“What’re the handcuffs for?” she asked batedly.
“Once in a while I won’t listen to reason.”
He started to light a cigarette, then interrupted the act, flame before lips, to tell her: “So if I start to crowd you too much, remember to pick up that monkey wrench there and hit the steam pipe with it with all your might.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she said a little tautly, “because I’m leaving now.”
She got up from the rickety chair she’d seated herself on (without noticing) a long while before, turned her back on him, went over to the door, and turned the knob.
The knob turned willingly enough, but the door wouldn’t open.
“What’d you do, lock this?” she said sharply. “Don’t try anything like that! You’d better open it, if you know what’s—”
Her last glimpse of him had had him standing on the opposite side of the table from her, a considerable distance, hands rounded toward chin, matchlight streaking his face like yellow crayon. Suddenly, before she even had time to turn her head and finish the denunciation facing him, she felt his arm go around her waist. Then the other one crossed over her shoulder, interlacing with the first. His face pressed hard against hers from over the opposite shoulder. She could feel the tough, often-shaved skin, stiff as cardboard, and he planted a trail of kisses down her cheek until he found her mouth.
Fear didn’t come at first, only anger and outrage did. But when she found she couldn’t move, not even enough to squirm or struggle, that the embrace was like iron, like steel, almost traumatic in its intensity, then fear did come, in a cold, sick rush, like nausea of the mind. She kept cautioning herself: Don’t panic, don’t lose your head, that’s the worst thing you could do. And then: Go limp, let yourself go limp, and his instinctive reaction may be to relax the embrace.
She let her knees dip, and though the rest of her body was held too compressed to slide down after them, she let him carry her full weight, and it worked. His arms slackened in reflex, and she was able to duck down under them and up again on the outside.
He was too close to the door, had it boxed in, so she fled back again the other way, behind the large round center table where he’d originally been himself.
She spoke in a breathless voice, as though she were whispering in confidence. “Don’t! Cut it out!”
“You overstayed your margin of safety.”
“I’m going to have you arrested for this!”
Again he came after her. She tried to overturn the table toward him, but it had too wide a base to tilt easily. Then she remembered what he’d told her about the wrench, fled over into the corner, picked it up, and swung it in a long, shattering arc against the standpipe. The sound of it was brazen in its intensity, and it seemed to go echoing up through the house high over their heads, playing back upon itself section by section.
She only had time for the one blow, he came in at her too fast. She threw it at him and it hit him, but only on the protective arm he’d thrown up before his head. Again he penned her in his arms, but this time forward, not from in back, and she could feel the heat of his breath stirring her hair like some kind of an ill wind. She tried to kick him in the ankle with the sharp point of one of her shoes, and did, but the blow couldn’t have hurt much, he hardly flinched, it had been too foreshortened.
He lied, she thought frantically. He said the man would come.
“A little love is all I want,” he was coaxing. “Just a little love—”
She saw the cigarette that he’d lit just before the thing began, still balanced there on the rim of the table. She strained one arm toward it behind his back, but it fell a finger-length short, for she could only use the forearm because the upper arm was pinned under his. She pushed forward against him unexpectedly, instead of pulling away as she had been doing. He wasn’t expecting the impulse and had to take a couple of steps back to hold his equilibrium. Her flexing fingers snatched up the cigarette, and she jabbed it into the drum of his ear, coal-forward.
He didn’t cry out, but he recoiled like a bounced ball and let go of her. He bent his head over to one side as though his neck had been broken, and kept pounding at his ear with one hand, and stamped his heel on the floor twice.
Then before she knew what was coming, he swung the flat of his hand around at her and gave her a terrific slap that covered one whole half of her face from eyebrow to jawline. The pain of it wasn’t as bad as the force, or at least she had no time to experience it; she went back onto the cot, shoulders prone, rolled over once in a complete body turn, and landed on the floor at the foot of it, but with one arm out to break her fall.
She saw him pick up the monkey wrench from the floor where she’d thrown it before, and for a moment thought he was going to attack her with it, but before she could have moved or done anything to defend herself, other than just draw her legs defensively in underneath her, he turned and went the other way with it, and banged the standpipe, not just once but three or four times in urgent succession.
Then he flung it away from him, and settled onto a chair, head bowed down and held in both hands. Not from pain, from remorse.
The room was quiet by the time the half-running footsteps came along the passage outside and a key started to work in the door. Neither of them had moved. They were both emotionally exhausted. They weren’t even looking at each other anymore.
A heavily built man with a shock of yellow-white hair came in. He had a massive neck, arms, and shoulders, and a sizable paunch under his blue denim work shirt. He had on a pair of peculiarly shaped glasses — they were either square or octagonal — that gave him an oddly benign, homespun appearance.
“What happened down here?” he demanded. “Vern, what have you been up to down here?”
“It’s over,” the man on the chair said apathetically.
The older man came over and stood looking down at Madeline. “What did he do to you?” he said. “The whole side of your face is red.”
“He slapped me,” she said, and began to cry from pent-up tension. “No man ever slapped me before in my life. Even my own father never slapped me.”
“What took you so long?” the man on the chair said accusingly.
“I was up on the roof, doing a yob,” the superintendent said.
He helped Madeline to her feet and brushed off the back of her dress with a heavy but well-meaning hand. “Sh-h, sh-h,” he said consolingly, as if he were talking to a child. “It’s all right now. Do you want a drink of water? I get you a drink of water.”
She stopped crying abruptly. “I don’t want a drink of water!” she said angrily. “I want to get out of here.”
“Well, go,” he told her matter-of-factly. “The door’s open. Nobody stops you.”
She went over and stood by it, but without leaving.
Jansen had turned his attention to Herrick, took no further notice of her.
“Get up,” he said brusquely. “Get up and come over here.” But she detected a paternal note in the brusqueness.
“I’m all right now,” Herrick said docilely, looking up at him.
“Yust the same, you do like I say,” Jansen insisted. “You come and sit over here.” He took the chair Herrick had just been on, and moved it over against the standpipe. Then he brought a table up against it, not the large round one in the middle of the room but a small unpainted one that had been against the wall. He opened a shallow drawer in it and took out a greasy deck of cards. “We play a few hands,” he said, and he brought up another chair for himself and sat down across the table from Herrick. Then he took a small drawstring sack of pipe tobacco out of his breast pocket and placed that on the table also.