Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  If Martin had his way, he would infuse a little of Billy’s scarred sassiness into his own son’s manner, a boy too tame, too subservient to the priests. Martin might even profit by injecting some sass into his own acquiescent life.

  Consider that: a sassy Martin Daugherty.

  Well, that may not be all that likely, really. Difficult to acquire such things.

  Billy’s native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city’s life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover there on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.

  Billy went for his ball, kissed it once, massaged it, chalked and toweled his right hand, spat in the spittoon to lighten his burden, bent slightly at the waist, shuffled and slid, and bazoo-bazoo, boys, threw another strike: not just another strike, but a titanic blast this time which sent all pins flying pitward, the cleanest of clean hits, perfection unto tidiness, bespeaking power battening on power, control escalating.

  Billy looked at no one.

  Nine in a row, but still nobody said anything except hey, and yeah-yeah, with a bit more applause offered up. Billy waited for the ball to come back, rubbing his feet on the floor dirt just beyond the runway, dusting his soles with slide insurance, then picked up the ball and sidled back to the runway of alley nine for his last frame. And then he rolled it, folks, and boom-boom went the pins, zot-zot, you sons of bitches, ten in a row now, and a cheer went up, but still no comment, ten straight and his score (even though Martin hadn’t filled in any numbers yet) is 280, with two more balls yet to come, twenty more pins to go. Is Billy Phelan ready for perfection? Can you handle it, kid? What will you do with it if you get it?

  Billy had already won the match; no way for Scotty to catch him, given that spot. But now it looked as if Billy would beat Scotty without the spot, and, tied to a perfect game, the win would surely make the sports pages later in the week.

  Scotty stood up and walked to the end of the ball return to wait. He chalked his hands, rubbed them together, played with the towel, as Billy bent over to pick up his ball.

  “You ever throw three hundred anyplace before?” Scotty asked.

  “I ain’t thrown it here yet,” Billy said.

  So he did it, Martin thought. Scotty’s chin trembled as he watched Billy. Scotty, the nervous sportsman. Did saying what he had just said mean that the man lacked all character? Did only relentless winning define his being? Was the fear of losing sufficient cause for him to try to foul another man’s luck? Why of course it was, Martin. Of course it was.

  Billy threw, but it was a Jersey hit, his first crossover in the game. The ball’s mixing power overcame imprecision, however, and the pins spun and rolled, toppling the stubborn ten pin, and giving Billy his eleventh strike. Scotty pulled at the towel and sat down.

  “You prick,” Morrie Berman said to him. “What’d you say that to him for?”

  “Say what?”

  “No class,” said Morrie. “Class’ll tell in the shit house, and you got no class.”

  Billy picked up his ball and faced the pins for the last act. He called out to Bugs, the pinboy: “Four pin is off the spot,” and he pointed to it. Martin saw he was right, and Bugs moved the pin back into proper position. Billy kissed the ball, shuffled and threw, and the ball went elegantly forward, perfect line, perfect break, perfect one-three pocket hit. Nine pins flew away. The four pin never moved.

  “Two-ninety-nine,” Martin said out loud, and the mob gave its full yell and applause and then stood up to rubberneck at the scoresheet, which Martin was filling in at last, thirty pins a frame, twenty-nine in the last one. He put down the crayon to shake hands with Billy, who stood over the table, ogling his own nifty numbers.

  “Some performance, Billy,” said Charlie Boy McCall, standing to stretch his babyfat. “I should learn not to bet against you. You remember the last time?”

  “Pool match at the K. of C.”

  “I bet twenty bucks on some other guy.”

  “Live and learn, Charlie, live and learn.”

  “You were always good at everything,” Charlie said. “How do you explain that?”

  “I say my prayers and vote the right ticket.”

  “That ain’t enough in this town,” Charlie said.

  “I come from Colonie Street.”

  “That says it,” said Charlie, who still lived on Colonie Street.

  “Scotty still has to finish two frames,” Martin announced to all; for Scotty was already at alley ten, facing down the burden of second best. The crowd politely sat and watched him throw a strike. He moved to alley nine and with a Jersey hit left the baby split. He cursed inaudibly, then made the split. With his one remaining ball he threw a perfect strike for a game of 219, a total of 667. Billy’s total was 668.

  “Billy Phelan wins the match by one pin, without using any of the spot,” Martin was delighted to announce, and he read aloud the game scores and totals of both men. Then he handed the bet money to Morrie Berman.

  “I don’t even feel bad,” Charlie Boy said. “That was a hell of a thing to watch. When you got to lose, it’s nice to lose to somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

  “Yeah, you were hot all right,” Scotty said, handing Billy a five-dollar bill. “Really hot.”

  “Hot, my ass,” Morrie Berman said to Scotty. “You hexed him, you bastard. He might’ve gone all the way if you didn’t say anything, but you hexed him, talking about it.”

  The crowd was already moving away, back to the bar, the sweeper confronting those cigar butts at last. New people were arriving, waiters and bartenders who would roll in the Nighthawk League, which started at 3:00 A.M. It was now two-thirty in the morning.

  “Listen, you mocky bastard,” Scotty said, “I don’t have to take any noise from you.” Scotty’s fists were doubled, his face flushed, his chin in vigorous tremolo. Martin’s later vision of Scotty’s coloration and form at this moment was that of a large, crimson firecracker.

  “Hold on here, hold on,” Charlie McCall said. “Cool down, Scotty. No damage done. Cool down, no trouble now.” Charlie was about eight feet away from the two men when he spoke, too far to do anything when Morrie started his lunge. But Martin saw it coming and jumped between the two, throwing his full weight into Morrie, his junior by thirty pounds, and knocking him backward into a folding chair, on which he sat without deliberation. Others sealed off Scotty from further attack and Billy held Morrie fast in the chair with two hands.

  “Easy does it, man,” Billy said, “I don’t give a damn what he did.”

  “The cheap fink,” Morrie said. “He wouldn’t give a sick whore a hairpin.”

  Martin laughed at the line. Others laughed. Morrie smiled. Here was a line for the Broadway annals. Epitaph for the Scotcheroo: It was reliably reported during his lifetime that he would not give a sick whore a hairpin. Perhaps this enhanced ignominy was also entering Scotty’s head after the laughter, or perhaps it was the result of his genetic gift, or simply the losing, and the unbearable self-laceration that went with it. Whatever it was, Scotty doubled up, gasping, burping. He threw his arms around his own chest, wobbled, took a short step, and fell forward, gashing his left cheek on a spittoon. He rolled onto his side, arms still aclutch, eyes squeezing out the agony in his chest.

  The mob gawked and Morrie stood up to look. Martin bent over the fallen man, then lifted him up from the floor and stretched him out on the bench from whic
h he had risen to hex Billy. Martin blotted the gash with Scotty’s own shirttail, and then opened his left eyelid. Martin looked up at the awestruck mob and asked: “Anybody here a doctor?” And he answered himself: “No, of course not,” and looked then at the night manager and said, “Call an ambulance, Al,” even though he knew Scotty was already beyond help. Scotty: Game over.

  How odd to Martin, seeing a champion die in the embrace of shame, egotism, and fear of failure. Martin trembled at a potential vision of himself also prostrate before such forces, done in by a shame too great to endure, and so now is the time to double up and die. Martin saw his own father curdled by shame, his mother crippled by it twice: her own and her husband’s. And Martin himself had been bewildered and thrust into silence and timidity by it (but was that the true cause?). Jesus, man, pay attention here. Somebody lies dead in front of you and you’re busy exploring the origins of your own timidity. Martin, as was said of your famous father, your sense of priority is bowlegged.

  Martin straightened Scotty’s arm along his side, stared at the closed right eye, the half-open left eye, and sat down in the scorekeeper’s chair to search pointlessly for vital signs in this dead hero of very recent yore. Finally, he closed the left eye with his thumb.

  “He’s really gone,” he told everybody, and they all seemed to wheeze inwardly. Then they really did disperse until only Charlie Boy McCall, face gone white, sat down at Scotty’s feet and stared fully at the end of something. And he said, in his native way, “Holy Mother of God, that was a quick decision.”

  “Somebody we should call, Charlie?” Martin asked the shocked young man.

  “His wife,” said Charlie. “He’s got two kids.”

  “Very tough. Very. Anybody else? What about his father?”

  “Dead,” said Charlie. “His mother’s in Florida. His wife’s the one.”

  “I’ll be glad to call her,” Martin said. “But then again maybe you ought to do that, Charlie. You’re so much closer.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Martin.”

  And Martin nodded and moved away from dead Scotty, who was true to the end to the insulting intent of his public name: tightwad of heart, parsimonious dwarf of soul.

  “I never bowled a guy to death before,” Billy said.

  “No jokes now,” Martin said.

  “I told you he was a busher,” Billy said.

  “All right but not now.”

  “Screw the son of a bitch,” Morrie said to them both, said it softly, and then went over to Charlie and said, “I know he was your friend, Charlie, and I’m sorry. But I haven’t liked him for years. We never got along.”

  “Please don’t say any more,” Charlie said with bowed head.

  “I just want you personally to know I’m sorry. Because I know how close you two guys were. I’da liked him if I could, but Jesus Christ, I don’t want you sore at me, Charlie. You get what I mean?”

  “I get it. I’m not sore at you.”

  “I’m glad you say that because sometimes when you fight a guy his friends turn into your enemies, even though they got nothin’ against you themselves. You see what I mean?”

  “I see, and I’ve got nothing against you, Morris. You’re just a punk, you’ve always been a punk, and the fact is I never liked you and like you a hell of a lot less than that right now. Good night, Morris.”

  And Charlie Boy turned away from Morrie Berman to study the corpse of his friend.

  Martin Daugherty, infused with new wisdom by the entire set of events, communicated across the miles of the city to his senile father in the nursing home bed. You see, Papa, Martin said into the microphone of the filial network, it’s very clear to me now. The secret of Scotty’s death lies in the simple truth uncovered by Morrie Berman: that Scotty would not give a sick whore a hairpin. And Papa, I tell you that we must all give hairpins to sick whores. It is essential. Do you hear me? Can you understand? We must give hairpins to sick whores whenever they require them. What better thing can a man do?

  Martin Daugherty, wearing bathrobe and slippers, sat at his kitchen table, bleeding from sardonic wounds. In the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, who will savor the Father when the Son is gone? He salted his oatmeal and spiced it with raisins, those wrinkled and puny symbols of his own dark and shriveling years. He chewed a single raisin, thinking of Scotty dead, his own son gone to the seminary. But the boy was alive and free to change his mind in time, and the bitter-sweetness of this thought flowed on his tongue: treasure lurking among the wrinkles.

  “You’re mad entirely,” Mary Daugherty said when she saw him smiling and chewing, grim and crazy. She broke into laughter, the lilt of Connacht, a callous response to madness in her morning kitchen.

  “You can bet your sweet Irish ass I’m mad,” Martin said. “I dreamed of Peter, carried through the streets by pederast priests.”

  That stopped her laughter, all right.

  “You’re at the priests again, are you? Why don’t you let it alone? He may not even take to it.”

  “They’ll see he does. Fill him full of that windy God shit, called to the front, cherub off Main Street. Give the helping hand to others, learn to talk to the birds and make a bridge to the next world. Why did God make you if it wasn’t to save all those wretched bastards who aren’t airy and elite enough to be penniless saviors?”

  “You’re worried he’ll be penniless, is that it?”

  “I’m worried he’ll be saved entirely by priests.”

  The boy, Peter, had been sitting in a web of ropes, suspended beyond the edge of the flat roof of home. Billy Phelan, in another suspended web, sat beside Peter, both of them looking at Martin as they lounged in the ropes, which were all that lay between them and the earth. Martin marveled at the construction of the webs, which defied gravity. And then Peter leaped off the web, face forward, and plummeted two stories. His body hit, then his head, two separate impacts, and he lay still. Two priests in sackcloth scooped him into a wheelbarrow with their shovels and one of them pushed him off into the crowded street. Billy Phelan never moved from his web. Martin, suddenly on the street, followed the wheelbarrow through the rubble but lost it. In a vacant lot he confronted a band of children Peter’s age. They jogged in an ominous circle which Martin could not escape. A small girl threw a stone which struck Martin on the head. A small boy loped toward Martin with an upraised knife, and the circle closed in. Martin rushed to meet the knife-wielding attacker and flew at the boy’s chest with both feet.

  He awoke and squinted toward the foot of the bed, where the figure of an adolescent, wearing a sweater of elaborate patterns, leaned back in a chair, feet propped on the bedcovers. But the figure was perhaps beyond adolescence. Its head was an animal’s, with pointed snout. A fox? A fawn? A lamb? Martin sat up, resting on his elbow for a closer look. The figure remained in focus, but the head was still blurred. Martin rubbed his eyes. The figure leaned back on the legs of the chair, feet crossed at the ankles, leisurely observing Martin. And then it vanished, not as a dream fading into wakefulness, but with a filmmaker’s magic: suddenly, wholly gone.

  Martin, half-erect, leaning on his elbow, heard Mary say the oatmeal was on the table. He thought of the illustrated Bible he had leafed through when he’d come home after Scotty’s death, compulsively searching through the Old Testament for an equivalent of the man’s sudden departure. He had found nothing that satisfied him, but he’d put out the light thinking of the engraving of Abraham and the bound Isaac, with the ram breaking through the bushes, and he had equated Isaac with his son, Peter, sacrificed to someone else’s faith: first communion, confirmation, thrust into the hands of nuns and priests, then smothered by the fears of a mother who still believed making love standing up damned you forever.

  Had Martin’s fuzzy, half-animal bedside visitor been the ram that saved Isaac from the knife? In a ski sweater? What did it have to do with Peter? Martin opened the Bible to the engraving. The sweatered animal at bedside bore no resemblance to the ram of salva
tion. Martin re-read what he had written years ago above the engraving after his first reading of the Abraham story: We are all in conspiracy against the next man. He could not now explain what precisely he had meant by that phrase.

  It had been years since the inexplicable touched Martin’s life. Now, eating his oatmeal, he examined this new vision, trying to connect it to the dream of Peter falling out of the web, to Peter’s face as he left home two days before, a fourteen-year-old boy about to become a high school sophomore, seduced by God’s holy messengers to enter a twig-bending preseminary school. Peter: the centerpiece of his life, the only child he would have. He raged silently at the priests who had stolen him away, priests who would teach the boy to pile up a fortune from the coal collection, to scold the poor for their indolence. The assistant pastor of Sacred Heart Church had only recently sermonized on the folly of striving for golden brown toast and the fatuity of the lyrics of “Tea for Two.” There was a suburban priest who kept a pet duck on a leash. One in Troy chased a nubile child around the parish house. Priests in their cups. Priests in their beggars’ robes. Priests in their eunuch suits. There were saints among them, men of pure love, and one such had inspired Peter, given him the life of Saint Francis to read, encouraging selflessness, fanaticism, poverty, bird calls.

  Months ago, when he was shaping his decision, the boy sat at this same kitchen table poking at his own raisins, extolling the goodness of priests. Do you know any good men who aren’t priests? Martin asked him.

  You, said the boy.

  How did I make it without the priesthood?

  I don’t know, but maybe sometimes you aren’t good. Are you always good?

  By no means.

  Then did you ever know any men good enough to talk to the birds?

  Plenty. Neil O’Connor talked to his ducks all day long. After four pints Marty Sheehan’d have long talks with Lackey Quinlan’s goose.

  But did the birds talk back?