Tom had a pretty good job, here in L.A., as a salesman, and I was working for Elise, and we were buying our little stucco house that was falling apart nearly as fast as we could nail and plaster it back together. Still, I knew we weren’t really doing so well. Tom had been completely cleared and he was supposed to be perfectly free. But he wasn’t free — not yet.
He was bitter. Oh, that was an awful thing to go through — being accused of a crime you had not committed, and being convicted, in spite of all you or your friends could do, and only saved in the end almost whimsically. It shook you, all right. And yet — you mustn’t throw good time after bad. So I dreamed. But all I could do, actually, was stand by, and hope that the days or the years would wash out the bitterness.
Tom was fanatically careful about everything we did. He feared and mistrusted the law, the police, the courts — any part of them. For instance, he drove the car with a tense correctness that hurt us both. But I was the same. I could no more go through a red light than I could kill somebody. We were living like guilty people.
Once I thought that if we could find some doctor who understood these things and go to him... But when I said something like that, one Sunday morning, Tom reacted as if I had hit him.
“How could it be inside of me? They put me in jail, didn’t they? They wouldn’t believe me, would they? I was innocent. I was truthful.”
“Yes, Tom, yes. I know it.”
“Don’t talk as if there’s something wrong with me! Don’t do it, Ellen! A man’s a fool who doesn’t learn from experience,” he added, more quietly.
“I only want us to be — well, easier in mind. Possibly we ought to remember that they did finally get it straightened out. They did let you go.”
“When they let me go, Ellen,” he said drearily, “this was their attitude. A kind of hard stare, they gave me. Not as if they were looking at an innocent man, but just at a lucky man. ‘Looks like we’ve got to let you go this time, Harkness. O.K., brother, but watch your step.’ ”
“Tom, who had that attitude?”
“All of them,” he said. “All of them.” His big fist went up and down, striking his thigh, and I tried to stop it with my two hands.
“All right, then. Let’s sue them! For false arrest or something!”
“Not me,” he said, with that wary, sharp look I had grown to hate. “I don’t get mixed up with Them again.”
I couldn’t argue with him. I wasn’t wise enough. I said, “Skip it. We’d be dumb to drag it up again. We’d better get going on those cupboards.”
Tom’s a good-looking blond beast with brown eyes. He said, “Pig...”
“What?”
“Little pig, that cries, We... we... we...” and there was that light in his eyes.
“I love you, you big mutt,” I said. “Hand me the paint brush. All right, then,” I snuffled. “All the way home.”
Oh, I dreamed up crazy plots, about me rescued from deadly peril by a flock of gallant cops. They were just dreams. All I could do was go along, loving him, and time went along, too, and got in a few good licks — until one Friday night.
We’d gone about twelve miles from home to catch a movie we’d miss and on the way back we got lost. We knew we were going in the right direction, but we didn’t know exactly where we were. So we were creeping along one of those open roads, through a section that hadn’t been built up much. It was pretty dark. There was a tall eucalyptus hedge on our right. We were both squinting for the street sign at the next intersection, when the right front wheel struck something like a soft lump in the road. The car lurched over it.
Tom’s reflexes were quick. We stopped, straddling what I hoped was a sack of some soft stuff. I opened my door and put my foot down. It touched something. I fell out, scrambling. My hand groped in the dark and touched warm skin.
“He shouldn’t have been lying in the road,” I said, and my voice sounded funny to my own ears. “The thing to do is find a doctor.” I got up and my knee cracked. I heard it so clearly — I heard everything, magnified a million times. The car idling, Tom’s breath. I could tell Tom’s muscles screamed to drive like fury away. But I said, “House — back of the hedge. I’ll go. I’ll phone.”
I went up a graveled drive. I don’t know how I knew, but I did know that somewhere inside this dark house there was a light. Everything was so vivid. I could feel each pebble turn under my shoe. I knew, in the dark, each brick of the steps to the door. There was a button to push and I pushed it. I knew there were ears in the house to hear the bell.
I could see through the glass pane when a door opened and let light into a hall. A woman in a housecoat appeared at the far end, put her hand to a switch, and a bulb came on in the ceiling, just inside the door. She walked toward me. I could hear every fall of her foot. She rattled chains. The door opened about five inches, and she put her face near the gap.
The ceiling light was harsh and it came straight down on her face. I could see her hand on the edge of the door. I could see the pink petunias of the print she was wearing. I could hear a clock. I could smell the house-smell. I knew what she’d had for dinner and what she’d been doing when I rang.
I said, “Do you know a doctor? There’s a man hurt in the road. May I use your phone?”
“Hurt?” she said. Her hand was going toward the chain that kept the door from opening any farther, but it seemed to move so slowly.
I said, “Oh, hurry!” Then an arm went around my waist, snatching me almost off my feet. I screamed. For a terrible moment I didn’t even know who it was. He put his hand over my face and shut off the noise I was making. He said in my ear, “Come away!” I heard the woman yelp, the door slam.
Then I knew it was Tom who was making me run down the drive. He dragged me around the car and stuffed me in under the wheel, over to my own side. Then I saw the other car — its big cat eyes, hunting the driveway of a dark house ahead of us. The beams swerved off the road and then jerked back, as if the big eyes had caught sight of us and wanted to look again.
Tom yanked our car into gear and got out of there. We tore past the neighbor’s stopped car. We flew down the dark road, screamed around the next intersection. We nosed into traffic. We settled into line. Tom’s face was wet with sweat, trying to drive as if we were two people coming home from the movies.
He didn’t say a word until we were almost home. Then he said, “Ellen, I’m sorry...”
“He was dead, Tom?”
“Ellen, we hit a corpse. The man had been shot in the head. He was dead before we ever...”
He took his right hand off the wheel and I saw something on his first two fingers. I thought it was blood, but then I saw that it was a purple-red. “What’s that, Tom!”
“I don’t know.” He rubbed the stain. It seemed dry.
We were at home, finally, and we could talk. Tom said the minute I’d left him, he’d taken the flashlight and turned it on the man. Our wheel had gone over his legs. Tom got out and tried for the pulse, but he couldn’t be sure. He said he’d had a lot of vague mixed-up thoughts — better not try to move him, better wait for a doctor. Then he wondered about identity. He’d wiggled his hand under the body to get into the right hip pocket, to see if he could find a name and address. But there was no wallet. Instead, there was a broken bottle, wrapped in paper, leaking this purple stuff. Tom had pulled his hand out, sniffed at the stain. An odor he couldn’t describe — it was gone now. The light had fallen on a wallet lying in the road. Tom said it looked as if it were bleeding that purple stuff.