Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

He picked up the baby and told the patrolmen, “Give me a ride.” The young girl already was walking down the old staircase. She was out on the sidewalk, lighting a cigarette, with a small suitcase at her feet, when Kaufhold and the cops came out of the house. She picked up the suitcase and started walking up toward Jamaica Avenue.

  “Hey,” Kaufhold called.

  “What y’all want?” she called back over her shoulder.

  “What’s the baby’s name?”

  “Dolores.”

  When she was about six, in the middle of the summer before she went to first grade, Dolores stood at the counter of Lutzen’s delicatessen on Catalpa Avenue with a note and money to hand to the owner. Standing in front of her, one of the neighborhood women looked back, then said to the owner, who was behind the counter, “She’s starting to look like them now.”

  “Looks like the father,” the owner said.

  “Oh, I think the mother.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” the owner said. “Whatever. It sure proves that even when you’re a stranger, you live with somebody long enough, you get to look like them.”

  The note and the money were clenched inside Dolores’s little fist as she went out the screen door of the store and went home.

  “Why didn’t you go to the store?” Ellen Kaufhold asked her adopted daughter.

  “Who do I look like?” Dolores said.

  A fire alarm sounded inside Ellen Kaufhold. She gave vague answers and waited for her husband to arrive home. At first, he felt the truth would weaken their authority with the girl. Ellen also noticed that her husband had an inability to put connected sentences together on the subject, thus indicating that he had not been able to think the matter out clearly enough to speak unhesitatingly. Billy then called his sister, Frances, who was still the dominant figure in his life at times such as this.

  “She told me to tell the baby the truth,” Kaufhold told his wife after he hung up.

  “I could have told you the same thing,” Ellen said.

  “Well, now I’m going to do it,” Billy said.

  The next day, he and Ellen took Dolores to Myrtle Avenue for a gleaming blue lunch box, a leather school bag made for students of college age, and then, with Dolores impatient to run out and show her presents to her friends, they forced her to sit in the living room while Billy Kaufhold told of how she had entered the family.

  “What happened to my real mother?” Dolores asked.

  “She went away that night and nobody ever saw her again. But we wanted you so much that we brought you into this house that very night. It was one of the happiest nights we ever had.”

  “My real father went with my real mother?” Dolores said.

  “No. He went in another direction. Something was the matter. I couldn’t ask them. I was too much in a hurry to bring you home and make your mother happy.”

  Later that night, when Billy spoke about this to Frances, he heard her voice rise to a scream. “Why did you say the mother and father ran away?”

  “Because that’s what happened. You told me to tell the kid the truth.”

  “But I didn’t tell you to tell her more truth than you had to,” his sister said.

  “What do I know? I do as I’m told,” Billy said.

  “I wish you’d tell yourself what to do sometimes,” Frances said.

  One day a year later, Dolores was on Myrtle Avenue with her mother and as they windowshopped at Empire Dresses, Dolores asked for change to buy a scissors for school. She went into the little Woolworth’s and bought shears and then went back to the mother at Empire Dresses. The mother then decided to go into Muller’s Shoes next door. Dolores said she wanted to remain outside. “But don’t wander,” the mother said. Dolores slipped into Empire Dresses and waited until the saleswoman was busy at the far end of the store. Then with the scissors, she carefully cut large pieces off the hem of each dress on the rack in front of her, and one blue dress, the one she had decided that her real mother was coming in to buy, was cut to ribbons.

  “Where is your mother?” the saleswoman said to her softly.

  “Shoe store,” Dolores said, hiding the scissors behind her back.

  “I see.”

  The woman walked into the shoe store.

  That night, Dolores was in bed, but Billy Kaufhold, who had had too much to drink, talked so loudly to his wife that Dolores heard him.

  “All we have to do is tell her that her mother went to a place way down South or something and that she never comes up here to buy a dress or anything like that. Then the kid’ll have no reason to cut everything up.”

  “Think that’ll work?” his wife said.

  “I hope so. I tell you, I’m starting to love her so much that I can’t handle it if she gets unhappy.”

  At the delicatessen two days later, the counterman caught Dolores stealing a family-size package of Fritos.

  When it came time for her first confession, she was uncertain of what to say to the priest. She had been doing wonderfully in school, but didn’t think he wanted to know about that. When she got in the confessional the first time, she couldn’t figure out what to do. To stand. Or kneel. She didn’t even know which way to turn in the darkness. Then a wooden panel slid and there was the priest’s face.

  “I said bum three times,” Dolores told the priest.

  “Is there anything else?” he asked.

  Dolores felt she needed something more, so she said, “I stole some money from my mother’s pocketbook.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty cents.”

  “Will you put it back?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where will you get the money to put it back?”

  “From her other purse.”

  3

  IN VIETNAM, THE FIRST time Owney Morrison was shot at, from trenches under a tree line that rose from the hot, stunted grass, he headed toward the fire. Springing, flopping, springing. He sidestepped an old Vietnamese face that was covered with orange sand and had the tongue hanging from one side of the mouth. He continued through grass and bushes that had wet bandages and torn shirts hanging from them. In a trench dug into the soft dirt he found himself for a suggestion of an instant looking at a regular North Vietnam soldier, in khaki uniform. The North Vietnamese was scared and did not move and Owney’s senses were clear and his hand and shoulder moved. The North Vietnamese went down on his back. There was no hesitation or sound. The body was gone before Owney could see the face or the wound. The body was in the dirt with one arm stiff in the air. Straight up in the air as if saluting. One ankle was behind the other. Only a few times did Owney see in his mind this ungainly form. Never did he give a fuck for the guy. Nor for the others. Always, his hand went inside his shirt and touched the scapular medal.

  He met John Wayne one day. Or, at least he got close enough to John Wayne to thrust his hand through the crowd and Wayne, shaking each hand that came at him, grabbed Owney’s. Wayne was making a tour, like a general, and showed up at Duc Co, standing in the middle of a hot field that was several miles from gunfire. His helicopter was behind him and old, gray, smiling officers nobody ever had seen accompanied him. As some sort of walking music, there was a Frank Sinatra tape playing over the loudspeaker.

  “That man got a slow voice,” Goat Gregory, a black from Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn, said.

  “It’s Sinatra,” Rulis, who came from New Jersey, said.

  “I don’t care who it is. He sings draggy. Get on some Aretha Franklin. Who wants to listen to this old man motherfucker draggin’ away?”

  Now here was Wayne with a circle of grunts around him. Big, all right, but old as hell, and he had on a blue baseball cap with admiral’s braid from the carrier Enterprise.

  “Mister Wayne!”

  He looked around, his face amused.

  “You can’t wear that here. You’re with the grunts.”

  Smiling, Wayne took the Navy cap off, revealing sparse hair over a red forehead. Somebody handed him a fatigue cap and he
put it on, letting it sit on the bridge of his nose. Everybody clapped.

  “You’re all a lot younger than I am,” Wayne said. “Seems to me, every time I see a war, the guys fightin’ it get … younger.”

  “You still could fight with us, Mister Wayne,” somebody called out.

  He smiled. “It would be my … honor. It’s an honor just to stand with you men. When I think of how some of my country is supportin’ you.” He bowed his head and shook it slowly. Then raising it, and looking around at the crowd, he said, “They hide in school. Do you know what’s their idea of somethin’ to read? John and Mary goin’ around San Pedro Bay! Mention to them about fightin’ for their country and you know what they do? They run to Canada. They run so fast you can’t even … see them. Even that’s not far enough. Somebody in Canada says to them, ‘Why don’t you go home and fight for your country?’ So they hightail it some more. They don’t stop runnin’ until they see polar bears. That’s how far north they go. The poor polar bear, he got to mosey off because he can’t stand the sight or the smell of the crummy-lookin’ bastards.”

  “Mister Wayne!”

  “Yes, son.”

  “What did they do to draft dodgers in your time?”

  “That was another time.”

  Now Owney yelled, “Tell us what did they do to those guys?”

  Wayne held up a hand in disdain. “Let’s not talk about those scum. I want to get around here and meet some real men.” He began stepping and grabbing hands and Owney thrust his hand between shoulders and he felt this big hand grab his and then Wayne stepped on. Smiling gray heads and silver eagles and stars around him. Behind Wayne, this chubby bald man in an expensive khaki hunting shirt was twisting one way and the other to help answer some of the questions that everybody was shouting at Wayne.

  “He wore the eye patch in True Grit,” the chubby man said. “What’s that? No, no. John Wayne never got laid on camera. Ha!”

  Owney called to the chubby man: “We were asking him what happened to the draft dodgers in his time. Do you know?”

  The guy shook his head. “I can’t even remember them.”

  “What war was that?” Owney said. “What war was John Wayne in? World War Two, right?”

  “Korea!” a voice yelled.

  “You’re nuts. He’s older than that. He was around in World War Two.”

  “What was he in, the Marines?” Owney asked.

  The chubby guy shook. “No, he wasn’t a Marine. We wouldn’t bring a Marine here to get you guys mad.” He smiled and clearly tried to curtail the subject.

  “A flier?”

  The guy shook his head and shuffled after Wayne.

  “He had to be infantry,” Owney said. Then he yelled, “Mister Wayne!”

  Wayne’s big head turned.

  “What were you in, Mister Wayne? Infantry, World War Two, right?”

  Wayne smiled and waved his hand and then began some vigorous handshaking with a group to his right.

  When he was gone, and it was getting dark, Gregory was smoking dope and insisting to a circle of guys, “I doan think that fucking man ever was in anything.”

  Everybody, Owney included, laughed at that.

  “Then why doan the man tell us what outfit he was in?” Gregory said. “You ask me what outfit I’m in, I tell you, George W. Gregory, RA 11817415, D Company, 17th Cav, 173rd Airborne Brigade. I tell you that. Now what did he tell you? You hear him give his outfit?”

  “Sure, he did,” somebody said.

  “What outfit?” Gregory said.

  “Marines.”

  “He never said Marines,” Owney said.

  “Then what did he say?” Gregory demanded.

  When nobody answered, Gregory said, “The man doan give an outfit ’cause he ain’t got one to give. He never was in no military service. He a hero in his mind.”

  “Bullshit,” Owney said. It was irritating to hear a nigger against Mr. John Wayne like this. That night, he got half shot on a bottle of Seagram’s and he made a tape recording to send home. He and everybody else with him felt puffed up, and capable of extra violence, because they had shaken hands with Mr. John Wayne. For the tape recording, they fired guns and screamed and then Owney spoke into the recorder. His words were only the least bit slurred. He said that they had had Mr. John Wayne with them all day and that he stirred things up.

  “I didn’t expect it to be this dangerous. The reason I am sending you this on tape instead of writing you is that I need both hands tonight. I can talk into a microphone I got set up, but I need my hands. I’m going to strangle a gook tonight when they come near me, which they sure will.”

  He mailed it, and then when he realized a day later what he had done, he went around trying to get the tape back, but it was too late. As they were out in the field and wouldn’t get to Pleiku, where there might be a chance to patch a call to New York, he could do nothing but hope the tape was not as bad as his memory told him it was. It was. When the tape arrived home, his father went to Kings Plaza in Canarsie and bought a player. That night, he had people over—Chris Doyle and Delaney from work, Owney’s cousin, and Owney’s mother’s brother and his wife—and they all had a drink and then Owney’s father stood in the middle of the room and told everybody to be quiet, that he had something special for them. He turned on the tape.

  The first gunshot sound caused Owney’s mother to wail.

  “Holy Jesus,” the father said. He tried to turn the tape off, but he got nervous and was still pulling at it when now, mixed with the shots on the tape, came screams. Finally, the father simply yanked the plug out. He carried the tape out of the house and when he made the turn to go to the bar on Putnam Avenue, stopped and threw the tape into the trash can.

  The letter that Owney wrote to Dolores that affected both the most was the one he wrote early one morning. He drank beer until as he wrote he could not feel the pen in his hand. The setting, lonely and threatening, demanded that he love someone, and he wrote page after page to her about the depth of his love.

  “Everything here is small. The cows are half the size of regular cows. The men are as big as school kids. Why do such big things happen here, then? I guess it’s just another test of a person. On earth, waiting to see someone you love makes every moment seem like an hour. In Heaven, the time races while you wait to see someone you love. But the time stops when the person you love walks in. The time stops forever. So what happens to me here doesn’t matter. I’ll just sit in Heaven and wait for you. I know that when you do come, I’ll have forever with you. So when I do get killed, it’ll be temporary.”

  Ten days later, his outfit was brought back to Pleiku, and he was able to get a phone call through to Dolores, who did nothing but cry because she had just finished reading his letter about death again. Owney then received a letter from Dolores that said that she appreciated his thoughts about being together in Heaven, but right now she preferred him alive in Queens.

  One day, when he had been there for seven months, Owney was sitting on a bunker and suddenly his throat tingled and his fingers scrambled inside his shirt and there was no scapular medal. He became nervous and started walking until he found the chaplain, who was saying Mass on an altar of sandbags. The moment the Mass was over, Owney asked him for a scapular medal and the chaplain went into a bag and came out with the ordinary kind, with two cloth medals.

  “I’ll have to take care of them,” Owney said.

  “And please God they’ll take care of you,” the chaplain said.

  Three days later, in the midst of the fight that brought him his honor, something blew up in his throat and he wound up on his back in the dirt in the sun, bleeding to death. The blood caused the front scapular medal to stick sopping to his chest. Nobody was able to stop the blood and Owney lay with his eyes glazing and then out of the dirt and the sun came a medic named Friedman, who had taken premedical courses in Brooklyn. Who knows how he got there, a Jew drafted out of Brooklyn and sent to Vietnam. Friedman dropped on his knee
s and told Owney not to move and to breathe as shallowly as possible, but not to hold his breath, and as he said this, he reached into Owney’s throat and simply clamped his fingers on a vein and stopped the blood from spurting out into the hot air. Friedman’s fingers holding the vein were a couple of inches above the sopping wet scapular medal.

  He was picking up his money, keys, and the rest of his belongings from the bed while the guy from the next bed, Robards, stood next to him and stared out the window.

  “They’re all your people out there,” Owney said.

  The St. Albans Naval Hospital was spread over what was once a golf course at one end of Queens, in a neighborhood filled with Catholics whose outward faith was stronger than a bank vault. Then a few blacks from South Jamaica, lawyers and shopkeepers, moved into frame houses sold to them by white Catholics. They were followed by Basie, the orchestra leader, Robinson, the baseball player, and Davis, the entertainer, who moved into the larger houses. The St. Albans neighborhood turned out to be, however, perhaps the only place in North America where people preferred not to live alongside Lena Horne. The white Catholics, their bank vaults of faith already on the moving trucks, started to flee, and the place was drained of whites in months.

  Catechism question:

  Q. Where is the dislike of blacks always the highest?

  A. In any decent Catholic neighborhood.

  “I see the sisters walkin’ their dogs,” Robards said, his forehead against the window. “I waves to them.”

  He raised his left arm and waved it back and forth. There were bandages piled at the end of his right arm.

  “Are you left-handed?” Owney said to Robards.

  “I am now.”

  By this time, it was an old line between them.

  Glancing out the window, Owney saw a workman on the circular plot at the hospital entrance, a rake in his left hand, the right scratching the small of his back. Now he whipped the hand out from behind the back and scratched a bite on the back of his neck. The left hand jiggled the rake.

  Two hands. And Robards here had one. Contrast, Owney had decided in bed one day, was one of the main implements of the Devil. It has to be luring Robards into a sin of envy, he thought. He also had figured out, during his months in bed, how it helped wars. Because bishops and priests of his church performed so much of what were generally regarded as women’s duties—comforting a widow, or visiting the sick—they were disturbed by the contrast of them holding some old lady’s hand in a funeral chapel, and a military man, with a blue jaw and sunglasses and looking good and tough, and became jealous of the hard guy and really wanted to be with him.