Рэй Брэдбери: The Other Highway

«Oh, we're not really interested,» said Cecelia Travers.

«Didn't think you would be,» said the old man. «Too far out from the city, too far off the freeway. And that dirt road there slops over when it rains, all muck and mud. And, heck, it's against the law to use that path. Not that they ever patrol it.» The old man snorted, shaking his head. «And not that I'll turn you in. But it gave me a nice start just now to see you coming down that rut. J had to give a quick look at my calendar, by God, and make sure it wasn't 1929!»

Lord, I remember, thought Clarence Travers. This is Fox Hill. A thousand people lived here. I was a kid, we passed through on summer nights. We used to stop here late late, and me sleeping in the backseat in the moonlight. My grandmother and grandfather in back with me. It's nice to sleep in a car driving late and the road all white, watching the stars turn as you take the curves, listening to the grown-ups' voices underwater, remote, talking, talking, laughing, murmuring, whispering. My father driving, so stolid. Just to be driving in the summer dark, up along the lake to the Dunes, where the poison ivy grew out on the lonely beach and the wind stayed all the time and never went away. And us driving by that lonely graveyard place of sand and moonlight and poison ivy and the waves tumbling in like dusty ash on the shore, the lake pounding like a locomotive on the sand, coming and going. And me crumpled down and smelling Grandmother's wind-cooled coat and the voices comforting and blanketing me with their solidity and their always-will-be-here sounds that would go on forever, myself always young and us always riding on a summer night in our old Kissel with the side flaps down. And stopping here at nine or ten for Pistachio and Tutti-frutti ice cream that tasted, faintly, beautifully, of gasoline. All of us licking and biting the cones and smelling the gasoline and driving on, sleepy and snug, toward home, Green Town, thirty years ago.

He caught himself and said:

«About these houses, would it be much trouble fixing them up?» He squinted at the old man.

«Well, yes and no, most of 'em over fifty years old, lots of dust. You could buy one off me for ten thousand, a real bargain now, you'll admit. If you were an artist, now, a painter, or something like that.»

«I write copy in an advertising firm.»

«Write stories, too, no doubt? Well, now, you get a writer out here, quiet, no neighbors, you'd do lots of writing.»

Cecelia Travers stood silently between the old man and her husband. Clarence Travers did not look at her, but looked at the cinders around the porch of the general store. «I imagine I could work here.»

«Sure,» said the old man.

«I've often thought,» said Mr. Travers, «it's time we got away from the city and took it a little easy.»

«Sure,» said the old man.

Mrs. Travers said nothing but searched in her purse and took out a minor.

«Would you like some drinks?» asked Clarence Travers with exaggerated concern. «Three Orange Crushes, make it four,» he told the old man. The old man moved inside the store, which smelled of nails and crackers and dust.

When the old man was gone, Mr. Travers turned to his wife, and his eyes were shining. «We've always wanted to do it! Let's!»

«Do what?» she said.

«Move out here, snap decision, why not? Why? We've promised ourselves every year: get away from the noise, the confusion, so the kids'd have a place to play. And…»

«Good grief» the wife cried.

The old man moved inside the store, coughing. «Ridiculous.» She lowered her voice. «We've got the apartment paid up, you've got a fine job, the kids have school with friends, I belong to some fine clubs. And we've just spent a bundle redecorating. We―»

«Listen,» he said, as if she were really listening. «None of that's important. Out here, we can breathe. Back in town, hell, you complain…»

«Just to have something to complain about.»

«Your clubs can't be that important.»

«It's not clubs, it's friends!»

«How many would care if we dropped dead tomorrow?» he said. «If I got hit in that traffic, how many thousand cars would run over me before one stopped to see if I was a man or dog left in the road?»

«Your job…» she started to say.

«My God, ten years ago we said, in two more years we'll have enough money to quit and write my novel! But each year we've said next year! and next year and next year!»

«We've had fun, haven't we?»

«Sure! Subways are fun, buses are fun, martinis and drunken friends are fun. Advertising? Yeah! But I've used all the fun there is! I want to write about what I've seen now, and there's no better place than this. Look at that house over there! Can't you just see me in the front window banging the hell out of my typewriter?»

«Stop hyperventilating!»

«Hyperventilate? God, I'd jump for joy to quit. I've gone as far as I can go. Come on, Cecelia, let's get back some of the spunk in our marriage, take a chance!»

«The children…»

«We'd love it here!» said the son.

«I think,» said the daughter.

«I'm not getting any younger,» said Clarence Travers.

«Nor am I,» she said, touching his arm. «But we can't play hopscotch now. When the children leave, yes, we'll think about it.»

«Children, hopscotch, my God, I'll take my typewriter to the grave!»

«It won't be long. We―»

The shop door squealed open again and whether the old man had been standing in the screen shadow for the last minute, there was no telling. It did not show in his face. He stepped out with four lukewarm bottles of Orange Crush in his rust-spotted hands.

«Here you are,» he said.

Clarence and Cecelia Travers turned to stare at him as if he were a stranger come out to bring them drinks. They smiled and took the bottles.

The four of them stood drinking the soda pop in the warm sunlight. The summer wind blew through the grottoes of trees in the old, shady town. It was like being in a great green church, a cathedral, the trees so high that the people and cottages were lost far down below. All night long you would imagine those trees rustling Their leaves like an ocean on an unending shore. God, thought Clarence Travers, you could really sleep here, the sleep of the dead and the peace-fill-of-heart.

He finished his drink and his wife half finished hers and gave it to the children to argue over, inch by compared inch. The old man stood silent, embarrassed by the thing he may have stirred up among them.

«Well, if you're ever out this way, drop in,» he said. Clarence Travers reached for his wallet.

«No, no!» said the old man. «It's on the house.»

«Thank you, thank you very much.»

«A pleasure.»

They climbed back into their car.

«If you want to get to the freeway,» said the old man, peering through the front window into the cooked-upholstery smell of the car, «just take your old dirt road back. Don't rush, or you'll break an axle.»

Clarence Travers looked straight ahead at the radiator fixture on the car front and started the motor.

«Good-bye,» said the old man.

«Good-bye,» the children yelled, and waved. The car moved away through the town.

«Did you hear what the old man said?» asked the wife.

«What?»

«Did you hear him say which way to the freeway?»

«I heard.»

He drove through the cool, shady town, staring at the porches and the windows with the colored glass fringing them. If you looked from the inside of those windows out, people had different-colored faces for each pane you looked through. They were Chinese if you looked through one, Indian through another, pink, green, violet, burgundy, wine, chartreuse, the candy colors, the lemon-lime cool colors, the water colors of the windows looking out on lawns and trees and this car slowly driving past.