Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (30 page)

“I know that. I don’t blame you for anything.”

“If I did own the joint, nobody’d keep you out.”

Billy managed a small smile and finished his beer. “Have you seen Martin tonight?”

“Not yet. He must be on the story.”

“I’ll catch you later, Tommy.”

And Billy went out of Becker’s, feeling a door close on his life when the outside door clicked behind him. He stood looking around Broadway, which was at its Saturday night brightest,
bustling with the traffic of cars and people, the usual bunch thickened by the showgoers and nightclubbers.

Not wanted in Becker’s? That’s like a ball game with no home plate.

Billy walked down Broadway and up the stairs into the Monte Carlo. The horse room was dark but the bird cage, the crap table, and two roulette wheels were all busy, and in the back Billy saw
lights on in the card room. He stepped to the crap table, where Marty Mitchell was on the stick and Bill Shea, who ran the Monte Carlo for Bindy, was watching the play. Billy didn’t know the
shooter, who was trying to make a six. He made it, and then threw an eleven. He doubled his bet to forty dollars and threw a seven. “That’s five passes,” somebody whispered, and
Billy pulled out the exchequer, sixty-two dollars, and put twenty on the come line.

“That twenty is dead,” Bill Shea said, and the game stopped.

“What’s the problem?” Billy said as the stickman nudged the twenty off the line and back toward Billy.

“No problem,” Shea said. “Your money’s no good here, Phelan.”

“Since when?”

“Since now. And you’re not wanted on the premises.”

“Is this Bindy’s orders?”

“I wouldn’t know that. Now, be a good fellow and take your money and get out.”

Billy put the twenty around the rest of his cash and backed away from the table under the silent eyes of the players. As he went out the door, the game resumed and the stickman called:
“Seven again.” Billy walked slowly down to the street.

He found the same response in three more Broadway bars, in Louie’s pool room and at Nick Levine’s card game. Nick, like Red Tom, apologized. No one gave Billy a reason for turning
him away. In Martha’s, he sat at the bar and she poured him a double scotch and then told him he’d been marked lousy.

“It was Bindy, I know that much,” Billy said. “When did you hear about it?”

“This afternoon,” Martha said.

“How?”

“Mulligan, the ward leader, called me. Said you might be mixed up in the kidnapping and to give you the treatment. I said, I got no argument with Billy, and he said, You don’t do
what I ask, your taxes go through the roof. So bottoms up, honey, and find someplace else to drink.”

“That’s a lie about the kidnapping. They wanted me to inform on somebody and I wouldn’t. That’s what it’s about.”

“Don’t make no difference to me what it’s about. Them taxes are what this place is about all of a sudden. They go through the roof, Martha goes back on the street, and
Martha’s too old for that.”

“I’m not your problem, Martha. Don’t worry.”

“You hear about Louie?”

“Louie?”

“Louie Dugan. He died about two this afternoon. Cop who took him to the hospital last night came by and took a statement. I liked that crazy old man. He was mean as a goose but I liked
him.”

“What’d he die of?”

“Stuff he swallowed in his lungs, the cop says. Drink up, Billy. Don’t make me no trouble.”

“I’ll catch you later, Martha.”

“Not till things is straight. Then you catch me all you like.”

Billy called Angie at the Kenmore, and while he waited for her room to ring he decided to ask her: How’d you like some fingerprints on your buns? But what he really
wanted was to talk to her. Her phone never rang. The operator said she’d checked out and left no message. He went up to the Kenmore anyway and found the bar was out of bounds for him. Wally
Stanton, a bartender, said the word came from Poop Powell, not Mulligan. Bindy had a whole team on the street fencing Billy out. Broadway gone, now Pearl Street.

He walked up Pearl toward Clinton Avenue and stopped in front of Moe Cohen’s old jewelry store. Now the store was a meat market and Moe was meat, too; hired three punks to get himself
killed, gave them five grand in diamonds and two hundred in promised cash. They shot him in the head and all it give him was a headache, and he says, Do something else, I’m dying of cancer
and heart trouble, hurry, and they let him have it in the wrist and then in the shoulder and hit him with seven shots before they got one through the eye to do the trick. When they checked his
pants for the two hundred, all they found was twenty-eight cents. The bum robbed us. They all went to jail, but nobody could figure out why Moe wanted to die. He didn’t have cancer or heart
trouble, he had something else.

My father has something else, is what Billy thought.

He thought of Moe among the sausages and turned around and headed toward South Pearl Street. Clinton Avenue would be fenced off by Bindy, too, but he probably wouldn’t bother with State
Street or South Pearl. That wasn’t Billy’s territory. Billy might even get a game on Green Street. Dealers didn’t know him very well there. But the Cronins ran Green Street for
Bindy and they knew Billy and they’d get the word around sooner or later. It’d be a game of recognition. Anybody know Billy Phelan? Throw the bum out. What it came down to was Billy
could go anyplace they didn’t recognize him, anyplace he’d never been before. Or he could leave town. Or hire some of those fellows like Moe. Or go off the Hawk Street viaduct like
Georgie the Syph.

No.

All his life Billy had put himself into trouble just to get himself out of it. Independent Billy Now, you dumb bastard, you’re so independent you can’t even get inside to get warm;
and it’s getting chilly Night air, like watching the last games of the Albany baseball season. Up high in Hawkins Stadium and the wind starts to whizz a little and you came in early when it
was warm and now you’re freezing your ass only the game ain’t over.

Tommy Dyke’s Club Petite? No. Bob Parr’s Klub Eagle? No. Packy Delaney’s Parody Club? No. Big Charlie’s? No. Ames O’Brien’s place? No.

Billy didn’t want to think about his problem in solitude. He wanted to watch something while he was thinking.

The University Club? Dopey B-girls. Club Frolics? The emcee stinks.

Hey. The Tally Ho on Hudson Avenue. Billy knew the Hawaiian dancer. She was Jewish. And the comic was Moonlight Brady. Billy went to St. Joseph’s school with him. He turned off Pearl
toward the Tally Ho.

Billy ordered a triple scotch and kept his hat on. The place was jammed, no elbowroom at the bar. The lights were dim while the adagio dancers did their stuff. When the lights went up Billy
looked at the half-naked-lady mural among the champagne glasses and bubbles on the wall. Some singer did a medley of Irish songs, for what? It ain’t Saint Patrick’s Day. The shamrocks
are growing on Broadway. Oh yeah. And the Hudson looks like the Shannon. Right. Betty Rubin, the Hawaiian dancer, had fattened up since Billy last saw her and since Billy likes ’em thin,
he’ll keep his distance and check out the toe dancer.

Billy had been chain smoking for an hour and the tip of his tongue was complaining. He wanted to punish himself for his independence. He could punish himself by going to Bindy and apologizing.
Yes, you may kiss my foot. He’d already punished himself by throwing the pool match to the Doc.

Moonlight Brady came on and told a joke about Kelly, who got drunk and fell into an open grave and when he woke up he thought it was Judgment Day and that an Irishman was the first man up. He
sang a song: Don’t throw a brick at your father, you may live to regret it one day.

Billy’s brain was speeding from the scotch, speeding and going sideways. Moonlight came out to the bar when the show ended, a chunky man with a face like a meat pie. All ears and no nose
so’s you’d notice and built like a fire plug. Billy bought him a drink to have someone to talk to. He would not apologize to Bindy, he decided, but what else he would do was not
clear.

“I saw your story in the paper,” Moonlight told him.

“What story?”

And Moonlight told him about Martin’s column on the two-ninety-nine game and the hex. Billy took the paper out of his pocket and found the column and tried to read it but the light was
bad.

“I bowled two-ninety-nine and two-ninety-seven back to back about six years ago,” Moonlight said.

“Is that so?”

“Damndest thing. I was in Baltimore and just got red hot.”

Billy smiled and bought Moonlight another drink. He was the greatest liar Billy ever knew. You wouldn’t trust him if he just came out of Purgatory. He dove into Lake George one day and
found two corpses. He put a rope around his chest and swam across Crooked Lake pulling three girls in a rowboat. He was sitting at a table with Texas Guinan and Billy Rose the night Rose wrote the
words to “Happy Days and Lonely Nights.” He gave Bix Beiderbecke’s old trumpet to Clara Bow, and she was such a Bix fan she went to the men’s room with Moonlight and he
screwed her on the sink. He pimped once for John Barrymore in Miami and got him two broads and a dog. He took care of a stable of polo ponies for Big Bill Dwyer, the rum-runner. Billy’s line
on Moonlight was that some guys can’t even lay in bed straight.

Morrie Berman was probably one of those guys. What if he was in on the kidnap? They took Charlie Boy’s world away from him and maybe they’ll even kill him. When Billy’s father
was gone for a year, his Uncle Chick told him he might never come back and that Billy would pretty soon forget his father and develop all sorts of substitutes, because that was how it went in life.
Chick was trying to be kind to Billy with that advice. Chick wasn’t as bad as the rest of them. And did Billy develop substitutes for his father? Well, he learned how to gamble. He got to
know Broadway.

He wanted to see his father and ask him again to come home.

If there was a burlesque show in town he’d go to it.

He watched Betty Rubin, who was beginning to look good.

Billy hated the sons of bitches who closed the town to him, including Red Tom, you prick. Why don’t you yell at them that it ain’t right to do such a thing?

He would not test out any more places. He would do something else.

Tough as Clancy’s nuts.

And to think, Billy, that you were afraid they’d mark you lousy if you finked.

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” Moonlight Brady said. “I saw your father’s name in the paper. That vote business. Funny as a ham sandwich on raisin bread.”

“That’s in the paper, too?”

“Same paper. They mentioned how he played ball so I knew it was him.”

“Where’s
your
father now, Moonlight?”

“He died ten years ago. Left me a quarter of a million he made on the stock market, every nickel he had, and I went through it in eighteen months. But it was a hell of an eighteen months.
What a guy he was.”

Billy laughed at that. It was one of Moonlight’s wilder, more unbelievable lies, but it had what it takes, and Billy’s laughter grew and grew. It took on storm proportions. He
coughed and tears came to his eyes. He hit the bar with his hand to emphasize the power of the mirth that was on him, and he took out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes.

“What got him?” the barman asked.

“I did,” Moonlight said, “but I don’t know how.” Moonlight was doing his best to keep smiling. “If the line is that funny, I oughta use it in the act,”
he said to Billy.

“Oh absolutely, Moonlight, absolutely,” Billy said. “Use that one in the act. You gotta use that one in the act.”

Billy walked down Green Street and looked at the whorehouses with their awnings, the sign. They were houses that used to be homes for Irish families like his own. Chinks on the
street now, and second-hand clothing stores and the grocery where George used to write numbers upstairs. Bucket-of-blood joints and guinea pool rooms where the garlic smell makes you miscue. Bill
Shea lives on Green Street, the son of a bitch. Billy brought him home one night in a cab, sick drunk from Becker’s, and he forgets that and says my twenty is dead.

Billy walked into a telephone pole.

Really in the guinea section now. Billy went with a guinea for two years. Teresa. Terrific Teresa. A torch singer. “Along Came Bill,” she’d sing when he showed up. She wanted
to get married, too.

Angie, you bitch, where are you when I need you?

Would Billy marry Angie? “Frivolous Sal.” Peculiar gal.

Angie got Billy thinking about marriage, all right, and now he thinks of Peg and George and the house they’ve got, and Danny. They can’t fence you out of your own house. They
can’t fence you away from your kid.

His father fenced himself out of the house because he thought they were ready to fence
him
out.

Billy can hear a mandolin being played in a second-floor apartment and he can taste the dago red. He got drunk once on dago red with Red the Barber, dago red and mandolins, and he went out like
a light and woke up the next day and lit a cigarette and was drunk all over again. So he don’t drink dago red no more.

After he crossed Madison Avenue, the bum traffic picked up. He turned on Bleecker Street toward Spanish George’s. It was moving toward eleven o’clock. Hello, Bill.

The stench of Spanish George’s hit Billy in the face when he walked through the door, the door’s glass panel covered with grating on both sides. A dozen bums and a
woman were huddled around five round wooden tables, three of the bums asleep, or dead. The stench of their breath, their filth, their shitty drawers, the old puke on their coats and shirtfronts,
rose up into Billy’s nose like sewer gas.

George was behind the bar in his sombrero, propped against the wall on the back legs of a wooden chair. Billy ordered a scotch, and George delivered it in a shot glass. Billy tossed it off and
asked for another.

“You know anybody named Francis Phelan?” he asked George.

George eyed him and touched the handle of his six gun.

“You ain’t a copper. I know coppers. Who are you?”