Someone Is Bleeding by Richard Matheson

thought so, anyway.
    But when we sat down, Peggy looked around restlessly. She looked at the people around us. She stared up at the hill, the banks of seats climbing.
    She turned around and tried to pretend she was satisfied where we were. But then some loudmouths sat behind us and started giggling and blathering about the show they’d seen that afternoon. Jim gave them a Vaughan look but for some appalling reason it didn’t seem to impress them.
    A man started blowing cigar smoke around. Peggy coughed. She looked unhappy. She kept turning around and looking up the hill at the sky.
    “What is it?” Jim asked her.
    “I . . . I feel so cramped down here. Could we . . . Jim, could we go up there?”
    “What, in the 65 cent .seats?”
    “We stand aghast,” I said.
    They paid no attention to me. She asked again. Jim couldn’t see any way out of it. Pampering her was his choicest weapon. So he shrugged and picked up his coat, looking like a martyr going up in flames.
    We climbed up the hill. Peggy first, me next. Jim behind us like a tired old man following his nutty children.
    Oh this is the place,” Peggy said when we sat down half-way to the moon.
    And, of course, she was right. Down there it was absurd, like sitting in a hole in the ground. Paying more to jam yourselves down with a thousand others when the sky and the night were calling,.
    Afterwards we went to the Mocambo. All I remember is people laughing and cigarette smoke and dancing once with Peggy and her not looking me in the eye.
    I drank. The room spun around me. I didn’t taste the drinks any more. They were just containers of liquid. And Peggy drank some and so did Jim.
    Then we were up again. Large denomination bills fluttering out of Jim’s wallet like flocks from a sanctuary. And me, God help me, staggering, almost falling. Jim’s hand at my elbow, guiding.
    “Let go!” Me, rambunctious. The tough guy. Sing me an old refrain. “Oh what an ass was Davie!”
    Out in the street. The reaction at last. Sudden quietude in me. A desire to be rid of everyone and everything for good.
    “Good night,” I said, casually and walked away from them as Jim was helping her into the car.
    “Davie.”
    Her voice was more irritated than concerned. I paid no attention. I walked quickly up Sunset. The wrong way, I later discovered.
    They didn’t follow. I suppose Jim talked her out of it. She was just angry enough to let him.
    I was peeved at that. I had sort of envisioned a car cruising alongside of me with Jim and Peggy sticking their heads out of the window entreating—Davie, come back, oh do come back.
    Me just sneering, the gallant one, despised of all.
    No such luck. They let me walk. Oh, I’m sure Peggy worried but, by the time she started, I guess I was gone. She must have worried how I was to get home. Jim must have been delighted. It must have warmed the chilly crypt of his heart, I kept thinking.
    I don’t know how long I wandered. The night went on and on and so did I. Everything whirled around, it was just dumb luck I wasn’t flattened by a car. I bumped into a couple of people who looked mildly revolted. I tried to get into somebody else’s 1940 Ford which I thought was mine.
    I don’t remember everything. But I remember sitting in a diner and drinking coffee and discussing religion with the cook. I remember sitting on a curb and petting a very patient collie dog who must have been repelled by my breath and my soporific mumbling. I remember standing in front of a ten-cent store and staring at hairpins. I remember lying on my back on somebody’s lawn and looking up at the stars and singing a soft version of Nagasaki to myself with lyric variations pertaining to the atom bomb.
    Then, finally, in some erratic fashion I found my way down to Wilshire Boulevard and got myself on a red bus. I rode down to Western and picked up my car where I’d left it. I drove back to the room.
    Key in door lock. Opening of door. Drunken weaving to lamp, turning on