Into the Night

They eyed one another steadily for a moment, each one trying to dominate. Then his eyes lost, and slid edgewise. They came right back again, but hers had had their victory. With that, she stepped past him and turned into the basement hallway. Without looking around she knew he had put out his hand to reclose the iron gate. “Would you mind leaving that open,” she said, “while I’m in here?”

He gave a sniff of laughter. “You won’t have to leave in that much of a hurry.”

The room was about what she’d expected it to be. A sagging cot against the wall, which he slept on. A couple of wood-backed chairs, of unsure stability. A table with a smoldering cigarette gnawing its way into its rim to join the dozens of other indented burns that ringed it around. A gas ring hooked to a jet and parked on a shelf. A number of copper beer cans in two positions, upright and prone. Meaning full and empty. A calendar on the wall, but it was the wrong year and the last leaf had never been torn off: December 1960. Yesterday’s newspaper and the day before yesterday’s newspaper, neither of them yet thrown out. Last month’s magazine (For Men Only), ditto. On the wall opposite the calendar, a photograph of a soldier in a flowerpot helmet, with a girl leaning her head against his shoulder.

Not much else.

Lives, she realized, are lived in such rooms. Some lives.

There was one other thing, though, of undetermined connotation, which caught her eye. There was a standpipe over in one corner, running through from floor to ceiling. Alongside it was a small steam radiator with a flat piece of tin nailed over it. On this lay a monkey wrench. She noticed a curious thing about the standpipe, which she couldn’t identify at first. It seemed to have a metal ring or “collar” encircling it at one point, and from this hung a short chain, at the end of which there was another ring or band. But this one was open at one end, and was not encircling the standpipe but was hanging down flat alongside it.

Suddenly it dawned on her what the complicated design was. It was a pair of handcuffs, fastened by one cuff to the pipe. And the other one, the open one, what was that for? Something made her go a little cold inside.

“How much do you want me to give?” he said, putting his hand to the baggy pocket of a moldy sweater hanging from a nail. This one was a coat-sweater with sleeves, but they had big holes at the elbows that seemed to peel outward.

“Give whatever you feel you can afford,” she said. Then, because it was a good opportunity, she rang the question in. “Are you married?”

“Not this minute.”

It was beginning to shape up more and more, she told herself.

He handed her a five-dollar bill. “Here,” he said grudgingly, and repeated the ancient wisecrack: “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

“But are you sure you can spare this?” She couldn’t resist glancing around a second time at the squalid room.

He caught her doing it. “Don’t let it worry you,” he said. “Money’s one thing I’ve got plenty of. Enough to get by on, anyway. I draw a Veterans’ Disability Pension.”

“Oh,” she said, and looked at him. He seemed untouched.

“I was wounded in the war. Kara something-or-other, I think it was called. It was an island.”

“Tarawa,” she said impatiently. “You were there but you don’t know the name. We learned about it in high school.”

“We were dying, not studying geography,” he rebuked her mildly. “I can still see it, though,” he went on. “Just a little patch of hell stuck out there in the ocean. Never knew why the Japs wanted it, or why we wanted to take it away from them. I can get sick thinking of all the boys who died for islands that were never any use to anybody, and never will be.” His eyes challenged her. “A lot of boys died,” he said.

“I know.”

“And they were the lucky ones,” he said. “Do you know that too?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s worse things than dying, but I don’t expect you to believe that.”

She thought of Starr, dying, and of herself, with a leftover life to live. “I believe it,” she said, softly.

He didn’t seem to have heard her. “Tarawa,” he said. “Guys left their arms there. Or their legs. Or came away blind or deaf or with their brains scrambled. They were lucky too. Not as lucky as the dead ones, but luckier than some.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because I wasn’t so lucky.”

She stared at him. “You’ve got your arms and legs,” she said. “And your hearing and your eyesight. What makes you the unluckiest man at Tarawa?”

“Do you know the difference between a bull and an ox?”

“Not exactly. An ox is bigger, isn’t it? And stronger, I guess.”

He laughed sourly. “You must be a city girl,” he said. “A farm girl would have the picture by now. How about a ram and a wether? A rooster and a capon?”

“I—”

“Or a stallion and a gelding. How about that?”

“You don’t mean—”

“Don’t I? We were on patrol. From out of nowhere, a Jap threw a grenade at us. My buddy dove for it to throw it back. It went off in his hand and killed him. The lucky bastard.”

“And—”