If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  On Death, in a block of darkened warehouses, sat the Emerald Green Tavern. It was on a Saturday morning in the dead of night at the Emerald Green that I had found myself in a moment of utter clarity with a pistol and pocket full of money reading a newspaper article about Leo Dunn. I stood for a while remembering that. Then maybe the cold got to me and I went home. My memory there is vague.

  What I will never forget is the sight of a ship outlined in green and red lights. I was staring at it and I was intensely cold. Gradually, I realized I was huddled against a pillar of the raised highway near the Hudson piers. One of the last of the cruise ships was docked there and I thought how good it would be to have the money to sail down to the warm weather.

  In fact, it would have been good to have any money at all. My worldly wealth was on me, suede boots and no socks, an overcoat and suit and no underwear. In one pocket was a penny, a dime and a quarter—my wealth. In another was a set of standard keys and the gravity knife I’d had since college.

  Then I knew why I had stolen the keys and where I was going to get money. And I recognized the state I was in, the brief, brilliant period of clarity at the end of a bender. My past was a wreck, my future held a terrifying crash. With nothing behind me and nothing to live for, I knew no fear and was a god.

  With all mortal uncertainty and weakness gone, I was pure spirit as I headed down familiar streets. A block east of Death and north of the Deuce, I looked up at a lighted window on the third floor. I crossed the street, my overcoat open, oblivious to the cold.

  Security at Mother’s was based on there being nothing in the building worth taking. Drawing out the keys, I turned the street door lock on my third try and went up the stairs, silently, swiftly. Ancient smells of boiled cabbages and fish, of damp carpet and cigarette smoke and piss, a hundred years of poverty, wafted around me. This was the kind of place where a loser lived, a fool came to rest. Contempt filled me.

  Light shone under his door. Finding a key the right shape, I transferred it to my left hand, drew out the knife with my right.

  The key went in without a sound. I held my breath and turned it. The lock clicked, the door swung into the miserable room with a bed, a TV on without the sound, a two-burner stove, a table. An all too familiar figure dozed in the only chair shoes off, pants unbuttoned. Sobriety had made him stupid. Not even the opening of the door roused him. The click of the knife in my hand did that.

  The eyes focused then widened as the dumb face I had seen in ten thousand morning mirrors registered shock. “I got a little debt I want to collect,” I said and moved for him. Rage swept me, a feeling that I had been robbed of everything: my body, my life. “You took that god-damn money. It’s mine. My plan. My guts. You couldn’t have pulled that scam in a thousand years.”

  For an instant, the miserable straight-head in front of me froze in horror. Then shoulder muscles tensed, feet shot out as he tried to roll to the side and go for the .25. But he was slow. My knife slashed and the fool put out his hands.

  Oh, the terror in those eyes when he saw the blood on his palms and wrists. He fell back, tripping over the chair. The blade went for the stomach, cutting through cloth and into flesh.

  Eyes wide, his head hit the wall. The knife in my hand slashed his throat. The light in the eyes went out. The last thing I saw in them was a reflection of his humiliation at dying like that, pants fallen down, jockey shorts filling with dark, red blood. His breath suddenly choked, became a drowning sound. An outstretched hand pointed to the loose board and the money.

  “I was just cut down,” I told Dunn the next day. “It wasn’t even a fight. I left that knife behind when I had to move and the fucking Silent Partner had it and just cut me down.” It was hard to get my throat to work.

  “It was a dream, Kevin, a drinking dream like the one you told me yesterday. It has no power over your conscious mind. You came home and fell asleep sitting up. Then you had a nightmare. You say you fell off your chair and woke up on the floor. The rest was just a dream.”

  My eyes burned. “The expression my Silent Partner had on his face is the one I used to see sometimes in the mirror. Moments when it was so far gone I could do anything.”

  “Nothing else has reached you like this, Kevin.”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Don’t be sorry. This is part of the process. I don’t know why, but this has to happen for the treatment to work. I’ve had detective sergeants bawl like babies, marines laugh until they cried. Until this, you haven’t let anything faze you. Our stupid drinker’s pride can take many forms.”

  “I won’t be able to sleep as long as I know he’s out there.”

  “Understand, Kevin, that I’m not a psychiatrist. I was educated by the Jesuits a long time ago. Dreams or how you feel about your mother don’t mean much to me. But I hear myself say that and spot my own stupid pride at work. If dreams are what you bring me, I’ll use them.” He paused and I blew my nose. “What does your Silent Partner want, Kevin? You saw through his eyes in your dream.”

  “He wants to disembowel me!”

  “The knife, even the murder, were the means, Kevin. Not the motive. What was he looking for?”

  “My money. He knew where I had it.”

  “You keep money in your room? You don’t have a job. But you pay me regularly in fairly crisp twenties and hundreds. It’s stolen money, isn’t it, Kevin?”

  “I guess so. I don’t remember.”

  “Earlier you mentioned that in the dream you went for a gun. Do you own a gun? Is there blood on the money, Kevin? Did you hurt anyone? Do you know?”

  “The gun hasn’t been fired.”

  “I assume it’s not registered, probably stolen. Get rid of it. Can you return the money?”

  “I don’t even know who it belonged to.”

  “You told me that he was in a calm eye when he came after you. That was his opportunity. You described having that same kind of clarity when you decided to leave him. You had the money with you then?”

  “The gun too.”

  “Kevin, let’s say that some people’s Silent Partners are more real than others. Then, let’s say that in a moment of clarity you managed to give yours the slip and walked off with the money the two of you had stolen. Without him holding you back, you succeeded in reaching out for help. The money is the link. It’s what still connects you to your drinking past. I don’t want any of that money and neither do you. Get rid of it.”

  “You mean throw it away?”

  “The other day you said your Silent Partner was borrowing from the West Side mob. If he’s real enough to need money that badly, let him have it. No one, myself above all, ever loses his Silent Partner entirely. But this should give you both some peace.”

  “What’ll I do for money? I won’t be able to pay you.”

  “Do you think after all this time, I don’t know which ones aren’t going to pay me?” I watched his hands rearrange the crystal ashtrays, the gold lighter, as he said, “Let’s look in the Record room where we will find that booze is a vicious mind-altering substance. And we have to be aware at every moment of its schemes.” I raised my eyes. Framed in the light from the windows, Dunn smiled at me and said, “Keep just enough to live on for a couple of weeks until you find work. Which you will.”

  Afterwards, in my room, I took out the pistol and the money, put two hundred back in the wall and placed the rest in a jacket pocket. The Beretta I carefully stuck under my belt at the small of my back. Then I went out.

  At first, I walked aimlessly around the Kitchen. My Silent Partner had threatened me. It seemed my choices were to give up the money or to keep the money and give up Mr. Dunn. The first I thought of as surrender, the second meant I’d be back on the booze and drugs. Then a third choice took shape. Payback. I would do to him just what he had tried to do to me.

  Searching for him, I followed what I remembered of our route on the last night of our partnership. It had begun at Sanctuary. Passing by, I saw that the disco
was no longer dying. It was dead. The doors were padlocked. On the former church steps, a black guy slept with his head on his knees. No sign of my Silent Partner.

  But I finally recalled what had happened there. Sanctuary was a hunting ground. Tourists were the game. That last night, I had run into four fraternity assholes in town with seven grand for a midwinter drug buy. Almost dead broke, I talked big about my connections. Before we left together, I bought the Beretta.

  Following my trail, I walked by the Victoria. That’s where I had taken them first. “Five guys showing up will not be cool,” I said and persuaded two of them to wait in my dismal room. “As collateral, you hold everything I own.” That amounted to little more than some clothes and a few keepsakes like the knife. With the other two, I left the hotel that last time knowing I wouldn’t be back. I recognized my Silent Partner’s touch. He had been with me at that point.

  Turning into an icy wind off the river, I took the same route that the frat boys and I had taken a few weeks before.

  At a doorway on a deserted side street near Ninth Avenue, I halted. I remembered standing in that spot and telling them this was the place. In the tenement hall, I put the pistol at the base of one kid’s head and made him beg the other one to give me the money.

  Standing in that doorway again, I recalled how the nervous sweat on my hand made it hard to hold on to the .25.

  When those terrified kids had handed over the money, I discouraged pursuit by making them throw their shoes into the dark, to take off their coats and lie face down with their hands behind their heads. The one I’d put the pistol on had pissed his pants. He wept and begged me not to shoot.

  Remembering that made my stomach turn. Right then my Partner had been calling the shots.

  The rest of that night was gone beyond recovery. What happened in those blank hours wasn’t important. I knew where the search for my Partner was going to end. Death Avenue, north of the Deuce, had always been a favorite spot for both of us. The deserted warehouses, the empty railroad yards, made it feel like the end of the world.

  Approaching the Emerald Green Tavern, I spotted a lone figure leaning on a lamp post watching trailer trucks roll south. Only a lack of funds would have kept a man out on the street on a night like that. Touching the pistol for luck, stepping up behind him, I asked, “Watcha doing?”

  Not particularly surprised, not even turning all the way around, he replied, “Oh, living the life.” I would never have his nonchalance. His face was hidden by the dark and masked by sunglasses. That was just as well.

  The air around him smelled of cheap booze. “We have to talk.” I gestured toward the Emerald Green.

  As we crossed the street, he told me, “I knew you’d show up. This is where we parted company. When I woke up days later, all I had was these clothes and a couple of keepsakes.”

  That reminded me of the knife. My Silent Partner knew as soon as that crossed my mind. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I sold it.”

  He went through the door first. The Emerald Green was a typical Hell’s Kitchen joint with a bar that ran front to back, a few booths, and beer-and-cigarette-soaked air unchanged since the Truman administration. The facilities were the one distinguishing feature of the place. The restrooms lay down a flight of stairs and across a cellar/storage area. You could organize a firing squad down there and the people above wouldn’t know.

  Or care. The customers that night were several guys with boozers’ noses, an old woman with very red hair who said loudly at regular intervals, “Danny? Screw, Danny,” and a couple of Spanish guys off some night shift and now immobile at a table. The dead-eyed donkey of a bartender looked right through me and nodded at my Silent Partner. In here, he was the real one. We went to the far end of the bar near the cellar door where we could talk. I ordered a ginger ale. My companion said, “Double Irish.”

  As we sat, he gave a dry chuckle. “Double Irish is about right for us.” At no time did I turn and stare my Silent Partner in the face. But the filmed mirror behind the bar showed that he wore the rumpled jacket over a dirty T-shirt.

  The camel hair coat was deeply stained. When the whiskey came, he put it away with a single gesture from counter to mouth. Up and in. I could taste it going down.

  It was like living in a drinking dream. I touched the back of my belt and said, “You found out where I live.”

  “Yeah. Billy at 596 told me you were staying at Mother’s. Of course, what he said was that he had seen me going in and out. So I knew.” Indoors, my partner smelled ripe. The back of his hand was dirty.

  “You owe them money?” The last thing I needed was to get shot for debts he had run up.

  “Not even five. My credit’s no good,” he said. “You left me with nothing. They locked me out of the hotel. Ripping off those kids was something you never could have done by yourself. You needed me.” He signaled for a refill. The bartender’s eyes shifted my way since I was paying.

  I shook my head, not sure I could have him drink again and not do it myself. “I’ve got most of the money on me. It’s yours. So that we don’t attract attention, what I want you to do is to get up and go downstairs. After a couple of minutes, I’ll join you.”

  “Pass the money to me under the bar.” He didn’t trust me.

  “There’s something else I want you to have.” For a long moment he sat absolutely still. The TV was on with the sound off. It seemed to be all beer ads. “When you come back up here,” I told him, “You can afford enough doubles to kill yourself.” That promise made him rise and push his way through the cellar door.

  For a good two minutes, I sipped ginger ale and breathed deeply to calm myself. Then I followed him. Downstairs, there were puddles on the floor. The restroom doors were open. Both were empty. One of the johns was broken and kept flushing. It sounded like an asthmatic trying to breathe.

  The cellar was lighted by an overhead bulb above the stairs and another one at the far end of the cellar near the restrooms. Both lights swayed slightly, making it hard to focus. My Silent Partner had reached up and bumped them for just that reason. It was the kind of thing that I would not have thought of. He stood where the light didn’t quite hit him.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I reached back and drew the .25. He seemed to flicker before me. “Easy does it,” he said. “You know how jumpy you are with guns.” His tone was taunting, not intimidated.

  I realized I could read him as easily as he could me. My Silent Partner wanted me to try to shoot him and find out that I couldn’t. Then after I failed, we could both go upstairs, have some drinks and resume our partnership. Carefully, I ejected the clip and stuck it in my pocket. His eyes followed me as I put the empty pistol on the stairs. “You bought this, you get rid of it.” I said. “My guess is it’s got a bad history.”

  “You’ll never have another friend like me.” His voice, my voice, had a whine to it and I knew this was getting to him. I reached into my pocket and took out the money and a piece of worn newspaper. “You thought about what it’s going to be like to be broke,” he asked. “It’s not like you’ve got any skills.”

  I’d had thought of it and it scared me. I hesitated.

  Then I noticed that the newspaper was the page with the Dunn article. Taking a deep breath, I riffled the money and told my Silent Partner, “Almost six grand. Just about everything I have.” I put the cash on the stairs beside the Beretta and turned to go. “So long. It’s been real.”

  “Oh, I’ll keep in touch,” he said in a whisper. Looking back, I saw nothing but the blur of light in the shadows.

  On the stairs, I felt light-footed, like a burden had been laid down. This was relief, maybe even the happiness Mr. Dunn had mentioned. From his perch near the front, the bartender gave me a slightly wary look like maybe I had come in at 2 A.M., drunk ginger ale, and had a conversation with myself. I occurred to me that if that’s what happened, the first one to go take a leak was going to get a very nice surprise.

  But as I went out into th
e cold, the bartender’s gaze shifted, his hand reached for the pouring bottle, and I heard the cellar door swing open behind me.

  The verbal snapshot, the anecdote, the New Yorker “Casual” is a staple of life in this city (“You wouldn’t believe what I just saw!”).

  Recently there’s been a newfound interest in very short stories (usually a thousand words or less) referred to as “Flash Fiction.” Once this was a popular length for newspaper and magazine fiction and the pieces were called “Short-Shorts.” By the late ’50s that term was used by people my age for the pants girls wore in summer and boys wore for gym.

  Here are three of mine.

  EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE

  His Only Nose

  A few weeks ago I passed a guy on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. He was saying in a loud, aggrieved tone of voice to the woman he was with, “I ONLY GOT THIS ONE NOSE.” And though I’ve lived in Manhattan for a long time and heard lots of great mad street cries and wonderful twisted passer-by talk, I still paid enough attention to wonder what led him to mention this.

  When I told people about the incident a writer friend suggested that the woman had bopped him in the nose. An interesting premise, but in my quick glance I’d seen no evidence that his nose (a serviceable but common enough medium sized specimen—not a pug, not a wild honker) was bleeding or was in any way not “a virgin.”

  That’s how unbroken noses were described in the South Boston of my childhood, a time and place where it was said that anyone who reached the age of twelve without a broken nose was either a newcomer or a girl.

  My friend, Liz, who has known me for decades, was inclined to believe that he came from an alternate world where any individual could have a variety of noses and other body parts. At first I thought this was a nice piece of whimsy on her part and was amused. Then she reminded me of certain experiences we had shared.