Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Alex started to cry. “I’ll give it to you right in the guts. So help me.”

“All right, Alex, all right,” McCracken said hurriedly. “What’re you crying about?”

“It hurts. I can’t stand it, it hurts so much.” Alex weaved back and forth in the hallway in pain. “I got to get to a doctor before I croak. Come on, you bastard,” he wept, “drive me to the city!”

All the way to Jersey City Alex cried as he sat there, jolting in the front seat, wrapped in a big coat of McCracken’s, an old hat slipping back and forth on his burnt head as the car sped east into the dawn. McCracken gripped the wheel with tight, sweating hands, his face drawn and pale. From time to time he glanced sidewise fearfully at Alex.

“Yeah,” Alex said once when he caught McCracken looking at him. “I’m still here. I ain’t dead yet. Watch where you’re goin’, Chief of Police.”

A block from the Jersey entrance of the Holland Tunnel, McCracken stopped the car.

“Please, Alex,” he pleaded, “don’t make me take you across to New York. I can’t take the chance.”

“I gotta get to a doctor,” Alex said, licking his cracked lips. “I gotta get to a doctor. Nobody’s gonna stop me from getting to a doctor. You’re goin’ to take me through the tunnel and then I’m goin’ to let you have it because you’re a bastard. You’re an Irish bastard. Start this car.” He rocked back and forth in the front seat to help him with the pain. “Start this car!” he shouted.

Shaking so that it was hard for him to control the car, McCracken drove Alex all the way to the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn where Flanagan lived. He stopped the car and sat still, slumped exhausted over the wheel.

“O.K., Alex,” he said. “Here we are. You’re gonna be a good guy, aren’t you, Alex, you’re not goin’ to do anythin’ you’re goin’ to be sorry for, are you? Remember, Alex, I’m a family man, I’m a man with three children. Come on, Alex, why don’t you talk? Why would you want to hurt me?”

“Because you’re a bastard,” Alex said painfully because his jaws were stiffening. “I got a good mind to. You didn’t want to help me. I had to make you help me.”

“I got a kid aged two years old,” McCracken cried. “Do you want to make a orphan of a two-year-old kid? Please, Alex. I’ll do anything you say.”

Alex sighed. “Go get Flanagan.”

McCracken jumped out quickly and came right back with Flanagan and Sam. Alex smiled stiffly when Flanagan opened the door of the car and saw Alex and whistled. “Nice,” Flanagan said. “Very nice.”

“Look at him,” Sam said, shaking his head. “He looks like he been in a war.”

“You ought to a’ seen what I done to the house,” Alex said. “A first-class job.”

“Are you goin’ to pass out, Alex?” Sam asked anxiously.

Alex waved his gun pointlessly two or three times and then pitched forward, his head hitting the dashboard with a smart crack, like the sound of a baseball bat on a thrown ball.

When he opened his eyes he was in a dark, meagerly furnished room and Flanagan’s voice was saying, “Lissen, Doc, this man can’t die. He’s gotta come through, understand? It is too hard to explain away a dead body. It can’t be done. I don’t care if he loses both legs and both arms and if it takes five years, but he’s got to pull through.”

“I should never’ve gotten mixed up in this,” McCracken’s voice wailed. “I was a damn fool. Risking a four-thousand-dollar-a-year job. I ought to have my head examined.”

“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” a strange professional voice said. “That is a well-done young man.”

“It looks to me,” Sam’s voice said, “as if he’s marked special delivery to Calvary Cemetery.”

“Shut up!” Flanagan said. “And from now on nobody says a word. This is a private case. Alexander. The lousy Greek.”

Alex heard them all go out before he dropped off again.

For the next five days, the doctor kept him full of dope, and Flanagan kept Sam at his bedside with a towel for a gag, to keep him quiet when the pain became too much to bear. He would start to yell and Sam would shove the towel into his mouth and say soothingly, “This is a respectable boarding house, Alex. They don’t like noise.” And he could scream all he wanted to into the towel and bother no one.

Ten days later the doctor told Flanagan, “All right. He’ll live.”

Flanagan sighed. “The dumb Greek,” he said, patting Alex on his bandaged head. “I would like to kick him in the belly. I am going out to get drunk.” And he put on his derby hat, square on his head, and went out.

Alex lay in one position for three months in the furnished room. Sam played nursemaid, feeding him, playing rummy with him, reading the sporting news to him.

At times when Sam wasn’t there Alex lay straight on his bed, his eyes half-closed, thinking of his poolroom. He would have a neon sign, “Alex’s Billiard Parlor” going on and off and new tables and leather chairs just like a club. Ladies could play in “Alex’s Billiard Parlor” it would be so refined. He would cater to the better element. Maybe even a refined free lunch, cold meats and Swiss cheese. For the rest of his life he would be a gentleman, sitting behind a cash register with his jacket on. He smiled to himself. When Flanagan gave him his money he would go straight to the pool parlor on Clinton Street and throw his money down on the counter. Cold cash. This was hard-earned money, he nearly died and there were days he’d wished he could die, and his hair was going to grow in patches, like scrub grass on a highway, for the rest of his life, but what the hell. You didn’t get nothing for nothing. Five thousand dollars, five thousand dollars, five thousand dollars …

On June first he put on his clothes for the first time in three months and twelve days. He had to sit down after he pulled his pants on because the strain hit him at the knees. He got completely dressed, dressing very slowly, and being very careful with his necktie, and then sat down to wait for Flanagan and Sam. He was going to walk out of that lousy little room with five thousand dollars flat in his wallet. Well, he thought, I earned it, I certainly did earn it.

Flanagan and Sam came in without knocking.

“We’re in a hurry,” Flanagan said. “We’re going to the Adirondacks. The Adirondacks in June are supposed to be something. We came to settle up.”

“That’s right,” Alex said. He couldn’t help but smile, thinking about the money. “Five thousand dollars. Baby!”

“I think you are making a mistake,” Flanagan said slowly.

“Did you say five thousand dollars?” Sam asked politely.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Yeah. Five thousand bucks, that’s what we agreed, isn’t it?”

“That was in February, Alex,” Flanagan explained calmly. “A lot of things’ve happened since February.”

“Great changes have taken place,” Sam said. “Read the papers.”

“Stop the kiddin’,” Alex said, weeping inside his chest. “Come on, stop the bull.”

“It is true, general,” Flanagan said, looking disinterestedly out the window, “that you was supposed to get five thousand dollars. But doctor bills ate it all up. Ain’t it too bad? It’s terrible, how expensive doctors are, these days.”

“We got a specialist for you, Alex,” Sam said. “Nothing but the best. He’s very good on gunwounds too. But it costs.”

“You lousy Flanagan,” Alex shouted. “I’ll get you. Don’t think I won’t get you!”

“You shouldn’t yell in your condition,” Flanagan said smoothly.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “The specialist says you should relax.”

“Get out of here,” Alex said through tears. “Get the hell out of here.”