Green Shadows, White Whales. Ray Bradbury

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СКАЧАТЬ groped through the fog and, immersed in the night beyond Heeber Finn’s, made direction by the heavy clubbing of shoes and a rally of voices ahead. A hundred yards off in eternity, the men approached, grunting whispers: “Easy now!” “Ah, the shameful blight!” “Hold on, don’t jiggle him!”

      I was flung aside by a steaming lump of men who swept suddenly from the fog, bearing atop themselves a crumpled object. I glimpsed a bloodstained and livid face high up there, then someone cracked my flashlight down.

      By instinct, sensing the far whiskey-colored light of Heeber Finn’s, the catafalque surged on toward that fixed and familiar harbor.

      Behind came dim shapes and a chilling insect rattle.

      “Who’s that!” I cried.

      “Us, with the vehicles,” someone husked. “You might say we got the collision.”

      The flashlight fixed them. I gasped. A moment later, the battery failed.

      But not before I had seen two village lads jogging along with no trouble at all, easily, lightly, toting under their arms two ancient black bicycles minus front and tail lights.

      “What …?” I said.

      But the lads trotted off, the accident with them. The fog closed in. I stood abandoned on an empty road, my flashlight dead in my hand.

      By the time I opened the door at Heeber Finn’s, both “bodies,” as they called them, had been stretched on the bar.

      And there was the crowd lined up, not for drinks, but blocking the way so the Doc had to shove sidewise from one to another of these relics of blind driving by night on the misty roads.

      “One’s Pat Nolan,” whispered Mike. “Not working at the moment. The other’s Mr. Peevey from Maynooth, in candy and cigarettes mostly.” Raising his voice: “Are they dead, now, Doc?”

      “Ah, be still, won’t you?” The Doc resembled a sculptor troubled at finding some way to finish up two full-length marble statues at once. “Here, let’s put one victim on the floor!”

      “The floor’s a tomb,” said Heeber Finn. “He’ll catch his death down there. Best leave him up where the warm air gathers from our talk.”

      “But,” I said quietly, confused, “I’ve never heard of an accident like this in all my life. Are you sure there were absolutely no cars? Only these two men on their bikes?”

      “Only?” Mike shouted. “Great God, man, a fellow working up a drizzling sweat can pump along at sixty kilometers. With a long downhill glide his bike hits ninety or ninety-five! So here they come, these two, no front or tail lights—”

      “Isn’t there a law against that?”

      “To hell with government interference! So here the two come, no lights, flying home from one town to the next. Thrashing like Sin Himself’s at their behinds! Both going opposite ways but both on the same side of the road. Always ride the wrong side of the road, it’s safer, they say. But look on these lads, fair destroyed by all that official palaver. Why? Don’t you see? One remembered it, but the other didn’t! Better if the officials kept their mouths shut! For here the two be, dying.”

      “Dying?” I stared.

      “Well, think on it, man! What stands between two able-bodied hell-bent fellas jumping along the path from Kilcock to Maynooth? Fog! Fog is all! Only fog to keep their skulls from bashing together. Why, look, when two chaps hit at a cross like that, it’s like a strike in bowling alleys, tenpins flying! Bang! There go your friends, nine feet up, heads together like dear chums met, flailing the air, their bikes clenched like two tomcats. Then they all fall down and just lay there, feeling around for the Dark Angel.”

      “Surely these men won’t …”

      “Oh, won’t they? Why, last year alone in all the Free State no night passed some soul did not meet in fatal collision with another!”

      “You mean to say over three hundred Irish bicyclists die every year, hitting each other?”

      “God’s truth and a pity.”

      “I never ride my bike nights.” Heeber Finn eyed the bodies. “I walk.”

      “But still then the damn bikes run you down!” said Mike. “A wheel or afoot, some idiot’s always panting up doom the other way. They’d sooner split you down the seam than wave hello. Oh, the brave men I’ve seen ruined or half ruined or worse, and headaches their lifetimes after.” Mike trembled his eyelids shut. “You might almost think, mightn’t you, that human beings was not made to handle such delicate instruments of power.”

      “Three hundred dead each year?” I was dazed.

      “And that don’t count the ‘walking wounded’ by the thousands every fortnight who, cursing, throw their bikes in the bog forever and take government pensions to salve their all-but-murdered bodies.”

      “Should we stand here talking?” I gestured helplessly toward the victims. “Is there a hospital?”

      “On a night with no moon,” Heeber Finn continued, “best walk out through the middle of fields, and be damned to the evil roads! That’s how I have survived into this my fifth decade.”

      “Ah …” The men stirred restlessly.

      The Doc, sensing he had withheld information too long, feeling his audience drift away, now snatched their attention back by straightening up briskly and exhaling.

      “Well!”

      The pub quickened into silence.

      “This chap here …” The Doc pointed. “Bruises, lacerations, and agonizing backaches for two weeks running. As for the other lad, however … ” And here the Doc let himself scowl for a long moment at the paler one there, looking rouged, waxed, and ready for final rites. “Concussion.”

      “Concussion!”

      The quiet wind rose and fell in the silence.

      “He’ll survive if we run him quick now to Maynooth Clinic. So whose car will volunteer?”

      The crowd turned as a body toward Timulty. I stared, remembering the front of Heeber Finn’s pub, where seventeen bicycles and one automobile were parked. “Mine!” cried Timulty. “Since it’s the only vehicle!”

      “There! A volunteer! Quick now, hustle this victim—gently!— to Timulty’s wreck!”

      The men reached out to lift the body, but froze when I coughed. I circled my hand to all and tipped my cupped fingers to my lips. All gasped in soft surprise. The gesture was hardly done when drinks foamed down the bar.

      “For the road!”

      And now even the luckier victim, suddenly revived, face like cheese, found a mug gentled to his hand with whispers.

      “Here, lad, here. Tell us …”

      “What happened, eh? Eh?”

      “Send,” СКАЧАТЬ