The subway is elevated there. There is something wrong about that, but there are long sections of the subway in the Bronx where it comes up out of the ground and runs along high above the street like the El. I suppose that some day they will put that under the ground, too, and that will be unfortunate because you can see a lot of New York from there, the way it is now.
I mean that often, as long as three or four days after a rain, you can still see puddles of water glistening on the flat, tarred roofs and reflecting the sky. On a windy day you can see the gray metal ventilators, some of them spinning and the others, with vanes like manes, snapping their heads in the gusts, sensitive and nervous the way you sometimes see a thoroughbred going to the post and trying to ease the bit with the boy standing on him and first hoping to soothe him and then swearing at him, if you could just hear it.
You can see the flower pots, too, on the fire escapes. Most of them have geraniums in them, but sometimes you will even see a rosebush, and always, a long time after they shouldn’t be there any longer, you’ll see the long, yellow leaves of Easter lilies, and the pink foil still around the pots.
“So why don’t you tell him?” a woman was saying.
There was an empty seat between us, and I was turned toward her so that I could look out of the window. She was sitting with another woman, and they were in their late thirties and their coats and their accessories were too obviously new and selected with too much care and not enough taste. I wanted to bet someone that they were going shopping and then to a movie.
“Tell him?” the other woman said. “Tell him what?”
When I got off at the station and carried my bag down the long flight of steps there was a cab parked under the structure and just back from the corner. The driver was reading a tabloid, folded and resting on the wheel in front of him. I opened the back door and lifted my bag in and got in and shut the door.
The driver was reading the Daily Mirror. He had it folded to that column called “Only Human” and written by a fellow named Sidney Fields, and I had time to see that at the top of the column there was a two-column cut of a cabbie, his elbow sticking out of the window of his cab and the cabbie smiling out over his elbow.
“Where to?” the driver said finally, putting the paper down on the seat beside him.
When I told him he started the motor and then he flipped the flag and shoved the shift in and made the right turn at the corner almost in one motion. I had to put my left hand out flat on the seat, but my bag fell over on the floor.
“Sorry,” the driver said.
“That’s all right,” I said.
“Guy’s got a story on a hackie in the Mirror,” he said.
“Oh?”
“He wants a story on hacking, I’ll give him one. I mean, I could give him plenty of stories.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
It was a broad, black avenue. It was just 9:30 of a gray morning, with the signs of early spring in the dampness of the litter in the gutters and in the mud tracked onto the oil-stained concrete aprons of the filling stations and of the garages where they do welding and auto-body repair. After a block or two the garages and the used-car lots gave way to old clapboard houses, all of them built high and square with porches on the front, here and there a porch enclosed with small panes of glass.
About a mile up the avenue we turned right and then made a left and another right. We started down a street of narrow duplex brick houses, each two houses pushed together and looking like one, except for the two concrete walks leading up to the separate entrances.
“You know the house?” the driver said.
“No, I don’t.”
The street itself was potholed, where the blacktop had given way, and now the holes held muddy water. Taking it slowly, the driver tried to skirt the holes, and then he settled for playing them as best he could.
“Got to be in the next block,” he said, “but these are good houses. They put them up about thirty years ago. They built good in them days. A guy owns one of these has got something, a nice home for himself and his family.”
The houses were not of really good brick, and some time ago the lime had weathered out of the mortar and left white stains. Between each pair of houses there was just room enough for a driveway, and in front of each house there was a small plot, about ten feet square. The plots afforded the only evidences of individuality. Some of them had low hedges around them and some were just grassed over with a shrub or two against the house. One of them had been concreted, so that it was of one piece with the sidewalk and the entrance walk and the driveway, except that the plot area had been painted light green.
“A guy’s doing all right, lives in one of these houses,” the driver said.
“But he should never come home with a load on,” I said. “He’d never find his own house.”
“You think you’re kiddin’?” the driver said. “One night I picked up a drunk at the subway lived on one of these blocks. He says he can’t think of his number, but he knows the house. It’s about three o’clock in the morning, and he tells me to stop at one of these places and he’s got no dough. He says his old lady will pay me. He goes up the steps and starts ringing the doorbell. A dame comes to the door and slams it in his face. Then he gets real mad. He starts kickin’ on the door. I get out and try to pull him off, and he rips two buttons off my shirt. Then the cops come. It ain’t the guy’s house. They find out he lives in the next block.
“So they take him down there and I tail them. Well, finally his old lady has to pay my meter. The cop says it’s legal, but she looks at me like I’m the guy got her husband drunk, and she stiffs me for a tip.”
“That’s what I mean,” I said.
“That’s what I mean,” the driver said. He had pulled over to the curb and he stopped the cab. “People always talking about how hackies roll drunks. This is your place, the left side.”
“Keep the change,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, “but if a guy wants to write a real article about a hackie in the paper, let him come see me.”
Well, I thought, he certainly worked me for the big tip, if that was what he was doing. Do you suppose he did roll the souse and then wait it out through all that rumpus and the cops for the fare? That would take a real brigand, but then he wouldn’t be a talker.
“Yes?”
“Oh,” I said. “Mrs. Brown?”
After I had pushed the doorbell I had been thinking again about that cabbie, and now she was standing here with the door half open. She had one of those round, even, pretty faces and big brown eyes with the white very white around them and dark brown hair drawn back and held by I couldn’t tell what.
“Yes?”
“I’m Frank Hughes,” I said. “Eddie said I could meet him here about 9:30.”
She was in her late twenties. She had on a white-and-red-flowered quilted housecoat and red mules, and her fingernails were painted the same red.
“Oh,” she said. “I think he mentioned something about it.”
She said this, pushing the door back and motioning me in. There was a small, gray-carpeted hall with carpeted stairs running up and the rest of the hall leading back to a kitchen. Off to the left was a rather small, square living room, carpeted the same as the hall and, after I had put my bag down, she led me in there.
“You might as well sit down,” she said. “Eddie just got up.”
“I’m sorry I’m early.”
“It doesn’t make any difference.”
She had her hair pulled back in one of those pony tails, and it was held by a small ribbon of the same red as the housecoat and the mules. She took a cigarette out of one of the pockets of the housecoat and had a lighter out of the other before I could get mine out. Then she sat down on the sofa and pulled the housecoat around her, and I sat down in a chair opposite.
“You’re the one who’s going to write the magazine article about Eddie.”
Her face never moved. I knew it had to open for her to say this, but it never moved and she didn’t look either at me or through me. It seemed as if she didn’t look quite as far as me, as if she were looking at a pane of glass between us.
“Yes. I’m the one.”
“What kind of an article are you going to write?”
“Oh, I never know. It’ll be a nice one.”
“If it’s about Eddie it will have to be a nice one. He’s a nice guy.”
“Said he, before he pulled the trigger.”
“I’m not a trigger man.”
“Let’s hope.”
What a placid face for all of that, I thought. Now it was turning slowly about the room. The room looked quite new, with the gray carpeting and the modern furniture and the precise folds of the drapes and with the woodwork and ceiling a flat, clean white.
“You have a nice home here. It’s very pleasant.”
“I do the best I can.”
“Look,” I said, “if it’ll put your mind at ease, all I’m going to do is spend a month in camp with Eddie and write a piece about how a fighter comes up to and goes into a championship fight.”
“Oh?”
“I mean, I’m just going to watch Eddie and the people around him and see what he does and listen to what he says. I want to write a piece that will give the reader an understanding, or anyway a feeling, of what a fighter goes through.”
“Do you think anybody cares about that?”
“All I know is that there’s a magazine editor who cares. It was his idea, not mine, although I like it.”
“Hello,” Eddie said.
I had heard him coming down the stairs. He had on light gray flannel slacks and tan loafers and a light woolen maroon sports shirt, buttoned at the neck. He always had good taste in clothes, and he always fitted into them perfectly. I put it that way because Eddie had a good neck and shoulders and chest and a narrow waist and small hips. Without knowing him you would know that he was an athlete, and only the slight heaviness of his brows and one small scar across the bridge of his nose gave him away as a fighter. His light brown hair was cropped in a crew cut and he had light blue eyes, and when he smiled he seemed to mean it.
“I see you and Helen met,” he said, after we had shaken hands.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“It’s all right with me.”
“But I told you I’d be ready at 9:30.”
“Look, I’m not going to get into a fight with you about it. You might be able to lick me.”
“How about some breakfast with me?”
“No, thanks. I’ve eaten.”
“Have a cup of coffee while I’m eating. Helen will make coffee.”
“It’s made,” she said.
There was a small breakfast nook with a window at the end of the table and you could see a garage and a small back yard enclosed with galvanized wire fencing. There was a sandbox and a swing-and-slide combination in the yard, and a small boy was playing in the yard. He had on blue jeans and red rubber boots and a brown hooded jacket, and he was standing by the fence, trying to push a stick through one of the openings between the wires. He appeared to be about five years old.
“I judge that’s Eddie, Jr.?”
“That’s him,” Eddie said.
“And no trouble at all?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, looking up from his cereal with a sliced banana on the top. “This morning he woke me at seven-thirty.”
“He woke me at seven,” his wife said.
She was standing by the gas range. She had a flame under the coffeepot and was boiling a couple of eggs over another.
“So I chased him out,” Eddie said. “At eight o’clock he was back. I chased him again. When he came back I hollered to Helen. I said: ‘Get him out of here. I want to sleep.’”
“You slept plenty,” Helen said.
“I wanted to sleep some more.”
“You slept enough.”
Eddie let it pass then, but I thought about it. The big thing he has to sell, I thought, is his body. It is one of the wonders of the world, this body of a good fighter. Think of the things it must do when the mind orders it, and because it can do these things it bought this house and the furnishings in it and the clothes you all wear and the food you eat. A month from now this man is going in there with that body against another man. There will be much written and read about this, and there will be many thousands of dollars involved. Throughout this country people will watch it in their homes and in bars, and after it is over they will read about it and, if it is a good fight, think about it and talk about it. All of this, I thought, depends upon this body, so if he wants to pamper it now, let him pamper it.
“You take sugar and cream?” Eddie said.
I couldn’t buy that Helen.