He was tall, this strange man; bone-thin tall, and exceedingly old. In his eighties, certainly; possibly his nineties. His skin had been so worked upon by time and the sun that it was weathered almost black. From his chin fell a small sparse beard of yellowed white hair; his face otherwise was quite hairless. He was clothed in a robe, a robe with the cut and flow of an Arabian burnoose or jallabiyah, made of some unsophisticated cloth whose bleach had come, not from processed chemicals, but directly from the sun. He wore sandals on bare feet; he carried a staff taller than himself. And on his shoulder he bore a keg of nails with no sign of strain.
No actor could play this man, Ellery swiftly thought (the denial reaching his mind’s surface even faster than the thought it denied - that the old man was here from Hollywood, on location for some Biblical production). He was not made up for a part; he was really aged; in any case he would be inimitable. This old man could only be, Ellery thought.
He is. An original.
The old man moved by him. The extraordinary eyes had rested a moment on his face and then had gone on - not so much past him as through him.
The second man was commonplace only by contrast with the old man.
He, too, was sun-black - if a shade less darkened than the ancient, perhaps only because he was half the ancient’s age. In his early forties, Ellery guessed; his beard was glossy black. The younger man’s garments were made from the same odd cloth, but they were of an entirely different character - a simple blouselike shirt, without a collar and open at the throat; and trousers that reached only far enough down to cover his calves. He carried a hundred-pound sack on each shoulder, one of salt, the other of sugar.
The eyes of this younger man were a clear-water gray, and they rested briefly on Ellery’s face with shy curiosity. The gray eyes shifted to look over at the Duesenberg, and they widened with an awe rarely inspired by that venerable vehicle except on the score of its age. The glance returned to Ellery for another shy moment; then the younger man moved after the elder and went over to the wagon and began to load the supplies.
Ellery stepped into the store. After the inferno outside, its dim coolness received him like a Good Samaritan; for a moment he simply stood there accepting its ministrations and looking about. It was a poor store, with sagging shelves scantily stocked and a dusty foliage of assorted articles hanging from the tin ceiling. The store proper was far too shallow to comprise the entire building, Ellery saw; there was a door at the rear, almost blocked by a stack of cardboard cartons imprinted Tomatoes, that probably led to a storeroom.
Along one side of the store ran a flaked and whittled counter; behind the counter, over a lop-eared ledger, stooped a roly-poly little man with a patch of seal mustache in the middle of his round and ruddy face - obviously the Otto Schmidt, Prop., of the sign. He did not look up from his ledger.
So Ellery stood there, not so much observing as absorbing, taking a sensual pleasure in the laving coolness; and then the tall old man came back into the store, moving very quietly. He went over to the counter, his blackened hand slipping into a slit in the side of his garment; it came out with something, and this something he laid on the counter before the roly-poly proprietor.
Schmidt looked up. In that instant he spotted Ellery. He snatched the something and pocketed it. But not before Ellery saw what it was.
It was a coin, large enough to be a silver dollar, and remarkably bright and shiny, almost as if it were new. But no new silver dollars had been minted for years. Perhaps, he thought dully, perhaps it was a foreign coin.
There were colonies of bearded sectarians, Old Russian in origin, in Mexico…
But dollar, or peso - whatever the coin was - the heap of supplies being loaded onto the wagon seemed far too much to be paid for by a single piece of silver.
Neither the old man nor the man behind the counter uttered a word.
Evidently all arrangements had been made before Ellery came in, leaving no need for further conversation. Once more the glance shafted through him; then, incredibly erect, incredibly light on his sandaled feet, the old man left the store. The mystery was not to be resisted; and even if the will to resist had been there, Ellery was too exhausted to exercise it. He followed.
In time to see the old man set one foot on the wagon wheel and lift himself easily to the high seat, where the younger man was now perched.
And to hear him speak for the second time, for one of the slow, deep voices Ellery had heard on first approaching the store had been this voice.
“Very well, Storicai.”
Storicai? At least that was how it sounded. Storicai… What a queer name! Ellery could not fix it in point of time or place. And oh, that voice, the voice that had uttered it, so rich with power, so tranquil - a voice with the strangest accent, and infinitely at peace…
Ellery sighed and shook his head as he went back into the store.
Distracted now only by the memory and not the presence, he allowed the store to sink into his pores: its musty fragrance of old wood, coffee beans, kerosene, spices, tobacco, vinegar, and coolness - above all, coolness.
“Never saw anything like that before, did you?” the storekeeper said cheerfully; and Ellery agreed that no, he never had. “Well,” the storekeeper went on, “it’s a free country, and they don’t bother nobody. What can I do for you?”
He could fill the Duesenberg up with high-test was what he could do.
No high-test? No call for it on a back road like this. Well, all right, regular would do. It would have to. What? Oh, yes, he had stamps for the gas… Otto Schmidt came back and took Ellery’s ten-dollar bill as if he had never seen one before, and rumpled his cowlick once or twice, and made change. Anything else?
Ellery glanced about, thinking there was something more he wanted; he ordered tobacco for his pipe, paid for it, looked around again… there was still something…
“How about some supper?” suggested Mr. Schmidt shrewdly. And all at once Ellery realized that this was exactly what he wanted. He nodded.
“Just take a seat at the table there. Ham and eggs, coffee and pie be all right? I could open a can of soup - ”
“Ham and eggs, coffee and pie will do just fine.” He felt guilty about Evelyn’s still unopened box lunch, but it was hot food he wanted. He sat down at the table. It was bare of cloth but quite clean; and there was a much-handled copy of the Reese River Reveille and Austin Sun dated the previous November.
Austin… that was in Nevada - it couldn’t be Texas. Or California. So he must be in Nevada. Or - no, that didn’t follow. Anyone coming west from Nevada could have left it just about here. He would ask Mr. Schmidt what state they were in. But Mr. Schmidt was frying ham in the kitchen; and by the time he returned, the question had left Ellery’s mind.
Ham and eggs, coffee and pie appeared on the table simultaneously.
All were surprisingly good for a country store in the middle of nowhere.
Even the pie had a surprise to it. In addition to a crisp, brown, flaky crust, the fruit was just the right mixture of tart and sweet, with a spicy flavor that reminded Ellery of cinnamon; but there was something else, too.
He looked up and saw that Mr. Schmidt was smiling. “It’s clove,” said Mr. Schmidt.
“Yes,” Ellery agreed. “I did smell the clove, but I thought it was from the ham. Delicious.”
The proprietor’s moon face was split by a grin. “Where I come from there are a lot of Cornishmen - Cousin Jacks, we called them - and they used to put clove in their pie instead of cinnamon. I thought to myself, Why not both? - and I’ve been putting in both ever since.” Ellery indicated the chair opposite him. “How about joining me in a cup of coffee?”
“Well, say. Thank you!” beamed Otto Schmidt; and he brought a cup of coffee from the kitchen and sat down and began to talk as if Ellery had opened a stop-valve. His delight in company and conversation was that of a man who did not often get much of either.
He was from Wisconsin originally, it seemed - a small ci
ty in the northern part of the state - where he had run his father’s neighborhood grocery store.
“Just about gave me a living,” Schmidt said. “After Pop died 1 had no family in the United States, so I was kind of lonesome as well as scraping along. Then two bad things happened more or less together…” The depression had settled on the land, and Schmidt’s health had broken down. His doctor had advised a warm, dry climate; the growing inability of his customers to pay their grocery bills had put an end to the matter.
“The store had been owned by my family for over forty years,” the stout little man said, “but I had no choice. Paid my suppliers, marked down everything, cleared off the shelves, and found myself heading west with five hundred dollars in my pockets and not an idea in the world where I was going or what I was going to do. Then my jalopy ran out of gas about a mile from here. I hiked in and found a fellow named Parslow running this store. He was fed up with it and I offered him the five hundred for the place, lock, stock, and barrel, half in cash. He held out for three hundred down. ‘Tell you what I’ll do,’ I told him. ‘My car’s a mile up the road and it doesn’t need a thing but gas. You can have her for the other fifty.’ ‘Done!’ he says. We closed the deal and he filled up a can with gasoline and was all set to start walking. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ I ask. ‘What?’ he says, patting his pockets. ‘That’ll be fifty cents for the gasoline,’ I says. Well, he swore at me, but he paid. And that was how I came to be here, and I’ve been here ever since.” And he chuckled with satisfaction. He would never go back, he assured Ellery. He made very little money, but even on his once-a-year trips to Los Angeles he was always glad to get back. It was… He hesitated, his pudgy hands making exploratory circles in the air. It was so clean out here on the edge of the desert. You could see for miles in the daytime, and at night… oh, you could see for millions of miles.
“How about those two fellows who were here when I arrived?” Ellery asked suddenly. “Who are they?”
“Oh, they live out in the desert somewhere. Hermits.”
“Hermits?”
“Sort of. Don’t know what they do for grub generally - they come to the store here only a couple times a year. Nice folks, though. Queer, maybe, but like I said, they don’t bother nobody. Everybody’s got a right to go his own way, so long as he don’t bother nobody, is what I always say.”Ellery remarked that he couldn’t agree more, and rose. Mr. Schmidt swiftly suggested more pie and coffee in a transparent maneuver to detain him. Ellery smiled faintly, shook his head, settled his bill, and then said that he had better get some directions before going on.
“Directions for where?” the little man asked. Ellery looked pained.
Where indeed?
“Las Vegas,” he said.
Schmidt took Ellery by the arm and marched him to the door. Here, with many gestures, corrections, and repetitions, he described a route.
Boiled down - as nearly as Ellery could remember afterward - it came to this: “Follow this road along the edge of the desert. Don’t take any of the roads that go off to the left. When you come to the first fork, bear right.
That’s the road that leads you onto the main highway for Las Vegas.” Ellery waved good-bye and drove off. He expected never to see the End-of-the-World Store or Otto Schmidt, Prop., again.
Once again he drove off toward home, reversing the path of the pioneers - for that matter, of the sun itself. The hot meal had added its own inducement toward drowsiness to his exhaustion, and he had to fight a running battle with it.
He kept his eyes open for the “first fork” in the road, where he was to bear right for the highway that led to Las Vegas. Once - perhaps twice, he was not sure - he noticed a wide path (it seemed little more) which he took to be one of the roads that “go off to the left,” and he avoided it with a minor sense of triumph. He had forgotten to ask Otto Schmidt how far away Las Vegas was and how long he might have to be on the road.
The day was settling into its decline, and he began to entertain an only half-amusing fantasy that he was not going to reach any recognizable destination that night. It made him think of the legend of Peter Rugg.
The Missing Man, New England’s version of The Flying Dutchman, who defied the heavenly elements and for punishment was condemned to gallop in his phantom chaise forever with a thunderstorm at his back, trying to reach a Boston that forever eluded him. Perhaps, Ellery thought, future travelers would repeat the tale of the ancient Duesenberg and its phantom driver, eternally stopping to inquire if he was on the right road to Las Vegas!
Try as he would to keep not only his sleepy eyes but his drifting mind on the road (“… first fork… turn right…”), Ellery’s thoughts kept circling back to the old man with the curious speech, the curious costume, the curiously powerful serenity. Funny old bird to meet in the year 1944, of the independence of the United States the 168th, even in a timeless desert. Was there ever an age when that old man would not have commanded attention, a fascination not far removed from awe?
A clump of desert willows pink with blossoms caught his eye; in the next moment he had forgotten them, but perhaps they sparked his mental leap backward over whole millennia to another time and desert and jalliabiyah-clad people among whom moved men like that old man - men called patriarchs, or prophets, or apostles.
That old man of the wagon and his “Very well, Storicai in an English flavored with that strange accent - no, not of those Russian sectarians in Mexico after all… It was not his accent, or his voice, or his face, or his garb that was so remarkable, although together they were remarkable enough. Rather it was his ineffable composure, a certain extraordinary aura of… grandeur? No, no! What was the word?
Righteousness, that was it. Not self-righteousness, but righteousness… unswerving rectitude… acceptance with God… It blazed from his eyes.
That was it! How very, very remarkable were the eyes of that old man…
Much later, recalling the dreamlike journey, Ellery came to believe that in his half-hallucinated state, while reflecting on the eyes of the old man, his own eyes had failed to see the fork in the road of which Otto Schmidt had spoken. Certainly he had not borne right, as Schmidt had instructed him. He must have borne left instead.
He was to remember how, floating between reflection and exhaustion, he realized that the road he was traveling had definitely stopped skirting the desert and had crept into it. Joshua trees thrust their spiky limbs every which way, as if groping blindly for something; the frail scent of sand verbena kept touching his nostrils…
… until it was replaced gently and slowly and, thus, imperceptibly, until all at once the verbena scent was gone, blocked out by something stronger, heavier, more recently familiar…
… the smoke of sagebrush burning.
Again.
He frowned, blinked, noticed - consciously for the first time - how the road had changed. The graded dirt had given way to ungraded dirt, then to sand. Before he could think this out, he noticed that it was little more than a weedy trail embraced by two narrow ruts. He did not even then think: I am on the wrong road, and I had better turn around now while there is still enough light. He thought: It must be a very old automobile that uses this road, perhaps a Model T… And then: No, no automobile uses this road, because there is not a trace of oil on the weeds running down the middle of it.
With that, Ellery stopped the car and looked around. There was nothing but desert on all sides - creosote bushes, the grayish humps of burro-weed, the thorny crowns of yuccas, rocks, boulders, sand. He had stopped the car providentially. The road came to an end just ahead of him, on a rise. What was on the other side he preferred not to dwell on.
Perhaps a sheer drop - a cliff.
The light was beginning to pale, and Ellery hastily stood up in the car and craned.
He saw at once that the rise was part of the rim of a low circular hill - a hill with a valley inside; or so it seemed in the failing light. A valley like the bottom of a shallow bowl, hence not rea
lly a valley at all, but a basin.
Geological niceties, however, were far from his thoughts. As valley it first came into his tired mind; as valley it was to remain there.
While he stood in the rising heat of the motor, gazing at the rim of hill, a figure suddenly rose from the crest to become fixed in silhouette between the lemon-yellow sky and the hill beyond, already deepening from pink to rose-red… while he watched, to purple. Hooded robe from which emerged gaunt profile and jutting beard, long staff in one hand, and in the other… It was, it had to be, it could be no other than the old man of the wagon at the End-of-the-World Store.
For a timeless interval Ellery stood there, in the Duesenberg, half convinced that he was the victim of a desert mirage, or that the appearance of this archetype of all father-figures was related in some way to his recent withdrawal from awareness of the world, characterized by the senseless repetition of his father’s name on the studio typewriter… He saw the curiously thin-looking figure on the hill - as sharp against the sky as if there were no thickness to him at all - raise something to his lips.
A trumpet?
In the silence (literally breathless for him, for he was holding his breath) Ellery heard, or fancied he heard, an unearthly sound. It was at once alien yet hauntingly familiar. Not the long, archaic silvern trumpets that had heralded the proclamation of the British king (and, eight months later, of his brother); not the harsh, yet tremendously stirring ram’s horn, the shofar of the synagogue, confuting Satan as it jarred slumbering sinners to repentance; nor the baroque boo-booing of the conch shell whereby the hundred thousand avatars of Brahma are summoned to compassion; not the horns of Elfland, faintly blowing; nor the sweet-cracked melancholy jazz of the cornet at an old-time New Orleans funeral… it was like none of these, yet it evoked something of all these…
And on the Eighth Day Page 2