Эд Макбейн - Running From Legs and Other Stories

I left home in 1946 to attend Fordham University in New York, where I majored in accounting. I got my degree in June of 1950, and was immediately shipped to Korea. I met a lot of different people there, black and white, Northerner and Southerner, and the only problems I had were trying to stay warm, and fed, and alive. I will tell you more about that later. I met Adele in 1953, when I was discharged, and shortly after that I got the job with Goldman, Fish and Rutherford. I still work there. Adele and I were married in October of 1954, and we now have one child, a daughter named Marcia who is eleven years old and is having orthodontic work done. I tell you all this merely to provide some sort of background for what happened with Harry Pryor.

I had always thought of myself as a reasonable man, you see. I am thirty-eight years old and whereas it infuriates me whenever I hear a racial slur, I still don’t think I would go to the South to do civil rights work. I’m very content with what I have. A good marriage, a good job, a daughter who is going to be a beauty once she gets rid of her braces, a house in North Stamford, and many many friends, some of whom are white.

In fact, everyone in my train group is white. I usually catch the 8:01 express from Stamford, which arrives at 125th Street in New York at 8:38. That’s where I get off. The train continues on down to Grand Central, but I get off at 125th Street because Goldman, Fish and Rutherford has its offices on 86th and Madison, and it would be silly for me to go all the way downtown only to head back in the other direction again. There are generally six or seven fellows in the train group, depending on who has missed the train on any given morning. We always meet on the platform. I don’t know where the 8:01 makes up, but when it reaches Stamford there are still seats, and we generally grab the first eight on either side of the aisle coming into the last car. We carry containers of coffee with us, and donuts or coffee cake, and we have a grand time eating our breakfast and chatting and joking all the way to New York.

The morning I met Harry Pryor, I spilled coffee on his leg.

He is white, a tall person with very long legs. He has a mustache, and he wears thick-lensed glasses that magnify his pale blue eyes. He is about my age, I would guess, thirty-eight or nine, something like that. What happened was that I tripped over his foot as I was taking my seat, and spilled half a container of coffee on him, which is not exactly a good way to begin a relationship. I apologized profusely, of course, and offered him my clean handkerchief, which he refused, and then I sat down with the fellows. None of them seemed to mind Harry being there among us. I myself figured he was a friend of one of the other fellows. He didn’t say anything that first morning, just listened and smiled every now and then when somebody told a joke. I got off at 125th Street, as usual, and took a taxi down to 86th Street.

You may think it strange that a fellow who earns only two hundred dollars a week, and who has a twenty-thousand-dollar mortgage on his house, and a daughter who is costing a fortune to have her teeth straightened, would be so foolish as to squander hard-earned money on a taxicab to and from the New York Central tracks, and only a single express stop from 86th Street. Why, you ask, would a working man allow himself the luxury of a taxi ride every morning and every night, which ride costs a dollar plus a twenty-five cents tip each way, when the subway costs considerably less? I’ll tell you why.

When I was a soldier in Korea, I was very hungry and very cold most of the time. Also, I almost got shot. So I decided if ever I was lucky enough to become a civilian again, I would not deny myself any little luxuries that might make life more comfortable or more interesting or even just more bearable. The first luxury I did not deny myself was buying Adele a two-carat engagement ring that cost me thirty-five hundred dollars, which was every penny I had managed to save during the war. Anyway, that’s why I take a taxicab every morning. And every night, too. I like to pamper myself. When you’ve almost been shot once or twice, you begin to realize you’d better enjoy whatever time you have left on this good sweet earth of ours.

The next time I saw Harry, he was carrying a container of coffee, and he looked exactly like the rest of us. He took one of the seats we usually reserved for the group, and made a little joke about my not spilling coffee on him this morning, please. I laughed because I still thought he was somebody’s friend. In fact, we all laughed. This encouraged him to tell a joke about two guys in the men’s room, which was really a pretty good joke. I got off as usual at 125th, and Harry said goodbye to me when all the other fellows did. I took my taxicab downtown, smoked a cigar, and read my newspaper.

The next morning, Harry got off at 125th Street, too.

Now, I don’t know whether or not you’re familiar with this particular section of New York City. It is Harlem. On one corner, there’s a big red brick building that must have been an armory at one time. There’s a luncheonette on the opposite corner, and a newsstand and a Loft’s on one side under the overhead tracks, and a hot dog stand on the other side. If you come straight out onto 125th Street and stand on Park Avenue waiting for a taxicab, you’re out of luck. Every commuter who was on the train comes rushing down the steps to grab for cabs with both hands, it’s a regular mob scene. So what I usually do is walk a block north, up to 126th Street, and I wait on the corner there, which is similar to shortstopping the chow line, an old trick I learned in Korea, where I was hungry all the time.

Harry and I came down the steps together that morning, but I immediately started for 126th Street, not asking him where he was going because I figured it was none of my business. He usually rode the train in to Grand Central, but here he was getting off at 125th, and I didn’t know what to think. Maybe he had a girl up there in Harlem or something, I didn’t know, and I wasn’t asking. All I was interested in doing was getting a taxicab because it can get pretty chilly standing on 126th Street and Park Avenue in January. I got my taxi within five minutes, and I sat back and lit my cigar, but as I passed the next corner, I noticed that Harry was still standing there trying to get a cab for himself. I didn’t ask the driver to stop for him, but I made a mental note of it, which I forgot soon enough because Harry didn’t get off at 125th again until maybe two or three weeks later.

This was already the beginning of February, and Park Avenue up there in Harlem looked pretty bleak. It is not like Park Avenue down around 80th Street, if that’s what you thought. Harlem is a ghetto, you see, with crumbling tenements and garbage-strewn backyards. I have even seen rats the size of alley cats leaping across the railroad tracks on 125th Street, bigger than the ones I saw in Korea. But in the winter, in addition to everything else, the place gets a bleak forbidding look. You just know, in the winter, that there are people shivering inside those crumbly buildings, afraid to come out because it’s even colder in the streets. You can stand a ghetto in the spring, I guess, because you can walk outside and look up at the sky. In New York, there is a sky above the building tops, and it is often a beautiful blue sky, even in a ghetto. But in the winter, you are trapped. There is only you and the four walls and the extra heat you can maybe get from a kerosene burner. I never go through Harlem in the winter without thinking how lucky I am.

I was standing on the corner of 126th and Park, when Harry Pryor walked up to me and said, “Are you taking a cab downtown?”

“Yes,” I said, “I take one every morning.”