The October Country. Ray Bradbury

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СКАЧАТЬ down, took up the third, threw that down a good fifteen minutes later and found herself breathing, breathing stiffly and swiftly in her body and out of her mouth. She put her hand up to the back of her neck.

      Somewhere, a soft breeze was blowing.

      The hairs along the back of her neck slowly stood upright.

      She touched them with one pale hand as one touches the nape of a dandelion.

      Outside, in the plaza, the street lights rocked like crazy flashlights on a wind. Papers ran through the gutters in sheep flocks. Shadows penciled and slashed under the bucketing lamps now this way, now that, here a shadow one instant, there a shadow next, now no shadows, all cold light, now no light, all cold blue-black shadow. The lamps creaked on their high metal hasps.

      In the room her hands began to tremble. She saw them tremble. Her body began to tremble. Under the bright bright print of the brightest, loudest skirt she could find to put on especially for tonight, in which she had whirled and cavorted feverishly before the coffin-sized mirror, beneath the rayon skirt the body was all wire and tendon and excitation. Her teeth chattered and fused and chattered. Her lipstick smeared, one lip crushing another.

      Joseph knocked on the door.

      

      They got ready for bed. He had returned with the news that something had been done to the car and it would take time, he’d go watch them tomorrow.

      “But don’t knock on the door,” she said, standing before the mirror as she undressed.

      “Leave it unlocked then,” he said.

      “I want it locked. But don’t rap. Call.”

      “What’s wrong with rapping?” he said.

      “It sounds funny,” she said.

      “What do you mean, funny?”

      She wouldn’t say. She was looking at herself in the mirror and she was naked, with her hands at her sides, and there were her breasts and her hips and her entire body, and it moved, it felt the floor under it and the walls and air around it, and the breasts could know hands if hands were put there, and the stomach would make no hollow echo if touched.

      “For God’s sake,” he said, “don’t stand there admiring yourself.” He was in bed. “What are you doing?” he said. “What’re you putting your hands up that way for, over your face?”

      He put the lights out.

      She could not speak to him for she knew no words that he knew and he said nothing to her that she understood, and she walked to her bed and slipped into it and he lay with his back to her in his bed and he was like one of these brown-baked people of this far-away town upon the moon, and the real earth was off somewhere where it would take a star-flight to reach it. If only he could speak with her and she to him tonight, how good the night might be, and how easy to breathe and how lax the vessels of blood in her ankles and in her wrists and the under-arms, but there was no speaking and the night was ten thousand tickings and ten thousand twistings of the blankets, and the pillow was like a tiny white warm stove undercheek, and the blackness of the room was a mosquito netting draped all about so that a turn entangled her in it. If only there was one word, one word between them. But there was no word and the veins did not rest easy in the wrists and the heart was a bellows forever blowing upon a little coal of fear, forever illumining and making it into a cherry light, again, pulse, and again, an ingrown light which her inner eyes stared upon with unwanting fascination. The lungs did not rest but were exercised as if she were a drowned person and she herself performing artificial respiration to keep the last life going. And all of these things were lubricated by the sweat of her glowing body, and she was glued fast between the heavy blankets like something pressed, smashed, redolently moist between the white pages of a heavy book.

      And as she lay this way the long hours of midnight came when again she was a child. She lay, now and again thumping her heart in tambourine hysteria, then, quieting, the slow sad thoughts of bronze childhood when everything was sun on green trees and sun on water and sun on blond child hair. Faces flowed by on merry-go-rounds of memory, a face rushing to meet her, facing her, and away to the right; another, whirling in from the left, a quick fragment of lost conversation, and out to the right. Around and round. Oh, the night was very long. She consoled herself by thinking of the car starting tomorrow, the throttling sound and the power sound and the road moving under, and she smiled in the dark with pleasure. But then, suppose the car did not start? She crumpled in the dark, like a burning, withering paper. All the folds and corners of her clenched in about her and tick tick tick went the wristwatch, tick tick tick and another tick to wither on… .

      Morning. She looked at her husband lying straight and easy on his bed. She let her hand laze down at the cool space between the beds. All night her hand had hung in that cold empty interval between. Once she had put her hand out toward him, stretching, but the space was just a little too long, she couldn’t reach him. She had snapped her hand back, hoping he hadn’t heard the movement of her silent reaching.

      There he lay now. His eyes gently closed, the lashes softly interlocked like clasped fingers. Breathing so quietly you could scarce see his ribs move. As usual, by this time of morning, he had worked out of his pajamas. His naked chest was revealed from the waist up. The rest of him lay under cover. His head lay on the pillow, in thoughtful profile.

      There was a beard stubble on his chin.

      The morning light showed the white of her eyes. They were the only things in the room in motion, in slow starts and stops, tracing the anatomy of the man across from her.

      Each little hair was perfect on the chin and cheeks. A tiny hole of sunlight from the window-shade lay on his chin and picked out, like the spikes of a music-box cylinder, each little hair on his face.

      His wrists on either side of him had little curly black hairs, each perfect, each separate and shiny and glittering.

      The hair on his head was intact, strand by dark strand, down to the roots. The ears were beautifully carved. The teeth were intact behind the lips.

      “Joseph!” she screamed.

      “Joseph!” she screamed again, flailing up in terror.

      Bong! Bong! Bong! went the bell thunder across the street, from the great tiled cathedral!

      Pigeons rose in a papery white whirl, like so many magazines fluttered past the window! The pigeons circled the plaza, spiraling up. Bong! went the bells! Honk went a taxi horn! Far away down an alley a music box played “Cielito Lindo.”

      All these faded into the dripping of the faucet in the bath sink.

      Joseph opened his eyes.

      His wife sat on her bed, staring at him.

      “I thought—” he said. He blinked. “No.” He shut his eyes and shook his head. “Just the bells.” A sigh. “What time is it?”

      “I don’t know. Yes, I do. Eight o’clock.”

      “Good God,” he murmured, turning over. “We can sleep three more hours.”

      “You’ve got to get up!” she cried.

      “Nobody’s up. They won’t be to work at the garage until ten, you know that, you can’t rush these people; СКАЧАТЬ