All he answered was, “God forgive you for what you’ve done to that man!”
Then it came. It was as though something frozen within her had melted, crumbled. Or maybe it was that hard crust that he had noticed forming on the outside of her, smothering her slowly to death. Her hands flew up to her already lowered face, stayed that way, covering it. She made very little sound. He’d never seen anyone shake so. As though she was being torn apart internally. He thought she was never going to stop shaking like that.
He didn’t speak to her. He didn’t look at her, except by indirection in the mirror.
After a while he could tell it was over. Her hands had dropped again. He heard her say, more to herself than him, “It makes you feel so clean, when you’re going to do a thing you’ve been afraid to do—”
They raced on in silence, just the two of them in the faint dashlight. Traffic was thinner now, and all coming one way, toward them, instead of along with them, as heretofore. They were out past the city limits, flying along the sleek, straight artery that led upcountry. The cars passing them left streaks of light on their side windows, they were going so fast.
“Why are we going this far out?” she asked presently, with only dulled awareness. “Isn’t the Criminal Courts Building the place where—?”
“I’m taking you straight up there to the penitentiary,” he answered tautly. “It’s the quickest in the end. Cut through all the red tape—”
“It’s right tonight — you said?”
“Sometime within the next hour and a half. We’ll make it.”
They’d hit full wooded country now; trees with whitewashed waistbands to give the road a boundary in the dark. No more terrain lights, only an occasional inbound car blurring into incandescence as it approached, then dousing its lights in that wayside salute so reminiscent of an ambulant tipping his hat.
“But suppose something happens to delay us? A tire goes out or something? Wouldn’t it be better to telephone?”
“I know what I’m doing. You sound quite anxious all at once.”
“Yes, oh yes, I am,” she breathed. “I’ve been blind. Blind. I see which was the dream, now, and which the reality.”
“Quite a reformation,” he said grudgingly. “For five months you didn’t lift a finger to help him. And now all at once, within fifteen minutes, you’re all hot and bothered.”
“Yes,” she said submissively. “It doesn’t seem to matter, all at once. About my husband, or the threat of being put into an institution, or any of the rest of it. You’ve made me see the whole thing in a different light.” She drew the back of one hand weariedly across her brow, said with infinite disgust, “I want to do at least one brave thing, I’m so sick of being a coward all my life!”
They rode in silence after that. Until presently she asked, almost with anxiety, “Will just my sworn testimony be enough to save him?”
“It’ll be enough to postpone — what they have scheduled for tonight. Once that’s been accomplished, we can turn it over to the lawyers, they’ll see it through the rest of the way.”
Suddenly she noticed they had swung off left, at a fork, onto a desolate, poorly surfaced cross-country “feeder.” It had already occurred several moments before, by the time she became aware of it. The motion of the car had become less even. The occasional passing road-mate had diminished to none. There was no sign of life on it.
“But why this? I thought the north and south highway we were on was the one that takes you up to the State Prison. Isn’t he at—?”
“This is a shortcut,” he answered briefly. “A sort of shuttle that’ll save time.”
The humming of the wind seemed to rise a little, take on an apprehensive moaning quality, as they rushed through, displacing it.
He spoke again, chin almost to wheel, eyes motionless and emotionless over it. “I’ll get you where we’re going in plenty of time.”
There were no longer just two of them in the car. At some indeterminate point in the previous silence, a third presence had entered it, was in it now, sitting between them. The icy, shrouded shape of fear, its unseen arms enfolding the woman in cold embrace, its frigid fingertips seeking out her windpipe.
There hadn’t been any lights but their own for ten minutes past now. There hadn’t been any word between them. The trees were a smoky, billowing mass on each side of them. The wind was a warning message, unheeded until too late. Their two faces were ghosts reflected side by side on the windshield before them.
He slowed, backed, turned aside once more, this time onto an unpaved dirt lane, little better than a defile through the trees. They jounced along over its unevenness of surface, dried leaves hissing in their wake, stirred by the exhaust tube; the wheels climbing over half-submerged roots, the fenders grazing trunks impinging on the right of way. The headlights played over a grottolike profundity of trees, bleaching the nearer ones into dazzling stalagmites, leaving the inner ones black and enshrouded. It was like some evil, bewitched glade in a fairy tale for children; woods of supernatural import where bad things were about to happen.
She said in a smothered voice, “No, what’re you doing?” Fear locked its embrace about her tighter, breathed glacially down her neck. “I don’t like the way you’re acting. What’re you doing this for?”
Suddenly they’d stopped, and it was over. The sound of the brakes only reached her senses after the fact had been accomplished. He killed the engine, and there was stillness all around. Inside the car and out. They were motionless, all of them; the car, and he and she, and her fear.
Not quite; there was one thing moving. The three fingers of his hand, that had remained upon the wheel rim, kept fluttering restlessly, rising and falling in rotation, like somebody striking successive keys on the piano over and over.
She turned and began to pummel at him, in impotent fright. “What is it? Say something! Say something to me! Don’t just sit there like that! What did we stop here for? What are you thinking, why are you looking like that?”
“Get out.” He gave the order with a hitch of his chin.
“No. What are you going to do? No.” She sat there staring at him in ever widening fright.
He reached across her and unlatched the door on that side. “I said get out.”
“No! You’re going to do something. I can see it on your face—”
He flung her before him with one stiffly locked arm. A moment later they were both standing there beside the car, toe deep in sandpapery tan and yellow leaves. He cracked the car door shut again after him. It was damp and penetrating under the trees, pitch-black around them in all directions but one: the ghostly tunnel ahead made by the projecting headlight beams.
“Come this way,” he said quietly. He started walking down it. He held her by the elbow, to make sure that she accompanied him. The leaves sloshed and spit under them in the unnatural quiet. The car fender fell behind them, they were clear of it now, walking ahead. She went turned unnaturally sidewise, staring into his unanswering face. She could hear her own breath, echoing under the canopy of the trees. His was quieter.
They walked like that in silent, unexplained pantomime until they’d reached a point where the projected headlight shine thinned out, was about to disappear. On this boundary line between light and shadows he stopped, took his hand off her. She went down convulsively a few inches, he caught her, straightened her, took his hand off her a second time.
He took out a cigarette and offered it to her. She tried to refuse. “Here,” he insisted roughly, thrusting it at her mouth. “Better take one!” He lit it for her, holding his hands cupped over the match flame. There was something ritualistic about the little attention that only struck redoubled fear into her, instead of reassuring her. She took one puff, then the cigarette dropped from her unmanageable lips, she wasn’t able to retain it. He made a precautionary pass at it with his foot, ground it out because of the leaves.