The Professional

by W. c. Heinz

  “So they take him down there and I tail them. Well, finally his old lady has to pay my meter. The cop says it’s legal, but she looks at me like I’m the guy got her husband drunk, and she stiffs me for a tip.”

  “That’s what I mean,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean,” the driver said. He had pulled over to the curb and he stopped the cab. “People always talking about how hackies roll drunks. This is your place, the left side.”

  “Keep the change,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said, “but if a guy wants to write a real article about a hackie in the paper, let him come see me.”

  Well, I thought, he certainly worked me for the big tip, if that was what he was doing. Do you suppose he did roll the souse and then wait it out through all that rumpus and the cops for the fare? That would take a real brigand, but then he wouldn’t be a talker.

  “Yes?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Mrs. Brown?”

  After I had pushed the doorbell I had been thinking again about that cabbie, and now she was standing here with the door half open. She had one of those round, even, pretty faces and big brown eyes with the white very white around them and dark brown hair drawn back and held by I couldn’t tell what.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Frank Hughes,” I said. “Eddie said I could meet him here about 9:30.”

  She was in her late twenties. She had on a white-and-red-flowered quilted housecoat and red mules, and her fingernails were painted the same red.

  “Oh,” she said. “I think he mentioned something about it.”

  She said this, pushing the door back and motioning me in. There was a small, gray-carpeted hall with carpeted stairs running up and the rest of the hall leading back to a kitchen. Off to the left was a rather small, square living room, carpeted the same as the hall and, after I had put my bag down, she led me in there.

  “You might as well sit down,” she said. “Eddie just got up.”

  “I’m sorry I’m early.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  She had her hair pulled back in one of those pony tails, and it was held by a small ribbon of the same red as the housecoat and the mules. She took a cigarette out of one of the pockets of the housecoat and had a lighter out of the other before I could get mine out. Then she sat down on the sofa and pulled the housecoat around her, and I sat down in a chair opposite.

  “You’re the one who’s going to write the magazine article about Eddie.”

  Her face never moved. I knew it had to open for her to say this, but it never moved and she didn’t look either at me or through me. It seemed as if she didn’t look quite as far as me, as if she were looking at a pane of glass between us.

  “Yes. I’m the one.”

  “What kind of an article are you going to write?”

  “Oh, I never know. It’ll be a nice one.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  “If it’s about Eddie it will have to be a nice one. He’s a nice guy.”

  “Said he, before he pulled the trigger.”

  “I’m not a trigger man.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  What a placid face for all of that, I thought. Now it was turning slowly about the room. The room looked quite new, with the gray carpeting and the modern furniture and the precise folds of the drapes and with the woodwork and ceiling a flat, clean white.

  “You have a nice home here. It’s very pleasant.”

  “I do the best I can.”

  “Look,” I said, “if it’ll put your mind at ease, all I’m going to do is spend a month in camp with Eddie and write a piece about how a fighter comes up to and goes into a championship fight.”

  “Oh?”

  “I mean, I’m just going to watch Eddie and the people around him and see what he does and listen to what he says. I want to write a piece that will give the reader an understanding, or anyway a feeling, of what a fighter goes through.”

  “Do you think anybody cares about that?”

  “All I know is that there’s a magazine editor who cares. It was his idea, not mine, although I like it.”

  “Hello,” Eddie said.

  I had heard him coming down the stairs. He had on light gray flannel slacks and tan loafers and a light woolen maroon sports shirt, buttoned at the neck. He always had good taste in clothes, and he always fitted into them perfectly. I put it that way because Eddie had a good neck and shoulders and chest and a narrow waist and small hips. Without knowing him you would know that he was an athlete, and only the slight heaviness of his brows and one small scar across the bridge of his nose gave him away as a fighter. His light brown hair was cropped in a crew cut and he had light blue eyes, and when he smiled he seemed to mean it.

  “I see you and Helen met,” he said, after we had shaken hands.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  “It’s all right with me.”

  “But I told you I’d be ready at 9:30.”

  “Look, I’m not going to get into a fight with you about it. You might be able to lick me.”

  “How about some breakfast with me?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve eaten.”

  “Have a cup of coffee while I’m eating. Helen will make coffee.”

  “It’s made,” she said.

  There was a small breakfast nook with a window at the end of the table and you could see a garage and a small back yard enclosed with galvanized wire fencing. There was a sandbox and a swing-and-slide combination in the yard, and a small boy was playing in the yard. He had on blue jeans and red rubber boots and a brown hooded jacket, and he was standing by the fence, trying to push a stick through one of the openings between the wires. He appeared to be about five years old.

  “I judge that’s Eddie, Jr.?”

  “That’s him,” Eddie said.

  “And no trouble at all?”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said, looking up from his cereal with a sliced banana on the top. “This morning he woke me at seven-thirty.”

  “He woke me at seven,” his wife said.

  She was standing by the gas range. She had a flame under the coffeepot and was boiling a couple of eggs over another.

  “So I chased him out,” Eddie said. “At eight o’clock he was back. I chased him again. When he came back I hollered to Helen. I said: ‘Get him out of here. I want to sleep.’”

  “You slept plenty,” Helen said.

  “I wanted to sleep some more.”

  “You slept enough.”

  Eddie let it pass then, but I thought about it. The big thing he has to sell, I thought, is his body. It is one of the wonders of the world, this body of a good fighter. Think of the things it must do when the mind orders it, and because it can do these things it bought this house and the furnishings in it and the clothes you all wear and the food you eat. A month from now this man is going in there with that body against another man. There will be much written and read about this, and there will be many thousands of dollars involved. Throughout this country people will watch it in their homes and in bars, and after it is over they will read about it and, if it is a good fight, think about it and talk about it. All of this, I thought, depends upon this body, so if he wants to pamper it now, let him pamper it.

  “You take sugar and cream?” Eddie said.

  I couldn’t buy that Helen.

  2

  We drove over to the Bronx River Parkway and then north on that, the sun starting to come brassy through the gray and the day getting a little warmer. Eddie had a Chevrolet convertible, dark green and two years old, and he drove it as if it were his living.

  “You ever had an accident?” I said.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, laughing at it. “I make you nervous?”

  “Just the opposite. I drive so much myself that I can’t sit still with most people, but I’ve never known a good athlete who wasn’t a good driver.”

  “I guess some of them have accidents.”

&nb
sp; “Sure. Art Houtteman, the Cleveland pitcher, was almost killed in a crash down in Florida when he was with Detroit. First they didn’t think he’d live and then they didn’t think he’d pitch again, but I rode with him after that through heavy traffic in Detroit and I relaxed. Maybe it’s in my mind, but good athletes have such great reflexes that I believe in them.”

  “I had one small brush a couple of years ago,” Eddie said. “One Sunday another guy and I scraped fenders. I had Helen and the kid with me, out for a little ride, and the guy wanted to make a big thing of it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, he wanted to swing on me. He was kind of a big guy, but in no shape.”

  “That’s a laugh. What did you do?”

  “I conned him out of it.”

  “Did he find out who you are?”

  “When I gave him my license. He looked at it and he looked at me and he said: ‘What business you in?’ I said: ‘Boxing,’ and he said: ‘Are you Eddie Brown, the fighter?’ I said: ‘That’s right.’”

  “Then what?”

  “He cooled out.”

  “I’d still like to see a fighter handle one of those SOBs someday.”

  “You never will.”

  “Probably not. The law says a fighter’s fists are lethal weapons.”

  “Besides, what are you going to prove?”

  “Nothing. The rest of us have to prove our manliness, or something, by standing up to some guy. A fighter never has that urge because he gets rid of it in his work. That’s why I say that, when everything else is equal, fighters are the best adjusted males in the world.”

  “I don’t know. You mention that ballplayer. I wish I coulda been a ballplayer.”

  “You win this, and you’re middleweight champion of the world.”

  “Where I came from, on the West Side, you couldn’t play much ball. We played stickball on the street, but what’s that? I envy those ballplayers.”

  “And Ted Williams looks up to fighters.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Eddie drove from the Bronx River Parkway into the Taconic State. Then he cut over toward the Bear Mountain Bridge and we went up that narrow, winding blacktop road, first climbing among the trees and then coming out on those turns where they have the low, thick stone walls across the roadway on your left with the rock rising straight up on your right and the view of the Hudson all down there beyond and below the walls.

  “This is something, isn’t it?” Eddie said.

  The sun had been eating at the haze, and you could see perhaps three or four miles. Down the river, where it widens, a small freighter was moving slowly toward New York, and up the river, where it narrows and turns, you could see, beyond the gray, looping span of the bridge, the hills, so green and so tumbled and so intimate with the river.

  “It’s a great view,” I said.

  “I always like it,” Eddie said.

  “If it were somewhere in Europe, Americans would come back raving about it. I’m not running for President on the See America First ticket, but here we take it for granted, and no one ever mentions it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I think that if they passed a law that all the inhabitants of the Highlands of the Hudson must speak only some foreign language—say German or Dutch—and dress only in native costumes, this view would become number one on the postcard parade.”

  “You ever in Germany?”

  “Only during the war, but when the bridge across the Rhine at Remagen was captured and we finally got a look at the river around there I said to myself: ‘This is the Highlands of the Hudson, between Bear Mountain and West Point, and, because it’s here, the writers and the poets have been singing about it for centuries.’”

  “I often wished I was in the war, especially when some of the older guys on my block got in, but I was only seventeen when it ended.”

  “I’ve realized that.”

  “My old man came from Germany.”

  “Then your name isn’t Brown?”

  “No. Doc changed it.”

  Doc Carroll was his manager.

  “What was your name?”

  “Braun. B-r-a-u-n. The same as that basketball player.”

  “Why did Doc change it?”

  “When I first turned pro, it was right after the war. When Doc took me over he said he remembered how it was with the Germans here in the First World War, so he changed it.”

  “What did your old man say?”

  “He was dead then almost four years.”

  “What did he do for a living?”

  “He was a plasterer.”

  “That’s a tough racket.”

  “I know. My old man wasn’t well, and I used to try to help him, Saturdays and sometimes Sundays and during vacation, when I was about fourteen and fifteen. You stand up on a scaffold and you plaster a ceiling all day long, and gotta be strong. It’s all holding that stuff over your head and my old man had terrific shoulders and arms, but he had hardening of the arteries. He used to get dizzy.”

  “That can be bad enough in itself.”

  “He’d get so dizzy he’d have to grab out for the wall to keep from falling. Then he’d sit down and hold his head in his hands. I’d say: ‘Look, Pop, let me do it. I can do a ceiling coat.’ He used to let me do the rough coat on the walls, but he’d shake his head and get up and steady himself and say: ‘More schtuff.’ That’s what he called it—‘schtuff.’ Once I had to catch him, he was falling, and he sat down and put his head in his hands and I had to turn away. I was crying. I mean, I was fourteen or fifteen and I was crying like a baby, and I didn’t want him to see me crying.”

  “He must have been a man of great courage, Eddie.”

  “I hear some guys say some fighter’s got guts. Sometimes after a fight I read in the papers that some fighter has a lot of guts. Sometimes they’ve even written that about me.”

  “They should.”

  “I’m not knocking the newspapermen. I appreciate it.”

  “I know you do.”

  “But no one seems to understand, and it makes me—I don’t know—kinda sad. You know what I mean? What does a fighter do that’s so great? It’s your business. You don’t even think of those punches. You don’t even feel them.”

  I know, I know, I was thinking, but please don’t say it. You are balancing the equation between fear and courage, telling me that you don’t know the one, and so don’t need the other. As I try to climb up to you, I find always that it is to me instead that you are climbing down.

  “What does a fighter do, like my old man?” he said. “My old man, nobody ever told him he had guts. Nobody ever paid any attention to him, and he was standing up there every day, fighting that dizziness, and all the time he was dying.”

  He stopped talking, but I said nothing. I could think of nothing to say.

  “When I think of my old man, I think of his temper, too. He used to holler sometimes so bad at my mother that she used to cry. He used to holler at me and belt me, when I was a kid. Sometimes, after he’d blow his top, nobody’d talk around our house for a couple of days. I probably shouldn’t say it now, but a lot of the time I used to hate him. We never really got along. Now I’m ashamed to say it.”

  “You shouldn’t be. It’s all very understandable.”

  “They write about guts,” he said. “My old man had the guts.”

  After we crossed the bridge we came to that traffic circle where the road to the right leads north to West Point and the road straight ahead leads west through the state park. I was thinking of the time, a few years ago, when Fordham had a good football team and they were playing Army at Michie Stadium. The Army announced that anyone driving to the game who hoped to see the kickoff should plan to reach the traffic circle no later than 1:15. All the New York sports pages ran the announcement in a box or in their stories before the game, and consequently everyone tried to reach the circle at just 1:15. They were backed up for miles, and it took the cops a cou
ple of hours to clear the jam.

  “Sometimes I think I’d like to live up here somewhere,” Eddie said. “I think about it quite a bit.”

  “You have a nice home,” I said, “and what would you do up here?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like it, but Helen wouldn’t want to leave New York. She likes New York.”

  “Where does she come from?”

  “My old neighborhood. We knew each other as kids. Her old man still runs a bar over there.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Oh, seven years.”

  “Having been in your home, I’d say she does a good job of it.”

  “I’m not complaining. I’ve got it so much better than so many guys, but it’s tough on her.”

  “It must be. What does she do while you’re away, like this, for a month?”

  “Her mother comes and stays at our place for a few days at a time. She takes care of the kid, and that gives Helen a chance to get out. She sees some of her old girl friends, and I guess they go to a show or go out shopping or go out for a meal. It’s a break that she can get away from the kid.”

  “All kids are problems.”

  “Our kid is a problem, because we’re not supposed to let him get too excited. He’s a smart little kid and he’s got a temper, too, but we’re not supposed to hit him or even discipline him too much.”

  “Who says so?”

  “The doctor.”

  “Oh? Has he had some trouble?”

  “He has epilepsy.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

  “About a year ago, we found it out. I came home from the gym one afternoon and Helen was crying. The kid had had kind of a tantrum, or something, and then he passed out right on the kitchen floor. Helen called the doctor and he came and gave the kid something. Then they made some tests and he said the kid has epilepsy, so we’ve got to go very easy with him.”