“I thought maybe you wanted me to smuggle some heroin out to you. You’d be surprised at the number of people who think I can get them drugs. Top-ranking people, some of them. Oh, I could name names. Shall we go?”
She stood, late one afternoon, at her window watching the ring of golden light that crowned the eastern hills at that season and time of day. It rested on the Babcocks’ lawn, the Filmores’ ranch house, the stone walls of the church, the Thompsons’ chimney—lambent, and as yellow and clear as strained honey and a ring, because, as she watched, she saw at the base of the hills a clear demarcation between the yellow light and the rising dark, and watched the band of light lift past the Babcocks’ lawn, the Filmores’ ranch house, the stone walls of the church and the Thompsons’ chimney, up into thin air. The street was empty, or nearly so. Everyone in Proxmire Manor had two cars and no one walked with the exception of old Mr. Cosden, who belonged to the generation that took constitutionals. Up the street he came, his blue eyes fixed on the last piece of yellow light that touched the church steeple, as if exclaiming to himself, “How wonderful, how wonderful it is!” He passed, and then a much stranger figure took her attention—a tall man with unusually long arms. He was a stray, she decided; he must live in the slums of Parthenia. In his right hand he carried an umbrella and a pair of rubbers. He was terribly stooped and to see where he was going had to crane his neck forward and upward like an adder. He had not bent his back over a whetstone or a workbench or under the weight of a brick hod or at any other honest task. It was the stoop of weak-mindedness, abnegation and bewilderment. He had never had any occasion to straighten his back in self-esteem. Stooped with shyness as a child, stooped with loneliness as a youth, stooped now under an invisible burden of social disregard, he walked now with his long arms reaching nearly to his knees. His wide, thin mouth was set in a silly half-grin, meaningless and sad, but the best face he had been able to hit on. As he approached the house, the beating of her heart seemed to correspond to his footsteps, the cutting pain returned to her breast, and she felt the return of her fear of darkness, evil and death. Carrying his umbrella and rubbers, although there was not a cloud in the sky, he duck-footed out of sight.
A few nights later, Melissa was driving back from the village of Parthenia. The street was lighted erratically by the few stores that hung on at the edge of town—general stores smelling of stale bread and bitter oranges, where those in the neighborhood who were too lazy, too tired and too infirm to go to the palatial shopping centers bought their coffee rings, beer and hamburgers. The darkness of the street was sparsely, irregularly, checkered with light, and she saw the tall man crossing one of these apertures, throwing a long, crooked shadow ahead of him on the paving. He held a heavy bag of groceries in each arm. He was no more stooped than before—the curvature of his spine seemed set—but the bags must be heavy, and she pitied him. She drove on, evoking defensively the worlds of difference that lay between them and the chance that he would have misunderstood her kindness had she offered to give him a ride. But when she had completed her defense it seemed so shallow, idle and selfish that she turned the car around in her own driveway and drove back toward Parthenia. Her best instinct was to help him—to make some peace between his figure and her irrational fear of death—and why should she deny herself this? He would have passed the lighted stores by this time, she decided, and she drove slowly up the dark street, looking for his stooped figure. When she saw him she turned the car around and stopped. “Can I help you?” she asked. “Can I give you a ride? You seem to have so much to carry.” He turned and looked at the beautiful stranger without quite relaxing his half-grin, and she wondered if he wasn’t a deaf-mute as well as weak-minded. Then a look of distrust touched the grin. There was no question about what he was feeling. She was from that world that had gulled him, pelted him with snowballs and rifled his lunchbox. His mother had told him to beware of strangers and here was a beautiful stranger, perhaps the most dangerous of all. “No!” he said. “No, no!” She drove on, wondering what was at the bottom of her impulse; wondering, in the end, why she should scrutinize a simple attempt at kindness.
