Ray Bradbury. The Pumpernickel

                Ray Bradbury
                http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal

                The Pumpernickel
                1951

     Mr.  and  Mrs.  Welles walked away from the movie theater late at night and
went  into  the  quiet  little store, a combination restaurant and delicatessen.
They  settled in a booth, and Mrs. Welles said, "Baked ham on pumpernickel." Mr.
Welles glanced toward the counter, and there lay a loaf of pumpernickel.
     "Why," he murmured, "pumpernickel. . . Druce's Lake. . ."
     The  night,  the  late  hour, the empty restaurant - by now the pattern was
familiar.  Anything  could  set him off on a ride of reminiscences. The scent of
autumn  leaves,  or  midnight  winds  blowing,  could stir him from himself, and
memories  would  pour  around  him. Now in the unreal hour after the theater, in
this  lonely  store,  he  saw a loaf of pumpernickel bread and, as on a thousand
other nights, he found himself moved into the past.
     "Druce's Lake," he said again.
     "What?" His wife glanced up.
     "Something  I'd  almost  forgotten,"  said Mr. Welles. "In 1910, when I was
twenty, I nailed a loaf of pumpernickel to the top of my bureau mirror. . . ."
     In  the  hard,  shiny  crust of the bread, the boys at Druce's Lake had cut
their  names: _Tom, Nick, Bill, Alec, Paul, Jack_. The finest picnic in history!
Their  faces  tanned  as  they rattled down the dusty roads. Those were the days
when  roads  were _really_ dusty; a fine brown talcum floured up after your car.
And the lake was always twice as good to reach as it would be later in life when
you arrived immaculate, clean, and un-rumpled.
     "That was the last time the old gang got together," Mr. Welles said.
     After  that, college, work, and. marriage separated you. Suddenly you found
yourself  with some other group. And you never felt as comfortable or as much as
ease again in all your life.
     "I wonder," said Mr. Welles. "I like to think maybe we all _knew_, somehow,
that  this  picnic might be the last we'd have. You first get that empty feeling
the day after high-school graduation. Then, when a little time passes and no one
vanishes  immediately,  you relax. But after a year you realize the old world is
changing.  And  you  want to do some one last thing before you lose one another.
While  you're  all still friends, home from college for the summer, this side of
marriage,  you've  got  to  have  something  like  a last ride and a swim in the
cool-lake."
     Mr.  Welles remembered that rare summer morning, he and Tom lying under his
father's  Ford,  reaching  up  their hands to adjust this or that, talking about
machines  and women and the future. While they worked, the day got warm. At last
Tom said, "Why don't we drive out to Druce's Lake?"
     As simple as that.
     Yet,  forty  years later, you remember every detail of picking up the other
fellows, everyone yelling under the green trees.
     "Hey!"  Alec  beating  everyone's  head with the pumpernickel and laughing.
"This is for extra sandwiches, later."
     Nick  had  made the sandwiches that were already in the hamper - the garlic
kind they would eat less of as the years passed and the girls moved in.
     Then,  squeezing  three  in  the  front, three in the rear, with their arms
across   one   another's  shoulders,  they  drove  through  the  boiling,  dusty
countryside, with a cake of ice in a tin washtub to cool the beer they'd buy.
     What  was  the  special  quality  of  that  day that it should focus like a
stereoscopic  image,  fresh  and clear, forty- years later? Perhaps each of them
had had an experience like his own. A few days before the picnic, he had found a
photograph  of  his  father  twenty-five years younger, standing with a group of
friends  at  college. The photograph had disturbed him, made him aware as he had
not  been  before  of the passing of time, the swift flow of the years away from
youth. A picture taken of him as he was now would, in twenty-five years, look as
strange  to  his  own children as his father's picture did to him - unbelievably
young, a stranger out of a strange, never-returning time.
     Was  that  how  the final picnic had come about - with each of them knowing
that  in  a few short years they would be crossing streets to avoid one another,
or,  if  they met, saying, "We've _got_ to have lunch sometime!" but never doing
it?  Whatever  the  reason,  Mr.  Welles could still hear the splashes as they'd
plunged  off  the  pier  under  a  yellow  sun. And then the beer and sandwiches
underneath the shady trees.
     We  never  ate that pumpernickel, Mr. Welles thought. Funny, if we'd been a
bit  .hungrier,  we'd have cut it up, and I wouldn't have been reminded of it by
the loaf there on the counter.
     Lying  under  the  trees  in a golden peace that came from beer and sun and
male  companionship,  they  promised  that  in  ten years they would meet at the
courthouse  on New Year's Day, 1920, to see what they had done with their lives.
Talking their rough easy talk, they carved their names in the pumpernickel.
     "Driving home," Mr. Welles said, "we sang 'Moonlight Bay'."
     He  remembered  motoring  along  in the hot, dry night with their swimsuits
damp  on  the  jolting floorboards. It was a ride of many detours taken just for
the hell of it, which was the best reason in the world.
     "Good night." "So long." "Good night."
     Then Welles was driving alone, at midnight, home to bed.
     He nailed the pumpernickel to his bureau the next day.
     "I  almost  cried  when,  two  years  later,  my  mother  threw  it  in the
incinerator while I was off at college."
     "What happened in 1920?" asked his wife. "On New Year's Day?"
     "Oh,"  said  Mr.  Welles. "I was walking by the courthouse, by accident, at
noon.  It  was  snowing.  I  heard  the  clock  strike. Lord, I thought, we were
supposed  to  meet  here today! I waited five minutes. Not right in front of the
courthouse, no. I waited across the street." He paused. "Nobody showed up."
     He  got  up  from  the table and paid the bill. "And I'll take that loaf of
unsliced pumpernickel there," he said.
     When  he and his wife were walking home, he said, "I've got a crazy idea. I
often wondered what happened to everyone."
     "Nick's still in town with his cafe?"
     "But  what about the others?" Mr. Welles's face was getting pink and he was
smiling and waving his hands. "They moved away. I think Tom's in Cincinnati." He
looked  quickly  at  his  wife.  "Just  for  the  heck of it, I'll send him this
pumpernickel!"
     "Oh, but -"
     "Sure!" He laughed, walking faster, slapping the bread with the palm of his
hand.  "Have  him  carve his name on it and mail it on to the others if he knows
their addresses. And finally back to me, with all their names on it!"
     "But,"  she said, taking his arm, "it'll only make you unhappy. You've done
things like this so many times before and . . ."
     He wasn't listening. Why do I never get these ideas by day? he thought. Why
do I always get them after the sun goes down?
     In  the  morning, first thing, he thought, I'll mail this pumpernickel off,
by  God,  to Tom and the others.       And when it comes back I'll have the loaf
just as it was when it got thrown out and burned! Why not?
     "Let's  see,"  he said, as his wife opened the screen door and let him walk
into  the  stuffy-smelling  house  to  be greeted by silence and warm emptiness.
"Let's see. We also sang 'Row Row Row Your Boat,' didn't we?"
     In  the  morning,  he  came down the hall stairs and paused a moment in the
strong  full  sunlight,  his  face  shaved,  his teeth freshly brushed. Sunlight
brightened every room. He looked in at the breakfast table.
     His wife was busy there. Slowly, calmly, she was slicing the pumpernickel.
     He  sat  down  at  the  table  in  the  warm  sunlight, and reached for the
newspaper.
     She  picked up a slice of the newly cut bread, and kissed him on the cheek.
He patted her arm.
     "One or two slices of toast, dear?" she asked gently.
     "Two, I think," he replied.