Thirteen
Above the rasp, rasp, rasp of the hack saw he looked at her. It was afternoon and she was sitting on the bed dressed to go to work at three-thirty. She would not look at the handcuff clamped in the vise on the table.
“So you ain’t seen anything of her at all?” he asked, sighting at the groove he had sawed. It was slow work and he had already broken a dozen blades.
“No.” Dorothy shook her head.
“Any letter from her?” he asked with elaborate casualness. If anybody’s heard from the bitch and knows where she is, he thought, it’d be Dorothy.
She shook her head again. He comes and lives with me, hiding out, when the police are after him, she thought, but all he wants to do is get back to that blonde slut who’s left him three times already when he was in trouble. And I was the one who introduced him to her when we were working together in the restaurant in Beaumont. I wish I had died first. It would have been better for him, too. God knows he could get into enough trouble by himself, but she sure didn’t help matters any, after him for money all the time.
It was all right that other time when he was here, and at least I had that, and the other times before I introduced him to her, but now there isn’t anything. I wish I could be like I was before, and go with him, because he does want to so much, but if you can’t, you just can’t. Every time I see that handcuff I feel sick in my stomach. If he put that hand on me the way he used to I couldn’t help myself and I’d throw up. If only there could have been just once more. Just once more, knowing it was the last, so you could remember every little thing for all the rest of the time.
She stood up. “I’ve got to go to work,” she said dully. “You won’t go out anywhere, will you?”
He looked up from his sawing. “What the hell, you think I’m crazy?”
“I’ll be back around midnight. The restaurant’s not very far from here.” She moved toward the door.
“All right,” he said indifferently.
Rasp, rasp, rasp, the hack saw sang, lost under the muffled thunderings of motorcycles being tuned. When there was silence from below, he stopped and waited, smoking a cigarette and thinking.
“Look at this, Mad Dog,” Harve had said, holding the picture up between the bars. “This babe is stacked, huh? Of course, you’ve probably seen better, being a big shot and getting around the way you do, but us old country boys up here in the sticks always appreciate anything that comes our way, especially when it’s nice and obliging like this. Thought you might have seen her, maybe. She comes from your part of the country, down on the coast.”
Well, Harve was a good man with his little jokes, he thought, looking at the empty half of the handcuff, but he sure didn’t show much judgment there at the end, putting me in that car with only one hand shackled. Maybe he’s lonesome now and waiting for her. And maybe I can help him out before they get me. If I can find her.
Late in the afternoon he had the handcuff off. He rolled it in an old newspaper and threw it under the bed. Dorothy could get rid of it some way after he was gone. Picking up the razor she had bought for him, he went into the bathroom and shaved. After that, he took a bath and put on the new clothes she had bought. The trousers of the brown suit were too large around the waist, but he pulled them in with the belt.
Now I’m all dressed up, he thought, and got nowhere to go. I don’t dare take a chance on going out of here for another three or four days. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but listen to the radio and look at the papers to see if any of ‘em mention where my loving wife is.
When Dorothy came home about twelve-fifteen, he was asleep on the bed. She lay down on the couch, without disturbing him.
In the morning he had another idea. “Go out to a pay phone somewhere,” he said. He handed her the telephone number written out on a piece of paper. “Get long-distance and put in a call to our apartment. If you get her, ask her how she is and the usual stuff, but don’t say anything about me at all. The phone may be tapped.”
“All right,” she said lifelessly.
She came back in about fifteen minutes and shook her head at his questioning glance. “There’s some other people living in the apartment now.”
Then she hasn’t been home at all, he thought. If she’d gone back she could probably have kept the apartment, by laying the landlord or selling her pictures. There ought to be a big demand for her pictures, he thought coldly.
“What are you going to do now?” Dorothy asked him the morning of the third day.
“Try to get out of the state, if I can make it. That is, if I can’t locate her.”
“When?”
“In another day or so. Why? You in a hurry for me to leave?” he asked suspiciously.
“No,” she said. “You can stay as long as you want.”
“I’ll pay you back for what you’ve spent,” he said angrily, “if the money’s bothering you.”
“I don’t care anything about the money.”
“You don’t care about anything, do you? I never thought I’d see the time I could be here three days and never even get to touch you.”
“I didn’t either,” she said, looking at the floor.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Nothing seems to make any difference.”
It was hot in the apartment during the day, almost unbearably hot with the door and the windows closed. Restlessness had begun to ride him with its raking spurs almost from the time he had the handcuff off, and he would pace the floor of the small room in stocking feet, going on for hours. The thought of Joy began to be an obsession. When Dorothy brought in the morning paper on her way home from work he would snatch it away and read the news stories of the man hunt, looking for some mention of her. Then he would make her go out at noon and bring in the afternoon papers as soon as they were on the street. I can’t hang around here forever, he thought. I’ll go nuts. I’ve got to try to get out of the state, maybe to Florida or somewhere, and if I don’t find out pretty soon where she is I’ll have to go anyway.
The fifth day was torment. He could no longer sit still at all and there were moments when he felt that within a matter of hours he would go berserk and run out into the street to shoot it out with the first policeman he saw. Then he would get hold of himself and force himself to calm clown, knowing that when he did leave the apartment it was going to take all the cunning and cold self-control he possessed to get clear. He rarely spoke to Dorothy now. When she left at three-thirty to go to work he merely stopped his pacing for a moment to growl.
As Dorothy went out the doorway at the foot of the stairs she glanced at the mailboxes through habit, then stopped. There was a letter in hers. She opened the box and took it out, glancing at it curiously. She very seldom received any mail, and thought it might be only an advertising circular until she saw the handwriting.
She opened it. It was from Joy.
Dear Dorothy:
I hope you will forgive me for not writing to you for so long, but there has been so much trouble, as you have probably read about. I am staying with Sewell’s family on their farm up here and they have been so nice to me during this trying time. Mr. Neely is a charming old gentleman, you would love him, and Sewell’s brother Mitchell is the handsomest thing, you wouldn’t believe it, really. There is a young sister, too, who is the most adorable thing.
I would like to stay here longer, but I really ought to go back to work. So, Dorothy, I wonder, if you could spare it, would you lend me twenty dollars ($20.00) for bus fare and expenses so I could come down there and look for a job. The Neelys would just insist on giving it to me if I told them I was short of money, but they have done so much for me already I hate to ask them.
I wouldn’t ask anybody but you, for you have always been my best friend. Dorothy, I will pay you back out of my first pay check, of course. Hoping to hear from you soon,
Your loving friend,
Joy
Dorothy slid it back inside the envelope and started to go back up the stairs. I might as well show it to him, she thought wearily. He’s so anxious to find her. Let him go on back to her once more.
Then she stopped, halfway up. If he goes there to see her, she thought, they’ll kill him. They’re bound to be watching all that country for him. I’ll wait till I come home from work tonight and that’ll give me time to think about it.
When she came home at twelve-thirty the apartment was empty. There was no farewell or note of any kind, but Sewell was gone.
She stood silently for a moment in the middle of the room, feeling the unbearable loneliness coming back. Then she changed into her kimono and sat down on the bed, just staring at her hands in her lap. He would never be back again, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter at all any more. She didn’t even want to cry. After a while she turned on the radio and set the volume low. Moving up to the head of the bed, she put her face up close to the loud-speaker and listened to the dance band coming from the Edgewater Beach in Chicago.