Deadline at Dawn

But chiefly she didn’t ask him because of another reason, and not the self-evident explanation that had occurred to her. She didn’t ask him because her own mind had just dropped shut at this point, like a portcullis catching itself open; rolling down with a harsh grating injunction, that had no mercy, no admission in it for anyone: What do you care? What is it to you? What do you want to know about it for? Let him keep it to himself. What are you, a settlement nurse? Did anyone else ever worry about you?

And in bitter silence she upbraided herself, “You still haven’t learned, have you? They beat you black and blue, and you still hold out your open hand to the next one that comes along. What does it take to get it into your head, a pounding with a lead pipe?”

He looked back again, and she let him.

They’d come to Ninth, wide and dismal in its grubby shadowiness, and not all the red and white beads whisking along it could make it anything but that.

They stood for a moment, toes overlapping the curb. The streaming beads slackened, dammed into sleazy diadems, reared facing one another, two to each intersection, all down the long billowy vista, that would crumble again and be strewn along as before in another moment.

She had already stepped down. There was an instant’s recoil on his part. A false start, nothing more. A small thing. “Come on, the light’s all right,” she said. He went over after her immediately, but that unaccountable hitch had been self-revelatory. Effect had been shown, so cause had to be somewhere around, it only remained to identify it. Then she saw that it wasn’t the light that had checked him, it was that lone figure all the way over on the other side, and going steadily away from them, that patrolman pacing his beat.

She saw that by the way his eyes came back from following him along, and then and only then went upward to the light, attracted to it by her remark.

The portcullis remained stubbornly closed.

They climbed the opposite curb, and went on into the maw of the ensuing westward block. Three anemic light-pools widely spaced down its seemingly endless length did nothing to dilute the gloom; they only pointed it up by giving it contrast. As if saying: See, this is what light is like — when there is any.

There was a clamminess to the air now, a sense of nearby water, that had been lacking further over. A tug-siren groaned dismally somewhere in the night ahead of them. And then another one answered it, way over near the Jersey side.

“Pretty soon now,” she said.

“I’ve never been this far over before,” he admitted.

“You can’t get very much further in off the river than this for five dollars a week.” And then, though she realized full well he hadn’t offered any objection, she couldn’t resist adding: “You can drop off anytime it gets you down.”

“It hasn’t got me down,” he murmured diplomatically.

She opened her bag and felt for her key ahead of time; a preparatory reflex, to make sure it was there.

She halted as they reached the midway pool of light, and its downward-fuming motes powdered them back into visibility to one another. “Well, this is it here,” she said.

He just looked at her. She thought it was almost stupid, the way he looked at her. Sort of bovine. As though he were trying to grasp the fact that they were separating and he would be by himself once more. Something like that. At least there wasn’t any of that other stuff in it; no amorous ambitions.

There was a doorway opposite them, or very nearly so. Left open to the street, but with the perils of ingress ameliorated to some slight extent by a faltering lemon-pale backwash that came from deep within it and failed to reach all the way to its mouth, leaving an intervening twilight zone. Still it was better than nothing. They’d formerly left it dark, and she’d dreaded having to enter it late at nights. Until someone had been knifed on the stairs one night, and since then they’d left a light there at their foot. Now, she reflected wryly, you could see who knifed you, if you were to have it happen.

She cut their parting short; carrying it into effect while holding him where he was under a delaying barrage of a few last words. That was simply to gain distance, get beyond arm’s reach. She’d learned by experience to do it that way, and not to stand still listening to remonstrances and purring objections. She’d had to.

“Take it easy,” she said. And suddenly she was already over in the doorway and he was standing alone on the sidewalk. “I’ll see you around,” she said from there. Meaning just the reverse: she never would see him again, he never would see her, this ended it.

But even before she’d quite gone inside, she’d already seen him turn his head away again and look back into the obscurity through which they’d just come. Fear was uppermost over dalliance in his mind.

What was he to her? He was just a pink dance-check, torn in half. Two-and-a-half cents’ worth of commission on the dime. A pair of feet, a blank, a cipher.

Chapter 2