Raymond Bradbury: Farewell Summer

"Think on it, anyway. Don't wait, or you'll sink bitch again."

"So that's what I've been! Well, well. I didn't start out intending to be mean, but I got there somehow. Are you mean, Bleak?"

"No, because I know what I did to myself. I'm only mean in private. I don't blame others for my own mistakes. I'm bad in a different way than you, of course, with a sense of humor developed out of necessity." For a moment, Bleak's eyes seemed to twinkle, but maybe it was only the passing sun.

"I'll need a sense of humor from here on out. Bleak, visit me more often." Quartermain's gnarled fingers grasped Bleak's hand.

"Why would I visit you, you sorry old bastard, ever again?"

"Because we're the Grand Army, aren't we? You must help me think."

"The blind leading the sick," said Bleak. "Here we

He paused at the walk leading up to the gray, flake-painted house.

"Is that my place?" said Quartermain. "My God, it's ugly, ugly as sin. Needs paint."

"You can think about that, too."

"My God, what a Christ-awful ugly house! Wheel me in, Bleak."

And Bleak wheeled his friend up the walk toward his house.

DOUGLAS STOOD WITH TOM AND CHARLIE IN THE moist-smelling warm late-summer-green ravine. Mosquitoes danced their delicate dances upon the silence. A dancing idiot hum-tune.

"Everyone's gone," said Tom.

Douglas sat on a rock and took off his shoes.

"Bang, you're dead," said Tom, quietly.

"I wish I was, oh, I wish I was dead," said Doug.

Tom said, "Is the war over? Shall I take down the flag?"

"What flag?"

"Just the flag, that's all."

"Yeah. Take it down. But I'm not sure if the war is really over yet… but it sure has changed. I've just got to figure out how."

Charlie said, "Yeah, well, you did give cake to the enemy. If that wasn't the strangest thing…"

"Ta-ta-tahhhh," hummed Tom. He made furling motions in the warm empty silent air. He stood solemnly by the quiet creek in the summer evening with the sun fading. "Ta-ta-tahhhh. Ta-ta-tahhhh." He hummed "Taps." A tear fell off his cheek.

"Oh, for gosh sakes!" cried Douglas. "Stop!" Douglas and Tom and Charlie climbed out of the ravine, and walked through the boxed and packaged town, through the avenues and streets and alleys, among the thousand-celled houses, the bright prisons, down the definite sidewalks and the positive lanes, and the country seemed far away and it was as if a sea had moved away from the shore of their life in one day. Suddenly there was the town and their lives to be lived in that town in the next forty years, opening and shutting doors and raising and lowering shades, and the green meadow was distant and alien. Douglas looked over at Tom getting taller every minute, it seemed. He felt the hunger in his stomach and he thought of the miraculous foods at home and he thought of Lisabell blowing out the candles and sitting there with fourteen years burnt behind her and not caring, very pretty and solemn and beautiful. He thought of the Lonely One, very lonely indeed, wanting love, and now gone.

Douglas stopped at Charlie's house, feeling the season change about them.

"Here's where I leave you guys," said Charlie. "See you later, at the haunted house with those dumb girls." "Yeah, see you later, Charlie." "So long, Charlie," said Tom.

"You know something," said Charlie, turning back toward his friends, as if he'd suddenly remembered something important. "I been thinkin'. I got an uncle, twenty-five years old. Came by earlier today in a big Buick, with his wife. A really nice, pretty lady. I was thinkin' all morning: Maybe I'll let them make me twenty-five. Twenty-five strikes me as a nice medium age. If they'll let me ride in a Buick with a pretty lady like that, I'll go along with them. But that's it, mind! No kids. It stops at squalling kids. Just a nice car and a pretty lady with me, ridin' along out toward the lake.

Boy! I'll take about thirty years of that. I'm puttin' in my order for thirty years of being twenty-five. Fill 'er up and I'm on my way."

"It's something to think about," said Douglas. "I'm goin' in the house to think about it right now," said Charlie.

"So, when do we start the war again?" said Tom. Charlie and Douglas looked at each other.

"Heck, I dunno," said Doug, a little uncomfortably. "Tomorrow, next week, next month?" "I guess."

"We can't give up the war!" said Tom. "Heck, we're not giving it up," said Charlie. "Every once in a while we'll do it again, huh, Doug?"

"Oh, sure, sure!"

"Shift the strategy, identify new objectives, you know," said Charlie. "Oh, we'll have wars okay, Tom, don't you worry."

"Promise?" cried Tom, tears in his eyes. "Cross our hearts, mother's honor."

"Okay," said Tom, lower lip trembling. The wind whistled, was cool: it was an early autumn evening, no longer a late summer one.

"Well," said Charlie, standing there, smiling shyly,

looking up from under his eyebrows at Doug. "It sure was a farewell summer, huh?"

"Sure kept us busy." "Sure did."

"Only thing is," said Tom, "it didn't come out in the papers: Who won?"

Charlie and Douglas stared at the younger boy. "Who won? Don't be silly!" Douglas lapsed into silence, staring up into the sky. Then he fixed them with a stare. "I don't know. Us, them."

Charlie scratched inside his left ear. "Everybody. The first war in history where everybody won. I can't figure it. So long." He went on up the sidewalk, crossed the front yard, opened the door of his house, waved, and was gone.

"There goes Charlie," said Douglas. "Boy, am I sad!" said Tom. "About what?"

"I don't know. I keep playin' 'Taps' inside my head. It's a sad song, that's all."

"Don't start bawlin' now!"

"No, I'm just gonna be quiet. You know why? I guess I got it figured."

"Why?"

"Ice cream cones don't last." "That's a silly thing to say."

"Ice cream cones are always gettin' done with. Seems I'm no sooner bitin' the top than I'm eatin' the tail. Seems I'm no sooner jumpin' in the lake at the start of vacation than I'm creepin' out the far side, on the way back to school. Boy, no wonder I feel bad."

"It's all how you look at it," said Doug. "My gosh, think of all the things you haven't even started yet. There's a million ice cream cones up ahead and ten billion apple pies and hundreds of summer vacations. Billions of things waitin' to be bit or swallowed or jumped in."

"Just once, though," said Tom, "I'd like one thing. An ice cream cone so big you could just keep eatin' and there isn't any end and you just go on bein' happy with it forever. Wow!"

"There's no such ice cream cone."

"Just one thing like that is all I ask," said Tom. "One vacation that never has a last day. Or one matinee with Buck Jones, boy, just ridin' along forever, bangin', and Indians fallin' like pop bottles. Gimme just one thing with no tail-end and I'd go crazy. Sometimes I just sit in the movie theater and cry when it says 'The End' for Jack Hoxie or Ken Maynard. And there's nothin' so sad as the last piece of popcorn at the bottom of the box."

"You better watch out," said Doug. "You'll be workin' yourself into another fit any minute. Just remember, darn it, there're ten thousand matinees waitin' right on up ahead."

"Well, here we are, home. Did we do anything today we might get licked for?"

"Nope."

"Then let's go in."

They did, slamming the door as they went.

THE HOUSE STOOD ON THE EDGE OF THE RAVINE. It looked haunted, just like everyone said it was.

Tom and Charlie and Bo followed Doug up the side of the ravine and stood in front of the strange house at nine o'clock at night. In the distance, the courthouse clock bonged off the hour.