Эд Макбейн - Running From Legs and Other Stories

“Good-by, Harry,” I would say. “Thanks for the ride.”

“My pleasure, Howard,” he would answer, “my distinct pleasure,” and the taxi would gun away from the curb.

On the following Monday, I arrived at the Stamford station late, approaching the train from the front end, which was closest to where I always parked my car. The train was about to pull out, so I hopped aboard and began walking back toward the last car when suddenly something powerful rooted me to the spot. I will not have to sit with the group, I thought, I will not have to ride in a taxi with Harry Pryor and tell him what it is like to be a Negro in America, I will not have to do either of those things if I stay up here in the first car. If I stay up here, I thought, if I take a seat up here, then I may be able to ride a taxicab down to 86th all by myself, light a cigar and inhale some good luxurious smoke, read my newspaper in peace and quiet, ruminate upon the state of world affairs if I want to, or dream of belly dancers in Cairo if I want to, or pray for peace, or wonder about my daughter’s teeth, or think about my wife’s car, or sketch out some plans for a boat I’d like to build one day, what with the Sound being so close and all. In short, if I take a seat in this first car of the train, I can perhaps avoid Harry at 125th Street and therefore be a Negro in America.

I took a seat next to a fat woman wearing a horrible perfume. I felt like a defector. I was certain they would come looking for me before the train reached 125th Street, certain Harry would burst into the car and shout, “Ah-ha, there you are!” exposing me for the runaway slave I most certainly was. The train rumbled across the Harlem River Bridge, the bleak gray tenements appeared suddenly on the horizon. I pulled my collar up high, and leaped onto the platform. I saw Harry as he got off the train at the other end, but I pretended not to. Instead, I walked very quickly to the closest staircase, raced down it, and, rather than walking up to 126th Street, cut across Park Avenue and headed crosstown.

I had just reached Lexington Avenue when two things happened at once.

A pair of taxis came rolling toward the corner, and I saw Harry Pryor standing there with his arm raised, hailing one of them. He saw me in that same instant.

“Good morning, Howard,” he said quickly, and pulled open the door of the nearest taxi. “I’ll grab this one,” he said, and got into the cab hastily and slammed the door. The second taxi had just pulled to the curb. I opened the door and got in. “86th and Madison,” I said, and watched as the taxi ahead, the one carrying Harry, gunned away from the curb and headed downtown.

I did not know what to think at first.

Had he realized I’d been trying to duck him, had he walked over to Lexington Avenue only to make it easier for me, figuring I’d head for my usual post at 126th and Park? Or had I offended him in some manner, had I said something the week before that had caused him to make a simultaneous and identical decision: we would no longer ride with each other, we would no longer share.

And then I realized what it was.

I had at last done the thing Harry had been waiting for me to do all along. After all that talk, after all those explanations and revelations and confidences freely offered, I had at last managed to convey to Harry the certain knowledge that I was only, at best, a Negro. I had finally and unprotestingly accepted his generosity, only to become in that instant the white man’s burden. I had made the terrible mistake, again, of thinking I could walk across that bridge with immunity, allow Harry to pay my fare at last because, you see, I was an equal who understood all about tax deductions, an accountant, you see, an educated man — even perhaps, a friend.

It was not a cold day, it was the middle of March, and spring was on the way, but I felt a sudden chill and longed to join the old men still huddling over coal fires in the side streets of Harlem. At 86th Street, I gave the driver a dollar and a quarter and got out of the cab.

I had forgotten to light my cigar.

Since that day, I have avoided Harry by taking an earlier train, the 7:30 out of Stamford, which arrives at 125th Street at 8:20. This gives me a little extra time, so I no longer have to ride a taxi to work in the morning. Instead, I walk over to Lexington Avenue, and I board the downtown express there on a platform that is thronged with Negroes like myself.

I do not mind it except when it’s raining.

When it’s raining, I think of Harry riding a cab downtown, alone, and I wonder if he has the window open a crack, and I wonder if anything will ever convince him that I was able to pay my own way, and that I would have happily done so if he’d only given me the chance.

The closet was a big walk-in, far more storage space than we needed on such a short Caribbean vacation. After we’d folded our beachwear into three dresser drawers, there was little else to hang — Kara’s two cocktail dresses, my own lightweight Navy blue blazer and gray slacks. We would be here for only five days, a brief respite from New York’s brutal February.

“Honey?” the voice in the closet said. “Come take a look at this!”

Kara and I had come up from the beach at a quarter past four, and were napping before dinner time. The voice sounded so immediate I thought it was actually in the room with us. It was a male voice, young and obviously impressed by whatever it was he was asking “Honey” to come see. Startled out of a light sleep, it took me a moment to realize that the voice was coming from our closet, and another moment to comprehend that it was coming from beyond the closet wall.

“Someone’s at the door,” Kara mumbled.

“No, he’s in the closet,” I said.

“Mm, funny,” she said.

We were both awakened an hour later by the sound of female moans, male groans, genderless gutter talk and heavy breathing. Kara sat up in a flash, directing a green-eyed laser beam at the closet, from beyond which the sounds of sexual engagement were emanating. Only once before in our twelve years of married life had we overheard a man and a woman making love in another room. That was in the Connaught Hotel in London, at two A.M. on a moonlit night in May, the windows wide open, the tumultuous tossings and passionate cries of pleasure rising from across the courtyard. Oddly, when it was all over and the night was once again still, the woman kept repeating over and over again, like the heroine in a Victorian novel, “You, sir, are a blackguard,” an epithet that reduced us both to helpless muffled laughter.

Here in the tropics, there was the sound of the ocean rushing the beach beyond our shuttered windows, and the whisper of palm fronds on the moonlit balmy night, and once again the same cries of passion spilling from the closet and across the room to where we lay listening, captive in our own bed.

We learned the next day that the object of attraction in the closet next door was an enormous tropical spider. From what we could overhear, and we overheard all, this was a truly extraordinary bug.

“God, he’s gigantic, sweetie!”

“Just don’t get too close, honey.”

“Look at all those colors!”

“Is that green or blue?”

“Green and blue.”

“Some red, too.”

“Do you think he’s poisonous?”

“I don’t think so, honey.”

“What shall we do with him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well... should we spray him or something?”

“I don’t think he’ll hurt us.”

“But let’s hang our things away from that corner, okay?”

At which point, I swear to God, they both began clapping their hands and singing “Eansie-Beansie Spider.”