His people. His world. Verne moved on. These ruins were his ruins. The remains of the Company. He came to the fence that marked the edge of the property. Beyond, even with the flashlight, he could see nothing but rolling fog and darkness. Was there anything out there? What would come from the fog and darkness? Would it be good?
They were out there. The new owners who would soon be coming to claim their new possessions.
Verne turned away. He walked slowly back toward the commissary, flashing his light aimlessly over the ruins and towers. The commissary was silent; the others had not finished their tour.
He went inside and sat down to wait. After a long time he heard them clattering up the stairs, talking and laughing together.
“What did you find?” Carl said. “Anyone?”
“No.”
“Nothing, either,” Barbara said. “Let’s eat. And then we can get my stuff uncrated. So I can go to bed.”
“Sure.” Verne got to his feet. “Let’s start.”
“I’m really hungry!” Carl said. “Really hungry.”
Five
Verne woke up. He was lying in bed, feeling the sunlight shining on him. If he opened his eyes it would blind him. He turned the other way and the red haze became black. He yawned. The covers were twisted around him. He opened one eye a little to see the clock.
The clock wasn’t there. He was facing a bare wall, the paint peeling, stained and cracking with dirt and age. For a moment he felt startled. He sat quickly up. Across the room Carl was still asleep. His blond head was hidden under the covers; only his hand and arm, hanging over the side of the bed, were visible. Verne reached around on the floor and found his glasses. He fitted them into place and got slowly out of bed.
It was only eight o’clock. He went over and sat by his clothes, heaped across an unused bed, rubbing his hands together and yawning. The day was warm and bright. Out the window he could see the trees and carefully arranged shrubs that grew in front of the men’s dorm. A long way off a blue bird was hopping among some weeds, growing up beside a heap of rusting slag. Presently he picked up his clothing and began to dress.
Eight o’clock was too early! He had wakened from years of habit; but there was no need, any longer. There was nothing to get to, nothing to begin. It was all behind him, in the past. He let go of his shirt, dropping it. Why was he up? What for? There was nothing to do.
He padded back to his bed and slid into it, pulling the blankets up over him. Carl stirred a little in his sleep. Verne watched him. How long he was! His feet and head stuck out at both ends of the bed. He smiled.
Gazing at the youth sprawled out on the bed, snoring faintly, Verne thought again of Teddy. The smile faded. That night he had come into the apartment; he had found her there, lying on his bed, passed out Messy and asleep.
He let his mind wander back to the scene.
Her shoes had been kicked off. Her skirt was up around her waist, showing her thin, white legs. She had rolled her stockings down; they were wrinkled and sagging.
Verne went back and bolted the door to the hall. He returned to the bedroom. She had turned over, so that her face was away from him. He could still hear her dull breathing. What had the manager thought? Had he known she was drunk? Maybe he thought she was sick.
Why had she come to his place?
He sat down on the edge of the bed. It was hard to connect her with Don Field. Don was so square, so out of the course of things. He plodded along between one meaningless activity and another, hunting down a certain old Genet record of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, reading a forgotten science-fiction serial in an old Air Wonder Stories magazine, patronizing some hum-drum café because it was off the beaten path and served some peculiar sauce. Everything he did was cultish, set aside.
But this girl looked as if she flowed in the main stream of things. Perhaps she had just picked up Don for a passing moment. It was hard to tell. He had never heard Don mention her before.
Watching, waiting for her to wake up, Verne lit a cigarette.
In the life of Verne Tildon there had been much trouble. That is true of most small men. A little man is aware of things a large man can ignore. Like colors beyond the end of the spectrum, invisible to the ordinary eye, certain things were major realities to Verne that another man would not even have noticed.
He had grown up in Washington, D.C. Most of his early life had been spent in the bleak snow-covered streets and vacant lots of the little town of Jackson Heights, just outside of the city proper. In the winter he and his brother went sledding. When they had to stay indoors they played duets on the piano together. He remembered nothing about the piano, later in life. Finally he had switched to the oboe, which he played in the high school orchestra.
Later he gave up that, too. Playing in the high school orchestra made him look silly. He was practicing in the afternoon when he could have been walking uptown with the other kids, and on some days he had to wear the gaudy red and gold uniform of the school that made him look like a ticket taker in a theater. After school he was very much alone. When he had finished practicing he ran up to the music store and listened to records.
At that age he talked with a slight stutter, in a nervous, excited way. It made him shy with people.
His brother graduated from college and left the family home. They got letters from him once in a while. Verne read a lot, and for a while he thought he would go on to college, too. But at nineteen, when he finished high school, his father convinced him that it would not be too bad a thing if he earned a little money working for a while. The family had carried the burden for too long; some help was needed. He got a job in the bookkeeping end of a big department store, typing up monthly statements and emptying the waste baskets.
At nineteen, a boy who still stuttered and who occasionally blew a few notes on his oboe, he met a girl his own age who was enough interested in books and music so that there seemed to be something between them, for a time. She was blonde and tall, with hair like corn silk. Her people came from the Middle West. She had blue eyes and a soft, thoughtful voice. The two of them walked and read and went to Sunday concerts. And considered their lives together.
One rainy night, when his family was away at the movies, Verne and the girl went upstairs to his room, and with many giggles and heart-beats, many murmurs and fears and nervous glances out the window, they pulled the shades down and crept into the little wooden bed he had slept in since he was a baby. There, in the room with his postage stamps, his model airplanes and maps, his oboe standing up silently in the corner, all the things from his so recently discarded childhood, Verne and the girl lay huddled together, heart against heart, knee against knee, shaking and holding onto each other.
Outside the rain poured down. Cars slithered past The room was silent, except for their own sounds. At first the girl was withdrawn, nervous and cold. But them, just as everything seemed to have come to an end, and he was starting to think about getting up again, something strange came over her, something he did not understand. All at once her rigid body relaxed, the coldness fled. He was pulled back, dragged abruptly against a scalding belly that strained and quivered with such violence that only the eventual return of the family and the sudden scramble to dress was sufficiently distracting to save him.
He escaped. His father drove her home; Verne and the girl were silent all the way. After that their relationship gradually fell off.