Read Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury for Free Online Page A

innards. The putter looks like a chopstick in his gigantic gnarled hands as he towers shakily over the golf ball. “I did enjoy it, being the heavy, I did . It was almost like . . .” He pauses, thinking, staring downward, teetering, holding himself up as though the putter were a cane. “ . . . the guys I was playing were bad apples, sure, but they . . . they . . . I guess what I’m trying to say is, my favorite part was when they got their comeuppance . . . when they took their medicine. You know? They looked the good guy in the face, they always did that, and they accepted the . . . whattyacallit . . . the consequences. I don’t know why that was so important to me . . . I guess that’s the only part I almost kinda miss. Putting the . . . whattyacallit . . . the punctuation at the end of the picture.”
    Zuckerman has no idea what the big guy is talking about but goes ahead and says, “That’s an interesting angle on things, my friend . . . and it brings to mind that great scene in . . . Haywood? Haywood?” Zuckerman drops his putter. “Haywood?! Haywood?! HAYWOOD!!”
    Once in a great while, in the great Muir Woods many miles north of here, a mighty redwood, suffering from blight, tumbles over in a great, heaving plunge, shaking the earth and sending up a plume of debris. When Haywood Allerton finally succumbs to the pain and goes down, hitting the green with all his weight, the manicured, perfectly landscaped, rarified ground of the Pine Ridge Country Club trembles with similar seismic reverberations.
     
    Z uckerman spares no expense. He has Allerton taken to the best facility money can buy—the Samuel Oschin Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai—not far from Zuckerman’s stately Beverly Hills mansion (which was once owned by Douglas Fairbanks, by the way).
    Zuckerman demands immediate attention and puts everything on his Visa. The doctors run the unconscious behemoth through a battery of tests and conclude that Allerton is in his final hours, his immune system shutting down, malabsorption syndrome making him a candidate for a feeding tube, and the administrator at Cedars informs Zuckerman that hospice is the only answer, and it’s a miracle the big guy was still walking around, and how about this chilly autumn weather we’re having?
    A widower with a lapsed Screen Actor’s Guild membership, Allerton has no insurance and no immediate family other than two estranged daughters living in the Midwest, both of whom are unable to get to L.A. for another week or two, so Zuckerman decides to have Allerton moved to Zuckerman’s sprawling Tudor mansion on Canon for home hospice care.
    It is here, five days later, in the elegant parlor in the rear of the house, around which French windows look out on a lovely grove of avocado trees and the hummingbirds play in the wisteria, that Zuckerman realizes what he has to do.
    “So your daughter, the older one—Nancy’s her name? She claims you never had a will,” Zuckerman says to the dying man.
    Nestled in the folds of a massive orthopedic hospital bed that was brought in by four burly orderlies earlier that week, hooked to a space shuttle’s worth of equipment, Allerton drifts in and out of consciousness, his face a gaunt, gray, sunken mask of torture. The pain constantly ebbs and flows—more flowing than ebbing lately—and it is agonizing for Zuckerman to watch.
    “I don’t know if you hear me anymore, but I just want you to know I got a plan.” Zuckerman sits on the edge of a chair next to the bed, his hand clutching the bed rail so tightly his knuckles whiten.
    Allerton’s eyelids flutter. His lips peel away from clenched, yellow teeth. It is unclear whether this is an indication that he understands human speech or he is simply writhing in pain—or both.
    It is also unclear how long the machines will keep him alive now, maybe days, weeks. God forbid, months . The former folk artist of evil, the greatest heavy ever, a man from a bygone era