THUMP!
Shaving himself before the bathroom mirror, Ragle Gumm heard the morning paper land on the porch. A muscular spasm shook his arm; at his chin his safety razor burred across his flesh and he drew it away. Then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and, opening his eyes, continued shaving.
"Are you almost done in there?" his sister called through the closed door.
"Yes," he said. He washed his face, patted on after-shave lotion, dried his neck and arms, and opened the bathroom door.
In her bathrobe, Margo materialized and went immediately past him into the bathroom. "I think I heard your paper," she said over her shoulder as she shut the door. "I have to drive Vic down to the store; could you push Sammy out the front door? He's in the kitchen--" Her voice was cut off by the sound of water in the washbowl.
Entering his bedroom, Ragle finished buttoning his shirt. He passed judgment on his various ties, discriminated from the group a dark green knit tie, put it on, put his coat on, and then said to himself,
Now the newspaper.
Before he went to get it he began dragging out his reference books, files, graphs, charts, scanning machinery. Today, by dealing with them first, he managed to delay contact with the paper by eleven minutes. He set up the table in the living room -- the room was cool and damp from the night, and smelled of cigarettes -- and then he opened the front door.
There, on the concrete porch, lay the _Gazette_. Rolled up, held by a rubber band.
He picked it up and slid the rubber band off. The rubber band sprang away and vanished into the bushes by the porch.
For several minutes he read the news items on the front page. He read about President Eisenhower's health, the national debt, moves by cunning leaders in the Middle East. Then he folded the paper back and read the comics page. Then he read the letters to the editor. While he was doing that, Sammy pushed by him and outside.
"Good-bye," Sammy said. "See you this afternoon."
"Okay," he said, hardly aware of the boy.
Margo appeared next; she hurried by him and to the sidewalk, her key extended. Unlocking the Volkswagen she slid inside and started up the motor. While it heated she wiped moisture from the windshield. The morning air was crisp. Along the street a few children trotted in the direction of the grammar school. Cars started up.
"I forgot about Sammy," Ragle said, when Vic stepped out of the house and onto the porch beside him. "But he left on his own power."
"Take it easy," Vic said. "Don't work too hard on your contest." His coat over his shoulder he descended the steps to the path. A moment later Margo put the Volkswagen into gear, and she and Vic thundered off toward the through-street leading downtown.
Those little cars make a lot of noise, Ragle thought to himself. He remained on the porch reading the newspaper as long as he could; then the cold morning air got the better of him and he turned and went back inside, to the kitchen.
As yet he had not looked at page 16, the page on which the _Where-Will-the-Little-Green-Man-Be-Next?_ entry form appeared. Most of the page belonged to the form; beyond it there was little but instructions and comments on the contest, news of previous winners. The tally-sheet of standings; everybody who was still competing was there, represented in the smallest typeface the newspaper could obtain. His name, of course, was huge. Unique. In a box by itself. Every day he saw it there. Below his name, other names had a transient existence, not quite at the threshold of consciousness.
For each day's contest the newspaper presented a series of clues, and these always got read by him as a preliminary to the task of solving the problem itself. The problem, of course, was to select the proper square from the 1,208 in the form. The clues did not give any help, but he assumed that in some peripheral fashion they contained data, and he memorized them as a matter of habits hoping that their message would reach him subliminally -- since it never did literally.
"A swallow is as great as a mile."
Some oblique stream of association process, perhaps... he let the crypticism lie about in his mind, sinking down layer by layer. To trip reflexes or whatever. Swallow suggested the process of eating. And of course flying. Wasn't flying a symbol of sex? And swallows returned to Capistrano, which was in California. The rest of the phrase reminded him of, "A miss is as good as a mile." Why great then, instead of good? Great suggested whales... the great white whale. Ah, association at work. Flying over the water, possibly toward California. Then he thought of the ark and the dove. Olive branch. Greece. That meant cooking... Greeks operate restaurants. Eating, again! Sensible... and doves were a gourmet's delight.
"The bell told on tee-hee."
That stuck in his craw. Gibberish, certainly. But it suggested homosexuality. "Bell." And the "tee-bee," the effeminate laugh of the queer, the belle. And the John Donne sermon with the line, "For whom the bell tolls." Also a Hemingway book. Tee might be tea. Ring bell, get tea served. Tiny silver bell. Mission! The mission at Capistrano, where the swallows returned to! It fitted.
While he was pondering the clues, he heard steps on the front walk. Setting down the paper, he slipped into the living room to see who it was.
Approaching the house was a tall, slim, middle-aged man wearing a baggy, tweedy suit, and smoking a cigar. He had a kindly look, like a minister or a drain-inspector. Under his arm he carried a manila folder. Ragle recognized him. The man represented the _Gazette_; he had come visiting a number of times before, sometimes to bring Ragle's check -- which ordinarily was mailed -- and sometimes to clear up misunderstandings about entries. Ragle felt dismay; what did Lowery want?
With no haste, Lowery stepped up onto the porch, raised his hand and touched the bell.
Bell, Ragle thought. Minister. Maybe the clues were there to tell him that the newspaper would be sending Lowery to visit him.
"Hi, Mr. Lowery," he said, opening the door.
"Hello, Mr. Gumm." Lowery beamed ingenuously; there was no gravity in his manner, nothing to suggest that any bad news was to be conveyed, or that anything had gone wrong.
"What's the visit for?" Ragle asked, sacrificing manners in the name of need.
Lowery, chewing on his Dutch Master, gazed at him and then said, "I have a couple of checks for you... the paper thought I might as well deliver them in person, since they knew I'd be driving out this way today." He wandered about the living room. "And I have a few things to ask you. Just to be on the safe side. About your entries for yesterday's contest."
"I mailed in six," he said.
"Yes, we got all six." Lowery winked at him. "But you failed to indicate the order of value." Opening the manila envelope, he laid out the six entry forms; they had already been photographed, reduced to more convenient size. Handing Ragle a pencil, Lowery said, "I know it's just an oversight on your part... but we have to have them numbered."
"God damn," he said. How could he have been in such a hurry? Swiftly, he marked them in order, from one to six. "There," he said, returning them. What a stupid oversight. It might have cost him the contest then and there.
Lowery seated himself, selected the entry marked one, and for a surprisingly long time studied it.
"Is it right?" Ragle demanded, although he knew that Lowery would not know; the entries had to be sent on to puzzle headquarters in New York or Chicago, wherever it all was done.
"Well," Lowery said, "time will tell. But this _is_ the one you mean as your first entry. Your primary entry."
"Yes," he said. This was the secret compact between himself and the contest people; he was permitted to submit more than one entry for each day's puzzle. They allowed him up to ten, with the stipulation that they be numbered in order of preference. If the number one entry was incorrect, it was destroyed -- as if it had never reached them -- and the second was considered, and so on down to the last. Usually, he felt sure enough of the solution to limit his submissions to three or four. The fewer, of course, the better the contest people felt about it. No one else, to his knowledge, had this privilege. It was for the one simple purpose of keeping him in the contest.
They had proposed it, after he had missed the correct solution by only a few squares. His entries generally grouped about tangent squares, but once in a while he was unable to decide between squares quite far apart on the entry form. In those cases, he took a risk; his intuition was not strong. But when he felt the solution to lie in an approximate region, he was safe. One or another of the entries proved correct. In his two and a half years of submissions, he had missed eight times. On those days none of his entries had been correct. But the contest people had allowed him to continue. There was a clause in the rules that permitted him to "borrow" against past correct entries. For every thirty correct entries he could make one mistake. And so it went. By the use of loopholes he had remained in the contest. No one outside the contest knew that he had ever missed; it was his secret and the contest people's secret. And neither of them had any motive to air it publicly.
Evidently he had become valuable from the standpoint of publicity. Why the public would want the same person to win over and over again he did not know. Obviously, if he won he won over the other contenders. But that was the manner of the public mind. They recognized his name. As it was explained to him, the theory went that the public liked to see a name they could identify. They resisted change. A law of inertia was involved; as long as he was out, the public wanted him -- and everyone else -- out; as soon as he was in, well, that made it self-perpetuating. The forces of stasis worked on his side. The vast reactionary pressures now ran with him, not against him. "Swimming with the tide," as Bill Black would put it.
Lowery, seated with his legs crossed, smoking and blinking, said, "Have you looked at today's puzzle?"
"No," he said. "Just the clues. Do they mean anything?"
"Not literally."
"I know that. I mean, do they mean anything at all, in any way, shape, or form? Or is it just to convince us that somebody up at the top knows the answer?"
"What does that mean?" Lowery said, with a shade of annoyance.
"I have a theory," Ragle said. "Not a very serious theory, but it's fun to toy with. Maybe there's no correct answer."
Lowery raised an eyebrow. "Then on what basis do we declare one answer a winner and all others incorrect?"
"Maybe you read over the entries and decide on the strength of them which appeals to you the most. Esthetically."
Lowery said, "You're projecting your technique on us."
"My technique?" He was puzzled.
"Yes," Lowery said. "You work from an esthetic, not a rational, standpoint. Those scanners you constructed. You view a pattern in space, a pattern in time. You try to fill. Complete the pattern. Anticipate where it goes if extended one more point. That's not rational; not an intellectual process. That's how -- well, vase-makers work. I'm not disapproving. How you go about it is your business. But you don't dope it out; I doubt if you've ever solved the content of the clues. If you had you wouldn't have asked, matter of fact."
No, he realized. I never have doped out the clues. In fact, it had never occurred to him that anybody did, that anyone read them and got concrete meanings from them. Such as lining up the first letters of each third word, adding ten, and coming out with the number of a specific square. Thinking that, he laughed.
"Why laugh?" Lowery said, with great soberness. "This is a serious business. A lot of money is at stake."
"I was just thinking about Bill Black."
"Who's that?"
"A neighbor. He wants me to teach him how I do it."
"Well, if it's done on an esthetic basis--"
"Then I can't," Ragle finished for him. "He's out of luck. That's why I laughed. He'll be disappointed; he wanted to pick up a couple of bucks."
With a suggestion of moral indignation, Lowery said, "Does it please you to know that your talent can't be taught? That it isn't a technique in the usual sense... it's more a--" He searched for the word. "God knows. Obviously, chance plays no role."
"I'm glad to hear somebody say that."
Lowery said, "Can anybody imagine in good faith that you could _guess_ correctly, day after day? That's ridiculous. The odds are beyond calculation. Or at least, almost beyond. Yes, we did calculate it. A stack of beans reaching to Betelgeuse."
"What's Betelgeuse?"
"A distant star. I use it as a metaphor. In any case, we know there's no guesswork involved... except perhaps in the final stage. When it's a choice between two or three squares."
"Then I can flip a coin," Ragle agreed.
"But then," Lowery said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin and waggling his cigar up and down, "when it's a question of two or three squares out of over a thousand, it doesn't matter. Any of us could guess it, at that point."
Ragle agreed.
In the garage of their home, Junie Black crouched before the automatic washer, stuffing clothes into it. Under her bare feet the concrete was cold; shivering, she straightened up, poured a stream of granules from the box of detergent into the washer, shut the little glass door, and turned on the machinery. The clothes, behind the glass, proceeded to swirl about. She set down the box, looked at her wristwatch, and started out of the garage.
"Oh," she said, startled. Ragle was standing in the driveway.
"I thought I'd drop by," he said. "Sis is ironing. You can smell that fine burned-starch smell all over the house. Like duck feathers and phonograph records roasted together at the bottom of an old oil drum."
She saw that he was peering at her from the corner of his eye. His straw-colored, shaggy eyebrows drew together and his big shoulders hunched as he clasped his arms together. In the mid-afternoon sunlight his skin had a deep underlying tan, and she wondered how it was achieved. She had never been able to tan that well, try as she might.
"What's that you have on?" he asked.
"Slim-jims," she said.
"Pants," he said. "The other day I asked myself, What's the psychological reason for my admiring women in pants? And then I said to myself, Why the hell not?"
"Thank you," she said. "I guess."
"You look very good," he said. "Especially with your feet bare. Like one of those movies where the heroine pads over the sand dunes, her arms to the sky."
Junie said, "How's the contest today?"
He shrugged. Obviously he wanted to get away from it. "I thought I'd take a stroll," he said. And again he peered at her sideways. It was a compliment to her, but it always made her wonder if she had left a button undone; she could scarcely resist glancing furtively down. But except for her feet and midriff she was well covered.
"Open midriff," she said.
"Yes, so I see," Ragle said.
"You like-e?" With her, that passed as humor.
Ragle said, almost brusquely, "I thought I'd see if you'd like to go for a swim. It's a nice day, not too cold."
"I have all this housework to do," she said. But the idea appealed to her; at the public park, on the north end of town, where the uncultivated hills began, were a playground and swimming pool. Naturally the kids used it mostly, but adults showed up, too, and quite often gangs of teen-agers. It always made her feel good to be where teen-agers were; she had been out of school -- high school -- only a few years, and for her the transition had been imperfect. In her mind she still belonged to that bunch which showed up in hot rods, with radios blaring pop tunes... the girls in sweaters and bobby socks, the boys in blue jeans and cashmere sweaters.
"Get your swimsuit," Ragle said.
"Okay," she agreed. "For an hour or so; but then I have to get back." Hesitating, she said, "Margo didn't -- see you come over here, did she?" As she had found out, Margo loved to blab.
"No," he said. "Margo's off on some--" He gestured. "She's busy ironing," he concluded. "Involved, you know."
She shut off the washer, got her swimsuit and a towel, and shortly she and Ragle were striding along across town to the swimming pool.
Having Ragle beside her made her feel peaceful. She had always been attracted to big burly men, especially older ones. To her, Ragle was exactly the right age. And look at the things he had done, his military career in the Pacific, for instance. And his national fame in the newspaper contest. She liked his bony, grim, scarred face; it was a real man's face, with no trace of double chin, no fleshiness. His hair had a bleached quality, white and curled, never combed. It had always struck her that a man who combed his hair was a sissy. Bill spent half an hour in the mornings, fussing with his hair; although now that he had a crewcut he fussed somewhat less. She loathed touching crewcut hair; the stiff bristles reminded her of a toothbrush. And Bill fitted perfectly into his narrow-shouldered ivy-league coat... he had virtually no shoulders. The only sport he played was tennis, and that really aroused her animosity. A man wearing white shorts, bobby socks, tennis shoes! A college student at best... as Bill had been when she met him.
"Don't you get lonely?" she asked Ragle.
"Eh?"
"Not being married." Most of the kids she had known in high school were now married, all but the impossible ones. "I mean, it's fine your living with your sister and brother-in-law, but wouldn't you like to have a little home of your own for you and your wife?" She put the emphasis on _wife_.
Considering, Ragle said, "Ultimately I'll do that. But the truth of the matter is I'm a bum."
"A bum," she echoed, thinking of all the money he had won in the contest. Heaven knew how much it added up to in all.
"I don't like a permanent thing," he explained. "Probably I picked up a nomadic outlook in the war... and before that, my family moved around a lot. My father and mother were divorced. There's a real resistance in my personality toward settling down... being defined in terms of one house, one wife, one family of kids. Slippers and pipe."
"What's wrong with that? It means security."
Ragle said, "But I'd get doubts." Presently he said, "I did get doubts. When I was married before."
"Oh," she said, interested. "When was that?"
"Years ago. Before the war. When I was in my early twenties. I met a girl; she was a secretary for a trucking firm. Very nice girl. Polish parents. Very bright, alert girl. Too ambitious for me. She wanted nothing but to get up in the class where she'd be giving garden parties. Barbecues in the patio."
"I don't see anything wrong with that," Junie said. "It's natural to want to live graciously." She had got that term out of _Better Homes and Gardens_, one of the magazines she and Bill subscribed to.
"Well, I told you I was a bum," Ragle grunted, and dropped the subject.
The ground had become hilly, and they had to climb. Here, the houses had larger lawns, terraces of flowers; fat imposing mansions, the homes of the well-to-do. The streets were irregular. Thick groves of trees appeared. And above them they could see the woods itself, beyond the final street, Olympus Drive.
"I wouldn't mind living up here," Junie said. Better, she thought, than those one-story tract houses with no foundations. That lose their roofs on the first windy day. That if you leave the hose running all night the water fills up the garage.
Among the clouds in the sky a rapidly moving glittery dot shot by and was gone. Moments later she and Ragle heard the faint, almost absurdly remote roar.
"A jet," she said.
Scowling upward, Ragle shaded his eyes and peered at the sky, not walking but standing in the middle of the sidewalk with his feet planted apart.
"You think it's perhaps a Russian jet?" she asked mischievously.
Ragle said, "I wish I knew what went on up there."
"You mean what God is doing?"
"No," he said. "Not God at all. I mean that stuff that floats by every now and then."
Junie said, "Vic was talking last night about groping around for the light cord in the bathroom; you remember?"
"Yes," he said, as they trudged on uphill once more.
"I got to thinking. That never happened to me."
"Good," Ragle said.
"Except I did remember one thing like that. One day I was out on the sidewalk, sweeping. I heard the phone ring inside the house. This was about a year ago. Anyhow, I had been expecting a real important call." It had been from a young man whom she had known in school, but she did not include that detail. "Well, I dropped the broom and I ran in. You know, we have two steps up to the porch?"
"Yes," he said, paying attention to her.
"I ran up. And I ran up three. I mean, I thought there was one more. No, I didn't _think_ there was in so many words. I didn't mentally say, I have to climb three steps...."
"You mean you stepped up three steps without thinking."
"Yes," she said.
"Did you fall?"
"No," she said. "It's not like when there's three and you think there's only two. That's when you fall on your face and break off a tooth. When there's two and you think there's three -- it's real weird. You try to step up once more. And your foot comes down -- bang! Not hard, just -- well, as if it tried to stick itself into something that isn't there." She became silent. Always, when she tried to explain anything theoretical, she got bogged down.
"Ummm," Ragle said.
"That's what Vic meant, isn't it?"
"Ummm," Ragle said again, and she let the subject drop. He did not seem in the mood to discuss it.
Beside him in the warm sunlight Junie Black stretched out with her arms at her sides, on her back, her eyes shut. She had brought a blanket along with her, a striped blue and white towel-like wrapper on which she lay. Her swimsuit, a blackwool two-piece affair, reminded him of days gone by, cars with rumble seats, football games, Glenn Miller's orchestra. The funny heavy old fabric and wooden portable radios that they had lugged to the beach... Coca-Cola bottles stuck in the sand, girls with long blond hair, lying stomach-down, leaning on their elbows like girls in "I was a ninety-eight pound scarecrow" ads.
He contemplated her until she opened her eyes. She had ditched her glasses, as she always did with him. "Hi," she said.
Ragle said, "You're a very attractive-looking woman, June."
"Thank you," she said, smiling up at him. And then she shut her eyes once more.
Attractive, he thought, albeit immature. Not dumb so much as sheer retarded. Dwelling back in high school days... Across the grass a bunch of small kids scampered, shrieking and pummeling one another. In the pool itself, youths splashed about, girls and boys wet and mixed together so that all of them appeared about the same. Except that when the girls crawled out onto the tile deck, they had on two-piece suits. And the boys had only trunks.
Off by the gravel road, an ice cream vendor roamed about pushing his white-enamel truck. The tiny bells rang, inviting the kids.
Bells again, Ragle thought. Maybe the clue was that I was going to wander up here with June Black -- _Junie_, as her corrupt taste persuades her to call herself.
Could I fall in love with a little trollopy, giggly ex-high school girl who's married to an eager-beaver type, and who still prefers a banana split with all the trimmings to a good wine or a good whiskey or even a good dark beer?
The great mind, he thought, bends when it nears this kind of fellow creature. Meeting and mating of opposites. Yin and yang. The old Doctor Faust sees the peasant girl sweeping off the front walk, and there go his books, his knowledge, his philosophies...
In the beginning, he reflected, was the word.
Or, in the beginning was the _deed_. If you were Faust.
Watch this, he said to himself. Bending over the apparently sleeping girl, he said, "'Im Anfang war die Tat.'"
"Go to hell," she murmured.
"Do you know what that means?"
"No."
"Do you care?"
Rousing herself, she opened her eyes and said, "You know the only language I ever took was two years of Spanish in high school. So don't rub it in." Crossly, she flopped over on her side, away from him.
"That was poetry," he said. "I was trying to make love to you."
Rolling back, she stared at him.
"Do you want me to?" he said.
"Let me think about it," she said. "No," she said, "it would never work out. Bill or Margo would catch on, and then there'd be a lot of grief, and maybe you'd get bounced out of your contest."
"All the world loves a lover," he said, and bending over her he took hold of her by the throat and kissed her on the mouth. Her mouth was dry, small, and it moved to escape him; he had to grab her neck with his hands.
"Help," she said faintly.
"I love you," he told her.
She stared at him wildly, her pupils hot and dark, as if she thought -- god knew what she thought. Probably nothing. It was as if he had clutched hold of a little thin-armed crazed animal. It had alert sense and fast reflexes -- under him it struggled, and its nails dug into his arms -- but it did not reason or plan or look ahead. If he let go of it, it would bound away a few yards, smooth its pelt, and then forget. Lose its fear, calm down. And not remember that anything had happened.
I'll bet, he thought, she's astonished every first of the month when the paper boy comes to collect. What paper? What paper boy? What two-fifty?
"You want to get us thrown out of the park?" she said, close to his ear. Her face, uncooperative and wrinkled, glowered directly beneath his.
A couple of people, walking by, had glanced back to grin. The mind of a virgin, he thought. There was something touching about her... the capacity to forget made her innocent all over again, each time. No matter how deeply she got involved with men, he conjectured, she probably remained psychically untouched. Still as she had been. Sweater and saddle-shoes. Even when she got to be thirty, thirty-five, forty. Her hair-style would alter through the years; she would use more make-up, probably diet. But otherwise, eternal.
"You don't drink, do you?" he said. The hot sun and the situation made him yearn for a beer. "Could you be talked into stopping off at a bar somewhere?"
"No," she said. "I want to get some sun."
He let her up. At once she sat up, rising forward to fix her straps and dust bits of grass from her knees.
"What would Margo say?" she said. "She's already snooping around seeing what dirt she can dig up."
"Margo is probably off getting her petition presented," he said. "To force the city to clear the ruins from its lots."
"That's very meritorious. A lot better than forcing your attentions on somebody else's spouse." From her purse she took a bottle of suntan lotion and began rubbing it into her shoulders, ignoring him pointedly.
He knew that one day he could have her. Chance circumstances, a certain mood; and it would be worth it, he decided. Worth arranging all the various little props.
That fool Black, he thought to himself.
Off past the park, in the direction of town, a flat irregular patch of green and white made him think again about Margo. The ruins. Visible from up here. Three city lots of cement foundations that had never been pried up by bulldozers. The houses themselves -- or whatever buildings there had been -- had long since been torn down. Years ago, from the weathered, cracked, yellowed blocks of concrete. From here, it looked pleasant. The colors were nice.
He could see kids weaving in and out of the ruins. A favorite place to play... Sammy played there occasionally. The cellars formed caves. Vaults. Margo was probably right; one day a child would suffocate or die of tetanus from being scratched on rusty wire.
And here we sit, he thought. Basking in the sun. While Margo struggles away at city hall, doing civic good for all of us.
"Maybe we ought to go back," he said to Junie. "I ought to get my entry whipped into shape." My job, he thought ironically. While Vic plugs away at the supermarket and Bill at the water company. I idle away the day in dalliances.
That made him crave a beer more than ever. As long as he had a beer in his hand he could be untroubled. The gnawing unease did not quite get through to him.
"Look," he said to Junie, getting to his feet. "I'm going up the hill to that soft-drink stand and see if by any chance they've got any beer. It could be."
"Suit yourself."
"Do you want anything? Root beer? A Coke?"
"No thank you," she said in a formal tone.
As he plodded up the grassy slope toward the soft-drink stand he thought, I'd have to take Bill Black on, sooner or later. In combat.
No telling what color the man would turn if he found out. Is he the kind that gets down his hunting .22 and without a word sets off and shoots the trespasser of that most sacred of all a man's preserves, that Elysian field where only the lord and master dares to graze?
Talk about bagging the royal deer.
He reached a cement path along which grew green wooden benches. On the benches assorted people, mostly older, sat watching the slope and pool below. One heavy-set elderly lady smiled at him.
Does she know? he asked himself. That what she saw going on down there was not happy springtide youthful frolic at all, but sin? Near-adultery?
"Afternoon," he said to her genially.
She nodded back genially.
Reaching around in his pockets, he found some change. A line of kids waited at the soft-drink stand; the kids were buying hot dogs and popsicles and Eskimo Pies and orange drink. He joined them.
How quiet everything was.
Stunning desolation washed over him. What a waste his life had been. Here he was, forty-six, fiddling around in the living room with a newspaper contest. No gainful, legitimate employment. No kids. No wife. No home of his own. Fooling around with a neighbor's wife.
A worthless life. Vic was right.
I might as well give up, he decided. The contest. Everything. Wander on somewhere else. Do something else. Sweat in the oil fields with a tin helmet. Rake leaves. Tote up figures at a desk in some insurance company office. Peddle real estate.
Anything would be more mature. Responsible. I'm dragging away in a protracted childhood... hobby, like glueing together model Spads.
The child ahead of him received its candy bar and raced off. Ragle laid down his fifty-cent piece on the counter.
"Got any beer?" he said. His voice sounded funny. Thin and remote. The counter man in white apron and cap stared at him, stared and did not move. Nothing happened. No sound, anywhere. Kids, cars, the wind; it all shut off.
The fifty-cent piece fell away, down through the wood, sinking. It vanished.
I'm dying, Ragle thought. Or something.
Fright seized him. He tried to speak, but his lips did not move for him caught up in the silence.
Not again, he thought.
Not again!
It's happening to me again.
The soft-drink stand fell into bits. Molecules. He saw the molecules, colorless, without qualities, that made it up. Then he saw through, into the space beyond it; he saw the hill behind, the trees and sky. He saw the soft-drink stand go out of existence, along with the counter man, the cash register, the big dispenser of orange drink, the taps for Coke and root beer, the ice-chests of bottles, the hot dog broiler, the jars of mustard, the shelves of cones, the row of heavy round metal lids under which were the different ice creams.
In its place was a slip of paper. He reached out his hand and took hold of the slip of paper. On it was printing, block letters.
SOFT-DRINK STAND
Turning away, he unsteadily walked back, past children playing, past the benches and the old people. As he walked he put his hand into his coat pocket and found the metal box he kept there.
He halted, opened the box, looked down at the slips of paper already in it. Then he added the new one.
Six in all. Six times.
His legs wobbled under him and on his face particles of cold seemed to form. Ice slid down into his collar, past his green knit tie.
He made his way down the slope, to Junie.