The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (38 page)

Bolie stared into the little face and felt an access of tenderness and affection of man for boy that did tight things to his throat. He knelt down in front of Henry and held him by the shoulders, then very gently he kissed him on the cheek, rose, went over to the bed, and took an overnight bag from it.

He left the little boy standing there as he went out the door and down the steps, conscious of the hundreds of nights he’d walked down these steps on his way to this stadium or that stadium. Sometimes to win and come back in a glorious homecoming to back-slapping neighbors. Other times to lose and to sneak skulking back in the dead of night, not wanting to see anyone, hating the pitying look of friends and hating more the accusing looks of people who had bet on him and lost.

It was almost as if he could funnel all the fights into a giant, vast moment of recollection and the result was one mass of remembered pain. The shocking, incredible, blinding agony of the broken nose; the dull throbbing ache of the kidney, the rib cage, the stomach that went on for weeks after a bad one. It all went through his mind as he walked slowly down the steps.

Standing near the front door was Henry Temple’s mother, an attractive widow in her thirties. She had just come out of her apartment and she smiled at Bolie. He stopped and smiled at her, then jerked his thumb in the direction of the stairs.

“You got quite a boy there, Frances,” Bolie grinned. “You got quite a boy. Talks like a little old man, you know? I’m his ‘good and close friend.’ That’s what he says. Real intense like. I’m his good and close friend.” He laughed softly and shook his head.

“You’re good to him,” Frances said. “You’re real good to him, Bolie. Takin’ him to ball games all the time. Takin’ him out for walks.” She looked up toward the steps and said simply, “Hard for a boy not to have a father. He never did know his.” She looked closely at Bolie and touched his arm. “He won’t be going to bed tonight till you get back. Take care of yourself, Bolie. Don’t get hurt none.”

Bolie’s smile was slight and crooked. “I’ll work hard on it.”

They both turned at the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. Henry walked past his mother directly over to Bolie. He reached up and took the fighter’s hand and then stared up intensely into his face.

“I’m gonna make a wish, Bolie,” he announced. “I’m gonna make a wish nothin’ happens to you. So don’t you be afraid, Bolie. Understand? Don’t you be afraid.”

He let go of Bolie’s hand, and went into his apartment. Bolie looked down at the floor.

“You’re his friend, Bolie,” Frances said softly. “He’s got you in a shrine.”

Bolie’s head jerked up and he laughed without humor. “Scared old man who don’t remember nothin’ except how to bleed.” He shook his head. “I don’t fit in no shrine, Frances.” He studied the closed door of the apartment and then smiled. “But you tell him, Frances...” his voice was softer. “You tell him how I’m obliged for his wish. That’s what I need right now.” He looked down at his big-knuckled hands, criss-crossed with bulging tendons and muscles and scarred like his face.

“That’s what I need,” he whispered. “A little magic.” He ran his hand over the line of mailboxes along the wall and he felt afraid. He felt desperately afraid.

“He’s been talking about makin’ a wish all night,” Frances said. “All the time makin’ wishes, Bolie. I see him standin’ there in his bedroom in the dark, lookin’ out the window. I come in real quiet and I say, ‘Henry, boy, why don’t you go to sleep?’, and he turns to me with that serious little face of his and he says, ‘Makin’ a wish, Mama.’ Makin’ a wish for this. Makin’ a wish for that. Oh, he’s all the time wishin’. Why just the other night—” She stopped abruptly and looked away. There was a puzzled look on her face and her eyes narrowed as she remembered something.

“What, Frances? What happened?”

Frances smiled at him then looked away. She laughed softly as if scoffing at herself. “I needed fifteen dollars for the rent,” she said. “Henry said he was gonna make the big, tall wish. That’s his biggest kind, the big, tall wish.” She laughed lightly again. “He don’t waste that wish on just anything. That’s what he calls the important one.” She was silent for a moment and again her voice was thoughtful. “That was last Friday and a woman I done some nursing for out on the Island sent me a check.” She looked at Bolie closely. “A check for fifteen dollars.”

Bolie smiled and shook his head. “Little boys,” he said. “Little boys with their heads full up with dreams. And when does it happen, Frances? When do they suddenly know there ain’t any magic?” He fiddled with one of the open mailboxes and then suddenly, impulsively, slammed it shut.

“When does somebody push their face down on the sidewalk and say to ‘em—’Hey, little boy’—it’s concrete. That’s what the world is made out of Concrete and gutters and dirty old buildings and tears for every minute you’re alive.” The black, scarred face was contorted and bitterness showed in the eyes as he turned to the woman. “When do they find out that you can wish your life away, Frances?”

“Good luck tonight, Bolie,” she said gently. “We’ll be waiting for you.”

“Sure, Frances, sure,” Bolie nodded. He pointed toward the closed door. “Kiss him good night for me.”

Then he went out the front door and down the steps of the brownstone toward the sidewalk. People lounged on the steps and curbs, fanning the sultry air with the sports pages of the evening newspaper.

“Give ‘im hell, Bolie,” screeched a scrawny little old man from the top steps.

“The old one, two, Bolie,” a fat woman said, going through a complicated motion with arms and trunk.

Somebody slapped him on the back and a newsboy asked for his autograph, but in a moment he was alone walking down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. In a few minutes he’d be in his dressing room at St. Nick’s Arena. In a strange way he felt at home there. The very ugliness of the place and everything connected with it were well-remembered adjuncts to his life. The smell of sweat that stayed on towels even after a washing. The odor of cheap liniment. The collective smell of people that permeated the walls. The cigar and cigarette smoke and the noises from up above. The stamping and whistling and shouting of the hard-to-please coterie of fight followers who wanted at least one bleeding, cut eye for every twenty-cent fraction of their admission ticket.

Riding on the bus down toward Sixty-sixth Street, Bolie thought about the thousands of hours he’d spent in dressing rooms and how the faces of the people dimly visible beyond the ring lights in the fourth and fifth rows always looked the same, as if the identical men had followed him over the years and across the country—always to show up booing and stamping while the pain came to him.

He looked out the window at the passing neon lights and knew that this would be the last bus ride to St. Nick’s Arena or any arena and this would be the last night spent in a dressing room and then in a ring. It would be the last of everything if he didn’t win. This was the comeback. This was the single and solitary last chance to prove he could still be reckoned with as a fighting entity.

And even as he pondered, he realized he was tired and old, and this whole thing was just a gesture, a ritual to deny all the opponents and all the years when in truth opponents and years had long ago cost him this fight as well as so many earlier ones.

He pushed this thought out of his mind, shaking his head and mumbling to himself, as if by the very act of rejection he might yet salvage a victory from a set of impossible odds.

Joe Mizell was what was called in the trade a “cut man.” This term covered a multitude of services but, boiled down, it meant he was a fighter’s handler, preparing him for the fight and “servicing” him between rounds. In some thirty-one years in the business, this little, partially hunchbacked, bald gnome of a man had deftly stopped the blood flow of fifty thousand cuts; pulled out the trunks of perhaps five hundred fighters as they tried torturously to breathe inside a body that had been punished beyond reason; and had, like a laboratory technician, opened up a comparable army of jaws to supply just the right amount of water to wet the insides of swollen mouths without allowing their owners to swallow any of it.

In short, Joe Mizell was an expert ringside functionary who had probably kept too many fighters on their feet when by all physical laws they should have been back in dressing rooms or in ambulances. Sometime back over the years he had trained himself never to look at fighters’ faces. He had assumed a kind of numb professionalism, allowing no emotion to enter his ministrations of aid. A fighter was just an evening’s job. But on occasion, rare occasion, Mizell couldn’t help but feel a sharp tug inside as he prepared an old-timer like the soft-voiced colored boy he was handling tonight.

He had seen Bolie Jackson fifteen years ago when he was a clear-faced, ebony young destroyer who had strength, resilience, and more brains than most. He’d handled Bolie for a four-year period when he was heading up for the championship and had been around in his corner the night Bolie’s right eye had been cut to ribbons and the fight had been called in the eleventh round.

That had been the pinnacle. From that moment on Bolie Jackson had gone downhill and Joe Mizell had been around for the downward trip as well. There were the close fights, the good fights with the rising newcomers who fought Bolie Jackson for his name value. And then there was the long line of over-matched evenings when Bolie had had no right even to enter a ring.

Now Mizell carefully finished taping the fighter’s hands and forced himself to look up into the scarred face, making an unconscious comparison between this hopelessly damaged countenance and the smooth, handsome face of Bolie Jackson at eighteen.

Mizell felt the little twinge of ache that came deep inside whenever he worked on over-the-hill fighters who stayed in a profession that sucked its warriors dry, held out a teasing promise of comeback, but in every case left them torn and scrambled and unfit for anything else. He finished the taping, then stepped back and held up the palms of his hands.

“Try it, Bolie,” he said.

Bolie flexed his hands and then cracked Mizell’s palms several times with his bandaged fists. “Feels okay, Joe,” Bolie said. “Feels good. Thanks.”

Mizell grunted an acknowledgment, then with strangely graceful fingers, began to knead Bolie’s back muscles, rippling his hands over the fighter’s shoulders and arms, first digging, then gouging, then gently massaging. Once when Bolie flinched, Mizell winked at him and the wink reminded Bolie of all the hours this small, misshapen man had worked on him. What decency, honesty, what precious little compassion there was to be found in the legal slaughterhouse known as professional prize fighting, was limited to men like Joe Mizell.

“You ain’t lost your touch, Joe,” Bolie grinned at him.

Mizell half smiled and continued the massage. Very gradually the taut, tense muscles, the bunched-up tendons loosened and became more pliable, and the fear that Bolie had carried into the room with him, though not dissipated, had been pushed into a comer.

Harvey Thomas came in. He was Bolie’s manager for the night—an obese, greasy-looking man who chewed wetly on the stub of a cigar. Bolie couldn’t afford a regular manager. There were transient managers who would handle a fighter on a one-fight basis. Thomas was one of these. He blew a cloud of dirty smoke into the air and Bolie noticed the spittle on the comers of Thomas’s mouth. Bolie turned away, rubbing his jaw with the back of a bandaged hand.

“He’s all ready,” Mizell announced shortly.

Thomas nodded without interest, formed his mouth into an “O” and blew out another stream of smoke. Bolie looked up at the clock. It was almost ten and he was beginning to feel that wet tension he always knew before a tough one. The room was small and the smoke from the cigar seemed to envelop him. He was frightened and angry. He had to strike out at someone. Thomas stood there, fat and ugly, and Bolie hated him.

“Butt it out, will you, Thomas?” Bolie barked. “I want to breathe.”

Thomas smiled and revealed a set of broken black and yellow teeth. He deliberately took another drag on the cigar. “You hired me for the fight, Bolie. It’s a package deal—me and the cigar.”

A thousand needles tore holes in Bolie’s mind and body. He could feel sweat under the bandages. He bolted up from the table.

“I told you to butt it out, Thomas.”

The two men stared at one another. Mizell turned away, busying himself collecting dirty towels that were strewn on the floor. Finally, Thomas, chuckling softly, held up the cigar and let the soggy thing drop from his hands.