“But the worst part of it all was, now that I had it, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it any more. Half an hour before I’d known a hundred things I’d wanted so bad I would have given my right arm for them. And now I couldn’t remember one of them any more.
“I’d thought that I’d been hungry, and matter of fact I hadn’t been eating right for a week or more past, but now I found that I wasn’t even that any more. I went into the swellest restaurant I could find, a real swell one, and I ordered everything straight down the list, like I’d always dreamed of doing some day. While I was still ordering, it sounded great, but when the stuff started to show up — something went wrong. I couldn’t seem to swallow right. Every time they brought something and put it down in front of me and I tried to dig in, somehow I’d find myself thinking ‘This is your own future you’re eating, years and years of it,’ and it would gang up and stick in my throat.
“After awhile I couldn’t stand it any more; I peeled off a five-dollar bill and I left it on the table, and I got up and I got out, without waiting for the rest of it. And when I came out, I couldn’t help remembering that when I only had a dime of my own to spend, a dime that really belonged to me, I didn’t have any trouble swallowing the coffee and the cruller that that bought me. In fact, my throat stayed wide open long after it was gone and there wasn’t any more on the way down, just waiting to see.
“I don’t know, I guess you’re either honest or you’re crooked by nature, and you can’t change yourself over that suddenly from the one thing to the other without a lot of growing pains. I guess you have to do it slowly, it takes years, maybe.
“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.”
He didn’t answer. She was leaning across the table now, to press her point more strongly home. “Don’t you see it has to be now or never? Don’t you see what this place is doing to us? Don’t you see what we’ll be like a year from now, even six months from now? It’ll be too late then, there won’t be anything to save any more. Just two other people, with our same names, that aren’t us any more—”
His eyes flicked aside to the packets of money on the table, then back to her again. “It’s already too late for me now. Just a few hours too late, just a half night too late, but that’s as good as a lifetime.” He said again what he’d said before. “I wish I’d met you last night, instead of tonight. Why couldn’t I have met you before, instead of after? It’s no good, now. They’d only be waiting to grab me when I got off the bus at the other end. They’d know by then who I was, where I was from; they’d look for me there when they couldn’t find me here. I’d only drag you into it, if I went with you. The people back there, the very ones I would want least of all to find out about it, they’d see it happen right under their eyes—” He shook his head. “You go. You’ve still got your chance, even if I haven’t got mine. Go by yourself, go right tonight. You’re right about it, it’s bad here. Go right now, before you weaken again. I’ll go with you down to the bus if you want me to, I’ll see you off, to make sure you get away—”