* * * * *
She just sat there. I couldn't even tell if she was trembling. I tried
to read a message in her eyes through the mask.
"I'll take you away," I said to her. "I can do it. I really will."
He smiled at me. "She'd like to go with you," he said. "Wouldn't you,
baby?"
"Will you or won't you?" I said to her. She still just sat there.
He slowly knotted his fingers in her hair.
"Listen, you little vermin," I snapped at him, "Take your hands off
her."
He came up from the seat like a snake. I'm no fighter. I just know that
the more scared I am, the harder and straighter I hit. This time I was
lucky. But as he crumpled back, I felt a slap and four stabs of pain in
my cheek. I clapped my hand to it. I could feel the four gashes made by
her dagger finger caps, and the warm blood oozing out from them.
She didn't look at me. She was bending over little Zirk and cuddling
her mask to his cheek and crooning: "There, there, don't feel bad,
you'll be able to hurt me afterward."
There were sounds around us, but they didn't come close. I leaned
forward and ripped the mask from her face.
I really don't know why I should have expected her face to be anything
else. It was very pale, of course, and there weren't any cosmetics. I
suppose there's no point in wearing any under a mask. The eye-brows
were untidy and the lips chapped. But as for the general expression, as
for the feelings crawling and wriggling across it--
Have you ever lifted a rock from damp soil? Have you ever watched the
slimy white grubs?
I looked down at her, she up at me. "Yes, you're so frightened, aren't
you?" I said sarcastically. "You dread this little nightly drama, don't
you? You're scared to death."
And I walked right out into the purple night, still holding my hand
to my bleeding cheek. No one stopped me, not even the girl wrestlers.
I wished I could tear a tab from under my shirt, and test it then and
there, and find I'd taken too much radiation, and so be able to ask to
cross the Hudson and go down New Jersey, past the lingering radiance of
the Narrows Bomb, and so on to Sandy Hook to wait for the rusty ship
that would take me back over the seas to England.