William Kennedy - Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“Why are you putting on your pants?”

“I got chilly.”

“No. You’re ashamed of the part of you that made me pregnant and now you want to cover yourself and hide.”

“You know everything about me. My headaches, why I put on my pants. Goddamn it cut it out! ” Billy screamed. “You don’t know the first goddamn thing that’s going on with me. You think I’m a goddamn moron like your goddamn dummy husband?”

“All right, Billy. Don’t get violent.”

“Violent? You kill my kid without even asking me about it. Who made you the butcher?”

“Don’t get like this, Billy. I’m sorry I started it this way.”

“Started?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, Christ Jesus, what is this game?”

“I wanted to see if you wanted the baby.”

“Hell no, I don’t want no baby.”

“So now it’s different.”

Billy put on his shirt, unable to speak. He folded his tie and put it in the pocket of his coat, which hung on a black bentwood chair. He sat on the chair and stared at Angie.

“I can take care of it,” she said. “I already slept with Joe when I found I had it, just so I could tell him it was his. But I’d never raise it with him. All he wants to raise is money. But I would keep it and give it all the nannies and private schools a kid’d ever need. The only thing it wouldn’t have is a real father.”

She stood up. “Or I could put it up for adoption.”

“No,” Billy said.

She came across the room and stroked his face. “Or we could raise it together, somehow. Any way you wanted. I don’t mean marriage. I’ll go away and have it, and you can come and see us when you want to. The only problem is that if my husband figured it out, he’d probably have all three of us killed. But I don’t care, do you?”

“No. Of course not. What the hell do I care?”

Billy walked away from her and sat in the armchair and looked at her standing there barefoot in front of him, the shadow of her crotch winking through the silk nightgown.

“Or you can claim it any time you want, and we could go off then. I’ve got plenty of my own money. I wouldn’t need alimony.”

Billy shook his head. “I don’t buy it. All this shotgun stuff can go to hell.”

“Then you want me to get rid of it?”

“No, I don’t want that. I think you oughta have it.”

“But you don’t want anything to do with it?”

“I’ll do something.”

“What?”

“I’ll go see it.”

“Like a cocker spaniel? Why shouldn’t I get rid of it?”

“By myself, I don’t want to hurt nobody. If you do it, it’s you and I can’t say don’t. I don’t even want to know about it.”

“That’s as far as you go?”

“If you have it, I’ll say it’s mine.”

“You’ll do that?”

“I’ll do that, yeah.”

“Even if Joe says he’ll shoot you?”

“He shoots me, he’s got big trouble.”

“I didn’t expect this.”

“I’d do it for any kid. You let him into the action, he’s got to know who his old man is.”

“It’s for the kid, not me?”

“Maybe some is for you.”

“Birth certificate, baptism, that whole business?”

“Whatever you want.”

“I really didn’t think you’d do this. You never committed yourself to me on anything. You never even answered my letters.”

“Letters? What the hell am I gonna do, write you letters and have you fix up my spelling?”

“I wouldn’t do that. Oh God, I love you. You’re such a life-bringer, Billy. You’re the real man for me, but you’re the wrong clay.”

“Clay?”

“You can’t be molded. Sex won’t do it and money won’t. Even the idea of a kid wouldn’t. But you did say you’d go along with me. That’s really something.”

“What do you mean the idea of a kid?”

“There’s no kid.”

She was rocking from foot to foot, half-twisting her body, playing with the ends of her hair.

“You did get rid of it.”

“I was never pregnant.” She smiled at Billy.

“Then what, what the hell, what?”

“I needed to know what you felt, Billy. You really think I’m dumb enough to let you knock me up? It’s just that we never talk about things that really matter. This was the first time we ever talked about anything important that wasn’t money or my goddamn husband. I know almost nothing about your life. All I know is I love you more now than I did when you walked in the door. I knew I wanted you even before I met you.”

Billy was shaking his head. “Imagine that,” he said. “You conned me right out of my jock.”

“Yes, I know.”

“What a sucker.”

“Yes, it was lovely. You were wonderful. Now will you take me out for a sandwich? I missed dinner waiting for you.”

“Sure. But first get busy with the douche bag. And I’m gonna watch. I’m not going through this noise again.”

“Ah, Romeo,” Angie said, massaging Billy’s crotch.

Martin, thinking of his father, of Charlie Boy, of Noah, all spread-eagled on their beds, of Melissa spread-eagled naked in fatigue on the floor of her suite at the Hampton Hotel, failed to sleep. He faced downward and leftward into the pillow, a trick he played on the fluids of his brain that generally brought sleep, but not now. And so he faced upward, rightward. He closed his eyes, fixating on a point just above his nose, behind the frontal bone, trying to drive out thoughts as they appeared.

But this also failed, and he saw the lonely, driven figure entering the wholly darkened tunnel, so narrow no man could survive the train should it come roaring through before he reached the far exit. He would be crushed by the wheels or squeezed to juice and pulp against the wall. The figure reached the trestle that spanned the bottomless canyon and began to inch across it on hands and knees, fearful of falling, fearful the train would come from beyond the forest curve and bear down on him at mid-trestle. No chance then for backward flight, no chance to sidestep, only to hang from trestle’s edge by fingertips. Would vertigo then claim him? Would his fingers hold him?

He sat up and lit the bedside lamp and began to count the ceiling panels again, eleven horizontal, twelve vertical. He multiplied. One hundred and thirty-two panels, including fragments. He counted the sides of the dresser, the number of edges on the six drawers: twenty-four. He counted the edges on the decorative trim on Mary Daugherty’s closet. He totaled the edge count: two-seventy-eight. He counted the edges on the ceiling molding. He counted the backs, fronts, and sides of books on his dresser. He lost track of the total.

He could never contain the numbers, nor did he want to. He usually counted sidewalk cracks when he walked, telephone poles when he drove. He remembered no totals except the eighteen steps to the city room, twelve to the upstairs of this house, and remembered these only after years of repetition. If he miscounted either staircase, he would recount carefully on the return trip. He once viewed the counting as a private way of demarcating his place in the world, numbering all boundaries, four counts to the edge of a drawer, four to the perimeter of a tile, an act of personal coherence. On the day he awoke and drawer edges were worth three, tile perimeters five, he would know the rules of his civilization had been superseded.

He switched off the lamp, closed his eyes, and found a staircase. He climbed it and at the turning saw the hag squirming on the wide step, caught in an enormous cobweb which covered all of her except her legs. Beneath her thighs, two dozen white baby shoes were in constant motion, being hatched.

I don’t like what everybody is doing to me, she said.