She glanced down just once, but didn’t bend over and look for it. She snapped her handbag shut on the rest of the change.
“I see it,” Mom said, trying to be helpful. “There it is, over there.”
“Never mind, let it go,” the woman answered in a muffled voice, and walked away at the same quick gait with which she had approached, looking to the right, looking to the left.
Mom gazed after her and shrugged. If it had been a penny, maybe; but a dime? Then she darted out to pick up the coin.
The woman—
The woman, still wary-eyed, went chip-chopping up a violet-black side street studded with glaring white disks like outsize polka dots. They came at wide-spaced intervals though — the ground-pools of brightness from the street lights. She went around the outside of each, instead of cutting straight through as ordinary walkers would have. The whole block was one long row of brownstone, compartmented into furnished rooms. She either missed the one she wanted, or else knew it only too well when she saw it. She strolled past it, four or five houses past it, then turned unhesitatingly and came back. The way she turned unhesitatingly, you knew she’d seen it the first time.
She hurried up the stoop and darted in, looking to the right, looking to the left. She keyed the inner door, then ran up the inside stairs which were linoleum-matted. She stopped in front of the door she wanted, and the way she knocked you could tell it was a signal. Two taps, then one, then two again. Very quietly, almost impossible to hear — unless it was being waited for.
A bolt slid back, a chain went off, and the door opened. A man was standing there. He didn’t look at her — he looked past her to where she’d just come from. She didn’t look at him either — she too looked back to where she’d just come from. They didn’t say hello.
She squeezed past him, and he rebolted and rechained the door.
He was unkempt. He hadn’t shaved, and his hair was on end from being ground into a pillow. His shirt was off; he just had trousers and undershirt on him. He would have been handsome — apparently he once had been — if he hadn’t been so incredibly vicious-looking. Everything about him bespoke viciousness — the eyes, the mouth, down to a vicious scar like a Band-Aid, diagonally across one cheek. Some women like their men vicious.
He followed her into the depths of the room, to get as far away from the door as possible, before either said a word.
There was a bottle of whiskey on a table and two glasses, one empty, one with about an inch of tan in it. Riffed about on the floor, as though it had been feverishly searched through, was an ancestor of the tabloid she had just brought in — a much earlier edition, almost a full day earlier, and with a different headline.
“Get it?” he said. His lips scarcely moved when he spoke. They say that men learn that in jail.
“It’s in,” she said. Her own voice was shaky. And now that she was indoors under light, it could be seen how white she was, almost gloweringly white with fright. “This time it hit. It hit finally. I knew it wouldn’t stay out much longer.”
He took it from her, looked. “Hoddaya know that’s it? Je stop and look at it on the street?”
“No, I didn’t dare stop. I didn’t have to. It hit me in the eye right as I picked it off the stand.” She was beginning to shake noticeably now.
He seemed to see her do it, even though his eyes were riveted on the paper. “Cut that out,” he said.
“I can’t help it, Al,” she said. “I can’t help it.”
“Take a drink.”
“This is one time I’m too scared even for that,” she quaked. “I’m afraid what it might do to me.”
He put both glasses and the bottle on the floor, to gain enough room on the table top for his reading. He spread the paper open on it. There was a chair there, but he read standing up, just bending forward, with his hands flat on the table.
She put the back of her hand to her forehead several times, as if distracted. She came up next to him finally, tried to read from over his shoulder.
“Quit shaking the table,” he said.
She took her hand off it. “I’m getting better,” she said. She tried to light a cigarette, but it shook too much in her mouth, and the match flame couldn’t pin it down.
“I never saw you like this,” he said.
“I never was this way before, like I am now.”
“Beatrice Barrett,” he said, from the paper.
“Was that her name?” she asked him.
“I never knew her name,” he said. “We only met about an hour before.”
Her own feminine eye now selected a detail. “Twenty-eight,” she said. Her throat gave a hiccup of derision. “Wanna bet? Sure, I’m twenty-eight too.”
“Shut up,” he said, but without animosity. He wanted to concentrate on what he was reading.
“Anything about—?”
He seemed to know what, rather whom, she meant.
“Not yet. They wouldn’t put it in even if there was. They jump first.”
“Oh, God,” she whimpered.
“You’re going to fix us good,” he said. “I can’t take you down to the street, that way.”
“I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try.”
“Is it the first time it ever happened to anyone?” he wanted to know disparagingly.
“For me it is,” she said.
He swore scaldingly. Not at her, but at the contents of the newspaper. He pasted his open hand down on it with vicious impact. “Damn them! They can’t wait till they break out with it.”
“You didn’t figure they were going to hold it back, did you?”
He didn’t answer.
“What do we do?”
He turned on her then — almost spun around he turned so swiftly. “We get the hell out of here but fast, while we can still make it!” he said intensely.
As if it were a signal, the two of them broke into a flurry of fast, frenzied action. He flung himself down into a chair, began shoveling his feet into his shoes, which he had discarded while she was out. She hauled a small valise out from under the bed and flung things into it.
She moaned, at one point, “Just when I thought we could sit tight for a day or two.”
“You don’t sit tight when you’ve got a rap like this coming at you.”
“Where do we go?”
“Where doesn’t matter. Just go and keep on going.”
“We’ll never make it.”
“Sometimes when you don’t think that, is just when you do.” He pulled a hat down low over his face, shading it.
“You carry the bag,” he said. “I may need both arms free.”
She whitened even more.
“Don’t leave anything behind, now,” he cautioned. “That’s just what they’re looking for.”
He went up close to the door and pressed his head sideward to it. He held still. Then the bolt slipped, the chain dropped.
He opened it and went out first, making a furtive gesture at her, with his hand held down low, to follow.
She looked around to make sure nothing had been forgotten — nothing that might betray them.
She saw the paper, left wide open at that particular story, lying conspicuously on the table under the light. She took it by both outer edges at once and closed it.
Then she stopped a minute, her arms wide, the paper between.
He went “Sssst” warningly through the open door, to hurry her up.
She turned and ran out after him, as if she had just been reminded that he was waiting for her. But she left the valise standing in the room.
He was at the end of the stairs, waiting to go down. He gave her a black look.
“Wait minute, Al!” she whispered urgently, running all the way over to him so that she could keep her voice low. “Wait a minute. Not the same one.”
“Whaddaya mean not the same one?”
“East, not West.” She was hissing like a tea kettle with her strenuous sibilancy. “The same street — but East, not West.”