RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (14 page)

Paige took out a crumpled letter from his pocket, handed it to him.

. . . They disappear from the time she meets him at 8. Then he brings her back . . .

"It is true," he said bitterly.

"Then go there anyway. What you got on the end of your arms here, lily pads?" He hoisted one of Paige's wrists, let it drop again. "They were put there to use, weren't they? Fight for her. You have to fight to hold them. The way I look at it, if nobody else wants 'em, then you ain't much of a picker, they're prob'ly not much good in the first place. I had the same thing. I hadda bust a guy in the jawr on the Coney Island boardwalk over my Sadie, back in the beginning. Since then--" he gave his hand an edgewise cut--"I ain't had a bit of trouble. All she does is stay home and have kids."

"I can't get a pass."

"What's a pass? You got feet, ain't you? There's a road out there, ain't there?" He stiff-armed him inquiringly, against the shoulder. "Just ask yourself one thing, that's all you gotta do. All right, I'll save you the trouble, I'll ask it for you instead. Do you want her?"

"Do I want to live?" Paige echoed.

Just before he reached the confines of the hamlet, he stepped aside into a clump of roadside trees, hurriedly changed over into the civvies Rubin had managed to obtain for him and which he'd carried until now packed into a tight roil under his arm. Or rather superimposed them, for the most part, on what he was already wearing, for it wasn't a complete outfit by any means. He discarded only his army jacket. This he folded neatly and buried under a large stone. He slid a pair of tight-skinned oiler's pants over his own trousers, buttoned a greasy mackinaw concealingly over his Government Issue shirt, and pulled a battered felt down over his head. The unaccustomedly generous brim felt as wide and overshadowing as a down-turned umbrella at first.

It wasn't a good job; he was a walking risk. The shoes, the haircut, the very way he moved his limbs, had "army" written all over them. He was a pushover for the first stray M.P. that took a second look, and he knew it. And besides, the very impersonation in itself was a liability. The war was in its five-alarm stage and you didn't see them his age out of the army and on the hoof any more.

The war. The war. He hated the war, he cursed its guts. The war had taken her from him. The war should have picked somebody its own size. Why did it have to bust him up? He'd never done anything to it.

It was beginning to get light when he showed up in the hamlet, just a roadside stray. The light didn't do the place any good; it only made its mangy clapboards look twice as dilapidated as before. Even the trees all around it acted like they were ashamed of it, the way they tried to cover it up. A rooster crowed; a dog barked at him as he went by. A kerosene lamp lit up with a slow glow behind one of the upstairs fronts. Not on account of him, but because it was time to get up.

If he'd had any feelings left over from his own misery, he would have felt sorry for anyone that had to live in a godforsaken dump like this. Better they should stay in bed all day and not have to come out and see it.

At least a train ran through it and there was a station shack where it was supposed to stop.

He had to wait around a half-hour for the agent to open it up and go in there, and that didn't look too good.

He had money on him. They'd all chipped in, they were all in on it. They'd pooled whatever they had. All to keep a man from losing his wife. All to ease a fellowsufferer's pain.

He went up to the window.

"Young feller?" the grizzled old man said brusquely.

"What time's the train go by?"

"The train where?"

"The train the hell out of here."

"Six."

"It's nearly that now--"

"Six t'night."

He went back onto the highway that ran through the place.

Everything was going in the other way, to camp, and he was on borrowed time. But after awhile an outbound truck came by, and he got it to stop by throwing his hat in front of its wheels. The driver instinctively braked before he'd had time to tell that it was just a hat, with nobody in it.

"What're you, a wise guy?"

"How's chances for a heist?"

"All right, latch on," the driver said weariedly, "as long as you got me to a dead stop."

The truck moved on. The road started to come at them like a roller-coaster chute, spreading open as it got near.

The truck driver was wise. He glanced at him covertly once or twice. Then he said, "Where you from, the camp back there?"

"No," Paige said resolutely. He pared a bill off his scanty stake, handed it to him.

The truck driver looked at it, jammed it into his pocket. "I guess you ain't, if you say so," he said. He winked at him.

After awhile he said, "Where d'you want to go? And that question's all paid up; you don't have to worry."

"East," Paige said grimly. "Just east. Straight east, all the way."

The day-coach went hurtling through the dusk like a ploughshare cleaving its sepia murkiness apart. And the fill it turned up on either side was speckled with the reflection of rows of lighted windows, so that it seemed to ripple and swim, like sod actually disturbed, as the car went slicing by.

It swayed and shuddered with its own velocity; its joints creaked and grunted and threatened to start apart. Nothing on rails dared go any faster and still remain on them. But it seemed to go so slow to one, at least, of its occupants. The land was so wide, so vast, so endless. The East never came any nearer. The further toward it you went, the further still you had to go.

The ceiling lights peered down through the blurring layers of tobacco smoke upon the packed humanity clogging the aisle, swaying and undulating in unison, but in no danger of falling, for there was not room enough to fall in. Passing paper cups of gin and corn along from hand to hand, like relays in a chain, from some farupward source to some far-downward destination. Singing, shouting, laughing, scowling in momentary quicklydispelled quarrel, comatose but still erect from too many paper cupfuls; blowing a harmonica; playing cards upon the points of their eight knees. The universal cloth and color of the death struggle on every shoulder, except that of an occasional young mother and child, used to this, belonging to it, following the camps around.

The only other non-uniformed individual in the whole carfull, the figure huddled in a corner seat, head down, hat brim covering his face, as if asleep; trying to make himself as unobtrusive as possible. He can't be seen, that way; but neither can he see.

Suddenly an authoritative hand came to rest, heavily, with pertinent meaning, on his shoulder, and he quailed and then he froze all over. The way an animal does when it first feels the light touch of imminent capture, and waits, bated, to see which way is the best to try to run.

Slowly his hand went up. Cautiously he raised his enshrouding hat brim. From the corners of his eyes, he sought out the direction of the arrested hand. Expecting to see the familiar olive-drab uniform, the white armband of a military policeman.

Instead, it was dark-blue serge, shiny, with brass buttons. An old man's face beneath the visored cap with a disk attached. All he had in his other hand was a chopper, not a club.

Only the train conductor, asking for his ticket.

"What time do we get in?" he said.

"Eight-fifteen," the conductor said.

"What time are you supposed to meet him?" Rusty asked.

"Eight-thirty," Sharon said.

Rusty leaned across the foot-rail of the bed, supported by her elbows, watching her put her things into the open valise that she'd placed on the bed itself.

She didn't say anything more for some time--just watched. Sharon seemed to be, or pretended to be unaware of her scrutiny.

"So you're going for good," Rusty said at last.

"Good is the word," Sharon agreed. "Good is the word."

"I could think of another," Rusty murmured half audibly.

Sharon raised her head, shot her a look. "What's the matter, don't you approve?"

"It's your business."

"Meaning you don't." She latched the valise down. "That's good, coming from you. Every night a date. Every night a different one."

"Sure, because I know how to handle love, and you don't. I take my love like a man. I may splash it all over the outside of me, but it don't go through. I'm waterproof at the seams, kid. Next morning I'm the same old Rusty. You take it like a woman. Right away you drown and don't come up again."

Sharon picked up the valise, started for the door.

"Why don't you take it easy?" Rusty said, almost pleadingly.

Sharon opened the door. "Talk to my heart. Don't talk to me. My ears'll listen to you, but my heart's tone deaf."

She raised her free hand and swirled it at her, in parting gesture.

"My share of the room money's on the bureau. You can give my key back to the manager; I've left it there with the money."

Rusty, however, didn't stay behind in the room. She followed her down the stairs, treading almost at her heels.

At the bottom, Sharon turned her head and cast her a slightly impatient look, as though this lengthening of their parting annoyed her. "What's the matter, haven't you got any date of your own tonight?"

"I could've had--two, or three, or four. But it's funny--maybe it's on account of what you're doing--all of a sudden I don't want a date. The game doesn't seem much fun any more."

"Then why don't you play it for keeps, like I do, and not as a game?" Sharon inquired tartly.

"And hit below the belt, you mean."

Sharon was at the front door by now. She didn't answer that.

Again Rusty came after her, even put her hand to the door, to keep it the way it was, if only for a moment longer.

"Is this the best break you can give him, Sharon?"

"Him? Who?" Then she remembered. "Oh. Him ."

"I read one of his letters. I didn't mean to, but you left it around the room, and I was fresh out of tissues for taking off lipstick. It wasn't written in ink. Do you have to spill a guy's heartblood that way?"

Sharon plunked the valise down and drew a deep breath, as though there was one point she wanted to get across, once and for all, before she finally left. "Look. I can remember being married to a stranger, once long ago. I can even remember what his name was, too. But it's no use, I can't bring his face back before me. It's like asking me to feel sorry for someone I never really knew."

"These good dames," said Rusty, tightlipped. "Give me a bum like I am."

Sharon reached down for the valise again.

A telephone suddenly peeled out shrilly at the back of the hall, more like a fire-alarm bell than anything else.

Rusty, almost by reflex action, reached out and gripped Sharon by both arms, as if to hold her fast a moment longer.

A middle-aged woman came out of the back, answered it. Then she went to the foot of the stairs, called up with the stentorian intonation of a train despatcher: "Fay MacKenzie, on the line! Fay MacKenzie, on the line!"

Carpet slippers came slapping down, with a sound like a paddle wheel beating water. A voice cried at the top of its lungs, "Hello, Joe!", then sank into blissful, purring inaudibility.

They both turned their heads away again.

"I've got a funny premonition," Rusty said huskily. "Don't go, Sharon." She kept her hands outstretched to the other's arms, trying to dissuade her.

Sharon laughed at her a little. "What's the matter, have you got the weeping creeps?"

"Look, will you do one last thing for me? I've never asked you anything before. Give me this for a good-bye present."

"Not if you're asking me to change my--"

"Wait half an hour. Give him thirty minutes more. He may phone or something. Give him that much of a chance at least. Don't just walk out cold like this. You'd wait that long for a bus. You'd wait that long for a grade B picture on a Saturday night. You'd wait that long for a table at a crummy greasy-vest feed-mill. Wait that long for the guy you once stood up with, long ago. For old time's sake. For the sake of clean sport. Then go if you have to."

Sharon looked at her. Then she stretched out her foot and shunted the valise over against the wall, just inside the door. "Fifteen minutes," she said inflexibly. "I don't know what for, I don't know what good it'll do, but you've got that tremolo in your voice that gets me. Come on into the company room, we'll sit and put a record on, while I hold my watch across my knee."

She turned her wrist and fumbled with its strap.

"Fifteen minutes' wake," she said, "for a love that's dead and will never breathe again."

The day coach stood motionless now, a hollowedout trough of hazy lights and blurry tobacco smoke and packed humanity, in the middle of the enshrouding blueblack night.

They weren't singing much any more; they were all sung out. They weren't drinking much either; they were out of that too. They were mostly dozing, somnolent, standing up as well as sitting down. The car was strangely quiet. An occasional remark cut through the silence, magnified out of all proportion to its original volume by the complete lack of other, competitive voices.