The ash-ringed coal of it vibrated a little, and a truculent sound came from behind it. “¿Bueno?” I didn’t know what it meant, but I could catch on by the inflection. Well? Or: What’s up? Something like that. A sort of tough challenge. But the voice, harsh as it was, was a young girl’s.
She said something else; I think it was: “Don’t move.” She whipped the hand holding the match, as though it were broken at the wrist, and there was darkness again. The knife point didn’t move, I didn’t move either. She must have gotten the new one from her bosom, where the shawl was at its tightest. She snapped it into combustion with her thumbnail again, one-handed, and the light came on again.
She was still waiting for the answer, I could see. The knife said she was going to get it too. She was grim; she was unfriendly.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” I said. “They’re after me out there. I can’t talk your language. Put that thing down, will you?” But I knew enough not to gesture or even point at it; I kept it strictly word of mouth.
“Oh, an Americano, eh?” she said. Her underlip jutted forward in a sort of caustic purse, then flattened out again. The knife point didn’t retreat a hairbreadth. It hung steady. She had perfect muscular control. And not a shadow of compunction.
I rolled my eyes to try to show her. They were the only things I could safely move, the way she had me nailed. “Cops — understand what I mean? Out there on the stairs. I don’t know how to say it. Policia. They’re after me.”
She switched unexpectedly to English. And good English too. I don’t mean good in the sense of high-class. Not the kind you get out of books. But the fluent kind you pick up in the gutter. “Cops, eh?” Her face changed when she said that word. A look of hatred overspread it. For me she’d had just impersonal menace; this was personalized hate.
Her eyes crackled like fuses; they stretched lengthwise, as though somebody were pinning her skin up behind her ears. “Why didn’t you say so before? I hate cops,” she spat.
The knife point backed out a little way. It let the indentation in my neck it had caused slowly fill up after it. It hung level there for a moment more.
“Anyone that’s no friend of theirs is a friend of mine.”
It dropped down all the way, was suddenly gone from between us. I don’t know where it went; I wasn’t quick enough. Stocking top, maybe, or some waistband under the shawl. She was fast with that thing, coming and going. For my part, all I was glad about was it was gone; I wasn’t interested in finding out where.
I took my first unrationed breath in what seemed like half an hour, though it may have been only four or five minutes.
“I didn’t know you talked English,” I said.
“I ought to. I been in enough of your jails to take out naturalization papers,” was the sullen answer.
The match was shortening up on her. She gave us the usual intermission of darkness, touched off a new one with her nail. This time she fed the flame to a stalagmite of misshapen candle stuck into the neck of a dark green beer bottle. It lifted a curtain of bleary light a few feet, leaving the top of the place, over our heads, still in darkness.
She fanned me aside with her hand, took over my place at the door seam, bent her head to listen.
“Get over there. Anyone they’re after I’ll do what I can for.”
They were plenty active; you could hear them thumping back and forth right over us, through the lead sheeting of the roof. It gave a funny, hollow, drumlike sound, like mild thunder rolling this way and that just over the ceiling.
She hissed a soft name or two at them in Spanish. I could figure what it was: genealogical stuff.
She raised her foot lengthwise up against the bottom of the door, then scraped it down to floor level. That shot home a bolt that I’d missed seeing until now. It went into a socket in the sill. Then she turned and went across the room, over to where there was a big square of oilcloth tacked up against the wall. It evidently blotted out an unsuspected window.
It was the first time I’d seen her walk in the light. The time before, she’d walked toward me in the darkness. Until you’d seen her walk you missed the full meaning of the word “toughness.” I don’t know how she did it or what it was she did, but her walk was something. It wasn’t hippy or sexy; as a matter of fact, she was pretty sparse; she hadn’t many curves. It was more that it was antagonistic, defiant, challenging. She seemed to lock each leg as she planted it out before her, without breaking it at the knee, and then she’d sort of hitch herself over onto it and bring up the next one and do it again. It reminded me, for some reason, of a car continually shifting gears. She walked like she had a chip on her hipbone. I tried to imagine some guy taking her for a stroll down the street on his arm like that, and it wouldn’t work. It was the kind of a walk that was meant to go strictly by itself, late at night, and if you were wise you’d steer clear of it when you saw it coming your way.
I thought to myself, watching her go by me, It’s a good thing you’re on my side, lady.
She spread two fingers at the side of this sort of oilcloth blackboard, stiffened her neck. “There’s twenty of them down there! They’re thick as bedbugs. You’ll never be able to get through.”
She pulled her fingers out; turned away, shaking her head. “They sure must want you bad, chico.” She got rid of the tag end of the famous cigar that had had me so petrified before by spitting it out dead-center on the floor and killing it with her foot. Then she took out another one from the same place where she’d had the matches, down past her chest under the shawl, and got it ready by rolling it briskly between her palms. She stalked back to the candle blob and lighted up. Her mouth had been empty for ten seconds, maybe, all told, between the two.
“Do you know the town at all?” she asked me through the fog.
“Never saw it in my life before six this evening.”
“You picked a good place for a jam. Where were you going to go, then, if you did get out of here?”
“You’ve got me,” I admitted. “I was just going to go — that was all — and keep going.”
She blew out another streak of skywriting. “I tried that in Jacksonville, and it won’t work. You’ve got to have a hole to pull in after you. Either that or you’ve got to lam out of the place altogether. Just to keep moving is no dice; you’re only heading for the police station the long way round.”
“There’s nothing but water around this place.”
She agreed with her eyebrows. She seemed to be thinking it over.
“What’re they after you for?” she asked suddenly, hugging herself tight around the shawl with both arms.
“They say I killed my girl,” I told her.
“They say wrong?”
“They say dead wrong.”
“That’s what you say they say. Another man took her away from you?”
“I took her away from another man.”
“Then any fool but a policeman knows, you didn’t kill her. You never kill what doesn’t belong to you, only what does.”
“Tell them that,” I muttered, ramming my hands down into my pockets.
She blew a smoke ring reflectively. “It’s a heavy count, but this is still as good a place for you as any.”
“I can’t let you get mucked up in it,” I growled. “I’ll blow out again like I blew in. You don’t owe me anything; why should you get loused up for me?”
She sliced off a layer of air with her hand in my direction. “Don’t kid yourself. Anything I do, I’m not doing it because it’s for you; I’m doing it because it’s against them.” She went into some Spanish again, her eyes shedding sparks in time with it.