Dram of Poison

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Paul said, “Somebody picked it up and took it and there’s no way of finding out who.… The broadcast warning will either reach him or it won’t.”

  The two cops were listening quietly. The older one shifted his weight.

  “Maybe,” said Rosemary. “Maybe there is something we can do. You were there,” she said to the bus driver. “Did you recognize anybody else who was on the bus then?”

  “Hey?” said the bus driver, wrinkling his brow.

  “Anyone else we could find and ask? Somebody who was also there and might have noticed?”

  “Wait a minute.” The driver seemed to bristle up. “This stuff’s poison, hey?”

  Paul said. “Damned dangerous,” and looked angry. “He took it from my lab. He knew what it was. He should never … Oh, come home, Rosie.”

  “A stranger,” said Rosemary, still addressing the bus driver, “trusting in a label. Some stranger to us, who doesn’t want to die. People do trust labels.…”

  “Yes,” he said, “they got a right to. And there was my blonde.”

  “Blonde?”

  “Yeah, and while she wouldn’t … I don’t think. … Nobody,” said the bus driver forcefully, heaving himself away from his leaning position, “is going to poison my blonde!” He grew taller. “Is that your car?”

  “Who is this blonde?” the young policeman said moving in.

  “I don’t know her name.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “I don’t know where she lives.”

  “She was on the bus?”

  “Yen, she was on the bus.”

  “If you don’t know her … how come …?”

  “She doesn’t know that she’s my blonde—not yet. One of these days … Aw, I was biding my time. Now look,” the bus driver said, “I’m going. One thing I do know and that’s the stop she gets off at. I can find her. And nobody’s going to poison my blonde.”

  He set off toward Paul’s car.

  “Oh yes! Paul,” Rosemary cried, “Kenneth, come on! We’ll all go, find her. She might have noticed … Hurry, come on!”

  The whole group was streaming toward Paul’s car.

  The older policeman said, “Wait … I can call in, you know. I can get a prowl car there in seconds …”

  “Where?” said the driver. “When I don’t know where myself? All I got is the stop. Corner of Allen and the Boulevard. What can you do with that? Thanks, anyway, but I guess I got to go find her myself. I’ll know her when I see her, see?”

  “What about this bus?”

  “Life and death,” said the driver, with his hand on Paul’s car. “Let them fire me.” Paul was right behind him. “Give me the keys,” the driver said.

  “My car … I’ll drive.” Paul looked as if he were suffering. His mouth was grim.

  “You are an amateur,” said the bus driver, and took the keys out of Paul’s hand.

  Mr. Gibson knew only that Rosemary’s hands were pulling and hustling him. He and she got into the back seat. Paul got in beside the bus driver.

  “Good luck,” said the older policeman, rather kindly. “Call in, now.” The younger one was chewing grass.

  The bus driver was moving levers. Paul’s car surged backward, slipped out into traffic. It seemed to respond with pleasure to a master’s hand. “I can make better time, that’s all,” the bus driver said. “Driving’s my business. Every business has its skills.”

  “That’s all right,” Paul murmured.

  They were sailing back toward town.

  Chapter XV

  MY NAME’S LEE COFFEY,” said the bus driver suddenly. Paul straightened up with an effect of relaxing, of feeling better. “I’m Paul Townsend,” he said in something nearer his normal amiable voice. “A neighbor of the Gibsons’.”

  “I see. And the lady is Mrs. Gibson.”

  “Rosie,” said Paul, “this is Lee Coffey—”

  “Her name is Rosemary,” Mr. Gibson heard himself saying loudly. “My name is Kenneth Gibson. I am the man …”

  “How do, Mrs. Rosemary?” the bus driver said over his shoulder. “Say, Mr. Kenneth Gibson, what was it that was coming to you … you’d rather take poison?”

  Mr. Gibson tried to swallow with a dry mouth.

  Paul said quickly, “No, no, don’t talk about it. It was a temporary … He didn’t even know what he was doing. He must have been crazy. He’s all right now.”

  “What puts him all right, all of a sudden?” the bus driver said.

  “Why, he knows … he has friends. He’s got everything to live for.”

  “Candy?” said the bus driver.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I never could get that,” said the bus driver, sliding the car skillfully to a strategic position in the center lane. “How come—now you take a suicide sitting on a ledge up high, see …? People trying to talk him out of it, offer the same as lollypops. Everybody’s his friend, they tell him. Come home, the dog needs him. Or he can have beer. He can have chocolate.… Seems to me if a man gets to the point of taking his life he’s got more serious things in his mind. It’s no time for candy, is it?”

  “You are wrong,” said Mr. Gibson forcefully.

  “That so?”

  “There is one moment when a lollypop is enough, either way.”

  “I see,” said the bus driver. “Yeah …. well, you’d know. That’s very interesting.”

  The car moved. It was not speeding. But no second was lost by indecision or by fumbling. Mr. Gibson found himself admiring this with peculiar pleasure.

  “If you want to talk about it …” the bus driver said, and Paul said again, “No, no …”

  Mr. Gibson answered truthfully. “I’d like to talk to you about it. Not just now, I guess.” He felt expanded and relaxed in contact with a mind that interested him: A mind that cheerfully pried off a certain lid … a lid that had been stifling and muffling and shutting up that which is interesting.

  He looked sideways at Rosemary, and her eyes were visited by the ghost of a smile. “Tell me about your blonde, Mr. Coffey,” she said almost brightly.

  “Look at me, rushing to the rescue,” the bus driver said, “of a blonde who doesn’t know she’s mine. I’ll tell you a little bit I see her nearly every day. Watch for her, now. I’m getting to know her. I’m thinking of getting up the nerve to speak to her. Never have. Doesn’t matter. I already know that I like her a lot. So how can I let her get the poison? Will this offend her, Mrs. Gibson?”

  “Rosemary,” said Rosemary gravely. “No, it won’t offend her, Mr. Coffey. It won’t offend her at all.”

  “Call me Lee,” said the bus driver. “These are unusual circumstances. Listen, Rosemary, she is a beautiful blonde.”

  “You are a very interesting man,” said Rosemary.

  “That’s possible,” said Lee Coffey thoughtfully.

  It was Paul who came in with an ordinary question. “Have you been a bus driver long?”

  “Ten years. Since I got out of the Army. Because I like to think.”

  “Like to think?” Paul repeated after him, seeming to find this shockingly obscure.

  “Ruminate. Ruminate,” said the bus driver. “That’s why I like a useful but not creative job. You start pushing and trying to a purpose … or even just trying to make a million dollars … it warps your thinking. My thinking, anyhow. The kind I like.”

  Paul said, impatient with bewilderment, “How can you possibly find this girl, this blonde, whoever she is …?”

  “He’ll find her,” said Rosemary with parted lips. “Don’t you think so, Kenneth?”

  “I do,” said Mr. Gibson. “I think so.” He felt astonished. The car slipped up to a red light and stopped smoothly.

  “Mr. Coffey—Lee Suddenly Rosemary took in a great breath and threw herself on her knees in the tonneau. “Please help me? Tell me something?”

  “Sure if I can …”

  “You are an expert driver. I can see that you are. Will you
tell me … I believe you will know. I can believe you.”

  “What’s the trouble?” said the bus driver, sending them swiftly off the mark as the light changed.

  Mr. Gibson sat astonished while Rosemary knelt and poured out words toward this bus driver’s ear.

  “It is a foggy night,” she said. “I am driving. I am trying to be careful. I know … to the best of my knowledge … that I am on the right side of the road.”

  “Go ahead,” said the bus driver encouragingly.

  “I also think I know that there is a deep ditch to my right. I think we have come that far … you see?”

  “Yeah … yeah …”

  “All of a sudden there is a car coming head on … and he is on his left side of the road. I have to do something quick.”

  “Can’t deny that,” said Lee Coffey cheerfully.

  “I turned left,” said Rosemary intensely. “You see, I thought …” She buried her head on her arm.

  “So what happened?” asked the driver.

  “He turned to his right, so we collided. Please tell me. You tell me if I was wrong.”

  The bus driver turned the situation over in his mind. Meanwhile, they glided upon the boulevard, having already reached the spot where the divided street began. The scenery floated by.

  “You had three choices,” the man said calmly in a moment. “You could turn right, supposed to be proper … and take a chance on the ditch. Pretty sure to be dangerous. You could stay where you were because you are legal … and take the chance the other fella’s going to correct himself and turn off in time. That takes cold nerve and an awful lot of stubborn righteousness. Or, you can turn left as you did and figure to get around him on the clear side … even though it’s the wrong side … of the road. Hey?”

  “It seemed clear …”

  “Was it?”

  “Well, yes, actually it was clear. You see, I thought … I thought he might be confused and think he was on his right side. I didn’t know he’d turn off. How could I know that?’

  “You did no wrong,” Lee Coffey said gravely. “You tried for a solution. Who can do more? Makes sense to me.”

  Rosemary’s breath shuddered in. “But the result was that the car hit us on our right, and—Kenneth was hurt.… Only Kenneth was hurt. Not me. Tell me, please … did I mean to put him between me and that other car? Did I choose to hurt him rather than myself? Is that why I turned to the left, really?”

  “You just told me why you turned left, didn’t you?” Lee Coffey said.

  “I thought I was trying to save us both. But, you see … there was no ditch. I was mistaken about that. We hadn’t come to the place where the ditch began to be there, along the right side of the road.”

  “Fog,” said the bus driver. “O.K. You were on the right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He, the other fella, was on his left?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought there was this ditch?”

  “I think I thought—but Ethel—says, there’s no such thing as an accident. As if—as if … subconsciously I made happen what I wanted to happen …”

  “No such thing as an accident!” cried the bus driver. “Where has this Ethel been living?”

  “Wait,” said Rosemary, warningly. “She’s … very wise. She’s not stupid … and she’s good …”

  “She is, eh? Well, I’ll tell you something. Nobody’s that wise. There happen to be plenty of accidents.”

  “But are they? Really?”

  “The subconscious, hey?” said the bus driver. “Well, I see what she’s getting at, all right. Sure. Some people are accident-prone … this is a thing that’s been discovered. It’s like some people take to getting sick because they’d rather … Certainly. But not so, in your case.”

  “Not—?” Rosemary trembled.

  “How so?” demanded the bus driver. “What did your subsconscious do? Explain it to me. Did it go up in the ether someplace and have a conference with the other fella’s subconscious? He didn’t have any accident either if Ethel is right. Hey? So did your subconscious say to the other subconscious, ‘Look here, old chap, I’m fixing to have an accident. Is this O.K. with you? How about right now?” So the other subconscious says, ‘Fine, fine. Well met. Me, too. I was fixing to have an accident, myself … and now is as good a time as any. So here’s how we’ll work it …’ Aaah …” The bus driver gave an effect of spitting over the side. “Explain to me how these two subconsciouses met, there and then, if not accidentally? Or if you’re going to say … well, only one of them meant to do it … Now you got to admit the other one anyhow had an accident. So which one of you did … or didn’t? You or him? Hey?”

  Rosemary said nothing. She knelt as if in prayer.

  “Certainly,” Coffey continued, “there’d be no accidents if you could know everything. But who can know everything? You can anticipate just so much. You cannot—now I don’t care—you cannot always guess when who is going to do what, where. Neither you nor your subconscious, either! It’s too much! There’s too damned much going on in this universe. So there’s going to happen what we call accidents. You see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Rosemary. “Yes, I do.” She sighed deep.

  “Those who skin out of having accidents are the ones who take care, who look ahead and so forth. But on top of that they better have some very snappy reflexes. See? And even they don’t always skin out of all the things they meet—”

  “Rosemary,” said Mr. Gibson sternly. “Ethel never said this thing to you. She couldn’t have told you that you deliberately hurt me.”

  “Not deliberately. No—but she thinks I must have meant to, because I did,” Rosemary sobbed. “She keeps saying she doesn’t ‘blame’ me. She keeps saying she ‘understands.’ Oh, Kenneth, I’m sorry—I wouldn’t say a word against Ethel but this … this has been …”

  Paul said angrily, “I told you you shouldn’t pay any attention to Ethel.”

  “Easier said than done,” said the bus driver … bluntly, accurately, and astonishingly.

  “Doom,” murmured Mr. Gibson, recovering from a stunned sensation. “Yes—doom—well.…”

  “Now, the subconscious,” said the bus driver, throwing out one hand as if he had been lecturing all along and was starting a new paragraph. “It’s down there and it operates all right, something like they say. There’s a little more to it. For instance, why would you want to hurt him?”

  “Because—” said Rosemary indistinctly. “But it isn’t true.” She wiggled back up upon the seat.

  “I’d say you had an accident,” Lee Coffey told her. “For the love of Pete, Mike, and Maria … I don’t see the point of this Ethel!”

  Rosemary was crying.

  Mr. Gibson began to feel quite angry for Rosemary’s sake. “Ethel isn’t infallible, mouse,” he said indignantly. He felt a surge of malicious mischief, too. “I’ve heard Ethel say, for instance, that bus drivers are perfectly ruthless brutes. Now, obviously …”

  “What!” Lee Coffey raised his head. “Let me tell you, for your information, nobody’s got more ruth than us bus drivers. Ruth’s our business. It’s a job, takes a mighty responsible party and no joking. You got to drive in whatever weather, whatever traffic, and on schedule, and what you meet you meet with your mind on safety first. Listen, we got more ruth than any twenty-five private drivers in this world.” He was sputtering. “We can’t take chances. We aren’t free to. Passengers, pedestrians, school kids, nuts, drunks … we got to look out for everybody in the world. We got to handle it, and if we do have an accident, believe me, it is an accident. What’s this Ethel talking? Who is this Ethel?”

  “My sister,” said Mr. Gibson, tossed in the storm of this outburst, yet somehow wanting to laugh out loud, which seemed unsuitable.

  “Some sister,” said the bus driver gloomily.

  “She came to … take care of us … after the accident …”

  “I must confess,” said Paul, his syllables falli
ng rapidly, “that we don’t … Mama and Jeanie and I … we just don’t care too much for Ethel. She seems so cold and superior …”

  “My sister Ethel!” said Mr. Gibson.

  “Ruthless. Hey?” muttered the bus driver. “Every last one of us, hey? The whole category? ‘Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men …’”

  “You are fond of Shakespeare?” asked Mr. Gibson.

  “Sure, I am. Not only his language hits the spot: his music does, too. You like Shakespeare, don’t you?”

  “I like Shakespeare very much,” said Mr. Gibson with his hair rising on his head in delighted astonishment “Do you like Browning?” he asked with strange urgency.

  “Some of it. Quite a lot of it. Of course you got to get onto his system.”

  “He was kind of a lady’s man.”

  “The ladies were the ones who had the time to—you know—ruminate, in a refined way,” said Lee Coffey, “or they used to before they started being riveters and tycoons.”

  “Just so,” said Mr. Gibson almost comfortably.

  Rosemary was not weeping any more. She sat with her shoulder to his. “Did you ever hear Ethel speak of a blonde?” she said demurely.

  “Wha’d she say?” demanded the bus driver.

  But Paul Townsend was fidgeting. “Look, I don’t like to keep worrying,” he said plaintively, “but where is this blonde? She might have the poison herself, you know. She might be in danger. She might be dead. I don’t see how you can talk about Shakespeare and Browning!”

  The bus driver said calmly, “She must live within four or five blocks of this next corner. What time is it?”

  “Three twenty. Three twenty-two in fact.”

  “Yeah, well—not many take olive oil for a snack between meals.”

  “Oh, that’s true!” cried Rosemary, clapping her hands. “We have more time than we thought.”

  “Maybe,” said Mr. Gibson hopefully but he thought, within, where a twinge—the pain of life—was creeping. But there are accidents. He felt a sweet sense of expansion, and a piercing alarm, all together.

  Accidents are possible.

  Chapter XVI

  THERE WAS a light at the corner of Allen Street and the Boulevard. Lee Coffey turned right on Allen. Nobody said a word. Paul’s car mooched down the first block: the driver seemed to be testing the very air for the scent. The car crossed one intersection. Then, in the middle of the second block on Allen, it stopped.