Judson Jerome
THE COMMON SENSE OF
EVERETT BJORKMAN
Since the radio had gone out, he could get no news.
Loose
connection, Everett Bjorkman figured--or a tube, he thought, more
technically. Without news, without even music, or ads, he was feel–
ing detached, or groggy, or balmy, he thought, feeling for the word.
One is not often left so helplessly alone with
his
own mind as when,
driving home from the city, between five and five-thirty (he glanced
at
his
watch; the hands appeared to be spinning; .but no matter-he
knew it was between five and five-thirty), the radio suddenly quits.
All he could do was read signs.
He was later to reflect that he would have done better not to
have read them at all, for, of course, he read the wrong ones, and
for the first time in all these years of living in the village, he some–
how turned off the highway a block too soon, on a street he had
never noticed, never knew existed. He had gone on for some way
before realizing that everything was strange. Now, the reins limp in
his hands, he eased down the leaf-strewn street in swirls of twilight.
The air was unusually winey and warm for Idaho;
his
wool suit was
scratchy; and the evening, extraordinarily bright for these shortening
days, was sudden and tropically golden. Dry oak and
elm
and maple
and mango leaves whispered under the quiet wheels. Children stopped
play to look at him, wiping their hands absently on their pinafores,
clenching their hoops by their waists, appearing, somehow, all to be
of the same age, like a row of birds on a wire, following
him
with
solemn stares. Here and there a woman sat in a doorway churning
or shelling peas or carding wool.
His wife would be worrying. He thought of her, faceless, pacing
the rumpus room. And he really had little idea of where
this
street
was taking him. Ahead he saw blue neon flickering to create the illu-
