The Toynbee Convector Part 13

And all around, in the dark, I thought I heard apples and plums and peaches falling from unseen trees, the sound of boots. .h.i.tting my lawn, and the sound of pillows striking the gra.s.s like bodies, and the swarming of tapes tries of white silk or smoke flung across the disturbed air.

"Bill!"

"No!" he yelled. "I'm okay! They're all around. Get back! Yes Yes!"

There was a tumult in the garden. The hedges s.h.i.+vered with propeller wind. The gra.s.s lay down its nape. A tin watering can blew across the yard. Birds were flung from trees. Dogs all around the block yelped. A siren, from another war, sounded ten miles away. A storm had arrived, and was that thunder or field artillery?

And one last time, I heard Bill say, almost quietly, "1 didn't know, oh, G.o.d, I didn't know what I was doing." And a final fading sound of "Please."

And the rain fell briefly to mix with the tears on his face.

And the rain stopped and the wind was still.

"Well." He wiped his eyes, and blew his nose on his big hankie, and looked at the hankie as if it were the map of France. "It's time to go. Do you think I'll get lost again?"

"If you do, come here."

"Sure." He moved across the lawn, his eyes clear. "How much do I owe you, Sigmund?"

"Only this," I said. I gave him a hug. He walked out to the street. I followed to watch. When he got to the corner, he seemed to be con fused. He turned to his right, then his left. I waited and then called gently: "To your left, Bill!"

"G.o.d bless you, buster!" he said, and waved.

He turned and went into his house.

They found him a month later, wandering two miles from home. A month after that he was in the hospital, in France all the time now, and Rickenbacker in the bed to his right and von Richthofen in the cot to his left.

The day after his funeral the Oscar arrived, carried by his wife, to place on my mantel, with a single red rose beside it, and the picture of von Richthofen, and the other picture of the gang lined up in the summer of '18 and the wind blowing out of the picture and the buzz of planes.

And the sound of young men laughing as if they might go on forever.

Sometimes I come down at three in the morning when I can't sleep and I stand looking at Bui and his friends. And sentimental sap that I am, I wave a gla.s.s of sherry at them.

"Farewell, Lafayette," I say. "Lafayette, farewell."

And they all laugh as if it were the grandest joke that they ever heard.

Banshee

It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spider web and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if that city died in the night, no one would know.

I paid my driver and watched the taxi turn to go back to the living city, leaving me alone with twenty pages of final screenplay in my pocket, and my film director employer waiting inside. I stood in the midnight silence, breathing in Ireland and breathing out the damp coal mines in my soul.

Then, I knocked.

The door flew wide almost instantly. John Hampton was there, shoving a gla.s.s of sherry into my hand and hauling me in.

"Good G.o.d, kid, you got me curious. Get that coat off. Give me the script Finished it, eh? So you say. You got me curious. Glad you called from Dublin. The house is empty. Clara's in Paris with the kids. Well have a good read, knock the h.e.l.l out of your scenes, drink a bottle, be in bed by two and-what's that?"

The door still stood open. John took a step, tilted his head, closed his eyes, listened.

The wind rustled beyond in the meadows. It made a sound in the clouds like someone turning back the covers of a vast bed.

I listened. There was the softest moan and sob from somewhere off in the dark fields. Eyes still shut, John whispered, "You know what that is, kid?"

"What?"

"Tell you later. Jump."

With the door slammed, he turned about and, the grand lord of the empty manor, strode ahead of me in his hacking coat, drill slacks, polished half-boots, his hair, as always, windblown from swimming upstream or down with strange women in unfamiliar beds.

Planting himself on the library hearth, he gave me one of those beacon flashes of laugh, the teeth that beckoned like a lighthouse beam swift and gone, as he traded me a second sherry for the screenplay, which he had to seize from my hand.

"Let's see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm, has birthed. Sit. Drink. Watch."

He stood astride the hearthstones, warming his back side, leafing my ma.n.u.script pages, conscious of me drinking my sherry much too fast, shutting my eyes each time he let a page drop and flutter to the carpet. When he finished he let the last page sail, lit a small cigarillo and puffed it, staring at the ceiling, making me wait.

"You son of a b.i.t.c.h," he said at last, exhaling. "It's good. d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l, kid. It's good!" My entire skeleton collapsed within me. I had not expected such a midriff blow of praise.

"It needs a little cutting, of course!"

My skeleton rea.s.sembled itself.

"Of course," I said.

He bent to gather the pages like a great loping chimpanzee and turned. I felt he wanted to hurl them into the foe. He watched the flames and gripped the pages.

"Someday, kid," he said quietly, "you must teach me to write."

He was relaxing now, accepting the inevitable, full of true admiration.

"Someday," I said, laughing, "you must teach me to direct."

"The Beast will be our film, son. Quite a team."

He arose and came to clink gla.s.ses with me.

"Quite a team we are!" He changed gears. "How are the wife and kids?"

"They're waiting for me in Sicily where it's warm."

"Well get you to them, and sun, straight off! I-"

He froze dramatically, c.o.c.ked his head, and listened.

"Hey, what goes on-" he whispered.

I turned and waited.

This time, outside the great old house, there was the merest thread of sound, like someone running a fingernail over the paint, or someone sliding down out of the dry reach of a tree. Then there was the softest exhalation of a moan, followed by something like a sob.

John leaned in a starkly dramatic pose, like a statue in a stage pantomime, his mouth wide, as if to allow sounds entry to the inner ear. His eyes now unlocked to become as huge as hen's eggs with pretended alarm.

"Shall I tell you what that sound is, kid? A banshee!"

"A what?" I cried. / "Banshee!" he intoned. The ghosts of old women who haunt the roads an hour before someone dies. That's what that sound was!" He stepped to the window, raised the shade, and peered out "Shh! Maybe it means-us!"

"Cut it out, John!" I laughed, quietly.

"No, kid, no no." He fixed his gaze far into the darkness, savoring his melodrama. "I lived here ten years. Death's out there. The banshee always knows knows! Where were were we?" we?"

He broke the spell as simply as that, strode back to die hearth and blinked at my script as if it were a brand new puzzle.

"You ever figure, Doug, how much The Beast is like me? The hero plowing the seas, plowing women left and right, off round the world and no stops? Maybe that's why I'm doing it You ever wonder how many women I've had? Hundreds! I-" He stopped, for my lines on the page had shut him again. His face took fire as my words sank in.

"Brilliant!"

I waited, uncertainly.

"No, not that!" He threw my script aside to seize a copy of the London Times off the mantel. "This! A brilliant review of your new book of stories!"

"What?" I jumped. "Easy, kid. Ill read this grand review to you! You'll love it. Terrific!" My heart took water and sank. I could see another joke coming on or, worse, the truth disguised as a joke.

"Listen!"

John lifted the Times and read, like Ahab, from the holy text.

"'Douglas Rogers's stories may well be the huge success of American literature-'" John stopped and gave me an innocent blink. "How you like it so far, kid?"

"Continue, John," I mourned. I slugged my sherry back. It was a toss of doom that slid down to meet a collapse of will.

"'-but here in London,'" John intoned, "we ask more from our tellers of tales. Attempting to emulate the ideas of Kipling, the style of Maugham, the wit of Waugh, Rogers drowns somewhere in mid-Atlantic. This is ramshackle stuff, mostly bad shades of superior scribes. Douglas Rogers, go home!'"

I leaped up and ran, but John with a lazy flip of his underhand, tossed the Times into the fire where it flapped like a dying bird and swiftly died in flame and roaring sparks.

Imbalanced, staring down, I was wild to grab that d.a.m.ned paper out, but finally glad the thing was lost.

John studied my face, happily. My face boiled, my teeth ground shut. My hand, struck to the mantel, was a cold rock fist.

Tears burst from my eyes, since words could not burst from my aching mouth.

"What's wrong, kid?" John peered at me with true curiosity, like a monkey edging up to another sick beast in its cage. "You feeling poorly?"

"John, for Christ's sake!" I burst out. "Did you have to do that?"

I kicked at the fire, making the logs tumble and a great firefly wheel of sparks gush up the flue.

"Why, Doug, I didn't think-"

"Like h.e.l.l you didn't!" I blazed, turning to glare at him with tear-splintered eyes. "What's wrong with you?"

"h.e.l.l, nothing, Doug. It was a fine review, great! I just added a few lines, to get your goat!"

"I'll never know now!" I cried. "Look!"

I gave the ashes a final, scattering kick.

"You can buy a copy in Dublin tomorrow, Doug.

You'll see. They love you. G.o.d, I just didn't want you to get a big head, right. The joke's over. Isn't it enough, dear son, that you have just written the finest scenes you ever wrote in your life for your truly great screenplay?" John put his arm around my shoulder.

That was John: kick you in the tripes, then pour on the wild sweet honey by the larder ton.

"Know what your problem is, Doug?" He shoved yet another sherry in my trembling fingers. "Eh?"

"What?" I gasped, like a sniveling kid, revived and wanting to laugh again. "What?"

"The thing is, Doug-" John made his face radiant. His eyes fastened to mine like Svengali's. "You don't love me half as much as I love you!"

"Come on, John-"

"No, kid, I mean it G.o.d, son, I'd kill for you. You're the greatest living writer in the world, and I love you, heart and soul. Because of that, I thought you could take a little leg-pull. I see that I was wrong-"

"No, John," I protested, hating myself, for now he was making me apologize. It's all right."

"I'm sorry, kid, truly sorry-"

"Shut up!" I gasped a laugh. "I still love you. I-"

"That's a boy! Now-" John spun about, brisked his palms together, and shuffled and reshuffled the script pages like a cardsharp. "Let's spend an hour cutting this brilliant, superb scene of yours and-"