Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

Two days ago, as I was walking along, someone had hissed at me from the hotel alley. ‘Sir, it’s important! Sir!’

I turned into the shadow. This little man, in the direst tones, said, ‘I’ve a job in Belfast if I just had a pound for the train fare!’

I hesitated.

‘A most important job!’ he went on swiftly. ‘Pays well! I’ll – I’ll mail you back the loan! Just give me your name and hotel.’

He knew me for a tourist. It was too late, his promise to pay had moved me. The pound note crackled in my hand, being worked free from several others.

The man’s eye skimmed like a shadowing hawk.

‘And if I had two pounds, why, I could eat on the way.’

I uncrumpled two bills.

‘And three pounds would bring the wife, not leave her here alone.’

I unleafed a third.

‘Ah, hell!’ cried the man. ‘Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city, and let me get to the job, for sure!’

What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, in and out, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.

‘Lord thank you, bless you, sir!’

He ran, my five pounds with him.

I was half in the hotel before I realized that, for all his vows, he had not recorded my name.

‘Gah!’ I cried then.

‘Gah!’ I cried now, my wife behind me, at the window.

For there, passing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights ago.

‘Oh, I know him,’ said my wife. ‘He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway.’

‘Did you give it to him?’

‘No,’ said my wife simply.

Then the worst thing happened. The demon far down on the sidewalk glanced up, saw us and damn if he didn’t wave!

I had to stop myself from waving back. A sickly grin played on my lips.

‘It’s got so I hate to leave the hotel,’ I said.

‘It’s cold out, all right.’ My wife was putting on her coat.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not the cold. Them.’

And we looked again from the window.

There was the cobbled Dublin street with the night wind blowing in a fine soot along one way to Trinity College, another to St. Stephen’s Green. Across by the sweetshop two men stood mummified in the shadows. On the corner a single man, hands deep in his pockets, felt for his entombed bones, a muzzle of ice for a beard. Farther up, in a doorway, was a bundle of old newspapers that would stir like a pack of mice and wish you the time of evening if you walked by. Below, by the hotel entrance, stood a feverish hothouse rose of a woman with a mysterious bundle.

‘Oh, the beggars,’ said my wife.

‘No, not just “oh, the beggars,”’ I said, ‘but oh, the people in the streets, who somehow became beggars.’

‘It looks like a motion picture. All of them waiting down there in the dark for the hero to come out.’

‘The hero,’ I said. ‘That’s me, damn it.’

My wife peered at me. ‘You’re not afraid of them?’

‘Yes, no. Hell. It’s that woman with the bundle who’s worst. She’s a force of nature, she is. Assaults you with her poverty. As for the others – well, it’s a big chess game for me now. We’ve been in Dublin what, eight weeks? Eight weeks I’ve sat up here with my typewriter, studying their off hours and on. When they take a coffee break I take one, run for the sweetshop, the bookstore, the Olympia Theatre. If I time it right, there’s no handout, no my wanting to trot them into the barbershop or the kitchen. I know every secret exit in the hotel.’

‘Lord,’ said my wife, ‘you sound driven.’

‘I am. But most of all by that beggar on O’Connell Bridge!’

‘Which one?’

‘Which one indeed. He’s a wonder, a terror. I hate him, I love him. To see is to disbelieve him. Come on.’

The elevator, which had haunted its untidy shaft for a hundred years, came wafting skyward, dragging its ungodly chains and dread intestines after. The door exhaled open. The lift groaned as if we had trod its stomach. In a great protestation of ennui, the ghost sank back toward earth, us in it.

On the way my wife said, ‘If you held your face right, the beggars wouldn’t bother you.’

‘My face,’ I explained patiently, ‘is my face. It’s from Apple Dumpling, Wisconsin, Sarsaparilla, Maine. “Kind to Dogs” is writ on my brow for all to read. Let the street be empty, then let me step out and there’s a strikers’ march of freeloaders leaping out of manholes for miles around.’

‘If,’ my wife went on, ‘you could just learn to look over, around or through those people, stare them down.’ She mused. ‘Shall I show you how to handle them?’

‘All right, show me! We’re here!’

I flung the elevator door wide and we advanced through the Royal Hibernian Hotel lobby to squint out at the sooty night.

‘Jesus come and get me,’ I murmured. ‘There they are, their heads up, their eyes on fire. They smell apple pie already.’

‘Meet me down by the bookstore in two minutes,’ said my wife.

‘Watch.’

‘Wait!’ I cried.

But she was out the door, down the steps and on the sidewalk.

I watched, nose pressed to the glass pane.