rolling cigars on her knee. When the music died, the town followed.”
“No one left by sea?”
“Ah, no. The sandbar. There is a rail track behind the opera house. The last train left there in the night, with the singers singing on the porch of the observation car. I ran down the track after them, throwing confetti. I ran long after the porchful of half-fat beautiful ladies were lost in the jungle, then I sat on the rail and listened to the train vibrating the iron, my ear pressed down, tears running off my nose, estupido, but I stayed on. Late nights I still go to place my ear on the rail, shut my eyes, and listen, but the track is dumb. Just as stupid as ever, I come back to sit and drink and say to myself, mañana: yes. The arrival! And now, you.”
“A poor arrival.”
“You will do for now.” Gomez leaned to touch one old, yellowed newspaper. “Señor, can you really know the year?”
Clayton smiled at the newspaper. “1932!”
“1932! A better year. How can we know that other years exist? Do planes fill the sky? Do the roads fill with tourists? Do warships stand in the harbor? I see none. Does Hitler live? His name is not yet here. Is Mussolini evil? Here he seems good. Does the Depression stay? Look! It will die by Christmas! Mr. Hoover says! So each day I unfold another paper and reread 1932. Who says otherwise?”
“Not I, Señor Gomez.”
“Let us drink to that.”
They drank the tequila and Clayton wiped his mouth.
“Don’t you want me to tell you what’s happening out beyond today?”
“No, no. My newspapers stand ready. One a day. In ten years I will arrive in 1942. In sixteen years I will reach 1948, by then it cannot wound me. Friends bring these papers twice a year, I simply stack them on the bar, pour more tequila and read your Mr. Hoover.”
“Is he still alive?” Clayton smiled.
“Today he did something about foreign imports.”
“Shall I tell you what happened to him?”
“I will not listen!”
“I was joking.”
“Let us drink to that.”
They quietly drank their drinks.
“I suppose you wonder why I came?” said Clayton at last.
Gomez shrugged. “I slept well last night.”
“I like lonely places. They tell y
ou more about life than cities. You can lift things and look under and no one watching so you feel self-conscious.”
“We have a saying,” said Gomez. “Where all is emptiness, there is room to move. Let us move.”
And before Clayton could speak, Gomez strode quietly with his long thick legs and his great body out to the Jeep, where he stared down at the great litter of bags and their labels.
His lips spelled out the words:
“Life.” He glanced at Clayton. “Even I have heard of that. In town I do not look left or right or listen to those radios in shops or the bar I know before my trip back with supplies. But I have seen that name on the big magazine. Life?”
Clayton nodded sheepishly.
Gomez scowled as he stared hard down at many black shiny metal objects.
“Cameras?”
Clayton nodded.
“Just lying there, open. You did not drive with them so, surely?”
“I opened them outside town,” said Clayton. “To take pictures.”
“Of what?” said Gomez. “Why would a young man leave all things to come where there is nothing, nada, to take pictures of a graveyard? You’re here to see more than this place,” said Gomez.
“Why do you say that?”
“The way you slap at flies that are not there. You cannot stand quietly. You watch the sky. Señor, the sun will go down without your help. Do you have an appointment? You have a camera but have not used it. Are you waiting for something better than my tequila?”
“I …” said Clayton
And then it happened.
Gomez froze. He listened and turned his head toward the hills. “What’s that?”
Clayton said nothing.
“Do you hear? Something?” said Gomez, and leaped to the bottom of an outside staircase that rose to the top of a low building, where he scowled off at the hills, shielding his eyes.
“On the road, there, where no cars have been in years. What?”
Clayton’s face colored. He hesitated.
Gomez yelled down at him. “Your friends?”
Clayton shook his head.
“Your enemies?” said Gomez.
Clayton nodded.
“With cameras?” Gomez exclaimed.