"Out looking for a man," said Vickers.
"Jay, don't be funny," she said. "Please don't be funny."
"I'm not being funny. An old man, a neighbor of mine, disappeared. I've been out helping look for him."
"Did you find him?"
"No, we didn't."
"That's too bad," she said. "Was he a nice old man?"
"The best."
"Maybe you'll find him later."
"Maybe we will," said Vickers. "Why are you upset?"
"You remember what Crawford said?"
"He said a lot of things."
"But what he said about what would come next. You remember that?"
"I can't say that I do."
"Well, he said clothing would be next. A dress for fifty cents."
"Now that you mention it," said Vickers, "it all comes back to me."
"Well, it happened."
"What happened?"
"A dress. Only it wasn't fifty cents. It was fifteen!"
"You bought one?"
"No, I didn't, Jay. I was too scared to buy one. I was walking down Fifth Avenue and there was a sign in the window, a little discreet sign that said the dress on the model could be had for fifteen cents. Can you imagine that, Jay! A dress for fifteen cents on Fifth Avenue!"
"No, I can't," Vickers confessed.
"It was such a pretty dress," she said. "It shone. Not with stones or tinsel. The material shone. Like it was alive. And the color… Jay, it was the prettiest dress I have ever seen. And I could have bought it for fifteen cents, but I didn't have the nerve. I remembered what Crawford had told us and I stood there looking at the dress and I got cold all over."
"Well, that's too bad," said Vickers. "Buck up your nerve and go back in the morning. Maybe they'll still have it."
"But that isn't the point at all, Jay. Don't you see? It proves what Crawford told us. It proves that he knew what he was talking about, that there really is a conspiracy, that the world really does have its back against the wall."
"And what do you want me to do about it?"
"Why, I–I don't know, Jay. I thought you would be interested."
"I am," said Vickers. "Very interested."
"Jay, there's something going on."
"Keep your shirt on, Ann," said Vickers. "Sure, there's something going on."
"What is it, Jay? I know it's more than Crawford said. I don't know how —»
"I don't know, either. But it's big — it's bigger than you and I can handle. I have to think it out."
"Jay," she said, and the sharp tenseness was gone from her voice. "Jay, I feel better now. It was nice to talk to you."
"You go out in the morning," he told her, "and buy up an armful of those fifteen-cent dresses. Get there early ahead of the crowd."
"Crowd? I don't understand."
"Look, Ann," Vickers said, "when the news gets around, Fifth Avenue is going to have a crush of bargain hunters like nothing you've ever seen before."
"I guess you're right at that," she said. "Phone me tomorrow, Jay?"
"I'll phone."
They said good night and he hung up, stood for a moment, trying to remember the next thing that he should do. There was supper to get and the papers to get in and he'd better see if there was any mail.
He went out the door and walked down the path to the mailbox on the gatepost. He took out a slim handful of letters and leafed through them swiftly, but there was so little light he could not make out what they were. Advertising mostly, he suspected. And a few bills, although it was a bit early in the month for the bills to start.
Back in the house he turned on the desk lamp and laid the pile of letters on the desk. Beneath the lamp lay the litter of tubes and discs that he had picked up from the floor the night before. He stood there staring at them, trying to bring them into correct time perspective. It had only been the night before, but now it seemed as if it were many weeks ago that he had thrown the paperweight and there had been a crunching sound that had erupted with a shower of tiny parts rolling on the floor.
He stood there then, as he stood now, and knew there was an answer somewhere, a clue, if only he knew where to find it.
The phone rang again and he went to answer it. It was Eb, asking: "What do you think of it?"
"I don't know what to think," said Vickers.
"He's in the river," Eb maintained. "That is where he is. That's what I told the sheriff. They'll start dragging tomorrow morning as soon as the sun is up."
"I don't know," said Vickers, "Maybe you are right, but I don't think that he is dead."
"Why don't you think so, Jay?"
"No reason in the world," said Vickers. "No actual, solid reason. Just a hunch."
"The reason I called," Eb told him, "is that I got some of those Forever cars. Came in this afternoon. Thought maybe you might want one of them."
"I hadn't thought much about it, Eb, to tell you the truth. But I might be interested."
"I'll bring one up in the morning," said Eb. "Give you a chance to try it out. See what you think of it."
"That'll be fine," said Vickers.
"All right, then," said Eb. "See you in the morning."
Vickers went back to the desk and picked up the letters. There were no bills. Of the seven letters, six were advertising matter, the seventh was in a plain white envelope addressed in a craggy hand.
He tore it open. There was one sheet of white note paper, neatly folded.
He unfolded it and read:
_My dear friend Vickers:_
_I hope that you are not unduly worn out by the strenuous efforts which you undoubtedly will have thrown into the search for me today._
_ I feel very keenly that my actions will impose upon the kind people of this excellent village a most unseemly amount of running around to the neglect of their business, although I do not doubt that they will enjoy it most thoroughly._
_I feel that I can trust your understanding not to reveal the fact of this letter nor to engage any further than is necessary to convince our neighbors of your kindly intentions in what must necessarily be a futile hunt for me. I can assure you that I am most happy and that only the necessity of the moment made me do what I have done._
_ I am writing this note for two reasons: Firstly, to quiet any fear you may feel for me. Secondly, to presume upon our friendship to the point of giving some unsolicited advice._
_ It has seemed to me for some time now that you have been confining yourself too closely to your work and that a holiday might be an excellent idea for someone in your situation. It might be that a visit to your childhood scene, to walk down the paths you walked when you were a boy, might clear away the dust and make you see with clearer eyes._
_ Your friend,_
_Horton Flanders._
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I WILL not go, thought Vickers. I cannot go. The place means nothing to me now and I do not want it to mean anything now that it is forgotten — now that it is forgotten after all these years of trying to forget it.
He could have shut his eyes and seen it — the yellow clay of the rain-washed cornfields, the roads all white with dust winding through the valleys and along the ridgetops, the lonely mailboxes sitting on forlornly leaning fence posts stuck into the ground, the sagging gates, the weather-beaten houses, the scraggy cattle coming down the lane, following the rutted path that their hoofs had made, the mangy dogs that ran out and barked at you when you drove past their farms.
If I go back they'll ask me why I came and how I'm getting on. "Too bad about your Pa, he was a damn good man." They'd sit on the upturned boxes in front of the general store and chew slowly on their cuds of tobacco and spit out on the sidewalk and look at him out of slanted eyes and say: "So you write books. By God, some day I'll have to read one of your books; I never heard of them."
He'd go to the cemetery and stand before a stone with his hat held in his hand and listen to the wind moan in the mighty pines that grew all around the cemetery fence and he'd
think, if only I could have amounted to something in time that you could have known, so that the two of you could have been proud of me and bragged about me a little when the neighbors dropped in for a visit — but of course, I never did.
He'd drive the roads he'd known when he was a boy and stop the car beside the creek and get out and climb the barbed wire fence and walk down to the hole where he always caught the chubs and the stream would be a trickle and the hole would be a muddy widening of the trickle and the tree where he had sat would be gone in some spring-time flood. He'd look at the hills and they would be familiar and at the same time strange, and he would try to puzzle out what was wrong with them and he could not tell for the life of him what was wrong with them and he'd go on, thinking about the creek and the unfamiliar hills, feeling lonelier by the minute. And finally in the end, he'd flee. He would press the accelerator to the boards and cling to the wheel and try not to think.
And he would — finally, he admitted it — he would drive past the great brick house with the portico and the fanlights above the door. He would drive very slowly and he would look at it and he'd see how the shutters had come loose and were sagging and how the paint was flaking and how the roses that had bloomed beside the gate had died out in some cold and blustery winter.
I won't go, he said. I will not go.
And yet, perhaps, he should.
It might clear away the dust, Flanders had written, might make you see with clearer eyes.
Might make him see _what_ with clearer eyes?
Was there something back there in his boyhood lanes that might explain this situation that had burst upon him, some hidden fact, some abstract symbol, that he had missed before? Some thing, perhaps, that he had seen before, even many times, and had not recognized?
Or was he imagining things, reading significance into words that had no significance? How could he be sure that Horton Flanders with his shabby suit and ridiculous cane had anything to do with the story that Crawford had spelled out about humanity standing with its back against the wall?
There was no evidence at all.
Yet Flanders had disappeared and had written him a letter.
Clear away the dust, Flanders had written, so that you may see the better. And all that he might have meant was that he should clear away the dust so that he could write the better, so that the manuscript which lay upon the desk might be the better piece of work because its creator had looked on life and fellow man with eyes that were clear of dust. The dust of prejudice, perhaps, or the dust of vanity, or simply the dust of not seeing as sharply as one should.
Vickers put down a hand on the manuscript and ruffled its pages with his thumb, an absent, almost loving gesture. So little done, he thought, so much still to do.
Now, for two whole days, he'd done nothing. Two full days wasted.
To do the writing that should be done, he must be able to sit down calmly and concentrate, shut out the world and then let the world come in to him, a little at a time, a highly selected world that could be analyzed and set up with a clarity and sharpness that could not be mistaken.
Calmly, he thought. My God, how can a man be calm when he has a thousand questions and a thousand doubts probing at his mind?
Fifteen cent dresses, Ann had said on the telephone. Fifteen cent dresses in a shop on Fifth Avenue.
There was some factor he was overlooking, some factor in plain sight waiting to be seen.
First there was the girl who had come to breakfast and after that the paper he had read. Then he'd gone down to get his car and Eb had told him about the Forever car and because his car had not been ready he'd gone to the drugstore corner to catch a bus and Mr. Flanders had come and joined him as he stared at the display in the gadget shop and Mr. Flanders had said — Wait a second. He had gone to the drugstore corner to get a bus.
There was something about a bus, something that tugged at his mind.
He had gotten on the bus and sat down in a seat next to the window. He'd sat down in a seat and looked out the window and no one else had come and sat down with him. He'd ridden to the city in a seat all by himself.
That is it, he thought, and even as he thought it he felt a wild elation and then a sense of horror at an incident forgotten and he stood for a moment unmoving, trying desperately to blot out the incident from so many years ago. He stood and waited and it would not blot out and there was no getting away from it and he knew what he must do.
He turned to the desk and pulled out the top drawer on the left hand side and slowly, methodically took out the contents, one by one. He did this with all the drawers and did not find what he was looking for.
Somewhere, he thought, I'll find it. It was a thing I would not throw away.
The attic, perhaps. One of the boxes in the attic.
He climbed the stairs and, reaching the top, blinked at the glow of the unshielded light bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a chill in the air, and the starkness of the rafters, coming down on either side like a mighty jaw about to close on him, went with the alien chill.
Vickers moved from the stairs across the floor to the storage boxes pushed against the eaves. In which one of the three would it be most likely to be found? There was no telling.
So he started with the first and he found it half way down, under the old pair of bird shooters that he had hunted for last fall and had finally given up for lost.
He opened the notebook and thumbed through it until he came to the pages that he was seeking.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IT MUST have been going on for years before he noticed it. At first, having noticed it, he speculated on it somewhat idly. Then he began a detailed observation, and when the observation bore out the idle speculation he tried to laugh it off, but it wasn't a thing that you could laugh off. He went through the observation again, for a period of a month, keeping a written record of the facts he noted.
When the written record bore out the evidence of his earlier observation, he had tried to tell himself it was imagination, but by now he had it down in black and white and he knew there must be something to it.
The record said that it was worse than he had first imagined, that it concerned not only one phase of his existence, but many different phases. As the evidence accumulated, he stood aghast that he had not noticed it before, because it was something which should have been obvious from the very first.
The whole thing started with the reluctance of his fellow passengers to ride with him on the bus. He lived, at the time, at an old ramshackle boarding house at the edge of town near the end of the line. He'd get on in the morning and, being one of the few who boarded at that point, would take his favorite seat.
The bus would fill up gradually as the stops were made, but it would be almost the end of the run before he'd have a seat companion. It didn't bother him, of course; in fact, he rather liked it to be that way, for then he could pull his hat down over his eyes and slump down in the seat and think and probably even doze a little without ever considering the need of civility. Not that he would have been especially civil in any case, he now admitted. The hour that he went to work was altogether too early for that.
People would get on the bus and they'd sit with other people, not necessarily people whom they knew, for sometimes, Vickers noticed, they didn't exchange a single word for the entire ride with their seat mate. They'd sit with other people, but they'd never sit with him until the very last, not until all the other seats were filled and they had to sit with him or stand.
Perhaps, he told himself, it was body odor; perhaps it was bad breath. He made a ritual of bathing after that, using a new soap that was guaranteed to make him smell fresh. He brushed his teeth more attentively, used mouth wash until he gagged at the sight of it.
It did no good. He still rode alone.
He looked at himself in the mirror and he knew it was not his clothes, for in those days he was a smart dresser.
So, he figured, it must be his attitude. Instead of slumping down in
the seat and pulling his hat over his eyes, he'd sit up and be bright and cheerful and he'd smile at everyone. He'd smile, by God, if it cracked his face to do it.
For an entire week he sat there looking pleasant, smiling at people when, they glanced at him, for all the world as if he were a rising young business man who had read Dale Carnegie and belonged to the Junior Chamber.
No one rode with him — not until there was no other seat. He got some comfort in knowing they'd rather sit with him than stand.
Then he noticed other things.
At the office the fellows were always visiting around, gathering in little groups of three or four at one of the desks, talking about their golf score or telling the latest dirty story or wondering why the hell a guy stayed on at a place like this when there were other jobs you could just walk out and take.
No one, he noticed, ever came to his desk. So he tried going to some of the other desks, joining one of the groups. Within a short time, the fellows would all drift back to their desks. He tried just dropping by to pass the time of the day with individual workers. They were always affable enough, but always terribly busy. Vickers never stayed.
He checked up on his conversational budget. It seemed fairly satisfactory. He didn't play golf, but he knew a few dirty stories and he read most of the latest books and saw the best of the recent movies. He knew something about office politics and could damn the boss with the best of them. He read the newspapers and went through a couple of news weeklies and knew what was going on and could argue politics and had armchair opinions on military matters. With those qualifications, he felt, he should be able to carry on a fair conversation. But still no one seemed to want to talk to him.
It was the same at lunch. It was the same, now that he had come to notice it, everywhere he went.
He had written it down, with dates and an account of each day, and now, fifteen years later, he sat on a box in a raw and empty attic and read the words he'd written. Staring straight ahead of him, he remembered how it had been, how he'd felt and what he'd said and done, including the original fact that no one would ride with him until all the seats were taken. And that, he remembered, was the way it had been when he'd gone to New York just the other day.
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