I saw Ralph Underhill. I saw him clearly.
And I had not seen him since I was twelve.
Then, he had towered over me to pummel and beat and scream. Now he was a little old man.
I am five foot eleven.
But Ralph Underhill had not grown much from his twelfth year on.
The man who stood before me was no more than five feet two inches tall. I towered over him.
I gasped. I stared. I saw more. I was forty-eight years old.
But Ralph Underhill, forty-eight, had lost most of his hair, and what remained was threadbare gray, black and white. He looked sixty or sixty-five.
I was in good health.
Ralph Underhill was waxen pale. There was a knowledge of sickness in his face. e had traveled in some sunless land. He had a ravaged and sunk look. His breath smelled of funeral flowers.
All this, perceived, was like the storm of night before, gathering all its lightnings and thunders into one bright concussion. We stood in the explosion.
So this is what I came for? I thought. This then, is the truth. This dreadful instant in time. Not to pull out the weapon. Not to kill. No, no. But simply—
To see Ralph Underhill as he is in this hour. That’s all.
Just to be here, stand here, and look at him as he has become.
Ralph Underhill lifted one hand in a kind of gesturing wonder. His lips trembled. His eyes flew up and down my body, his mind measured this giant who shadowed his door. At last his voice, so small, so frail, blurted out:
“Doug—?” I recoiled.
“Doug?” he gasped, “is that you?”
I hadn’t expected that. People don’t remember! They can’t! Across the years? Why would he know, bother, summon up, recognize, call?
I had a wild thought that what had happened to Ralph Underhill was that after I left town, half of his life had collapsed. I had been the center of his world, someone to attack, beat, pummel, bruise. His whole life had cracked by my simple act of walking away thirty-six years ago.
Nonsense! Yet, some small crazed mouse of wisdom scuttered about my brain and screeched what it knew: You needed Ralph, but, more! He needed you! And you did the only unforgivable, the wounding, thing! You vanished.
“Doug?” he said again, for I was silent there on the porch with my hands at my sides. “Is that you?”
This was the moment I had come for.
At some secret blood level, I had always known I would not use the weapon. I had brought it with me, yes, but Time had gotten here before me, and age, and smaller, more terrible deaths….
Bang.
Six shots through the heart.
But I didn’t use the pistol. I only whispered the sound of the shots with my mouth. With each whisper, Ralph Underhill’s face aged another ten years. By the time I reached the last shot he was one hundred and. ten years old.
“Bang,” I whispered. “Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.” His body shook with the impact.
“You’re dead. Oh, God, Ralph, you’re dead.”
I turned and walked down the steps and reached the street before he called: “Doug, is that you?”
I did not answer, walking.
“Answer me?” he cried, weakly. “Doug! Doug Spaulding, is that you? Who is that? Who are you?”
I got my suitcase and walked down into the cricket night and darkness of the ravine and across the bridge and up the stairs, going away.
“Who is that?” I heard his voice wail a last time. A long way off, I looked back.
All the lights were on all over Ralph Underhill’s house. It was as if he had gone around and put them all on after I left.
On the other side of the ravine I stopped on the lawn in front of the house where I had been born.
Then I picked up a few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, ever in my life.
I tossed the few bits of gravel up to tap that window where I had lain every morning of my first twelve years. I called my own name. I called me down in friendship to play in some long summer that no longer was.
I stood waiting just long enough for my other young self to come down to join me.
Then swiftly, fleeing ahead of the dawn, we ran out of Green Town and back, thank you, dear Christ, back toward Now and Today for the rest of my life.
The End
