by Rod Serling
“Just the one boy,” Mizell answered softly. “Nine years your junior and with two good hands.” He pointed to Bolie’s bandaged right hand. “But I’ll tell you something, Bolie,” he continued softly. “You took it good. You took it like a man. They’re jackals up there,” he jerked his head toward the ceiling. “Jackals. They don’t know what’s what, but I know. You showed them the kind of guts they don’t get too often. I’m proud of you, old timer. I really am.”
He patted Bolie on the back and held the door open a little wider. Bolie walked slowly out of the room and then down the corridor toward the exit.
He walked through the still stifling heat along the sidewalk heading toward his brownstone. Just three people sat on the steps. The scrawny little old man looked up at him through slitted eyes then spat through the railing.
“You should have stood in bed,” he announced coldly. “Why the hell didn’t you use your right hand?”
The other two people just looked away. Bolie looked briefly at his swollen, bandaged right hand, then walked up the steps and inside. He knocked at Frances’s door and heard her footsteps approaching from inside. She opened the door a few inches then, seeing Bolie, swung it open completely to let him enter.
“He’s in bed,” she said quietly “That’s a sad little boy in there.”
“Can I see him?” Bolie asked.
“Sure. I expect he’s waiting for you.”
Bolie went to the bedroom door.
“Bolie?”
He stopped at the door and turned to her.
“I’m real sorry,” Frances said.
Bolie smiled, nodded.
Henry lay in bed, his eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling. He half rose as Bolie came in. Bolie stopped halfway to the bed, suddenly, inexplicably, ill at ease. He cleared his throat.
“Pulled a rock, Henry,” he said, grinning. “Threw a punch before I should have. Hit the wall. Busted my knuckles. I went in with half my artillery gone.”
The little boy smiled at him through the darkness and held out his hand. Bolie went to the bed, took Henry’s hand and held it.
“You looked like a tiger, even so,” Henry said. “You looked like a real tiger. I was proud of you. I was real proud.”
Bolie leaned over and kissed the boy on the cheek, then stood up and started toward the door.
“Bolie?” Henry’s voice was heavy with sleep.
“You go to sleep, Henry Temple. Tomorrow we’ll go to the baseball game. We’ll get some hot dogs in the park, you and me.”
“Sure thing, Bolie. That’ll be nice.” Then he called softly, “Bolie.”
“What, boy?”
“I ain’t gonna make no more wishes,” Henry said. “I’m too old for wishes. There ain’t no such thing as magic, is there?”
Outside the neon lights blinked on and off and distant traffic was a light hum. Bolie thought for a while and then said gently, “I guess not, Henry. Or maybe...maybe there is magic. Maybe there’s wishes, too. I guess the trouble is.. .I guess the trouble is, there’s not enough people around to believe.” He looked at the tiny huddled figure on the bed. “Good night, boy.”
“Good night, Bolie,” Henry’s voice was a barely discernible whisper as the gates of sleep closed him off.
Bolie said good night to Frances and went up to his room. He thought about what he would have to do next. There would be no more fighting, no more comeback. Fifteen years of his life had been bound up in fight arenas, irretrievable years that could supply him nothing in the future but memories. He was tired and his hand hurt and there was an ache to his body like all the other aches he collected. And he was much too tired to think any further.
Mr. Bolie Jackson, a hundred and sixty-three pounds, had on that night left a second chance lying in a heap on a rosin-spattered canvas at St. Nick’s. And Mr. Bolie Jackson shared the common ailment of all men...the strange and perverse disinclination to believe in a miracle. He went into his room and lay down on the bed and closed his eyes and let the pain drain from him. Tomorrow the sun would come up and it would be morning. He had plans to make...but they would have to wait until morning.
A Stop At Willoughby
Mr. Oliver Misrell sat at the end of the conference table, his piggish eyes half-buried in his fat, jowly face, blinking like a shaven owl. He looked dourly past the eight men who sat four on each side of the table until his gaze stopped and focused on the tall, thin man at the opposite end, his chair pulled away so that he half-faced the big double doors.
This was Gart Williams who was suffering from a stifling heat brought on by his own fears. They’d been there almost two hours and Jake Ross, the young man they were waiting for, had sent no message explaining his delay. Williams stared at the double doors, poised and tense, imagining footsteps, playing secret mental games with himself. He would wait five more minutes, or he would count to two hundred, or he would wind his watch each time setting the deadline for some comment he would make, or some resolve he would announce. But when the deadline came and went he could do no more than sit staring at the doors.
The other men in the room felt his discomfort and knew what was happening. Jake Ross was Gart Williams’s personal recommendation to take over a major automobile account. This meeting had been called to discuss its advertising campaign. Mr. Misrell, head of the firm, had been violently opposed to Ross, but had agreed to Williams’s recommendation with a grudging “it’s your funeral” kind of acquiescence.
The account execs were secretly reveling in their roles as dispassionate onlookers, while Mr. Misrell’s looks spelled out precisely the guilt of the single party whose brand of vulnerability shone on his pale, perspiring face. For Gart Williams was a frightened man. The thought came to him that this was like a funeral. He was the corpse and the other men were mourners who were waiting impatiently for him to assume the position.
Gart Williams hated his job, hated ad agencies and hated Mr. Misrell. It was an extension of the utter dislike he felt for himself and for the things he had to do for his twenty thousand a year. He glanced at Mr. Misrell with revulsion. How deep a man could dive, to seek that small nugget of security that sometimes could be found only several fathoms below a man’s self-respect.
He’d been with the agency for fifteen years and each day it had become easier to say “sir” to Mr. Misrell, to laugh at his jokes, to deferentially praise him and to deny to himself that this man was a walking, belching symbol of the twentieth-century huckster. That’s what they all were in a sense, Williams knew this. They wore expensive silk suits, but they were carnival men. They had deftly draped themselves with the trappings of respectability, but they were barkers and pitchmen.
They could, Gart reflected, dress up their jobs with the terminology of Madison Avenue—“statistics”; “interviews in depth; “research”; and all the rest of the pseudo-scientific jargon. They could house it all in sumptuous offices like this one, but down deep and close to the nerve of it was the ugly truth of their whole function.
They were con men as crooked and devious as any nineteenth-century snake oil vendor. Fragments of all this crossed Gart Williams’s mind as he stared at the door, listened to the creak of chairs as men fidgeted around him, and felt the glare of Mr. Misrell’s coldly accusing eyes. While somewhere outside, in the early Manhattan winter, catastrophe, like a dark and billowing cloud, was forming. Williams rose from his seat, palms perspiring. He wet his lips and, for want of something else to do, picked up the telephone for the fourth time in half an hour.
“I want Jake Ross’s secretary,” he said into the phone.
“Williams,” Misrell said softly, “We’re still waiting for your Mr. Ross.”
Williams threw a brief, sick smile over his shoulder and said, “I’m trying to get him now, sir.”
A girl answered the phone.
“Is this Jake Ross’s secretary?” Williams said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. “Is this Joannie? Joannie, where is he?...I know he’s out to l
unch, but there was a conference called here at one-thirty. It’s twenty-five minutes to four. Now where the hell is he?” He forced his voice down an octave. “All right, Joannie. Check around. Call Sardi’s East, or The Colony, and tell him to get his kiester back here in a hurry!”
He slammed down the receiver and kept his back to the men until he could fix his face into a smiling nonchalant mask.
Misrell’s fat fingers drummed on the table top. “Well, Williams? Where’s your protégé with the three-million-dollar automobile account?
The perspiration was now rolling in rivulets down Williams’s back. “He’s due at any moment, sir. Probably a big lunch crowd or something—”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Misrell’s graveled voice interrupted him. “More likely a big martini, or three or four of ‘em.” He leaned over the table, his big paunch folding and unfolding in front of him, picked up a pencil and pointed it at Williams. “He is too young to put on this account. I told you that, Williams. I kept telling you that. He is much too young to put on so large and important an account!”
There was a knock. Williams bolted out of his seat as the double doors opened and a young woman entered carrying an envelope. He literally yanked it out of her hand and ignored her stricken expression as she backed out. He kicked the door shut and ripped open the envelope.
The men watched him carefully, seeing him turn white. Misrell’s piggish little eyes narrowed. The flappy “O” of his mouth remained open and poised like some kind of man-eating plant ready to pounce on a victim. Gart Williams crumpled the note in his hand.
“Well?” Misrell’s voice grated against the silence. “We have now been here a little over two hours, Mr. Williams.”
Williams nodded, not looking up, then he took a deep breath. “This is a communication from Jake Ross.”
Misrell looked around with a half-smile. “Would you be so kind as to share its contents with us?” he invited and commanded at the same time.
Williams took another deep breath. He was at the precipice and he knew there was no sense in delaying the jump any longer. He threw the crumpled paper on the table, squared his shoulders and said quietly, “I can give you the sense of it very quickly, Mr. Misrell. This is Ross’s resignation. He’s moving over to another agency.”
There was an intake of breath all over the room. Each man sat transfixed. Only Misrell moved slightly. His jowls twitched and again his fingers began to drum.
“And?” Misrell asked.
Williams’s voice was almost a whisper. “And he’s taking the automobile account with him.”
Again the intake of breath. Again the frozen suspension of each man at his place. This was the catastrophe that had been building up through the afternoon like a hurricane off shore, ready to move in with crushing destructive force.
A billing like this represented a quarter of an agency’s take during a given year. Its loss was a back-breaking, irreparable wound to an organization and each man in the room knew it. They kept their eyes averted, but listened to the squeak of Misrell’s chair as the president ponderously rose. They heard the flats of his hands slam down on the table top. They heard his short, wheezing breath and then his voice, icy and outraged.
“That account represented a gross billing of something in the neighborhood of three million dollars a year.”
Nausea rose up in Gart He had to hold on to the table. “This is as much a shock to me as it is to you, Mr. Misrell.”
“Is that an honest-to-God fact?” roared Misrell. “It’s as much a shock to you as it is to me, huh? You stupid bastard don’t con me! It was your pet project! Your pet project.” The fat man’s face quivered and rolled and undulated. His eyes blazed as he fed rage into himself and roared like a furnace.
“It was your idea to give it to that little college greeny,” he shouted. “Now get with it, Williams! Get with it, boy.” He kicked his chair aside and screwed up his face lie a little baby about to cry. He pointed a finger at Williams. “So what’s left, Williams? Not only has your pet project backfired, but it’s sprouted wings and left the premises.” Grandly, emotionally, and with great theatricality, he spread his fat hands. “I’ll tell you what’s left to us, in my view. Nothing but a deep and abiding concern about your judgment in men.”
The various executives sat with their heads down, in the vast embarrassment that permeated the room. Williams continued to gaze at the table, wondering how long it would last. He felt like a man in a rack, the screws being turned tighter and tighter, the pain going higher and higher, thinking all the while it couldn’t get worse, while all the time it did get worse.
Misrell pounded the flats of his hands on the table again. “This is a push business, Williams,” he said.
(God, how many times Williams had heard him use that phrase.)
“Push, push, push business! Push and drive! But personally push and drive! You don’t delegate responsibility to little boys, Williams!” he screamed, making Williams look up to face the punishment. “You should know better than anyone else.”
A thought crossed Gart Williams’s mind. Misrell was enjoying this. He was taking pleasure in it. It was a twisted, perverse, ugly enjoyment, but enjoyment it was, and something deep inside the thin, sick man revolted in disgust. He stared, fascinated, at the big mouth that jabbered at him and screamed and wiggled and twisted and spewed out phrases that were so repetitious, so familiar and so impossible to listen to again.
“It’s a push, push, push business, Williams,” the fat mouth railed at him. “It’s a push, push, push business all the way, all the time, right on down the line—”
Williams knew the words were coming up. He didn’t think he would let them out, but they came out. Like screaming shrapnel, they exploded into the room and smashed against the walls.
“Why don’t you shut your mouth, fat boy?”
The executives stared at Williams, open-mouthed, aghast. Misrell’s jaw hung down in almost comic fashion as he gaped at the insane man at the other end of the table.
There was no retreat for Williams now. There was no evading, no covering up. “Why don’t you shut your mouth, fat boy?” It had been said. The outrage had been committed. It was now a matter of record and could not be obliterated. Gart Williams knew all this. So he leaned forward in his chair and pointed a finger at Oliver Misrell.
“God, but I can’t stand the sight of you,” he said. “You’re about as palatable as a Crisco sandwich. In addition, you’re the most predatory, thoughtless, unfeeling animal of a man I’ve ever met, let alone worked for.” He looked around the table, his face white and glistening with sweat. “God, how do you stand it, all of you? How do you?”
Again the wave of nausea rose up in him. He lowered his head, spent a moment recovering. Then he took a deep breath and walked out of the room. Sick and frightened, he still could find a tiny fragment of perverse pleasure at the problem in conversation he had left behind. Who says what and how do they start? Perhaps that fat bastard would have a coronary and there would be no need for conversation.
In his own office, his secretary smiled up at him.
“Messages on the desk,” the attractive girl said, “and hot coffee out here. Can I bring you some?” Her smile faded as she saw the look on Gart’s face. “Do you want anything at all?” she asked in a whisper.
Williams leaned against the door and shut his eyes. “Yeah. A sharp razor and a chart of the human anatomy showing where all the arteries are!”
He went into his office and closed the door behind him. He flicked off the fluorescent lighting, and sat down at his desk in the semidarkness. On the desk was a picture of the beautiful woman who was Jane, his wife. And she was beautiful. Beautiful and cold as a glacier.
He put two fingers to his eyes and closed them. He knew what he was. He was a forty-one-year-old man, protected by a suit of armor all held together by one bolt. A moment ago the bolt had been removed and his protection had fallen away from him and left him a naked target.
&nbs
p; He had been cannonaded this afternoon by all the enemies of his life. His insecurity had shelled him; his oversensitivity had straddled him with humiliation; his deep-rooted disquiet about his own worth had zeroed in on him, landed on target and blown him apart. He had the ridiculous feeling that he must suddenly burst into tears and it was only with effort that he kept himself from doing so.
After a while he began to hear the whisperings from outside. Secretaries’ voices, the buzzing of interoffice phones. He smiled slightly to himself. The news was getting around. “Did you hear what Williams said to the old man in the conference room?...Did you hear?...”
He got his topcoat from the closet, told his secretary that he was going home for the day and went down in the elevator, leaving the shambles behind him.
The New Haven Railroad ran northeast from New York, close to the coast, stopping every twenty-odd minutes to unload tired-eyed men in wrinkled suits. It was on the stretch between Stamford and Westport, where Gart lived, that the conductor paused to take his seat tab and then lingered, smiling.
“How are you tonight, Mr. Williams?”
Williams, aware that his face was gray, nodded. “In the absolute pink.”
“Cold winter this year,” the conductor said conversationally. “It seems to get dark earlier than it ever has.”
“That’s the way of the world,” Williams answered. “The rich get richer and the days get shorter.”
He vaguely heard the conductor chuckle as he moved down the car, then closed his eyes and leaned hack in the uncomfortable seat.
Over and over inside his mind he played the scene that had occurred that afternoon. Misrell’s voice kept pushing around deep inside his mind. “It’s a push, push, push business,” the voice said as it tore into him. “It’s an absolutely push, push, push business. You’ve got to stick with it, boy. You absolutely have to stick with it. It’s a push, push, push business. It’s a push, push, push business.”