Эд Макбейн - Running From Legs and Other Stories

We never did catch our intruder; I’m not sure we were trying very hard. Besides, word of our vigilance spread all over the island, and our man would have been a fool to pay a return visit. But Jason’s idea was a rewarding one nonetheless. We had all been subjected either to watches or guard duty during our time in the service, but this was somehow different. It was October, and not too cold, and there was something almost pioneerlike about setting the alarm and waking in the middle of the night, touching Joan’s warm shoulder where she lay asleep in the sofa bed, and then going up to the roof where Norman was waiting to be relieved. Each night Mary provided a thermos of hot coffee for the men standing watch. Norman would hand over the flashlight, and I would pour myself a cup and then lean against the parapet wall, alone, looking up at the stars or out over the river. There was a lot of sky over North Brother Island. The stars were sharp and bright against it; the air was crisp. The factories on the mainland burned with activity all night, their long stacks sending up pillars of gray smoke tinted with the glow of neon. The prison on Riker’s Island was dark except for probing fingers of light that occasionally pierced the blackness. There was hardly any river traffic, no hooting of tugs, no pounding diesels. Out on the dark water you could hear only the solemn gonging of the buoy marking South Brother Island and beneath that, if you listened very carefully, the gentle hiss of waves slipping almost soundlessly against the walls of the island.

I thought a lot of things alone on the roof of Finley Hall. I wondered about the future and about what was in store for Joan and me and our newborn son. I thought ahead to graduation; I thought of our canceled Paris sojourn, perhaps lost to us forever. I thought a lot about marriage and about what my responsibilities were supposed to be. The night encouraged speculation. I was twenty-one years old, and the world lay ahead of me, and I searched the darkness for answers it could not and did not contain.

That was in October.

In December, Herbie and Shirley and their two children moved into the building. I must describe them now as they first seemed to me and not as I came to see them later, after New Year’s Eve. They were, to begin with, much older than most of the people on the island. Herbie was perhaps thirty-eight, and his wife was at least thirty-five. We were not still young enough to believe that anyone past thirty was middle-aged, but Herbie and Shirley were certainly beyond us in years, and this made them strangers to us. Then, too, they were from someplace in the Middle West; he had chosen to be discharged in New York City so that he could go to television school there before going back home with his family. So, in addition to their age, they spoke with an accent that was unfamiliar to most of us and grating on the ears. But, most important, Herbie and Shirley were not attractive people. He was short and stout and always seemed to have a beard stubble, even immediately after he had shaved. He was nearsighted and wore thick spectacles that magnified his eyes to almost Martian proportions. He was balding at the back of his head, unevenly, so that he always seemed in need of a haircut. He wore brown shoes with a blue suit, and he moved with a lumbering, ponderous gait that seemed designed to infuriate speedier people. His wife seemed to be a perfect soul mate. She called him “Herbert,” and she looked at him with adoring eyes that were a pale, washed-out blue in a shapeless plain face. She had borne two children and apparently never bothered with post-natal exercises; her figure, like her face, was shapeless, and she draped it with clothes in the poorest taste. She made only one concession to beauty, and that was in the form of a home bleach job on her hair, which left it looking like lifeless straw. Watching them walk to the ferry together was like watching a comic vaudeville routine. You always expected one or the other of them to take a pratfall, and when neither did, it only heightened their comic effect.

The walls on North Brother Island were hastily erected and paper-thin; Herbie and his wife lived in the apartment immediately next door to ours. It was impossible not to hear them in the middle of the night.

“Herbert,” she would say, “do you think I’m beautiful?”

“I think you’re very beautiful,” Herbie would answer in his thick Midwestern voice.

“Do you think I have a good figure?”

“I think you have a beautiful figure, Shirley.”

There would be a pause. Joan and I would lie motionless on our sofa bed. The night was still.

“Herbert, do you love me?”

“I love you, darling. I love you.”

Joan got out of bed one night and whispered, “I don’t want to listen. Please, do we have to listen?”

“Honey, what can we do?” I whispered back.

“I don’t know. I’m going into Timmy’s room. I don’t want to listen. I think...” She shook her head. “It makes me feel that maybe we sound that way, too.”

We went into Timmy’s room. He was sleeping peacefully, his blond head turned into the pillow. We sat together in the old easy chair near his crib, Joan on my lap, her head on my shoulder. We sat quietly for a long time. The December winds raced over the river and shuddered against the windows in the small room.

Her mouth close to my ear, Joan whispered, “Are you very angry with me?”

“About what?”

“Paris. About not going.”

“No,” I said, but I suppose my voice could not hide my disappointment.

“I didn’t want a baby so soon, you know,” she said.

“I know, darling.”

“But I do love him. He seems so helpless. Doesn’t he seem helpless to you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Do you wonder about us?” Joan asked.

“Sometimes.”

“I do. A lot. I sometimes feel... I don’t know... I feel we never talk to each other much any more, the way we used to when we were single.” She paused. She was silent for a very long time. Then she said, “I don’t want to get lost.”

“We won’t get lost.”

“I don’t want to get lost in people.”

“We won’t.”

“I feel so... so terribly afraid that...” She shook her head.

“What is it, darling?”

“I have the feeling I never finished being a girl,” she whispered, “and now I have to be a woman. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I feel like sitting on the dock where the ferry comes in and just let my feet hang in the water, and then I remember I’m a mother now and can’t do that, but at the same time everything here seems so... as if, well, as if I could do that and nobody would mind very much or even notice it.” She paused again. “I’m going to say something terrible.”

“What?”

“I wish we hadn’t had the baby.” She took a deep breath. “I wish we could have gone to Paris.”

“We’ll go one day,” I whispered.

“Will it matter then?” she said, and she began weeping softly against my shoulder, and I could feel her trembling in my arms. In a little while we went back to bed. The apartment next door was silent.

My first real encounter with Herbie came shortly after Christmas. Joan’s mother had given us a television set as a present, and I was busy at the pay telephone on the second-floor landing of Finley when Herbie came lumbering up the steps. I guess he couldn’t help overhearing my conversation, which was with a television man, and which concerned the price of putting up an antenna and installing the set. He lingered awhile at the top of the landing, and when I hung up, he asked, “How much does he want?”

“Too much,” I said.

Herbie smiled. There was a sweetness to his smile that contradicted his absurd appearance and his horrible speech. He offered his smile the way some men offer their hands for a handshake, openly and without guile.