Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (17 page)

Mr. Breeze turns on the windshield wipers, and cleaning fluid squirts up as the wipers squeak across the glass. The world appears through the smeared arcs the wipers make. There is a great expanse of valley and hills and wide open sky.

W
e’re getting very low on gas,” Mr. Breeze says, after they’ve driven for a while in silence.

And Peter doesn’t say anything.

“There’s a place up ahead. It used to be safe, but I’m not sure if it’s safe anymore.”

“Oh,” Peter says.

“You’ll tell me if it’s safe, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Peter says.

“It’s called Little America. Do you know why?”

Mr. Breeze looks at him. His eyes are softly sad, and he smiles just a little, wanly, and it’s tragic, but it’s also okay because that boy wasn’t special, not like Peter is special. It is something to be left behind us, says Mr. Breeze’s expression.

Peter shrugs.

“It’s very interesting,” Mr. Breeze says. “Because there once was an explorer named Richard Byrd. And he went into Antarctica, which is a frozen country far to the south, and he made a base on the Ross Ice Shelf, south of the Bay of Whales. And he named his base ‘Little America.’ And so then later—much much later—they made a motel in Wyoming, and because it was so isolated they decided to call it by the same name. And they used a penguin as their mascot, because penguins are from Antarctica, and when I was a kid there were a lot of signs and billboards that made the place famous.”

“Oh,” Peter says, and he can’t help but think of the kid. The kid saying, “Yaaah!”

They are driving along very slowly, because it is still hard to see out of the windshield, and the windshield wiper fluid has stopped working. It makes its mechanical sound, but no liquid comes out anymore.

I
t is a kind of oasis, this place. This Little America. A great, huge parking lot, and many gas pumps, and a store and beyond that a motel, with a green concrete dinosaur standing in the grass, a baby brontosaurus, a little taller than a man.

It is the kind of landscape they like. The long, wide strip-mall buildings with their corridors of shelves; the cavelike concrete passageways of enormous interstate motels, with their damp carpets and moldering beds, the little alcoves where ice machines and tall soda vendors may still be inexplicably running; the parking lots where the abandoned cars provide shelter and hiding places, better than a forest of trees.

“There are a lot of them around here, I think,” Mr. Breeze says as they settle in next to a pump. Above them there is a kind of plastic-metal canopy, and they sit for a while under its shade. Peter can sense that Mr. Breeze is uncertain.

“How many of them are there, do you think?” Mr. Breeze says, very casually, and Peter closes his eyes.

“More than a hundred?” Mr. Breeze says.

“Yes,” Peter says, and he looks at Mr. Breeze’s face, surreptitiously, and it is the face of a man who has to jump a long distance but does not want to.

“Yes,” he says. “More than a hundred.”

He can feel them. They are peering out from the travel-center building and the windows of the boarded-up motel and old abandoned cars in the parking lot.

“If I get out of the car and try to pump gas, will they come?” Mr. Breeze says.

“Yes,” Peter says. “They will come very fast.”

“Okay.” Mr. Breeze says. And the two of them are silent for a long time. The face of Mr. Breeze is not the face of a television man, or a skeleton, or a puppet. It is the elusive face that adults give you when they are telling you a lie, for your own good, they think, when there is a big secret that they are sorry about.

Always remember,
Peter’s mother said.
I loved you, even. . .

“I want you to hold my gun,” Mr. Breeze says. “Do you think you can do that? If they start coming . . . ?”

And Peter tries to look at his real face. Could it be said that Mr. Breeze loves him, even if . . .

“We won’t make it to Salt Lake unless we get gas,” Mr. Breeze says, and Peter watches as he opens the door of the car.

Wait,
Peter thinks.

Peter had meant to ask Mr. Breeze about his son, about Jim, the rock hound. “You killed him, didn’t you?” Peter had wanted to ask, and he expected that Mr. Breeze would have said yes.

Mr. Breeze would have hesitated for a while, but then finally he would have told the truth, because Mr. Breeze was that kind of person.

And what about me?
Peter wanted to ask.
Would you kill me too?

And Mr. Breeze would have said yes.
Yes, of course. If I needed to. But you would never put me in that situation, would you, Peter? You aren’t like the others, are you?

Peter thinks of all this as Mr. Breeze steps out of the car. He can sense the other kids growing alert, with their long black nails and sharp teeth, with their swift, jumping muscles and bristling hairs. He can see the soft, slow movement of Mr. Breeze’s legs. How easy it would be to think:
Prey.

How warm and full of pumping juice were his sinews, how tender was his skin, the cheeks of his face like a peach.

He knew that they would converge down upon him so swiftly that there wouldn’t be time for him to cry out. He knew that they could not help themselves, even as Peter himself could not help himself. His mom, his dad.
Wait,
he wanted to say, but it happened much faster than he expected.

Wait,
he thinks. He wants to tell Mr. Breeze.
I want. . .

I want?

But there isn’t really any time for that.
Oh, Mom, I am a good boy,
he thinks.
I want to be a good boy
.

About “Little America”

Ray Bradbury changed my life.

Perhaps that sounds melodramatic, but it’s not meant to be. I would not be the same person—I would not have become a writer—if it weren’t for Ray Bradbury.

I started reading Bradbury at an early age. I wish I could remember the first I read—I think it might have been
October Country
—but in any case, by the time I was ten or eleven, I was well on my way to reading his entire oeuvre, and one of the results of this reading was that I was inspired to write myself. I wrote sequels to his stories, and imitations of his stories, because I couldn’t get enough of them.

I was growing up then in Nebraska, in a very rural western corner of the panhandle. The village I lived in had about twenty people in it, and I was the only child in my grade. I was bused to school in a bigger town, ten miles away, but I was always glad to come home to my books. I didn’t fit in very well with the kids in town.

When I was in seventh grade, my English teacher, Mr. Christy, gave us a strange assignment. He asked us to write a letter to our favorite writer, living or dead. In the letter, we were supposed to explain why we liked their writing.

I decided that I would write to Ray Bradbury. But I went further than the assignment. I went to the library and found Ray Bradbury’s address in
Contemporary Authors
, and I sent him some of the stories that I’d written. I asked him if he thought I could become a writer.

A few weeks later I got a letter back from him. It was typed on the most beautiful stationery that I’d ever seen, and it was addressed to me. “Dear Dan Chaon: You must never let anyone tell you what you want to be. If you want to be a writer, be a writer. It’s that simple. When I was your age, I wrote every day of my life, and my stuff wasn’t half as good as yours. Quality doesn’t count, to begin with, quantity does. The more you write, the better you’ll get. If you write a short story a week for the next three or four years, think of the improvement you’ll find in yourself. And, above all, what fun! Are you intensely library-oriented? I hope so. If not, from now on, you must be in the library, when you’re not writing, reading, finding, knowing poetry, essays, history, you name it! Keep at it!”

Then, a week later, he sent me a critique of the story I had sent him, and I was so hooked, and so crazy in love. I grew up in a family where no one read, and books were not a big part of daily life, and I felt intensely as if I had been rescued. Ray sent me his book
Zen and the Art of Writing
and Brenda Ueland’s
If You Want to Write
, and I read them over and over.

During the next few years of junior high and high school, I would send stories that I thought were good to Ray Bradbury, and he would write me back about them. “The story is a small gem, and perhaps, as with your other stories, too small,” he would say. Or: “Take a look at your structure here. What does Mr. B. want from life? I guess you have left that out. My characters write my stories for me. They tell me what they want, then I tell them to go get it, and I follow as they run, working at my typing as they rush to their destiny. Montag, in F.451, wanted to stop burning books. Go stop it! I said. He ran to do just that. I followed, typing. Ahab, in
Moby Dick
, wanted to chase and kill a whale. He rushed raving off to do so. Melville followed, writing the novel with a harpoon in the flesh of the damned Whale!”

And: “This werewolf story is too short! It is an idea in search of conflict, but you are close to finding a short story—some nice ideas there. Develop them! What about the other people in the ‘school’? You drop hints, but I would like to know about the others. It is almost like the start of a longer story. What happens when he arrives at the school, or does he ever arrive? Play with the idea.”

By the time I went away to college, I had started writing other kinds of stories, and my correspondence with Ray began to peter out. I was distracted by undergraduate life, and I was thoughtless in a lot of ways. Ray wrote: “Why are you going to college? If you aren’t careful, it will cut across your writing time, stop your writing stories. Is
that
what you want? Think.
Do
you want to be a writer for a lifetime? What will you take in college that will help you be a writer? You already have a full style. All you need now is practice at structure. Write back. Soon! Love to you! RBradbury”

I never did write back to him. I was scared by his questioning of college, and by that time, I was enamored of a different Ray—Raymond Carver. And, ultimately, I didn’t know what to say. I loved college. I thought it did me good. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

And then daily life took hold. I published a few stories in magazines, and I sent them to Ray, but he never wrote back. I spoke about him in interviews, his influence on me—and once I even saw him briefly at the Los Angeles Festival of Books, but the line to see him was hours long, and when I came to the front of it I wasn’t sure whether he realized who I was. I gave him copies of my books, and he said, “Thank you, thank you,” and then I was hustled along. He was a very old man, and he had been signing books for hours and hours. I don’t know whether he knew who I was or not.

Oh! I thought. How I wished I had written him back, all those years ago. How I wished I had kept up our correspondence.

But now more than thirty years have passed since I got my first letter from Ray Bradbury. And when Mort Castle wrote to me, suggesting that I write a “tribute” story, I couldn’t help but think of that old werewolf story I sent to Ray all those years ago. The first sentence and the last sentence are the same as they were when I was nineteen; the middle is infected with my middle age.

I am nearly the same age that Ray was when he first wrote to me—and that desperate twelve-year-old is very far in the distance. But I can see now how fully Bradbury has fitted himself into my brain. It is not just that he was a mentor to me at a time when I needed him most; it is also that his style, his mood, his way of thinking, has seeped into the very core of my work.

I don’t know whether “Little America” will seem like a “Ray Bradbury” story to readers; but I know for a fact that Ray Bradbury has a hold on my soul as a writer.

—Dan Chaon

THE PHONE CALL

John McNally

D
ougie had been home from the hospital only an hour when Bob, Dougie’s uncle, opened the bedroom door and flipped off Dougie’s light without saying a word. The door creaked shut, and footsteps grew softer as his uncle retreated.

Dougie wanted the light back on. He was six years old and couldn’t sleep, his throat still pulsing from where his tonsils had been removed. In his room at the hospital he could at least turn on the TV or buzz for the nurse, whom he had fallen in love with, but here at home he had to remain in bed, and all there was to do was study his walls, which he had decorated with covers from his favorite magazine,
Famous Monsters of Filmland
. With the light out, he couldn’t even do that.

Dougie had no idea what time it was. He passed the hours thinking about Nurse Jill, who had long, straight hair like Susan Dey in
The Partridge Family
, and how she had rubbed her hand over his hair and said, “I know girls who’d
kill
for those curls.” She leaned close to him, almost to his mouth, and whispered, “But you probably hate them, don’t you?” With her mouth so close to his own, Dougie wanted to sit up and kiss her. Instead, he stared into her foam-green eyes until she touched his nose with the tip of her finger and stood up.

Dougie replayed that particular memory over and over, because if he let it fade away, it would be replaced by the man he saw right after he’d woken up after his surgery. The man lay motionless in the bed next to him—tubes running into his mouth, a machine beeping continuously, his skin the color of Silly Putty. When the doctor saw that Dougie had come to, he nodded angrily toward Nurse Jill, who swiftly pulled the curtain shut between them. Dougie, barely able to keep his eyes open, eventually fell back to sleep. The next time he woke up he saw two men wearing white shirts and white pants rolling the man out of the room, a blanket covering all of him, including his head, the way Dougie liked to sleep with a flashlight under the covers whenever he stayed awake to look at his magazines with their photos of Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

“What was his name?” Dougie asked Nurse Jill later that day.

Nurse Jill smiled. “Mr. Belvedere.”

“Where’d he go?” Dougie asked.

Nurse Jill reached down and rested the tip of a finger inside one of Dougie’s curls. Testing the curl’s buoyancy, she said, “To a better place.”

A better place,
Dougie thought now, in his bedroom, in the dark. Over the years Doug would meet other people, strangers mostly, with remarkably similar stories, of waking up in a haze of anesthesia next to a dead person whose soul was being spirited away.
Did everyone have such stories?
he would wonder.

The phone in the hallway rang.

The ring was so loud, Dougie’s heart sped up.

The phone continued to ring. Wouldn’t Uncle Bob or his mother answer it? Bob was his father’s brother, but Dougie didn’t remember anything about his father. The man had died when Dougie was still a baby. A hunting accident, he’d been told. No, his earliest memories of any man in the house were of Uncle Bob, who came sniffing around every few days like a stray dog, often spending the night.

On the fifth ring, Dougie slid out of bed and, feeling his way from one end of his room to the other, eased open his door.

In the hallway, Dougie could lean against the banister and see the living room below, where aquarium light sprayed gently up toward him, causing the walls to look like they were alive and moving, as though he were the one inside the fish tank. He picked up the phone.

“Hello?” he whispered.

A man called out from the earpiece: “Hello? Hello? Who is this? Is this Dougie?”

Dougie did not recognize the man’s voice. “Who are you?” he asked. And then a chill blew up under his pajamas, causing him to shiver. “Is this Mr. Belvedere?”

“Who’s Mr. Belvedere? Tell me about him.”

“He’s in a better place now,” Dougie said.

“He’s dead?” the man asked. “Did someone kill him?”

“He’s in a better place now,” Dougie repeated, but he felt like weeping this time because he didn’t know who this man was or why he was asking questions.

“Listen,” the man said. “I don’t have much time, and you won’t hear from me again for another couple of years, so I want you to do something for me, okay? I want you to remember who I am. I want you to pay attention. Because something terrible is going to happen, and only you can stop it.”

The harder Dougie cried, the worse his stitched and bleeding throat hurt. He began to moan from the pain.

“Don’t cry, Dougie,” the man said. “Don’t cry. I’m your friend. You have to believe me. I’m your . . .”

Dougie hung up and returned to his bedroom, leaving behind the room with walls that looked like they were breathing and a phone call he would barely remember in a week. He could have turned on his bedroom light now, but he was afraid to. He wouldn’t see those walls again until morning, when sunlight seeped through his curtains, waking all the monsters.

T
hirty years later, Doug sits at the Tick Tock Lounge with a baker’s dozen of his coworkers from Rockwell International. The three tables they pushed together earlier in the night now harbor a collection of beer mugs and pitchers and shot glasses, glasses for highballs and martinis, peeled-off beer bottle labels and soggy napkins. Someone had slammed a beer down onto the last jalapeño popper, squeezing cheese out at both ends, causing it to look like a thick worm that’s been stepped on.

Across from Doug sits Louise Malgrave, who keeps touching Doug’s ankle with her toes and then acting as though it’s an accident.

“Is that you again?” she asks, smiling. She reaches over and taps his hand with her fingernails. She can’t
not
touch him, it would seem. “I’m sorry.” Louise is a supervisor at Rockwell, while Doug does data entry, typing in long strings of code that he doesn’t understand.

“It’s okay,” Doug says. He considers asking her to go home with him—why not?—but when he leans toward her, what comes out of his mouth surprises even him: “This is the anniversary of my mother’s death,” he says. He forces a grim, hopeless smile and, almost as an afterthought, adds, “She was murdered when I was fifteen.”

“Oh, no!” Louise says, and her face droops, as if sympathy and muscle control are incompatible. She looks a dozen years older now, and whatever vague plans Doug had with her in mind crumble before him.

What Doug has said is true—his mother
was
murdered, and today
is
the anniversary—but he can’t stand the way Louise is looking at him, the pity, the anguish, so he shakes his head and says, “I’m kidding.”

“What?”

“I’m drunk. I’m sorry.”

“You’re a jerk,” Louise says. His coworkers stop talking to see why Louise is so angry. “He’s a
jerk
,” Louise says to her captive audience. “You know what he told me?”

“Actually,” Doug says, keeping his voice low, “it’s
true
. It’s just that . . . I don’t know . . . the way you were looking at me.”

Jerry, Doug’s boss, stands up from his end of the table and walks over. He’s eighty pounds overweight and speaks in a voice that sounds like every businessman Doug’s ever overheard: deep, loud, fake. “Hey, now,” he says, smiling. “Everything okay over here?”

“Fine,” Doug says, standing. Louise is crying but shrugging away those who want to comfort her, even though it’s obvious she wants the attention. “It’s fine,” Doug continues. “A misunderstanding is all.”

Jerry nods. He escorts Doug to the Tick Tock’s exit, and together they stand in the glow of neon beer signs. “Let’s talk on Monday, shall we?”

Doug nods. “Okay. All right.” He reaches out to shake Jerry’s hand, but Jerry turns and heads toward Louise Malgrave, leaving Doug with his arm outstretched.

D
oug hits three more taverns on his way home. By the time he reaches his apartment foyer, he’s having a hard time inserting the miniature key into his mailbox lock. He rests his head against the wall, shuts his eyes, and tries it one last time. This time the key goes in. When he opens the door, a fat phone bill falls out onto the chipped tile floor.

“Damnit,” he says when he sees it’s the same phone company he’s been having problems with. His long-distance phone service was slammed. Doug heard the term
slammed
for the first time only recently when news reports popped up about a local renegade phone company taking over people’s long-distance service without the customers’ approval. It’s illegal, of course, but extraordinarily difficult to stop once it’s set in motion. The name of this company is Blue Skies.

Doug tears open the phone bill as he mounts the stairs to his apartment, and after banging open his door and flipping on the kitchen light, he examines the bill. Amount Due: $3,456.72.

“Three thousand and
what
?” he yells. “Are they
kidding
?” He squints at the bill.

He walks into his bedroom, where he has hung all the old covers from the magazine
Famous Monsters of Filmland
, the same covers he’d hung on his wall in childhood. They are torn now and fading, but he can’t bring himself to take them down. The thought of doing so fills him with an inexplicable sadness. He clings to his monsters, the way others cling to old blankets or favorite coffee mugs.

Doug climbs into bed with his shoes on. The heavy black rotary phone sits like a purposefully silent and endangered reptile, the last of its kind, on his bedside table. He picks up the receiver and dials the number for Blue Skies.

“Blue Skies,” a woman says. “My name is Bethany. How may I help you?”

“How may you help me,” Doug says coldly, staring into the eyes of Lon Chaney as Mr. Hyde. “First off, Bethany, you can tell me how it’s even possible for my bill to be over three thousand dollars.”

“The amount due,” Bethany begins, “is based on how many calls you—”

Doug cuts her off. “
Look
,” he yells, “I didn’t even sign up with your company. What you’re doing is illegal. I want you to switch me back to my old provider.”

“I’m sorry,” Bethany says, “but it’s too late. There’s nothing to be done.”

“What the hell do you mean it’s too late, that there’s nothing to be done?”

“Sir,” Bethany says. “Please lower your voice.”

“I
won’t
lower my voice. I . . .”

The phone goes dead.

“Hello? Bethany? Hello?”

Doug slams down the phone. He calls back and Bethany answers again.

“Are you calm now, sir?”

“Look,” Doug says. He shuts his eyes. He’s drunk and sleepy. He can feel the room spinning, the way the merry-go-round felt when his Uncle Bob started to push it faster and faster—Dougie crying, begging him to stop because it was going too fast and he could barely hang on. He starts dreaming about that time in his life when he hears a voice in his ear: “Hello? Are you still there?”

“Who is this?” Doug asks.

“It’s Bethany.”

“Hi, Bethany,” Doug whispers. He waits for her to say something, but when she doesn’t, he asks, “What are you wearing?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m in bed,” Doug says. “Where are
you
?”

“Maybe
that’s
why your bill is so expensive,” Bethany says sharply. “Those sorts of calls are expensive. Now, good night, sir,” she says, and hangs up.

Doug falls asleep with the phone against his ear until he’s woken by a loud beeping, a phone off its hook. He returns the phone to its cradle, stares at it for a good while, then picks up the receiver again. Every year, on the anniversary of his mother’s death, he dials his old home’s phone number, a number that has remained etched in his mind, even though it’s been disconnected for years.

Concentrating, he puts his finger in the rotary’s dial, draws his finger to the right for each number, and lets the dial go. He expects the familiar we’re-sorry-but-the-number-you-have-dialed-is-no-longer-in-service message, but on the second ring a woman answers, an actual human being, and Doug quickly sits up.

“Hello?” she says. A baby is crying in the background.

“Hello?” Doug says. “Who’s this?”

“Hey, who’s
this
?” the woman asks. She laughs, and a chill runs through Doug:
He knows this woman
. The baby cries louder now, and the woman is saying, “Hush, hush, sweetie.” A doorbell rings. “Hold on there,” the woman says to Doug. He hears the phone getting set down; he hears footsteps, a door opening, voices. And then he hears what sounds like a hurt animal, a sound that frightens Doug, has always frightened Doug—the plaintive wailing of grief. What’s happening?

“Hello!” Doug yells into the phone. “What’s going on there? Hello!”

He hears someone moving toward the phone. The receiver is lifted, and a man says, “Who is this?”

“It’s Doug. Who’s this?”

“Doug?” The man sounds confused, disoriented. “I don’t know what you’re selling, Doug, but you’ll have to call another time. There’s been an accident here.” The phone is hung up with a thud.