The little shuffling steps came closer. “How d’ya bet she’ll take care of ’em both?”

I refused to answer. I was trembling hideously inside. “I bet she blows one of ’em.” Stoop-neck shuffled by close to my knees, paused, shuffled around the back of the pew, paused, and moaned as if to himself, “Nothin’ doin’ around here tonight.” Then, to my immense relief, he went out the double doors into the night.

For all of its Victorian elaboration, the interior of the station lacked a clock. Surely Malcolm’s forty minutes was used up. It was one of my artistic affectations in those years not to wear a watch. I kept on reading:

We saw on one of the islands, in the middle of the river, a large elephant; it was of a red clay color with black legs.

The sad stoop-necked man came back through the station doors, with their brass crashbars polished by generations of hands. “Gettin’ to be a cold night out there.” Shyly keeping his eyes fastened above my head, he wandered closer, his feet scuffling grittily on the marble floor and his little head tilted to one side. “Nothin’ doin’ around here tonight,” he repeated.

I explained, “I’m waiting for somebody. I wish to hell they’d come.”

“Yeah, well,” the other replied, with an oddly cynical, reedy lilt.

I realized that my responding, whatever the words, was a mistake—encouragement. Stoop-neck had paused ten feet away, transfixed by some scent. I stared rigidly into the book, as if like a campfire its white page made a circle of safety. A foot scratched one step closer, and then the man had seated himself beside me. “You like books, huh?” The thighs of his unpressed cotton trousers were inches from mine. “Hey,” he continued, on the same conversational level, “was you ever blowed?”

I jumped to my feet and ran out of the station, abandoning my suitcase. My heart was swollen bigger than an elephant’s and pounding with terror and indignation. Remember, I was very young. Not quite twenty-six—a stranger to myself. I restrained myself from running up the stony valley between the railroad embankment and a row of dark shops. The drugstore where I had had the doughnut was at the end of this row, and itself dark. But a taxi-stand shelter opposite the drugstore was still lit inside, waiting for whatever scrap the dying railroads might throw it. Behind a dirty picture window, in a little room papered with calendars, two old men sat on opposite sides of a worn desk that held a telephone and a radio. The radio, with a crackle of static, was playing, I seem to remember, a Benny Goodman quintet. One of the men, wearing a lumberjack shirt, pushed open the door to ask me, “You want a cab, son?”