Billy Bathgate

Billy Bathgate - E. L. Doctorow


Part One



ONE

He had to have planned it because when we drove onto the dock the boat was there and the engine was running and you could see the water churning up phosphorescence in the river, which was the only light there was because there was no moon, nor no electric light either in the shack where the dockmaster should have been sitting, nor on the boat itself, and certainly not from the car, yet everyone knew where everything was, and when the big Packard came down the ramp Mickey the driver braked it so that the wheels hardly rattled the boards, and when he pulled up alongside the gangway the doors were already open and they hustled Bo and the girl upside before they even made a shadow in all that darkness. And there was no resistance, I saw a movement of black bulk, that was all, and all I heard was maybe the sound someone makes who is frightened and has a hand not his own over his mouth, the doors slammed and the car was humming and gone and the boat was already opening up water between itself and the slip before a thin minute had passed. Nobody said not to so I jumped aboard and stood at the rail, frightened as you might expect, but a capable boy, he had said that himself, a capable boy capable of learning, and I see now capable of adoring worshiping that rudeness of power of which he was a greater student than anybody, oh and that menace of him where it might all be over for anyone in his sight from one instant to the next, that was what it all turned on, it was why I was there, it was why I was thrilled to be judged so by him as a capable boy, the danger he was really a maniac.
Besides, I had that self-assurance of the very young, which was in this case the simple presumption I could get away when I would, anytime I wanted, I could outrun him, outrun his rage or the range of his understanding and the reach of his domain, because I could climb fences and hustle down alleys and jump fire escapes and dance along the roof parapets of all the tenements of the world if it came to that. I was capable, I knew it before he did, although he gave me more than confirmation when he said it, he made me his. But anyway I wasn’t thinking of any of this at the time, it was just something I had in me I could use if I had to, not even an idea but an instinct waiting in my brain in case I ever needed it, or else why would I have leapt lightly over the rail as the phosphorescent water widened under me, to stand and watch from the deck as the land withdrew and a wind from the black night of water blew across my eyes and the island of lights rose up before me as if it were a giant ocean liner sailing past and leaving me stranded with the big murdering gangsters of my life and times?
My instructions were simple, when I was not doing something I was specifically told to do, to pay attention, to miss nothing, and though he wouldn’t have put it in so many words, to become the person who would always be watching and always be listening no matter what state I was in, love or danger or humiliation or deathly misery—to lose nothing of any fraction of a moment even if it happened to be my last.
So I knew this had to have been planned, though smeared with his characteristic rage that made you think it was just something that he had thought of the moment before he did it as for instance the time he throttled and then for good measure stove in the skull of the fire safety inspector a moment after smiling at him in appreciation for his entrepreneurial flair. I had never seen anything like that, and I suppose there are ways more deft, but however you do it, it is a difficult thing to do: his technique was to have none, he sort of jumped forward screaming with his arms raised and brought his whole weight of assault on the poor f*ck, and carried him down in a kind of smothering tackle, landing on top of him with a crash that probably broke his back, who knows? and then with his knees pinning down the outstretched arms, simply grabbing the throat and pressing the balls of his thumbs down on the windpipe, and when the tongue came out and eyes rolled up walloping the head two three times on the floor like it was a coconut he wanted to crack open.
And they were all in dinner clothes too, I had to remember that, black tie and black coat with the persian lamb collar, white silk scarf and his pearl gray homburg blocked down the center of the crown just like the president’s, in Mr. Schultz’s case. Bo’s hat and coat were still in the hatcheck in his case. There had been an anniversary dinner at the Embassy Club, five years of their association in the beer business, so it was all planned, even the menu, but the only thing was Bo had misunderstood the sentiment of the occasion and brought along his latest pretty girl, and I had felt, without even knowing what was going on when the two of them were hustled into the big Packard, that she was not part of the plan. Now she was here on the tugboat and it was entirely dark from the outside, they had curtains over the portholes and I couldn’t see what was going on but I could hear the sound of Mr. Schultz’s voice and although I couldn’t make out the words I could tell he was not happy, and I supposed they would rather not have her witness what was going to happen to a man she might possibly have come to be fond of, and then I heard or felt the sounds of steps on a steel ladder, and I turned my back to the cabin and leaned over the railing just in time to see a lighted pucker of green angry water and then a curtain must have been drawn across a porthole because the water disappeared. A few moments later I heard one returning set of footsteps.
Under these circumstances I could not hold to the conviction that I had done the smart thing by coming aboard without his telling me to. I lived, as we all did, by his moods, I was forever trying to think of ways to elicit the good ones, the impulse to placate was something he brought out in people, and when I was engaged in doing something at his instruction I pressed hard to do my urgent best while at the same time preparing in my mind the things I would say in my defense in any unforeseen event of his displeasure. Not that I believed there was an appeals process. So I rode as a secret rider there at the cold railing through several minutes of my irresolution, and the strings of lights on the bridges behind me made me sentimental for my past. But by then we were coming downriver into the heavier swells of the open water, and the boat began to pitch and roll and I found I had to widen my stance to keep my balance. The wind was picking up too, and spray was flying up from the prow and wetting my face, I was holding the rail and pressing my back against the side of the cabin and beginning to feel the light head that comes with the realization that water is a beast of another planet, and with each passing moment it was drawing in my imagination a portrait of its mysterious powerful and endlessly vast animacy right there under the boat I was riding, and all the other boats of the world as well, which if they lashed themselves together wouldn’t cover an inch of its undulant and heaving hide.
So I went in, opening the door a crack and slipping through shoulder first, on the theory that if I was going to die I had rather die indoors.
Here is what I saw in the first instant of my blinking in the harsh light of a work lamp hooked to the deckhouse ceiling: the elegant Bo Weinberg standing beside his pointed patent-leather shoes, with the black silk socks and attached garters lying twisted like dead eels beside them, and his white feet looking very much longer and very much wider than the shoes he had just stepped from. He was staring at his feet, perhaps because feet are intimate body parts rarely seen with black tie, and following his gaze, I felt I had to commiserate with what I was sure he was thinking, that for all our civilization we go around on these things that are slit at the front end into five unequal lengths each partially covered with shell.
Kneeling in front of him was the brisk and impassive Irving methodically rolling Bo’s pant legs with their black satin side-stripe to the knees. Irving had seen me but chose not to notice me, which was characteristic. He was Mr. Schultz’s utility man and did what he was told to do and gave no appearance of thought for anything else. He was rolling up pant legs. A hollow-chested man, with thinning hair, he had the pallor of an alcoholic, that dry paper skin they have, and I knew about drunks on the wagon what they paid for their sobriety, the concentration it demanded, the state of constant mourning it produced. I liked to watch Irving whatever he was doing, even when it was not as it was now something extraordinary. Each fold-up of the pant leg exactly matched the one before. He did everything meticulously and without wasted movement. He was a professional, but since he had no profession other than dealing with the contingencies of his chosen life, he carried himself as if life was a profession, just as, I suppose, in a more conventional employment, a butler would.
And partially obscured by Bo Weinberg and standing as far from him as I was but at the opposite side of the cabin, in his open coat and unevenly draped white scarf and his soft gray homburg tilted back on his head, and one hand in his jacket pocket and the other casually holding a gun at his side that was pointed with no particular emphasis at the deck, was Mr. Schultz.
This scene was so amazing to me I gave it the deference one gives to the event perceived as historical. Everything was moving up and down in unison but the three men didn’t seem to notice and even the wind was a distant and chastened sound in here, and the air was close with the smell of tar and diesel oil and there were coils of thick rope stacked like rubber tires, and pulleys and chain tackle, and racks filled with tools and kerosene lamps and cleats and numerous items whose names or purposes I did not know but whose importance to the nautical life I willingly conceded. And the tug’s engine vibrations were comfortingly powerful in here and I could feel them running into my hand, which I had put against the door in order to close it.
I caught Mr. Schultz’s eye and he suddenly displayed a mouth of large evenly aligned white teeth, and his face of rude features creased itself into a smile of generous appreciation. “It’s the Invisible Man,” he said. I was as startled by his utterance as I would have been if someone in a church painting had started to talk. Then I found myself smiling back. Joy flooded my boyish breast, or perhaps gratitude to God for granting me at least this moment in which my fate wasn’t in the balance. “Look at that, Irving, the kid came along for the ride. You like boats, kid?” he said.
“I don’t know yet,” I said truthfully and without understanding why this honest answer was so funny. For he was laughing now loudly and in his hornlike voice, which I thought was terribly careless of the solemn nature of the occasion; the mien of the other two men seemed preferable to me. And I will say something more about Mr. Schultz’s voice because it was so much an aspect of his power of domination. It was not that it was always loud but that it had a substantial body to it, it came out of his throat with harmonic buzz, and it was very instrumental actually, so that you understood the throat as a sound box, and that maybe the chest cavity and the nose bones, too, were all involved in producing it, and it was a baritone voice that automatically made you pay attention in the way of wanting a horn voice like that yourself, except when he raised it in anger or laughed as he was doing now, and then it grated on your ears and made you dislike it, as I did now—or maybe it was what I’d said that I disliked because I was joining in some cleverness at a dying man’s expense.
There was a narrow green slat bench or shelf hung from the cabin wall and I sat down on it. What could Bo Weinberg possibly have done? I had had little acquaintance with him, he was something of a knight errant, rarely in the office on 149th Street, never in the cars, certainly not on the trucks, but always intimated to be central to the operation, like Mr. Dixie Davis the lawyer, or Abbadabba Berman the accounting genius—at that level of executive importance. He was reputed to do Mr. Schultz’s diplomatic work, negotiating with other gangs and performing necessary business murders. He was one of the giants, and perhaps, in fearsomeness, second only to Mr. Schultz himself. Now not just his feet but his legs to the knees were exposed. Irving rose from his kneeling position and offered his arm, and Bo Weinberg took it, like some princess at a ball, and delicately, gingerly, placed one foot at a time in the laundry tub in front of him that was filled with wet cement. I had of course seen from the moment I had come through the door how the tubbed cement made a slow-witted diagram of the sea outside, the slab of it shifting to and fro as the boat rose and fell on the waves.
I could handle the sudden events, getting baptized as by a thunderstorm, but this was more than I was ready for to tell the truth, I found I was not a self-confident witness here in contemplation of the journey about to be taken by the man sitting before me with his feet being cast in stone. I was working to understand this mysterious evening and the unhappy tolling of a life in its prime that was like the buoys I heard clanking their lonely warnings as we passed out to sea. I felt my witness was my own personal ordeal as Bo Weinberg was invited to sit now in a wooden kitchen chair that had been shoved into place behind him and then to present his hands for their tying. They were crisscrossed to each other at the wrist with fresh and slightly stiff clothesline still showing the loops it came in from the hardware store, and with Irving’s perfect knots between the wrists like a section of vertebrae. The joined hands were placed between Bo’s thighs and tied to them cat’s cradle, over and under, over and under, and then everything together was roped in three or four giant turns to the chair so that he could not lift his knees, and then the chair was twice looped to the laundry tub through the handles and the final knot was pulled tight around a chair leg just as the rope ran out. Quite possibly Bo had at some time in the past seen this scoutcraft displayed on someone else for he looked upon it with a sort of distracted admiration, as if now, too, someone not himself was sitting hunched over in a chair there with his feet entubbed in hardening cement in the deckhouse of a boat running without lights past Coenties Slip across New York Harbor and into the Atlantic.
The deckhouse was shaped like an oval. A railed hatch where the girl had been put below was in the center of the deck at the rear. Toward the front was a bolted metal ladder leading straight up through a hatch to the wheelhouse where I assumed the captain or whatever he was called was duly attending to his business. I had never been on anything bigger than a rowboat so all of this, at least, was good news, that something like a boat could be so much of a construction, all according to the rules of the sea, and that there was a means of making your tenuous way across this world that clearly reflected a long history of thought. Because the swells got higher and longer, and everyone had to anchor himself, Mr. Schultz taking the side bench directly opposite where I sat and Irving gripping the ladder leading upstairs to the wheelhouse as if it were a pole on a subway train. And there was a silence for some time inside the sounds of the running engine and the waves, like the solemnity of people listening to organ music. And now Bo Weinberg was coming to life and beginning to look around him, to see what he could see, and who was here and what could be done; I received the merest glance of his dark eyes, one short segment of arc in their scan, for which I was incredibly relieved, not bearing any responsibility, nor wanting any, for these wheezing shifting seas or for the unbreathable nature of water, or its coldness, or its dark and bottomless craw.
Now there was such intimacy among all of us in this black cabin shining in the almost-green shards of one work light that when anyone moved everyone else noticed, and at this time my eyes were riveted by Mr. Schultz’s small action of dropping his gun in his ample coat pocket and removing then from his inside jacket pocket the silver case that held his cigars and extracting a cigar and replacing the case and then biting off the tip of his cigar and spitting it out. Irving came over to him with a cigarette lighter, which he got going with one press of his thumb just a moment before he held it to the tip. And Mr. Schultz leaned slightly forward rotating the cigar to light it evenly, and over the sound of the sea and the grinding engine I heard the sip sip of his pull on the cigar and watched the flame flare up on his cheeks and brow, so that the imposition of him was all the more enlarged in the special light of one of his appetites. Then the light went out and Irving retreated and Mr. Schultz sat back on the bench, the cigar glowing in the corner of his mouth and filling the cabin with smoke, which was not really a great thing to be smelling in a boat cabin on the high seas.
“You can crack a window, kid,” he said. I did this with alacrity, turning and kneeling on the bench and sticking my hand through the curtains and unlatching the porthole and pushing it open. I could feel the night on my hand and drew it in wet.
“Isn’t it a black night though?” Mr. Schultz said. He rose and moved around to Bo, who was sitting facing astern, and hunkered down in front of him like a doctor in front of a patient. “Look at that, the man is shivering. Hey Irving,” he said. “How long till it hardens up? Bo is cold.”
“Not long,” Irving said. “A little while.”
“Only a little while longer,” Mr. Schultz said, as if Bo needed a translation. He smiled apologetically and stood and put a companionable hand on Bo’s shoulder.
At this Bo Weinberg spoke and what he said was genuinely surprising to me. It was not what any apprentice or ordinary person in his situation could have said and more than any remark of Mr. Schultz’s to this moment gave me to understand the realm of high audacity these men moved in, like another dimension. Perhaps he was only admitting to his despair or perhaps this was his dangerous way of getting Mr. Schultz’s sincere attention; I would not have thought of the possibility that a man in his circumstances would feel he had a measure of control over how and when his death would occur. “You’re a cocksucker, Dutch” is what he said.
I held my breath but Mr. Schultz only shook his head and sighed. “First you beg me and now you go calling me names.”
“I didn’t beg you, I told you to let the girl go. I spoke to you as if you were still human. But all you are is a cocksucker. And when you can’t find a cock to suck you pick up scumbags off the floor and suck them. That’s what I think of you, Dutch.”
As long as he was not looking at me I could look at Bo Weinberg. He certainly had spirit. He was a handsome man, with smooth shiny black hair combed back without a part from a widow’s peak, and a swarthy Indian sort of face with high cheekbones, and a full well-shaped mouth and a strong chin, all set on the kind of long neck that a tie and collar dresses very nicely. Even hunched over in the shame of his helplessness, with his black tie askew on his wing collar and his satiny black tuxedo jacket bunched up above his shoulders, so that his posture was subservient and his gaze necessarily furtive, he suggested to me the glamour and class of a big-time racketeer.
I wished now in some momentary confusion of loyalties, or perhaps thinking only as a secret judge that the case had not yet been made to my satisfaction, that Mr. Schultz could have some of this quality of elegance of the man in the tub. The truth was that even in the finest clothes Mr. Schultz seemed badly dressed, he suffered a sartorial inadequacy, as some people had weak eyes or rickets, and he must have known this because whatever else he was up to he would also be hiking up his trousers with his forearms, or lifting his chin while he pulled at his collar, or brushing cigar ashes from his vest, or taking off his hat and blocking the crown with the side of his hand. Without even thinking about it he tried constantly to correct his relationship to his clothes, as if he had some sort of palsy of dissatisfaction, to the point where you thought everything would settle on him neatly enough if he would stop picking at it.
The trouble may have been in part his build, which was short-necked and stolid. I think now that the key to grace or elegance in any body, male or female, is the length of the neck, that when the neck is long several conclusions follow, such as a proper proportion of weight to height, a natural pride of posture, a gift for eye contact, a certain nimbleness of the spine and length of stride, all in all a kind of physical gladness in movement leading to athletic competence or a love for dancing. Whereas the short neck predicts a host of metaphysical afflictions, any one of which brings about the ineptitude for life that creates art, invention, great fortunes, and the murderous rages of the disordered spirit. I am not suggesting this as an absolute law or even a hypothesis that can be proved or disproved; it is not a notion from the scientific world but more like an inkling of a folk truth of the kind that seemed reasonable enough before radio. Maybe it was something that Mr. Schultz himself perceived in the unconscious genius of his judgments because up to now I knew of two murders he had personally committed, both in the region of the neck, the throttling of that Fire Department inspector, and the more viciously expedient destruction of a West Side numbers boss who was unfortunate enough to be tilted back in a chair and having himself shaved in the barbershop of the Maxwell Hotel on West Forty-seventh Street when Mr. Schultz found him.
So I suppose the answer to his regrettable lack of elegance was that he had other ways of impressing you. And after all there was a certain fluent linkage of mind and body, both were rather powerfully blunt and tended not to recognize obstacles that required going around rather than through or over. In fact it was just this quality of Mr. Schultz’s that Bo Weinberg now remarked upon. “Think of it,” he said, addressing the cabin, “he makes this cheap dago move on Bo Weinberg, can you believe it? Only the guy who took out Vince Coll for him and held Jack Diamond by the ears so he could put the gun in his mouth. Only the guy who did Maranzano and bought him a million dollars of respect from the Unione. Who made the big hits for him and covered his ass for him, and found the Harlem policy he was too dumb to find for himself, who handed him his fortune, made him a goddamn millionaire, made him look like something else than the f*cking lowdown gonif he is—this shmuck from the gutter. This bullethead. Listen, what did I expect, pulls me out of a restaurant in front of my fiancée? Women and children, anything, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t know any better did you see those waiters cringing, Irving, you weren’t there you should have seen those waiters trying not to watch him shovel it in sitting there in his Delancey Street suit that he bought from the signboard.”
I thought whatever was going to happen now I didn’t want to witness; I had scrunched up my eyes and instinctively pressed back into the cold cabin wall. But Mr. Schultz hardly seemed to react, his face was impassive. “Don’t talk to Irving,” he said by way of reply. “Talk to me.”
“Men talk. When there are differences men talk. If there is a misunderstanding they hear each other out. That’s what men do. I don’t know what you came out of. I don’t know what stinking womb of pus and shit and ape scum you came out of. ’Cause you’re an ape, Dutch. Hunker down and scratch your ass, Dutch. Swing from a tree. Hoo hoo, Dutch. Hoo hoo.”
Mr. Schultz said very quietly: “Bo, you should understand I am past the madness part. I am past the anger. Don’t waste your breath.” And like a man who has lost interest he returned to his seat along the bulkhead across from me.
And from the slump of Bo Weinberg’s shoulders, and the droop of his head, I thought it might be true of a man of rank that he would be naturally defiant, and it might furthermore be true that he would exhibit the brazen courage of a killer of the realm for whom death was such a common daily circumstance of business, like paying bills or making bank deposits, that his own was not that much different from anyone else’s, as if they were all a kind of advanced race, these gangsters, trained by their chosen life into some supernatural warrior spirit; but what I had heard had been a song of despair; Bo would know better than anyone there were no appeals; his only hope would be for a death as quick and painless as possible; and my throat went dry from the certainty that came over me that this was exactly what he had been trying to do, effect it, invoke Mr. Schultz’s hair-trigger temper to dictate the means and time of his own death.
So I understood of the uncharacteristic controlled response that it was so potent as to be merciless; Mr. Schultz had made his very nature disappear, becoming the silent author of the tugboat, a faceless professional, because he had let Bo’s words erase him and had become still and thoughtful and objective in the approved classical manner of his henchman Bo Weinberg, as Bo, swearing and ranting and raving, had seemed to become him.
In my mind it was the first inkling of how a ritual death tampers with the universe, that inversions occur, everything flashes into your eyes backward or inside out, there is some kind of implosive glimpse of the other side, and you smell it too, like crossed wires.
“Men talk, if they are men,” Bo Weinberg said now in an entirely different tone of voice. I could barely hear him. “They honor the past, if they are men. They pay their debts. You never paid your debts, your deepest debts, your deepest debts of honor. The more I done for you, the more like a brother I been, the less I have counted to you. I should have known you would do this, and for no more reason than you are a welsher who never paid me what I was worth, who never paid anybody what they are worth. I protected you, I saved your life a dozen times, I did your work and did it like a professional. I should have known this was the way you would make good on your debt, this is the way Dutch Schultz keeps the books, trumping up the wildest cockamamie lie just to chisel, a cheap chiseler chiseling every way he can.”
“You always had the words, Bo,” Mr. Schultz said. He puffed on his cigar and took his hat off and reblocked it with the side of his hand. “You got more words than me, being having been to high school. On the other hand I got a good head for numbers, so I guess it all evens out.”
And then he told Irving to bring up the girl.
And up she came, her marcelled blond head, and then her white neck and shoulders, as if she was rising from the ocean. I had not before in the darkness of the car gotten a really good look at her, she was very slender in her cream white evening gown hanging by two thin straps, and in this dark and oily boat, totally alarming, white with captivity, staring about her in some frightened confusion so that prophecies of an awful evil despoil-age filled my chest, not just of sex but of class, and a groan like a confirmation of my feeling strangled in the throat of Bo Weinberg, who had been cursing a stream of vile oaths at Mr. Schultz and who now strained at his ropes and shook his chair from side to side until Mr. Schultz reached in his coat pocket and brought the grip of his pistol smartly down on Bo’s shoulder and the girl’s green eyes went wide as Bo howled and lifted his head in pain and then said from his squeezed face of pain that she shouldn’t look, that she should turn away and not look at him.
Irving coming up the stairs behind her caught her as she began to fold and set her down in the corner on a cushion of piled tarpaulins and leaned her back against cylinders of coiled line, and she sat on her side with her knees drawn and her head averted, a beautiful girl, I was able to see now, with a fine profile, as in the aristocracy of my imagination, with a thin nose and under it a lovely dimpled crescent curving out downward to a mouth which from the side was full-lipped in the middle and carved back to no more than a thin line at the corner, and a firm jawline and a neck that curved like a waterbird’s, and—I dared to let my eyes go down—a thin fragile chest, with her breasts unencumbered as far as I could determine by any undergarment, being slight, although apparent at the same time under the shining white satin of her décolletage. Irving had brought her fur wrap along and draped it now over her shoulders. And all of a sudden it was very close in here with all of us, and I noticed a stain on the lower part of her gown, with some matter stuck to it.
“Threw up all over the place,” Irving said.
“Oh Miss Lola, I am so sorry,” Mr. Schultz said. “There is never enough air on a boat. Irving, perhaps a drink.” From his coat pocket he withdrew a flask encased in leather. “Pour Miss Lola out a bit of this.”
Irving stood with his legs planted against the rock of the boat and unscrewed from the flask a metal cap and precisely poured into it a shot of neat and held it out to the woman. “Go ahead, missy,” Mr. Schultz said. “It’s good malt whiskey. It will settle your stomach.”
I couldn’t understand why they didn’t see she had fainted but they knew more than I did, the head stirred, the eyes opened and all at once in their struggle to come to focus betrayed my boy’s romance: She reached out for the drink and held it and studied it and raised it and tossed it back.
“Bravo, sweetheart,” Mr. Schultz said. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you? I bet you know how to do just about everything, don’t you. What? Did you say something, Bo?”
“For God’s sake, Dutch,” Bo whispered. “It’s over, it’s done.”
“No, no, don’t worry, Bo. No harm will come to the lady. I give you my word. Now Miss Lola,” he said, “you can see the trouble Bo is in. You been together how long?”
She would not look at him or say a word. The hand in her lap went slack. The metal screw cap rolled off her knee and lodged in a crack of the decking. Immediately Irving picked it up.
“I had not the pleasure of meeting you before this evening, he never brought you around, though it was clear Bo had fallen in love, my bachelor Bo, my lady-killer, it was clear he had gone head over heels. And I see why, I do most certainly see why. But he calls you Lola and I am sure that is not your name. I know all the girls named Lola.”
Irving passed forward, handing the flask to Mr. Schultz, and continuing, and it was at this moment an uphill walk, the boat riding a run of wave prow up, and he reached the forward ladder and turned to wait with all of us, watching the girl, who would not answer as the boat dropped under us, but sat now with two streams of tears silently coursing down her cheeks, and all the world was water, inside and out, while she didn’t speak.
“But be that as it may,” Mr. Schultz went on, “whoever you are you can see the trouble your Bo is in. Right, Bo? Show her how you can’t do certain things anymore in your life, Bo. Show her how the simplest thing, crossing your legs, scratching your nose, it can’t be done anymore by you. Oh yeah, he can scream, he can shout. But he can’t lift his foot, he can’t open his fly or unbuckle his belt, he can’t do much of anything, Miss Lola. Little by little he is taking leave of his life. So answer me now, sweetheart. I’m just curious. Where did you two meet? How long you been lovebirds?”
“Don’t answer him!” Bo shouted. “It’s nothing to do with her! Hey Dutch, you’re looking for reasons? I can give you all the reasons in the world and they all add up to you’re an a*shole.”
“Aah that is such bad talk,” Mr. Schultz said. “In front of this woman. And this boy. There are women and children here, Bo.”
“You know what they call him? Shortpail. Shortpail Schultz.” Bo cackled with laughter. “Everyone has a name and that’s his. Shortpail. Deals in this brewed catpiss he calls beer and doesn’t even pay for it. Chintzes on payoffs, has more money than he knows what to do with and still nickels-and-dimes his associates. An operation this size, beer, unions, policy, runs it like some f*cking candy store. Am I right, Shortpail?”
Mr. Schultz nodded thoughtfully. “But look, Bo,” he said. “I’m standing here and you’re sitting there and you’re all finished, and who would you rather be at this moment, Mr. class-act Bo Weinberg? Moves on the man he works for? That’s class?”
“May you f*ck your mother flying through the air,” Bo said. “May your father lick the shit of horses off the street. May your baby be served to you boiled on a platter with an apple in its mouth.”
“Oh Bo.” Mr. Schultz rolled his eyes upward. He lifted his arms out and his palms up and made mute appeal to the heavens. Then he looked back at Bo and let his arms fall to his sides with a slap. “I give up,” he muttered. “All bets off. Irving, is there another cabin down there that has not been occupied?”
“Cabin aft,” Irving said. “The back end,” he said in explanation.
“Thank you. Now Miss Lola, would you be so kind?” Mr. Schultz reached out to the seated woman as if they were at a dance. She gasped and folded herself back away from his hand, bringing her knees up in the gown and pressing back, which made Mr. Schultz look for a moment at his hand as if he was trying to see what about it was so repugnant to her. We all looked at his hand, Bo from under his lowering brow while at the same time making strange strangling noises, his ears and neck turning red with the effort to burst Irving’s ropes. Mr. Schultz had stubby fingers, a plump meaty rise where the thumb and forefinger joined. His nails needed a manicure. Sparse colonies of black hair grew behind each knuckle. He yanked the woman to her feet so that she cried out and held her by the wrist while he turned to face Bo.
“You see, missy,” he said, though he was not looking at her, “since he won’t make it easier we’ll have to do it for him. So he couldn’t care less when the time comes. So he’ll be only too happy.”
Pushing the girl in front of him, Mr. Schultz descended to the deck below. I heard her slip on the stairs and cry out, and then Mr. Schultz telling her to shut up, and then a thin, extended wail, and then a door slamming, and then only the wind and the plash of water.
I didn’t know what to do. I was still sitting on the side bench, I was bent over and gripping the bench with my hands and feeling the engine reverberate in my bones. Irving cleared his throat and climbed the ladder into the wheelhouse. I was now alone with Bo Weinberg, whose head had slumped forward in the privacy of his torment, and I didn’t want to be alone with him so took Irving’s place at the bottom of the ladder and started to climb it, rung by rung, but with my back to it, climbing the ladder backward by my heels and then coming to a halt halfway up between the deck and the hatch, and entwining myself there because Irving had begun to talk with the pilot of the boat. It was dark up there when I peered up, or maybe as dark as the light from a compass or some other dashboard instrument, and I could picture them staring over the prow from that height as they spoke, looking out to sea as the boat rode to its impenetrable destination.
“You know,” Irving said in his dry gravelly voice, “I started out on the water. I ran speedboats for Big Bill.”
“That right?”
“Oh sure. What is it, ten years now? He had good boats. Liberty motors in ’em, do thirty-five knots loaded.”
“Sure,” the pilot said, “I knew those boats. I remember the Mary B. I remember the Bettina.”
“That’s right,” Irving said. “The King Fisher. The Galway.”
“Irving,” Bo Weinberg said from his tub.
“Come out here to the Row,” Irving said, “load the cases, be back on the Brooklyn side or off Canal Street in no time at all.”
“Sure,” the pilot said. “We had names and numbers. We knew which boats were Bill’s and which boats we could go after.”
“What?” Irving said, and the word seemed conditioned by a wan smile I imagined up there in the dark.
“Sure,” the pilot said. “I ran a cutter in those days, the C.G. two-eight-two.”
“I’ll be damned,” Irving said.
“Saw you go by. Well, hell, even a lieutenant senior grade only got a hundred and change a month.”
“Irving!” Bo shouted. “For God’s sake!”
“He covered everything,” Irving said. “That’s what I liked about Bill. Nothing left to chance. After the first year we didn’t even have to carry cash. Everything on credit, like gentlemen. Yes, Bo?” I heard Irving say from the top of the ladder.
“Put me out, Irving. I’m begging you, put a muzzle to my head.”
“Bo, you know I can’t do that,” Irving said.
“He’s a madman, he’s a maniac. He’s torturing me.”
“I’m sorry,” Irving said in his soft voice.
“The Mick did him worse. I took the Mick out for him. How do you think I did it, hanging him by his thumbs, like this? You think I held him for contemplation? I did it, bang, it was done. I did it mercifully,” Bo Weinberg said. “I did it merci-ful-ly,” he said, the word breaking out of him on a sob.
“I could give you a drink, Bo,” Irving called down. “You want a drink?”
But Bo was sobbing and didn’t seem to hear, and in a moment Irving was gone from the hatch.
The pilot had turned on the radio, twisting the knob through static till some voices came in. He kept it low, like music. People talked. Other people answered. They warranted their positions. They were not on this boat.
“It was clean work,” Irving was saying to the pilot. “It was good work. Weather never bothered me. I liked it all. I liked making my landing just where and when I’d figured to.”
“Sure,” the pilot said.
“I grew up on City Island,” Irving said. “I was born next to a boatyard. If I didn’t catch on when I did I would have joined the navy.”
Bo Weinberg was moaning the word Mama. Over and over again, Mama, Mama.
“I used to like it at the end of a night’s work,” Irving said. “We kept the boats there in the marine garage on a Hundred and Thirty-second Street.”
“Sure,” the pilot said.
“You’d come up the East River just before dawn. City fast asleep. First you’d see the sun on the gulls, they’d turn white. Then the top of the Hell Gate turned to gold.”