“You got your tail whipped tonight.”
“Doc was hot,” Billy said. “A good player got hot.”
“Bet your ass he’s a good player. Bet your ass. He’ll whip you every time out.”
“Then why didn’t he whip me the last two matches we played?”
“He’ll whip you from now on. He’s got your number. All you know how to shoot is safe and you blew that tonight. You ain’t got nothin’ left, if you ever had anything.” Daddy waved his left hand in front of his face like a man shooing flies. He lurched for the door with one word: “Bum,” and went out cross-footed, leaving the door ajar. Martin closed it as Daddy Big careened in the direction of Union Station.
“He’s got a mean mouth,” Martin said.
“Yeah,” said Billy. “He’s a prick now. Prison got him twisted. But he used to be a nice guy, and at pool he was a champ. Nobody in Albany could beat him. I learned a whole lot watching him sucker chumps who thought they knew something about the game.”
The white man from the end of the bar stopped beside Billy. “That guy talks like the wants to wind up dead in the alley. He keeps that up in here, he’ll get what he’s after.”
“He’s a cousin of the McCalls,” Billy told the man. “Nobody’ll touch him.”
“Is that so?” The man was chastened. “I didn’t know that.”
“That pimp,” Billy said to Martin when the stranger left, “I don’t know why he didn’t stay down. I hit him right on the burton. They used to stay down when I hit ’em like that.”
“Do you suppose he’ll try to get even?”
“He’d get worse. You don’t come back at Morrie.”
“Then you think Morrie’s dangerous?”
“Anybody pals around with Maloy and Curry’s dangerous.” Billy thought about that. “But I like Morrie,” he said. “And I like Maloy. Curry’s nuts, but Morrie’s all right. He saved my ass there.”
Slopie finished his ragtime number, a tour de force that won applause. Billy signaled to Martha to buy Slopie a drink.
“Can I tell you something, Martin?”
“Anything.”
“Positively on the q.t.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yeah, I do. For a straight guy, you know a lot. Why’d you piss on that guy’s feet?”
“He seemed worth that kind of attention. I don’t meet too many like that. What did you want to tell me?”
“I threw that match tonight.”
“Hey,” said Martin. “What for?”
“So I wouldn’t owe Berman.”
“I don’t think I follow that.”
“He lent me fifty to bet on myself. If I win, then I got money through him, right? But if I lose, I owe him nothing. I already give him back the fifty and we were even. Then the son of a bitch saves my ass.”
“So you were going to talk to Patsy about him then?”
“I don’t know.”
“I could tell them what you want to say. I don’t have your qualms.”
“They’d know I pumped him and then didn’t tell them.”
“Then tell them.”
“But that puts me full on the tit. Bindy and Patsy paying my debts. Paying you. Me on the tit like Daddy Big. That bastard calls me a bum, but he’d chew catshit if Bindy said it was strawberries.”
The stranger who said Daddy Big wanted to die came back into Martha’s. “Somebody better call an ambulance,” he said. “That drunk guy is outside bleedin’ all over the street.”
Martha went for the phone, and Billy and Martin ran down the block. Daddy Big lay on his back, his face bloodied badly, staring at the black sky with bugged eyes and puffed cheeks, his skin purple where it wasn’t smeared with blood. Two of his front teeth were bent inward and the faint squeal of a terrified mouse came out of his mouth. Billy rolled him face down and with two fingers pulled out his upper plate, then grabbed him around the waist with both arms and lifted him, head down, to release the vomit in his throat. Billy sat down on the sidewalk, knees up, and held Daddy across his lap, face down, tail in the air. Billy slapped his back and pressed both knees into his stomach until his vomiting stopped. Daddy looked up.
“You son of a bitch,” Billy said. “Are you all right?”
“Blllgggggggghhh,” Daddy said, gasping.
“Then get your ass up.”
Billy rolled him off his lap, stood up and pulled the drunken Daddy to his feet. Customers from Martha’s stood behind the two men, along with half a dozen passersby Billy leaned Daddy against the wall of the Railroad YMCA and Martha blotted his face with a wet towel, revealing a split forehead and a badly scraped nose, cheek, and chin. A prowl car arrived and two patrolmen helped Daddy into the back seat.
“Where’ll you take him?” Martin asked.
“Home. He does this regular,” one policeman said.
“You should have him looked at up at the emergency room. He might have aspirated. Inhaled some vomit.”
“Nngggggnnnhhh,” said Daddy Big.
The policeman frowned at Martin and got behind the wheel.
“He don’t have any teeth,” Billy said. Billy found the teeth on the edge of the curb, where a dog was licking the vomit. Billy reached in through the car window and put the teeth in Daddy Big’s shirt pocket. As the crowd moved back toward Martha’s, Martin saw another car pull up behind the police car, Poop Powell at the wheel.
“Hey, Phelan,” Poop called, and both Billy and Martin then saw Bindy McCall in the front seat alongside Poop. Martin parted Billy gently on the shoulder.
“You do lead a full life, Billy,” he said.
Martin sat in Martha’s window looking at Billy standing in the middle of Broadway, his back to traffic, talking into Bindy’s window. The neon sign, which spelled Martha’s name backward, gave off a humming, crackling sound, flaming gas contained, controlled. Martin drank his beer and considered the combustibility of men. Billy on fire going through the emotions of whoring for Bindy when he understood nothing about how it was done. It was not done out of need. It rose out of the talent for assuming the position before whoremongers. Billy lacked such talent. He was so innocent of whoring he could worry over lead slugs.
Slopie played “Lullaby of Broadway,” a seductive tune. Slopie was now playing in a world never meant to be, a world he couldn’t have imagined when he had both his legs and Bessie on his arm. Yet, he’d arrived here in Martha’s, where Billy and Martin had also arrived. The music brought back Gold Diggers of some year gone. Winnie Shaw singing and dancing the “Lullaby.” Come and dance, said the hoofers, cajoling her, and she danced with them through all those early mornings. Broadway Baby couldn’t sleep till break of dawn, and so she danced, but fled them finally. Please let me rest, she pleaded from her balcony refuge. Dick Powell kissed her through the balcony door, all the hoofers pleading, beckoning. Dance with us, Baby. And they pushed open the door. She backed away from them, back, back, and ooooh, over the railing she went. There goes Broadway Baby, falling, poor Baby, falling, falling, and gone. Good night, Baby.
Spud, the paper boy, came into Martha’s with a stack of Times-Unions under his right arm, glasses sliding down his nose, cap on, his car running outside behind Bindy’s, with doors open, hundreds more papers on the back seat.
“Paper,” Martin said. He gave Spud the nickel and turned to the classifieds, found the second code ad. Footers O’Brien was the top name, then Benny Goldberg, who wrote a big numbers book in Albany and whose brother was shot in his Schenectady roadhouse for having five jacks in a house deck. Martin lost patience translating the names in the dim light and turned to the front page. No story on Charlie Boy, but the Vatican was probing a new sale of indulgences in the U.S. And across the top a promotion headline screamed: “Coming Sunday in the Times-Union: How and Why We Piss.”