by Pete Dexter
He smiles while she looks into her bag, and then she hands him half a pound of mail from people he doesn’t know. He goes through it quickly, noticing a letter for the old man.
Nick looks at the small, careful writing on the envelope.
"Urban Matthews."
The old man is the only person named Urban Nick ever heard of. It’s his second letter.
He got the first one couple of weeks ago—a check from the government—and now a letter from Des Moines, Iowa. He wonders if they have Catholic schools in Des Moines. It looks like the handwriting of somebody who went to Catholic school.
"That’s it," she says, and she reaches out suddenly and squeezes Nick’s hand.
He watches her walk up the street—her pants are tight across the back too—and remembers a morning when she stopped something she was saying about her husband’s lawyer to lick her thumb and wipe at a grease stain at the corner of his mouth.
* * *
He climbs the stairs with the letter and finds the old man sitting naked, except for his socks and shoes, on the edge of a chair near the mats. He is bent at the waist, his fingers pushed all the way to the knuckles into a hole in one of the mats, retrieving something he has hidden.
The old man starts when he sees him, and drops the mat. Nick looks around the room, thinking there is probably money hidden a hundred places up here.
"You got a letter from Iowa," he says.
The old man accepts the letter without moving off the chair. A scar runs the length of his stomach, dividing it. The skin billows up on each side, hiding the scar itself, all of it but the deep red stitch marks at the ends.
The old man bends again and picks up a towel off the floor and his face is florid when he comes back up. He covers his lap with the towel and looks up at Nick, waiting for him to leave.
Nick looks other places in the room, not to intrude. He blows into his hands and nods toward the window. "Cold today," he says.
The old man waits.
Nick heads toward the staircase. As he starts down, the old man is studying the envelope, as if he were trying to decide how to open it. The towel falls off his lap again; he doesn’t seem to notice.
Nick returns to the Ford.
He sets the new battery on the tray in the corner of the engine compartment, and then reconnects the cables. Leaving the hood open, he gets into the front seat and turns the key. The engine cranks and then starts; the garage fills with black smoke.
He parks the Ford on the sidewalk and then backs a Plymouth into the spot where the Ford had been and begins a ring job. He works quickly, to keep himself warm. He thinks of pulling the Plymouth all the way into the garage and shutting the door, but the feel of the place changes when it’s sealed off; it’s like a hotel room.
Still, he’d like to shut the door. He would if Harry were here to keep him company. He thinks about his son as he takes the cylinder head off, exposing the pistons—the earnest expression that comes over his face when he looks into an engine. He remembers the same look on the kid’s face when he was sitting in a high chair, figuring out a banana.
He is reminded suddenly of Charley’s son, who is always serious, and can’t be talked out of it, the way Harry can. A kid who understands too much, who isn’t really a kid at all, not a whole one.
He’s got a foot in the world.
Nick knows because he was that kind of kid himself.
* * *
Sometime before lunch, he realizes that he hasn’t heard anything move upstairs. Even when the old man doesn’t come down in the morning, he hears him moving.
He straightens out of the engine and holds still, listening.
Not a sound.
* * *
Nick eats soup for lunch. The diner is full now, everyone talking about Constantine. He listens to two men at the counter. "It was drugs. Constantine wouldn’t let no drugs on the street, and it was too much money in it. If it wasn’t for that, he’s still alive."
"How old was he?" the other one says.
"I don’t know, seventy-eight, seventy-nine, but he was all there, you know? He knew what he was about."
"Anybody seventy-nine years old ain’t all there. You get that old, you start thinking your own dick’s funny."
Nick sits with his face a few inches over the soup bowl, not wanting to be included. He thinks of his own father, who died at seventy-six.
"Phyllis thinks my dick’s funny already," the first man says.
She hears that as she walks past, carrying dirty dishes. "I think it’s a riot," she says and disappears into the kitchen.
"I ain’t kidding," the other one says. "My wife’s father, he started laughing at his dick. He’d take it out at dinner and laugh."
"For what?"
"I don’t know for what. Like it was a big joke."
Nick blows across his spoon and leans into the steam rising off the bowl. The metal burns his lips and his eyes water. The conversation stops and starts.
"Constantine wasn’t laughing at his dick. He knew what he was about."
It is quiet a moment, and then Phyllis comes through the swinging doors, carrying hamburgers.
"You don’t believe me," the same man says, "you see what happens now. You want to see some crazy shit, you watch what happens now the young guys take over."
Nick stands up and walks to the cash register. Phyllis takes his money, makes the change.
"Give me a coffee and one of them donuts," he says.
She puts a jelly donut and the coffee in the same bag and he carries it back to the garage. The Plymouth is sitting where he left it. He looks at the engine, remembering where he was, and then heads upstairs. The old man likes sweets, maybe the donut will cheer him up.
He isn’t there.
His bags are pushed into a corner near the mats and covered with a blanket. He has more things now than when he came; Nick isn’t sure what kind of things they are. He keeps them covered. Nick looks at the blanket, estimating the number of bags underneath. Four.
He walks to the window near the old man’s things and sets the paper bag on the chair where he will see it. The coffee will stay warm an hour and the donut is good for a week. The old man still eats from garbage cans, he doesn’t mind stale donuts.
Thinking of that, Nick passes the trash can on the way back to the stairs. He stops and lifts the top and looks inside, wondering what it would be like. Adhesive tape, a Vaseline jar, old newspapers, dust. Before the old man came, the same stuff would have been all over the floor.
He sees the letter right away, torn in half and then in quarters.
The envelope is on the other side of the can, intact. It would be an easy thing to put the pieces of the letter together, and Nick stares at them, wondering what sort of life they might say this Urban Matthews had.
What he gave up for paper bags and a borrowed corner of a gym. Who he gave up. But it’s the old man’s business.
Nick puts the lid back on the can and walks downstairs to finish the Plymouth.
* * *
Nick is sitting in the window late in the afternoon, watching the street for Urban, when the black car stops in front of the gym and begins to unload. First two men in windbreakers who check the street, then Phillip Flood, then the boys.
The men in the windbreakers stay on the street and Phillip Flood and the boys come up.
"Nicky," Phillip says, "I come over to ask you a favor." Nick doesn’t answer. Phillip draws him back to the windows, where he can watch the street as they talk.
"I don’t know what you heard about me and Constantine," he says, "but the man was like my own family."
Nick looks at him, surprised. The Lincoln is still sitting in the middle of the narrow street, white smoke coming out of the tailpipe almost the way water pours out of a faucet. The men in the windbreakers have gotten back inside.
"We had our disagreements, but I give you my word . . ."
Nick looks at him, thinking, So this is who got Constantine? A Mick?
He remembers the way his hand felt patting his pocket after he’d put the hundred-dollar bill there.
"Like my own family," he says, moving to put his face in Nick’s line of sight.
Phillip Flood shakes his head. "On account of the way this happened, I think there could be some misunderstandings, you understand what I mean?"
"Misunderstandings," Nick says.
"And I just want to ask you, you know, to let the boys come up here like before. That’s all. And I might have somebody to come up here with them, to keep an eye out that none of this shit spills over onto you."
His hand moves to the side of Nick’s cheek. He pats him there, and then on the back of the neck.
"I got people tellin’ me to hide until everything calms down," he says. He pauses a moment, as if to think it over, then shakes his head. "That just makes it look worst, right?"
Nick doesn’t answer. The hand moves off the back of his neck.
"I don’t want nobody in here carrying," Nick says, looking at the car outside.
Phillip Flood smiles. "No problem, Nick. They’ll stay downstairs, you won’t even know they’re around."
Nick nods.
"Is that all right, they stay down there on the street?"
He shrugs. "It ain’t my street."
Phillip turns back into the room and watches an old-time trainer working a young colored fighter in the ring, moving his padded catching gloves to call for hooks or jabs. The force of the punches throws the trainer’s ancient arms backward, and finally knocks the glove off his left hand.
The fighter waits while he bends slowly to retrieve it, and then fits it back over his hand. A respectful kid, Nick thinks, he won’t say anything to hurt his feelings. For the same reason, he doesn’t take anything off his punches when he starts in again.
"How are they doin’, anyway?" Phillip Flood says, meaning the boys. "They learning to fight?"
"They’re doing all right," Nick says. He can’t remember the last time Phillip’s kid even got out of his street clothes.
It is quiet a moment while Phillip watches the trainer and the colored kid in the gym. When he turns back, something has changed.
"Tell me something, Nick," he says. "If they’re doing all right, how come Peter comes home busted up all the time and Michael don’t ever get a fucking mark on him?"
Nick takes his time answering. "Everybody’s got their own speed," he says finally.
Phillip Flood nods. "Maybe I’ll come by some time and watch them mix it up."
Nick shrugs.
"You don’t mind I come by and watch," he says, watching Nick, as if he’s trapped him. The kid in the ring knocks the glove off the old trainer’s hand again.
Nick shrugs. "Nobody has to fight up here," he says, "that ain’t the idea. If they feel like it, then they can fight. You feel like it, you can watch."
"They feel like it," Phillip Flood says, and then pats him again on the cheek. "Kids are always fightin’, right?" He smiles and then starts to leave, the moist feel of his hand is still on Nick’s cheek.
Nick stops him, grabbing his elbow. Phillip Flood looks at the hand; everything in the gym seems to stop. Out of the corner of his eye, Nick sees his son, standing in his socks on the scale, his face perfectly still, watching.
"I don’t want nobody up here with guns," he says.
Phillip Flood nods. "Yeah, you already said that," he says.
Nick lets go of him and turns back to the window in time to see the old man crossing slowly in front of the black Cadillac, looking inside. He stops for a moment, as if the car has no business there, and then the driver’s side door opens and one of the men in the windbreakers steps out, his head tilted at an angle just behind his left shoulder, and watches him until he moves to the other sidewalk.
The man in the windbreaker gets back inside the car; Nick sees him laughing at something the other man says.
The old man and Phillip Flood pass each other on the stairs, and by the time the old man clears the stairwell, the gym is itself again, full of movement and noise. All of it somehow connected, like an engine.
Harry is tying his shoes, the ancient trainer in the ring shuffles to his right, holding the catching gloves for the lighter to hit. A cop does sit-ups on a board propped against the edge of the ring, a huge white kid who has been training here the last week begins hitting one of the heavy bags.
The place has no memory, and that’s the way it is supposed to be too.
Over on the bench, Charley’s kid—what’s his name, Peter?—is taking off his street clothes to work out. He hangs his shirt and pants carefully from the nails overhead, and puts his socks in his shoes and slides them underneath. He bends over to pull on his sweat socks, still as narrow as a bird across the chest, but he is growing into his body. He is going to be strong—Nick already feels it when they’re in the ring—but he’s got no talent for this, no instincts. Everything he knows, he’s learned.
Not that there weren’t fighters who went somewhere without talent, but that kind, there wasn’t usually much else they could do. And the payments went up all the time. Even after they quit. Something in that thought—the payments—calls up the uneasy feeling Nick gets once in a while watching Harry in the ring, that this could lead someplace it isn’t supposed to.
But it’s not the same situation. Harry’s protected. And he has talent; he has Nick.
But Charley’s kid—something occurs to Nick that’s been in the back of his mind almost since the first day Phillip Flood brought him up here.
He thinks maybe Charley’s kid likes to get hit.
* * *
Peter and Michael sit in the back seat of a car. The two men who picked them up at the gym are inside the gas station while the attendant cleans the windows. He takes a long time, making sure the dirt is out of the corners.
"Jimmy Measles told me he’d get us blown," Michael says.
Peter feels a chill run six ways at once through his body. He thinks of the woman who stepped into the back seat of his uncle’s car that night; he has thought of her every day and night since it happened. Repeated the words she said to him, remembering the sound.
"Blown?" he says.
Michael shrugs and looks out the window. "Anytime we want.
He’ll take us to Bandstand and get us blown."
"We can’t get into Bandstand. We can’t dance."
"He can get us in. He’s on the committee."
"How come he can get blown at Bandstand, he’s hanging around in front of Nick’s all week dancing with a light pole?"
Michael stares at the men inside, smoking cigarettes, and when he answers his breath fogs the window. "He’s scared they’re going to kick his ass."
"Who?"
"Kids at Bandstand, I don’t know. They said they were going to kick his ass, so we go along to protect him and he gets us blown."
"We’re supposed to protect Jimmy Measles? You seen those guys on television? They’re seventeen years old."
Michael looks at his cousin and smiles. "All we got to do is show up with him."
Peter sits quietly in the back seat of the car, waiting for the men who work for his uncle to come out of the filling station, imagining blow jobs from the girls he has seen on television.
"Nobody’s going to fuck with us," his cousin says.
* * *
The same two men always pick Peter and Michael up at school and take them to the gym. Ever since Constantine was hit. They wait outside and then drive them home. In between, they leave for half an hour and visit the Rosemont Diner on Passyunk for coffee and Danish.
They aren’t supposed to leave, but then they aren’t supposed to eat in the car either, and they do that all the time. They are big men with thick necks, and Peter doesn’t think they are afraid of his uncle, even though they pretend to be.
They leave for the Rosemont at the same time every afternoon. They order the same Danish, sit in the same table by the window, and are back in thirty minutes.
> Michael has followed them, and knows these things down to the number of sugars they put in their coffee.
Eight.
* * *
On the afternoon Jimmy Measles is going to get them blown, l Peter waits by the stairs, his gym bag at his feet, while Michael watches the street from the corner of the window.
"You ain’t going to train today?" Nick says.
Peter shakes his head. He says, "We got someplace we got to go."
Nick nods, looking at him, then at his cousin. "You waiting for your uncle?" he says.
Peter looks into his face and says, "No." He doesn’t lie to Nick.
"You going to do something stupid?" he says.
Peter thinks it over; he doesn’t know. It feels stupid, but it’s something you do a lot when you get older. At least he thinks it is. "Naw, we’re just going somewhere."
Nick smiles at him as if he knows where they are going, and a moment later Michael leaves the window and hurries toward the stairs.
"Let’s go," he says.
Michael notices Nick watching them, and he smiles. "We got to go back to school," he says.
Nick nods.
And then Michael is headed down the stairs and Peter is starting down after him. Nick is still at the top, looking at him in a peculiar way.
"It isn’t too stupid, Nick," Peter says.
Nick nods. "Something a little stupid, that’s good for you once in a while."
Jimmy Measles is waiting on the sidewalk downstairs. He is wearing new pants and a green jacket and he practices dance steps as they walk to Broad Street to catch the C bus. The toe of one of his black loafers touches the cement behind the heel of the other, his elbows come tight against his sides, and then he spins effortlessly, never losing a step, his eyes closing as he goes around.
Everything is easy for Jimmy Measles.
The sidewalk narrows under some scaffolding, and Peter steps behind Jimmy Measles and Michael, and watches them from the back. Michael has combed his hair back over his ears on both sides, the way Jimmy Measles does, the way Fabian does; it meets in the center of the back of his head.