The Professional

by W. c. Heinz

  “Time!” Freddie Thomas called.

  “That’s all,” Doc said, standing on the ring apron and motioning.

  “One more,” Eddie said. “How about just one more?”

  “Come out of there,” Doc said, shaking his head, and then to me: “Now I can breathe again.”

  It was that Thursday, a day of pale sun and cool. After they came off the road and had breakfast we walked Memphis up the driveway to meet the 9:25 bus. Memphis, in that same old gray sharkskin suit, carried his barracks bag over his shoulder. DeCorso walked on one side of him, carrying Memphis’ cardboard suitbox tied with that twine, and Eddie walked on the other. We stood across the road again in the sun.

  “Here it comes,” DeCorso said.

  “You’re gonna beat that boy,” Memphis said, shaking Eddie’s hand. “You’re gonna be the new champion of the whole world.”

  “That’s right. Thanks, Memphis.”

  “I always know that boy got some geezer in him. He try to be Robinson. I know him since he start. Once I see him punch the big bag in the gym and, when I first come in, I thought it was Robinson, but he ain’t. Robinson mean it. This boy don’t.”

  “Thanks, Memphis. Thanks for everything.”

  “I’m glad to do it. I’m glad.”

  “And good luck yourself. You win your own fight.”

  “Sure,” Memphis said, winking.

  The bus had stopped and the door was open, waiting for Memphis.

  “Is somebody gettin’ on or not?” The driver said. “I haven’t got all day.”

  “Sure, mister,” Memphis said. “I’m sorry.”

  We watched Memphis get aboard and go down the aisle, looking out at us once and smiling as the bus started, and then we watched it disappear.

  “How will you get back?” I said to DeCorso.

  “I won’t,” he said. “Artie Winant wants me to work with him. I’m gonna stay with Artie.”

  That evening at dinner Katie came out of the kitchen and asked Eddie about the steak and stood there for a couple of minutes, smiling and nodding and watching him eat, while Doc looked at me and shook his head once. After dinner Freddie Thomas and I walked with Eddie. We walked for an hour, just taking it easy and talking about the stars and new cars and every baseball story I could remember. When we got back we watched Dragnet and then Jackie Cooper and Playhouse 90, and Eddie stayed up until eleven o’clock for the first time in camp.

  In bed that night I lay for a long while in the darkness, listening to Doc turning and then hearing his breathing even out. Then I thought of Eddie, lying alone in Doc’s old room.

  It was the last of the quiet days.

  24

  When the alarm clock went off I was floating on my back, suspended half in sleep and half in wakefulness. Now, with it ringing, it was as if I were trying to sit up in the water, until suddenly it stopped and I got my feet down and realized that I could stand up in it and that there was no need for panic.

  “You awake?” Doc said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Not too well. You sleep much?”

  “No.”

  “You will, after it’s over.”

  “Not right away. It takes me two or three nights to unwind after a fight.”

  He was up now, in his rumpled, light-blue pajamas, his white hair shaggy, raising the dark shade at one of the windows.

  “It’s not a bad day,” he said. “It looks nice out.”

  I waited, half dressed and cold and sitting on the bed, until he came out of the bathroom. Then I went in and, when we were finished dressing, it was 8:15 and I followed him into Eddie’s room.

  “Doc?” Eddie said, sitting up in the bed, the light from the hall playing across him and the bed.

  “It’s a nice day,” Doc said, raising one shade and then the other.

  “Is it?”

  He was still sitting up in the bed, and then he pulled the covers off and swung his legs over the side. He had on white pajamas, with dark red piping edging the collar and down the front, and he sat there a moment, the pajama top failing to hide the bulk of his shoulders. With his right hand he rubbed the back of that good neck.

  “Close the window, will you?” he said to Doc.

  “I am. You sleep all right?”

  “I guess so. If Artie and Vince went on the road I never heard them.”

  “They went, and they’re back already and having breakfast,” Freddie Thomas said.

  He was standing, slim and neat, in the doorway. He had on a single-breasted gray suit and white shirt and dark blue tie, and he looked like a businessman about to leave for the office.

  “Get him a large glass of orange juice, will you?” Doc said to Freddie.

  “Sure thing.”

  Eddie put his robe on then and slid into a pair of slippers and went to the bathroom. When he came back he sat down in the wicker chair and waited, still looking like he had just awakened.

  “We’ll go down and weigh now,” Doc said. “Get out of those slippers.”

  “Why?” Eddie said. “I don’t want to walk downstairs barefooted.”

  “I don’t want you slipping on those stairs. Put those other things on with heels on them.”

  Eddie kicked his slippers off and put on his loafers and we went down. We walked through the empty quiet of the gym into the small room and Eddie took off his robe and took his loafers off.

  “Shall I take off the pajamas? They don’t weigh much.”

  “Take them off.”

  Freddie Thomas took the pajama top and then the pants and Eddie stepped up onto the scale, naked and standing straight with just his head bowed, watching Doc slide the weights on the bars.

  “One-fifty-nine and a quarter,” Doc said.

  “I hope this scale is right,” Eddie said, watching the bar suspended in balance.

  “You move your bowels this morning?”

  “No. You know I just got up.”

  “Put your robe and those shoes on. You’re all right. You’re just what we tried for.”

  Freddie Thomas helped Eddie back into the robe and Eddie put the loafers back on. Freddie held the door open and Doc and I followed Eddie back upstairs. Then Freddie Thomas came up with the orange juice, and Eddie sat in the wicker chair and drank it slowly.

  “This tastes good,” he said.

  Doc and I had packed our things the night before, and now he started taking Eddie’s clothes out of the closet, folding them on the bed and packing them into Eddie’s bag. By the time he was finished, Eddie was dressed. He had put on the light gray flannel slacks and the light wool maroon sports shirt and the almost cream-colored sports jacket he had worn to camp. He had shaved the afternoon before, but he still looked clean enough.

  “How are you today, Frank?” he said, seeming really to notice me for the first time.

  “I’m fine. I was just thinking you might pose for one of those fashion ads in Esquire.”

  “No chance.”

  “Never mind that fashion stuff,” Doc said. “Anything in the drawers of that bureau?”

  “Just some shirts and underwear in the top drawer. There’s that stuff on the top of the dresser, too. It goes in that kit. I’ll do it.”

  When he had finished putting it in the kit he closed the kit and handed it to Doc and looked around the room.

  “That’s all. I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

  “You take care of his foot locker?” Doc said to Freddie.

  “All taken care of. When we go down I’ll get Artie and Vince to help me move it out.”

  “Don’t forget to leave the cup and the ring shoes and that stuff out,” Eddie said.

  “All taken care of. I brought along a zipper bag and it’s all in there. Your robe’s in there, too, and the guy from Everlast is bringing the trunks to the weigh-in. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  Freddie took Eddie’s bag from Doc, and Doc and I went into our room and got our own bags. When we came out o
f our room, Eddie was taking a last look around, and we went down to the lobby. Girot, in his butcher’s apron, was standing there and Freddie Thomas came out of the dining room followed by Artie Winant and Vince.

  “My wife wants to say good-bye, Eddie,” Girot said.

  “We’ll be out by the car,” Doc said.

  Eddie held the front door open while we went through with the bags. In the parking space he got out his keys and opened the luggage compartment of the car. Freddie Thomas and Artie Winant and Vince DeCorso had gone back into the gym for the foot locker.

  “Give Frank the keys,” Doc said to Eddie.

  “Why?”

  “He’ll drive.”

  “I can drive.”

  “I know you can. I want you to sit in front with Frank and be able to stretch your legs.”

  “Twenty-five years without an accident,” I said.

  “I’m not worried,” Eddie said. “I just thought I’d drive.”

  “So, Eddie,” Girot said. His wife was with him, her butcher’s apron on over her dark green coat sweater, a short, stocky, gray-haired, red-faced woman, smiling too obviously now.

  “Right, bon ami,” Eddie said, giving it that same pronunciation and shaking Girot’s hand.

  “Some Eddie. You could learn to speak French if you wanted to.”

  “Thanks for everything, Katie,” Eddie said, holding out his hand to Girot’s wife.

  “God bless you,” she said, and, taking Eddie’s hand, she pulled him down. With her left arm around his neck she kissed him on the right cheek. “God bless you, Eddie.”

  “Put that foot locker in first,” Doc said.

  Freddie Thomas was removing the bag he had placed in the luggage compartment. One end of the foot locker rested on the bumper, and Artie Winant held the strap handle at the other end.

  “Some difference, hey, Eddie?” he said. “I mean, from the day you and I fought.”

  “That’s right. You’ll do all right, Artie.”

  “Four or five fights, that’s all for me. This is too tough.”

  “Good luck, Eddie,” DeCorso said, shaking Eddie’s hand. “You’ll flatten him.”

  “Thanks for everything, Vince.”

  “You’ll win it,” Artie Winant said, shaking Eddie’s hand.

  Eddie had to tell me again how to start the car, and I stalled it once, backing it up. Then we left the four of them standing there in the parking space, Girot’s wife still holding that smile and waving with just her hand, like a small child, as we pulled out.

  “It’s a good camp,” Eddie said, “but I’m glad to get out of here.”

  “I know,” I said. “So am I.”

  “I’ll bet. Tell me one thing.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you really get what you wanted up here? I mean, for the article?”

  “Yes, thanks to you. It’s been fine and I appreciate it.”

  “How long will it take you to write it?”

  “Oh, about two weeks. I’ll walk around and around for about five days, thinking about it. Just about the time when I start getting scared that nothing will come, something will happen—I hope. Then it’ll take me a week to write it and a couple of days to rewrite it.”

  “I’m glad I don’t have to do it,” Eddie said. “Can you imagine me trying to write something?”

  In the town we passed the movie theater and took the next right and left the town and followed the winding blacktop through the rolling country, the hills light green and, here and there where they opened out and always within sight of a house and a barn or two, the sloping land tilled fresh brown. Once or twice at such vistas I had the impulse to stop the car and announce that this would be where we would all get out and live our years, for it is foolish for a man to have to fight.

  “Now we’ll make time,” Eddie said, when we came in sight of the Thruway. “I should have thought of this before.”

  “It’s so new that I still don’t think of it.”

  “I don’t either, but they say you can cut a half hour off the time, easy.”

  We did. As the monotony set in, Eddie settled down in the seat and stretched his legs and put his head back and, when I looked over at him, his eyes were closed. I could hear Doc and Freddie Thomas talking in the back seat, although I could not hear what they were saying, and finally Eddie sat up.

  “Were you asleep?”

  “No. That’s some bridge, isn’t it?”

  It was the Tappan Zee Bridge just ahead, slightly to the left and below us, reaching across the widest point of the Hudson, risen from the waters like the skeleton of some Loch Ness monster, stripped clean and dry and shining now in the bright sun. When we crossed it, Eddie turned and looked up and down the river.

  “Some view,” he said.

  “We’ll go right to the hotel first,” Doc said, on the West Side Highway. The traffic had slowed us now, and I was trying to measure the engine drag to the distance to the next car and Eddie was looking ahead and to the right at the build-up of the big, docked liners.

  “Have we got time?” he said. “We’re supposed to be there at twelve.”

  “It’s eleven-twenty-five,” Doc said. “There’s plenty of time. The other guy will play it late for effect anyway. The big shot.”

  I pulled up in the small clearing space in front of the hotel. I left the engine running and slid out behind Eddie.

  “You gentlemen registered here?” the doorman said, looking from one to the other of us.

  “I got a reservation,” Doc said. “You take care of the car?”

  “We use a garage around the corner for our guests. Who takes the ticket?”

  “I’ll take it,” Eddie said.

  “Say,” the doorman said, handing him the ticket. “You’re Eddie Brown, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, good luck to you,” the doorman said, smiling and shaking Eddie’s hand. “Good luck.”

  “No handshaking,” Doc said to Eddie. “You know better than that with strangers.”

  “I know,” Eddie said, nodding.

  “Gee, I’m sorry,” the doorman said.

  We waited in the compact, busy lobby while Doc registered. Then we got into the elevator with three or four other people, and I noticed the bellhop carrying the zipper bags nudge the elevator operator and nod back toward Eddie and say something in a low voice.

  “How do you feel, Edward?” Doc said, when we got to the room.

  “Okay.”

  “You better go to the bathroom.”

  “I know. I have to.”

  The two beds, the night table with the lamp on it, the bureau, the writing table and one easy chair just about filled the room. Doc opened one of the two windows that looked out on the small, bleak brick quadrangle formed by the other three sides of the hotel.

  “All right?” he said when Eddie came out.

  “Sure. Good.”

  “We might as well get down to the commission. It’s twelve now.”

  We walked the four blocks, through the noonday crowds, the noise of the car traffic beside us. Doc walked with Eddie, and Freddie Thomas and I followed them, and in New York, as everywhere, you can always pick out the tourists. As we passed Dempsey’s, three of them had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk—a man with the collar of his open-necked sports shirt worn outside the collar of his jacket, a camera hung over one shoulder, a woman and a girl of about ten. He was pointing to Dempsey’s name over the big windows and the woman was nodding, and just as Eddie and Doc tried to get by, the man turned and bumped into Eddie.

  “I’m very sorry,” he was saying as we walked up.

  “That’s all right,” Eddie said, and we walked on. I should tell him, I was thinking, that he bumped into Eddie Brown. Then when he got back to Indianapolis it would be one of the highlights of the trip and someone would think out loud about the probability of such a thing happening and someone else would end it by remarking about it being, really, such a small world. />
  As we turned off Broadway and approached the commission we could see the crowd on the sidewalk. There were about a hundred there, just a few of them women and at least a couple of dozen of them teen-aged kids. One of the kids spotted Eddie while we were still fifty yards out and ran toward him with a half-dozen others following.

  “No,” Doc said, shaking his head. “No autographs.”

  “Aw, come on,” the first kid said.

  One of the photographers came up and two others spread the crowd. Doc and Eddie waited, and Freddie Thomas and I moved to the side. Here and there Eddie’s name was being called to him, and Eddie was nodding and he waved a couple of times when he recognized someone.

  “Will you wave like that again?” a photographer, on one knee, said.

  “Please,” another of the photographers said, pushing back against the crowd. “Will you give us a chance to work?”

  “Knock him out, Eddie!” someone shouted. “Flatten him!”

  Doc made the way then, and Freddie Thomas followed close behind Eddie. They were still calling to Eddie from the crowd, and one of them reached over and slapped him on the back.

  “I don’t think I even got it,” one photographer was saying to another in the elevator, going up. “I better send over for yours.”

  “I don’t know what I got myself,” the other said.

  The narrow hallway was crowded and we pushed through them and through the doorway. There was a crowd in the big room, but inside a square formed by benches only the newspapermen and the people from the Garden and from the commission were standing.

  “Hello, Eddie ... Say, Eddie? ... Good luck to you, Eddie.”

  “Good,” Doctor Martin said. “You’re late.”

  “The other guy here yet?” Doc said.

  “No, but he’ll be here. I’ll examine Eddie, meanwhile.”

  “You can weigh him, too. If the other guy isn’t here, never mind the pictures. We’re leaving as soon as you’re through.”

  “You come in here, Eddie.”

  Eddie and Doc started to follow the doctor into the next room.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” the doctor said, turning at the door as Eddie walked past him. “Only the fighter.”