He pushed open the door and let the hot wind of the early evening blow dust into his just-cleaned car. In front of him, the sun had set.
He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Five thirty.
Six and a half more hours for the world to survive, to prove he was right and Candy and all the other doomsday shouters were wrong.
He unbuckled his seat belt and climbed out of the car, standing in the middle of the road in the fading light and looking in both directions, fighting down the panic that threatened to choke him at any moment. His only hope of getting out of this stupid mess was to stay calm.
No point in trying anything until daylight. Even with the sun just barely set, he could feel a bite to the air. It was going to be a long, cold night.
He went back to the Jaguar and checked for anything that might help him pass the time more comfortably. Nothing. He kept the Jaguar’s trunk clean enough to eat out of, and he had not thought to bring either food or drink with him.
He had on light slacks, a light shirt, and not much else.
He went back to the car, buckled himself back into the driver’s seat, reclined the seat just slightly, and shut the door.
He had no idea just how cold it got later that evening. But it was already colder than he had ever experienced or imagined possible.
Elliot Leiferman: December 22, 2012, near Death Valley
The cold had drained Elliot more than he had ever imagined it could. His stomach was threatening to claw its way out of his body from hunger, and his lips were chapped from no water and the extreme dry air.
At sunrise, he’d managed to stagger out of the car and back onto the road. Then he had started walking back toward the roadblock at the same pace he used on the gym’s treadmill, a steady four miles per hour.
After an hour his speed had slowed and he knew, without a doubt, that he had no chance of making that walk clear back to the roadblock. The intense cold of the night was already being replaced by the hot, dry heat of the day, and the constant wind and blowing sand seemed to suck every ounce of moisture from his body.
His only hope was to return to the car and pray that someone either spotted him from the air or happened to drive by. Even if Candy noticed he was missing and reported that to the police, no one would know where to look. He’d never told anyone he used this old highway to take drives on.
He barely made it back to the car, again snapping himself into his seat with his seat belt and leaving the door open for ventilation.
Yesterday clearly hadn’t been the end of the world, at least not for Candy. But it might have been for him unless he got very, very lucky.
That night, after a long, very hot day, the night again got bitingly cold and thunderstorms echoed through the desert, sending flashes of bright white light to show him the vast wasteland and how hopeless his situation really was.
A flash flood also washed out the bridge near the roadblock that night, making it impossible for any car to travel the old county road again.
The next morning he again started the walk out, but this time turned around after just a mile, almost too weak to make it back to the car.
He slept off and on through the rest of the heat of the day and into the biting cold of the night, his seat belt holding him in place. The hood of his car and that fence post leaning against the bumper of his Jaguar became his entire world as he drifted in and out of consciousness.
By the third day, Elliot’s strength was gone. He could barely keep his eyes open as the intense heat of the day drained what will to live he had away.
His mind escaped the constant of the old fence post, drifting back to the good days with Candy, the fun they had had, the trips they had taken.
Candy had been right.
If he had just listened to her, drunk with her, eaten with her, gotten fat with her, enjoyed the last three years as she had done, he wouldn’t be sitting where he was, dying from the heat and thirst and hunger, staring at an old fence post.
He had caused the world, as he and Candy knew it, to end on the last day of the Mayan calendar.
He had caused it by not believing it could happen.
Yet it had. The world had ended.
“I’m so sorry, Candy,” he managed to whisper through cracked, dry lips.
As he slipped off into his last sleep, the sun beating down on the top of his Jaguar, he asked one last question, hoping somehow that Candy could hear him all the way out in Malibu.
How did the Mayans know?
An old, rotting, time-worn fence post resting against the perfect metal bumper of an expensive car. A man facing his final moments, staring at the post, wondering why he had doubted the seers, the prophets, the prophecies about the end of the world. They had all been right. So very right. His world had ended on December 21, 2012. . . in the Twilight Zone.
THOUGHTFUL
BREATHS
Peter Crowther
Come meet Boswell and Irma Mendholsson, both of them—in the nomenclature of the day—“good people” . . . everyday folks with everyday dreams and, particularly in Boswell’s case, a yearning for away-from-it-all locations. But, when life’s power pitcher throws an unexpected curveball at them, Boz and Irma get to sample the rare and exotic delights on offer in that most fascinating of all off-the-beaten-track retreats—the Twilight Zone.
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath;
A traveller between life and death.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,
She Was a Phantom of Delight (1807)
In Forest Plains, just the way it is in many thousands of communities the length and breadth of these United States (and, for that matter, all around the world), the quality of life centers on the relationships formed by people with other people. Small towns, campuses, apartment buildings, and office blocks all thrive with the buzz of connecting.
There is an indefinable magic in the way we react with others, whether those relationships are business-orientated contacts, simple platonic friendships, schoolyard liaisons, tempestuous love affairs, or the gentle settling together of two people committed to the long haul. But it’s just one of these—the last one—that we’re concerned with here.
Boswell Raymond Mendholsson met Irma Jayne Petschek (“—and that’s Jayne with a ‘Y,’ ” Irma would always say, her voice Katharine Hepburn-ballsy, hand on hip and chin thrust out) when Boz worked the summer at the water purification plant over on the interstate about sixteen miles out of the Plains. It was 1947, the war over two years and Boz looking to find some stability with a regular job, toying with the idea of the GI Bill and trying to forget Iwo Jima. He was twenty-three years old, a look of a young Robert Taylor—complete with widow’s peak and steely-eyed stare—his face gradually smoothing over the telltale craters of acne, and his feet once more finding their spring.
Irma was the third-stringer from a six-sister family of semi-strict Presbyterian stock come down from Providence in the 1930s when jobs were hard everywhere, not just in the Dust Bowl that that Guthrie feller sang about. She had a wide mouth, full lips, a front tooth—the left one as you faced her—that curled over its partner slightly, legs fit to make Betty Grable throw in her hose, and a laugh that sounded like water running across wind chimes.
Boz thought Irma was the cat’s pj’s, and when Irma caught sight of Boz—no matter how far away he was—her knees buckled fit to snap right in two, like they were made of modeling clay that old Miss Timberlake gave out to her first- and second-graders over at the schoolhouse.
When a job came up at the real estate office down in Forest Plains, Boz applied. He didn’t know diddly about selling houses, but he had an air to him that seemed to calm people right down. Folks trusted him and that counts for a lot in real estate selling, just as it counts for a lot in life.
Those were the days when fellows took candy and flowers around to their dates’ houses, promised to have them home by a reasonable hou
r, and took them maybe to the soda shoppe on Main Street or out to the “WI-I-I-IDE SCREEN” drive-in over on the canal road. There was no fooling around permitted by the Screen’s head honcho, the matriarchal Josepha Hjortsburg who, ever since the death of her beloved Gabby out in the Pacific, wouldn’t show war movies and so made things difficult for herself and her clientele with a string of romances and comedies that tended to make the kids more amorous than when they’d been waiting in line to buy tickets. But, through making constant rounds, the flashlight-laden Josepha made sure all the canoodling stayed right up there on the screen and not out in the parked cars.
On those dates when Boz and Irma made it out to the Screen, Boz liked the newsreels the most. He might have had it with war—which, like most folks in those magical far-off days of the late 1940s, he surely had—but the lure of far-off places burned inside him like a furnace. Boz maintained that joining the fighting forces was the best way to see the world and he figured there was no way he was ever likely to make it over to ride a trolley car in ’Frisco, never mind climbing the age-worn steps of the pyramids or sailing the canals of waterlogged Venice. But Irma would squeeze his hand tight when he sounded kind of down-in-the-mouth and she’d tell him that it was good to have a dream. “A person should always have something to aim for in life,” the twenty-year-old Irma would proclaim sagely, nodding at the words as though she were underlining them a mite. “One day,” she’d finish off, letting the words trail away all by themselves. And Boz would squeeze her right back and consider leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek, risking the flashlight treatment from Josepha.
The “one day” that Irma had long dreamed of—even before she knew Boswell Raymond Mendholsson existed—came on a drizzly fall day in 1949, with the bottle-green leaves of summer turning russet-red and muddy brown. That was the day that Irma, resplendent in a wedding gown (specially made by Boz’s Auntie Mildred), walked slowly down the aisle of the Forest Plains Presbyterian Church on Canal Street, her arm in her father Ted’s and him looking like the cat that got the cream while his wife, Annie, sitting in the front pew on the left, looked at the two of them with tears rolling down her cheeks onto an angel’s smile. Boz himself glanced over his shoulder, at first a little nervously, and then all the nerves faded away like ice in a glass of summertime lemonade.
Married life passed without a hitch—so long as you don’t count the little problems we all get from time to time—but money was never something the Mendholssons had in abundance. Truth to tell, things started off tight and just got tighter. But they doted on each other right from when the two of them said, breathlessly, “I do,” their hearts skipping more beats than Joe Morello. They meant it then and they never had cause to go back on it in all the days and weeks and months and years that were to follow . . . happy times indeed.
Life for the Mendholssons seemed like a summer meadow—beautiful, fragrant, and set to go on forever. They were rich in ways that had nothing at all to do with money . . . mainly just through their own company. Irma kind of drifted away from her family and even her friends—excepting Jeannie Gustavson and her husband, Ray—and Boz pretty much followed suit. He did, however, stay in close contact with Phil Defantino. A childhood friend and Boz’s best man, Phil had landed a job with ICI Industries down in Philadelphia and he rose quickly through the ranks at a time of great expansion for the company. Within less than two years, Phil was spending a lot of time away from home . . . initially traveling the U.S. and then moving on to worldwide travel to cities that Boz had only ever read about, advising small businesses on how to maximize their profits.
Whenever Phil was home for any length of time, he and his wife Jackie would come out to Forest Plains, the old hometown, to spend time with Boz and Irma. At first, they stayed at the house, giving Boz more time to quiz Phil about his latest trips, but when the house got a little more “crowded” with the so-called patter of tiny feet, they stayed at the Holiday Inn over on the interstate. “I reckon I know more about Holiday Inns than the folks who work in them!” Phil said on more than one occasion.
Truth to tell, Irma was a little embarrassed about having house-guests who stayed in the local hotel, but Phil always let her know the plain and simple truth: that bringing up a family needs all your attention—and that, according to Phil, meant you need folks getting under your feet like Custer needed more injuns! Phil and Jackie never had children and neither Boz nor Irma ever felt comfortable in asking them why. They had their suspicions, of course, but they believed that if Phil and Jackie had ever wanted to discuss it, then they would have.
The first product of the Mendholssons’ union came into the world kicking and squawking just a couple of days before Thanksgiving 1950, and Irma and Boz had a lot to be thankful for when the Thursday arrived. Sitting alongside Irma’s hospital bed, with little James cradled in his wife’s arms, Boz told her that he loved her more than anything else in the world, the tears in his eye-corners underlining that a few times.
While the arrival of Baby James served to erode still further the already shaky Mendholsson fortunes, the tough financial situation served only to deepen Boz’s determination to provide for his new family. Thus he took an additional job in the kitchens of the Forest Plains Bar ’n’ Grill, Irma having nixed other ideas of additional income by virtue of the fact that it wouldn’t do for folks to see the guy who was trying to interest them in property also serving drinks at Max’s Bar over on the Canal Road, or mowing lawns on Saturdays and Sundays. But at night, after chores were done, Boz would disappear into his den—a lavishly mysterious title for a small room that he’d decked out with shelving—where he sat and perused travel books and city guides and the occasional foreign language tome.
It was in here that, after a visit from Phil and Jackie to see the new baby, Boz discovered that Phil had left his billfold—he remembered Phil taking it out of his pants pocket because it was giving him a numb backside. But when he’d called his friend to give him the good news, Phil had said blankly, “Not my billfold, Boz. Must be yours.” Boz had laughed at that. He’d flipped it open while he was talking on the phone and there were five twenty-dollar bills in there. “Well,” Phil had said—and was that just a touch of a smile Boz heard in his friend’s voice?—“whyn’t you check if there’s a name in there?” Boz did just that and discovered a handwritten card—handwritten in the unmistakable scrawl of Phil Defantino—proclaiming THIS BILLFOLD AND ALL THAT IT CONTAINS IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF BOSWELL MENDHOLSSON. “Oh, Phil . . .” was all that Boz could think of to say.
Then, in 1952, the day before Independence, along came Nicola, a gloriously raven-haired companion for young James and whose cherubic face and open, trusting smile filled Boz and Irma with levels of love that even they had not dreamed possible. As the summer was already showing signs of turning to fall, Boz discovered another “lost” billfold.
Evenings and weekends, the Mendholssons walked their charges along the park paths and the sidewalks, passing the time of day with anyone they happened to meet along the way. These were the magical days of America, a time of peace and plenty, when everything was possible. A time when the picket fences of Rockwell’s Post covers could still be found in pretty much any small town up and down and left and right across the country. A time when guys still presented their dates with candies and flowers. A time when the human spirit still retained some dignity.
Dignity, the Mendholssons had in abundance. Money—with the exception of the miraculous billfolds that continued to show up in Boz’s inner sanctum of travel tomes—they had not. But Irma and Boz never allowed their restricted finances to affect their home life, and their house over on Cedar Avenue rang constantly with the sound of happiness . . . a sound that was a tinkle of baby chuckles for a while, then preschool mirth, then youthful laughter until at last, in the closing days of the sixties—a troubled decade, in Boz’s eyes, when the magical and exotic landscapes on the other side of the world took on a sinister cloak of danger and threat—just a couple of
weeks after man set foot on the moon, the quartet was reduced to a trio with the departure of James Mendholsson to Boston U.
They were all happy for him, of course—after all, what had they strived for so hard all of their lives except to improve their children’s lot?—but on the day he drove their son out of Forest Plains, the air in Boz’s old Pontiac was so thick you’d have needed a knife to cut it.
Now forty-six years old, with the big five-oh straddling the horizon like a gunfighter who had called him out onto Main Street for a showdown that Boz knew he couldn’t win, Boswell Mendholsson retreated into the den still more, leafing through books on Paris and Provence, the waterways of Venice, the jungles of Peru, and wistful train journeys through China and mainland Europe. In the pages of these books—repeatedly- and often-read pages that Boz would occasionally hold up to his face as he breathed in the imagined aroma of the far-off lands the words described—Boz’s life was different. It wasn’t that he didn’t love or want Irma—the truth of the matter was that he loved and wanted her more than he had ever done—but rather that he felt, if only a tad, unfulfilled. Even the occasional visits from Phil and his tales of airport lounges and cab rides in alien cities (plus the inevitable Grand Den Discovery, which, in line with inflation, had increased in value over the years) did little to assuage Boz’s feeling of despondency. To put it plain and simple, he was getting older. Old, even.
The specter of the mortality gunslinger darkened a little more when, one sunny morning in April 1973, Nicola announced that she and Bobby Eads were planning to marry. Irma shrieked with happiness like a drunken banshee, her arms lifting and lowering as though she were about to take off and soar right up into the sky. Boz meanwhile adopted a fixed smile that made him look like he’d suddenly discovered a worm in that last bite of apple. He had known, of course, that Nicola and Bobby were getting kind of serious but “kind of serious” in Boz’s book was a mighty long way from actual marriage. But as he watched his wife and suddenly-not-so-baby-anymore baby daughter dancing around the worn work surfaces in Irma’s kitchen, Boz couldn’t hold back the out-and-out Cheshire cat grin and he leapt into his women’s midst, took their proffered hands as they all danced around like witches around a cauldron on All Hallows’.
More Stories from the Twilight Zone Page 9