Kockroach (23 page)

He wonders why. It is a puzzle. Something is troubling him. Outside the car window, great fields pass by. The car is deep in the country, the fields are green and stretch on forever and their very greatness is what troubles him.

Business has made him rich, powerful in the world of men. It has allowed him to rise, to support his colony, it has brought Mite back, and Istvan, and Celia, and Norman. But business, he now sees, has its limitations. The more he buys, the more there is to buy. In the ribbons of possibility floating into the future he sees the positions of his pieces on the chessboard advance and then retreat. There are too many other players who all want to be on the same blocks, there is too much money that will never be his. His fear has been greatly eased in the world of business, McGreevy has seen to that, but with
the lessening of his fear, his greed has concomitantly grown to monstrous dimensions, whispering, imploring, shouting in his ear that he doesn’t have enough, not enough, that he needs more, more, everything.

He gazes outside the window at the passing fields with their rising mounds, their twisting valleys. He wants to stride over those fields, he wants to plow the earth with the spikes hammered through the soles beneath his feet, he wants to spill his seed along the furrows, he wants to make his claim, he wants to mark, control, dominate the entire breadth of the world.

“I like the shoes,” he says.

I suppose
I gots a problem with saying goodbye.

Maybe it’s something in my genes. My daddy he wasn’t no good at saying so long neither, but at least he would just take a powder. I leans toward the powder keg. Why I can’t just get on with it, like other Joes, what shake a hand and are on their ways, is a mystery. Champ, for instance, didn’t make no big thing of leaving. It was just, “Goodbye, Mick,” two words, a nod, and quick as that he’s off in the old Packard for points west.

I ever tell you how I said goodbye to Old Dudley, what first taught me chess and the ways of the world? This was after my mother got swallowed whole by Hubert and I checked out her rainy-day cookie jar and found not a dollar, not a cent, just an IOU signed by, wouldn’t you know it, Old Dudley hisself. So we were pulling one of our inside jobs, scouring some house shiny of its jewels and silver and cash, all placed in that white sack of his. And then, just as he’s shimmying legs-first back out the window, I slams the frame on his back, locking him in. “Mickey, my boy,” he says, that puzzled look on his puss. But the puzzlement it disappears when I takes the sack and starts to bashing his face with it. It was his blood and my
tears and so long Dudley. I left him there, trapped like a rat for the cops to find, and used that sack to pay my way to New York. But that’s what you get, that’s the price of betrayal.

“Goodbye, Mick.”

Yeah, and good riddance. Just what I needed, another voice from the chorus singing out my own utter worthlessness.

You want to blame it on something, that soft goodbye? Then blame it on them envelopes, just like the one with Harrington’s name you gots your eye on. You been looking at it all this time like it was the holy grail, like it was something powerful and golden, when let me tell you, missy, it is a steaming pile of crap. And how does I knows? Because I’m the rodent what scours them sewers until I finds the tastiest morsels. The lowest rat in the lowest stream of sewage in this whole damn town ain’t got nothing on Mite. This is what the Boss has made of me.

“I need information,” the Boss told me, all the time knowing I was the one to get it for him. With the new line I had picked up in Chi-town, I could get the goods, I could fill them envelopes. And believe me when I tells you, in the land of money where the Boss now was plying his trade, there was plenty of filling to find.

I thought the Times Square of my young manhood was a place of vice and degeneration, a place where all the lowliest desires could find a few moments of release, but let me tell you this, missy, Times Square never had nothing on the dark and desolate landscape of money. I found thievery and perversion, falsehoods and incest, violence, boorishness, bad breath, and murder. And, worst of all, fools what thought that
money it could cleanse the darkest secrets of the soul. And maybe it could have, if I wasn’t there with my envelopes. Like I was for a muck-a-muck what faced off against the Boss, name of Nicholas Van Ater.

Van Ater was a society type, loaded to the gills and liked showing it. Short, squat, thick fingers, thick cigars, his black hair slicked back like a cartoon. To see Van Ater was to see a soul swelled fat on money pure. And his wife was so thin, if she turned sideways you could see the bone in her throat. Van Ater had a lien on a property the Boss, he wanted to buy, and Van Ater was leaning a bit too hard. So the Boss, he put me on the case. When it came time for the sit-down with Van Ater, Boss had more than enough information to slap that fat face into submission.

“How’d it go, Boss?” I said when he left out of Van Ater’s building with the envelope still in his hand.

“Not so good, Mite.”

“You tell him you knows the girl she’s only fourteen?”

“He said he likes to reach out to the nation’s youth.”

“What about the girl afore her, what he beat near to senseless?”

“A lovers’ spat.”

“And about his wife, the powder up her upturned nose and the tennis instructor what is instructing her plenty with his forehand?”

“He was pleased he was getting value for his money.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “The bastard’s shameless.”

“I admire that,” said the Boss.

“So does I. Want me to spill it all to the press?”

“No,” said Blatta. “I sensed there was something else, something you had missed.”

“I dug hard, Boss.”

“Dig harder. Wipe the smile off his face.”

It took me two weeks to find it when it should have taken me two hours. With a society guy like Van Ater, it wasn’t enough to find out what sins he committed, sins was why they all had that money in the first place. It had to be something different, something what would make that society hound he had married and the boys at the club take notice. And I found it, sures I did. Because the Boss is right, damn it to hell, it’s always there.

“What does that bastard Blatta want now?” says Van Ater. He talks in an affected gangsterese, like he had suckled at the droopy breast of Edward G. Robinson hisself.

I leans back, props my feet on the rim of his huge mahogany desk. “He wants you to mark the lien settled.”

“Tell your boss to find some young bear cub he can steamroll,” says Van Ater.

“Oh, I thinks you’ll do as we wants,” I says.

“You know, you’re just the size, I’d have fun working you over myself.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to try, believe me,” I says, “I’ve got a face like a hardball, all stitches and horsehide already.”

And then I pulls the envelope out my jacket. I drops my feet, puts the envelope on the desk, pushes it oh so slowly toward his grinning mug.

I watch as he snatches it up, watch as he opens it, takes out the note, unfolds it, watch as the smile is wiped off his fat face just like the Boss, he wanted. Within the week the lien was
settled and the property was slipped into the Boss’s side pocket. Now Van Ater’s one of the Boss’s big supporters in the run for the Senate. Funny how it works, isn’t it, all from a single name on a folded-up slip of paper?

See, that’s how the Boss did business in them days, how he does it still. Because the Boss, he don’t strong-arm no more. Now it’s all what you know and who you’re willing to tell. That’s what this envelope is too, a little treat for that son of a bitch Harrington who thinks the open Senate seat is his for the taking, so long as he gets the most votes. Stupid son of a bitch, he don’t have the foggiest damn notion of what he got hisself into.

And neither did Champ.

It wasn’t like there wasn’t no happy times riding along with the Boss. We was a family then, or the closest thing I ever had to one, other than that tight threesome in my boyhood: me, my momma, and Hubert. In the Boss’s triple townhouse there lived the Boss and Celia, and Norman, Celia’s boy. And there was Istvan, and Cassandra too. And then there was me, the envelope man, and Champ hisself, who from the first day was treated like one of the family. That was the thing about the Boss, he didn’t have no hang-ups about color or twisted dispositions. And we couldn’t forget the money boys what was always skulking about, McGreevy, looking after all the details, and Albert Gladden, the real estate man, his sad-sack face putting a damper on everything. Not to mention the passel of servants what served us all.

There was one more member I don’t want to slight, Glenda,
who moved into the house to nanny the boy and then moved right in on the Boss. Celia was blue in them days, not being able to have no more babies after Norman. And then Glenda shows up, all tall and blond, full of youth and an obvious ambition for the Boss. Celia tried like hell to get Glenda out of that house, but by the time she cottoned to what was going on, Glenda was already under the protection of the Boss, and so no matter how many dishes was throwed, Glenda stayed and Celia just had to learn to live with it.

But then, what’s a family without a little family strife.

Look at us there, the family that we was. It’s all in the snapshots. Champ and me smoking stogies in Miami. Celia and Norman and the two of us in Hollywood, with our hands on the cement in front of that Chinese Theatre. Norman on the beach, fat and white, standing over a buried Mite, me with my hat still on. Norman in horse pants, getting taller, wider, his smile getting a little too familiar. The whole gang, including McGreevy and Cassandra, Istvan and Glenda and the Boss, on the Strip in Vegas, dressed in our finery, all of us all smiles, excepting of course the way Celia she looks at Glenda as the Boss wraps his arm around Glenda’s whippet waist.

It was anything any of us ever could have hoped for, but it wasn’t enough for Champ. Not after that last envelope.

It was just another get, nothing big. A fat cat named Gorman had something the Boss wanted to buy, a conglomeration of companies bigger than anything the Boss had bought before. McGreevy worked out a whole new financing arrangement to provide the cash. My job was to get Gorman to sell.
Except the Boss told us right off the key it wasn’t Gorman hisself, but the son. And even afore I started looking I knew what I would find. Champ and me, first time we laid eyes on the boy we both of us knew.

And finding proof, what did that take?

Follow the car to the joint west by the Hudson, not far, actually, from the very pier what Sylvie used to work. Wait until the son, he slips out that bar and back to his car with a new pal. Take a few pictures and then slip inside yourself.

Smoke and fancy lights and music what was like a throbbing in your head. A place what was on the other side of the rainbow from where Champ and me we lived our lives. And the ways they dressed, with their feathers and finery, made my green outfit seem pale. Champ and me, we sat at the bar, ordered our drinks, rubbernecked like we was tourists.

“What do you think, Mick?”

“I don’t likes it,” I said. “It’s a damn costume party. When I first came to the Square there wasn’t no filly-fallying like this here. When I first came to the Square—”

“I heard it all already,” said Champ. “What, are you going to tell me again about Jimmy Slaps?”

“He was an interesting guy, is all. And that’s my point. There was a way of doing things then. There was a world to aspire to. But this, this is like giving up. I don’t likes it.”

“I don’t think they care, Mick.”

“Shows you what they know. Let’s get to work. I’ll talk up the barkeep, you start to asking around.”

“I don’t think so.”

I stopped at that, stared at Champ, acted like I didn’t know
what was up, even though I certainly did. “What do you mean you don’t think so?”

“I say we walk out right now and tell the Boss we didn’t find a thing.”

“Oh, quit your bellyaching. It’s business, is all. And it ain’t our business the kind of business the Boss plays at.”

“But this one is, Mick, can’t you see?”

“It ain’t no different than Van Ater.”

“No, it’s not. But I didn’t learn about that one till later. You purposely kept that one from me.”

“Don’t act like some holy shaman. You’ve been filling them envelopes too.”

“But what those fools did is different than what they are.”

“Van Ater done plenty.”

“But that’s not what you put in the envelope.”

“I put his name is all.”

“His old name.”

“That he was passing hisself off as something he never was, acting like there was something to be ashamed of in being the same race as you, that didn’t piss you off?”

“Just made me sad for him, Mick. Just that. You don’t know what it is.”

“Don’t tell me I don’t know what it is. It’s all I ever knowed.”

“And now with this boy, it’s the same.”

“He’s a creep.”

“He might be that, but that’s not what you’ll be putting in the envelope, is it? You give what he is to the Boss, you be betraying nothing but yourself.”

“Can’t say I don’t deserve it.”

“Maybe not, but you be betraying me too, and I won’t be staying around to see that.”

“I promised I’d be square with him here on in,” I said. “I left him once, I can’t leave him again. I don’t got no choice.”

“Sure you do, Mick.”

But did I? Did I ever in the presence of the Boss? Not really. My fate in this world is to latch on to the strong, and no one was ever stronger than the Boss. So, yeah, I handed the envelope with the facts and the photos over to the Boss and he handed it to the Joe what owned the company and, yeah, to keep it quiet from the country club world that his married boy preferred to tango with other boys, Gorman caved. And Champ, well, he was as good as his word.

“Goodbye, Mick.”

And goodbye to you, you son of a bitch.

And out of my life went something I never had before and I won’t near see again. It’s been a year already and still it slays me. Every day. But it was me who said goodbye first, wasn’t it? And now I’m saying goodbye again, but not so quietly as Champ.

So here’s the envelope what should make the race a one-horse exhibition. Look inside and you’ll find everything what Harrington done to make the fortune he’s using to buy his seat. All the thieving, all the swindling, an insider stock deal what already has the SEC boys hard just thinking about it. Not to mention the name of his lady friend, with the Spanish eyes and the tits like urns of soft butter, what he keeps in a pad on Park Avenue.

But when betrayal it’s in your blood and bones, you end up betraying everyone who ever cared for your soul. So I’m betraying the Boss, too. Without an envelope but with a story of my own. The one I just told. You won’t find any of it in the record, McGreevy he scrubbed it clear and created for the Boss an entire background as false as the lifts in my shoes, but write it up just as I told it and you’ll be writing up the truth, missy. Pulitzer will be calling, and the Republican Party will soon enough be looking for a new boy to carry its hat into the race. With Champ safe and away in Mexico, I figure it’s time to call in my chips.

You don’t spend a chunk of your life in a place like Times Square without learning a thing or two. And what I learned was this: People, theys all liars, and the ones they lying to most of all is theyselves. Like Tab, what hustled the men’s rooms and back alleys, selling hisself to men, but who insisted all along he wasn’t no queer. And Tony the Tune, what was just one fighter away from the big time. And Jimmy Slaps, what was devoting his life to Jesus. And Sylvie, what was going to visit her sister and get herself well. And Old Dudley hisself, what always claimed him bloodying my lip and diddling my yard was done for my own damn good. My own damn good. And even my mother, telling me time and again everything was going to be all right. All of them, every one of them, was just lying to theyselves so they could stand the company for the next couple months or days or hours.