Life and Death of a Tough Guy (15 page)

“What’s a-matter?” she had heard his voice or with it White Shirt’s voice or the voice of her shoes. Her mind see-sawing between hysteria and the truth of this room, this bed, herself in this bed, her shoes on this floor. “Papa,” she had screamed, beginning to weep.

“Sweetie — ”

“You — ” she had screamed.

“I didn’ do nothin’, Sweetie, you didn’ wanna do — ”

“You, you, you — ”

“We had a coupla sodas and when we left you let me pet you and when I said we should come here….”

White Shirt was talking. The shoes were talking. In a fit of hysteria, she had flung the sheet from her, for she was going somewhere — Yes! to the police, somewhere, somewhere! — but the sight of her naked legs made her gasp. She had reached down with trembling fingers to cover her thighs, and then pulled the sheet over herself again. “Papa, papa!” she had screamed. “I’ll kill myself!”

“Sweetie,” he had said. “You gotta use your head on this — Your old man gets the wrong idea, we’ll both be in dutch. He’ll go to the cops and you’ll go to reform school. Don’t be crazy, Sweetie! For Christ sake, you don’t want the reform school. I love you, honest! I love you, Sadie. When I’m legal age, twenny-one, we can get married — I love you so don’t start actin’ crazy. For God’s sake, don’t start actin’ crazy. For God’s sake — ”

God!
The huge and holy word she had heard all her life, that she had seen spelled out in the mystic Hebrew letters of her father’s prayer book, had blazed like the first star of evening in this room of spotted sheets and spotted souls. Blazed and vanished as if lost in the vast white glittering sand of a multitude of evening stars.

• • •

In their clothes, they slept as if the furnished room were out on the street — the tailor’s daughter and Joey Kasow home from his talk with the Spotter.

He slept and wandered down the long corridors of broken dreams. He was with his mother. He was alone, walking down an endless sidewalk, carefully and deliberately treading on the dirtfilled spaces between the slabs. “Jesus Christ stay in hell!” he was saying, for if he stepped off, even for a second, Jesus Christ might get out…. He and Georgie walked into a church. They were the only ones there and when he looked up to see the ceiling, he was frightened, it was so high, so high. He wanted to leave but the stone saints shook their heads, No. The head on the cross shook Its head, No. He began to cry. His mother appeared but she shook her head, No. The Spotter sat like a stone saint in a long flowing robe. No….

“No!” he cried, awaking out of childhood. Years ago, he had chanted “Jesus Christ stay in hell!” and once on a dare from Georgie had walked into Holy Cross Church on Forty-Second Street. Dreams of childhood, dreams of fear.

“Joey!” the girl whispered, her fingers touching his cheek. “Joey — ”

He tried to rise. His elbow caved in; he tried again. He stumbled out of the room into the corridor where small yellow bulbs in the ceiling lighted his way to the bathroom. He went inside, groped for the light-chain, found it, pulled it. Before him were the brown walls of the bathroom. Brown gurgled in his throat. He rushed to the white bowl and nothing would stay down any more. Nothing. He puked the night’s whiskey and the night’s betrayals; the pride he had eaten and the broken splinters of his dreams. Croak! he cursed heaving up his guts. Croak! he cursed the whiskey. Croak! he cursed the Spotter and Georgie. Croak! he cursed himself and when the spasm ended, drenched with sweat, he looked down the hole and had a vision of his grave.

He staggered to the sink, washed, soaking his head. A face emerged in the mirror. “Croak!” he muttered.

When he returned to their room, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, crying quietly. She had learned in her two weeks with him that the walls of furnished rooms aren’t walls so much as ears. She glanced at Joey. “Are you all right?”

He looked at her with the heavy eyes of exhaustion. She was a regular crybaby, he thought. Served him right for tying up with her. Should’ve slammed the door in her face when she’d come around that night. So instead like a damn fool he’d chased Georgie out and here they were in their own God damn room. Served him right. What’d he expected?

Yes, what had he expected? From her, from the Spotter, from Georgie, from himself?

He walked to the closet, reached in for a quart of rye cached there. “Joey, don’t drink any more,” she whimpered.

“Here,” he said wearily bringing the bottle and glass over to her. “Here! Have a drink. Stop that God damn snivelin’ for once!”

“I don’t want any, Joey — ” she cried.

“It’ll make you feel better. Gwan, have a drink!”

“Joey, let’s go away,” she said brokenly, rubbing at her wet eyes.

“Yeh, but take a drink first.” He poured whiskey into the glass, pushed it into her hand. “Gwan, drink it down!”

The girl swallowed the whiskey, coughing.

A second they looked at each other. The hour was late, the furnished rooming house quiet, all its doors locked.

All hearts locked up for the night, too. Behind his store on Twenty-Fourth Street, Tailor Madofsky couldn’t sleep for thinking of his daughter. And over on Thirty-Seventh Street, Carpenter Kasow slept with his wife who maybe was dreaming of her lost son. Georgie Connelly slept in the furnished room where he was living by himself these days. And even Spotter Boyle dozed in his room at the Hotel Berkeley on Forty-Sixth Street. Only the street didn’t sleep, its thousand eyes dark with the shades drawn in the windows, its ten thousand shades dark but here and there, a shining golden eye, the golden unwinking eye of the stone that never slept, its jaws the night and the darkness.

The next day, at the Young Democrats, Big Georgie led Joey aside. Later, in a Tenth Avenue speak, Georgie put what was between them out in the open. When he was finished, he wanted to know, his eyes anxious, “Joey, you tell me what else could I’ve done?”

“Nothin’. Spotter says jump off the roof, we gotta jump.”

“I’m just a rat, Joey.”

“Spotter’s boss, ain’t he?”

After nine or ten needle beers, they had their arms around each other’s shoulders, with Georgie shouting for the whole world and his cousin to hear, “I let yuh down, Joey! Gonna carry that cross ‘til I die!” Tearily, he cracked a hardboiled egg, pulled off the shell with clumsy fingers and offered Joey the mangled meat. “Take it!” Georgie pleaded. “Holy Mary, we know each other our whole life and looka what I done.”

Joey accepted the egg, its yellow center exposed like a heart. He ate Georgie’s peace offering but he knew things couldn’t be the same again. Georgie could cry in his beer all night. Georgie could roll on the floor a week, but it was too late. Georgie’d ratted on him! And they’d been pals all their lives, Joey mourned beerily. Through golden-brown colored glasses he peered through the speakeasy smoke at the good old days….

The good old days when they had sat around in a backyard, sailed on their black ship, the 1-4-All, the candle on the shelf glowing like a sun on a far horizon. Ship-mates on the 1-4-All, in the days when they had played fair in the gang and foul with everybody else, when teachers’ pets and snitchers, rats and stool-pigeons, were somebody to mobilize.

A rat was a rat, a doublecross was a doublecross. The Spotter’d made a rat out of Georgie. And what about himself? The guy who thought he was so hot? The Spotter’d made him backtrack. Made him spit in his own face.

• • •

In the lonely nights when all friends are gone, Joey poured out a little of what was burning him up. Responding like other tough guys before him to the beating heart behind a woman’s naked breast. But only a little. Hell, he was no sap to spill the beans. If you couldn’t trust a guy you’d known your whole life, how the hell could you trust a dame. Especially a crybaby of a dame. “Remember how I said I worked in a warehouse? Well, it’s a brewery, a closed-down brewery.” And because she was such a weeper, he’d dosed up the truth with a little brand-new bull. “This is no cheap bootlegger brewery, Sweetie. A judge’s one of the owners besides the Spotter. It’s high class. Like a bank.” Grinning when she had timidly suggested he get another job. “I will,” he’d said with another off-the-lip promise and yet touched despite himself. Most dames didn’t give a damn what the guy did as long as he produced the cash or the good times. She did. She liked him, she loved him even. And if he cynically remembered that she had no choice, since her old man’d booted her out into the street, that was okay, too. You had to expect everybody to look out for themself, he thought. Whether it was a guy he’d known his whole life or this dumb cherry. “Sweetie, it’s a good job I have. Only this Spotter Boyle — he’s what you call a boss! I usta think, Sweetie, he was for me. Whatta sap! The Spotter’s the kind what wants to own you like the pencil in his vest pocket.”

As he owned the beaten and dispirited girl whom without conscious irony, he called Sweetie.

The owners and the owned: in a world where all the rooms, furnished or unfurnished, were narrow.

• • •

Sadie, when Joey was working in the ‘closed-down brewery,’ had gotten into the habit of going on long aimless walks.

One day she noticed the stained blue glass windows of an upstairs synagogue. It was above a haberdashery on Seventh Avenue below Forty-Second Street. She looked at the Hebrew words on the blue glass and thought this was some place to have a
schul
. Right in the middle of the crowds!

The fast-walking Seventh Avenue crowds seemed to have no need for synagogues or churches whether upstairs or downstairs. The men all seemed to have important engagements, the corsetless women skipped along, their flesh-colored stockings rolled below the knees. But everybody with a minute to spare at the deep excavations where foundations were being prepared for the cloak and suit lofts, to gawk at raw earth and uncovered rock: the pits of a new time without devils.

Sadie Madofsky had paused near the haberdashery. Above was the synagogue. Her heart was beating fast, she was tempted to go up and pray. She didn’t care. How could she who was living with a bootlegger? A
kurva!
Still, with the holy Hebrew words above her, she surrendered to her mood. She felt somehow as if under God’s roof. Her eyelids flickered, her reddish-brown eyes moistened, and she prayed for forgiveness, facing the haberdashery window, elegant with the scrolls of fashion. The crowds shuffled by, the traffic rolled, the rivet guns dinned of iron tomorrows.

She began coming here often on her walks, the haberdashery a wailing wall, and God shining in blue glass over her head. But her prayers became briefer. She was wondering instead if she shouldn’t go upstairs and talk to the rabbi. Why not? Yes, why not? She memorized exactly what she’d tell him. She even imagined what he looked like — he would have dark sad eyes and a kind face and he would understand it wasn’t her fault. Something’d happened to her that first time, something….

But when she did climb the flight to the synagogue and was admitted to the rabbi’s office, her set speech never reached her lips. “Please help me,” was all she could say, faltering and tearful.

“Who are you?” the rabbi asked quietly. His eyes weren’t dark and sad as Sadie had imagined, but blue behind their gold-rimmed glasses. “Who are you, young woman?”

Kurva
, a voice shouted inside her head. She wept.

“I will help you if I can,” she heard the rabbi saying but she was already edging towards the door. He lifted his hands to stay her, “My daughter — ” She gasped, hearing her father calling her, but it was not her father. She stared at the rabbi’s hands and fled the peace voice and hands were holding out to her. Like the peace of the Sabbath when all was white and gold, the table cloth a spotless white, the dead hands of her mother white, the candlelight and the twisted yellowish bread of the Sabbath, the
chalah
, golden.

Downstairs, the crowd directed a quick look at her reddened eyes and just as quickly lost interest. She walked alone among the thousands, she prayed silently:

Dear God, blessed Lord, please forgive me. Dear God, forgive Joey, too. Please forgive his sin, forgive my sin. He’ll marry me, dear God, when he’s twenty-one. He promised, he loves me, please forgive him, forgive us, dear God in heaven. Forgive us.

FORGIVE….

Like a bell the mighty word clanged in her consciousness. She trembled. She moved with the crowd to Times Square. The trollies on Forty-Second Street clattered north and south, shoeleather scraped, voices argued. And shouts of news-hawkers selling still another bootlegger killing for a couple of pennies.

• • •

“I’m givin’ you the Bug’s spot,” the Spotter had said to Joey with Bughead Moore still on a slab at the morgue. “I like you, Joey, I always have. You got no police record,” he’d congratulated the kid slyly. “Keep on bein’ smart. One of these days you’ll be as smart as the Ol’ Spotter.”

Joey had shown the Spotter the cold and obedient face of a lead soldier while he vowed he’d be smart all right. Let the Spotter think he owned him. His break’d come. Christ, he could wait. He was young, wasn’t he?

Joey Kasow was only nineteen, but just the same he was no longer as young as he believed. The Spotter’d put a crimp in him, all right — the crimp of caution.

Four, five weeks later, in late September, the Spotter sent Joey up-state on his first gun job. There were three of them: Joey, Ted Griffin, the ex-pug, and black-haired Lefty. They picked up the mark, a guy by name of Longo, in the house of one of the Spotter’s boys by name of Zelucci. It was, Joey thought, a ginzo party. In Zelucci’s house, Longo was ready for delivery, tied hand and foot, a gag in his mouth. How Zelucci’d managed it the three from New York would never know. They asked no questions. The hell with it! They had their job. Zelucci had his. They carried Longo into their car, drove as per instructions on a country backroad until a deserted barn lifted into their headlights. Lefty, the driver switched the lights off. The night was cloudy, real dark. They picked up Longo and moved towards the barn. Inside, they dropped Longo to the floor. Ted Griffin clicked on a flashlight. The white beam steadied on Longo’s face, shifted to empty stalls, a stoved-in milk pail, a rusted axe, to Lefty, to Joey with his hands in his pants pockets.