Deadline at Dawn

She stopped short, to deliver an ultimatum. “Look,” she said. “I didn’t ask you to walk all the way over with me. If you want to, that’s up to you. Just one thing. Keep your own thinking clear. Don’t get any ideas in your head.”

He accepted it in silence. He didn’t protest that she’d misjudged him. That was almost the first thing she’d liked about him, the first favorable comment she’d permitted herself to make upon him, since he’d first come within her orbit an hour or two ago. But she had a prejudiced mind against all who came her way as he had, a mind that had long ago learned: the less obnoxious you found them in the beginning, the greater care you had better take, for the more obnoxious they were likely to prove in the end, having partially disarmed you.

They went on again, still at their spaced width of several feet, still uncommunicative, being together only in the act of going forward simultaneously. It was the strangest escorting she had ever had, and if she must have any, she preferred them all to be like this.

Up a tunnel-dim side-street, that had once carried a lateral branch of the Elevated over to Ninth Avenue. It was now shorn of it but permanently stunted in its development by the sixty-year strait jacket it had endured. The slab-like sides of windowless warehouses, the curved back of a well-known skating-rink that looked like a cement tank, gaps torn in the building-ranks here and there by the Depression, particularly on corner-sites, and never rebuilt upon, used now for parking lots.

The street lampposts, few and far apart, would talcum them thinly white for a moment or two like something sifting downward from the punctures of a reversed container, then their figures would darken again, blend into the gloom.

He said something finally. She couldn’t remember precisely, but she thought it was the first remark he’d made since the fracas at the taxi. “You mean you come through here alone other nights?”

“Why not? It’s no worse than back there. Along here, if they’d make a grab at you, it would only be your purse they’d be after.” And then she felt like adding, “Why, are you afraid?” but forbore. Mainly because he hadn’t said or done anything deserving the slash, at least up to this point, and she was tired of having her claws out and ready all the time; it felt good to leave them in where they were for a change.

He looked back again. That was the second or third time he’d done that now. Even if there’d been something to see back there, in the gloom through which they’d just now passed, he wouldn’t have been able to see it.

This time she didn’t let it pass unnoticed. “What are you afraid of, he’ll come after you with a knife? He won’t, don’t let it worry you.”

“Oh, him,” he said, “you mean that guy,” and gave her a surprised look, as though again she had recalled him from a separate train of thought wide of her own. He smiled a little, sheepishly, and rubbed his hand across the back of his neck, as though the fault of the act lay therein and not in his volition. A moment later he’d put it into words, half to himself. “I didn’t know I was doing it, myself. Must be a sort of habit I’ve fallen into.”

There’s something on his mind, she told herself. People didn’t look behind them like that, every few steps of the way. And strangely enough she believed him, that it had nothing to do with the recent incident of the blow. The way he reacted each time she caught him at it bore that out. His wariness wasn’t of the immediate stretch of sidewalk behind them, of someone skulking up in back of him, it was more general, more widespread, it was of the entire night behind him. On two dimensions: both the hours of it, and the island-wide depths of it.

And now that she recalled it, that monstrous purchase of tickets he’d made, back at the mill, and then flung extravagantly away, as though they’d lost their value with tonight, there were never going to be any later time in which to use them, that was of a piece with it.

She remembered something else, and asked him a question.

“When I came out, and you were standing there in the foyer, up at the top of the stairs, you know — were you waiting for someone?”

“No,” he said. “No, I wasn’t.”

“Then why were you standing there after the place was already closed?” She’d known he hadn’t been, because he’d been looking down the steps and not over toward the inner doors.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I... didn’t know where to go, or what to do, after the place was once closed. I guess I... I guess I was trying to make up my mind where to go from there.”

Then why didn’t he stand outside, at the street entrance; that would have been the natural place for him to stand and do his thinking. She didn’t ask him that. The answer had come with it. Because you couldn’t be seen from upstairs in the stair-foyer, you were safe while you stayed there; you could be seen downstairs at the street entrance. If anyone were looking for you. Or you thought they were.