Into the Night

“So we rigged up this signal between us. When I start getting restless, and know that I’m about to go out and roam around, I hit that pipe a wallop with that monkey wrench over there, and he comes down here and keeps me from going. Sits down and plays cards with me, and we have a few drinks, and when I start to get sleepy he locks the door from the outside and goes back upstairs. Next day I’m all over it.”

“What’re the handcuffs for?” she asked batedly.

“Once in a while I won’t listen to reason.”

He started to light a cigarette, then interrupted the act, flame before lips, to tell her: “So if I start to crowd you too much, remember to pick up that monkey wrench there and hit the steam pipe with it with all your might.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said a little tautly, “because I’m leaving now.”

She got up from the rickety chair she’d seated herself on (without noticing) a long while before, turned her back on him, went over to the door, and turned the knob.

The knob turned willingly enough, but the door wouldn’t open.

“What’d you do, lock this?” she said sharply. “Don’t try anything like that! You’d better open it, if you know what’s—”

Her last glimpse of him had had him standing on the opposite side of the table from her, a considerable distance, hands rounded toward chin, matchlight streaking his face like yellow crayon. Suddenly, before she even had time to turn her head and finish the denunciation facing him, she felt his arm go around her waist. Then the other one crossed over her shoulder, interlacing with the first. His face pressed hard against hers from over the opposite shoulder. She could feel the tough, often-shaved skin, stiff as cardboard, and he planted a trail of kisses down her cheek until he found her mouth.

Fear didn’t come at first, only anger and outrage did. But when she found she couldn’t move, not even enough to squirm or struggle, that the embrace was like iron, like steel, almost traumatic in its intensity, then fear did come, in a cold, sick rush, like nausea of the mind. She kept cautioning herself: Don’t panic, don’t lose your head, that’s the worst thing you could do. And then: Go limp, let yourself go limp, and his instinctive reaction may be to relax the embrace.

She let her knees dip, and though the rest of her body was held too compressed to slide down after them, she let him carry her full weight, and it worked. His arms slackened in reflex, and she was able to duck down under them and up again on the outside.

He was too close to the door, had it boxed in, so she fled back again the other way, behind the large round center table where he’d originally been himself.

She spoke in a breathless voice, as though she were whispering in confidence. “Don’t! Cut it out!”

“You overstayed your margin of safety.”

“I’m going to have you arrested for this!”

Again he came after her. She tried to overturn the table toward him, but it had too wide a base to tilt easily. Then she remembered what he’d told her about the wrench, fled over into the corner, picked it up, and swung it in a long, shattering arc against the standpipe. The sound of it was brazen in its intensity, and it seemed to go echoing up through the house high over their heads, playing back upon itself section by section.

She only had time for the one blow, he came in at her too fast. She threw it at him and it hit him, but only on the protective arm he’d thrown up before his head. Again he penned her in his arms, but this time forward, not from in back, and she could feel the heat of his breath stirring her hair like some kind of an ill wind. She tried to kick him in the ankle with the sharp point of one of her shoes, and did, but the blow couldn’t have hurt much, he hardly flinched, it had been too foreshortened.

He lied, she thought frantically. He said the man would come.

“A little love is all I want,” he was coaxing. “Just a little love—”

She saw the cigarette that he’d lit just before the thing began, still balanced there on the rim of the table. She strained one arm toward it behind his back, but it fell a finger-length short, for she could only use the forearm because the upper arm was pinned under his. She pushed forward against him unexpectedly, instead of pulling away as she had been doing. He wasn’t expecting the impulse and had to take a couple of steps back to hold his equilibrium. Her flexing fingers snatched up the cigarette, and she jabbed it into the drum of his ear, coal-forward.

He didn’t cry out, but he recoiled like a bounced ball and let go of her. He bent his head over to one side as though his neck had been broken, and kept pounding at his ear with one hand, and stamped his heel on the floor twice.