Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (33 page)

Not meaning to frighten Nora, I half yelled at her, “What? Zora or Nora?”

I was hoping that what she’d said was just her own name. I knew it hadn’t been. What I was thinking about, of course, was of the old goddess of midnight and dawn, the dark woman Zoraya, that Nana and Grandma Sala told us about when we were babies.

Nora misunderstood me. There was laughter and talk overlapping itself all over.

“Who’s Zola?” She laughed. “Is that your talk for Nora?”

She took a cold beer out of the pail of ice—glancing at her parents first to make sure they didn’t see—and bent down to pick up the cross. “This is a beautiful small thing you’ve made. Thank you, Jack.” She leaned forward as if to give him a hug around the neck, as thanks, the way a girl will. But Jackie’s face was white and moist as new bread. He stiffened and pulled back from Nora and said not a word. For just a second, he and Nora looked like their eyes were bound together on a wire. The sweet, familiar grin melted from Nora’s face. A blush spread over her neck like someone had spilt a pot of pink woman’s face paint. She took hold of the hem of her dress and spun off in that dancing way she had, making sure we saw the turn of her fine legs in their cotton hose. “See you later, boys,” she called back to us.

“You heard it, too,” Jackie said to me then, quiet, so no one under all the gabble could hear him but me. He took the knife out of his pocket and told me to take it. I wouldn’t. I held up both hands like a baby that’s been burned. He said Go, Jan, give it to the Field Museum for nothing. I said I would tell Papa to give it to the Field Museum, and for him to just put it down. We knew Papa wouldn’t. Neither one of us knew if the knife was cursed before Jackie used it to break into the tomb—cursed by our soldier ancestor who stole it off a dying boy—or only afterward. But we could tell the curse had jumped from the knife into Jackie, no matter how many crosses he whittled. We could tell it was so strong that it spread to Nora for a minute. Damned if we knew why. Maybe it was layers of sin, old and new, none of them really Jackie’s fault, waiting for the knife to come out of the box and spring on him, making him different, little by little, taking pieces of him that were good and turning them wrong.

Quickly, I told my cousin, “That’s all there is to it. It was just a strange thing and they happen.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jackie said finally, after he’d gone over to the table and gulped down two fingers of whiskey. “There’s nothing can be done.”

He ran his hand along his short hair and squeezed his forehead. Then he pulled Patricia Finnian out onto the floor and danced with her, their hips together like snakes wound around each other. The two of them took off in the car, not coming back until everyone was gone. If I hadn’t been awake still, I wouldn’t have heard them. I don’t think it was the first time Patricia had been out until dawn; but Auntie Maggie was murderous the next morning, slamming Jackie’s coffee down in front of him like she meant it to slop over and burn him. Jackie made plain he wasn’t his mama’s little boy no more, and just asked for the sugar. If he could fight a war, he could damn well spend the night with a woman.

That night, in honor of the feast day after Christmas, we put our feet together on an axe under the table, the tradition for luck. Uncle Gaston and Uncle Josef were home. And they toasted Jackie and me.

“To the pair of Jacks,” Uncle Josef said, and glanced at our friend Reb Jaworsky, who came to dinner though our old strange ways didn’t mean a thing to him or his wife or their three kids, any more than their feasts did to us. Uncle Josef added, “And to the man with the axe. The king of diamonds.” Mr. Jaworsky blushed. I guess it was in bad taste to mention having money. It was good of Reb Jaworsky to come. He was a white Jew; and we cared how bad it was for them over there. His children were still small, too young for soldiers. He was too old. But he had a brother in Poland still.

I drove Jackie to the train station in his car. He was wearing his green uniform then, and used the sleeve to rub a speck off the black hood. I handed him his big bag and told him not to be no hero.

“Not me, brother Jan,” he said. “I’ll be back for sweet Patricia one fine day.” But when I went to hug him, he pulled away. “Be good,” he said, and swung up on the steps. It was wrong. It was all wrong, us parting from each other that way. But maybe Jackie didn’t want whatever it was to jump to me.

I married pretty young.

Joanie was only seventeen, but our girls took their time coming. We did a lot of dancing and strolling to the movies before we was ever parents—when so many of them we’d grown up with already were.

I went to the place where Jackie is buried almost on a whim, like a jet-setter. I was a father two times already. I should have been too busy to take time away from Joanie and my girls, not to mention my job as the owner of Nickolai and Nickolai Plumbing and Heating. It was Joanie told me to go ahead and take the trip—that Sam, my helper, could manage without me for a week. She knew that something worked on my mind about Jackie, and from her mother, she heard tales of how close we were. We could afford it, and she had not the slightest wish to go along. To her, Eastern Europe was still stained dark with blood. When Joanie travels, she wants to go to California or Florida. She didn’t want to go to where our families came from then or now.

“You’ve been good to me always, Jan,” she said seriously. “You never took a drink or raised your voice to me and the children. If you need to do this, you should.” The dreams had started by then—long before we were married. Maybe Joanie thought the trip would lay them to rest.

After the plane landed, I rented a junk of a car and drove with maps from the Triple A up narrow roads between forested hills. The place was easy enough to find, from the letters sent me by Jackie’s best friend in the war, a boy named Anton—that told me the story of the way they’d got lost from their unit in the night,
like we were drinking swallows of fog with every breath.
The mountains they finally fetched up against were the Carpathians. The woods were dark and snow-heavy still in March. They found a clearing, and Jackie took out his knife and stripped some logs high up a dead tree, small to burn good. He sat sharpening a twig into an arrow point in case they saw a rabbit. There was no food in their packs but biscuits days old; and although their coats and hats were good, their boots were shot.

They couldn’t even hear the gunshot they were so lost.

Finally, they laid down evergreen boughs and huddled next to the fire in their coats.

It was long after midnight when Anton woke to hear Jackie talking. Anton opened his eyes.

The woman was standing right in the snow, wearing a long white dress, her short dark hair uncovered. She was holding out her hand. She wore no coat and she didn’t shiver.

“It wasn’t me,” Jackie pleaded. “It was my grandfather, no, it was my great-grandfather took it from the man. And when I took those rings, I was just a kid, a fool kid. Lots have done worse.” The woman just shook her head and held out her hand. Jackie finally dropped the Barlow knife into her palm.

The knife went right through and clinked on a rock.

Anton wrote to me that he tried to put himself back to sleep again. He threw himself down and closed his eyes. And he laid with his face in the snow until his skin burned and didn’t move. He licked the snow if he felt thirst. The hours crawled past. He pulled his itching green greatcoat over his head, and God save him, even when he heard Jackie cry out, he didn’t move. He was like us—his own grandmother brought him up on tales of the
Wili
and the
Wampyr
. No coat on the beautiful dark-haired girl, he thought, as the wind scored his naked hands. No coat and her arms were bare. A madwoman, he thought, from the hospital that was one of their coordinates on the map they had. And he thought, this poor land, tossed back and forth between bully countries like a child’s beanbag. But all the time, even under the greatcoat, he could sense the woman beside him, soundless and patient. Finally, she said, “You will live long enough to see many children, Ee-van.” Anton was sure he heard it. He asked who was Evon. He wrote me that in the first letter. And it wasn’t until years later, after we had exchanged eight, ten letters, that I told him that Ivan was my own given name.

By the time I was in my early middle years, they could copy even an old picture in a few hours at the drugstore. I had them copy a picture of me and Nora Finnian, that night at that party. I wrapped one copy, the larger one, in office paper and sent it to Anton. I knew he would say that the woman in the white dress was Nora, and he wrote back special delivery and said it was.

And then I never heard from him again. The letters I sent came back unopened; but no postman had written on them, in big letters, NO SUCH PARTY.

All I have to say is one thing more. I wish I could set it down better. I can’t explain.

Anton found Jackie in the morning dead. You knew that. The knife lay beside his head, and Anton picked it up and used it to strip a little birch sapling for a cross and lash it with the supple bark. He buried Jackie under rocks, said the rosary, then threw the Barlow knife and heard it hit the face of the cliff. He ran. German patrols fanned out looking for stragglers never even saw him when he ran right past them. It was like he was made of the fog himself. He ran until his leather boots turned to strips, then barefoot, until he came to a farmer’s barn. The farmer made off like he didn’t know Anton was there but left food for him in the manger every night.

There was not a mark or a drop of blood on Jackie, Anton wrote, in the last letter.

There was only this, a huge nail, driven through his hand. The wound had not bled. It was the long nails Gypsy roofers use, them they call tinkers. Out there in the wilderness where there wasn’t a village or a farm about, there was this nail, like one of those nails so long they could not get an ironmonger in Jerusalem to make one to use to crucify our Lord, and so they had to go outside the city until they found a Gypsy woman, who made the nails all unknowing, like Jackie made those flowers.

I never went to college.

I worked with Dad. When Dad got older, I kept the company and he did the books. The name is the same on the truck, though it’s only me and Sam and my nephew, Karin’s boy Brian Olsky. No more Nickolai boys. I thought I would have sons. And then I had only daughters, five daughters, just like Mr. Finnian did. I keep it the same, though. All my daughters had sons. I have seven grandsons. My daughter Polly went to college for a teacher, but she wants to take over my business, call it Nickolai and Daughter. I don’t think she will, though I would like a family business.

She’s not afraid of anything.

I am.

In that mountain field, I looked the better part of a long summer day and the following morning for the Barlow knife. I knew it was the right place because of Anton’s photos he took when he went back once himself, of this clumber of rocks that looked just like a rowboat and the little birch whip Anton planted over Jackie. It had grown into a tree with fretful arms.

But I never found it.

The nail, I found. What, twenty-five years had passed. It should have been deep under a foot of dirt, what with winter snows and summer mudslides. But it was there, waiting for me. And though I missed Jackie every day, I knew that if I picked it up, all Jackie knew in the shadow of that mountain would fly up into me. I left the nail lie.

Many years later, one of the girls was talking about this band called that: Nine Inch Nails. Sharper than I meant, I asked her did she know what that name meant. One day, in the car, their song come on. Polly turned it up loud. It sounded like someone kicking a pipe organ to death.

I never told a living soul. Only Mama. She tried to make light, but her mouth squirmed helplessly on its own. She made the sign of the cross, the Orthodox cross—head, two hearts, stomach.

It was just chance he got the knife and me the bayonet. Papa didn’t favor either of us boys. What if Jackie got what was meant for me? Wasn’t that nail there—unmarked, uncovered, plain as a judgment? Left alone, all us Nickolais, we live long lives. Polly may call me “Gramps,” but I could have twenty more years. What if your fate got switched with someone so like you in every way it could fool God himself—God or whatever else there is that waits? What if that fate is there still, and knows my given name? It’s like Jackie said. There’s nothing can be done.

When I was a very young woman, and Ray Bradbury was already a senior citizen, I was trying to impress a guy I liked by reading a story to his little daughter. The story was called “I Sing the Body Electric!” If you happened to see a charming 1982 TV production that starred Edward Hermann, you might know it as
The Electric Grandmother
.

The story was more than I bargained for.

Like every child in school, I’d read
Dandelion Wine
and the short novel
The Halloween Tree
.

But returning to Ray Bradbury as an adult, I found myself unable to get through “I Sing the Body Electric” in one sitting. And it was not because the little girl, who was about six, was bored. She wasn’t.

It was I.

I wasn’t bored.

I was overcome—first by the writing and then by emotion I couldn’t suppress with my newfound adult authority. I sat in the rocking chair and sobbed, as I did the first time that I read that Charlotte was not only a true friend, but a good writer.