66
By Ray
Bradbury
(excerpts)
I'm going
to tell you a story and you’re not going to
believe it, but nevertheless I’m going to tell
you. It’s kind of a murder mystery. On the other
hand, maybe it’s a time travel story and, come to
think of it, it’s a story of vengeance, and then
throw in a couple of ghosts and there you have
it.
What I am
is a motorcycle officer with the Oklahoma police
on what used to be called Route 66, somewhere
between Kansas and Oklahoma City.
During
the last month a series of very strange
discoveries have been made along the route from
Kansas City to Oklahoma.
The
bodies of a man, a woman, a younger man, and two
children were discovered by me in fields along the
way in early October. The bodies were widely
distributed over a stretch of more than a hundred
miles, and yet the way they were dressed indicated
that somehow, I felt, they were all related,
because the clothes they wore did not belong to
this day, in this month, in this year.
Each of
them appeared to have died from some sort of
strangulation, but that has not been completely
ascertained. There were no marks on the bodies,
but indeed all indications were that they had been
slain and left by the side of the road.
When I
speak of the costumes they wore, indeed they felt
like costumes instead of the clothes you would buy
at shops today.
The man
appeared to be a farmer who was dressed in work
clothes: denims and a ragged shirt and battered
hat.
The woman
resembled a timeworn scarecrow, starved by
life.
The
younger man was dressed as a farmer also, but with
clothes that looked like they had been through 500
miles in a dust storm.
The two
children, a boy and a girl around twelve, also
looked as if they had wandered the roads in heavy
rains and blistering sun and then fallen by the
way.
When I
mention dust bowl, memories come back which are
not mine. My mother and father were born in the
early twenties, and were alive during the great
depression, which I heard about all my life. We
people here in the center of America suffered that
nightmare which we’ve all seen in motion pictures
of dust blowing in great billowing gusts across
the land, destroying the barns and leveling the
crops.
I’ve
heard the story and seen it portrayed so often
that I feel I lived through it. That is why my
finding the bodies of these people was so
strange.
When I
woke some nights ago at three in the morning I
found that I had been crying and I didn’t know
why, but I sat up in bed and realized I’d been
dreaming about these bodies found all along the
road from Kansas City to beyond the Oklahoma
border.
It was
then that I got up and rifled through some old
books left me by my parents and found pictures of
the Okies; people who had gone west and who had
been had been immortalized in Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath. The more I looked at the
pictures, the more I had an increasing tendency to
weep. I had to put the books away and go back to
bed, but I lay there for a long time with tears
streaming down my face and only slept when the sun
rose in the morning.
I’ve
taken the long way to tell you about this because
it has been so mysterious and so hurtful to my
soul.
I found
the body of the man in an empty cornfield, lying
in a ditch, with his clothes burnt by the sun and
parched as in a dry harvest, no signs of
violence.
I called
in the county coroner and moved on searching. I
did not realize I was searching, but there was a
sense in me that there were more bodies to be
found. Why I should think this still remains an
immense mystery to me.
I found
the woman thirty miles further on, under a
culvert, and she, in turn, bore no marks of
violence, but seemed dead as a result of an
invisible bolt of lightning having struck her by
night.
Fifty
miles further on lay the bodies of the children
and the young man.
When they
were all assembled, like a jigsaw puzzle, in the
county coroner’s office, we surveyed them with a
terrible sense of loss, though we did not know
these people. Somehow we felt we had seen them
before and known them well and mourned their
deaths.
The case
went on for days, and then weeks, then several
months, and would have remained a terrible
mystery, if I hadn’t been sitting in a barber shop
one afternoon, waiting for a haircut. I dug
through a pile of magazines on the barber shop
table, came across an issue of an old magazine and
leafed through to a page of photographs which
caused me to jump up, throw the magazine against
the wall, then pick it up, shouting to nobody,
"Damn! Oh, Jesus! Damn!"
I
clenched the magazine in my hand and asked the
barber if I could take it and stormed
out.
Because,
my God, the pictures of the Okies in the magazine
were of the people I’d found along the
road!
But,
looking closer, I read that these pictures had
been taken a few weeks ago of folks in New York
who had dressed up in old thirties outfits and
were photographed to look like Okies.
The
clothes they wore were new, but made to look full
of dust. If you wanted to buy them you could go to
a store in New York and get these old clothes at
new prices and think yourself back sixty
years.
I don’t
know what happened next. I kind of went red-hot
blood-shot blind. I heard someone yelling, and it
was me. "Damn! Oh God!"
Crushing
the magazine, I stared at my motorbike.
The night was autumn
cold and somehow I knew I had to ride the bike
somewhere. I had an appointment with someone, but
I didn’t know who and I didn’t know
why.
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