Mrs. Shrike stood as if he had struck her on the head, quite suddenly, with a large weight. Then just her blurred lips moved. «And you came _here?_»
«Well―»
«You've been watching me?»
«We only―»
«Following _me?_»
«In order to―»
«Get out!» she said.
«We can―»
«Get out!» she said.
«If you'll only listen―»
«Oh, I _said_ this would happen,» whispered Shaw, shutting his eyes.
«Dirty old men, get out!» she shouted.
«There's no money involved.»
«I'll throw you out, I'll throw you out!» she shrieked, clenching her fists, gritting her teeth. Her face colored insanely. «Who are you, dirty old grandmas, coming here, spying, you old cranks!» she yelled. She seized the straw hat from Mr. Foxe's head; he cried out; she tore the lining from it, cursing. «Get out, get out, get out, get out!» She hurled it to the floor. She crunched one heel through the middle. She kicked it. «Get out, get out!»
«Oh, but you _need_ us!» Foxe stared in dismay at the hat as she swore at him in a language that turned corners, blazing, that flew in the air like great searing torches. The woman knew every language and every word in every language. She spoke with fire and alcohol and smoke.
«Who do you think you are? God? God and the Holy Ghost, passing on people, snooping, prying, you old jerks, you old dirtyminded grandmas! You, you―» She gave them further names, names that forced them toward the door in shock, recoiling. She gave them a long vile list of names without pausing for breath. Then she stopped, gasped, trembled, heaved in a great suction of air, and started a further list of ten dozen even viler names.
«See here!» said Foxe, stiffening.
Shaw was out the door, pleading with his partner to come along, it was over and done, it was as he expected, they were fools, they were everything she said they were, oh, how embarrassing!
«Old maid!» shouted the woman.
«I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue.»
«Old maid, old maid!»
Somehow this was worse than all the really vile names.
Foxe swayed, his mouth clapped open, shut, open, shut.
«Old woman!» she cried. «Woman, woman, woman!»
He was in a blazing yellow jungle. The room was drowned in fire, it clenched upon him, the furniture seemed to shift and whirl about, the sunlight shot through the rammed-shut windows, firing the dust, which leaped up from the rug in angry sparks when a fly buzzed a crazy spiral from nowhere; her mouth, a feral red thing, licked the air with all the obscenities collected just behind it in a lifetime, and beyond her on the baked brown wallpaper the thermometer said ninety-two, and he looked again and it said ninety-two, and still the woman screamed like the wheels of a train scraping around a vast iron curve of track; fingernails down a blackboard, and steel across marble. «Old maid! Old maid! Old maid!»
Foxe drew his arm back, cane clenched in fist, very high, and struck.
«No!» cried Shaw in the doorway.
But the woman had slipped and fallen aside, gibbering, clawing the floor. Foxe stood over her with a look of positive disbelief on his face. He looked at his arm and his wrist and his hand and his fingers, each in turn, through a great invisible glaring hot wall of crystal that enclosed him. He looked at the cane as if it was an easily seen and incredible exclamation point come out of nowhere to the center of the room. His mouth stayed open, the dust fell in silent embers, dead. He felt the blood drop from his face as if a small door had banged wide into his stomach. «I―»
She frothed.
Scrabbling about, every part of her seemed a separate animal. Her arms and legs, her hands, her head, each was a lopped-off bit of some creature wild to return to itself, but blind to the proper way of making that return. Her mouth still gushed out her sickness with words and sounds that were not even faintly words. It had been in her a long time, a long long time. Foxe looked upon her, in a state of shock, himself. Before today, she had spat her venom out, here, there, another place. Now he had loosed the flood of a lifetime and he felt in danger of drowning here. He sensed someone pulling him by his coat. He saw the door sills pass on either side. He heard the cane fall and rattle like a thin bone far away from his hand, which seemed to have been stung by some terrible unseen wasp. And then he was out, walking mechanically, down through the burning tenement, between the scorched walls. Her voice crashed like a guillotine down the stair. «Get out! Get out! Get _out!_»
Fading like the wail of a person dropped down an open well into darkness.
At the bottom of the last flight, near the street door, Foxe turned himself loose from this other man here, and for a long moment leaned against the wall, his eyes wet, able to do nothing but moan. His hands, while he did this, moved in the air to find the lost cane, moved on his head, touched at his moist eyelids, amazed, and fluttered away. They sat on the bottom hall step for ten minutes in silence, drawing sanity into their lungs with every shuddering breath. Finally Mr. Foxe looked over at Mr. Shaw, who had been staring at him in wonder and fright for the full ten minutes.
«Did you _see_ what I did? Oh, oh, that was close. Close. Close.» He shook his head. «I'm a fool. That poor, poor woman. She was right.»
«There's nothing to be done.»
«I see that now. It had to fall on me.»
«Here, wipe your face. That's better.»
«Do you think she'll tell Mr. Shrike about us?»
«No, no.»
«Do you think we could―»
«Talk to _him?_»
They considered this and shook their heads. They opened the front door to a gush of furnace heat and were almost knocked down by a huge man who strode between them.
«Look where you're going!» he cried.
They turned and watched the man move ponderously, in fiery darkness, one step at a time, up into the tenement house, a creature with the ribs of a mastodon and the head of an unshorn lion, with great beefed arms, irritably hairy, painfully sunburnt. The face they had seen briefly as he shouldered past was a sweating, raw, sunblistered pork face, salt droplets under the red eyes, dripping from the chin; great smears of perspiration stained the man's armpits, coloring his tee-shirt to the waist.
They shut the tenement door gently.
«That's him,» said Mr. Foxe. «That's the husband.»
They stood in the little store across from the tenement. It was five-thirty, the sun tilting down the sky, the shadows the color of hot summer grapes under the rare few trees and in the alleys.
«What was it, hanging out of the husband's back pocket?»
«Longshoreman's hook. Steel. Sharp, heavy-looking. Like those claws one-armed men used to wear on the end of their stumps, years ago.»