Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (47 page)

 
          
 
"Go to sleep," cried his mother,
faintly.

 
          
 
Another kick.

 
          
 
Tom lay getting his breath. All was quiet. His
hand was pushed to his chest, tight, tight. He lay for half an hour this way,
eyes closed.

 
          
 
Then he felt something, and it was a cold
white light. The moon rose very high and the little square of light moved in
the silo and crept slowly over Tom's body. Then, and only then, did his hand
relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those who slept about him, Tom drew his
hand forth. He hesitated, sucked in his breath, and then, waiting, opened his
hand and uncrumpled the tiny fragment of painted canvas.

 
          
 
All the world was asleep in the moonlight.

 
          
 
And there on his hand was the Smile.

 
          
 
He looked at it in the white illumination from
the
midnight
sky. And he thought, over
and over to himself, quietly, the Smile, the lovely Smile.

 
          
 
An hour later he could still see it, even
after he had folded it carefully and hidden it. He shut his eyes and the Smile was
there in the darkness. And it was still there, warm and gentle, when he went to
sleep and the world was silent and the moon sailed up and then down the cold
sky toward morning.

 
          
 
So you want to know all the whys and
wherefores of the Irish? What shapes them to their Dooms and runs them on their
way? you ask. Well, listen, then. For though I've known but a single Irishman
in all my life, I knew him, without pause, for one hundred and forty-four
consecutive nights. Stand close; perhaps in him you'll see that entire race
which marches out of the rains but to vanish through the mists; hold on, here
they come! Look out, there they go!

 
          
 
This Irishman, his name was Nick.

 
          
 
During the autumn of 1953, I began a
screenplay in
Dublin
, and each
afternoon a hired cab drove me thirty miles out from the River Liffey to the
huge grey Georgian country house where my producer-director rode to hounds.
There, we discussed my eight pages of daily script through the long fall,
winter, and early spring evenings. Then, each
midnight
,
ready to turn back to the
Irish Sea
and the Royal
Hibernian Hotel, I'd wake the operator in the Kilcock village exchange and have
her put me through to the warmest, if totally unheated, spot in town.

           
 
"Heber Finn's
pub?"
I'd shout, once connected. "Is Nick there? Could you
send him along here, please?"

 
          
 
My mind's eye saw them, the local boys, lined
up, peering over the barricade at that freckled mirror so like a frozen winter
pond and themselves discovered all drowned and deep under that lovely ice. Amid
all their jostlings and their now-here's-a-secret-in-a-stage-whisper-commotion
stood Nick, my village driver, his quietness abounding. I heard Heber Finn sing
out from the phone. I heard Nick start up and reply:

 
          
 
"Just look at me, headin' for the
door!"

 
          
 
Early on, I learned that "headin' for the
door" was no nerve-shattering process that might affront dignity or
destroy the fine filigree of any argument being woven with great and breathless
beauty at Heber Finn's. It was, rather, a gradual disengagement, a leaning of
the bulk so one's gravity was diplomatically shifted toward that far empty side
of the public room where the door, shunned by all, stood neglected. Meantime, a
dozen conversational warps and woofs must be ticked, tied, and labeled so next
mom, with hoarse cries of recognition, patterns might be seized and the shuttle
thrown with no pause for breath or thought.

 
          
 
Timing it, I figured the long part of Nick's
midnight
journey —the length of Heber Finn's—took
half an hour. The short part —from Finn's to the house where I waited—took but
five minutes.

 
          
 
So it was on the night before the first night
of Lent. I called. I waited.

 
          
 
And at last, down through the night forest,
thrashed the 1931 Chevrolet, peat-turf colored on top like Nick. Car and driver
gasped, sighed, wheezed softly, easily, gently, as they nudged into the
courtyard and I groped down the front steps under a moonless but brightly
starred sky.

 
          
 
I peered through the car window at unstirred
dark; the dashboard had been dead these many years.

 
          
 
"Nick . . . ?"

 
          
 
"None other," he whispered secretly.
"And ain't it a fine warm evenin'?"

 
          
 
The temperature was fifty. But, Nick'd been no
nearer
Rome
than the
Tipperary
shore line; so weather was relative.

 
          
 
"A fine warm
evening."
I climbed up front and gave the squealing door its
absolutely compulsory, rust-splintering slam. "Nick, how've you been
since?"

 
          
 
"Ah." He let the car bulk and grind
itself down the forest path. "I got me health. Ain't that
all-and-everything with Lent comin' on tomorra?"

 
          
 
"Lent," I mused. "What will you
give up for Lent, Nick?"

 
          
 
"I been turnin' it over." Nick
sucked his cigarette suddenly; the pink, Hned mask of his face blinked off the
smoke. "And why not these terrible things ya see in me mouth? Dear as
gold-fillin's, and a dread congestor of the lungs they be. Put it all down, add
'em up, and ya got a sick loss by the year's turnin', ya know. So ya'll not
find these filthy creatures in me face again the whole time of Lent, and, who
knows, after!"

 
          
 
"Bravo!" said I, a non-smoker.

 
          
 
"Bravo, says I to meself," wheezed
Nick, one eye flinched with smoke.

 
          
 
"Good luck," I said.

 
          
 
"I'll need it," whispered Nick,
"with the Sin's own habit to be broke."

 
          
 
And we moved with firm control, with
thoughtful shift of weight, down and around a turfy hollow and through a mist
and into
Dublin
at thirty-one easy
miles an hour.

 
          
 
Bear with me while I stress it: Nick was the
most careful driver in all God's world, including any sane, small, quiet,
but-ter-and-milk producing country you name.

 
          
 
Above all, Nick stands innocent and sainted
when compared to those motorists who key that small switch marked paranoia each
time they fuse themselves to their bucket seats in
Los
Angeles
,
Mexico
City, or
Paris
. Also, to those
blind men who, forsaking tin cups and canes, but still wearing their Hollywood
dark-glasses, laugh insanely down the Via Veneto, shaking brake-drum fining
like carnival serpentine out their race-car windows. Consider the Roman ruins;
surely they are the wreckage strewn and left by those motor-biking otters who,
all night beneath your hotel window, shriek down dark Roman alleys, Christians
hell-bent for the Colosseum lion pits.

 
          
 
Nick, now. See his easy hands loving the wheel
in a slow clocklike turning as soft and silent as winter constellations snow
down the sky. Listen to his mist-breathing voice all night-quiet as he charms
the road, his foot a tenderly benevolent pat on the whispering accelerator,
never a mile under thirty, never two miles over. Nick, Nick, and his steady
boat gentling a mild sweet lake where all Time slumbers. Look, compare. And
bind such a man to you with summer grasses, gift him with silver, shake his
hand warmly at each journey's end.

 
          
 
"Good night, Nick," I said at the
hotel "See you tomorrow."

 
          
 
"God willing," whispered Nick.

 
          
 
And he drove softly away.

 
          
 
Let twenty-three hours of sleep, breakfast,
lunch, supper, late night-cap pass. Let hours of writing bad script into fair
script fade to peat mist and rain, and there I come again, another midnight,
out of that Georgian mansion, its door throwing a warm hearth of color before
me as I tread down the steps to feel Braille-wise in fog for the car I know
hulks there; I hear its enlarged and asthmatic heart gasping in the blind air,
and Nick coughing his "gold by the ounce is not more precious" cough.

 
          
 
"Ah, there you are, sir!" said Nick.

 
          
 
And I climbed in the sociable front seat and
gave the door its slam. "Nick," I said, smiling.

 
          
 
And then the impossible happened. The car
jerked as if shot from the blazing mouth of a cannon, roared, took off,
bounced, skidded, then cast itself in full, stoning ricochet down the path
among shattered bushes and writhing shadows. I snatched my knees as my head hit
the car top four tunes.

 
          
 
Nick! I almost shouted. Nick!

 
          
 
Visions of
Los Angeles
,
Mexico
City,
Paris
,
jumped through my mind. I gazed in frank dismay at the speedometer. Eighty,
ninety, one hundred kilometers; we shot out a great blast of gravel behind and
hit the main road, rocked over a bridge and slid down in the
midnight
streets of Kilcock. No sooner in than
out of town at one hundred ten kilometers, I felt all
Ireland
's
grass put down its ears when we, with a yell, jumped over a rise.

 
          
 
Nick! I thought, and turned, and there he sat,
only one thing the same. On his lips a cigarette burned, blinding first one
eye, then the other.

 
          
 
But the rest of Nick, behind the cigarette,
was changed as if the Adversary himself had squeezed and molded and fired him
with a dark hand. There he was, whirling the wheel roundabout, over-around;
here we frenzied under trestles, out of tunnels, here knocked crossroad signs
spinning like weathercocks in whirlwinds.

 
          
 
Nick's face; the wisdom was drained from it,
the eyes neither gentle nor philosophical, the mouth neither tolerant, nor at
peace. It was a face washed raw, a scalded, peeled potato, a face more like a
blinding searchlight raking its steady and meaningless glare ahead while his
quick hands snaked and bit and bit the wheel again to lean us round curves and
jump us off cliff after cliff of night.

 
          
 
It's not Nick, I thought, it's his brother. Or
a dire thing's come in his life, some destroying affliction or blow, a family
sorrow or sickness, yes, that's the answer.

 
          
 
And then Nick spoke, and his voice, it was
changed too. Gone was the mellow peat bog, the moist sod, the warm fire in out
of the cold rain, gone the gentle grass. Now the voice fairly cracked at me, a
clarion, a trumpet, all iron and tin.

 
          
 
"Well, how ya been since!" Nick
shouted. "How is it with ya!" he cried.

 
          
 
And the car, it too had suffered violence. It
protested the change, yes, for it was an old and much-beaten thing that had
done its time and now only wished to stroll along, like a crusty beggar toward
sea and sky, careful of its breath and bones. But Nick would have none of that,
and cadged the wreck on as if thundering toward Hell, there to warm his cold
hands at some

 
          
 
Special blaze. Nick leaned, the car leaned; great
livid gases blew out in fireworks from the exhaust. Nick's frame, my frame, the
car's frame, all together, were wracked and shuddered and ticked wildly.

 
          
 
My sanity was saved from being torn clean off the
bone by a simple act. My eyes, seeking the cause of our plaguing flight, ran
over the man blazing here like a sheet of ignited vapor from the Abyss, and
laid hands to the answering clue.

 
          
 
"Nick," I gasped, "it's the
first night of Lent!"

 
          
 
"So?" Nick said, surprised.

 
          
 
"So," I said, "remembering your
Lenten promise, why's that cigarette in your mouth?"

 
          
 
Nick did not know what I meant for a moment.
Then he cast his eyes down, saw the jiggling smoke, and shrugged.

 
          
 
"Ah," he said, "I give up the
other."

 
          
 
And suddenly it all came clear.

 
          
 
The other one hundred forty odd nights, at the
door of the old Georgian house I had accepted from my employer a fiery douse of
scotch or bourbon or some-such drink "against the chill." Then,
breathing summer wheat or barley or oats or whatever from my scorched and
charcoaled mouth, I had walked out to a cab where sat a man who, during all the
long evenings' wait for me to phone for his services, had lived in Heber Finn's
pub.