William Kennedy - Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“Now give me the knife.”

“It’s mine.”

“You can have it later.”

“No.”

“You rather have coffee in the face and then I beat the shit out of you and get the knife anyway?”

Eddie handed the knife to Billy, who pocketed it and put the coffee on the table in front of Eddie. He put the western in front of him. “Have a sandwich,” Billy said. He pushed the sugar bowl toward the kid and gave him a spoon a customer had left at the next table.

“Now behave yourself,” Billy said, and he went back to his table. “Will you for chrissake gimme a western?” he said to Tod.

The dishwasher came in the front door with the Clinton Square beat cop, Joe Riley. Riley had his hand on his pistol. People were leaving quickly. Tod came around the counter and explained the situation to Riley, who took Eddie’s knife from Billy and then took Eddie away.

“That was clever, what you did,” Chick said.

“Toddy taught me that one. I seen him use it on nasty drunks two or three times.”

“All the same it was clever, and dangerous, with that knife and all. You never know what crazy people will do. It was clever.”

“I’m a clever son of a bitch,” Billy said, and he reached for Chick’s check and pocketed it. One up on you, Chick, you sarcastic prick. “Doughnuts are on me, Chick.”

“Why thanks, Billy, thanks. Take care of yourself.”

Tod came around the counter with two coffees in one mitt and Billy’s western in the other. He sat down.

“You play a nice game of coffee.”

“I had a good teacher. You call Harvey?”

“Yeah. He’ll be down at Louie’s.” Tod looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes from now. Damn, I wish I didn’t have to work. I love to see old Harvey in action. He makes me feel smart.”

“Listen, you know what I heard? Charlie McCall was snatched.”

“No. No shit?”

“And I just saw him last night. He backed Scotty against me in this match.”

“That’ll teach him.”

“They must’ve grabbed him after he left the alleys.”

“Wow, that’s a ballbuster. Broadway’ll be hot tonight.”

“Too bad I gotta play cards. Be fun just floatin’ tonight.” Billy finished his coffee and then gave both his own and Chick’s food checks to Tod, who knew how to make them disappear. “Now I gotta go get fresh money.”

When Billy walked into Louie’s pool room on Broadway across from Union Station, Daddy Big, wearing his change apron and eyeshade, was leaning on a cue watching Doc Fay, the band leader, run a rack. Tomorrow night, Billy would likely face the Doc here in the finals of a six-week-old round robin. There were four players left and Billy and the Doc could beat the other two left-handed. But Billy and the Doc were also near equals in skill. They beat each other as often as they were beaten: Doc, a flashy shooter; Billy, great control through position and safe shots. Doc, as usual, was playing in his vest. Billy watched him mount the table with one leg, flatten out, stretch his left arm as far as it would take him, with the intention of dropping the fourteen ball into the far corner, a double combination shot he’d never try in a match unless he was drunk, or grandstanding. Ridiculous shot, really, but zlonk! He sank it. Sassy shooter, the Doc, no pushover.

Only one of the other ten tables was busy, Harvey Hess at that one, revving up his sucker suction. Billy could feel it pulling him, but he resisted, walked over to Daddy Big, whose straight name was Louis Dugan, known from his early hustling days because of his willingness to overextend the risk factor in any given hustle — once sporting a mark eighty-four points in a game of one hundred — as Daddy Big Ones, which time shortened to Daddy Big. He’d grown old and wide, grown also a cataract on one eye that he wouldn’t let anybody cut away. The eye was all but blind, and so focusing on the thin edge of a master shot was no longer possible for him, which meant that Daddy Big no longer hustled. Now he racked for other hustlers and their fish, for the would-bes, the semi-pros, the amateurs who passed through the magically dismal dust of Louie’s parlor.

Daddy Big had run Louie’s since the week he came out of Comstock after doing two for a post-office holdup flubbed by Georgie Fox, a sad, syphilitic freak with mange on his soul. Because Fox had lifted Daddy Big’s registered pistol to pull the job, then dropped it in a scuffle at the scene, Daddy ended up doing the two instead of Georgie, whom the police never connected to the job. But Bindy McCall, Daddy’s cousin, made the connection, and sent out the word: Mark Fox lousy; which swiftly denied Georgie the Syph access to all the places the Broadway crowd patronized: the gin mills, the card games, the gambling joints, the pool rooms, the restaurants, the nightclubs, even the two-bit whorehouses Georgie had never learned to live without. He lived two years like a mole, and then, the week before Daddy Big was due to return to Albany and perhaps find a way to extract some personal compensation for lost time from him, Georgie walked into Fobie McManus’s grill on Sheridan Avenue, bought a double rye for himself and one for Eddie Bradt, the barman, and said to Eddie: “I’m all done now,” and he then walked west to the Hawk Street viaduct, climbed its railing, and dropped seventy feet to the middle of the granite-block pavement below, there to be scraped up and away, out of the reach of Daddy Big forever. Bindy’s reward to Daddy for time lost was the managership of this pool room, which Bindy had collected during Daddy’s absence as payment on a gambling debt. And Daddy had a home ever after.

“Hey, Daddy,” Billy said; “the Doc monopolizing the action?”

“He’s got an idea he’s Mosconi.”

“He thinks he can spot Mosconi.”

“I know some I can spot. And beat,” the Doc said, smiling at Billy. Good guy, the Doc. The ladies love his curls.

“Tomorrow you get your chance,” Billy said, “if you got the money to back up the mouth.”

“I’ll handle all you can put on the table. That’s if you don’t lose your first match.”

“I lose that, I’ll get a job,” Billy said.

“You want a game here, Billy?” Daddy Big asked. “I’m just keeping a cue warm.”

Daddy slurred when he spoke, half in the bag already. By midnight, he’d be knee-walking, with no reason to stay sober anymore. Also, his teeth clicked when he talked, prison dentures. Sadistic bastards pulled all his teeth when they had him down. Yet he’s still living, and Georgie Fox is gone. Georgie, turned into a cadaver in shoe leather, had hit Billy many a time for coffee money, and Billy’d peel off a deuce or a fin for the bum, even though he was a bum. Georgie was dead long before he hit the pavement, sucked dry by Bindy’s order. Why didn’t they just beat on him a little, Billy wondered. Lock him up or take away what he owned? But they took away the whole world he lived in. Billy always hated a freak, but he couldn’t hate Georgie. I ain’t et in two days, Billy. Billy can still remember that line. But Billy also says: You know what you do when you lose, don’t you, Georgie? Do you hear me, freak? You pay.

“I already got a game,” Billy told Daddy, nodding his head in Harvey’s direction.

The Doc heard that and looked up from the cue ball. He glanced at Harv, then smiled at Billy. “So you do have dough, then,” he said.

“A hungry chicken picks up a little stray corn once in a while. How much we on for tomorrow night?”

“Fifty all right? And fifty more if my backer shows up?”

“Fifty definite, fifty maybe. You got it.”

Billy moved close to Daddy Big and spoke in a whisper. “I heard something maybe you know already About Charlie McCall.”