“That’s a misprint,” he whispered back to her. “Can’t take a chance — papers are full of ’em.”
“No, it isn’t. Come back in, I’ll show you.”
He followed her back. They re-closed the door, then bent over the paper again, her finger guiding him.
“There it is. East. And there it is down there again.”
“It’s a misprint,” he said. “It’s got to be. They came out with it in a hurry.”
Then suddenly he stopped and fixed his eyes.
“No,” he agreed slowly. “You’re right. It isn’t the same one. ‘The victim’s apartment was located upstairs over a fashionable restaurant, Luigi and Manfredo’s.’ And—” He turned and looked at her. They stared at each other eye to eye. “And — where I was — there was a dry cleaning establishment down below.”
She finished putting back the bolt and chain. “Pour me one too,” she said, luxuriating. “All the way to the top.”
When it was halfway down to the bottom again, she held it up and gazed at the light through it, musingly.
“You know, that’s something that could never happen in a story. Two blondes, both the same night, both the same street. Only, one east, one west. Could happen only in real life.”
The truck drove up at 9:29 P.M.
The batch hit the ground.
“Twanny-four returns,” Mom said to the driver.
Her nephew ran out from in back and sheared the twine binding. He hoisted the free bale in sections to the top of the counter. Mom stowed some of them below the shelf, left the rest on view for immediate sale. She adjusted the wick of the oil lantern, which had begun to flicker a little. She propped up her elbows. The rest was up to the buying public.
A boy and a girl came along, thin as clothespins—
The place was empty and unlighted until the boy and the girl came into it together. She looked around after he’d turned on the light.
“Hey, how’d you find this place?”
Her voice was shrill, splitting. Not naturally so, purposely so, as if she were calling to him across the width of a street.
“Dusty told me about it. He came here with Marge the other night.”
“Ho, what I know about Marge!” she chortled brassily. Every remark was pitched in a raucous key. She couldn’t seem to keep her voice moderate. Or even try to.
They were both approximately the same age, perhaps a year or two in his favor — that evanescent slot just in between the end of adolescence and the onset of maturity. Childhood’s final sunset.
They were dressed alike too. He wore a coat-shirt of vivid scarlet, hers was electric blue. His trousers were legging-tight, hers were too. Her hair was long, his was too. The only difference was that hers was bound into a mane and lifted away from the back of the head; his mane clung to the back of his neck and went down inside his collar. And they were both thin as inverted exclamation-points.
“What’s wrong with Marge?” he answered her last remark. “Think she’s a square?”
“I know she isn’t,” his companion agreed with ready gang-loyalty.
He began to dump cans of beer out of a brown-paper bag they’d brought in with them.
“You’re the square,” he told her.
“I’m here, ennI?” she squalled protestingly. “So what more do you want?”
He chopped at the top of one of the beer cans with an opener, and it overbalanced, rolled off the table, and clouted to the floor. He used a filthy expletive, but she was neither surprised nor offended.
From a second paper bag he pawed out a number of soft, rounded buns, split through the middle and spread with hamburger.
“What’d you do, buy out the whole store?” she shrieked in an appalling cat-call.
“We’re gunna be here for a while, ain’t we?”
Her lack of comment indicated complete acquiescence.
“Wuddle your old lady say?” he jeered. The jeer was meant for the old lady, not for her.
A dripping beer can in one hand, crumbling hamburger in the other, he flung himself full-length on the white-enamel bedstead, crossed his heels and elevated them to the foot-rail.
“Ah, she’s a pain in the neck,” the girl screeched impatiently.
“They all are. Mine was too, until I got too big for her. Now she don’t make a peep. She better not, boy.”
She was still intent on her own maternal difficulties, not his previous ones. “She already thinks I’ve done this.”
“How diya know?” he shot at her.
“She’s all the time warning me about it.” She performed a savage parody, clasping her hands before her face, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling, and dragging down the corners of her mouth dolorously. ‘Oh, I only hope I’m not too late,’ she keeps moaning, ‘I only hope I’m not too late.’ ”
“Y’ better go around wearing a sign after tonight. ‘You’re too late.’ So she don’t have to worry about you any more.”
They both went into thunderclaps of laughter, as shattering as the dropping of ashcan lids on a cement pavement.
When the guffaws had stilled finally, he up-ended the beer can so that the last remaining drops would fall through the puncture into his open mouth, then cast it away from him with a clatter.
By now she was seated on the edge of the bed, with her back to him, head bent to the newspaper he had brought in.
“Whattiya gunna do, sit there all night reading the paper?” He pawed clumsily at her shoulder from behind, so that momentarily she half toppled over, then immediately righted herself again like a rubber plaything. She slashed her arm backwards at him, to ward him off. It was more a reflex than an intended blow. “Come on, babe,” he whispered.
“Lemme finish reading about this blonde first.”
“Why? Whadda you care? She’s dead, ain’t she? So what’s to read?”
Absorbed, she didn’t answer.
“Ah, she was just a high-class tramp,” he said airily.
“But she wasn’t until she started,” she pointed out. “She wasn’t before. Everyone, even one of them, s’got to start sometime.”
She read a little further.
“I wonder what she was like. Then, I mean. At the start.”
“Like you are now,” he shrugged.
She got up from the bed abruptly, went over to the tarnished mirror, peered into it, still holding the paper.
“Whattiya looking at?” he said idly, without watching her, blowing smoke toward the ceiling.
“Me, like I am now,” the girl said, bending forward even closer. Then she moved her head aside and down, and stared with equal intentness at the photo in the paper.
“Matter, you don’t know what you look like?” he mocked, but still without watching her.
“I know what I look like now,” she replied thoughtfully, “but I wonder what I’ll look like—” She didn’t finish it and her eyes went back to the paper once more.
She came away at last, still staring at the picture in the paper.
All of a sudden the paper rippled to the floor, its pages molting.
“I’m going home, Frankie.” She didn’t squall it. For the first time all evening — maybe all year and the year before — she spoke quietly.
“You — what?” He sat bolt upright on the bed.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I’m— I’m afraid.”
“Whatsa matter with you anyway,” he yelled. “I lived on the same street with you all my life.”
Her thoughts now seemed to be elsewhere.
“They always do. They always do. The first one of them all. And then after a while, they don’t live on the same street with you. And then after a while, they find you dead. Like her.”