Come Morning

Chapter 7

Louise wore wide-wale cords and a puff-shouldered sweater under her Icelandic wool jacket. Runyan had a heavy Navy wool watch sweater under his windbreaker; but Pier 39 was thronged with tourists woefully underdressed for a San Francisco summer. A little black boy appeared beside their reflections in a shop window, dancing and throwing punches at his image.

“I’m fightin’ myself in the mirror!” he exclaimed.

Runyan dropped to his knees, covering up. The kid crowed with delight and bounced a few punches off Runyan’s forearms before a long male parental arm whisked him off as an angry parental voice trailed away.

“You’re never going anywhere else with me for the whole entire history of the world, you hear me talking, boy?”

They made a circuit of the massive hexagonal games arcade in an absolutely stunning din of voices, laughter, music from the two-story carrousel in the center of the building, electronic bleats and whistles, and the popping of guns from the shooting gallery. Chinese youths in black satin jackets with ornate embroidered dragons on the backs yelled and punched each other over the skeeball games. At MAKE A HOOP, Runyan sank bucket after bucket without a miss.

Louise exclaimed, “Why, you’re really good!”

“For nothing.” Runyan immediately tossed the basketball back to the girl attendant. He added sheepishly, “Lots of free time in the exercise yard.”

They started off, but the girl called after them: Runyan could choose anything on the top shelf for free. He picked a huge fluffy teddy bear, four feet long with big soulful glass eyes and a soft black cloth nose.

“You clown! What are you going to do with it?”

“What are you going to do with it?” he said, shoving it into her arms like a first grader giving a present. So unexpected was the gesture that Louise grabbed him and held him for a few moments; she didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes.

“Nobody’s given me a teddy bear since I was five,” she said against his shoulder.

They went down the pier arm-in-arm, Louise feeling as she used to on the first date with a new boy. Suppressed excitement, a sense of adventure, a hint of future wickedness, an almost overwhelming feeling of something strange and shining about to happen. What usually happened was the boys tried to make her, and after a few years she started to let them, and the shiningness had gone away and hadn’t come back. Until today.

But then her eyes met those of a slouchy fortyish man standing slightly splay-footed in front of a poster display. She jerked back.

“Runyan! That man...”

“What?”

He already was gone. There were a lot of slouchy fortyish men with lustful eyes in this world; no use inviting Runyan to share her paranoid belief that those were the eyes which had ogled her through the philodendrons the afternoon before.

“Nothing.” She put the heavy, awkward bear back in Runyan’s arms. “You can borrow this until we get back to the car.”

It started to go bad at the restaurant, as if the slouchy man’s lustful gaze had turned their luck sour. She had chosen a large, impersonal place on the second level, its walls covered with rare photos of old San Francisco — the water chute at the Great Highway, the Cliff House, the Sutro Baths, downtown before and after the ’06 quake. The sunken dining area overlooked the pleasure-craft marina, with the Bay Bridge a silver parabola in the background.

They ordered, touched their wine glasses, and drank.

“Did you miss alcohol in prison?”

He shook his head. “I missed you.”

“You didn’t know me.”

“I knew you. In my dreams I knew you.” He paused. “In my fantasies.”

Runyan drenched everything with ketchup and began eating very quickly, casting quick looks around, his left arm forming a protective circle around his plate. Like a dog with its food bowl, she thought, and had to look away, moved almost to tears by a sort of anguished rage. But he caught her look and straightened up quickly, guiltily, jerking away his protective arm and dropped the ketchup-drenched cheeseburger back on the plate.

“Don’t apologize, damn you!” she cried.

They left the pier and walked swiftly, aimlessly, not saying much. In a narrow covered passageway between two of the pastel-colored, low-income housing units in the projects off Bay Street, monuments to the hope-filled redevelopment era of the ’sixties, they passed a dozen black and Chinese kids, ranging from eleven down to about five. They were bouncing a soft, basketball-sized rubber ball against one of the concrete walls.

The ball hit a boy of about seven in the forehead; eyes squeezed tight shut, he started to cry. Nobody paid attention, so he grabbed the ball and threw it into the face of a five-year-old girl. She sat down abruptly and started shrieking. Louise moved to comfort her; Runyan stopped her.

“Don’t humiliate her more than she is!” he said harshly.

Now everyone had stopped to stare. The boy, worried, stooped over her with his hands on his knees.

“You ain’t hurt, woman,” he said hopefully. She yelled louder. He pointed a finger and jeered, ashamed of his own tears a moment before, “Crybaby! Crybaby!”

As she fled, screaming, past them, Runyan thrust the huge soft floppy teddy bear into her arms. It was as big as she, its yellow furry feet dragging the ground between her own. She clasped it automatically, her steps slowing, faltering, stopping. She just stood there, hugging it, staring at them with huge wet-stained eyes; then she whirled and was gone between the buildings with her treasure.

Runyan’s unexpected beau geste brought tears to Louise’s eyes for the second time that day. She said gruffly, “Dammit, Runyan, you gave away my teddy bear.”

“You ain’t hurt, woman,” he said.

They started away, laughing, the bad moments on Pier 39 forgotten — and a tall skinny man on roller skates, wearing a helmet with a tiny rear-view mirror attached, whipped by them backwards with only inches to spare.

Louise yelped with surprise, but Runyan sprang somehow backwards and sideways at the same time, his eyes absolutely wild, every muscle of his body rigid with incipient violence. His skull was momentarily visible beneath the roped muscles. After several moments of total rigidity, his face lost its scraped-bone look, and he slowly came erect.

“I saw two murders in prison,” he panted. “I was around the corner from three more. You don’t do anything. You don’t say anything. You just walk away. Otherwise, a couple of weeks later when you’ve quit expecting it, somebody rams the sharpened end of a pail handle between your ribs in the shower room and you’re just blood on the tiles.”

She raised a hand to touch him, comfort him, then let it drop. His voice rose, thickened.

“You ask me what I want? I want OUT. Out from under people like Moyers, following us around.”

He gestured after the skater, his voice ragged with control. “I wanted this to be our day, just me with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and I can’t do it! I’m still in prison, I—”

Louise grabbed him and began physically dragging him toward her hotel.

“All day we’ve been doing what you want to do,” she said. “Now we’re going to do what I want to do.”

Astride Runyan in the dim golden light, Louise felt the pulsating contractions begin yet again. She stiffened, cried out, trapped in ecstasy at the edge of pain. Her orgasm triggered Runyan’s: His clenched buttocks reared two feet off the bed and his own spasms began. They remained that way for ten or fifteen seconds, frozen, utterly concentrated, as he emptied himself into her with no movement by either of them. Then gradually his buttocks returned to the bed, and her thighs unclenched from around his hips. Without strength now, she gently folded down upon him.

“I wish every day was this day,” she whispered into the hollow of his throat.

“Today is this day.”

He could feel himself going limp inside her soft hot cradle. He had never known such utter arousal followed by such utter tenderness. He started to say so, but she spoke first.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“In fact, I can’t really remember when I haven’t been hungry.” She dropped the empty oyster shell on the bed of cracked ice, selected another, slurped, chewed, licked the juice from the corner of her mouth as he watched her in awe. “Better have some before I eat them all.”

“You already have.” He leaned forward. “Your old man doesn’t own a liquor store, does he?”

“He manages the Osco Drug in Rochester, Minnesota. Why?”

“The Marine’s dream — the deaf-and-dumb nympho whose old man owns a liquor store—”

“So that’s how I strike you.”

“Rochester, Minnesota,” he said musingly. “Don’t they have the Mayo Clinic there?”

“Runs the town.”

As she spoke, a vivid memory rushed back upon her. She could smell the sharp tang of green apples, feel her T-shirt cling to her bony adolescent back with evaporated sweat, rough bark under her hands, the shock and sting in her feet when she dropped to the ground and darted into the bushes lining the fieldstone drywall at Mayowood. The guard’s flashlight bouncing and probing unsuccessfully through the orchard.

“The Mayos had a big estate a couple of miles out of town when I was a kid, we used to ride out there on our bikes and steal apples.”

“What happened if you got caught? They’d take out your appendix?”

She laughed and shook her head. “I never got caught.”

“Were you scared?”

“Petrified. But it was such a delicious feeling.”

“I’ve never been so scared as this last month, waiting to get out,” he said, surprising her; she had thought so much openness was impossible for him. “You get scared of freedom. Every con who’s served a few years without getting killed or turning queer has learned how to survive inside. You run a couple of bluffs, you get your Levi’s pressed and your shoes shined and wear a fancy belt and buckle. You’re a big man. But in the process you let yourself get defined by the place. When you finally make parole, you start getting scared you won’t be able to make it on the outside.”

“You want them to have stopped the world while you got off?”

“Or at least slow it down so I can jump back on. But they don’t.” He squeezed her hand. “You. The way you are. Maybe there were women like you around when I went inside, but I never knew any of them. I don’t know how to handle someone like you.” His tone changed, tightened; his eyes caught hers and held them. “I wanted it to be simple when I got out. So I could be out — not carrying prison around on my back. Nothing coming at me. But you’re coming at me. You—”

“Runyan, you don’t have to—”

“Of course I do. You make me feel...” He paused. His voice was intense, slightly hoarse. “You turn me around. I’ve got to handle that. Moyers is staked out on Beach Street, waiting for me to make my move. I’ve got to handle that, too. Last night I got a phone call that means I’m going to have to get out of this hotel tonight without being seen. All of a sudden my options are limited. If Moyers finds out I’m going...”

“Take my car,” she said. Her smile was stunning, full of devilish delight. “I’ll take care of Moyers. Moyers will never know what hit him.”