Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (31 page)

“I’m a relative. The guy’s my father.”

“Whoosa guy you want?”

“Francis Phelan.”

“I don’t know nobody that name.”

Billy ordered another scotch and took it to the only empty table in the room. The floor beneath his feet had been chewed up long ago by old horses’ hooves and wagon wheels. It looked like
the faces in the room, old men with splintered skin. The wagons of the old days had rolled over them, too, many times. Most of them seemed beyond middle age, though one with a trimmed mustache
looked in his thirties. Yet he was a bum, no matter what he did to his mustache. His eyes were bummy and so were his clothes. He was at the table next to Billy and he stank of old sweat, like
Billy’s locker at the K. of C. gym. Billy was in the Waldorf one night, and an old drunk was raving on about his life. Not a bum, just an old man on a drunk, and he looked clean. He got
Billy’s eye and told him, Son, have B.O. and they’ll never forget you.

Unforgettable stench of right now. They oughta bottle the air in this joint and sell it for stink bombs.

The man with the mustache saw Billy looking at him.

“You fuck around with me,” the man said, “I’ll cut your head off.” The man could barely lift his glass. Billy laughed out loud and other men took notice of him. He
could lick any four of them at once. But if they got him down, they’d all kick him to death. Billy saw that the men had no interest in him beyond the noise he made when he laughed.

The woman at the far table was drinking beer and sitting upright and seemed the soberest one in the room, soberer than Billy. Old bat. Fat gut and spindle legs, but her face wasn’t so bad.
She wore a beret off to the left and smoked a cigarette and stared out the front window, which was also covered with grating. Bums like to put their hands through windows. And their heads.

The man next to the woman lay with his face on the table. He moved an arm, and Billy noticed the coat and remembered the twill. Billy went across the room and stood beside the woman and stared
down at his father. The old man’s mouth was open and his lips were pushed to one side so that Billy could see part way into the black cavity that had once been the smile of smiles.

“I don’t want any,” the woman said.

“What?”

“Whatever it is you’re gonna ask.”

“Conalee Street.”

“I don’t want any.”

“Neither do I.”

“Go way and leave me alone. I don’t want any.”

“Is he all right?”

“Go way.”

“Is he all right? I asked a polite question.”

“He’s all right if he ain’t dead.”

Billy grabbed a handful of her blouse and coat just below the neck and lifted her halfway to her feet.

“Holy Mother of God, you’re as crazy as two bastards.”

“Is he hurt?”

“No, he’s passed out, and he’ll probably be out for hours.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he drank whiskey. He had money and he drank whiskey till he fell over. He never drinks whiskey. Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a relative. Who are you?”

“I’m his wife.”

“His wife?”

“You got very good hearing.”

“His wife?”

“For nine years.”

Billy let go of her coat and slumped into an empty chair beside her.

When he told his mother he’d met him he made sure Peg was in the room. They sat in the breakfast nook, just the three of them, George still working. Billy was looking out
at the dog in the back yard, and he told them all that had happened and how he wouldn’t come home. The response of the women bewildered Billy. His mother smiled and nodded her head.
Peg’s mouth was tight, the way it gets when she fights. They listened to it all. He didn’t say anything about Gerald just then. Just the bail and the turkey and the money he had and the
way he looked and the change Billy saw from the photograph. I’m goddamn glad you didn’t bring him home, Peg said. I don’t ever want to see him again. Let him stay where he is and
rot for all of me. And Ma said, No, the poor man, the poor, poor man, what an awful life he’s had. Think of what a life he could’ve had here with us and how awful it must’ve been
for him as a tramp. But neither of them said they were sorry he didn’t come home. They think of him like he was some bum down the block.

So Billy told them then about Gerald, and Peg couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe Ma hadn’t told us, and Ma cried because of that and because your father didn’t mean
it, and how he apologized to her and she accepted his apology, but she was numb then, and he took her numbness for hatred, and he went away. But she wouldn’t hold an accident against a man as
good as Francis was and who loved the children so and was only weak, for you can hate the weakness but not the man. Oh, we’re all so weak in our own ways, and none of us want to be hated for
that or killed for that. He suffered more than poor little Gerald, who never suffered at all, any more than the innocents who were slaughtered suffered the way Our Lord suffered. Your father was
only a man who didn’t know how to help himself and didn’t know better. I kept it from you both because I didn’t want you to hate him more than you did. You couldn’t know how
it was, because he loved Gerald the way he loved both of you, and he picked him up the way he’d picked you up a thousand times. Only this time the diaper wasn’t pinned right, and that
was my fault, and Gerald slipped out of it, and your father stood there with the diaper in his hand, and Gerald was already dead with a broken neck, I’m sure of that, the way his little head
was. I’m sure he never suffered more than a pinprick of pain and then he went to heaven because he was baptized, and I thanked God for that in the same minute I knew he was gone. Your father
knelt over him and tried to pick him up, but I said, Don’t, it might be his back and we shouldn’t move him, and we both knelt there looking at him and trying to see if he was breathing,
and finally we both knew he wasn’t, and your father fell over on the floor and cried, oh, how he cried, how that man cried. And I cried for him as well as for Gerald, because I knew
he’d never get over this as long as he lived. Gerald was gone but your father would have to live with it, and so we held one another and in a minute or so I covered him with a blanket and
went up the street for Doctor Lynch and told him I put him on the table to change his diaper and then he rolled off and I never knew he could move so much. He believed me and put accidental death
on the record, and it surely was that, even though your father was drinking when it happened, which I know is the reason he went away. But he wasn’t drunk the way he got to be in the days
after that, when he never saw a sober minute. He had just come home after the car barns and a few jars at the saloon, and he wasn’t no different from the way he was a thousand other nights,
except what he did was different, and that made him a dead man his whole life. He’s the one now that’s got to forgive himself, not me, not us. I knew you’d never forgive him
because you didn’t understand such things and how much he loved you and Gerald and loved me in his way, and it was a funny way, I admit that, since he kept going off to play baseball. But he
always came back. When he went this time I said to myself, He’ll never come into this house again, and he never did, and when we moved here to North Pearl, I used to think, If he does come
back he’ll go to Colonie Street and never find us, but then I knew he would if he wanted to. He’d find us if he had to.

Sweet Jesus, I never thought he’d come back and haunt you both with it, and that’s why I’m telling you this. Because when a good man dies, it’s reason to weep, and he
died that day and we wept and he went away and buried himself and he’s dead now, dead and can’t be resurrected. So don’t hate him and don’t worry him, and try to understand
that not everything that happens on this earth has a reason behind it that we can find in the prayer book. Not even the priests have answers for things like this. It’s a mystery we
can’t solve any more than we can solve the meaning of the stars. Let the man be, for the love of the sweet infant Jesus, let the man be.

Billy stared at the woman next to him and smiled.

“What’s your name?”

“Helen.”

“Do you have any money, Helen?”

“There’s a few dollars left of what he had. We’ll get a room with that when he wakes up.”

Billy took out his money, fifty-seven dollars, and pressed it into Helen’s hand.

“Now you can get a room, or get as drunk as he is if you like. Tell him Billy was here to say hello.”

Billy tossed the newspaper on the table.

“And tell him he can read all about me and him both in the paper. This paper.”

“Who are you?”

“I told you. I’m Billy.”

“Billy You’re the boy.”

“Boy, my ass. I’m a goddamn man-eating tiger.”

He stood up and parted Helen on the beret.

“Good night, Helen,” he said. “Have a good time.”

“God bless your generosity.”

“Generosity can go piss up a rainpipe,” Billy said, and he started to laugh. The laugh storm again. The coughing, the tears of mirth. He moved toward Spanish George’s door,
laughing and telling the old bums who watched him: “Generosity can go piss up two rainpipes for all I give a good goddamn.”

He halted in the doorway.

“Anybody here like to disagree with me?”

“You fuck with me,” said the bum with the trimmed mustache, “I’ll cut your head off.”

“Now you’re talkin’,” Billy said. “Now you’re talkin’.”

Billy could go anywhere now, anywhere in town. He was broke. All the way broke.

He began to run, loping across a vacant lot, where a man was warming himself by a bonfire. It had grown chillier. No place for that fellow to go.

Billy could always get a buck. But where now?

He padded down Madison Avenue to Broadway, where the ramp to the Dunn bridge began. Tommy Kane’s garage, where George got his car fixed. He turned up Broadway, still running, putting
distance between him and the drunken dead. He wasn’t even winded when he reached the Plaza and the D&H building. But he stopped running at Coulson’s and went inside for a later
edition of the
Times-Union.
The front page was different, but the kidnapping news was the same. He turned to Martin’s column and read about himself. A gamester who accepts the rules
and plays by them, but who also plays above them. Billy doesn’t care about money. A healthy man without need for artifice or mysticism.

What the hell was Martin talking about? Whose rules? And what the hell was that about money? How can anybody not care about money? Who gets along without it? Martin is half crazy, a spooky bird.
What is that stuff about mysticism? I still believe in God. I still go to the front.

He folded the paper and went out and crossed State Street and walked north on Broadway past Van Heusen Charles, which always reminded him of the goddamn house on Colonie Street, where they
bought their junk. And Cottrell and Leonard and the mannequins in the window. Two bums broke that window one night, drunked up on zodiac juice, everybody’s bar dregs, beer, whiskey, wine,
that old Lumberg kept in a can and then bottled and sold to the John bums for six bucks a gallon. When the cops caught up with the bums, one of them was dead and the other was screwing the
mannequin through a hole cut in its crotch.

Jimmy-Joe’s shoeshine stand. Jimmy-Joe told his customers he shined Al Smith’s shoes once, and Jack Dempsey’s. Everybody’s a sucker for big names. Bindy McCall. I kissed
Bindy McCall’s foot. Suckers.

Broadway was slowing down at one o’clock, all the trains in except the Montreal Limited. Traffic down to nothing, shows all let out. Bill’s Magic Shop in darkness. Billy was sweating
slightly and breathing heavily. Get the blood pounding and sober up. But he was still drunk as a stewbum, and reeling. Scuse me.

“Where the hell you walkin’?” said Mike the Wop coming out of Brockley’s.

“Hey, Mike.”

“That you, Billy?”

“Me.”

“Whataya know. You got yourself in trouble, I hear.”

“What do you hear?”

“That you got yourself in trouble and nobody’ll take your action.”

“They’ll get over it.”

“Didn’t sound that way.”

“Hey, Mike, you got a double sawbuck? I need coffee money and cab fare.”

“Double sawbuck?”

“Don’tcha think I’m good for it?”

“You’re a bad risk all of a sudden, Billy. You ain’t got a connection. You can’t even get a drink on this street.”

Mike pulled out his roll and crumpled a twenty and tossed it up in the air at Billy. Billy bobbled it and the bill fell to the sidewalk. He picked it up and said nothing. Mike grunted and walked
up Broadway and into Becker’s. Billy walked toward Clinton Avenue, considering a western at the Grand Lunch. Martha’s across the street. Martha’s door opened, and Slopie Dodds
came out wearing his leg. He saw Billy and crossed the street.

“Hey, man, how you makin’ it?”

“I’m coastin’, Slope.”

“You got a little grief, I hear.”

“Little bit.”

“How you fixed? You need anything?”

“I need a drink.”

“She don’t want you over there.”