Driving Blind by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy - General, Science Fiction, Fiction - Fantasy, Fiction, United States, Fantasy, Science Fiction - General, General, Short Stories (single author), Modern fiction, Short stories
ISBN: 9780380789603
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1998-10-01T18:11:19.210000+00:00

Driving Blind

SOMEONE IN THE RAIN

Everything was almost the same. Now that the luggage was brought into the echoing damp cottage, with the raindrops still shining on it, and he had drawn the canvas over the car which was still warm and smelling of the drive two hundred miles north into Wisconsin from Chicago, he had time to think. First of all, he had been very lucky to get this same cabin, the one he and his brother Skip and his folks had rented twenty years ago, in 1927. It sounded just the same, there was the empty echo of your voice and your feet. Now, for some unaccountable reason, he was walking about barefoot, because it felt good, perhaps. He closed his eyes as he sat on the bed and listened to the rain on the thin roof. You had to take a lot of things into account. First of all, the trees were larger. You looked out of your streaming car window in the rain and you saw the Lake Lawn sign looming up and something was different and it was only now, as he heard the wind outside, that he realized what the real change was. The trees, of course. Twenty years of growing lush and high. The grass, too; if you wanted to get particular, it was the same grass, perhaps, he had lain in that long time ago, after the jump in the lake, his swimsuit still cold around his loins and around his thin small chest. He wondered, idly, if the latrine still smelled the way it did: of brass and disinfectant and old shuffling fumbling men and soap.

The rain stopped. It tapped occasionally on the house from the washing trees above, and the sky was the color and had the feel and expectancy of gunpowder. Now and again it cracked down the middle, all light; and then the crack was mended.

Linda was over in the ladies' rest room, which was just a run between the bushes and the trees and the small white cottages, a run through puddles now, he supposed, and bushes that shook like startled dogs when you passed, showering you with a fresh burst of cool and odorous rain. It was good that she was gone for awhile. He wanted to look for certain things. First there was the initial he had carved on the windowsill fifteen years ago on their last trip up for the late summer of 1932. It was a thing he would never have done with anyone about, but now, alone, he walked to the window and ran his hand over the surface. It was perfectly smooth.

Well then, he thought, it must have been another window. No. It was this room. And this cottage, no doubt of it. He felt a sudden resentment at the carpenter who had come in here some time ago and smoothed and sandpapered surfaces and taken away the immortality he had promised himself that rainy night when, locked into the house by the storm, he had busied himself with the careful initialing.

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