Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “Chico doesn’t interest me,” Dell’Appa said. “If Chico gets asked to the junior prom by anyone this year, it won’t be me who sends his corsage; that’ll come from the Effa-Bee-Eye. We won’t ask him to dance unless and until the Bureau says they’ve broken up, and everything’s over between them.”

  “Because Chico did stuff for my father,” Ernie said. “He was real good to my father. And also real good to me.”

  “Doesn’t interest me in the slightest,” Dell’Appa said. “Joe Mossi’s the guy interests me, in the final analysis, all the way down the line. The meantime, of course, also who he hangs with, and what he does with them. Also: why. Everett Rollins, for instance. Ev Rollins.”

  Ernie licked his lips again. “I’m, ah,” he said, “I’m missin’ lunch while I’m up here, you know.” He jerked his head at the Seiko. “They got separate feeding times for us here, you know? We don’t eat with the other guys here; population eats after we do. I don’t go with the other guys in isolation, I don’t get to eat ’til the next meal. I get pretty hungry, that happens.”

  “Which no doubt spoils your memory,” Dell’Appa said. “Yeah, well: not to worry. I’m on good terms with Stan Graham down here, known Captain Graham for years. I’ve been in this hotel many times. So I mentioned to him, I reminded him when I called yesterday, that I hoped if we did hit it off, you and I, it wouldn’t cause you to skip meals. He assured me it wouldn’t, just as it hasn’t in the past when I’ve interviewed inmates here before. They’ll have a meal waiting for you.”

  “ ’Cause I really am gettin’ hungry,” Ernie said morosely. “ ’Sides, I would rather, I like to eat with the guys. No fun, eatin’ alone.”

  “Aww,” Dell’Appa said, “and you see so little of all your playmates, locked up with each other all day and all night. Gimme a break, willya? You guys’d win an Olympic gold medal, if team-synchronized jerkin’-off ever became a recognized sport. This here, what you’re doin’? It’s much more important ’n tradin’ your cookies, his cake. This’s your future we’re talkin’ about. Precious days outta your life. Tell me a tale of Joe Mossi. Tell me what you know about him.”

  “I still don’t know what you could do for me,” Ernie said. “You didn’t tell me that yet.”

  “Fuckin’ A-Y,” Dell’Appa said. “Fuckin’-A, I didn’t do that. That isn’t how we make deals. I do that and then I walk outta here after, after you give me nothin’, and you call the ACLU. ‘He said he’d get me out and then get me a pension, and make sure all my teeth’d get fixed. And a date with Madonna, besides. Sue him and sue him again. Make the judge make him get me out.’ Right. Up yours, pal. You tell me what you’ve got that you can give to me. I’ll think about it overnight and then I’ll get back to you, what I can trade you for it. You don’t like it? Fine by me. Rot your ass off in here. But that’s the way the deals go down. Ain’t no other way.”

  13

  “What I did was the night shift down at Reno’s onna Lynnway,” Ernie said. “I was the night-man down Reno’s, I went in there, ’Cause that’s what everyone was—first went in, after he trained. ’Cause no one wanted it, see, eight until four inna mornin’, on account of it fucked up their love-life something awful for them. So every time somebody leaves, one of the older guys finds somethin’ better, gets called back on a job he got laid off of, maybe their wife gets a job so they don’t need to work two themselves no more, well, that meant guys that’re still there and’d been Reno’s longer, all of those guys’d move up. If they didn’t like their particular shift, see? The night-guy’d draw the early-shift then, come in four an’ then he’d leave at noon, and whoever got hired to take the old guy’s place’d be the new night-guy again. It’d always been happenin’ that way.

  “Until I come along. With me it was different. I was a new kind of night-guy for them, different ’Cause I kind of liked it. It didn’t fuck up my love-life for me for the plain and simple reason because I didn’t have no love-life, okay? I am like sixteen years old. Not actually old enough, be pushin’ a hack, didn’t have no hack-license or nothin’, so when someone comes in, from the city or somethin’, sees me sittin’ around when I’m there—which is, after all, it’s eight hours a day and five days a week, so you know it’s got to happen there sometimes, I’d be in there when someone comes in—Reno tells them I answer the phone. He don’t tell them I’m drivin’ a cab. And when I’m still workin’, on my shift, all right? But I’m just between fares, or somethin’, I don’t wait out in front inna seatah the cab, like all the rest of the guys, read the paper or somethin’ like that. I come back to the office, shut it down and go in. I read the paper in there. Before two A.M, I mean, I do that. After that you’re still gettin’ the fares from the after-hours joints, sendin’ guys home in them that aren’t too drunk to drive—they’re too drunk to even stand up. But who’s gonna turn Reno in for havin’ me do that? Havin’ me drivin’ to pick up the stiffs, huh? I’ll tell you who’ll do that: nobody, uh-uh, nobody’s gonna do that. Nobody wants these drunken guys, drivin’ themselves home, killin’ all kinds of people, so nobody wants no one to know, and nobody turns Reno in. For havin’ me do that there. And that’s what I know about that there.

  “But so anyway, if that’s what I’m doin’, doin’ that alla the time, how’m I sposed to have any love-life? I’m not in school anymore since my old man goes inna can, my mother and I got no money except what Chico sends over, maybe half what my father was makin’, so all right, okay? Nobody hadda tell me or anythin’. Nobody hadda come and say to me, you know, tell me I didn’t have no choice there: I hadda go to work—I could figure that out by myself. But, you wanna tell me how I’m supposed to get a love-life, I’m not meetin’ no girls, with no girls and no money to spend? There’s a way, well, all I can say is I wished someone would’ve told me back then, when that was what I was doin’. Because I couldn’t think of no way. So for me, though, because of that, I’m actually givin’ up nothin’, I’m not gettin’ laid anyway, bein’ the night-guy’s not really that bad. Wouldn’t’ve been that way for anybody, but for me, it was pretty good.

  “You get better tippers at night, that was one thing. You don’t get so many old ladies. Not so many old-lady pickups, the plaza, the market, the drugstore and all that shit, the kind that the day-drivers get. Not too many widows on Social Security’re gonna tip you real good. The old men don’t tip you good either, most of them anyway, at least. They still think a quarter is serious money, like it used to be, they were kids, tank-ah gas cost them two bucks or so then. You believe that? I wasn’t sure if I did. You know. That’s pretty hard to believe. But I had a fare, told me that once. When he was still growin’ up, that’s what he said, he said it was twenny-five cents. For a gallon of gasoline, right?” Ernie dropped his voice an octave: “ ‘And that was for high-test, young man,’ he says to me, meanin’ I guess, he meant premium by that. He swore he was tellin’ the truth. ‘I can tell you, young man, a buck was a buck then. A quarter meant somethin’ in those days.’ Well, maybe he was, tellin’ the truth, but that still didn’t change nothin’ for me: Guy can’t make no money on quarters if that’s what he’s gettin’—maybe could once, but he sure can’t now.

  “But anyway, no, that’s not what I’m sayin’, at night’s when the spenders come out. And also, the whores make their out-calls—none of them use their own car, naturally, because who wants their ex-husband, payin’ alimony to them ’Cause they haven’t got a job, or maybe they aren’t even really divorced yet, they’re still in a custody fight, somethin’, maybe? Well, how is that gonna look then, he sees their car, their car’s at the motels every night, like they’re workin’ in housekeepin’ there? He isn’t gonna believe that, you know, that they got this new job makin’ beds. Not after what she told him at least, what the thing is she likes to do best, what she called it her specialty, when they was married, when she was doing it, him.”

  “Or their boyfriend, puh-haps? Maybe someone else, a cousin they’re maybe related-to? Their
sister-in-law who never did like them? Their ex-mother-in-law? Oh, she would just love seein’ that, that mean old bitch, catch them out puttin’ out down the beach. She’d go straight home and take out a big ad in the paper, whole fuckin’ full-page announcement: ‘My ex-daughter-in-law’s a no-good fuckin’ slut, she’s a tramp, like I said all along, peddlin’ her ass for cash every night the Imperial Inn. She accepts major credit cards, too.’ Or even one of their regular customers, maybe; he wants to pretend she only does it with him—he knows she’s out sellin’ her hole every single night, just makin’ believe she’s only his girl. Fucks him every Thursday because she loves him so much, the money that he gives her’s just to buy her her own candy and flowers, those garter belts he likes on her so much—not to pay her car insurance, get new soles put on her shoes and keep the telephone turned on. So, the whores don’t, they don’t drive to their tricks; hired pussy takes cabs to the job—and the johns pay for their cab-ride home, too. Which they also book before they leave the car, so that way they’ll have an excuse to get out if the john wants more than he paid them for, or he decides to turn mean: ‘Oh, sweetie, I can’t let you do that to me tonight—that’s my ride honking outside right now. Bye-bye now—don’t forget your sweet Tootsie.’

  “Not that the whores are that good-ah tippers, unless they got to know you real good, they got so they trusted you and like that. But then quite a lot of them want to tip you in trade, and it’s pretty hard payin’ the landlord with blow-jobs—unless he’s the one gettin’ blown. Which’re the principal thing that whores do, by the way, what they always told me was the thing that they got the most call for. I had this enormous black whore that I got so I knew pretty well, drove her around lots of nights, and she was just about the ugliest-lookin’, fat-lookin’ fat skag that you ever seen in your life. A hell of a nice broad, she was really nice, get you laughin’ like you’d never stop. It’s a wonder I didn’t put the cab inna drink onna Lynnway some night, she got me laughin’ so hard. She thought all of her customers were just perfect assholes, the things they all asked her to do, ‘but if they’ve got the money, I’ll do them.’ But she was still, she was really very ugly. She must’ve weighed six hundred pounds. The first night I picked her up and I was going out to get her, Reno happened to be in there and he told me: ‘That’s fat Rita. Make her sit in the middle the back seat.’ See Reno didn’t always take what you’d call the best care of his cars, didn’t always have new shocks put in quite as soon as he should-ah, so as a result they didn’t ride right if you got an unbalanced load. ‘You let her sit to one side of the cab, the front wheel on the opposite side’ll lift half of the road and the headlight on that side’ll look like a small airport beacon, pointin’ right up at the sky.’

  “So I liked Rita, like I say, but I could not imagine how she ever got a customer. Who could get it hard, lookin’ at her? So I asked her one night and she told me: ‘Blow jobs,’ she said, ‘I could suck a basketball through a hundred feet of top-grade fire-hose, and if somebody pays me, I’ll do it. I suck cock. That’s my motto. That’s the motto of all of us girls. Cock-sucking’s our stock-in-trade. “Cocks will be sucked here for money.” Don’t pay any attention to any the girls that tell you they are different, that they got their Mercedes and they got the mink coat doin’ somethin’ different to men, because they’re better, because that’s a fuckin’ lie, kid, just a fuckin’ lie that they maybe wish was true, but it never, never is. I don’t care if they look like Marlene Dietrich when she was only fifteen. What we make our dough offa’s suckin’ dick. You show me a good-lookin’ kid that don’t mind what she puts in her mouth, I’ll show you a good-lookin’ kid who can get you the deed to Japan in three years, she plays her cards right in this world. If middle-class white broads, and rich ones, if they ever start doin’ that, takin’ their men’s cocks into their mouth, us workin’-class girls of this world’ll be out of business. We won’t have nothin’ to do.’ So, I maybe couldn’t pay for nothing with those blow-jobs I got in tips, but they were good at it, knew what they were doin’, and a blow-job a night’s not that bad a tip, either, for a horny kid with no love-life at all.

  “And, bein’ the night-guy, what I could do, I would go right home from work, hit the sack. Because how many people’re there to hang out with, you get off work at four inna mornin’? You see what I mean about that. And my mother’s sacked out, collecting her Zs, which is also a good thing for me, because like my old man was always sayin’: my ma never nags when she’s sleepin’. So she’s not on my ass alla time, drivin’ me nuts like she did him so bad I think in a way he might’ve kinda looked forward—a little bit, you know?—to going to jail like he did. Cut her nagging to one day a week. And then when I wake up, eleven or so, my mother’s gone off to work there, I got the whole place to myself. I get showered, get dressed, I have somethin’ to eat, and then I go over the track. I go over Suffolk, all right? The weekdays. And onna weekends, when I am off—which’s also why I like bein’ the night-guy; night-guy gets all his weekends off; Reno’s got another guy, just works the weekends for him—I also go over to Wonderland there, so: horses days, then the puppies at night. I like goin’ the track even then. I guess you could probably tell that, huh? I always liked bein’ the track, people, excitement and stuff.

  “Well, that’s how I met Short Joe Mossi. I’m over the track there, forget which one it was, one or the other, and it’s just the usual thing. I’m hooked up with someone, you know, like you do, I run into some guy that I knew, and he knows a guy and we’re talkin’. An’ that’s all we were doin’—nothin’ particular goin’ on. And Joey comes up and he knows one of them, and so that’s how I meet him. He’s just ‘Joey’ to me, that’s all he was—I didn’t know him before. I never heard of the guy.

  “The four of us shoot the shit for a while, this’n that, you know the routine, had a beer or had somethin’ to eat, but nothing too serious, you know? Just a few guys over the track. And I see him again, from time to time there, Suffolk and Wonderland, too, and it’s: ‘Whaddaya hear?’ ‘Hey, how’s it goin’?’ The usual stuff like that there. And that’s all I know about him.

  “Now by now I am workin’ for this other guy,” Ernie said. “I’m still over at Reno’s, I’m still night man there, but now I got this other job. Well, not really a real job, exactly. I just do things for him now and then.”

  “And this would be Chico, of course,” Dell’Appa said. “Odd-jobs for him at the track.”

  Ernie sighed. “Look,” he said, “you know what I told you, all right? You know what I already said. I told you my father goes inna can, draws a Concord Twenty, all right? He thinks he’ll get out in a couple of years. That’s what everyone does, ten percent, am I right? If they draw MCI Concord. So naturally that’s what everyone thinks, and so he thinks that, too, that that’s what’s gonna happen to him. Except he doesn’t get out in two years like he thinks—gets the heart attack first, so he dies. And everyone’s sorry, naturally, because most of them liked him, all right? And nobody even expected it, either. He was just barely forty years old, and looked like he was in pretty good shape. But he did drink and smoke a lot, that doesn’t help, and I guess it could’ve been that.

  “So, but that don’t change nothin’. Once he’s dead, well, now everything’s different. He wasn’t at home, of course, he’s doin’ time, so it wasn’t like he wasn’t there: All of a sudden, boom, he’s not at home—he didn’t come home anyway. No, but what it was, like, this still meant that there was a change. Back then, at least, still some of the guys would still do the right thing, if a guy that they knew went away. And, it wouldn’t be much, maybe, but you still would know that if you ran with them and if you got hooked there, and then you stood up and went in, well, your family’d have food onna table, all right? So you knew they would still be all right on that kind of thing, there, as far as that was concerned. They would still have enough to eat. And the landlord would not throw them out, or like that, so they wouldn’t be out onna street. Because
he would know that if he did that, then someone would come to see him, someone he would not like seeing, if he did something like that to your family, just because you were in jail and they got behind on their rent. Even though when you got out, naturally, you would still owe the rent. And the guys that still did this—and not all of them did—but the ones that still did it took pride.

  “But once the guy’s out, once he’s out of the joint, then that was the end of it, okay? They done all they’re supposed to do. Jesus, I mean, you got to be reasonable—how much can you ask a guy, huh? How long can you ask them to do this? Guy doesn’t get out, he dies inna can, what’s his rabbi supposed to do then? It isn’t their fault that he died. And he’s not keepin’ quiet for anyone now, so now what’re they doin’ this for? Give his family a pension for life? No, you can’t ask for that. They’re all really sorry the guy died inna can, ’course they are, because look what he did for them, with him not talkin’, or otherwise they would’ve been going in too. Themselves, just like he did, they would’ve gone in with him, too. And so, they appreciate it, and the money is how they show that. But Jesus, the guy’s dead now. Bein’ sorry don’t make him alive; there’s nothin’ they can do about that, and sooner or later, there’s no way around it, that money has gotta end sometime. It just hasta come to an end.

  “So,” Ernie said, “that meant that I hadda find some more work to do, you know? Somethin’ else I could do to get money—more money, I mean. Because my mother, she’s still workin’ too, but wait-ressin’ don’t pay that much and she never liked hostessin’ there, keepin’ track of the help, customers always pissin’ and moanin’, all of that shit and so forth. She said it gave her a headache. So, but it was takin’ what she makes and almost all what I bring home, from bein’ the night guy at Reno’s, takin’ almost all of what we both make just in what it’s costin’ us to live. And I’m eighteen years old now, you know what I mean? It’s not like I mind gettin’ my spine sucked out three or four times a week, any time that I want, actually, but I think there should be more to your life’n jump-inna-backseat, quickie blow-jobs between fares in Reno’s second-oldest cab. Sure, I’m a still a young guy, that’s easy to say, but I’m also, hardworkin’ guy too. I also deserve to have a good time, have a few laughs for myself. Well, as you probably know, been a young guy yourself, you’ve been one too, you got to have money for that. You can’t have a good time without money, if you deserve it or not.”