"All right, boys," Cooley said. "Get gloved up. We'll meet back here in fifteen minutes."
The entire gym was crowded. Word seemed to have gone out along the street like wildfire. Everyone and his brother and cousins seemed eager to watch Benny get his head handed to him.
The gloves laced up on his hands made him feel like an idiot. He looked down at his birdlike frame, and then over at Willie's glistening expanse of brown muscles, and realized that this wasn't just a mismatch—this was a mugging.
The bell rang, and Benny left his corner. "Keep your hands up!" Cass said behind him. He did, and just in time, because Willie threw a thunderous right which hit Benny's gloves instead of his face, which Benny found highly preferable.
Jab cross.
Where had that thought come from? Benny didn't know, but he was moving out of the way before Willie began to throw it, and—
Hook to body.
Time froze. He could see himself, see the blows, watch his own fist extend, and knew that Willie would run into it, supplying the force needed to provide impact.
He watched as his body did it, as he moved, and moved, and his hand rose almost by itself, and he remembered to plant it squarely in the solar plexus—
Willie went whoof! And the air left his mouth in a whoosh. An expression like indignation spread over his face, and—
Hook to head.
He saw it, he knew that the opening would be there, but he couldn't quite get his body to respond fast enough, and the opening disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared.
And he knew what was happening. It was back, he was seeing things before they happened. He knew what Willie was going to do before Willie himself knew. There was only one problem: knowing what to do and being able to do something about it were two entirely different things.
He was able to use his unexpected gift to avoid Willie for most of the first round, that odd precognition pulling him this way and that … twice more he saw openings before they appeared, and managed to get his fists up into them. Only one of those times was he able to respond to the timing and leverage necessary to create power—and Willie's feet shot out from under him, and he hit the mat, hard.
The bell rang, and Willie got back up, not hurt, but embarrassed. The crowd, which had come to watch the local Goliath slay David, was being treated to a spectacle of a different kind.
Benny wobbled back to his corner, huffing. Cass was almost bouncing with glee. "How are you doing that? I didn't know you could box."
"Neither did I," he said.
He looked out at the audience, and met Jenny's eyes. They were embarrassed, and frightened … and proud.
Of him.
He put his mouthpiece back in, and bounced back into the center of the ring, feeling as if he was ready to take on the champion of the world.
Rush.
He felt it before it happened, knew that in frustration Willie was going to try to rush him, and moved just to where he needed to be as the bigger boy plowed across the ring, bounced off the ropes, turned and—
Right cross.
With perfect timing, Benny punched, putting everything he had into it, and it landed right squarely on Willie's nose. The crunch was clearly audible. Willie staggered back, with an expression on his face something like how did I get into this?
Benny whaled on him, throwing rights and rights and lefts, and Willie covered up, dizzy, a flash of genuine confusion and doubt on his face, and the crowd now cheering Benny! Benny! Benny!
Suddenly, and sickeningly, Benny realized that he was getting tired, and that he wasn't hurting Willie at all.
Oops.
Willie pushed him back.
There are immutable realities in the universe: gravity, friction, toast landing butter-side down. In that moment Benny recalled another one. He had first learned it listening to a radio interview with Joe Louis, during which the Brown Bomber had said: "If a boxer had to fight a heavy bag for ten rounds, the heavy bag would win."
Well, Benny hadn't even gone two rounds, six full minutes, before the reality of that came home to him. To put it more bluntly, Benny ran out of gas.
He saw what Willie was going to do,
Cross.
knew exactly where it would land—
Head.
He saw the second punch, and the third one, and knew that he would dodge the first two, and then, from sheer fatigue, run right into the third.
Hook.
It wasn't fair.
Be that as it may, it happened anyway. He dodged. And dodged, and then—
"—the winner!" Benny opened his eyes and saw Willie Hawkins's arm being raised in the middle of the ring. He staggered up and extended his hand to Willie.
Hawkins looked at him curiously, something unfamiliar in the bigger boy's face. Then he turned and left the ring without touching gloves, and Benny was alone.
God, he was tired.
"Listen, Benny—you want to get a soda? I'll buy," Cass said as he laced up his shoes.
His jaw hurt like blazes. "Not right now," he muttered. "Maybe later."
She protested, but he kissed her on the cheek—the first time he had ever done that—and said, "Maybe later."
He walked out of the gym, noticing vaguely that some of the kids were staring at him. He managed to wring a smile out of his sore and exhausted muscles when they began a halfhearted round of applause.
He had walked two blocks toward home when he heard someone behind him, calling his name. He turned in time to see Jenny running behind him, her face flushed with the effort. She stared at him, and he saw something in her eyes that he had never dared hoped to see there. Now that he did, he didn't know quite what to think.
"I hate Willie for what he did to you," she said.
She reached out and touched the side of his face. "Does it hurt?" she asked.
"Only when I breathe," he said.
Her eyes were huge. "I think that I live a little closer than you do," she said. "Why don't you let me take care of that for you?"
He took her hand in his. And realized in that moment that they were both outsiders, in their way, and that they were both alone. All of the time that he had known her, had seen her from afar, he had only seen that all the boys wanted to be with her, and had never asked what it would feel like to be Jenny, and to know what the boys wanted, and why.
He looked in her eyes, and saw the fire.
"I don't know," he said.
She seemed to have read his thoughts, and she chewed at the fleshiness of her lower lip. "I know," she said. "I know about my reputation, and maybe I deserve it. And it's not like that. You're not like any of the others. You always treated me so good. Kind of like a queen. I ain't no queen, Benny." Her eyes were huge, and chocolate, and bottomless.
"But right now, if you want me, I'll try to be."
He was speechless.
Jenny's apartment building made his look like the Taj Mahal. It was overcrowded, the halls were too narrow, and it stank, as if the residents hadn't bothered to flush for a week. He smelled rank, oily smoke, as from searing fat, and through an open door saw a painfully thin woman frying meat in an iron skillet over a smoking stove. Rags were hung around the kitchen, too damned close to the fire, and he cringed at the sight.
"Pretty, isn't it?" Jenny said, aware of his thoughts. "I'm getting out of here one day. This might be enough for my Momma, but if I can get my grades up, I think I can talk my uncle into taking me in."
She touched her finger to her lips and stopped beside a door on the fifth floor, fished in her pocket for a key then slipped inside, leaving him in the hall. A naked light bulb flickered from a chain overhead, and from somewhere deep in the bowels of the building came the moist syncopation of dripping water.
Jenny emerged a minute later, with a blanket over her arm. She smiled at him shyly, and led him up to the tar-paper covered rooftop. The evening shadows were just stealing over the chimneys. She laid the blanket down for both of them, took his hand and sat hi
m down, kneeling beside him. His throat felt as if it had swollen shut, and he didn't know what to say or do.
She took his hand, and kissed the palm gently.
He finally managed to stammer out: "I've never … I mean, this is my first."
"There's a first time for all of us," she said, and leaned forward to kiss him.
For all of his life, he had heard boys and men talking about the secrets between men and women, and had always wondered about them, wondered what the truth might have been. It was different than he had thought it would be. It wasn't the fireworks, it wasn't the sound of trumpets or the clap of thunder. It was something very quiet, and strong, like a current pulling him toward a waterfall, a gentle welcome back to a world long lost, a homecoming.
It wasn't what the boys had said.
It was better.
There was something different about the days that followed. Benny walked taller, strode the streets as if he was a man for the first time. He had survived a fight with the toughest dude in the neighborhood, and even if he lost, he had also bloodied his tormentor's nose. Numbers runners for Big Sid glanced at him as if he was a little crazy, but that didn't bother him—he knew that he was right, he knew that within the next few days it would be proven.
And in the evenings, there was Jenny, and the rooftop, and all of the sweetness that he had ever imagined, and had never truly hoped to find.
Three days after their first time together, Jenny lay close to him, propped up on her elbows on their blanket. Although the sun had set, the air was still warm. They looked out across the city, and its lights, and sounds, and she sighed.
"I want something more, you know?" she said.
He knew. And told her so, with a kiss.
"I want to find something that would make most people think they were dreaming. I have these dreams sometimes. About people and places, you know? There's more to the world than just these few blocks. Can you understand that, Benny?"
Yes.
More than he could say, he understood.
She turned to look at him. "I know what you think, Benny," she said. "You think that you're in love with me. But you're not. And I don't want you to say anything here that you'll feel like you're bound by."
"Jenny—"
"Hush," she said. "This is just for now. Just because you've always been sweet. And if I was to tell you the truth—it wasn't for you. It was for me. There is something special about you. And maybe I've always seen it, always known it, but it's like this summer you learned it yourself. You're just passing though, Benny. You're going to do something special. I just wanted to know that you'd remember me," she said.
The weary fatalism in her voice couldn't completely mask the fierce animal energies slumbering within her. She rolled atop him. "Remember me, Benny," she said. "Promise?"
He nodded. "I promise."
"I want another promise from you."
At that moment, he could not have denied her anything.
"I'm going to say something, and you have to promise not to answer."
He nodded again, silently this time.
"I love you, Benny," she said, and kissed him.
SHUFFLE
CHAPTER
27
1953
TIME PASSED. Sleep and waking melding together into a single flowing reality.
Benny slept, but in sleeping was graced—or cursed—with the same visions that haunted his waking. He woke, lurched directly to the typewriter, opened a hole in his reality and fell into it, into a world of far places and alien ideas, a world far preferable to his own.
Sleeping became waking. Waking was sleeping. The two melded until they were almost indistinguishable. He wasn't certain whether he was a man typing stories of the future on a battered typewriter in a walk-up apartment in 1953 Harlem, or if he was a man who commanded a space station in the twenty-third century, who, in the midst of terrible stress, had begun to dream of a simpler, darker time.
But those two streams of consciousness wove together on a deeper level than they ever had before, and in the depths of the very core of his mind, they met in a place where Benny didn't seem to exist at all.
He dreamed while awake; his fingers became a living creature all their own. They were having their own way with him. He floated back away, up above the dark and driven man hunched above a keyboard.
I'm afraid, he thought.
And he was. This was a place without time, without any connection to meaning as he had understood it all his life. And then he understood that it wasn't new fear that he felt, it was the fear he had always known, now revealing itself to him at a new and deeper level.
What was it that Franklin Roosevelt had once said to his beleaguered people? "There is nothing to fear, but fear itself."
If that was true, then the greatest gift that he could give himself was to own that fear, so that it could teach him.
But his fear took no dark shape. Instead, it was again like the gentle, glowing shape of an hourglass, a gemstone glowing and flowing for his benefit alone.
And this time it spoke to him.
Every man fears, it said. But not every man looks into his fear. Just as few men truly gaze into the face of the thing that they love. They seek to spare themselves terror or desire by so doing.
Look onto the streets of your city, and you will see people who have lost touch with that which they love and fear. This is the source of all despair.
I don't understand, Benny said.
The thing you fear you either fight or run from. The thing you love you pursue. Together, they create motion. Together, they combine to drive you toward your future. Look at the children of Africa around you.
There is so much fear in their lives that it seems to surround them, seems to create walls and floor and ceiling, seems to create a tiny box in which they are forced to live out their existence. So they give up trying, and seek to find what happiness they can find within the limitations.
Look at the children of Europe, those who once enslaved your ancestors. Instead of facing the reality and the shame of what once happened, they live in denial. Yet they know how they would long for vengeance if such had been done to them, and they fear what the Africans would do to them if ever they had the chance to strike back. So a portion of their energy is used to hold you back, rather than seek the things they love. Rather than deal with their deeper fears. They cheat themselves, and you.
You cheat yourself, and them.
Who am I, Benny asked, that you would say such things to me?
You are the one who will help them remember. Who will help them remember what they fear.
And help them to seek what they love.
SHUFFLE
CHAPTER
28
PABST WAS SEATED at his desk, holding one of Benny's stories, extracted from a pile of files stacked before him. The sun streaming through his window bleached the little remaining color from his face. He looked stricken.
"Have you lost your mind?" he asked.
Benny sat in a chair across from him. He seemed consumed by his own inner flame, burnt out. Completely spent. Somehow, he managed to find the strength or self-possession to smile.
"Lately," Benny said, "I've been asking myself the same question."
Pabst looked as if he wanted to cry. "I give you a novella to write—even offered you a shot at the cover. And three weeks later, instead of a novella, you come back with six stories—six sequels to a story I refused to publish in the first place. So I guess the answer to the question we've both been asking is yes—you're certifiable!"
And that moment, Benny couldn't find it within him to say that Pabst was wrong.
In the outer office, Albert, Kay, Julius, and Herbert watched Benny and Pabst from the "Bull Pen." The glass partition prevented them from hearing a word, but the body language was clear. Darlene, who was typing furiously at her desk, muttered without looking up from her machine.
"The old man's not a happy camper," she said.
&
nbsp; "Can't blame him, can we?" Julius said.
"Watch me," Herbert said, furious.
Albert searched his pockets for a nonexistent match. "Well, to be fair … I mean, after all … well, Mister Pabst did tell Benny … you know, not to bother him with any more of those …"
Herbert looked disgusted. "Whose side are you on?"
"Do we, uh …," he searched an inside pocket, found nothing, and kept looking. "Really have to, you know, pick sides?"
"If we did," Kay sneered, "we all know whose side you'd be on. The robots'."
The door to Pabst's office opened. A dejected Benny emerged.
Herbert was the first to speak. "Let me guess," he said to Benny. "Attila the Nazi said 'no.'"
Benny tried to smile, but failed miserably. "Good guess," he said.
Julius sighed, and drummed his fingers, then a sudden, half-optimistic light appeared in his eyes. "You might consider putting those stories out yourself—you know, through a private publishing house. A nice, elegant little volume. Fifty to a hundred copies."
For a moment Benny's eyes widened. "I couldn't really do that …"
"Why not? Some of our finest men of letters self-published."
Kay was openly derisive. "He may as well write them in chalk on the sidewalk. More people would read them that way."
Herbert struck his palms together, grinning. "Huzzah. You tell him, Kay. I know a good divorce lawyer if you need one."
Albert was lost in thought for a long time. In fact, the entire office seemed to sink into a slumber. The distant sound of car horns outside the window was the only break from the depths of shared despair. Then Albert pursed his lips, muttered to himself, then looked up and said: "I've got an idea. Why not make it … you know, a dream?"
The comment was met with stunned silence. It seemed that everyone in the room had literally stopped breathing. For Benny, he wondered if the bottom had fallen out of the world. They all looked at Albert as if they had never seen anything quite like him before.
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