“Do you know him?” she said. “Ernie Pass, the prize fighter?”
“Yes, I know him,” Colley said, “I once broke his head.”
He checked with the guys the next day, and they all told him it was true; she was engaged to Ernie, they planned to get married in the spring. Colley said, “That’s very interesting to know,” and he went to the candy store and looked up her phone number and called her up. Her mother told him she was at work. He asked where she worked, and Mrs. Brufani said in the bank on Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue. Colley looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. When Terry came out of the bank at three, he was waiting for her on the sidewalk. That night he took her to bed with him in a motel on the Post Road, up past Parkchester. She wasn’t a virgin, he didn’t know anybody who was a virgin. She told him Ernie would kill them both if he found out.
He didn’t wait for Ernie to find out. In Colley’s experience, the guy who picked up the marbles was the guy who made the first move. You went into a grocery store to rob the place, you didn’t wait for the guy behind the counter to pull out a shotgun. You stuck the pistol in his face, you told him shut up or he was dead. That was the way he’d done it the first time, and that was the way he was still doing it. The first place he’d held up was a pawnshop on Tremont Avenue. He went in there thinking he would get himself a good camera. This was when he was nineteen. He had got off with the suspended sentence on shooting the spic in the throat, and he had met all his obligations, and the record was clean. They still had the club, but there wasn’t much bopping any more, and the younger kids were beginning to take over. By the time him and Benny and Duke and Ernie were nineteen, twenty, the younger kids were beginning to think of them as old men. Some of the guys — Jimmy Giglio and Petie Sanero — were already married. One guy, Angelo Di Santo, was doing time in Attica.
Colley decided he needed a camera, and he also decided he was going to go into a camera store and shove a gun in the man’s face and steal the camera. Then he decided instead he would go in a pawnshop, and he picked the one on Tremont Avenue. When he got inside there, he told the man to shut up, this was a stickup, but for some reason he didn’t ask for a camera, he instead asked the man to give him all the money in the cash register. He came away from the job with eight hundred dollars and some change. He never knew why he’d done that first robbery, or why he continued sticking up places.
When they had the club, they occasionally shook down kids for nickels and dimes, and of course they were always shoplifting in this or that store. But Di Santo was the only guy in the club who had really been into it, you know, into real crime. Not bullshit stuff like pushing dope or running a stable of hookers or taking numbers bets, like Jimmy was doing even though he was already married. Di Santo had been doing burglaries before he got busted and sent to Attica. What they got him for was burglary one, he was going to be up there in Attica a long, long time. Colley often tried to remember how he’d felt that day of the first robbery, what had gone through his head before he’d done it. His motivation, you know. All he could remember was that he really wanted a camera bad. And he’d decided to steal one. And he’d decided to use a gun. But then, why had he picked a pawnshop instead of a camera store? And why had he taken money instead of a camera? He couldn’t figure it out. He never could figure it out.
The thing with Ernie Pass came to a head when Ernie got back from some town upstate where he was on a double bill with a black fighter named Tornado Jackson, who incidentally had belonged to a club named the Scorpions, which the Orioles had gone up against many times in the past. Colley didn’t wait for Ernie to come to him. He knew Ernie would have heard about him and Terry by now, so he went straight up to Ernie’s house. Mrs. Passaro was in the kitchen, standing at the stove, roasting peppers over the gas jets.
“Hey, hello, Colley,” she said. “You never come around no more.”
Mrs. Passaro said that to all the guys who used to be in the club. She took it as a personal insult that none of the guys stopped in to talk to her or have a glass of milk in her kitchen now that Ernie was a boxer and on the road all the time.
“Where’s Ernie?” Colley said.
“In his room,” Mrs. Passaro said, and gestured with her head toward the doorway leading out of the kitchen. Colley knew where Ernie’s room was; when they were kids he’d go up there early in the morning, wake Ernie up, then both of them would go around getting all the other guys.
Ernie was awake now and listening to the radio. This was maybe ten o’clock in the morning, a shaft of sunlight was coming through the window next to Ernie’s bed. There were pictures of him all over the wall, boxing pictures — Ernie with his gloved left hand tucked under his chin, right hand cocked to deliver the knockout punch, Ernie posing with the big bag, Ernie with his arm around the guy who was his manager, Jew named Oscar Holmes, who had changed it from Horowitz. There were also three-sheets on the wall, printed in red and blue, announcing the bill wherever Ernie happened to be fighting. The three-sheet in the center of all the others announced Ernie at the very bottom of the bill in St. Nicholas Arena. That was probably the biggest fight he’d ever had. He’d lost it, incidentally.
Colley got straight to the point. “Ernie,” he said, “I want to tell you this before you hear it from any—”
“I already heard it,” Ernie said.
“About me and...?”
“You’re doing me a favor,” Ernie said. “You’re welcome to her. I been racking my brain trying to figure how I could ditch her. I met this girl in Albany, I’ve been going with her for three months now.”
“Well, okay then,” Colley said.
He’d been expecting trouble, but everything was cool. He never did find out whether Ernie really did have a girl in Albany, or whether he was just shining it on, trying to avoid trouble himself. Either way, Terry was now officially his. It was just like taking money from some guy’s cash register. Before you stole it, the money was his; after that, it became yours. Terry became his the morning he went up to Ernie’s house; that made it official. On the way out, Mrs. Passaro said, “You want some chocolate pudding? I made some nice chocolate pudding.”
He sat down at the kitchen table and had some chocolate pudding. From Ernie’s room, he could hear the radio going. He had the feeling something was ending that day.
The black girl sitting in the booth across the way from them came over to the table, interrupting Terry’s story about the night they were trapped on the Ferris wheel. She whispered a few words to Terry, and Terry nodded, and the black girl went back to sit with the two black dudes in the booth.
“I have to go now,” Terry said, putting her cigarettes in her bag, and closing the bag, and sliding out of the booth. “It was nice seeing you again. Say hello to your mother for me, will you?”
“Hey, where you going?” Colley said.
“Thanks for the drinks,” Terry said, and went over to the other booth.
“Hey!” Colley said.