… like trolleys. Trolleys, big as they are, always
come to the end of the line …
YOU CAN’T DEPEND ON PEOPLE BECAUSE . . .
… they go away … strangers die … people you know fairly well die … friends die … people murder people, like in books … your own folks can die.
So … !
He held onto a double fistful of breath, let it hiss out slow, grabbed more breath, and let it whisper through his tight-gritted teeth.
SO. He finished in huge heavily blocked capitals.
SO IF TROLLEYS AND RUNABOUTS AND FRIENDS AND NEAR FRIENDS CAN GO AWAY FOR A WHILE OR GO AWAY FOREVER, OR RUST, OR FALL APART OR DIE, AND IF PEOPLE CAN BE MURDERED, AND IF SOMEONE LIKE GREAT—
GRANDMA, WHO WAS GOING TO LIVE FOREVER, CAN DIE . . .IF ALL OF THIS IS TRUE . . . THEN . . . I, DOUGLAS SPAULDING, SOME DAY . . . MUST . . .
But the fireflies, as if extinguished by his somber thoughts, had softly turned themselves off.
I can’t write any more, anyway, thought Douglas. I won’t write any more. I won’t, I won’t finish it tonight.
He looked over at Tom asleep on his upraised elbow and hand. He touched Tom’s wrist and Tom collapsed into a sighing ruin, back upon the bed.
Douglas picked up the Mason jar with the cold dark lumps in it and the cool lights flicked on again, as if given life by his hand. He lifted the Mason jar to where it shone fitfully on his summing-up. The final words waited to be written. But he went instead to the window and pushed the screen frame out. He unscrewed the top of the jar and tilted the fireflies in a pale shower of sparks down the windless night. They found their wings and flew away.
Douglas watched them go. They departed like the pale fragments of a final twilight in the history of a dying world. They went like the few remaining shreds of warm hope from his hand. They left his face and his body and the space inside his body to darkness. They left him empty as the Mason jar which now, without knowing that he did so, he took back into bed with him, when he tried to sleep . . .
There she sat in her glass coffin, night after night, her body melted by the carnival blaze of summer, frozen in the ghost winds of winter, waiting with her sickle smile and carved, hooked, and wax-poured nose hovering above her pale pink and wrinkled wax hands poised forever above the ancient fanned-out deck of cards. The Tarot Witch. A delicious name. The Tarot Witch. You thrust a penny in the silver slot and far away below, behind, inside, machinery groaned and cogged, levers stroked, wheels spun. And in her case the witch raised up her glittery face to blind you with a single needle stare. Her implacable left hand moved down to stroke and fritter enigmatic tarot-card skulls, devils, hanging men, hermits, cardinals and clowns, while her head hung close to delve your misery or murder, hope or health, your rebirths each morning and death’s renewals by night. Then she spidered a calligrapher’s pen across the back of a single card and let it titter down the chute into your hands. Whereupon the witch, with a last veiled glimmer of her eyes, froze back in her eternal caul for weeks, months, years, awaiting the next copper penny to revive her from oblivion. Now, waxen dead, she suffered the two boys’ approach.
Douglas fingerprinted the glass.
“There she is.”
“It’s a wax dummy,” said Tom. “Why do you want me to see her?”
“All the time asking why!” yelled Douglas. “Because, that’s why, because!”
Because . . . the arcade lights dimmed . . .because . . .
One day you discover you are alive.
Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight!
You laugh, you dance around, you shout.
But, not long after, the sun goes out. Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon.
At the cowboy matinee last Saturday a man had dropped down dead on the white-hot screen. Douglas had cried out. For years he had seen billions of cowboys shot, hung, burned, destroyed. But now, this one particular man . . .
He’ll never walk, run, sit, laugh, cry, won’t do anything ever, thought Douglas. Now he’s turning cold. Douglas’s teeth chattered, his heart pumped sludge in his chest. He shut his eyes and let the convulsion shake him.
He had to get away from these other boys because they weren’t thinking about death, they just laughed and yelled at the dead man as if he still lived. Douglas and the dead man were on a boat pulling away, with all the others left behind on the bright shore, running, jumping, hilarious with motion, not knowing that the boat, the dead man and Douglas were going, going, and now gone into darkness. Weeping, Douglas ran to the lemon-smelling men’s room where, sick, it seemed a fire hydrant churned three times from his throat.
And waiting for the sickness to pass he thought: All the people I know who died this summer! Colonel Freeleigh, dead! I didn’t know it before; why? Great-grandma, dead, too. Really-truly. Not only that but . . .He paused. Me! No, they can’t kill me! Yes, said a voice, yes, any time they want to they can, no matter how you kick or scream, they just put a big hand over you and you’re still . . . I don’t want to die! Douglas screamed, without a sound. You’ll have to anyway, said the voice, you’ll have to anyway . . .
The sunlight outside the theater blazed down upon unreal street, unreal buildings, and people moving slowly, as if under a bright and heavy ocean of pure burning gas and him thinking that now, now at last he must go home and finish out the final line in his nickel tablet: SOME DAY, I, DOUGLAS SPAULDING, MUST DIE . . .
It had taken him ten minutes to get up enough courage to cross the street, his heart slowing, and there was the arcade and he saw the strange wax witch back where she had always hidden in cool dusty shadow with the Fates and Furies tucked under her fingernails. A car passing flashed an explosion of light through the arcade, jumping the shadows, making it seem that the wax woman nodded swiftly for him to enter.
And he had gone in at the witch’s summoning and come forth five minutes later, certain of survival. Now, he must show Tom . . .
“She looks almost alive,” said Tom.
“She is alive. I’ll show you.”
He shoved a penny in the slot.
Nothing happened.
Douglas yelled across the arcade at Mr. Black, the proprietor, seated on an upended soda-pop crate uncorking and taking a swig from a three-quarters empty bottle of brownyellow liquid.
“Hey, something’s wrong with the witch!” Mr. Black shuffled over, his eyes half closed, his breath sharp and strong. “Something’s wrong with the pinball, wrong with the peep show, wrong with the ELECTROCUTE YOURSELF FOR A PENNY machine.” He struck the case. “Hey, in there! Come alive!” The witch sat unperturbed. “Costs me more to fix her each month than she earns.” Mr. Black reached behind the case and hung a sign “OUT OF ORDER” over her face. “She ain’t the only thing’s out of order. Me, you, this town, this country, the whole world! To hell with it!” He shook his fist at the woman. “The junk heap for you, you hear me, the junk heap!” He walked off and plunged himself down on the soda-pop crate to feel the coins in his money apron again, like it was his stomach giving him pain.
“She just can’t—oh, she can’t be out of order,” said Douglas, stricken.
“She’s old,” said Tom. “Grandpa says she was here when he was a boy and before. So it’s bound to be some day she’d konk out and . . .”
“Come on now,” whispered Douglas. “Oh, please, please, write so Tom can see!”
He shoved another coin stealthily into the machine. “Please . . .”
The boys pressed the glass, their breath made cumulus clouds on the pane.
Then, deep inside the box, a whisper, a whir.
And slowly, the witch’s head rose up and looked at the boys and there was something in her eyes that froze them as her hand began to scrabble almost frantically back and forth upon the tarots, to pause, hurry on, return. Her head bent down, one hand came to rest and a shuddering shook the machine as the other hand wrote, paused, wrote, and stopped at last with a paroxysm so violent the glass in the
case chimed. The witch’s face bent in a rigid mechanical misery, almost fisted into a ball. Then the machinery gasped and a single cog slipped and a tiny tarot card tickled down the flue into Douglas’s cupped hands.
“She’s alive! She’s working again!”
“What’s the card say, Doug?”
“It’s the same one she wrote for me last Saturday! Listen . . .”
And Douglas read:
“Hey, nonny no! Men are fools that wish to die! Is’t not fine to dance and sing When the bells of death do ring? Is’t not fine to swim in wine, And turn upon the toe, And sing Hey, nonny no! When the winds blow and the seas flow? Hey, nonny no!”
“Is that all it says?” said Tom.
“At the bottom is a message: ‘PREDICTION: A long life and a lively one.’”
“That’s more like it! Now how about one for me?”
Tom put his coin in. The witch shuddered. A card fell into his hand.
“Last one off the premises is the witch’s behind,” said Tom calmly.
They ran out so fast, the proprietor gasped and clutched forty-five copper pennies in one fist, thirty-six in the other.
Outside the glare of the uneasy street lights Douglas and Tom made a terrible discovery.
The tarot card was empty, there was no message.
“That can’t be!”
“Don’t get excited, Doug. It’s just a plain old card; we only lost a penny.”
“It’s not just a plain old card, it’s more than a penny, it’s life and death.”
Under the fluttering moth light in the street Douglas’s face was milky as he stared at the card and turned it, rustling, trying somehow to put words on it.
“She ran out of ink.”
“She never runs out of ink!”
He looked at Mr. Black sitting there finishing off his bottle and cursing, not knowing how lucky he was, living in the arcade. Please, he thought, don’t let the arcade fall apart, too. Bad enough that friends disappeared, people were killed and buried in the real world, but let the arcade run along the way it was, please, please . . .
Now Douglas knew why the arcade had drawn him so steadily this week and drew him still tonight. For there was a world completely set in place, predictable, certain, sure, with its bright silver slots, its terrible gorilla behind glass forever stabbed by waxen hero to save still more waxen heroine, and then the flipping waterfalling chitter of Keystone Kops on eternal photographic spindles set spiraling in darkness by Indianhead pennies under naked bulb light. The Kops, forever in collision or near-collision with train, truck, streetcar, forever gone off piers in oceans which did not drown, because there they rushed to collide again with train, truck, streetcar, dive off old and beautifully familiar pier. Worlds within worlds, the penny peek shows which you cranked to repeat old rites and formulas. There, when you wished, the Wright Brothers sailed sandy winds at Kittyhawk, Teddy Roosevelt exposed his dazzling teeth, San Francisco was built and burned, burned and built, as long as sweaty coins fed self-satisfied machines.
Douglas looked around at this night town, where anything at all might happen now, a minute from now. Here, by night of day, how few the slots to shove your money in, how few the cards delivered to your hand for reading, and, if read, how few made sense. Here in the world of people you might give time, money, and prayer with little or no return.
But there in the arcade you could hold lightning with the CAN YOU TAKE IT? electrical machine when you pried its chromed handles apart as the power wasp-stung, sizzled, sewed your vibrant fingers. You punched a bag and saw how many hundred pounds of sinew were available in your arm to strike the world if it need be struck. There grip a robot’s hand to Indian-wrestle out your fury and light the bulbs half up a numbered chart where fireworks at the summit proved your violence supreme.
In the arcade, then, you did this and this, and that and that occurred. You came forth in peace as from a church unknown before.
And now? Now?
The witch moving but silent, and perhaps soon dead in her crystal coffin. He looked at Mr. Black droning there, defying all worlds, even his own. Someday the fine machinery would rust from lack of loving care, the Keystone Kops freeze forever half in, half out of the lake, half caught, half struck by locomotive; the Wright Brothers never get their kite machine off the ground . . .
“Tom,” Douglas said, “we got to sit in the library and figure this thing out.”
They moved on down the street, the white unwritten card passing between them.
They sat inside the library in the lidded green light and then they sat outside on the carved stone lion, dangling their feet over its back, frowning.
“Old man Black, all the time screaming at her, threatening to kill her.”
“You can’t kill what’s never lived, Doug.”
“He treats the witch like she’s alive or was once alive, or something. Screaming at her, so maybe she’s finally given up. Or maybe she hasn’t given up at all, but’s taken a secret way to warn us her life’s in danger. Invisible ink. Lemon juice, maybe! There’s a message here she didn’t want Mr. Black to see, in case he looked while we were in his arcade. Hold on! I got some matches.”
“Why would she write us, Doug?”
“Hold the card. Here!” Douglas struck a match and ran it under the card.
“Ouch! The words ain’t on my fingers, Doug, so keep the match away.”
“There!” cried Douglas. And there it was, a faint spidery scrawl which began to shape itself in a spiral of incredible corkscrew calligrapher’s letters, dark on light . . .a word, two words, three . . .
“The card, it’s on fire!”
Tom yelled and let it drop.
“Stomp on it!”
But by the time they had jumped up to smash their feet on the stony spine of the ancient lion, the card was a black ruin.
“Doug! Now we’ll never know what it said!”
Douglas held the flaking warm ashes in the palm of his hand. “No, I saw. I remember the words.”
The ashes blew about in his fingers, whispering.
“You remember in that Charlie Chase Comedy last spring where the Frenchman was drowning and kept yelling something in French which Charlie Chase couldn’t figure. Secours, Secours! And someone told Charlie what it meant and he jumped in and saved the man. Well, on this card, with my own eyes, I saw it. Secours!”
“Why would she write it in French?”
“So Mr. Black wouldn’t know, dumb!”
“Doug, it was just an old watermark coming out when you scorched the card . . .” Tom saw Douglas’s face and stopped. “Okay, don’t look mad. It was ’sucker’ or whatever. But there were other words . . .”
“Mme. Tarot, it said. Tom, I got it now! Mme. Tarot’s real, lived a long time ago, told fortunes. I saw her picture once in the encyclopedia. People came from all over Europe to see her. Well, don’t you figure it now yourself? Think, Tom, think!”
Tom sat back down on the lion’s back, looking along the street to where the arcade lights flickered.
“That’s not the real Mrs. Tarot?”
“Inside that glass box, under all that red and blue silk and all that old half-melted wax, sure! Maybe a long time ago someone got jealous or hated her and poured wax over;j her and kept her prisoner forever and she’s passed down the line from villain to villain and wound up here, centuries later, in Green Town, Illinois—working for Indian-head pennies instead of the crown heads of Europe!”
“Villains? Mr. Black?”
“Name’s Black, shirt’s black, pants’re black, tie’s black. Movie villains wear black, don’t they?”
“But why didn’t she yell last year, the year before?”
“Who knows, every night for a hundred years she’s been writing messages in lemon juice on cards, but everybody read her regular message, nobody thought, like us, to run a match over the back to bring out the real message. Lucky I know what secours means.”
“Okay, she said, ‘Help!’ Now what
?”
“We save her, of course.”
“Steal her out from under Mr. Black’s nose, huh? And wind up witches ourselves in glass boxes with wax poured on our faces the next ten thousand years.”
“Tom, the library’s here. We’ll arm ourselves with spells and magic philters to fight Mr. Black.”
“There’s only one magic philter will fix Mr. Black,” said Tom. “Soon’s he gets enough pennies any one evening, he—well, let’s see.” Tom drew some coins from his pocket. “This just might do it. Doug, you go read the books. I’ll run back and look at the Keystone Kops fifteen times; I never get tired. By the time you meet me at the arcade, it might be the old philter will be working for us.”
“Tom, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Doug, you want to rescue this princess or not?”
Douglas whirled and plunged.
Tom watched the library doors wham shut and settle. Then he leaped over the lion’s back and down into the night. On the library steps, the ashes of the tarot card fluttered, blew away.
The arcade was dark, inside, the pinball machines lay dim and enigmatic as dust scribblings in a giant’s cave. The peep shows stood with Teddy Roosevelt and the Wright Brothers faintly smirking or just cranking up a wooden propeller. The witch sat in her case, her waxen eyes cauled. Then, suddenly, one eye glittered. A flashlight bobbed outside through the dusty arcade windows. A heavy figure lurched against the locked door, a key scrabbled into the lock. The door slammed open, stayed open. There was a sound of thick breathing.
“It’s only me, old girl,” said Mr. Black, swaying.
Outside on the street, coming along with his nose in a book, Douglas found Tom hiding in a door nearby.
“Shh!” said Tom. “It worked. The Keystone Kops, fifteen times; and when Mr. Black heard me drop all that money in, his eyes popped, he opened the machine, took out the pennies, threw me out and went across to the speak-easy for the magic philter.”
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