Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Page 44

  "We've got to block the windows," he said hoarsely. "Their weight is going to break them, and if that happens, they'll pour in."

  "With what?" Elise asked in her hoarse bark of a voice. "What can we use?"

  He looked around and saw several sheets of plywood, elderly and dark, leaning against one wall. Not much, perhaps, but something.

  "That," he said. "Help me to break it up into smaller pieces."

  *

  They worked quickly and frantically. There were only four windows in the cellar, and their very narrowness had caused the panes to hold longer than the larger windows upstairs had done. They were just finishing the last when they heard the glass of the first shatter behind the plywood . . . but the plywood held.

  They staggered into the middle of the cellar again, John limping on his broken foot.

  From the top of the stairway came the sound of the toads eating their way through the cellar door.

  "What do we do if they eat all the way through it?" Elise whispered.

  "I don't know," he said . . . and that was when the door of the coal-chute, unused for years but still intact, suddenly swung open under the weight of all the toads which had fallen or hopped into it, and hundreds of them poured out in a high-pressure jet.

  This time Elise could not scream. She had damaged her vocal cords too badly for that.

  It did not last long for the Grahams in the cellar after the coal-chute door gave way, but until it was over, John Graham screamed quite adequately for both of them.

  *

  By midnight, the downpour of toads in Willow had slackened off to a mild, croaking drizzle.

  At one-thirty in the morning, the last toad fell out of the dark, starry sky, landed in a pine tree near the lake, hopped to the ground, and disappeared into the night. It was over for another seven years.

  Around quarter past five, the first light began to creep into the sky and over the land. Willow was buried beneath a writhing, hopping, complaining carpet of toads. The buildings on Main Street had lost their angles and corners; everything was rounded and hunched and twitching. The sign on the highway which read WELCOME TO WILLOW, MAINE, THE FRIENDLY PLACE! looked as if someone had put about thirty shotgun shells through it. The holes, of course, had been made by flying toads. The sign in front of the General Mercantile which advertised ITALIAN SANDWICHES PIZZA GROCS * FISHING LICENCES had been knocked over. Toads played leapfrog on and around it. There was a small toad convention going on atop each of the gas-pumps at Donny's Sunoco. Two toads sat upon the slowly swinging iron arm of the weathervane atop the Willow Stove Shop like small misshapen children on a merry-go-round.

  At the lake, the few floats which had been put out this early (only the hardiest swimmers dared the waters of Lake Willow before July 4th, however, toads or no toads) were piled high with toads, and the fish were going crazy with so much food almost within reach. Every now and then there was a plip! plip! sound as one or two of the toads jostling for place on the floats were knocked off and some hungry trout or salmon's breakfast was served. The roads in and out of town--there were a lot of them for such a small town, as Henry Eden had said--were paved with toads. The power was out for the time being; free-falling toads had broken the power-lines in any number of places. Most of the gardens were ruined, but Willow wasn't much of a farming community, anyway. Several people kept fairly large dairy herds, but they had all been safely tucked away for the night. Dairy farmers in Willow knew all about rainy season and had no wish to lose their milkers to the hordes of leaping, carnivorous toads. What in the hell would you tell the insurance company?

  As the light brightened over the Hempstead Place, it revealed drifts of dead toads on the roof, rain-gutters which had been splintered loose by dive-bombing toads, a dooryard that was alive with toads. They hopped in and out of the barn, they stuffed the chimneys, they hopped nonchalantly around the tires of John Graham's Ford and sat in croaking rows on the front seat like a church congregation waiting for the services to start. Heaps of toads, mostly dead, lay in drifts against the building. Some of these drifts were six feet deep.

  At 6:05, the sun cleared the horizon, and as its rays struck them, the toads began to melt.

  Their skins bleached, turned white, then appeared to become transparent. Soon a vapor which gave off a vaguely swampy smell began to trail up from the bodies and little bubbly rivulets of moisture began to course down them. Their eyes fell in or fell out, depending on their positions when the sun hit them. Their skins popped with an audible sound, and for perhaps ten minutes it sounded as if champagne corks were being drawn all over Willow.

  They decomposed rapidly after that, melting into puddles of cloudy white shmeg that looked like human semen. This liquid ran down the pitches of the Hempstead Place's roof in little creeks and dripped from the eaves like pus.

  The living toads died; the dead ones simply rotted to that white fluid. It bubbled briefly and then sank slowly into the ground. The earth sent up tiny ribands of steam, and for a little while every field in Willow looked like the site of a dying volcano.

  By quarter of seven it was over, except for the repairs, and the residents were used to them.

  It seemed a small price to pay for another seven years of quiet prosperity in this mostly forgotten Maine backwater.

  *

  At five past eight, Laura Stanton's beat-to-shit Volvo turned into the dooryard of the General Mercantile. When Laura got out, she looked paler and sicker than ever. She was sick, in fact; she still had the six-pack of Dawson's Ale in one hand, but now all the bottles were empty. She had a vicious hangover.

  Henry Eden came out on the porch. His dog walked behind him.

  "Get that mutt inside, or I'm gonna turn right around and go home," Laura said from the foot of the stairs.

  "He can't help passing gas, Laura."

  "That doesn't mean I have to be around when he lets rip," Laura said. "I mean it, now, Henry. My head hurts like a bastard, and the last thing I need this morning is listening to that dog play Hail Columbia out of its asshole."

  "Go inside, Toby," Henry said, holding the door open.

  Toby looked up at him with wet eyes, as if to say Do I have to? Things were just getting interesting out here.

  "Go on, now," Henry said.

  Toby walked back inside, and Henry shut the door. Laura waited until she heard the latch snick shut, and then she mounted the steps.

  "Your sign fell over," she said, handing him the carton of empties.

  "I got eyes, woman," Henry said. He was not in the best temper this morning, himself. Few people in Willow would be. Sleeping through a rain of toads was a goddam hard piece of work. Thank God it only came once every seven years, or a man would be apt to go shit out of his mind.

  "You should have taken it in," she said.

  Henry muttered something she didn't quite catch.

  "What was that?"

  "I said we should have tried harder," Henry said defiantly. "They was a nice young couple. We should have tried harder."

  She felt a touch of compassion for the old man in spite of her thudding head, and laid a hand on his arm. "It's the ritual," she said.

  "Well, sometimes I just feel like saying frig the ritual!"

  "Henry!" She drew her hand back, shocked in spite of herself. But he wasn't getting any younger, she reminded herself. The wheels were getting a little rusty upstairs, no doubt.

  "I don't care," he said stubbornly. "They seemed like a real nice young couple. You said so, too, and don't try to say you didn't."

  "I did think they were nice," she said. "But we can't help that, Henry. Why, you said so yourself just last night."

  "I know," he sighed.

  "We don't make them stay," she said. "Just the opposite. We warn them out of town. They decide to stay themselves. They always decide to stay. They make their own decision. That's part of the ritual, too."

  "I know," he repeated. He drew a deep breath and grimaced. "I hate the smell afterward. Whole goddam
town smells like clabbered milk."

  "It'll be gone by noon. You know that."

  "Ayuh. But I just about hope I'm underground when it comes around again, Laura. And if I ain't, I hope somebody else gets the job of meetin whoever comes just before rainy season. I like bein able to pay m'bills when they come due just as well as anybody else, but I tell you, a man gets tired of toads. Even if it is only once every seven years, a man can get damned tired of toads."

  "A woman, too," she said softly.

  "Well," he said, looking around with a sigh, "I guess we might try puttin some of this damn mess right, don't you?"

  "Sure," she said. "And, you know, Henry, we don't make ritual, we only follow it."

  "I know, but--"

  "And things could change. There's no telling when or why, but they could. This might be the last time we have rainy season. Or next time no one from out of town might come--"

  "Don't say that," he said fearfully. "If no one comes, the toads might not go away like they do when the sun hits em."

  "There, you see?" she asked. "You have come around to my side of it, after all."

  "Well," he said, "it's a long time. Ain't it. Seven years is a long time."

  "Yes."

  "They was a nice young couple, weren't they?"

  "Yes," she said again.

  "Awful way to go," Henry Eden said with a slight hitch in his voice, and this time she said nothing. After a moment, Henry asked her if she would help him set his sign up again. In spite of her nasty headache, Laura said she would--she didn't like to see Henry so low, especially when he was feeling low over something he could control no more than he could control the tides or the phases of the moon.

  By the time they'd finished, he seemed to feel a little better.

  "Ayuh," he said. "Seven years is a hell of a long time."

  It is, she thought, but it always passes, and rainy season always comes around again, and the outsiders come with it, always two of them, always a man and a woman, and we always tell them exactly what is going to happen, and they don't believe it, and what happens . . . happens."

  "Come on, you old crock," she said, "offer me a cup of coffee before my head splits wide open."

  He offered her a cup, and before they had finished, the sounds of hammers and saws had begun in town. Outside the window they could look down Main Street and see people folding back their shutters, talking and laughing.

  The air was warm and dry, the sky overhead was a pale and hazy blue, and in Willow, rainy season was over.

  My Pretty Pony

  The old man sat in the barn doorway in the smell of apples, rocking, wanting not to want to smoke not because of the doctor but because now his heart fluttered all the time. He watched that stupid son of a bitch Osgood do a fast count with his head against the tree and watched him turn and catch Clivey out and laugh, his mouth open wide enough so the old man could observe how his teeth were already rotting in his head and imagine how the kid's breath would smell: like the back part of a wet cellar. Although the whelp couldn't be more than eleven.

  The old man watched Osgood laugh his gaspy hee-hawing laugh. The boy laughed so hard he finally had to lean over and put his hands on his knees, so hard the others came out of their hiding places to see what it was, and when they saw, they laughed, too. They all stood around in the morning sun and laughed at his grandson and the old man forgot how much he wanted a smoke. What he wanted now was to see if Clivey would cry. He found he was more curious on this subject than on any other which had engaged his attention over the last several months, including the subject of his own fast-approaching death.

  "Caught im out!" the others chanted, laughing. "Caught im, caught im, caught im out!"

  Clivey only stood there, stolid as a chunk of rock in a farmer's field, waiting for the razzing to be over so the game could go on with him as It and the embarrassment beginning to be behind him. After awhile the game did. Then it was noontime and the other boys went home. The old man watched to see how much lunch Clivey would eat. It turned out to be not much. Clivey just poked at his potatoes, made his corn and his peas change places, and fed little scraps of meat to the dog under the table. The old man watched it all, interested, answering when the others talked to him, but not much listening to their mouths or his own. His mind was on the boy.

  When the pie was done he wanted what he couldn't have and so excused himself to take a nap and paused halfway up the stairs because now his heart felt like a fan with a playing card caught in it, and he stood there with his head down, waiting to see if this was the final one (there had been two before), and when it wasn't he went on up and took off all but his underdrawers and lay down on the crisp white coverlet. A rectangular label of sun lay across his scrawny chest; it was cut into three sections by dark strokes of shadow that were the window laths. He put his hands behind his head, drowsing and listening. After awhile he thought he heard the boy crying in his own room down the hall and he thought, I ought to take care of that.

  He slept an hour, and when he got up the woman was asleep beside him in her slip, and so he took his clothes out into the hallway to dress before going down.

  Clivey was outside, sitting on the steps and throwing a stick for the dog, who fetched with more will than the boy tossed. The dog (he had no name, he was just the dog) seemed puzzled.

  The old man hailed the boy and told him to take a walk up to the orchard with him and so the boy did.

  *

  The old man's name was George Banning. He was the boy's grandfather, and it was from him that Clive Banning learned the importance of having a pretty pony in your life. You had to have one of those even if you were allergic to horses, because without a pretty pony you could have six clocks in every room and so many watches on each wrist you couldn't raise your arms and still you'd never know what time it was.

  The instruction (George Banning didn't give advice, only instruction) had taken place on the day Clive got caught out by that idiot Alden Osgood while playing hide and seek. By that time Clive's Grandpa seemed older than God, which probably meant about seventy-two. The Banning homestead was in the town of Troy, New York, which in 1961 was just starting to learn how not to be the country.

  The instruction took place in the West Orchard.

  *

  His grandfather was standing coatless in a blizzard that was not late snow but early apple blossoms in a high warm wind; Grandpa was wearing his biballs with a collared shirt beneath, a shirt that looked as if it had once been green but was now faded to a no-account olive by dozens or hundreds of washings, and beneath the collared shirt was the round top of a cotton undershirt (the kind with the straps, of course; in those days they made the other kind, but a man like Grandpa would be a strap-undershirt man to the end), and this shirt was clean but the color of old ivory instead of its original white because Gramma's motto, often spoken and stitched into a living-room sampler as well (presumably for those rare times when the woman herself was not there to dispense what wisdom needed dispensing), was this: Use it, use it, never lose it! Break it in! Wear it out! Keep it safe or do without! There were apple blossoms caught in Grandpa's long hair, still only half white, and the boy thought the old man was beautiful in the trees.

  He had seen Grandpa watching them as they went about their game earlier that day. Watching him. Grandpa had been sitting in his rocker at the entrance to the barn. One of the boards squeaked every time Grandpa rocked, and there he sat, a book facedown in his lap, his hands folded atop it, there he sat rocking amid the dim sweet smells of hay and apples and cider. It was this game that caused his Grandpa to offer Clive Banning instruction on the subject of time, and how it was slippery, and how a man had to fight to hold it in his hands almost all the while; the pony was pretty but it had a wicked heart. If you didn't keep a close eye on that pretty pony, it would jump the fence and be out of sight and you'd have to take your rope bridle and go after it, a trip that was apt to tire you all the way to your bones even if it was short.

/>   Grandpa began his instruction by saying that Alden Osgood had cheated. He was supposed to hide his eyes against the dead elm by the chopping block for a full minute, which he would time by counting to sixty. This would give Clivey (so Grandpa had always called him, and he hadn't minded, although he was thinking he would have to fight any boy or man who called him that once he was past the age of twelve) and the others a fair chance to hide. Clivey had still been looking for a place when Alden Osgood got to sixty, turned around, and "caught him out" as he was trying to squirm--as a last resort--behind a pile of apple crates stacked haphazardly beside the press-shed, where the machine that squeezed the blems into cider bulked in the dimness like an engine of torture.

  "It wasn't fair," Grandpa said. "You didn't do no bitching about it and that was right, because a natural man never does no bitching--they call it bitching because it ain't for men or even boys smart enough to know better and brave enough to do better. Just the same, it wasn't fair. I can say that now because you didn't say it then."

  Apple blossoms blowing in the old man's hair. One caught in the dent below his Adam's apple, caught there like a jewel that was pretty simply because some things were and couldn't help it, but was gorgeous because it lacked duration: in a few seconds it would be brushed impatiently away and left on the ground where it would become perfectly anonymous among its fellows.

  He told Grandpa that Alden had counted to sixty, just as the rules said he must, not knowing why he wanted to argue the side of the boy who had, after all, shamed him by not even having to find him but had simply "caught him out." Alden--who sometimes slapped like a girl when he was mad--had needed only to turn, see him, then casually put his hand on the dead tree and chant the mystic and unquestioned formula of elimination: "I-see-Clive, my gool-one-two-three!"

  Maybe he only argued Alden's case so he and Grandpa wouldn't have to go back yet, so he could watch Grandpa's steel hair blow back in the blizzard of blossoms, so he could admire that transient jewel caught in the hollow at the base of the old man's throat.

  "Sure he did," Grandpa said. "Sure he counted to sixty. Now looka this, Clivey! And let it mark your mind!"