Billy Bathgate (20 page)

I got in the back and found the only available seat was in the middle, between Irving and Lulu Rosenkrantz. It was not a comfortable place to be, after Mr. Berman got in the front and Mickey started the engine, Lulu leaned forward and I could feel the tension in him as he said, “Why does this little shit have to go with us?” Mr. Berman didn’t bother to answer but looked straight ahead and Lulu banged back into the seat beside me, giving me a murderous look but clearly talking to everyone else as he said, “I’m fed up with all this crap, I don’t give a pig’s fuck for any of this.”

Mr. Berman knew that, he understood, he did not have to be told. We drove past the county courthouse and as we did an Onondaga police car backed away from the curb and swung out behind us. I glanced back to make sure and was about to say something when my instinct told me not to. Mickey’s pale blue eyes appeared regularly in the rearview mirror. Mr. Berman’s shoulders barely rose above the front seat, his panama hat was horizontally forward of where it should have been because of his humpback, but to me this was the deportment of canniness and wisdom, I knew somehow the police car behind us was something else he knew and didn’t have to be told.

Mickey drove across the rattly boards of the Onondaga bridge and out into the country. Everything looked baked and bleached in the high noon and it was hot in the car. After ten or fifteen minutes, he turned off the paved road into a farmyard and nudged through a protesting squawking flutter of chickens and past a gamboling goat or two and around a barn and a silo and then picked up speed down a long bumpy dirt road, with rocks making a popping against the tires and a big plume of dust billowing out behind us. He pulled up in front of a hut fenced in with chain link. A moment later I heard the brakes of the police car and a slamming door, and a policeman walked past us and unlocked the fence gate with its sign that said
KEEP OUT
and swung it open and we drove in.

What I’d thought was a hut was in fact a long barracks sort of structure where the Onondaga police took their pistol practice, the floor was dirt and at the far end the wall was earth, a big pile of it having been shoveled up into a sort of hill or berm, and there were overhead wires attached to pulleys at either end of the building like clotheslines. The cop pulled some paper targets out of a bin and clipped them to the lines and ran them to the berm and then he sat by the door leaning his chair back on two legs and rolling himself a cigarette, and Lulu Rosenkrantz stepped up to the railing without ceremony, unpacked his forty-five and began blasting away. I felt as if my head had burst, I looked around and saw that everyone else was wearing leather
earmuffs, and only then noticed a clump of them on a table and quickly availed myself of them, clutching my hands over them for good measure while crazy Lulu shot that target into smithereens and left a smell of burning powder in the air and the echo of high-caliber concussions that seemed to press the sides of the building outward and suck them back in.

Lulu hauled the target back and didn’t bother to study it but pulled it off and clipped on a new one and yanked it back down to the end and proceeded to load his pistol hurriedly, even dropping cartridges in his haste, he was so eager to go at it again, and again he shot off his rounds one after another like he was in an argument and jabbing his pointed finger for emphasis, so that a continuous roar filled the shed, it was all too much for me, I went out the door and stood in the sun leaning against the car fender and listened to my head ringing, it rang in several different notes simultaneously, like the horn of Mr. Schultz’s Packard.

The firing stopped for a few minutes and when it began again I heard the discreet shots of careful aim, a shot and a pause and another shot. After this had gone on for a while Mr. Berman came outside holding up two of the white target sheets and he came over and laid them out side by side on the hood of the Buick.

The targets were printed in black ink in the shape of a man’s head and torso, and one of them was peppered with holes both inside and outside the target area with the biggest a kind of jagged shell hole in the middle of the chest, so that I could see the sun reflected in the car hood underneath. The other target had small precise holes arranged almost like a design, one in the middle of the forehead, one where each eye would be, one in each shoulder, one in the middle of the chest and two in the stomach region just above the waistline. None of the shots had missed the target area.

“Who is the better shooter?” Mr. Berman asked me.

I replied without hesitation, pointing to the second target with its unerring carefully placed holes: “Irving.”

“You know that’s Irving?”

“He does everything this way, very neat, and with nothing wasted.”

“Irving has never killed a man,” Mr. Berman said.

“I wouldn’t like to have to kill a man,” I said, “but if I did I would want to know how like that,” I said, pointing to Irving’s target.

Mr. Berman leaned back against the fender and shook an Old Gold out of his pack and put it in his mouth. He shook out another one and offered it to me and I took it and he gave me his matchbook and I lit both cigarettes.

“If you were in a tight situation you would want Lulu standing up for you and emptying his barrel at everything in sight,” he said. “You would know that in such a circumstance it is all decided in a matter of seconds.” He flipped out his hand with one finger pointing, then flipped it again with two fingers pointing, and so on, till the whole claw was extended: “
Boom boom boom boom boom
, it’s over,” he said. “Like that. You couldn’t dial a phone number in that time. You couldn’t pick up your change from the Automat.”

I felt chastened, but stubborn in my opinion too. I looked at the ground at my feet. He said, “We are not speaking of ladies’ embroidery, kid. It don’t have to be neat.”

We stood there and he didn’t say anything for a while. It was hot. I saw way up a single bird circling, way up high in the whiteness of this hot sunless day, it dipped around like a model glider, and it had a red or rust tone to it, lazing about up there drifting one way and then another. I listened to the
pop pop
of the pistol fire.

“Of course,” Mr. Berman said, “the times change and looking at you I see what’s in the cards, you’re the upcoming generation and it’s possible what is required of you will be different, you would need different skills. It is possible everything will be smooth and streamlined, people will work things out quietly, with not so much fire in the streets. We will need fewer Lulus. And if that comes to pass you may not ever have to kill no one.”

I glanced at him and he gave me a little smile with his V-shaped mouth. “You think that’s possible?” he said.

“I don’t know. From what I can see it don’t seem too likely.”

“At a certain point everyone looks at the books. The numbers don’t lie. They read the numbers, they see what only makes sense. It’s like numbers are language, like all the letters in the language are turned into numbers, and so it’s something that everyone understands the same way. You lose the sounds of the letters and whether they click or pop or touch the palate, or go ooh or aah, and anything that can be misread or con you with its music or the pictures it puts in your mind, all of that is gone, along with the accent, and you have a new understanding entirely, a language of numbers, and everything becomes as clear to everyone as the writing on the wall. So as I say there comes a certain time for the reading of the numbers. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“Cooperation,” I said.

“Exactly. What happened in the railroad business is a perfect example, you look at the railroads, they used to be a hundred railroad companies cutting each other’s throats. Now how many are there? One to each section of the country. And on top of that they got a trade association to smooth their way in Washington. Everything nice and quiet, everything streamlined.”

I inhaled the cigarette smoke and there was an undeniable opening-out of excitement through my chest and into my throat like the looming of my own power. What I was hearing was prophecy but of an inevitable event or of a planned betrayal I wasn’t sure. And why did it matter as long as I knew that I was valued?

“But anyway, whatever is going to happen you must learn the basics,” Mr. Berman said. “Whatever happens you have to know how to handle yourself. I already told Irving he should show you. As soon as they’re through you’ll take your turn.”

I said, “What, you mean shoot?”

He was holding out in his palm the Automatic I had bought from Arnold Garbage. It was all cleaned and oiled, not a speck
of rust, and when I took it I saw the cartridge clip was locked into place and I knew from the heft it was loaded.

“If you’re going to carry it, carry it,” Mr. Berman said. “If not, put it somewhere else than the bureau drawer under the underwear. You’re a smart kid but like all kids you do dumb things.”

I will never forget how it felt to hold a loaded gun for the first time and lift it and fire it, the scare of its animate kick up the bone of your arm, you are empowered there is no question about it, it is an investiture, like knighthood, and even though you didn’t invent it or design it or tool it the credit is yours because it is in your hand, you don’t even have to know how it works, the credit is all yours, with the slightest squeeze of your finger a hole appears in a piece of paper sixty feet away, and how can you not be impressed with yourself, how can you not love this coiled and sprung causation, I was awed, I was thrilled, the thing is guns come alive when you fire them, they move, I hadn’t realized that. I tried to remember my instruction, I tried to breathe properly and plant myself in the sidearm stance and sight down my arm, but it took all that day and in fact the rest of the week of daily practice and a lot of sprays of earthclots brittle as crockery before I brought it around and turned that piece into the familiar of my own hand’s warmth and got it to hit where I looked, and my natural athletic genius of coordination, the spring of my juggler’s arm and the strength of my legs and my keen eyesight asserted themselves to their natural levels of achievement and I was hitting the target to kill whoever it was with every little pressure of my index finger. In a few short afternoons I could take aim and place the shot in the center of the forehead, either eye, the shoulders, the heart, or the belly, as I chose, Irving would pull the target back and take it down and put it down measuredly on the table over the previous target and the holes would match up. He never praised me but never did he seem to get bored with instructing me. Lulu didn’t deign to watch. He didn’t know my plan, which was to have Irving’s techniques of accuracy so governed by my skills that I could lose
the form, drop my arm, snap point like Lulu in the punishment of his blasting rage, and make the same holes in the same places. I also knew what he would say if I did this, that shooting at paper targets didn’t mean shit, let me go out on a job with someone rising from his chair in the restaurant and people’s guns coming round in my direction looking big as field eighty-eights, looking in their barrels as wide and deep as a big bertha on a railroad flatbed, let me see what I could do then.

Oddly enough, I detected this same attitude in the cop who came every day to open the gate and sit back on the two rear legs of his tilted chair and roll his cigarettes, it was only after my second day shooting I realized he was the chief, he had this braid on his cap none of the others in town had, not even the sergeants, and the arms in his short-sleeved shirt were an older man’s arms of former muscle, and his abdomen slumped, I had thought a police chief would have something better to do than personally unlock the gate of the firing range for the city folks who’d paid him off and hang around to enjoy the show, but in Onondaga he had all the time in the world and it had nothing to do with the responsibilities of his office, he was watching a boy, and even as I fired my clips, I thought of the chief behind me with the slight smile on his lips, another man imbedded in his institutional job out in the country, like Father Montaine, with a very low visibility in the world but quite comfortable even so and satisfied with the rewards of his life, the smoke from his shag cigarette keeping me in mind of his presence like some farmer’s on his porch sitting for his amusement to watch the passing parade.

But for the first time since coming to Onondaga County I felt I was doing proper work, those few days of squeezing off rounds, I could hardly wait to get out there, and in the evenings I came to dinner hungry, with my ears still ringing and memorial pungencies of burned gunpowder sputtering in my brain. Clearly they were bringing me along, and I could reflect how organized everything really was in the apparent chaos of Mr. Schultz’s life, how patiently they were dealing with everything, from the present exigencies of the law to the anticipated needs
of the future, they were managing their business interests from a distance, establishing a presence in this county seat of the north country, adjudicating their own internal problems in their own way, and also he had brought along someone pretty for the ride. It was a kind of juggling, wasn’t it, keeping everything in the air. I really liked pistol-shooting, I thought I was probably the youngest expert marksman in the history of the rackets, I’m not sure I went so far as to swagger, but at night in bed I thought of neighborhood louts chasing me down Washington Avenue, how if that happened now I would stop in my tracks and turn with my gun in my hand and my arm pointed and watch them skid, brake, and tumble all over themselves even crawling under cars to get out of my sights, and the picture of that made me smile in the dark.

But nothing else I could think of doing with that gun was anything to smile about.

I should say here that there were things going on behind the life I am describing, business things that I wasn’t directly involved in. Mr. Schultz was still collecting on policy, he was still selling beer and running the window washers’ and the waiters’ unions, once or twice he disappeared for a day or two and went down to New York but by and large he ran things long-distance, which couldn’t have been a terribly comfortable way to do business if you happened to be by nature suspicious as he was and distrustful of all but your closest associates, and of them too when they were not where you could keep your eye on them. A lot of time I could hear him screaming on Mr. Berman’s special phone, the walls were too thick for the words to be heard but the pitch and timbre and intonation came through clearly and like the man who woke up when the train didn’t go past his window I would have been startled if one day passed not carrying his raised voice.