“Pop O’Rourke knows what I’m doing.”
“Patsy said Pop didn’t know.”
“I’ll call Pop in the morning. I’ll straighten it out. How come you talked to Patsy?”
“It was about another thing.”
“Something about your name in the paper?”
“Something about that, yeah.”
“Oh, it’s a secret. You got secrets with Patsy McCall. Excuse me, let me out. Your company is too rich for my blood.”
“Look, George, don’t strain your juice. I don’t keep secrets I don’t have to keep. You know what’s going on with Charlie McCall, and you ought to know by this time I’m on your side. For chrissake, don’t you know that?”
“Mmmmmm,” said George.
“You don’t want to know what I know, George. Believe me.”
“All right, Billy, but you got a nasty tongue.”
“Yeah. Have a drink. I buy.”
“No, I just had tea.”
“Have a drink, for chrissake. Do you good.”
“I don’t want a drink. I’ll take the nickel. What did Patsy say about me? Was he mad?”
“He didn’t sound happy. He mentioned you by name.”
“I don’t want to get in any jackpots with Patsy. I’ll call Pop first thing in the morning. I never had a cross word with the McCalls all my life. I give fifteen dollars to John Kelleher for Patsy’s first campaign as assessor and Kelleher only asked me for five.”
“You’ll fix it. Probably you just got to pay more dues.”
“I’m not making anything yet. I’m losing money.”
“It’s goin’ around, that problem.”
“But I can’t afford more.”
“You can’t afford to stay in business?”
“Pop understands I’m not in the chips yet.”
“How does he understand that? You expect him to check your books?”
“No, I don’t expect nothing like that.”
“Then how the hell does he know your action? All he knows is you’re moving into heavier stuff. And you got to pay heavier dues for that. George, you been in this racket fifteen years, and you been in this town all your life. You know how it works.”
“I’ll pay if Patsy said I got to pay. But Patsy understands a guy being down on his luck.”
“Don’t cry the blues to them. Don’t beg for anything. If they say pay, just pay and shut up about it.”
“I don’t beg from anybody.”
“Tell ’em your story straight and don’t weep no tears. I’m telling you be tough, George.”
“I know what I’m doing. I know how it works.”
“All right. You want that drink?”
“I’ll take a rain check.”
George went out onto Broadway, and Billy went to the bar for a tall beer, thinking how George couldn’t get off the dime. A banty rooster and don’t underrate him when he fights. But he don’t fight easy enough. Been around tough guys and politicians all his life and he don’t know how to blow his nose right. But Billy has to admit George ain’t doing bad for a fifty-year-old geezer. Got the house and Peg and a great kid in Danny. Billy’s fifty, he’ll be what? Alone? Racking balls like Daddy Big? On the chalk like Lemon Lewis? Nineteen years to find out.
“Your lady friend Angie called again, Billy,” Red Tom said, as he slid Billy a new, tall, free one. “She says it’s urgent.”
“I know her urgent.”
“And she says it’s not what you think. Important, she says.”
“Important.”
“She sounded like she meant it.”
“I’ll check her out, Tommy. Have one on me.”
“Save your money, Billy. Winter’s coming.”
“Billy knows where the heat is.”
“Up in Angie’s room?”
“Some there, yeah. Definitely some up there.”
Ten
I’ll screw you as long as my equipment lasts, Billy once told Angie, but I won’t marry you. She repeated the line for Billy after he rolled off her. He sat up, lit a cigarette, and then fixed a scotch with tap water. He put on his white boxer shorts, hiding the ragged scar on the left cheek of his behind. He got that when he was ten, sliding into a second base made from a flattened tin oil can. Almost made him half-assed. But Doc Lennon sewed it up after he poured two bottles of iodine into the slice, which still gives Billy the screaming meemies when he thinks about it. Then Billy’s mother bathed the wound and fussed at it for weeks, and the teamwork let Billy grow up with a complete tail.
“Why you bringing that up now?” Billy asked. “You thinking about marriage again?”
“I’m always thinking about marriage, with you.”
“Drop it, Ange. I’ll never be any good in that husband racket.”
“And you couldn’t, wouldn’t marry a divorcee.”
“The hell with that stuff.”
“I’m only teasing, Billy I love to tease you.”
Angie stood up and slipped back into her nightgown, sheer white silk with white lace trim where her cleavage would’ve been if she had any. She was a long, lean, dark-haired Latinesque girl of twenty-five who looked thirty when she talked because she was smart but who grew wispy with a turn of emotion and fled into the look of adolescence. She read sad poetry and went to sad movies in order to cry, for crying at trouble, she told Billy, was almost as good as weeping with love. There was so little love in the world, she said, that people needed substitutes. It’s why lonely old people keep pets, she said. Billy was Angie’s pet. I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t sometime want to do away with themselves because of love, she once said to Billy, for chrissake. Billy, she said, stroking him, tickling the back of his neck, if you ever died I’d make sure they put flowers on your grave forever, just like they do for Valentino. This, of course, is just what Billy needs.
But Angie was part of his life now, and had been since her husband slapped her around in the Clubhouse at Saratoga. Billy was watching from the bar when they started their screaming over the car keys. Give ’em to me, you bitch, he said. I haven’t got ’em, Angie said. You got ’em, he said. You just wanna hang around here makin’ moon eyes at all the studs. Billy was her only stud then, and when her husband was around, she never even gave Billy a nod. So she walked away from the son of a bitch when he said that, and he spun her around by the arm and slapped her twice. Billy wanted to hit him till his teeth fell out, but all he could do was watch. Angie took the whipping and didn’t say a word, which beat the bastard. He slammed out of the Clubhouse and left their car in the lot and walked back to the hotel. And found the car keys in his own coat pocket when he was halfway there. Billy bought Angie a drink and smooched her on the cheek where she’d been hit and put her in a taxi and bet twenty on a horse named Smacker in the last race and it showed eight dollars.
Angie came to Albany every other month after that, for a weekend at least and sometimes a week. She’d call Billy and he’d see her and once in a while she’d give him money, which made him feel like a gigolo, but of course that wasn’t what Billy was. He only took it when he needed it. Angie called Billy her little wheel of excitement. When I was a kid I used to sit on the stoop and wait for it to roll down the street to me, she said. But it never showed up till I met you.
Why’d ya marry that bum? Billy asked her once, and she said, Because he was like my father and I loved my father, but you’re right, he is a bum, he’s not like my father at all. He’s a bum, he’s a bum, and he’s got his women, too. He came home one night with the smell of oral sex on his face. Angie never called him on it. She just packed a bag and came to Albany. But he was good in bed, Angie said, he was very good. Angie never told Billy he was very good in bed, but then he didn’t hear any complaints out of her either. What got Billy about Angie was the way she was alone so much. Billy was almost never alone. I can stand being alone, Angie told him. Being with him is like being alone. It won’t kill you.