Theodore “Tally” Chambers was twenty-nine years old. I knew that from Mardi’s research. His state of health made him look older, while his state of mind was reminiscent of a much younger man. I had him on my hook, but this didn’t offer me any comfort. Usually, when things went too easily something was bound to go wrong.
“I got to get to my house, man,” he told me and then he coughed some more.
“In Vinegar Hill?” Mardi’s research had been thorough.
“Yeah,” he said behind big reddish-brown eyes.
I hailed a cab and we piled in. Tally gave the driver his address after we both closed our doors.
“I don’t go to Brooklyn,” the foreign white man told us.
I smiled, thinking that this trouble was just the speed bump I needed.
“We’re not getting out of this car until you stop in front of the address my friend gave you.”
“I don’t know how to get there,” the middle-aged driver said.
“You take the Brooklyn Bridge—” Tally started saying.
“I’m not going!”
“Oh yes you are, my friend,” I said calmly. “Because if you don’t we’re gonna sit back here all day long.”
The man turned around in his seat, showing us a white wood baton that was about two feet long. Tally reached for the door but I laid a hand on his forearm and smiled for our mustachioed driver.
“Listen to me, brother,” I said in a modulated but still threatening voice. “I have been in the ring my whole fuckin’ life. Hit me with that stick and I will beat you until your own brother will not know your face.”
I meant what I said, the driver could tell. He turned around and shifted the car into drive.
“Which way?” he asked.
On the way over the bridge I began the interrogation.
“Have you ever heard that Cyril was violent or threatening toward Chrystal?” I asked.
“Naw, man. But, you know, I never had much to do with him. Only time we evah really spoke was at the weddin’, an’ even then it was like he wasn’t even talkin’ to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was just a whole bunch’a words. He talked but didn’t listen, then moved on like I didn’t make no difference at all.”
“So you didn’t like him?”
“I’m not married to the mothahfuckah,” he said, raising his voice.
The driver looked up nervously into the rearview mirror.
The bark got Tally coughing again.
“Was Shawna close to him?” I asked after he got his lungs under control.
“Shawna don’t care ’bout nobody, man. That’s why I wondered why she send you to me.”
This brotherly revelation renewed my speculations about Shawna’s motives.
“She told me she cared,” I said. “She gave me the money for your bond.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I bet.”
There was something behind this private wager but it would take longer than a taxi ride to tease it out.
We made it to Brooklyn and Tally guided our reluctant driver through a labyrinthine journey to a house in a run-down neighborhood.
When we got out I gave the driver a fifty and said, “Keep the change.”
“Fuck you, nigger,” he said to me before hitting the gas.
I grinned, watching the yellow cab fishtail down the street. The man was Eastern European and unschooled in the ways of American racism. He used that word to hurt me and express his fear and resentment. But in truth it was I who had oppressed him.
There is no balance between men unless everything around them is even. My father used to say those words to me. On that ramshackle street in Brooklyn I began to understand their meaning.
“Come on, Mr. McGill,” Tally said at my back.
He was walking down a lane between two six-story apartment buildings. I followed until we got to a little cove where a small tarpaper dwelling was nestled like a dying rat.
“Hey, asshole!” a voice called.
I glanced to my left and saw two good-sized young black men moving toward us. They were both wearing black leather jackets and blue jeans — uniforms of the street. Tally took a step back.
“So here’s the rub,” I said out loud.
“What you say, mothahfuckah?” the fatter of the two thugs said.
I grinned broadly.
14
Overconfidence killed the cat, dog, pouncing lion, and the entire global alliance of the Axis powers. That is to say, when two men who have the strength to stand upright get in your face you have to act fast and with certainty.
I took a step toward them, holding out my right hand as if I expected somebody to shake it. The gesture was meant to say that we were all brothers there in the rat’s-nest cove behind the dirty brick buildings. The smaller of the two men was five inches taller and forty pounds heavier than I. That put him well over two hundred pounds. I could see that it wasn’t all fat. He tried to stiff-arm me when I got close enough. I lowered down into a squat and hit him with a left hook to the gut that made him whimper. Instantly, with my right hand, now a fist, I slammed the jaw of Shorty’s jumbo partner. He would have hit the ground if I hadn’t followed up with six or seven punches that both debilitated him and kept him standing upright. Then I turned back to the whimperer and threw a long right hand.
That was a mistake.
Sometimes I forget that you are not compelled to follow the rules of boxing when in the street. The second man stood back and pushed against my shoulders. Already off balance, I fell to the ground. Even though he was probably suffering from a broken rib or two, the guy tried to kick me in the head. I rolled onto my left shoulder, grabbed his ankle, and yanked. Falling, he cried out again. I climbed up his prone body, throwing punches at anything flesh. I connected with half a dozen punches and got to my feet just in time to duck under a fist aimed at my head by Jumbo. The fact that he was still conscious meant that he would have made a good specimen for the sweet science. But he was raw, untrained.
We traded blows for all of ninety seconds, me landing and him not. When it was over he’d lost a few teeth, broken his right hand against a brick wall, and had blood streaming from three cracks in his face.
I stood back and gestured at the two men; the larger one was down on one knee and Shorty was lying on his side, wondering how to breathe right.
The gesture said that if they wanted more I had it for them.
Working together, they managed to get to their feet and stumble away.
To my surprise Tally had not fled. He hadn’t helped in the fight, but he was standing in front of the shack with a fist-sized rock in either hand.
“You were waiting for me to soften them up?” I asked the frightened young man.
Tremors traveled from his shoulders down into his hands. He showed his teeth in a rictus that might have been anything from a laugh to the beginnings of a heart attack.
“Shall we go inside?” I said.
He looked back the way his attackers had gone.
“They’ll need medical help before coming back here,” I said. “You think they might send some friends?”
He shook his head and then gazed at me with those unhealthy orbs.
Dropping the stones, he said, “You know how to fight.”
“Comes in handy in back alleys and jail pens.”
Tally pulled a key from his pocket and turned toward the entrance. He went through the rough-hewn door into a dwelling that was most likely a temporary workman’s shed when it was first thrown up.
It was a medium-sized room with no windows, a cot against one wall, and a huge plank table against another. There were clothes on the floor and comic books strewn around. Taped and tacked up on the walls were blue-lined sheets of notebook paper that had drawings of faces on them. Lots of native talent with little follow-through. The doodlings of a talented but hyperactive mind that the teachers never got through to — if they ever tried.