Get help?
Not this old lady and her daughter. Not this Neanderthal sailor on his
way to a bar and a blonde. Not the bookkeeper. Maybe the car salesman,
ex-Army, Lions Club member, beefy, respectable, well-intentioned, not
a complete fool. The guy on the corner reading a newspaper by the bus
stop.
"I need help," I panted to him. "Somebody's trying to kidnap me."
"Really makes you sick to hear about something like that, doesn't it?"
he said. "I'm in favor of the Lindbergh Law myself."
"I'm not sure whether--"
"This heat is murder, isn't it? Especially here in these concrete
canyons. Sometimes I wish I was back in Springfield. Cool, shaded
streets...."
"Listen to me! These people, they're conspiring against me, trying to
drive me insane! Two men, a girl--"
"For my money, Marilyn Monroe is _the_ doll of the world. I just don't
understand these guys who say she hasn't got class. She gets class by
satirizing girls without any...."
He was like anybody you might talk to on the street. I knew what he
would say if I cued him with "baseball" or "Russia" instead of the key
words I had used.
I should have known better, but I wanted to touch him in some way, make
him know I was alive. I grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders, and
there was a whoosh and as I might have expected he collapsed like the
insubstantiality he was.
There was a stick figure of a man left before me, an economical
skeleton supporting the shell of a human being and two-thirds of a
two-trouser suit.
Hide.