The Digger's Game (6 page)

“What he’s afraid of,” Torrey said to Schabb, “he’s afraid the guys down the Bright Red’ll tell him to go home, and make him cry.”

“I don’t know those guys,” Schabb said. “I was after some other guys, I know them from around town. You see them various places. I had about thirty of them, the movers that don’t always go home at night, like they’re supposed to, I figured them for naturals. Except I didn’t figure, I was talking the last two weeks in July, first week in August. That’s when these birds take the family to the Cape and pretend they’re behaving themselves. I got about four out of the lot and I was counting on twenty. We could’ve lost some serious money on that. So I asked Richie.”

“Richie give you some bad advice, then,” the Greek said. “I’ll do the best I can with it this time, but I don’t want no more of this. Next time, ask me, too, see what I got to say.”

“Okay,” Torrey said, “ask him, Mill, is it all right, we got the Holy Name?”

The Greek said, “What?”

“Yeah,” Schabb said, “Saint Barbara’s Holy Name from Willow Hill there. Going to Freeport over Labor Day. Three glorious days and nights of sun, sand, excitement and luxury living in the glamour center of the Caribbean, a welcome Daiquiri in the well-appointed Casino Lounge, a pineapple in every spacious room, a spectacular view of sparkling beaches and azure water from your own private terrace. Plus: a surprise gift for the ladies, an orchid corsage about the size of a quarter that we get for thirty-eight cents apiece. All for the incredibly low price of three hundred and fifty dollars a couple, including round trip by jet and transfers between the airport and the hotel. I cut the parish school in for five hundred to get the pastor to let me in the door, but I did it.”

“Per couple,” the Greek said. “They’re taking their wives.”

“Sure,” Schabb said. “One or two of them wanted to know if they could bring the kids, but I said I couldn’t arrange it.”

“Isn’t that something?” Torrey said.

“It sure is,” the Greek said. “It’s a mess of shit, is what it is. Those guys haven’t got ten bucks to put on the table. What’re you giving them, counters? How much you staking them?”

“Twenty dollars a couple,” Schabb said. “I could’ve done a little better, it’s a cheap plane ride, but I figured the twenty was enough. That’ll get them inside at night.”

“It’ll get them inside the first night,” the Greek said. “Daddy’ll lose the twenty while the little woman watches. Then he’ll lose six bucks more. Then they’ll go
back the room and eat the fuckin’ pineapple. Why the fuck’re we giving away pineapples, for Christ sake? Who wants a goddamned pineapple?”

“Everybody wants a pineapple,” Schabb said. “They started doing that in Hawaii. Pretty soon the word got around. Now your average clown doesn’t think he’s been to a resort if there isn’t a pineapple on the commode when he walks in the room.”

“Yeah,” the Greek said. “Well, this group, we probably ought to give one
slice
of pineapple. All night long the old lady’ll be at him, dropping all that great American dough, gambling. He wasn’t so goddamned stupid they could’ve stayed home and seen a movie on the six bucks. The next two days they spend getting the sun, on which we don’t make no money, the way I get it. We’ll be lucky we make expenses.

“We get unlucky,” the Greek said, “it’ll be worse. The silly bastards won’t quit. They’ll lose their fuckin’ shirts and sign everything you put in front of them, and then I’ll have to go out and take a lot of washing machines and secondhand cars to write the stuff off. Why in Christ you want them nickel-stealing hot dogs for, can you tell me that?”

“We’re, they’re not signing any papers,” Schabb said. “The priest thought of that one right off, and I agreed with him. ‘No, Father,’ I said, ‘nothing like that. No credit gambling. Just what they bring with them. We’re not that kind of operation, Father, trying to victimize people. Basically, we’re just a travel agency. Labor Day’s a slack period in the package-tour business. Just a way to keep the airplanes going and the hotels full. Frankly, we expect to take a loss on this, but the hotels make it up to us.’ ”

“At least you didn’t lie to a priest,” the Greek said. “What are we gonna do with this?”

“We’re gonna take pictures of them,” Torrey said. “That first night, they’re blowing the twenty, we’re gonna, we got this guy with a camera. He’s gonna take about eighty pictures of those jerks. Then he’s gonna send them back, and Mill’s gonna make up a brochure.”

Schabb grinned.

“I don’t get it,” the Greek said.

“It
makes
the flyer,” Schabb said. “I talked to the Philadelphia group the other day; they did that. They got a deadhead bunch and they made about sixty dollars on the deal. But then they put it on the brochure: ‘The Holy Sucker’s Men’s Club, Satisfied Customers At Play In San Juan.’ Ten pictures of fat guys and women. You should see the business it gets them. The used-car dealers and the appliance distributors and the Rich Kids A.C., the guys who really want to go and have the money we’re interested in, they take the pamphlet home. How does the wife argue with them? You’ve really got something you can work with, then. A trip like this is just something you get through. Then it pays and it pays and it pays, and it just never stops.”

“You see, Greek?” Torrey said. “Now you understand? That all right with you?”

“That’s pretty fuckin’ good,” the Greek said. “I got to admit it. That is all right.”

“You never would’ve thought of that, would you, Greek?” Torrey said.

“No,” the Greek said. “Just the same as you didn’t think how I was gonna get twenty-eight out of guys down in Dorchester there. Just like Mister Schabb there, got himself all steamed up, he’s gonna have some
empty seats on the plane and he’s gonna lose, maybe fifteen thousand, so him and you get together and now as a result we got a pretty good chance of losing twenty-eight, instead. See, there was something you guys didn’t think of in a million years, and another thing you didn’t think of was to ask me if maybe I thought of something. I’m different than you, Richie,” the Greek said, “I always known, I known ever since I got out, and that was a long time ago, I’m the kind of guy that’s got to think about things, you know? Because there’s certain things I can do and certain things that if I do them, I’m gonna get inna shit. You, I done all right, see? You, you don’t.”

T
HE
D
IGGER GOT UP
at eleven and asked his wife for ten dollars.

“How come I got to give you ten dollars out of the house money?” Agatha Doherty said. She was thirty-nine years old. She was five feet, three inches tall and she had a trim figure. She wore a nine-dollar tan dress. “You don’t give me enough as it is, and then you’re always coming back and dipping into it. I’ve been saving up to get my hair done. I got to have it frosted again.”

“I thought you were gonna quit having that,” the Digger said. “You’re always telling me, how it hurts. And it costs, what?”

“Thirty dollars,” she said. “It does hurt, it hurts a lot. They take a crochet hook and they pull your hair out through this cap that’s got holes in it. I do it because I thought you liked it. You told me you liked it, you didn’t care about the thirty dollars. Now I suppose you’re more interested in what you can do with the thirty dollars’n you care how I look any more.”

“Oh boy,” the Digger said. He was eating four fried eggs, blood pudding and toast. “It
does
look good. I
don’t
care about the thirty. You’re a good-looking woman. You take care of yourself. I appreciate it. There’s very few women I ever see, raised four kids by themselves and look as good as you do. I said that lots of times.”

“It’s nice to hear,” she said. “I don’t know as it’s worth ten dollars to me, but it is nice to hear. You shouldn’t eat so much, you know. That stuff’s all full of
cholesterol. You’re going to get yourself a nice heart attack if you don’t stop stuffing yourself all the time.”

“Look,” the Digger said, “I quit smoking, right? You remember that? I got off the butts. Well, that don’t do the weight no good, you know? You’re so worried, how much I weigh, why the hell is it I couldn’t get a minute’s peace around this house every time I light up a cigarette?”

“I’m not likely to forget you quit,” she said. “It was like living with a regular bear. No, I know that helps. And I thought, Well, let him put the blubber on, he’ll take it off later. Only, you didn’t. You just keep on, getting bigger and bigger. I bet you weigh two hundred and fifty pounds.”

“I don’t,” the Digger said. “You want to think so, okay. But I don’t.”

“You don’t,” she said, “it’s because you weigh more. You’re probably up to two-seventy-five. You damned near crushed me, the last time.”

“Hey,” the Digger said, “quit that kind of talk. What if the kids hear you?”

“If you got up in the morning,” she said, “you know, you’d know where they are. They all went over to the pool. Anyway, Anthony’s fourteen.”

“So what?” the Digger said.

“I don’t think he thinks the stork brings them any more,” she said.

“Of course he don’t,” the Digger said. “He’s known different since he was six. I think they give him a copy of
Playboy
when he makes his First Communion there. He’s the horniest little bastard I ever seen. That still don’t mean, he oughta hear his mother talking like a longshoreman.”

“I don’t see what difference it makes,” she said. “He can hear the bed squeaking, you know. As much as you weigh, the whole house probably moves around. He knows about sex and he knows we do it.”

“How,” the Digger said, “how do you know?”

“Never mind,” she said.

“The sheets, probably,” the Digger said. “Good. Better he’s having wet dreams’n he’s going out knocking up some eighth-grader, I could have that on my mind too.”

“Now who’s talking like a longshoreman?” she said.

“You told me, the kids’re out,” the Digger said.

“I don’t matter of course,” she said. “No reason to watch your language around me.”

“Look,” the Digger said, “are you having your period or something? I ask you for ten bucks, you give me nothing but grief. You don’t want to loan it to me, say so, I’ll go cash a check.”

Aggie Doherty took her handbag from the cupboard. “I’ll loan you ten dollars,” she said. “That means I get it back.”

“Tonight,” the Digger said. “When I close up tonight, I’ll take it out of the deposit. You’ll have it tomorrow morning.”

“How come you didn’t take it Saturday?” she said, handing him the money. “You should’ve taken some money when you closed up Saturday, the way you usually do so I don’t know how much money you’re spending.”

“I did,” the Digger said.

“Uh huh,” she said, “that’s what I figured. Then last night after everybody else went to bed, all of a sudden you went out. Now today you need ten more dollars.
Who’d you spend all your money on, Sunday night when it’s the only night you can spend home with your family and all of a sudden you’ve got to go out? What can she do for you that I can’t do?”

“Look,” the Digger said, “you went to bed, nine thirty. Matthew and Patricia went to bed before you. Paul right afterwards. Tony come in about ten thirty and he went to bed. See, I’m such a good father, I take my family the beach on Sunday, it’s my day off. The traffic down and the traffic back, I buy practically every kind of hot dog there is in the world, everybody takes rides at Paragon Park, I even give Tony five, so he can go off and see what’s female and breathing he can try to get in trouble. I come home with ten or eleven bucks left out of twenty-five I take Saturday night, everybody craps out on the old man by eleven. So I sit and I think and I watch the news, I’m still wide awake. I’m not used to your kind of hours. It’s my one night off, for Christ sake, I’m supposed to spend it looking at the newspaper or something? So I go down the Saratoga, see what’s going on.”

“That’s what I asked you,” she said, “who was she?”

“I spent four bucks on some drinks,” the Digger said. “I meet Marty Jay down there and we talk and I had the four drinks. A guy I know comes along, he’s stiff, my big mouth, I told him, he oughta take a cab home. No dough. So I lend him five. I was there a long time, I didn’t leave till after two, me and Marty we each leave the kid a buck, we take up the table all that time. So I got a buck and change on me now. I had four lousy drinks and I lend a guy five and now I been out all night in a whorehouse. You better get some fresh news,
sweetheart: you can’t make out nowhere on ten bucks any more. All I did was have four drinks.”

“Martinis, I suppose,” she said. “You drink too much, too. That isn’t good for the heart. I could smell it on you when I woke up.”

“You oughta get your nose frosted instead of your hair,” the Digger said. “I was drinking bourbon.”

“It’s no better for the heart,” she said. “Just for my information, what’s this ten for? You got another friend who needs a cab?”

“Gas for the car,” the Digger said.

“Haven’t you got enough gas to get to work?” she said. “You could go to work and take it out of the till.”

“I’m not going to work,” the Digger said. “What I mean is, first I gotta see a guy. Then I’m going to work.”