Free A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury Page A

mouth of a stove, motionless, forever. His shadow under him was stenciled a permanent black.
    As I stepped down the old man’s eyes flicked every door on the train and stopped, surprised, at me.
    I thought he might wave.
    But there was only a sudden coloring of his secret eyes; a chemical change that was recognition. Yet he had not twitched so much as his mouth, an eyelid, a finger. An invisible bulk had shifted inside him.
    The moving train gave me an excuse to follow it with my eyes. There was no one else on the platform. No autos waited by the cobwebbed, nailed-shut office. I alone had departed the iron thunder to set foot on the choppy waves of platform lumber.
    The train whistled over the hill.
    Fool! I thought. My fellow passenger had been right. I would panic at the boredom I already sensed in this place. All right, I thought, fool, yes, but run, no!
    I walked my suitcase down the platform, not looking at the old man. As I passed, I heard his thin bulk shift again, this time so I could hear it. His feet were coming down to touch and tap the mushy boards.
    I kept walking.
    â€œAfternoon,” a voice said faintly.
    I knew he did not look at me but only at that great cloudless spread of shimmering sky.
    â€œAfternoon,” I said.
    I started up the dirt road toward the town. One hundred yards away, I glanced back.
    The old man, still seated there, stared at the sun, as if posing a question.
    I hurried on.
    I moved through the dreaming late afternoon town, utterly anonymous and alone, a trout going upstream, not touching the banks of a clear-running river of life that drifted all about me.
    My suspicions were confirmed: it was a town where nothing happened, where occurred only the following events:
    At four o’clock sharp, the Honneger Hardware door slammed as a dog came out to dust himself in the road. Four-thirty, a straw sucked emptily at the bottom of a soda glass, making a sound like a great cataract in the drugstore silence. Five o’clock, boys and pebbles plunged in the town river. Five-fifteen, ants paraded in the slanting light under some elm trees.
    And yet—I turned in a slow circle—somewhere in this town there must be something worth seeing. I knew it was there. I knew I had to keep walking and looking. I knew I would find it.
    I walked. I looked.
    All through the afternoon there was only one constant and unchanging factor: the old man in the bleached blue pants and shirt was never far away. When I sat in the drugstore he was out front spitting tobacco that rolled itself into tumblebugs in the dust. When I stood by the river he was crouched downstream making a great thing of washing his hands.
    Along about seven-thirty in the evening, I was walking for the seventh or eighth time through the quiet streets when I heard footsteps beside me.
    I looked over, and the old man was pacing me, looking straight ahead, a piece of dried grass in his stained teeth.
    â€œIt’s been a long time,” he said quietly.
    We walked along in the twilight.
    â€œA long time,” he said, “waitin’ on that station platform.”
    â€œYou?” I said.
    â€œMe.” He nodded in the tree shadows.
    â€œWere you waiting for someone at the station?”
    â€œYes,” he said. “You.”
    â€œMe?” The surprise must have shown in my voice. “But why …? You never saw me before in your life.”
    â€œDid I say I did? I just said I was waitin’.”
    We were on the edge of town now. He had turned and I had turned with him along the darkening riverbank toward the trestle where the night trains ran over going east, going west, but stopping rare few times.
    â€œYou want to know anything about me?” I asked, suddenly. “You the sheriff?”
    â€œNo, not the sheriff. And no, I don’t want to know nothing about you.” He put his hands in his pockets. The sun was set now. The air was suddenly cool. “I’m just surprised