Ray Bradbury: Driving Blind

“Not bad.” The sharpster nodded. “Go on.”

“Or you are on your way to a small European state where some nut keeps a witch doctor to suck the economy into a Swiss bank.”

“The boy’s a poet! I have a letter here, from Castro.” His gambler’s hand touched his heart. “And one from Bothelesa, another from Mandela in South Africa. Which do I choose? Well.” The gambler glanced at the rushing storm outside the window. “Choose any pocket, right, left, inside, out.” He touched his coat.

“Right,” Cruesoe said.

The man shoved his hand in his right coat pocket, pulled out a fresh pack of cards, gave it a toss.

“Open it. That’s it. Now riffle and spread. See anything?”

“Well …”

“Gimme.” He took it. “The next monte will be from the deck you choose.”

Cruesoe shook his head. “That’s not how the trick works. It’s how you lay down and pick up the cards. Any deck would do.”

“Pick!”

Cruesoe picked two tens and a red Queen.

“Okay!” The gambler humped the cards over each other. “Where’s the Queen?”

“Middle.”

He flipped it over. “Hey, you’re good.” He smiled.

“You’re better. That’s the trouble,” Cruesoe said.

“Now, see this pile of ten-dollar bills? That’s the stake, just put by these gents. You’ve stopped the game too long. Do you join or be the skeleton at the feast?”

“Skeleton.”

“Okay. They’re off! There she goes. Queen here, Queen there. Lost! Where? You ready to risk all your cash, fellows? Want to pull out? All of a single mind? ”

Fierce whispers.

“ All ,” someone said.

“No!” Cruesoe said.

A dozen curses lit the air.

“Smart-ass,” said the cardsharp, his voice deadly calm, “do you realize that your static may cause these gentlemen to lose everything? ”

“No,” Cruesoe said. “It’s not my static. Your hands deal the cards.”

Such jeers. Such hoots. “Move! My God, move!”

“Well.” With the three cards still under his clean fingers the gambler stared at the rushing storm beyond the window. “You’ve ruined it. Because of you, their choice is doomed. You and only you have intruded to burst the ambience, the aura, the bubble that enclosed this game. When I turn the card over my friends may hurl you off the train.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” Cruesoe said.

The card was turned over.

With a roar the train pulled away in a downpour of rain and lightning and thunder. Just before the car door slammed, the gambler thrust a fistful of cards out on the sulfurous air and tossed. They took flight: an aviary of bleeding pigeons, to pelt Cruesoe’s chest and face.

The club car rattle-banged by, a dozen volcanic faces with fiery eyes crushed close to the windows, fists hammering the glass.

His suitcase stopped tumbling.

The train was gone.

He waited a long while and then slowly bent and began to pick up fifty-two cards. One by one. One by one.

A Queen of hearts. Another Queen. Another Queen of hearts. And one more.

A Queen …

Queen.

Lightning struck. If it had hit him, he would never have known.

“Holy Jeez, damn. Christ off the cross!” said Jerry Would.

“Please,” said his typist-secretary, pausing to erase a typo in a screenplay, “I have Christian ears.”

“Yeah, but my tongue is Bronx, New York,” said Would, staring out the window. “Will you just look, take one long fat look at that! ”

The secretary glanced up and saw what he saw, beyond.

“They’re repainting the studio. That’s Stage One, isn’t it?”

“You’re damn right. Stage One, where we built the Bounty in ‘34 and shot the Tara interiors in ‘39 and Marie Antionette’s palace in ‘34 and now, for God’s sake, look what they’re doing!”

“Looks like they’re changing the number.”

“Changing the number, hell, they’re wiping it out! No more One. Watch those guys with the plastic overlays in the alley, holding up the goddamn pieces, trying them for size.”

The typist rose and took off her glasses to see better.

“That looks like UGH. What does ‘Ugh’ mean?”

“Wait till they fit the first letter. See? Is that or is that not an H?”

“H added to UGH. Say, I bet I know the rest. Hughes! And down there on the ground, in small letters, the stencil? ‘Aircraft’?”

“Hughes Aircraft, dammit!”

“Since when are we making planes? I know the war’s on, but—”

“We’re not making any damn planes,” Jerry Would cried, turning from the window.

“We’re shooting air combat films, then?”

“No, and we’re not shooting no damn air films!”

“I don’t see …”

“Put your damn glasses back on and look. Think! Why would those SOBs be changing the number for a name, hey? What’s the big idea? We’re not making an aircraft carrier flick and we’re not in the business of tacking together P-38s and—Jesus, now look!”

A shadow hovered over the building and a shape loomed in the noon California sky.

His secretary shielded her eyes. “I’ll be damned,” she said.

“You ain’t the only one. You wanna tell me what that thing is?”

She squinted again. “A balloon?” she said. “A barrage balloon?”

“You can say that again, but don’t! ”

She shut her mouth, eyed the gray monster in the sky, and sat back down. “How do you want this letter addressed?” she said.

Jerry Would turned on her with a killing aspect. “Who gives a damn about a stupid letter when the world is going to hell? Don’t you get the full aspect, the great significance? Why, I ask you, would MGM have to be protected by a barrage—hell, there goes another! That makes two barrage balloons!”

“ No reason,” she said. “We’re not a prime munitions or aircraft target.” She typed a few letters and stopped abruptly with a laugh. “I’m slow, right? We are a prime bombing target?”

She rose again and came to the window as the stencils were hauled up and the painters started blow-gunning paint on the side of Stage One.

“Yep,” she said, softly, “there it is. AIRCRAFT COMPANY. HUGHES. When does he move in? ”

“What, Howie the nut? Howard the fruitcake? Hughes the billionaire bastard?”

“ That one, yeah.”

“He’s going nowhere, he still has his pants glued to an office just three miles away. Think! Add it up. MGM is here, right, two miles from the Pacific coast, two blocks away from where Laurel and Hardy ran their tin lizzie like an accordion between trolley cars in 1928! And three miles north of us and also two miles in from the ocean is—”

He let her fill in the blanks.

“Hughes Aircraft?”

He shut his eyes and laid his brow against the window to let it cool. “Give the lady a five-cent seegar.”

“I’ll be damned,” she breathed with revelatory delight.