Somebody Owes Me Money

27

Abbie was shaking my shoulder and saying, “Chet?”

“Boy,” I said. I struggled to sit up. “Wow,” I said.

“Are you all right?”

“I think my chassis’s out of alignment.” With the help of Abbie and a handy wall I dragged myself to my feet.

“You ought to be more careful,” she said. “You scared me half to death.”

“Thoughtless of me,” I said. I moved all my limbs and turned my head back and forth. Everything seemed to work all right.

“Can you run?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said, and staggered up the stairs.

“Not that way!” she shouted. “That’s the way we came from!”

“I know it. Buzz for the elevator.”

I tottered to the top of the stairs and slammed the door. There was a bolt, which I threw home, and then I blundered back down again, this time managing to stay on my feet.

The elevator wasn’t there yet. “It was on one,” Abbie said. She squinted at the little dial by the call button. “Just passing four.”

Somebody thudded on the door up there.

“I wonder if they’ll shoot the lock off,” I said, looking up, and a gun went bang and the door went ngngngngngn but didn’t open.

The elevator oozed into view. We jumped in, I pushed the first-floor button, and the roof door took another bullet. We began to drift leisurely down the elevator shaft.

I said, “Where’s your car?”

“In a lot on 48th Street. But I don’t have the ticket. I don’t have my purse. I don’t have anything.”

I patted my behind. Yes, I had my wallet. I was wearing my own clothes, the only problem being that I wasn’t wearing enough of them. I said, “We’ll just have to hope they remember you.”

“It was a huge lot,” she said, “with a hundred guys working there. They won’t remember me, and I don’t have any identification.”

The elevator inched past three. I said, “We have to have a car. We can’t run around the streets. If they don’t get us, the cold will.”

“I know,” she said. “Do you suppose they all ran out? Maybe we could sneak back into the apartment and get our things.”

“Abbie,” I said, “you aren’t thinking.”

“I guess that was kind of fantasizing, wasn’t it?” she said.

The second floor went by, lingeringly.

I stared at the elevator door. “We’ve got to have a car,” I said. I knew it was up to me. Time to start being the resourceful hero.

The elevator door opened. First floor, everybody out.

Abbie said, “What are we going to do, Chet?”

She was counting on me. I looked at her and said, “We’re going to run. Think later.”

“Listen!”

I heard it. Feet pounding down the stairwell. I grabbed Abbie’s hand and we ran.

Standing in the elevator we’d had a chance to cool off a bit, and when we hit the outside air with our clothing damp from perspiration we both staggered at the impact of the cold. “Oh, boy!” I shouted.

“H-h-h-h-h,” Abbie said.

I looked down to the right, just as three guys on the sidewalk in front of Tommy’s building saw us and started frantically pointing us out to each other. Any minute now they were going to stop pointing and start running. I turned and ran the other way, Abbie’s hand still clutched in mine, Abbie herself trailing along somewhere in my wake like a water skier.

I got to Ninth Avenue, and took a second to look back. The three on the sidewalk were just passing the building we’d come out of, and the rest of them were boiling out that building now. Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.

I turned left, for two carefully-thought-out reasons. First, it didn’t involve crossing any streets. Second, it got me out of their sight faster. Which is to say I was running blind.

People in New York never pay any attention to anything. The middle of January, two coatless, hatless people go running pellmell up Ninth Avenue at five o’clock in the afternoon, the sidewalk full of kids walking around and fat women talking to each other and guys in cloth hats waiting for buses, and I doubt any one of them gave us more than a passing glance. Maybe some kid, more impressionable than most, said to some other kid, “Hey, look at them nuts,” but that would have been about the extent of the excitement we caused.

I was running in a straight line now, so when I got to the corner of 47th Street, I ignored my carefully-thought-out reasons from before and just went straight ahead across the street. I also ignored whether the traffic light was red or green, and was therefore nearly run down by an off-duty cab. He slammed on his brakes, I slammed on his hood, and Abbie piled on me from behind.

The cabby rolled his window down and stuck his head out and said, “Whatsa matter witchoo? Wyncha watch where you’re goin?”

I’d been in the wrong, of course, but I knew better than to admit it. I was about to go into my automatic offensive response when I looked again and realized I recognized the cab. Not the driver, the cab. It was one I’d driven, it belonged to the V. S. Goth Service Corporation.

Of course! A cab!

I said, “Take us to—”

“Don’tcha see the sign, dummy?” He leaned out farther to stick an arm up and point at it.

“You’re going to Eleventh Avenue and 65th Street, dummy,” I told him, “and so are we.” I ran around his head and pulled open the rear door. Half a dozen slightly overweight hoods were puffing away at full steam in the middle of the block, a sight that even some New Yorkers couldn’t resist looking at.

Abbie jumped into the cab and I jumped in after her. The cabby said, “Them guys friends of yours?”

“We’re eloping,” I said. “Those are her brothers. Let’s go.”

He looked at the track team again, made a how-about-that? face, and we finally got moving.

It took him half a block to start talking, and then he said, “Don’t do it.”

I looked at the back of his head. “Don’t do what?”

“Don’t get married,” he said. “I got married, and what did it get me?”

“You got to be careful who you marry,” I said.

He glared at me in the rear-view mirror.

“You making cracks about my wife?”

That’s the kind of conversation you can’t win. I said, “No,” and looked out the window.

We were stopped by the light at Tenth Avenue, of course. It has been my experience in my six years as a cabdriver that I would say I have spent four and a half of those years sitting in front of red lights. I looked out the back window, and here they came, just turning the corner way back at the other end of the block, running full tilt, arms pumping, ties whipping out behind them, jackets open. Most of them were just in suits, only two wearing overcoats, and if they ever slowed down they were going to be mighty cold.

The light turned green and we crossed Tenth Avenue and went to Eleventh Avenue, where the light was red. “You folks left without your coats,” the cabby pointed out. He’d apparently decided to forgive my slur against his wife.

“We were in a hurry,” I said.

“You must be elopin’ to Miami.”

“That’s right,” Abbie said, and grinned at me, and reached over to squeeze my hand.

“Don’t I wish I was there right now,” the cabby said, and the light turned green. We made our right and went one block to 48th Street, where the light was red. “You folks flyin?”

“You bet we are,” Abbie said.

“That’s the only way to go,” he said. “Right? Right?”

“Right,” Abbie said.

The light turned green. We made eight blocks, and at 56th Street got stopped by another light. All in all it took us three greens to get to 65th Street, and it turned out we had us a talkative driver. By the time we got where we were going he’d told us about his two airplane rides, about Miami, and about his brother-in-law’s car-wash operation in Long Island City which he could have had a half interest in only it had been during New York’s water crisis and he’d figured it was too dangerous to invest in something that used water and now he could kick himself.

I could have kicked him, too. My own feeling when driving a cab is that the customer should decide if he wants to hold a conversation or not. If somebody says something to me, I respond. But I don’t push conversations on people who don’t want conversations.

Anyway, we finally got to the garage, at which point it occurred to him to ask, “Why come here? Don’t you want the West Side terminal?”

“We’ve got to get married first,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. At the rate his mind turned over, it should be three or four days before it occurred to him there weren’t any churches or anything around here.

I paid him, and gave him a good tip because I want people to give me good tips — but no more horses, please — and we got out into the cold. He drove on into the garage, and I said to Abbie, “See that gas station down there? Wait in the office in there. I’ll pick you up in a couple minutes.”

“What are you going to do?” Her teeth were chattering.

“Get a car,” I said.

“You’re going to steal a cab?”

“What steal? I’m an employee here, I’m going to sign one out.”

“Oh,” she said, and smiled in wonderment. “Of course. How easy.”

“Go get indoors,” I said. “You’re turning blue.”

“Thank God I’m wearing my boots,” she said, and turned and hurried away. I watched her go, and I hoped for her sake the boots went up to her waist, because the skirt was barely long enough to reach her legs.

I went on into the garage and talked to the dispatcher. He had a couple of remarks about my not having called in the last three or four days, but there’s a lot of guys less dependable than me and he knew it, so I didn’t say anything and he didn’t keep it up. I signed out a car and while I was walking across the floor to get it, here came the cabby we’d just ridden with, bringing his time sheet into the office.

He stared at me. “Where’s your girl?”

“The hell with her,” I said. “I don’t like her family.”

I felt him staring at me as I walked on.