Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  Martin crossed Pearl and went into the K. of C. and called the city desk by candlelight. Viglucci said there was still no explanation for the blackout, but up at Harmanus Bleecker Hall the audience had panicked when the lights went. People shoved one another and Tip Mooney was knocked down and trampled.

  Punishment.

  “This bum’s a Cuban and so’s one of the broads,” said Morrie as Billy and Martin followed him down two slate steps to the basement doorway beneath the high stoop. Morrie rapped and the pimp peered out in his puce shirt, his hair brilliantined, his shoes pointed and shiny, both ends of him gleaming in the harsh backlight. The lights of the city had come back on an hour earlier.

  “Hey, Mo-ree,” the pimp said. “Whatchou lookin’ for?”

  “Pussy,” said Morrie.

  “You in the right place.”

  The pimp, the same man Red Tom threw out of Becker’s, had a face as pointy as his shoes and resembled Martin’s long-snouted animal child. Why should the likes of him concretize a Daugherty abstraction? But why not? Ooze to ooze, slime to slime. Brothers under the sheets.

  Two young women sat at the kitchen table drinking sarsaparilla out of jelly glasses. Knives, forks, glasses, and dishes sat in the sink. The stub of a candle stood in a pool of dry wax on a saucer. The pimp introduced the girls as Fela and Margie. Fela, obviously La Cubana, was dark, with hair to her kidneys. Margie had carroty red hair, redder by blood weight than Mary Daugherty’s crop. Both wore brassieres, Woolworth couture, a size too small, shorts to mid-thigh, with cuffs, and high heels.

  “They got shorts on,” Morrie said. “Last time I saw a whore in shorts was Mame Fay’s.”

  “I know Mame,” said the pimp. “She’s got influence up in Troy.”

  “She used to recruit salesgirls in the grocery marts,” Billy said. “She tried to hawk a friend of mine.”

  “She’d give talks in the high schools if they let her,” said Morrie.

  “Young stuff is what Mame likes,” Margie said.

  “Yeah,” said Morrie, licking his lips.

  “Talk is gettin’ hot, hombres. Young stuff right in front of you. Who’s ready?”

  “Don’t rush me,” said Morrie.

  Billy pulled up a chair between Fela and Margie and looked them over. Martin felt a thirst rising.

  “You have any beer?”

  “Twenty-five cents, hombre.”

  “I’m a sport,” said Martin, and the pimp cracked a quart of Stanwix.

  “Those broads up at Mame’s,” Morrie said, “took their tops off when we come in. I’m the best, one of ’em says to us, so take me. If you’re the best, says the other, how come your boyfriend screwed me? You? says the other. He’d screw a dead dog with the clap, but he wouldn’t screw you. And then they went at it. Best whore fight I ever saw. Bit one another, blood all over the joint, one of their heads split open. Me and Maloy laughed our tits off.”

  “We don’t fight,” Margie said. “We like one another.”

  “That’s nice,” said Morrie, and he put his hand inside her brassiere. “Soft.” He laughed, found a chair, and sat down.

  “Maloy,” said Billy. “What the hell is he doing in Newark?”

  “Who said he was in Newark?” Morrie asked.

  “I thought you did.”

  “He ain’t in Newark.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s someplace else.”

  “How do you know he ain’t in Newark? I heard he was in Newark.”

  “What the hell’d he be in Newark for?”

  “Why not Newark?”

  “He don’t know nobody in Newark.”

  “This is a famous guy,” the pimp told the girls, putting his hand on Morrie’s shoulder. “His name’s in the paper this morning. They say that’s all about the kidnapping, right Mo-ree?”

  “Billy’s name’s in there, too.”

  “Very big men in Albany if the McCalls put your name in there,” said the pimp.

  “You don’t like the McCalls,” Billy said. “They threw you out of Becker’s for bad-mouthing them.”

  “I never like them,” said the pimp. “They make me a janitor at the public bath, then fire me.”

  “What’d they do that for?”

  “For nothing. A little thing. Look at the ladies and pull the old rope. They catch me and tell me I’m all finish. Little thing like that.”

  “It ain’t against the law to pull your rope,” Morrie said. “It’s against the law to get caught.”

  “It sure ain’t against the law here,” Margie said.

  “Yeah, you boys come here to talk or screw?” Fela the Cubana said.

  “Screw,” said Morrie, “and you got it, lady. Let’s go.” He stood up and tongued her ear and she knocked a jelly glass off the table. He took her down the hallway and into a bedroom.

  “Hey, Mo-ree,” said the pimp, “she’s the best blow-job in town.” Then he told Martin and Billy: “Margie’s good too.”

  “Is that right?” Billy asked Margie. “Are you good?”

  “I ain’t had a complaint all week.”

  Billy washed a glass in the sink with soap and water and poured himself a beer. The pimp came over to Martin.

  “What do you like, Mister? Little blow from the best?”

  “I’m just along for the ride. I’ll stay with the drink.”

  Martin washed a glass and poured a beer. He stared at the door of the broom closet, then opened the door and saw the notebook for The Flaming Corsage hanging from a nail on a short piece of cord. It was inscribed on the cover: To my beloved son, who played a whore’s trick on his father. Martin closed the closet door and sipped his beer, which tasted like the juice of rotted lemons. He spat into the sink.

  Martin dried his mouth and studied Margie, who removed her brassiere for him. Her nipples lay at the bottom of the curves, projecting somewhat obliquely. Martin considered the nipple fetishists of history. Plutarch, Spinoza, Schubert, Cardinal Wolsey The doorbells of ecstasy, Curzio Malaparte called them. Billy reached across the table and lifted one of Margie’s breasts. People preparing for sexual conflict. The pimp slavered and picked his nose with his thumb.

  How had Martin’s father prepared for sex? On spindly legs, he stood in his shorts in his bedroom, reading Blake on the dresser top. The shorts seemed unusually long. Perhaps he had short thighs. He looked sexually disinterested, but that was unquestionably deceptive. His teeth carried stains from pipe-smoking. He had a recurring ingrown toenail, clipped with a V, a protruding bone on the right elbow from an old fracture. These things were antisexual.

  How would Martin’s son ever know anything of his own sexuality? Gone to the priests at thirteen, blanketed with repressive prayer and sacramental censure. How could the tigers of chastity be wiser than the horses of coition?

  Ten years ago, a phone call had come for Martin after he’d completed a sexual romp with his wife. The caller, a Boston lawyer, had heard that the notebook of The Flaming Corsage was in Martin’s possession. Was that true?

  Yes.

  Was it for sale, or would it be preserved in the trove of Daugherty papers?

  The latter, of course.

  Well, you may take my name and address, and should you change your mind I want you to know that I will pay a handsome price for that notebook. Like the play made from it, it has a deep significance for my client.

  What significance is that?

  My client, said the lawyer, was your father’s mistress.

  “All right,” Morrie said, emerging from the bedroom. “Little bit of all right.”

  “That was quick,” Billy said. “You like it?”

  “Short but sweet,” Morrie said. “How much?”

  “Buck and a half,” said the pimp.

  Morrie snapped a dollar off his roll and fished for the fifty cents. Margie put on her brassiere. Fela picked up the sarsaparilla bottle and looked for a glass.

  “Only a buck and a half?” Billy said.

  “Th
at’s all,” said the pimp.

  “It must be some great stuff for a buck and a half.”

  “Go try it.”

  Fela tipped up the bottle and gargled with sarsaparilla. She spat it into the sink and eyed Billy. The pimp took Morrie’s dollar and change. Martin opened the broom closet and found a dust pan hanging from a nail.

  “How the hell can it be any good for a buck and a half?” Billy asked.

  “Hey, I ought to know,” said the pimp with a rattish smile of cuspids. “She’s my sister.”

  Billy hit him on the chin. The pimp sped backward and knocked over a chair, shook his head and leaped at Billy’s throat. Billy shook him off, and the pimp reached for the butcher knife in the sink, but Martin reached it first and threw it out the open window into the alley. Billy hit the pimp again, a graze of the head, but the pimp found Billy’s throat again and held on. Martin pulled at the pimp as the whores scrambled away from the table. Morrie pushed past Martin and bashed the pimp with the sarsaparilla bottle. The pimp slid to the floor and lay still. The whores came out of the bedroom carrying their dresses and handbags.

  “He looks dead,” Billy said.

  “Who gives a goddamn?” Morrie said, and he tipped over the kitchen table, opened the dish closet and threw the dishes on the floor. Billy tipped over the garbage pail and threw a chair at the kitchen window. The whores went out the back door.

  “Son of a bitch, pimping for his own sister,” said Billy.

  “She wasn’t bad,” said Morrie as he swept the contents of the refrigerator onto the floor. “She’s got nice teeth.”

  Martin salvaged a new cold bottle of Stanwix and poured himself a glass. He opened the broom closet so Morrie could empty it. Billy went into the bedroom where Morrie had been with Fela and tore up the bed clothes, then kicked the footboard until the bed fell apart. On the bedside table stood a metal lamp of a nautical F.D.R. at the wheel of the Ship of State, standing above the caption: “Our Leader.” Billy threw the lamp through the bedroom window. Martin straightened up two kitchen chairs, sat on one and used the other as a table for his beer, which no longer tasted like rotten lemons. Billy came back and nudged the inert pimp with his foot.

  “I think you killed him,” he said to Morrie.

  “No,” said Martin. “He moved his fingers.”

  “He’s all right then,” Morrie said. “You ain’t dead if you can move your fingers.”

  “I knew a guy couldn’t move his toes,” Billy said, winded but calming. “His feet turned to stone. First his feet then the rest of him. Only guy I ever knew whose feet turned to stone and then the rest of him.”

  Transgressors of good fame are punished for their deeds, was what occurred to Martin. He stood up and opened his fly, then urinated on the pimp’s feet. Simoniacs among us.

  “What’d you make of Morrie’s answer about Maloy?” Billy asked.

  “I thought he was evasive,” Martin said.

  “I think he’s lying.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  “You tell me,” Billy said. “Must be he doesn’t want Maloy connected to Newark.”

  “Maybe he’s not connected.”

  “No. He was lying. I saw it in his face.”

  They listened to the dismal blues Slopie Dodds was making at the piano. Martin squinted in the dim light of Martha’s Place, where they’d come for a nightcap after leaving Morrie. The smoke was dense in the low-ceilinged bar, which was full of Negroes. There were four white men in the place, Martin and Billy, a stranger at the far end of the bar, and Daddy Big, a nightly Negrophile after he reached his drunken beyond. Daddy was oblivious now of everything except hustling Martha, a handsome tan woman in her forties with shoulder-length conked hair, small lips, and a gold-capped canine tooth. Martha was not about to be hustled, but Daddy Big did not accept this, steeped as he was in his professional wisdom that everybody is hustleable once you find the weak spot.

  Slopie ended his blues and, as Martha moved to another customer, Daddy Big swung around on his stool and said, “Play me the white man’s song, Slopie.” Slopie grinned and trilled an intro, a ricky-tick throwback, and Daddy Big sang from his barstool the song he said he had learned from a jail-house nigger who’d sung it in World War One: I don’t care what it costs, I’ll suffer all the loss. It’s worth twice the money just to be the boss. ’Cause I got a white man workin’ for me now. The song merged with “The Broadway Rag,” into which Slopie passed without comment. Daddy Big opened his arms to the room and said as the ragtime bounced off the walls, “I love all niggers.” Looking then to the black faces for reciprocation and getting none, he discovered Billy at the corner table, near the neon-lighted window.

  “What’re you doing here, Phelan?” he asked. “You ain’t a nigger.” The words were crooked with whiskey.

  “I’m an Irish Catholic,” Billy said. “Same thing to some people.”

  A few who heard this smiled. Daddy Big hurled himself off the barstool and staggered toward Billy, stopping his own forward motion by grabbing the back of a chair with both hands.

  “You got your tail whipped tonight.”

  “Doc was hot,” Billy said. “A good player got hot.”

  “Bet your ass he’s a good player. Bet your ass. He’ll whip you every time out.”

  “Then why didn’t he whip me the last two matches we played?”

  “He’ll whip you from now on. He’s got your number. All you know how to shoot is safe and you blew that tonight. You ain’t got nothin’ left, if you ever had anything.” Daddy waved his left hand in front of his face like a man shooing flies. He lurched for the door with one word: “Bum,” and went out cross-footed, leaving the door ajar. Martin closed it as Daddy Big careened in the direction of Union Station.

  “He’s got a mean mouth,” Martin said.

  “Yeah,” said Billy. “He’s a prick now. Prison got him twisted. But he used to be a nice guy, and at pool he was a champ. Nobody in Albany could beat him. I learned a whole lot watching him sucker chumps who thought they knew something about the game.”

  The white man from the end of the bar stopped beside Billy. “That guy talks like the wants to wind up dead in the alley. He keeps that up in here, he’ll get what he’s after.”

  “He’s a cousin of the McCalls,” Billy told the man. “Nobody’ll touch him.”

  “Is that so?” The man was chastened. “I didn’t know that.”

  “That pimp,” Billy said to Martin when the stranger left, “I don’t know why he didn’t stay down. I hit him right on the burton. They used to stay down when I hit ’em like that.”

  “Do you suppose he’ll try to get even?”

  “He’d get worse. You don’t come back at Morrie.”

  “Then you think Morrie’s dangerous?”

  “Anybody pals around with Maloy and Curry’s dangerous.” Billy thought about that. “But I like Morrie,” he said. “And I like Maloy. Curry’s nuts, but Morrie’s all right. He saved my ass there.”

  Slopie finished his ragtime number, a tour de force that won applause. Billy signaled to Martha to buy Slopie a drink.

  “Can I tell you something, Martin?”

  “Anything.”

  “Positively on the q.t.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Yeah, I do. For a straight guy, you know a lot. Why’d you piss on that guy’s feet?”

  “He seemed worth that kind of attention. I don’t meet too many like that. What did you want to tell me?”

  “I threw that match tonight.”

  “Hey,” said Martin. “What for?”

  “So I wouldn’t owe Berman.”

  “I don’t think I follow that.”

  “He lent me fifty to bet on myself. If I win, then I got money through him, right? But if I lose, I owe him nothing. I already give him back the fifty and we were even. Then the son of a bitch saves my ass.”

  “So you were going to talk to Patsy about him then?”

  “I don’t know.” />
  “I could tell them what you want to say. I don’t have your qualms.”

  “They’d know I pumped him and then didn’t tell them.”

  “Then tell them.”

  “But that puts me full on the tit. Bindy and Patsy paying my debts. Paying you. Me on the tit like Daddy Big. That bastard calls me a bum, but he’d chew catshit if Bindy said it was strawberries.”

  The stranger who said Daddy Big wanted to die came back into Martha’s. “Somebody better call an ambulance,” he said. “That drunk guy is outside bleedin’ all over the street.”

  Martha went for the phone, and Billy and Martin ran down the block. Daddy Big lay on his back, his face bloodied badly, staring at the black sky with bugged eyes and puffed cheeks, his skin purple where it wasn’t smeared with blood. Two of his front teeth were bent inward and the faint squeal of a terrified mouse came out of his mouth. Billy rolled him face down and with two fingers pulled out his upper plate, then grabbed him around the waist with both arms and lifted him, head down, to release the vomit in his throat. Billy sat down on the sidewalk, knees up, and held Daddy across his lap, face down, tail in the air. Billy slapped his back and pressed both knees into his stomach until his vomiting stopped. Daddy looked up.

  “You son of a bitch,” Billy said. “Are you all right?”

  “Blllgggggggghhh,” Daddy said, gasping.

  “Then get your ass up.”

  Billy rolled him off his lap, stood up and pulled the drunken Daddy to his feet. Customers from Martha’s stood behind the two men, along with half a dozen passersby Billy leaned Daddy against the wall of the Railroad YMCA and Martha blotted his face with a wet towel, revealing a split forehead and a badly scraped nose, cheek, and chin. A prowl car arrived and two patrolmen helped Daddy into the back seat.

  “Where’ll you take him?” Martin asked.

  “Home. He does this regular,” one policeman said.

  “You should have him looked at up at the emergency room. He might have aspirated. Inhaled some vomit.”