“And Pop Gregory’s candy store?”
“Folks saying good morning to you from across the street, even if they’d never set eyes on you before in their life. Morning glories on the porch lattices—”
“And look at us now.” Her head dropped into her folded arms on the tabletop.
He watched the shaking of her shoulders a while. Then when she’d looked up again, trying to smile, trying to pretend her eyes weren’t wet, he asked: “Why don’t you go back?”
“Because I didn’t make good. They think I’m in a big Broadway production. I’ve tried to go back, over and over. I’ve priced the fare. I’ve inquired until I know the bus schedule by heart. There’s only one through bus a day and it leaves at six in the morning. The evening one, you have to stop overnight in Chicago. And overnight you lose your nerve.”
She stopped. “I’ve never had the courage to face them all and admit that I’m a flop. Once I even got as far as the terminal, bag all packed, and then I backed out. The city has a half-nelson on me. The city’s bad; it gets you down. Maybe the reason I wasn’t able to give it the slip was because I was all alone. Maybe if I had some one going back home with me, someone to grab me by the arm when I tried to back out, I wouldn’t weaken.”
His face tightened up. “I wish I’d met you yesterday.” He drew an imaginary boundary line across the table with the edge of his hand. She knew what he meant. He’d done something he shouldn’t, since yesterday, and now he couldn’t go back.
She waited a long time, then finally she said, in a husky voice: “They’re after you, aren’t they?”
“They will be, by about nine or ten in the morning.” He started to tell her about it, maybe because she was from his hometown and he had to tell someone. She was the girl next door, the one he would have told his troubles to if they were both still back home. “My name’s Bowder — Frank Bowder.”
“I’m Carol Warren,” she said.
He fumbled in the lining of his coat, unpinned a slit that looked as though it had been made purposely. He worked slim sheaves of rubber-banded currency free through it, with probing fingers. Large bills, twenties and fifties and even some hundreds. It took him some time. He’d evened them out around the hem of his coat so their bulk wouldn’t betray him. When he had them all spread out on the table, there was fourteen hundred and eighty dollars there.
“I had a job as an electrician’s helper until a couple months ago, then I lost it. When I saw that I couldn’t get another right away, I should have gone back home while I still had the fare. Or written them for money. But I was like you, I guess; I hated to admit I was licked. One of the places my boss and I had been called in to do repair work was a swanky private house over on East Seventieth.
“Someone must have left their front-door latch key lying around loose while we were in there working, and it got mixed up with my kit. I carried it out with me by mistake. I meant to drop around the next day and return it to them, but I was on the jump from seven in the morning until late at night, and first thing, I forgot it.
“Then I was laid off, and my money all went, and — well, yesterday I got out my kit and looked it over, thinking maybe I could get something on it at a hock shop. And I saw the key and I remembered where it had come from. So I went back there with it. All that was in my mind was that maybe they’d give me a little work to do, even if it was only tightening a lamp socket.
“I kept ringing away, and no one answered. I started to leave — and how I wish I’d gone home again — and then a delivery boy, who saw me turning away from the door, told me they’d all gone to their country place for the summer the week before. They hadn’t boarded up the house yet, because the oldest son had stayed behind to finish up some business; he was supposed to follow them a week later.
“I walked around the block with the key in my pocket, and I kept fighting the idea. I even tried to drop the key into a rubbish can, to overcome the temptation. But I weakened and went back and picked it up again. I hadn’t eaten right for two weeks, and I hadn’t eaten anything for a whole day. I’d seen the wall safe in there when my boss and I were doing the job — in fact, that was what we’d been wiring up — and I knew by the looks of the house and by the things that were said that it had plenty in it at all times.
“So I came back around the corner, and I rang the bell one last time. The son who had stayed in town was obviously not home. I used the key and I went in. It was my first attempt at anything like that, but it was easy, because my boss and I had worked around that very safe. I didn’t have to fiddle with the combination or anything. I chopped a hole through the plaster in the room behind — the bath — big enough to dislodge one of the wooden panels lining the safe and squeeze the cash box out backwards. It was an old-fashioned safe; only the lid and the frame were steel. The lining that the cash box fitted into was wood.”
He indicated the money on the table ruefully. “I only took the cash; fifteen hundred even. I left the jewelry and the securities they had in it. I cleaned the chipped plaster up off the floor, and I put the cash box back. I spread out the shower curtain a little, so that it covered the hole. He’ll discover it by about nine or ten in the morning, when he swings the curtain around him to take his bath. And probably the errand boy’ll remember seeing some fellow ringing the doorbell there earlier in the evening. I didn’t try to run out of town because—”
He shrugged hopelessly. “If they’re going to get you, they’ll get you.” He sat there staring down at the floor with a puzzled, defeated smile showing dimly on his face.
Something about that got to her. The boy next door, she thought poignantly. He came here to do big things, to lick the town, but now instead, the town had licked him. Back home his folks probably read his letters across the back fence to her folks, bragged about how good he was doing. And her folks read her letters and bragged back. He shouldn’t end up like this, hunted up and down the streets, never knowing when a hand was going to fall on his shoulder from behind and the accusing voice start speaking.
“Listen,” she said, hitching her chair forward. “I’ve got a proposition for you. What d’you say we both go back where we belong, get our second wind, give ourselves another chance? Both get on that six o’clock bus that I was never able to make alone.”
“They’d only be waiting to grab me when I get off at the other end, and I’d drag you into it.”
“Not if nothing’s missing, if nothing’s been taken out. Have you still got the key?”
He felt in his pocket. “Yeah.”
She riffled the money together, thrust it into his hand. “How much have you blown already?”
“Twenty bucks. After I had it, I found out I didn’t know what to do with it. A five-buck meal, and fifteen dollars’ worth of dance checks up at your place—”
She jumped up, ran over to the cot, half-dismantled it, thrust her hand into a gap along the seam, brought something out. “Here’s the twenty bucks to complete the amount you originally took. You can pay me back after we get home and you’re working again. And I’ve still got enough left to take care of both our bus tickets. You can pay me that back, too.”
“I can’t let you get tangled up in it like this—”
She put on her best dancehall armor, sliced her hand at him. “I’m doing the talking, and I don’t want to hear any argument. You got in once. You can get in twice — to put back what you took out the first time. A summer bachelor, living alone like that in the city without his family — there’s an even chance he’s stepping out somewhere, won’t get back till three-thirty or even four.” She hurried over to the window, squinted out at the Paramount clock in the near distance. “Hurry up, you’ve still got time...”