The Dead Man, Ray Bradbury

The Dead Man

That’s the man, right over there,” said Mrs. Ribmoll, nodding across the street. “See that man perched on the tar barrel afront Mr. Jenkins’ Odd Martin.”
Odd Martin.

“The one that says he’s dead?” cried Arthur.

Mrs. Ribmoll nodded. “Crazy as a weasel down a chimney. Carries on firm about how he’s been dead since the flood and nobody appreciates.”

“I see him sitting there every day,” cried Arthur.

“Oh yes, he sits there, he does. Sits there and stares at nothing. I say it’s a crying shame they don’t throw him in jail.”

Arthur made a face at the man. “Yah!”

“Never mind, he won’t notice you. Most uncivil man I ever seen. Nothing pleased him.” She yanked Arthur’s arm. “Come on, sonny, we got shopping to do.”

They passed on up the street past the barber shop. In the window, after they’d gone by, stood Mr. Simpson, sniping his blue shears and chewing his tasteless gum. He squinted thoughtfully out through the fly-specked glass, looking at the man sitting over there on the tar barrel.

“I figure the best thing could happen to Odd Martin would be to get married,” he figured. His eyes glinted slyly. Over his shoulder he looked at his manicurist, Miss Weldon, who was busy burnishing the scraggly fingernails of a farmer named Gilpatrick. Miss Weldon, at this suggestion, did not look up. She had heard it often. They were always ragging her about Odd Martin.

Mr. Simpson walked back and started work on Gilpatrick’s dusty hair again. Gilpatrick chuckled softly. “What woman would marry Odd? Sometimes I almost believe he is dead. He’s got an awful odor to him.”

Miss Weldon looked up into Mr. Gilpatrick’s face and carefully cut his finger with one of her little scalpels. “Gol darn it!” “Watch what you’re doing, woman!”

Miss Weldon looked at him with calm little blue eyes in a small white face. Her hair was mouse-brown; she wore no make-up and talked to no one most of the time.

Mr. Simpson cackled and snicked his blue steel shears. “Hope, hope, hope!” he laughed like that. “Miss Weldon, she knows what she’s doin’, Gilpatrick. You just be careful. Miss Weldon, she give a bottle of eau de cologne to Odd Martin last Christmas. It helped cover up his smell.”

Miss Weldon laid down her instruments.

“Sorry, Miss Weldon,” apologized Mr. Simpson. “I won’t say no more.”

Reluctantly, she took up her instruments again.
“Hey, there he goes again!” cried one of the four other men waiting in the shop. Mr. Simpson whirled, almost taking Gilpatrick’s pink ear with him in his shears. “Come look, boys!”
Across the street the sheriff stepped out of his office door just then and he saw it happen, too. He saw what Odd Martin was doing.

Everybody came running from all the little stores.
The sheriff arrived and looked down into the gutter.

“Come on now, Odd Martin, come on now,” he shouted. He poked down into the gutter with his shiny black boot-tip. “Come on, get up. You’re not dead. You’re good as me. You’ll catch your death of cold there with all them gum wrappers and cigar butts! Come on, get up!”

Mr. Simpson arrived on the scene and looked at Odd Martin lying there. “He looks like a carton of milk.”
“He’s takin’ up valuable parkin’ space for cars, this bein’ Friday mornin’,” whined the sheriff. “And lots of people needin’ the area. Here now, Odd. Hmm. Well, give me a hand here, boys.”
They laid the body on the sidewalk.

“Let him stay here,” declared the sheriff, jostling around in his boots. “Just let him stay till he gets tired of layin’. He’s done this a million times before. Likes the publicity. Git, you kids!”

He sent a bunch of children scuttling ahead of his cheek of tobacco.

Back in the barber shop, Simpson looked around. “Where’s Miss Weldon? Unh.” He looked through the glass. “There she is, brushing him off again, while he lies there. Fixing his coat, buttoning it up. Here she comes back. Don’t nobody fun with her, she resents it.”

The barber clock said twelve o’clock and then one and then two and then three. Mr. Simpson kept track of it. “I make you a bet that Odd Martin lies over there ’till four o’clock,” he said.
Someone else said, “I’ll bet he’s there until four-thirty.”

“Last time—” a snickering of the shears “—he was there four hours. Nice warm day today. He may nap there until five. I’ll say five. Let’s see your money, gents or maybe later.”
The money was collected and put on a shelf by the hair-ointments.

One of the younger men began shaving a stick with his pocketknife. “It’s sorta funny how we joke about Odd. We’re scared of him, inside. I mean we won’t let ourselves believe he’s really dead. We don’t dare believe it.

We’d never get over it if we knew. So we make him a joke. We let him lie around. He don’t hurt nobody. He’s just there. But I notice Doc Hudson has never really touched Odd’s heart with his stethoscope. Scared of what he’d find, I bet.”

“Scared of what he’d find!” Laughter. Simpson laughed and snished his shears. Two men with crusty beards laughed, a little too loud. The laughter didn’t last long. “Great one for jokin’, you are!” they all said, slapping their gaunt knees.

Miss Weldon, she went on manicuring her client.
“He’s getting up!”

There was a general scramble to the plate glass window to watch Odd Martin gain his feet. “He’s up on one knee, now up on the other, now someone’s givin’ him a hand.”
“It’s Miss Weldon. She sure got over there in a rush.”

“What time is it?”
“Five o’clock. Pay me, boys!”

“That Miss Weldon’s a queer nut herself. Takin’ after a man like Odd.”
Simpson clicked his scissors. “Being an orphan, she’s got quiet ways. She likes men who don’t say much. Odd, he don’t say hardly anything. Just the opposite of us crude men, eh, fellows?

We talk too much. Miss Weldon don’t like our way of talking.”
“There they go, the two of ’em, Miss Weldon and Odd Martin.”
“Say, take a little more off around my ears, will you, Simp?”

Skipping down the street, bouncing a red rubber ball, came little Charlie Bellows, his blond hair flopping in a yellow fringe over his blue eyes. He bounced the ball abstractedly, tongue between lips, and the ball fell under Odd Martin’s feet where he sat once more on the tar barrel. Inside the grocery, Miss Weldon was doing her supper shopping, putting soup cans and vegetable cans into a basket.

“Can I have my ball?” asked little Charlie Bellows upward at the six feet, two inches of Odd Martin. No one was within hearing distance.

“Can you have your ball?” said Odd Martin haltingly. He turned it over inside his head, it appeared. His level gray eyes shaped up Charlie like one would shape up a little ball of clay. “You can have your ball; yes, take it.”

Charlie bent slowly and took hold of the bright red rubber globe and arose slowly, a secretive look in his eyes. He looked north and south and then up at Odd’s bony pale brown face. “I know something.”

Odd Martin looked down. “You know something?”
Charlie leaned forward. “You’re dead.”
Odd Martin sat there.

“You’re really dead,” whispered little Charlie Bellows. “But I’m the only one who really knows. I believe you, Mr. Odd. I tried it once myself. Dying, I mean. It’s hard. It’s work. I laid on the floor for an hour. But I blinked and my stomach itched, so I scratched it. Then—I quit. Why?” He looked at his shoes. “’Cause I had to go to the bathroom.”

A slow, understanding smile formed in the soft pallid flesh of Odd Martin’s long, bony face. “It is work. It isn’t easy.”

“Sometimes I think about you,” said Charlie. “I see you walking by my house at night. Sometimes at two in the morning. Sometimes at four. I wake up and I know you’re out walking around. I know I should look out, and I do, and, gee, there you are, walking and walking. Not going hardly any place.”

“There’s no place to go.” Odd sat with his large square, calloused hands on his knees. “I try thinking of some—place to—go—” He slowed, like a horse to a bit-pull. “—but it’s hard to think. I try and—try. Sometimes I almost know what to do, where to go. Then I forget. Once I had an idea to go to a doctor and have him declare me dead, but somehow—” his voice was slow and husky and low “—I never got there.”

Charlie looked straight at him. “If you want, I’ll take you.”

Odd Martin looked leisurely at the setting sun. “No. I’m weary-tired, but I’ll—wait. Now I’ve gone this far, I’m curious to see what happens next. After the flood that washed away my farm and all my stock and put me under water, like a chicken in a bucket, I filled up like you’d fill a Thermos with water, and I came walking out of the flood, anyhow.

But I knew I was dead. Late of nights I lay listening in my room, but there’s no heartbeat in my ears or in my chest or in my wrists, though I lie still as a cold cricket. Nothing inside me but a darkness and a relaxation and an understanding.

There must be a reason for me still walking, though. Maybe it was because I was still young when I died. Only twenty-eight, and not married yet. I always wanted to marry. Never got around to it.

Here I am, doing odd jobs around town, saving my money, ’cause