She pointed. “Right across the hall.”
“Oh,” he said. He remembered the night he had cried, and pushed the picture away in embarrassment. He turned away, hunting for a change of subject, any change. “Let’s go out.”
“All right.” Was that relief he detected in her voice?
They rode on a roller coaster and ate cotton candy and danced in an outdoor pavilion. He wondered aloud where he had ever learned to dance, but that was the only mention he made of the things which were troubling him until late in the evening. It was the first time he had consciously enjoyed being with Janie; it was an Occasion, rather than a way of life. He had never known her to laugh so easily, to be so eager to ride this and taste that and go yonder to see what was there. At dusk they stood side by side, leaning on a railing which overlooked the lake, watching the bathers. There were lovers on the beach, here and there. Hip smiled at the sight, turned to speak to Janie about it and was arrested by the strange wistfulness which softened her taut features. A surge of emotion, indefinable and delicate, made him turn away quickly. It was in part a recognition of the rarity of her introspection and an unwillingness to interrupt it for her; and partly a flash of understanding that her complete preoccupation with him was not necessarily all she wanted of life. Life had begun for him, to all intents and purposes, on the day she came to his cell. It had never occurred to him before that her quarter of a century without him was not the clean slate that his was.
Why had she rescued him? Why him, if she must rescue some one? And—why? What could she want from him? Was there something in his lost life that he might give her? If there was, he vowed silently, it was hers, whatever it might be; it was inconceivable that anything, anything at all she might gain from him would be of greater value than his own discovery of the life which produced it.
But what could it be?
He found his gaze on the beach and its small galaxy of lovers, each couple its own world, self-contained but in harmony with all the others adrift in the luminous dusk. Lovers … he had felt the tuggings of love … back somewhere in the mists, he couldn’t quite remember where, with whom … but it was there, and with it his old, old reflex, not until I’ve hunted him down and—But again he lost the thought. Whatever it was, it had been more important to him than love or marriage or a job or a colonelcy. (Colonelcy? Had he ever wanted to be a colonel?)
Well, then maybe it was a conquest. Janie loved him. She’d seen him and the lightning had struck and she wanted him, so she was going about it in her own way. Well, then! If that’s what she wanted …
He closed his eyes, seeing her face, the tilt of her head in that waiting, attentive silence; her slim strong arms and lithe body, her magic hungry mouth. He saw a quick sequence of pictures taken by the camera of his good male mind, but filed under “inactive” in his troubled, partial one: Janie’s legs silhouetted against the window, seen through the polychrome cloud of her liberty silk skirt. Janie in a peasant blouse, with a straight spear of morning sunlight bent and molded to her bare shoulder and the soft upper curve of her breast. Janie dancing, bending away and cleaving to him as if he and she were the gold leaves of an electroscope. (Where had he seen … worked with … an electroscope … Oh, of course! In the … But it was gone.) Janie barely visible in the deep churning dark, palely glowing through a mist of nylon and the flickering acid of his tears, strongly holding his hands until he quieted.
But this was no seduction, this close intimacy of meals and walks and long shared silences, with never a touch, never a wooing word. Lovemaking, even the suppressed and silent kind, is a demanding thing, a thirsty and yearning thing. Janie demanded nothing. She only … she only waited. If her interest lay in his obscured history she was taking a completely passive attitude, merely placing herself to receive what he might unearth. If something he had been, something he had done, was what she was after, wouldn’t she question and goad, probe and pry the way Thompson and Bromfield had done? (Bromfield? Who’s he?) But she never had, never.
No, it must be this other, this thing which made her look at lovers with such contained sadness, with an expression on her face like that of an armless man spell-bound by violin music….
Picture of Janie’s mouth, bright, still, waiting. Picture of Janie’s clever hands. Picture of Janie’s body, surely as smooth as her shoulder, as firm as her forearm, warm and wild and willing—
They turned to each other, he the driving, she the driven gear. Their breath left them, hung as a symbol and a promise between them, alive and merged. For two heavy heartbeats they had their single planet in the lovers’ spangled cosmos; and then Janie’s face twisted in a spasm of concentration, bent not toward a ponderous control, but rather to some exquisite accuracy of adjustment.
A thing happened to him, as if a small sphere of the hardest vacuum had appeared deep within him. He breathed again and the magic about them gathered itself and whipped in with the breath to fill the vacuum which swallowed and killed it, all of it, in a tick of time. Except for the brief spastic change in her face, neither had moved; they still stood in the sunset, close together, her face turned up to his, here gloried, here tinted, there self-shining in its own shadow. But the magic was gone, the melding; they were two, not one, and this was Janie quiet, Janie patient, Janie not damped, but unkindled. But no—the real difference was in him. His hands were lifted to go round her and no longer cared to and his lips lost their grip on the unborn kiss and let it fall away and be lost. He stepped back. “Shall we go?”
A swift ripple of regret came and went across Janie’s face. It was a thing like many other things coming now to plague him: smooth and textured things forever presenting themselves to his fingertips and never to his grasp. He almost understood her regret, it was there for him, it was there—and gone, altogether gone, dwindling high away from him.
They walked silently back to the midway and the lights, their pitiable thousands of candlepower; and to the amusement rides, their balky pretense at motion. Behind them in the growing dark they left all real radiance, all significant movement. All of it; there was not enough left for any particular reaction. With the compressed air guns which fired tennis balls at wooden battleships; the cranks they turned to make the top greyhounds race up a slope; the darts they threw at balloons—with these they buried something now so negligible it left no mound.
At an elaborate stand were a couple of war surplus servo-mechanisms rigged to stimulate radar gun directors. There was a miniature anti-aircraft gun to be aimed by hand, its slightest movement followed briskly by the huge servo-powered gun at the back. Aircraft silhouettes were flashed across the domed half ceiling. All in all, it was a fine conglomeration of gadgetry and dazzle, a truly high-level catchpenny.
Hip went first, amused, then intrigued, then enthralled as his small movements were so obediently duplicated by the whip and weave of the massive gun twenty feet away. He missed the first “plane” and the second; after that he had the fixed error of the gun calculated precisely and he banged away at every target as fast as they could throw them and knocked out every one. Janie clapped her hands like a child and the attendant awarded them a blurred and glittering clay statue of a police dog worth all of a fifth of the admission price. Hip took it proudly, and waved Janie up to the trigger. She worked the aiming mechanism diffidently and laughed as the big gun nodded and shook itself. His cheeks flushed, his eyes expertly anticipating the appearance-point of each target. Hip said out of the corner of his mouth, “Up forty or better on your right quadrant, corp’r’l, or the pixies’ll degauss your fuses.”
Janie’s eyes narrowed a trifle and perhaps that was to help her aiming. She did not answer him. She knocked out the first target that appeared before it showed fully over the artificial horizon, and the second, and the third. Hip swatted his hands together and called her name joyfully. She seemed for a moment to be pulling herself together, the odd, effortful gesture of a preoccupied man forcing himself back into a conversation. She then let one go by a
nd missed four in a row. She hit two, one low, one high, and missed the last by half a mile. “Not very good,” she said tremulously.
“Good enough,” he said gallantly. “You don’t have to hit ’em these days, you know.”
“You don’t?”
“Nah. Just get near. Your fuses take over from there. This is the world’s most diabetic dog.”
She looked down from his face to the statuette and giggled. “I’ll keep it always,” she said. “Hip, you’re getting that nasty sparkle stuff all over your jacket. Let’s give it away.”
They marched up and across and down and around the tinsel stands in search of a suitable beneficiary, and found him at last—a solemn urchin of seven or so, who methodically sucked the memory of butter and juice from a well-worn corncob. “This is for you,” caroled Janie. The child ignored the extended gift and kept his frighteningly adult eyes on her face.
Hip laughed. “No sale!” He squatted beside the boy. “I’ll make a deal with you. Will you haul it away for a dollar?”
No response. The boy sucked his corncob and kept watching Janie.
“Tough customer,” grinned Hip.
Suddenly Janie shuddered. “Oh, let’s leave him alone,” she said, her merriment gone.
“He can’t outbid me,” said Hip cheerfully. He set the statue down by the boy’s scuffed shoes and pushed a dollar bill into the rip which looked most like a pocket. “Pleasure to do business with you, sir,” he said and followed Janie, who had already moved off.
“Regular chatterbox,” laughed Hip as he caught up with her. He looked back. Half a block away, the child still stared at Janie. “Looks like you’ve made a lifetime impress—Janie!”
Janie had stopped dead, eyes wide and straight ahead, mouth a triangle of shocked astonishment. “The little devil!” she breathed. “At his age!” She whirled and looked back.
Hip’s eyes obviously deceived him for he saw the corncob leave the grubby little hands, turn ninety degrees and thump the urchin smartly on the cheekbone. It dropped to the ground; the child backed away four paces, shrilled an unchivalrous presumption and an unprintable suggestion at them and disappeared into an alley.
“Whew!” said Hip, awed. “You’re so right!” He looked at her admiringly. “What clever ears you have, grandma,” he said, not very successfully covering an almost prissy embarrassment with badinage. “I didn’t hear a thing until the second broadside he threw.”
“Didn’t you?” she said. For the first time he detected annoyance in her voice. At the same time he sensed that he was not the subject of it. He took her arm. “Don’t let it bother you. Come on, let’s eat some food.”
She smiled and everything was all right again.
Succulent pizza and cold beer in a booth painted a too-bright, edge-worn green. A happy-weary walk through the darkening booths to the late bus which waited, breathing. A sense of membership because of the fitting of the spine to the calculated average of the bus seats. A shared doze, a shared smile, at sixty miles an hour through the flickering night, and at last the familiar depot on the familiar street, echoing and empty but my street in my town.
They woke a taxi driver and gave him their address. “Can I be more alive than this?” he murmured from his corner and then realized she had heard him. “I mean,” he amended, “it’s as if my whole world, everywhere I lived, was once in a little place inside my head, so deep I couldn’t see out. And then you made it as big as a room and then as big as a town and tonight as big as … well, a lot bigger,” he finished weakly.
A lonely passing streetlight passed her answering smile over to him. He said, “So I was wondering how much bigger it can get.”
“Much bigger,” she said.
He pressed back sleepily into the cushions. “I feel fine,” he murmured. “I feel … Janie,” he said in a strange voice, “I feel sick.”
“You know what that is,” she said calmly.
A tension came and went within him and he laughed softly. “Him again. He’s wrong. He’s wrong. He’ll never make me sick again. Driver!”
His voice was like soft wood tearing. Startled, the driver slammed on his brakes. Hip surged forward out of his seat and caught the back of the driver under his armpit. “Go back,” he said excitedly.
“Goddlemighty,” the driver muttered. He began to turn the cab around. Hip turned to Janie, an answer, some sort of answer, half formed, but she had no question. She sat quietly and waited. To the driver Hip said, “Just the next block. Yeah, here. Left. Turn left.”
He sank back then, his cheek to the window glass, his eyes raking the shadowed houses and black lawns. After a time he said, “There. The house with the driveway, there where the big hedge is.”
“Want I should drive in?”
“No,” Hip said. “Pull over. A little further … there, where I can see in.”
When the cab stopped, the driver turned around and peered back. “Gettin’ out here? That’s a dollar ’n—”
“Shh!” The sound came so explosively that the driver sat stunned. Then he shook his head wearily and turned to face forward. He shrugged and waited.
Hip stared through the driveway’s gap in the hedge at the faintly gleaming white house, its stately porch and porte-cochère, its neat shutters and fanlit door.
“Take us home,” he said after a time.
Nothing was said until they got there. Hip sat with one hand pressing his temples, covering his eyes. Janie’s corner of the cab was dark and silent.
When the machine stopped Hip slid out and absently handed Janie to the walk. He gave the driver a bill, accepting the change, pawed out a tip and handed it back. The cab drove off.
Hip stood looking down at the money in his hand, sliding it around on his palm with his fingers. “Janie?”
“Yes, Hip.”
He looked at her. He could hardly see her in the darkness. “Let’s go inside.”
They went in. He switched on the lights. She took off her hat and hung her bag on the bedpost and sat down on the bed, her hands on her lap. Waiting.
He seemed blind, so deep was his introspection. He came awake slowly, his gaze fixed on the money in his hand. For a moment it seemed without meaning to him; then slowly, visibly, he recognized it and brought it into his thoughts, into his expression. He closed his hand on it, shook it, brought it to her and spread it out on the night table—three crumpled bills, some silver. “It isn’t mine,” he said.
“Of course it is!”
He shook his head tiredly. “No it isn’t. None of it’s been mine. Not the roller coaster money or the shopping money or coffee in the mornings or … I suppose there’s rent here.”
She was silent.
“That house,” he said detachedly. “The instant I saw it I knew I’d been there before. I was there just before I got arrested. I didn’t have any money then. I remember. I knocked on the door and I was dirty and crazy and they told me to go around the back if I wanted something to eat. I didn’t have any money; I remember that so well. All I had was …”
Out of his pocket came the woven metal tube. He caught lamplight on its side, flicked it off again, squeezed it, then pointed with it at the night table. “Now, ever since I came here, I have money. In my left jacket pocket every day. I never wondered about it. It’s your money, isn’t it, Janie?”
“It’s yours. Forget about it, Hip. It’s not important.”
“What do you mean it’s mine?” he barked. “Mine because you give it to me?” He probed her silence with a bright beam of anger and nodded. “Thought so.”
“Hip!”
He shook his head, suddenly, violently, the only expression he could find at the moment for the great tearing wind which swept through him. It was anger, it was humiliation, it was a deep futility and a raging attack on the curtains which shrouded his self-knowledge. He slumped down into the easy chair and put his hands over his face.
He sensed her nearness, then her hand was on his shoulder. “Hip …” she whispered.
He shrugged the shoulder and the hand was gone. He heard the faint sound of springs as she sat down again on the bed.
He brought his hands down slowly. His face was twisted, hurt. “You’ve got to understand, I’m not mad at you, I haven’t forgotten what you’ve done, it isn’t that,” he blurted. “I’m all mixed up again,” he said hoarsely. “Doing things, don’t know why. Things I got to do, I don’t know what. Like …” He stopped to think, to sort the thousand scraps that whirled and danced in the wind which blew through him. “Like knowing this is wrong, I shouldn’t be here, getting fed, spending money, but I don’t know who ever said I shouldn’t, where I learned it. And … and like what I told you, this thing about finding somebody and I don’t know who it is and I don’t know why. I said tonight …” He paused and for a long moment filled the room with the hiss of breath between his teeth, his tense-curled lips. “I said tonight, my world … the place I live, it’s getting bigger all the time. It just now got big enough to take in that house where we stopped. We passed that corner and I knew the house was there and I had to look at it. I knew I’d been there before, dirty and all excited … knocked … they told me to go around back … I yelled at them … somebody else came. I asked them, I wanted to know about some—”
The silence, again the hissing breath.
“—children who lived there, and no children lived there. And I shouted again, everybody was afraid, I straightened out a little. I told them just tell me what I wanted to know. I’d go away, I didn’t want to frighten anybody. I said all right, no children, then tell me where is Alicia Kew, just let me talk to Alicia Kew.”
He straightened up, his eyes alight, and pointed the piece of tubing at Janie. “You see? I remember, I remember her name, Alicia Kew!” He sank back. “And they said, ‘Alicia Kew is dead.’ And then they said, oh her children! And they told me where to go to find them. They wrote it down someplace, I’ve got it here somewhere….” He began to fumble through his pockets, stopped suddenly and glared at Janie. “It was the old clothes, you have it, you’ve hidden it!”
More Than Human Page 17