Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (55 page)

 
          
 
Mr. Fremley shouted from the sky. "Dead?
I say, is the car dead? I can feel it from here! Well—it's way past time for
supper!"

 
          
 
Mr. Terle put out his hand. "Miss
Hillgood, that there is Joe Terle's Desert Hotel, open twenty-six hours a day.
Gila monsters and road runners please register before going upstairs. Get you a
night's sleep, free, we'll knock our Ford off its blocks and drive you to the
city come morning."

 
          
 
She let herself be helped from the car. The
machine groaned as if in protest at her going. She shut the door carefully with
a soft click.

 
          
 
"One friend gone, but the other still
with me. Mr. Terle, could you please bring her in out of the weather?"

 
          
 
"Her, ma'am?"

 
          
 
"Forgive me, I never think of things but
what they're people. The car was a man, I suppose, because it took me places.
But a harp, now, don't you agree, is female?"

 
          
 
She nodded to the rear seat of the car. There,
tilted against the sky like an ancient scrolled leather ship prow cleaving the
wind, stood a case which towered above any driver who might sit up in front and
sail the desert calms or the city traffics.

 
          
 
"Mr. Smith," said Mr. Terle,
"lend a hand."

 
          
 
They untied the huge case and hoisted it
gingerly out between them.

 
          
 
"What you got there?" cried Mr.
Fremley from above.

 
          
 
Mr. Smith stumbled. Miss Hillgood gasped. The
case shifted in the two men's arms.

 
          
 
From within the case came a faint musical
humming.

 
          
 
Mr. Fremley, above, heard. It was all the
answer he needed. Mouth open, he watched the lady and the two men and their
boxed friend sway and vanish in the cavernous porch below.

 
          
 
"Watch out!" said Mr. Smith.
"Some damn fool left his luggage here—" He stopped. "Some damn
fool? Me!"

 
          
 
The two men looked at each other. They were
not perspiring any more. A wind had come up from somewhere, a gentle wind that
fanned their shirt collars and flapped the strewn calendar gently in the dust.

 
          
 
''My luggage . . ." said Mr. Smith.

 
          
 
Then they all went inside.

 
          
 
"More wine. Miss Hillgood? Ain't had wine
on the table in years."

 
          
 
"Just a touch, if you please."

 
          
 
They sat by the light of a single candle which
made the room an oven and struck fire from the good silverware and the
un-cracked plates as they talked and drank warm wine and ate.

 
          
 
"Miss Hillgood, get on with your
life."

 
          
 
"All my life," she said, "I've
been so busy running from Beethoven to Bach to Brahms, I never noticed I was
twenty-nine. Next time I looked up I was forty. Yesterday, seventy-one. Oh,
there were men; but they'd given up singing at ten and given up flying when
they were twelve. I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I
couldn't stand most men shuffling along with all the iron of the earth in their
blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their
black business suits, you could hear them roll by like funeral wagons."

 
          
 
"So you flew away?"

 
          
 
"Just in my mind, Mr. Terle. It's taken
sixty years to make the final break. All that time I grabbed onto piccolos and
flutes and violins because they make streams in the air, you know, like streams
and rivers on the ground. I rode every tributary and tried every fresh-water
wind from Handel on down to a whole slew of Strausses. It's been the far way
around that's brought me here."

 
          
 
"How'd you finally make up your mind to
leave?" asked Mr. Smith.

 
          
 
"I looked around last week and said,
*Why, look, you've been flying alone!' No one in all
Green
City
really cares // you fly or how
high you go. It's always. Tine, Blanche,' or 'thanks for the recital at the PTA
tea. Miss H.'
But
no one really listening. And when I
talked a long time ago about
Chicago
or
New York
, folks swatted me and
laughed. 'Why
be
a little frog in a big pond when you
can be the biggest frog in all
Green
City
!'
So I stayed on, while the folks who gave me advice moved away or died or both.
The rest had wax in their ears. Just last week I shook myself and said, 'Hold
on! Since when do frogs have wings?'"

 
          
 
"So now you're headin' west?" said
Mr. Terle.

 
          
 
"Maybe to play in pictures or in that
orchestra under the stars. But somewhere I just must play at last for someone
who'll hear and really listen. . . ."

 
          
 
They sat there in the warm dark. She was
finished, she had said it all now, foolish or not—and she moved back quietly in
her chair.

 
          
 
Upstairs someone coughed.

 
          
 
Miss Hillgood heard, and rose.

 
          
 
It took Mr. Fremley a moment to ungum his eyelids
and make out the shape of the woman bending down to place the tray by his
rumpled bed.

 
          
 
"What you all talking about down there
just now?"

 
          
 
"I'll come back later and tell you word
for word," said Miss Hillgood. "Eat now. The salad's fine." She
moved to leave the room.

 
          
 
He said, quickly, "You goin' to
stay?"

 
          
 
She stopped half out the door and tried to
trace the expression on his sweating face in the dark. He, in turn, could not
see her mouth or eyes. She stood a moment longer, silently, then went on down
the stairs.

 
          
 
"She must not've heard me," said Mr.
Fremley.

 
          
 
But he knew she had heard.

 
          
 
Miss Hillgood crossed the downstairs lobby to
fumble with the locks on the upright leather case.

 
          
 
"I must pay you for my supper."

 
          
 
"On the house," said Mr. Terle.

 
          
 
"I must pay," she said, and opened
the case.

 
          
 
There was a sudden flash of gold.

 
          
 
The two men quickened in their chairs. They
squinted at the little old woman standing beside the tremendous heart-shaped
object which towered above her with its shining columbined pedestal atop which
a calm Grecian face with antelope eyes looked serenely at them even as Miss
Hillgood looked now.

 
          
 
The two men shot each other the quickest and
most startled of glances, as if each had guessed what might happen next. They
hurried across the lobby, breathing hard, to sit on the very edge of the hot
velvet lounge, wiping their faces with damp handkerchiefs.

 
          
 
Miss Hillgood drew a chair under her, rested
the golden harp gently back on her shoulder, and put her hands to the strings.

 
          
 
Mr. Terle took a breath of fiery air and
waited.

 
          
 
A desert wind came suddenly along the porch
outside, tilting the chairs so they rocked this way and that like boats on a
pond at night.

 
          
 
Mr. Fremley's voice protested from above.
"What's goin' on down there?"

 
          
 
And then Miss Hillgood moved her hands.

 
          
 
Starting at the arch near her shoulder, she
played her fingers out along the simple tapestry of wires toward the blind and
beautiful stare of the Greek goddess on her column, and then back. Then for a
moment she paused and let the sounds drift up through the baked lobby air and
into all the empty rooms.

 
          
 
If Mr. Fremley shouted, above, no one heard.
For Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith were so busy jumping up to stand riven in the
shadows, they heard nothing save the storming of their own hearts and the
shocked rush of all the air in their lungs. Eyes wide, mouths dropped, in a
kind of pure insanity, they stared at the two women there, the blind Muse proud
on her golden pillar, and the seated one, gentle eyes closed, her small hands
stretched forth on the air.

 
          
 
Like a girl, they both thought wildly, like a
little girl putting her hands out a window to feel what? Why, of course, of
course!

 
          
 
To feel the rain.

 
          
 
The echo of the first shower vanished down
remote causeways and roof drains, away.

 
          
 
Mr. Fremley, above, rose from his bed as if
pulled round by his ears.

 
          
 
Miss Hillgood played.

 
          
 
She played and it wasn't a tune they knew at
all, but it was a tune they had heard a thousand times in their long lives,
words or not, melody or not. She played and each time her fingers moved, the
rain fell pattering through the dark hotel. The rain fell cool at the open
windows and the rain rinsed down the baked floor boards of the porch. The rain
fell on the roof top and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rusted car and empty
stable and dead cactus in the yard. It washed the windows and laid the dust and
filled the rain barrels and curtained the doors with beaded threads that might
part and whisper as you walked through. But more than anything the soft touch
and coolness of it fell on Mr. Smith and Mr. Terle. Its gentle weight and
pressure moved them down and down until it had seated them again. By its
continuous budding and prickling on their faces it made them shut up their eyes
and mouths and raise their hands to shield it away. Seated there, they felt
their heads tilt slowly back to let the rain fall where it would.

 
          
 
The flash flood lasted a minute, then faded
away as the fingers trailed down the loom, let drop a few last bursts and
squalls and then stopped.

 
          
 
The last chord hung in the air like a picture
taken when lightning strikes and freezes a billion drops of water on their
downward flight. Then the lightning went out. The last drops fell through
darkness in silence.

 
          
 
Miss Hillgood took her hands from the strings,
her eyes still shut.

 
          
 
Mr. Terle and Mr. Smith opened their eyes to
see those two miraculous women way over there across the lobby somehow come
through the storm untouched and dry.

 
          
 
They trembled. They leaned forward as if they
wished to speak. They looked helpless, not knowing what to do.

 
          
 
And then a single sound from high above in the
hotel corridors drew their attention and told them what to do.

 
          
 
The sound came floating down feebly,
fluttering like a tired bird beating its ancient wings.

 
          
 
The two men looked up and listened.

 
          
 
It was the sound of Mr. Fremley.