Ray Bradbury - Green Shadows, White Whales

I saw Ricki stiffen and pause in her eating, and then continue picking at her food as John went on about Hemingway and the bullfights and Franco and traveling to and from Madrid and Barcelona.

“We were there just a month ago,” said John. “You really ought to go there sometime, kid,” he said. “Beautiful country. Wonderful people, it’s been a bad twenty years, but they’re getting back on their feet. Anyway, we had a little event there, didn’t we, Ricki? A small thing got out of hand.”

Ricki started to rise, her plate in her hand, and the knife fell clattering to the table.

“Why don’t you tell us about it, dear,” said John.

“No, I—” said Ricki.

“Tell us what happened at the border,” said John.

His words were so heavy that, weighted, Ricki sat back down and after a pause to regain her breath, held for a long moment, let it out, “We were driving back up from Barcelona and there was this Spaniard wanted to get into France without papers and John wanted us to smuggle him across the border in our car under a rug in the back seat and John said it was okay and the Spaniard said please and I said my God, if they found out, the border guards, if they caught us we’d be held, put in jail maybe, and you know what Spanish jails are like, in there for days or weeks or forever, so I said no, no way, and the Spaniard pleaded and John said it was a matter of honor, we had to do it, we had to help this poor man and I said I was sorry but I wouldn’t endanger the children. What if I was in jail and the kids would be in the hands of others too many hours and days and who would explain to them and John insisted and there was a big row—”

“Very simply,” said John, “you were a coward.”

“No, I wasn’t,” said Ricki, looking up from her food.

“You were yellow,” said John, “pure yellow, and we had to leave the poor son of a bitch behind because my wife didn’t have enough guts to let us get him across.”

“How do we know he wasn’t a criminal, John,” said Ricki. “Some sort of political fugitive, and then we would have been in jail forever—”

“Just yellow is all.” John lit a cigarillo and leaned forward to stare at his wife at the far end, miles away down the table. “I really hate to think I am married to a woman with no guts, who wears a yellow stripe down her back. Wouldn’t you hate to be married to that kind of woman, kid?”

I sat back in my chair, my mouth full of food I could not chew nor swallow.

I looked at my genius employer and then at his wife then back to John and then back to Ricki.

Her head was bent.

“Yellow,” said John, a final time, and blew smoke.

As I looked down at the dead bird on my plate, I recalled a scene that now seemed so long ago.

In August, I had wandered, stunned, into a bookstore in Beverly Hills looking for a small, comfortable-sized copy of Moby Dick. The copy I had at home was too large to travel. I needed something compact. I shared with the proprietor my excitement about writing the screenplay and traveling overseas.

Even as I spoke, astonished, a woman in the far corner of the shop turned and said, very clearly:

“Don’t go on that journey.”

It was Elijah, at the foot of the Pequod’s gangplank, warning Queequeg and Ishmael not to follow Ahab off ’round the world: it was a dread mission and a lost cause from which no man might return.

“Don’t go,” said the strange woman again.

I recovered and said, “Who are you?”

“A former friend of the director’s and the former wife of one of his screenwriters. I know them both. God, I wish I didn’t. They’re both monsters, but your director’s the worst. He’ll eat you and spit out your bones. So—”

She stared at me.

“—whatever you do, don’t go.”

Ricki’s eyes were shut, but tears were leaking out of the lashes and running down to the tip of her nose where they fell, one by one, onto her plate.

My God, I thought, this is my first day in Ireland, my first day at work for my hero.

Chapter 6

The next day after lunch, we circled Courtown House, the old mansion where my director stayed. There was a large meadow and a forest beyond and another meadow and forest beyond that.

In the middle of the meadow we met a rather large black bull.

“Huh!” cried John, and whipped off his coat.

He charged the bull, shouting:

“Ha, Toro! Toro, ha!”

One minute from now, I thought, one of us will be dead. Me?

“John!” I cried quietly, if such is possible, “please, put on your coat!”

“Huh, Toro!” my director yelled. “Ho!”

The bull stared at us, motionless.

John shrugged his coat back on.

I ran ahead of him to toss Fedallah overboard, assemble the crew, bid Elijah to warn Ishmael not to go, then launch the Pequod to sail off and around the world.

So it went, day on day, week on week, as I killed the Whale each night, but to see him reborn each dawn, while I was lost in Dublin, where the weather struck from its bleak quarters in the sea and came searching with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain.

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and found it dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it’s just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

Then, late each afternoon, I taxied out amidst Kilcock’s gray stone with green beards on it, a rock town, and the rain falling down for weeks as I worked on a script that was to be shot in the hot sun of the Canary Isles sometime next year. The pages of the script were full of hot suns and burning days as I typed in Dublin or Kilcock, with the weather a beast at the windows.

On the thirty-first night, a knock at the door of my hotel room revealed Mike, shuffling.

“There you are!” he exclaimed. “I been thinking on what you said. You to find the Irish, me to help. I got me a car! So would you get the hell out to find some wild life in our land? And forget this damn rain on the double?”

“Double!” I said gladly.

And we blew along the road to Kilcock in a dark that rocked us like a boat on a black flood until, sweating rain, faces pearled, we struck through the pub doors and it was warm as a sheepfold because there were the townsmen pressed in a great compost heap at the bar and Heeber Finn yelling jokes and foaming up drinks.

“Heeber!” cried Mike. “We’re here for that wild night!”

“A wild night it is!”

Whereupon Heeber whipped off his apron, shrugged his meat-cleaver shoulders into a tweed coat, jumped up in the air and slid down inside his raincoat, slung on his beardy cap, and thrust us at the door.

“Nail everything down till I get back!” he advised his crew. “I’m taking these gents to the damnedest evening ever! Little do they know what waits for them beyond!”

He opened the door. The wind threw half a ton of ice water on him. Taking this as a spur to rhetoric, Heeber added in a roar, “Out with you! On!”

“Do you think we should?” I wondered.

“What do you mean?” cried Mike. “Would you freeze in your room? Rewrite the dead Whale?”

“Well …,” I said, and slung on my cap.

Then, like Ahab, I thought on my bed, a damp box with its pale cool winding sheets and the window dripping next to it like a conscience all night through. I groaned. I opened the door of Mike’s car, took my legs apart to get in, and in no time we shot down the town like a ball in a bowling alley.

Finn at the wheel talked fierce, half hilarity, half sobering King Lear.

“A wild night? Ahead! You’d never guess, would you, to walk through Ireland, so much could go on under the skin?”