The Toynbee Convector

The wind rustled beyond in the meadows. It made a sound in the clouds like someone turning back the covers of a vast bed.

I listened. There was the softest moan and sob from somewhere off in the dark fields. Eyes still shut, John whispered, “You know what that is, kid?”

“What?”

“Tell you later. Jump.”

With the door slammed, he turned about and, the grand lord of the empty manor, strode ahead of me in his hacking coat, drill slacks, polished half-boots, his hair, as always, windblown from swimming upstream or down with strange women in unfamiliar beds.

Planting himself on the library hearth, he gave me one of those beacon flashes of laugh, the teeth that beckoned like a lighthouse beam swift and gone, as he traded me a second sherry for the screenplay, which he had to seize from my hand.

“Let’s see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm, has birthed. Sit. Drink. Watch.”

He stood astride the hearthstones, warming his back side, leafing my manuscript pages, conscious of me drinking my sherry much too fast, shutting my eyes each time he let a page drop and flutter to the carpet. When he finished he let the last page sail, lit a small cigarillo and puffed it, staring at the ceiling, making me wait.

“You son of a bitch,” he said at last, exhaling. “It’s good. Damn you to hell, kid. It’s good!” My entire skeleton collapsed within me. I had not expected such a midriff blow of praise.

“It needs a little cutting, of course!”

My skeleton reassembled itself.

“Of course,” I said.

He bent to gather the pages like a great loping chimpanzee and turned. I felt he wanted to hurl them into the foe. He watched the flames and gripped the pages.

“Someday, kid,” he said quietly, “you must teach me to write.”

He was relaxing now, accepting the inevitable, full of true admiration.

“Someday,” I said, laughing, “you must teach me to

direct.”

“The Beast will be our film, son. Quite a team.”

He arose and came to clink glasses with me.

“Quite a team we are!” He changed gears. “How are the wife and kids?”

“They’re waiting for me in Sicily where it’s warm.”

“Well get you to them, and sun, straight off! I—”

He froze dramatically, cocked his head, and listened.

“Hey, what goes on—” he whispered.

I turned and waited.

This time, outside the great old house, there was the merest thread of sound, like someone running a fingernail over the paint, or someone sliding down out of the dry reach of a tree. Then there was the softest exhalation of a moan, followed by something like a sob.

John leaned in a starkly dramatic pose, like a statue in a stage pantomime, his mouth wide, as if to allow sounds entry to the inner ear. His eyes now unlocked to become as huge as hen’s eggs with pretended alarm.

“Shall I tell you what that sound is, kid? A banshee!”

“A what?” I cried. / “Banshee!” he intoned. The ghosts of old women who haunt the roads an hour before someone dies. That’s what that sound was!” He stepped to the window, raised the shade, and peered out “Shh! Maybe it means—us!”

“Cut it out, John!” I laughed, quietly.