Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Thanks.” The man lifted his head, looked sidewise, but challengingly, at O’Malley. O’Malley put the matches away and started to move westward, holding his head in gentle balance.

“Lovely night,” said the man hurriedly. His voice was shrill and girlish and came from high in his throat, all breath, nervous, almost hysterical. “I adore walking in the park at this time on a night like this. Breathe,” he said. “Just breathe the air.”

O’Malley breathed the air.

“All alone?” the man asked nervously.

“Uhuh,” O’Malley said.

“You’re not lonesome?” The man’s hands pulled at each other as he talked. “You’re not afraid to walk all alone through the park at this hour?”

“No,” O’Malley said, ready, with the drinks and the sweetness of the air, and the feeling of living in and, in a way, owning the great city of New York, to pass on a kind word to every living thing. “I never get lonesome and I like to walk through the park when it’s empty and dark like this.”

The man nodded unhappily. “Are you sure you don’t want company?” he asked desperately, looking up at O’Malley with that sidewise and challenging look, like the look of a frightened but determined woman at a man she has decided to catch.

“I’m sure,” O’Malley said gently. “I’m sorry.” And he left the man with the carefully waved hair standing next to a tree with the little light of the cigarette gleaming in his hand and walked slowly on. He walked on, feeling sorry for the man, feeling good that he had enough of a fund of sympathy and human feeling so that he could sorrow, even slightly, over a man like that, rouged and roaming the park on a sinful and illicit errand, met for sixty seconds in the middle of the night.

“Say, Buddy,” another man, small, and even in the darkness, knobby and gnarled, stepped out from behind a tree. “I want a dime.”

O’Malley dug dreamily in his pocket. There was nothing there. “I haven’t got a dime,” he said.

“I want a dime,” the man said. O’Malley saw that his face was dark and savage-looking, not a city face, grimy, hard, gleaming in the light of a distant lamppost. The clothes the man wore were too large and improvised and torn, and he continually lifted his arms to slide the sleeves back from his wrist, giving him a supplicant and religious look.

“I told you I haven’t got a dime,” O’Malley said.

“Gimme a dime!” the little man said loudly. His voice was rough and hoarse, as though he had been shouting in noisy places for years on end.

O’Malley took out his wallet and opened it and showed it to the man. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “Look.”

The man looked. He lifted his arms to free his wrists from his sleeves, looked uneasily over O’Malley’s shoulder up at the lamppost. O’Malley put his wallet away.

“Gimme a dollar,” the man said.

“I showed you my wallet,” O’Malley said. “I haven’t got a dollar. I haven’t got anything. I’m busted.”

The man walked thoughtfully around O’Malley, walking lightly, on his toes, as though he expected to take O’Malley by surprise. “I’ll beat you up,” he said. “No matter how big you are. I’m a prizefighter. I’m an Indian. I’m a Creek Indian. My name’s Billy Elk. Gimme a dime!” He put out his hand as though he was absolutely confident now that he’d convinced O’Malley and the money would be dropped in his hand.

“I’m busted,” O’Malley said. “Honest.”

Billy Elk circled O’Malley slowly, his large and ragged garments flapping around him. O’Malley stood there, gently willing, in the fragrance and loneliness and peace of the night, to befriend a penniless Creek Indian prizefighter astray far from home in Central Park.

Billy Elk’s face creased in thought as he tip-toed around O’Malley. “Give me the wallet,” he said suddenly. “I can get a dollar for that.”

“It only cost seventy-five cents,” O’Malley said.

Billy Elk’s face creased in thought again. Only half-consciously now, he walked lightly in a circle around O’Malley, who stood there dreamily, looking up at the towers of the city rearing dark and magnificent against the clear soft sky, with here and there the scattered lights, lust and illness, keeping the city from total sleep in the depths of the night.

Suddenly Billy Elk leaped at him, snatched from his outside breast pocket the fountain pen O’Malley carried there. Billy Elk covered it proudly and lovingly in his gnarled hands, half-bent over it, his dark and savage face lit now by wild satisfaction. “I can get a dollar for this,” he said.

“It only cost twenty-five cents,” O’Malley said gently. “In the five and ten.”

Billy Elk considered the pen in his hands. “All right,” he said. “I can get twenty-five.”

“Who’ll give you twenty-five?” O’Malley asked.

Billy Elk backed up three steps to think about this. He sighed, came up to O’Malley and gave him the pen. O’Malley put the pen in his pocket, smiled in a pleasant, brotherly way at the Indian.

“Give me a dollar!” Billy Elk said harshly.

O’Malley smiled again and patted him on the shoulder. “Good night,” he said, and started slowly home.

“If you don’t give me the dollar,” Billy Elk shouted, keeping pace with him, talking up at him, “I’ll report you to the police.”

O’Malley stopped. “For what?” he asked, smiling dreamily, pleased that the city and the night had produced, after the one Scotch too many, this wild and tiny creature.

“For talking to a fairy,” Billy Elk shouted. “I saw you!”

“What did you see?” O’Malley asked mildly.

“I saw you with that fairy,” Billy Elk said. “I’ll take you to a policeman. Don’t try to get away. I’m a prizefighter. Keep your hands in your pockets!”

“Take me to a policeman,” O’Malley said, feeling somehow that it was his duty, as one of the few citizens of the city awake and moving, to be pleasant, hospitable, at the service of visitors, beggars, lunatics, lost children and young girls fled from home.

They walked out of the park in silence. Billy Elk’s face was cast in harsh, savage lines, his eyes glittered, his mouth was set. At a corner on Central Park West, a fat policeman was wearily talking to a cab driver slouched in his seat. All the weight of the night hung over them, the deaths in the hospitals, the pain endured, the crimes committed in the dark hours, the hearts broken and the torture of men betrayed by women while the city slept, distilled and poured down in the bleak lamplight over the officer of the law and the tired man at the wheel of the old cab under the lamppost.

O’Malley stopped ten yards away and Billy Elk strode up to the policeman, who was lamenting the fact that his wife had kidney trouble and that his daughter was free with the boys, although she was only in the third term of high school.

The policeman stopped talking when Billy Elk stopped in front of him, and looked at the Indian slowly, mournfully, expecting only trouble, the night’s everlasting gift to him.

“Well?” he asked Billy Elk sadly.

Billy Elk looked fleetingly and wildly over his shoulder at O’Malley, then turned back to the policeman. “Is there an Indian Reservation around here?” he asked loudly.

The policeman, grateful that no murder had turned up, no entry, rape, arson, assault, double-parking committed, thought seriously for a full minute. “No,” he said. “I don’t know of any Indian Reservation in these parts.”

“There’s a place called Indian Point,” said the cab driver. “It’s up the river.”

Billy Elk nodded soberly, with ancient dignity, came back to O’Malley and the policeman went on to tell the cab driver that although his daughter was merely sixteen years old she was built in all respects like a full-blooded woman of thirty.