Billy Bathgate

TEN

I slept to an unaccustomed late hour, which I realized at once when I woke and saw the room filled with light and the white curtains on the windows like movie screens with the picture about to start. The chambermaid was running a vacuum cleaner in the corridor and I heard a chain-drive truck coming around the back of the hotel to make a delivery. I got out of bed and felt very heavy in the limbs, but I did my ablutions and dressed, and inside of ten minutes I was on my way to breakfast. When I got back to the hotel Abbadabba Berman was out front with the Buick Roadmaster at the curb, he was waiting for me. “Hey kid,” he said, “come on we’ll go for a ride.”
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 f*ck 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.
Mickey was gone a lot making the long drive to New York and back in a night and a day, and sometimes other men in other cars appeared whom everyone seemed to know but me, they would take their dinner with Irving and Lulu at the other table, I would say I saw two or three new faces a week. From all of this I began to appreciate the size of the operation, that the weekly payroll alone must be considerable, and from my vantage point Mr. Schultz would have to be now holding his own after the losses he had suffered as a lammister. It was difficult to judge these things because he portrayed himself so consistently as someone wronged, or double-crossed, or taken for a chump. Mr. Berman pored over the books constantly, and sometimes Mr. Schultz joined him, they really put in the time, usually late at night, and on one occasion I passed the open door of Mr. Berman’s office and saw there for the first time a safe, and some deflated canvas mail bags lying on the floor beside it, and it came to me that all the money was ending up right here across the hall from me, a reality that I found unsettling. Apart from the token sums he had deposited that day for political purposes, Mr. Schultz did not keep a bank account, because bank records could be subpoenaed and assets confiscated and tax cases made against him, it was a simple precaution, the case the Feds had now was based on adding-machine slips and policy records taken in a raid on the 149th Street office, which was bad enough. So it was essential accounting practice that everything was done in cash, cash for the payouts, cash for the payoffs, cash for the payroll, it was a cash business and the profits to Mr. Schultz were in pure cash and I dreamed one night of a great tide of cash coming in and going out and what was left on the beach Mr. Schultz ran along and scooped up in packets, which he stuffed into a burlap bag like potatoes, knowing it was a dream as I dreamed it because it put the country at the seashore but realizing in the dream, which is to say reading it for the truth of the matter, that he had been doing this for some time and he had to have accumulated many many burlap bags of culled cash, or cold cash, and then it turned into a gold cache, but I didn’t know in the dream where it was hidden, any more than I knew when I awakened.
Around this time, Mr. Schultz’s lawyer, Dixie Davis, whom I had seen that time in the numbers office, came up from New York and arrived at the Hotel Onondaga in a Nash sedan driven by a member of the gang I didn’t know. Dixie Davis was my model for a good dresser, I had gotten my wing-tip shoes from seeing his and now I noticed his country summer shoes, which had a kind of mesh on top, they were brown with this cream-colored mesh going from the laces to the tip and I was not crazy about them although they were probably cool on the feet. He was wearing a double-breasted very light tan suit, which I liked, and a striped tie of cotton colored pale shades of blue and gray and pink, which I thought was smart, but best of all was the straw skimmer on his head, which he put on as he emerged in a crouch from the car. I happened to have been coming downstairs and so I saw Mr. Berman, himself no slouch at color combinations, greet him just outside the revolving door. Dixie Davis had his briefcase with him and it looked fat with the mysterious problems of legal life. He was somehow different from what I remembered, perhaps in anticipation of meeting Mr. Schultz he seemed to lose his self-assurance the moment he pushed into the lobby, he took off his straw hat and looked around somewhat nervously and held his briefcase in both arms, and though he was smiling and being jolly I saw that he was city pale, not handsome as I remembered under that pompadour haircomb, but somewhat toothy, and unctuous in his deportment, he had one of those smiles that went down at the corners of his mouth, what we in the Bronx called a shit-eating smile, and it was on his face as he passed with Mr. Berman into the elevator.
Mr. Schultz was going to be tied up for the afternoon so he told Drew Preston to put in the time acting like my governess. She and I had a conference standing outside the little Indian museum that they had in the red stone courthouse around the back down some basement steps. “Look,” she said, “it’s just a few headdresses and spears and such and there’s no one there anyway to see what a good governess I am. Let’s go for a picnic instead, is that all right with you?”
I said anything was all right with me as long as it didn’t involve education. I took her down the side street to where my secret tea shop lady made up such good things, and we bought chicken salad sandwiches and fruit and napoleons, and then she bought a bottle of wine at the liquor store, and we set out uphill through the east side of the town into the mountains. This was a longer hike than I expected, I had done most of my exploring north and west into the farmlands, but hills always look closer than they are, and we were well beyond the end of the paved streets and still going up in wide spirals on a dirt road with the big hill behind the Onondaga Hotel looking just the way it did from my window, close enough to touch but just as far away, even when I turned around and looked down at the roofs of the city and saw what progress we had made.
She strode out ahead of me, which ordinarily would have brought out my competitive spirit, except I enjoyed watching the flex of the muscles in her long white calves. The minute we were out of the town limits, she had unwrapped and removed her governess’s skirt and flung it over her shoulder, which stopped my heart beating for a moment, but she had a pair of walking shorts underneath, the hippy kind of shorts girls wear, and she was walking with a very attractive leggy stride, a smart practiced walk, head down, her free arm swinging, each buttock of her shorts rising and falling in a way that very quickly became reliably familiar to me, she was making good time uphill, her long legs her little feet pointing in their low-heeled shoes and white anklets, and then the road leveled and we were out of the sun into the shade of pines, and here the road petered out into a path and we struck off into woods, an entirely new world, very soft underfoot with a thick cushion of dried brown pine needles, and dry twigs cracking in the stillness, a brownish world with the sun breaking up high above us in the high-topped evergreens so that only speckles of it or small patches managed to reach the forest floor. I had never been in woods of such extent before, I mean there were dirt lots in the Bronx with weeds growing like trees all twisted and jungly but there wasn’t enough extension of them to get lost in them, not even the wilder parts of the Bronx Zoo gave me the sense I had now, of being inside something, as in a cavern or a cave, I had not realized that about forests that you would be walking down at the bottom of them.
Drew Preston seemed to know where she was going, she found what she said were old logging trails, so I followed her trustfully, and we passed into small sun meadows that I thought might do for a picnic but still she didn’t stop but kept going in a generally uphill direction, and then I knew we were really in the hills some miles from the town because I heard the sound of water, and we came to the Onondaga River, which here was shallow and not much wider than a brook so that you could walk across it on the rocks imbedded in it, which we did, and I thought then she would want to stop but she kept going away from the river steeply uphill in a dark woods and I was thinking of beginning to complain, the socks in my new sneakers rubbing up blisters and the gnats itching my bare legs, for I was in my new Little Lord Fauntleroy summer shorts of linen and my short-sleeved polo shirt of blue-and-white stripes that she had chosen for me, but we came to a large flat natural park of brown woods, and here the sound of water became louder, and she was some yards ahead of me standing still now finally and silhouetted in a corona of dazzling light, and when I came up to her I saw we were at the edge of a great sunlit gorge of falling water, falling so thick it was white and thunderous breaking on tumblings of boulders all the way down. This was where she chose to have the picnic, seated with our legs hanging over the root-tangled and mossy banks into thin air, as if she had known all along this place was here and exactly where to find it.
We unwrapped our sandwiches from the wax paper, and laid the picnic out behind us on her skirt, which she had spread on the ground, she unscrewed the cap from the bottle of New York State red wine and had the tact or carelessness to assume I would naturally take my turn drinking from the bottle as she did, and so I did, but only after removing my glasses, and we sat in silence eating and drinking and staring into this very amazingly beautiful roaring gorge of washed white boulders streaming with sun. At the very bottom there hovered a perpetually shimmering rainbow as if not water but light was pouring and shattering into its colors. This had to be the most secret of places. I had the feeling that if we just stayed here we would be free, Mr. Schultz would never find us because he couldn’t imagine such a place existed. What new assumption was I making now in this romantic setting? What could I have been about to declare when I turned to her only to realize this was not a shared silence between us? She sat with her shoulders rounded in some clearly deepening meditative privacy and forgot me and forgot to eat and, holding the bottle in both hands between her knees, forgot to give me any more swigs of wine. The advantage to me in this was that I could stare at her without attracting her attention and first I looked at her thighs, you know the way thighs broaden in the sitting position especially when they are not overly muscular, and in this unsparing sun they were soft and very milk-white girl’s thighs with the thinnest bluest veins of such tracing delicacy that it was with some shock I realized she was younger than I had taken her to be, I didn’t know her age but the company she had kept and the fact that she was married had made me think of her as an older woman, it had never occurred to me she might be as precocious in her way as I was in mine, she was a girl, clearly older than I but still a girl, maybe twenty, maybe twenty-one, this Mrs. Preston with the gold band on her finger. You could see that just looking at her skin in the sun. Yet she lived a life so beyond mine in practiced knowledge that I was a child beside her. I don’t mean just her free access as a great beauty to the most advanced realms of power and depravity, she had chosen this life for herself when, perhaps for her same reasons of staring meditation, she might have chosen life in a convent, say, or to be an actress on the stage. I mean rather how she knew this place would be here. How familiar woods were to her. She knew about horses. I remembered her invert husband, Harvey, had mumbled something about a regatta. So she probably knew about sailing and oceans too, and beaches to swim from with no crowds on them and skiing in the European mountains of the Alps and in fact all the pleasures of the planet, all the free rides of the planet that you could have if you knew where they were and had the training to take them. This was what wealth was, the practiced knowledge of these things so you could appropriate them for yourself. So looking at her now I had revelation of the great expanse of my ambitions, I felt the first acute pain of this same knowledge, which was an appreciative inkling of how much I had so far missed and my mother had missed and would forever miss and how much the little dark-eyed Becky was doomed to miss if I didn’t love her and take her with me through all the chain-link fences I had to get through.
I now found myself painfully conscious of Drew Preston, I was impatient of the solitude she made for herself, it seemed to me a slight. I found myself waiting upon her, waiting for her attention, which I wanted very badly but would not abase myself to demand. I was at this point up to her profile. The heat of the hike had matted her hair off her forehead and I saw the whole line of it, a bone-white curve smooth as sculpture. The sun’s rays coming up off the boulders allowed me to see through the transparency of her eye to the green oval iris with its golden lights which blurred into radiance, and the whole orb seemed to magnify and I realized she was crying. She cried silently, staring through her tears, and she licked the tears at the corner of her mouth. I turned away as you do in intimate and uninvited witness of a terrible emotion. And only then did I hear her sniff and drink it in, like a normal sniveling human being, and she asked me in a choked voice to tell her how Bo Weinberg died.
I didn’t want to talk about it any more than I do now but I did and so I will, this was the time I told it so now I have to tell it again.
“He sang ‘Bye Bye Blackbird.’”
She stared at me with the water roaring and the rainbow shimmering below us. She didn’t seem to understand.
“‘Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singing low, bye bye blackbird,’” I said. “It’s a famous song.” And then, as if I thought I couldn’t make it more clear, I sang to her:
“‘Make my bed and light the light,
I’ll arrive
Late tonight
Blackbird, bye bye.’”