“And what did you do, I ask, what?” said Tom, in a tired voice, looking ahead. “The same as you always did, just the same, no different, no different at all. You should’ve seen yourself.”
They dropped the boys off at their beach house. The youngest spoke in a voice you could hardly hear against the wind. “Gosh, nobody’ll ever believe …”
The two men drove down the coast and parked.
Chico sat for two or three minutes waiting for his fists to relax on his lap, and then he snorted.
“Hell. I guess things turn out for the best.” He took a deep breath. “It just came to me. Funny. Twenty, thirty years from now, middle of the night, our phone’ll ring. It’ll be one of those two boys, grown-up, calling long-distance from a bar somewhere. Middle of the night, them calling to
ask one question. It’s true, isn’t it? they’ll say. It did happen, didn’t it? Back in 1958, it really happened to us? And we’ll sit there on the edge of the bed, middle of the night, saying, Sure, boy, sure, it really happened to us in 1958. And they’ll say, Thanks, and we’ll say, Don’t mention it, any old time. And we’ll all say good night. And maybe they won’t call again for a couple of years.”
The two men sat on their front-porch steps in the dark.
“Tom?”
“What?”
Chico waited a moment.
“Tom, next week—you’re not going away.”
It was not a question but a quiet statement.
Tom thought about it, his cigarette dead in his fingers. And he knew that now he could never go away. For tomorrow and the day after the day after that he would walk down and go swimming there in all the green and white fires and the dark caverns in the hollows under the strange waves. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
“Yes, Chico. I’m staying here.”
Now the silver looking glasses advanced in a crumpling line all along the coast from a thousand miles north to a thousand miles south. The mirrors did not reflect so much as one building or one tree or one highway or one car or even one man himself. The mirrors reflected only the quiet moon and then shattered into a billion bits of glass that spread out in a glaze on the shore. Then the sea was dark awhile, preparing another line of mirrors to rear up and surprise the two men who sat there for a long time never once blinking their eyes, waiting.
The Day It Rained Forever
The hotel stood like a hollowed dry bone under the very center of the desert sky where the sun burned the roof all day. All night, the memory of the sun stirred in every room like the ghost of an old forest fire. Long after dusk, since light meant heat, the hotel lights stayed off. The inhabitants of the hotel preferred to feel their way blind through the halls in their never-ending search for cool air.
This one particular evening Mr. Terle, the proprietor, and his only boarders, Mr. Smith and Mr. Fremley, who looked and smelled like two ancient rags of cured tobacco, stayed late on the long veranda. In their creaking glockenspiel rockers they gasped back and forth in the dark, trying to rock up a wind.
“Mr. Terle …? Wouldn’t it be really nice … someday…if you could buy … air conditioning…?”
Mr. Terle coasted awhile, eyes shut.
“Got no money for such things, Mr. Smith.”
The two old boarders flushed; they hadn’t paid a bill now in twenty-one years.
Much later Mr. Fremley sighed a grievous sigh. “Why, why don’t we all just quit, pick up, get outa here, move to a decent city? Stop this swelterin’ and fryin’ and sweatin’.”
“Who’d buy a dead hotel in a ghost town?” said Mr. Terle quietly. “No. No, we’ll just set here and wait, wait for that great day, January 29.”
Slowly, all three men stopped rocking.
January 29.
The one day in all the year when it really let go and rained.
“Won’t wait long.” Mr. Smith tilted his gold railroad watch like the warm summer moon in his palm. “Two hours and nine minutes from now it’ll be January 29. But I don’t see nary a cloud in ten thousand miles.”
“It’s rained every January 29 since I was born!” Mr. Terle stopped, surprised at his own loud voice. “If it’s a day late this year, I won’t pull God’s shirttail.”
Mr. Fremley swallowed hard and looked from east to west across the desert toward the hills. “I wonder … will there ever be a gold rush hereabouts again?”