“Then afterwards, I was walking along the streets again, in that new way I had now, leery of faces in front of me, shying from steps in back of me, and I heard music coming from a row of open windows across the street. There was a guy I hadn’t liked the looks of the last couple of blocks, he seemed to be coming along behind me too steadily, so when he wasn’t looking, I cut over and jumped in there. It seemed a good place to stay in for a while, to keep out of sight and off the streets. I bought a whole carload of tickets, to make sure I’d have enough to last me for a while, and then I looked around, and the very first girl I saw—” he ridged his forehead at her deprecatingly — “was you.”
“Was me,” she repeated thoughtfully, running her hand slowly along the edge of the table and back, slowly along the edge of the table and back.
They fell silent. He’d been speaking so steadily, just now, that the silence seemed longer to both of them than it actually was, by contrast. It was probably only a moment or two.
“What are you going to do now?” she said finally, looking up at him.
“What’s there I can do? Just wait, I guess; just wait for them to finally catch up. They always do. He’ll find out about it by nine or ten, when he goes in there to take his bath. And probably that errand boy’ll remember seeing some fellow ringing the doorbell there the afternoon before. Then my old boss’ll tell them who I am and where I lived last. It won’t take long. They’ll know me, they’ll get me. Tomorrow. The day after. By the end of the week. What difference does it make? They always do, they never fail to. You never stop to think of that before. You think of it after. It’s after for me, now, and I’m thinking of it.”
He shrugged hopelessly. “It’s no use trying to run out of town, hide somewhere else; that never works either. Not for little guys like me, that are new at it. If they’re going to get you, they’ll get you wherever it is, whether it’s here or some place else. They’ve got a long reach, and it’s no use trying to get away from it. So I guess I’ll just stick around and wait.” He sat there staring down at the floor with a puzzled, defeated smile on his face. As if he was wondering how the whole thing had come about in the first place, couldn’t quite make it out.
Something about that look got to her. There was some sort of a helplessness about it, you might say a resigned helplessness, that did something to her. The boy next door, she thought poignantly. That’s who he is, that’s all he is. He’s no crook, no dance-hall shark. He’s just that boy on the next porch you waved to when you went in or out your own gate. Or that sometimes leaned his bicycle against the fence and chatted with you over it for a while, a big wide grin on his face. He came here to do big things, to lick the town, but now instead the town had licked him. He’d kissed his mother or his sister goodbye, at the trainside or at the bus one day, and she’d be willing to bet anything he’d felt a little like crying, for just the first few minutes after leaving them, though of course he hadn’t shown it. She knew, because so had she. And then the golden glow came on, effacing that; the promise of great things to be, the aura in which youth sallies to the wars. Probably before the first hour was done, all his plans were made, his castles reared; fame, fortune, happiness, all the things that were to be had taken shape. She could have read just what the thoughts in his mind were, that first day of departure, because hers had been that too. Back home they, the one or two of them who were particularly his, thought he was swell, they thought he was wonderful. And the funny part of it was, they were right and the rest of the world, that didn’t, was wrong. Back home they probably read from his letters across the back fence to the neighbors, bragged about how well he was doing. Her folks did too.
And look at him now, look at him here, in this room with her. She didn’t know, any more than he, why it had gone wrong, why it had turned out like this. She only knew he shouldn’t end up like this, furtive, hiding, hunted up and down the streets, never knowing when a hand was about to drop to his shoulder and hold him fast. The boy next door, the grinning, puppy-friendly boy next door.
She raised her head at last from the hand that had shaded it. She hitched her chair forward, as if some invisible dividing-line it crossed in doing so marked the boundary between passive auditor and active participant, slight as the adjustment was. She stared at him closely for a moment, not so much in discernment of him as in contemplation of what she herself was about to say. “Listen,” she said finally. “I’ve got a proposition for you. What do you say we both go back where we belong, back home there where we come from? Get our second wind, give ourselves another chance? Both get on that six o’clock bus that I was never able to make alone.”
