William Kennedy - Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“How?”

“Mulligan, the ward leader, called me. Said you might be mixed up in the kidnapping and to give you the treatment. I said, I got no argument with Billy, and he said, You don’t do what I ask, your taxes go through the roof. So bottoms up, honey, and find someplace else to drink.”

“That’s a lie about the kidnapping. They wanted me to inform on somebody and I wouldn’t. That’s what it’s about.”

“Don’t make no difference to me what it’s about. Them taxes are what this place is about all of a sudden. They go through the roof, Martha goes back on the street, and Martha’s too old for that.”

“I’m not your problem, Martha. Don’t worry.”

“You hear about Louie?”

“Louie?”

“Louie Dugan. He died about two this afternoon. Cop who took him to the hospital last night came by and took a statement. I liked that crazy old man. He was mean as a goose but I liked him.”

“What’d he die of?”

“Stuff he swallowed in his lungs, the cop says. Drink up, Billy. Don’t make me no trouble.”

“I’ll catch you later, Martha.”

“Not till things is straight. Then you catch me all you like.”

Billy called Angie at the Kenmore, and while he waited for her room to ring he decided to ask her: How’d you like some fingerprints on your buns? But what he really wanted was to talk to her. Her phone never rang. The operator said she’d checked out and left no message. He went up to the Kenmore anyway and found the bar was out of bounds for him. Wally Stanton, a bartender, said the word came from Poop Powell, not Mulligan. Bindy had a whole team on the street fencing Billy out. Broadway gone, now Pearl Street.

He walked up Pearl toward Clinton Avenue and stopped in front of Moe Cohen’s old jewelry store. Now the store was a meat market and Moe was meat, too; hired three punks to get himself killed, gave them five grand in diamonds and two hundred in promised cash. They shot him in the head and all it give him was a headache, and he says, Do something else, I’m dying of cancer and heart trouble, hurry, and they let him have it in the wrist and then in the shoulder and hit him with seven shots before they got one through the eye to do the trick. When they checked his pants for the two hundred, all they found was twenty-eight cents. The bum robbed us. They all went to jail, but nobody could figure out why Moe wanted to die. He didn’t have cancer or heart trouble, he had something else.

My father has something else, is what Billy thought.

He thought of Moe among the sausages and turned around and headed toward South Pearl Street. Clinton Avenue would be fenced off by Bindy, too, but he probably wouldn’t bother with State Street or South Pearl. That wasn’t Billy’s territory. Billy might even get a game on Green Street. Dealers didn’t know him very well there. But the Cronins ran Green Street for Bindy and they knew Billy and they’d get the word around sooner or later. It’d be a game of recognition. Anybody know Billy Phelan? Throw the bum out. What it came down to was Billy could go anyplace they didn’t recognize him, anyplace he’d never been before. Or he could leave town. Or hire some of those fellows like Moe. Or go off the Hawk Street viaduct like Georgie the Syph.

No.

All his life Billy had put himself into trouble just to get himself out of it. Independent Billy Now, you dumb bastard, you’re so independent you can’t even get inside to get warm; and it’s getting chilly Night air, like watching the last games of the Albany baseball season. Up high in Hawkins Stadium and the wind starts to whizz a little and you came in early when it was warm and now you’re freezing your ass only the game ain’t over.

Tommy Dyke’s Club Petite? No. Bob Parr’s Klub Eagle? No. Packy Delaney’s Parody Club? No. Big Charlie’s? No. Ames O’Brien’s place? No.

Billy didn’t want to think about his problem in solitude. He wanted to watch something while he was thinking.

The University Club? Dopey B-girls. Club Frolics? The emcee stinks.

Hey. The Tally Ho on Hudson Avenue. Billy knew the Hawaiian dancer. She was Jewish. And the comic was Moonlight Brady. Billy went to St. Joseph’s school with him. He turned off Pearl toward the Tally Ho.

Billy ordered a triple scotch and kept his hat on. The place was jammed, no elbowroom at the bar. The lights were dim while the adagio dancers did their stuff. When the lights went up Billy looked at the half-naked-lady mural among the champagne glasses and bubbles on the wall. Some singer did a medley of Irish songs, for what? It ain’t Saint Patrick’s Day. The shamrocks are growing on Broadway. Oh yeah. And the Hudson looks like the Shannon. Right. Betty Rubin, the Hawaiian dancer, had fattened up since Billy last saw her and since Billy likes ’em thin, he’ll keep his distance and check out the toe dancer.

Billy had been chain smoking for an hour and the tip of his tongue was complaining. He wanted to punish himself for his independence. He could punish himself by going to Bindy and apologizing. Yes, you may kiss my foot. He’d already punished himself by throwing the pool match to the Doc.

Moonlight Brady came on and told a joke about Kelly, who got drunk and fell into an open grave and when he woke up he thought it was Judgment Day and that an Irishman was the first man up. He sang a song: Don’t throw a brick at your father, you may live to regret it one day.

Billy’s brain was speeding from the scotch, speeding and going sideways. Moonlight came out to the bar when the show ended, a chunky man with a face like a meat pie. All ears and no nose so’s you’d notice and built like a fire plug. Billy bought him a drink to have someone to talk to. He would not apologize to Bindy, he decided, but what else he would do was not clear.

“I saw your story in the paper,” Moonlight told him.

“What story?”

And Moonlight told him about Martin’s column on the two-ninety-nine game and the hex. Billy took the paper out of his pocket and found the column and tried to read it but the light was bad.

“I bowled two-ninety-nine and two-ninety-seven back to back about six years ago,” Moonlight said.

“Is that so?”

“Damndest thing. I was in Baltimore and just got red hot.”

Billy smiled and bought Moonlight another drink. He was the greatest liar Billy ever knew. You wouldn’t trust him if he just came out of Purgatory. He dove into Lake George one day and found two corpses. He put a rope around his chest and swam across Crooked Lake pulling three girls in a rowboat. He was sitting at a table with Texas Guinan and Billy Rose the night Rose wrote the words to “Happy Days and Lonely Nights.” He gave Bix Beiderbecke’s old trumpet to Clara Bow, and she was such a Bix fan she went to the men’s room with Moonlight and he screwed her on the sink. He pimped once for John Barrymore in Miami and got him two broads and a dog. He took care of a stable of polo ponies for Big Bill Dwyer, the rum-runner. Billy’s line on Moonlight was that some guys can’t even lay in bed straight.

Morrie Berman was probably one of those guys. What if he was in on the kidnap? They took Charlie Boy’s world away from him and maybe they’ll even kill him. When Billy’s father was gone for a year, his Uncle Chick told him he might never come back and that Billy would pretty soon forget his father and develop all sorts of substitutes, because that was how it went in life. Chick was trying to be kind to Billy with that advice. Chick wasn’t as bad as the rest of them. And did Billy develop substitutes for his father? Well, he learned how to gamble. He got to know Broadway.

He wanted to see his father and ask him again to come home.

If there was a burlesque show in town he’d go to it.