Green Shadows, White Whales. Ray Bradbury

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      “Get my wife,” husked the victim, “to call me three uncles and four nephews and my grandfather and Timothy Doolin, and you’re all invited to my wake!”

      “You was always a good sort, Peevey!”

      “There’s two gold coins put by in my best shoes at home. For me eyelids! There’s a third gold coin; buy me a fine black suit!”

      “It’s good as done!”

      “Be sure there’s plenty of whiskey. I’ll buy it meself!”

      There was a stir at the door.

      “Thank God,” cried Timulty. “It’s you, Father Leary. Father, quickly, you must give the Extremest form of Unction you ever gave!”

      “Don’t tell me my business!” said the priest in the door. “I got the Unctions, you provide the victim! On the double!”

      There was a cheer from the men as the victim was held high and run for the door where the priest directed traffic, then fled.

      With one body gone off the bar, the potential wake was over, the room empty save for myself, the Doc, the revived lad, and two softly cudgeling friends. Outside, you could hear the crowd putting the one serious result of the great collision into Timulty’s car.

      “Finish your drink,” the Doc advised.

      But I stood, looking numbly around at the pub: at the recovered bicyclist, seated, waiting for the crowd to come back and mill about him; seeing the blood-spotted floor, the two bicycles tilted near the door like props from a vaudeville turn, the dark night waiting outside with its improbable fog; listening to the roll and cadence and gentle equilibrium of these voices, balanced each in its own throat and environment.

      “Doctor,” I heard myself say as I placed the money on the bar, “do you often have auto wrecks—collisions between people in cars?”

      “Not in our town!” The Doc nodded scornfully east. “If you like that sort of thing, now, Dublin’s the very place!”

      Crossing the pub, the Doc took my arm as if to impart some secret which would change my fate. Thus steered, I found the stout inside me a shifting weight I must accommodate from side to side as the Doc breathed softly in my ear.

      “Look here now, son, admit it, you’ve traveled little in Ireland, right? Then listen! Biking to Maynooth, fog and ail, you’d best take it fast! Raise a din! Why? Scare the other cyclists and cows off the path, both sides! If you pump slow, why, you’ll creep up on and do away with dozens before they know what took them off! And another thing: when a bike approaches, douse your light—that is, if it’s working. Pass each other, lights out, in safety. Them devil’s own lights have put out more eyes and demolished more innocents than all of seeing’s worth. Is it clear now? Two things: speed, and douse your lights when bikes loom up!”

      At the door, I nodded. Behind me I heard the one victim, settled easy in his chair, working the stout around on his tongue, thinking, preparing, beginning his tale:

      “Well, I’m on me way home, blithe as you please, assailing downhill near the cross, when …”

      Outside, the Doc offered final advice.

      “Always wear a cap, lad, if you want to walk nights ever—on the roads, that is. A cap’ll save you the frightful migraines should you meet Kelly or Moran or anyone else hurtling full tilt the other way, full of fiery moss and hard-skulled from birth. Even on foot, these men are dangerous. So you see, there’s rules for pedestrians, too, in Ireland, and wear a cap at night is number one!” He handed me a cap.

      Without thinking, I took the brown tweed cap and put it on. Adjusting it, I looked out at the dark mist boiling across the night. I listened to the empty highway waiting for me ahead, quiet, quiet, quiet, but not quiet somehow. For hundreds of long strange miles up and down all of Ireland, I saw a thousand crossroads covered with a thousand fogs through which one thousand tweed-capped, gray-mufflered phantoms wheeled along in midair, singing, shouting, and smelling of Guiness stout.

      I blinked. The phantoms shadowed off. The road lay empty and dark and waiting.

      Taking a deep breath, I straddled my bike, pulled my cap down over my ears, shut my eyes, and pumped down the wrong side of the road toward some sanity never to be found.

Chapter 5

      The door swung wide at my knock.

      My director stood there in boots and riding pants and a silk shirt open at the neck to reveal an ascot tie. His eyes bulged like eggs to see me here. His chimpanzee mouth fell down a few inches, and the air came out of his lungs in an alcohol-tinged rush.

      “I’ll be damned!” he cried. “It’s you!”

      “Me,” I admitted meekly.

      “You’re late! You okay? What delayed you?”

      I waved behind me, up the road.

      “Ireland,” I said.

      “Christ, that explains it. Welcome!”

      He pulled me in. The door slammed.

      “You need a drink?”

      “Ah, God,” I said. Then hearing my newly acquired brogue, I spoke meticulously.

      “Yes, sir,” I said.

      As John, his wife Ricki, and I sat down to dinner, I gazed long and hard at the wee dead birds on a warm plate, their heads awry, their beady eyes half shut, and said:

      “Can I make a suggestion?”

      “Make it, kid.”

      “It’s about the Parsee Fedallah who runs as a character through the whole book. He ruins Moby Dick.”

      “Fedallah? That one? Well?”

      “Do you mind if right now, over our wine, we give all the best lines and acts to Ahab? And throw Fedallah overboard?”

      My director lifted his glass. “He’s thrown!”

      The weather outside was beginning to clear, the grass was lush and green in the dark beyond the French windows, and I was blushing warmly all over to think I was really here, doing this work, beholding my hero, imagining an incredible future as screen-writer for a genius.

      Somewhere along in the dinner the subject of Spain came up, almost casually, or perhaps John brought it up himself.

      I saw Ricki stiffen and pause in her eating, and then continue picking at her food as John went on about Hemingway and the bullfights and Franco and traveling to and from Madrid and Barcelona.

      “We were there just a month ago,” said John. “You really ought to go there sometime, kid,” he said. “Beautiful country. Wonderful people, it’s been a bad twenty years, but they’re getting back on their feet. Anyway, we had a little event there, didn’t we, Ricki? A small thing got out of hand.”

      Ricki СКАЧАТЬ