Lucky Billy (32 page)

"Would you listen to this. A murderer from infancy."

"Slight exaggeration," says Pete.

'"His unnatural desire to murder again is manifested in the killing of William Matthews and an unknown man.' I never killed Matthews."

"Maybe someone else did."

"I seriously doubt it. And an unknown man. Unknown to me, too. I'd like to shove all these papers down this scribbler's throat." But Billy keeps reading. He reads the accompanying article, then the one for the next day: is
THE KID KILLED
? That gives him a good laugh. It seems that someone named Marshal Studemier has gunned Billy the Kid down on the streets of El Paso. And he's a Torquemado now! Whatever Torquemados are.

T
HE HORSE THAT REARS
up has just seen a rat, though how he spotted the vermin down there amid the boots, wheels, wagon tongues, skirts, handbills, canes, dogs, newspapers, legs, pushcarts, sandwich signs, single-trees, double-trees, the occasional pig, unlit lanterns hung beneath rear axles—not to mention nosebags, bustles, parcels, market baskets, baseball bats, grain sacks freighted on handcarts, wheelbarrows spilling feathers—and street Arabs ducking between and among crinolined dresses, chasing guttersnipes—and gouts of tobacco juice aimed at the interstices—is anyone's guess. Perhaps he imagined it. In rearing, he panics the mob in his path which, squeezing together, squirts a little girl into a cop's arms, while behind the rising horse his cart raises up, barely a foot, but that's enough to eject several sacks of coal. They smash open in the dirt. Like birds to seed, boys flock to the scattered coal on the street, filling their pockets. Several have pails. The city cop with the girl in his arms pats her on the bum back to her mother but the crowd is so dense his meaty hand is forced to linger. This side-whiskered policeman then looks to the coal, and Henry and Josie duck behind a fruit cart. Their pockets are full. The rules regarding spillage are not their concern. Spillage goes to the poor; the poor are everyone. No, it's not the coal that worries Henry McCarty, it's the way that frog had been eyeing him and Josie, the something in his look. Josie says the police are paid fifty cents for each delinquent boy they hand over to the Protestants. That's why Henry's brother always keeps a lump of lead tied inside a hanky in his pocket.

The Protestants wait on side streets off of Hester, away from the mobs. Josie often points them out. They look upright and wealthy, wear claw-hammer coats, sport burnsides, wear spectacles. Their sisters in the Lord wear high-necked dresses with long sleeves and gloves but eschew corsets. They are ogres. They eat little boys. The Children's Aid Society, for which they work, first catches loose urchins with the help of policemen then questions them severely on their parents and religion and if they have either. Catholics get locked in a special room at the so-called House of Refuge, according to Josie. There, they convert you. They throw you in a cage and burn you with pokers until you give up the pope and if you don't they cook you good. If you do, they put you on an orphan train filled with others like yourself and ship you out west. Past the Mississippi, at each station they stop at, farmers and mine-owners stroll through the cars looking over the child-flesh. They pinch your arms and legs, pry open your mouths, examine your teeth. Those they want, they buy to work in a mine or slave on a farm and if they catch you being Catholic there's hell to pay.

"How can they catch you being Catholic?"

Henry asked this question that morning outside their Cherry Street tenement. In answer, Josie reached down his brother's shirt and pulled out his scapular. "See, as long as you wear this you're a Catholic. So suppose when they catch you, you manage to hide it? If they find it, you're dead. Those farmers in Nebraska—they'll tie you to a tree and burn you alive." Holding on to the scapular, he pulled Henry's neck, and swung him by the cord at the mouth of their alley.

"Quit it!"

He yanked Henry toward him, slapped his left ear with an open hand, released him. The ringing in Henry's ears wouldn't stop. He crouched there for a minute, jaw hanging open, clutching both ears, scapular swinging.

Now, the cop starts toward them and they run. Pockets bulging with coal, they run east on Hester but it's a desperate dream of running attempted underwater against a tide of bipeds. Their arms pump and grope, weakly prying breaches, their feet skip and slitter. Elbows whack Henry's head, he's used to it though, Josie McCarty has ever loved to smack his brother. Time about-faces; they're going so slow, against the current of flesh, it seems they've washed backwards. But so has the policeman. In fact, he's receded. Could be he's not chasing them at all. He's snatched a prerogative apple from a cart and his head swings back and mouth opens wide as though not to bite but engulf it entirely. But the brothers run regardless, from sheer doggedness and pluck, just to keep the ball rolling—from the fierce and all but animal pleasure of ducking under carts and dodging swift kicks and racing past shouts and ordinary clatter, snatching fruit themselves. At one point, strong hands lift Henry high and toss the little monkey over heads and shoulders, and he sinks through the hats, he gently subsides, lowering dreamily, he's ahead of Josie now. At a break in the crowd, he dashes ahead and waits on Allen Street near the corner of Hester, warily eyeing a pinch-necked man in collar and tails conferring with an oldish woman. They stand beside a lamppost, she grips a parasol, and he thumbs through a notebook that both of them consult.

Josie catches up. Here, the noise of the market—the rumble of wheels and scrape of clothing and murmur of voices and cries of the hawkers—is its own separate whale with a loose skin around it sliding down Hester Street. One noise trumps the rest: a large woman on the corner behind a barrel of oysters, screaming, "Alive in the shell! Alive in the shell!"

"I'd love one of those snots," Josie says. Henry hangs back but Josie draws closer to the woman on the corner, who faces away. With swift flicks of her hands, one holding the knife, she opens oysters left and right. The long wavy queue before her—kelp along the shore—laps against the mob moving through Hester Street. One by one, she takes their coins and slips them in her apron while offering half-shells like communion wafers to their open mouths. The arm with the knife swings a wild arc at Josie's backside when he darts past. Henry can't help but admire his crafty brother. He's managed to nick three oysters from the barrel in one quick strike and now he's flying back. Then Henry's breath catches. Josie's flying all right, he flies straight into the Children's Aid Society man—for that's all he could be—whose thin lips sneer. He's chopped the notebook to seize Josie by the collar, holding him out at arm's length like a fish. Josie flails and kicks; one oyster falls. When the arm weakens, Josie aims a kick on his shins below the knee with boot-toes, Henry knows, that are sharded with glass. The man howls and grabs his leg and hops on one foot, Josie lands on his feet, and Josie and Henry race full-chisel down Allen Street to Pike.

On Pike Street, they crack their two oysters with paving stones and pick out the bits of shell. They bite the salty cartilaginous plugs off at the base.

Cherry Street's an omnium-gatherum of tenements, dying shacks, cheap hotels in old colonial residences now in shabby disrepair, saloons, dance halls, and empty lots where mansions once stood with just the carriage house left converted to a brothel. Fire escapes geometrically festoon the row of seven-story tenements past Clinton Street. Ash barrels on the street. Wash hangs from windows and on the iron balconies morning glories grow in cheese- and lard-boxes. Lace curtains on some windows, burlap on others. They pass clown an alley to their tenement behind its twin on Cherry Street, picking their way through garbage, trash, paving stones, a dead cat, foul rags, unmentionable deposits. Laundered sheets on lines over their heads cross every which way. In an alcove of their building, behind a fence of dismantled packing crates, a pig litter snuffles its overfat mother. Sharp stink of pigshit; then coal soot and dust and something else smelling like eggs poached in ammonia. Their home's in the basement, down narrow stairs to which the darkness clings like a blanketing fuzz, even at midday. Each step going down has a pressed-iron tread but you have to be mindful, loosened treads can snag toes. The stench of soot and urine overpowers down here. From wet, oozing walls, roaches slip out of cracks to sniff passing children. Sound of coughing, puddles on the floor, colonies of slugs and worms in wet corners. They locate their door by feel. Josie kicks it open and the two brothers unload the coal from their pockets into the scuttle on the floor. "Who's that, then?" The hoarse squeaky voice is one they haven't heard before.

"Is our mother here?"

"She's marketing," says the man. They vaguely make him out at the kitchen table with his white ghostly arms and hairy bare chest. Neither burlap nor lace hangs on the windows in their dark kitchen, for the windows up near the ceiling are small, the size of narrow shelves. Burlap has other uses; the walls themselves are burlap, varnished with linseed oil. Above a cup of steaming tea, the man at the table twists himself toward the boys. "Which one's Josie?"

"That's me."

"She said to take your bath."

"I'll do it later. We're off, so. Give Catherine our love."

"Done that already."

"Smartass," mumbles Josie.

Where was he this morning? wonders Henry. Back on Cherry Street, they aim west for Broadway. Today's Saturday, market day, bathe-in-the-tenement's-slop-sink clay for Henry. His mother had washed him this morning when they rose, and no man was there then, unless still in her bed. She used reclaiming powder, the only soap in the house; his raw skin still stings. Saturday was when, until a year or so ago, he'd held his mother's hand to the market and back, but now it's the day he roams the city with Josie. And even that will change soon. Next week, Josie begins his first job: cutting heels at the shoe factory down on Water Street. No more scrounging rusted pins to clean in coal oil and wrap inside papers and sell for pennies at the market. No more, for that matter, annually massacreeing sparrows and robins with their fellow guttersnipes on the first day of May. It was always grand, a spring ritual for urchins, to march up Broadway past Wood's Museum where the shabby farms and squatters' shacks began and the trees grew more plentiful and the lilacs were blowing and cows mooed in fields. The bright sunlight and smell of unsupervised earth and perfume of apple blossoms will, in their memories, be forever fused with the slaughter of birds by means of slingshots and pea-shooters expertly wielded until their sacks were stuffed full. Then they carried them back to sell in Five Points. Henry's never asked whether Josie would miss it.

***

"
THERE HE IS.
"

"Who?"

"The one in the cape. I knew he'd be here."

"Who is he?"

Josie whacks the side of Henry's head. "He's your father, dumbbell. You didn't know you had a father?"

Confused, vaguely fearful, Henry peers through the window. It's a cigar store. The man is busy sniffing a balsa-wood container, whose dome he's just removed. Other gentlemen like him in black coats and plug hats float through the store but he's the most striking. His cutaway cloak is bordered with silk and his white wing collar looks stiff as a board. The black tie sports a diamond tiepin matched by diamond cuff buttons. I lis hair falls to his shoulders; a thin precise mustache and elegant goatee highlight his long face. He's amazingly handsome; shadows chisel the features. He removes a cigar from the container and lovingly runs it underneath his nose.

"Don't he look respectable?" says Josie. "Got polish, I'd say."

Henry just stares. This man—their father? The very concept of a father had been a morass of confusion for Henry when younger. Naturally, he knew what a mother was. A mother was someone you could never love enough. The ache of love he felt for his mother often seemed like a strong wind blowing through a world with nothing vertical to meet it, a wind across an empty desert. Fortunately, they lived not in a vacant but a teeming world, and mothers were everywhere—
his
mother was everywhere—and when her mercurial humors allowed her, she swept him up and waltzed him along and raised his little face and neck to her lips. She sang, she danced, she let him help her dress. I Ie rubbed rouge into her cheeks and brushed her red hair and painted her nails and scratched her back on the sofa. Sometimes Henry ran the pads of his fingers across the mysterious map of her face (she would close her eyes), always landing at her smiling lips and teeth. He still slept in her bed—as long as no one else was there—when Josie kicked him out of theirs after a walloping. The full presence of Catherine threw the very idea of a father into murky shadows. What, for example, would a father's face feel like? That was inconceivable. Given the little he'd heard about fathers, it was easy to imagine that what people called a father was just another phase of his prodigious mother, her morning person after a bad night, or her sudden dark moods; I am not a good mother. Or her status when she stood at the kitchen table as the headwater of a course of admonitions: eat your biscuits, comb your hair, wash your face, smile. No one ever rose in this sorry world without a smile, Henry. Later, when he learned more about motherhood, though still not enough—about babies growing inside a mother's body, mainly—he thought that mothers also made fathers inside themselves and the process had something to do with rubbing, which was the natural outgrowth of a mother's work, such as doing laundry.

At the same time, he thought that Josie was his father. He lacked a clear notion of scrapping that idea, it just seemed to vanish. When had he stopped thinking he'd grow up and marry Josie and live with him in a cabin north of Wood's Museum? Maybe the time Josie pummeled him so much his eye swelled up and closed. He came home and told Catherine a bully had done it and she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him out the door and up the stairs and together they ran through streets and alleys looking for the bully. Henry had to direct her this way and that. They searched the piers and wharves. This is where it happened; he ran in this direction; I don't know where he is.