Driving Blind (12 page)

O
ne.
Two
. Hattie’s lips counted the long, slow strokes of the high town clock as she lay quietly on her bed. The streets were asleep under the courthouse clock, which seemed like a white moon rising, round and full, the light from it freezing all of the town in late summer time. Her heart raced.

She rose swiftly to look down on the empty avenues, the dark and silent lawns. Below, the porch swing creaked ever so little in the wind.

She saw the long, dark rush of her hair in the mirror as she unknotted the tight schoolteacher’s bun and let it fall loose to her shoulders. Wouldn’t her pupils be surprised, she thought; so long, so black, so glossy. Not too bad for a woman of thirty-five. From the closet, her hands trembling, she dug out hidden parcels. Lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil, nail polish. A pale blue negligee, like a breath of vapor. Pulling off her cotton nightgown, she stepped on in, hard, even while she drew the negligee over her head.

She touched her ears with perfume, used the lipstick on her nervous mouth, penciled her eyebrows, and hurriedly painted her nails.

She was ready.

She let herself out into the hall of the sleeping house. She glanced fearfully at three white doors. If they sprang open now, then what? She balanced between the walls, waiting.

The door stayed shut.

She stuck her tongue out at one door, then at the other two.

She drifted down the noiseless stairs onto the moonlit porch and then into the quiet street.

The smell of a September night was everywhere. Underfoot, the concrete breathed warmth up along her thin white legs.

“I’ve always wanted to do this.” She plucked a blood rose for her black hair and stood a moment smiling at the shaded windows of her house. “You don’t know what I’m doing,” she whispered. She swirled her negligee.

Down the aisle of trees, past glowing street lamps, her bare feet were soundless. She saw every bush and fence and wondered, “Why didn’t I think of this a long time ago?” She paused in the wet grass just to feel how it was, cool and prickly.

The patrolman, Mr. Waltzer, was wandering down Glen Bay Street, singing in a low, sad tenor. As he passed, Hattie circled a tree and stood staring at his broad back as he walked on, still singing.

When she reached the courthouse, the only noise was the sound of her bare toes on the rusty fire escape. At the top of the flight, on a ledge under the shining silver clock face, she held out her hands.

There lay the sleeping town!

A thousand roofs glittered with snow that had fallen from the moon.

She shook her fists and made faces at the town. She flicked her negligee skirt contemptuously at the far houses. She danced and laughed silently, then stopped to snap her fingers in all four directions.

A minute later, eyes bright, she was racing on the soft lawns of the town.

She came to the house of whispers.

She paused by a certain window and heard a man’s voice and a woman’s voice in the secret room.

Hattie leaned against the house and listened to whispering, whispering. It was like hearing two tiny moths fluttering gently inside on the window screen. There was a soft, remote laughter.

Hattie put her hand to the screen above, her face the face of one at a shrine. Perspiration shone on her lips.

“What was that?” cried a voice inside.

Like mist, Hattie whirled and vanished.

When she stopped running she was by another house window.

A man stood in the brightly lighted bathroom, perhaps the only lighted room in the town, shaving carefully around his yawning mouth. He had black hair and blue eyes and was twenty-seven years old and
every morning carried to his job in the railyards a lunch bucket packed with ham sandwiches. He wiped his face with a towel and the light went out.

Hattie waited behind the great oak in the yard, all film, all spiderweb. She heard the front door click, his footsteps down the walk, the clank of his lunch pail. From the odors of tobacco and fresh soap, she knew, without looking, that he was passing.

Whistling between his teeth, he walked down the street toward the ravine. She followed from tree to tree, a white veil behind an elm, a moon shadow behind an oak. Once, he whirled about. Just in time she hid from sight. She waited, heart pounding. Silence. Then, his footsteps walking on.

He was whistling the song “June Night.”

The high arc light on the edge of the ravine cast his shadow directly beneath him. She was not two yards away, behind an ancient chestnut tree.

He stopped but did not turn. He sniffed the air.

the night wind blew her perfume over the ravine, as she had planned it.

She did not move. It was not her turn to act now. She simply stood pressing against the tree, exhausted with the shaking of her heart.

It seemed an hour before he moved. She could hear the dew breaking gently under the pressure of his shoes. The warm odor of tobacco and fresh soap came nearer.

He touched one of her wrists. She did not open her eyes. He did not speak.

Somewhere, the courthouse clock sounded the time as three in the morning.

His mouth fitted over hers very gently and easily.

Then his mouth was at her ear and she was held to the tree by him. He whispered. So
she
was the one who’d looked in his windows the last three nights! He kissed her neck. She,
she
had followed him, unseen, last night! He stared at her. The shadows of the trees fell soft and numerous all about, on her lips, on her cheeks, on her brow, and only her eyes were visible, gleaming and alive. She was lovely, did she know that? He had thought he was being haunted. His laughter was no more than a faint whisper in his mouth. He looked at her and made a move of his hand to his pocket. He drew forth a match, to strike, to hold by her face, to see, but she took his hand and held it and the unlit match. After a moment, he let the matchstick drop into the wet grass. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

She did not look up at him. Silently he took her arm and began to walk.

Looking at her pale feet, she went with him to the edge of the cool ravine and down to the silent flow of the stream, to the moss banks and the willows.

He hesitated. She almost looked up to see if he was still there. They had come into the light, and she kept her head turned away so that he saw only the blowing darkness of her hair and the whiteness of her arms.

He said, “You don’t have to come any further, you know. Which house did you come from? You can run back to wherever it is. But if you run, don’t ever come
back; I won’t want to see you again. I couldn’t take any more of this, night after night. Now’s your chance. Run, if you want!”

Summer night breathed off her, warm and quiet.

Her answer was to lift her hand to him.

Next morning, as Hattie walked downstairs, she found Grandma, Aunt Maude, and Cousin Jacob with cold cereal in their tight mouths, not liking it when Hattie pulled up her chair. Hattie wore a grim, high-necked dress, with a long skirt. Her hair was a knotted, hard bun behind her ears, her face was scrubbed pale, clean of color in the cheeks and lips. Her painted eyebrows and eyelashes were gone. Her fingernails were plain.

“You’re late, Hattie,” they all said, as if an agreement had been made to say it when she sat down.

“I know.” She did not move in her chair.

“Better not eat much,” said Aunt Maude. “It’s eight-thirty. You should’ve been at school. What’ll the superintendent say? Fine example for a teacher to set her pupils.”

The three stared at her.

Hattie was smiling.

“You haven’t been late in twelve years, Hattie,” said Aunt Maude.

Hattie did not move, but continued smiling.

“You’d better go,” they said.

Hattie walked to the hall to take down her green umbrella and pinned on her ribboned flat straw hat.
They watched her. She opened the front door and looked back at them for a long moment, as if about to speak, her cheeks flushed. They leaned toward her. She smiled and ran out, slamming the door.

A
t first it was like a storm, far away, a touch of thunder, a kind of wind and a stirring. The streets had been emptied by the courthouse clock. People had looked at the great white clock face hours ago, folded their newspapers, got up from the porch swings, hooked themselves into their summer night houses, put out the lights, and settled into cool beds. All this the clock had done, just standing above the courthouse green. Now there was not a thing on the street. Overhead street lights, casting down illumination, made shines upon the asphalt. On occasion a leaf would break loose from a tree and clatter down. The night was so dark you could not see the stars. Why this was so there was no way of telling. Except that everyone’s eyes were closed and that way no stars were seen, that’s how dark the night was. Oh, here and there, behind a window screen, if one peered into a dark room, one might see a red point of light, nothing else; some man
sitting up to feed his insomnia with nicotine, rocking in a slow rocker in the dark room. You might hear a small cough or someone turn under the sheets. But on the street there was not even a policeman swinging along with his club pointed to the earth in one hand.

From far away the small thunder began. First it was far across town. You could hear it across the ravine, going along the street over there, three blocks away across the deep blackness. It took a direction, it made square cuts, this sound of thunder, then it crossed over the ravine on the Washington Street bridge, under the owl light, and turned a corner and—there it was, at the head of the street!

And with a whiskering, brushing, sucking noise down the street between the houses and trees came the thundering metal cleaning machine of Mr. Britt. It was a tornado, funneling, driving, whispering, murmuring, feeling of the street ahead of it with big whirl-around brushes like sewer lids with rotary brushes under them, spinning, with a big rolling-pin brush turning under all the scattered trivia of the world’s men, the ticket stubs from that show at the Elite tonight, and the wrapper from a chewing gum stick that now rested on top of a bureau in one of the houses, a small chewed cannonball of tasteless elasticity, and the candy wrapper from a bar now hidden and folded into the small accordion innards of a boy high in a cupola house in a magic room. All these things, streetcar trransfers to Chessman Park, to Live Oak Mortuary, to North Chicago, to Zion City, giveaway handbills on hairdos at that new chromium
shop on Central. All these were whiskered up by the immense moving mustache of the machine, and on top of the machine, like a great god, in his leather-metal saddle, sat Mr. Roland Britt, age thirty-seven, the strange age between yesterday and tomorrow, and he, in his way, was a duplicate of the machine upon which he rode, with his proud hands on the steering wheel. He had a little curly mustache over his mouth, and little curly hairs that seemed to rotate upon his scalp under the passing lamps, and a little sucking nose that was continually astonished with the world, sucking it all in and blowing it out the astonished mouth. And he had hands that were always taking things and never giving at all. He and the machine, very much the same. They hadn’t begun that way. Britt had never
started
to be like the machine. But after you rode it awhile it got up through your rump and spread through your system until your digestion roiled and your heart spun like a small pink top in you. But, on the other hand, neither had the machine intended being like Britt. Machines change also, and become like their masters, in imperceptible ways.

The machine was gentler than it used to be under an Irishman named Reilly. They sailed down the midnight streets together, through little streams of water ahead of them to dampen the trivia before combing it into its gullet. It was like a whale, with a mouth full of bristle, swimming in the moonlight seas, slaking in ticket minnows and gum-wrapper minnows, feeding and feeding in the silvery school of confetti that lived in the shallows
of the asphalt river. Mr. Britt felt like a Greek god, even with his concave chest, bringing gentle April showers with him with the sprinklers, cleansing the world of dropped sin.

Halfway up Elm Road, whiskers bristling, great mustache hungrily eating of the street, Mr. Britt, in a fit of sport, swerved his great storm machine from one side of the street to the other, just so he could suck up a rat.

“Got him!”

Mr. Britt had seen the large running gray thing, leprous and horrible, skittering across under a lamp flare. Whisk! And the foul rodent was now inside the machine, being digested by smothering tides of paper and autumn leaf.

He went on down the lonely rivers of night, bringing and taking his storm with him, leaving fresh-whisked and wetted marks behind him.

“Me and my magical broomstick,” he thought. “Me a male witch riding under the autumn moon. A good witch. The good witch of the East; wasn’t that it, from the old Oz book when I was six with whooping cough in bed?”

He passed over innumerable hopscotch squares which had been made by children drunk with happiness, they were so crooked. He sucked up red playbills and yellow pencils and dimes and sometimes quarters.

“What was that?”

He turned upon his seat and looked behind.

The street was empty. Dark trees whirled past,
swishing down branches to tap his brow, swiftly, swiftly. But in the midst of the stiff thunder he had thought he heard a cry for help, a kind of violent screaming.

He looked in all directions.

“No, nothing.”

He rode on upon the whirl-away brooms.

“What!”

This time he almost fell from his saddle the cry was so apparent. He looked at the trees to see if some man might be up one, yelling. He looked at the pale streetlights, all bleached out with so many years of shining. He looked at the asphalt, still warm from the heat of the day. The cry came again.

They were on the edge of the ravine. Mr. Britt stopped his machine. The bristles still spun about. He stopped one rotary broom, then the other. The silence was very loud.

“Get me out of here!”

Mr. Britt stared back at the big metal storage tank of the machine.

There was a man inside the machine.

“What did you say?” It was a ridiculous thing to ask, but Mr. Britt asked it.

“Get me out of here, help, help!” said the man inside the machine.

“What happened?” asked Mr. Britt, staring.

“You picked me up in your machine!” cried the man.

“I what?”

“You fool; don’t stand there talking, let me out, I’ll suffocate to death!”

“But you couldn’t possibly have gotten into the machine,” said Mr. Britt. He stood first on one foot, then on another. He was very cold, suddenly. “A thing as big as a man couldn’t fit in up through the vent, and anyway, the whiskers would have prevented you from behind taken in, and anyway I don’t remember seeing you. When did this happen?”

There was a silence from the machine.

“When did this happen?” demanded Mr. Britt.

Still no answer. Mr. Britt tried to think back. The streets had been entirely empty. There had been nothing but leaves and gum-wrappers. There had been no man, anywhere. Mr. Britt was a thoroughly clear-eyed man. He wouldn’t miss a pedestrian if one fell.

Still the machine remained strangely silent. “Are you there?” said Mr. Britt.

“I’m here,” said the man inside, reluctantly. “And I’m suffocating.”

“Answer me, when did you get inside the machine?” said Britt.

“A while ago,” said the man.

“Why didn’t you scream out then?”

“I was knocked unconscious,” said the man, but there was a quality to his voice, a hesitation, a vagueness, a slowness. The man was lying. It came to Mr. Britt as a shock. “Open up the top,” said the inside man. “For God’s sake, don’t stand there like a fool talking, of all the ridiculous inanities, a street cleaner at
midnight talking to a man inside his machine, what would people think.” He paused to cough violently and spit and sputter. “I’m choking to death, do you want to go up for manslaughter?”

But Mr. Britt was not listening. He was down on his knees looking at the metal equipment, at the brushes under the machine. No, it was quite impossible. That opening was only a foot across, under there, no man could possibly be poked up into it. And anyway he hadn’t been going fast. And anyway the rotary brushes would have bounced a man ahead of the machine. And anyway, he hadn’t
seen
a man!

He got to his feet. He noticed for the first time that the top of his forehead was all perspiration. He wiped it off. His hands were trembling. He could hardly stand up.

“Open up, and I’ll give you a hundred dollars,” said the man inside the machine.

“Why should you be bribing me to let you out?” said Mr. Britt. “When it is only natural that I should let you out
free
, after all, if I picked you up I should let you out, shouldn’t I? And yet, all of a sudden, you start offering me money, as if I didn’t
intend
to let you out, as if you knew that I might know a reason for
not
letting you out. Why is that?”

“I’m dying,” coughed the man, “and you debate. God, God, man!” There was a fierce wrestling and a pounding inside. “This place in here is full of dirt and leaves and paper. I can’t
move!
”

Mr. Britt stood there. “It is
not possible
,” he said,
clearly and firmly, at last, “that a man could be in my machine. I know my machine. You do not belong in there. I did not ask you to be in there. It is your responsibility.”

“Bend closer …”

“What?”

“Listen!”

He put his ear to the warm metal.

“I am here,” whispered the high voice, the sweet high fading voice. “I am in here and I wear no clothes.”

“What!”

He felt his hands jerk, his fingers twitch in on themselves. He felt his eyes squeeze up almost to blind him.

“I am in here and I have no clothes,” said the voice. And after a long while, “Don’t you want to see me? Don’t you? Don’t you want to see me? I’m in here now. I’m waiting …”

He stood by the side of the great machine for a full ten seconds. The echo of his breathing jumped off the metal a foot from his face.

“Did you hear what I said?” whispered the voice.

He nodded.

“Well then, open the lid. Let me out. It’s late. Late at night. Everyone asleep. Dark. We’ll be alone …”

He listened to his heart beating.

“Well?” said the voice.

He swallowed.

“What are you waiting for?” said the voice, lasciviously.

The sweat rolled down his face.

There was no answer. The fierce breathing that had been in the machine for a while now suddenly stopped. The thrashing stopped.

Mr. Britt leaned forward, put his ear to the machine.

He could hear nothing now but a kind of soft inner squeaking under the lid. And a sound like one hand, cut off from the body perhaps, moving, struggling by itself. It sounded like a small thing moving.

“I climbed in to sleep,” said the man.

“Oh, now you
are
lying,” said Mr. Britt.

He climbed up on his silent machine and sat in the leather saddle. He put his foot down to start the motor.

“What are you doing?” the voice shouted from under the lid suddenly. There was a dull stir. There was a sound as of a large body again. The heavy breathing returned. It was so sudden it made Mr. Britt almost fall from his perch. He looked back at the lid.

“No, no, I won’t let you out,” he said.

“Why?” cried the failing voice.

“Because,” said Mr. Britt, “I have my work to do.” He started the machine and the whisking thunder of the brushes and the roar of the motor drowned out the screams and shouts of the captured man. Looking ahead, eyes wet, hands hard on the wheel, Mr. Britt took his machine brooming down the silent avenues of the night town, for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two hours more, sweeping and scouring and never stopping, sucking in tickets and combs and dropped soup-can labels.

At four in the morning, three hours later, he drew
up before the vast rubbish heap that slid down the hill in a strange avalanche to the dark ravine. He backed the machine up to the edge of the avalanche and for a moment cut the motor.

There was not the slightest sound from inside the machine.

He waited, but there was nothing but the beat of his heart in his wrists.

He flipped a lever. The entire cargo of branches and dust and paper and tickets and labels and leaves fell back and piled in a neat pile upon the edge of the ravine. He waited until everything had slid out upon the ground. Then he flipped the lever, slamming the lid shut, looked back once at the silent mound of rubbish, and drove off down the street.

He lived only three houses from the ravine. He drove his machine up before his house, parked, and went in to bed. He lay in the quiet room, not able to sleep, from time to time getting up and going to look out the window at the ravine. Once he put his hand on the doorknob, half opened the door, shut it, and went back to bed. But he could not sleep.

It was only at seven in the morning as he was brewing some coffee, when he heard the sound, that he knew any relief. It was the sound of young Jim Smith, the thirteen-year-old boy, who lived across the ravine. Young Jim came whistling down the street, on his way to the lake to fish. Every morning he came along in mists, whistling, and always he stopped to rummage through the rubbish left by Mr. Britt to seek dimes and
quarters and orange bottle caps to pin to his shirtfront. Mr. Britt moved the window curtains aside to peer out into the early dawn mists to see little Jim Smith walk jauntily by carrying a fish pole over one shoulder, and on the end of the line at the top of the fish pole, swinging back and forth like a gray pendulum in the mists, was a dead rat.

Mr. Britt drank his coffee, crept back in bed, and slept the sleep of the victorious and innocent.