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

you’re here at last, is all.”
    â€œSurprised?”
    â€œSurprised,” he said, “and … pleased.”
    I stopped abruptly and looked straight at him.
    â€œHow long have you been sitting on that station platform?”
    â€œTwenty years, give or take a few.”
    I knew he was telling the truth; his voice was as easy and quiet as the river.
    â€œWaiting for me?” I said.
    â€œOr someone like you,” he said.
    We walked on in the growing dark.
    â€œHow you like our town?”
    â€œNice, quiet,” I said.
    â€œNice, quiet.” He nodded. “Like the people?”
    â€œPeople look nice and quiet.”
    â€œThey are,” he said. “Nice, quiet.”
    I was ready to turn back but the old man kept talking and in order to listen and be polite I had to walk with him in the vaster darkness, the tides of field and meadow beyond town.
    â€œYes,” said the old man, “the day I retired, twenty years ago, I sat down on that station platform and there I been, sittin’, doin’ nothin’, waitin’ for something to happen, I didn’t know what, I didn’t know, I couldn’t say. But when it finally happened, I’d know it, I’d look at it and say, yes, sir, that’s what I was waitin’ for. Train wreck? No. Old woman friend come back to town after fifty years? No. No. It’s hard to say. Someone. Something. And it seems to have something to do with you. I wish I could say—”
    â€œWhy don’t you try?” I said.
    The stars were coming out. We walked on.
    â€œWell,” he said slowly, “you know much about your own insides?”
    â€œYou mean my stomach or you mean psychologically?”
    â€œThat’s the word. I mean your head, your brain, you know much about that ?”
    The grass whispered under my feet. “A little.”
    â€œYou hate many people in your time?”
    â€œSome.”
    â€œWe all do. It’s normal enough to hate, ain’t it, and not only hate but, while we don’t talk about it, don’t we sometimes want to hit people who hurt us, even kill them?”
    â€œHardly a week passes we don’t get that feeling,” I said, “and put it away.”
    â€œWe put away all our lives,” he said. “The town says thus and so, Mom and Dad say this and that, the law says such and such. So you put away one killing and another and two more after that. By the time you’re my age, you got lots of that kind of stuffbetween your ears. And unless you went to war, nothin’ ever happened to get rid of it.”
    â€œSome men trapshoot or hunt ducks,” I said. “Some men box or wrestle.”
    â€œAnd some don’t. I’m talkin’ about them that don’t. Me. All my life I’ve been saltin’ down those bodies, puttin’ ’em away on ice in my head. Sometimes you get mad at a town and the people in it for makin’ you put things aside like that. You like the old cave men who just gave a hell of a yell and whanged someone on the head with a club.”
    â€œWhich all leads up to …?”
    â€œWhich all leads up to: everybody’d like to do one killin’ in his life, to sort of work off that big load of stuff, all those killin’s in his mind he never did have the guts to do. And once in a while a man has a chance. Someone runs in front of his car and he forgets the brakes and keeps goin’. Nobody can prove nothin’ with that sort of thing. The man don’t even tell himself he did it. He just didn’t get his foot on the brake in time. But you know and I know what really happened, don’t we?”
    â€œYes,” I said.
    The town was far away now. We moved over a small stream on a wooden bridge, just near the railway embankment.
    â€œNow,” said the old man, looking at the water, “the only kind of killin’ worth doin’ is the one where nobody can guess who