Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon Page A

play of expression on her face that I didn’t follow her gaze. Abruptly she brought her eyes back to my face and then slapped it. It was a stinger. I stepped back and swore, and by the time I was finished she was halfway up the block. I stood there rubbing my cheek and let her go.
    I met Henry Gade a couple of days later and told him about it. Henry is a practical psychologist. Perhaps I should say his field is practical psychology, because Henry ain’t practical. He has theories. He has more damn theories than any man alive. He is thirty and bald and he makes lots of money without doing any work.
    “I think she was crazy,” I said.
    “Ah,” said Henry, and laid a finger beside his nose. I think the nose was longer. “But did you ask her what
she
thought?”
    “No. I only asked her what she was doing running around that time of night.”
    “The trouble with you, Gus, is that you have no romance in you. What you should have done was to catch her up in your arms and smothered her with kisses.”
    “She’d have sla—”
    “She did, anyway, didn’t she?” said Henry, and walked off.
    Henry kids a lot. But he sometimes says crazy things like that when he isn’t kidding a bit.
    I met the girl again three months later. I was in the Duke’s beer garden looking at his famous sunflower. The sunflower was twelve feet tall and had crutches to keep it standing up. It grew beside the dirt alley that was the main road of the beer garden. There were ratty-looking flowerbeds all over the place and tables set among them. And Japanese lanterns that had been out in the rain, and a laryngitic colored band. The place was crowded, and I was standing there letting all that noise beat me back and forth, looking at the sunflower. The Duke swore he could fill a No. 6 paper bag with the seeds from that one flower.
    And then she said, “Hello. I’m sorry I had to slap your face.” She was squinched up against the stem of the sunflower, in amongst all those shadows and leaves.
    I said, “Well, if it isn’t my pretty little pug. What do you mean, you’re sorry you
had
to? You should be just sorry you did.”
    “Oh, I had to. I wouldn’t slap you just for nothing.”
    “Oh—I did something? I shoulda got slapped?”
    “Please,” she said. “I am sorry.”
    I looked at her. She was. “What are you doing in there—hiding?”
    She nodded.
    “Who are you hiding from?”
    She wouldn’t say. She just shrugged and said she was just—you know—hiding.
    “Is it the same thing you were running away from that night?”
    “Yes.”
    I told her she was being silly. “I looked all around after you left and there wasn’t a thing on the street.”
    “Oh, yes there was!”
    “Not that I could see.”
    “I know that.”
    I suddenly got the idea that this was a very foolish conversation. “Come out of there and have a beer with me. We’ll talk this thing over.”
    “Oh, I couldn’t do that!”
    “Sure you could. Easy. Look.” I reached in and grabbed her.
    “You should know better than that,” she said, and then something happened to break the stem of the big sunflower. It tottered and came crashing down like a redwood. The huge flower landed on the tray that Giuseppe, the waiter, was carrying. It held eight long beers, two pitchers and a martini. The beers and a lot of broken glass flew in every direction but up. The martini went back over his head and crashed on the bars of the cage where the Duke kept his trained squirrel. There was some confusion. The girl with the white hair was gone. All the time that the Duke was telling me what a menace I was, I kept staring over his heaving shoulder at the squirrel, which was lapping up the martini that had splashed inside the cage. After the Duke ran out of four-letter words he had me thrown out. We’d been pretty good friends before that, too.
    I got hold of Henry as soon as I could. “I saw that girl again,” I told him, “and I grabbed her like you said.” I told him what had