“What’s that?” I asked, and answered:
Why, summer gone. The calendar pages, all the hours and days, like in the movies, the way they just blow off over the hills. Charlie and I working together, finished, through. Many days at the library, over! Many nights reading aloud with Miss Emily done! Trains come and gone. Moons waxed and waned. New trains arriving and new lives teetering on the brink, and Miss Emily suddenly standing right there, and Charlie here with all their suitcases and handing me a paper sack.
“What’s this?”
“Rice, Pip, plain ordinary white rice, for the fertility ritual. Throw it at us, boy. Drive us happily away. Hear those bells, Pip? Here goes Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Dickens! Throw, boy, throw! Throw!”
I threw and ran, ran and threw, and them on the back train platform waving out of sight and me yelling good-bye, Happy marriage, Charlie! Happy times! Come back! Happy . . . Happy . . .
And by then I guess I was crying, and Dog chewing my shoes, jealous, glad to have me alone again, and Mr. Wyneski waiting at the barbershop to hand me my broom and make me his son once more.
And autumn came and lingered and at last a letter arrived from the married and traveling couple.
I kept the letter sealed all day and at dusk, while Grandpa was raking leaves by the front porch I went out to sit and watch and hold the letter and wait for him to look up and at last he did and I opened the letter and read it out loud in the October twilight:
“Dear Pip,” I read, and had to stop for a moment seeing my old special name again, my eyes were so full.
“Dear Pip. We are in Aurora tonight and Felicity tomorrow and Elgin the night after that. Charlie has six months of lectures lined up and looking forward. Charlie and I are both working steadily and are most happy . . . very happy . . . need I say?
“He calls me Emily.
“Pip, I don’t think you know who she was, but there was a lady poet once, and I hope you’ll get her books out of the library someday.
“Well, Charlie looks at me and says: ‘This is my Emily’ and I almost believe. No, I do believe.”
I stopped and swallowed hard and read on:
“We are crazy, Pip.
“People have said it. We know it. Yet we go on. But being crazy together is fine.
“It was being crazy alone I couldn’t stand any longer.
“Charlie sends his regards and wants you to know he has indeed started a fine new book, perhaps his best yet . . . one you suggested the title for, Bleak House.
“So we write and move, move and write, Pip. And some year soon we may come back on the train which stops for water at your town. And if you’re there and call our names as we know ourselves now, we shall step off the train. But perhaps meanwhile you will get too old. And if when the train stops, Pip, you’re not there, we shall understand, and let the train move us on to another and another town.
“Signed, Emily Dickinson.
“P.S. Charlie says your grandfather is a dead ringer for Plato, but not to tell him.
“P.P.S. Charlie is my darling.”
“Charlie is my darling,” repeated Grandpa, sitting down and taking the letter to read it again. “Well, well . . .” he sighed. “Well, well . . .”
We sat there a long while, looking at the burning soft October sky and the new stars. A mile off, a dog barked. Miles off, on the horizon line, a train moved along, whistled, and tolled its bell, once, twice, three times, gone.
“You know,” I said. “I don’t think they’re crazy.”
“Neither do I, Pip,” said Grandpa, lighting his pipe and blowing out the match. “Neither do I.”
The Garbage Collector
This is how his work was: He got up at five in the cold dark morning and washed his face with warm water if the heater was working and cold water if the heater was not working. He shaved carefully, talking out to his wife in the kitchen, who was fixing ham and eggs or pancakes or whatever it was that morning. By six o’clock he was driving on his way to work alone, and parking his car in the big yard where all the other men parked their cars as the sun was coming up.
The colors of the sky that time of morning were orange and blue and violet and sometimes very red and sometimes yellow or a clear color like water on white rock. Some mornings he could see his breath on the air and some mornings he could not.
But as the sun was still rising he knocked his fist on the side of the green truck, and his driver, smiling and saying hello, would climb in the other side of the truck and they would drive out into the great city and go down all the streets until they came to the place where they started work. Sometimes, on the way, they stopped for black coffee and then went on, the warmness in them.
And they began the work which meant that he jumped off in front of each house and picked up the garbage cans and brought them back and took off their lids and knocked them against the bin edge, which made the orange peels and cantaloupe rinds and coffee grounds fall out and thump down and begin to fill the empty truck. There were always steak bones and the heads of fish and pieces of green onion and stale celery. If the garbage was new it wasn’t so bad, but if it was very old it was bad.
He was not sure if he liked the job or not, but it was a job and he did it well, talking about it a lot at some times and sometimes not thinking of it in any way at all. Some days the job was wonderful, for you were out early and the air was cool and fresh until you had worked too long and the sun got hot and the garbage steamed early. But mostly it was a job significant enough to keep him busy and calm and looking at the houses and cut lawns he passed by and seeing how everybody lived. And once or twice a month he was surprised to find that he loved the job and that it was the finest job in the world.
It went on just that way for many years. And then suddenly the job changed for him. It changed in a single day. Later he often wondered how a job could change so much in such a few short hours.
He walked into the apartment and did not see his wife or hear her voice, but she was there, and he walked to a chair and let her stand away from him, watching him as he touched the chair and sat down in it without saying a word. He sat there for a long time.
“What’s wrong?” At last her voice came through to him. She must have said it three or four times.
“Wrong?” He looked at this woman and yes, it was his wife all right, it was someone he knew, and this was their apartment with the tall ceilings and the worn carpeting.
“Something happened at work today,” he said.
She waited for him.
“On my garbage truck, something happened.” His tongue moved dryly on his lips and his eyes shut over his seeing until there was all blackness and no light of any sort and it was like standing alone in a room when you got out of bed in the middle of a dark night. “I think I’m going to quit my job. Try to understand.”
“Understand!” she cried.
“It can’t be helped. This is all the strangest damned thing that ever happened to me in my life.” He opened his eyes and sat there, his hands feeling cold when he rubbed his thumb and forefingers together. “The thing that happened was strange.”
“Well, don’t just sit there!”
He took part of a newspaper from the pocket of his leather jacket. “This is today’s paper,” he said. “December 10, 1951. Los Angeles Times. Civil Defense Bulletin. It says they’re buying radios for our garbage trucks.”
“Well, what’s so bad about a little music?”
“No music. You don’t understand. No music.”
He opened his rough hand and drew with one clean fingernail, slowly, trying to put everything there where he could see it and she could see it. “In this article the mayor says they’ll put sending and receiving apparatus on every garbage truck in town.” He squinted at his hand. “After the atom bombs hit our city, those radios will talk to us. And then our garbage trucks will go pick up the bodies.”
“Well, that seems practical. When—”
“The garbage trucks,” he said, “go out and pick up all the bodies.”
“You can’t just leave bodies around, can you? You’ve got to take them and—” His wife shut her mouth very slowly. She blinked, one time only, and she did this very slowly also. He watched that one slow blink of her eyes. Then, with a turn of her body, as if someone else had turned it for her, she walked to a chair, paused, thought how to do it, and sat down, very straight and stiff. She said nothing.
He listened to his wristwatch ticking, but with only a small part of his attention.
At last she laughed. “They were joking!”
He shook his head. He felt his head moving from left to right and from right
