Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (12 page)

“She’s coming to see me,” he said. “I’m so very much scared. What if she doesn’t like me? What if I don’t like her? So many years have passed since we were young and in love.”

I tapped my finger on the front of the cage, and I couldn’t help but think of Vonnie, then, and the way she was when we were first falling for each other. The way we were when we were setting out together. Hearts wide open with wonder.

“Touchdown,” I said, remembering Popcorn’s call, and how back in the autumn it delighted everyone on the court to hear it. “Touchdown, touchdown,” I kept repeating, but the bird in the cage didn’t say a word.

Finally, Mr. Mendes stopped me, his voice low and kind. “Mr. Lex,” he said, “it’s not yet the football season.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say what I’d come to tell him—that unbeknownst to him I’d come into his house on the day that Popcorn disappeared. I’d seen Mr. Mendes leave for work. I knew he wouldn’t come home until his lunch hour. For weeks, ever since I’d pressed the button on the remote for the ceiling fan and seen his garage door lift, I’d tried to talk myself out of a crazy thought. Didn’t a garage door opener work by the same principle of a code set between transmitter and receiver? What would happen if I fooled around with combinations on my own opener until I found the one that would work on Mr. Mendes’s door?

The door would go up. That’s what would happen, as I discovered that day in late March. I walked across the street, wondering whether anyone was watching. I walked into Mr. Mendes’s garage and used the control on the wall to lower the door. I opened the door from the garage to the house, and I stepped inside.

All I wanted was a place to be that wasn’t my house. That’s what I couldn’t explain to Mr. Mendes. I couldn’t tell him how I enjoyed the open deck door and the warm breeze. I sat in the quiet of his home, content to be away from my own house, eager to believe, if only for an hour or so, that such peace and quiet belonged to me—that I deserved such rest.

Popcorn was in his cage, but the door was open so he could have free rein of the house. He chirped and trilled. Then he said, “Touchdown, touchdown.”

At one point, he came out of his cage and made a few low swoops around the breakfast area and family room.

I wasn’t thinking. I’d explain that to Mr. Mendes if I could. I’d tell him how I went to the deck door, and I felt so much at ease that I wanted to sit on his deck for a few moments, letting the sun warm me. I slid open the screen.

It was then that I felt a whisk of wings at my ear. With horror, I watched Popcorn lift beyond the beech tree in the backyard, then disappear around the corner of Chick Hartwell’s house.

What could I do but go home? If I’d been a better man, I would’ve come clean, but how in the world would I have explained being in that house in the first place? How would I have been able to tell Mr. Mendes how much those peaceful moments meant to me? How would I have said I knew my life was coming apart, and I didn’t know how to stop it?

I couldn’t say it then, and I can’t say it now that Vonnie has come for Henry and taken him away. It’s just me and that couch now. That sorry-assed couch. I sit here now in the dog days of summer, drinking. I remember that day when Mr. Mendes was so pleased to have this cockatiel he’d insist was Popcorn. The day he told me about his lost love, Eva, who lives in his home now and is a perfectly pleasant sort. I watch them come and go, often hand in hand, and as much as I want to, I can’t quite begrudge them. I just can’t manage it.

That day in his house, he said to me, “Are you happy for me, Mr. Lex?”

He stood there, wild-eyed—caught, so I imagined, between what was done and what was still ahead. Uncertain, I guess you’d say, and maybe sometimes that’s the best we can hope. I’d tell Vonnie this if I thought it might mean anything to her. A stir of air, a sliver of sky, an open door.

“I am,” I told Mr. Mendes. What else could I say? I didn’t want him to know that I was scared to death. Scared of all the days ahead of me. “Yes.” I patted him on the back. He was my neighbor, and for his sake I could pretend that I was a good man. “I’m happy. I’m very happy.” I even slipped an arm around his shoulders and pressed him to me. Just for an instant. “Very, very happy,” I said.

Then I did the only thing I could. I let him go.

About “Cat on a Bad Couch”

My story “Cat on a Bad Couch” takes as its inspiration the Ray Bradbury short “I See You Never.” In a little more than a thousand words, Bradbury tells the story of Mrs. O’Brian, whose tenant, Mr. Ramirez, has come in the presence of police officers to tell her he must give up his room as he’s being returned to Mexico; his temporary visa has long ago expired and the police have now discovered that fact. He’ll have to give up his job at the airplane factory, where he makes a good wage. He’ll have to give up his clean room with the blue linoleum and the flowered wallpaper. Most of all, he’ll have to give up Mrs. O’Brian, his “strict but kindly landlady,” who doesn’t begrudge him the right to get a little drunk at the end of the week.

I’ve used this story for years in my fiction workshops. Notice, I tell my students, how skillfully Bradbury evokes the aching loss at the heart of the story by paying such careful attention to the details of Mrs. O’Brian’s home—the huge kitchen, the long dining table covered with a white cloth and laden with water glasses and pitcher and bright cutlery and platters and bowls, the freshly waxed floor—and the facts of Mr. Ramirez’s pleasant life in Los Angeles—the radio and wristwatch he bought, the jewels he purchased for his few lady friends, the picture shows he attended, the streetcar rides he took, the grand restaurants where he dined, the opera and the theater. Those details contrast with what Mrs. O’Brian recalls from a visit she once made to a few Mexican border towns—dirt roads, scorched fields, small adobe houses, an eroded landscape. Such is the world to which Mr. Ramirez must return, and the details of the story do the work of portraying his heartache. No need for the author to offer comment.

I ask my students to notice how Bradbury stays out of the way, allowing Mr. Ramirez’s agony to emerge organically from the details of the story. Mr. Ramirez says, “Mrs. O’Brian, I see you never, I see you never!” In the final move of the story, Mrs. O’Brian, sitting down to dinner with her children, realizes that this is indeed true, and again the details evoke her melancholy. With graceful understatement, Bradbury describes how she quietly shuts the door and returns to her dining table, how she takes a bit of food and chews it a long time, staring at the closed door. Then she puts down her knife and fork, and when her son asks her what’s wrong, she says she’s just realized—here she puts her hand to her face—that she’ll never again see Mr. Ramirez. The full brunt of her loss comes to her when it’s too late for her to express her sadness to him the way he has to her. Notice the irony in that last move, I tell my students, how it comes to us covertly because a skillful writer lets it emerge from the details of the story’s world.

I hope I’ve been able to do the same at the end of “Cat on a Bad Couch,” when my narrator, Lex, because of his own actions, is unable to fully connect with the one person left who might be most sympathetic to his loss.

—Lee Martin

BY THE SILVER WATER OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN

Joe Hill

T
he robot shuffled
clank-clank
into the pitch dark of the bedroom, then stood staring down at the humans.

The female human groaned and rolled away and folded a pillow over her head.

“Gail, honey,” said the male, licking dry lips. “Mother has a headache. Can you take that noise out of here?”

“I CAN PROVIDE A STIMULATING CUP OF COFFEE,” boomed the robot in an emotionless voice.

“Tell her to get out, Raymond,” said the female. “My head is exploding.”

“Go on, Gail. You can hear mother isn’t herself,” said the male.

“YOU ARE INCORRECT. I HAVE SCANNED HER VITALS,” said the robot. “I HAVE IDENTIFIED HER AS SYLVIA LONDON. SHE IS HERSELF.”

The robot tilted her head to one side, inquisitively, waiting for more data. The pot on her head fell off and hit the floor with a great steely crash.

Mother sat up screaming. It was a wretched, anguished, inhuman sound, with no words in it, and it frightened the robot so much, for a moment she forgot she was a robot and she was just Gail again. She snatched her pot off the floor and hurried
clangedy-clang-clang
to the relative safety of the hall.

She peeked back into the room. Mother was already lying down, holding the pillow over her head again.

Raymond smiled across the darkness at his daughter. “Maybe the robot can formulate an antidote for martini poisoning,” he whispered, and winked.

The robot winked back.

For a while the robot worked on her prime directive, formulating the antidote that would drive the poison out of Sylvia London’s system. The robot stirred orange juice and lemon juice and ice cubes and butter and sugar and dish soap in a coffee mug. The resulting solution foamed and turned a lurid sci-fi green, suggestive of Venutian slime and radiation.

Gail thought the antidote might go down better with some toast and marmalade. Only there was a programming error; the toast burnt. Or maybe it was her own crossed wires beginning to smoke, shorting out the subroutines that required her to follow Asimov’s laws. With her circuit boards sizzling inside her, Gail began to malfunction. She tipped over chairs with great crashes and pushed books off the kitchen counter onto the floor. It was a terrible thing but she couldn’t help herself.

Gail didn’t hear her mother rushing across the room behind her, didn’t know she was there until Sylvia jerked the pot off her head and flung it into the enamel sink.

“What are you doing?” Sylvia screamed. “What in the name of sweet Mary God? If I hear one more thing crash over, I’ll take a hatchet to someone. My own self maybe.”

Gail said nothing, felt silence was safest.

“Get out of here before you burn the house down. My God, the whole kitchen stinks. This toast is ruined. And what did you pour in this Goddam mug?”

“It will cure you,” Gail said.

“There isn’t no cure for me,” her mother said, which was a double negative, but Gail didn’t think it wise to correct her. “I wish I had one boy. Boys are quiet. You four girls are like a tree full of sparrows, the shrill way you carry on.”

“Ben Quarrel isn’t quiet. He never stops talking.”

“You ought to go outside. All of you ought to go outside. I don’t want to hear any of you again until I have breakfast made.”

Gail shuffled toward the living room.

“Take those pots off your feet,” her mother said, reaching for the pack of cigarettes on the windowsill.

Gail daintily removed one foot, then the other, from the pots she had been using for robot boots.

Heather sat at the dining room table, bent over her drawing pad. The twins, Miriam and Mindy, were playing wheelbarrow. Mindy would hoist Miriam up by the ankles and walk her across the room, Miriam clambering along on her hands.

Gail stared over Heather’s shoulder at what her older sister was drawing. Then Gail got her kaleidoscope and peered at the drawing through that. It didn’t look any better.

She lowered her kaleidoscope and said, “Do you want me to help you with your drawing? I can show you how to draw a cat’s nose.”

“It isn’t a cat.”

“Oh. What is it?”

“It’s a pony.”

“Why is it pink?”

“I like them pink. There should be some that are pink. That’s a better color than most of the regular horse colors.”

“I’ve never seen a horse with ears like that. It would be better if you drew whiskers on it and let it be a cat.”

Heather crushed her drawing in one hand and stood up so quickly she knocked over her chair.

In the exact same moment, Mindy wheelbarrowed Miriam into the edge of the coffee table with a great bang. Miriam shrieked and grabbed her head and Mindy dropped her ankles and Miriam hit the floor so hard the whole house shook.

“GODDAM IT WILL YOU STOP THROWING THE GODDAM CHAIRS AROUND?” screamed their mother, reeling in from the kitchen. “WHY DO YOU ALL HAVE TO THROW THE GODDAM CHAIRS? WHAT DO I HAVE TO SAY TO MAKE YOU STOP?”

“Heather did it,” Gail said.

“I did not!” Heather said. “It was Gail!” She did not view this as a lie. It seemed to her that somehow Gail
had
done it, just by standing there and being ignorant.

Miriam sobbed, clutching her head. Mindy picked up the book about Peter Rabbit and stood there staring into it, idly turning the pages, the young scholar bent to her studies.

Their mother grabbed Heather by the shoulders, squeezing them until her knuckles went white.

“I want you to go outside. All of you. Take your sisters and go away. Go far away. Go down to the lake. Don’t come back until you hear me calling.”

They spilled into the yard, Heather and Gail and Mindy and Miriam. Miriam wasn’t crying anymore. She had stopped crying the moment their mother went back into the kitchen.

Big sister Heather told Miriam and Mindy to sit in the sandbox and play.

“What should
I
do?” Gail asked.

“You could go drown yourself in the lake.”

“That sounds fun,” Gail said, and skipped away down the hill.

Miriam stood in the sandbox with a little tin shovel and watched her go. Mindy was already burying her own legs in the sand.

It was early and cool. The mist was over the water and the lake was like battered steel. Gail stood on her father’s dock, next to her father’s boat, watching the way the pale vapor churned and changed in the dimness. Like being inside a kaleidoscope filled with foggy gray beach glass. She still had her kaleidoscope, patted it in the pocket of her dress. On a sunny day, Gail could see the green slopes on the other side of the water, and she could look up the stony beach, to the north, all the way to Canada, but now she could not see ten feet in front of her.

She followed the narrow ribbon of beach toward the Quarrels’ summer place. There was only a yard of rocks and sand between the water and the embankment, less in some places.

Something caught the light, and Gail bent to find a piece of dark green glass that had been rubbed soft by the lake. It was either green glass or an emerald. She discovered a dented silver spoon, not two feet away.

Gail turned her head and stared out again at the silvered surface of the lake.

She had an idea a ship had gone down, someone’s schooner, not far offshore, and she was discovering the treasure washed in by the tide. A spoon and an emerald couldn’t be a coincidence.

She lowered her head and walked along, slower now, on the lookout for more salvage. Soon enough she found a tin cowboy with a tin lasso. She felt a shiver of pleasure, but also sorrow. There had been a child on the boat.

“He’s probably dead now,” she said to herself, and looked sadly out at the water once more.

“Drowned,” she decided.

She wished she had a yellow rose to throw into the water.

Gail went on but had hardly trudged three paces when she heard a sound from across the lake, a long, mournful lowing, like a foghorn, but also not like one.

She stopped for another look.

The mist smelt of rotting smelt.

The foghorn did not sound again.

An enormous gray boulder rose out of the shallows here, rising right up onto the sand. Some net was snarled around it. After a moment of hesitation, Gail grabbed the net and climbed to the top.

It was a really large boulder, higher than her head. It was curious she had never noticed it before, but then, things looked different in the mist.

Gail stood on the boulder, which was high but also long, sloping away to her right, and curling in a crescent out into the water on her left. It was a low ridge of stone marking the line between land and water.

She peered out into the cool, blowing smoke, looking for the rescue ship that had to be out there somewhere, trolling for survivors of the wreck. Maybe it wasn’t too late for the little boy. She lifted her kaleidoscope to her eye, counting on its special powers to penetrate the mist and show her where the schooner had gone down.

“What are you doing?” said someone behind her.

Gail looked over her shoulder. It was Joel and Ben Quarrel, both of them barefoot. Ben Quarrel looked just like a little version of his older brother. Both of them were dark-haired and dark-eyed and had surly, almost petulant faces. She liked them both, though. Ben would sometimes spontaneously pretend he was on fire, and throw himself down and roll around screaming and someone would have to put him out. He needed to be put out about once an hour. Joel liked dares, but he would never dare anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He had dared Gail to let a spider crawl on her face, a daddy longlegs, and then when she wouldn’t, he did it. He stuck his tongue out and let the daddy longlegs crawl right over it. She was afraid he would eat it, but he didn’t. Joel didn’t say much and he didn’t boast, even when he had done something amazing, like get five skips on a stone.

She assumed they would be married someday. Gail had asked Joel if he thought he’d like that, and he had shrugged and said it suited him fine. That was in June, though, and they hadn’t talked about their engagement since. Sometimes she thought he had forgotten.

“What happened to your eye?” she asked.

Joel touched his left eye, which was surrounded by a painful looking red-and-brown mottling. “I was playing Daredevils of the Sky and fell out of my bunk bed.” He nodded toward the lake. “What’s out there?”

“There’s a ship sank. They’re looking for survivors now.”

Joel took off his shoes and put them up on the rock. Then he grabbed the netting tangled on the boulder, climbed to the top, and stood next to her, staring out into the mist.

“What was the name?” he asked.

“The name of what?”

“The ship that sank.”

“The
Mary Celeste
.”

“How far out?”

“A half a mile,” Gail said, and lifted her kaleidoscope to her eye for another look around.

Through the lens, the dim water was shattered, again and again, into a hundred scales of ruby and chrome.

“How do you know?” Joel asked after a bit.

She shrugged. “I found some things that washed up.”

“Can I see?” Ben Quarrel asked. He was having trouble climbing the net to the top of the boulder. He kept getting halfway, then jumping back down.

She turned to face him and took the soft green glass out of her pocket.

“This is an emerald,” she said. She took out the tin cowboy. “This is a tin cowboy. The boy this belonged to probably drowned.”

“That’s my tin cowboy,” Ben said. “I left it yesterday.”

“It isn’t. It just looks like yours.”

Joel glanced over at it. “No. That’s his. He’s always leaving them on the beach. He hardly has any left.”

Gail surrendered the point and tossed the tin cowboy down to Ben, who caught it, and lost interest in the sunk schooner. He turned his back to the great boulder and sat in the sand and got his cowboy into a fight with some pebbles. The pebbles kept hitting him and knocking him over. Gail didn’t think it was an even match.

“What else do you have?” Joel asked.

“This spoon,” Gail said. “It might be silver.”

Joel squinted at it, then looked back at the lake.

“Better let me have the telescope,” he said. “If there are people out there, we have as good a chance of spotting them as anyone searching for them on a boat.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” She gave him the kaleidoscope.

Joel turned it this way and that, scanning the murk for survivors, his face tense with concentration.

He lowered it at last and opened his mouth to say something. Before he could, the mournful foghorn sounded again. The water quivered. The foghorn sound went on for a long time before trailing sadly away.

“I wonder what that is,” Gail said.

“They fire cannons to bring dead bodies to the surface of the water,” Joel told her.

“That wasn’t a cannon.”

“It’s loud enough.”