Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“No, bud isn’t going to keep out of this,” the first one told him.

She sensed the blow rather than saw it. A swift rush of air, and then she felt the jar, the impact, at secondhand as the bully’s body jolted. His hold on her arm disintegrated, and he kited back against the wall in an upright sprawl, his arms spread out and his legs spread out. He didn’t have a counterblow in him. He scuttled crabwise farther along the wall a yard or two, to widen the distance between himself and any possible second blow. Then he called out vengefully: “You know what she is, don’t you!”

“No, but I know what you are!” growled the other man, and he took an ominous step toward him.

That ended the incident. The pavement-rat promptly turned tail and scurried from sight through the sprinkling of people standing about.

Some of them were still staring curiously at Marie. She averted her gaze and said in a smothered voice, more to herself than to him, “Oh, let me get out of here!”

“Come on,” he said, taking her protectively by the arm. “I’ll walk you.”

From a safe distance, an epithet came zig-zagging back through the scattered people moving along the sidewalk. “Whoremaster!”

She heard it, and she shivered a little, defensively. She couldn’t tell whether or not he had too.

When they had reached the corner he stopped, as though he intended leaving her there. “Which way do you go now?” he said.

“As a matter of fact,” she told him lamely, “I live up the other way. The same direction he went in. But I was afraid if I went that way myself, I might run into him a second time.”

“I’ll walk back with you along the other side of the street,” he volunteered. “That way we can spot him if he’s still hanging around.”

“I’m giving you an awful lot of trouble.”

“No trouble,” he said reassuringly.

Along the way back, he remarked: “He got off easy, at that. Anybody else would’ve called the police on him.”

She dropped her eyes without answering. She knew why she hadn’t. Her own guilty conscience had kept her hands tied.

“This is it,” she said finally.

They both stopped uncertainly, not knowing how to bring the brief association to a deft close.

“You’ll be all right now,” he said.

“I hope so,” she said. “The only thing is. I come by this way every night on my way home from work. I hope he doesn’t find out about that.” A moment after it was out, she wished she hadn’t said it. It sounded as though she were looking for an excuse to see him again, and in all sincerity she hadn’t meant it that way.

“Well, look,” he said, “I could wait there by the bus-stop, walk you back to your door. The first night or two, anyway. Maybe after that you won’t have to worry about him any more. Around what lime do you usually get there?”

“No. Oh, no,” she balked volubly. “That would be asking too much. I couldn’t let you do that. That would be making a regular bodyguard out of you.”

He touched his finger to where his hat-brim would have been if he’d been wearing a hat. Somehow she knew he’d be there the next night.

He was.

Nothing memorable was said, but they were beginning to become better acquainted more by what was left unspoken than by the words they used.

She hadn’t had her meal yet when she met him, but rather than risk having him think she was trying to get a free meal out of him by referring to it, she refrained from mentioning it and did without it instead. After he’d left her at the door, she went upstairs and made herself a cup of instant coffee from a jar of it she kept there for use on Sunday mornings. She felt the alternative she had chosen to be the eminently more preferable one of the two: a full meal alone, or a cup of instant coffee with his company along the way home.

While she was drinking it, she sat there thinking about him.

Her thoughts were pleasant ones.

The following evening, the bus-stop again. This time he was the one who said: “I haven’t eaten yet. Have you?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll go Dutch with you.”

“I don’t do that,” he said firmly, but then he smiled to take some of the rebuke out of it.

At the table he told her, “I hadn’t eaten yet last night either when I met you, but I was afraid to ask you, afraid you’d turn me down. Would you?”

She thought back carefully. Then she said, “Yes, I would.”

“But you didn’t tonight,” he said.

All she said was, “I know you a day longer.”

She ordered frugally out of consideration for him, reading the menu-card from the right-hand side, where the price was, across to the left, where the item was. She received an impression that he was aware of what she was doing, and liked her all the better for it, though he wouldn’t have wanted to admit it.

Next, he picked her up at the candy-store at closing-time, instead of waiting for her at the other end of the bus-run. “Hello, Marie,” he said a little diffidently, as though wondering whether she’d approve his calling her by her first name.

She answered that for him forthwith. “Hello, Don,” she said. “Be with you in just a few minutes, as soon as I finish locking up.”

Acquaintanceship rapidly became friendship, friendship rapidly became fondness. Fondness started to ripen toward—

She realized he would have had to work terribly hard at disillusioning her to overcome the initial advantage he had started out with: her gratitude for the way he had taken her part and extricated her from her difficulty with the sidewalk-dizard.

Something he’d said kept coming back to her. It’s a lonely town when you’re by yourself.

One night they were sitting in a snack-bar lingering over a couple of cups of coffee, when he started talking to her about himself. About the part of him, that is, that dated from before she had known him. In every friendship, and in every love where the love has outstripped the time required for a true, deep understanding of one another, a time comes for one to tell the other the things about himself that he or she does not yet know. Sometimes little things, sometimes big. Even as he was speaking she realized dimly that she would have to face up to this herself some day, and in her case it was no mere anecdote that was to be told. But as yet this was only a tiny black speck in a whole vast sky of blue, too far away to be feared or thought about.

He didn’t speak well and he didn’t speak artfully, his words were commonplace and sometimes badly put, and sometimes halt and slow in coming, for lack of extensive-enough vocabulary. But it was his story, and so she drank in every word, cheeks propped within her cupped hands, elbows on tabletop.

His mother had died when he was no more than three or four, so he was left with no impression of her. After a fairly longish interval studded with feminine overnight house-guests, his father finally married a fat, ugly-tempered blonde, who never got fully dressed and who lay sprawled on a settee all day drinking beer through the holes punched in cans. This woman developed a hatred of her predecessor, and by the time she was through had managed to discard or get rid of every reminder or memento of her that was to be found around the house. All but one, the living reminder, which there was no way for her to discard or get rid of. So she found another way to vent her venom.

She fell into the habit of spanking him unmercifully while his father was at work. For anything, for nothing, for everything. If he looked at her, she spanked him for that. “Whaddye lookin’ at me for? I’ll teach you not to look at me!” If he didn’t look at her, remembering the last spanking, then she spanked him for not looking. “Look at me when I’m talking to ya! I’ll teach you not to turn your head away!”