Strangers on a Train

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Women like that draw men,” Bruno mumbled, “like garbage draws flies.”

  two

  The shock of Bruno’s words detached him from himself. “You must have had some unpleasant experiences yourself,” he remarked. But Bruno troubled by women was hard to imagine.

  “Oh, my father had one like that. Redhead, too. Named Carlotta.” He looked up, and the hatred for his father penetrated his fuzziness like a barb. “Fine, isn’t it? It’s men like my father keep ’em in business.”

  Carlotta. Guy felt he understood now why Bruno loathed Miriam. It seemed the key to Bruno’s whole personality, to the hatred of his father and to his retarded adolescence.

  “There’s two kinds of guys!” Bruno announced in a roaring voice, and stopped.

  Guy caught a glimpse of himself in a narrow panel mirror on the wall. His eyes looked frightened, he thought, his mouth grim, and deliberately he relaxed. A golf club nudged him in the back. He ran his fingertips over its cool varnished surface. The inlaid metal in the dark wood recalled the binnacle on Anne’s sailboat.

  “And essentially one kind of women!” Bruno went on. “Two-timers. At one end it’s two-timing and the other end it’s a whore! Take your choice!”

  “What about women like your mother?”

  “I never seen another woman like my mother,” Bruno declared. “I never seen a woman take so much. She’s good-looking, too, lots of men friends, but she doesn’t fool around with them.”

  Silence.

  Guy tapped another cigarette on his watch and saw it was 10:30. He must go in a moment.

  “How’d you find out about your wife?” Bruno peered up at him.

  Guy took his time with his cigarette.

  “How many’d she have?”

  “Quite a few. Before I found out.” And just as he assured himself it made no difference at all now to admit it, a sensation as of a tiny whirlpool inside him began to confuse him. Tiny, but realer than the memories somehow, because he had uttered it. Pride? Hatred? Or merely impatience with himself, because all that he kept feeling now was so useless? He turned the conversation from himself. “Tell me what else you want to do before you die.”

  “Die? Who said anything about dying? I got a few crackproof rackets doped out. Could start one some day in Chicago or New York, or I might just sell my ideas. And I got a lot of ideas for perfect murders.” Bruno looked up again with that fixity that seemed to invite challenge.

  “I hope your asking me here isn’t part of one of your plans.” Guy sat down.

  “Jesus Christ, I like you, Guy! I really do!”

  The wistful face pled with Guy to say he liked him, too. The loneliness in those tiny, tortured eyes! Guy looked down embarrassedly at his hands. “Do all your ideas run to crime?”

  “Certainly not! Just things I want to do, like—I want to give a guy a thousand dollars some day. A beggar. When I get my own dough, that’s one of the first things I’m gonna do. But didn’t you ever feel you wanted to steal something? Or kill somebody? You must have. Everybody feels those things. Don’t you think some people get quite a kick out of killing people in wars?”

  “No,” Guy said.

  Bruno hesitated. “Oh, they’d never admit it, of course, they’re afraid! But you’ve had people in your life you’d have liked out of the way, haven’t you?”

  “No.” Steve, he remembered suddenly. Once he had even thought of murdering him.

  Bruno cocked his head. “Sure you have. I see it. Why don’t you admit it?”

  “I may have had fleeting ideas, but I’d never have done anything about them. I’m not that kind of person.”

  “That’s exactly where you’re wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far—and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know!”

  “I don’t happen to agree,” Guy said tersely.

  “I tell you I came near murdering my father a thousand times! Who’d you ever feel like murdering? The guys with your wife?”

  “One of them,” Guy murmured.

  “How near did you come?”

  “Not near at all. I merely thought of it.” He remembered the sleepless nights, hundreds of them, and the despair of peace unless he avenged himself. Could something have pushed him over the line then? He heard Bruno’s voice mumbling, “You were a hell of a lot nearer than you think, that’s all I can say.” Guy gazed at him puzzledly. His figure had the sickly, nocturnal look of a croupier’s, hunched on shirtsleeved forearms over the table, thin head hanging. “You read too many detective stories,” Guy said, and having heard himself, did not know where the words had come from.

  “They’re good. They show all kinds of people can murder.”

  “I’ve always thought that’s exactly why they’re bad.”

  “Wrong again!” Bruno said indignantly. “Do you know what percentage of murders get put in the papers?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  “One twelfth. One twelfth! Just imagine! Who do you think the other eleven twelfths are? A lot of little people that don’t matter. All the people the cops know they’ll never catch.” He started to pour more Scotch, found the bottle empty, and dragged himself up. A gold penknife flashed out of his trousers pocket on a gold chain fine as a string. It pleased Guy aesthetically, as a beautiful piece of jewelry might have. And he found himself thinking, as he watched Bruno slash round the top of a Scotch bottle, that Bruno might murder one day with the little penknife, that he would probably go quite free, simply because he wouldn’t much care whether he were caught or not.

  Bruno turned, grinning, with the new bottle of Scotch. “Come to Santa Fe with me, huh? Relax for a couple days.”

  “Thanks, I can’t.”

  “I got plenty of dough. Be my guest, huh?” He spilled Scotch on the table.

  “Thanks,” Guy said. From his clothes, he supposed, Bruno thought he hadn’t much money. They were his favorite trousers, these gray flannels. He was going to wear them in Metcalf and in Palm Beach, too, if it wasn’t too hot. Leaning back, he put his hands in his pockets and felt a hole at the bottom of the right one.

  “Why not?” Bruno handed him his drink. “I like you a lot, Guy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a good guy. Decent, I mean. I meet a lot of guys—no pun—but not many like you. I admire you,” he blurted, and sank his lip into his glass.

  “I like you, too,” said Guy.

  “Come with me, huh? I got nothing to do for two or three days till my mother comes. We could have a swell time.”

  “Pick up somebody else.”

  “Cheeses, Guy, what d’you think I do, go around picking up traveling companions? I like you, so I ask you to come with me. One day even. I’ll cut right over from Metcalf and not even go to El Paso. I’m supposed to see the Canyon.”

  “Thanks, I’ve got a job as soon as I finish in Metcalf.”

  “Oh.” The wistful, admiring smile again. “Building something?”

  “Yes, a country club.” It still sounded strange and unlike himself, the last thing he would have thought he’d be building, two months ago. “The new Palmyra in Palm Beach.”

  “Yeah?”

  Bruno had heard of the Palmyra Club, of course. It was the biggest in Palm Beach. He had even heard they were going to build a new one. He had been to the old one a couple of times.

  “You designed it?” He looked down at Guy like a hero-worshiping little boy. “Can you draw me a picture of it?”

  Guy drew a quick sketch of the buildings in the back of Bruno’s address book and signed his name, as Bruno wanted. He explained the wall that would drop to make the lower floor one great ballroom extending onto the terrace, the louver windows he hoped to get permission for that would eliminate air-conditioning. He grew happy as he talked, and tears of excitement came in his eyes, though he kept his voice low. How could he talk so i
ntimately to Bruno, he wondered, reveal the very best of himself? Who was less likely to understand than Bruno?

  “Sounds terrific,” Bruno said. “You mean, you just tell them how it’s gonna look?”

  “No. One has to please quite a lot of people.” Guy put his head back suddenly and laughed.

  “You’re gonna be famous, huh? Maybe you’re famous now.”

  There would be photographs in the news magazines, perhaps something in the newsreels. They hadn’t passed on his sketches yet, he reminded himself, but he was so sure they would. Myers, the architect he shared an office with in New York, was sure. Anne was positive. And so was Mr. Brillhart. The biggest commission of his life. “I might be famous after this. It’s the kind of thing they publicize.”

  Bruno began to tell him a long story about his life in college, how he would have become a photographer if something hadn’t happened at a certain time with his father. Guy didn’t listen. He sipped his drink absently, and thought of the commissions that would come after Palm Beach. Soon, perhaps, an office building in New York. He had an idea for an office building in New York, and he longed to see it come into being. Guy Daniel Haines. A name. No longer the irksome, never quite banished awareness that he had less money than Anne.

  “Wouldn’t it, Guy?” Bruno repeated.

  “What?”

  Bruno took a deep breath. “If your wife made a stink now about the divorce. Say she fought about it while you were in Palm Beach and made them fire you, wouldn’t that be motive enough for murder?”

  “Of Miriam?”

  “Sure.”

  “No,” Guy said. But the question disturbed him. He was afraid Miriam had heard of the Palmyra job through his mother, that she might try to interfere for the sheer pleasure of hurting him.

  “When she was two-timing you, didn’t you feel like murdering her?”

  “No. Can’t you get off the subject?” For an instant, Guy saw both halves of his life, his marriage and his career, side by side as he felt he had never seen them before. His brain swam sickeningly, trying to understand how he could be so stupid and helpless in one and so capable in the other. He glanced at Bruno, who still stared at him, and, feeling slightly befuddled, set his glass on the table and pushed it fingers’ length away.

  “You must have wanted to once,” Bruno said with gentle, drunken persistence.

  “No.” Guy wanted to get out and take a walk, but the train kept on and on in a straight line, like something that would never stop. Suppose Miriam did lose him the commission. He was going to live there several months, and he would be expected to keep on a social par with the directors. Bruno understood such things very well. He passed his hand across his moist forehead. The difficulty was, of course, that he wouldn’t know what was in Miriam’s mind until he saw her. He was tired, and when he was tired, Miriam could invade him like an army. It had happened so often in the two years it had taken him to turn loose of his love for her. It was happening now. He felt sick of Bruno. Bruno was smiling.

  “Shall I tell you one of my ideas for murdering my father?”

  “No,” Guy said. He put his hand over the glass Bruno was about to refill.

  “Which do you want, the busted light socket in the bathroom or the carbon monoxide garage?”

  “Do it and stop talking about it!”

  “I’ll do it, don’t think I won’t! Know what else I’ll do some day? Commit suicide if I happen to feel like committing suicide, and fix it so it looks like my worst enemy murdered me.”

  Guy looked at him in disgust. Bruno seemed to be growing indefinite at the edges, as if by some process of deliquescence. He seemed only a voice and a spirit now, the spirit of evil. All he despised, Guy thought, Bruno represented. All the things he would not want to be, Bruno was, or would become.

  “Want me to dope out a perfect murder of your wife for you? You might want to use it sometime.” Bruno squirmed with self-consciousness under Guy’s scrutiny.

  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 b
urst of companionship, Guy linked his arm through Bruno’s.

  “I don’t wanna walk!” 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.