William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

But no. No lightning. No thunder. No dice. Just the memory of time gone, and the vision of the vanishing space where the winners and losers, the grifters and suckers, had so vividly filled the air with yesterday’s action.

“They want me to get married,” Billy said to me.

“Who does?”

“Peg. The priest. Agnes.”

“What’s the priest say?”

“He says we’re givin’ scandal with Agnes livin’ in. She’s been with us a year maybe.”

“Then you’re already married, basically.”

“Nah. She’s got her own room. She’s a roomer.”

“Ah, I get it,” I said.

“ ‘Doesn’t look moral,’ the priest says.”

“Well he’s half right, if you worry about that sort of thing.”

“I don’t worry. They worry.”

“What’s Peg say?”

“Peg says she doesn’t give a damn whether I marry the girl or not. But yeah, she wants it too. It’d get the priest off her back.”

“So get married, then,” I said. “You like the girl?”

“She’s great, but how the hell can I get married? I’m fifty-one years old and I don’t have a nickel and don’t know where to get one. I scrounge a little, deal now and then, but I haven’t had steady work since Morty closed the horseroom. And the chiselin’ bastard owes me back wages and two horse bets.”

“How much?”

“About a grand. Little less, maybe.”

“That’s a lot.”

“He said he went dry, couldn’t pay off, said he’d pay me later. But then he went off with Lulu and now he’s runnin’ a floatin’ card game and he don’t listen. I oughta cut his heart out, but it’s even money he don’t have one.”

Billy stopped talking, stopped looking me in the eye. Then, with his voice in a low register and on the verge of a tremolo, he said, “You know, Orson, I never could hold a job. I never knew how to do nothin’. I couldn’t even stay in the army. I got eye trouble and they sent me home after eight months. The horseroom was the longest steady job I ever had.”

“Something’ll turn up,” I said.

“Yeah? Where? I could always get a buck around Broadway but now there ain’t no Broadway.”

Yeah.

Put a star on Billy’s Broadway.

I drank the beer Billy bought me, drank it in silent communion with his unexpected confession. Billy — who had been inhaling money for years in bowling alleys, pool rooms, and card games — was he unemployable? Was he really a man who “never knew how to do nothin’ ”? It’s true Billy found straight jobs laughable, that he left as many as he was fired from, once even calling the foreman of a machine-shop paint gang a moron for presiding over such labor. Liberated by such words, Billy invariably wended his way back to the cocoon of Broadway, within whose bounds existed the only truly usable form of life; or so Billy liked to believe.

I was making a decision about telling him my own tribulations when the door opened and Buffalo Johnny Rizzo walked in, a fashion plate in blue seersucker suit and white Panama hat with a band that matched his suit. He stood in the doorway, hands in his coat pockets, looked us all over, opened his coat and took a pistol from his belt, then fired two shots at his most favored target: Morty Pappas’s crotch, which was forked east toward Broadway, from whence Johnny was just arriving.

Billy saw it all happening and so did I, but Billy acted, lifting his cane from its dangle on bar’s edge into a vivid upthrust and sending Johnny’s pistol flying, but not before Johnny got off two shots. Morty fell from his bar stool with a crumpling plaster thud, his crotch intact but one bullet hitting his good leg, and the other lodging in the neck of the stuffed cow over the back bar, victim yet again of inept shooters.

Sport quickly retrieved the flown pistol and Johnny just as quickly moved toward the aging Sport to get it back and try again for Morty’s gender. Billy and I both stepped between the two men, and Sport, still a formidable figure with the arms and fists of the light heavyweight he had once been, said only, “Better get outa here, John.”

Buffalo Johnny, his failed plan sinking him into the throes of social wisdom, looked then at the fallen and bleeding Morty; and he smiled.

“Boom-boom, fucker,” he said. “Boom-boom. Boom-boom.”

And then he went out onto Broadway.

Except for Billy and me, the customers at Sport’s saloon exited with sudden purpose after Buffalo Johnny left the premises. Sport drew new beers for us as we gave aid and comfort to Morty Pappas in his hour of pain Sport then called an ambulance and together Billy and I organized Morty on the floor, propping him with an overcoat someone had left on a hook during the winter. Sport made a pressure pack on the wound with a clean bar towel.

“So, ya bastard, ya saved my life,” Morty said to Billy between grimaces of agony.

“Yeah,” said Billy. “I figure you’re dead you’ll never pay me what you owe me.”

“You oughta pay him,” Sport said, putting a new beer in Morty’s grip.

“I’ll pay him all right,” and Morty put down the beer and reached for his wallet, a hurtful move. “What do I owe you?”

“You know what you owe me,” Billy said.

“Six hundred,” Morty said.

“That’s wages. Plus the bets, three eighty, that’s nine eighty.”

Morty fumbled with his wallet, took out his cash. “Here. It’s all I got with me,” he said. He yelped with new pain when he moved. Billy took the money, counted it.

“Count it,” said Morty.

“I’m countin’.”

“Four hundred, am I right?”

“Three sixty, three eighty, four.”

“That wacky bastard Rizzo,” Morty said. “They’ll lock him up now. Put him in a fucking dungeon.”

“If they find him,” said Sport.

“He’s too stupid to hide out,” Morty said. “Stupidest man I ever know. He ain’t got the brains God gave a banana.”

“He knows somethin’,” Sport said. “He knows how to shoot you in the leg.”

“How was his broad?” Billy asked.

“She wasn’t his broad.”

“He thought she was.”

“She was hot,” Morty said. “Hot for everybody. Gimme his gun.”

“Whataya gonna do with it?” Sport asked.

“Give it to the cops.”

“I didn’t call the cops,” Sport said.

“They’ll turn up at the hospital.”

“Cops’ll want witnesses,” Billy said. “You got any?”

“You saw,” Morty said.

“Who, me?” Billy said.

“Who’s your friend there?” Morty said, looking at me.

“I never saw him before,” Billy said.

“What’s your name, bud?”

“Bud,” I said.

“All I can remember is my money,” Billy said.

“I was out in the kitchen when it happened,” Sport said.

“You bastards.”

“Pay the man, Morty,” Sport said.

“I got no more cash,” Morty said. “You come to the game, Billy, I’ll back you for what I owe you.” He turned to Sport. “He comes to the game I’ll back him for what I owe him.”

“You on the level?” asked Billy.

“Would I lie at a time like this?”

“You only lie when you move your lips. Where you playin’?”

“Tuesday eight o’clock, Win Castle’s house.”

“Win Castle, the insurance guy?”

“He asked me to run a game for him. He likes to play but he needs players. You play pretty good.”

“You’ll back me?” Billy asked.

“Up to what I owe you,” Morty said.

“Here’s the ambulance,” Sport said.

After they packed Morty off to the hospital I told Billy, “You get me into that card game and I’ll make sure you get your money from Morty.” Then I explained my talent with cards to him, the first time I ever told anybody about it. Giselle knew I gambled but she didn’t know there was no risk involved, that I could cut aces and deal anybody anything. I told Billy how I’d practiced for months in front of the mirror until I could no longer see myself dealing seconds, or bottom cards, and that now it was second nature. Billy was mesmerized. He never expected this out of me.