"No, I checked. Nothing but the steps, Zelda, the steps!"
Tears rolled down Zelda"s plump cheeks.
"Oh, G.o.d, that is his voice! I"m the expert, I"m the mad fanatic, Bella. That"s Ollie. And that other voice, Stan! And you"re not nuts after all!"
The voices below rose and fell and one cried: "Why don"t you do something to help me?"
Zelda moaned. "Oh, G.o.d, it"s so beautiful."
"What does it mean?" asked Bella. "Why are they here? Are they really ghosts, and why would ghosts climb this hill every night, pushing that music box, night after night, tell me, Zelda, why?"
Zelda peered down the hill and shut her eyes for a moment to think. "Why do any ghosts go anywhere? Retribution? Revenge? No, not those two. Love maybe"s the reason, lost loves or something. Yes?"
Bella let her heart pound once or twice and then said, "Maybe n.o.body told them."
"Told them what?"
"Or maybe they were told a lot but still didn"t believe, because maybe in their old years things got bad, I mean they were sick, and sometimes when you"re sick you forget."
"Forget what?"
"How much we loved them."
"They knew!"
"Did they? Sure, we told each other, but maybe not enough of us ever wrote or waved when they pa.s.sed and just yelled "Love!" you think?"
"h.e.l.l, Bella, they"re on TV every night!"
"Yeah, but that don"t count. Has anyone, since they left us, come here to these steps and said? Maybe those voices down there, ghosts or whatever, have been here every night for years, pushing that music box, and n.o.body thought, or tried, to just whisper or yell all the love we had all the years. Why not?"
"Why not?" Zelda stared down into the long darkness where perhaps shadows moved and maybe a piano lurched clumsily among the shadows. "You"re right."
"If I"m right," said Bella, "and you say so, there"s only one thing to do-"
"You mean you and me?"
"Who else? Quiet. Come on."
They moved down a step. In the same instant lights came on around them, in a window here, another there. A screen door opened somewhere and angry words shot out into the night: "Hey, what"s going on?"
"Pipe down!"
"You know what time it is?"
"My G.o.d," Bella whispered, "everyone else hears now!"
"No, no." Zelda looked around wildly. "They"ll spoil everything!"
"I"m calling the cops!" A window slammed.
"G.o.d," said Bella, "if the cops come-"
"What?"
"It"ll be all wrong. If anyone"s going to tell them to take it easy, pipe down, it"s gotta be us. We care, don"t we?"
"G.o.d, yes, but-"
"No buts. Grab on. Here we go."
The two voices murmured below and the piano tuned itself with hiccups of sound as they edged down another step and another, their mouths dry, hearts hammering, and the night so dark they could see only the faint streetlight at the stair bottom, the single street illumination so far away it was sad being there all by itself, waiting for shadows to move.
More windows slammed up, more screen doors opened. At any moment there would be an avalanche of protest, incredible outcries, perhaps shots fired, and all this gone forever.
Thinking this, the women trembled and held tight, as if to pummel each other to speak against the rage.
"Say something, Zelda, quick."
"What?"
"Anything! They"ll get hurt if we don"t-"
"They?"
"You know what I mean. Save them."
"Okay. Jesus!" Zelda froze, clamped her eyes shut to find the words, then opened her eyes and said, "h.e.l.lo."
"Louder."
"h.e.l.lo," Zelda called softly, then loudly.
Shapes rustled in the dark below. One of the voices rose while the other fell and the piano strummed its hidden harp strings.
"Don"t be afraid," Zelda called.
"That"s good. Go on."
"Don"t be afraid," Zelda called, braver now. "Don"t listen to those others yelling. We won"t hurt you. It"s just us. I"m Zelda, you wouldn"t remember, and this here is Bella, and we"ve known you forever, or since we were kids, and we love you. It"s late, but we thought you should know. We"ve loved you ever since you were in the desert or on that boat with ghosts or trying to sell Christmas trees door-to-door or in that traffic where you tore the headlights off cars, and we still love you, right, Bella?"
The night below was darkness, waiting.
Zelda punched Bella"s arm.
"Yes!" Bella cried, "what she said. We love you."
"We can"t think of anything else to say."
"But it"s enough, yes?" Bella leaned forward anxiously. "It"s enough?"
A night wind stirred the leaves and gra.s.s around the stairs and the shadows below that had stopped moving with the music box suspended between them as they looked up and up at the two women, who suddenly began to cry. First tears fell from Bella"s cheeks, and when Zelda sensed them, she let fall her own.
"So now," said Zelda, amazed that she could form words but managed to speak anyway, "we want you to know, you don"t have to come back anymore. You don"t have to climb the hill every night, waiting. For what we said just now is it, isn"t it? I mean you wanted to hear it here on this hill, with those steps, and that piano, yes, that"s the whole thing, it had to be that, didn"t it? So now here we are and there you are and it"s said. So rest, dear friends."
"Oh, there, Ollie," added Bella in a sad, sad whisper. "Oh, Stan, Stanley."
The piano, hidden in the dark, softly hummed its wires and creaked its ancient wood.
And then the most incredible thing happened. There was a series of shouts and then a huge banging crash as the music box, in the dark, rocketed down the hill, skittering on the steps, playing chords where it hit, swerving, rushing, and ahead of it, running, the two shapes pursued by the musical beast, yelling, tripping, shouting, warning the Fates, crying out to the G.o.ds, down and down, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred steps.
And half down the steps, hearing, feeling, shouting, crying themselves, and now laughing and holding to each other, the two women alone in the night wildly clutching, grasping, trying to see, almost sure that they did see, the three things ricocheting off and away, the two shadows rushing, one fat, one thin, and the piano blundering after, discordant and mindless, until they reached the street, where, instantly, the one overhead street-lamp died as if struck, and the shadows floundered on, pursued by the musical beast.
And the two women, abandoned, looked down, exhausted with laughing until they wept and weeping until they laughed, until suddenly Zelda got a terrible look on her face as if shot.
"My G.o.d!" she shouted in panic, reaching out. "Wait. We didn"t mean, we don"t want-don"t go forever! Sure, go, so the neighbors here sleep. But once a year, you hear? Once a year, one night a year from tonight, and every year after that, come back. It shouldn"t bother anyone so much. But we got to tell you all over again, huh? Come back and bring the box with you, and we"ll be here waiting, won"t we, Bella?"
"Waiting, yes."
There was a long silence from the steps leading down into an old black-and-white, silent Los Angeles.
"You think they heard?"
They listened.
And from somewhere far off and down, there was the faintest explosion like the engine of an old jalopy knocking itself to life, and then the merest whisper of a lunatic music from a dark theater when they were very young. It faded.
After a long while they climbed back up the steps, dabbing at their eyes with wet Kleenex. Then they turned for a final time to stare down into the night.
"You know something?" said Zelda. "I think they heard."
THE DWARF.
AIMEE WATCHED THE SKY, QUIETLY.
Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights. The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly, not talking, all down the line.
Two customers had pa.s.sed through an hour before. Those two lonely people were now in the roller coaster, screaming murderously as it plummeted down the blazing night, around one emptiness after another.
Aimee moved slowly across the strand, a few worn wooden hoopla rings sticking to her wet hands. She stopped behind the ticket booth that fronted the MIRROR MAZE. She saw herself grossly misrepresented in three rippled mirrors outside the Maze. A thousand tired replicas of herself dissolved in the corridor beyond, hot images among so much clear coolness.
She stepped inside the ticket booth and stood looking a long while at Ralph Banghart"s thin neck. He clenched an unlit cigar between his long uneven yellow teeth as he laid out a battered game of solitaire on the ticket shelf.
When the roller coaster wailed and fell in its terrible avalanche again, she was reminded to speak.
"What kind of people go up in roller coasters?"
Ralph Banghart worked his cigar a full thirty seconds. "People wanna die. That rollie coaster"s the handiest thing to dying there is." He sat listening to the faint sound of rifle shots from the shooting gallery. "This whole d.a.m.n carny business"s crazy. For instance, that dwarf. You seen him? Every night, pays his dime, runs in the Mirror Maze all the way back through to Screwy Louie"s Room. You should see this little runt head back there. My G.o.d!"
"Oh, yes," said Aimee, remembering. "I always wonder what it"s like to be a dwarf. I always feel sorry when I see him."
"I could play him like an accordion."
"Don"t say that!"
"My Lord." Ralph patted her thigh with a free hand. "The way you carry on about guys you never even met." He shook his head and chuckled. "Him and his secret. Only he don"t know I know, see? Boy howdy!"
"It"s a hot night." She twitched the large wooden hoops nervously on her damp fingers.
"Don"t change the subject. He"ll be here, rain or shine."
Aimee shifted her weight.
Ralph seized her elbow. "Hey! You ain"t mad? You wanna see that dwarf, don"t you? Sh!" Ralph turned. "Here he comes now!"
The Dwarf"s hand, hairy and dark, appeared all by itself reaching up into the booth window with a silver dime. An invisible person called, "One!" in a high, child"s voice.
Involuntarily, Aimee bent forward.
The Dwarf looked up at her, resembling nothing more than a dark-eyed, dark-haired, ugly man who has been locked in a winepress, squeezed and wadded down and down, fold on fold, agony on agony, until a bleached, outraged ma.s.s is left, the face bloated shapelessly, a face you know must stare wide-eyed and awake at two and three and four o"clock in the morning, lying flat in bed, only the body asleep.
Ralph tore a yellow ticket in half. "One!"
The Dwarf, as if frightened by an approaching storm, pulled his black coat-lapels tightly about his throat and waddled swiftly. A moment later, ten thousand lost and wandering dwarfs wriggled between the mirror flats, like frantic dark beetles, and vanished.
"Quick!"
Ralph squeezed Aimee along a dark pa.s.sage behind the mirrors. She felt him pat her all the way back through the tunnel to a thin part.i.tion with a peekhole.
"This is rich," he chuckled. "Go on-look."
Aimee hesitated, then put her face to the part.i.tion.
"You see him?" Ralph whispered.
Aimee felt her heart beating. A full minute pa.s.sed.
There stood the Dwarf in the middle of the small blue room. His eyes were shut. He wasn"t ready to open them yet. Now, now he opened his eyelids and looked at a large mirror set before him. And what he saw in the mirror made him smile. He winked, he pirouetted, he stood sidewise, he waved, he bowed, he did a little clumsy dance.
And the mirror repeated each motion with long, thin arms, with a tall, tall body, with a huge wink and an enormous repet.i.tion of the dance, ending in a gigantic bow!