I leaned my back against the window and watched the rain water pour off the awning and splash over my shoes. I was standing in a puddle about an inch deep, but it hardly mattered any more. I was beginning to feel sick again. There was no sign of the bus. To take my mind off myself, I turned and faced the window, and I saw the woman dancing around the store with her arms outstretched and her eyes half closed. The men standing near the refrigerated case kept up a rhythmic clapping. She went on dancing around, having a marvelous time, while the man in the porkpie hat looked sullenly at the floor.
After a while, I turned around and faced the street again. I felt like a shipwreck hanging on a reef, or a piece of driftwood. I think I had a touch of delirium. I was thinking about what to do next, when the woman and the man in the porkpie hat came out of the grocery store.
“You deny that? You deny that?” he yelled at her. He was standing next to me under the awning.
“Go on, man. Go on. Go on,” she said, walking away from him and moving indifferently into the rain.
“Now, you deny that?” he said. “Now where you going? You come on back here.”
“You don’t own me, baby,” she said, walking on.
He gave a few preliminary grunts of frustration, and then he began to scream at her to come back, but she paid no attention to him. “You hear me? I’m talking to you! You come on back here,” he said.
Halfway down the block, she stopped and turned around, put her hands on her hips, yelled something obscene at him, and then stretched out her arms and began to laugh.
“Honey, you getting wet. Now, you come on back here,” he called imploringly.
She yelled something at him again.
“Now, honey, why you talk that way to me?” he yelled.
“Man, leave me alone. You make me sick,” she said, moving on.
“Come on, honey, you know I don’t feel good,” he cried at her in a sad whine.
The woman crossed the street quickly, and the man watched her, moving his mouth without saying anything. He seemed too tired to go after her. For a while, he stood with his arms folded and shook his head. He didn’t seem to know that I was there, even though only about a foot separated us. I was slightly behind him, still leaning against the window, when he turned around and looked surprised; then he closed his mouth and narrowed his eyes and looked angry.
“How are you?” I said.
“What you say?” he asked, putting a hand over his eyes.
“I said, ‘How are you?’”
He held his hand over his eyes, considering the question. “That ain’t what you said,” he told me finally, still covering his eyes.
“O.K., that’s not what I said.”
I looked down at my feet, at the puddle I was standing in, trying to ignore him. I noticed that he was wearing a ripped pair of black, misshapen shoes and no socks, and that his pants legs were rolled up a little above his ankles. Suddenly he jumped into the puddle I was standing in and splashed me. I couldn’t believe it.
“Now, what did you say?” he asked, folding his arms.
I didn’t answer.
“You trying to make a fool out of me?” he asked.
“I’m not trying to make a fool out of you,” I said. I looked down the street, feeling sick and desperate, but the street was empty and it was raining harder than ever.
“You mean you ain’t trying but I am a fool anyhow. Right?” he said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that what you mean,” he said. “You a wise guy. Right?”
“I’m just waiting for a bus. If I insulted you, it was unintentional,” I said.
“Don’t give me unintentional. I unintentional you.”
He kicked the puddle, splashing my pants with water, and said he was going to knock me down. Then he stepped back, dropping his hands to the level of his belt, and measured me. I picked up my suitcase and moved it a few feet, setting it on a narrow ledge just below the window.
“Man, I’m gonna wipe you out,” he said, opening and closing his hands several times.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked very strong, and I am of medium height and rather frail. “Well,” I said, “you’re going to have the worst fight of your life.”
“You gonna give it to me?” he asked, smiling.
I told him that I was going to beat the hell out of him, and then I brought my hands up.
“Man, will you look at that!” he said. “This is gonna be some fun.”
He touched the brim of his hat, dropped his hands into position again, and, five feet away from me, began to bob and weave. “You come on in,” he said. “I’m a counterpuncher.”
I didn’t move, but watched him closely, keeping my hands high. I told him I was a counterpuncher, too. He began to circle me, and I turned with him. He kept on going through this little shadowboxing routine, paying only nominal attention to me. He looked very good, very agile.
After a few minutes of circling and jabbing and hooking at the air, he stopped and looked at me. “You looks terrible,” he said. We had maneuvered ourselves out into the rain, and the water was streaming over our faces. “You off balance,” he said.
I told him not to worry about it, that I had fast hands and a good punch.
“The only thing you doing right is standing up,” he said, shaking his head. He held up his hands in a truce gesture and walked over to me. He said he wanted to give me some basic instruction. He adjusted my hands slightly and pushed my head down so that it was protected by my left shoulder, and then he kicked my feet to a different position, saying I was standing flat-footed. “Now you looking good,” he said.
“Well, it feels unnatural,” I said, resuming my old position.
Then, to prove that my style was poor, he asked me to try to hit him. He said he wouldn’t try to hit me but would just give me a little demonstration that would do more for me than all the talk in the world.
“I don’t want to hit you,” I said.
“Don’t worry, you ain’t going to,” he said.
“Look, I’ll take your word for it,” I said.
“Come on, now,” he said. “You got to see what I mean to really believe it.”
So he began to bob and weave with his hands low, presenting his head as a slowly moving target. I watched his head bob for about thirty seconds, and tried to measure him. He kept talking the whole time. “You can’t get set, see. Now you see it, now you don’t. You all tied up.”
I pulled my right hand back a few inches, and he broke into a wide grin, and then, while he was grinning, I feinted with my right hand and came hard with a left hook, catching him squarely on the side of the jaw. He whirled around and pitched forward on the pavement, landing hard on his chest and then rolling over on his side. He wasn’t hurt. He grabbed his hat and jumped quickly to his feet, looking annoyed and embarrassed. “I’ll be goddam,” he said, one hand on top of his hat.
“I’m very sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Some rain got in my eye,” he said. “I ain’t seen your left.”
He said he wanted to give me a few more demonstrations, but I told him I’d had enough. I suddenly felt sick again, with the hot-and-cold business returning—the nausea and cramps and the rest. My legs became weak. Feeling I was going to faint, I walked over to the window and leaned against it. I decided to forget about the bus, for the time being, and go back to the men’s room in the gasoline station. I took up my suitcase and started to walk away, when the man trotted over and grabbed me by the arm. “Where you going?” he asked.
“I’m not feeling well,” I said, jerking my arm away. “Leave me alone.”
“Man, what’s wrong with you?” he asked, smiling. “You knock me down and you is mad.”
Then he began to throw a flurry of punches at the air in front of me, bobbing and weaving, going into a series of strange forward and lateral hops and skips, dancing, and finally winding it up by running in place. I think he felt he was cheer
ing me up, for he kept up the running for about two minutes, making faces, and then he stopped and said, “Now how you feeling?”
I told him to get out of my way, but he continued to block me, and I was too weak to try to run around him.
He jumped up in the air and closed his eyes and flapped his arms. “Now how you feeling?” he asked, after a few jumps.
I told him I was feeling worse than ever, and that if he really wanted to help me he would go away and leave me alone.
He said that I was just a little down and out, and there was nothing to worry about if I listened to him. He told me about his Opposite Theory. “If you feel like lying down, then stand up,” he said. “If you feel like crying, then laugh.”
I tried to get by him, but he grabbed me by the shoulder of my coat. “Maybe if you lie down you never get up. You thought of that?”
I broke away and started to run, but he caught up with me easily and clapped a huge hand on my shoulder and pressed down. I whirled around, dropped my suitcase, and threw a wild right hand at him, but he ducked under it neatly and countered, though intentionally missing, with a classic one-two. “Sickness all in the mind,” he said.
I told him my sickness was in the stomach and that he should get the hell away from me, but he shook his head, half closing his eyes. “I ain’t gonna let you give in to it,” he said. “I gonna help you fight it.”
He said he knew all about the body, because he was an ex-fighter, and most ex-fighters knew more about the human body than any doctor, and that every man has a secret place in him which fights sickness and pain, and the trick was to have faith in that secret place. He said you had to turn on that little secret power by doing just the opposite of what your body asked you to do.
While he was talking, I developed a headache, and I was about to ask him what this headache was telling me to do, so I could do the opposite, when I began to see objects in pairs and threes, and I knew I was going to fall. The nausea was so bad that I couldn’t keep my mouth closed, and the ground seemed to tilt. I dropped down on one knee, pushing at the ground with both hands. “Get up,” I heard him say, his voice far off. “Is you gonna lay down? Is you gonna quit?”
As I pushed at the ground, fighting it and the nausea, a bus went by, and the next thing I knew the man was grabbing me under the arms and pulling me to my feet. “We gonna make it,” he said.
I tried to push him away. I succeeded in breaking free of one hand, but he had me by the collar with the other. “You doing fine,” he said. “You got to keep moving around. It good for the circulation.” The word “circulation” seemed to give him an idea, for he began to slap my face with his free hand.
I called him a stupid son of a bitch, hit him hard on the mouth, lurched and spun away from him, hearing my coat and shirt rip, and fell onto the pavement, where I crawled to the gutter and threw up. He stood near me. He kept saying, “You doing fine. You doing fine. You gonna be a new man now. We gonna clear you out.”
As he was talking, the street lamps came on. I looked over at him and watched the rain bounce off his shoes. One of his pants legs had come unrolled in the scuffle, and the cuff was ripped.
“How you doing?” he asked, smiling, getting down on one knee and putting his hand on my forehead. His lip was bleeding. I knocked his hand away, and looked down at the fast-moving water in the gutter.
“Man, I is wounded,” he said. He leaned over the gutter and brought some water up for his bloodied lip. “Look, I’m gonna tell you a joke,” he went on. I got up and started to walk back to the awning, and he followed me, taking my suitcase from my hand and carrying it for me. “This man, he in a restaurant, and he say, ‘Waiter, there is a fly in the soup,’ and this waiter, he say, ‘Don’t worry, he can swim.’”
He began to laugh. We stood under the awning, and he continued to laugh at his joke while I looked down the street for the bus. He calmed down and then began to regard me seriously, putting a hand over his mouth.
“Say, you know who I am?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I guess you heard of Ringo Brown,” he said, “who fight in Griffith Stadium in 1939, ’40, ’41, and ’46.”
“If you’re Ringo Brown, I never heard of you,” I said.
“Aw, come on, man,” he said, smiling. “I fight twenty-three preliminaries and one main event. I lose the main event. You remember Red Hickey, from Delaware?”
“No.”
“I lose to him in a split decision. He was a good boy, but he never did nothing. I was a middleweight.”
“You lost only one fight?” I said.
“Now, I ain’t said that, but I never knocked out.”
I pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The pack was wet, but I managed to find two dry cigarettes, and I gave Ringo one.
We smoked for a while without saying anything, and then Ringo said, “Say, kid, what’s your name?”
“John,” I said. “John Lionel.”
I saw a bus coming, and I picked up my suitcase and began to move away.
“Where you going?” Ringo asked.
“So long, Ringo,” I said.
As I started to cross the street, he came and grabbed me by the arm. “John, I carry your bag,” he said. “You tired.”
“I’m all right. It’s not heavy,” I said.
“No, I carry it.”
Ringo began to fight me for the suitcase, right there in the middle of the street. He pushed me with one hand and grabbed the suitcase away with the other. I ran over to the bus stop and called back to Ringo to bring the suitcase. The bus had stopped and was letting off passengers. Ringo just smiled at me from the other side of the street. I asked the driver to wait a second, but he took one look at me and closed the door and drove off. I walked over to Ringo and took the suitcase from him. “You’re crazy,” I said.
“They be another bus, John,” he said, smiling. “One as good as another.”
I walked back to the bus stop and decided to wait there, even though the rain was coming down harder than ever. Ringo followed me. “I try to do you a good turn and you don’t let me. Don’t you know that hurt?” he said.
“Get away from me!”
“Won’t even let me carry his suitcase across the street,” Ringo said, shaking his head.
He remained standing by me, his arms folded across his chest. I was beginning to feel faint again—not sick, only weak and tired and a little dizzy—and I put my hand over my face.
“Let’s go to Billy’s and have a sandwich,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. He pointed to the grocery store across the street.
“No, thanks,” I said.
He said that a sandwich would build up my strength, and that he was hungry.
“I’ve only got a quarter,” I said, “and that’s for the bus.”
“You can clean up at Billy’s. He got a bathroom,” Ringo said. “You can watch for the bus inside the store and keep warm. You can dry off some.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Come on, John,” he said. And then he grabbed my suitcase again and ran off across the street with it and into Billy’s. I was so damned mad I slammed my hand against the bus-stop post, and then I followed Ringo across the street and into the grocery store.
* * *
“Here I am, Billy,” Ringo was saying when I went in.
“Yeah, I see you,” a slight, light-brown Negro said. He was the one in the white apron. The three Negroes leaning against the refrigerated case were smiling. Billy looked at Ringo, then at me, then back at Ringo.
“Now what you getting mad at? You mad at me, Billy?” Ringo said.
“What you doing with that suitcase?” Billy asked. “You going to catch a train?”
“Ain’t this Union Station?” Ringo said, smiling at everyone.
“You ain’t funny, Ringo. You just ain’t funny,” Billy said. “Give this man his suitcase.”
“You got to be serious about everything. Nobody can take a joke,” Ringo
said, handing me the suitcase without looking at me.
“We seen the whole thing,” Billy said. “We seen this man drop you, Ringo.” Billy looked at me. “He deserved it,” he said.
“You got that same tricky style, Ringo,” one of the other Negroes said.
“He sure know how to fall,” Billy said. “He an expert at that.”
“Aw, man,” Ringo said. “We wasn’t in no fight. I teaching him some things.”
“Yeah, you a real teacher, all right,” Billy said. “You teach any man alive how to fall. But fighting something else.”
Billy smiled at the other men, and then he looked at me. “You been sick, right?” he said.
I said yes, that I had an upset stomach. Billy said there was a bathroom in the back of the store, and that I could use it if I wanted to. I thanked him and said that I would like to clean up.
“I give you something for your stomach when you come back,” Billy said. He took my suitcase and put it behind the counter, and then he led me back to the bathroom and switched on the light for me.
When I got back from the bathroom, Ringo was shadowboxing in the middle of the room.
“Go. Go. Go. Hey!” one of the men said.
I walked over to Billy and stood beside him, watching the performance. Ringo was putting together some combinations to the head and body. “He won’t go down. This sucker’s tough,” he said.
“They all tough, Ringo, for you,” Billy said, and then he turned to me. “I lost more damn money on him,” he said.
I asked Billy if Ringo had fought in Griffith Stadium.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “That was a long time ago. He look pretty good when there ain’t nobody in his way. Say, how you feeling?” Billy looked seriously at me. I told him I was feeling a little tired.