Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  But one night I was sitting on the orphans’ stoop in the white side of my Shadows jacket with my two friends Rebecca the Witch and Arnold Garbage and we had it mostly to ourselves, the younger kids having been herded inside because it was their curfew, and it was that moment of summer night when it is still light blue in the sky but lamppost dark in the street and it was noisy enough with everyone’s window open and the radios playing and the arguments going, and there came around the corner the green-and-white prowl car of the local precinct house and when it reached us it stopped at the curb and the motor ran quietly there and I stared at the cop in the car and he looked up the steps at me, and the appraisal was keen and measured, and it seemed to me everything grew immediately quiet, although of course this was not so, and I felt my white jacket glowing in the last light coming down from the sky, I felt levitated by that light and the cop car too seemed to float away, from its dark green bottom to its upper half in white suspension over the tires, and then the head in the window turned away and said something to the cop I couldn’t see, the driver, and they laughed and the headlights went on like gunshots in the street and they drove away.

  This was the moment of my awareness, in this strange light, of that first anger Mr. Schultz had told me about, how it comes to you as a benefit, as an endowment. I felt the defining criminal rage, I recognized it, except that it had come to me as I sat in contentment with other strange half-children there on the steps of the Max and Dora Diamond Home. Clearly what I had sought and didn’t want at the same time, that peculiar notoriety of a kid’s dreams, was now official, I was another kind of citizen, there was no longer any question. I was angry because I still thought it was up to me to decide what I was, not fucking cops. I was angry because nothing in this world is provisional. I was angry because Mr. Berman had sent me home with money in my pocket for no other reason than to teach me what money costs and I hadn’t realized it.

  Now I remembered what he had said, that I should just take it easy and when they wanted me they would find me. I was standing at the foot of the stairs to the El. I hadn’t really heard him, why don’t we hear the things said to us? A minute later I had bounded up the stairs and dropped my nickel in the turnstile with its thick magnifying glass showing you under light how big an American buffalo is.

  So that night I did something I had never done before, I threw a party. It seemed to me properly defiant. I found a bar on Third Avenue that sold beer to minors for the right price and bought a pony and rented the tapping equipment to go with it and Garbage wheeled it all covered up in one of his carriages and we bumped it down the steps to his cellar and that’s where I threw the party. The big work was clearing enough of his storehouse of shit out of the way so that we had something like an old couch or two to sit on and some floor space to dance on. On the other hand it was Garbage who supplied the tall dusty glasses we drank the beer from and the old Victor Talking Machine with the sound horn curled like a seashell and the pack of steel needles and the box of race records that gave us our dance music. I told him I would pay rent for everything he supplied. I was determined that night to pay everybody for everything, even God for the air I breathed. And I threw the party for the incorrigibles of the Max and Dora Diamond Home after everyone else including the floor wardens and the custodial supervisor had gone to sleep. Eventually there were maybe ten or twelve kids altogether including my friend Rebecca, who arrived like some of the other girls in a nightgown, but she had earrings on too and some lipstick. All the girls wore lipstick, all the same color all obviously from the same tube. And there we were making a big deal over this beer that must have come from Mr. Schultz’s drop because it was really piss water but because it was beer gave us the requisite taste of adult corruption. Someone had raided the house kitchen and come away with three salamis and several loaves of white bread in wax paper and Garbage poked around in one of his bins till he found a kitchen knife and a broken coffee table, and sandwiches were made and beer was poured and I had cigarettes for those who wanted them, and in the dry and ashen air of the basement, with suspensions of coal dust lit in the yellow light of an old standing lamp, we smoked Wings and drank our foamless beer and ate and danced to the old black voices of the 1920s singing their slow songs of doubled lines of love and bitter one-line resolutions, of pig’s feet and jelly rolls and buggy rides and papas who did wrong and mamas who did wrong and people who were waiting for trains that had already gone, and though none of us knew how to dance except the square dancing they taught upstairs, the music taught us how. Garbage sat by the Victrola and cranked it up and took a record out of its blank paper jacket and put it on, he sat cross-legged on a table with a pillow under him and did this, neither dancing himself nor talking to anyone for that matter but giving by his assent to everything going on in his basement the best measure of impassive sociability of which he was capable, neither drinking beer nor smoking but only eating and engrossing himself with the endless supply of scratchy music, the cornets and clarinets and tubas and pianos and drums of sorrowful passion, and the girls danced with each other and then pulled the boys in to dance with them, and it was a very solemn party we were having, white Bronx kids holding on to each other in the sweet black music, full of the intent to live life as it should be lived, there in the orphans’ home. But little by little it began to look different because some of the girls found collections of clothing in big cardboard boxes in the recesses of Arnold Garbage’s bins, and he didn’t seem to mind, so they dressed themselves in this and that over their nightclothes, trying and choosing different hats and dresses and high-heeled shoes of bygone times, till everyone was satisfied, and my little Rebecca wore a kind of Spanish black lace affair down to her ankles, and a gauzy shawl of rose with great looping tears in it, but continued to dance with me in her bare feet, and some of the boys had found suit jackets whose shoulders were like football pads on them, and pointed patent-leather shoes, and big wide ties they looped around their bare throats, and so by and by in the smoke and jazz we were all just the way we wanted to be, dancing in the dust of the Embassy Club of our futures, in the costumes of shy children’s love, and learning as only the fortunate do that God is not only the instruction of the mind but of the hips in their found rolling rhythm.

  Much later Rebecca and I were sitting on one of the couches and she had her legs crossed at the knees and one dirty foot swinging and her nightgown showing below the hem of her black lace dress. She was the last kid there. She raised her arms and she pulled her black hair back behind her head and did something deft back there the way girls do with their hair so that it stays the way they fix it without any visible reason to and despite the law of gravity. Maybe I was a little drunk by then, maybe we both were. Also the dancing had been warm and close. I was smoking a cigarette and she took it out of my fingers and drew on it, one puff, and blew out the smoke without inhaling and put the cigarette back in my fingers. I saw now she was wearing mascara on her eyelashes and eyelids and had on that communal red lipstick, paled somewhat since its application, and was glancing at me sideways with her foot swinging, and those eyes dark as black grapes, and her white neck draped in that torn shawl of dusty pink—I had no warning or preparation from one moment to the next, I was swimming in a realm of intimacy, as if I had just met her, or as if I had just lost her, but surely as if I had never roof-fucked her. My mouth went dry she was so incredibly childishly beautiful. Until this moment I had been the party-giver and big boss of the evening, dispensing his largesse and granting his favors. All those dances—oh I knew everyone knew I favored her on my randy forays up the fire escape, but it was athletics, I paid her, for christsake, I must have been staring at her because she turned away and lowered her eyes, her foot going madly—all those dances I had danced with her and only her were the exacting ceremonies of possession. And this ancient witch child understood before I did that everything was now up in the heart, as if my rise in the world had lifted us to an immensity of consequence, which we were now allowed to see, lik
e a distance ahead of us, like a horizon. They must all have understood, every fucking kid there, while I thought what I had been feeling was only a sweetly mellow good time.

  So when everyone else had gone we lay for the first time together without any clothes on that same couch, everyone else asleep, even Garbage in some inner bin of his privacy. We lay in the dark cellar of dust and ash, and I was passive and on my back and Rebecca lay on top of me and cleaved herself on me letting herself down with a long intake of her breath which I felt as a cool flute of air on my neck, and slowly awkwardly she learned her rhythm upon me as I was patient to allow her to do. My hands were on her back for a while and then on her buttocks, I followed the soft down with my fingers, I knew it was as black as her hair, it went from the bottom of her spine down into the crack between her ass, and then I put my finger on her small ring of an asshole and as she raised her hips I touched it, and as she lowered her hips I lost it in the clamp of her hard buttocks. Her hair fell forward as she raised herself and it brushed my face, and when she lowered herselfit fell around my ears, and I kissed her cheeks as she rested and I felt her lips on my neck and her hard little nipples against my chest and her wet thighs on my thighs, and then I didn’t remember when it started she was making little discoveries which she voiced in private almost soundless whimperings in my ear and then she moved into some arrhythmic panic and went stiff and I felt around my cock the grasp of her inner musculature and when I reached down with my finger and touched the asshole it clamped around my fingertip and released and contracted and released in the same rhythm as her interior self was squeezing and unsqueezing my cock and I couldn’t stand it anymore I arched myself into her and pulled back, raising myself and lowering myself with her dead body-weight as vehemently as if I were on top pretty soon going so fast she was being bounced on my chest and thighs with little grunts until she found my rhythm and went stuttering and imperfectly and finally workingly, smoothly against it, meeting me when I was to be met, leaving me when I was leaving to be left, and that was so unendurably exquisite I shot into her and held her down against me with my hands while I came pulsing up into her milkingly lovely little being as far as I could go. And she held her arms around me to get me through that, and then there was peace between us, and we lay as we were with such great trust as to require no words or kisses, but only the gentlest slowest and most coordinate drift into sleep.

  EIGHT

  What woke me was the chill of empty air on my skin, and the degree of ashen gray light that represented morning in the basement of the Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children. A mound of black and rose lace lay on the floor beside the couch as if the witch had disembodied: My lover had gone back upstairs to her childhood. Institutional orphans know with a basic workaday cunning how not to get caught, and it occurred to me that that was not bad training for a gangster’s girl. I wondered what age people had to be before they could marry. I reflected as I lay there that my life was changing more quickly and in more ways than I could keep up with. Or was it all just one thing, as if everything had the same charge to it, so that if I was remade to Mr. Schultz’s touch, Becky was remade to mine, and there was only one infinitely extending flash of conformation. She had never come before, with me anyway, and I felt pretty sure with nobody else either. Her cunt barely had hair. She was growing herself up to match me.

  Oh my God what I felt right then for this mysterious parent-less little girl, this Mediterranean olive, this nimble nipply witch-ling, with her arching backbone, her downy ass, as hard-living dumb as a female could be. She liked me! I wanted to race her, I knew she could run, I would give her a head start because I was older, and I bet she could make a good race of it. I had seen her jump rope, inexhaustibly, with lots of tricks, on one foot, or with a quick two-step, or skipping through the snapping arcs, hip-hopping through a double rope, the left and right coming from opposite directions, and do it faster and longer than anyone else. She could walk on her hands too, totally careless of her falling inversion of skirt and her white panties for all the boys to see, her swarthy legs waving in the air, as she paraded the street upside down. She was an athlete, a gymnast: I would teach her to juggle, I would teach her and myself at the same time to throw-juggle till we had six bowling pins flying in the air between us.

  But first I wanted to buy her something. I tried to think of what it should be. I listened. I knew the orphans’ home as well as I knew my own, I could lie there, and even hung over, and with every signal sense refracted in an atmosphere fetid with stale beer, I could tell by the degree of vibration of the building what time of day it was: they were barely beginning to get going in the kitchen. It was just dawn. I roused myself, grabbed my clothes, and sneaking up a back stairs I made it to the Boys Showers and ten minutes later was out in the new morning, the hair of my recent haircut wet and shining, my Shadows jacket turned out in satin white, and the breakfast to hand a fresh bagel lifted from the big bread bag left before light on the delivery platform by the Pechter’s Bakery truck.

  It was so early nobody was up yet, not even my mother. The streets were empty, the lamppost lights were still on under the white sky. I had the idea, going to Third Avenue, that I would look in the pawnshop windows for something and just wait around for the day to begin to buy it. I wanted to buy Becky a piece of jewelry, maybe even a ring.

  At this hour not even the newsstand at the foot of the El station had opened. The morning papers lay baled in twine where they’d been tossed from the trucks. I knew the headline in the Mirror was meant for me before I looked at it, I felt the attraction of the words before I read them: GRISLY GANG MURDER. Underneath was a murky photo of a dead man in a barber chair who I thought was headless until I read the caption explaining that his head was swathed in bloodied barbers’ hot towels. Some West Side numbers boss. I was so distracted, I actually put my three cents on the ground by the stack of papers before I pulled one out to get the story.

  I read with a proprietary interest, I read first in the shadow of the El and then not sure I’d gotten it all I stepped into a stripe of light cast by the space between the overhead tracks, I held my arms out and I read again in the pacific glare of the morning the Mirror gang murder of the day, while nothing moved on any of the levels, neither train nor trolley, except the pattern of darkness striped with light up and down the cobbled avenue like a jail guard running his stick along the bars of the cells, my head beginning to hurt through the eyes, and the recognition of darkness alternating with light in the black print on the white paper as the personal message for me in this news.

  For of course I knew whose work this was, there wasn’t much more to the story than there was in the headline and the picture, but I read with intense concentration, not merely as one who was in the same trade, but of the same shop, I was reading of my mentor, and the proof was I didn’t need any proof, I knew to the point of looking for Mr. Schultz’s name in the story, and wondering why it wasn’t there, numb and not thinking properly after my first night on earth of love, as if everybody in the world would know something because I did, as if I didn’t know anything nobody else knew, especially the papers. I went back and pulled out a News, which had almost the same picture and no more information, and then I took a Herald Tribune, one of those hifalutin rags, and they didn’t know anything more than the others, although they used more words. None of them knew. Gangsters were killed every day in the week and why and by whom was a matter of public confusion. Lines of power crossed in secret, allies became enemies, partnerships split up, any one man could be killed by just about anybody else in the business on any given day, and the press, the cops, they needed eyewitnesses, testimony, documentation, to make their tracings and figure things out. They might have their theories but it took them a while to get up an authoritative version, as with all historians going through the wreckage after the silence has set in. By contrast I immediately knew, as if I had been there. He had used whatever was to hand. He had improvised something from his rage, I mean you don’t sit s
omeone down in a barber chair to murder him, you find him there and you grab a razor. He had gone totally out of his mind the way he did with the fire inspector, I had caught on with the great Dutch Schultz in his decline of empire, he was losing control, it was a bloody maniac’s portrait there on the front page, and now what the fuck was I going to do? I had this sense of being implicated in a way that wasn’t fair to me, as if he had broken a trust and there was nothing after all to learn from him except self-destruction.

  I broke into a clammy sweat and that most dreaded and unendurable of feelings, nausea, rose in me. At such times you just want to fling yourself on the ground and clutch it, nothing else is possible. I looked around and dropped the papers in an ashcan, as if I could be arrested for holding them, as if they were evidence of my complicity.

  I sat in a doorway and put my head between my knees and waited for the awful nausea to go away. After a few minutes I felt better, the sweat turns to a chill and you’re all right, you can breathe again. Perhaps this was the moment when I germinated my secret conviction that I could always get out, that they could come looking but they’d never find me, that I knew more escapes than they dreamed of. But consciously all I could think was that Mr. Schultz was a greater danger to me when I was not in his presence than when I was. He’d do another one of these things that I wouldn’t know about and I’d be picked up. All of them, Mr. Berman too, the less I saw of them the more vulnerable I became. It was a most contrary proposition but as a feeling it was indisputable. If I didn’t have him where I could see him, how could I get away if I didn’t know when to run? Then and there I knew I had to be back with the gang, it was my empowerment, my protection. I felt, sitting there under the El, that not being with them was a luxury I couldn’t afford. It wasn’t safe not to be around them.