Billy Phelan's Greatest Game Read online

  My father has something else, is what Billy thought.

  He thought of Moe among the sausages and turned around and headed toward South Pearl Street. Clinton Avenue would be fenced off by Bindy, too, but he probably wouldn’t bother with State Street or South Pearl. That wasn’t Billy’s territory. Billy might even get a game on Green Street. Dealers didn’t know him very well there. But the Cronins ran Green Street for Bindy and they knew Billy and they’d get the word around sooner or later. It’d be a game of recognition. Anybody know Billy Phelan? Throw the bum out. What it came down to was Billy could go anyplace they didn’t recognize him, anyplace he’d never been before. Or he could leave town. Or hire some of those fellows like Moe. Or go off the Hawk Street viaduct like Georgie the Syph.

  No.

  All his life Billy had put himself into trouble just to get himself out of it. Independent Billy Now, you dumb bastard, you’re so independent you can’t even get inside to get warm; and it’s getting chilly Night air, like watching the last games of the Albany baseball season. Up high in Hawkins Stadium and the wind starts to whizz a little and you came in early when it was warm and now you’re freezing your ass only the game ain’t over.

  Tommy Dyke’s Club Petite? No. Bob Parr’s Klub Eagle? No. Packy Delaney’s Parody Club? No. Big Charlie’s? No. Ames O’Brien’s place? No.

  Billy didn’t want to think about his problem in solitude. He wanted to watch something while he was thinking.

  The University Club? Dopey B-girls. Club Frolics? The emcee stinks.

  Hey. The Tally Ho on Hudson Avenue. Billy knew the Hawaiian dancer. She was Jewish. And the comic was Moonlight Brady. Billy went to St. Joseph’s school with him. He turned off Pearl toward the Tally Ho.

  Billy ordered a triple scotch and kept his hat on. The place was jammed, no elbowroom at the bar. The lights were dim while the adagio dancers did their stuff. When the lights went up Billy looked at the half-naked-lady mural among the champagne glasses and bubbles on the wall. Some singer did a medley of Irish songs, for what? It ain’t Saint Patrick’s Day. The shamrocks are growing on Broadway. Oh yeah. And the Hudson looks like the Shannon. Right. Betty Rubin, the Hawaiian dancer, had fattened up since Billy last saw her and since Billy likes ’em thin, he’ll keep his distance and check out the toe dancer.

  Billy had been chain smoking for an hour and the tip of his tongue was complaining. He wanted to punish himself for his independence. He could punish himself by going to Bindy and apologizing. Yes, you may kiss my foot. He’d already punished himself by throwing the pool match to the Doc.

  Moonlight Brady came on and told a joke about Kelly, who got drunk and fell into an open grave and when he woke up he thought it was Judgment Day and that an Irishman was the first man up. He sang a song: Don’t throw a brick at your father, you may live to regret it one day.

  Billy’s brain was speeding from the scotch, speeding and going sideways. Moonlight came out to the bar when the show ended, a chunky man with a face like a meat pie. All ears and no nose so’s you’d notice and built like a fire plug. Billy bought him a drink to have someone to talk to. He would not apologize to Bindy, he decided, but what else he would do was not clear.

  “I saw your story in the paper,” Moonlight told him.

  “What story?”

  And Moonlight told him about Martin’s column on the two-ninety-nine game and the hex. Billy took the paper out of his pocket and found the column and tried to read it but the light was bad.

  “I bowled two-ninety-nine and two-ninety-seven back to back about six years ago,” Moonlight said.

  “Is that so?”

  “Damndest thing. I was in Baltimore and just got red hot.”

  Billy smiled and bought Moonlight another drink. He was the greatest liar Billy ever knew. You wouldn’t trust him if he just came out of Purgatory. He dove into Lake George one day and found two corpses. He put a rope around his chest and swam across Crooked Lake pulling three girls in a rowboat. He was sitting at a table with Texas Guinan and Billy Rose the night Rose wrote the words to “Happy Days and Lonely Nights.” He gave Bix Beiderbecke’s old trumpet to Clara Bow, and she was such a Bix fan she went to the men’s room with Moonlight and he screwed her on the sink. He pimped once for John Barrymore in Miami and got him two broads and a dog. He took care of a stable of polo ponies for Big Bill Dwyer, the rum-runner. Billy’s line on Moonlight was that some guys can’t even lay in bed straight.

  Morrie Berman was probably one of those guys. What if he was in on the kidnap? They took Charlie Boy’s world away from him and maybe they’ll even kill him. When Billy’s father was gone for a year, his Uncle Chick told him he might never come back and that Billy would pretty soon forget his father and develop all sorts of substitutes, because that was how it went in life. Chick was trying to be kind to Billy with that advice. Chick wasn’t as bad as the rest of them. And did Billy develop substitutes for his father? Well, he learned how to gamble. He got to know Broadway.

  He wanted to see his father and ask him again to come home.

  If there was a burlesque show in town he’d go to it.

  He watched Betty Rubin, who was beginning to look good.

  Billy hated the sons of bitches who closed the town to him, including Red Tom, you prick. Why don’t you yell at them that it ain’t right to do such a thing?

  He would not test out any more places. He would do something else.

  Tough as Clancy’s nuts.

  And to think, Billy, that you were afraid they’d mark you lousy if you finked.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot,” Moonlight Brady said. “I saw your father’s name in the paper. That vote business. Funny as a ham sandwich on raisin bread.”

  “That’s in the paper, too?”

  “Same paper. They mentioned how he played ball so I knew it was him.”

  “Where’s your father now, Moonlight?”

  “He died ten years ago. Left me a quarter of a million he made on the stock market, every nickel he had, and I went through it in eighteen months. But it was a hell of an eighteen months. What a guy he was.”

  Billy laughed at that. It was one of Moonlight’s wilder, more unbelievable lies, but it had what it takes, and Billy’s laughter grew and grew. It took on storm proportions. He coughed and tears came to his eyes. He hit the bar with his hand to emphasize the power of the mirth that was on him, and he took out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes.

  “What got him?” the barman asked.

  “I did,” Moonlight said, “but I don’t know how.” Moonlight was doing his best to keep smiling. “If the line is that funny, I oughta use it in the act,” he said to Billy.

  “Oh absolutely, Moonlight, absolutely,” Billy said. “Use that one in the act. You gotta use that one in the act.”

  Billy walked down Green Street and looked at the whorehouses with their awnings, the sign. They were houses that used to be homes for Irish families like his own. Chinks on the street now, and second-hand clothing stores and the grocery where George used to write numbers upstairs. Bucket-of-blood joints and guinea pool rooms where the garlic smell makes you miscue. Bill Shea lives on Green Street, the son of a bitch. Billy brought him home one night in a cab, sick drunk from Becker’s, and he forgets that and says my twenty is dead.

  Billy walked into a telephone pole.

  Really in the guinea section now. Billy went with a guinea for two years. Teresa. Terrific Teresa. A torch singer. “Along Came Bill,” she’d sing when he showed up. She wanted to get married, too.

  Angie, you bitch, where are you when I need you?

  Would Billy marry Angie? “Frivolous Sal.” Peculiar gal.

  Angie got Billy thinking about marriage, all right, and now he thinks of Peg and George and the house they’ve got, and Danny. They can’t fence you out of your own house. They can’t fence you away from your kid.

  His father fenced himself out of the house because he thought they were ready to fence him out.

  Billy can hear a mand
olin being played in a second-floor apartment and he can taste the dago red. He got drunk once on dago red with Red the Barber, dago red and mandolins, and he went out like a light and woke up the next day and lit a cigarette and was drunk all over again. So he don’t drink dago red no more.

  After he crossed Madison Avenue, the bum traffic picked up. He turned on Bleecker Street toward Spanish George’s. It was moving toward eleven o’clock. Hello, Bill.

  The stench of Spanish George’s hit Billy in the face when he walked through the door, the door’s glass panel covered with grating on both sides. A dozen bums and a woman were huddled around five round wooden tables, three of the bums asleep, or dead. The stench of their breath, their filth, their shitty drawers, the old puke on their coats and shirtfronts, rose up into Billy’s nose like sewer gas.

  George was behind the bar in his sombrero, propped against the wall on the back legs of a wooden chair. Billy ordered a scotch, and George delivered it in a shot glass. Billy tossed it off and asked for another.

  “You know anybody named Francis Phelan?” he asked George.

  George eyed him and touched the handle of his six gun.

  “You ain’t a copper. I know coppers. Who are you?”

  “I’m a relative. The guy’s my father.”

  “Whoosa guy you want?”

  “Francis Phelan.”

  “I don’t know nobody that name.”

  Billy ordered another scotch and took it to the only empty table in the room. The floor beneath his feet had been chewed up long ago by old horses’ hooves and wagon wheels. It looked like the faces in the room, old men with splintered skin. The wagons of the old days had rolled over them, too, many times. Most of them seemed beyond middle age, though one with a trimmed mustache looked in his thirties. Yet he was a bum, no matter what he did to his mustache. His eyes were bummy and so were his clothes. He was at the table next to Billy and he stank of old sweat, like Billy’s locker at the K. of C. gym. Billy was in the Waldorf one night, and an old drunk was raving on about his life. Not a bum, just an old man on a drunk, and he looked clean. He got Billy’s eye and told him, Son, have B.O. and they’ll never forget you.

  Unforgettable stench of right now. They oughta bottle the air in this joint and sell it for stink bombs.

  The man with the mustache saw Billy looking at him.

  “You fuck around with me,” the man said, “I’ll cut your head off.” The man could barely lift his glass. Billy laughed out loud and other men took notice of him. He could lick any four of them at once. But if they got him down, they’d all kick him to death. Billy saw that the men had no interest in him beyond the noise he made when he laughed.

  The woman at the far table was drinking beer and sitting upright and seemed the soberest one in the room, soberer than Billy. Old bat. Fat gut and spindle legs, but her face wasn’t so bad. She wore a beret off to the left and smoked a cigarette and stared out the front window, which was also covered with grating. Bums like to put their hands through windows. And their heads.

  The man next to the woman lay with his face on the table. He moved an arm, and Billy noticed the coat and remembered the twill. Billy went across the room and stood beside the woman and stared down at his father. The old man’s mouth was open and his lips were pushed to one side so that Billy could see part way into the black cavity that had once been the smile of smiles.

  “I don’t want any,” the woman said.

  “What?”

  “Whatever it is you’re gonna ask.”

  “Conalee Street.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Go way and leave me alone. I don’t want any.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Go way.”

  “Is he all right? I asked a polite question.”

  “He’s all right if he ain’t dead.”

  Billy grabbed a handful of her blouse and coat just below the neck and lifted her halfway to her feet.

  “Holy Mother of God, you’re as crazy as two bastards.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “No, he’s passed out, and he’ll probably be out for hours.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he drank whiskey. He had money and he drank whiskey till he fell over. He never drinks whiskey. Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m a relative. Who are you?”

  “I’m his wife.”

  “His wife?”

  “You got very good hearing.”

  “His wife?”

  “For nine years.”

  Billy let go of her coat and slumped into an empty chair beside her.

  When he told his mother he’d met him he made sure Peg was in the room. They sat in the breakfast nook, just the three of them, George still working. Billy was looking out at the dog in the back yard, and he told them all that had happened and how he wouldn’t come home. The response of the women bewildered Billy. His mother smiled and nodded her head. Peg’s mouth was tight, the way it gets when she fights. They listened to it all. He didn’t say anything about Gerald just then. Just the bail and the turkey and the money he had and the way he looked and the change Billy saw from the photograph. I’m goddamn glad you didn’t bring him home, Peg said. I don’t ever want to see him again. Let him stay where he is and rot for all of me. And Ma said, No, the poor man, the poor, poor man, what an awful life he’s had. Think of what a life he could’ve had here with us and how awful it must’ve been for him as a tramp. But neither of them said they were sorry he didn’t come home. They think of him like he was some bum down the block.

  So Billy told them then about Gerald, and Peg couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe Ma hadn’t told us, and Ma cried because of that and because your father didn’t mean it, and how he apologized to her and she accepted his apology, but she was numb then, and he took her numbness for hatred, and he went away. But she wouldn’t hold an accident against a man as good as Francis was and who loved the children so and was only weak, for you can hate the weakness but not the man. Oh, we’re all so weak in our own ways, and none of us want to be hated for that or killed for that. He suffered more than poor little Gerald, who never suffered at all, any more than the innocents who were slaughtered suffered the way Our Lord suffered. Your father was only a man who didn’t know how to help himself and didn’t know better. I kept it from you both because I didn’t want you to hate him more than you did. You couldn’t know how it was, because he loved Gerald the way he loved both of you, and he picked him up the way he’d picked you up a thousand times. Only this time the diaper wasn’t pinned right, and that was my fault, and Gerald slipped out of it, and your father stood there with the diaper in his hand, and Gerald was already dead with a broken neck, I’m sure of that, the way his little head was. I’m sure he never suffered more than a pinprick of pain and then he went to heaven because he was baptized, and I thanked God for that in the same minute I knew he was gone. Your father knelt over him and tried to pick him up, but I said, Don’t, it might be his back and we shouldn’t move him, and we both knelt there looking at him and trying to see if he was breathing, and finally we both knew he wasn’t, and your father fell over on the floor and cried, oh, how he cried, how that man cried. And I cried for him as well as for Gerald, because I knew he’d never get over this as long as he lived. Gerald was gone but your father would have to live with it, and so we held one another and in a minute or so I covered him with a blanket and went up the street for Doctor Lynch and told him I put him on the table to change his diaper and then he rolled off and I never knew he could move so much. He believed me and put accidental death on the record, and it surely was that, even though your father was drinking when it happened, which I know is the reason he went away. But he wasn’t drunk the way he got to be in the days after that, when he never saw a sober minute. He had just come home after the car barns and a few jars at the saloon, and he wasn’t no different from the way he was a thousand other nights, except what he did wa
s different, and that made him a dead man his whole life. He’s the one now that’s got to forgive himself, not me, not us. I knew you’d never forgive him because you didn’t understand such things and how much he loved you and Gerald and loved me in his way, and it was a funny way, I admit that, since he kept going off to play baseball. But he always came back. When he went this time I said to myself, He’ll never come into this house again, and he never did, and when we moved here to North Pearl, I used to think, If he does come back he’ll go to Colonie Street and never find us, but then I knew he would if he wanted to. He’d find us if he had to.

  Sweet Jesus, I never thought he’d come back and haunt you both with it, and that’s why I’m telling you this. Because when a good man dies, it’s reason to weep, and he died that day and we wept and he went away and buried himself and he’s dead now, dead and can’t be resurrected. So don’t hate him and don’t worry him, and try to understand that not everything that happens on this earth has a reason behind it that we can find in the prayer book. Not even the priests have answers for things like this. It’s a mystery we can’t solve any more than we can solve the meaning of the stars. Let the man be, for the love of the sweet infant Jesus, let the man be.

  Billy stared at the woman next to him and smiled.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Helen.”

  “Do you have any money, Helen?”

  “There’s a few dollars left of what he had. We’ll get a room with that when he wakes up.”

  Billy took out his money, fifty-seven dollars, and pressed it into Helen’s hand.

  “Now you can get a room, or get as drunk as he is if you like. Tell him Billy was here to say hello.”

  Billy tossed the newspaper on the table.

  “And tell him he can read all about me and him both in the paper. This paper.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you. I’m Billy.”

  “Billy You’re the boy.”

  “Boy, my ass. I’m a goddamn man-eating tiger.”