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

“I’ll have to go to the pharmacy and get some kind of a salve.”

She heated up and brought him coffee-and-milk, and some bread and other stuff that she always kept there for her own use in the mornings, and sat opposite him at the little pushed-over-to-the-wall table, watching him eat. Once she reached over and stroked back a tendril of hair that had come down before his eye.

“What are you going to do?” she murmured finally, low, as if afraid to hear the answer.

He blew out the match he was holding. “One thing I’m not going to do, is ever go back there again alive. For me, that’s over.”

“But how—?” The worry on her face finished it without words.

“All I need is a breathing-spell, one day or two, to rest up and clean myself up.”

“You’ll stay here with me,” she said briefly, as if there were no sense in even discussing that part of it. “We’ll manage it somehow. But then—?”

“I know a guy who’ll fix me up some fake papers. With them, I can get some job on a ship, outbound. Jump it at the other end, and start all over again clean. It doesn’t matter where. Then as soon as I get my bearings, you — you’ll come, won’t you?”

“ Any where,” she said fiercely. “The minute you say the word.”

“It’s asking a lot,” he admitted, as if telling it to himself.

“What is a lot?” she said. “And what is a little? There are no measurements when you — care. It is all one, one-size.”

He sat staring into the distance, hunched over his own lap, hands folded together across his knees. She wondered what he saw there — their future?

After a while she told him about it. This was the time to, to make them more one. When he needed somebody to be close the most. “I’m going to have your baby. Our baby.”

“You fool,” was what he said to that at first. “You could have gotten out of that. You’ve been around.” And then he took the hardness out of the words by putting the flat of his hand on top of her head and rumpling her hair in a rough-neck and yet an almost tender sort of way, and scraped his knuckle past her chin.

“I didn’t want to,” she said softly. And left the “get out of it” part unsaid.

He was testing it in his mind. “A guy likes a kid of his own. To show that he passed through this world at least once. Imagine, me. Me of all people. A kid of my own. How the old crowd would laugh. Lejeune, that was too fast for any cop. And too slick for any woman. Well, the cops got me first. And a woman’s got me now.”

He looked grimly up at her from under his thick black lashes, which were the only thing left of his old looks. “You take good care of it, hear? You watch over it careful. If anything happens to it, I’ll break your loving jaw.”

She framed his face with her hands and kissed him, laughing but with a softness in her eyes that was more than just the light in the room shining back from them.

“You haven’t even got it yet, and you’re already growling like an old, experienced father.”

When she put out the light, they lay close to one another for a while, quiet and happy just to be together. Then in the darkness, his soft murmur sounded in her ear.

“Let’s make doubly sure, shall we?”

Tomorrow was the big opening, the most trying day of the year for a fashion-house mannequin. Like an opening-night is for an actress. She had to be there early, she had to be on her toes. And she’d been rehearsing all day, today just past. But — he was Gerard, her Gerard and nobody else’s.

“Let’s,” she whispered back to him in the dark.

Later, he was asleep but she was still awake, thinking about them and what their chances were. Something from the radio broadcast came back to her: “This man is believed to be armed.” And then something that he had said himself. “I’m never going back there again alive.” She wondered if he really had a gun on him or not. She hadn’t thought about it the whole time until now. Now that she recalled, she hadn’t been able to see one anywhere on him. But if he did have one on him, it might cost him his life. Men were so quick about using things like that, and he in particular was so hot-headed, she knew that well.

He was sleeping with his shirt on, turned toward her, lying on his side. She reached out carefully and felt his shoulder, the uppermost one, through the wide-spread gap of his shirt-front. There were several bands of tape spliced around it and going through his armpit. She reached around to the back, to his shoulder-blade, and the gun was there, bedded in some kind of a makeshift holster. She couldn’t tell what it was (canvas perhaps or gunnysack fiber, hurriedly put together along the way) except that it held it there, so that he could swing his opposite arm up overshoulder and pull it out with one swift move.

She started to ease it slyly out, a millimeter at a time. There was nothing to impede it, the impromptu holder or sac had no top to it, there was no lid to snap up as a leather one would have had. Then when it was halfway out, she stopped and began going over the possible consequences of what she was about to do.

No, it wasn’t fair to do this, disarm him in his sleep this way like a thief in the night, leave him vulnerable to his enemy. It wasn’t fair; he had to have his chance to defend himself. Right or wrong, she wouldn’t be the one to do this to him. If their positions had been reversed, she couldn’t see him doing this to her, she knew his attitudes too well.

She let the gun slide back in again, and he went on sleeping, never knowing.

In the morning she dressed swiftly and quietly, and left him there still sleeping in the pale-blue early morning light, his face looking like a pale-blue terra cotta, with a little scribble alongside the bed for him to find in case he awoke.

“I’ve only gone down the street a minute to get some foodstuffs. If you hear someone at the door, don’t jump at them, it’s only me. L.”

On her way back inside, burdened with bags and bundles like an overladen coolie, she ran into the fat woman who was in charge of the house.

The latter grinned with a wizened monkey-like expression as she saw her go by. “It pays to buy in large quantities like that, it’s more economical,” she observed. “You almost have enough there for two people.”

Leone halted and whirled around to face her. “Have I?” she challenged.

“One shouldn’t be alone too much,” the woman went on.

Now what does that mean? Leone wondered, beginning to tighten up inside. She said, “If you mean me, haven’t I always been? What about it?”

“After a while you — you know, you start talking to yourself.”

She overheard us, last night, Leone told herself, with a cold stricken sensation taking hold of her around the heart. “What do you do, come up and listen outside my door?” she flared up angrily. “Well, the next time, let me know what I say to myself! I want to know how good I sound!” And she swung around and continued on up the stairs, but with a chipper indifference she was far from feeling.

He was still asleep; he’d never even heard her leave. She put her things down, and then went over to where he was lying and stood looking at him for a moment. One of those gravely sweet, inscrutable looks that love can give at times. Then she bent over and kissed him, soft as a petal dropping, on the forehead.

His lids flickered and started to go up several times, then lost their battle and settled down once more. But a spark of consciousness had been ignited that was slower in dying down again. He went “Mm,” and his head stirred a little, and she knew that he could understand her, even though he seemed not to. Or he would remember what she had said when he fully woke up.