Somebody Owes Me Money

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.