Billy Phelan's Greatest Game Page 13

  “I don’t know what the hell to do with this pot,” Nick was saying as they reentered the cellar. He was still picking quarters off the floor.

  “Give it to Billy,” Morrie said. “He deserves it.”

  “You’re a genuine hero,” Martin said to Billy. “Like the quarterback who makes the touchdown with a broken leg. There’s a heroic edge to such behavior. You think bullets don’t kill the single-minded.”

  “Weird day,” Billy said. “I took a knife away from a looney in the Grand Lunch a few hours ago.”

  The others stopped talking.

  “This kid was poking near my belly,” and Billy showed them and told them about the coffee game.

  “But you had a weapon in the coffee,” Martin said. “Tonight you had nothing. You know a twenty-two slug can damage you just as permanently as five rounds from a machine gun. Or is your education lacking in this?”

  “I didn’t think like that,” Billy said. “I just wasn’t ready to hand over a night’s work to that drippy little bastard. His gun didn’t even look real. Looked like a handful of candy. Like one of them popguns my nephew has that shoots corks. Worst I’m gonna get is a cork in the ear, that’s how it went. But the money counted, Martin. I owe people, and I was hot for that pot, too. I had kings and nines, ready to fill up.”

  “Billy should get a chunk of that pot, Nick,” Morrie said.

  “He got two handfuls,” Nick said.

  “That was his own dough going back home,” Morrie said. “What about the rest? And Bud ought to get something. Without them guys, I’d have personally lost one hell of a bundle.”

  “Everybody oughta split the pot,” Lemon said. “Nobody had a winning hand.”

  “Especially you,” Footers said.

  “You folded, Lemon, forget it,” Morrie said.

  “Fuck you guys,” Lemon said.

  “Why you gommy, stupid shit,” Morrie said. “You might be dead if it wasn’t for Billy and Bud. Your head is up your ass.”

  “While it’s up there, Lemon,” Footers said, “see if you can see Judge Crater anywhere. He’s been gone a long time.”

  “The only three had the power in that last hand,” said Morrie, “was Billy, me, and you, Nick. Everybody else was out of it. So it’s a three-way split. I say Billy gets half my share and Bud the other half.”

  “I got enough,” Billy said.

  “I’ll take it,” said Bud.

  “It’s about forty apiece, what’s left, three ways. One-twenty and some silver here.” Nick counted out the split, forty to each, and pocketed his own share.

  “You really keeping your whole forty, Nick?” Morrie asked, divvying his share between Billy and Bud. “After what those boys did for you and your joint?”

  “Whataya got in mind now?”

  “The house buys them steaks at Becker’s.”

  “I don’t fight that,” Billy said.

  “I ate,” Nick said.

  “So eat again, or send money.”

  Nick snapped a five on the table to Morrie, who looked at it, looked at Nick, didn’t pick it up. Nick peeled off another five.

  “I give ten to the meal. Eat up. But is the game dead here? What the hell, everybody gonna eat? Nobody gonna play cards?”

  “Dead for me,” Morrie said, picking up the fivers. And clearly, Billy and Martin were pointed elsewhere when Nick took a good look, and Footers was drawing himself another beer.

  “I do believe I’ll pass, Nick, me boy,” Footers said. “That last one was a tough act to follow.”

  “I’m still playing,” Lemon said, sitting alone at the table.

  “You’re playing with yourself,” Footers said. “As usual.”

  “Tomorrow night, nine-thirty,” Nick said. “Same time, same station.”

  “Steak time, boys,” Morrie said.

  Billy found Nick’s toilet and pissed before they left. While the old beer sudsed up in the bowl, he consolidated his cash. Out of the coat pocket came the handfuls of bills. He counted it all. Nice. He’d pulled more out of the pot than he put in. He wrapped it all around the rest of the wad. He still needed $275 to pay off Martin, his bankroll now up to $514.

  It mounts up. No question about that. Put your mind to it and it mounts up.

  No man who wore socks in Albany felt better in the nighttime than Billy Phelan, walking with a couple of pals along his own Broadway from Nick’s card game to Union Station to get the papers, including the paper that was going to make him famous tonight. Maybe he feels so good that he’s getting a little crazy about not being afraid. Martin was right. A .22 in the eye gives you a hell of a headache.

  But now Billy looks around and sees this Broadway of his and knows he’s not crazy, because he knows it all and it all makes sense. He has known it this way since 1913 when he was six and his father took him in the rowboat and they rowed down the middle of the street. The Hudson had backed up over its banks and they were rowing down to Keeler’s Hotel to rescue his Uncle Peter, who had had a fight with Billy’s grandmother and hadn’t been home for a month and was caught now, stranded at the hotel with the big trunk he was taking to New York, leaving Albany to work in a Manhattan publishing house. But he could not carry the trunk on his back through two and three feet of water from Keeler’s to the station. And so his brother, Francis, became the hero who would travel across the waters to the rescue. Francis put Billy in the boat at the station and right now Billy can see the spot where he stepped off the curb into that boat, where Steuben Street intersects Broadway. The water was up to the curb there, and toward State Street it became deeper and deeper.

  Billy got into the boat, one of a dozen rowing around on Broadway, and his father rowed them down the center of the street, down the canyon of buildings, wearing his cap and the heavy knit sweater with the collar that Billy remembers. Never a coat; a sweater and gloves always enough for that man. He rowed Billy half a block and then said: They’ll fix this stuff one of these days.

  I don’t want them to fix it, Billy said.

  They’ve got to, said his father, because they can’t let this kind of thing go on.

  Billy, sitting in the back of the boat like the captain, said, I hope they never fix it. Then they got the trunk and Uncle Peter, who sat with Billy on his lap, and the trunk standing up in the middle of the boat.

  A damn shame, Uncle Peter said, to put up with this, but I suppose you like it, young fellow. And Billy said he liked it better than snow. They rowed to the station, where Uncle Peter got his train and went away.

  Now 1913 was gone, too, but Billy was again gliding down Broadway in a craft of his own making, and he relished the sight. There was Albany’s river of bright white lights, the lights on in the Famous Lunch, still open, and the dark, smoky reds of Brockley’s and Becker’s neon tubes, and the tubes also shaping the point over the door of the American Hotel, and the window of Louie’s pool room lit up, where somebody was still getting some action, and the light on in the Waldorf restaurant, where the pimps worked out of and where you could get a baked apple right now if you needed one, and the lights of the Cadillac Cafeteria with the pretty great custard pie, and the lights on in the upper rooms of the Cadillac Hotel, where the Greek card game was going on and where Broadway Frances was probably turning a customer upside down and inside out, pretty, tough, busy, knobby lady and Billy’s old friend, and the lights in the stairway to the Monte Carlo, where the action would go on until everybody ran out of money or steam, and the lights, too, in Chief Humphrey’s private detective office, the Chief working late on somebody’s busted marriage, and the light in Joe Mangione’s rooms upstairs over his fruit store, and light in the back of Red’s barbershop coming through a crack in the door, and Billy knew that Red and others were in there playing blackjack. And look there, too, buddy boy: The lights are on in Bill’s Magic Shop, where Bill is staying late, hoping to sell a deck of cards or a pair of dice or a punch board or a magic wand to some nighthawk in search of transport, and the lights are on, too,
in Bradt’s drugstore, where Billy does all his cundrum business.

  The lights are on because it’s not quite half past eleven on Broadway and some movies are still not out and plenty of people are waiting for the westbound train just now pulling into Union Station, bound for Cleveland and Chicago and carrying the New York papers. Lights are on in Gleason’s Grill, which was a soda fountain before beer came back, and lights are shining in the other direction, up toward Orange Street and Little Harlem, like Broadway but only a block long, with the colored crap and card games going strong now, and the Hotel Taft doing its colored business on white sheets, and Prime and Ginsburg’s candy store still open, with beer by the bottle and a game in the back and people talking politics there, McCall nigger politics, even at this hour, because that is where the power Democrats gather in Little Harlem.

  There is Helen’s Lunch, dark now, which feeds the colored hungry and Martha’s colored bar all lit up and full of all-night wild music (Play it, Fatha), where Martha wets down the colored thirsty but not just the colored. Lights burn in the Carterer Mission, where the colored bums get the same treatment and food the white bums get; and in the colored rooming house run by Mrs. Colored O’Mara, where Slopie Dodds has his rooms and where he keeps his crutches when he’s wearing his leg.

  There is light still in the triangular sign of the Railroad YMCA, keeping the lamp lit for the conductors and brakemen and engineers who terminate in Albany tonight and want a clean pillow. And next door a light is on in the Public Bath, closed now but where Billy watched his sister, Peg, learn to swim, ducked by Uncle Chick. Peg, older than Billy by eight years, was terrified when she went under. Billy was already a swimmer then, learned in the Basin and in the Hudson when Peg was afraid to go near it. Billy learned everything by himself, everything worth learning. He’d been swimming all that summer when his mother told him to stay away from the river. That August he climbed the Livingston Avenue railroad bridge and dove in—forty feet high, was it?—wearing a straw hat to protect his head. The next summer Billy dove off that trestle without the hat and came up with a fish in his mouth and a mermaid biting his big toe.

  Look down Broadway.

  Here comes a Pine Hills trolley, and here are the cars coming in to pick up the train people, and there are the Yellow cabs and the gypsies waiting for their long-distance action.

  And here comes Mike the Wop ahead of all the passengers, Mike always one of the first off the train because he knows the kids are waiting. Thirty kids anyway. Oughta be in bed, you scurvy little rug-rats. But they know Mike is due.

  Mike comes out wearing his candy butcher’s apron full of change. He has no use for change because he is thick with folding money and bound for the action at the Monte Carlo, and after that he may contract for a bit of the old interrelatedness with Broadway Frances or one of her peers, but for now he is the God Almighty Hero of the Albany rug-rats who scream: Here he comes. And of course Mike sees them as soon as he moves across the concourse of the station, the great, glorious, New York Central monument to power, and, feeling perhaps as potent as Vanderbilt, Mike expansively lets his great, pasta-filled stomach precede him toward the door to Broadway.

  He then pushes open the station’s storm door and enters onto that segment of Broadway Billy and his friends are just now approaching from the north.

  Billy pauses and says, Hey, Mike.

  Mike turns and is distracted only momentarily from the performance at hand but does say, Eh, Billy, and turns back then to the rug-rats and spins out the change onto the sidewalk under the canopy: dollar, two, five, ten, twenty. Who knows how much change Mike the Wop strews before the rug-rats of Broadway? He gives, they receive. They scramble and pick it up, take it home, and buy the milk and beer.

  A man, a grown man, a bum, a wino, a lost derelict from the sewers and gutters of elsewhere, passes and sees Mike’s generosity and reaches down for a dime.

  Get lost, bum, says Mike, and when the bum does not, Mike raises a foot and pushes the bum over, into the street, where he falls and rolls and is almost run over by a Yellow cab just leaving for Loudonville with a customer and four valises, and is also almost decapitated by the Number Four Pine Hills trolley.

  The bum rises, walks on, the dime in his grip.

  Mike supervises as the rug-rats clean up every visible nickel and penny, sift in the soft dirt of the gutters for dimes that rolled into the glop. And some will be back, scrounging at dawn for coins that eluded everyone last night. Now they take their cache and disentangle themselves from one another. They run, seethe into the night, and evaporate off Broadway.

  Billy watches them go, watches, too, as Mike crosses the street to walk beneath the brightest of the bright lights, one of the many maestros of Broadway power, now heading into the center of the garden in search of other earthly delights.

  The station was still alive with travelers, with the queers buzzing in and out of the men’s room, and the night crowd hot for the papers. When Billy had bought the Times-Union, found the ad, decoded what they all knew was there to begin with, then Martin said to Morrie: “I saw your father tonight and told him about this.”

  “Heh,” said Morrie. “What’d he say?”

  “Ah, a few things.”

  “Nothing good, bet your ass on that, the old son of a bitch.”

  “It wasn’t exactly flattering, but he was interested.”

  “Who’s that?” Billy asked, looking up from the newspaper.

  “My old man,” Morrie said.

  “He’s a son of a bitch?”

  “In spades.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Nothing. He’s just a son of a bitch. He always was.”

  Well, you got an old man, is what Billy did not say out loud.

  They stood in the rotunda, in front of the busy Union News stand with the belt-high stacks of Albany papers, the knee-high stacks of New York Newses and Daily Mirrors, the ankle-high stacks of Herald Tribs and Tmeses and Suns. Billy was translating Honey Curry’s name from the code. E-d-w-a-r-d C-u-r-r-e-y They spelled it wrong.

  “Honey Curry,” Billy said. “Where the hell is he these days?”

  Martin passed on that, and Morrie said, “Who knows where that son of a bitch is?”

  Billy laughed out loud. “Remember when they had the excursion. The Sheridan Avenue Gang. And Curry went wild and hit Healy, the cop, with a crock of butter and knocked him right off the boat and Healy goddamn near drowned. Curry lit out and wound up in Boston and Maloy met him there, downtown, and they’re cuttin’ it up and Curry’s afraid of his shadow. Then a broad walks by, a hooker, and looks at Curry and says to him, Hi ya, honey, how ya doin’? and Curry grabs her with both hands and shoves her up against a tree and shakes the hell out of her. How come you know my name? he says to her.”

  “That’s Curry,” said Morrie.

  “Where’s Maloy? I hear he’s in Jersey. Newark, is it?” Billy asked.

  “Could be,” said Morrie.

  “Goddamn,” Billy said. “That’s where I heard it.”

  “What?”

  “The rumor they were going to kidnap Bindy last summer. We were up in Tabby Bender’s saloon. You and me. Remember?”

  “No. When was that?” said Morrie.

  “Goddamn it, don’t anybody remember what I remember? We were sitting at the bar, you and me, and Maloy was with Curry, and Maloy asks if I heard about the Bindy kidnap thing and I didn’t. We talked about it, Maloy and Curry shootin’ the shit and comin’ up to the bar for drinks. And then Maloy tells me, We’re gonna take this joint. Now, you remember?”

  “I remember that,” Morrie said. “Screwballs.”

  “Right,” said Billy. “Maloy says, Get out now if you want; we’re gonna clean him out. And I told him, I’m comfortable. Clean him out. Take the pictures off the walls. What the hell do I care? And you and me kept drinking.”

  “Right,” Morrie said. “We never moved.”

  “Right, and they go out and they’re gone ten minutes
and back they come with handkerchiefs on their faces. Goddamn wouldn’t of fooled my nephew, in the same suits and hats. And they cleaned out the whole damper, every nickel. And when they were gone, I said to George Kindlon, the bartender, Let’s have a drink, George, and I pushed a fiver at him. I don’t think I can change it, he said, and we all busted up because George didn’t give a rat’s ass, he didn’t own the joint. It was Tabby’s problem, not George’s.”

  “Right,” Morrie said, “and George give us the drink free.”

  “Yeah,” said Billy. “But it was Maloy and Curry really got us the free drink.”

  “That’s it. Maloy and Curry bought that one,” and Morrie laughed.

  “Son of a bitch,” Billy said.

  “Right,” said Morrie.

  Billy pictured Morrie kicking the holdup kid. Vicious mouth on him then, really vicious, yet likable even if he used to be a pimp. He had a good girl in Marsha. Marsha Witherspoon, what the hell kind of a name is that? Billy screwed her before she even went professional. She was a bum screw. Maybe that’s why Morrie dumped her, couldn’t make a buck with her. But he didn’t take up any other whores. Morrie would always let Billy have twenty, even fifty if he needed it. Morrie was with Maloy the night Billy almost lost a match to Doc Fay two years ago. Billy played safe till his ass fell off to win that one, and when he won and had the cash, Morrie and Maloy came over and Maloy said, You didn’t have to worry, Billy. If he’d of won the game, we’d of taken the fuckin’ money away from him and give it to you anyway. Crazy Maloy. And Morrie was tickled when Maloy said that, and he told Billy, Billy, you couldn’t have lost tonight even if you threw the match. Morrie was two years older than Billy and he was a Jew and a smart Jew and Billy liked him. This was funny because Billy didn’t like or even know that many Jews. But then Billy thought of Morrie as a gambler, not as a Jew. Morrie was a hustler who knew how to make a buck. He was all right. One of Billy’s own kind.

  While Billy, Martin, and Morrie ate midnight steaks in Becker’s back room, tables for ladies but no ladies, George Quinn came in and found Billy, took him away from the table and whispered. “You hear that Charlie McCall’s been kidnapped?”