Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (18 page)

‘Lie back,’ I said.

She lay back against the slope of the ground, her arms folded across her breasts. I unfolded her arms and put them at her sides.

‘Close your eyes,’ I said.

‘Don’t move a muscle now,’ I said. ‘Don’t even breathe.’

She stopped breathing and her chest stopped rising and falling. I moved my head backwards and forwards several times, trying to bring into focus in the gloom the whiteness of her face where it was whitest, and the blackness of her hair where it was blackest. I found the focus and held my head still, staring at her, surrendering completely to the ancient memory that was leading me back. … By Jesus Christ, it was true! This is what it was all the time. But this cannot be. I tried to tell myself, this simply cannot be! I did not know about such things then. I was only four years old. …

Beams of light suddenly bounced around us, and she sat up, alive now and startled, and I whirled on my knees and saw that the beams were from two headlights. Two motorcycles were idly rattling down the road towards us. She started to get to her feet, but I grabbed her and pulled her down, whispering: ‘Sh-h-h!’ They could only be motor-cops. I lay prone on the grassy slope, holding her beside me, having the feeling that she wanted to jump up and run away. I fluttered my hand in her face, warning her to keep quiet and remain still. The beams of lights now stopped bouncing around us and centered on the car, and I heard the motors being taken out of gear, but left idling, and the machines being racked. There was a brief pause and I knew they were standing beside the roadster, and I moved my right hand slowly along the ground to my hip pocket, reaching for my automatic.

One cop said: ‘This is the buggy, all right. Last four plate numbers check.’

The second cop said: ‘Radiator’s hot as hell.’

‘So are these tires. Somebody just parked this job.’

‘You suppose…’

‘I don’t know. Let’s have a look around. …’

‘Damn lucky they’re in one piece.’

‘Hell, you know how people exaggerate. Hundred miles an hour!’

I heard the car door open and then one of them whistled.

‘Hey, Nick …’ the second cop said. ‘Look. …’

Now Nick whistled too.

The girl grunted and sprang up before I could stop her and started towards the car, yelling: ‘Stop it! Take your hands off my car!’ God, I thought. I took my automatic out of my pocket and hunched up the slope and stooped down behind the oak tree.

‘How dare you!’ she yelled.

I peeked out from behind the tree and saw that she was walking into the glare of the pocket flashlights.

‘Take those lights out of my face!’ she said.

‘Your name Margaret Dobson?’ Nick asked.

‘Let’s see your driver’s license,’ the second cop said, turning his flashlights out of her face.

‘I’ll let you see nothing,’ she snapped. ‘Get on those machines and get away from here. …’

‘Lissen,’ Nick said, ‘we don’t want to have to run you in. …’

‘What’s the number of your badge?’ she asked coldly.

‘Please, lady not that routine…’ he said. He turned the light on his shield. ‘Read it for yourself.’

She leaned in and read it. ‘One-eight-two-two,’ she said.

‘I asked you a question, lady,’ Nick said. ‘Is your name Margaret Dobson?’

‘Is this your car?’ the second cop asked.

‘Yes. Certainly. Of course it’s mine. Whose do you think it is?’

‘Now, lissen, Miss Dobson,’ Nick said, ‘we don’t want to run you in. We’re just checking up. Half a dozen people back there said you were travelling a hundred miles an hour. You might get yourself killed going that fast. We don’t want Ezra Dobson’s daughter killed on our beat. Do we, Damon?’

‘No …’ Damon said.

I almost fainted. The cops were apologizing. She was somebody they were afraid of. Now I knew why she had kept trying to get up when I was holding her down to hide.

‘And something else, Miss Dobson,’ Nick said. ‘You oughtn’t to be out here at night like this. You ought to be home. …’

‘I’ll get home when I please,’ she said curtly.

‘Well,’ Nick said, you ought to get home just the same…’ He flipped the light around the tree, looking for whoever she was with. I ducked back.

‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she said. ‘Perfectly. Now, will you go?’

‘Sure, Miss Dobson, sure,’ Damon said. ‘Remember me to your father. Name’s Steer. Only one on the force. And my partner’s badge number – forget it, will you, Miss Dobson?’

‘That depends on how fast you get away from here,’ she said.

‘We’re going. Good night,’ Nick said.

She did not reply.

The flashlights went off, and they unracked their motors and got on them and rode away. She stood there watching them until they had turned off the surfaced road, back on to the highway. The sounds of their exhausts rose high and crackling as they went into high gear. I put the automatic back into my hip pocket, and moved from behind the tree as she walked to me.

‘The next I come out with you, I’m going to bring along an extra set of nerves,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry …’ she said.

‘For what?’ I said. ‘That was wonderful. That’s the way the bastards ought to be handled. Just who are you, anyway?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said.

‘I’m curious,’ I said. ‘Who is your father? Commissioner of Police or something?’

‘No…’ she said. She looked around at the slope of the ground where she had been lying, and moved to it. What the hell is this, I asked myself, who is this dame, what goes on here? I looked around and she was on the ground again, on the slope.

I went over and sat down beside her. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘Stop thinking about it,’ she said. ‘Think about what you were thinking about before. Look …’ she said. She placed her arms beside her and closed her eyes and stopped breathing, utterly inert, like a statue, like …

I just sat there staring at her.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked quietly.

‘In a minute, in a minute,’ I said, trying to think about what I had been thinking about before. But I couldn’t. My mind was full of motorcycles and motor-cops and flashlights and one big question. ‘Just give me a minute,’ I said, struggling to recapture that most ancient memory …

T
HE SECOND
I
STARTED
waking up, before I had even got my eyes open, I knew something was wrong. The body in bed beside me was unyielding and displeasing, and the room was bitter with the feculence of imprisoned air that had been exhausted by a thousand usings. I at last came awake and saw that the window had been closed and that the door to the living-room had been shut, and I sat up, looking down, and discovered that it was Jinx who was in bed beside me. I got up and went over and unlatched the window and let the fresh warm morning come through the screen, and also the deep bass sounds of the steam shovel still digging away down the street, and the florid counter-point of city noises. I went back to the bed and snatched the covers off Jinx. This disturbed him, but did not wake him; he simply hunched up in the fetal position. I slapped him across the face with the back of my hand, and leaned down and shook him; and he raised his head, startled, and saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth.

‘What – what…’ he mumbled.

‘How many times do I have to tell you not to shut windows?’ I said.

He pushed himself up in bed, rubbing at his left eye to unglue the lids. ‘It was open when I went to bed. I didn’t shut it. It must’ve blown shut,’ he said.

‘The hell it did blow shut,’ I said. ‘It was latched. Somebody latched it.’

‘Well, it wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘It must’ve been Holiday.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘This is just the kind of cheap petty stunt she’d pull. This is just the way her mind works. She told you to sleep in here too, didn’t she?’

‘Yeah. That’s right. She was pretty mad about you staying away so long last night’

‘That makes two of us that’s mad then,’ I said, going into the living-room. Holiday was on her back on the davenport under a blanket, smoking a cigarette; and one look at her and I wondered what was eating her and what she was up to. She wasn’t mad now: she might have been mad last night but not now. There was a bitchy smile on her face and it was evident that she had been awake for some time (if, indeed she had slept at all), waiting for me to discover the closed window and Jinx in bed with me, waiting for me to come to her as I was coming now. There was an air of almost eager anticipation about her, like a guy in a duck-blind at dawn, that was so obvious and so thick I could feel it, and when I felt it, I stopped, no longer certain of my ground. For her this kind of behavior was not characteristic, for that matter, I suddenly realized, neither was her behavior of last night – letting me sleep. I had left the apartment, telling her and Jinx I would be gone for only a few minutes, that I was just going to walk around the block, and instead I had gone out to Doc Green’s to meet the girl, and had stayed away five hours. When I got back they were not here, but that didn’t worry me; I went to bed, to sleep, fully expecting her, I now remembered, to wake me up when she came back, and raise hell. That was what I had expected and that is what I was prepared for and that would have been in character. But she hadn’t. Why hadn’t she? Why all this masquerade? I didn’t know, but this I did know, this I could not escape: she was trying to force me to bring hell to her. All right, you son-of-a-bitch, I told her in my thoughts, here we go.

‘Good morning. …’ I said pleasantly.

‘Good morning…’ she replied, in a tone which the pleasantness of my own voice, and the hesitation I had suffered at the foot of the davenport, had forced her to make neutral, waiting to see if my genial manner were genuine, waiting to see which way I was going to jump.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked in the same sparring neutral tone.

‘I feel wonderful.…’ I replied, asking myself why I could not dispel the compulsion to play this neurotic game, why I was wasting my time, why I didn’t save my energy for more important things, why I didn’t just let this dame have it where it would hurt the most, and then I laughed inside. I wasn’t kidding myself. I knew why. Perversity.
Dégéneré supérieur
, that was why. ‘I thought I’d put on some coffee,’ I said. ‘Would you care for some?’

A flash of disappointment crossed her face, wiping off the bitchy smile, and she threw back the blanket and swung her feet to the floor, demurely pulling together the front of the wrapper she had slept in. ‘Let me do that,’ she said. ‘Let me make the coffee…’

‘I can do it. No trouble at all…’ I said, going into the kitchen, leaving her standing there staring at me, light indecisive wrinkles on her forehead.

I put some water in the pot and was dipping the coffee with a glass measuring cup when I heard her come in. I turned around and she was standing just inside the door, smoking a fresh cigarette. She put her arms out full and arched her back, stretching lazily and elaborately.

‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked.

‘I slept beautifully,’ I said, putting the coffee pot on the stove, lighting a burner. ‘I really did …’ I said, adjusting the flame.

‘No sign of a cold? No sign of a sore throat?’

‘I?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No sign of a cold, no sign of a sore throat. Should there be?’

‘I was hoping not, I guess I closed that window just in time. It got draughty around two o’clock. I didn’t want you to catch cold.’

‘I’m certainly due for a cold, all right,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had one in ten or twelve years. …’

‘Colds are very easy to get,’ she said. ‘They are very easy to get –
especially
when you’re tired. You were very tired last night. You don’t know how tired you were.’

‘I can imagine. I didn’t even hear you come in.’

She laughed quietly. ‘You didn’t even hear Jinx when he got in bed with you. You were dead to the world.’

‘I must have been, not to hear that. I can’t think of anything that would more conclusively prove how dead to the world I was.’

‘Well, you see, that’s when you catch things, when you get that way. And if you don’t look out for yourself, somebody else has to. You catch a cold and it goes into pneumonia … I don’t want you to catch pneumonia. Where would I be if you caught pneumonia?’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’d manage somehow.’ I said.

‘Well, I’m not so sure. …’ she said. She flipped the cigarette into the sink and put that bitchy smile on her face again. ‘You’ve got to be careful. The very idea of you walking for five or six hours when you’re not used to it. I never would have let you out of here if I’d known that. You said you were only going to be gone for a few minutes’

‘I was detained,’ I said.

‘Was it nice?’ she asked, showing her teeth a little.

‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘ “Grand Hotel.” First movie I’ve seen in three years.’

‘Some movie,’ she said. ‘I hear she’s got a Cadillac…’

There! She couldn’t carry the masquerade any further, the double-talk was ended and the silly pretence and spurious solicitude was finished and done with. So this was what was eating her – the other girl. Her information, of course, had come from Jinx, but what could he tell her other than the fact that I had met a girl who drove a Cadillac? If he had told her I was having a date with Margaret Dobson last night he had been guessing. I had been very careful not to mention her name around him, not even to refer to her, for this very reason. So now they couldn’t prove a thing.

‘She? Who? Cadillac? What’re you talking about?’ I asked.

‘That queer you and Jinx met the other night. Hasn’t she got a Cadillac?’

‘I don’t know what kind of a car she’s got,’ I said. ‘I never saw her but once in my life. I don’t know her name or where she lives or how to find her – even if I wanted to.’

‘Finding her shouldn’t be any trouble for a bright boy like you. For a master mind like you. I hear she’s queer and classy…’

‘What Jinx thinks is queer and classy and what I think is queer and classy are two entirely different things, I assure you,’ I said. ‘I told you I was at a movie last night. I didn’t have a date with any girl. I dropped into a movie.’ Her lips were sneering now and her eyes were bulging with poison. ‘If your berserk brain won’t permit you to believe that, then you believe whatever the hell you want to believe.’