RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (15 page)

Somewhere immediately outside there was a continu ous clacking vibration going on. It didn't come from the car itself now; that stood still; it was an external vibration that shook its windowpanes, and shook its wheeltrucks, and even seemed to shake the very tracks it stood on. On one side only, on the left, outside on the next track, an endless succession of dark inscrutable cars went flitting by, ghostlike. Not a light showing. A train of death. A cavalcade of doom. Dozens of black cars, scores of them; shaking the rails, shaking the night, shaking the stalled day coach.

All the railroad cars there were in the whole country, all the railroad cars there were in the whole world, going down to death. Like black dominoes on wheels, like litmus paper cut-outs against the stars. Not a light, not a glimpse of the thousands of already dead they were packed with; and all the more awful for that.

The war, the war. The madness of the whole universe.

His foot kept beating a tattoo upon the floor, faster and faster and faster. Trip-hammering his despair, his agony.

"Cut it out!" the man in the seat beside him burst out at last. "I can't stand it any more! You've been doing it for hours. You've got my nerves on edge. Keep your foot still."

"Shut up," he growled dangerously, but he stopped it.

He held his head for a minute, with both hands.

He stood up suddenly, wrenched his way out past his neighbor's knees. Five other men immediately roused from their comas, made a converging dive for his seat. Two of them got it at once; neither one would relinquish it. They split it between them after that, each forcing one hip down into it.

He buffeted his way to the end of the car, momentarily rousing the standing sleepers, breaking up dreams of this girl or that, as he went by-- Of a turkey dinner at home, or of a bed in some call-house. It didn't matter much; dreams are made to be broken.

He wrenched open the door, and went out into the car vestibule.

The noise rose to a crescendo out here; the side door of the car was open.

"What is it?" he shouted. "How much longer? Forty minutes now."

"What do I know? I'm just the conductor of this train. When it stops, I stop with it. Troop movement cutting in ahead of us, down at the next switch, I guess. They gotta get there first, you know." And then he looked him up and down contemptuously, the battered felt hat, and the greasy mackinaw, and the oiler's pants. "You ain't going anywhere so important. There's a war on, you know."

"Shut up!" he yelped, and flung up his hand before his face, and sank his own teeth into the back of it the way you do when pain is unendurable, when you can't stand a thing any more.

Then suddenly he seized the handrail, swung down off the platform into the darkness outside. Was swallowed up, was lost, was gone.

"Well, that's one way of keeping moving," the conductor observed drily to the soldier next to him. "Under your own power."

The salesman's black coupe hummed along the highway, its headlights lending the only light there was to the lonely black countryside. Inside it there was silence. The two men sat staring straight ahead, their faces pale ovals against the dashboard light.

The man holding the wheel, had the somewhat injured mien of one whose attempts at conversation have been snubbed, and who has made up his mind not to make any more overtures. Paige just had a stony look, as though his face was a gray plaster cast that had long ago set, would have had to be chipped off him to let any expression come through.

"Can't you pick it up a little?" he said suddenly, without moving his lips.

"Sure," was the cold answer. "But I'm not going to. This happens to be my car, and fifty's the ceiling as far as I'm concerned, even in the country at night. I have a wife and two kids. If you want to make better time--" He nudged his head sideward toward the accompanying strip of road.

A smoking sigh hissed through Paige's tight lips. He folded his arms tight across his chest, as if to keep them under control. His hand, slipping under his mackinaw, came to rest on the butt of his service gun. They closed around it.

One word more from him, he vowed, and I'll empty the seat. Keep his mouth closed; I don't want to do it, I'm trying to keep from doing it.

The man at the wheel kept quiet, didn't say anything further.

Paige's fingers relaxed, slipped off the gun-butt.

The speed-clock indicator stayed, quiveringly, at fifty.

The man at the wheel, unconscious of what he was doing, began to hum. Presently he was singing words, in an undertone. "Somebody stole my gal--"

Paige's fingers tightened again on the gun-butt. It jarred a fraction of an inch upward.

He writhed a little on the seat. I'm trying not to kill this man, he pleaded querulously. I don't want to kill anybody . I just want to . . ."

"Don't," he said, so subduedly that the word could hardly be detected.

Some slight hint of it must have reached his companion, however. He turned his head to Paige in affronted inquiry. "What was that?"

Paige hugged his chest tight. "I said 'Don't.'"

The man gave him a rebuking stare. Then he turned front again. "Touchy, aren't you?" he mumbled.

"Yes," said Paige. "Touchy."

All of a sudden they'd come to a halt. "What're you stopping for?" "This is where we split up. Don't you see that intersection in front of us? If you want east, you have to keep on straight along this same road. My territory's down that way. My car and I, we turn off here."

Paige's wrist gave a jolt, and the gun came out, in all its baleful entirety.

"Get out," he said.

"Wha-what're you going to do?"

"Just get out and stand clear."

He accelerated the process by ramming his hip into him. The door opened and the man half fell into the road, had to scramble to keep from going down entirely.

"Wait, what are you doing--? All my samples are in there--! That's the thanks I--I knew I shouldn't have--"

The door slammed shut. The backs of his hands crept pleadingly over its top, trying to hang onto it.

The gun-butt chopped down efficiently, there was a scream, and the backs of his hands weren't there any more.

"You may be going south. But your car and me, we're going east." Paige floored the accelerator. "And mister," he added, "you don't know how lucky you are to be alive."

His frantic pounding with both fists stopped short. The door had opened. A girl came out, slowly. She pulled it closed after her, and then she stood there and looked at him, with her back slumped against the door.

She'd had a drink or two and looked like she'd had them alone. She had a lighted cigarette between her lips and talked without removing it. A spare was stuck behind her ear like a pencil.

"You're too late," she blurted out without introduction. "She left just quarter of an hour ago. You missed her by fifteen minutes."

"How'd you know who I--?"

"Your heart's all up in your eyes," she said gruffly. "I'd knowyou in the dark by the shine it gives off. Why didn't you get here sooner? Or better still, why did you ever meet her in the first place?"

"She was my wife. She swore that all our lives-- Where'd they go? Which way?"

She slumped lower against the door, as if she were tired. Tired of the whole world. "Just call it 'away' and let it go at that. 'Away from you.' You're licked. They may still be in the town somewhere. Or at some motor court on the road out--"

He backed his hand to his skull and screwed up his face into a weazened grimace.

"Tell me something," she said with a curious sort of objective curiosity. "Is it that bad? Does it hurt as much on the inside as it looks like it does on the outside of you?"

She never got the answer.

She was still standing there, shoulders slumped low against the door, tired, tired of the whole world, long after his figure had plunged back into the darkness, the car door had cracked closed, and the red taillight had whirled off.

Suddenly she gave her cigarette a violent downward fling that splintered it into sparks against the ground.

"Jesus!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I hate love!" She turned on her heel and the door slammed.

She was alone in there. She had grown tired waiting for him, had dozed off. The tableau spoke for itself. The brightly-lighted room in the motor court bungalow, probably reserved ahead of time in her name alone, so he could join her there. And he hadn't come, and she'd slept while she waited.

The shades down on both windows, for she'd undressed before. Her bag open and balanced astride two chair arms, partially emptied. The covers of the bed turned neatly back on a diagonal line.

She was asleep seated at the dressing table, her face resting on her forearm. She was in night attire, a pale-blue negligee over her gown. The hairbrush she had used before sleep overcame her lay there within reach of her hand. Near it stood the little traveling alarm clock she had taken out of her bag. Its ticking was the only sound in there with her. It seemed to point up the scene. Its hands were crossing at five to eleven now, and though no one but she could have told when he was originally supposed to have come, the inclination of her drowsing head showed that time was far past--far past and gone.

And then the knob on the door by which you came in twisted slowly, in subtle noiselessness, as though pres sure were being exerted from the outside, secretive pressure. The pressure relaxed, the knob turned back the other way to where it had started from.

No tread, no sound. No withdrawal any more than there had been any approach. But then a window went up softly behind one of the overlapping, fully-drawn shades. The shade billowed out. A man's leg came down to the floor behind it. A second one followed.

She didn't hear him. Her sleep was too deep and the sounds he had made too hushed.

A hand, the bent fingers of a hand, clasped the edge of the shade, held it taut for a minute, then bent it back in a sharp momentary indentation.

Bucky came out from in back of it, his gun readied in his hand. His eyes were only eyes when they rested on her. When they left her to roam searchingly elsewhere about the room, they became stones, cold and hard, imbedded in his face.

He trod softly. 'With the terrible softness of oncoming death. He looked into the bath first, fanning his gun in a half turn. He looked into the closet. She'd hung her clothes there, the clothes she'd taken off on arriving here.

There was no other place to look. He put his gun back in his pocket. Those hard stones turned to glance over at her, softened into eyes again. Forgiving eyes. He took down her things from the closet hooks, and carried them over to the open bag, and put them back into it. Even with them, even with her inanimate belongings, because they were hers, he was gentle. He folded them over first, so they'd fit in, wouldn't be crushed, wouldn't be harmed.

All but one coat and dress. He left them out for her to wear home with him. Home? Yes, home. Even though they had no house waiting for them, no roof to go over them, home was wherever they were, together. Then he latched the bag closed and stood it down on the floor, ready to carry it out for her.

Even that she didn't hear, the click of the latches.

Then he went toward her, to wake her.

He stopped just behind her and stood there looking down at her for a minute. If she could have seen his face just then, she would have known she never need fear she'd ever hear a word of recrimination about this afterward. No questions asked, no blame allotted. Just to have her back, that would be enough.

He bent over at last and kissed her gently on the top of the head, to wake her.

"Sharon," he whispered tenderly in her ear. "Sharon, wake up. I'm taking you back with me."

Her head rolled over slightly, along her arm, as a person does who slowly comes back to wakefulness. And she was grinning up at him, sidewise (he could see her profile now). In a sly, elfin sort of way.

But her eyes were still blurry with slee--.

His hand stabbed suddenly downward toward the hairbrush, there before her. Snatching, not the brush but what lay under it, held in place by it.

Pencilled lines on a square of paper.

You can have her back now, soldier.

Don't say I never gave you anything.

He fell down, first upon one knee, then both, there beside her. He tried to take her in his arms, but every which way he held her, she dangled another way, at cross-purposes to his embrace. Until at last she lay there stretched out on the floor. Still smiling up at him, slyly, elfinly.

With the desperate helplessness of a man beside himself, his hands went slapping down his own sides, seeking to bring something, anything, out of his pockets to help her with. What, he didn't know.

And then they stopped, as one of them felt the gun.

Hoarse with his pain, he crooned to her brokenly, "I don't want it either, Sharon. I don't want it either. If this is what it does to you, they can have it."

He hovered low above her, until he'd reached her tortured, twisted mouth. He kissed it, as a husband does, a husband should.

"Thank you, Sharon. It was nice loving you."