I didn’t waste time about it. And that night when I told Willie Boy how I come to see it his way he said, “Now you’re talking like a real Yankee Doodle Dandy. We’ll make a great team, you and me, kid. We’ll take Prohibition and shove it right up Uncle Sam. We’ll shove it into him like an umbrella and open it all the way. What do you think of that?”
I didn’t like such talk against the government, even if it was mostly fooling. I said, “I got nothing against Prohibition one way or the other. And I got nothing against Uncle Sam. Far as I can see, it’s the land of the free and the home of the brave and all I’m trying to do is make a little money for myself. When do we start?”
“As soon as we get a boat fitted out,” said Willie Boy. “And that’s your first job. Want to stay over in town tonight and get on it tomorrow?”
“No, I have to get the truck back and tell my boss. Wouldn’t be right to just walk out on him, the way he treated me so fair and square. And he owes me pretty near a week’s pay, too.”
“All right,” said Willie Boy, “you do that. You tell him you’re going digging the kind of clams you use a corkscrew on instead of a knife. Then get back here on the double, because if you want to make money, kiddo, you’ve got to move fast. It’s a fast little world, pal, and even if you don’t want to make money you’ve got to move fast or get run over. Keep moving, Mike. Keep that throttle wide open, because in a little while they’re going to lay you six foot under for keeps, and then you’ll have all the time you need to take it easy. You follow me? I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow night.”
Fred Duane hated to see me go, but he wasn’t too much surprised about it. He gave me what pay was coming to me and then counted out ten dollars extra. “That’s for bringing the truck through last night,” he said. “You done a good job bringing it through like that. Sure you wouldn’t want to stay on for thirty a week? Might even talk it over with O. P. Smith and get it up to thirty-five. That’s good pay for easy work, ain’t it? A lot better than taking a chance on getting drowned off Fire Island somewhere. You can’t get drowned driving a truck.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “but you can sure get shot at.”
“Well, suppose instead of Calvin along with you, you had one of them Italian fellers from New York with a gun on him to scare off trouble. That’s what it’s coming to now, anyhow, what with them hijacking bastards moving onto the roads around here.”
“No,” I said, “I’m set to run a boat. And it ain’t only the money. I feel kind of easy around boats.”
Fred Duane looked at me, all the while sucking his lips in and out. “I guess you do,” he said. “Where do you figure to unload that boat? You and your friend don’t have any ideas about working out of Tippietown, do you? O. P. Smith wouldn’t take kindly to that, nohow. He’s sort of got the idea the only liquor boat belongs at the dock here is mine.”
“Far as I know, we’ll be working out of New York. I can’t say for sure, but that’s the way it looks.”
“Well, all right,” said Fred Duane. “And that’s smart, too, if them hijacking bastards are going to be thick as bedbugs on the Long Island roads. You work right out of the city, you save yourself a lot of heartburn. But you watch yourself in New York, and I’m talking to you now like your own pa would. You watch yourself in New York because the people there ain’t our kind. It’s all Italians there and Jews and a lot of niggers and a bunch of Pope-kissing Irish that ain’t any better than the niggers. You do business with them, and that’s all. There’s no call to be friendly with them more than that. Remember you’re a white man, and that’s what your pa would tell you if he was here to do it.”
“That’s the truth,” I said, and we shook hands on it.
So after that I worked for Willie Boy, and got paid a hundred a week the way he said I would. But worked hard for every penny of it, because of so many things having to be done. First of all was getting a boat fitted out, and before I could judge what kind of hull to buy I had him show me the motor he was so crazy about. As soon as I got a look at it I could see why he felt that way about it. It was chocked up on a pair of two-by-fours in a garage not far from the fish market, all wrapped up in cloth and tied tight around, and when we got the wrappings off I knew I was looking at the finest motor I ever saw in my life. It was even bigger and better than any Pierce-Arrow or Packard engine I was ever around, and it looked like it had been put together by a watchmaker.
“That’s my baby,” Willie Boy said, and he ran his hand over it the way you’d do to a woman. “What do you think of it?”
“It’s a nice motor,” I said. “It’ll be a hog on gas, but it’s a nice motor. What kind of car did it come out of?”
“Rolls-Royce. It’s got about five thousand miles on it, but when you hear it turn over you’ll swear it came out of the factory yesterday. I’ve got a weakness for Rolls-Royces, kiddo. An inherited kind of weakness. Now do you think we’ve got something that’ll do better than fifteen knots going and ten coming?”
“Maybe so. Depends on the hull.”
“And that’s where you come in. Find us the right one, and when you do I’ll give you the money for it. Then you get it over to the haulway in Voorhees’ yard in Brooklyn and work on it until it’s shipshape. Soon as you’re ready I’ll have baby here delivered to you, and once we’re in the water we’re in business.”
“Where’ll you be while all this is going on?”
“Don’t you worry about that. All you have to know is that I pay for the works, and I skipper the boat, and I make the contacts. But when I’m not around, you don’t know me and never heard of me. Nobody’ll ask you any questions at Voorhees’—not if they want to keep doing their little haulway jobs while the tug and barge business is so slow—and you keep your own lip buttoned all the time. You never heard of any Willie Boy or any Willie or even anybody whose name starts with a W. Got that straight?”
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t make any difference to me. Not as long as I don’t get stuck with money troubles when they want to get paid.”
“You won’t be. Any time they give you a bill you bring it here and I’ll give you the cash to pay them. And don’t ever try any tricks with me, kiddo. You got any idea in your thick head of taking off in that boat when my back is turned—you got the least little notion of a double cross—you better put a bullet in your own belly to start with. Otherwise I’ll sure as hell catch up to you and do it myself.” And he pulled open the pea jacket and stuck his thumbs in his belt on each side of that big gun so that I could see it plain.
“I’m an honest man,” I told him. “That thing can’t make me any more honest than I am.”
“There are no honest men,” Willie Boy said, and he reached out and patted the motor. “There’s only honest machines. All a man has to be is smart enough to know what’s good for him. If you’re that smart we’ll get along fine.”
And we did. He left everything to my judgment, and I made sure to do right by him. And he was never cheap or quarrelsome about money, so that made it easy for me. In the long run it was more like being partners than working for him.
I had luck in finding a boat right away. It was over in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and it was a beat-up-looking sea skiff about thirty foot long and a little narrower in the beam than most. But when I had the man row me out to where she was moored I could tell this was the one for me. For all she looked so beat-up her bottom was bone dry, and as for her being narrower than I had figured on, it meant that much more speed in a pinch.
Once I had her on the haulways at Voorhees I pulled out her old motor and junked it, and went over every inch of the hull until it was better than new. Willie Boy said to paint it black so I did that, and then put the name Ursula on her which is what he wanted her called. She was ready for the motor then, so I had it trucked in from the garage and set it into the weathertight housing I had built into the hull. Knowing she’d be a hog for gas I set in a big auxiliary tank at the bow which would help bear it down when we were
going out empty. And for the propeller I took a chance on one that was a little oversized, figuring that the Rolls-Royce engine could handle it and make good use of it.
When I got the boat down the haulways and into the water I had no way of timing it exactly, but when I opened up wide I knew we were doing better than fifteen knots, we must have been doing twenty or more. And it danced along easy as a flirty girl. I went across the bay that way, the bow chopping the ripples, the hull rocking in the cross wind, and the motor telling me it had more to give if I wanted it. She was a dream of a boat. I never saw any before or since that was better, nor anything her size could take calm water or rough better than the Ursula. She was a fit boat for someone like Willie Boy, no question about it.
FIVE
Those were the days when the money was there for the taking, and a willing man could live off the fat of the land. And everybody was willing. I was and Willie Boy was. And everybody we did business with was, right down to them who ran the Voorhees’ yard.
We moored the Ursula up the canal a little ways past the yard but still on Voorhees’ property. There were plenty of other small boats in the same line of work using the place, too, because on the bank of the canal where the yard stockpiled steel you could load liquor into a truck without trouble from the police. The Voorhees people stood in with the police and with all kinds of politicians. As long as you paid the man in charge enough, and enough of that got up to Voorhees himself, you could do business right out in the open at the mooring, and never a word said. And it was all cash business. A lot of cash, but worth it because boats working out of there had a head start on most others.
From the canal we could clear the harbor and get out to Rum Row in no time, especially with Willie Boy at the tiller. That was his pleasure, running wide-open no matter how it burned up gas. What drink was to another man, moving fast was to him, and once I showed him the course, nothing would do but that he handle the boat himself, the bow busting into rough water so hard that I had to keep at the pump or have the spray coming in enough to swamp us. Times like that I would watch him and swear he had a bucket of liquor in him just from the look in his eye, yet knowing he didn’t have a drop to drink all that day. He didn’t believe in drinking until he had got the boat back safe and sound and all unloaded, because however much he might have liked his bottle he liked that motor of his even more, and he was smart enough to know that making the homeward run through the Coast Guard was no job for a drunk man. It would have killed him if anything happened to that motor, like if the boat was sunk, or was caught and taken away from him. For myself I liked him, motor or no motor. I wouldn’t have traded him for all my brothers lumped together with whatever they had to throw in. He was that kind of man.
We bought our stock mostly from one ship, the Anglesey, out of Liverpool from the lettering on her stern but now working regular between Miquelon and Rum Row. Willie Boy had contacts with her owner, so we headed for her first, and only if she wasn’t at anchor when we got there would we try our luck with some of the ships along the line. It was hard to count how many ships were out there in that line doing business, the small boats around them like hungry fish rising to bait, and they were all shapes and sizes. Fishing smacks stripped down to take cargo, schooners, tugs with cases and sacks of liquor piled on deck, and one tramp after another held together by nothing more than barnacles and rust, all waiting there so that nobody would have to go back to New York empty. All of them at anchor, one after another in a long line, heaving in the swells, a mess of slops so heavy around their hulls you couldn’t bring a small boat up against them without fouling it, the gulls squawking away overhead getting fat on it, and noise and yelling and wickedness going on aboard so that a decent man hated to go up on deck and stand there amongst that crowd. Liquor was what they craved and women, and they had what they wanted of both, the women being brought out from town every few days for the purpose.
The Anglesey was no better than the rest of them. Her hull was as foul as theirs, and her crew even fouler, officers and men alike because you couldn’t tell one from the other. They were a mixed lot but mostly Limeys, and when they talked it was like nothing heard on God’s earth, being a kind of barking and whining like dogs let loose. Only a couple of them talked half human, and one was the captain who wasn’t in sight much, and the other was a supercargo named Nickles who handled the business on board. He was a fat little man with the face of a pig and always dressed in fine clothes with a derby hat on, except with the weather so cold and raw out there he wore an old sheepskin coat that didn’t go much with the rest of him.
He was the one used to be waiting when I came up the Jacob’s ladder on deck, and aside from the ugly look of him he was a mistrustful man. I would give him the roll of money from Willie Boy and tell him what the order was, but before he made a move he would count through the money, wetting his thumb now and again to make sure nothing was stuck together. Then he would pass the order along to the crew about what stock to break out for us. The liquor came some in cases but mostly in sacks, six bottles to a sack, and I would work along with the Limeys lowering it over the side to Willie Boy in the Ursula until it was all stowed away and covered with tarpaulins.
Heading back to port I was the one at the tiller. There was no pleasure in it for Willie Boy if he couldn’t run the boat fullspeed, and since he couldn’t do that when she was loaded so heavy he would just sit there on the engine-housing, hunched into his jacket, his hands in his pockets, and his cap down over his eyes. Now and then when we flushed too much of a sea he would work the pump some, but that was all. Even if it was harder handling the boat when she lay close to the waterline and what with all the patrols around, he let me do it the way I wanted and never mixed in. He knew how I could work a boat, and he trusted to my judgment with never a word.
When we got to the mooring there would be two trucks waiting for us. They were made out to be laundry trucks and had some sacks of wash in them, but they were meant for liquor, and once we had the load divided between them and the sacks thrown over it the job was done. After that the only thing left was to go into New York and spend our money. We would take a walk down the canal bank to an old warehouse where Willie Boy kept his car parked—a fine big Marmon—and then drive into town. He was cautious about that car. The rest of the crowd using the mooring kept their cars parked right in the street outside Voorhees’ yard, but he said he didn’t want the car where people might ask questions about it. So we would walk to it, and he’d drive into New York, dropping me off near the fish market, where I had a room, and then going off by himself wherever he went. As for me, I’d go to my room and get cleaned up and dressed in my good suit and then head over to a house I found on Catherine Street near the Bowery, where the girls were mostly big, nice-looking Polacks out of Pennsylvania and the prices were reasonable. And after I got done there I would head along the Bowery into places where the liquor was fit to drink and there might be a woman who’d be glad to come along back to my room with me for the price of a bottle. All my money went that way. I was like a young bull, and anything big and healthy that went by in a skirt was a heifer to my fancy.
So, outside of working with him on the job, I never saw Willie Boy or had anything to do with him. A couple of times I came close to saying something about it, saying something to him about the kind of fun we might have going on the town together, but I never did get it out. I didn’t know the women he went with or the friends he had, but I had an idea what they must be like, and I had the feeling that amongst them I would be two left feet and a tongue hinged at the wrong end. He was a long cut above me, and I knew that without anybody having to say it out loud.
But there came a day when I found out he thought more about me than if I was just someone handy to have on the job with him. And I was glad of that even if it was a hard day for both of us. Up to that time the Ursula was a lucky boat. We moved in and out of the canal tending our business with never a whisper of trouble from the Coast Guard or police boats or t
he hijackers in speedboats that were showing up on the water now like sharks. And it was only luck, because every week we’d hear of this rumrunner or that being caught and towed back to port by the law, or being run down and robbed by hijackers of their whole bankroll and maybe shot up and sunk if they tried to do something about it.
So it was plain luck, and it was Willie Boy blew it up the time he answered me back for telling him that. “Luck?” he said. “We make our own luck, you dummy. We’ve got the right boat and the right crew for it, we steer a smart course, and we’re not afraid to go out in dirty weather when nobody could find you if he was on top of you. That’s what luck is, knowing how to take care of yourself. You think I’ve got you along for luck like some kind of Kewpie doll? You think there’s an angel up there takes care of bootleggers? Why, you goddam dummy,” he said, and he was laughing at me, making me out to be a big fool, “when you’ve got brains enough to know what to do and hands to do it with, you don’t call it luck.”
And there was no use trying to tell him different, because he could turn anything I said upside down and make a joke of it. But I knew it was the worst thing he could have done, talking down luck like that, and when he wasn’t looking I spit three times overboard trying to fix it up. And could have saved my spit, for all the good it did.
That day we pulled away from the Anglesey into the kind of weather that favored us. There was a mist low on the water, and a heavy sea running so that a patrol boat would have a hard time sighting anything small like the Ursula. Yet, when we were close on the twelve-mile limit a searchlight suddenly came out of nowhere and swung back and forth on the sea right across us. There was only one kind of ship in those waters had a light like that and the kind of engines I could hear pounding up on our tail, and I knew then and there that our luck had been twisted clean around and that Willie Boy had been too loose-lipped for his own good.
The Winter After This Summer Page 30