"She's all right," said the husband. "She's not afraid."
On and on the passing, the screams, the hilarity.
The autumn wind sighed about the house. And he, the husband, stood at the head of the dark cellar, intoning the words, handing out the items.
"Marion?" asked Louise again, from far across the cellar.
Everybody was talking.
"Marion?" called Louise.
Everybody quieted.
"Marion, answer me, are you afraid?"
Marion didn't answer.
The husband stood there, at the bottom of the cellar steps.
Louise called, "Marion, are you there?"
No answer. The room was silent.
"Where's Marion?" called Louise.
"She was here," said a boy.
"Maybe she's upstairs."
"Marion!"
No answer. It was quiet.
Louise cried out, "Marion, Marion!"
"Turn on the lights," said one of the adults.
The items stopped passing. The children and adults sat with the witch's items in their hands.
"No." Louise gasped. There was a scraping of her chair, wildly, in the dark. "No. Don't turn on the lights, oh, God, God, God, don't turn them on, please, please don't turn on the lights, don't!" Louise was shrieking now. The entire cellar froze with the scream.
Nobody moved.
Everyone sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of this October game; the wind blew outside, banging the house, the smell of pumpkins and apples filled the room with the smell of the objects in their fingers while one boy cried, "I'll go upstairs and look!" and he ran upstairs hopefully and out around the house, four times around the house, calling, "Marion, Marion, Marion!" over and over and at last coming slowly down the stairs into the waiting breathing cellar and saying to the darkness, "I can't find her." Then . .. some idiot turned on the lights.
The Pumpernickel
Mr. and Mrs. Welles walked away from the movie theater late at night and went into the quiet little store, a combination restaurant and delicatessen. They settled in a booth, and Mrs. Welles said, "Baked ham on pumpernickel." Mr. Welles glanced toward the counter, and there lay a loaf of pumpernickel.
"Why," he murmured, "pumpernickel . . . Druce's Lake ..."
The night, the late hour, the empty restaurant—by now the pattern was familiar. Anything could set him off on a tide of reminiscences. The scent of autumn leaves, or midnight winds blowing, could stir him from himself, and memories would pour around him. Now in the unreal hour after the theater, in this lonely store, he saw a loaf of pumpernickel bread and, as on a thousand other nights, he found himself moved into the past.
"Druce's Lake," he said again.
"What?" His wife glanced up.
"Something I'd almost forgotten," said Mr. Welles. "In 1910, when I was twenty, I nailed a loaf of pumpernickel to the top of my bureau mirror. . . ."
In the hard, shiny crust of the bread, the boys at Druce's Lake had cut their names: Tom, Nick, Bill, Alec, Paul, Jack. The finest picnic in history! Their faces tanned as they rattled down the dusty roads. Those were the days when roads were redly dusty; a fine brown talcum floured up after your car. And the lake was always twice as good to reach as it would be later in life when you arrived immaculate, clean, and un-rumpled.
"That was the last time the old gang got together," Mr. Welles said.
After that, college, work, and marriage separated you. Suddenly you found yourself with some other group. And you never felt as comfortable or as much as ease again in all your life.
"I wonder," said Mr. Welles. "I like to think maybe we all knew, somehow, that this picnic might be the last we'd have. You first get that empty feeling the day after high-school graduation. Then, when a little time passes and no one vanishes immediately, you relax. But after a year you realize the old world is changing. And you want to do some one last thing before you lose one another. While you're all still friends, home from college for the summer, this side of marriage, you've got to have something like a last ride and a swim in the cool lake."
Mr. Welles remembered that rare summer morning, he and Tom lying under his father's Ford, reaching up their hands to adjust this or that, talking about machines and women and the future. While they worked, the day got warm. At last Tom said, "Why don't we drive out to Druce's Lake?"
As simple as that.
Yet, forty years later, you remember every detail of picking up the other fellows, everyone yelling under the green trees.
"Hey!" Alec beating everyone's head with the pumpernickel and laughing. "This is for extra sandwiches, later."
Nick had made the sandwiches that were already in the hamper—the garlic kind they would eat less of as the years passed and the girls moved in.
Then, squeezing three in the front, three in the rear, with their arms across one another's shoulders, they drove through the boiling; dusty countryside, with a cake of ice in a tin washtub to cool the beer they'd buy.
What was the special quality of that day that it should focus like a stereoscopic image, fresh and clear, forty years later? Perhaps each of them had had an experience like his own. A few days before the picnic, he had found a photograph of his father twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of friends at college. The photograph had disturbed him, made him aware as he had not been before of the passing of time, the swift flow of the years away from youth. A picture taken of him as he was now would, in twenty-five years, look as strange to his own children as his father's picture did to him—unbelievably young, a stranger out of a strange, never-returning time.
Was that how the final picnic had come about— with each of them knowing that in a few short years they would be crossing streets to avoid one another, or, if they met, saying, "We've got to have lunch sometime!" but never doing it? Whatever the reason, Mr. Welles could still hear the splashes as they'd plunged off the pier under a yellow sun. And then the beer and sandwiches underneath the shady trees.
We never ate that pumpernickel, Mr. Welles thought. Funny, if we'd been a bit hungrier, we'd have cut it up, and I wouldn't have been reminded of it by the loaf there on the counter.
Lying under the trees in a golden peace that came from beer and sun and male companionship, they promised that in ten years they would meet at the courthouse on New Year's Day, 1920, to see what they had done with their lives. Talking their rough easy talk, they carved their names in the pumpernickel.
"Driving home," Mr. Welles said, "we sang 'Moonlight Bay'."
He remembered motoring along in the hot, dry night with their swimsuits damp on the jolting floorboards. It was a ride of many detours taken just for the hell of it, which was the best reason in the world.
"Good night." "So long." "Good night."
Then Welles was driving alone, at midnight, home to bed.
He nailed the pumpernickel to his bureau the next day.
"I almost cried when, two years later, my mother threw it in the incinerator while I was off at college."
"What happened in 1920?" asked his wife. "On New Year's Day?"
"Oh," said Mr. Welles. "I was walking by the courthouse, by accident, at noon. It was snowing. I heard the clock strike. Lord, I thought, we were supposed to meet here today! I waited five minutes. Not right in front of the courthouse, no. I waited across the street." He paused. "Nobody showed up."
He got up from the table and paid the bill. "And I'll take that loaf of unsliced pumpernickel there," he said.
When he and his wife were walking home, he said, "I've got a crazy idea. I often wondered what happened to everyone."
"Nick's still in town with his cafe."
"But what about the others?" Mr. Welles's face was getting pink and he was smiling and waving his hands. "They moved away. I think Tom's in Cincinnati." He looked quickly at his wife. "Just for the heck of it, I'll send him this pumpernickel!"
"Oh, but-"
"Sure!" He laughed, walking faster, s
lapping the bread with the palm of his hand. "Have him carve his name on it and mail it on to the others if he knows their addresses. And finally back to me, with all their names on it!"
"But," she said, taking his arm, "it'll only make you unhappy. You've done things like this so many times before and . . ."
He wasn't listening. Why do I never get these ideas by day? he thought. Why do I always get them after the sun goes down?
In the morning, first thing, he thought, I'll mail this pumpernickel off, by God, to Tom and the others. And when it comes back I'll have the loaf just as it was when it got thrown out and burned! Why not?
"Let's see," he said, as his wife opened the screen door and let him walk into the stuffy-smelling house to be greeted by silence and warm emptiness. "Let's see. We also sang 'Row Row Row Your Boat,' didn't we?"
In the morning, he came down the hall stairs and paused a moment in the strong full sunlight, his face shaved, his teeth freshly brushed. Sunlight brightened every room. He looked in at the breakfast table.
His wife was busy there. Slowly, calmly, she was slicing the pumpernickel.
He sat down at the table in the warm sunlight, and reached for the newspaper.
She picked up a slice of the newly cut bread, and kissed him on the cheek. He patted her arm.
"One or two slices of toast, dear?" she asked gently.
"Two, I think," he replied.
Long After Midnight
The police ambulance went up into the palisades at the wrong hour. It is always the wrong hour when the police ambulance goes anywhere, but this was especially wrong, for it was long after midnight and nobody imagined it would ever be day again, because the sea coming in x>n the lightless shore below said as much, and the wind blowing salt cold in from the Pacific reaffirmed this, and the fog muffling the sky and putting out the stars struck the final, unfelt-but-disabling blow. The weather said it had been here forever, man was hardly here at all, and would soon be gone. Under the circumstances it was hard for the men gathered on the cliff, with several cars, the headlights on, and flashlights bobbing, to feel real, trapped as they were between a sunset they hardly remembered and a sunrise that would not be imagined.
The slender weight hanging from the tree, turning in the cold salt wind, did not diminish this feeling in any way.
The slender weight was a girl, no more than nineteen, in a light green gossamer party frock, coat and shoes lost somewhere in the cool night, who had brought a rope up to these cliffs and found a tree with a branch half out over the cliff and tied the rope in place and made a loop for her neck and let herself out on the wind to hang there swinging. The rope made a dry scraping whine on the branch, until the police came, and the ambulance, to take her down out of space and place her on the ground.
A single phone call had come in about midnight telling what they might find out here on the edge of the cliff and whoever it was hung up swiftly and did not call again, and now the hours had passed and all that could be done was done and over, the police were finished and leaving, and there was just the ambulance now and the men with the ambulance to load the quiet burden and head for the morgue.
Of the three men remaining around the sheeted form there were Carlson, who had been at this sort of thing for thirty years, and Moreno, who had been at it for ten, and Latting, who was new to the job a few weeks back. Of the three it was Latting now who stood on the edge of the cliff looking at that empty tree limb, the rope in his hand, not able to take his eyes away. Carlson came up behind him. Hearing him, Latting said, "What a place, what an awful place to die."
"Any place is awful, if you decide you want to go bad enough," said Carlson. "Come on, kid."
Latting did not move. He put out his hand to touch the tree. Carlson grunted and shook his head. "Go ahead. Try to remember it all."
"Any reason why I shouldn't?" Latting turned quickly to look at that emotionless gray face of the older man. "You got any objections?"
"No objections. I was the same way once. But after a while you learn if s best not to see. You eat better. You sleep better. After a while you leam to forget."
"I don't want to forget," said Latting. "Good God, somebody died up here just a few hours ago. She deserves—"
"She deserved, kid, past tense, not present. She deserved a better shake and didn't get it. Now she deserves a decent burial. That's all we can do for her. It's late and cold. You can tell us all about it on the way."
"That could be your daughter there."
"You won't get to me that way, kid. It's not my daughter, that's what counts. And it's not yours, though you make it sound like it was. It's a nineteen-year-old girl, no name, no purse, nothing. I'm sorry she's dead. There, does that help?"
"It could if you said it right."
"I'm sorry, now pick up the other end of the stretcher."
Latting picked up one end of the stretcher but did not walk with it and only looked at the figure beneath the sheet.
"It's awful being the young and deciding to just quit."
"Sometimes," said Carlson, at the other end of the stretcher, "I get tired, too."
"Sure, but you're—" Latting stopped.
"Go ahead, say it, I'm old. Somebody fifty, sixty, ifs okay, who gives a damn, somebody nineteen, everybody cries. So don't come to my funeral, kid, and no flowers."
"I didn't mean ..." said Latting.
"Nobody means, but everybody says, and luckily I got the hide of an iguana. March."
They moved with the stretcher toward the ambulance where Moreno was opening the doors wider.
"Boy," said Latting, "she's light. She doesn't weigh anything."
"That's the wild life for you, you punks, you kids." Carlson was getting into the back of the ambulance now and they were sliding the stretcher in. "I smell whiskey. You young ones think you can drink like college fullbacks and keep your weight. Hell, she don't even weigh ninety pounds, if that."
Latting put the rope in on the floor of the ambulance. "I wonder where she got this?"
"It's not like poison," said Moreno. "Anyone can buy rope and not sign. This looks like block-and-tackle rope. She was at a beach party maybe and got mad at her boyfriend and took this from his car and picked herself a spot. .. ."
They took a last look at the tree out over the cliff, the empty branch, the wind rustling in the leaves, then Carlson got out and walked around to the front seat with Moreno, and Latting got in the back and slammed the doors.
They drove away down the dim incline toward the shore where the ocean laid itself, card after white card, in thunders, upon the dark sand. They drove in silence for a while, letting their headlights, like ghosts, move on out ahead. Then Latting said, "I'm getting myself a new job."
Moreno laughed. "Boy, you didn't last long. I had bets you wouldn't last. Tell you what, you'll be back. No other job like this. All the other jobs are dull. Sure, you get sick once in a while. I do. I think: I'm going to quit. I almost do. Then I stick with it. And here I am."
"Well, you can stay," said Latting. "But I'm full up. I'm not curious anymore. I seen a lot the last few weeks, but this is the last straw. I'm sick of being sick. Or worse, I'm sick of your not caring."
"Who doesn't care?"
"Both of you!"
Moreno snorted. "Light us a couple, huh, Carlie?" Carlson lit two cigarettes and passed one to Moreno, who puffed on it, blinking his eyes, driving along by the loud strokes of the sea. "Just because we don't scream and yell and throw fits—"
"I don't want fits," said Latting, in the back, crouched by the sheeted figure. "I just want a little human talk, I just want you to look different than you would walking through a butcher's shop. If I ever get like you two, not worrying, not bothering, all thick skin and tough—"
"We're not tough," said Carlson, quietly, thinking about it, "we're acclimated."
"Acclimated, hell, when you should be numb?"
"Kid, don't tell us what we should be when you don't even know what we are. Any doctor is a lou
sy doctor who jumps down in the grave with every patient. All doctors did that, there'd be no one to help the live and kicking. Get out of the grave, boy, you can't see nothing from there."
There was a long silence from the back, and at last Latting started talking, mainly to himself:
"I wonder how long she was up there alone on the cliff, an hour, two? It must have been funny up there looking down at all the campfires, knowing you were going to wipe the whole business clean off. I suppose she was to a dance, or a beach party, and she and her boyfriend broke up. The boyfriend will be down at the station tomorrow to identify her. I'd hate to be him. How he'll feel—"
"He won't feel anything. He won't even show up," said Carlson, steadily, mashing out his cigarette in the front-seat tray. "He was probably the one found her and made the call and ran. Two bits will buy you a nickel he's not worth the polish on her little fingernail. Some slobby lout of a guy with pimples and bad breath. Christ, why don't these girls leam to wait until morning."
"Yeah," said Moreno. "Everything's better in the morning."
"Try telling that to a girl in love," said Latting.
"Now a man," said Carlson, lighting a fresh cigarette, "he just gets himself drunk, says to hell with it, no use killing yourself for no woman."
They drove in silence awhile past all the small dark beach houses with only a light here or there, it was so late.
"Maybe," said Latting, "she was going to have a baby."
"It happens."
"And then the boyfriend runs off with someone and this one just borrows his rope and walks up on the cliff," said Latting. "Answer me, now, is that or isn't it love?"
"It," said Carlson, squinting, searching the dark, "i3 a kind of love. I give up on what kind."
"Well, sure," said Moreno, driving. "I'll go along with you, kid. I mean, it's nice to know somebody in this world can love that hard."
They all thought for a while, as the ambulance purred between quiet palisades and now quiet sea and maybe two of them thought fleetingly of their wives and tra*ct houses and sleeping children and all the times years ago when they had driven to the beach and broken out the beer and necked up in the rocks and lay around on the blankets with guitars, singing and feeling like life would go on just as far as the ocean went, which was very far, and maybe they didn't think that at all. Latting, looking up at the backs of the two older men's necks, hoped or perhaps only nebulously wondered if these men remembered any first kisses, the taste of salt on the lips. Had there ever been a time when they had stomped the sand like mad bulls and yelled out of sheer joy and dared the universe to put them down? • And by their silence, Latting knew that yes, with all his talking, and the night, and the wind, and the cliff and the tree and the rope, he had gotten through to them; it, the event, had gotten through to them. Right now, they had to be thinking of their wives in their warm beds, long dark miles away, unbelievable, suddenly unattainable while here they were driving along a salt-layered road at a dumb hour half between certainties, bearing with them a strange thing on a cot and a used length of rope.
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