Ray Bradbury
http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal
Long After Midnight
1963
The police ambulance went up into the palisades at the wrong hour. It is
always the wrong hour when the police ambulance goes anywhere, but this was
especially wrong, for it was long after midnight and nobody imagined it would
ever be day again, because the sea coming in on the light-less shore below said
as much, and the wind blowing salt cold in from the Pacific reaffirmed this, and
the fog muffling the sky and putting out the stars struck the final,
unfelt-but-disabling blow. The weather said it had been here forever, man was
hardly here at all, and would soon be gone. Under the circumstances it was hard
for the men gathered on the cliff, with several cars, the headlights on, and
flashlights bobbing, to feel real, trapped as they were between a sunset they
hardly remembered and a sunrise that would not be imagined.
The slender weight hanging from the tree, turning in the cold salt wind,
did not diminish this feeling in any way.
The slender weight was a girl, no more than nineteen, in a light green
gossamer party frock, coat and shoes lost somewhere in the cool night, who had
brought a rope up to these cliffs and found a tree with a branch half out over
the cliff and tied the rope in place and made a loop for her neck and let
herself out on the wind to hang there swinging. The rope made a dry scraping
whine on the branch, until the police came, and the ambulance, to take her down
out of space and place her on the ground.
A single phone call had come in about midnight telling what they might find
out here on the edge of the cliff and whoever it was hung up swiftly and did not
call again, and now the hours had passed and all that could be done was done and
over, the police were finished and leaving, and there was just the ambulance now
and the men with the ambulance to load the quiet burden and head for the morgue.
Of the three men remaining around the sheeted form there were Carlson, who
had been at this sort of thing for thirty years, and Moreno, who had been at it
for ten, and Latting, who was new to the job a few weeks back. Of the three it
was Latting now who stood on the edge of the cliff looking at that empty tree
limb, the rope in his hand, not able to take his eyes away. Carlson came up
behind him. Hearing him, Latting said, "What a place, what an awful place to
die."
"Any place is awful, if you decide you want to go bad enough," said
Carlson. "Come on, kid."
Latting did not move. He put out his hand to touch the tree. Carlson
grunted and shook his head. "Go ahead. Try to remember it all."
"Any reason why I shouldn't?" Latting turned quickly to look at that
emotionless gray face of the older man. "You got any objections?"
"No objections. I was the same way once. But after a while you learn it's
best not to see. You eat better. You sleep better. After a while you learn to
forget."
"I don't want to forget," said Latting. "Good God, somebody died up here
just a few hours ago. She deserves -"
"She deserved, kid, past tense, not present. She deserved a better shake
and didn't get it. Now she deserves a decent burial. That's all we can do for
her. It's late and cold. You can tell us all about it on the way."
"That could be your daughter there."
"You won't get to me that way, kid. It's not my daughter, that's what
counts. And it's not yours, though you make it sound like it was. It's a
nineteen-year-old girl, no name, no purse, nothing. I'm sorry she's dead. There,
does that help?"
"It could if you said it right."
"I'm sorry, now pick up the other end of the stretcher."
Latting picked up one end of the stretcher but did not walk with it and
only looked at the figure beneath the sheet.
"It's awful being that young and deciding to just quit."
"Sometimes," said Carlson, at the other end of the stretcher, "I get tired,
too."
"Sure, but you're -" Latting stopped.
"Go ahead, say it, I'm old. Somebody fifty, sixty, it's okay, who gives a
damn, somebody nineteen, everybody cries. So don't come to my funeral, kid, and
no flowers."
"I didn't mean..." said Latting.
"Nobody means, but everybody says, and luckily I got the hide of an iguana.
March."
They moved with the stretcher toward the ambulance where Moreno was opening
the doors wider.
"Boy," said Latting, "she's light. She doesn't weigh anything."
"That's the wild life for you, you punks, you kids." Carlson was getting
into the back of the ambulance now and they were sliding the stretcher in. "I
smell whiskey.
You young ones think you can drink like college fullbacks and keep your
weight. Hell, she don't even weigh ninety pounds, if that."
Latting put the rope in on the floor of the ambulance. "I wonder where she
got this?"
"It's not like poison," said Moreno. "Anyone can buy rope and not sign.
This looks like block-and-tackle rope. She was at a beach party maybe and got
mad at her boyfriend and took this from his car and picked herself a spot...."
They took a last look at the tree out over the cliff, the empty branch, the
wind rustling in the leaves, then Carlson got out and walked around to the front
seat with Moreno, and Latting got in the back and slammed the doors.
They drove away down the dim incline toward the shore where the ocean laid
itself, card after white card, in thunders, upon the dark sand. They drove in
silence for a while, letting their headlights, like ghosts, move on out ahead.
Then Latting said, "I'm getting myself a new job."
Moreno laughed. "Boy, you didn't last long. I had bets you wouldn't last.
Tell you what, you'll be back. No other job like this. All the other jobs are
dull. Sure, you get sick once in a while. I do. I think: I'm going to quit. I
almost do. Then I stick with it. And here I am."
"Well, you can stay," said Latting. "But I'm full up. I'm not curious
anymore. I seen a lot the last few weeks, but this is the last straw. I'm sick
of being sick. Or worse, I'm sick of your not caring."
"Who doesn't care?"
"Both of you!"
Moreno snorted. "Light us a couple, huh, Carlie?" Carlson lit two
cigarettes and passed one to Moreno, who puffed on it, blinking his eyes,
driving along by the loud strokes of the sea. "Just because we don't scream and
yell and throw fits -"
"I don't want fits," said Latting, in the back, crouched by the sheeted
figure. "l just want a little human talk, I just want you to look different than
you would walking through a butcher's shop. If I ever get like you two, not
worrying, not bothering, all thick skin and tough -"
"We're not tough," said Carlson, quietly, thinking about it, "we're
acclimated."
"Acclimated, hell, when you should be numb?"
"Kid, don't tell us what we should be when you don't even know what we are.
Any doctor is a lousy doctor who jumps down in the grave with every patient. All
doctors did that, there'd be no one to help the live and kicking. Get out of the
grave, boy, you can't see nothing from there."
There was a long silence from the back, and at last Latting started
talking, mainly to himself:
"I wonder how long she was up there alone on the cliff, an hour, two? It
must have been funny up there looking down at all the campfires, knowing you
were going to wipe the whole business clean off. I suppose she was to a dance,
or a beach party, and she and her boyfriend broke up. The boyfriend will be down
at the station tomorrow to identify her. I'd hate to be him. How he'll feel? -"
"He won't feel anything. He won't even show up," said Carlson, steadily,
mashing out his cigarette in the front-seat tray. "He was probably the one found
her and made the call and ran. Two bits will buy you a nickel he's not worth the
polish on her little fingernail. Some slobby lout of a guy with pimples and bad
breath. Christ, why don't these girls learn to wait until morning."
"Yeah," said Moreno. "Everything's better in the morning."
"Try telling that to a girl in love," said Latting.
"Now a man," said Carlson, lighting a fresh cigarette, lie just gets
himself drunk, says to hell with it, no use killing yourself for no woman."
They drove in silence awhile past all the small dark ach houses with only a
light here or there, it was so late.
"Maybe," said Latting, "she was going to have a baby."
"It happens."
"And then the boyfriend runs off with someone and s one just borrows his
rope and walks up on the cliff," lid Latting. "Answer me, now, is that or isn 't
it love?"
"It," said Carlson, squinting, searching, the dark, "is a id of love. I
give up on what kind."
"Well, sure," said Moreno, driving. "I'll go along with you, kid. I mean,
it's nice to know somebody in this world a love that hard."
They all thought for a while, as the ambulance purred between quiet
palisades and now quiet sea and maybe two of them thought fleetingly of their
wives and tract houses and sleeping children and all the times years ago when
they had driven to the beach and broken out the beer and necked up in the rocks
and lay around on the blankets with guitars, singing and feeling like life would
go on just as far as the ocean went, which was very far, and maybe they didn't
think that at all. Latting, looking up at the backs of the two older men's
necks, hoped or perhaps only nebulously wondered if these men remembered any
first kisses, the taste of salt on the lips. Had there ever been a time when
they had stomped the sand like mad bulls and yelled out of sheer joy and dared
the universe to put them down?
And by their silence, Latting knew that yes, with all his talking, and the
night, and the wind, and the cliff and the tree and the rope, he had gotten
through to them; it, the event, had gotten through to them. Right now, they had
to be thinking of their wives in their warm beds, long dark miles away,
unbelievable, suddenly unattainable while here they were driving along a
salt-layered road at a dumb hour half between certainties, bearing with them a
strange thing on a cot and a used length of rope.
"Her boyfriend," said Latting, "will be out dancing tomorrow night with
somebody else. That gripes my gut."
"I wouldn't mind," said Carlson, "beating the hell out of him."
Latting moved the sheet. "They sure wear their hair crazy and short, some
of them. All curls, but short. Too much makeup. Too -" He stopped.
"You were saying?" asked Moreno.
Latting moved the sheet some more. He said nothing. In the next minute
there was a rustling sound of the sheet, moved now here, now there. Latting's
face was pale.
"Hey," he murmured, at last. "Hey."
Instinctively, Moreno slowed the ambulance.
"Yeah, kid?"
"I just found out something," said Latting. "I had this feeling all along,
she's wearing too much make-up, and the hair, and -"
"So?"
"Well, for God's sake," said Latting, his lips hardly moving, one hand up
to feel his own face to see what its expression was. "You want to know something
funny?"
"Make us laugh," said Carlson.
The ambulance slowed even more as Latting said, "It's not a woman. I mean,
it's not a girl. I mean, well, it's not a female. Understand?"
The ambulance slowed to a crawl.
The wind blew in off the vague morning sea through the window as the two up
front turned and stared into the back of the ambulance at the shape there on the
cot.
"Somebody tell me," said Latting, so quietly they almost could not hear the
words. "Do we stop feeling bad now? Or do we feel worse?"
Nobody answered.
A wave, and then another, and then another, moved in and fell upon the
mindless shore.