“That’s a lot of prickly you got on your chin.”
… In the heat of battle brave men do not feel their wounds. … Sometimes it is better not …
“I said, that’s a lot of prickly.”
He felt for his beard, his fingers like babes in their first woods. … 2:06 A.M. … (Better not what?) “Do you like it?”
She shrugged, looked away in amusement, as if it were impossible to take such a question seriously. Curt forced a laugh, unamused. “Well, Professor Big Hands,” she said, taking his arm, “let’s go where we’re going.”
“I have a few errands to run,” he said, improvising. “Could you meet me in about an hour?” He wrote an address, the same one he had given his wife, on the back of a movie stub and, winking, pressed it into her hand.
“A man like you goes on an errand,” she said, “he may never come back.”
In the middle of the next block she stopped him, pulling on his arm like a weight. A taxi, she said. She wanted a taxi. “You know if the lady is tired, Professor, that extra-special something is missing, huh?” She rubbed her hand along his arm. “I make it worth your while,” she whispered, something in her voice mocking itself.
“I can’t afford a cab,” he told her, unnerved by the thought of that extra-special something, wanting by this time only to get away.
“How much do you have?”
“Not enough,” he said evasively, surprised at the question.
“Let me see.” She frisked him, feeling all his pockets — other places — with a facility that betrayed a certain amount of practice, a certain natural gift. “I want to see what you have.”
Curt held her arms out away from him, holding her by the wrists as if he were holding a pair of poisonous snakes.
“How strong you are,” she said, smirking.
“What do you want?” Looking behind him. “What is it?”
“What do I want?” She laughed, the sound like jagged glass, painful to listen to, threatening.
He dropped her hands, backed up, thought of running away but knew his father would disapprove. Beat a woman, kill her if necessary, but for God’s sake don’t run away.
“Who was it,” she asked, “you or me put his big spender’s hand on my ass?” She shook her head, made a noise of disbelief. “Professor, I think maybe you got something missing upstairs. What do you think?”
He thought about it, missing the something that was missing. “Look,” he said, looking around him like a man in a room without doors, “if money’s what you’re after, you’ve made a mistake.”
She repossessed his arm. “You’re not so bad as I thought.”
They walked another block, her arm enclasped in his, Curt by turns desperate and elated, dreaming. The street in a fog of light.
Another block. What demon had made him pat her ass? What mad whim? His sense of himself, out of shape, melted under the pressure of some enormous heat.
“Oh, my aching ass,” she said, letting go of his arm a moment at the corner to stretch, to dance her weariness before him — his head in the cosmic eye of their game already on a platter. And which head was it? It was all the heads he had.
“Hey, look at that,” he said. “Jesus! Hey. Over there. It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”
Her head turned, her eyes trying to make forms out of mist, Curt slipped behind her and ran.
He had run two blocks, his chest burning from the effort, before he stopped to look back. The woman, whoever she was, was out of sight. Taking a deep breath, he stepped into the gutter to get a better view of the direction he had come from. There was no sign of the woman; he kept looking, refusing to believe that she wasn’t there.
He wandered into a phone booth on the corner of the next street and, without thinking about the time, without thinking about anything, dialed Christopher’s number.
His mother answered on the second ring. She said Christopher wasn’t home.
“I just want to say good-bye,” Curt said. “I’m going away.”
“I don’t know when Christopher will be back. Are you some friend of his?”
“I was his teacher.”
“I’ll tell him you called, Mr. … Is it about school that you want to see him? Has it something to do with Christopher’s schoolwork?”
“Parks. Curtis Parks.”
“I’ll give him the message.”
“No message. I’m leaving. Just wanted to say good-bye.”
“I’ll tell him to be sure to call you back. Don’t worry. I’ll get the message to him, Mr. Parks. Don’t worry about it.”
The phone was dead. He was looking at the receiver in his hand as if trying to remember how it had got there.
He stood in the phone booth a few minutes more, private, at home in the limits of its isolation, as though he were expecting a call. Alas, no one had his number, no one.
When he left the rectangular box he was in — his lungs surprised by the sudden rush of air — it was with some idea of where he was going. His eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, he walked down Forty-fifth Street from the Avenue of the Americas to Ninth Avenue.
A fight was going on in front of a bar, two men shoving each other in the chest, taking turns. Curt was knocked into as he went by, surprised, shaken into anger. Outraged, victimized at every turn, he thrust the man who had bumped him back in the direction he had come. Off balance — not looking to go the way he wasn’t going — the man (a lard-bellied drunk) stumbled and collapsed on his face. “There goes the surly shit,” someone yelled. “Boom.”
“Who’s a shit, ya fuckhead. I’d like to hear you say that to his face.”
Curt edged away; the man on the sidewalk, he noticed, the one he had shoved in self-defense, lying like a sack.
“Congratulations,” an inebriated woman yelled from the doorway of the bar to Curt. “No one’s ever put the bastard O’Sullivan down before.”
“He bumped into me,” Curt said. “What else could I do?”
“You could have minded your own business,” a voice assaulted him. “Who the hell asked you to butt in, Champ? I’d like to know who asked you.”
Two men approached, burly types, and Curt backed up into a parking meter at the curb, turning abruptly, a man threatened on all sides.
“Look,” Curt said, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, dimly aware that he was in danger, “it was an accident. I was walking by and the guy banged into me.”
“He doesn’t look so tough,” the one on the right said to his companion.
“He looks tough to me,” the other said, smiling at Curt in a friendly though peculiarly insinuating way, a man who understood, respected, on the whole, the malice of others. “How tough are you, Champ?”
Curt didn’t answer, tested the range of his freedom by taking a casual step to the side, the taste of panic in his throat. The men looked at each other; neither moved. Curt saw himself, conceived it as in a dream, thrown to the ground, beaten, pummeled by kicks. For no cause, to no purpose. (PACIFIST PUMMELED IN BAR-FRONT BRAWL.) Yet it seemed somehow fitting — the perfect end to his day — that he should be beaten for something he had done without intent, an act, if violent, of innocence.
“Excuse me,” Curt said. “I have to go.”
The men parted, made room between them — the space they offered barely large enough for him to get through.
“Thank you,” Curt said, a man who appreciated favors, holding on to his pose of unconcern. A matter of time, of moments. His move. In a moment he would make it, anesthetized, beyond fear. In a moment.
Now.
He went between the two men, resigned to whatever awaited him, turning sideways to avoid unnecessary contact. He waited for the blow to fall, the first blow, with resignation, almost — he had waited so long for it — with a martyr’s pleasure. A hand patted him on the back and he brushed it off with a shrug. Kept going, mean and tense (like a Western movie hero). “Hey, bucko, don’t get into any more trouble,” one of them yelled after him.