William Kennedy - Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

“I’m here.”

“They’re burned pretty good. Roy couldn’t talk. And they got some smoke.”

“Doc, the fire was set?”

“Too soon to say. And you know I can’t say that out loud.”

“But that’s what you think. You.”

“When you find fire in two separate places in one house. .”

“Are you at the hospital?”

“I just got here.”

“Wait for me if you can. I’m out the door right now with Renata.”

“Listen, Dan, I saw them both. They’re hurt and they’re burned, but they’re not dead. I’m telling you what I saw.”

“Does Cody know about this?”

“No.”

“You got his number?”

“I’ll get somebody on it.”

“Things have changed, Doc.”

“Yes, they have. Look both ways at the crosswalk.”

George came down the stairs wearing his navy blue gabardine suit with a gray felt fedora, a solid gray tie, and his gray shoes with the black cap toe: the full dude.

“I heard the bell ring,” he said. “Are we ready?”

“That was a phone call, Pop. We’ve got to go out.”

“We’re going to the club?”

“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I have to go somewhere, but I can’t take you along.”

“I’ll stay with George,” Renata said. “We can’t leave him.”

“You’ve got to see Gloria.”

“I’ll see her. I’ll have Ursula take a cab and stay here tonight. She won’t have to do any work, just take care of him. He does what she tells him. She can make a pot of tea with one arm. I’ll pay her double. It’s more important for you to be there if anything needs to be done, things I wouldn’t know how to do. I’ll join you as soon as she gets here.”

“That’s good on Ursula.”

“You should do something with that money. You can’t ride around with it.”

“I’ll do something.”

Quinn, using a flashlight in his dark garage, its door closed, opened Max’s suitcase in the trunk of his car, separated a hundred and fifty thousand of wrapped cash, and put it in the cloth sack where he kept his road maps. He went down the garage’s interior stairs to the cellar and put the sack on a low shelf beside his electric saw. He found two soft rags and went back up to the garage and rubbed all fingerprints off the exterior and interior of the suitcase. He then did the same to the two top layers of the bundled cash. He had never touched the bottom layers. Max had. He closed and locked the suitcase and the car’s trunk, opened the sliding garage door, and backed the car out into the driveway. He got out and padlocked the garage, and then he got back behind the wheel and headed down Pearl Street toward the war zone.

He turned onto Van Woert Street to see the burned-out house. The once-Irish street was now mostly black. Two walls had partially collapsed into rubble and spilled into the street, which was wet and blocked by traffic cones. The ruin was three houses away from where George Quinn had been raised by the Galvins, cousins from Clonmel, after his parents died in the ’95 train wreck. The Galvin house was a three-storied twin of the burned house, the Galvins long gone from Van Woert.

Quinn had met them as a child, making the rounds with George as he collected or delivered numbers money; but George fell out with them in the late ’30s over an unpaid gambling debt. Quinn last visited the house in 1945 when he was a high school senior and went to pick up belongings George had left there in a steamer trunk thirty years earlier.

Quinn called Ben Galvin, who worked in the paint gang at the West Albany railroad shops, and was the only cousin left on Van Woert Street. Ben found the trunk in the attic, where George thought it might be, and there it sat in Ben’s parlor, open and empty.

“What’s he want with the trunk?” Ben asked Quinn.

“He doesn’t want the trunk. He wants the trophies he won in dancing contests, six of them. We talked about them last night. He said his patent leather dancing shoes and a tuxedo were also here.”

“None of them things were in it,” said Ben. “Only this stuff,” and he pointed to two books lying on top of a packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord, and a thick scrapbook jammed with folded newspapers. “Paper is all it is. Paper. That’s the lot.”

Quinn untied the cord and opened the packet: a manuscript written in ink on linen rag paper. He read the first line. “I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns. . ” The scrapbook was fat with newspaper clippings about Civil War battles, about Fenian troops on horseback moving from Albany toward Canada in 1866, about Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. The cloth bindings of both books had been slit and hung loose when Quinn picked them up: The Personal Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan , 1888, and Going to See the Hero by Daniel Quinn, 1872. Ben bent over to watch Quinn’s hands closely as he handled the books.

“You knew about these?”

“Pop thought there were books here but he didn’t remember what they were. My grandfather was a writer. This is his,” and he held up the Hero book.

“Can’t be worth much,” Ben said. “Sixty, seventy years old.”

The dance trophies couldn’t have been worth much either and were probably pawned long ago, along with the tux and shoes. Quinn smoothed the cloth binding of the Hero ’s spine. He could glue it.

“I heard of this book but I never knew we might have it,” he said.

Quinn guessed Ben had cut the bindings, searching for hidden money. And he thinks it may still be in there someplace and that I know how to get at it.

“So that’s it?” Quinn said.

“I should charge him rent for keepin’ it here thirty years.”

“How much rent would that be?”

“I’m not that kind of guy,” Ben said.

Quinn, behind the wheel, stared at the Galvin house, measuring the odyssey that the Hero book had set in motion: a career in news and fiction that would deliver him into the Hemingway orbit, which would lead to the perpetual revolution and Renata, Max, Fidel, Tremont, Matt, others, and ultimately, now, back to George Quinn and the Galvin house. Next stop: the hospital burn unit, and the two latest casualties of this perpetual revolution.

“George,” said Renata after Quinn’s departure and her call to Ursula, “take off your hat. We’re not going out anymore. It’s a handsome hat. Very stylish.”

“I had a hat when I came in.”

He set his hat on top of the bridge lamp. Renata lifted it off and hung it on the coatrack. They sat on opposite ends of the sofa.

“I loved what you said to Daniel when he asked you about Peg. You said, ‘Don’t you love your girl, for chrissake?’”

“I said that?”

“You did. It was a wonderful answer.”

“All compliments gratefully accepted.”

“I’ll bet you had a lot of girls in the old days.”

“There were a few in the shirt factory.”

“You said Daniel was your only child. You said he was the only one who came to you.”

“Daniel. Is he the one who owns this place?”

“That’s the one.”

“He’s a very nice fella. He could lick his weight in gold.”

“You said he was your doll.”

George considered that.

“My doll.” He paused. “The boy.”

“Daniel Quinn. Your son.”

“He was a wonder, smart as a cracker. Shot a hole in one when he was twelve with the driver I gave him.”

“He’s my husband.”

“Is that so? I didn’t know. He’ll be a good husband.”