Sanctuary (26 page)

She went to the washroom. In the mirror she examined her face. “Shucks,” she said, “it didn’t leave a mark, even;” drawing the flesh this way and that. “Little runt,” she said, peering at her reflection. She added a phrase, glibly obscene, with a detached parrotlike effect. She painted her mouth again. Another woman entered. They examined one another’s clothes with brief, covert, cold, embracing glances.

Popeye was standing at the door to the dance-hall, a cigarette in his fingers.

“I gave you your chance,” Temple said. “You didn’t have to come.”

“I dont take chances,” he said.

“You took one,” Temple said. “Are you sorry? Huh?”

“Go on,” he said, his hand on her back. She was in the act of stepping over the sill when she turned and looked at him, their eyes almost on a level; then her hand flicked toward his armpit. He caught her wrist; the other hand flicked toward him. He caught that one too in his soft, cold hand. They looked eye to eye, her mouth open and the rouge spots darkening slowly on her face.

“I gave you your chance back there in town,” he said. “You took it.”

Behind her the music beat, sultry, evocative; filled with movement of feet, the voluptuous hysteria of muscles warming the scent of flesh, of the blood. “Oh, God; oh, God,” she said, her lips scarce moving. “I’ll go. I’ll go back.”

“You took it,” he said. “Go on.”

In his grasp her hands made tentative plucking motions at his coat just out of reach of her finger-tips. Slowly he was turning her toward the door, her head reverted. “You just dare!” she cried. “You just—” His hand closed upon the back of her neck, his fingers like steel, yet cold and light as aluminum. She could hear the vertebrae grating faintly together, and his voice, cold and still.

“Will you?”

She nodded her head. Then they were dancing. She could still feel his hand at her neck. Across his shoulder she looked swiftly about the room, her gaze flicking from face to face among the dancers. Beyond a low arch, in another room, a group stood about the crap-table. She leaned this way and that, trying to see the faces of the group.

Then she saw the four men. They were sitting at a table near the door. One of them was chewing gum; the whole lower part of his face seemed to be cropped with teeth of an unbelievable whiteness and size. When she saw them she swung Popeye around with his back to them, working the two of them toward the door again. Once more her harried gaze flew from face to face in the crowd.

When she looked again two of the men had risen. They approached. She dragged Popeye into their path, still keeping his back turned to them. The men paused and essayed to go around her; again she backed Popeye into their path. She was trying to say something to him, but her mouth felt cold. It was like trying to pick up a pin with the fingers numb. Suddenly she felt herself lifted bodily aside, Popeye’s small arms light and rigid as aluminum. She stumbled back
against the wall and watched the two men leave the room. “I’ll go back,” she said. “I’ll go back.” She began to laugh shrilly.

“Shut it,” Popeye said. “Are you going to shut it?”

“Get me a drink,” she said. She felt his hand; her legs felt cold too, like they were not hers. They were sitting at a table. Two tables away the man was still chewing, his elbows on the table. The fourth man sat on his spine, smoking, his coat buttoned across his chest.

She watched hands: a brown one in a white sleeve, a soiled white one beneath a dirty cuff, setting bottles on the table. She had a glass in her hand. She drank, gulping; with the glass in her hand she saw Red standing in the door, in a gray suit and a spotted bow tie. He looked like a college boy, and he looked about the room until he saw her. He looked at the back of Popeye’s head, then at her as she sat with the glass in her hand. The two men at the other table had not moved. She could see the faint, steady movement of the one’s ears as he chewed. The music started.

She held Popeye’s back toward Red. He was still watching her, almost a head taller than anybody else. “Come on,” she said in Popeye’s ear. “If you’re going to dance, dance.”

She had another drink. They danced again. Red had disappeared. When the music ceased she had another drink. It did no good. It merely lay hot and hard inside her. “Come on,” she said, “dont quit.” But he wouldn’t get up, and she stood over him, her muscles flinching and jerking with exhaustion and terror. She began to jeer at him. “Call yourself a man, a bold, bad man, and let a girl dance you off your feet.” Then her face drained, became small and haggard and
sincere; she spoke like a child, with sober despair. “Popeye.” He sat with his hands on the table, finicking with a cigarette, the second glass with its melting ice before him. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Daddy,” she said. Moving to shield them from the room, her hand stole toward his arm pit, touching the butt of the flat pistol. It lay rigid in the light, dead vise of his arm and side. “Give it to me,” she whispered. “Daddy. Daddy.” She leaned her thigh against his shoulder, caressing his arm with her flank. “Give it to me, daddy,” she whispered. Suddenly her hand began to steal down his body in a swift, covert movement; then it snapped away in a movement of revulsion. “I forgot,” she whispered; “I didn’t mean.…I didn’t.……”

One of the men at the other table hissed once through his teeth. “Sit down,” Popeye said. She sat down. She filled her glass, watching her hands perform the action. Then she was watching the corner of the gray coat. He’s got a broken button, she thought stupidly. Popeye had not moved.

“Dance this?” Red said.

His head was bent but he was not looking at her. He was turned a little, facing the two men at the other table. Still Popeye did not move. He shredded delicately the end of the cigarette, pinching the tobacco off. Then he put it into his mouth.

“I’m not dancing,” Temple said through her cold lips.

“Not?” Red said. He said, in a level tone, without moving: “How’s the boy?”

“Fine,” Popeye said. Temple watched him scrape a match, saw the flame distorted through glass. “You’ve had enough,” Popeye said. His hand took the glass from her lips.
She watched him empty it into the ice bowl. The music started again. She sat looking quietly about the room. A voice began to buzz faintly at her hearing, then Popeye was gripping her wrist, shaking it, and she found that her mouth was open and that she must have been making a noise of some sort with it. “Shut it, now,” he said. “You can have one more.” He poured the drink into the glass.

“I haven’t felt it at all,” she said. He gave her the glass. She drank. When she set the glass down she realised that she was drunk. She believed that she had been drunk for some time. She thought that perhaps she had passed out and that it had already happened. She could hear herself saying I hope it has. I hope it has. Then she believed it had and she was overcome by a sense of bereavement and of physical desire. She thought, It will never be again, and she sat in a floating swoon of agonised sorrow and erotic longing, thinking of Red’s body, watching her hand holding the empty bottle over the glass.

“You’ve drunk it all,” Popeye said. “Get up, now. Dance it off.” They danced again. She moved stiffly and languidly, her eyes open but unseeing; her body following the music without hearing the tune for a time. Then she became aware that the orchestra was playing the same tune as when Red was asking her to dance. If that were so, then it couldn’t have happened yet. She felt a wild surge of relief. It was not too late: Red was still alive; she felt long shuddering waves of physical desire going over her, draining the color from her mouth, drawing her eyeballs back into her skull in a shuddering swoon.

They were at the crap table. She could hear herself
shouting to the dice. She was rolling them, winning; the counters were piling up in front of her as Popeye drew them in, coaching her, correcting her in his soft, querulous voice. He stood beside her, shorter than she.

He had the cup himself. She stood beside him cunningly, feeling the desire going over her in wave after wave, involved with the music and with the smell of her own flesh. She became quiet. By infinitesimal inches she moved aside until someone slipped into her place. Then she was walking swiftly and carefully across the floor toward the door, the dancers, the music swirling slowly about her in a bright myriad wave. The table where the two men had sat was empty, but she did not even glance at it. She entered the corridor. A waiter met her.

“Room,” she said. “Hurry.”

The room contained a table and four chairs. The waiter turned on the light and stood in the door. She jerked her hand at him; he went out. She leaned against the table on her braced arms, watching the door, until Red entered.

He came toward her. She did not move. Her eyes began to grow darker and darker, lifting into her skull above a half moon of white, without focus, with the blank rigidity of a statue’s eyes. She began to say Ah-ah-ah-ah in an expiring voice, her body arching slowly backward as though faced by an exquisite torture. When he touched her she sprang like a bow, hurling herself upon him, her mouth gaped and ugly like that of a dying fish as she writhed her loins against him.

He dragged his face free by main strength. With her hips grinding against him, her mouth gaping in straining protrusion, bloodless, she began to speak. “Let’s hurry. Anywhere.
I’ve quit him. I told him so. It’s not my fault. Is it my fault? You dont need your hat and I dont either. He came here to kill you but I said I gave him his chance. It wasn’t my fault. And now it’ll just be us. Without him there watching. Come on. What’re you waiting for?” She strained her mouth toward him, dragging his head down, making a whimpering moan. He held his face free. “I told him I was. I said if you bring me here. I gave you your chance I said. And now he’s got them there to bump you off. But you’re not afraid. Are you?”

“Did you know that when you telephoned me?” he said.

“What? He said I wasn’t to see you again. He said he’d kill you. But he had me followed when I telephoned. I saw him. But you’re not afraid. He’s not even a man, but you are. You’re a man. You’re a man.” She began to grind against him, dragging at his head, murmuring to him in parrotlike underworld epithet, the saliva running pale over her bloodless lips. “Are you afraid?”

“Of that dopey bastard?” Lifting her bodily he turned so that he faced the door, and slipped his right hand free. She did not seem to be aware that he had moved.

“Please. Please. Please. Please. Dont make me wait. I’m burning up.”

“All right. You go on back. You wait till I give you the sign. Will you go on back?”

“I cant wait. You’ve got to. I’m on fire, I tell you.” She clung to him. Together they blundered across the room toward the door, he holding her clear of his right side; she in a voluptuous swoon, unaware that they were moving,
straining at him as though she were trying to touch him with all of her body-surface at once. He freed himself and thrust her into the passage.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“You wont be long? I’m on fire. I’m dying, I tell you.”

“No. Not long. Go on, now.”

The music was playing. She moved up the corridor, staggering a little. She thought that she was leaning against the wall, when she found that she was dancing again; then that she was dancing with two men at once; then she found that she was not dancing but that she was moving toward the door between the man with the chewing gum and the one with the buttoned coat. She tried to stop, but they had her under the arms; she opened her mouth to scream, taking one last despairing look about the swirling room.

“Yell,” the man with the buttoned coat said. “Just try it once.”

Red was at the crap table. She saw his head turned, the cup in his lifted hand. With it he made her a short, cheery salute. He watched her disappear through the door, between the two men. Then he looked briefly about the room. His face was bold and calm, but there were two white lines at the base of his nostrils and his forehead was damp. He rattled the cup and threw the dice steadily.

“Eleven,” the dealer said.

“Let it lay,” Red said. “I’ll pass a million times tonight.”

They helped Temple into the car. The man in the buttoned coat took the wheel. Where the drive joined the lane that led to the highroad a long touring car was parked.
When they passed it Temple saw, leaning to a cupped match, Popeye’s delicate hooked profile beneath the slanted hat as he lit the cigarette. The match flipped outward like a dying star in miniature, sucked with the profile into darkness by the rush of their passing.

T
he tables had been moved to one end of the dance floor. On each one was a black table-cloth. The curtains were still drawn; a thick, salmon-colored light fell through them. Just beneath the orchestra platform the coffin sat. It was an expensive one: black, with silver fittings, the trestles hidden by a mass of flowers. In wreaths and crosses and other shapes of ceremonial mortality, the mass appeared to break in a symbolical wave over the bier and on upon the platform and the piano, the scent of them thickly oppressive.

The proprietor of the place moved about among the
tables, speaking to the arrivals as they entered and found seats. The negro waiters, in black shirts beneath their starched jackets, were already moving in and out with glasses and bottles of ginger ale. They moved with swaggering and decorous repression; already the scene was vivid, with a hushed, macabre air a little febrile.