Doomsday Morning M Page 14

  He looked glad to see me. “You’re late,” he said. “I thought you had the town set up for us. What do you think now?”

  As he spoke a little knot of overgrown adolescents burst out of the crowd to hurl themselves shouting against the supports of the bleachers. The whole row of seats staggered and the metal sang on a complaining note.

  Guthrie said angrily. “This has been going on ever since I set the thing up. It’s getting worse. What do we do now?”

  I started to say something, but a hollow, booming sound like a sheet of tin shaken drowned out my voice. There was an outburst of yells and heavy laughter. The crowd parted and a little mob of men who looked like Croppers came laughing and staggering up the street carrying huge slabs of something bright crimson and very thin. It reverberated when they shook it. The red was Comus color. (A quick, involuntary thought flashed through my mind. What’s bright crimson and thunders when you strike it, but it’s thin enough to put your fist through when you see it disassembled? A riddle. And the answer?)

  I knew what the red stuff was. Sheets of molded plastic ripped off the side of the Comus check station near the highway. One of the Croppers stooped over, yelled with drunken laughter, and sailed the big sheet toward us level with the street. It smashed into the steel legs of the bleachers and splintered with a booming crash, fragments flying into the crowd. People screamed and laughed protestingly.

  Guthrie looked at me.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I glanced around the bright, crowded street behind us. As I’d expected, I saw one face I knew. I sauntered softly across to the sidewalk and stood at the corner of a grocery for a minute or two surveying the crowd. Then I turned left and went down the alley between stores. Looking back, I saw after a moment a dark figure shutting out the light, coming after me.

  “Harris?” I asked quietly.

  “Hello, Rohan,” he said.

  “What’s going on here?” I demanded, hearing my voice rise a little.

  “Nothing yet,” Harris said placidly. “We just want to make sure you kept your end of the deal. Got what we sent you for?”

  “I got it. Didn’t your boy with the shotgun report in?”

  “Not yet. Want to prove you delivered the goods?”

  “How the hell can I? I haven’t got it in my pocket.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “If you want the key you can say so,” I told him irritably, plunging my hand in my pocket. “Is that it? Here.”

  He accepted it, nodding. “Good enough. I’ll have the thing picked up sometime tomorrow. All right then, give me ten minutes and you can start your show.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I hear you’ve got some news for me about the reason we’re here.”

  He hesitated, but only briefly. “We think we know. I guess you have a right to. You’re working with us. Seems you’ve got a kind of portable mine detector in that truck of yours. Only it isn’t looking for mines.”

  “What is it looking for then?”

  He didn’t answer me directly. “Comus has a lot of probing apparatus set up around the country. This gadget probes too. But it’s sensitive, very sensitive. It’s looking for a special kind of radiation, and there’s only one kind of radiation Comus could be hunting in California.”

  It didn’t take long to think that one over. The Anti-Com would be what Comus was worrying about. So we were traveling with an Anti-Com detector. If Harris was right. If the man in the brown sweater had known enough to dope it all out from the one quick glance which was all he might have had time for. It occurred to me to wonder if Ted Nye might have thought of some such search as this and planted a red herring device to cover the real facts. But there’s such a thing as being too devious. I only nodded.

  You don’t seem very much worried,” I said. “You going to call off our tour?”

  “Not yet. Not for a lot of reasons.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked suddenly.

  He laughed.

  “Maybe I just want to see what you’ll do,” he said with an ambiguous look at me. “Never mind, Rohan. We know what we’re doing. Now why don’t you get back to the square and start your show? I’ll be in the front row, so make it good.”

  Rather hollowly I said, “I’ll make it good, all right. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE CROPPERS AND the adolescents must have been Harris’s to a man, because the crowd quieted down right away. But I kept my eye on the Croppers. I knew what it’s like to work the way they do, all day every day, and nothing to look forward to but sleep and more work tomorrow. You need excitement. You welcome trouble. A revolution would be a godsend to men like this. And I thought some of these particular boys weren’t far from moving over to the renegade bands like the necklace men of two nights ago.

  We got a pretty good crowd. The bleachers were almost full by the time Guthrie, who was taking admission money, decided that was it and signaled me to open the show.

  My face felt stiff under the make-up. My hands and feet were cold. I noticed this only abstractly at first, because my mind was so full of what Harris had been saying, and I had to make sure the Henkens were ready to go and the rest of the cast standing by. There was something wrong with me, but until the Henkens were on stage I didn’t have time to wonder what.

  Both of them seemed terrifyingly composed for an opening night. Rosy-cheeked with make-up, wrinkles penciled in black, they squeezed calmly past between the end of the bleachers and the buildings. Eileen moved into a store-front doorway. Pod strolled forward in his dusty brown denims, hat on the back of his head, looking like one of the audience strayed on stage, waiting for the show to start. He pulled up the knees of his trousers and sat down on the curb, grunting a little as old bones complained. He took out his pocket-knife, pulled a block of white wood from his pocket, and began to whittle, holding the work up now and then to squint at it. Gradually the crowd fell silent, not sure quite what was happening.

  Eileen’s voice from the door made everybody start just slightly. It was a firm, full voice under perfect control. “Dad!” she called. “Dad, you hear me? With all these people in town tonight, seems like you’d find something better to do than sit here whittling.”

  “Now, Mother.” Pod didn’t even look up. “You’d holler a lot louder if I was in the Irish Rose tonight.”

  A wave of gratified laughter swept the stands. Pod thumbed the knife blade complacently, waiting out his laugh. The show was under way.

  I breathed a deep sigh of relief and had time to think about the next thing—myself. It was startling to find my heart thundering, my lips stiff, my hands icy and shaking. Curiously, though my mind had been too busy with other things, my body remembered. This was stage fright. A bad attack of it, maybe the worst I’ve ever had. And everybody has stage fright who ever stepped on a stage. I shut my cold hands hard to keep them steady and looked around at the others.

  Cressy in a bell-shaped dress of clear yellow stood with bent head, lips moving, eyes fixed on nothing, drawing her own private world about her to shut out all distraction, making herself over into the Susan Jones who would step out into the lights in forty seconds from now. Polly stood with her hand over her eyes, her moving lips visible under it, forgetting even Roy. And as pacing up and down with short, quick steps, muttering, very pale under his make-up. He had a dot of carmine at the inside corner of each eye and it gave him a strange, lustrous look seen this close.

  I looked at them once and then looked away, my mind blank to their troubles, blank to the revolution still in progress around us, blank to the danger that might yet be waiting us from the crowd. Totally blank. I had no idea what my first line was or where I came in. And it didn’t matter, because even if I could remember, my lips were too stiff to speak and my knees too shaky to carry me.

  “And even if all this weren’t true,” I told myself, “still, we haven’t rehearsed enough. We can’t put the play on. We’ll be booed off the stage. We’re six fools for even tr
ying.”

  Dimly I watched Cressy take a deep breath, smooth down her skirts, listen intently to the voices from the stage. She counted five with careful beats of an uplifted finger, and on the fifth squeezed past the end of the steel stands and moved composedly out into the lights. I heard her voice saying words that had no meaning to me.

  Polly was joggling my arm. “You’re on! Wake up, Rohan, you’re on!”

  For an instant the continent wheeled under me again and this was New York and the Raleigh Theater, and I was standing in the familiar wings again hearing these familiar words. But the last time I had heard them were through a swimming haze of alcohol, and the words bubbled incoherently in my mind. The memory was so vivid I felt for one instant a deep wave of intoxication from liquor I had not drunk. I thought, I can’t do it, I can’t. I’ve failed too often and I’ll fail this time, too.

  But Polly’s hands whirled me around and faced me toward the entry. I moved forward on stiff, uncertain legs.

  The lights were dazzling. I could feel their heat on the top of my head beating hard. I saw swimming seas of faces on all sides—all! Knowing it would be this way was one thing; stepping out between them was something else again, something shattering. Always before I had stood surrounded by the stage itself, the audience invisible beyond the fourth wall. Always before the illusion of the play had closed me in. But here we had no stage, no set, no walls. Nothing but the bare street open all around and lined with watching people. It was like stepping out into life itself when I had lived for so long in a world of shadows. For a moment the sheer weight of the gazing eyes upon me was paralyzing.

  Then Cressy swung her yellow skirts toward me, put her head on one side a little, looked up and said, “I didn’t think you’d come. I really didn’t.”

  My ice-cold hand rose entirely of itself and knuckled her gently under the chin. I saw her start very slightly at the coldness of it and then smile. I heard my own voice speak …

  And then the miracle took over. The familiar miracle I had almost forgotten the feel of, it had been so long. I heard my voice speak out, full and confident and richer than it had ever sounded befre on stage. (Maybe because I had changed a lot in the last few days, more perhaps than I knew.) I heard the words as if I had never heard them before, fresh, spontaneous, shaping themselves in my mind and mouth out of a surge of deeply felt emotion, because this yellow-haired girl in the yellow dress was not Cressy, but Susan Jones. A very young, fresh, lovely Susan whose youth might be a touchstone to renew my own if I could win her. And I had to win her.

  I wasn’t myself any more. I was a jaded city exile making a casual pass at a country girl. But the part had more implicit in it than that, and the part created itself. I wasn’t in a play any more. I was the part I played, the man who makes the casual pass and finds himself trapped in it, helpless against his own passionate need for the fountain of youth the girl becomes for him. Knowing he can’t have her, but knowing he has to try. I felt the deep and anguished longing as if it were my own. The words I spoke were the words I had rehearsed, every step and gesture was on cue—but a new power flowed into the part that carried along with it not only me but the whole cast, the whole play.

  I rewrote the play without changing a line or a motion. It was still a comedy, but now it had depth and emotion and something to say about the universal verities of life that was a little sad and a little foolish, and very moving for everyone who watched.

  I knew these things about it later. At the time I knew nothing except that I had to pour forth all the power that was in me to win the girl called Susan and renew my youth at the fountain of her freshness. And the power in me was infinite. The play structured and glowed into life around me. I could feel the outpouring emotion that flowed in upon us from the audience so that it seemed not even to breathe except as we breathed. The whole cast was swept up in it along with me, and new meanings seemed to bloom into life in every line. I couldn’t have brought it off without them, but I think the onward sweep of the feeling I was creating was so strong none of them could have bucked the tide even if he’d wanted to.

  Crossroads wasn’t a play about a young lovers’ quarrel any more. It was about an aging sophisticate who sees too late what he wants and can never win. Maybe he never could have. Maybe if he got it he wouldn’t want it. But while he wants it and tries to win it he goes through an intense emotional upheaval, and the audience goes right along with him.

  We were nearly at the end before I came to myself a little, feeling something ahead in the play that wasn’t right for the new Crossroads I was creating as we went. Polly’s song and my fight with Roy. They were high points in the comedy at the end, but false, very false for the mood I wanted to leave with the audience.

  I knew what I was going to do about it. I was the pivot of the play and there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do. The confidence that swelled in me was larger than myself, larger than the world. I felt the earth turning under me simply because I stood here balancing it under my feet as a logger rolls a log in midstream. I had created a magic world around us no wider than the magic room I used to spin to keep reality out. But now it enclosed infinity and the realities, inside it were so intense they burned to the touch.

  The moment for Polly’s song came inexorably onward as we spoke our lines. But the song followed on a cue speech from me—and I didn’t make it. Calmly and confidently I cut a dozen lines of dialogue and jumped the whole song sequence entirely. Then I threw very strongly at Polly a question from the next page of the script, a question she had to answer to lead up to my fight with Roy.

  She picked it up magnificently, without a stumble, without a blink. I felt only the briefest ripple go over the others on the stage as they made mental cuts in their own lines and very deftly moved left and right into the new groupings that went with the later dialogue I had jumped us all ahead to.

  And I moved into the climax and my fight with Roy. But I played it without the fight. We followed the script exactly except that there were no blows exchanged. Not physically.

  It was a very strange feeling, this living the events as if they were happening for the first time in the world, spontaneous and fresh, yet knowing as by prescience what the outcome had to be and reaching ahead through time to mold it to the shape I wanted.

  The man I had become in the play was fighting a lost cause, and by now he knew it, and the audience knew it, and knew it was right that he should lose. But it wasn’t right that the victorious lover should win by a knockout blow. The knockout was emotional, not physical.

  There was a strange, strong quality to the scene because we never came to blows, a feel of subdued violence discharging itself on some emotional level in the minds of the audience itself, since it wasn’t discharged on stage. I felt the anguish of the defeated lover more actual in my mind than I’d ever felt the bruises from the falls I took when we were rehearsing. It was intolerable to give up the youth and the fresh fountain of joy that the girl Susan had become to me. I felt the desolation and the despair …

  And at the last moment I realized that the man I had made myself into would have one further feeling now. Being the man he was, he had to. He would begin to feel the first faint flickering of relief.

  So I gave it to them that way at the end. Just a nuance, but they got it. A very slight jauntiness to the shoulders, a straightening of the back, and a shrugging off of a burden I hadn’t really wanted—maybe I hadn’t wanted it—after all.

  The play ended to a dead, intense silence for a long moment, and then a solid avalanche of applause that made the bleachers rock and the windows rattle on both sides of the street.

  The ovation lasted a good five minutes and could have gone on all night. After that we were nearly mobbed by dazed people frantic to touch us and rub off a little of the glamour onto their own hands.

  When it was over and the stage nearly clear, I heard Guthrie’s voice, sounding flat and grim from the back of the sound truck.

  “Mr. Rohan, will you ste
p inside here a minute? I want to have a word with you. …”

  I’ve never seen a man so mad. For what must have been ten minutes I stood there and let him yell at me in a whisper, purple in the face from the strain of keeping his voice down.

  I didn’t hear a word he said.

  Because Rohan was himself again. Better than himself—better than ever before. All I’d been through was worth it if it built to a feeling of confidence and triumph like this. Anything else I had to go through would be nothing if I could only win my way back to the place where I belonged. I kept seeing the Raleigh Theater shining out in its dark street, crowds streaming in under the marquee, and HOWARD ROHAN RETURNS in dazzling lights half the height of the building. Rohan had come to life. Rohan was on his way back to the top again, and nothing Guthrie could say or do penetrated the blaze in my mind.

  I let Guthrie rage. I said yes and no and never again, not really hearing, until his color began to decrease and the veins in his forehead went back to normal. It didn’t matter. I didn’t even see him. The world was turning only because my feet stood on it, rolling it over, and nobody else existed except me.

  CHAPTER XVII

  A SOFT, STRONG WIND had begun to blow by the time we got back to the redwood grove. Somehow we had got ourselves packed up and on the road back, Guthrie too angry to speak and the cast strangely silent too. I don’t know what I’d expected of them. Not this. But it didn’t matter. I hardly knew they were alive.

  The air was full of rustling and the creaking of enormous boughs in the wind, so we all kept glancing up apphrensively at the floating continents of foliage. The whisper of needles against each other made a sound as continuous as the wind itself, filling our senses as the wind filled the grove. The stars were big and bright and burning.