William Kennedy - Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

The fire was out, and so Billy must have slept a while. He felt an ember. Cold. Maybe he’d slept an hour.

What I learned about pool no longer applies.

What Daddy Big learned no longer applies.

He took a swig of the whiskey, looked at the bottle, still half full, and then flung it into the river.

He saw a train coming in over the Maiden Lane trestle and watched the moving lights. He stood up and saw mail trucks moving in the lights of the post office dock on Dean Street. Up on the hill, he could see lights in the Al Smith building, and streetlights blazed across the river in Rensselaer. People all over town were alone in bed. So what the hell’s the big deal about being alone in the dark? What’s the big deal about being alone?

Billy saw the elephant going up toward Broadway, a man walking beside it, holding its ear with a long metal hook on a stick.

Billy brushed off the seat of his pants, which was damp from the earth. He went to touch the brim of his hat but he had no hat. He looked around but his hat was gone. The goddamn river spirits got it. What do they want with my hat? Well, keep it. That’s all you’re gonna get out of me, you dead bastards.

Billy knew he was going to puke. He kept walking and after a while he puked. Good. He wiped his mouth and his eyes with his handkerchief and straightened his tie. He brushed grass off the sleeves of his coat, then took the coat off and brushed its back and put it on again. He bent over and pulled up his silk socks.

He walked toward Broadway.

No money.

No hat.

No connection.

The street was bright and all but empty, a few lights, a few cars, two trainmen waiting for a bus in front of the station, carrying lunch pails.

The street was closed, not only to Billy.

Billy knew he’d lost something he didn’t quite understand, but the onset of mystery thrilled him, just as it had when he threw the match to the Doc. It was the wonderment at how it would all turn out.

Something new going on here.

A different Broadway.

He walked into the station and went to the men’s room. He washed his face and hands and combed his hair. The tie was fine. He inspected his suit, his tan glen plaid, for grass and dirt, and he shined the toes of his shoes with toilet paper. He pissed, shat, and spit and went out and bought the New York News and Mirror with his last half a buck. Forty cents left in the world. He looked at the papers and saw Charlie Boy’s picture on page one of each. The news of the day is Charlie McCall. A nice kid, raised like a hothouse flower. He folded the papers and put them in his coat pocket. In the morning, he’d read Winchell and Sullivan and Dan Parker and Nick Kenny and Moon Mullins.

He would have an orange for breakfast to make his mouth feel good.

He went out of the station and climbed into a parked Yellow cab. He rode it to North Albany, to Jack Foy’s Blackout on Erie Street and Broadway, and told the cabbie to wait. Jack hadn’t heard the news about Billy yet and so Billy hit him for a deuce and paid the cabbie and then hoisted two cold beers to cool his throat. He knew Jack Foy all his life and liked him. When the word came down from Pop O’Rourke, Jack would not let him inside the joint.

Erie Street’d be as dead as Broadway downtown.

The word would spread and every joint in town would be dead.

Billy drank up and walked across Broadway and up through Sacred Heart Park to North Pearl Street, which was deserted, silent at four in the morning. He walked up Pearl, Joe Keefe sleeping, Pop O’Rourke sleeping, Henny Hart sleeping, Babe McClay sleeping.

He was in front of his house when he heard what he heard. First came the quiet snap, then almost simultaneously the streetlight exploded behind him like a cherry bomb, and he ran like a goddamn antelope for the porch.

He crouched behind the solid railing of the porch and listened for new shooting, but the street was already re-enveloped by silence. Still crouching, he leaped for the door to the vestibule and, with key at the ready, he opened the inside door and crawled into the living room. He locked the door and peered over the radio, out a front window, then out a dining room and a kitchen window, without moving any curtains, but he saw nothing. He heard movement upstairs and went toward it.

The door to the attic stairway was ajar.

Peg was in bed, but no George. Danny was in bed.

Billy went back to the attic door and climbed the stairs. The upper door to the attic was also ajar. He opened it all the way.

“Hello,” he said. Who the hell to?

He smelled dust and old cloth and mothballs. He waited for noise but heard nothing. He went in and pulled the string of the ceiling light and stood in the midst of family clutter that belonged mostly to a child. Boxing gloves and bag, fire engine and steam locomotive, a stack of games, toy animals, skis, two sleds, a collection of matchcovers, a large pile of funny books, a smaller pile of pulps— Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider. On a rack in transparent bags hung George’s World War uniform, his satin-lapeled tux, a dozen old suits, and, unbagged, a blue woolen bathrobe full of moth holes. Peg’s old windup Victrola sat alongside a dusty stack of records, half of which Billy had bought her, or boosted. There was the fake Christmas tree wrapped in a sheet, and the ornament boxes, and a dozen of Peg’s hatboxes.

The front window was open. Two inches.

Under it Billy found a flashlight and a copy of The Spider Strikes , a pulp Billy remembered buying five years ago, anyway. Richard Wentworth, the polo-playing playboy, is secretly The Spider, avenger of wrong. More than just the law, more dangerous than the underworld. Hated, wanted, feared by both. Alone and desperate, he wages deadly one-man war against the supercriminal whose long-planned crime coup will snuff a thousand lives! Can The Spider prevent this slaughter of innocents?

When he put the magazine back on the floor, Billy found an empty BB package.

He put the light out and went downstairs and met Peg coming out of her bedroom, pushing her arm into her bathrobe.

“What’s going on? I heard walking upstairs.”

“Is that all you heard?”

“What is it?”

“Somebody shot out the streetlight out in front.”

“Shot it out?”

Billy showed her the BB package.

“The Spider carries the most powerful air pistol there is.”

“Oh,” she said.

They went into the room of Daniel Quinn, and Billy snapped on the wall switch, lighting two yellow bulbs in the ceiling fixture. The boy pulled the covers off his face and looked at them. Billy held up the BB package.

“Did you shoot out the streetlight?” Peg asked.

The boy nodded.

“Why?”

“I wanted it dark so when Billy came home the police wouldn’t see him. I didn’t know it was you, Billy. I thought you’d have your hat on.”

“The police were here tonight,” Peg said. “He was very impressed.”

“What’d they want?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t come in. They just stopped out front and shone their searchlight in the front window. We had all the lights out, because George got a call they were coming to see him.”

“Him? What the hell they want with him?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Were they looking for me, too?”

“Only George, from what we heard. But they never came in.”

“Where is George?”

“He went out for a while.” She turned her head away from her son and winked at Billy.

Billy went to Danny’s bedside and poked a finger in his ear.

“Thanks for the protection, kid, but you scared the bejesus out of me. I thought I was bushwhacked.”

Daniel Quinn reciprocated the remark with a smile.