Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

They were drinking coffee and not looking at each other in the ticket booth half an hour later, when the Dwarf came out of the mirrors. He took his hat off and started to approach the booth, when he saw Aimee and hurried away.

‘He wanted something,’ said Aimee.

‘Yeah.’ Ralph squashed out his cigarette, idly. ‘I know what, too. But he hasn’t got the nerve to ask. One night in this squeaky little voice he says, “I bet those mirrors are expensive.” Well, I played dumb. I said yeah they were. He sort of looked at me, waiting, and when I didn’t say any more, he went home, but next night he said, “I bet those mirrors cost fifty, a hundred bucks.” I bet they do, I said. I laid me out a hand of solitaire.’

‘Ralph,’ she said.

He glanced up. ‘Why you look at me that way?’

‘Ralph,’ she said, ‘why don’t you sell him one of your extra ones?’

‘Look, Aimee, do I tell you how to run your hoop circus?’

‘How much do those mirrors cost?’

‘I can get ’em secondhand for thirty-five bucks.’

‘Why don’t you tell him where he can buy one, then?’

‘Aimee, you’re not smart.’ He laid his hand on her knee. She moved her knee away. ‘Even if I told him where to go, you think he’d buy one? Not on your life. And why? He’s self-conscious. Why, if he even knew I knew he was flirtin’ around in front of that mirror in Screwy Louie’s Room, he’d never come back. He plays like he’s goin’ through the Maze to get lost, like everybody else. Pretends like he don’t care about that special room. Always waits for business to turn bad, late nights, so he has that room to himself. What he does for entertainment on nights when business is good, God knows. No, sir, he wouldn’t dare go buy a mirror anywhere. He ain’t got no friends, and even if he did he couldn’t ask him to buy him a thing like that. Pride, by God, pride. Only reason he even mentioned it to me is I’m practically the only guy he knows. Besides, look at him – he ain’t got enough to buy a mirror like those. He might be savin’ up, but where in hell in the world today can a dwarf work? Dime a dozen, drug on the market, outside of circuses.’

‘I feel awful. I feel sad.’ Aimee sat staring at the empty boardwalk. ‘Where does he live?’

‘Flytrap down on the waterfront. The Ganghes Arms. Why?’

‘I’m madly in love with him, if you must know.’

He grinned around his cigar. ‘Aimee,’ he said. ‘You and your very funny jokes.’

A warm night, a hot morning, and a blazing noon. The sea was a sheet of burning tinsel and glass.

Aimee came walking, in the locked-up carnival alleys out over the warm sea, keeping in the shade, half a dozen sun-bleached magazines under her arm. She opened a flaking door. The world of Giants far away, an ugly rumor beyond the garden wall. Poor mama, papa! They meant only the best for me. They kept me, like a porcelain vase, small and treasured, to themselves, in our ant world, our beehive rooms, our microscopic library, our land of beetle-sized doors and moth windows. Only now do I see the magnificent size of my parents’ psychosis! They must have dreamed they would live forever, keeping me like a butterfly under glass. But first father died, and then fire ate up the little house, the wasp’s nest, and every postage-stamp mirror and saltcellar closet within. Mama, too, gone! And myself alone, watching the fallen embers, tossed out into a world of Monsters and Titans, caught in a landslide of reality, rushed, rolled, and smashed to the bottom of the cliff!

‘It took me a year to adjust. A job with a sideshow was unthinkable. There seemed no place for me in the world. And then, a month ago, the Persecutor came into my life, clapped a bonnet on my unsuspecting head, and cried to friends, “I want you to meet the little woman!”’

Aimee stopped reading. Her eyes were unsteady and the magazine shook as she handed it to Ralph. ‘You finish it. The rest is a murder story. It’s all right. But don’t you see? That little man. That little man.’

Ralph tossed the magazine aside and lit a cigarette lazily. ‘I like Westerns better.’

‘Ralph, you got to read it. He needs someone to tell him how good he is and keep him writing.’

Ralph looked at her, his head to one side. ‘And guess who’s going to do it? Well, well, ain’t we just the Savior’s right hand?’

‘I won’t listen!’

‘Use your head, damn it! You go busting in on him he’ll think you’re handing him pity. He’ll chase you screamin’ outa his room.’

She sat down, thinking about it slowly, trying to turn it over and see it from every side. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Oh, it’s not just pity, Ralph, honest. But maybe it’d look like it to him. I’ve got to be awful careful.’

He shook her shoulder back and forth, pinching softly, with his fingers. ‘Hell, hell, lay off him, is all I ask; you’ll get nothing but trouble for your dough. God, Aimee, I never seen you so hepped on anything. Look, you and me, let’s make it a day, take a lunch, get us some gas, and just drive on down the coast as far as we can drive; swim, have supper, see a good show in some little town – to hell with the carnival, how about it? A damn nice day and no worries. I been savin’ a coupla bucks.’

‘It’s because I know he’s different,’ she said, looking off into darkness. ‘It’s because he’s something we can never be – you and me and all the rest of us here on the pier. It’s so funny, so funny. Life fixed him so he’s good for nothing but carny shows, yet there he is on the land. And life made us so we wouldn’t have to work in the carny shows, but here we are, anyway, way out here at sea on the pier. Sometimes it seems a million miles to shore. How come, Ralph, that we got the bodies, but he’s got the brains and can think things we’ll never even guess?’

‘You haven’t even been listening to me!’ said Ralph.

She sat with him standing over her, his voice far away. Her eyes were half shut and her hands were in her lap, twitching.

‘I don’t like that shrewd look you’re getting on,’ he said, finally.

She opened her purse slowly and took out a small roll of bills and started counting. ‘Thirty-five, forty dollars. There. I’m going to phone Billie Fine and have him send out one of those tall-type mirrors to Mr Bigelow at the Ganghes Arms. Yes, I am!’

‘What!’

‘Think how wonderful for him, Ralph, having one in his own room any time he wants it. Can I use your phone?’

‘Go ahead, be nutty.’

Ralph turned quickly and walked off down the tunnel. A door slammed.

Aimee waited, then after a while put her hands to the phone and began to dial, with painful slowness. She paused between numbers, holding her breath, shutting her eyes, thinking how it might seem to be small in the world, and then one day someone sends a special mirror by. A mirror for your room where you can hide away with the big reflection of yourself, shining, and write stories and stories, never going out into the world unless you had to. How might it be then, alone, with the wonderful illusion all in one piece in the room. Would it make you happy or sad, would it help your writing or hurt it? She shook her head back and forth, back and forth. At least this way there would be no one to look down at you. Night after night, perhaps rising secretly at three in the cold morning, you could wink and dance around and smile and wave at yourself, so tall, so tall, so very fine and tall in the bright looking-glass.

A telephone voice said, ‘Billie Fine’s.’

‘Oh, Billie!’ she cried.

Night came in over the pier. The ocean lay dark and loud under the planks. Ralph sat cold and waxen in his glass coffin, laying out the cards, his eyes fixed, his mouth stiff. At his elbow, a growing pyramid of burned cigarette butts grew larger. When Aimee walked along under the hot red and blue bulbs, smiling, waving, he did not stop setting the cards down slow and very slow. ‘Hi, Ralph!’ she said.

‘How’s the love affair?’ he asked, drinking from a dirty glass of iced water. ‘How’s Charlie Boyer, or is it Cary Grant?’

‘I just went and bought me a new hat,’ she said, smiling. ‘Gosh, I feel good! You know why? Billie Fine’s sending a mirror out tomorrow! Can’t you just see the nice little guy’s face?’

‘I’m not so hot at imagining.’

‘Oh, Lord, you’d think I was going to marry him or something.’

‘Why not? Carry him around in a suitcase. People say, Where’s your husband? all you do is open your bag, yell, Here he is! Like a silver cornet. Take him outa his case any old hour, play a tune, stash him away. Keep a little sandbox for him on the back porch.’

‘I was feeling so good,’ she said.

‘Benevolent is the word.’ Ralph did not look at her, his mouth tight. ‘Ben-eve-o-lent. I suppose this all comes from me watching him through that knothole, getting my kicks? That why you sent the mirror? People like you run around with tambourines, taking the joy out of my life.’

‘Remind me not to come to your place for drinks anymore. I’d rather go with no people at all than mean people.’

Ralph exhaled a deep breath. ‘Aimee, Aimee. Don’t you know you can’t help that guy? He’s bats. And this crazy thing of yours is like saying, Go ahead, be batty, I’ll help you, pal.’

‘Once in a lifetime anyway, it’s nice to make a mistake if you think it’ll do somebody some good,’ she said.

‘God deliver me from do-gooders, Aimee.’