The Black Path of Fear

4

It was a woman.

Her face glowed out at me like something transparent lighted from the inside. The typical Cuban type: high Carib cheekbones, sleek black hair parted arrow-straight up the center of her crown and twined circularly about each ear, full pouting lips, red as wet paint without there being any paint on them, biscuit-colored skin, jet-black eyes, probably large but pulled cornerwise into slits now and smoldering and dangerous behind those shuttered slits.

She had on a shawl; not your romantic Spanish-dancer thing, with roses all over it, but black and threadbare and shabby; cheap cotton, with rips in a couple of places where it had caught on nails or something. Down under one arm, up and over the other, and clinging to her person by some unaided trick of its own spiral drapery. Under it a short length of red calico petticoat peered. Under that, pink cotton stockings that didn’t look any too clean. Under them, cheap native moccasins or sandals — I don’t know what they were — felt or maybe straw-soled. They had no heels or arches or anything else. I didn’t look down there right now; I only got that presently. I was still too busy up above, at knife level.

The match light flashed from the blade and struck into my eyes. The tendon in my neck was wearing thin. How she had managed to be so accurate in the dark, I don’t know. Long practice, perhaps, in needling just the right place, sight unseen.

Oh, one other thing: the cigarette that had telegraphed her so far ahead wasn’t a cigarette after all; it was a small plump native cigar, down to quarter length now, its fumes apparently inhaled along with the oxygen her system took in without once removing it from her mouth from first to last and yet without inconveniencing her, it was such second nature. A feat I defy any male cigar smoker to match.

The ash-ringed coal of it vibrated a little, and a truculent sound came from behind it. “¿Bueno?” I didn’t know what it meant, but I could catch on by the inflection. Well? Or: What’s up? Something like that. A sort of tough challenge. But the voice, harsh as it was, was a young girl’s.

She said something else; I think it was: “Don’t move.” She whipped the hand holding the match, as though it were broken at the wrist, and there was darkness again. The knife point didn’t move, I didn’t move either. She must have gotten the new one from her bosom, where the shawl was at its tightest. She snapped it into combustion with her thumbnail again, one-handed, and the light came on again.

She was still waiting for the answer, I could see. The knife said she was going to get it too. She was grim; she was unfriendly.

“Take it easy, take it easy,” I said. “They’re after me out there. I can’t talk your language. Put that thing down, will you?” But I knew enough not to gesture or even point at it; I kept it strictly word of mouth.

“Oh, an Americano, eh?” she said. Her underlip jutted forward in a sort of caustic purse, then flattened out again. The knife point didn’t retreat a hairbreadth. It hung steady. She had perfect muscular control. And not a shadow of compunction.

I rolled my eyes to try to show her. They were the only things I could safely move, the way she had me nailed. “Cops — understand what I mean? Out there on the stairs. I don’t know how to say it. Policia. They’re after me.”

She switched unexpectedly to English. And good English too. I don’t mean good in the sense of high-class. Not the kind you get out of books. But the fluent kind you pick up in the gutter. “Cops, eh?” Her face changed when she said that word. A look of hatred overspread it. For me she’d had just impersonal menace; this was personalized hate.

Her eyes crackled like fuses; they stretched lengthwise, as though somebody were pinning her skin up behind her ears. “Why didn’t you say so before? I hate cops,” she spat.

The knife point backed out a little way. It let the indentation in my neck it had caused slowly fill up after it. It hung level there for a moment more.

“Anyone that’s no friend of theirs is a friend of mine.”

It dropped down all the way, was suddenly gone from between us. I don’t know where it went; I wasn’t quick enough. Stocking top, maybe, or some waistband under the shawl. She was fast with that thing, coming and going. For my part, all I was glad about was it was gone; I wasn’t interested in finding out where.

I took my first unrationed breath in what seemed like half an hour, though it may have been only four or five minutes.

“I didn’t know you talked English,” I said.

“I ought to. I been in enough of your jails to take out naturalization papers,” was the sullen answer.

The match was shortening up on her. She gave us the usual intermission of darkness, touched off a new one with her nail. This time she fed the flame to a stalagmite of misshapen candle stuck into the neck of a dark green beer bottle. It lifted a curtain of bleary light a few feet, leaving the top of the place, over our heads, still in darkness.

She fanned me aside with her hand, took over my place at the door seam, bent her head to listen.

“Get over there. Anyone they’re after I’ll do what I can for.”

They were plenty active; you could hear them thumping back and forth right over us, through the lead sheeting of the roof. It gave a funny, hollow, drumlike sound, like mild thunder rolling this way and that just over the ceiling.

She hissed a soft name or two at them in Spanish. I could figure what it was: genealogical stuff.

She raised her foot lengthwise up against the bottom of the door, then scraped it down to floor level. That shot home a bolt that I’d missed seeing until now. It went into a socket in the sill. Then she turned and went across the room, over to where there was a big square of oilcloth tacked up against the wall. It evidently blotted out an unsuspected window.

It was the first time I’d seen her walk in the light. The time before, she’d walked toward me in the darkness. Until you’d seen her walk you missed the full meaning of the word “toughness.” I don’t know how she did it or what it was she did, but her walk was something. It wasn’t hippy or sexy; as a matter of fact, she was pretty sparse; she hadn’t many curves. It was more that it was antagonistic, defiant, challenging. She seemed to lock each leg as she planted it out before her, without breaking it at the knee, and then she’d sort of hitch herself over onto it and bring up the next one and do it again. It reminded me, for some reason, of a car continually shifting gears. She walked like she had a chip on her hipbone. I tried to imagine some guy taking her for a stroll down the street on his arm like that, and it wouldn’t work. It was the kind of a walk that was meant to go strictly by itself, late at night, and if you were wise you’d steer clear of it when you saw it coming your way.

I thought to myself, watching her go by me, It’s a good thing you’re on my side, lady.

She spread two fingers at the side of this sort of oilcloth blackboard, stiffened her neck. “There’s twenty of them down there! They’re thick as bedbugs. You’ll never be able to get through.”

She pulled her fingers out; turned away, shaking her head. “They sure must want you bad, chico.” She got rid of the tag end of the famous cigar that had had me so petrified before by spitting it out dead-center on the floor and killing it with her foot. Then she took out another one from the same place where she’d had the matches, down past her chest under the shawl, and got it ready by rolling it briskly between her palms. She stalked back to the candle blob and lighted up. Her mouth had been empty for ten seconds, maybe, all told, between the two.

“Do you know the town at all?” she asked me through the fog.

“Never saw it in my life before six this evening.”

“You picked a good place for a jam. Where were you going to go, then, if you did get out of here?”

“You’ve got me,” I admitted. “I was just going to go — that was all — and keep going.”

She blew out another streak of skywriting. “I tried that in Jacksonville, and it won’t work. You’ve got to have a hole to pull in after you. Either that or you’ve got to lam out of the place altogether. Just to keep moving is no dice; you’re only heading for the police station the long way round.”

“There’s nothing but water around this place.”

She agreed with her eyebrows. She seemed to be thinking it over.

“What’re they after you for?” she asked suddenly, hugging herself tight around the shawl with both arms.

“They say I killed my girl,” I told her.

“They say wrong?”

“They say dead wrong.”

“That’s what you say they say. Another man took her away from you?”

“I took her away from another man.”

“Then any fool but a policeman knows, you didn’t kill her. You never kill what doesn’t belong to you, only what does.”

“Tell them that,” I muttered, ramming my hands down into my pockets.

She blew a smoke ring reflectively. “It’s a heavy count, but this is still as good a place for you as any.”

“I can’t let you get mucked up in it,” I growled. “I’ll blow out again like I blew in. You don’t owe me anything; why should you get loused up for me?”

She sliced off a layer of air with her hand in my direction. “Don’t kid yourself. Anything I do, I’m not doing it because it’s for you; I’m doing it because it’s against them.” She went into some Spanish again, her eyes shedding sparks in time with it.

There’d been a lull; now there was a sudden rampage again. They must have finished casing the roofs, or as many of them as they could reach. The sound of their heavy footsteps recrossing the lead or whatever it was came through to us, it was like somebody thumping on a washtub. Then the chain ladder started to sluice around.

“Here comes payday,” I said.

She threw down her cigar, went into high gear. She could move fast when she wanted to. She took a jerk at my sleeve as she brushed by me. “Come here. Over here. Lie down on this cot over here. I’ve got an out for you. Get rid of your stuff from the waist up; take off everything.”

I didn’t get it, but I took her word for it. That was all there was time for. They were holding a confab, giving out instructions or something, out there at the foot of the ladder.

She dived into the gloom, over in one of the far corners of the big barnlike room. I heard a wooden drawer rasp out. “Where’s that smear-stick I used to use when I was still going around with Manolito?” I heard her say.

I used the buttons on my shirt front like a zipper; just wrenched from top to bottom, and they all flew off.

They were on the last lap out there now. They were pounding on a door; it must have been the next one up from this one. Or the next one down below — I don’t know which.

She came hustling back to me.

“Undershirt too,” she told me.

I skinned that off me too.

“Now lie down flat there, face to the wall... That’s it. Keep your face pressed as close to the wall as you can. Whatever happens, don’t turn around this way. Keep your arm up over your head, like that, so they can’t see you from the side either. Wait a minute; first let’s get this coat and stuff underneath the covers you’re lying on. They may recognize that suit you were wearing.”

I felt her stuffing it underneath me. Then she sat down on the edge of the cot, alongside my bared back. Without any warning something cold and slippery started to typewrite all over my back and shoulders, and down the hollow of my spine, and along the outside of one arm. I jumped at the unexpected feel of it. She pushed me flat again with a vicious swipe. “Lie still!” she hissed. “There isn’t very much time.”

She kept going dab-dab-dab all over me, a mile a minute. I stole a look around over my shoulder at an acute downward angle, and she seemed to be printing out coin dots all over my skin with a lipstick. I didn’t get it; Quick-Brain didn’t get it. When she’d hit my backbone with it I’d jump a little; I couldn’t help it. It was like a spinal anesthetic.

They were in the adjoining room now. We could hear them scuffing against the partition wall here and there as they walloped their way around in it. They were giving it a good, thorough going-over, by the sounds of it.

She flung the covers back over me, nearly to the top of my head. “Hold it, now. Don’t rub against the covers. Keep your face to the wall.”

She shifted the candle farther over to the other side of the room, bringing down the curtain of darkness that overhung us still lower, so that the line where the light ended and shadow began fell across me and cut me off at the neck. Then I heard her pick up some kind of a bottle standing against the wall somewhere off in the recesses of the room. An overpowering reek of some strong disinfectant welled up unexpectedly as she moved back and forth around the cot with it. I looked backward out of the corner of my eye, and she was sloshing out a few drops left over in the bottle this way and that on the floor.

They were at the door now. It almost seemed to bulge and swell inward to bursting point with the lambasting they gave it. Somebody bellowed something through in Spanish.

She made a quick pass at me, meaning: This is it now. Here we go, sink or swim. I was still glimpsing her out of the far corner of my eye. She took the shawl and elevated it, changed the hang of it, so that it draped the top of her head and her shoulders. Then she flung the end of it around back on itself, so that it covered her mouth. She looked back towards me, and I got the effect. The transformation was magical. The underworld girl had become a shrouded figure of sorrow, almost nunlike in its austerity. She even changed her walk; sort of crept submissively. She grabbed up a string of beads from somewhere as she went by — and whatever they were, they weren’t religious beads — and folded them into the shawl, and after that you could hear them clicking faintly, sight unseen, while her lips moved in accompaniment, mumbling a prayer that never quite came to boiling point but kept simmering away down in her throat. Her coifed head was piously inclined.

For such short notice it was a very good act.

I rolled my face back full-compass to the wall and got the rest of it from then on by my sense of hearing alone.

She prodded up the foot latch; the door creaked wide, and there was a questioning masculine growl from two or three voices at once. The original two must have added to their number.

She went “Shhhh!” in a long-drawn breath of pleading remonstrance. I could even visualize her placing a cautioning finger against the shawl over the place where her submerged mouth was, but maybe she didn’t.

That wasn’t enough to hold them. I would have been surprised if it had been.

There was an inward surging of footsteps as they elbowed her aside and fanned out into the room. Then a halt again as they sighted me, floating half submerged in the gloom, just over the watermark of candleshine. Then a sharply barked question, obvious enough to translate itself without aid: “¿Quién es eso?” Who’s that?

She wined a long-drawn-out answer in a weepy undertone, with sniffles for punctuation marks. All I could get out of it was the couplet “mi hombre,” repeated a couple of times over. My man. I was her man.

There was a pause when she got through, ominous rather than reassuring. I could feel their sharp, shrewd policemen’s eyes boring into me from about six different angles at once, fluoroscoping me through the covers and all. It wasn’t a very comfortable feeling. I forced myself to lie there huddled and inert, the way she’d posed me. Gee, it’s hard not to move a muscle when you’re dying to. It was tougher than if I’d been standing upside down on my head. The damp plaster of the wall smelled rotten that close to the button of my nose. It tickled the inside of it, too, and I was afraid the old sneezing itch that you invariably get when you’re trying not to attract attention would hit me any minute, but fortunately it didn’t develop.

I opened one eyelid guardedly, under the shelter of my upcurved arm, and watched the wall, like you do the rear-sight mirror in a car. The dividing line between candlelight and gloom suddenly shot way up high. I could get what that meant. One of them had picked up the candle, was holding it aloft so they could all get a better look at me.

She was remonstrating in a plaintive, melancholy voice, but that didn’t do any good, it stayed up where it was.

I knew what was coming in another minute after that, and it did. A looming form started to swell upward on the wall, creeping up from below, as one of them came slowly over toward me to take a look at contact point. The nearer he got, the darker and bigger his silhouette got. The tread stopped right up against my backbone, or practically so, and he was standing there, looking down at me. I was afraid to close even the half eye that I had open now, although it was on the inside of my face, away from him.

The silhouette suddenly crumpled, foreshortened, and I knew what that meant. He was bending his head down now, to examine me from even closer quarters. I could feel his breath on a strip of my neck that wasn’t covered.

If she’d only passed me that knife of hers before she let them in, I kept thinking, I might have been able to jump him, turn him around and use him as a shield against the others, force my way out right through the middle of them. No, I knew better than that. How far would I get? Down to the foot of the stairs, maybe, at best. Then I’d simply walk into the arms of those who were waiting down there around the entrance.

In a half minute now it would be all over. I almost felt like turning around of my own accord and giving up, but I didn’t

I saw the grasping, open-clawed shadow his hand made on the wall as it hung poised over me for a moment, about to come down and pull the covers back, fling me around so he could see my face.

It dipped, and I felt the covers go off me. The air played over my unprotected back, crinkling the skin.

There was a startled gasp, not just from one but from four or five different throats at once. The wall brightened; the shadow had suddenly snapped back to a distance, like stretched elastic. He must have given a backward broad jump, to move that fast.

Somebody choked out a question in a curdled voice.

I heard the girl utter a single musical-sounding word in answer. She rolled it on her tongue as though she enjoyed it. Gee, it was a pretty word. Their language is full of them, but this was so liquid, so melodious, it had even the others beat. “Viruela,” she said.

There was an equine scream, a whinny of dismay. Somebody else let out a hoarse yell to go with that. There was a floor-throbbing stampede of heavy feet that quivered the cot I was on, all converging toward one point, all trying to get out of the room at, one time. You could hear loose arms and legs strike against the doorframe before they were pulled through after their floundering owners. The backdraft bent the candle flame over flat, teetered the whole structure of light and shadow in the room.

Then the door slammed shut like a bomb; their sound track faded to a whisper, and the two of us were alone in there again.

I could tell we were, but I didn’t move for a minute, just to make sure.

They kept going, outside in the hall. The panic was on them bad. The whole rickety building seemed to vibrate with their headlong tumbling down the stairs out there.

Then a little of the clamor came up from the outside, from the front way, when they first hit the open air, and that meant they were out altogether; they were back in the alley where they’d started from.

She hadn’t given me any signal yet, but I turned slowly and looked. The candle flame had only just managed to straighten up again after the suction of their exit, was still jiggling crazily. She was head-bent by the door, listening. I saw her thumb her nose at it in a sort of blanket farewell to them. She slurred something under her breath, but it was no prayer this time.

I rolled over and sat up. “Good work,” I said cheerfully.

She turned around and looked at me. She gave me the wink with one of her big black eyes. “Not bad, eh?” she agreed. She dropped the shawl back to where it had been before and became the street Arab again. Funny what a little touch like that can do sometimes. She chucked the beads back into the discard.

She moved aside from her listening post, revealed a small yellow placard dangling from the doorknob that had been hidden from me until now. It was still swaying lightly on its cord from the ferocious exit slam they’d given it just now. On it, it had the same pretty-sounding word, printed in big black capitals that I’d heard her mention to them before: VIRUELA.

“Say, what is that?” I asked her. “What does it mean?”

“Smallpox,” she said unconcernedly, giving the card a little flick aside with her nail. “It’s a Board of Health warning to keep out. You know, a sort of quarantine sign. It should have been on the outside of the door, not in here, but they were too excited to stop and think about that. I knew they wouldn’t have the guts to take hold of you and turn you over and look at your face.”

“It sure did the trick.” I grinned. I was sitting on the edge of the cot now, pulling my shirt down around me again, rouge spots and all. “How’d you happen to have it handy like that?”

She shrugged offhandedly. “It was left over. The sanitation people forgot to take it away with them last time they were here. You see, somebody really did die of smallpox on that cot a couple of weeks ago.”

I got up off it fast, with a sort of spring; finished my dressing someplace else.

She smiled a little when she saw the querulous way I was looking over at it and dusting off my seat. “Don’t worry, they fumigated everything before they left. I’ve been sleeping on it myself ever since, and I’m all right. It worked, anyway; that’s the main thing.”

“Just the same,” I admitted, “I’m glad I didn’t find out about it until after it was over.”

She went over to one of the wooden drawers, opened it, and retrieved the unfinished cigar she’d dunked in there just before she let them in. It must have died lingeringly. A whole lot of pent-up smoke came up out of the drawer with it.

She socked the dead ash off it against the edge of the drawer, jacked it into her mouth, pulled a match out of that endless frontal reservoir she seemed to carry around with her, and lit up with a grateful sigh. She was back in the underworld full-time again. Then she leaned there slantwise, with her back and both elbows against the wooden chest.

“What do you do, smoke cigars all the time?” I asked her curiously. “Don’t you ever go for cigarettes?”

She curled her lip at me. “Cigarettes are for babies. I was smoking cigarettes when I was nine years old.”

“Wow,” I said softly.

“I didn’t inhale until I was ten, though,” she qualified it virtuously.

I just took that in. That was about all you could do with it.

“I used to work in a cigar factory in Tampa,” she added. “That’s where I got used to them. About every tenth one I made up I’d smoke myself.”

I was knotting my tie now, sight unseen. I kept looking at her, trying to figure her out. “Why’d you go to bat for me like that just now?” I asked curiously.

She gave one shoulder a slight push. “Different reasons. Like I told you, I hate the police. I’m always on the side that they’re not; I don’t care whose it is.” She followed a trajectory of smoke upward with her eyes. “Flowers on a grave, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s my way of doing something for someone that isn’t around any more, I guess. It’s the only way I have. I don’t know any other way... You see, I know what it is to lose someone you love, too, just like you. It happened to me only a couple of weeks ago, right here in this same room.”

I thumbed the fumigated cot. “Is that the—?”

“Yeah, that was Manolito. We were deported from Miami after we both did a stretch there. We had an old record hanging over us here, and they were just laying for us. They hounded us — him especially. For weeks and months they wouldn’t let us alone. He got it in jail, where they were holding him for something they found out later he hadn’t done. Then when they saw how sick he was they threw him out like a dog and let him crawl back to me here to die.”

You couldn’t tell how deep it went except by her eyes. They flashed like the beacon of Morro Castle on an overcast night. The rest of her face stayed impassive, didn’t show anything.

I didn’t know what to say. I turned away and tucked in my shirt. “What’s your name?” I asked her finally, with my back turned.

“My real name? I forgot it long ago. I’ve got a dozen of them, one for every place I go. I’d better give you the one for this district, as long as we’re in it. Around here they call me Media Noche, because I always hang around late by myself — since he’s gone.”

“Media — I can’t say it.”

“Midnight is what it means. Try it that way.”

“Okay, Midnight it is, then.” I went over to her and put my hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Well, Midnight, I don’t know what to say to you except — thanks.”

“Flowers on a grave,” she murmured, low.

I gave my hatbrim a final tug. “I better blow, I guess. The coast must be clear by now.”

“You better not blow, you mean. You’ll get as far as the first street corner before they spot you and jump on you again. What do you want to throw away all my hard work for?”

“I can’t hang around here the rest of the night.”

“Is there any other place in town you’ve got you can go to?”

“No, I don’t know any—”

“Then what’s the matter with it here?” She held out one hand, like you do when you’re trying to feel for rain. “It’s your life, chico. Go ahead and throw it away if you want to; it’s up to you. But then in that case, why didn’t you just string along with them in the first place? You would have saved yourself a lot of wear and tear.”

That was right; why hadn’t I? I lit a cigarette from her candle flame and went over and sat down undecidedly on the edge of the smallpox cot again. Even if it hadn’t been fumigated as she’d said, I was getting used to it by now.

We hung around like that in silence for a while, while the candle burned away. Me with my cigarette and she with her cigar. Two faces in the dusky pallor, thoughtful and unaware of each other. She was thinking of him, I guess, and I know I was thinking of her. A sort of wake of the underdogs.

After some time she spoke again. “How you figuring on getting out of town, even if you do get out of this place?”

“I don’t know; there must be some way—”

“If you do give them the slip on the landward side, what good does it do? You’re still on the island, water all around you.”

I nodded dejectedly.

“And if you try to get out by water, then you’ve got the customs and the harbor police to buck. They keep a closer watch on the waterfront than anywhere else in this town.”

I threw my cigarette away. “It looks like I stay in Havana.”

“It looks like you do. And if you do stay in La Habana, I give you about thirty minutes at the outside from the time you leave the door downstairs.”

“Some future,” I said.

More silence. After a while I looked up again. “It looks like I stay in Havana and clear myself,” I told her finally. “I wasn’t particularly keen on running away from something I didn’t do, anyway, even if it could have been done. Once you start running you never quit running. I’m going to stay here till I’ve got this thing licked.”

“There’s no law against trying,” she commented.

I started fooling around with my fingers, bending them in and out and looking at them, as if they were interesting.

After a while she changed hips against the dresser top. “You want to tell me about it?” she suggested. “We got nothing else to do right now, anyway.”

So I told her about it.