Long After Midnight (13 page)

 
          
"Yes,
sir!"

 
          
"How
much food do you carry at this moment, Willis?"

 
          
"Enough
to last two hundred days in Space."

 
          
"Dear
me,
thaf
s fine, fine! And self-recycling oxygen
units, also, for two hundred days?"

 
          
“Yes,
sir. Now, how long will
your
batteries
last, Mr. Shaw?"

 
          
"Ten
thousand years!" the old man sang out happily. "Yes, I vow, I swear!
I am fitted with solar-cells which will collect God's universal light until I
wear out my circuits."

 
          
"Which
means you will outtalk me, Mr. Shaw, long after I have stopped eating and
breathing."

 
          
"At
which point you must dine on conversation, and breathe past participles instead
of air. But, we must hold the thought of rescue uppermost. Are not the chances
good?"

 
          
"Rockets
do
come by. And I am equipped with
radio signals—"

 
          
"Which
even now cry out into the deep night: I'm here with ramshackle Shaw, eh?"

 
          
I'm
here with ramshackle Shaw, thought Willis, and was suddenly warm in winter.

 
          
"Well,
then, while we're waiting to be rescued, Charles Willis, what next?"

 
          
"Next?
Why-"

 
          
They
fell away down Space alone but not alone, fearful but elated, and now grown
suddenly quiet.

 
          
"Say
it, Mr. Shaw."

 
          
"Say
what?"

 
          
"You
know. Say it again."

 
          
"Well,
then." They spun lazily, holding to each other. "Isn't life
miraculous? Matter and force, yes, matter and force making itself over into
intelligence and will."

 
          
"Is
that
what we are, sir?" .

 
          
"We
are, bet ten thousand bright tin-whistles on it, we are. Shall I say
more,
young Willis?"

 
          
"Please,
sir," laughed Willis. "I want some more!"

 
          
And
the old man spoke and the young man listened and the young man spoke and the
old man hooted and they fell around a corner of Universe away out of sight,
eating and talking, talking and eating, the young man biting gumball foods, the
old man devouring sunlight with his solar-cell eyes, and the last that was seen
of them they were gesticulating and babbling and conversing and waving their
hands until their voices faded into Time and the solar system turned over in
its sleep and covered them with a blanket of dark and light, and whether or not
a rescue ship named Rachel, seeking her lost children, ever came by and found
them, who can tell, who would truly ever want to know?

 
          
It
was such an utterly perfect, such an incredibly delightful idea for murder,
that I was half out of mind all across
America
.

 
          
The
idea had come to me for some reason on my forty-eighth birthday. Why it hadn't
come to me when I was thirty or forty, I cannot say. Perhaps those were good
years and I sailed through them unaware of time and clocks and the gathering of
frost at my temples or the look of the lion about my eyes. . . .

 
          
Anyway,
on my forty-eighth birthday, lying in bed that night beside my wife, with my
children sleeping through all the other quiet moonlit rooms of my house, I
thought:

 
          
I
will arise and go now and kill
Ralph
Underhill
.

 
          
Ralph
Underhill
! I cried, who in God's name is
he?

 
          
Thirty-six
years later, kill him? For
what?

 
          
Why,
I thought, for what he did to me when I was twelve.

 
          
My
wife woke, an hour later, hearing a noise.

 
          
"Doug?"
she called. "What are you doing?" "Packing," I said.
"For a journey." "Oh," she murmured, and rolled over and
went to sleep.

 
          
"Board!
All aboard!" the porter's cries went down the train platform.

 
          
The
train shuddered and banged.

 
          
"See
you!" I cried, leaping up the steps.

 
          
"Someday,"
called my wife, "I wish you'd
ftyr

 
          
Fly?
I thought, and spoil thinking about murder all across the plains? Spoil oiling
the pistol and loading it and thinking of Ralph Underhill's face when I show up
thirty-six years late to settle old scores? Fly? Why, I would rather pack
cross-country on foot, pausing by night to build fires and fry my bile and sour
spit and eat again my old, mummified but still-living antagonisms and touch
those bruises which have never healed. Fly?!

 
          
The
train moved. My wife was gone.

 
          
I
rode off into the Past

 
          
Crossing
Kansas
the second night, we hit a
beaut
of a thunderstorm. I stayed up until four in the
morning, listening to the rave of winds and thunders. At the height of the
storm, I saw my face, a darkroom negative-print on the cold window glass, and
thought:

 
          
Where
is that fool going?

 
          
To
kill
Ralph
Underhill
!

 
          
Why?
Because!

 
          
Remember
how he hit my arm? Braises. I was covered with bruises, both arms; dark blue,
mottled black, strange yellow bruises. Hit and run, that was Ralph, hit and run—

 
          
And
yet... you loved him?

 
          
Yes,
as boys love boys when boys are eight, ten, twelve, and the world is innocent
and boys are evil beyond evil because they know not what they do, but do it
anyway. So, on some secret level, I
had
to
be hurt.

 
          
We
dear fine friends needed each other. I to be hit. He to strike. My scars were
the emblem and symbol of our love.

 
          
What
else makes you want to murder Ralph so late in time?

 
          
The
train whistle shrieked. Night country rolled by.

 
          
And
I recalled one spring when I came to school in a new tweed
knicker
suit and Ralph knocking me down, rolling me in snow and fresh brown mud. And
Ralph laughing and me going home, shame-faced, covered with slime, afraid of a
beating, to put on fresh dry clothes.

 
          
Yes!
And what
else?

 
          
Remember
those toy clay statues you longed to collect from the Tarzan radio show?
Statues of Tarzan and
Kala
the Ape and
Numa
the Lion, for just twenty-five cents?! Yes, yes!
Beautiful! Even now, in memory, O the sound of the Ape man swinging through
green jungles far away, ululating! But who had twenty-five cents in the middle
of the Great Depression? No one.

 
          
Except
Ralph
Underhill
.

 
          
And
one day Ralph asked you if you wanted one of the statues.

 
          
Wanted!
you cried. Yes!
Yesl

 
          
That
was the same week your brother in a strange seizure of love mixed with contempt
gave you his old, but expensive, baseball-catcher's mitt.

 
          
"Well,"
said Ralph, "I'll give you my extra Tarzan statue if you'll give me that
catcher's mitt."

 
          
Fool!
I thought. The statue's worth twenty-five cents. The glove cost two dollars! No
fairl
Don't!

 
          
But
I raced back to Ralph's house with the glove and gave it to him and he, smiling
a worse contempt than my brother's, handed me the Tarzan statue and, bursting
with joy, I ran home.

 
          
My
brother didn't find out about his catcher's mitt and the statue for two weeks,
and when he did he ditched me when we hiked out in farm country and left me
lost because I was such a sap. "Tarzan statues! Baseball mitts!" he
cried. "That’s the last thing I
ever
give you!"

 
          
And
somewhere on a country road I just lay down and wept and wanted to die but
didn't know how to give up the final vomit that was my miserable ghost.

 
          
The
thunder murmured.

 
          
The
rain fell on the cold Pullman-car windows.

 
          
What
else?
Is that the list?

 
          
No.
One final thing, more terrible than all the rest.

 
          
In
all the years you went to Ralph's house to toss up small bits of gravel on his
Fourth of July six-in-the-morning fresh dewy window or to call him forth for
the arrival of dawn circuses in the cold fresh blue railroad stations in late
June or late August, in all those years, never once did Ralph run to your
house.

 
          
Never
once in all the years did he, or anyone else, prove their friendship by coming
by. The door never knocked. The window of your bedroom never faintly clattered
and belled with a high-tossed confetti of small dusts and rocks.

 
          
And
you always knew that the day you stopped going to Ralph's house, calling up in
the morn, that would be the day your friendship ended.

 
          
You
tested it once. You stayed away for a whole week. Ralph never called. It was as
if you had died, and no one came to your funeral.

 
          
When
you saw Ralph at school, there was no surprise, no query, not even the faintest
lint of curiosity to be picked off your coat. Where
were
you, Doug? I need someone to beat. Where you
been,
Doug, I got no one to
pinch!

 
          
Add
all the sins up. But especially think on the last:

 
          
He
never came to my house. He never sang up to my early-morning bed or tossed a
wedding rice of gravel on the clear panes to call me down to joy and summer
days.

 
          
And
for this last thing, Ralph Underhill, I thought, sitting in the train at four
in the morning, as the storm faded, and I found tears in my eyes, for this last
and final thing, for that I shall kill you tomorrow night.

 
          
Murder,
I thought, after thirty-six years. Why, God, you're madder than Ahab.

 
          
The
train wailed. We ran cross-country like a mechanical Greek Fate carried by a
black metal Roman Fury.

 
          
They
say you can't go home again.

 
          
That
is a lie.

 
          
If
you are lucky and time it right, you arrive at sunset when the old town is
filled with yellow light.

 
          
I
got off the train and walked up through
Green
Town
and looked at the courthouse, burning with
sunset light. Every tree was hung with gold doubloons of color. Every roof and
coping and bit of gingerbread was purest brass and ancient gold.

 
          
I
sat in the courthouse square with dogs and old men until the sun had set and
Green
Town
was dark. I wanted to savor
Ralph
Underhill
's death.

 
          
No
one in history had ever done a crime like this.

 
          
I
would stay, kill, depart, a stranger among strangers.

 
          
How
would anyone dare to say, finding
Ralph
Underhill
's body on his doorstep, that a boy aged
twelve, arriving on a kind of Time Machine train, traveled out of hideous
self-contempt, had gunned down the Past? It was beyond all reason. I was safe
in my pure insanity.

 
          
Finally,
at eight-thirty on this cool October night, I walked across town, past the
ravine.

 
          
I
never doubted Ralph would still be there.

 
          
People
do, after all, move away. .. .

 
          
I
turned down
Park Street
and walked two hundred yards to a single streetlamp and looked across.
Ralph
Underhill
's white two-story Victorian house waited
for me.

 
          
And
I could feel him
in
it.

 
          
He
was there, forty-eight years old, even as I felt myself here, forty-eight, and
full of an old and tired and self-devouring spirit.

 
          
I
stepped out of the light, opened my suitcase, put the pistol in my right-hand
coat pocket, shut the case, and hid it in the bushes where, later, I would grab
it and walk down into the ravine and across town to the train.

 
          
I
walked across the street and stood before his house and it was the same house I
had stood before thirty-six years ago. There were the windows upon which I had
hurled those spring bouquets of rock in love and total giving. There were the
sidewalks, spotted with firecracker burn marks from ancient July Fourths when
Ralph and I had just blown up the whole damned world, shrieking celebrations.