That one, I thought.
Bug glanced from her to me. I nodded. And in a moment he was bowing at her table and a conversation ensued. It seemed she didn"t dance, didn"t know how to dance, didn"t want to dance. Ah, yes, he seemed to be saying. Ah, no, she seemed to reply. Bug turned, holding her hand, and gave me a long stare and a wink. Then, without looking at her, he raised her by her hand and arm and out, with a seamless glide, onto the floor.
What can I say, how can I tell? Bug, long ago, had never bragged, but only told the truth. Once he got hold of a girl, she was weightless. By the time he had whisked and whirled and glided her once around the floor, she almost took off, it seemed he had to hold her down, she was pure gossamer, the closest thing to a hummingbird held in the hand so you cannot feel its weight but only sense its heartbeat sounding to your touch, and there she went out and around and back, with Bug guiding and moving, enticing and retreating, and not fifty anymore, no, but eighteen, his body remembering what his mind thought it had long forgotten, for his body was free of the earth now, too. He carried himself, as he carried her, with that careless insouciance of a lover who knows what will happen in the next hour and the night soon following.
And it happened, just like he said. Within a minute, a minute and a half at most, the dance floor cleared. As Bug and his stranger lady whirled by with a glance, every couple on the floor stood still. The bandleader almost forgot to keep time with his baton, and the members of the orchestra, in a similar trance, leaned forward over their instruments to see Bug and his new love whirl and turn without touching the floor.
When the "Serenade" ended, there was a moment of stillness and then an explosion of applause. Bug pretended it was all for the lady, and helped her curtsy and took her to her table, where she sat, eyes shut, not believing what had happened. By that time Bug was on the floor again, with one of the wives he borrowed from the nearest table. This time, no one even went out on the floor. Bug and the borrowed wife filled it around and around, and this time even Bug"s eyes were shut.
I got up and put twenty dollars on the table where he might find it. After all, he had won the bet, hadn"t he?
Why had I done it? Well, I couldn"t very well have left him out in the middle of the high school auditorium aisle dancing alone, could I?
On my way out I looked back. Bug saw me and waved, his eyes as brimmed full as mine. Someone pa.s.sing whispered, "Hey, come on, lookit this guy!"
G.o.d, I thought, he"ll be dancing all night.
Me, I could only walk.
And I went out and walked until I was fifty again and the sun was going down and the low June fog was coming in early over old Los Angeles.
That night, just before going to sleep, I wished that in the morning when Bug woke up he would find the floor around his bed covered with trophies.
Or at the very least he would turn and find a quiet and understanding trophy with her head on his pillow, near enough to touch.
DOWNWIND FROM GETTYSBURG.
AT EIGHT THIRTY THAT NIGHT he heard the sharp crack from the theater down the hall.
Backfire, he thought. No. Gun.
A moment later he heard the great lift and drop of voices like an ocean surprised by a landfall which stopped it dead. A door banged. Feet ran.
An usher burst through his office door, glanced swiftly about as if blind, his face pale, his mouth trying words that would not come.
"Lincoln . . . Lincoln . . ."
Bayes glanced up from his desk.
"What about Lincoln?"
"He . . . he"s been shot."
"Good joke. Now-"
"Shot. Don"t you understand? Shot. Really shot. For the second time, shot!"
The usher wandered out, holding to the wall.
Bayes felt himself rise. "Oh, for Christ-"
And he was running and pa.s.sed the usher who, feeling him pa.s.s, began to run with him.
"No, no," said Bayes. "It didn"t happen. It didn"t. It couldn"t. It didn"t, couldn"t . . ."
"Shot," said the usher.
As they made the corridor turn, the theater doors exploded wide and a crowd that had turned mob shouted or yelled or screamed or stunned simply said, "Where is he?" "There!" "Is that him?" "Where?" "Who did it?" "He did? Him?" "Hold him!" "Watch out!" "Stop!"
Two security guards stumbled to view, pushed, pulled, twisted now this way and that, and between them a man who struggled to heave back from the bodies, the grasping hands and now the upflung and downfell fists. People s.n.a.t.c.hed, pecked, pummeled, beat at him with packages or frail sun parasols which splintered like kites in a great storm. Women turned in dazed circles seeking lost friends, whimpering. Men, crying out, shoved them aside to squirm through to the center of the push and thrust and backward-pumping guards and the a.s.saulted man who now masked his cut face with splayed fingers.
"Oh G.o.d, G.o.d." Bayes froze, beginning to believe. He stared upon the scene. Then he sprang forward. "This way! Back inside! Clear off! Here! Here!"
And somehow the mob was breached, a door cracked wide to shove flesh through, then slammed.
Outside, the mob hammered, threatening d.a.m.nations and scourges unheard of by living men. The whole theater structure quaked with their muted wails, cries and estimates of doom.
Bayes stared a long moment at the shaken and twisted doork.n.o.bs, the chattering locks, then over to the guards and the man slumped between them.
Bayes leaped back suddenly, as if an even fresher truth had exploded there in the aisle.
Dimly, he felt his left shoe kick something which spun skittering like a rat chasing its tail along the carpeting under the seats. He bent to let his blind hand search, grope, find the still-half-warm pistol which, looked at but disbelieved, he shoved in his coat pocket as he backed down the aisle. It was a full half minute before he forced himself to turn and face the inevitable stage and that figure in the center of the stage.
Abraham Lincoln sat in his carved highback chair, his head bent forward at an unfamiliar angle. Eyes flexed wide, he gazed upon nothing. His large hands rested gently on the chair arms, as if he might momentarily shift weight, rise, and declare this sad emergency at an end.
Moving as under a tide of cold water, Bayes mounted the steps.
"Lights, dammit! Give us more lights!"
Somewhere, an unseen technician remembered what switches were for. A kind of dawn grew in the dim place.
Bayes, on the platform, circled the occupant of the chair, and stopped.
Yes. There it was. A neat bullet hole at the base of the skull, behind the left ear.
"Sic semper tyrannis," a voice murmured somewhere.
Bayes jerked his head up.
The a.s.sa.s.sin, seated now in the last row of the theater, face down but sensing Bayes" preoccupation with Lincoln, spoke to the floor, to himself: "Sic-"
He stopped. For there was an outraged stir above him. One security guard"s fist flew up, as if the man had nothing to do with it. The fist, urgent to itself, was on its way down to silence the killer when- "Stop!" said Bayes.
The fist paused halfway, then withdrew to be nursed by the guard with mixtures of anger and frustration.
None, thought Bayes, I believe none of it. Not that man, not the guards and not . . . he turned to again see the bullet hole in the skull of the slain leader.
From the hole a slow trickle of machinery oil dripped.
From Mr. Lincoln"s mouth, a similar slow exudation of liquid moved down over the chin and whiskers to rain drop by drop upon his tie and shirt.
Bayes knelt and put his ear to the figure"s chest.
Faintly within there was the whine and hum of wheels, cogs, and circuitries still intact but malfunctioning.
For some reason this sound reared him to his feet in alarm.
"Phipps . . . !?"
The guards blinked with incomprehension.
Bayes snapped his fingers. "Is Phipps coming in tonight? Oh G.o.d, he mustn"t see this! Head him off! Tell him there"s an emergency, yes, emergency at the machine plant in Glendale! Move!"
One of the guards hurried out the door.
And watching him run, Bayes thought, please, G.o.d, keep Phipps home, keep him off . . .
Strange, at such a time, not your own life but the lives of others flashed by.
Remember . . . that day five years past when Phipps first slung his blueprints, his paintings, his watercolors out on a table and announced his Grand Plan? And how they had all stared at the plans and then up at him and gasped: Lincoln?
Yes! Phipps had laughed like a father just come from a church where some sweet high vision in some strange Annunciation has promised him a most peculiar son.
Lincoln. That was the idea. Lincoln born again.
And Phipps? He would both engender and nurture this fabulous ever-ready giant robot child.
Wouldn"t it be fine . . . if they could stand in the meadow fields of Gettysburg, listen, learn, see, hone the edge of their razor souls, and live?
Bayes circled the slumped figure in the chair and, circling, numbered the days and remembered years.
Phipps, holding up a c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s one night, like a lens that simultaneously proportions out the light of the past and the illumination of the future: "I have always wanted to do a film on Gettysburg and the vast crowd there and far away out at the edge of that sun-drowsed impatient lost thick crowd, a farmer and his son trying so hard to hear, not hearing, trying to catch the wind-blown words from the tall speaker there on the distant stand, that gaunt man in the stovepipe hat who now takes off his hat, looks in it as to his soul rummaged there on scribbled letterbacks and begins to speak.
"And this farmer, in order to get his son up out of the crush, why, he hefts the boy up to sit upon his shoulders. There the boy, nine years old, a frail enc.u.mbrance, becomes ears to the man, for the man indeed cannot hear nor see but only guess what the President is speaking far across a sea of people there at Gettysburg and the President"s voice is high and drifts now clear, now gone, seized and dispersed by contesting breeze and wind. And there have been too many speakers before him and the crowd all crumpled wool and sweat, all mindless stockyard squirm and jostled elbow, and the farmer talks up to his son on his shoulders in a yearning whisper: What? What"s he say? And the boy, tilting his head, leaning his peach-fuzz ear to the wind, replies: ""Fourscore and seven years . . .""
"Yes?"
"". . . ago, our fathers brought forth . . .""
"Yes, yes!?"
"". . . on this continent . . .""
"Eh?"
"Continent! "A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are . . ."
"And so it goes, the wind leaning against the frail words, the far man uttering, the farmer never tiring of his sweet burden of son and the son obedient cupping and catching and telling it all down in a fierce good whisper and the father hearing the broken bits and some parts missing and some whole but all fine somehow to the end . . .
"". . . of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
"The boy stops whispering.
"It is done.
"And the crowd disperses to the four directions. And Gettysburg is history.
"And for a long time the father cannot bring himself to ease his translator of the wind down to set him on the earth, but the boy, changed, comes down at last . . ."
Bayes sat looking at Phipps.
Phipps slugged down his drink, suddenly chagrined at his own expansiveness, then snorted: "I"ll never make that film. But I will make this!"
And that was the moment he pulled forth and unfolded the blueprints of the Phipps Eveready Salem, Illinois, and Springfield Ghost Machine, the Lincoln mechanical, the electro-oil-lubricated plastic India-rubber perfect-motioned and outspoken dream.
Phipps and his born-full-tall-at-birth Lincoln. Lincoln. Summoned live from the grave of technology, fathered by a romantic, drawn by need, slapped to life by small lightnings, given voice by an unknown actor, to be placed there to live forever in this far southwest corner of old-new America! Phipps and Lincoln.
And that was the day, yes, of the first wild bursts of laughter which Phipps ignored by simply saying, "We must, oh we must, stand all of us, downwind from Gettysburg. It"s the only hearing place."
And he shared out his pride among them. This man he gave armatures, to that the splendid skull, another must trap the Ouija-spirit voice and sounding word, yet others must grow the precious skin, hair, and fingerprints. Yes, even Lincoln"s touch must be borrowed, copied, the same!
Derision then was their style of life.
Abe would never really speak, they all knew that, nor move. It would all be summed and written off with taxes as a loss.
But as the months lengthened into years, their outcries of hilarity turned to accepting smiles and stunned wild grins. They were a gang of boys caught up in some furtive but irritably joyous mortuary society who met midnights in marble vaults to disperse through graveyards at dawn.
The Lincoln Resurrection Brigade yeasted full and prospered. Instead of one mad fool, a dozen maniacs fell to rifling old mummy-dust newsfiles, begging and then pilfering death masks, burying and then digging up new plastic bones.
Some toured the Civil War battlefields in hopes that history, borne on some morning wind, might whip their coats like flags. Some prowled the October fields of Salem, starched brown with farewell summer, sniffing airs, p.r.i.c.king ears, alert for some lank lawyer"s unrecorded voice, anxious for echoes, pleading their case.
And none more anxious nor paternal-proud worrying than Phipps until the month when the robot was spread out on delivery tables, there to be ball and socketed, voice box locked in, rubber eyelids peeled back to sink therein the deep sad eyes which, gazing out, had seen too much. The generous ears were appended that might hear only time lost. The large-knuckled hands were hung like pendulums to guess that time. And then upon the tall man"s nakedness they shucked on suiting, b.u.t.toned b.u.t.tons, fixed his tie, a gathering of tailors, no, Disciples now on a bright and glorious Easter morn and them on Jerusalem"s hills ready to roll aside the rock and stand Him forth at their cry.
And in the last hour of the last day Phipps had locked them all out as he finished the final touches on the rec.u.mbent flesh and spirit and at last opened the door and, not literally, no, but in some metaphoric sense, asked them to hoist him on their shoulders a last time.
And in silence watched as Phipps called across the old battlefield and beyond, saying the tomb was not his place; arise.
And Lincoln, deep in his cool Springfield marbled keep, turned in his slumbers and dreamed himself awake.
And rose up.