“Well, only two bucks short is all, Jay.”
“Two bucks is two bucks.”
“I thought maybe just this once.”
“I’d help you if I could, Ralphie, but I can’t.”
“Because I plan to go see my mother tomorrow, you know, and she’s always good for a hit.”
“Go see her tonight.”
“Yeah, I would, only she went out to Sands Spit. We got people out there. My father drove her out there this morning.”
“Then go see her tomorrow. And after you see her, you can come see me.”
“Yeah, Jay, but... I’m starting to feel sick, you know?”
“That’s too bad, Ralphie.”
“Oh, sure, listen, I know it ain’t your fault.”
“You know it ain’t.”
“I know, I know.”
“I’m in business, same as anybody else.”
“Of course you are, Jay. Am I saying you ain’t? Am I asking you for freebies? If it wasn’t so close, I wouldn’t ask you at all.”
“Two dollars ain’t close.”
“Maybe for strangers it ain’t, Jay. But we know each other a long time, ain’t that true?”
“That’s true.”
“I’m a good customer, Jay. You know that.”
“I know that.”
“You carry me till tomorrow, Jay...”
“I can’t, Ralphie. I just can’t do it. If I did it for you, I’d have to do it for everybody on the street.”
“Who’d know? I wouldn’t tell a soul. I swear to God.”
“Word gets around. Ralphie, you’re a nice guy, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. But I can’t help you. If I knew you didn’t have the bread, I wouldn’t even have come to meet you. I mean it.”
“Yeah, but it’s only two bucks.”
“Two bucks here, two bucks there, it adds up. Who takes the risks, Ralphie, you or me?”
“Well, you, sure. But...”
“So now you’re asking me to lay the stuff on you free.”
“I’m not. I’m asking you to carry me till tomorrow when I get the bread from my old lady. That’s all.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Jay? Jay, listen, have I ever asked you before? Have I ever once come to you and not had the bread? Tell the truth.”
“No, that’s true.”
“Have I ever complained when I got stuck with shit that wasn’t...”
“Now wait a minute, you never got no bad stuff from me. Are you trying to say I laid bad stuff on you?”
“No, no. Who said that?”
“I thought that’s what you said.”
“No, no.”
“Then what did you say?”
“I meant when the stuff was bad all over the city. When the heat was on. Last June. You remember last June? When it was so hard to get anything halfway decent? That’s what I meant.”
“Yeah, I remember last June.”
“I’m saying I never complained. When things were bad, I mean. I never complained.”
“So?”
“So help me out this once, Jay, and...”
“I can’t, Ralphie.”
“Jay? Please.”
“I can’t.”
“Jay?”
“No, Ralphie. Don’t ask me.”
“I’ll get the money tomorrow, I swear to God.”
“No.”
“I’ll see my mother tomorrow...”
“No.”
“And get the money for you. Okay? What do you say, huh?”
“I got to split, Ralphie. You go see your mother...”
“Jay, please. Jay, I’m sick, I mean it. Please.”
“See your mother, get the money...”
“Jay, please!”
“And then talk to me, okay?”
“Jay!”
“So long, Ralphie.”
Dusk moves rapidly over the city, spreading through the sky above Calm’s Point to fill with guttering purple the crevices between chimney pot and spire. Flickers of yellow appear in window slits, neon tubes burst into oranges and blues, race around the shadowed sides of buildings to swallow their sputtering tails. Traffic signals blink in fiercer reds and brighter greens, emboldened by the swift descent of darkness. Color claims the night. It is impossible to hate this glittering nest of gems.
The patrolman does not know what to do.
The woman is hysterical, and she is bleeding from a cut over her left eye, and he does not know whether he should first call an ambulance or first go upstairs to arrest the man who hit her. The sergeant solves his dilemma, fortuitously arriving in a prowl car, and getting out, and coming over to where the woman is babbling and the patrolman is listening with a puzzled expression on his face.
The person who hit her is her husband, the woman says. But she does not want to press charges. That’s not what she wants from the police.
The sergeant knows an assault when he sees one and is not particularly interested in whether or not the woman wants to press charges. But it is a nice Sunday night in April, and he would much rather stand here on the sidewalk and listen to the woman (who is not bad-looking, and who is wearing a nylon wrapper over nothing but bikini panties) than go upstairs to arrest whoever clobbered her over the eye.
The woman is upset because her husband has said he is going to kill himself. He hit her over the eye with a milk bottle and then he locked himself in the bathroom and started running the water in the tub and yelling that he was going to kill himself. The woman does not want him to kill himself because she loves him. That’s why she ran down into the street, practically naked, to find the nearest cop. So he could stop her husband from killing himself.
The sergeant is somewhat bored. He keeps assuring the woman that anybody who’s going to kill himself doesn’t go around advertising it, he just goes right ahead and does it. But the woman is hysterical and still bleeding, and the sergeant feels he ought to set a proper example for the young patrolman. “Come on, kid,” he says, and the two of them start into the tenement building while the patrolman at the wheel of the RMP car radios in for a meat wagon. The lady sits weakly on the fender of the car. She has just begun to notice that she is pouring blood from the open cut over her eye, and has gone very pale. The patrolman at the wheel thinks she is going to faint, but he does not get out of the car.
On the third floor of the building (Apartment 31, the lady told them), the sergeant knocks briskly on the closed door, waits, listens, knocks again, and then turns to the patrolman and again says, “Come on, kid.” The door is unlocked. The apartment is still save for the sound of running water in the bathroom.
“Anybody home?” the sergeant calls. There is no answer. He shrugs, makes a “Come on, kid” gesture with his head, and starts for the closed bathroom door. He is reaching for the knob when the door opens.
The man is naked.
He has climbed out of the tub where the water still runs, and his pale white body is glistening wet. The water in the tub behind him is red. He has slashed the arteries of his left wrist, and he is gushing blood onto the white tile floor while behind him water splashes into the tub. He holds a broken milk bottle in his right hand, presumably the same bottle with which he struck his wife, and the moment he throws open the bathroom door he swings the bottle at the sergeant’s head. The sergeant is concerned about several things, and only one of them has to do with the possibility that he may be killed in the next few moments. He is concerned about grappling with a naked man, he is concerned about getting blood on his new uniform, he is concerned about putting on a good show for the patrolman.
The man is screaming, “Leave me alone, let me die,” and lunging repeatedly at the sergeant with the jagged ends of the broken bottle. The sergeant, fat and puffing, is trying desperately to avoid each new lunge, trying to grab the man’s arm, trying to stay out of the way of those pointed glass shards, trying to draw his revolver, trying to do all these things while the man keeps screaming and thrashing and thrusting the bottle at his face and neck.