The October Country

He grinned. “I’m being benevolent, Aimee, benevolent.”

“Ralph,” she said.

“Sh,” he said. “Listen.”

They waited in the booth in the long warm silence.

Then, a long way off, muffled, there was a scream.

“Ralph!” said Aimee.

“Listen, listen!” he said.

There was another scream, and another and still another, and a threshing and a pounding and a breaking, a rushing around and through the maze. There, there, wildly colliding and ricocheting, from mirror to mirror, shrieking hysterically and sobbing, tears on his face, mouth gasped open, came Mr. Bigelow. He fell out in the blazing night air, glanced about wildly, wailed, and ran off down the pier.

“Ralph, what happened?”

Ralph sat laughing and slapping at his thighs.

She slapped his face. “What’d you do?”

He didn’t quite stop laughing. “Come on. I’ll show you!”

And then she was in the maze, rushed from white-hot mirror to mirror, seeing her lipstick all red fire a thousand times repeated on down a burning silver cavern where strange hysterical women much like herself followed a quick-moving, smiling man. “Come on!” he cried. And they broke free into a dust-smelling tiny room.

“Ralph!” she said.

They both stood on the threshold of the little room where the Dwarf had come every night for a year. They both stood where the Dwarf had stood each night, before opening his eyes to see the miraculous image in front of him.

Aimee shuffled slowly, one hand out, into the dim room.

The mirror had been changed.

This new mirror made even tall people little and dark and twisted smaller as you moved forward.

And Aimee stood before it thinking and thinking that if it made big people small, standing here, God, what would it do to a dwarf, a tiny dwarf, a dark dwarf, a startled and lonely dwarf?

She turned and almost fell. Ralph stood looking at her. “Ralph,” she said. “God, why did you do it?”

“Aimee, come back!”

She ran out through the mirrors, crying. Staring with blurred eyes, it was hard to find the way, but she found it. She stood blinking at the empty pier, started to run one way, then another, then still another, then stopped. Ralph came up behind her, talking, but it was like a voice heard behind a wall late at night, remote and foreign.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said.

Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr. Kelly from the shooting gallery. “Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol from my place, loaded, run off before I’d get a hand on him! You help me find him?”

And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.

Aimee rocked back and forth and took a step.

“Aimee, where you going?”

She looked at Ralph as if they had just turned a corner, strangers passing, and bumped into each other. “I guess,” she said, “I’m going to help search.”

“You won’t be able to do nothing.”

“I got to try anyway. Oh God, Ralph, this is all my fault! I shouldn’t have phoned Billie Fine! I shouldn’t’ve ordered a mirror and got you so mad you did this! It’s me should’ve gone to Mr. Big, not a crazy thing like I bought! I’m going to find him if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.”

Swinging about slowly, her cheeks wet, she saw the quivery mirrors that stood in front of the Maze, Ralph’s reflection was in one of them. She could not take her eyes away from the image; it held her in a cool and trembling fascination, with her mouth open.

“Aimee, what’s wrong? What’re you—”

He sensed where she was looking and twisted about to see what was going on. His eyes widened.

He scowled at the blazing mirror.

A horrid, ugly little man, two feet high, with a pale, squashed face under an ancient straw hat, scowled back at him. Ralph stood there glaring at himself, his hands at his sides.

Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.

THE NEXT IN LINE (#ulink_ef94b98c-7b9f-5150-b0b3-42d053762d6b)

It was a little caricature of a town square. In it were the following fresh ingredients: a candy-box of a bandstand where men stood on Thursday and Sunday nights exploding music; fine, green-patinated bronze-copper benches all scrolled and flourished; fine blue and pink tiled walks—blue as women’s newly lacquered eyes, pink as women’s hidden wonders; and fine French-clipped trees in the shapes of exact hatboxes. The whole, from your hotel window, had the fresh ingratiation and unbelievable fantasy one might expect of a French villa in the nineties. But no, this was Mexico! and this a plaza in a small colonial Mexican town, with a fine State Opera House (in which movies were shown for two pesos admission: Rasputin and the Empress, The Big House, Madame Curie, Love Affair, Mama Loves Papa).

Joseph came out on the sun-heated balcony in the morning and knelt by the grille, pointing his little box Brownie. Behind him, in the bath, the water was running and Marie’s voice came out:

“What’re you doing?”

He muttered “—a picture.” She asked again. He clicked the shutter, stood up, wound the spool inside, squinting, and said, “Took a picture of the town square. God, didn’t those men shout last night? I didn’t sleep until two-thirty. We would have to arrive when the local Rotary’s having its whingding.”

“What’re our plans for today?” she asked.

“We’re going to see the mummies,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. There was a long silence.

He came in, set the camera down, and lit himself a cigarette.

“I’ll go up and see them alone,” he said, “if you’d rather.”

“No,” she said, not very loud. “I’ll go along. But I wish we could forget the whole thing. It’s such a lovely little town.”

“Look here!” he cried, catching a movement from the corner of his eyes. He hurried to the balcony, stood there, his cigarette smoking and forgotten in his fingers. “Come quick, Marie!”

“I’m drying myself,” she said.

“Please, hurry,” he said, fascinated, looking down into the street.