The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,56

poor people and Park Avenue types, black and white, Puerto Ricans, on the curb, holding signs and national flags and cheering the people who had been their opponents the day before in front of them at the A&P checkout, grabbing the last seat on the subway, walking like a walrus too slow on the sidewalk. Competitors for apartments, for schools, for the very air—all those hard-won and cherished animosities fell away for a few hours as they celebrated a rite of endurance and vicarious suffering. You can do it.

Tomorrow it was back to the front but this afternoon the truce held until the last runner’s last cheer.

The sun was gone. November decided to remind everybody they lived in its kingdom now, ordering up gusts. He exited the park at Sixty-Sixth, darted between two cops on horses, reflected in the cops’ sunglasses as a black minnow. The dispersing spectators thinned when he got off Central Park West.

“Hey, man! Hey, hold up a minute!”

Like many New Yorkers he had a crackhead alert system and turned, steeling himself.

The man grinned. “You know me, man—Chickie! Chickie Pete!”

So it was. Chickie Pete from Cleveland, a man now.

He didn’t run into a lot of people from the old days. One of the advantages of living up north. He saw Maxwell one time at a wrestling match at the Garden, Jimmy “Superfly” Snucka in a steel match swooping through the air like a giant bat. Maxwell was in line at one of the concessions, close enough to see the six-inch scar on his forehead that leapt over his eye socket and gouged into his jaw. And he thought he saw pigeon-toed Birdy once outside Gristedes, had that same curly golden hair, but the guy looked straight through him. As if he were in disguise, crossing the border under false documents.

“How you doing, man?” His old Nickel comrade wore a green Jets sweatshirt and red track pants that were a size too big, borrowed.

“Hanging in there. You look good.” He’d pegged the energy correctly—Chickie wasn’t a crackhead but he’d been around the block a few times, with that too-raw thing druggies have when they just get out of jail or a clinic. Here he was, slapping him five, grabbing his shoulder, and talking too loud in a performance of gregariousness. A walking flinch.

“My man!”

“Chickie Pete.”

“Where you headed?” Chickie Pete proposed a beer, drinks on him. He begged off, but Chickie Pete wouldn’t hear of it, and after the marathon perhaps a test of goodwill for his fellow man was in order. Even when the fellow man hailed from dark days.

He knew Chipp’s from his Eighty-Second Street days, before he moved uptown. Columbus was a sleepy stretch when he came to the city—everything closed by eight, tops—and then neighborhood joints opened up on the avenue, singles bars and restaurants that took reservations. Like everywhere in the city: It’s a dump and then presto, it’s the in-thing. Chipp’s was a proper saloon—bartenders who tracked your usual, decent burgers, conversation if you want it and a nod if you don’t. The only time he remembered something racial happening, this cracker in a Red Sox cap started going nigger this and nigger that and got kicked out in a hot minute.

Horizon guys liked to duck in on Mondays and Thursdays, Annie’s shifts, on account of her buy-back policy and her bosom, both generous. After he got Ace up and running, he sometimes took his employees out and brought them here, until he learned that if he drank with the guys they took liberties. Show up late or no-show with lame excuses. Or scruffy, their uniforms rumpled. He paid good money for those uniforms. Designed the logo himself.

The game was on, sound low. He and Chickie sat at the bar and the bartender placed their pints on coasters advertising Smiles, a fern bar that used to be a few blocks up the street. The bartender was new, a white guy. A redhead with a bumpkin manner. He liked to pump iron, his T-shirt sleeves as tight as a rubber on his biceps. The kind of gorilla you hire for Saturday nights if you get a crowd.

He put down a twenty even though Chickie said drinks were on him. “You used to play trumpet,” he said. Chickie was in the colored band and made a splash in the New Year’s talent show with a jazzy version of “Greensleeves,” if he recalled, a rendition that verged on bebop.

Chickie smiled at the reminder