Deadline at Dawn

The woman’s hand went to the base of her throat for a minute, trying to ease it. A sob that was more like a cough sounded in it. “Let me get a drink of water a minute, I’m all— It’s all right, there’s no other way out of here.”

“And get your things while you’re in there,” Bricky said mercilessly.

She went in through the lighted opening. She had to hold onto one side of it to steer herself through it.

Bricky stood there looking down. She was listening, not thinking. A glass tinked. Her ears didn’t tell her. Some wire-fine instinct, jangling to an unseen current, told her. She took a quick step forward, went in there after her.

“Don’t drink that!” Bricky swung backhand at her face. The glass was knocked away from her parted lips. It didn’t break, it was cheap and thick. It just thudded to the floor, rolled over, spewing a thin watery trail after it.

It was only after she’d completed the act that her eyes roamed around and saw the bottle standing uncapped on a shelf above the sink. Brown glass, “Lysol” on the label.

The woman was gripping the edge of the sink with both hands, as though it were unsteady and liable to get away from her.

“So you’ve as good as told me, haven’t you?”

The woman was silent. Her hands, on the sink were shaking a little, that was all.

“You didn’t have to. I knew it anyway.”

The woman was silent.

“You’re coming back there with me now. You’re coming up there — where it happened.”

The woman exploded into a strangled bleat. “No. You can’t make me. I don’t know who you are, but you can’t make me. I’ll kill you first. I don’t have to die twice. Once was enough.”

Her hand shot out into some sort of a rubber rack hanging to one side of the sink. Something flashed in the light, and a short, sharp-bladed kitchen-knife reared back over her shoulder, about to slash forward at Bricky.

There was no time to get out of the way, the place was too cramped. She flung herself forward upon her instead. Her hand caught the death-dealing arm at the wrist, tried to hold it off. Their other two arms threshed and clawed at one another, and finally riveted themselves together and stalemated one another.

The woman had the strength of desperation, of suicide. Bricky had the strength of self-preservation. An equipoise was established, that had to break sooner or later. They swayed slightly, moving very little, scarcely leaving the rim of the sink at all. Once they both bent over it together; again, they both bent outward the other way. Their hair came down. They didn’t scream, didn’t shrill. This wasn’t a cat-fight over some fancied slight; this was a fight to the death between two human beings. And death abolishes sex.

They rotated a little, then they went back again the other way. In the silence you couldn’t hear anything but their strident breaths. They had frozen into a tableau of exhaustion, Bricky too spent to ward off the knife, the other too spent to drive it home altogether.

A key fumbled at the door, on the outside of the other room.

Suddenly, with crazy irrelevancy, their roles had reversed.

The other woman was desperately trying to fling the knife away, rid herself of it, discard it. Bricky, still not understanding, held her wrist in a vise, choked off its power of motion. The fingers opened and the knife fell to the floor. The woman’s foot darted out, kicked it out of sight under the sink. There was nothing to strive over any more. They released one another uncertainly.

The woman dropped to her knees beside Bricky, began pulling at the bottom of her dress in agonized supplication.

“Don’t tell Harry. Oh my God, don’t tell Harry. Have pity on me.”

The door in the other room was opening.

A voice called through cheerily: “Helen, you back yet?”

“Don’t. I don’t care what you do to me, but don’t tell Harry. Not right away, anyway. I love him so. He’s all I’ve got. I’ll do anything you say — anything.”

Bricky was bending over, trying to detach her importunate, kneading hands from the fabric of her dress. “Will you come back there with me? Will you come back quietly, like I want you to?”

The woman nodded, avid for reprieve.

His shadow was already coming toward the doorway. He must have stepped aside for a moment to sample a mouthful of the food waiting on the card table.

“All right,” Bricky relented. “I’ll play ball with you if you play it with me.”

The woman cowering at her feet only had time to whisper one thing more. “Leave it to me, let me do the talking—”

He was standing in the doorway.

Just a guy, to Bricky, a man. Only the eyes of love could change him into what he was for this other woman, and only this other woman had those eyes of love for him. So Bricky couldn’t really see him as he was to her. Just a guy. A dime-a-dozen guy.

The woman kneeling at her feet seemed not to see him. She said, “The hem is too long on this side, that’s what the trouble is. It makes the whole skirt hang uneven.” She stopped as if she’d only then seen him. “Oh, hello, Harry,” she said delightedly. “I didn’t even hear you come in!”