Ed McBain - He Who Hesitates

"Hey," the voice behind him said, "wait up!"

He recognized the voice with surprise and turned to see Amelia running to catch up with him. She was wearing a pale-blue coat with the collar pulled up high against her chin, her head covered with a vibrant-blue kerchief. She came up to him panting, vapor pluming from her mouth. Catching her breath, she said, "You sure are a fast walker."

"I didn't think you were coming."

"The boss had to arrange for relief. It took a few minutes."

"Well, I'm glad you're here," Roger said.

"I'm not sure / am," Amelia said, and laughed. Her complexion was smooth and unmarked, her color a warm brown, her eyes a shade darker, her hair beneath the electric-blue kerchief a black as deep as night. When she laughed, a crooked tooth showed in the front of her mouth, and sometimes she lifted her hand self-consciously to cover the tooth, but only when she remembered. She had good legs, and she was wearing dark-blue, low-heeled pumps. She was still out of breath, but she kept up with him as he began crossing the street, and them impulsively took his arm.

"There," she said, "what the hell! If we're doing this, we might as well do it, huh?"

"What?"

"I mean, if I'm with you, I'm with you. So I'm with you, so I'll take your arm the same way I'd take the arm of a colored fellow I was with, right?"

"Right," Roger said.

"I've never been out with a white man before."

"Neither have I," Roger said, and burst out laughing. "With a colored girl, I mean."

"That's good," Amelia said.

"Why?"

"I don't know. I wouldn't like to think you were one of those guys who just dug, you know, all colored girls. That would make it a drag."

"There isn't a single colored girl in all Carey," Roger said.

"They're all married?" Amelia asked seriously, and he burst out laughing again. "What's the matter?"

"I mean there aren't any," Roger said. "Not a one."

"That's too bad," Amelia said. "What do you do for race riots?"

"We pick on Jews," Roger said, and realized he had made a pretty good joke, and was pleased when Amelia laughed at what he'd said. He didn't really know why there was any humor in his comment, except that the people in Carey didn't pick on Jews. In fact there was one Jew in all of Carey, a man named Samuel Silverstein, who ran the hardware store and who had arthritis, poor man, why would anyone want to go picking on him? He knew he never would have said anything like that to his mother or to Buddy, but somehow being with Amelia made him seem witty and daring, which was why he had made the joke. He was suddenly very glad she'd come after him.

"You always go chasing strange men in the streets?" he asked.

"Sure. You always go telling strange girls to hang up their aprons and pretend to be sick and—"

"A headache isn't sick," Roger said.

" — and meet you on street corners, and then disappear?"

"Right into thin air!" he said. "Mandrake the Magician!"

"That's what you do, huh?"

"Yeah, I'm a magician," Roger said, beaming.

"You go into drugstores and work your charms on poor little colored girls."

"Are you poor?" he said.

"I'm very poor."

"Really?"

"Hey, mister, you think I'd joke about being poor?" Amelia said. "What the hell is that to joke about? I'm very poor. I mean it. I, am, very, poor."

"I am very rich," Roger said.

"Good. I knew one day I'd meet a white millionaire who'd take me away from it all," Amelia said.

"That's me."

"Mandrake."

"Yeah," he said. "Yesterday, I made one hundred and twenty-two dollars. How about that?"

"That's a lot of money."

"Today, I've only got, oh, maybe fifteen dollars of it left."

"Easy come, easy go," Amelia said, and shrugged.

"What I did was mail a hundred to my mother."

"Up in Gulchwater, right?"

"Up in Carey."

"Oh, I thought it was called Gulchwater Basin."

"No, it's called Carey."

"I thought you said it was Gulchwater Depot."

"No, Carey."

"Alongside Huddlesworth, right?"

"Huddleston."

"Where they toboggan." , "Where they ski." f "Right, I knew I had it," Amelia said.

"Anyway," Roger said, laughing, "I sent her — my mother — I sent her a hundred, and I paid four dollars for my room, and I bought the cards and some stamps and had some coffee and paid for Ralph's hot chocolate and—"

"Ralph?"

"A fellow I met." Roger paused. "He's a drug addict."

"You meet nice people," Amelia said.

"He was," Roger said. "A nice person, I mean."

"My mother has told each and every one of us in our house," Amelia said, "that if we ever touch any of that stuff, she will personally cripple us. She means it. | My mother is a very skinny woman made of iron. She ' would rather see us dead than on junk."

"Is it that easy to get?" Roger asked.

"If you have the money, you can get it. In this city, if you have the money, you can get anything you want."

"That's what Ralph said." [

"Ralph knows. Ralph is a very wise man."

"Anyway, here's what I've got left," Roger said, and I reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded packet of bills and transferred those to his left hand, and then reached into his pocket again for his loose change. The change totaled seventy-two cents, and the bills were two fives and four singles. "Fourteen dollars and seventy-two cents," he said.

"A millionaire. Just like you said."

"Right."

"Right," she said.

"What would you like to do?"

"I don't know," she said. "Show me the city. Show me your city."

"My city? This ain't my city, Amelia."

"I mean the white man's city."

"I wouldn't know his city from your city. I'm a stranger here."

"Looking for a friend outside the police station," she said suddenly.

"Yes," he said, and watched her.

"Who you never found."

"Who I never bothered looking for."

"Bad place to look," Amelia said. "Where are you going to take me, mister? Uptown, downtown, crosstown? Where?"

"I know where," he said.

"Where?"

"There's a place I've always wanted to go. My mother brought me to the city for the first time when I was ten years old, and we were suppposed to go then, but it rained that day. Come on," he said, and took her hand.

"Where?" she said.

"Come on."

The Ferris wheels were motionless, the roller-coaster tracks hung on wooden stilts against a forbidding February sky, devoid of hurtling cars or screaming youngsters. The boardwalk stands were sealed tight, shuttered against the wind that howled in over the ocean and raised whirling eddies of sand on the beach, leaping the iron-pipe railing and hurling itself hopelessly against the weathered boards. Last summer's newspapers fluttered into the air, yellowed and torn, flapping wildly like alien birds and then soaring over the minarets of an amusement called The Arabian Nights. The rides huddled beneath their canvas covers in seemingly expectant watchfulness, waiting for a sparrow, silent, motionless, the wind ripping at the covers and making a faint whistling sound as it caught in metal studs and struts. There were no barkers touting games of chance or skill, no vendors selling hot dogs or slices of pizza, no sound but the sound of the wind and the ocean.

The boardwalk benches were a flaking green.

An old man stood at the far end of the boardwalk, looking out over the ocean, unmoving.

"You've never been here before?" Amelia asked.

"No," Roger said.

"You picked the right time to come."

"It's kind of spooky, isn't it?" he said, and thought of Molly the night before.

"It's like standing on the edge of the world," Amelia said, and he turned to look at her curiously. "What is it?" she asked.

"I don't know. What you said. I felt that a minute ago. As if there was just the two of us standing on the edge of the world."