Very Old Bones, Page 4

  “Billy’d be single even after he got married, if he ever got married, which I don’t think.”

  “He loves you, though,” I said. “Anybody can see that.”

  “Sure. But what’s he done for me lately?”

  “Maybe you ought to go out together more often, be alone. I know you’re in a lot with the family, taking care of Annie.”

  “We go to the movies once a week, and dinner after. But you’re right. We should. I also got another obligation, a patient. An old man I sit with one night a week. And another night I take piano.”

  “How long you been taking?”

  “Twenty-four years.”

  “You must be good.”

  “I’m terrible. Maybe I’ll be good some day, but I don’t practice enough.”

  “It’s hard without a piano.”

  “Yeah. But I get a thrill playing the teacher’s. I always do a half-hour alone, before and after the lesson. And once or twice a week I play in the church basement in the afternoons. It fills me up, excites me. You know how it is when you feel young and you know you still got a lot to learn, and it’s gonna be good?”

  “You’re a graceful person, Agnes.”

  “Yeah, well, George shouldn’t be afraid of lettin’ people do him a favor. That down payment’s not a whole lot of money, really. But I heard him tell Peg, ‘They don’t give loans to people like me.’ “

  “What’s he mean, ‘people like me’?”

  “He doesn’t know about credit,” Agnes said. “He’s got no credit anyplace. He paid cash all his life, even for cars. Doesn’t wanna owe anybody a nickel. He thinks credit’s bad news.”

  “So’s not having a place to live.”

  “He said he’d live in a ditch before he bought a house.”

  “He’s batty .”

  “Could be: Wouldn’t be a first in this family.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t mean that personally,” she said.

  Billy expected to have his cast removed but that didn’t happen. After Doc McDonald read the X-rays he decided the cast should stay in place another three weeks at least, and so Billy had to carry his right shoe around in a paper bag the rest of the day. We were in my car, Danny Quinn’s old 1952 Chev that I’d bought from Peg. Billy mentioned an eye-opener at Sport Schindler’s, but it was only ten-fifteen, and that’s a little early for my eye.

  “You been to the filtration plant since they started that dig?” I asked Billy.

  “I ain’t been there in years. My grandfather used to run that joint.”

  “I know, and Tommy was the sweeper. You see in the paper about the bones they found?”

  “Yeah, you think they’re still there?”

  “It’s worth a look.”

  The old plant, which had changed the health of Albany in 1899, was being torn down. The chronic “Albany sore throat” of the nineteenth century had been attributed to inadequate filtering of Hudson River water. But after the North Albany plant opened, the sore throats faded. Still, river water was a periodic liability until the late 1920s, when the politicians dammed up two creeks in the Helderberg Mountains and solved all city water troubles forever. The filtration plant relaxed into a standby item, then a useless relic. Now it stood in the way of a superhighway’s course and so it was time to knock it down.

  Construction workers had found bones in their dig, near the mouth of the Staatskill, the creek that ran eastward from Albany’s western plateau and had long ago been buried in a pipe under North Pearl Street and Broadway. When the dig reached the glacial ledge where the creek made its last leap into the Hudson River, half a dozen huge bones were found. Workers didn’t inform the public until they also found two tusks, after which a geologist and biologist were summoned. No conclusions had been reported in the morning paper but everybody in town was saying elephants.

  I drove down the hill from the doctor’s office and into North Albany. When I reached Pearl Street Billy said, “Go down Main Street. I want to see what it looks like.”

  Billy’s grandfather Joe Farrell (they called him Iron Joe because two men broke their knuckles on his jaw) had lived at the bottom of Main Street, and also had run a saloon, The Wheelbarrow, next to his home. The house was gone but the saloon building still stood, a sign on it noting the headquarters of a truckers’ union. Trucking companies had replaced the lumber yards as the commerce along Erie Boulevard, the filled-in bed of the old canal.

  “I wouldn’t know the place,” Billy said. “I never get down here anymore.” He’d been born and raised on Main Street.

  “Lot of memories here for you,” I said.

  “I knew how many trees grew in those lots over there. I knew how many steps it took to get from Broadway to the bottom of the hill. The lock house on the canal was right there.” And he pointed toward open space. “Iron Joe carried me on his shoulder over the bridge to the other side of the lock.”

  Implicit but unspoken in Billy’s memory was that this was the street his father fled after dropping his infant son and causing his death. I was close to Billy, but I’d never heard him mention that. He and I are first cousins, sons of most peculiar brothers, I the unacknowledged bastard of Peter Phelan, Billy the abandoned son of Francis Phelan, both fathers flawed to the soul, both in their errant ways worth as much as most martyrs.

  Billy was still looking at where his house had been when I turned onto the road that led to the filtration plant. It was busy with heavy equipment for the dig; also a police car was parked crossways in the road. A policeman got out of the car and raised his hand to stop us. Billy knew him, Doggie Murphy.

  “Hey, Dog,” Billy said. “We came to see the elephants.”

  “Can’t go through, Billy.”

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  “They found bones.”

  “I know they found bones. I read the paper.”

  “No, other bones. Human bones.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “So nobody comes or goes till the coroner gets here.”

  “Whose bones are they?”

  “Somebody who don’t need ’em anymore,” Doggie said.

  And so I swung the car around and headed for Sport Schindler’s, where I would have my eye opened whether it needed it or not. Sport was pushing sixty, a retired boxer who had run this saloon for thirty-five years, keeping a continuity that dated to the last century. The place had a pressed-tin ceiling, a long mahogany bar with brass rail, shuffleboard, dart board, and years of venerable grime on the walls. Apart from the grime it was also unusually clean for a saloon, and a haven for the aging population of Broadway. A poster at one end of the bar showed two sixtyish, wrinkled, white-haired naked women, both seated with hands covering their laps, both wearing glasses, both with an enduring shapeliness and a splendid lack of sag. Centered over the back bar was the mounted head of a cow, shot in Lamb’s lot by Winker Wilson, who thought it was a rabbit.

  Billy had lived for years in the night world of Broadway, where Schindler’s was a historic monument. But times were changing now with the press of urban renewal by squares and straights who had no use at all for Billy’s vanishing turf. Also, the open horserooms of Albany had moved underground when the racing-information phone line was shut off by pressure from the Governor, and the only action available now was by personal phone call or handbook. Bookies, to avoid being past-posted, paid off only on the race results in tomorrow’s newspaper. What the hell kind of a town is it when a man can’t walk in off the street and bet a horse?

  Sport Schindler’s looked like an orthopedic ward when we settled in. Billy sat at the end of the bar, his right foot in his plaster cast partially covered by white sock and trouser cuff, his hickory cane dangling from the edge of the bar. Up the bar was a man whose complete right leg was in a cast elevated on another stool, a pair of crutches leaning against the bar beside him.

  Billy earned his cast riding in a car whose windshield somebody hit with a rock, scaring hell out of the driver, who drove into a tree. Billy broke his ankle p
utting on the brakes in the back seat. “You ain’t safe noplace in this world,” Billy concluded.

  The man with the crutches was Morty Pappas, a Greek bookie who had been a casualty of the state-police crackdown on horserooms. Instead of booking on the sneak, Morty took his bankroll and flew to Reno with a stripper named Lulu, a dangerous decision, for Lulu was the most favored body of Buffalo Johnny Rizzo, the man who ran the only nightclub strip show in town. Morty came back to Albany six months after he left, flush with money from a streak of luck at the gaming tables, but minus Lulu and her body. Rizzo welcomed Morty back by shooting him in the leg, a bum shot, since he was aiming at Morty’s crotch. Rizzo went to jail without bail, the shooting being his third felony charge in four years. But it had come out in the morning paper that by court order he was permitted bail; and so Buffalo Johnny was back in circulation.

  Billy was offering Morty even money that the bones found up at the filtration plant were not elephant bones, Billy’s argument based in his expressed belief that they never let elephants hang around Albany.

  “Whataya mean they never let ’em hang around,” Morty said. “Who’s gonna tell an elephant he can’t hang around?”

  “You want the bet or don’t you?” Billy asked.

  “They found tusks with the bones.”

  “That don’t mean nothin’,” Billy said.

  “Who else got tusks outside of elephants?”

  “Joey Doyle and his sister.”

  “You’re so sure gimme two to one,” said Morty.

  “Six to five is all I go.”

  “You’re right and the newspaper’s wrong, is that it?”

  “What I’m sayin’ is six to five.”

  “You got a bet,” said Morty, and Billy looked at me and winked.

  I couldn’t figure out why Billy was so hot to bet against elephants, but neither could I bet against Billy, for I was his kinsman in more ways than one. Someone once remarked that Billy had lived a wastrel’s useless life, which struck me as a point of view benightedly shrouded in uplift. I always found this world of Broadway to be the playground of that part of the soul that is impervious to any form of improvement not associated with chance, and relentlessly hostile to any conventional goad toward success and heaven. I remember years ago standing with Billy and Sport Schindler as a Fourth of July parade went past Sport’s place on Broadway. A stranger beside us, seeing a Boy Scout troop stepping along, remarked, “What a fine bunch of boys.” Sport took his cigar out of his mouth to offer his counterpoint: “Another generation of stool pigeons,” he said.

  That was years ago, and now here I was again with Sport and Billy and their friends, and those Scouts had grown up to become the lawyers, bankers, and politicians who had forced Sport to sell his saloon so they could level the block and transform it into somebody else’s money. The Monte Carlo gaming rooms were gone, another victim of the crackdown: end of the wheel-and-birdcage era on Broadway; Louie’s pool room was empty, only Louie’s name left on the grimy windows; Red the barber had moved uptown and so you couldn’t even get shaved on the street anymore; couldn’t buy a deck of cards either, Bill’s Magic Shop having given way to a ladies’ hat store. A ladies’ hat store. Can you believe it, Billy?

  Also Becker’s Tavern had changed hands in the early fifties, and after that nobody paid any attention to the photographic mural behind the bar, mural of two hundred and two shirt-sleeved men at a 1932 clambake. Nobody worried anymore about pasting stars on the chests of those men after they died, the way old man Becker used to. One by one the stars had gone up on those chests through the years; then sometimes a star would fall and be carried off by the sweeper. Stars fell and fell, but they didn’t rise anymore, and so now the dead and the quick were a collage of uncertain fates. Hey, no star on his chest, but ain’t he dead? Who knows? Who gives a goddamn? Put a star on him, why not? Put a star on Becker’s.

  One by one we move along and the club as we know it slowly dissolves, not to be reconstituted. “Broadway never sleeps,” Sport always said, but now it did. It slept in the memories of people like him and Billy, men who wandered around the old turf as if it wasn’t really old, as if a brand-new crap table might descend from the sky at any minute—and then, to the music of lightning bolt and thunder clap, the dice would roll again.

  But no. No lightning. No thunder. No dice. Just the memory of time gone, and the vision of the vanishing space where the winners and losers, the grifters and suckers, had so vividly filled the air with yesterday’s action.

  “They want me to get married,” Billy said to me.

  “Who does?”

  “Peg. The priest. Agnes.”

  “What’s the priest say?”

  “He says we’re givin’ scandal with Agnes livin’ in. She’s been with us a year maybe.”

  “Then you’re already married, basically.”

  “Nah. She’s got her own room. She’s a roomer.”

  “Ah, I get it,” I said.

  “ ‘Doesn’t look moral,’ the priest says.”

  “Well he’s half right, if you worry about that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t worry. They worry.”

  “What’s Peg say?”

  “Peg says she doesn’t give a damn whether I marry the girl or not. But yeah, she wants it too. It’d get the priest off her back.”

  “So get married, then,” I said. “You like the girl?”

  “She’s great, but how the hell can I get married? I’m fifty-one years old and I don’t have a nickel and don’t know where to get one. I scrounge a little, deal now and then, but I haven’t had steady work since Morty closed the horseroom. And the chiselin’ bastard owes me back wages and two horse bets.”

  “How much?”

  “About a grand. Little less, maybe.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “He said he went dry, couldn’t pay off, said he’d pay me later. But then he went off with Lulu and now he’s runnin’ a floatin’ card game and he don’t listen. I oughta cut his heart out, but it’s even money he don’t have one.”

  Billy stopped talking, stopped looking me in the eye. Then, with his voice in a low register and on the verge of a tremolo, he said, “You know, Orson, I never could hold a job. I never knew how to do nothin’. I couldn’t even stay in the army. I got eye trouble and they sent me home after eight months. The horseroom was the longest steady job I ever had.”

  “Something’ll turn up,” I said.

  “Yeah? Where? I could always get a buck around Broadway but now there ain’t no Broadway.”

  Yeah.

  Put a star on Billy’s Broadway.

  I drank the beer Billy bought me, drank it in silent communion with his unexpected confession. Billy—who had been inhaling money for years in bowling alleys, pool rooms, and card games—was he unemployable? Was he really a man who “never knew how to do nothin’ ”? It’s true Billy found straight jobs laughable, that he left as many as he was fired from, once even calling the foreman of a machine-shop paint gang a moron for presiding over such labor. Liberated by such words, Billy invariably wended his way back to the cocoon of Broadway, within whose bounds existed the only truly usable form of life; or so Billy liked to believe.

  I was making a decision about telling him my own tribulations when the door opened and Buffalo Johnny Rizzo walked in, a fashion plate in blue seersucker suit and white Panama hat with a band that matched his suit. He stood in the doorway, hands in his coat pockets, looked us all over, opened his coat and took a pistol from his belt, then fired two shots at his most favored target: Morty Pappas’s crotch, which was forked east toward Broadway, from whence Johnny was just arriving.

  Billy saw it all happening and so did I, but Billy acted, lifting his cane from its dangle on bar’s edge into a vivid upthrust and sending Johnny’s pistol flying, but not before Johnny got off two shots. Morty fell from his bar stool with a crumpling plaster thud, his crotch intact but one bullet hitting his good leg, and the other lodging in the ne
ck of the stuffed cow over the back bar, victim yet again of inept shooters.

  Sport quickly retrieved the flown pistol and Johnny just as quickly moved toward the aging Sport to get it back and try again for Morty’s gender. Billy and I both stepped between the two men, and Sport, still a formidable figure with the arms and fists of the light heavyweight he had once been, said only, “Better get outa here, John.”

  Buffalo Johnny, his failed plan sinking him into the throes of social wisdom, looked then at the fallen and bleeding Morty; and he smiled.

  “Boom-boom, fucker,” he said. “Boom-boom. Boom-boom.”

  And then he went out onto Broadway.

  Except for Billy and me, the customers at Sport’s saloon exited with sudden purpose after Buffalo Johnny left the premises. Sport drew new beers for us as we gave aid and comfort to Morty Pappas in his hour of pain Sport then called an ambulance and together Billy and I organized Morty on the floor, propping him with an overcoat someone had left on a hook during the winter. Sport made a pressure pack on the wound with a clean bar towel.

  “So, ya bastard, ya saved my life,” Morty said to Billy between grimaces of agony.

  “Yeah,” said Billy. “I figure you’re dead you’ll never pay me what you owe me.”

  “You oughta pay him,” Sport said, putting a new beer in Morty’s grip.

  “I’ll pay him all right,” and Morty put down the beer and reached for his wallet, a hurtful move. “What do I owe you?”

  “You know what you owe me,” Billy said.

  “Six hundred,” Morty said.

  “That’s wages. Plus the bets, three eighty, that’s nine eighty.”

  Morty fumbled with his wallet, took out his cash. “Here. It’s all I got with me,” he said. He yelped with new pain when he moved. Billy took the money, counted it.

  “Count it,” said Morty.

  “I’m countin’.”

  “Four hundred, am I right?”

  “Three sixty, three eighty, four.”

  “That wacky bastard Rizzo,” Morty said. “They’ll lock him up now. Put him in a fucking dungeon.”

  “If they find him,” said Sport.

  “He’s too stupid to hide out,” Morty said. “Stupidest man I ever know. He ain’t got the brains God gave a banana.”