The Heat's on

16

Kid Blackie was a short black man with a face like a monkey’s and a shining bald head. His torso was naked in the dim-lit stinking heat of the small dirty gym. Big flopping breasts shaped like gourds with rusty-looking teats as big as a woman’s hung down to his navel. His flabby muscles seemed about to drop from the bones and his bay window was big enough to give birth to quintuplets.

He had his thumbs hooked in frayed suspenders holding up baggy-seated pants that looked loaded, and was chewing the stub of a cigar in the corner of his mouth, as he watched two young chocolate-skinned middleweights work out on the greasy square of canvas.

“Wait a minute, Ed,” he said and blew on a whistle that hung from a string about his neck.

The boys stopped punching and stared at him.

He climbed into the ring and squared off with one of the boys.

“Like this,” he said, the cigar butt wobbling in the corner of his mouth, and jabbed a left at the boy’s face.

When the boy’s guard flew up automatically, he crossed a right to the boy’s stomach, bringing it down. The boy’s right shoulder dropped as he started a looping right hook. Kid Blackie hooked a left to the boy’s jaw so fast the boy never saw it. The boy sat down, looking dazed.

Kid Blackie turned to the other boy. “You seen how I done it?”

The boy nodded mutely.

“You try it.”

The boy jabbed with his left. Kid Blackie went under it and left-hooked him in the stomach. The boy bent in slightly, dropping his left arm, and tried to cross with his right. But he wasn’t fast enough. Kid Blackie threw an overhand right to his jaw and knocked him unconscious.

He spat frayed tobacco to the canvas and climbed down out of the ring. His old glassy brown eyes looked sad.

“These boys that turn up nowadays,” he bemoaned. “If they was chicks they’d never get hatched.”

Kid Blackie had been lightweight champion of the world at one time. Rumor had it that he had squandered over a million dollars on white women and Cadillacs. He didn’t look as though he regretted it.

“All old people say the same thing,” Coffin Ed dissented. “There’re always some good and some bad. You don’t expect everybody to be like you.”

“Maybe you’re right.” He watched the two boys helping one another up. “What’s on your ass?”

“I’m looking for Pinky.”

Kid Blackie scratched his bald head. “That’s funny. Some bitch was just in here looking for him too. Cat-eyed woman. Ain’t been more’n ten minutes ago.”

Coffin Ed tensed and his tic started jumping.

“By herself?”

Kid Blackie wasn’t looking directly at him, but he didn’t miss the sudden change.

“Yeah,” he said. “She come up by herself but I got curious. Only reason for a bitch like her be looking for Pinky would be to shoot him, so when she left I looked out the window. She got in a car with two white jokers — looked like mobsters.” He let it go at that.

Coffin Ed felt his heart constrict and his breath turned rock-hard in his lungs. I’m on your tail now, you mother-rapers, he thought. Pain flooded his head like a sudden hemorrhage and his tic went spasmodic. He tried to control his voice.

“Get a look at ’em?”

“Not much. Come on, let’s take a gander. Maybe they’re still hanging around.”

They walked to the grimy flyspecked window and looked down on 116th Street.

“Had a gray Buick — little one,” Kid Blackie added.

Their gazes searched the parked cars lining the curbs.

The sun was on the south side and the street lay in shadow. Colored people dressed for the heat milled about on the wide sidewalks, shiny black faces peering from beneath a variety of headgear, black arms protruding from light cotton fabrics.

A two-wheel pushcart loaded with slices of watermelon packed in ice and covered with wet gunnysacks was parked behind an empty ice truck. A hand-lettered sign on one side read: SUGAR TOOF GORGIA MELON, with the S turned around. Water dripped from the bottom.

Farther down an old man with a smaller pushcart was selling glasses of flavored ice. The varicolored bottles stood in a rack about a block of ice covered with wet newspaper. Fronting on the sidewalk behind it was an open hot-dog counter with big glass bottles of orange-flavored ice water and a grill covered with franks like soldiers on parade.

Venetian blinds covered the windows of the bars. Signboards in the lobby of a movie theater depicted gangsters never seen on land or sea shooting it out with blasting rods. On the street in front ot it, skinny black children wearing loincloths romped in a stream of water gushing from a fire hydrant.

Coffin Ed had left the dog in his Plymouth and she had her head out of the window, panting. A crowd had collected to stare at her. They kept a respectful distance despite her muzzle.

One little boy was holding up his mongrel in his arms to see the big dog. The mongrel didn’t like that business.

There was no sign of a gray Buick.

Kid Blackie shook his head. “They musta gone.”

The distant blaring of a jukebox came from a bar somewhere below. A bottle fly buzzed against the grimy windowpane.

“You didn’t get a look at ’em?” Coffin Ed asked finally, trying to keep the disappointment from his voice.

“I didn’t see ’em too good,” Kid Blackie confessed. “The mugs looked like mugs look anywhere. One looked sort of bony, white-faced, like he was sick, a hopheaded-looking character. Other was a fatty, too light to be a greaser, maybe a Swede. Both of ’em was wearing straw hats and smoked glasses. That mean anything to you?”

“They sound like the ones who sapped me and got Digger.”

Kid Blackie clicked his tongue. “Too bad about Digger. Think he’ll make it?”

There wasn’t much sympathy in his voice, but Coffin Ed understood it. Kid Blackie liked Digger, but he was so old he was glad it was somebody else dying and not himself.

“Can’t tell ’til the deal’s down,” he said.

“Wish I could help you. The woman was dressed sharp, had on a light green suit-”

“I know her.”

“Well, that’s all I seen.”

“Every little bit helps. You ain’t seen Pinky?”

“Not since three days ago. What you think these mobsters want with him?”

“Same as me.”

Kid Blackie looked at Coffin Ed’s face through the corners of his eyes and dropped it.

“Too bad about that big ape,” he said. “He might have made the grade if it wasn’t for his skin.”

“What’s the matter with his skin?” Coffin Ed asked absently. He was thinking of the janitor’s wife, trying to figure this new angle.

“Bruises too easily,” Kid Blackie said. “Touch him with a feather and he’ll turn black-and-blue. In the ring it always looks like he’s getting beat to death when he ain’t even hurt. I remember once the ref stopped the fight and Pinky wasn’t even-”

“I ain’t got much time, Kid,” Coffin Ed cut him off. “You got any idea where I can find him?”

Kid Blackie scratched his shiny bald head. “Well, he’s got a pad somewhere on the Riverside Drive.”

“I know that, but he’s on the lam.”

“Yeah? In that case I couldn’t say.” Kid Blackie screwed up his eyes and gave Coffin Ed a tentative look. “A man can’t ask you no questions, can he?”

“It ain’t that,” Coffin Ed said. “I just ain’t got time to answer.”

“Well, I heered he got an aunt up in the Bronx somewheres,” Kid Blackie volunteered. “Called Sister Heavenly. You ever heered of her?”

Coffin Ed was thinking. “Yeah, once or twice. But I’ve never seen her.”

“From the stone age they say. She got a faith healing pitch. Cover-up they say.”

“For what?”

“Pushing H they say.”

Inside of his blinding headache Coffin Ed’s thoughts were jumping like ants frying on a red-hot stove. Whichever way it went, it came back to H, he was thinking.

“Has she got a temple?” he asked.

“I couldn’t say.” Kid Blackie shook his head. “Pinky says she’s got a pisspot full of money but she wouldn’t give him the sweat off her ass. She must got some kind of joint.”

“Know whereabouts it’s at?”

“I couldn’t say. Somewheres in the sticks.”

“That don’t help much. There’re sticks all over the Bronx.”

Kid Blackie decided finally to give up on the cigar butt. He spit it to the floor and carefully picked the shreds from his snaggle-tooth mouth.

“Who might know is Daddy Haddy,” he said. “You know where he’s at?”

“Yeah,” Coffin Ed said, turning about to leave. “See you.”

“Don’t tell him I told you.”

“I won’t.”

All the time he was there Kid Blackie had been looking him over covertly. His wise old eyes hadn’t missed a thing. He had made the two guns and the sap and he figured they weren’t all.

He let Coffin Ed reach the head of the staircase, then called, “Wait a minute. You got some blood on your shirt cuff.”

He was curious to know whose blood it was but it was too risky to ask outright.

Coffin Ed didn’t even look at his cuff; he didn’t stop walking; he didn’t look around. “Yeah,” he said. “And there’s going to be some more.”