Time and Again

by Jack Finney

  I stopped, my hand on Julia's arm swinging her around with me, and we stood staring. My mind wouldn't translate what was happening into sense. Because the sergeant's helmeted head had appeared out the street-side window of the carriage, and he was pointing at us, his arm extended, his forefinger aiming. But it wasn't his finger at all, because I saw it flash, heard it roar, felt the zing of the bullet split the air near our heads.

  Our minds worked then; we were running for our lives, and we heard the explosion of the sergeant's revolver, the high-pitched zing, and I saw a chip fly out of the balustrade of the brownstone house just ahead. Again the astonishingly loud explosion of the big revolver, then we were at the street corner, and in the instant of hurling ourselves around it I had to look back once again: Byrnes was in the street, his hand on the sergeant's wrist forcing the gun straight upward; not to save us, I knew that, but because there were too many startled citizens now, stopped and staring, between us and the gun.

  We were around the corner on Forty-seventh Street running hard, Julia with her skirt gathered up in one hand, people gaping. Across the street a man on the steps of the Windsor Hotel suddenly ran down and across the cobbles toward us, his hand raised in a "halt" gesture, saying something, I couldn't tell what. But I raised a fist, and he stopped at the curb and watched us tear past. It was a long crosstown block, an endless row of identical brownstones, and halfway down it Julia gasped, "I can't, I have to stop!" We slowed to a walk, and I looked behind. But though people were turned to stare after us, others leaning out of carriage windows or looking back from the drivers' seats of delivery wagons, no one was chasing us and there was no sign of Byrnes or the sergeant, I didn't know why.

  We reached Madison Avenue. A horsecar traveling south was just past the far corner, and we stepped out into the street, and I helped Julia up onto the rear platform as it moved past, then swung up after her. It was rolling along about as fast as we could have traveled on foot unless we'd run full speed without letup, which was impossible; and this was a lot less noticeable. I paid our fares, we sat down and stared out the window, getting our wind back and trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. But no one looked at us. People sat staring out their windows at the quiet street. I'd walked along here in the sun, with Felix's camera, day before yesterday. People coughed, yawned, and got on or off the car, crunching down the aisle through the ankle-deep straw that was supposed to keep your feet warm and didn't. At Forty-fourth Street and again at Forty-third, I looked down the short block to our left at Grand Central Station standing exactly where it was supposed to stand, and where I'd seen it countless times. Only now it was red brick and white stone, and only three stories high.

  Forty-second Street just ahead was busy, noisy; we could hear the endless clatter of iron-tired wheels over cobble paving, and two cops stood out in the street directing traffic. One was short, the other tall, but both had great protruding stomachs bellying the blue cloth of their long uniform coats. Our tracks curved east onto Forty-second Street, and the tall cop beside the tracks glanced toward our car, then took off his helmet and peered into it.

  We drew abreast of him, starting to take the curve, and when he was directly beside our window I leaned across Julia's lap to peer down into his helmet and see what he was looking at. I don't think I've ever been more astonished. There, jammed down into the deep crown of his felt helmet, lay my face looking up at me. Beside it lay Julia's—our police photographs again, mounted on heavy cardboard—and now I understood why Byrnes's photographer had actually run from the little basement room with his plates. From that moment on, as fast as he could work, our photographs were being duplicated. And as we'd jogged block after block uptown in the carriage, as we'd stood listening to Carmody, to Byrnes, to Thompson, these photos were being rushed to very possibly every cop on duty in the city—the warning to look for us already out while we were still in custody.

  Now in the instant of our passing, the cop on Forty-second Street looked up from the helmet in his hand. And I knew too late that for an hour or more he'd been checking our photographed images with the faces of all the pedestrians crossing before him and of the passengers in each car passing his post; there was probably a promotion for the man who got us. Our eyes met and, a foot from mine, I saw his widen in startled recognition and—this astonished me—in sudden sharp fear. What he'd been told about how dangerous I was, I didn't know, but—we were a car length past him now—I heard the urgency in his voice as he turned and shouted at the other cop. He answered—I couldn't make out what he said—and they both began to run down the middle of the street after us.

  They were twenty yards behind, and they didn't gain—running heavily, flat-footedly, heads far back, each with a hand on his jiggling belly. It was a scene in every way precisely like many another I'd seen in old-time silent-movie comedies. They weren't shouting now; they needed all their breath to run. But the short one pulled out the long nightstick hanging from a loop of his wide leather belt, held it high over his head, brandishing it threateningly, and the resemblance to the Keystone Cops—they even wore mustaches—was complete.

  Except that there was nothing funny about them. They were absolutely real, and I knew that if they caught us, we could end up in Sing Sing prison. Neither driver nor conductor had seen them, though a couple of passengers had turned as Julia and I had, to stare back at them. At Grand Central Station just ahead the car would stop, I was sure, and they'd catch up with it in seconds. I was sliding from my seat toward the aisle, a hand on Julia's wrist; and looking as serene and innocent as I could manage, I walked on toward the front of the car, Julia right behind me. We passed the conductor, I smiled at him vaguely, then we stepped out onto the open front platform.

  Directly before Grand Central Station, high over the center of the street, stood the little wooden gabled building of an El station, stairs leading up to it from each side of Forty-second Street. It was a spur line apparently, leading to the main line of the Third Avenue El, I supposed, and I had only one vague plan, if it could be called even that. There were four flights of steps leading up to that station, two on each side of the street, and the station stood directly at the end of the spur-line track. Any one of the four flights could be reached through the station, and if we ran up one of those flights we had an exactly even chance—two cops, each coming up one flight of steps after us—of running down one of the other two flights and escaping them.

  It was all I could think of, and standing on the platform, I murmured, "Jump off and run when I do," and Julia smiled and nodded as though at a casual remark of mine. I was watching the driver, I saw his mittened hands draw back on the reins, felt my body lean slightly forward as the car began to slow; then I nudged Julia, and we jumped off and ran hard. Down the center of the street alongside the horse, then cutting before him, ducking between two wagons, one of them piled high with barrels, up onto the sidewalk, and then pounding up the stairs two at a time, Julia in the lead and running as fast as I was.

  People coming down paid us no particular attention, merely stepping aside to let us pass, and I realized that people running up or down these steps at Grand Central were no unusual sight. I heard shouts behind us, turned at the top of the flight, and saw the taller of the cops hit the first step—he was moving faster than I'd thought—then we ran on into the station. Inside we walked. I put on a smile as we approached the ticket booth, pulling two nickels from my pocket. Julia was tugging at my sleeve, I looked at her, she gestured with her chin, and as we stopped and stood waiting while the man in the booth leisurely tore two tickets from his roll, I looked out and saw a one-car train standing on the track, engine first with its front end nearly touching the station house here at the end of the single track. Inside the car an old man, his clasped hands and chin resting comfortably on the top of his cane, sat quietly waiting till it was time for the train to start. At the far end of the car the conductor sat staring out the window toward the other side of the street. It was momentarily tempting but as I took o
ur tickets I shook my head at Julia. To be caught inside that car, a cop entering at each end, just couldn't be risked.

  We walked quickly out onto the platform, and passing the engine, I turned to look back toward the head of the stairs we'd come up, and saw the helmet rising into view, then the cop's face, and saw his head turn and catch sight of us. Then Julia and I ran along the platform toward the stairs at its opposite end, and as we passed the car, I heard the conductor slam the waist-high metal gate of its open platform. The tiny steam engine behind the car tootled, and I turned to see its miniature drive-shaft move; then the car was rolling past us and Julia moaned—we could have been on it!

  But it was too late now. Chuff-chuff, chuff-chuff—the engine, moving backward behind the car on this return run down the single track, was picking up speed, the conductor at the back of the car slamming the back-platform gate closed, and the second cop's helmet rose into sight at the head of the stairs we were racing toward. They'd outguessed us. I swung around, and the other cop, belly jouncing, a hand holding his helmet on, was running along the platform toward us not fifty feet away.

  I've never really been one of the people who think fast in an emergency. I think fast enough, that is, but usually what I think of is the wrong thing to do. This time, hardly thinking at all, I did precisely the right thing. Both cops running toward us now, I turned to Julia beside me. My arms, swinging in toward her waist like giant claws, gripped her, raised her high off her feet, and dropped her down on the other side of the waist-high gate on the rear platform of the car rolling past us. Then—the short cop grabbing at me, his hand raking down the back of my coat as I turned—I jumped into the open doorway of the engine cab as it passed, swung around fast, and the cop running at me ran his face right into the heel of my hand. He staggered, then stood staring after us as we rolled past the end of the station platform.

  Across the little engine cab from me, the engineer, leaning out his window to stare down the track ahead, had neither seen nor heard me jump on, over the rattle and rapid huff of his engine. Standing there in the engine's open doorway, I was completely oriented; I knew I was directly above the center of Forty-second Street, moving east just past Grand Central Station. The sketch—just below—is one I've made showing our train just after leaving Grand Central Station and the El platform. Third Avenue, toward which we are moving, is off to the right, and that's Forty-second Street below our train.

  I looked up and saw only the gray and empty winter sky in the space I'd always before seen filled by the soaring needle-spired tower of the Chrysler Building. I glanced down, and where the base of the Chrysler Building belonged stood the round little red-brick-and-white-stone tower you see in my sketch, no more than a dozen feet taller than our tracks. And in that moment—the moment of my sketch—moving through this partly familiar yet utterly strange and now suddenly hostile city, I felt a rush of homesickness nearly overwhelm me; I had to close my eyes for a moment to fight it off.

  Within seconds we were slowing down, backing in between the twin arms of the station platform at the other end of the two-block spur line. It wasn't impossible that the two cops could hurry along Forty-second Street for those two blocks, even commandeering a carriage or wagon for all I knew, and I stood in the doorway of the engine cab staring ahead at the Third Avenue line, hoping a train we could transfer to would be just coming in. But there was none even in sight, and the moment the wooden floor of the station platform appeared beside me, I hopped off the engine—I don't think the engineer ever did see me—and let my own momentum carry me trotting forward to the slowing car just ahead. Julia was standing at the gate, the conductor right behind her. "That's against the law, you know!" he said angrily to me. I wasn't sure whether he meant lifting Julia over the gate or riding the engine, and I said I was sorry, and handed him our tickets. Then—I wanted to yell at him to open the gate but was afraid if I did that he'd be deliberately slower than ever—he got out his punch, carefully punched both tickets, handed them back to me, and I thanked him. And only then did he open the gate and let Julia off. Then we ran for the stairs.

  I think the two cops could have been there if they'd really tried, waiting for us to step down off the stairs onto the walk at Third and Forty-second. But they'd have had to move faster than they'd done in some years, and no one grabbed us. But across the street a cop walking his beat looked into a saloon over the tops of the two waist-high latticed doors of the entrance, then strolled to the curb at the corner, and stood, skillful as a professional entertainer, bouncing and twirling his club at the end of its thong. I had the feeling that he'd given far more time to club twirling than crook catching, and as we turned and walked south on Third Avenue, moving away from him as fast as we could without obviously hurrying, I was glad that this was his beat. Julia was looking at me questioningly, and I understood. Were our photographs in his helmet, too? I shrugged; if not, they would be soon. Every cop in the city would have them, to be passed on to the next shift, and with extra cops and probably plainclothesmen out, too. The reward Carmody had almost openly offered Byrnes would be big if we were caught and convicted, or "killed while escaping"; it wouldn't matter which. Because Byrnes was clever: Our "escape" and flight, of course, would be accepted as confession.

  The cop on the corner was half a block behind now and hadn't even glanced at us. But the next one could be different, and if he wasn't, then the one after that. We simply could not walk through the streets for block after block; we'd be caught within minutes. And any public transportation would be as bad. We had to get off the streets right now: into a hansom, it occurred to me longingly, where we could sit back and move unseen through the streets with time to think. But Byrnes knew the problems of people trying to hide; it takes money, and he had ours.

  "Julia, have you any friends who'd hide you for a few days, lend you some money?"

  "In Brooklyn, yes; we lived there up until two years ago. But the only friend here I could ask to do that lives at Lexington and Sixty-first, and—"

  "Too far, too far!" I got rattled. "Where are we, Julia, Forty-first? What's the nearest bridge? Maybe they aren't guarding them yet, and we can still—"

  "Si, there's only one bridge, Brooklyn, and it's way downtown."

  I nodded, glancing at store windows we passed, trying to see whether they reflected anyone following or about to challenge us. More than ever before, I was realizing that Manhattan is an island and not a very big one, either; you can walk its circumference in a day. "I don't want us to be trapped sitting on a ferry like a couple of pigeons. We need money, dammit! To hole up in a hotel where they can supply our meals. Suppose we telephoned your aunt—" I stopped.

  "Did what?"

  "Never mind."

  But she'd heard me. "I don't know anyone who has a telephone. Or who has even seen one."

  "I know, I know!"

  "We could send a messenger boy; there's an office near here."

  "But we'd have to wait there for the reply?"

  "Yes."

  "When the boy came back, the cop that I'm certain must be watching the house would be right along with him. God, how I wish there were movies! Between us we probably have the price of a cheap one, and we could sit and wait till dark."

  "Movies?"

  I'd lose my mind if this kept up. I said, "We've got to separate, Julia. Till dark. They're looking for the pair of us; let's not make it easy for them. It'll be dark in forty minutes, an hour at most. And I'll try to sneak in and out of the house then; I've got money in my room. Meet me in a hour and a half at—where's the nearest good place from the house?—in Madison Square. Walk through it as though you're going somewhere, and I'll follow you out. If I'm not there, try again in half an hour. Then give me up, and"—I shrugged—"do your best. Okay?" Before she could answer I looked at the windows of a store we were passing; the entranceway passed between double display windows, one pane of each set at a 45-degree angle to the walk. It reflected the half block or so behind us and I saw a man running sil
ently toward us. He was in plainclothes, wearing a derby and a long topcoat, but nothing could disguise the truth that he was a cop. He was running on his toes without a sound, and he was about the length of a football field behind. Without turning around I spoke quietly and very rapidly. "Julia. You must run. To the corner, and around it, and keep on. Do it now, now!"

  She didn't hesitate or waste time looking back, but gathered up her skirts and ran. I turned and walked straight out into the street. There I turned to face the sidewalk and stood waiting. And now the man running toward us had a choice to make between me or going after Julia, leaving me behind his back, and not sure what I'd do. He had to choose me, and he did it cleverly, running right past me as though going for Julia, as I thought he was for a moment. Then he whirled in a fast right-angle turn and came at me. But I'd picked a metal pillar of the El tracks to stand near, and I stepped over to it. For a moment or so we stood, both of us balanced on our toes, the pillar between us, trying to out-feint each other. Then he lunged, I shoved off hard from the post, and he was after me.

  But he could shoot and probably would if I began outracing him, and at this distance he wouldn't miss. Running on was pointless, and I did the only other thing left to do. I whirled and literally threw myself at his ankles in an action he may not ever have seen before—a football tackle, though this was from the front. I'd played a little football in high school before the players got too big for me. And now I hit his shins with my left shoulder, my arms wrapping tight around his knees in a tackle so illegal it would have drawn a hundred-yard penalty—and he went right on forward over my shoulders and down onto cobbles. I thought my shoulder was broken—the numbness reminded me of why I'd had to quit the game—but I was up right away and running in the opposite direction. I looked back; he was still lying on the street. Fifteen more running steps right down the middle of the street, wagon drivers turning to stare, then I looked back again. He was on his knees, turning to face me and pulling a big nickel-plated revolver from his back pocket. I stayed on the side of the line of pillars opposite him, and kept glancing over my shoulder in a series of fast peeks. Using both hands, he was aiming carefully; he wanted me, all right. I slowed suddenly, then sprinted, trying to throw his aim off; he fired, and the bullet struck a pillar, making a surprisingly loud clang. People stood frozen on the walks, but none of them seemed to want to come out into the street. At the corner I turned and ran east in the direction opposite from Julia's, and the gun roared again, and I mentally examined myself and decided I hadn't been hit.