Charley interrupted me; apparently he took no stock in my semantics talk.
«George,» he asked, «what do you know of him?»
George was sunk back deep into a chair, with his shoeless feet stuck out in front of him. He had his big mitt wrapped around the paper cup and was wriggling his toes and he was content. It did not take an awful lot to make George content.
«I don’t know a thing,» said George.
«But he was riding with you. He must have told you something.»
«He never told me a thing,» said George. «He never said a word. I was just driving off and he came running up and jumped into the seat and then …»
«You were driving off from where?»
«Well,» said George, «there was this big pile of stuff. It must have covered several acres and it was piled up high. It seemed to be in a sort of square, like the courthouse and no lawn, but just a sort of paving that might have been concrete and all around it, everywhere you looked, but quite a distance off, there were big high buildings.»
Charley asked, exasperated, «Did you recognize the place?»
«I never saw the place before,» said George, «nor no pictures of it, even.»
«Perhaps it would be best,» suggested Charley, «if you told it from the start.»
So George told it the way he had told it to me.
«That first time it was raining pretty hard,» he said, «and it was sort of dark, as if evening might be coming on, and all I saw was this pile of junk. I didn’t see no buildings.»
He hadn’t told me he’d seen anything at all. He had claimed he hadn’t known a thing until he was back in Willow Grove, walking on the street, with the police car pulling up. But I let it go and kept on listening.
«Then,» said George, «after Chet threw me into pokey …»
«Now, wait a minute there,» said Charley. «I think you skipped a bit. Where did you get the diamonds and the painting and all the other stuff?»
«Why, off the pile of junk,» said George. «There was a lot of other stuff and if I’d had the time I might have done some better. But something seemed to warn me that I didn’t have much time and it was raining and the rain was cold and the place was sort of spooky. So I grabbed what I could and put it in my pockets and I took the pail of diamonds, although I wasn’t sure they were really diamonds, and then I took the painting because Myrt has been yelling that she wants a high class picture to hang in the dining room …»
«And then you were back home again?»
«That is it,» said George, «and I am walking down the street, minding my own business and not doing anything illegal …»
«And how about the second time?»
«You mean going back again?»
«That’s what I mean,» said Charley.
«That first time,» said George, «it was unintentional. I was just sitting in the living room with my shoes off and a can of beer, watching television and in the seventh inning the Yankees had two on and Mantle coming up to bat—say, I never did find out what Mantle did. Did he hit a homer?»
«He struck out,» said Charley.
George nodded sadly; Mickey is his hero.
«The second time,» said George, «I sort of worked at it. I don’t mind a cell so much, you understand, as the injustice of being there when you ain’t done nothing wrong. So I talked John into bringing me some beer and I sat down and started drinking it. There wasn’t any television, but I imagined television. I imagined it real hard and I put two men on bases and had Mantle coming up—all in my mind, of course—and I guess it must have worked. I was back again, in the place where there was this pile of junk.
Only you must understand it wasn’t really junk. It was all good stuff. Some of it didn’t make any sense at all, but a good part of it did; and it was just setting there and no one touching it and every now and then someone would come walking out from some of those tall buildings—and it was quite a walk, I tell you, for those buildings were a long ways off—and they’d be carrying something and they’d throw it on the pile of junk and go walking back.»
«I take it,» said the colonel, «that you spent more time there on your second trip.»
«It was daytime,» George explained, «and it wasn’t raining and it didn’t seem so spooky, although it did seem lonesome. There weren’t any people—just the few who came walking to throw something on the pile, and they didn’t pay much attention to me; they acted almost as if they didn’t see me. You understand, I didn’t know if I’d ever get back there again and there was a limit to how much I could carry, so this time I figured I’d do a job of it. I’d look over the pile and figure exactly what I wanted. Maybe I should say that a little differently. There was a lot of it I wanted, but I had to decide what I wanted most. So I started walking around the pile, picking up stuff I thought I wanted until I saw something I took a special liking to then I’d decide between it and something else I had picked up. Sometimes I’d discard the new thing I had picked up and sometimes I’d keep it and drop something else. Because, you see, I could carry just so much, and by this time I was loaded with about all that I could carry. There was a lot of nice items up on the sides of the pile, and once I tried climbing the pile to get a funny-looking sort of gadget, but that stuff was piled loose, just tossed up there, you know; and when I started to climb, the stuff started to shift and I was afraid it might all come down on top of me. So I climbed down again, real careful. After that I had to satisfy myself with whatever I could pick up at the bottom of the pile.»
The colonel had become greatly interested, leaning forward in his chair so he wouldn’t miss a word. «Some of this junk,» he asked. «Could you tell what it was?»
«There was a pair of spectacles,» said George, «with some sort of gadget on them and I tried them on and I got so happy that it scared me, so I took them off and I quit being happy; then I put them on again and I was happy right away …»
«Happy?» asked Charley. «Do you mean they made you drunk?»
«Not drunk happy,» said George. «Just plain happy, that is all. No troubles and no worries and the world looked good and a man enjoyed living. Then there was another thing, a big square piece of glass. I suppose you’d call it a cube of glass. Like these fortune tellers have, but it was square instead of round. It was a pretty thing, all by itself, but when you looked into it—well, it didn’t reflect your face, like a mirror does, but there seemed to be some sort of picture in it, deep inside of it. It looked to me, that first time, like maybe it was a tree and when I looked closer I could see it was a tree. A big, high elm tree like the one that used to stand in my grandfather’s yard, the one that had the bobolink’s nest way up at the top, and this one, too, I saw, had a bobolink’s nest and there was the bobolink, himself, sitting on a limb beside the nest. And then I saw it was the very tree that I remembered, for there was my grandfather’s house and the picket fence and the old man sitting in the battered lawn swing, smoking his corncob pipe. You see, that piece of glass showed you anything that you wanted to see. First there was just the tree, then I thought about the nest and the nest was there and then the house showed up and the picket fence and I was all right until I saw the old man himself—and him dead for twenty years or more. I looked at him for a while and then I made myself look away, because I had thought a lot of the old man and seeing him there made me remember too much, so I looked away. By then I thought I knew what this glass was all about and so I thought of a pumpkin pie and the pie was there, with gobs of whipped cream piled on it and then I thought of a stein of beer and the beer was there …»