Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (42 page)

 
          
 
The parcel arrived in the late afternoon mail.
Mr. Andrew Lemon knew what was inside by shaking it. It whispered in there like
a large hairy tarantula.

 
          
 
It took him some time to get up his courage,
tremble the wrappings open, and remove the lid from the white cardboard box.

 
          
 
There the bristly thing lay on its snowy
tissue bed, as impersonal as the black horsehair clock springs stuffed in an
old sofa. Andrew Lemon chuckled.

 
          
 
"Indians come and gone, left this piece
of a massacre behind as a sign, a warning. Well. There!”

 
          
 
And he fitted the new patent-leather black
shining toupee to his naked scalp. He tugged at it like someone touching his
cap to passers-by.

 
          
 
The toupee fit perfectly, covering the neat
coin-round hole which marred the top of his brow. Andrew Lemon gazed at the
strange man in the mirror and yelled with delight.

 
          
 
"Hey there, who're you? Face's familiar,
but, by gosh now, pass you on the street without looking twice! Why? Because,
it's gone! Darn hole's covered, nobody'd guess it was ever there. Happy New
Year, man, that's what it is, Happy New Year!"

           
 
He walked around and around his little
apartment, smiling, needing to do something, but not yet ready to open the door
and surprise the world. He walked by the mirror, glancing sidewise at someone
going past there and each time laughed and shook his head. Then he sat down in
the rocker and rocked, grinning, and tried to look at a couple of copies of
Wild West Weekly and then Thrilling Movie Magazine. But he couldn't keep his
right hand from crawling up along his face, tremulously, to feel at the rim of
that crisp new sedge above his ears.

 
          
 
"Let me buy you a drink, young
fellow!"

 
          
 
He opened the fly-specked medicine cabinet and
took three gulps from a bottle. Eyes watering, he was on the verge of cutting
himself a chew of tobacco when he stopped, listening.

 
          
 
Outside in the dark hallway there was a sound
like a field mouse moving softly, daintily on the threadbare carpeting.

 
          
 
"Miss Fremwell!" he said to the
mirror.

 
          
 
Suddenly the toupee was off his head and into
the box as if, frightened, it had scuttled back there of itself. He clapped the
lid down, sweating cold, afraid of even the sound that woman made moving by
like a summer breeze.

 
          
 
He tiptoed to a door that was nailed shut in
one wall and bent his raw and now furiously blushing head. He heard Miss
Fremwell unlock her door and shut it and move delicately about her room with
little tinkles of chinaware and chimes of cutlery, turning in a merry-go-round
to make her dinner. He backed away from that door that was bolted, locked,
latched, and driven shut with its four-inch hard steel nails. He thought of the
nights he had flinched in bed, thinking he heard her quietly pulling out the
nails, pulling out the nails, touching at the bolts and slithering the latch .
. . And how it always took him an hour to turn away toward sleep after that.

 
          
 
Now she would rustle about her room for an
hour or so. It would grow dark. The stars would be out and shining when he
tapped on her door and asked if she'd sit on the porch or walk in the park.
Then the only way she could possibly know of this third blind and staring eye
in his head would be to run her hand in a Braille-like motion there. But her
small white fingers had never moved within a thousand miles of that scar which
was no more to her than, well, one of those pockmarks off on the full moon
tonight. His toe brushed a copy of Wonder Science Tales, He snorted. Perhaps if
she thought at all of his damaged head-she wrote songs and poems, didn't she,
once in a while?—she figured that a long time back a meteor had run and hit him
and vanished up there where there were no shrubs or trees, where it was just
white, above his eyes. He snorted again and shook his head. Perhaps, perhaps.
But however she thought, he would see her only when the sun had set.

 
          
 
He waited another hour, from time to time
spitting out the window into the warm summer night.

 
          
 
"Eight-thirty. Here goes."

 
          
 
He opened the hall door and stood for a moment
looking back at that nice new toupee hidden in its box. No, he still could not
bring himself to wear it.

 
          
 
He stepped along the hall to Miss Naomi Fremwell's
door, a door so thinly made it seemed to beat with the sound of her small heart
there behind it.

 
          
 
"Miss Fremwell," he whispered.

 
          
 
He wanted to cup her like a small white bird
in his great bowled hands, speak soft to her quietness. But then, in wiping the
sudden perspiration from his brow, he found again the pit and only at the last
quick moment saved himself from falling over, in, and screaming, down! He
clapped his hand to that place to cover that emptiness. After he had held his
hand tight to the hole for a long moment he was then afraid to pull his hand
away. It had changed. Instead of being afraid he might fall in there, he was
afraid something terrible, something secret, something private, might gush out
and drown him.

 
          
 
He brushed his free hand across her door,
disturbing little more than dust.

 
          
 
"Miss Fremwell?"

 
          
 
He looked to see if there were too many lamps
lit under her doorsill, the light of which might strike out at him when she
swung the door wide. The very thrust of lamplight alone might knock his hand
away, and reveal that sunken wound. Then mightn't she peer through it, like a
keyhole, into his life?

 
          
 
The light was dim under the doorsill.

 
          
 
He made a fist of one hand and brought it down
gently, three times, on Miss Fremwell's door.

 
          
 
The door opened and moved slowly back.

 
          
 
Later, on the front porch, feverishly
adjusting and readjusting his senseless legs, perspiring, he tried to work
around to asking her to marry him. When the moon rose high, the hole in his
brow looked like a leaf shadow fallen there. If he kept one profile to her, the
crater did not show; it was hidden away over on the other side of his world. It
seemed that when he did this, though, he only had half as many words and felt
only half a man.

 
          
 
"Miss Fremwell," he managed to say
at last.

 
          
 
"Yes?" She looked at him as if she
didn't quite see him.

 
          
 
"Miss Naomi, I don't suppose you ever
really noticed me lately."

 
          
 
She waited. He went on.

 
          
 
"I've been noticing you. Fact is, well, I
might as well put it right out on the line and get it over with. We been
sitting out here on the porch for quite a few months. I mean we've known each
other a long time. Sure, you're a good fifteen years younger than me, but would
there be anything wrong with our getting engaged, do you think?"

 
          
 
"Thank you very much, Mr. Lemon,"
she said quickly. She was very polite. "But I—"

 
          
 
"Oh, I know," he said, edging
forward with the words. "I know! It's my head, it's always this dam thing
up here on my head!"

 
          
 
She looked at his turned-away profile in the
uncertain light.

 
          
 
"Why, no, Mr. Lemon, I don't think I
would say that, I don't think that's it at all. I have wondered a bit about it,
certainly, but I don't think it's an interference in any way. A friend of mine,
a very dear friend, married a man once, I recall, who had a wooden leg. She
told me she didn't even know he had it after a while."

 
          
 
"It's always this darn hole," cried
Mr. Lemon bitterly. He took out his plug of tobacco, looked at it as if he
might bite it, decided not to, and put it away. He formed a couple of fists and
stared at them bleakly as if they were big rocks. "Well, I'll tell you all
about it. Miss Naomi. I'll tell you how it happened."

 
          
 
"You don't have to if you don't
want."

 
          
 
"I was married once. Miss Naomi. Yes, I
was, darn it. And one day my wife she just took hold of a hammer and hit me
right on the head!"

 
          
 
Miss Fremwell gasped. It was as if she had
been struck herself.

 
          
 
Mr. Lemon brought one clenching fist down
through the warm air.

 
          
 
"Yes, ma'am, she hit me straight on with
that hammer, she did. I tell you, the world blew up on me. Everything fell down
on me. It was like the house coming down in one heap. That one little hammer
buried me, buried me! The pain? I can't tell you!"

 
          
 
Miss Fremwell turned in on herself. She shut
her eyes and thought, biting her lips. Then she said, "Oh, poor Mr.
Lemon."

 
          
 
"She did it so calm," said Mr.
Lemon, puzzled. "She just stood over me where I lay on the couch and it
was a Tuesday afternoon about
two o'clock
and she said, ‘Andrew, wake up!' and I opened my eyes and looked at her is all
and then she hit me with that hammer. Oh, Lord."

 
          
 
"But why?" asked Miss Fremwell.

 
          
 
"For no reason, no reason at all. Oh,
what an ornery woman."

 
          
 
"But why should she do a thing like
that?" said Miss Fremwell.

 
          
 
"I told you: for no reason."

 
          
 
"Was she crazy?"

 
          
 
"Must of been. Oh, yes, she must of
been."

 
          
 
"Did you prosecute her?"

 
          
 
"Well, no, I didn't. After all, she
didn't know what she was doing."

 
          
 
"Did it knock you out?"

 
          
 
Mr. Lemon paused and there it was again, so
clear, so tall, in his mind, the old thought of it. Seeing it there, he put it
in words.

 
          
 
"No, I remember just standing up. I stood
up and I said to her, 'What'd you do?' and I stumbled toward her. There was a
mirror. I saw the hole in my head, deep, and blood coming out. It made an
Indian of me. She just stood there, my wife did. And at last she screamed three
kinds of horror and dropped that hammer on the floor and ran out the
door."

 
          
 
"Did you faint then?"

 
          
 
"No. I didn't faint. I got out on the
street some way and I mumbled to somebody I needed a doctor. I got on a bus,
mind you, a bus! And paid my fare! And said to leave me by some doctor's house
downtown. Everybody screamed, I tell you. I got sort of weak then, and next
thing I knew the doctor was working on my head, had it cleaned out like a new
thimble, like a bunghole in a barrel. . . ."

 
          
 
He reached up and touched that spot now,
fingers hovering over it as a delicate tongue hovers over the vacated area
where once grew a fine tooth.

 
          
 
"A neat job. The doctor kept staring at
me too, as if he expected me to fall down dead any minute."