William Kennedy - Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“You got a hell of an aim with that pistol. That’s gotta be twenty-five yards, anyway.”

“I had to hit it thirty-two times before it busted.”

“An eye like that, you’ll make a hell of a dart shooter.”

Daniel Quinn reciprocated that remark with another smile.

Billy went to bed after he poured himself a glass of milk. Peg told him George had gone to Troy to stay at the Hendrick Hudson Hotel under the name of Martin Dwyer and would stay there until someone called him and said it was all right to come home. Billy pulled up the covers and thought of taking a trip to Miami or New York, if this was how it was going to be. But where would the money come from? Clean out the kid’s bank account? He’s been saving since he was in first grade. Probably got fifty by this time. Hock George’s golf clubs for train fare?

Billy had a vision of wheat pouring into a grain elevator.

He saw Angie in bed with his twins.

When Billy was a kid he had no attic, no pile of toys, no books. He didn’t want books. Billy played on the street. But now Billy has a trunk in this attic with his old spikes and glove in it, and old shirts, and pictures Teresa took of him in his bathing suit out at Crystal Lake. What the hell, it’s his attic.

The kid was protecting himself and his mother. George was gone and Billy wasn’t home. The kid must’ve felt he was alone.

Billy thought of the carton of tuna fish Toddy won at a church raffle and how he took a taxi and left the tuna on Billy’s stoop because Toddy never ate fish.

Billy thought of all the times he’d been suckered. In high school, it was a blonde who said she would and then didn’t after it took him two days to find somebody who’d sell him cundrums. Plenty of bums stiffed him on horse bets, but then Pope McNally, a friend of Billy’s all his life, welshed on a fifty-dollar phone bet and said he’d never made it. And that whole Colonie Street bunch. Presents at Christmas and your birthday, and in between you couldn’t get a glass of water out of any of them. You think you know how it is with some people, but you don’t know. Billy thought he knew Broadway.

He listened to the night and heard a gassy bird waking up. The light of Sunday morning was just entering the sky, turning his window from black to dark blue at the bottom. The house was silent and his brain was entering a moment of superficial peace. He began to dream of tall buildings and thousands of dice and Kayo and Moon Mullins and their Uncle Willie all up in a palm tree, a scene which had great significance for the exhausted man, a significance which, as he reached for it, faded into the region where answers never come easy.

And then Billy slept.

Free the children. The phrase commanded the attention of Martin’s head the way a war slogan might. Stop the fascists.

Charlie McCall was the child uppermost in his thought, but he kept receiving images of Peter as a priest in a long, black cassock, blessing the world. He’d be good at that. Free Peter. Let him bless anybody he wants to bless.

It was three o’clock Monday morning and Martin was sitting alone in Morrie’s DeSoto in an empty lot on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, Patsy’s loaded pistol in his right coat pocket. Hudson Street was deserted, and in the forty minutes he’d been sitting here, only two cars had passed.

This was the finale. Perhaps.

With Morrie, he’d left Albany and driven to Red Hook and then onto the Taconic Parkway. They stopped at the second gas station on the parkway and waited half an hour by the pay phone for a call. The caller told them to go to the Harding Hotel on 54th and Broadway in Manhattan, check in, and wait for another call. They did. They listened to “The Shadow” on the radio, and dance music by Richard Himber and the orchestra, and ordered coffee and sandwiches sent up. They played blackjack for a nickel and Martin won four dollars. Jimmie Fiddler was bringing them news of Hollywood when the phone rang and Morrie was given a circuitous route to deliver the money. Change cabs here and then there, take a bus, take two more cabs, get out at this place and wait to be picked up. Morrie was gone two hours and came back with the money.

“They threw it at me,” he said. “They looked at it once and saw right away it was marked.”

Martin called Patsy, who took two hours to call back. Go to a Wall Street bank on Sunday morning and the manager will give you new, unmarked money. Martin and Morrie slept and in the morning went together to the bank. They were watched, they later learned, by New York detectives, and also by the kidnappers, whose car Morrie recognized. With the new money, Morrie set off again on a new route given in another call. He was back at noon and said they took the money and would call with directions on where to get Charlie.

Martin and Morrie ate in the room and slept some more and exhausted all card games and the radio. Martin ordered a bottle of sherry, which Morrie would not drink. Martin sipped it and grew inquisitive.

“Why did they pick you, Morrie?”

“They know my rep.”

“You know them?”

“Never saw any of them before.”

“What’s your rep?”

“I hung around with guys like them a few years back, tough guys who died with their shoes on. And I did a little time for impersonating a Federal officer during Prohibition. I even fooled Jack Diamond with that one. Our boys had the truck half loaded with his booze when he caught on.”

“What’d he do?”

“He congratulated me, with a pistol in his hand. I knew him later and he bought me a drink.”

“Were you a street kid?”

“Yeah. My old man wanted me to study politics, but I always knew politics was for chumps.”

“The McCalls do all right with it.”

“What they do ain’t politics.”

“What would you call it?”

“They got a goddamn Roman empire. They own all the people, they own the churches, they even own most of the Jews in town.”

“They don’t own your father.”

“No. What’d he tell you when you talked to him?”

“I already gave you that rundown. He said you two didn’t get along, but he gets along with your sisters.”

“When my mother died, they worked like slaves around the house for him. But he was never there when I was a kid. He worked two jobs and went to college nights. I had to find a way to amuse myself.”

“You believe in luck, Morrie?”

“You ever know a gambler who didn’t?”

“How’s your luck?”

“It’s runnin’.”

“How’s Charlie’s luck?”

“He’s all right.”

“You saw him?”

“They told me.”

“And you believe them?”

“Those fellas wouldn’t lie.”

To free the children it is necessary to rupture the conspiracy against them. We are all in conspiracy against the children. Fathers, mothers, teachers, priests, bankers, politicians, gods, and prophets. For Abraham of the upraised knife, prototypical fascist father, Isaac was only a means to an enhanced status as a believer. Go fuck yourself with your knife, Abe.

When Martin was eight, he watched his mother watching Brother William chastising fourth graders with a ruler. She watched it for two days from the back parlor and then opened her window and yelled into the open window of the Brothers School: If you strike any more of those children, I’m coming in after you. Brother William closed the window of his classroom and resumed his whipping.

She went out the front door and Martin followed her. She went down the stoop empty-handed and up the stoop of the school and down the corridor into the classroom opposite the Daugherty back parlor. She went directly to the Brother, yanked the ruler out of his hand, and hit him on his bald head with it. She slapped him on the ear with her left hand and slapped his right shoulder and arm with the ruler. He backed away from her, but she pursued him, and he ran. She ran after him and caught him at a door and hit him again on his bald head and drew blood. Brother William opened the chapel door and ran across the altar and escaped. Katrina Daugherty went back to the classroom and told the boys: Go home and tell your parents what happened here. The student who was being whipped when she came in stopped to thank her. Thank you, mum, he said, and half genuflected.