Charlie looked into the old man’s face and saw visitations of plagues there. “Yes, sir.”
The colonel watched the mob milling around the post office two blocks away. The fife-and-drum corps arrived and played some tune vaguely inclined toward the Egyptian.
“Sundown, Charlie,” whispered the colonel, eyes shut. “We make our final move.”
What a day it was! Years later people said: That was a day! The mayor went home and got dressed up and came back and made three speeches and held two parades, one going up Main Street toward the end of the trolley line, the other coming back, and Osiris Bubastis Rameses Amon-Ra-Tut at the center of both, smiling now to the right as gravity shifted his flimsy weight, and now to the left as they rounded a corner. The fife-and-drum corps, now heavily implemented by accumulated brass, had spent an hour drinking beer and learning the triumphal march from Aïda and this they played so many times that mothers took their screaming babies into the house, and men retired to bars to soothe their nerves. There was talk of a third parade and a fourth speech, but sunset took the town unawares, and everyone, including Charlie, went home to a dinner mostly talk and short on eats.
By eight o’clock, Charlie and the colonel were driving along the leafy streets in the fine darkness, taking the air in the old man’s 1924 Moon, a car that took up trembling where the colonel left off.
“Where we going, colonel?”
“Well,” mused the colonel, steering at ten philosophical miles per hour, nice and easy, “everyone, including your folks, is out at Grossett’s Meadow right now, right? Final Labor Day speeches. Someone’ll light the gasbag mayor and he’ll go up about forty feet, kee-rect? Fire department’ll be setting off the big skyrockets. Which means the post office, plus the mummy, plus the police chief sitting there with him, will be empty and vulnerable. Then, the miracle will happen, Charlie. It has to. Ask me why.”
“Why?”
“Glad you asked. Well, boy, folks from Chicago’ll be jumping off the train steps tomorrow hot and fresh as pancakes, with their pointy noses and glass eyes and microscopes. Those museum snoopers, plus the Associated Press, will rummage our Egyptian Pharaoh seven ways from Christmas and blow their fuse boxes. That being so, Charles—”
“We’re on our way to mess around.”
“You put it indelicately, boy, but truth is at the core. Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn’t go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son. Now, before people get used to our ancient friend, before he wears out the wrong bath towel, like any smart weekend guest he should grab the next scheduled camel west. There!”
The post office stood silent, with one light shining in the foyer. Through the great window, they could see the sheriff seated alongside the mummy-on-display, neither of them talking, abandoned by the mobs that had gone for suppers and fireworks.
“Charlie.” The colonel brought forth a brown bag in which a mysterious liquid gurgled. “Give me thirty-five minutes to mellow the sheriff down. Then you creep in, listen, follow my cues, and work the miracle. Here goes nothing!”
And the colonel stole away.
Beyond town, the mayor sat down and the fireworks went up.
Charlie stood on top of the Moon and watched them for half an hour. Then, figuring the mellowing time was over, dogtrotted across the street and moused himself into the post office to stand in the shadows.
“Well, now,” the colonel was saying, seated between the Egyptian Pharaoh and the sheriff, “why don’t you just finish that bottle, sir?”
“It’s finished,” said the sheriff, and obeyed.
The colonel leaned forward in the half-light and peered at the gold amulet on the mummy’s breast.
“You believe them old sayings?”
“What old sayings?” asked the sheriff.
“If you read them hieroglyphics out loud, the mummy comes alive and walks.”
“Horse radish,” said the sheriff.
“Just look at all those fancy Egyptian symbols!” the colonel pursued.
“Someone stole my glasses. You read that stuff to me,” said the sheriff. “Make the fool mummy walk.”
Charlie took this as a signal to move, himself, and sidled around through the shadows, closer to the Egyptian king.
“Here goes.” The colonel bent even closer to the Pharaoh’s amulet, meanwhile slipping the sheriff’s glasses out of his cupped hand into his side pocket. “First symbol on here is a hawk. Second one’s a jackal. That third’s an owl. Fourth’s a yellow fox-eye—”
“Continue,” said the sheriff.
The colonel did so, and his voice rose and fell, and the sheriff’s head nodded, and all the Egyptian pictures and words flowed and touched around the mummy until at last the colonel gave a great gasp.
“Good grief, sheriff, look!”
The sheriff blinked both eyes wide.
“The mummy,” said the colonel. “It’s going for a walk!”
“Can’t be!” cried the sheriff. “Can’t be!”
“Is,” said a voice, somewhere, maybe the Pharaoh under his breath.
And the mummy lifted up, suspended, and drifted toward the door.
“Why,” cried the sheriff, tears in his eyes.
“I think he might just—fly!”
“I’d better follow and bring him back,” said the colonel.
“Do that!” said the sheriff.
The mummy was gone. The colonel ran. The door slammed.
“Oh, dear.” The sheriff lifted and shook the bottle. “Empty.”
They steamed to a halt out front of Charlie’s house.
“Your folks ever go up in your attic, boy?”
“Too small. They poke me up to rummage.”
“Good. Hoist our ancient Egyptian friend out of the back seat there, don’t weigh much, twenty pounds at the most, you carried him fine, Charlie. Oh, that was a sight. You running out of the post office, making the mummy walk. You shoulda seen the sheriff’s face!”
“I hope he don’t get in trouble because of this.”
“Oh, he’ll bump his head and make up a fine story. Can’t very well admit he saw the mummy go for a walk, can he? He’ll think of something, organize a posse, you’ll see. But right now, son, get our ancient friend here up, hide him good, visit him weekly. Feed him night talk. Then, thirty, forty years from now—”
“What?” asked Charlie.
“In a bad year so brimmed up with boredom it drips out your ears, when the town’s long forgotten this first arrival and departure, on a morning, I say, when you lie in bed and don’t want to get up, don’t even want to twitch your ears or blink, you’re so damned bored. . . .Well, on that morning, Charlie, you just climb up in your rummage-sale attic and shake this mummy out of bed, toss him in a cornfield and watch new hellfire mobs break loose. Life starts over that hour, that day, for you, the town, everyone. Now grab, git, and hide, boy!”
“I hate for the night to be over,” said Charlie, very quietly. “Can’t we go around a few blocks and finish off some lemonade on your porch? And have him come, too.”
“Lemonade it is.” Colonel Stonesteel banged his heel on the car-floor. The car exploded into life. “For the lost king and the Pharaoh’s son!”
It was late on Labor Day evening, and the two of them sat on the colonel’s front porch again, rocking up a fair breeze, lemonades in hand, ice in mouth, sucking the sweet savor of the night’s incredible adventures.
“Boy,” said Charlie. “I can just see tomorrow’s Clarion headlines: PRICELESS MUMMY KIDNAPPED. RAMESES-TUT VANISHES. GREAT FIND GONE. REWARD OFFERED. SHERIFF NONPLUSSED. BLACKMAIL EXPECTED.”
“Talk on, boy. You do have a way with words.”
“Learned from you, colonel. Now it’s your turn.”
“What do you want me to say, boy?”
“About the mummy. What he really is. What he’s truly made of. Where he came from. What’s he mean . . .?”
“Why, boy
, you were there, you helped, you saw—”
Charles looked at the old man steadily.
“No.” A long breath. “Tell me, colonel.”
The old man rose to stand in the shadows between the two rocking chairs. He reached out to touch their ancient harvest-tobacco dried-up-Nile-River-bottom old-time masterpiece, which leaned against the porch slattings.
The last Labor Day fireworks were dying in the sky. Their light died in the lapis lazuli eyes of the mummy, which watched Colonel Stonesteel, even as did the boy, waiting.
“You want to know who he truly was, once upon a time?”
The colonel gathered a handful of dust in his lungs and softly let it forth.
“He was everyone, no one, someone.” A quiet pause. “You. Me.”
“Go on,” whispered Charlie.
Continue, said the mummy’s eyes.
“He was, he is,” murmured the colonel, “a bundle of old Sunday comic pages stashed in the attic to spontaneously combust from all those forgotten notions and stuffs. He’s a stand of papyrus left in an autumn field long before Moses, a papier-mâché tumbleweed blown out of time, this way long-gone dusk, that way at come-again dawn . . . maybe a nightmare scrap of nicotine/dogtail flag up a pole at high noon, promising something, everything . . . a chart-map of Siam, Blue River Nile source, hot desert dust-devil, all the confetti of lost trolley transfers, dried-up yellow cross-country road maps petering off in sand dunes, journey aborted, wild jaunts yet to night-dream and commence. His body? . . . Mmmm . . . made of . . . all the crushed flowers from brand new weddings, dreadful old funerals, ticker-tapes unraveled from gone-off-forever parades to Far Rockaway, punched tickets for sleepless Egyptian Pharaoh midnight trains. Written promises, worthless stocks, crumpled deeds. Circus posters—see there? Part of his paper-wrapped ribcage? Posters torn off seedbarns in North Storm, Ohio, shuttled south toward Fulfillment, Texas, or Promised Land, Calif-orn-I-aye! Commencement proclamations, wedding notices, birth announcements . . . all things that were once need, hope, first nickel in the pocket, framed dollar on the café wall. Wallpaper scorched by the burning look, the blueprint etched there by the hot eyes of boys, girls, failed old men, time-orphaned women, saying: Tomorrow! Yes! It will happen! Tomorrow! Everything that died so many nights and was born again, glory human spirit, so many rare new daybreaks! All the dumb strange shadows you ever thought, boy, or I ever inked out inside my head at three A.M. All, crushed, stashed, and now shaped into one form under our hands and here in our gaze. That, that is what old King Pharaoh Seventh Dynasty Holy Dust Himself is.”
“Wow,” whispered Charlie.
The colonel sat back down to travel again in his rocker, eyes shut, smiling.
“Colonel.” Charlie gazed off into the future. “What if, even in my old age, I don’t ever need my own particular mummy?”
“Eh?”
“What if I have a life chock-full of things, never bored, find out what I want to do, do it, make every day count, every night swell, sleep tight, wake up yelling, laugh lots, grow old still running fast, what then, colonel?”
“Why then, boy, you’ll be one of God’s luckiest people!”
“For you see, colonel,” Charlie looked at him with pure round, unblinking eyes, “I made up my mind. I’m going to be the greatest writer that ever lived.”
The colonel braked his rocker and searched the innocent fire in that small face.
“Lord, I see it. Yes. You will! Well then, Charles, when you are very old, you must find some lad, not as lucky as you, to give Osiris-Ra to. Your life may be full, but others, lost on the road, will need our Egyptian friend. Agreed? Agreed.”
The last fireworks were gone, the last fire balloons were sailing out among the gentle stars. Cars and people were driving or walking home, some fathers or mothers carrying their tired and already sleeping children. As the quiet parade passed Colonel Stonesteel’s porch, some folks glanced in and waved at the old man and the boy and the tall dim-shadowed servant who stood between. The night was over forever. Charlie said:
“Say some more, colonel.”
“No. I’m shut. Listen to what he has to say now. Let him tell your future, Charlie. Let him start you on stories. Ready . . .?”
A wind came up and blew in the dry papyrus and sifted the ancient wrappings and trembled the curious hands and softly twitched the lips of their old/new four-thousand-year night-time visitor, whispering.
“What’s he saying, Charles?”
Charlie shut his eyes, waited, listened, nodded, let a single tear slide down his cheek, and at last said:
“Everything. Just everything. Everything I always wanted to hear.”
I SEE YOU NEVER
THE SOFT KNOCK CAME AT THE KITCHEN DOOR, and when Mrs. O’Brian opened it, there on the back porch were her best tenant, Mr. Ramirez, and two police officers, one on each side of him. Mr. Ramirez just stood there, walled in and small.
“Why, Mr. Ramirez!” said Mrs. O’Brian.
Mr. Ramirez was overcome. He did not seem to have words to explain.
He had arrived at Mrs. O’Brian’s rooming house more than two years earlier and had lived there ever since. He had come by bus from Mexico City to San Diego and had then gone up to Los Angeles. There he had found the clean little room, with glossy blue linoleum, and pictures and calendars on the flowered walls, and Mrs. O’Brian as the strict but kindly landlady. During the war he had worked at the airplane factory and made parts for the planes that flew off somewhere, and even now, after the war, he still held his job. From the first he had made big money. He saved some of it, and he got drunk only once a week—a privilege that, to Mrs. O’Brian’s way of thinking, every good workingman deserved, unquestioned and unreprimanded.
Inside Mrs. O’Brian’s kitchen, pies were baking in the oven. Soon the pies would come out with complexions like Mr. Ramirez’—brown and shiny and crisp, with slits in them for the air almost like the slits of Mr. Ramirez’ dark eyes. The kitchen smelled good. The policemen leaned forward, lured by the odor.
Mr. Ramirez gazed at his feet as if they had carried him into all this trouble.
“What happened, Mr. Ramirez?” asked Mrs. O’Brian.
Behind Mrs. O’Brian, as he lifted his eyes, Mr. Ramirez saw the long table laid with clean white linen and set with a platter, cool, shining glasses, a water pitcher with ice cubes floating inside it, a bowl of fresh potato salad and one of bananas and oranges, cubed and sugared. At this table sat Mrs. O’Brian’s children—her three grown sons, eating and conversing, and her two younger daughters, who were staring at the policemen as they ate.
“I have been here thirty months,” said Mr. Ramirez quietly, looking at Mrs. O’Brian’s plump hands.
“That’s six months too long,” said one policeman. “He only had a temporary visa. We’ve just got around to looking for him.”
Soon after Mr. Ramirez had arrived he bought a radio for his little room; evenings, he turned it up very loud and enjoyed it. And he had bought a wristwatch and enjoyed that too. And on many nights he had walked silent streets and seen the bright clothes in the windows and bought some of them, and he had seen the jewels and bought some of them for his few lady friends. And he had gone to picture shows five nights a week for a while. Then, also, he had ridden the streetcars—all night some nights—smelling the electricity, his dark eyes moving over the advertisements, feeling the wheels rumble under him, watching the little sleeping houses and big hotels slip by. Besides that, he had gone to large restaurants, where he had eaten many-course dinners, and to the opera and the theater. And he had bought a car, which later, when he forgot to pay for it, the dealer had driven off angrily from in front of the rooming house.
“So here I am,” said Mr. Ramirez now, “to tell you I must give up my room, Mrs. O’Brian. I come to get my baggage and clothes and go with these men.”
“Back to Mexico?”
“Yes. To Lagos. That is a little town north of Mexico City.”
“I’m
sorry, Mr. Ramirez.”
“I’m packed,” said Mr. Ramirez hoarsely, blinking his dark eyes rapidly and moving his hands helplessly before him. The policemen did not touch him. There was no necessity for that.
“Here is the key, Mrs. O’Brian,” Mr. Ramirez said. “I have my bag already.”
Mrs. O’Brian, for the first time, noticed a suitcase standing behind him on the porch.
Mr. Ramirez looked in again at the huge kitchen, at the bright silver cutlery and the young people eating and the shining waxed floor. He turned and looked for a long moment at the apartment house next door, rising up three stories, high and beautiful. He looked at the balconies and fire escapes and backporch stairs, at the lines of laundry snapping in the wind.
“You’ve been a good tenant,” said Mrs. O’Brian.
“Thank you, thank you, Mrs. O’Brian,” he said softly. He closed his eyes.
Mrs. O’Brian stood holding the door half open. One of her sons, behind her, said that her dinner was getting cold, but she shook her head at him and turned back to Mr. Ramirez. She remembered a visit she had once made to some Mexican border towns—the hot days, the endless crickets leaping and falling or lying dead and brittle like the small cigars in the shop windows, and the canals taking river water out to the farms, the dirt roads, the scorched scape. She remembered the silent towns, the warm beer, the hot, thick foods each day. She remembered the slow, dragging horses and the parched jack rabbits on the road. She remembered the iron mountains and the dusty valleys and the ocean beaches that spread hundreds of miles with no sound but the waves—no cars, no buildings, nothing.
“I’m sure sorry, Mr. Ramirez,” she said.
“I don’t want to go back, Mrs. O’Brian,” he said weakly. “I like it here, I want to stay here. I’ve worked, I’ve got money. I look all right, don’t I? And I don’t want to go back!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ramirez,” she said. “I wish there was something I could do.”
“Mrs. O’Brian!” he cried suddenly, tears rolling out from under his eyelids. He reached out his hand and took her hand fervently, shaking it, wringing it, holding to it. “Mrs. O’Brian, I see you never, I see you never!”