William Kennedy - Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“He looks dead,” Billy said.

“Who gives a goddamn?” Morrie said, and he tipped over the kitchen table, opened the dish closet and threw the dishes on the floor. Billy tipped over the garbage pail and threw a chair at the kitchen window. The whores went out the back door.

“Son of a bitch, pimping for his own sister,” said Billy.

“She wasn’t bad,” said Morrie as he swept the contents of the refrigerator onto the floor. “She’s got nice teeth.”

Martin salvaged a new cold bottle of Stanwix and poured himself a glass. He opened the broom closet so Morrie could empty it. Billy went into the bedroom where Morrie had been with Fela and tore up the bed clothes, then kicked the footboard until the bed fell apart. On the bedside table stood a metal lamp of a nautical F.D.R. at the wheel of the Ship of State, standing above the caption: “Our Leader.” Billy threw the lamp through the bedroom window. Martin straightened up two kitchen chairs, sat on one and used the other as a table for his beer, which no longer tasted like rotten lemons. Billy came back and nudged the inert pimp with his foot.

“I think you killed him,” he said to Morrie.

“No,” said Martin. “He moved his fingers.”

“He’s all right then,” Morrie said. “You ain’t dead if you can move your fingers.”

“I knew a guy couldn’t move his toes,” Billy said, winded but calming. “His feet turned to stone. First his feet then the rest of him. Only guy I ever knew whose feet turned to stone and then the rest of him.”

Transgressors of good fame are punished for their deeds, was what occurred to Martin. He stood up and opened his fly, then urinated on the pimp’s feet. Simoniacs among us.

“What’d you make of Morrie’s answer about Maloy?” Billy asked.

“I thought he was evasive,” Martin said.

“I think he’s lying.”

“Why would he lie?”

“You tell me,” Billy said. “Must be he doesn’t want Maloy connected to Newark.”

“Maybe he’s not connected.”

“No. He was lying. I saw it in his face.”

They listened to the dismal blues Slopie Dodds was making at the piano. Martin squinted in the dim light of Martha’s Place, where they’d come for a nightcap after leaving Morrie. The smoke was dense in the low-ceilinged bar, which was full of Negroes. There were four white men in the place, Martin and Billy, a stranger at the far end of the bar, and Daddy Big, a nightly Negrophile after he reached his drunken beyond. Daddy was oblivious now of everything except hustling Martha, a handsome tan woman in her forties with shoulder-length conked hair, small lips, and a gold-capped canine tooth. Martha was not about to be hustled, but Daddy Big did not accept this, steeped as he was in his professional wisdom that everybody is hustleable once you find the weak spot.

Slopie ended his blues and, as Martha moved to another customer, Daddy Big swung around on his stool and said, “Play me the white man’s song, Slopie.” Slopie grinned and trilled an intro, a ricky-tick throwback, and Daddy Big sang from his barstool the song he said he had learned from a jail-house nigger who’d sung it in World War One: I don’t care what it costs, I’ll suffer all the loss. It’s worth twice the money just to be the boss. ’Cause I got a white man workin’ for me now. The song merged with “The Broadway Rag,” into which Slopie passed without comment. Daddy Big opened his arms to the room and said as the ragtime bounced off the walls, “I love all niggers.” Looking then to the black faces for reciprocation and getting none, he discovered Billy at the corner table, near the neon-lighted window.

“What’re you doing here, Phelan?” he asked. “You ain’t a nigger.” The words were crooked with whiskey.

“I’m an Irish Catholic,” Billy said. “Same thing to some people.”

A few who heard this smiled. Daddy Big hurled himself off the barstool and staggered toward Billy, stopping his own forward motion by grabbing the back of a chair with both hands.

“You got your tail whipped tonight.”

“Doc was hot,” Billy said. “A good player got hot.”

“Bet your ass he’s a good player. Bet your ass. He’ll whip you every time out.”

“Then why didn’t he whip me the last two matches we played?”

“He’ll whip you from now on. He’s got your number. All you know how to shoot is safe and you blew that tonight. You ain’t got nothin’ left, if you ever had anything.” Daddy waved his left hand in front of his face like a man shooing flies. He lurched for the door with one word: “Bum,” and went out cross-footed, leaving the door ajar. Martin closed it as Daddy Big careened in the direction of Union Station.

“He’s got a mean mouth,” Martin said.

“Yeah,” said Billy. “He’s a prick now. Prison got him twisted. But he used to be a nice guy, and at pool he was a champ. Nobody in Albany could beat him. I learned a whole lot watching him sucker chumps who thought they knew something about the game.”

The white man from the end of the bar stopped beside Billy. “That guy talks like the wants to wind up dead in the alley. He keeps that up in here, he’ll get what he’s after.”

“He’s a cousin of the McCalls,” Billy told the man. “Nobody’ll touch him.”

“Is that so?” The man was chastened. “I didn’t know that.”

“That pimp,” Billy said to Martin when the stranger left, “I don’t know why he didn’t stay down. I hit him right on the burton. They used to stay down when I hit ’em like that.”

“Do you suppose he’ll try to get even?”

“He’d get worse. You don’t come back at Morrie.”

“Then you think Morrie’s dangerous?”

“Anybody pals around with Maloy and Curry’s dangerous.” Billy thought about that. “But I like Morrie,” he said. “And I like Maloy. Curry’s nuts, but Morrie’s all right. He saved my ass there.”

Slopie finished his ragtime number, a tour de force that won applause. Billy signaled to Martha to buy Slopie a drink.

“Can I tell you something, Martin?”

“Anything.”

“Positively on the q.t.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yeah, I do. For a straight guy, you know a lot. Why’d you piss on that guy’s feet?”

“He seemed worth that kind of attention. I don’t meet too many like that. What did you want to tell me?”

“I threw that match tonight.”

“Hey,” said Martin. “What for?”

“So I wouldn’t owe Berman.”

“I don’t think I follow that.”

“He lent me fifty to bet on myself. If I win, then I got money through him, right? But if I lose, I owe him nothing. I already give him back the fifty and we were even. Then the son of a bitch saves my ass.”

“So you were going to talk to Patsy about him then?”

“I don’t know.”

“I could tell them what you want to say. I don’t have your qualms.”

“They’d know I pumped him and then didn’t tell them.”

“Then tell them.”

“But that puts me full on the tit. Bindy and Patsy paying my debts. Paying you. Me on the tit like Daddy Big. That bastard calls me a bum, but he’d chew catshit if Bindy said it was strawberries.”

The stranger who said Daddy Big wanted to die came back into Martha’s. “Somebody better call an ambulance,” he said. “That drunk guy is outside bleedin’ all over the street.”

Martha went for the phone, and Billy and Martin ran down the block. Daddy Big lay on his back, his face bloodied badly, staring at the black sky with bugged eyes and puffed cheeks, his skin purple where it wasn’t smeared with blood. Two of his front teeth were bent inward and the faint squeal of a terrified mouse came out of his mouth. Billy rolled him face down and with two fingers pulled out his upper plate, then grabbed him around the waist with both arms and lifted him, head down, to release the vomit in his throat. Billy sat down on the sidewalk, knees up, and held Daddy across his lap, face down, tail in the air. Billy slapped his back and pressed both knees into his stomach until his vomiting stopped. Daddy looked up.