Deadline at Dawn

She hitched her head sharply away from him a couple of times, in pantomimic order to him to come up and join her where she was. He rose in instant acquiescence, and she lost him for a moment or two, but she could hear him climbing hastily, two and three steps at a time. Then he showed up on the last flight, made the final turn of the railing, and stopped short beside her, breathing heavily. He looked at her questioningly, and at the same time in a half-hopeful sort of way, as if any summons to him, at this pass, was bound to be a good one.

He looked younger to her than he had before, somehow. Younger than she’d taken him for over at the mill. The lights over there, more than that even, the setting itself, made everyone look more sinister and seasoned than they actually were. She knew he hadn’t changed, it was her impression of him that must have. Perhaps the sight of him she’d had just now sitting on the stairs, rudderless, had retouched her mental image of him. And after all, everyone came to you through the filter of your own individual lens, not as they were in actuality.

“What’s your trouble, Joe? Whatiya got on your mind?” She asked it with intentionally-emphasized, grating harshness, to cancel out the interest implicit in her asking it at all in the first place, and not just letting him be down there on the stairs. Because she was breaking one of her own self-imposed rules, so she did it as grudgingly as possible.

He said, “Nothing — I... I don’t get you,” and faltered badly over it. Then got his second wind, and said, “I was just resting up down there a minute.”

“Yeah,” she observed stonily. “People rest on the stairs of strange houses, at two in the morning, when they’ve got nothing on their minds. I know. Listen, it all adds up. I don’t need my fingers to count off on. The way you kept hinging behind you, all the way over here; don’t you think I got that? The way you were roosting there in the corner, when I first came out of the barn—”

He was looking down at the rail beside him as though he hadn’t seen it until just now, as though it had suddenly appeared there where it hadn’t been before. He kept swivelling his palm around on it, as if he were polishing it off in one particular place, a place that wouldn’t come clean.

Yes, he kept getting younger to her by the minute. He was down to about twenty-three now, which was probably a little below par. And when he’d first come in the dance-hall he’d been — well, rats have no age. At least, you don’t inquire into it.

“What’d you say your name was again? I know you gave it to me outside before, but it slipped my mind.”

“Quinn Williams.”

“Quinn? I never heard that name before.”

“It used to be my mother’s before she married.”

She shrugged with her eyebrows. Not about the name, about their preceding discussion. “Well, have it your way,” she dismissed it. “It’s your own spot. Hang onto it, if you feel that way about it.”

Something from within her own room attracted her attention. A slight clattering commotion, that she could identify instantly, from long experience. She turned hastily and went in, left him out there without a word. She went over to the gas-ring and turned it off; the twinkling blue diadem fluffed out and the commotion subsided.

She picked up the tin coffee-pot and transferred it to the table. She’d left the door open. She stepped over to close it between the two of them.

He was still standing out there, back a little ways, by the stairs, where she’d last left him just now. There was a sort of passive, fatalistic air about him. He was still kneading his hand on the rail and looking down and watching himself do it.

She held her hand arrested to the door. What a dope you are, she wrangled with herself. Don’t you ever learn? Don’t you know any better than to do what you’re thinking of doing? Then she went ahead and did it anyway. Offering this to herself in extenuation: I’ve got one last friendly impulse left in me. Exactly one, that this town has overlooked and left me. May as well get it out of my system and get it over with, then I’ll be in the clear.

Again she gave him that curt, peremptory hitch of the head. “I’ve got some coffee in here. Come in a minute, and I’ll split a cup with you.”

He came forward again as eagerly as he’d come up the stairs. He needed bucking up, she could see; partly, that was what was the matter with him, someone to talk to.

But her arm stayed up, crossbarring the door-gap and blocking him when he’d come up to it. “Only get one thing,” she warned him lethally. “This is an invite to share a cup of coffee with me, and nothing more. No sugar goes with it. You give me one blink too many and—”

“I’m not thinking of that sort of stuff,” he said with an odd sort of demureness that she hadn’t known males could show until now. “A fellow can tell just by looking at someone whether they mean one thing or mean the other.”

“You’d be surprised how many of them ought to see an optician,” she commented sourly.

Her arm dropped and he came through.