Эд Макбейн - Running From Legs and Other Stories

I felt the same frustration now as we rode down to 86th Street, and I also felt the same danger. That’s ridiculous, I know. Harry was only sharing a taxicab with me. But I had the feeling he was also trying to move in on me, he had put all his furniture into a Santini Brothers van and now they were moving into my head and my heart and even my soul, and were beginning to unpack their barrels.

The cab pulled to the curb at Madison Avenue. I silently took out a dollar and a quarter and handed it to Harry.

“Please,” he said.

“Are you sure this is on the business?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and shrugged, and put my money away, and got out of the cab. I didn’t tell him to have a nice day. I just closed the taxi door, slammed it actually (the Negro cabbie turned to give me a dirty look), and then stopped for a cup of coffee before going up to the office.

That night, I had my talk with Adele, the one in which she insisted I was a Cheap Charlie. When I finally shouted that the cab fare had nothing to do with the damn situation, she very quietly said, “You’re allowing a white man to buy your freedom and your privacy.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true, Howard.”

“You’re a racist, is what you are,” I said. “You’re as bad as the segregationists down south.”

“He’s going to ask you to have lunch with him one day, you wait and see.”

“I don’t want to have lunch with him.”

“Do you want to share a taxi with him?”

“No!”

“But you do share one,” Adele said. She nodded sagely. “And you’ll have lunch with him, too, wait and see.”

“I will not have lunch with him,” I said.

“You’re allowing him to enslave you,” Adele said. “Howard, you are letting him snatch you out of the African jungle and throw you into the hold of a ship in chains.”

“He wants to be my friend!”

“Do you want to be his friend?”

“No, but...”

“Are you afraid of him, Howard?”

“No, but...”

“Then why can’t you tell him you don’t want to ride with him? I’ll tell you why, Howard. You can’t because he’s white. And it’s the white man’s privilege to decide whether or not he’ll ride with a nigger.”

“Don’t use that word in this house,” I said.

“Howard,” she said, “if you let Harry Pryor do this to you, you are nothing but a nigger,” and she went up to bed.

I sat alone in the living room for a long time. Then I went upstairs and made sure Marcia hadn’t kicked the blanket off the way she usually did. She was sleeping with a wide grin on her face. Her braces gleamed in the dim light from the hallway. I touched her face gently, tucked the blanket in around her feet, and then went into my own bedroom. Adele was asleep. A frilly cap covered her set hair. My grandmother had worn an old silk stocking on her head the day I came home from trying to walk over the bridge. The toe of the stocking, knotted, had flapped around her ears as she shook her head and washed my cuts.

My grandmother’s father had been a slave.

I decided to tell Harry in the morning that I no longer cared to share a taxi with him.

I kept putting it off.

He got into the taxi with me every morning, and every morning I would turn toward him and start to tell him, and I would see those pale blue eyes behind the thick glasses, and I would remember how he had eased his way into our group on the train. And it would occur to me that perhaps Harry Pryor needed my companionship more than I needed my own privacy, which was crazy.

He kept asking me questions about Negroes.

He wanted to know how it felt to walk into a good restaurant, did I always fear I would be turned away, or not served, or otherwise treated badly? He wanted to know how I handled hotel reservations; did I explain on the phone that I was a Negro, or did I simply arrive with my luggage and surprise them? He asked me if I had ever gone out with white girls, so I told him about Susan who had been in the School of Journalism at Columbia and whom I had dated for six months when I was going to Fordham. We were quite open about being seen in public together, I told Harry, even though Susan never mentioned me to her parents, and even though I never wrote about her in my letters home. We had quite a thing going for six months, but then it all ended pretty routinely when I went off to fight in Korea. I wrote to her once or twice, and once or twice she answered, and then it simply ended, almost as if it had never happened at all.

I also told him about my sister who was in the English department at U.C.L.A., and how she had gone through a severe Muslim phase, only to swing over to dating white men exclusively. She was now involved in all that crazy California scene of surfing and psychedelics and Oriental religion. I told him she still called me “Hub,” which had been my nickname as a boy. I told him Adele’s brother favored a separate Negro nation, that he had been jailed six times in Georgia and Alabama, and that he had fled north this past summer after striking back at a deputy with a piece of lead pipe. His eyes burn in his head, I said, I think he’s a fanatic. I told him that I myself had respected only Martin Luther King as leader of the civil rights movement, but that I would never ride a freedom bus or join in a march because, quite frankly, I was afraid I would be hurt or possibly killed. I told him I had an aunt named Fiorina who hired out as a cleaning woman, and whom I had not seen since I was coming along in the South, though every Christmas she sent a plum cake to the house in North Stamford. I told him that James Baldwin gave me a pain in the ass. And at last, I told him about what had happened the day I tried to walk across that little wooden bridge a mile from where my sister and I lived with my grandmother.

“Why didn’t you fight back?” Harry asked.

“I was just a little kid,” I said.

“How old?”

“Six. And my sister was only four.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought I was a fool to get into a fight with bigger kids.”

“Bigger white kids?”

“No.”

“But you must have thought that, Howard.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Just bigger kids, that’s all. White had nothing to do with it.”

These conversations all took place in various taxicabs in the space of, oh, two or three weeks, I would guess. All the time, I had the oddest feeling that Harry was waiting for me to say something I had not yet said, reveal something I had kept hidden until then, do something — it was the oddest feeling. It brought to mind again the Chinese machine gunners waiting for us to try a run through that treacherous ravine.

One morning, as I got out of the cab, I realized I had forgotten to offer Harry my customary dollar and a quarter. I reached for my wallet.

“Forget it,” he said.

“Harry,” I said, “we’ve been riding together for a long time now. I wish you’d let me pay my share.”

“It’s deductible,” he said, and shrugged.

“Are you sure?”

“I am absolutely positive,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and got out of the cab. “So long,” I said, “have a good day.”

“The same to you, Howard,” he answered. “The same to you.”

All through the next week, I rode down to 86th Street in a cab with Harry, telling him what it was like to be a Negro in America. I no longer offered to pay for the ride because it seemed to me the point had been settled. If he really was deducting it, then why go through the same pointless routine each morning, taking out my wallet and extending the cash only to have it turned away?