"What've we done! Poor Mister Quartermain!"
"We must've killed him. And someone must've seen and followed us. Look ..."
Miss Fern and Miss Roberta peered from the cobwebbed attic window. Below, as if no great tragedy had occurred, the oaks and elms continued to grow in fresh sunlight. A boy strolled by on the sidewalk, turned, strolled by again, looking up.
In the attic the old women peered at each other as if trying to see their faces in a running stream.
"The police!"
But no one hammered the downstairs door and cried, "In the name of the law!"
"Who's that boy down there?"
"Douglas, Douglas Spaulding! Lord, he's come to ask for a ride in our Green Machine. He doesn't know. Our pride has ruined us. Pride and that electrical contraption!"
"That terrible salesman from Gumport Falls. It's his fault, him and his talking."
Talking, talking, like soft rain on a summer roof.
Suddenly it was another day, another noon. They sat with white fans and dishes of cool, trembling lime Jell-O on their arbored porch.
Out of the blinding glare, out of the yellow sun, glittering, splendid as a prince's coach ...
THE GREEN MACHINE!
It glided. It whispered, an ocean breeze. Delicate as maple leaves, fresher than creek water, it purred with the majesty of cats prowling the noontide. In the machine, his Panama hat afloat in Vaseline above his ears, the salesman from Gumport Falls! The machine, with a rubber tread, soft, shrewd, whipped up their scalded white sidewalk, whirred to the lowest porch step, twirled, stopped. The salesman leaped out, blocked off the sun with his Panama. In this small shadow, his smile flashed.
"The name is William Tara! And this--" He pinched a bulb. A seal barked. "--is the horn!" He lifted black satin cushions. "Storage batteries!" A smell of lightning blew on the hot air. "Steering lever! Foot rest! Overhead parasol! Here, in toto, is The Green Machine!"
In the dark attic the ladies shuddered, remembering, eyes shut.
"Why didn't we stab him with our darning needles!"
"Shh! Listen."
Someone knocked on the front door downstairs. After a time the knocking stopped. They saw a woman cross the yard and enter the house next door.
"Only Lavinia Nebbs, come with an empty cup, to borrow sugar, I guess."
"Hold me, I'm afraid."
They shut their eyes. The memory-play began again. An old straw hat on an iron trunk was suddenly flourished, it seemed, by the man from Gumport Falls.
"Thanks, I will have some iced tea." You could hear the cool liquid shock his stomach, in the silence. Then he turned his gaze upon the old ladies like a doctor with a small light, looking into their eyes and nostrils and mouths. "Ladies, I know you're both vigorous. You look it. Eighty years"--he snapped his fingers--"mean nothing to you! But there are times, mind, when you're so busy, busy, you need a friend indeed, a friend in need, and that is the two-seater Green Machine."
He fixed his bright, stuffed-fox, green-glass-eyed gaze upon that wonderful merchandise. It stood, smelling new, in the hot sunlight, waiting for them, a parlor chair comfortably put to wheels.
"Quiet as a swan's feather." They felt him breathe softly in their faces. "Listen." They listened. "The storage batteries are fully charged and ready now! Listen! Not a tremor, not a sound. Electric, ladies. You recharge it every night in your garage."
"It couldn't--that is--" The younger sister gulped some iced tea. "It couldn't electrocute us accidently?"
"Perish the thought!"
He vaulted to the machine again, his teeth like those you saw in dental windows, alone, grimacing at you, as you passed by late at night.
"Tea parties!" He waltzed the runabout in a circle. "Bridge clubs. Soirees. Galas. Luncheons. Birthday gatherings! D.A.R. breakfasts." He purred away as if running off forever. He returned in a rubber-tired hush. "Gold Star Mother suppers." He sat primly, corseted by his supple characterization of a woman. "Easy steering. Silent, elegant arrivals and departures. No license needed. On hot days--take the breeze. Ah ..." He glided by the porch, head back, eyes closed deliciously, hair tousling in the wind thus cleanly sliced through.
He trudged reverently up the porch stairs, hat in hand, turning to gaze at the trial model as at the altar of a familiar church. "Ladies," he said softly, "twenty-five dollars down. Ten dollars a month, for two years."
Fern was first down the steps onto the double seat. She sat apprehensively. Her hand itched. She raised it. She dared tweak the rubber bulb horn.
A seal barked.
Roberta, on the porch, screamed hilariously and leaned over the railing.
The salesman joined their hilarity. He escorted the older sister down the steps, roaring, at the same time taking out his pen and searching in his straw hat for some piece of paper or other.
"And so we bought it!" remembered Miss Roberta, in the attic, horrified at their nerve. "We should've been warned! Always did think it looked like a little car off the carnival roller coaster!"
"Well," said Fern defensively, "my hip's bothered me for years, and you always get tired walking. It seemed so refined, so regal. Like in the old days when women wore hoop skirts. They sailed! The Green Machine sailed so quietly."
Like an excursion boat, wonderfully easy to steer, a baton handle you twitched with your hand, so.
Oh, that glorious and enchanted first week--the magical afternoons of golden light, humming through the shady town on a dreaming, timeless river, seated stiffly, smiling at passing acquaintances, sedately purring out their wrinkled claws at every turn, squeezing a hoarse cry from the black rubber horn at intersections, sometimes letting Douglas or Tom Spaulding or any of the other boys who trotted, chatting, alongside, hitch a little ride. Fifteen slow and pleasurable miles an hour top speed. They came and went through the summer sunlight and shadow, their faces freckled and stained by passing trees, going and coming like an ancient, wheeled vision.
"And then," whispered Fern, "this afternoon! Oh, this afternoon!"
"It was an accident."
"But we ran away, and that's criminal!"
This noon. The smell of the leather cushions under their bodies, the gray perfume smell of their own sachets trailing back as they moved in their silent Green Machine through the small, languorous town.
It happened quickly. Rolling soft onto the sidewalk at noon, because the streets were blistering and fiery, and the only shade was under the lawn trees, they had glided to a blind corner, bulbing their throaty horn. Suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box, Mister Quartermain had tottered from nowhere!
"Look out!" screamed Miss Fern.
"Look out!" screamed Miss Roberta.
"Look out!" cried Mister Quartermain.
The two women grabbed each other instead of the steering stick.
There was a terrible thud. The Green Machine sailed on in the hot daylight, under the shady chestnut trees, past the ripening apple trees. Looking back only once, the two old ladies' eyes filled with faded horror.
The old man lay on the sidewalk, silent.
"And here we are," mourned Miss Fern in the darkening attic. "Oh, why didn't we stop! Why did we run away?"
"Shh!" They both listened.
The rapping downstairs came again.
When it stopped they saw a boy cross the lawn in the dim light. "Just Douglas Spaulding come for a ride again." They both sighed.
The hours passed; the sun was going down.
"We've been up here all afternoon," said Roberta tiredly. "We can't stay in the attic three weeks hiding till everybody forgets."
"We'd starve."
"What'll we do, then? Do you think anyone saw and followed us?" They looked at each other.
"No. Nobody saw."
The town was silent, all the tiny houses putting on lights. There was a smell of watered grass and cooking suppers from below.
"Time to put on the meat," said Miss Fern. "Frank'll be coming home in ten minutes."
"Do we
dare go down?"
"Frank'd call the police if he found the house empty. That'd make things worse."
The sun went swiftly. Now they were only two moving things in the musty blackness. "Do you," wondered Miss Fern, "think he's dead?"
"Mister Quartermain?"
A pause. "Yes."
Roberta hesitated. "We'll check the evening paper."
They opened the attic door and looked carefully at the steps leading down. "Oh, if Frank hears about this, he'll take our Green Machine away from us, and it's so lovely and nice riding and getting the cool wind and seeing the town."
"We won't tell him."
"Won't we?"
They helped each other down the creaking stairs to the second floor, stopping to listen.... In the kitchen they peered at the pantry, peeked out windows with frightened eyes, and finally set to work frying hamburger on the stove. After five minutes of working silence Fern looked sadly over at Roberta and said, "I've been thinking. We're old and feeble and don't like to admit it. We're dangerous. We owe a debt to society for running off--"
"And--?" A kind of silence fell on the frying in the kitchen as the two sisters faced each other, nothing in their hands.
"I think that"--Fern stared at the wall for a long time-- "we shouldn't drive the Green Machine ever again."
Roberta picked up a plate and held it in her thin hand. "Not--ever?" she said.
"No."
"But," said Roberta, "we don't have to--to get rid of it, do we? We can keep it, can't we?"
Fern considered this. "Yes, I guess we can keep it."
"At least that'll be something. I'll go out now and disconnect the batteries."
Roberta was leaving just as Frank, their younger brother, only fifty-six years, entered.
"Hi, sisters!" he cried.
Roberta brushed past him without a word and walked out into the summer dusk. Frank was carrying a newspaper which Fern immediately snatched from him. Trembling, she looked it through and through, and sighing, gave it back to him.
"Saw Doug Spaulding outside just now. Said he had a message for you. Said for you not to worry--he saw everything and everything's all right. What did he mean by that?"
"I'm sure I wouldn't know." Fern turned her back and searched for her handkerchief.
"Oh well, these kids." Frank looked at his sister's back for a long moment, then shrugged.
"Supper almost ready?" he asked pleasantly.
"Yes." Fern set the kitchen table.
There was a bulbing cry from outside. Once, twice, three times--far away.
"What's that?" Frank peered through the kitchen window into the dusk. "What's Roberta up to? Look at her out there, sitting in the Green Machine, poking the rubber horn!"
Once, twice more, in the dusk, softly, like some kind of mournful animal, the bulbing sound was pinched out.
"What's got into her?" demanded Frank.
"You just leave her alone!" screamed Fern._
Frank looked surprised.
A moment later Roberta entered quietly, without looking at anyone, and they all sat down to supper.
The first light on the roof outside; very early morning. The leaves on all the trees tremble with a soft awakening to any breeze the dawn may offer. And then, far off, around a curve of silver track, comes the trolley, balanced on four small steel-blue wheels, and it is painted the color of tangerines. Epaulets of shimmery brass cover it and pipings of gold; and its chrome bell bings if the ancient motorman taps it with a wrinkled shoe. The numerals on the trolley's front and sides are bright as lemons. Within, its seats prickle with cool green moss. Something like a buggy whip flings up from its roof to brush the spider thread high in the passing trees from which it takes its juice. From every window blows an incense, the all-pervasive blue and secret smell of summer storms and lightning.
Down the long elm-shadowed streets the trolley moves along, the motorman's gray-gloved hand touched gently, timelessly, to the levered controls.
At noon the motorman stopped his car in the middle of the block and leaned out. "Hey!"
And Douglas and Charlie and Tom and all the boys and girls on the block saw the gray glove waving, and dropped from trees and left skip ropes in white snakes on lawns, to run and sit in the green plush seats, and there was no charge. Mr. Tridden, the conductor, kept his glove over the mouth of the money box as he moved the trolley on down the shady block, calling.
"Hey!" said Charlie. "Where are we going?"
"Last ride," said Mr. Tridden, eyes on the high electric wire ahead. "No more trolley. Bus starts to run tomorrow. Going to retire me with a pension, they are. So--a free ride for everyone! Watch out!"
He ricocheted the brass handle, the trolley groaned and swung round an endless green curve, and all the time in the world held still, as if only the children and Mr. Tridden and his miraculous machine were riding an endless river, away.
"Last day?" asked Douglas, stunned. "They can't do that! It's bad enough the Green Machine is gone, locked up in the garage, and no arguments. And bad enough my new tennis shoes are getting old and slowing down! How'll I get around? But ... But ... They can't take off the trolley! Why," said Douglas, "no matter how you look at it, a bus ain't a trolley. Don't make the same kind of noise. Don't have tracks or wires, don't throw sparks, don't pour sand on the tracks, don't have the same colors, don't have a bell, don't let down a step like a trolley does!"
"Hey, that's right," said Charlie. "I always get a kick watching a trolley let down the step, like an accordion."
"Sure," said Douglas.
And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman's Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.
"Here's where we turn around," said Charlie.
"Here's where you're wrong!" Mr. Tridden snapped the emergency generator switch. "Now!"
The trolley, with a bump and a sailing glide, swept past the city limits, turned off the street, and swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools. Here and there creek waters flushed the tracks and sun filtered through trees like green glass. They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers past abandoned way stations empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a summer country, while Douglas talked.
"Why, just the smell of a trolley, that's different. I been on Chicago buses; they smell funny."
"Trolleys are too slow," said Mr. Tridden. "Going to put busses on. Busses for people and busses for school."
The trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that emptied into a silent lake where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into termite dust.
They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden's voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherri
es. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.
A loon flew over the sky, crying.
Somebody shivered.
Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. "Well, time to go. Parents'll think I stole you all for good."
The trolley was silent and cool dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands.
Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Tridden's foot and they soared back over sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out in shady streets.
Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden's gloves on the brass controls.
Douglas ran his fingers on the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling.
"Well ... so long again, Mr. Tridden."
"Good-by, boys."
"See you around, Mr. Tridden."
"See you around."
There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed gently shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. The trolley sailed slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, all tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far corner, wheeling, and vanished, gone away.
"School busses!" Charlie walked to the curb. "Won't even give us a chance to be late to school. Come get you at your front door. Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare, Doug, just think it all over."
But Douglas, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had ever run this way. He knew it would take as many years as he could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter he knew he'd wake and, if he didn't go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm in his bed, he would hear it, faint and far away.
And around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of sycamore, elm and maple, in the quietness before the start of living, past his house he would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a clock, the rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of a single immense dragonfly at dawn. Like a merry-go-round, like a small electrical storm, the color of blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolley's chime! The hiss like a soda-fountain spigot as it let down and took up its step, and the starting of the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried track to some hidden and buried destination....