Hush Money by Robert B. Parker Page A

Both genders dressed for business, carrying briefcases, paying no attention to each other, too busy to flirt, or too tired, or it might mess their hair.
    “I was about fifteen,” Hawk said, “making a living as a mugger. Used to go to the Joe Louis gym to use the bathroom. Joe Louis didn’t have anything to do with it, of course, but half the black boxing clubs in the country were using his name. Got so I’d hang around in there, watch the fighters. Sometimes when there wasn’t much going on they’d let me hit the bag. I figured if I was going to make a living beating people up, I might as well practice. I got good at it. Make the body bag jump, make the speed bag dance. Had trouble in those days with that little jeeter bag, but even some of the fighters had trouble with that.”
    “I still have troubles with that,” I said.
    Hawk smiled.
    “Naw, you don’t,” he said. “Neither one of us do. So one day Bobby Nevins comes in, sees me working on the bag, asks me have I got a manager? I say no. He says ‘You ever fight in the ring?’ I say no. So he says, ‘You want to try it?’ And since I been making a living beating people up I figure why not? So I say sure, and he puts me in with some tall skinny Puerto Rican guy probably don’t weigh more than a hundred fifty pounds. And I’m thinking how smart Bobby is to start me off easy, so I lace ‘em on and get in the ring and of course the guy cleans my clock.”
    “Knowing how helps,” I said.
    “It do. But Bobby sees something he likes and he takes me on, and when he finds out I’m not living anywhere special he takes me in, and I learn to fight and maybe along the way to use a fork when I’m eating. Stuff like that. Robinson was a little kid then, maybe twelve, and his mother kept him away from the fighters, so I see him, but I don’t know him much. So one day Bobby say to me, ‘I think you need to get a little schooling.’ And I say why, I gonna reason with people in the ring? And Bobby say, ‘You should take an English class and a math class.’ And pretty soon I’m in night school at the community college. And my English professor is a brother name of Dennis Crawford. Young guy maybe four, five years older than me. He talk like Walter Cronkite, and he wear horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets and English brogues and all around, he about the smartest brother I ever saw. I never saw a black man with an education. Bobby’s wife was a schoolteacher, but she didn’t spend no time with the fighters so I didn’t really know her either, and besides she was a woman. So we reading Othello and we reading Invisible Man and we discussing them and Professor Crawford, he smarter than the white boys and even the white girls in the class. Never saw nothing like it.”
    Hawk tilted the beer bottle back and drank some more and held it up to the light and looked to see how much was left. I stayed quiet. Then he took another swallow and put the bottle down.
    “‘Course I never say nothing in class. Those days I only know six words if you count mother fucker as two. But I listened. One day after class Professor Crawford asks me to come to his office.”
    Hawk had turned so he was staring out at the now empty harbor where the ocean moved in its directionless way.
    “When I get there he say he notice me in class and don’t think I’m your usual night school student and he ask what I do. And I tell him I’m a fighter and he says well tell me a little about that, so I do.”
    I was as still as I was able to be and still breathe. The air in the room seemed to have gotten suddenly very dense. I wanted to drink some beer but I didn’t want to move. Hawk swung slowly around and let his feet rest on the floor.
    “And while I’m telling him, he hit on me,” Hawk said with no discernible change in his voice.
    “Shit,” I said.
    “I got up and left. Never went back to his class again. Never told nobody about it.”
    “Professor Crawford get caught up in the black