Bradbury Stories 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Part 16

The last bit of jigsaw fell in place.

Tonight, the first night of Lent.

Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Nick was sober.

All those other one hundred and forty-odd nights, Nick hadn't been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.

Oh, who really knows the Irish, say I, and which half of them is which? Nick?-who is Nick?-and what in the world is he? Which Nick's the real Nick, the one that everyone knows?

I will not think on it!

There is only one Nick for me. The one that Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her summer-grain-colored pubs astir and advance with the wind in the wheat and barley by night, you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as you roll by. That's Nick to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands. If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I'd point on down the road and tell where you turn to Heber Finn's.

The first night of Lent, and before you count nine, we're in Dublin! I'm out of the cab and it's puttering there at the curb and I lean in to put my money in the hands of my driver. Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly urging in the world, I look into that fine man's raw, strange, torchlike face.

"Nick," I said.

"Sir!" he shouted.

"Do me a favor," I said.

"Anything!" he shouted.

"Take this extra money," I said, "and buy the biggest bottle of Irish moss you can find. And just before you pick me up tomorrow night, Nick, drink it down, drink it all. Will you do that, Nick? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do that?"

He thought on it, and the very thought damped down the ruinous blaze in his face.

"Ya make it terrible hard on me," he said.

I forced his fingers shut on the money. At last he put it in his pocket and faced silently ahead.

"Good night, Nick," I said. "See you tomorrow."

"G.o.d willing," said Nick.

And he drove away.

LAFAYETTE, FAREWELL.

THERE WAS A TAP ON THE DOOR, the bell was not rung, so I knew who it was. The tapping used to happen once a week, but in the past few weeks it came every other day. I shut my eyes, said a prayer, and opened the door.

Bill Westerleigh was there, looking at me, tears streaming down his cheeks.

"Is this my house or yours?" he said.

It was an old joke now. Several times a year he wandered off, an eighty-nine-year-old man, to get lost within a few blocks. He had quit driving years ago because he had wound up thirty miles out of Los Angeles instead of at the center where we were. His best journey nowadays was from next door, where he lived with his wondrously warm and understanding wife, to here, where he tapped, entered, and wept. "Is this your house or mine?" he said, reversing the order.

"Mi casa es su casa." I quoted the old Spanish saying.

"And thank G.o.d for that!"

I led the way to the sherry bottle and gla.s.ses in the parlor and poured two gla.s.ses while Bill settled in an easy chair across from me. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose on a handkerchief which he then folded neatly and put back in his breast pocket.

"Here's to you, buster." He waved his sherry gla.s.s. "The sky is full of 'em. I hope you come back. If not, we'll drop a black wreath where we think your crate fell."

I drank and was warmed by the drink and then looked a long while at Bill.

"The Escadrille been buzzing you again?" I asked.

"Every night, right after midnight. Every morning now. And, the last week, noons. I try not to come over. I tried for three days."

"I know. I missed you."

"Kind of you to say, son. You have a good heart. But I know I'm a pest, when I have my clear moments. Right now I'm clear and I drink your hospitable health."

He emptied his gla.s.s and I refilled it.

"You want to talk about it?"

"You sound just like a psychiatrist friend of mine. Not that I ever went to one, he was just a friend. Great thing about coming over here is it's free, and sherry to boot." He eyed his drink pensively. "It's a terrible thing to be haunted by ghosts."

"We all have them. That's where Shakespeare was so bright. He taught himself, taught us, taught psychiatrists. Don't do bad, he said, or your ghosts will get you. The old remembrance, the conscience which doth make cowards and scare midnight men, will rise up and cry, Hamlet, remember me, Macbeth, you're marked, Lady Macbeth, you, too! Richard the Third, beware, we walk the dawn camp at your shoulder and our shrouds are stiff with blood."

"G.o.d, you talk purty." Bill shook his head. "Nice living next door to a writer. When I need a dose of poetry, here you are."

"I tend to lecture. It bores my friends."

"Not me, dear buster, not me. But you're right. I mean, what we were talking about. Ghosts."

He put his sherry down and then held to the arms of his easy chair, as if it were the edges of a c.o.c.kpit.

"I fly all the time now. It's nineteen eighteen more than it's nineteen eighty-seven. It's France more than it's the US of A. I'm up there with the old Lafayette. I'm on the ground near Paris with Rickenbacker. And there, just as the sun goes down, is the Red Baron. I've had quite a life, haven't I, Sam?"

It was his affectionate mode to call me by six or seven a.s.sorted names. I loved them all. I nodded.

"I'm going to do your story someday," I said. "It's not every writer whose neighbor was part of the Escadrille and flew and fought against von Richthofen."

"You couldn't write it, dear Ralph, you wouldn't know what to say."

"I might surprise you."

"You might, by G.o.d, you might. Did I ever show you the picture of myself and the whole Lafayette Escadrille team lined up by our junky biplane the summer of 'eighteen?"

"No," I lied, "let me see."

He pulled a small photo from his wallet and tossed it across to me. I had seen it a hundred times but it was a wonder and a delight.

"That's me, in the middle left, the short guy with the dumb smile next to Rickenbacker." Bill reached to point.

I looked at all the dead men, for most were long dead now, and there was Bill, twenty years old and lark-happy, and all the other young, young, oh, dear G.o.d, young men lined up, arms around each other, or one arm down holding helmet and goggles, and behind them a French 7-1 biplane, and beyond, the flat airfield somewhere near the Western Front. Sounds of flying came out of the d.a.m.ned picture. They always did, when I held it. And sounds of wind and birds. It was like a miniature TV screen. At any moment I expected the Lafayette Escadrille to burst into action, spin, run, and take off into that absolutely clear and endless sky. At that very moment in time, in the photo, the Red Baron still lived in the clouds; he would be there forever now and never land, which was right and good, for we wanted him to stay there always, that's how boys and men feel.

"G.o.d, I love showing you things." Bill broke the spell. "You're so d.a.m.ned appreciative. I wish I had had you around when I was making films at MGM."

That was the other part of William (Bill) Westerleigh. From fighting and photographing the Western Front half a mile up, he had moved on, when he got back to the States. From the Eastman labs in New York, he had drifted to some flimsy film studios in Chicago, where Gloria Swanson had once starred, to Hollywood and MGM. From MGM he had s.h.i.+pped to Africa to camera-shoot lions and the Watusi for King Solomon's Mines. Around the world's studios, there was no one he didn't know or who didn't know him. He had been princ.i.p.al cameraman on some two hundred films, and there were two bright gold Academy Oscars on his mantel next door.

"I'm sorry I grew up so long after you," I said. "Where's that photo of you and Rickenbacker alone? And the one signed by von Richthofen."

"You don't want to see them, buster."

"Like h.e.l.l I don't!"

He unfolded his wallet and gently held out the picture of the two of them, himself and Captain Eddie, and the single snap of von Richthofen in full uniform, and signed in ink below.

"All gone," said Bill. "Most of 'em. Just one or two, and me left. And it won't be long"-he paused-"before there's not even me."

And suddenly again, the tears began to come out of his eyes and roll down and off his nose.

I refilled his gla.s.s.

He drank it and said: "The thing is, I'm not afraid of dying. I'm just afraid of dying and going to h.e.l.l!"

"You're not going there, Bill," I said.

"Yes, I am!" he cried out, almost indignantly, eyes blazing, tears streaming around his gulping mouth. "For what I did, what I can never be forgiven for!"

I waited a moment. "What was that, Bill?" I asked quietly.

"All those young boys I killed, all those young men I destroyed, all those beautiful people I murdered."

"You never did that, Bill," I said.

"Yes! I did! In the sky, dammit, in the air over France, over Germany, so long ago, but Jesus, there they are every night now, alive again, flying, waving, yelling, laughing like boys, until I fire my guns between the propellers and their wings catch fire and spin down. Sometimes they wave to me, okay! as they fall. Sometimes they curse. But, Jesus, every night, every morning now, the last month, they never leave. Oh, those beautiful boys, those lovely young men, those fine faces, the great s.h.i.+ning and loving eyes, and down they go. And I did it. And I'll burn in h.e.l.l for it!"

"You will not, I repeat not, burn in h.e.l.l," I said.

"Give me another drink and shut up," said Bill. "What do you know about who burns and who doesn't? Are you Catholic? No. Are you Baptist? Baptists burn more slowly. There. Thanks."

I had filled his gla.s.s. He gave it a sip, the drink for his mouth meeting the stuff from his eyes.

"William." I sat back and filled my own gla.s.s. "No one burns in h.e.l.l for war. War's that way."

"We'll all burn," said Bill.

"Bill, at this very moment, in Germany, there's a man your age, bothered with the same dreams, crying in his beer, remembering too much."

"As well they should! They'll burn, he'll burn too, remembering my friends, the lovely boys who got themselves screwed into the ground when their propellers chewed the way. Don't you see? They didn't know. I didn't know. No one told them, no one told us!"

"What?"

"What war was. Christ, we didn't know it would come after us, find us, so late in time. We thought it was all over; that we had a way to forget, put it off, bury it. Our officers didn't say. Maybe they just didn't know. None of us did. No one guessed that one day, in old age, the graves would bust wide, and all those lovely faces come up, and the whole war with 'em! How could we guess that? How could we know? But now the time's here, and the skies are full, and the s.h.i.+ps just won't come down, unless they burn. And the young men won't stop waving at me at three in the morning unless I kill them all over again. Jesus Christ. It's so terrible. It's so sad. How do I save them? What do I do to go back and say, Christ, I'm sorry, it should never have happened, someone should have warned us when we were happy: war's not just dying, it's remembering and remembering late as well as soon. I wish them well. How do I say that, what's the next move?"

"There is no move," I said quietly. "Just sit here with a friend and have another drink. I can't think of anything to do. I wish I could. . . ."

Bill fiddled with his gla.s.s, turning it round and round.

"Let me tell you, then," he whispered. "Tonight, maybe tomorrow night's the last time you'll ever see me. Hear me out."

He leaned forward, gazing up at the high ceiling and then out the window where storm clouds were being gathered by wind.

"They've been landing in our backyards, the last few nights. You wouldn't have heard. Parachutes make sounds like kites, soft kind of whispers. The parachutes come down on our back lawns. Other nights, the bodies, without parachutes. The good nights are the quiet ones when you just hear the silk and the threads on the clouds. The bad ones are when you hear a hundred and eighty pounds of aviator hit the gra.s.s. Then you can't sleep. Last night, a dozen things. .h.i.t the bushes near my bedroom window. I looked up in the clouds tonight and they were full of planes and smoke. Can you make them stop? Do you believe me?"

"That's the one thing; I do believe."

He sighed, a deep sigh that released his soul.

"Thank G.o.d! But what do I do next?"

"Have you," I asked, "tried talking to them? I mean," I said, "have you asked for their forgiveness?"

"Would they listen? Would they forgive? My G.o.d," he said. "Of course! Why not? Will you come with me? Your backyard. No trees for them to get strung up in. Christ, or on your porch. . . ."

"The porch, I think."

I opened the living room French doors and stepped out. It was a calm evening with only touches of wind motioning the trees and changing the clouds.

Bill was behind me, a bit unsteady on his feet, a hopeful grin, part panic, on his face.

I looked at the sky and the rising moon.

"Nothing out here," I said.

"Oh, Christ, yes, there is. Look," he said. "No, wait. Listen."

I stood turning white cold, wondering why I waited, and listened.

"Do we stand out in the middle of your garden, where they can see us? You don't have to if you don't want."

"h.e.l.l," I lied. "I'm not afraid." I lifted my gla.s.s. "To the Lafayette Escadrille?" I said.

"No, no!" cried Bill, alarmed. "Not tonight. They mustn't hear that. To them, Doug. Them." He motioned his gla.s.s at the sky where the clouds flew over in squadrons and the moon was a round, white, tombstone world.