Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

Guy stood up. “I want to take a walk.”

Bruno slammed his palms together. “Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?”

The wall before his eyes pulsed rhythmically, as if it were about to spring apart. Murder. The word sickened him, terrified him. He wanted to break away from Bruno, get out of the room, but a nightmarish heaviness held him. He tried to steady himself by straightening out the wall, by understanding what Bruno was saying, because he could feel there was logic in it somewhere, like a problem or a puzzle to be solved.

Bruno’s tobacco-stained hands jumped and trembled on his knees. “Airtight alibis!” he shrieked. “It’s the idea of my life! Don’t you get it? I could do it sometime when you’re out of town and you could do it when I was out of town.”

Guy understood. No one could ever, possibly, find out.

“It would give me a great pleasure to stop a career like Miriam’s and to further a career like yours.” Bruno giggled. “Don’t you agree she ought to be stopped before she ruins a lot of other people? Sit down, Guy!”

She hasn’t ruined me, Guy wanted to remind him, but Bruno gave him no time.

“I mean, just supposing the setup was that. Could you do it? You could tell me all about where she lived, you know, and I could do the same for you, as good as if you lived there. We could leave fingerprints all over the place and only drive the dicks batty!” He snickered. “Months apart, of course, “and strictly no communication. Christ, it’s a cinch!” He stood up and nearly toppled, getting his drink. Then he was saying, right in Guy’s face, with suffocating confidence: “You could do it, huh, Guy? Wouldn’t be any hitches, I swear. I’d fix everything, I swear, Guy.”

Guy thrust him away, harder than he had intended. Bruno rose resiliently from the window seat. Guy glanced about for air, but the walls presented an unbroken surface. The room had become a little hell. What was he doing here? How and when had he drunk so much?

“I’m positive you could,” Bruno frowned.

Shut up with your damned theories, Guy wanted to shout back, but instead his voice came like a whisper: “I’m sick of this.”

He saw Bruno’s narrow face twist then in a queer way—in a smirk of surprise, a look that was eerily omniscient and hideous. Bruno shrugged affably.

“Okay. I still say it’s a good idea and we got the absolutely perfect setup right here. It’s the idea I’ll use. With somebody else, of course. Where you going?”

Guy had at last thought of the door. He went out and opened another door onto the platform where the cooler air smashed him like a reprimand and the train’s voice rose to an upbraiding blare. He added his own curses of himself to the wind and the train, and longed to be sick.

“Guy?”

Turning, he saw Bruno slithering past the heavy door.

“Guy, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Guy said at once, because Bruno’s face shocked him. It was doglike in its self-abasement.

“Thanks, Guy.” Bruno bent his head, and at that instant the pound-pound-pound of the wheels began to die away, and Guy had to catch his balance.

He felt enormously grateful, because the train was stopping. He slapped Bruno’s shoulder. “Let’s get off and get some air!”

They stepped out into a world of silence and total blackness.

“The hell’s the idea?” Bruno shouted. “No lights!”

Guy looked up. There was no moon either. The chill made his body rigid and alert. He heard the homely slap of a wooden door somewhere. A spark grew into a lantern ahead of them, and a man ran with it toward the rear of the train where a boxcar door unrolled a square of light. Guy walked slowly toward the light, and Bruno followed him.

Far away on the flat black prairie a locomotive wailed, on and on, and then again, farther away. It was a sound he remembered from childhood, beautiful, pure, lonely. Like a wild horse shaking a white mane. In a burst of companionship, Guy linked his arm through Bruno’s.

“I don’t wanna walkl” Bruno yelled, wrenching away and stopping. The fresh air was wilting him like a fish.

The train was starting. Guy pushed Bruno’s big loose body aboard.

“Nightcap?” Bruno said disspiritedly at his door, looking tired enough to drop.

“Thanks, I couldn’t.”

Green curtains muffled their whispers.

“Don’t forget to call me in the morning. I’ll leave the door unlocked. If I don’t answer, come on in, huh?”

Guy lurched against the walls of green curtains as he made his way to his berth.

Habit made him think of his book as he lay down. He had left it in Bruno’s room. His Plato. He didn’t like the idea of its spending the night in Bruno’s room, or of Bruno’s touching it and opening it.

Three

He had called Miriam immediately, and she had arranged to meet him at the high school that lay between their houses.

Now he stood in a corner of the asphalt gamefield, waiting. She would be late, of course. Why had she chosen the high school, he wondered. Because it was her own ground? He had loved her when he had used to wait for her here.

Overhead, the sky was a clear strong blue. The sun poured down moltenly, not yellow but colorless, like something grown white with its own heat. Beyond the trees, he saw the top of a slim reddish building he did not know, that had gone up since he had been in Metcalf two years ago. He turned away. There was no human being in sight, as if the heat had caused everyone to abandon the school building and even the homes of the neighborhood. He looked at the broad gray steps that spilled from the dark arch of the school doors. He could still remember the inky, faintly sweaty smell on the fuzzy edges of Miriam’s algebra book. He could still see the MIRIAM penciled on the edge of its pages, and the drawing of the girl with the Spencerian marcel wave on the flyleaf, when he opened the book to do her problems for her. Why had he thought Miriam any different from all the others?

He walked through the wide gate between the crisscross wire fence and looked up College Avenue again. Then he saw her, under the yellow-green trees that bordered the sidewalk. His heart began to beat harder, but he blinked his eyes with deliberate casualness. She walked at her usual rather stolid pace, taking her time. Now her head came into view, haloed by a broad, light-colored hat. Shadow and sun speckled her figure chaotically. She gave him a relaxed wave, and Guy pulled a hand out of his pocket, returned it, and went back into the gamefield, suddenly tense and shy as a boy. She knows about the Palm Beach job, he thought, that strange girl under the trees. His mother had told him, half an hour ago, that she had mentioned it to Miriam when Miriam last telephoned.

“Hello, Guy.” Miriam smiled and quickly closed her broad orangey-pink lips. Because of the space between her front teeth, Guy remembered.

“How are you, Miriam?” Involuntarily he glanced at her figure, plump but not pregnant looking, and it flashed through his mind she might have lied. She wore a brightly flowered skirt and a white short-sleeved blouse. Her big white pocketbook was of woven patent leather.

She sat down primly on the one stone bench that was in the shade, and asked him dull questions about his trip. Her face had grown fuller where it had always been full, on the lower cheeks, so that her chin looked more pointed. There were little wrinkles under her eyes now, Guy noticed. She had lived a long time, for twenty-two.

“In January,” she answered him in a flat voice. “In January the child’s due.”

It was two months advanced then. “I suppose you want to marry him.”