“The first thing I’ll need in the morning is a hack saw,” he said. “And a little vise. I can work on this handcuff during the day while they’re tuning up them damn motorcycles down there. Nobody’ll hear the sawing.” He wasn’t thinking about the handcuff now, though. He was thinking about being in bed with her, remembering the smooth, warm feel of her in the dark and all the eager, responsive passion.
“You remember how the motorcycles used to wake us” up in the mornings?” he went on. “When we slept late and how we would lie there in bed not having to worry about anybody hearing us because they made so much noise?”
She made no reply to that. In a minute she asked, “Where do you get hack saws?”
“In hardware stores. But you can get little ones at the dime store, in the tool department. They break, but you can get spare blades. They ain’t as good as the regular ones, but it’ll be safer that way. Nobody’ll see you carrying it in.”
“And you want a little vise, too?”
“Yes. You may have to get that in a hardware store. Just a small one. The cheapest one they have. One you can clamp onto a table.”
“All right. I’ll get them in the morning.”
“We’d better go to bed now,” he said. To hell with all this stalling around, he thought. All that can wait till tomorrow.
She got up. “You can sleep here on the bed,” she said, as if she had been waiting for and dreading this moment. “I’ll take the sofa.”
He ground out the cigarette in the ash tray and stared at her. “What the hell, sleep on the couch?” he demanded. “Since when? We’ll sleep in the bed. Both of us.”
“No,” she said.
“What do you mean, no? What’s the matter with you?”
She stood and stared back at him as if he were a long way off. “Nothing.”
“Well, where do you get this couch stuff?”
“Do you have to ask so many questions? Can’t you be reasonable about it?”
“Well, of all the silly damn— Oh, it’s that? Just my rotten luck. Of all the times to get here. But, Christ, why didn’t you just say so?”
“No. That’s not it.”
“Well, for God’s sake, what is it?” She had a perfect out, he thought, but she wouldn’t lie about anything. She’s a funny duck, all right. “Have you caught something?
”No,” she said coldly.
“Well, what’s the trouble?”
“I just don’t want to do it.” Her eyes were miserable, but she looked straight at him.
He went around the table and moved to put his arm around her. She backed away from him, the way she had before.
“Come on now, baby.”
“No,” she said. “I mean it, Sewell. No.”
He began to grow angry. “If there’s anything on earth crazier than a damned woman— I ought to clout you one.”
“I suppose you could beat me up. But it would make a lot of noise.”
“Oh, don’t be a damn fool. I’m not going to beat you up.” He sat down on the sofa again. “Pitch me one of those pillows. I’ll sleep here if you’re going to be that pigheaded about it.”
“You’re so big. You ought to take the bed.”
“To hell with the bed.’”
He punched the pillow angrily and stuffed it under his head. His legs stuck out over the armrest on the other end of the sofa.
She got her nightgown out of the closet and went into the bathroom with it. She kept her face turned away, but her shoulders were shaking and he knew she was crying. In a little while she came out, with the kimono on over the nightgown. She turned the light out and he heard her take off the kimono and get into bed.
Thirteen
Above the rasp, rasp, rasp of the hack saw he looked at her. It was afternoon and she was sitting on the bed dressed to go to work at three-thirty. She would not look at the handcuff clamped in the vise on the table.
“So you ain’t seen anything of her at all?” he asked, sighting at the groove he had sawed. It was slow work and he had already broken a dozen blades.
“No.” Dorothy shook her head.
“Any letter from her?” he asked with elaborate casualness. If anybody’s heard from the bitch and knows where she is, he thought, it’d be Dorothy.
She shook her head again. He comes and lives with me, hiding out, when the police are after him, she thought, but all he wants to do is get back to that blonde slut who’s left him three times already when he was in trouble. And I was the one who introduced him to her when we were working together in the restaurant in Beaumont. I wish I had died first. It would have been better for him, too. God knows he could get into enough trouble by himself, but she sure didn’t help matters any, after him for money all the time.
It was all right that other time when he was here, and at least I had that, and the other times before I introduced him to her, but now there isn’t anything. I wish I could be like I was before, and go with him, because he does want to so much, but if you can’t, you just can’t. Every time I see that handcuff I feel sick in my stomach. If he put that hand on me the way he used to I couldn’t help myself and I’d throw up. If only there could have been just once more. Just once more, knowing it was the last, so you could remember every little thing for all the rest of the time.
She stood up. “I’ve got to go to work,” she said dully. “You won’t go out anywhere, will you?”
He looked up from his sawing. “What the hell, you think I’m crazy?”
“I’ll be back around midnight. The restaurant’s not very far from here.” She moved toward the door.
“All right,” he said indifferently.
Rasp, rasp, rasp, the hack saw sang, lost under the muffled thunderings of motorcycles being tuned. When there was silence from below, he stopped and waited, smoking a cigarette and thinking.
“Look at this, Mad Dog,” Harve had said, holding the picture up between the bars. “This babe is stacked, huh? Of course, you’ve probably seen better, being a big shot and getting around the way you do, but us old country boys up here in the sticks always appreciate anything that comes our way, especially when it’s nice and obliging like this. Thought you might have seen her, maybe. She comes from your part of the country, down on the coast.”
Well, Harve was a good man with his little jokes, he thought, looking at the empty half of the handcuff, but he sure didn’t show much judgment there at the end, putting me in that car with only one hand shackled. Maybe he’s lonesome now and waiting for her. And maybe I can help him out before they get me. If I can find her.
Late in the afternoon he had the handcuff off. He rolled it in an old newspaper and threw it under the bed. Dorothy could get rid of it some way after he was gone. Picking up the razor she had bought for him, he went into the bathroom and shaved. After that, he took a bath and put on the new clothes she had bought. The trousers of the brown suit were too large around the waist, but he pulled them in with the belt.
Now I’m all dressed up, he thought, and got nowhere to go. I don’t dare take a chance on going out of here for another three or four days. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but listen to the radio and look at the papers to see if any of ‘em mention where my loving wife is.
When Dorothy came home about twelve-fifteen, he was asleep on the bed. She lay down on the couch, without disturbing him.
In the morning he had another idea. “Go out to a pay phone somewhere,” he said. He handed her the telephone number written out on a piece of paper. “Get long-distance and put in a call to our apartment. If you get her, ask her how she is and the usual stuff, but don’t say anything about me at all. The phone may be tapped.”