Rendezvous in Black

by Cornell Woolrich

  It wasn’t a good job; he was a walking risk. The shoes, the haircut, the very way he moved his limbs, had “army” written all over them. He was a pushover for the first stray M.P. that took a second look, and he knew it. And besides, the very impersonation in itself was a liability. The war was in its five-alarm stage and you didn’t see them his age out of the army and on the hoof any more.

  The war. The war. He hated the war, he cursed its guts. The war had taken her from him. The war should have picked somebody its own size. Why did it have to bust him up? He’d never done anything to it.

  It was beginning to get light when he showed up in the hamlet, just a roadside stray. The light didn’t do the place any good; it only made its mangy clapboards look twice as dilapidated as before. Even the trees all around it acted like they were ashamed of it, the way they tried to cover it up. A rooster crowed; a dog barked at him as he went by. A kerosene lamp lit up with a slow glow behind one of the upstairs fronts. Not on account of him, but because it was time to get up.

  If he’d had any feelings left over from his own misery, he would have felt sorry for anyone that had to live in a godforsaken dump like this. Better they should stay in bed all day and not have to come out and see it.

  At least a train ran through it and there was a station shack where it was supposed to stop.

  He had to wait around a half-hour for the agent to open it up and go in there, and that didn’t look too good.

  He had money on him. They’d all chipped in, they were all in on it. They’d pooled whatever they had. All to keep a man from losing his wife. All to ease a fellow-sufferer’s pain.

  He went up to the window.

  “Young feller?” the grizzled old man said brusquely.

  “What time’s the train go by?”

  “The train where?”

  “The train the hell out of here.”

  “Six.”

  “It’s nearly that now—”

  “Six t’night.”

  He went back onto the highway that ran through the place.

  Everything was going in the other way, to camp, and he was on borrowed time. But after a while an outbound truck came by, and he got it to stop by throwing his hat in front of its wheels. The driver instinctively braked before he’d had time to tell that it was just a hat, with nobody in it.

  “What’re you, a wise guy?”

  “How’s chances for a heist?”

  “All right, latch on,” the driver said weariedly, “as long as you got me to a dead stop.”

  The truck moved on. The road started to come at them like a roller-coaster chute, spreading open as it got near.

  The truck driver was wise. He glanced at him covertly once or twice. Then he said, “Where you from, the camp back there?”

  “No,” Paige said resolutely. He pared a bill off his scanty stake, handed it to him.

  The truck driver looked at it, jammed it into his pocket. “I guess you ain’t, if you say so,” he said. He winked at him.

  After a while he said, “Where d’you want to go? And that question’s all paid up; you don’t have to worry.”

  “East,” Paige said grimly. “Just east. Straight east, all the way.”

  The day-coach went hurtling through the dusk like a ploughshare cleaving its sepia murkiness apart. And the fill it turned up on either side was speckled with the reflection of rows of lighted windows, so that it seemed to ripple and swim, like sod actually disturbed, as the car went slicing by.

  It swayed and shuddered with its own velocity; its joints creaked and grunted and threatened to start apart. Nothing on rails dared go any faster and still remain on them. But it seemed to go so slow to one, at least, of its occupants. The land was so wide, so vast, so endless. The East never came any nearer. The further toward it you went, the further still you had to go.

  The ceiling lights peered down through the blurring layers of tobacco smoke upon the packed humanity clogging the aisle, swaying and undulating in unison, but in no danger of falling, for there was not room enough to fall in. Passing paper cups of gin and corn along from hand to hand, like relays in a chain, from some far-upward source to some far-downward destination. Singing, shouting, laughing, scowling in momentary quickly dispelled quarrel, comatose but still erect from too many paper cupfuls; blowing a harmonica; playing cards upon the points of their eight knees. The universal cloth and color of the death struggle on every shoulder, except that of an occasional young mother and child, used to this, belonging to it, following the camps around.

  The only other non-uniformed individual in the whole carful, the figure huddled in a corner seat, head down, hat brim covering his face, as if asleep; trying to make himself as unobtrusive as possible. He can’t be seen, that way; but neither can he see.

  Suddenly an authoritative hand came to rest, heavily, with pertinent meaning, on his shoulder, and he quailed and then he froze all over. The way an animal does when it first feels the light touch of imminent capture, and waits, bated, to see which way is the best to try to run.

  Slowly his hand went up. Cautiously he raised his enshrouding hat brim. From the corners of his eyes, he sought out the direction of the arrested hand. Expecting to see the familiar olive-drab uniform, the white armband of a military policeman.

  Instead, it was dark-blue serge, shiny, with brass buttons. An old man’s face beneath the visored cap with a disk attached. All he had in his other hand was a chopper, not a club.

  Only the train conductor, asking for his ticket.

  “What time do we get in?” he said.

  “Eight-fifteen,” the conductor said.

  “What time are you supposed to meet him?” Rusty asked.

  “Eight-thirty,” Sharon said.

  Rusty leaned across the foot-rail of the bed, supported by her elbows, watching her put her things into the open valise that she’d placed on the bed itself.

  She didn’t say anything more for some time—just watched. Sharon seemed to be, or pretended to be, unaware of her scrutiny.

  “So you’re going for good,” Rusty said at last.

  “Good is the word,” Sharon agreed. “Good is the word.”

  “I could think of another,” Rusty murmured half audibly.

  Sharon raised her head, shot her a look. “What’s the matter, don’t you approve?”

  “It’s your business.”

  “Meaning you don’t.” She latched the valise down. “That’s good, coming from you. Every night a date. Every night a different one.”

  “Sure, because I know how to handle love, and you don’t. I take my love like a man. I may splash it all over the outside of me, but it don’t go through. I’m waterproof at the seams, kid. Next morning I’m the same old Rusty. You take it like a woman. Right away you drown and don’t come up again.”

  Sharon picked up the valise, started for the door.

  “Why don’t you take it easy?” Rusty said, almost pleadingly.

  Sharon opened the door. “Talk to my heart. Don’t talk to me. My ears’ll listen to you, but my heart’s tone-deaf.”

  She raised her free hand and swirled it at her, in parting gesture.

  “My share of the room money’s on the bureau. You can give my key back to the manager; I’ve left it there with the money.”

  Rusty, however, didn’t stay behind in the room. She followed her down the stairs, treading almost at her heels.

  At the bottom, Sharon turned her head and cast her a slightly impatient look, as though this lengthening of their parting annoyed her. “What’s the matter, haven’t you got any date of your own tonight?”

  “I could’ve had—two, or three, or four. But it’s funny—maybe it’s on account of what you’re doing—all of a sudden I don’t want a date. The game doesn’t seem much fun any more.”

  “Then why don’t you play it for keeps, like I do, and not as a game?” Sharon inquired tartly.

  “And hit below the belt, you mean.”

  Sharon was at the front door by
now. She didn’t answer that.

  Again Rusty came after her, even put her hand to the door, to keep it the way it was, if only for a moment longer.

  “Is this the best break you can give him, Sharon?”

  “Him? Who?” Then she remembered. “Oh. Him. ”

  “I read one of his letters. I didn’t mean to, but you left it around the room, and I was fresh out of tissues for taking off lipstick. It wasn’t written in ink. Do you have to spill a guy’s heartblood that way?”

  Sharon plunked the valise down and drew a deep breath, as though there was one point she wanted to get across, once and for all, before she finally left. “Look. I can remember being married to a stranger, once long ago. I can even remember what his name was, too. But it’s no use. I can’t bring his face back before me. It’s like asking me to feel sorry for someone I never really knew.”

  “These good dames,” said Rusty, tight-lipped. “Give me a bum like I am.”

  Sharon reached down for the valise again.

  A telephone suddenly peeled out shrilly at the back of the hall, more like a fire-alarm bell than anything else.

  Rusty, almost by reflex action, reached out and gripped Sharon by both arms, as if to hold her fast a moment longer.

  A middle-aged woman came out of the back, answered it. Then she went to the foot of the stairs, called up with the stentorian intonation of a train despatcher: “Fay MacKenzie, on the line! Fay MacKenzie, on the line!”

  Carpet slippers came slapping down, with a sound like a paddle wheel beating water. A voice cried at the top of its lungs, “Hello, Joe!,” then sank into blissful, purring inaudibility.

  They both turned their heads away again.

  “I’ve got a funny premonition,” Rusty said huskily. “Don’t go, Sharon.” She kept her hands outstretched to the other’s arms, trying to dissuade her.

  Sharon laughed at her a little. “What’s the matter, have you got the weeping creeps?”

  “Look, will you do one last thing for me? I’ve never asked you anything before. Give me this for a good-bye present.”

  “Not if you’re asking me to change my—”

  “Wait half an hour. Give him thirty minutes more. He may phone or something. Give him that much of a chance at least. Don’t just walk out cold like this. You’d wait that long for a bus. You’d wait that long for a grade B picture on a Saturday night. You’d wait that long for a table at a crummy greasy-vest feed-mill. Wait that long for the guy you once stood up with, long ago. For old time’s sake. For the sake of clean sport. Then go if you have to.”

  Sharon looked at her. Then she stretched out her foot and shunted the valise over against the wall, just inside the door. “Fifteen minutes,” she said inflexibly. “I don’t know what for, I don’t know what good it’ll do, but you’ve got that tremolo in your voice that gets me. Come on into the company room, we’ll sit and put a record on, while I hold my watch across my knee.”

  She turned her wrist and fumbled with its strap.

  “Fifteen minutes’ wake,” she said, “for a love that’s dead and will never breathe again.”

  The day coach stood motionless now, a hollowed-out trough of hazy lights and blurry tobacco smoke and packed humanity, in the middle of the enshrouding blue-black night.

  They weren’t singing much any more; they were all sung out. They weren’t drinking much either; they were out of that too. They were mostly dozing, somnolent, standing up as well as sitting down. The car was strangely quiet. An occasional remark cut through the silence, magnified out of all proportion to its original volume by the complete lack of other, competitive voices.

  Somewhere immediately outside there was a continuous 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, ghost-like. 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, slippe
d 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 on to 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.”