The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (35 page)

Bolie’s head kept going back and forth in disbelief, in rejection, in denial.

The little boy’s words kept coming out like a chant. “Had to, Bolie. Had to. Had to.”

Then Bolie grabbed the boy His voice was cold fury, “You crazy kid. You crazy, kookie kid.” He shook him. “Don’t you know there ain’t no magic? There ain’t no magic or wishing or nothin’ like that. You’re too big to have nutsy thoughts like that. You’re too big to believe in fairy tales.’’

Tears rolled down Henry Temple’s face. “If you wish hard enough, Bolie!” he said, “it’ll come true. If you wish hard enough...”

Bolie had stood up and moved across the roof. Henry held out his hands to him.

“Bolie, if you wish and then believe. The whole thing is believing because if you believe it’ll stay that way.”

Bolie stood with his back to the boy and shook his head again.

“Somebody got to knock it out of you, don’t they? Somebody got to take you by the hair and rub your face in the world and give you a taste and a smell of the way things are, don’t they? He turned toward Henry. “Listen, boy,” he said, his voice crusted with misery “I’ve been wishing all my life. You understand, Henry? All my life. I got a gut ache from wishing. And all I got to show for it is a faceful of scars and a headful of memories of the hurt and the misery I’ve had to eat with and sleep with all my miserable life.”

His voice broke as he heard the sobbing intake of Henry’s breath. “You crazy kid, you,” Bolie said, his voice breaking. “Crazy, crazy, kookie kid. You tellin’ me you wished me into a knockout? You tellin’ me it was magic that got me off my back? He took a step toward Henry. “Well now you listen, boy. There ain’t no magic. No magic, Henry. I had that fight coming and going. I had it in my pocket. I was the number one out there and there ain’t no such thing as magic.”

“Bolie,” the little boy sobbed, “Bolie, if you believe, understand? You’ve got to believe. If you don’t believe, Bolie, it won’t be true. That’s the way magic works.” He took a stumbling run over to the fighter and grabbed him around the waist, burying his face against him. “Bolie, you got to believe. Please, please believe.”

“Little kook,” Bolie said to the tiny, kinky head. “Little kook, that’s what you are. How come I got mixed up with you? Ain’t I got enough trouble without getting mixed up with some dopey kid who—”

He stopped and looked down at the little boy and then he was on his knees and had suddenly swept the boy into his arms, holding him tightly, pressing his cheek against his.

“Henry,” he said softly, “I can’t believe. I’m too old and I’m too hurt to believe. I can’t, boy. I just can’t!” He held the little boy’s face in both hands and wiped away the tears with his thumbs. “Henry, there ain’t no such thing as magic. God help us both, I wish there was.”

“Bolie, you got to believe.”

“I can’t.”

“You got to, Bolie. You got to believe, or else—”

“I can’t.”

They stood there close together. Henry’s voice, a plaintive, hopeful prayer; the fighter’s, a hollow, empty rejection. The sick, thin yellow light from the bulb over the roof door held them briefly in a weak illumination and then time froze again. The light gradually changed until it was no longer on the roof. It was the white-hot orb of the ring light bathing the canvas of the roped-off area of a fight arena where a dark and bleeding fighter lay on his stomach, his face against the canvas and rosin of the ring floor. Above him a referee brought down his arm in measured sweeps.

“Eight, nine, ten.”

He swiped his hands out in opposite directions like a baseball umpire judging someone safe, then pointed to the stocky white man in purple trunks, who stood nonchalantly in the neutral corner, waiting for the victory that he knew was his to be made official. The referee came to him, raised his right arm, and he was then engulfed by handlers, his manager, and other people who swarmed in over the ropes.

Mizell walked tiredly to Bolie, who had just risen to his hands and knees like a blind, groping animal. Bolie allowed Mizell to help him to his feet and took the traditional, beaten, stiff-legged walk back to his corner.

He did not hear the crowd nor see the light. He did not hear the voice on the loudspeaker announce, “The winner by a knock out, one minute, thirteen seconds of the fourth round, Jerry Corrigan.”

Another cascade of cheers rippled over the room and next thing Bolie knew he was standing on his feet in street clothes with Joe Mizell opening the door for him. He looked down at the misshapen little handler and forced a grin.

“How many of them was there?” he said, with a crooked smile.

“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.

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 lunch, 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.