The phone did ring-twice. It wasn’t Marty, or Li Marais, either time. The first call was a woman who wanted her fifteen-year-old daughter tailed, the second was a man who suspected his wife’s nephew of stealing from his store. I turned down both jobs. I didn’t like them, and I had five hundred dollars.
It was after 7:00 P. M when I finally found Marty at home. She told me to come over.
As I walked downtown in the hot evening, I suddenly felt like a boy really wanting a woman for the first time, nervous and afraid she wouldn’t want him. Uncertain and shy, like a stranger to Marty, an unseen wall up between us.
The wall was there in her eyes as she opened her door and walked ahead of me into her living room. She repairs and refinishes all her own furniture. Antiques and junk, whatever meets her fancy. She works hard on it, a small woman in jeans and a stained man’s shirt. Now she was a different woman-somehow taller, reserved in a slim green pants suit that had cost her three hundred dollars. She usually wore it only for business, for the theater. Not for me.
“I got the money,” I said.
“That’s fine,” she said, sat on the long old couch I’d known for so many years now.
“I hocked the ring, but I got a job, too,” I said. I didn’t sit with her on the couch. I took a chair. “So I can get the ring back, okay? Where’ll we go? Fair Harbor?”
“It’s the best,” Marty said.
“I’d have the ring back now, but the police are holding it. Eugene Marais was murdered in his store last night.”
“No, Dan! Marais?” Her eyes widened, and narrowed with a kind of pain. “Who? Why? He was such a… kind man. My God, half the people we know hung on because Marais paid too much, bought what he couldn’t really sell.”
“A thief, it looks like. You know how pawn shops get hit.”
“That’s horrible.” She was silent. “He asked so little for himself. Chance, Dan? Just stupid, blind chance?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “It’s all chance, Marty, all just accident. The good and the bad.”
Her face went hard. “No, I can’t believe that. A person has to make life happen, act to have what he wants. Good or bad, you have to have the life you decide you want.”
“Meaning?” I said.
She didn’t answer. She found a cigarette, lit it, her small face closed. Not a beautiful face, but pretty enough, and very alive.
I said, “I’m not sure Marais’s murder was an accident. A lot’s wrong. Call it a feeling, a theory. My hound nose.”
“Theory?” she said. “Are you going to investigate?”
“No one’s asked me.”
“When did that stop you, Dan?” Marty said. “The observer, the detached theorizer. Curiosity and the hunt. The interesting puzzle. So neutral, Dan?”
I said, “What’s wrong, Marty?”
She smoked in the hot living room. I waited, and out in the streets of the city twilight was turning to darkness. That sudden surge and fading of noise that comes in the city just at twilight.
“I’m not sure, Dan,” she said.
“When will you be sure?”
She was silent again. “Dan? Don’t plan Fire Island just yet. I’m not sure I want to do it that way. May be I want to be alone for a while.”
“All right. Take my money. I’ll get the ring when-”
“No, give me the pawn money,” she said. “I have to think. I want to think, Dan. I can’t live and die like Eugene Marais. What did he have? What did he do? Nothing.”
“He had peace. Acceptance of what he was, and what the world is. And maybe his death wasn’t blind chance.”
“That’s not enough for me. Not for any woman.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
I gave her the five hundred for the ring. She sat silent. I didn’t want to leave then, but I left. A man is what he is.
I wanted to stay with Marty, show her that she was mine, make her want to be mine. I wanted to do that, but I never would. That doesn’t make me much of a man, I know, but it makes me what I am. She had to shape her own life. All I could do was hope she would, in the end, want me. You owe every human being understanding, respect for their needs and wants. But that doesn’t mean that you will like the results. To accept, understand, another person’s needs, doesn’t change one iota of what you need yourself.
I wanted to stay, but I left. Not much man. Not very strong. But a human being. At least, I like to think that’s what I am. Sometimes I wonder even about that. The observer, even of myself.
So busy observing myself as I cut through the alley behind my five cheap rooms, that I never saw them until they had me trapped cold in the alley.
Four shadows. Two at each end of the dark alley.
Silent, they stood there.
Four quick, alert shapes that appeared to block my way front and rear. Coming up from nowhere, silhouetted against the feeble street light at either end of the alley in the hot night. Each a distinct shadow, a person, yet all the same-thin and without faces. They made no sound or movement, looming like thin birds of prey in the night.
I looked around the alley. Windowless walls on both sides, locked rear doors. No way out except past them. Nothing to help me except three ranks of garbage cans, and two cats that ran silently away as the four shadows began to move toward me.
They came bent forward, watching me warily like hunters approaching some cornered animal. An animal they weren’t going to let escape, yet respected, so advanced carefully.
I didn’t try to talk to them. They hadn’t come to talk, at least not until they had given me their message in a more direct way.
I sidled toward a rank of six garbage cans.
The first attack came from behind me.
One jumped in alone, something in his raised right hand. A darting attack like a snake striking. Maybe he thought I was momentarily not looking behind me. Whatever, it gave me a faint chance. For a moment, he was alone.
It was a tire iron in his hand. I grabbed at his arm, missed, ducked under and in, took a hard blow from the tire iron on my left shoulder, and hit him in the belly.
A scrawny belly, my fist sinking almost to his backbone. He vanished, the tire iron clattering down on the cobblestones.
A shadow behind me.
I kicked over a garbage can, and the shadow sprawled and rattled among the cans.
Something like a club smashed against my nose and cheek. I tasted blood.
My hand closed on a thin, bony wrist. My face was close against a pale, hard-breathing face-a young face, with acne.
Kids!
Street kids. Thin, savage, crazy-eyed, breathing hard and silent as they swarmed over me as deadly as wild animals in any jungle.
I kicked the one I held. He fell away. I had a garbage can cover. I smashed it into a face. A long iron bar cracked my ribs. Something battered my head, my arm. They breathed, grunted, said nothing. They had not come to talk at all. To at least put me into some hospital.
I was bruised and bleeding-one arm against eight arms with weapons. But they were kids. There is a difference between a kid and an adult, even a street kid. It’s called viciousness, the ability to attack totally without flinching. An adult has learned to hold back nothing in a fight. Most kids, if they are sane, sober and not on drugs, will hesitate a hair, flinch unsure, and that was what saved me.
That, and the fact that street kids are all muscle, but the muscles are starved. They are not in good shape or health. Pound for pound, they are weak compared to a well-fed, athletic suburban boy.
They had me, but they flinched. They could grab me, but they couldn’t hold me.
I sank teeth into a face. I kicked bellies and groins. I stamped thin arms on the ground. I hammered them with my garbage can cover. I tangled them among the cans.
I saw a clear space, and ran. Unsure, without stamina, they gave me space and too much time, and I ran for the escape of the street. My street.
I saw them behind me. Two of them. The other two must have taken more from me than they could handle. I didn’t know the two behind me, not exactly. Familiar faces, but I could fit no names to the faces.