Very Old Bones (5 page)

“I’m going where there’s no lamb chops,” Peg said. She gave George a quick kiss and went out.

The phone rang and George, the closest to it, answered: “Hello there, who’s calling this early? . . . Who? . . . Oh, yeah . . . Well, no, Peg’s gone to work.
Any message? . . . Yeah, Billy’s right here,” and he handed Billy the phone with the words, “It’s Orson, that floo-doo.”

“What’s the prospect, Orson?” Billy said into the phone.

“I need to get out of this goddamn house,” I said. “What are you up to?”

“I gotta go to the doctor’s.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“I’ll take you,” I said.

“What’s your problem down there?” Billy asked.

“It’s a big day today. I need to get out from under for a while.”

“So come have breakfast and we’ll go down to Sport Schindler’s for an eye-opener. I gotta meet a guy there owes me money.”

“Always a pleasant prospect,” I said. “I’ll see you in five minutes.”

“You can’t get here sooner?”

George Quinn sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar on his eggs, his tie tied tight on his lightly starched collar on this day that was headed into the high nineties: sartorial
propriety, impervious to weather.

“So how’s the numbers business, George?” I asked as I sat across the breakfast table from him and Billy.

“It don’t exist,” George said.

“What?”

“Where you been, Orson?” Billy said. “George has been out of business for a year.”

“I thought that was temporary,” I said.

“A few of the big boys went to work by phone after it all closed down. But not me,” George said.

“I blame Dewey for starting it,” Billy said. “That son of a bitch, what the hell’s the town gonna do without numbers? Without Broadway.”

“Broadway? Broadway’s not gone.”

“It ain’t gone,” Billy said, “but it ain’t got no life to it. You can’t get arrested on Broadway anymore. Town is tough as Clancy’s nuts. Even if you
get a bet down you don’t know the payoff. No phone line with the information anymore. You gotta wait for tomorrow’s newspaper. I blame Kefauver.”

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Tell me about the house, George. Peg says you may buy this place after all these years.”

“Peg said that?”

“She said you might cash an insurance policy. Seven grand for this house sounds like the bargain of the century.”

“Not buyin’,” George said.

“It’s fifteen hundred down,” Billy said.

“Fifteen hundred down the bowl,” George said. “Who’s got money to buy houses when you’re seventy-one years old? I’m not waitin’ for my ship to come in.
It’s not comin’ and I know it.”

“What’re you gonna do, move?” I asked.

“Yeah. We’ll find a place.”

“Probably not at this rent,” Billy said.

“Then we’ll pay what it takes,” George said.

“Why not put that into owning the house?” I said. “It’d make more sense.”

“I’m not buyin’ a house!” George yelled, standing up from the table. “Has everybody got that? No house. Period.”

“You ready to go, Orson?” Billy asked softly, reaching for his cane.

“I guess I’m ready. I haven’t had any coffee but I guess I’m ready.”

“Let him have his coffee,” Agnes said.

“I don’t know if I’ll make it for dinner,” George said to Agnes. “Depends on when the picnic ends.”

“Picnic? I thought it was a political meeting,” Agnes said.

“It’s a political picnic.”

“What’s not political in this town?” Billy said.

“Buyin’ a house,” George said.

Agnes collected Annie’s breakfast dishes and her untouched eggs and put them on the counter by the sink, gave Peg’s African violets by the windowsill of the nook
their weekly watering, then sat across from me to finish her second cup of coffee. As she sat, Billy rose up on his cane.

“I gotta do a wee-wee before we leave,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Time to worry is when you can’t.”

“Stop that talk,” Agnes said.

I stared at her and decided she was a looker. Lucky Billy. Agnes had bottled blond hair, the color of which she changed whimsically, or maybe it was seasonally. She’d put on a few pounds
since I’d last seen her, but she could handle them. She looked crisp and fresh in a red-and-white-check house dress with a box neck and two-inch straps over bare shoulders.

“I couldn’t butt in on that conversation about the house,” Agnes said, “but I’d be glad to give a hand with the down payment. I’ve got some dollars tucked
away.”

“That’s real nice, Agnes,” I said. “Did you tell Peg?”

“Nobody yet. I’m just sayin’ it now ’cause it occurred to me. But if Billy hears he’ll think I’m proposin’.”

“Have you done that before?”

“Twenty times, how about. But he can’t see himself married. He’s been single too long.”

“Everybody’s single till they marry.”

“Billy’d be single even
after
he got married,
if
he ever got married, which I don’t think.”

“He loves you, though,” I said. “Anybody can see that.”

“Sure. But what’s he done for me lately?”

“Maybe you ought to go out together more often, be alone. I know you’re in a lot with the family, taking care of Annie.”

“We go to the movies once a week, and dinner after. But you’re right. We should. I also got another obligation, a patient. An old man I sit with one night a week. And another night I
take piano.”

“How long you been taking?”

“Twenty-four years.”

“You must be good.”

“I’m terrible. Maybe I’ll be good some day, but I don’t practice enough.”

“It’s hard without a piano.”

“Yeah. But I get a thrill playing the teacher’s. I always do a half-hour alone, before and after the lesson. And once or twice a week I play in the church basement in the afternoons.
It fills me up, excites me. You know how it is when you feel young and you know you still got a lot to learn, and it’s gonna be good?”

“You’re a graceful person, Agnes.”

“Yeah, well, George shouldn’t be afraid of lettin’ people do him a favor. That down payment’s not a whole lot of money, really. But I heard him tell Peg, ‘They
don’t give loans to people like me.’ “

“What’s he mean, ‘people like me’?”

“He doesn’t know about credit,” Agnes said. “He’s got no credit anyplace. He paid cash all his life, even for cars. Doesn’t wanna owe anybody a nickel. He
thinks credit’s bad news.”

“So’s not having a place to live.”

“He said he’d live in a ditch before he bought a house.”

“He’s batty .”

“Could be: Wouldn’t be a first in this family.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t mean that personally,” she said.

Billy expected to have his cast removed but that didn’t happen. After Doc McDonald read the X-rays he decided the cast should stay in place another three weeks at least,
and so Billy had to carry his right shoe around in a paper bag the rest of the day. We were in my car, Danny Quinn’s old 1952 Chev that I’d bought from Peg. Billy mentioned an
eye-opener at Sport Schindler’s, but it was only ten-fifteen, and that’s a little early for my eye.

“You been to the filtration plant since they started that dig?” I asked Billy.

“I ain’t been there in years. My grandfather used to run that joint.”

“I know, and Tommy was the sweeper. You see in the paper about the bones they found?”

“Yeah, you think they’re still there?”

“It’s worth a look.”

The old plant, which had changed the health of Albany in 1899, was being torn down. The chronic “Albany sore throat” of the nineteenth century had been attributed to inadequate
filtering of Hudson River water. But after the North Albany plant opened, the sore throats faded. Still, river water was a periodic liability until the late 1920s, when the politicians dammed up
two creeks in the Helderberg Mountains and solved all city water troubles forever. The filtration plant relaxed into a standby item, then a useless relic. Now it stood in the way of a
superhighway’s course and so it was time to knock it down.

Construction workers had found bones in their dig, near the mouth of the Staatskill, the creek that ran eastward from Albany’s western plateau and had long ago been buried in a pipe under
North Pearl Street and Broadway. When the dig reached the glacial ledge where the creek made its last leap into the Hudson River, half a dozen huge bones were found. Workers didn’t inform the
public until they also found two tusks, after which a geologist and biologist were summoned. No conclusions had been reported in the morning paper but everybody in town was saying elephants.

I drove down the hill from the doctor’s office and into North Albany. When I reached Pearl Street Billy said, “Go down Main Street. I want to see what it looks like.”

Billy’s grandfather Joe Farrell (they called him Iron Joe because two men broke their knuckles on his jaw) had lived at the bottom of Main Street, and also had run a saloon, The
Wheelbarrow, next to his home. The house was gone but the saloon building still stood, a sign on it noting the headquarters of a truckers’ union. Trucking companies had replaced the lumber
yards as the commerce along Erie Boulevard, the filled-in bed of the old canal.

“I wouldn’t know the place,” Billy said. “I never get down here anymore.” He’d been born and raised on Main Street.

“Lot of memories here for you,” I said.

“I knew how many trees grew in those lots over there. I knew how many steps it took to get from Broadway to the bottom of the hill. The lock house on the canal was right there.” And
he pointed toward open space. “Iron Joe carried me on his shoulder over the bridge to the other side of the lock.”

Implicit but unspoken in Billy’s memory was that this was the street his father fled after dropping his infant son and causing his death. I was close to Billy, but I’d never heard
him mention that. He and I are first cousins, sons of most peculiar brothers, I the unacknowledged bastard of Peter Phelan, Billy the abandoned son of Francis Phelan, both fathers flawed to the
soul, both in their errant ways worth as much as most martyrs.

Billy was still looking at where his house had been when I turned onto the road that led to the filtration plant. It was busy with heavy equipment for the dig; also a police car was parked
crossways in the road. A policeman got out of the car and raised his hand to stop us. Billy knew him, Doggie Murphy.

“Hey, Dog,” Billy said. “We came to see the elephants.”

“Can’t go through, Billy.”

“What’s goin’ on?”

“They found bones.”

“I know they found bones. I read the paper.”

“No, other bones. Human bones.”

“Oh yeah?”

“So nobody comes or goes till the coroner gets here.”

“Whose bones are they?”

“Somebody who don’t need ’em anymore,” Doggie said.

And so I swung the car around and headed for Sport Schindler’s, where I would have my eye opened whether it needed it or not. Sport was pushing sixty, a retired boxer who had run this
saloon for thirty-five years, keeping a continuity that dated to the last century. The place had a pressed-tin ceiling, a long mahogany bar with brass rail, shuffleboard, dart board, and years of
venerable grime on the walls. Apart from the grime it was also unusually clean for a saloon, and a haven for the aging population of Broadway. A poster at one end of the bar showed two sixtyish,
wrinkled, white-haired naked women, both seated with hands covering their laps, both wearing glasses, both with an enduring shapeliness and a splendid lack of sag. Centered over the back bar was
the mounted head of a cow, shot in Lamb’s lot by Winker Wilson, who thought it was a rabbit.

Billy had lived for years in the night world of Broadway, where Schindler’s was a historic monument. But times were changing now with the press of urban renewal by squares and straights
who had no use at all for Billy’s vanishing turf. Also, the open horserooms of Albany had moved underground when the racing-information phone line was shut off by pressure from the Governor,
and the only action available now was by personal phone call or handbook. Bookies, to avoid being past-posted, paid off only on the race results in tomorrow’s newspaper. What the hell kind of
a town is it when a man can’t walk in off the street and bet a horse?

Sport Schindler’s looked like an orthopedic ward when we settled in. Billy sat at the end of the bar, his right foot in his plaster cast partially covered by white sock and trouser cuff,
his hickory cane dangling from the edge of the bar. Up the bar was a man whose complete right leg was in a cast elevated on another stool, a pair of crutches leaning against the bar beside him.

Billy earned his cast riding in a car whose windshield somebody hit with a rock, scaring hell out of the driver, who drove into a tree. Billy broke his ankle putting on the brakes in the back
seat. “You ain’t safe noplace in this world,” Billy concluded.

The man with the crutches was Morty Pappas, a Greek bookie who had been a casualty of the state-police crackdown on horserooms. Instead of booking on the sneak, Morty took his bankroll and flew
to Reno with a stripper named Lulu, a dangerous decision, for Lulu was the most favored body of Buffalo Johnny Rizzo, the man who ran the only nightclub strip show in town. Morty came back to
Albany six months after he left, flush with money from a streak of luck at the gaming tables, but minus Lulu and her body. Rizzo welcomed Morty back by shooting him in the leg, a bum shot, since he
was aiming at Morty’s crotch. Rizzo went to jail without bail, the shooting being his third felony charge in four years. But it had come out in the morning paper that by court order he was
permitted bail; and so Buffalo Johnny was back in circulation.

Billy was offering Morty even money that the bones found up at the filtration plant were not elephant bones, Billy’s argument based in his expressed belief that they never let elephants
hang around Albany.

“Whataya mean they never let ’em hang around,” Morty said. “Who’s gonna tell an elephant he can’t hang around?”

“You want the bet or don’t you?” Billy asked.

“They found tusks with the bones.”

“That don’t mean nothin’,” Billy said.