Very Old Bones (6 page)

“Who else got tusks outside of elephants?”

“Joey Doyle and his sister.”

“You’re so sure gimme two to one,” said Morty.

“Six to five is all I go.”

“You’re right and the newspaper’s wrong, is that it?”

“What I’m sayin’ is six to five.”

“You got a bet,” said Morty, and Billy looked at me and winked.

I couldn’t figure out why Billy was so hot to bet against elephants, but neither could I bet against Billy, for I was his kinsman in more ways than one. Someone once remarked that Billy
had lived a wastrel’s useless life, which struck me as a point of view benightedly shrouded in uplift. I always found this world of Broadway to be the playground of that part of the soul that
is impervious to any form of improvement not associated with chance, and relentlessly hostile to any conventional goad toward success and heaven. I remember years ago standing with Billy and Sport
Schindler as a Fourth of July parade went past Sport’s place on Broadway. A stranger beside us, seeing a Boy Scout troop stepping along, remarked, “What a fine bunch of boys.”
Sport took his cigar out of his mouth to offer his counterpoint: “Another generation of stool pigeons,” he said.

That was years ago, and now here I was again with Sport and Billy and their friends, and those Scouts had grown up to become the lawyers, bankers, and politicians who had forced Sport to sell
his saloon so they could level the block and transform it into somebody else’s money. The Monte Carlo gaming rooms were gone, another victim of the crackdown: end of the wheel-and-birdcage
era on Broadway; Louie’s pool room was empty, only Louie’s name left on the grimy windows; Red the barber had moved uptown and so you couldn’t even get shaved on the street
anymore; couldn’t buy a deck of cards either, Bill’s Magic Shop having given way to a ladies’ hat store. A ladies’ hat store. Can you believe it, Billy?

Also Becker’s Tavern had changed hands in the early fifties, and after that nobody paid any attention to the photographic mural behind the bar, mural of two hundred and two shirt-sleeved
men at a 1932 clambake. Nobody worried anymore about pasting stars on the chests of those men after they died, the way old man Becker used to. One by one the stars had gone up on those chests
through the years; then sometimes a star would fall and be carried off by the sweeper. Stars fell and fell, but they didn’t rise anymore, and so now the dead and the quick were a collage of
uncertain fates. Hey, no star on his chest, but ain’t he dead? Who knows? Who gives a goddamn? Put a star on him, why not? Put a star on Becker’s.

One by one we move along and the club as we know it slowly dissolves, not to be reconstituted. “Broadway never sleeps,” Sport always said, but now it did. It slept in the memories of
people like him and Billy, men who wandered around the old turf as if it wasn’t really old, as if a brand-new crap table might descend from the sky at any minute—and then, to the music
of lightning bolt and thunder clap, the dice would roll again.

But no. No lightning. No thunder. No dice. Just the memory of time gone, and the vision of the vanishing space where the winners and losers, the grifters and suckers, had so vividly filled the
air with yesterday’s action.

“They want me to get married,” Billy said to me.

“Who does?”

“Peg. The priest. Agnes.”

“What’s the priest say?”

“He says we’re givin’ scandal with Agnes livin’ in. She’s been with us a year maybe.”

“Then you’re already married, basically.”

“Nah. She’s got her own room. She’s a roomer.”

“Ah, I get it,” I said.

“ ‘Doesn’t look moral,’ the priest says.”

“Well he’s half right, if you worry about that sort of thing.”

“I don’t worry. They worry.”

“What’s Peg say?”

“Peg says she doesn’t give a damn whether I marry the girl or not. But yeah, she wants it too. It’d get the priest off her back.”

“So get married, then,” I said. “You like the girl?”

“She’s great, but how the hell can I get married? I’m fifty-one years old and I don’t have a nickel and don’t know where to get one. I scrounge a little, deal now
and then, but I haven’t had steady work since Morty closed the horseroom. And the chiselin’ bastard owes me back wages and two horse bets.”

“How much?”

“About a grand. Little less, maybe.”

“That’s a lot.”

“He said he went dry, couldn’t pay off, said he’d pay me later. But then he went off with Lulu and now he’s runnin’ a floatin’ card game and he don’t
listen. I oughta cut his heart out, but it’s even money he don’t have one.”

Billy stopped talking, stopped looking me in the eye. Then, with his voice in a low register and on the verge of a tremolo, he said, “You know, Orson, I never could hold a job. I never
knew how to do nothin’. I couldn’t even stay in the army. I got eye trouble and they sent me home after eight months. The horseroom was the longest steady job I ever had.”

“Something’ll turn up,” I said.

“Yeah? Where? I could always get a buck around Broadway but now there ain’t no Broadway.”

Yeah.

Put a star on Billy’s Broadway.

I drank the beer Billy bought me, drank it in silent communion with his unexpected confession. Billy—who had been inhaling money for years in bowling alleys, pool rooms, and card
games—was he unemployable? Was he really a man who “never knew how to do nothin’ ”? It’s true Billy found straight jobs laughable, that he left as many as he was fired
from, once even calling the foreman of a machine-shop paint gang a moron for presiding over such labor. Liberated by such words, Billy invariably wended his way back to the cocoon of Broadway,
within whose bounds existed the only truly usable form of life; or so Billy liked to believe.

I was making a decision about telling him my own tribulations when the door opened and Buffalo Johnny Rizzo walked in, a fashion plate in blue seersucker suit and white Panama hat with a band
that matched his suit. He stood in the doorway, hands in his coat pockets, looked us all over, opened his coat and took a pistol from his belt, then fired two shots at his most favored target:
Morty Pappas’s crotch, which was forked east toward Broadway, from whence Johnny was just arriving.

Billy saw it all happening and so did I, but Billy acted, lifting his cane from its dangle on bar’s edge into a vivid upthrust and sending Johnny’s pistol flying, but not before
Johnny got off two shots. Morty fell from his bar stool with a crumpling plaster thud, his crotch intact but one bullet hitting his good leg, and the other lodging in the neck of the stuffed cow
over the back bar, victim yet again of inept shooters.

Sport quickly retrieved the flown pistol and Johnny just as quickly moved toward the aging Sport to get it back and try again for Morty’s gender. Billy and I both stepped between the two
men, and Sport, still a formidable figure with the arms and fists of the light heavyweight he had once been, said only, “Better get outa here, John.”

Buffalo Johnny, his failed plan sinking him into the throes of social wisdom, looked then at the fallen and bleeding Morty; and he smiled.

“Boom-boom, fucker,” he said. “Boom-boom. Boom-boom.”

And then he went out onto Broadway.

Except for Billy and me, the customers at Sport’s saloon exited with sudden purpose after Buffalo Johnny left the premises. Sport drew new beers for us as we gave aid and
comfort to Morty Pappas in his hour of pain Sport then called an ambulance and together Billy and I organized Morty on the floor, propping him with an overcoat someone had left on a hook during the
winter. Sport made a pressure pack on the wound with a clean bar towel.

“So, ya bastard, ya saved my life,” Morty said to Billy between grimaces of agony.

“Yeah,” said Billy. “I figure you’re dead you’ll never pay me what you owe me.”

“You oughta pay him,” Sport said, putting a new beer in Morty’s grip.

“I’ll pay him all right,” and Morty put down the beer and reached for his wallet, a hurtful move. “What do I owe you?”

“You know what you owe me,” Billy said.

“Six hundred,” Morty said.

“That’s wages. Plus the bets, three eighty, that’s nine eighty.”

Morty fumbled with his wallet, took out his cash. “Here. It’s all I got with me,” he said. He yelped with new pain when he moved. Billy took the money, counted it.

“Count it,” said Morty.

“I’m countin’.”

“Four hundred, am I right?”

“Three sixty, three eighty, four.”

“That wacky bastard Rizzo,” Morty said. “They’ll lock him up now. Put him in a fucking dungeon.”

“If they find him,” said Sport.

“He’s too stupid to hide out,” Morty said. “Stupidest man I ever know. He ain’t got the brains God gave a banana.”

“He knows somethin’,” Sport said. “He knows how to shoot you in the leg.”

“How was his broad?” Billy asked.

“She wasn’t his broad.”

“He thought she was.”

“She was hot,” Morty said. “Hot for everybody. Gimme his gun.”

“Whataya gonna do with it?” Sport asked.

“Give it to the cops.”

“I didn’t call the cops,” Sport said.

“They’ll turn up at the hospital.”

“Cops’ll want witnesses,” Billy said. “You got any?”

“You saw,” Morty said.

“Who, me?” Billy said.

“Who’s your friend there?” Morty said, looking at me.

“I never saw him before,” Billy said.

“What’s your name, bud?”

“Bud,” I said.

“All I can remember is my money,” Billy said.

“I was out in the kitchen when it happened,” Sport said.

“You bastards.”

“Pay the man, Morty,” Sport said.

“I got no more cash,” Morty said. “You come to the game, Billy, I’ll back you for what I owe you.” He turned to Sport. “He comes to the game I’ll back
him for what I owe him.”

“You on the level?” asked Billy.

“Would I lie at a time like this?”

“You only lie when you move your lips. Where you playin’?”

“Tuesday eight o’clock, Win Castle’s house.”

“Win Castle, the insurance guy?”

“He asked me to run a game for him. He likes to play but he needs players. You play pretty good.”

“You’ll back me?” Billy asked.

“Up to what I owe you,” Morty said.

“Here’s the ambulance,” Sport said.

After they packed Morty off to the hospital I told Billy, “You get me into that card game and I’ll make sure you get your money from Morty.” Then I explained
my talent with cards to him, the first time I ever told anybody about it. Giselle knew I gambled but she didn’t know there was no risk involved, that I could cut aces and deal anybody
anything. I told Billy how I’d practiced for months in front of the mirror until I could no longer see myself dealing seconds, or bottom cards, and that now it was second nature. Billy was
mesmerized. He never expected this out of me.

“They shoot guys they catch doin’ that,” Billy said.

“They shoot guys anyway. Haven’t you noticed?”

“You really good? You know I can spot cheaters.”

“Come over to the house I’ll show you. I can’t show you in public.”

When we got to Colonie Street Billy was vigorously aloof, refused to look at anything in the parlor in a way that would give the thing significance. He came here only when he was obliged to, and
left as soon as possible. Now he let his gaze fall on the chandeliers, and sketches, and ancestor paintings, the framed old photos, dried flowers, the bric-a-brac on the mantel, the ancient
furniture, the threadbare rugs, and the rest of the antique elegance, and it was all dead to him. He sat in the leather chair by the window where Peter always sat to watch the traffic on Colonie
Street, took a sip of the beer I gave him, and then I told him, “You look like your father.”

“They always told me that,” he said.

“I met him just once, in 1934, when your grandmother died. I have some old photos of him upstairs. He’s in a baseball uniform, playing with Chattanooga in the Southern
League.”

“He managed that team,” Billy said.

“I know. You want to see the pictures?”

“It don’t matter,” Billy said. “I know what he looked like.”

“He looks very young. My father did a sketch from one of them, a good sketch. In the dining room.”

“Never mind that stuff. Your father wouldn’t let him in this joint when he came home in ’34.”

“That’s not how it was,” I said.

“Just get the cards,” said Billy, and I knew we’d come back to Francis before long. Billy was intimidated by the house, by the memories of his father’s exile from it
after his marriage to Annie Farrell, and by his inexact knowledge of Francis’s peculiar visit here when Kathryn died. But here he was, on deck for the family luncheon with the lawyer that
would take place in another hour or so. My father, when we organized this luncheon, thought it essential that Billy be present to hear whatever was going to be said, even if he didn’t care
about any of it.

The gathering had to do with money, but Peter was tight-lipped about specifics. He knew he was seriously ill and he was putting what was left of his life in order, the way I had put his
Malachi Suite
in order (with the Leica I’d given Giselle in Germany, and which she gave back to me when I undertook the job), numbering and photographing the hundreds of sketches,
watercolors, and oils that my father was obsessively creating, and which had sprawled chaotically in all the upstairs rooms until I put everything into categories.

Peter did not consider the
Malachi Suite
finished, and I wasn’t sure he ever would. Two days ago he had asked me to hang one of the oils over the dining-room table, the first time
he’d exhibited any of the work anywhere in the house outside his studio. It was the painting he called
Banishing the Demons
, and it showed Malachi and his co-conspirator, Crip Devlin,
shooing invisible demons out of Malachi’s cottage, with five others, including a woman in bed, as terrorized witnesses. It is a mysterious and eerie painting, but Peter gave me no explanation
of why he wanted it on the dining-room wall.

“Where’s your old man now?” Billy asked me.