Someone Is Bleeding Read Online Free PDF Page B

it to Peggy’s attention. Her mouth grew hard again
    “Oh.” She bit her lip. “I have to get out of here,” she said. “Do you think I could find an apartment . . . or something?”
    “Has he . . . tried anything?”
    “No. Not with his wife around. But I’m afraid.”
    “We’d better get you out of here.”
    “And he pretends to be so pious,” she said angrily, “just like all men. Pretending to be moral when all the time they’re just pigs.”
    I didn’t want to get started on that again. Besides, I thought, she was probably right in Albert’s case.
    Albert turned away from the window when I made it obvious from my look that I felt a severe desire to plant my foot in his pudgy face. His white, sickly face. Mushroom shade.
    “You sure he hasn’t tried anything?” I said.
    “No,” she answered, “but I know he’d . . . like to. The other day Mrs. Grady called me to the phone. I had on my shortie nightgown. I was too sleepy to think about putting on my robe. And Albert came out in the hall and saw me.”
    She shuddered.
    “The way he looked at me made me sick,” she said. “Like a . . . like an animal.”
    “I’d like to break his neck,” I heard myself saying. Manly pose. I really couldn’t break anybody’s neck, I was sure. I get melancholy just dressing a chicken for Sunday dinner.
    “I don’t want any more trouble,” Peggy said. “I’ll just leave.”
    “Trouble?” I asked. And, sometimes, wished I’d cultivated a deceiving voice like Jim’s. Too often, practically always, my voice is a mirror of my feelings.
    She looked at me dispassionately.
    “You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?” she said.
    “About what?” I pretended.
    “You’re thinking about what Jim told you.”
    I must have looked flustered.
    “I’ll tell you what I mean,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be sorry I told you.”
    Her sensitive face was cold, hurt.
    “When I was eight years old,” she told me, “I was attacked by a boy. He was seventeen. He dragged me in a closet and tore all my clothes off.”
    She swallowed and avoided my eyes.
    “When my father found out,” she said, “he tried to kill the boy.”
    I reached for her hand instinctively but she drew back.
    “Was it . . . ?” I started. “How far did . . . he go?”
    Her voice was like an axe blow.
    “All the way,” she said. “I was unconscious.”
    Peggy, Peggy.
    “I can’t help the way I feel,” she said, “about men. It’s in my flesh. If you weren’t . . . if you hadn’t been so different, I’d have run from you too.”
    “And Jim . . . ?”
    “Jim took care of me,” she said. “He was always good to me. And he never asked anything in return.”
    We sat there in silence awhile. Finally our eyes met. We looked at each other. I smiled. She tried to smile but it didn’t work.
    “Be nice to me, Davie,” she said. “Don’t be suspicious.”
    “I won’t,” I promised. “Peggy, I won’t.”
    Then I said, as cheerfully as possible, “Come on, let’s find you an apartment.”
    I found a car that same day at a used-car lot, and afterwards we found a place for Peggy.
    It was a small place. Two rooms, bath and kitchenette for $55 a month.
    It wasn’t going to be empty for about two days so we went back to her old place. I invited her out to dinner. Then to a show or maybe down to the amusement pier at Venice. She accepted happily.
    “Let’s start all over,” she said impulsively during the afternoon. “Let’s forget the past. It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
    I hugged her. “No, baby,” I said, “of course it doesn’t.”
    When we went in the house Albert and his wife were sitting there in the front room. That they’d been arguing was obvious from the forced way they broke off conversation. There were splashes of red up Albert’s white cheeks.
    They looked up at us. The old. sullen resentment in Albert’s expression. The prissy, forced amiability in Mrs. Grady’s face.
    “Mrs. Grady,” Peggy