Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

“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.”

  TWO

  It was juggling that had got me where I was. All the time we hung around the warehouse on Park Avenue, and I don’t mean the Park Avenue of wealth and legend, but the Bronx’s Park Avenue, a weird characterless street of garages and one-story machine shops and stonecutter yards and the occasional frame house covered in asphalt siding that was supposed to look like brick, a boulevard of uneven Belgian block with a wide trench dividing the uptown and downtown sides, at the bottom of which the trains of the New York Central tore past thirty feet below street level, making a screeching racket we were so used to, and sometimes a wind that shook the bent and bowed iron-spear fence along the edge, that we stopped our conversation and continued it from mid-sentence when the noise lifted—all the time that we hung out there for a glimpse of the beer trucks, the other guys pitched pennies against the wall, or played skelly on the sidewalk with bottle caps, or smoked the cigarettes they bought three for a cent at the candy store on Washington Avenue, or generally wasted their time speculating what they would do if Mr. Schultz ever noticed them, how they would prove themselves as gang members, how they would catch on and toss the crisp one-hundred-dollar bills on the kitchen tables of their mothers who had yelled at them and the fathers who had beat their ass—all this time I practiced my juggling. I juggled anything, Spaldeens, stones, oranges, empty green Coca-Cola bottles, I juggled rolls we stole hot from the bins in the Pechter Bakery wagons, and since I juggled so constantly nobody bothered me about it, except once in a while just because it was something nobody else could do, to try to interrupt my rhythm by giving me a shove, or to grab one of the oranges out of the air and run with it, because it was what I was known to do, along the lines of having a nervous tic, something that marked me but after all wasn’t my fault. And when I wasn’t juggling I was doing sleight of hand, trying to make coins disappear and reappear in their dirty ears, or doing card tricks of trick shuffles and folded aces, so their name for me was Mandrake, after the Hearst New York American comics magician, a mustached fellow in a tuxedo and top hat who was of no interest to me any more than magic was, magic was not the point, it was never the point, dexterity was to me the point, the same exercise as walking like a tightrope walker on the spear fence points while the trains made their windy rush under me, or doing backflips or handstands or cartwheels or whatever else arose to my mind of nimble compulsion. I was double-jointed, I could run like the wind, I had keen vision and could hear silence and could smell the truant officer before he even came around the corner, and what they should have called me was Phantom, after that other Hearst New York American comics hero, who wore a one-piece helmet mask and purple skintight rubberized body garment a
nd had only a wolf for a companion, but they were dumb kids for the most part and didn’t even think of calling me Phantom even after I had disappeared into the Realm, the only one of all of them who had dreamed about it.

  The Park Avenue warehouse was one of several maintained by the Schultz gang for the storage of the green beer they trucked over from Union City New Jersey and points west. When a truck arrived it didn’t even have to blow its horn the warehouse doors would fold open and receive it as if they had an intelligence of their own. The trucks were from the Great War, and still the original army khaki color, with beveled hoods and double rear wheels and chain-wheel drives that sounded like bones being ground up; the beds had stakes around the sides to which homemade slats were affixed, and tarpaulin was lashed down with peculiar and even gallant discretion over the cargo as if nobody would know then what it was. But when a truck came around the corner the whole street reeked of beer, they carried their gamy smell like the elephants in the Bronx Zoo. And the men who got down from the cab were not ordinary truck drivers in soft caps and mackinaws but men in overcoats and fedoras with a way of lighting their cigarettes in their cupped hands while the teamsters on inside duty backed the trucks into the black depths we were desperate to see into, that made me think of officers returned from a patrol across no-man’s-land. It was the sense of all this purveyed lawless might and military self-sufficiency that was so thrilling to boys, we hung around there like a flock of filthy messenger pigeons, cooing and clucking and fluttering up from the ground the minute we heard the chains grinding and saw the sneering Mack hood nosing around the corner.

  Of course this was just one of Mr. Schultz’s beer drops, and we didn’t know how many he had though we knew it was a fair number, and the truth was none of us had ever seen him though we never stopped hoping, and in the meantime we were honored to know that our neighborhood was good enough for one of his places, we were proud we enjoyed his confidence, and in our rare sentimental moments when we weren’t sassing each other for our pretensions, we thought that we were part of something noble and surely had a superior standing among other kids from ordinary neighborhoods that could not boast a beer drop or the rich culture it brought with it of menacingly glancing men who needed shaves and a precinct house of cops whose honor it was never if they could help it to breathe the air out-of-doors.

  Of particular interest to me was that Mr. Schultz maintained this business in all its prohibitional trappings even though Repeal had come. I thought that this meant beer like gold was by nature dangerous to handle however legal it might have become, or that people would buy better beer than his if he didn’t continue to frighten them, which meant, breathtakingly, that in Mr. Schultz’s mind his enterprise was an independent kingdom of his own law, not society’s, and that it was all the same to him whatever was legal or illegal, he would run things the way he thought they ought to be run, and fuck woe to anybody who got in his way.

  So there you see the heart and soul of what we were, in that moment in the history of the Bronx, and you would never know from these dirty skinny boys of encrusted noses and green teeth that there were such things as school and books and a whole civilization of attendant adults paling into insubstance under the bright light of the Depression. Least of all from me. And then one day, I remember it was particularly steamy, so hot in July that the weeds along the spear fence pointed to the ground and visible heat waves rose from the cobblestone, all the boys were sitting in an indolent row along the warehouse wall and I stood across the narrow street in the weeds and rocks overlooking the tracks and demonstrated my latest accomplishment, the juggling of a set of objects of unequal weight, a Galilean maneuver involving two rubber balls, a navel orange, an egg, and a black stone, wherein the art of the thing is in creating a flow nevertheless, maintaining the apogee from a kind of rhythm of compensating throws, and it is a trick of such consummate discipline that the better it is done the easier and less remarkable it looks to the uninitiated. So I knew that I was not only the juggler but the only one to appreciate what the juggler was doing, and after a while I forgot those boys and stood looking into the hot gray sky while assorted objects rose and fell through my line of vision like a system of orbiting planets. I was juggling my own self as well in a kind of matching spiritual feat, performer and performed for, and so, entranced, had no mind for the rest of the world as for instance the LaSalle coupé that came around the corner of 177th Street and Park Avenue and immediately pulled up to the curb in front of a hydrant and sat there with its motor running, nor of the Buick Roadmaster with three men that came next around the corner and drove past the warehouse doors and pulled up at the corner of 178th Street nor finally of the big Packard that came around the corner and rolled to a stop directly in front of the warehouse to block from my view, if I had been looking, all the boys slowly standing now and brushing the backs of their pants, while a man got out from the front right-hand door and then opened, from the outside, the right rear door, through which emerged in a white linen double-breasted suit somewhat wilted, with the jacket misbuttoned, and a tie pulled down from his shirt collar and a big handkerchief in his hand mopping his face, once a boy known to the neighborhood as Arthur Flegenheimer, the man known to the world as Dutch Schultz.

  Of course I am lying that I did not see it happening because I saw it all, being gifted with extraordinary peripheral vision, but I pretended I was not aware he stood there with his elbows on the car roof and watched with a smile on his face a juggling kid with mouth slightly open and eyes rolled skyward like a beatific boy angel in adoration of his Lord. And then I did something brilliant, I glanced out of my orbit across the hot street and let my face register ordinary human astonishment, to the effect of omigod it’s him standing there in the flesh and watching me, and at the same time continued the pistonlike movement of my arms, while one by one my miniature planets, the two balls, the navel orange, the egg, and the stone, after a farewell orbit, plumed out into space, and went soaring in equidistant intervals over the fence to disappear down into the New York Central chute of railroad tracks behind me. And there I stood with my palms up and empty and my gaze transfixed in theatrical awe, which to tell the truth was a good part of what I felt, while the great man laughed and applauded, and glanced at the henchman beside him to encourage his appreciation, which duly came, and then Mr. Schultz beckoned me with his finger, and I ran across the street with alacrity, and around the car, and there, in a private court chamber composed of my gang of boys watching on one quarter, and the open Packard door on another, and the darkness of the warehouse depths on the third, I faced my king and saw his hand remove from his pocket a wad of new bills as thick as a half a loaf of rye bread. He stripped off a ten and slapped it in my hand. And while I stared at calm Alexander Hamilton enshrined in his steel-pointed eighteenth-century oval I heard for the first time the resonant rasp of the Schultz voice, but thinking for one stunned instant it was Mr. Hamilton talking, like a comic come to life, until my senses righted themselves and I realized I was hearing the great gangster of my dreams. “A capable boy,” he said, by way of conclusion, either to his associate or to me, or to himself, or perhaps to all three, and then the meaty killer’s hand came down, like a scepter, and gently held for a moment my cheek and jaw and neck on its hot pads, and then was lifted, and then the back of Dutch Schultz was disappearing into the dark depths of the beer drop and the big doors flattened out with a screech and locked with a loud boom behind him.

  What happened now showed me all at once the consequences of a revolutionary destiny: I was immediately surrounded by the other boys all of them staring, as I was, at the mint ten-dollar bill lying flat in my palm. It dawned upon me that I had half a minute at most before I became a tribal sacrifice. Someone would make a remark, someone else would jab the heel of his hand against my shoulder, and the rage and resentment would flare, and a collective rationale would arise for sharing the treasure and administering a punitive lesson—probably to the effect that I was an asslicking brownnos
e whose head was going to be broken for thinking he was better than anyone else. “Watch this,” I said, holding forth the bill but really extending my arms to hold the circle, because before the attack comes there is a kind of crowding movement, an encroachment on the natural territorial rights of the body; and taking the crisp bill in my fingers I folded it once lengthwise, and once again, and then tightly twice more to the size of a postage stamp and then I did a hocus-pocus pass of the hands over each other, snapped my fingers, and the ten-dollar bill was gone. Oh you miserable fucking louts, that I ever needed to attach my orphan self to your wretched company, you thieves of the five-and-ten, you poking predators of your own little brothers and sisters, you dumbbells, that you could aspire to a genius life of crime, with your dead witless eyes, your slack chins, and the simian slouch of your spines—fuck you forever, I consign you to tenement rooms and bawling infants, and sluggish wives and a slow death of incredible subjugation, I condemn you to petty crimes and mean rewards and vistas of cell block to the end of your days. “Look!” I cried, pointing up, and they tracked my hand, expecting to see me pluck the bill out of the air, as I had so often their coins and steelies and rabbits’ feet, and in the instant of their credulity, as they stared upward at nothing, I ducked under the circle and ran like hell.

  Once I was running no one could catch me, though they tried, I cut down 177th to Washington Avenue, and then turned right and ran south, with some of them right behind me and some chasing me in parallel on the other side of the street, and some of them fanning out down side streets behind me in anticipation of my cutting back toward them, but I ran a straight course, I was really getting out of there, and one by one they pulled up panting, and I made one more change of direction for insurance and finally I was truly alone. I was in the valley of the Third Avenue El. I stopped in the doorway of a pawnshop, unlaced my sneaker, flattened the bill, and slid it down as far as it would go. Then I laced up and resumed running, I ran for the joy of it, flickering like a movie in the alternations of sun and shadow under the elevated tracks, and feeling each warm stripe of sun, its quick dazzle in my eyes, as Mr. Schultz’s hand.