by Rod Serling
Martin smiled a little sadly. “Thirty-five cents, huh?” His eyes scanned the room again. “How about old Mr. Wilson,” he asked. “Used to own this place.”
“Oh, he died,” the soda jerk said. “A long time ago. Maybe fifteen, twenty years. What kind of ice cream you want? Chocolate? Vanilla?”
Martin wasn’t listening to him.
“Vanilla?” the soda jerk repeated.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Martin said. “I guess I’ll pass on the soda.”
He started to get off the stool and half stumbled as his stiff right leg was thrust out momentarily in an awkward position. “These stools weren’t built for bum legs,” he said with a rueful grin.
The soda jerk looked concerned. “Guess not. Get that in the war?”
“What?”
“Your leg. Did you get that in the war?”
“No,” said Martin thoughtfully. “As a matter of fact I got it falling off a merry-go-round when I was a kid. Freak thing.”
The soda jerk snapped his fingers. “The merry-go-round! Hey, I remember the merry-go-round. They tore it down a few years ago. Condemned it.” Then he smiled sympathetically. “Little late I guess, huh?”
“How’s that?” Martin asked.
“A little late for you, I mean.”
Martin took a long look around the drugstore. “Very late,” he said softly. “Very late for me.”
He went out into the hot summer day again. The hot summer day that appeared on the calendar as June 26, 1959. He walked down the main street and out of the town, back toward the gas station, where he’d left his car for a lube job and oil change so long ago. He walked slowly, his right leg dragging slightly along the dusty shoulder of the highway.
At the gas station he paid the attendant, got into his car, turned it around and started back toward New York City. Only once did he glance over his shoulder at a sign which read, “Homewood, 1 ½ miles.” The sign was wrong. He knew that much. Homewood was farther away than that. It was much farther.
The tall man in the Brooks Brothers suit, driving a red Mercedes-Benz, gripped the wheel thoughtfully as he headed south toward New York. He didn’t know exactly what would face him at the other end of the journey. All he knew was that he’d discovered something. Homewood. Homewood, New York. It wasn’t walking distance.
From Rod Serling’s closing narration, “Walking Distance,” The Twilight Zone, October 30, 1959,CBS Television Network.
LONG ANGLE SHOT
Looking down as the car slowly starts onto the highway. Over the disappearing car we hear the Narrator’s Voice.
NARRATOR’S VOICE
Martin Sloan, age thirty-six. Vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things, but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again.
(a pause)
And also like all men perhaps there’ll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he’ll look up from what he’s doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope—and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there’ll flit a little errant wish—that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth.
(a pause)
And he’ll smile then too because he’ll know it is just an errant wish. Some wisp of memory not too important really. Some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind...that are a part of The Twilight Zone.
Now the CAMERA PANS down the road to the sign that reads “Homewood, 1 ½ miles.”
FADE TO BLACK
The Fever
It was this way with Franklin Gibbs. He had a carefully planned, precisely wrought little life that encompassed a weekly Kiwanis meeting on Thursday evening at the Salinas Hotel; an adult study group sponsored by his church on Wednesday evening; church each Sunday morning; his job as a teller at the local bank; and about one evening a week spent with friends playing Parcheesi or something exciting like that. He was a thin, erect, middle-aged, little man whose narrow shoulders were constantly kept pinned back in the manner of a West Point plebe and he wore a tight-fitting vest which spanned a pigeon chest. On his lapel was a Kiwanis ten-year attendance pin and, above that, a fifteen-year service pin given him by the president of the bank. He and his wife lived on Elm Street in a small, two-bedroom house which was about twenty years old, had a small garden in back, and an arbor of roses in front which were Mr. Gibbs’s passion.
Flora Gibbs, married to Franklin for twenty-two years, was angular, with mousy, stringy hair and chest measurements perhaps a quarter of an inch smaller than her husband’s. She was quiet voiced though talkative, long, if unconsciously, suffering and had led a life devoted to the care and feeding of Franklin Gibbs, the placating of his sullen moods, his finicky appetite, and his uncontrollable rage at any change in the routine of their daily lives.
This background explains at least in part Franklin Gibbs’s violent reaction to Flora’s winning the contest. It was one of those crazy and unexpected things that seem occasionally to explode into an otherwise prosaic, uneventful life. And it had exploded into Flora’s. She had written in to a national contest explaining in exactly eighteen words why she preferred Aunt Martha’s ready-mix biscuits to any other brand. She had written concisely and sparingly, because her life was a concise and spare life without the frills or the little, flamboyant luxuries of other women, a life of rationed hours and budgeted moments; thin, skimpy, unadorned, unpunctuated, until the contest, by the remotest hint of variance or color. And then she got the telegram. Not the first prize—that would have been too much. (It happened to be fifty thousand dollars, and Franklin, with thin-lipped impatience, suggested that perhaps had she tried harder she might have won it.) It was the third prize, which involved a three-day trip for two, all expenses paid, to Las Vegas, Nevada, a beautiful room in a most exceptionally modern and famous gambling hotel, with shows, sightseeing tours, and wonderful food all thrown in, along with an airplane flight there and back.
The announcement of the trip fell into Flora’s life like a star shell bursting over a no-man’s-land. Even Franklin was momentarily taken aback at the suddenly animated appearance of his normally drab-faced wife. It gradually dawned on him that Flora was quite serious about wanting to take the trip to Vegas. There was a scene over the breakfast table the morning after the telegram’s arrival. Franklin told his wife in no uncertain terms that gambling in Las Vegas was for the very rich or the very foolish. It was not for the stable or the moral and since morality and stability meant a great deal to Mr. Gibbs, they would have to telegraph back to the contest people (collect, Mr. Gibbs parenthetically noted) to acquaint them with their decision about Las Vegas, Nevada, and, as Mr. Gibbs put it, “its decidedly questionable roadhouse vice-dens.”
When Mr. Gibbs returned from the bank that noontime for lunch, there wasn’t any. Flora was crying in her room and, for the first time in a rooster-pecked, subservient, acquiescent life, she took a stand. She had won the trip to Las Vegas and she was going, with or without Franklin. This information was imparted through heavy sobbing and a spasmodic rendition of a biblical quotation something about whither thou goest I shalt go; something some lady in the Old Testament had said to another lady, but sufficiently close in its application here to cover a husband not accompanying his wife on a trip to Las Vegas. But actually it was a combination of a long Memorial Day weekend and the fact that the trip was free that finally made Franklin Gibbs change his mind.
A week later, Franklin, in his shiny, tight, blue Kiwanis Officer’s Installation suit with vest and lapel button, and Flora, in a flower-patterned cotton dress with a big green sash and a flowerpot hat with a large feather, took the six-and-a-half-hour flight to Las Vegas, Nevada. Flora spent the entire six-and-a-half hours gurgling excitedly; Franklin remained petulantly silent with only an occasional remark about any state government so totally immoral as to permit legalized gambling.
They were met at th
e airport by a hotel car which drove them to the Desert Frontier Palace—a gaudy, low-slung, sweeping structure emblazoned with nude girls in neon. Flora spent the automobile trip telling the driver all about Elgin, Kansas, in a high-pitched, ludicrously girlish way. Franklin remained silent except for a single comment on a platinum blonde who passed in front of the car when it stopped for a light. This was to the effect that she seemed typical of a town of decidedly questionable virtue.
Their room was air-conditioned, very modern and comfortable in a highly chromed way. The management had left a bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers which Flora nervously rearranged three or four times, while she chattered at her husband. Franklin sat glumly reading a Chamber of Commerce booklet from the City Fathers of Las Vegas, punctuating the few silences with negative comparisons between Vegas and much more solid, if smaller, Elgin, Kansas.
An hour later there was a knock on the door and the hotel public relations man entered with a photographer. His name was Marty Lubow and he wore the professional greeter’s smile with competence.
“Well, Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs,” Lubow asked, “is your room comfortable? Is there anything at all you need? Anything I can do for you?”
Flora’s voice trilled nervously as her hands darted around her dress, pulling up, yanking down, straightening, smoothing. “Oh, it’s lovely, Mr. Lubow, just lovely. You make us feel—well, you make us feel important!”
Lubow laughed jovially back at her, “Well, after all, you are important, Mrs. Gibbs. It isn’t every day we can entertain a celebrated contest winner!”
The photographer at his elbow looked glum and whispered over his shoulder, “Not every day—maybe every other day.”
Lubow’s laugh covered the photographer’s voice and pushed its way through the room. There was something enveloping about Mr. Lubow’s laugh. It was his own special weapon for every emergency.
“I think,” he said, “we should take our pictures right here. I think standing in the middle of the room would be best, don’t you, Joe?”
The photographer heaved a deep sigh which was a combination of agreement and resignation. He stuck a bulb in the flash section of the camera, then leaned against the door lining up the shot. Lubow ushered Flora to a spot in the center of the room, then beckoned to Franklin who remained silently dour in his chair.
“Right over here next to your lovely missus, Mr. Gibbs,” he said happily.
Franklin let out a long-suffering sigh, rose and walked over to stand close to Flora.
“Wonderful,” gushed Lubow, looking at the two of them with amazed eyes, as if by joining them in the center of the room he had performed a feat only a degree less amazing than climbing the Matterhorn all alone. “Just wonderful,” he repeated. “All right, Joe, how’s that look?”
The photographer responded by taking the picture and left both Flora and Franklin blinking in the aftermath of the flash—Flora with her fixed, nervous smile, and Franklin staring malevolently and challengingly toward the photographer. Again Lubow’s laughter shook the room. He pounded on Franklin’s back, wrung his hand, patted Flora’s cheek and somehow, in the same motion, headed toward the door. The photographer had already opened it and was on his way out.
“Now you folks just keep in touch with us—” Lubow was saying as he left.
“It’s The Elgin Bugle, Mr. Lubow,” Flora called after him.
Lubow turned. “How’s that?” he inquired.
“That’s our home town paper,” Flora answered. “The Elgin Bugle.”
“Of course, of course, Mrs. Gibbs. The Elgin Bugle. We’ll send a copy of the picture right out to them. Enjoy yourselves, folks, and welcome to Las Vegas and the Desert Frontier Palace.”
He winked happily at Flora, grinned manfully at Franklin and was only momentarily nonplussed by the frozen petulance on Franklin’s face. He recovered sufficiently to wave as he walked away. His laughter was a twenty-one-gun salute honoring nothing in particular, but in an odd way pulling the curtain down on the meeting.
It was another fifty-five minutes before Flora could persuade her husband to go out to the gambling room and see what it was like. It took the bulk of those minutes for her to persuade him that there was nothing immoral in just watching people gambling. And in the intervals between argument she was forced to listen to Franklin’s own personal critique on the miserable weakness of human beings who threw away money on dice, cards and machines. In the end he suffered himself to be put into his Kiwanis Officer Installation coat once again and led by Flora into the main building of the hotel, and then into the principal gambling room. It was a plush, noisy, people-loaded room, crowded with crap tables, a long bar, roulette wheels and three rows of one-armed bandits. It was a room full of noises that rose up from the heavily carpeted floor, touched the acoustical ceiling, and though softened by both, nonetheless hung in the air. The noises were gambling noises. There was the spinning clatter of roulette wheels. The tinkle of glasses. The metallic clack, clack, clack of the one-armed bandit levers being pulled down. There were the droning voices of the croupiers calling out numbers, red and black, and underneath all of this the varied pitch of human voices—the nervous squeals of the winners, the protesting groans of the losers. The sounds fused together and hit Franklin and Flora Gibbs with the force of an explosion as they entered the room and stood there on the periphery of the activity, staring into the strange, gaudy and noisy new world.
The two of them stood at the door trying to feel at ease, conscious for the first time of how they looked—Flora, a fluttery woman, in an unfashionable dress with a corsage that did nothing but emphasize dullness; Franklin, a little man in a 1937 suit, with slicked-down hair, pointed shoes and a look of midwestern primness, worn defensively like a badge. They were two foreign elements at this moment, joined together in a bond of inferiority closer, perhaps, than they ever shared in Elgin, Kansas.
They stood there like that for ten minutes, watching the tables, the games, the stacks of chips and silver dollars; the glamorous-looking women and the impeccable men. Flora’s eyes grew wider and wider. She turned to Franklin.
“It has such a flavor, this place!”
He looked at her, fishy-eyed, then turned up his nose. “Flavor, Flora? I’m surprised at you. You know how I feel about gambling.”
Flora smiled appeasingly. “Well, this is different though, Franklin—”
“It is neither different nor moral. Gambling is gambling! It’s your vacation, Flora. But I must, in good conscience, repeat to you what I have been saying all along—that it’s a tragic waste of time. Hear me, Flora? A tragic waste of time!”
Flora’s lower lip trembled and she reached out to touch his arm. “Please, Franklin,” she said quietly, “try to enjoy it, won’t you? We haven’t had a vacation in such a long time. Such a very long time. A vacation—or even a good time together.’’
Franklin’s left eyebrow shot upward and his voice was that of a wounded Congressional Medal of Honor winner who had suddenly been told he had to go back on the line. “It is a matter of record, Flora,” he announced, “that I work desperately hard and I have very little time—” It was the opening paragraph to a tailor-made speech that Franklin delivered at least once a month. It was when he branched off into a new tack, alleging that he felt unclean in this kind of room with semi-clad girls and dice throwers, that he realized Flora was no longer listening to him.
Across the room a one-armed bandit had lit up, a bell clanged, and a woman screamed hysterically. After a moment, a long-legged blonde in tights, carrying a basket of money, walked over to the woman by the machine, called out its number to a floor manager and then handed the woman the basket of money She was immediately surrounded by members of her party who took her to the bar, all chattering like happy squirrels.
Flora left Franklin’s side and went to the one-armed bandits spread along one whole side of the room. From where she stood it looked like a forest of arms yanking down levers. There was a continuous clack, clack, clack of l
evers, then a click, click, click of tumblers coming up. Following this was a metallic poof sometimes followed by the clatter of silver dollars coming down through the funnel to land with a happy smash in the coin receptacle at the bottom of the machine.
Franklin was studying the long-legged blonde with sour disapproval, and was unaware that Flora had taken a nickel out of her purse until she dropped the coin into one of the machines. Flora was reaching for the lever when she realized that Franklin was glaring at her. She flushed, forced a smile and then looked supplicatingly at him.
“Franklin, it’s—it’s only a nickel machine, dear.”
His high-pitched voice sandpapered against her. “Just a nickel machine, Flora? Just a nickel machine! Why don’t you just go out and throw handfuls of nickels into the street?”
“Franklin, darling—”
He moved closer to her, his voice low, but full of a carefully closeted fury. “All right, Flora, we go to Las Vegas. We waste three days and two nights. We do it because that’s your idiotic way of enjoying yourself. And it doesn’t cost us anything. But now you’re spending our money. Not even spending it, Flora—you’re just throwing it away. And it’s at this point, Flora, that I have to take a hand. You are obviously not mature enough—”
There was the suggestion of pain in Flora’s eyes. Her face was edged with a nervousness that Franklin recognized as a prelude to several hours of quiet handwringing, and deep, spasmodic sighs. It was Flora’s only defense over the years.
“Please...please, Franklin, don’t make a scene,” she whispered. “I won’t play. I promise you—” She turned to the machine and then, with a kind of hopeless gesture, back to him. “The nickel’s already in.”
Franklin heaved a deep, resigned sigh and looked up toward the ceiling. “All right,” he said. “Throw it away. Pull down the lever or whatever it is you do. Just throw it away”