Free Shadow Dancers by Herbert Lieberman Page B

and I believe her. The Lord chose me to do that work and I’m gonna damned well do it the best way I know how. When He thinks I’ve gone too far, He’ll let me know.
    The one thing that still bothers me, Janine, is that you’re the only other person on this earth who really understands me. Knows my work and my special calling. You and me, Janine, we go back a long ways. I know that if I had trouble. Not just ordinary trouble, but big bad trouble, I know you’d be the only one in this world I could turn to. And even though we haven’t spoken to each other in two years (next March 12th will be two years exactly), I know I can still trust you.
    But sometimes late at night I can be lying in bed unable to sleep, and my mind running 150 miles an hour. You can’t imagine the stuff that flies through your head nights like that. But sometimes, when I’m feeling a little down, and off my mark, the thought does cross my mind … what if Janine … what if some night with some guy, Janine.... Like, you know what I’m saying. Just the thought of it …
    “… gets me crazy. And if I ever believed that was the case, long as we’ve been friends and all that, I’d have to come and do something about it. …”
    Her voice trailed off. She’d been reading it aloud. Not actually aloud, but with her lips forming each word under her breath, but hearing his voice pronounce them. The voice was inside her head, quiet and slow and slightly singsong, the way he had, with that oddly British inflection of his. She wondered where he got it from. Certainly not that scruffy crowd they ran with in the old days when she first knew him. More probably, it came from watching old British movies. The same ones, over and over again: David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice , The Lavender Hill Mob, Brighton Rock. He loved Brighton Rock, particularly the character of Pinkie. He was a great mimic and could recite by heart most of the major roles in those films. It had got so that he would speak that way without his even knowing he was doing it. There were times, she knew, he would stay up all night, watching those films on a VCR, one after the other. Watching them with some secret solitary delight, seeing them each time all new and fresh as though he were just watching them for the first time.
    He was no more British than she, of course. That was just some kind of make-believe in his head. He was a city rat, like her, right out of one of those unclaimed litters. They lived in the rubble of basements and condemned buildings. They ran in packs and battened on refuse and whatever they found that hadn’t been nailed down. They were a sort of nomadic tribe in those days, roving, predatory, homeless, orphaned, made up chiefly of those who’d fled domestic situations out of a strong sense of their own self-preservation. “Bug life,” the police in the station houses used to call them during the periodic roundups and the appearances in juvenile court, with the judges and lawyers and social workers and other functionaries all going through the solemn charade of administering a system virtually bankrupt of any solution to their problems.
    “… friends and all that, I’d have to come and do something about it.”
    She read the words again. This time more slowly, aware of the slight breathlessness she felt, and of the cold numb spot about the size of a quarter that had risen like a moon on her forehead.
    It was his handwriting, all right, a calligraphy such as one seldom sees in the course of normal daily commerce. Those small, crimped, penciled figures, looking as though each had been wrought with a chisel. Each figure precisely the same height, all slanted at precisely the same angle, descenders and ascenders all matching perfectly, each with a tiny serif at the bottom and all unattached, but yet close enough to read as a whole. Marshaled one against the other, they gave the impression of tiny toy soldiers massed in perfect