Life and Death of a Tough Guy (9 page)

The eyes of her schoolmates darted at the two of them, the blushing girl in a faded dark gray coat, her dress sweeping below the coat line and reaching almost to her ankles, the boy cocky as a street sparrow in a stylish belted overcoat, his hands in gray suede gloves, a gray felt hat cocked over his left ear.

“Gimme those books, Sadie,” he smiled.

She clutched them more tightly as if she felt her father’s presence in the giggling crowd of school girls. But that embittered and observant eye was on the other side of town, confined to his store where it revolved as if in a second and larger socket. “Mister, please go away,” she whispered and walked from him.

He was at her elbow. “How’m I gonna get to know you, Sadie? How about a movin’ pitcher tonight? Gee whiz, Sadie, what’s the harm?”

He wouldn’t let her go home by herself. Together they crossed the roaring avenues and gray spaces of the winter city: Fourth Avenue, Union Square with its crowds arguing about the Russian Bolshevik Lenin who had killed the Czar, Fifth Avenue with its tall buildings of the 1890’s. Everywhere, a thousand strangers hurried with them, indifferent to them. They walked west under the Sixth Avenue elevated tracks — a boy too old for his years and a girl without any experience with boys.

At Seventh Avenue she begged him again, “Please, let me alone. Somebody might see us and tell my father. Please, mister.”

At that, he nodded and waved good-bye. He stood on the corner, watching her walk down Twenty-Fourth Street. She was like a figure sinking into a four-sided shaft of red brick, gray gutter and gray sky, a girl in a hand-me-down coat, her hair brave and coppery red like the wing of a bird.

“Dames!” he would say contemptuously to Georgie after a night in a sidestreet joint where a guy could have himself three different kinds of redheads if he wanted.

Sadie Madofsky wouldn’t go to a moving picture with him, but he kept on meeting her after school anyway. “Call a cop,” he would advise her with a smile. Once he bought a bag of pretzels and when she accepted one after five minutes of urging, he had smiled, thinking that sooner or later he’d have her eating out of his hand.

Outside the big stores on Fourteenth Street the Santa Claus bells tinkled, the clear winter sky hanging like a great blue bell over the Christmas city: a Christmas city and a Jewish girl.

The Jewish girls, the Jewish girls
, the street refrain beat inside his head. She could have been Irish with her red hair and short nose, but when she looked at him with sad and fearful eyes, Joey wasn’t so sure. It was a look that seemed to come from deep inside of her. Deep down she was Jewish, he had thought; and it’s what you are deep down that makes you what you are.

Joey Kasow’d never had a lulu of a thought like that one before. It had shaken him up and he’d wondered about himself with his gray eyes and blondie hair and beak straight as any damn mick’s. Straighter, for there were plenty micks with hooked beaks, and big beaks, and micks with black hair like Georgie. What you are deep down…. The thought had whirled through him, hot and red as his own beating blood and then it had vanished, lost in the maze of years in which he had tried to lose the Jew inside. Leaving the faintest and most cynical of smiles on his lips. “Next time I see her,” he had decided, “I’ll tell her I’m a jewboy too.”

• • •

“How come you and Joey’re buddies?” Bughead Moore was always asking Georgie when they were alone. Once he’d followed Georgie down from the club, catching up with him on the sidewalk. It wasn’t late and it wasn’t early, around ten o’clock, and they’d walked together toward Ninth Avenue. Far away an approaching El beat a pan of iron against the winter sky. “How come?” the Bug wanted to know.

“I told you a million times. I know Joey since we was kids on Thirty-Sevent’.”

“Be your age, Georgie. You don’t trust them sheenies, do yuh?”

“Nope!” Georgie answered instantly.

“Then what the hell you buddies with Joey?”

They had loitered on the windy corner a minute, smoking cigarettes. A cat glided under the dark El pillars and all was quiet and still in the dark hollow hush of the week before Christmas. Soon the Prince of Peace would be walking the Hell’s Kitchen streets again.

“You oughta forget that sheeny, Georgie. You and me, we could be buddies.”

“I thought we wuz buddies — ”

“Hell you thought! I mean real buddies.”

“I thought we wuz real buddies — ”

The Bug spat disgustedly and Georgie said to wait a minute. He went over to a penny chewing-gum machine in front of a candy store, inserted a penny in the slot, returned with two balls of colored gum. “I like this kinda chunggum better’n the slicey kind,” Georgie declared, offering the Bug his choice.

The Bug accepted one of the colored balls and shot it out into the gutter like a marble. “You’re dumb, Georgie, but you ain’t that dumb! I hate a guy what plays dumb, Georgie.”

But when Joey heard the latest on Bug, he’d only laughed and repeated the Spotter’s words of advice. “Grudges don’ mean a damn ‘til one of the guys takes a baseball bat to the other guy.”

“He ain’t called Bughead for nothin’, Joey. One of these days, he’ll get drunk and go bugs on you.”

“Yeh?” And Joey added mysteriously, “Don’t forget, Georgie, there’s more’n one way to skin a cat.”

He swung that same skinned cat when he was with Sadie. “Sure, I’m Jewish. I’m not foolin’ you.” Joey was glad she didn’t believe him. Her surprised face reminded him of the two East Side gamblers who also hadn’t believed him.

“You don’t look Jewish,” Sadie said.

“What about yourself? All that red hair and freckles! Wanna hear me talk Jewish?
Ich bin Yiddish wie du
.” I am Jewish like you, he had said and continued glibly, “I’m no
goy
, Sadie, just ‘cause I live among ‘em. Now with Christmas it oughta be
Chanukah
, too.
Rosh Hashona, Pesach!
” he named the great Jewish holidays; the Feast of Light and New Year and Passover. The holiday candles of his father’s house shone in his mind, magnified a thousandfold by the golden office windows of the city. His father and mother and brother and sister leaped in his mind like candlelight, so that in a voice that was both remembering and mocking, Jew and Jew-hater, he said, “My mother’s
gefillte
fish, yeh. Your mother make
gefillte
fish, Sadie?”

“My mother’s dead.”

That day, as he lingered on the corner as she went on by herself, the faint smile on his lips was like that of an old man. He stared after her, thinking he was using the old bean sure enough. His smile widened, predatory now, the smile of guys on a corner undressing every dame passing by. His eyes shifted from Sadie’s red hair, to her hips and legs, to her hair again and with an animal joy he asked himself if she had red hair all over. Yah!

The Jewish girls, the redhaired Jewish girls…
.

She still protested when he met her. He smiled away her arguments. Even if her father was strict, did he have to know everything? Here she was going to school, working in the store, keeping house. Didn’t she have a right to a little fun, what harm was there in a moving picture? She could say she was seeing a friend, one of the girls at Washington Irving.

Oh, the Jewish girls, the Jewish girls…
. They could be dumb like any other kind, he was thinking. Here she was, sixteen and in high school, but she didn’t have the brains of a fly. When he said his family lived out in Chicago, she believed him. When she asked him what his job was in New York and he said he worked in a warehouse, she believed him. When he said he’d written his mother about Sadie and his mother’d written back he should go out with a nice Jewish girl like her, she believed him.

The lonely have no other alternative in life but to believe.

The strong believe only in their strength. Joey was certain he’d get her — and not only Sadie — but anything else he wanted. As if courage and cunning were a pair of unbeatable dukes. Had he tasted his vomit on the floor of an East Side gambling joint? Chewed the green bile of fear? Sweated at the flashlight of a railroad shack, tightened his belt after kissing another meal good-bye, stared hungrily at women who didn’t see him for dirt — the dirt and dust of the road that had covered him from head to foot? He was eighteen, with twice eighteen lives….

And the Spotter, with no such illusions, lay in his dark bed at the Hotel Berkeley, scheming up new schemes, always figuring, a bookkeeper whose numbers were men.

Early that December, the Spotter’d about decided to use some of his boys — Bughead, Joey, Georgie, a couple others — in a hijacking job. Ordinarily the Spotter was leery of hijackings. Even if you got away clean, it meant killing the truckdriver and maybe the guard with him. It meant cops asking questions, for a killing brought them buzzing like flies to a stiff. It meant riling up the gang who’d lost the load of booze. But when you get a real hot tip, what can a guy do? Fifty thousand bucks in wet money, ninety proof Canadian, was coming down in trucks from outside of Albany, fifty thousand in each and every truck. Booze for the Christmas trade. The Spotter had his tip from a federal who’d gumshoed the backroads upstate and uncovered the new route being used by Big Bill Dwyer’s gang. This particular fed was earning eighteen hundred a year, he was married, with two kids. The Spotter paid him a thousand cash down, with another fifteen hundred promised if the hijacking came off okay.

• • •

From around the curve, the headlights of the truck opened two tunnels of white light in the darkness. Joey blinked, he was sitting at the wheel of a flivver inside a rutted side road. “Count to four or five when you see their lights,” the Bug had said. “Gotta make it look real. like you just come along and got yourself stuck like you was a hick farmer yourself.” One, Joey counted. Two, three, Joey counted, the numbers springing into his mind, cut out of white light. Four, he counted. FIVE, and one two three four five, he drove out onto the main road, shutting off his gas, the truck roaring down at him, enormous, his heart swelling too fast in his chest like a balloon some immense mouth had suddenly inflated. Not fifteen feet away the truck braked to a stop, Joey hurled himself from the flivver’s seat to the floor, while the bursting noise of shotguns boomed and the metal split of pistols washed across his breaking nerves.

Georgie ran across the road to the flivver. “Joey, you aw right? Joey Joey?”

“Yeh,” he said shakily, rising from the floor, hearing the huge blast of silence after gunfire.

“I got the driver!” Georgie boasted excitedly as if he’d been hunting deer. Joey watched the Bug yelling orders in the light of the truck’s headlights — the sonafabitch, Joey thought. In that white inhuman glare, they were dragging the bodies of the truckdriver and the guard into the brush. Joey thought of how he’d been a sitting duck in that flivver, a damn decoy. If the luck’d gone against him, if….

Forty minutes later, the hijacked truck crawled into an unused barn belonging to a farmer recommended by the federal with the hot tip. The Spotter’s boys piled out of their sedan, walked into the farmhouse. It was warm inside, the potbellied stove a cherry red, the kerosene lamps shedding a mild golden light. To Joey, it was all a crazy pipedream. This farm dropping out of the middle of nowhere. The farmer and his wife bringing in platters of fried eggs and potatoes and pots of coffee, and then the woman following her husband upstairs as if she were used to having her home overrun every second night in the week by racketeers from the city.

“Spotter’s got things organized good,” Joey said and lit himself another cigarette. He was feeling a little better now although he was still hearing echoes of the night’s gunfire.

“You bet!” Ted Griffin agreed and for a second the Spotter, a hundred odd miles away, walked into all their thoughts: Spotter the organizer, the leader of the racket. They sat down at the table, ate. The Bug, his jaws champing on a huge mouthful of egg and potato, winked at Ted Griffin. Ted followed the Bug outside, they returned with six bottles of Canadian whiskey.

“One for each-a you,” the Bug said magnanimously. “We got plenty time to kill in this dump….” They started drinking the good Canadian stuff. Georgie produced a deck of cards and all six of the Spotter’s boys began playing poker.

They had tossed their overcoats onto a battered red sofa, but they still wore their hats on their heads. Cigarettes drooping out of their mouths, they looked as if they had no home anywhere, this farmhouse some kind of queer railroad station where the whiskey was served in bottles. Time ticked off in a shuffle of cards.

The Bug, fortified with close to a pint of straight whiskey, said to Joey who’d just lost a pot, “I like to see you lose,” the Bug announced, an honest drunk who deserved and got an honest laugh.

“Can’t always win,” Joey said.

“Shut up, jewboy!” the Bug yelled suddenly, showing his hate for all of them to see like a blackjack in his hand. The Bug’s eyes were gone between his squinched-up narrowed lids, his broad face throwing off a heat as intense as that of the potbelly stove.

“Aw, Bug, lay off,” Georgie said.

The Bug cursed him. “Yuh good-for-nothin’ mick!”

Killigan smiled at the Bug; a careful smile guaranteed to arouse no anger. “I was goin’ to drive tonight. The last minute you said Joey should. He done good. Let’s have a drink, Bug, and forget it.”

The Bug said nothing. They all liked Killigan whom they called Sarge because he’d been in the war. Killigan was older than any of them, and now as the Bug remained silent, Georgie and Lefty and Ted began to get their hopes up.

“Hell!” said the Bug. “The jewboy’s gotta lotta buddies t’night!” He pushed back his chair, rising, and suddenly he seemed to have gained not only his own height but some huge stature. His head lowered on his chest, a rock. The jacket of his double-breasted blue suit wrapped around a body that could have been a solid cake of ice.

“Bug — ” Killigan tried to say.

“Go to hell!” The Bug swung around, confronting Joey who was still seated at the table, his cards exposed before him, their faces up. Three jacks — they hadn’t done much for Joey tonight. “Get out!” the Bug said.