Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (52 page)

 
          
 
Tom, knee-deep in the waves, a piece of
driftwood in his hand, listened.

 
          
 
The house, up toward the
Coast
Highway
in the late afternoon, was silent. The
sounds of closets being rummaged, suitcase locks snapping, vases being smashed,
and of a final door crashing shut, all had faded away.

 
          
 
Chico
,
standing on the pale sand, flourished his wire strainer to shake out a harvest
of lost coins. After a moment, without glancing at Tom, he said, "Let her
go."

 
          
 
So it was every year. For a week or a month,
their house would have music swelling from the windows, there would be new
geraniums potted on the porch rail, new paint on the doors and steps. The
clothes on the wire line changed from harlequin pants to sheath dresses to
handmade Mexican frocks like white waves breaking behind the house. Inside, the
paintings on the walls shifted from imitation Matisse to pseudo-Italian
Renaissance. Sometimes, looking up, he would see a woman drying her hair like a
bright yellow flag on the wind. Sometimes the flag was black or red. Sometimes
the woman was tall, sometimes short, against the sky. But there was never more
than one woman at a time. And, at last, a day like today came. . . .

 
          
 
Tom placed his driftwood on the growing pile
near where
Chico
sifted the billion
footprints left by people long vanished from their holidays.

 
          
 
"
Chico
.
What are we doing here?"

 
          
 
"Living the life of
Reilly, boy!"

 
          
 
"I don't feel like Reilly,
Chico
."

 
          
 
"Work at it, boy!"

 
          
 
Tom saw the house a month from now, the
flowerpots blowing dust, the walls hung with empty squares, only sand carpeting
the floors. The rooms would echo like shells in the wind. And all night every
night bedded in separate rooms he and
Chico
would hear a tide falling away and away down a long shore, leaving no trace.

 
          
 
Tom nodded, imperceptibly. Once a year he
himself brought a nice girl here, knowing she was right at last and that in no
time they would be married. But his women always stole silently away before
dawn, feeling they had been mistaken for someone else, not being able to play
the part. Chico's friends left like vacuum cleaners, with a terrific drag,
roar, rush, leaving no lint unturned, no clam unprized of its pearl, taking
their purses with them like toy dogs which Chico had petted as he opened their
jaws to count their teeth.

 
          
 
"That's four women so far this
year."

 
          
 
"Okay, referee."
Chico
grinned. "Show me the way to the showers."

 
          
 
"
Chico
—"
Tom bit his lower lip,
then
went on. "
I been
thinking. Why don't we split up?"

 
          
 
Chico
just looked at him.

 
          
 
"I mean," said Tom, quickly,
"maybe we'd have better luck, alone."

 
          
 
"Well, I'll be goddamned," said
Chico
slowly, gripping the strainer in his big fists before him. "Look here,
boy, don't you know the facts? You and me, we'll be here come the year 2000.
A couple of crazy dumb old gooney-birds drying their bones in the
sun.
Nothing's ever going to happen to us now, Tom, it's too late. Get
that through your head and shut up."

 
          
 
Tom swallowed and looked steadily at the other
man. "I'm thinking of leaving—next week."

 
          
 
"Shut up, shut up, and get to work!"

 
          
 
Chico
gave the sand an angry showering rake that tilled him forty-three cents in
dimes, pennies, and nickels. He stared blindly at the coins shimmering down the
wires like a pinball game all afire.

 
          
 
Tom did not move, holding his breath.

 
          
 
They both seemed to be waiting for something.

 
          
 
The something happened.

 
          
 
"Hey ... hey ... hey . . ."

 
          
 
From a long way off down the coast a voice
called.

 
          
 
The two men turned slowly.

 
          
 
"Hey ... hey ... oh, hey .. . !"

 
          
 
A boy was running, yelling, waving, along the
shore two hundred yards away. There was something in his voice that made Tom
feel suddenly cold. He held onto his own arms, waiting.

 
          
 
"Hey!"

 
          
 
The boy pulled up, gasping, pointing back
along the shore.

 
          
 
"A woman, a funny woman, by the North
Rock!"

 
          
 
"A woman!"
The words exploded from
Chico
's
mouth and he began to laugh.
"Oh, no, no!"

 
          
 
"What you mean, a 'funny' woman?"
asked Tom.

 
          
 
"I don't know," cried the boy, his
eyes wide. "You got to come see! Awful funny!"

 
          
 
"You mean 'drowned'?"

 
          
 
"Maybe! She came out of the water, she's
lying on the shore, you got to see, yourself . . . funny . . ." The boy's
voice died. He gazed off north again. "She's got a fish's tail."

 
          
 
Chico
laughed. "Not before supper, please."

 
          
 
"Please!"
cried
the boy, dancing now. "No He! Oh, hurry!"

 
          
 
He ran off, sensed he was not followed, and
looked back in dismay.

 
          
 
Tom felt his lips move. "Boy wouldn't run
this far for a joke, would he,
Chico
?"

 
          
 
"People have run further for less,"

 
          
 
Tom started walking. "All right,
son."

 
          
 
"Thanks, mister, oh thanks!"

 
          
 
The boy ran. Twenty yards up the coast, Tom
looked back. Behind him,
Chico
squinted,
shrugged, dusted his hands wearily, and followed.

 
          
 
They moved north along the twilight beach,
their skin weathered in tiny folds about their burnt pale eyes, looking younger
for their hair cut close to the skull so you could not see the grey. There was
a fair wind and the ocean rose and fell with prolonged concussions.

 
          
 
"What," said Tom, "what if we
get to North Rock and it's true? The ocean has washed some thing up?"

 
          
 
But before
Chico
could answer, Tom was gone, his mind racing down coasts littered with horseshoe
crabs, sand dollars, starfish, kelp, and stone. From all the tunes he'd talked
on what lives in the sea, the names returned with the breathing fall of waves.
Argonauts, they whispered, codlings, pollacks, houndfish, tautog, tench, sea
elephant, they whispered, gillings, flounders, and beluga, the white whale, and
grampus, the sea dog . . . always you thought how these must look from their
deep-sounding names. Perhaps you would never in your life see them rise from
the salt meadows beyond the safe limits of the shore, but they were there, and
their names, with a thousand others, made pictures. And you looked and wished
you were a frigate-bird that might fly nine thousand miles around to return
some year with the full size of the ocean in your head.

 
          
 
"Oh, quick!"
The boy had run back to peer in Tom's face. "It might be gone!"

 
          
 
"Keep your shirt on, boy," said
Chico
.

 
          
 
They came around the North Rock. A second boy
stood there, looking down.

 
          
 
Perhaps from the comer of his eye, Tom saw
something on the sand that made him hesitate to look straight at it, but fix
instead on the face of the boy standing there. The boy was pale and he seemed
not to breathe. On occasion he remembered to take a breath, his eyes focused,
but the more they saw there on the sand the more they took time off from
focusing and turned blank and looked stunned. When the ocean came in over his
tennis shoes, he did not move or notice.

 
          
 
Tom glanced away from the boy to the sand.

 
          
 
And Tom's face, in the next moment, became the
face of the boy. His hands assumed the same curl at his sides and his mouth
moved to open and stay half open and his eyes, which were light in color,
seemed to bleach still more with so much looking.

 
          
 
The setting sun was ten minutes above the sea.

 
          
 
"A big wave came in and went out,"
said the first boy, "and here she was."

 
          
 
They looked at the woman lying there.

 
          
 
Her hair was very long and it lay on the beach
like the threads of an immense harp. The water stroked along the threads and
floated them up and let them down, each time in a different fan and silhouette.
The hair must have been five or six feet long and now it was strewn on the hard
wet sand and it was the color of limes.

 
          
 
Her face . . .

 
          
 
The men bent half down in wonder.

 
          
 
Her face was white sand sculpture, with a few
water drops shimmering on it like summer rain upon a cream-colored rose. Her
face was that moon which when seen by day is pale and unbelievable in the blue
sky. It was milk-marble veined with faint violet in the temples. The eyelids,
closed down upon the eyes, were powdered with a faint water color, as if the
eyes beneath gazed through the fragile tissue of the lids and saw them standing
there above her, looking down and looking down. The mouth was a pale flushed sea-rose,
full and closed upon itself. And her neck was slender and white and her breasts
were small and white, now covered, uncovered, covered, uncovered in the flow of
water, the ebb of water, the flow, the ebb, the flow. And the breasts were
flushed at their tips, and her body was startlingly white, almost an
illumination, a white-green lightning against the sand. And as the water
shifted her, her skin glinted like the surface of a pearl.

 
          
 
The lower half of her body changed itself from
white to very pale blue, from very pale blue to pale green, from pale green to
emerald green, to moss and lime green, to scintillas and sequins all dark
green, all flowing away in a fount, a curve, a rush of light and dark, to end
in a lacy fan, a spread of foam and jewel on the sand. The two halves of this
creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman,
woman of a whiteness made of cream-water and clear sky merged with that half
which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the
shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home. The
woman was the sea, the sea was woman. There was no flaw or seam, no wrinkle or
stitch; the illusion, if illusion it was, held perfectly together and the blood
from one moved into and through and mingled with what must have been the ice
waters of the other.