Night My Friend

by Edward D. Hoch

  He went up the narrow flight of wooden steps and entered the little room above the great arcade. It was the closest thing to home, much closer than the place where he spent his nights. Here, looking out on the activity below while he repaired and rewired the complex electrical systems of the three hundred-odd machines, Craidy felt a peace of mind which was rare. He was never disturbed while working up there, and sometimes he felt himself a sort of god as he watched the teenagers at the machines, the girls lined up at the little fortune-telling booth which was Arnie’s latest innovation.

  For a long time, through all the chill of spring, Arnie and Craidy had worked alone in the big arcade, getting ready for the summer crowds that would overflow from the nearby beach. Though he didn’t really respect Arnie, he couldn’t help liking the man, and he’d felt a twinge of regret when Arnie had taken on the pale blonde girl who told fortunes. Her name was Rita O’Blanc, and she was twenty-two years old. While she was working she wore a gray wig to make her look older, but most of the guys who hung around the place in the evening were wise to that, and a few had even gotten to taking her out on dates.

  But until that morning, her relationship with Craidy had been confined to a single nod when they passed each other downstairs. It was as if she sensed his feeling and stayed clear of him because of this. Now, as he worked over the intricacies of wiring removed from the back of the bowling machine, she appeared suddenly in the doorway.

  “Good morning!”

  He looked up, hiding his surprise. “How are you today?”

  “Fine. I wondered if you might like a cup of coffee.”

  “From that machine downstairs? No thanks.”

  “I know, it’s pretty bad. I was thinking of walking up to the hotdog stand. I won’t have any customers for a while yet.”

  “Sure, I’ll go for a cup. But let me pay for yours, too.” He handed her two greasy dimes.

  She returned some ten minutes later, carrying two steaming paper cups. “It’s longer up there than I thought.”

  “Thanks a lot, but you shouldn’t have bothered.” He put down his wire strippers and leaned back against the workbench. She wasn’t bad to look at, really, in the good light.

  “You live in that building, don’t you? Over the stand?”

  “Yeah. Beautiful view of all the dead dandelions.”

  “I like them, alive or dead.” She sipped her coffee. “I don’t think of them as a weed at all. Not really.” Another sip, then, “What are you doing?”

  “Fixing up these bowling machines. Damn wiring is like a maze.”

  “Is there really enough repair work to keep you busy all summer?”

  He’d often thought about that himself. “Well, most of that stuff is pretty old. Arnie bought a lot of it second-hand. It’ll take me another month to have everything working, and after that he thinks maybe he can get me some work from the other concessions.”

  “Were you always an electrician, Craidy?”

  He smiled, somehow liking her. “Were you always a fortune teller?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I can read people’s minds.”

  “That must be handy when you’re out on a date.”

  “You’re a crazy guy.” She walked over to the window and peered down at the arcade, where she could see a couple of boys playing pinball machines. They were wearing swimming trunks and knitted shirts. “Look at those kids down there! Swimming this early in the season! That water must be freezing.”

  “Maybe that’s why they came here instead.” He lit a cigarette and offered her one. “Do you swim?”

  “Not till after June first, I don’t.”

  “What do you do with yourself evenings? When these guys around here aren’t dating you?”

  She laughed and blew out some smoke. “I’m going to the fight tonight. You going?”

  The weekly fights were held in a little arena a half-mile down the beach. The fighters were mostly one-punch nobodies on their way up, or more often on their way down. Many of them progressed no further than the Beach Arena. “Well, I drop by occasionally,” he admitted.

  “Would you take me? I feel funny going alone.”

  “So that’s why you came up this morning.” He had to laugh about it. She wasn’t the sort of girl anyone could dislike, and he wondered how he’d avoided her charms for so long. “Isn’t Arnie going?”

  “Sure, but I don’t want to go with the boss.”

  “What’s so special about tonight, anyway?”

  “Frank Wayne’s fighting. The fellow that hangs out here all the time.”

  Frank Wayne was an old friend of Arnie’s, a down-and-out boxer with a glass jaw. The only thing that kept him going was a solid right that managed to connect once in a while. For a time he was known as Tiger Wayne, but somewhere along the downward path he’d reverted to just plain Frank.

  “I’ll take you,” Craidy said, “if you don’t mind being seen with someone old enough to be your father.”

  “Come on! You’re only thirty-seven.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “I told you I could read minds,” she answered with a laugh. “It comes in handy sometimes.”

  There was some noise from below and they looked down to see Frank Wayne strolling in, calling out a greeting to Arnie. “Let’s go down and see him,” Craidy said, surprised at his own sudden interest in the fight. During the past weeks, the Beach Arena had been nothing more than a destination that need not be reached. Now he was actually taking an interest in this man who would be fighting.

  Arnie was talking with Wayne when they reached the arcade, and the two boys in bathing trunks stood watching from a distance, trying to decide on the correct attitude toward this almost-hero. “What kind of shape you in, Tiger?” Arnie asked him.

  “I’m not Tiger any more, just Frank. But I’ll take that punk tonight! I’ll flatten him in one round. A cheap punk kid on his way up!”

  Arnie smiled. “You’re talking big, Tiger. Here, you know Rita already. This guy’s Craidy—he sits up there like God in his little room and fixes the wires. He keeps the whole damn joint running.”

  They shook hands, and Wayne gave it a little extra squeeze to show he was in condition. “Glad to meet you. Coming to see me tonight?”

  Craidy nodded. “I’ll be there. We’ll both be there.”

  Wayne nodded like a small boy. “Good! After the fight I’ll come back here and beat these machines.”

  After he’d gone, Arnie started opening the big overhead doors that lined one side of the arcade. “Going to be a warm one,” he said. “If the rain holds off we’ll have a good crowd today.”

  Craidy breathed in some fresh air and took out his cigarettes. “Think Wayne’ll win tonight?”

  “He should, but don’t make any bets. That manager of his—Sam Seffer—isn’t above a little hanky-panky. And when you get to Wayne’s age you can’t really do much but go along with it.”

  “You mean he might have to throw the fight?” Rita asked, unbelieving.

  “He might. This young punk is just getting started. If there’s money behind him, they might be trying to give him the big buildup. You know, fifteen straight knockouts, that sort of thing.”

  “Would Wayne do it?”

  “What choice has he got?”

  Craidy climbed back up the stairs to his little room, feeling suddenly depressed. Frank Wayne was no longer a Tiger, but there was still about his chiseled features and metallic hair the look of an almost-champion, a man of integrity in a world that had too few. He hoped that Arnie was wrong about the fight.

  The day clouded up around noon, which turned out to be good for the arcade’s business. The early swimmers were driven inside by the threat of rain, and a good many of them drifted into the aisles of glistening, neoned machines. Craidy watched them come and go from his room, occasionally pausing in his work to give a special bit of attention to a girl in a bathing suit or a boy who looked as if he might cause trouble. Arnie was busy giving c
hange and keeping order and generally running things, and Craidy noted a steady stream of customers—exclusively girls—for Rita O’Blanc’s fortune telling booth. He watched a couple of them giggling in a corner after a session with Rita and decided she must have a pretty good act.

  The rain, when it came, was brief and cooling with a sudden wind that churned up little eddies of sand along the length of the beach until the moisture darkened and dampened it. Arnie worked hard, and when the returning sun scattered his customers he relaxed with a cold bottle of beer. “Want one?” he called up to Craidy. “Tastes good.”

  Craidy came down to join him, and after the beer he finished rewiring the last of the bowling machines. He played a game to be certain it was working properly, and Rita came out of her booth to watch. “You’re pretty good at this,” she said.

  “It’s all a trick. After working on them for a solid week I know just where you have to hit those pins to trip the scoring mechanism.”

  “Life is pretty much of a trick to you, isn’t it?”

  “I guess maybe you can read minds. Mine, at least.”

  The evening was cool, and after supper he met Rita back at the arcade, wondering vaguely where she lived. He supposed that she had an apartment nearby much like his own, but he’d never really had occasion to think about it before. They walked the short distance to the arena, under a sky turning dark as clouds once more obscured the setting sun.

  “It’ll rain tomorrow,” Rita said. “Not good for the holiday weekend.”

  “Is that a guess or a prediction?”

  “We’ll see tomorrow,” she answered with a laugh.

  He was surprised at the crowd in the Beach Arena. Generally, the promoters considered it a good night when they could fill half the seats, but tonight the little place was loaded almost to capacity and a cloud of blue cigarette smoke was already visible near the ceiling lights.

  They sat in bored relaxation through the first two bouts, watching a boy not yet twenty flatten a colored youth in the second round, then two older fighters who went the limit as if the whole thing were a dull spring dance. They were earning their money, but just barely. During this last bout Craidy went outside for a smoke and some popcorn, unable to gear his body to the hour of uneventful sitting. He amused himself by studying the lights and wiring of the place for a time, and then returned to Rita with the box of popcorn.

  “Did I miss anything?”

  She shook her head. “Wayne’s fighting next, though. That’s the other guy, just getting into the ring.”

  Frank Wayne’s opponent was a youth in his early twenties who carried himself already as if the television cameras were on him. He had sandy, wavy hair, and a body like a Greek god, and his name was Blaze Dungan. “He looks good,” Craidy commented.

  Rita munched her popcorn. “He’s got six knockouts.”

  “Think it’ll be like Arnie said?”

  “I hope to hell not.”

  The smoke had grown thicker during the first two bouts, and now the fighters in the ring appeared as if in a dream—a half-remembered fog of action that lacked the hard sharp outlines of waking truth. They came out at the bell, clashing like iron-chested gladiators, and Wayne’s first punch was only a glancing blow to the neck. Blaze Dungan danced back, bobbed and weaved with professional stance, and landed a neat right to Wayne’s jaw. To Craidy the two seemed evenly matched, though even this early in the bout Dungan’s youth was beginning to show. What he lacked in experience he more than made up for in sheer guts.

  At ringside, Craidy could see a fuzzy little man with a damp cigar urging Wayne on, wringing a towel between his hands. This would be Sam Seffer, the manager, a man obviously acclimated to the shoddy, smoky squalor of the Beach Arena. At the end of the first round he was up there, massaging Wayne’s shoulders, whispering words of battle into his ear. They might have been the same words spoken by every manager to every fighter, and Craidy wondered if Wayne even heard them, in spite of the nodding of his head.

  They came out for the second round a bit more slowly, a bit more respectfully. In the center of the ring, almost lost in the smoke and overhead lights, they traded punches to the gradually rising throb of the crowd. Then, suddenly, Blaze Dungan landed a solid left to the body, a right to the jaw, and Wayne began to cave in, all at once.

  “Craidy! He’s down!” Rita gripped his arm in sudden alarm.

  They left their seats and ran down to ringside as the referee counted Wayne out. Rita clawed at the canvas floor of the ring and shouted his name over the roar of the crowd, but he only lifted his head a bit and stared at her through bloodshot eyes. They were not the glazed eyes of a semi-conscious man, but rather the sad eyes of a lost man, lost in a world he never made.

  As the referee held Blaze Dungan’s right arm high in victory, Rita turned away and brushed past Craidy. There were tears in her eyes.

  “He threw it! He threw the fight!” she said later, as they walked back along the beach in the darkness.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know it.”

  “I suppose you read his mind,” Craidy said. He was beginning to get just a little annoyed with Rita O’Blanc.

  “Yes, I did! But you don’t have to believe that if you don’t want to. All you had to do was look into his eyes to know the truth.”

  “I looked into his eyes.” He lit a cigarette, blinking as the flare of the match blinded him for a moment. “So maybe he did throw the fight. So what? That’s life—it happens every day.”

  “Not to a man like Frank Wayne.”

  Craidy kicked at a floundering piece of driftwood, sending it splashing into the surf. “What’s with you, anyway? Do you really believe this bit about reading people’s minds?”

  “I learned that I could quite early in life, actually. When I was twelve my mother took me to a doctor who’d studied such matters. He gave us a long speech about every human mind being different, about some minds being below normal and some being above normal. He said what I had was a great gift. My mother didn’t look at it that way. She just wanted a normal daughter, without any gifts. I remember she kept asking the doctor how I’d gotten that way—as if the thing was some sort of disease. And all he answered was that it happens, sometimes.”

  Somehow he believed her. He couldn’t help believing her. “How did you end up telling fortunes at Arnie’s, of all places?”

  “I left home when I was seventeen, and went to New York. Some friends I met there told me about the experiments in extrasensory perception going on at Duke University, and I went down there for a time. They were quite impressed, actually—Doctor Rhine and the others—but I guess I wasn’t really as unique as I’d supposed. They ran me through a series of tests with a special deck of cards, and I scored high—but not perfect. This ESP of mine seems only a sometimes thing. After a while I left Duke and went back to New York. I tried to get a job using this talent, but it—or I—wasn’t good enough for a nightclub act or anything like that. I drifted for a couple of years, through a few jobs as a secretary, a waitress, just about anything. It was hell, though, having this thing—like taking dictation from your boss and knowing what he was thinking about when he looked at you. Finally I just decided I was safer and happier just telling fortunes at a place like Arnie’s. He gave me a job and I like it.”

  “Does he know you can read minds?”

  “I told him, but of course he doesn’t much believe it.”

  Craidy flipped his dying cigarette into the water. “You been reading my mind much?”

  “Not much, really. I guess you interested me, up there in your little room. That’s one of the reasons I wanted you to bring me tonight. I was able to tell your age by ESP, though. That’s easy, once I get you thinking about it.”

  “And Wayne?”

  She was suddenly somber. “I knew he threw the fight, knew it was tearing at his insides as he was being counted out. I guess that’s why I started to cry.”

  Ahead of them, the lights of Arnie
’s Arcade came into view. Arnie had gotten one of the beach hangers-on to look after the place while he went to the fight, but now they saw he was back already, standing in the wide entrance with the neon shimmering around him like a giant halo.

  “You two took forever,” he said as they came up off the beach.

  “We were talking,” Craidy explained, a bit weakly.

  “Have you seen Wayne since the fight?”

  “No, why?”

  Arnie’s face was hard in the neon light. “The cops were just here. Blaze Dungan was beaten to death in an alley right after the fight, and it looks like Wayne did it.”

  Arnie pulled down the big overhead doors and closed the place a half-hour before midnight. The three of them sat in his office drinking beer by the light of his little desk lamp. For Craidy, it was an unreal experience—a dream night of dark fantastic conversation. He felt once like leaping up and telling them both he wanted no part of people, telling them both he wanted only the safety of his little upstairs room. Where he could be merely an observer.

  “Murder?” Rita O’Blanc was saying. “Who could possibly call it murder?”

  “If it was just a fight, it couldn’t be more than manslaughter,” Craidy said, his mind growing thick with beer and sleep and frustration.

  But Arnie waved a hand in disagreement. “In the eyes of the law, a boxer’s fists constitute a deadly weapon. Assault with a deadly weapon is a felony, and murder during commission of a felony is first-degree murder, even if it was unintentional. It would depend a lot on the District Attorney, but they could throw the book at him if they wanted to.”

  Rita shook her head as if to clear it. “But they were fighting in the ring only minutes before! If Wayne had killed him there it would have been nothing—nothing but an unfortunate accident!”

  “That’s right. But they weren’t in the ring. I think we all know what happened. Sam Seffer forced Wayne to throw the fight. But afterwards, something got to Wayne. He sought out Blaze in that alley just to prove to both of them who was the better man. I suppose he just kept on hitting him, maybe waiting for the referee to stop it.” He took a sip of beer. “Only there wasn’t any referee out in that alley.”