The Teddy Bear Habit

by James Lincoln Collier

  The streetlights were on below, putting a low shine on the tops of the cars rowed up along the curb. Small people coming home from work were going up and down the sidewalk, and two kids tore up the street, chasing each other.

  The iron slatted platform at the top of the fire escape was a few feet farther along the edge of the roof. I did not dare stand up, for I would be silhouetted in the dim light coming up from below. I crawled toward it along the edge of the roof on my belly.

  Wiggsy pounded across the roofs toward me. He had stopped shouting and cursing now, and he was panting so hard I could hear the rasp of breath in his throat across two roofs. He grunted, crossing the wall onto the last roof.

  “Oh ho,” he said triumphantly. “You run out of roofs, babe.” He stopped dead, listening.

  I lay frozen at the edge of the roof just above the iron slats of the fire escape platform three feet below. Wiggsy stood unmoving about fifty feet away. Lying flat, I could see the shape of his huge body against the city sky, his arms hanging loosely down by his round belly.

  He looked around, turning his head this way and that, trying to spot me in the dark. Finally he began to move directly across the roof toward the last wall. As he walked he swiveled his head constantly from side to side, and every two or three paces he suddenly stopped, to listen for me.

  I didn’t dare move, but lay still, trying to breathe as quietly as possible, watching him come on.

  He reached the far wall and moved along it a few paces. He was now pretty much behind me as I lay flat on the roof. I wriggled my head around a little to see where he was. My shoulder scraped on the rough tar.

  He looked up and saw me faintly outlined on the edge of the roof. He dove for me, and I rolled off the roof and dropped down onto the iron platform at the top of the fire escape. His body slammed down onto the roof above me. I scrambled for the ladder going down. His big arm shot down toward me. I twisted toward the ladder.

  He caught me by my collar and in one sweeping movement he jerked me sideways off the fire escape, and held me there, dangling at the end of his arm five stories above the sidewalks.

  “You know, babe,” he said in that soft voice, “if I just opened my hand you’d go all the way down by yourself.”

  I raised my hands to grab on to his wrist, but he slapped them away with his free hand. He chuckled. “You’d just slide on down through the air with the greatest of ease, eh, babe? Slip right down there. Nothing to stop you but the cement at the bottom.”

  Suddenly he jerked me onto the roof and flung me down. “But if I threw you away like a bag of garbage a crowd would collect, and I don’t think I want the publicity right now. No, I think I could do without the publicity.” He paused. “Get up.”

  I stood up. Then he hit me. I didn’t see it coming. The next thing I knew I was flat on the roof. My head rung and the side of my face was numb. “You pull another stunt like that and I’ll give you one that’ll take your head off. Get up. We’re getting out of here.”

  He worked one of the fire doors open and we went down through the building to the street. I was dead tired. I’d been up since early in the morning, I’d done a terrific amount of walking, and I’d had hardly anything to eat all day. On top of it all, I’d been scared to death for hours. You stay scared like that for a long time, and it takes all the strength out of you.

  Wiggsy wasn’t taking any chances with me. Instead of going by cab, we walked across town to the Village. I didn’t think I was going to make it. A couple of times my legs just gave way and I stumbled and fell down. When that happened Wiggsy picked me up and set me going again. He did it gently so that anyone going along the street wouldn’t notice anything, but each time he’d give my arm another one of those warning squeezes.

  He took me along Bleecker and up Sullivan Street and then down a narrow dark alleyway full of ash cans to hit at his shop from the rear. We landed in a tiny airshaft—about eight feet by four feet—that went up like a dark tower five stories high. Up at the top I could see a patch of light sky.

  It was a dark, hidden place, a good place for strangling somebody, but he didn’t do it. Instead he worked his way along the dark walls, dragging me by the hand to an iron door in the wall, which he pulled open. The door covered a low window hole which I guessed had been used to dump coal through in the old days.

  Wiggsy crouched and listened by the window. Then he stepped back and motioned for me to climb through. I peered in. In the dim light from a distant bulb I could see a chair set below the window, and then a huge furnace surrounded by ash cans, like kids clustered around a grown-up. Wiggsy stuck his fist into my back. I dropped onto the chair and down to the floor in front of the furnace. Wiggsy slid in beside me and closed the iron door behind us.

  The furnace was a monster which crouched under the low basement ceiling, with huge pipes leading away from its head like tentacles. Its skin was gray, and from around the edges of its mouth came the orange light of fire.

  Wiggsy opened its door. The chamber inside was wide and deep and full of whirling, roaring flames. Wiggsy put his hand around the back of my neck and we stared at it, side by side. For a long time he didn’t move, he didn’t say anything, but stood there staring, and sucking on his cigarette which dangled from the corner of his mouth. The heat from the flames was hot on my face, and in a moment it was soaked with sweat. I watched the flames lash around in confusion, making a windy sound.

  Finally Wiggsy flipped his cigarette butt into the boiling fire. The instant it touched the flames it disappeared. Then he put his hands around my neck and began to squeeze.

  I shut my eyes and screamed; and when I opened them there was a policeman in a blue uniform standing in front of me with his pistol pointed straight into Wiggsy’s face. For a fraction of a second I thought I was seeing things. Then Wiggsy flung me aside, and with one swift motion jerked the teddy bear out from under his shirt and flung it into the fire. It disappeared in the swirling flame and in a moment it was gone forever.

  “Sapphires don’t burn, Wiggsy,” the cop said. “We’ll get them later. Okay, let’s go upstairs.”

  I didn’t start crying until we got upstairs into Wiggsy’s shop and I saw Pop. The place was crawling with cops and detectives. They were coming down the stairs, and in from the hall, and up the front steps. They were all over the place. But I hardly saw them. Pop picked me up and hugged me. He looked like he was about to cry, too, but he didn’t. I did the crying for both. Most times I would have been ashamed, but this time I wasn’t: I figured I had it coming.

  So then after a bit an ambulance came, and I went outside and a young doctor in a white Ben Casey suit looked me over.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” the doctor said, “but he looks pretty tired, and I’d just as soon put him in the hospital overnight.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t go to the hospital. I’ve got to be on television in half an hour.”

  Pop laughed. “I think they’ll forgive you this one time,” he said.

  But I wanted to go. “Please, Pop, they’re counting on me. Please.”

  It was a dirty trick, for I knew that right then he’d do anything I wanted him to do, even burn a Jackson Pollock if I asked.

  He looked at the doctor. The doctor shrugged.

  “Please, Pop,” I said. “The whole thing is only five minutes. Then I promise I’ll go right to bed.”

  “It won’t hurt him,” the doctor said. “We’ll take him up in the ambulance and wait for him.”

  So we got into the ambulance and went peeling uptown through the traffic with the siren going full speed. I lay on a stretcher and rested and Pop told me what had happened.

  Naturally, when he couldn’t find me anyplace, he called up Stanky to see if I was there. And then, after an hour or so, when I still didn’t show up, Stanky had gotten scared and spilled the whole story: about the teddy, and the television show, and Wiggsy, and the guitar lessons, and the jewels—the whole thing. The story turned on the whole New Y
ork police force. They’d had a city-wide alarm out for me, and of course they’d staked out Wiggsy’s building from top to bottom—including the furnace room. The cop who saved me had been hidden down behind the furnace just watching us to see what Wiggsy was going to do.

  I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much about doing the television show. It all happened so fast. When I walked into the theater with Ben Casey and a couple of cops for an escort all the kids burst into cheers. Mr. Woodward and Damon Damon, the Button King, bustled me into my costume and told me about all the last-minute changes they’d made. Then all at once we were out on the stage under the glare of bright lights going through our songs and doing the bad jokes with Jerry Wastebasket, and the audience was laughing and applauding. When suddenly it was over and we were off-stage and Damon Damon was whispering, “You were just mahvelous, dearies,” and some other things that made Pop wince; and about five minutes after that I was in Manhattan General Hospital, falling asleep.

  The big fuss came the next day. Of course they’d shut off Wiggsy’s furnace and sifted the jewels out of the ashes. There was nothing for Wiggsy to do but confess, and naturally he squealed on his partners. According to his story he hadn’t been in on the robbery at all. He had only been holding the jewels until they could be smuggled out of the country. You can believe that or not, however you like.

  When Pop came to get me out of the hospital and take me home there were a mess of reporters from the news papers and a couple of cameramen from the television news programs. I told them everything that happened, although I admit I skipped over the teddy bear part of it as much as I could: I just sort of slid over it. It didn’t help much, though. The next day the newspapers started calling me “teddy bear hero” and things like that. Man, the way they wrote it up I was a big hero who’d saved the Hermes Sapphire, instead of a kid who got himself into trouble by being dumb, and out of it by being lucky.

  That night Pop took me out to the Howard Johnsons and filled me up with hamburgers and all that jazz, and he let me go over to Crespino’s so I could see myself on the television there. He even let me stay up late so I could see myself in the news shows three times. The way my voice sounded surprised me.

  On Monday the kids kept clustering around all day and staring at me and asking questions, and of course I was embarrassed and blushed most of the day; but not so embarrassed that I didn’t manage to put on a casual pose and tell them that it wasn’t anything, they’d have done the same themselves.

  But then after school Stanky and I went over to his house and swiped some stuff out of his icebox and messed up his room with it, and after a while I began to feel normal again.

  So that was the end of it. But of course nothing is ever over. This whole thing had two effects. One was that Pop bought me a Gretsch guitar and got me a good guitar teacher, after I promised to go on exposing myself to the finer music with Mr. Smythe-Jones.

  The other effect was that I finally got the teddy bear off my back. Not that it didn’t still make me nervous and embarrassed when I had to go in front of an audience. I got that feeling sometimes; but I didn’t panic and go all to pieces anymore. You see, the teddy was dead and gone. I knew I had to get along without it, and I knew I could, for I’d done my whole part in the television show perfectly without it.

  I guess I would have had to get used to it anyway. Mr. Woodward has got those of us who were on the show working up a little group of our own. He isn’t making any promises, but he thinks something might come of it. We rehearse Wednesdays after school, and then we all go down to the drugstore and drink Cokes and swagger around like a lot of big deals. We’re beginning to sound pretty good. What we need now is a cool name. Mr. Woodward wanted to call us the Teddy Bears, but I talked him out of it. I’ve had enough of teddy bears to last me for a while.

  THE END