Life and Death of a Tough Guy (4 page)

Creakity creakity creak, said the stairs. Be careful, said the stairs. Watch out, said the stairs. Tensely, Joey listened. “Help!” the plumber cried once in a choking voice. Down Georgie thundered. Joey leaped into the doorway. He saw the plumber trying to pull free from Bughead. He heard the plumber moaning like a stunned slaughterhouse bull. Bughead must’ve sloughed him one in the kisser, Joey guessed. The plumber’s glazed eyes lifted to Georgie closing in with the leadpipe, and as the Bughead spun him around his eyelids, like the wings of a trapped bird, fluttered, eyes meeting the eyes of Joey on top of the stairs. For a second before Georgie smashed him one, those eyes seemed to speak. “Help!” they begged and were answered. “Damn you!” Joey’s eyes said. Yet he felt a sudden pressure on his temples: pity touched him with its gentle fingers.

The leadpipe thudded against the plumber’s head. He dropped, Georgie kicked him in penalty for calling for help. Then staring down at the man’s fat mustached face, Georgie muttered, “Looks like a sauerkraut,” and patriotically kicked the plumber a second one. Bughead was picking up the scattered tools. Georgie helped him dump them into the plumber’s bag.

Up they came, while down below in the steady light the unconscious plumber pointed at them all with one outflung limp arm.

“Bug,” Joey said in the street, “when do I get my chance with the leadpipe?”

“You’re tough, ain’t you? Here’s your chance!” Bughead laughed, and unslinging the heavy tool bag from his shoulder, he slipped the leather strap over Joey’s shoulder.

But if Bughead, like Clip Haley, carried a spite against him because he was a jewboy, most of the gang treated him fair and square. The Spotter was always preaching to the new Badgers. “You guys gotta get along good. And no scrap-pin’.” Billy Muhlen, the dutchie from the dutchie block on Thirty-Eighth Street, used to grin at Joey and Georgie. “Remember when we usta fight like cats and dogs?” Billy Muhlen was a good guy, they were nearly all good guys, Joey thought. Still Georgie remained his best friend. Between jobs they would loaf along Broadway, darkened now to save electricity for the war, lingering in front of Liberty Hall, on Times Square, listening to the speakers. Buy bonds, the speakers all said. Joey and Georgie would yawn after a while and take in a burlesque. There in the male darkness that somehow smelled of both a whorehouse bedroom and a kennel, they pointed out their favorites among the bespangled girls.

It was a feeling to be a Badger, to be one of the gang at a beer party when the smoke was so thick a guy could hardly see the next guy’s mug. Yet those smoky faces were the only real faces to Joey Kasow. If he still slept at home, still shared a bed with his brother Danny, his family wasn’t real to him. Faces that didn’t count as if cut out of brown paper with the eyes and mouths painted on like the masks he’d made as a kid. A bunch of dumb Jews, was how Joey Kasow appraised them. His old man working like a dog, his old lady always sewing and cooking and washing, his dumb brother and sister only trying to get good marks at school like the dumb Jewish bookworms they were.

Jew, jewboy, sheeny, kike? Maybe he was one, but he was also a Badger as he had been a 1-4-All. It was a feeling! Like the last day in school when everybody ran out into the street singing:

And no more swiping stuff from Paddy’s Market! No more swimming off the docks! No more crowding into a shed with a dumb old boat on the shelf, 1-4-All scribbled on it! Yet sometimes when he and Georgie walked down Thirty-Seventh Street, down the old block, passing a bunch of little kids roasting sweet mickeys in a fire in the gutter and yelling in foghorn voices like the runts they were, he would glimpse the boy he had been and hear the voices of his abandoned boyhood.

By March, Joey and Georgie were broken in on their new work — robbing stores. One rainy night when most stores on Ninth Avenue had already closed, Joey and Georgie and Bughead, a team since the plumbers of the winter, hurried down the wet sidewalks, Joey carrying an empty suitcase. A trolley, lit up like a huge yellow box on wheels, rattled underneath the elevated tracks. Far away, an approaching El sounded like an iron beast loose in the middle of the dark wet sky.

“That’s the joint,” Bughead said as the three Badgers neared a little candy store, its window a lonely square of light. “Joey, you lay Butso — ” To lay Butso meant to watch out for a cop, for danger.

“Let Georgie lay Butso — ”

“Aw, pipe down!”

“You never gimme a chance — ”

“Some other time — ”

“Always some other time.”

Georgie put in his nickel’s worth too. “Bug, give’m a chance.”

Ahead of them, the candy store window loomed, solitary and shining among the locked-up stores. Its window was full of tops and balls, rows of toy soldiers; but in the lonely night, it seemed there would never be any hands to spin those tops or throw those balls, no generals in knee pants and black stockings to play with the soldiers, no voices anywhere to shout, “I’m the ‘Mericans, you can be the Huns.”

“Hey Joey, you still game?” the Bughead asked out of a corner of his mouth.

Game…
. It was the word of his lifetime. It rang now like a bell, a ringside bell where one round followed another in a match that had no end.

“Sure.”

“I’ll lay Butso,” Bughead decided. “Gimme the bag.” He took the suitcase and said, “Georgie, you’n Joey know what to do.”

Joey…
. His name had a new sound to him. Joey! That’s who he was, neither jewboy nor mick. He felt himself to be anonymous, like the toy soldiers in the candy store window, a Badger with two other Badgers.

Already Georgie was at the door. The doorbell tinkled; they stepped inside. Electric bulbs hung on long wires from the corrugated metal ceiling, empty spots of light. Joey stared at the cigar counter. Five sleepless dolls on a shelf behind the counter stared back at him. His eyes leaped to the rear where a dark green velvety curtain separated store from home.

“Hey!” Georgie hollered down the store.

“We ain’t got all night!” Joey cried brashly.

That’d show Georgie, show ‘em all, he thought.

Georgie looked at him with surprise. Joey, intoxicated by what he’d done, almost forgot that they were waiting for the storekeeper to come out from behind the curtain. His racing mind jumped the mile of time; he could almost hear Georgie telling Bughead, “Know what? Joey, he yells, ‘We ain’t got all night!’ ” And Bughead telling it to Clip and Spotter and all the Badgers, and all of them saying he was a game guy. He breathed in the candy store smell of licorice and chocolate and tasted the strong good salt of his own courage, hearing the praise of the only guys in the world from whom he wanted praise.

The drunken second vanished when the curtain in the rear parted. The storekeeper hurried forward in slipper feet, on his tired face the wired-on smile he displayed to all his customers.

“I wanna box of chalklits for my mudder,” Georgie said. “Somethin’ ‘round a dollar.”

The big blackhaired boy was parroting the Spotter who had the right line for every wrong move. The Spotter knew that a storekeeper would look twice at a couple of tough kids blowing into his store at the tail-end of the day’s business. You had to give a storekeeper a hunk of sugar if you were smart. And the Spotter was smart. He knew there was no song and dance as sweet as the one with a mother in it. The Spotter had seen roaring dock wallopers and teamsters get soft as putty when they got onto the subject of Their Mothers. True, these same men when they staggered home would knock the bloody hell out of the little mothers of their own families, which only proved that a square peg could fit a round hole and that a man had to give the boot to somebody in this bloody life.

The storekeeper nodded, he padded down the counter, returned with a box wrapped in violet paper and tied with a green ribbon. “This is good chocolate. Your mother’ll like it.” And added as sentimentally as the next man, “The best for a mother — ”

Joey reached across the counter, his arms diving before him, his hands locking tight on the storekeeper’s throat. Like a huge round snake that he had caught, it thrashed wildly between his tight pressing fingers. Then Georgie had his blackjack out — the storekeeper slumped and Joey let go his stranglehold. He peered, frightened suddenly, at the curtain in the rear. Nobody! Only Bughead coming in with the suitcase, coming and going so fast, he could’ve been a ghost. Georgie’d already gone behind the counter, emptying out the storekeeper’s pockets. Nimbly, Joey took from Georgie’s hands a worn brown wallet, a watch with a gold lion fob. He opened the suitcase, dropped them in. Georgie passed him cigar boxes, toys. Georgie passed over himself, for one second he’d been behind the counter and the next he was at Joey’s side, grinning. Joey felt the numbing heaviness lift, he felt light and giddy and triumphant, and as he tagged after Georgie, he snatched at the box of candy wrapped in violet paper that everybody’d forgotten about.

Behind them the door bell tinkled in warning. Bughead was waiting. They legged it for the corner. “Joey, you done good,” Bughead said.

“What about that guy’s family? They deaf?”

“Deaf, me eye! Leave it to the Spotter. The guy ain’t got no fam’ly. So, you were worried, huh, Joey?”

“Not on your life, Bug.” He became aware of the box of candy in his hand. “Here. Got sometin’ for you, Bug.”

“What?”

“A box of candy for your mudder!”

“Sonuvabitch joker.”

Georgie laughed. “A box of candy for your mudder! That’s good, that’s good.”

Their heels hit the sidewalks, a night-owl truck rumbled down Ninth, and everything Joey heard, all the sounds of the great sleeping city that never really slept seemed to be saying one thing:

For your mother, for your mother, FOR YOUR MOTHER….

• • •

“Mama, I can’t look for work if I don’t feel well,” he shouted the next morning. But he managed to eat a big bowl of stewed mixed fruits, some scrambled eggs and a couple of the big fat poppyseed rolls she had bought at the Jewish grocery on Thirty-Eighth Street.

His mother stood there in her scrubbed kitchen, watching her oldest born.
Gott
, she asked herself, why did this son alone have to be such an
ausworf. Ausworf
— it was Yiddish for outlaw. His brother Danny and his sister Sarah had left for school long ago, her husband for work. Only this one slept like a king and then he had paraded into the kitchen for her to serve him. Sick? Yes, he was sick as a
goy
, she thought bitterly.

“No school, no woik,” she mourned, speaking in English because this son of hers, this
halber goy
— half Christian — wouldn’t listen to her if she spoke Yiddish.

“Aw, don’t bother me! Do I ask
you
for money?”

“Your father will drive you out of the house like a dog!” she cried angrily in her own language.

“Who cares,” he said, thinking that he’d had about one breakfast too many in this house anyway.

He felt better down in the street. With Georgie. With the Badgers.

Later that week, after the story of The Box of Chocolates for Your Mother had gotten around, the Spotter invited the kid to have a beer with him. He led Joey through the Ladies’ Entrance of Quinn’s saloon to an empty table in the backroom. “There’s some cockeye law about minors,” the Spotter explained. He smiled, the gentlest of lawbreaking fagans, at Joey’s eyes opening up like Sambo himself. Maybe, the Spotter mused, Quinn’s backroom did look like heaven when the guy looking was sixteen. The Spotter was twenty-seven but what with the Bum Ticker and all, he sometimes felt like a hundred.

Joey had tried to keep a poker face on him as if he wasn’t really a minor but a grown man used to stepping out with Spotter Boyle every second night in the week. But he couldn’t control his eyes.

Women in flowered hats sat at all the tables, their long skirts brushing the gleaming hardwood floor as they drank with the cigar-smoking Eighth Avenue sports. Ladies of the evening, their rouged cheeks glowing like sunsets, cigarettes in their fingers. Smoke hung from the antlers of a stuffed deer’s head and through it Joey peered at the paintings on the wall where veiled and naked sirens, the sisters of the women at the tables, displayed their pink and rosy thighs and breasts. “Genuwine hand-painted hunerd percent erls,” boasted Quinn, the proud owner.

A baldheaded Irish waiter in a spotless black coat came to the Spotter’s table and said, “Boyle, you know we can’t soive nobody underage.”

The Spotter chuckled. It was a low and throaty chuckle, as if he didn’t have the strength to laugh hard these days. “You mean him? Why next week President Wilson’s draftin’ the poor bastid into the army. You ain’t gonna begrudge him a schooner of beer?”

When the waiter brought them two schooners, the Spotter’s toast was, “For your ole mother.” The Spotter’d become curious about this Joey Kasow. It was plain the kid was more than a fighting fool like his pal Georgie. Fighting fools came a dime a dozen. And they didn’t interest the Spotter much. In his nine years with the Badgers, he’d seen tough guys galore, the tough guys who’d rather fight than eat. There were the ones too dumb to know better, their brains put in backwards. Others were tough because they were fighting a yellow streak. Joey’s cross, the Spotter guessed, must be his being a jewboy. But after he’d asked the kid a few questions, the Spotter decided that the jewboy was only a part of it. “So all you want’s a chance?”

“I can do anything anybody else can,” Joey said in a shaky yet reckless voice, as if borrowing himself a tongue out of that hairy-chested and bawdy backroom smelling of whiskey and French perfume.

“How about usin’ the old bean?” the Spotter asked, tapping a bony forefinger against his temple. “The guy who’s tough ain’t in the same class as the guy who’s tough and smart. Don’t let the Bug get you down, kid. Be smart. He’s worried he’ll be drafted so he has to pick on somebody. He’s even gonna get married to beat the draft.” The Spotter lazily lifted a thumb at the door leading to the saloon out front. “Quinn and his fat-ass politicians fixed up Clip with a fake wife and four kids, but that’s for Clip.”