William Kennedy: Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

So Billy told them then about Gerald, and Peg couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe Ma hadn’t told us, and Ma cried because of that and because your father didn’t mean it, and how he apologized to her and she accepted his apology, but she was numb then, and he took her numbness for hatred, and he went away. But she wouldn’t hold an accident against a man as good as Francis was and who loved the children so and was only weak, for you can hate the weakness but not the man. Oh, we’re all so weak in our own ways, and none of us want to be hated for that or killed for that. He suffered more than poor little Gerald, who never suffered at all, any more than the innocents who were slaughtered suffered the way Our Lord suffered. Your father was only a man who didn’t know how to help himself and didn’t know better. I kept it from you both because I didn’t want you to hate him more than you did. You couldn’t know how it was, because he loved Gerald the way he loved both of you, and he picked him up the way he’d picked you up a thousand times. Only this time the diaper wasn’t pinned right, and that was my fault, and Gerald slipped out of it, and your father stood there with the diaper in his hand, and Gerald was already dead with a broken neck, I’m sure of that, the way his little head was. I’m sure he never suffered more than a pinprick of pain and then he went to heaven because he was baptized, and I thanked God for that in the same minute I knew he was gone. Your father knelt over him and tried to pick him up, but I said, Don’t, it might be his back and we shouldn’t move him, and we both knelt there looking at him and trying to see if he was breathing, and finally we both knew he wasn’t, and your father fell over on the floor and cried, oh, how he cried, how that man cried. And I cried for him as well as for Gerald, because I knew he’d never get over this as long as he lived. Gerald was gone but your father would have to live with it, and so we held one another and in a minute or so I covered him with a blanket and went up the street for Doctor Lynch and told him I put him on the table to change his diaper and then he rolled off and I never knew he could move so much. He believed me and put accidental death on the record, and it surely was that, even though your father was drinking when it happened, which I know is the reason he went away. But he wasn’t drunk the way he got to be in the days after that, when he never saw a sober minute. He had just come home after the car barns and a few jars at the saloon, and he wasn’t no different from the way he was a thousand other nights, except what he did was different, and that made him a dead man his whole life. He’s the one now that’s got to forgive himself, not me, not us. I knew you’d never forgive him because you didn’t understand such things and how much he loved you and Gerald and loved me in his way, and it was a funny way, I admit that, since he kept going off to play baseball. But he always came back. When he went this time I said to myself, He’ll never come into this house again, and he never did, and when we moved here to North Pearl, I used to think, If he does come back he’ll go to Colonie Street and never find us, but then I knew he would if he wanted to. He’d find us if he had to.

Sweet Jesus, I never thought he’d come back and haunt you both with it, and that’s why I’m telling you this. Because when a good man dies, it’s reason to weep, and he died that day and we wept and he went away and buried himself and he’s dead now, dead and can’t be resurrected. So don’t hate him and don’t worry him, and try to understand that not everything that happens on this earth has a reason behind it that we can find in the prayer book. Not even the priests have answers for things like this. It’s a mystery we can’t solve any more than we can solve the meaning of the stars. Let the man be, for the love of the sweet infant Jesus, let the man be.

Billy stared at the woman next to him and smiled.

“What’s your name?”

“Helen.”

“Do you have any money, Helen?”

“There’s a few dollars left of what he had. We’ll get a room with that when he wakes up.”

Billy took out his money, fifty-seven dollars, and pressed it into Helen’s hand.

“Now you can get a room, or get as drunk as he is if you like. Tell him Billy was here to say hello.”

Billy tossed the newspaper on the table.

“And tell him he can read all about me and him both in the paper. This paper.”

“Who are you?”

“I told you. I’m Billy.”

“Billy You’re the boy.”

“Boy, my ass. I’m a goddamn man-eating tiger.”

He stood up and parted Helen on the beret.

“Good night, Helen,” he said. “Have a good time.”

“God bless your generosity.”

“Generosity can go piss up a rainpipe,” Billy said, and he started to laugh. The laugh storm again. The coughing, the tears of mirth. He moved toward Spanish George’s door, laughing and telling the old bums who watched him: “Generosity can go piss up two rainpipes for all I give a good goddamn.”

He halted in the doorway.

“Anybody here like to disagree with me?”

“You fuck with me,” said the bum with the trimmed mustache, “I’ll cut your head off.”

“Now you’re talkin’,” Billy said. “Now you’re talkin’.”

Billy could go anywhere now, anywhere in town. He was broke. All the way broke.

He began to run, loping across a vacant lot, where a man was warming himself by a bonfire. It had grown chillier. No place for that fellow to go.

Billy could always get a buck. But where now?

He padded down Madison Avenue to Broadway, where the ramp to the Dunn bridge began. Tommy Kane’s garage, where George got his car fixed. He turned up Broadway, still running, putting distance between him and the drunken dead. He wasn’t even winded when he reached the Plaza and the D&H building. But he stopped running at Coulson’s and went inside for a later edition of the Times-Union. The front page was different, but the kidnapping news was the same. He turned to Martin’s column and read about himself. A gamester who accepts the rules and plays by them, but who also plays above them. Billy doesn’t care about money. A healthy man without need for artifice or mysticism.

What the hell was Martin talking about? Whose rules? And what the hell was that about money? How can anybody not care about money? Who gets along without it? Martin is half crazy, a spooky bird. What is that stuff about mysticism? I still believe in God. I still go to the front.

He folded the paper and went out and crossed State Street and walked north on Broadway past Van Heusen Charles, which always reminded him of the goddamn house on Colonie Street, where they bought their junk. And Cottrell and Leonard and the mannequins in the window. Two bums broke that window one night, drunked up on zodiac juice, everybody’s bar dregs, beer, whiskey, wine, that old Lumberg kept in a can and then bottled and sold to the John bums for six bucks a gallon. When the cops caught up with the bums, one of them was dead and the other was screwing the mannequin through a hole cut in its crotch.

Jimmy-Joe’s shoeshine stand. Jimmy-Joe told his customers he shined Al Smith’s shoes once, and Jack Dempsey’s. Everybody’s a sucker for big names. Bindy McCall. I kissed Bindy McCall’s foot. Suckers.

Broadway was slowing down at one o’clock, all the trains in except the Montreal Limited. Traffic down to nothing, shows all let out. Bill’s Magic Shop in darkness. Billy was sweating slightly and breathing heavily. Get the blood pounding and sober up. But he was still drunk as a stewbum, and reeling. Scuse me.

“Where the hell you walkin’?” said Mike the Wop coming out of Brockley’s.