“Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said guardedly.
There was a snap of her shoddy, oversized handbag, and a pair of them were planked down. Companion pieces, from the same night. A musical show at the Regina, season before last. I wonder who she was with that night, he thought. She probably was secure yet and comely, she didn’t dream—
He pretended to consult a reference list giving his needs, the gaps that remained to be filled in his “sets.”
“I seem to be short that one. Seven-fifty,” he said.
He saw her eyes glitter. He’d hoped that would get her.
“Got any more?” he suggested craftily. “This is your last chance, you know. I’m closing up this place tonight.”
She hesitated. He saw her eyes go to her bag. “Well, do you bother buying just one at a time?”
“Any number.”
“As long as I’m in here—” She opened the bag once more, tilted the flap over against her so that he couldn’t look down into it, pulled an additional program out. She snapped the bag shut again, first of all, before she did anything else. He noted that. Then she spaded the folder at him. He took it, reversed it his way.
It was the first one that had showed up in the full three days. He leafed through it with pretended casualness, past the preliminary filler columns to where the play-matter itself began. It was dated by the week, as all theatrical programs are. “Week beginning May 17th.” His breath log-jammed. That was the week. The right week. It had been on the night of the twentieth. He kept his eyes down so they wouldn’t give him away. Only — the upper right-hand corners of the pages were untouched. It wasn’t that they’d been smoothed out, that would have left a tell-tale diagonal seam; they’d never been folded over in the first place.
It was hard to keep his voice casual. “Got the mate to it? Most of them come in twos, you know, and I could make you a better offer.”
She gave him a searching look. He even caught the little uncompleted start her hand made toward the snap of her pocketbook. Then she forced it down again. “What d’you think I do, print them?”
“I prefer to buy duplicates, doubles, whenever possible. Didn’t anyone go with you to this particular show? What became of the other pro—?”
There was something about it she didn’t like. Her eyes darted suspiciously around the store, as if in search of a trap. She edged warily backward a step or two from the table. “Come on, one is all I got. Do you wanna buy or don’t you?”
“I can’t give you as much as I could have given you for a pair—”
She was obviously in a hurry to get outside into the open again. “All right, anything you say—” She even arched over to reach for the money from where she was standing, he couldn’t get her to close in toward the purchasing table again.
He let her get as far as the door with it. Then he called after her, but in a quietly modulated voice, unwarranted to cause alarm, “Just a moment. Could I ask you to come back here a moment, there’s something I forgot.”
She stopped short for a single instant, cast a look of sharp distrust back over her shoulder at him. It was more than just the look of automatic response one gives to a suramons; it was a look of wariness. Then as he rose, crooking his finger at her, she gave a stifled cry, broke into a scampering run, rounded the store entrance, and fled from sight.
He flung the impediment of the table bodily over to one side to get quick clearance, dashed out after her. Behind him several of the topheavy stacks of programs reared by the boy wavered from the vibration of his violent exit, crumbled, and spilled all over the floor in snowdrifts.
She was chopsticking it down toward the next corner when he got out on the sidewalk, but her high heels were against her. When she glanced back and saw him coming full tilt behind her, she gave another cry, louder this time, and was stung into an added spurt of velocity that carried her around into the next street before he had quite halved the distance.
But he got her there, only a few yards past where his own car had been standing waiting all day, in hopes of just such an eventuality as this. He overlapped her, blocked her off, gripped her by the shoulders, and then swung her in with him against the building front, pinning her there in a sort of enclave of his arms.
“All right now, stand still — it’s no use,” he breathed heavily.
She was less able to speak than he was; alcohol had killed her wind. He almost thought she was going to choke for a minute. “Lemme — ’lone. What — uf I done?”
“Then what did you run for?”
“I didn’t like,” her head hung over his arms, trying to get air, “the way you looked.”
“Lemme see that bag. Open that pocketbook! Come on, open up that pocketbook or I’ll do it for you!”
“Take your hands off me! Leave me alone!”
He didn’t waste any more time arguing. He yanked it so violently from under her arm that the frayed loop strap she had it suspended by tore off bodily. He opened it, plunged his hand in, crowding her back with his body so that she couldn’t escape from the position he had her backed into. It came up again with a program identical to the one she had just sold him in the store. He let the pocketbook drop to free his hands. He tried to flutter the leaves to open it, and they adhered. He had to pry them away from one another. All the inner ones, from cover to cover, were notched, were neatly folded over at their upper right-hand tips. He peered in the uncertain street light, and the date line was the same as the other.
Scott Henderson’s program. Poor Scott Henderson’s program, returning at the eleventh hour, like bread cast upon the waters—
22
The Hour of the Execution
10.55 p.m. The last of anything, ah the last of anything, is always so bitter. He was cold all over, though the weather was warm, and he was shivering, though he was sweating, and he kept saying to himself over and over, “I’m not afraid,” more than he was listening to the chaplain. But he was and he knew he was, and who could blame him? Nature had put the instinct to live in his heart.
He was stretched out face downward on his bunk, and his head, with a square patch shaved on the top, was hanging down over the edge of it toward the floor. The chaplain was sitting by him, one hand pressed consolingly against his shoulder as if to keep the fear in, and every time the shoulder shook, the hand would shake in sympathy with it, although the chaplain was going to live many more years yet. The shoulder shook at regularly spaced intervals. It’s an awful thing to know the time of your own death.
The chaplain was intoning the 23rd Psalm in a low voice. “Green pastures, refresh my soul—” Instead of consoling him, it made him feel worse. He didn’t want the next world, he wanted this one.
The fried chicken and the waffles and the peach shortcake that he’d had hours ago felt like they were all gummed up somewhere behind his chest, wouldn’t go down any further. But that didn’t matter, it wouldn’t give him indigestion, there wouldn’t be time enough for it to.
He wondered if he’d have time to smoke another cigarette. They’d brought in two packs with his dinner, that had been only a few hours ago, and one was already crumpled and empty, the second half gone. It was a foolish thing to worry about, he knew, because what was the difference if he smoked one all the way down or had to throw it away after a single puff? But he’d always been thrifty about things like that, and the habits of a lifetime die hard.
He asked the chaplain, interrupting his low-voiced chant, and instead of answering directly the chaplain simply said, “Smoke another, my boy,” and struck the match and held it for him. Which meant there really wasn’t time.