Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Heaney called today. He said I have a job with the Ferries Department.”

  “They’re just going to give you the job?” Dolores said.

  “Because of the medal.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  She pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “All right. Why not? Is it for you? What do you have to do?”

  “If it’s a job, I can do it.”

  “I don’t mean that. I’m not worried about you doing a job. But will you like a job where you have to sit all day in a building? That’s important, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll take it,” Owney said.

  The next Wednesday, the night before the meeting, they went out for a while and of course Owney wanted to tarry wherever he was and the time in the night outpaced them and at four in the morning Owney was in the bedroom, the door open, looking at his new brown job suit that was on a wooden hanger hooked to the top of the bedroom door. Actually, he saw one brown suit and half of another, so he closed one eye to consolidate the clothes and in doing this he saw that the lapel hole was still sewn. He took the blue rosette for his medal and said to himself, Let me see what this looks like in my new suit. As long as I’m going, put on a show. He went into the bathroom for a razor blade, then took the brown suit jacket off the hanger. Actually, he yanked the suit jacket off and in doing so lost his balance and fell onto his back on the bed. Keeping one eye closed, he aimed the razor blade at the sewn lapel hole and his hand darted at the material, causing the razor blade to cut completely through the edge of the lapel, miss the hole entirely, and slice his thumb. Blood smudged the lapel. Owney swore and began cutting at the lapel as if it were tough beef until he had the rosette in place.

  “How’s it look?” he said, flat on his back, holding the jacket up with both hands. The blue rosette for the medal had a nest of brown tufts sprinkled with dark blood spots.

  Dolores, watching from the doorway, said, “Fine.”

  “You bet it’s fine.”

  In the morning they took the M train, which ran on a ribbon of rust between apartment houses where Puerto Rican women in housedresses leaned out top-floor windows of rooms in which there were mattresses with no sheets. The train then climbed the Williamsburg Bridge, and squealing, scraping, passing windows with more Puerto Rican women staring out, it dove into a tunnel in lower Manhattan.

  In front of City Hall, limousines were parked with their rear tires against the sidewalk. Owney and Dolores went up many wide steps with grooves worn in them from seventy-five years of people running up them and trying to leap through the doors and make a huge splash in the gravy. At the top of the steps was a line of French doors, with only one of them open. The policeman on duty inside felt comfortable only when the usual municipal thieves walked by. As Owney approached, the policeman inspected him, saw with satisfaction that Owney had short hair, and allowed him to pass. In the lobby, standing on a marble staircase leading to the second floor, were lacquered men with starved eyes.

  “I think I’ll wait here,” Dolores said in the lobby.

  “You come with me,” Owney said.

  “No.”

  “Hey, this has got to do with you, too.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “If I get it, then you get it.”

  “In a way.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That I’m staying here.”

  She put her purse on a radiator top. With a shrug, Owney walked up the stairs, reading his matchbook cover, which said his appointment with Mortarano, the Ports and Terminals Department man, was outside a hearing room on the second floor. Owney asked a cop, who pointed to a thin man with hooded eyes who stood in an open doorway that looked into a large room where a woman with a clipboard was screaming into a microphone at a circle of men seated at a high desk. When Owney introduced himself, Mortarano’s hand came out solemnly, as if at the entrance to a funeral chapel. “It is my honor to meet you.”

  “Heaney told me,” Owney said.

  “I know. How can I assist you?”

  “I’m supposed to get a job.”

  “You’re not working now?”

  “I’m in the sandhogs.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  “I think that’s a very good job.”

  “In a way. Heaney said I ought to be here.”

  “Of course you’re a very hard man to turn down. A record like yours. The trouble with my department is, you’ve got to take the civil service test.”

  “Heaney told me you were supposed to see me about a job has no test,” Owney said.

  “What job did he tell you?”

  “Deputy for ferries.”

  “That’s my job!”

  “I didn’t know,” Owney said.

  The hooded eyes were wide in alarm and the soft voice now ran up the scale. “Who told you ask for my job? Did Heaney tell you this?”

  “I told you what he told me.”

  “Did you speak to your county leader before you came here? Are you coming here to push me out of work?”

  He whirled and looked into the big room. The woman shrieking into the microphone was waving her clipboard. Mortarano said, “Now look what you’ve done to me. This is my hearing. A new slip for Staten Island. I’m supposed to be running it. Excuse me now.” Brisk steps took him into the big room.

  Owney went to bed early that night in order to be fit for work in the morning. As he stretched out in bed, the anger kept his eyes wide open. It was hours before he fell asleep. He wanted to be someplace where the rock overhead, no matter how dangerous, still protected him from the disorder above ground.

  He walked in his boots through the mud puddle that ran the length of the wooden floor between the rows of lockers, the sudden flopping sound causing men to look up, for at this time of the morning—six-fifteen—it was the loudest noise in the long hut, even though there were already more than fifty men dressing for their day’s work in the mine. Their fingers moved across shirt fronts like tired crabs. Low coughs formed their most coherent sounds. Always, these men boast loudly of the great money to be made in the mine; money for them at this time was marvelous, six and seven hundred dollars a week, depending on overtime, but all of this talk is done at a distance from the job, out in a bar someplace where they talk through their glasses. Here, in a wet hut and approaching the moment when they must put up their bodies in order to finally realize this money of which they talk so much, tongues stick to the teeth.

  Overhead, dry street clothes hung on chains from low rafters. The hut was called the hog house by workers who would use it for the length of the job, probably fifteen years. It looked like the dressing room of an old fight club, and gave the same feeling that somewhere outside the door, waiting for each arrival, was some sort of a calamity. Of the couple of hundred who used the hut each day, there would be, before the job was finished and the hut torn down, deaths and feet crushed and bones rotted by dampness and livers rotted by drink and babies born and daughters married and fathers crying at graduations. And, always, in the darkness of a morning, the fresh face of somebody’s son, in grammar school when the job first started and now presenting his own body for a man’s hardest labor. No matter what the occasion of the moment, whoever was in the hut each morning through all the years would sit without words.

  At the end of the rows of lockers was a picnic table, at which five men, the first dressed for work that day, sat in plaid wool shirts, yellow rain pants, and boots with metal tips. They played cards silently. One of them, James, a black with a close-cropped beard, was a member of Owney’s work gang. He had his lunch bag on the table, and next to it a Bible. When James opened the Bible each day to read it at lunch in the tunnel, inside the cover he had pictures of his house in St. Croix, a squat cinder-block hut that had a tin roof and a dirt path from the door that led out to a road where people waited in the dust for two and three hours at a time for rides. James foun
d four rooms in the Bronx, with heatless days and cold water in the winter, with extra locks on the doors and guns in pockets of people on the street, a vast improvement over the stillness of St. Croix.

  On the bulletin board behind the picnic table was a sign reading: ANYBODY CAUGHT STEALING WILL BE KILLED.

  Owney stood in the doorway and looked out at equipment sheds and, beyond them, trucks and bulldozers. Then a slick hill rose from the mud, and atop the hill, dominating the area and placing a curse in the sky that caused, the eye seeing it to look away, was the high tower of red steel, and the great, angry wheel hanging from its top, that marked the presence of a mine. The wheel spins and metal lifts loaded with human flesh drop into the deep hard cold folds of the earth.

  In the mist in the morning in Wales, in Merthyr Tydfil, men step from their mean row houses and walk with their heads bowed toward the black tower and great ugly wheel suspended at the top. And at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where the wheel is also black, and men work deep and far out under the bed of the North Sea, hunched over in tunnels four feet high, and at Cabin Creek, West Virginia, where men step out of trailers dug into the side of the hill and wearily go toward the tower and the wheel, at all the places all over the earth where men give up their dreams and their bodies for the money of mining, the wheel dominates. As he looked at it, regarding it as an enemy of his youth, he heard from somewhere in the air the squeak of a boxing shoe on canvas, and somewhere in him he knew what this was, but he paid attention only to the ugliness of the wheel.

  Owney stepped out of the hog house and into the moist air and then walked behind the shack and up to a chain link fence, on the other side of which was a street of two-family houses, good houses of the upper Bronx, frame houses with aluminum siding and storm doors that had family initials. Owney faced the side of the nearest house, which had butter-yellow aluminum siding. He grasped the chain link fence and rattled it, causing a loose section of the chain link to slap loudly against the metal post holding it. Right away, in the butter-yellow house, at the ground-floor window, a small face appeared. The window opened.

  “Rock Man!”

  “Bang bang!” Owney answered.

  The face was gone and now there was a sound at the side storm door. A boy of about four came running out in a yellow pajama top and the rest of him bare. Ran to the fence through the mud with a hand out. “Rock Man!” Owney took a piece of rock out of his shirt pocket, rock from the mine, a rock maybe five hundred million years old. He pushed the piece of rock through the fence and the kid grabbed it.

  “You’re the second boy in the whole world ever to touch this rock,” Owney said.

  “Hi, Rock Man,” the kid said.

  Owney pointed at the house directly across the street from the boy’s. Pale green aluminum siding all sleeping in the morning light.

  “That one!” Owney said.

  The bare bottom raced away. Tiptoed across the street, hopping once when he stepped on a pebble, ran up the front stoop to the top, where he held up the rock and twisted his body around, the lips pursed in mighty effort, and let the rock go at the front door. The rock struck one of the glass panes under the mailbox and bounced back. Nothing was broken but the rock had made noise enough in the stillness. The kid started to hop down the stoop.

  “Chris boy!” A mother’s voice. Bare bottom teetered on the stoop as he looked over at Owney.

  “Bang bang!” Owney’s finger pointed at the milk box on the stoop. The bare bottom spun around, saw nothing, and looked back at Owney. “Bang bang!” Owney called again, finger remaining at the milk box. Bare bottom spinning, he saw the milk box and Owney yelled, “Yeah!” and then the kid picked it up, high, empty metal, an off day, which was too bad, for a full milk box would have been more fun for both the kid and Owney. The kid held the milk box to his chest and then heaved it against the door. Heaved it only a couple of inches, because after all, he was a small boy, but heaved it enough to make a loud noise as the milk box struck the storm door. In the clattering, the bare ass came down the stoop and went across the street, giving a great leap when the foot hit another thing, a stone or a stick, that hurt.

  And behind him at the green house, the storm door opened and a man looked out sleepily.

  “Yo!” Owney called to the kid. Who stopped in midstride, a jumble of bare legs and bottom turning around to face the man in the green house and recite lines that had been learned perfectly over the months of mornings.

  “Fucko!” he yelled at the man.

  “Give it to him good,” Owney hissed.

  “You fucko!” the kid yelled.

  Now he turned again and came bounding toward Owney at the fence. There was a sound at the side of the butter-yellow house, the boy’s house, and the side door opened and she leaned out, her long black hair asleep on her shoulders, her eyes squinting, and the lace of the top of the white nightgown looped across her breasts.

  She heard her son cry again, “Fucko!” and her voice carried along the side of the house: “Chris!”

  The boy started scurrying along the side of his yellow house to the woman in the doorway.

  “Rock Man!” Owney called out.

  Again, bare legs and bottom jumbled around and the boy came flying to the fence. Owney went into his pocket for another rock. Slow, go slow. Take your time. He had some of his vision on the shirt pocket with the rocks in it and the rest of it on the woman just inside the doorway. Slow, go slow, then maybe she will come out and stand in the morning light in her white nightgown.

  “Chris-to-PHER!”

  The kid turned around without his rock and ran to the side door. The mother had a hand out for him. She looked across at Owney with feigned exasperation on her face. “Lunatic!” she called to Owney.

  I want to see you, Owney said to himself.

  The woman looked down as her son slipped through the door. Which then closed.

  Tomorrow morning, Owney thought.

  He wanted his life to be on the other side of the fence, dancing in the air like a kite, trying for that one moment when the kite, caught full by the breeze, shimmers in excitement. Bare bottom causing the heart to leap with a rock banging against a window so loud the whole house jumps up. And a woman outside the door with the light streaming through her nightgown and over her body. All fun. Kite in the sun.

  Once, at the start, he enjoyed things inside the fence. There was the day when he came into the hog house after a shift and here was one of the men, McSweeney, who sat on a wooden bench and scratched the side of a bare foot that was stained gray from the day’s mud. McSweeney looked up with eyes that had been stabbed by a lively night.

  “No showers,” he said, pulling back on an old blue work sock and leaving as dirty as the earth could make him.

  Outside, Owney’s father, as shop steward, was talking to the contractor, Deutscher. Owney walked out and stood alongside him.

  “That’s a crime we got no showers,” his father said.

  “I’m just hearing about it now,” Deutscher said.

  “We told your office yesterday,” Owney’s father said.

  “That’s just what we did,” Owney said. The contractor seemed irritated that Owney cut in. But Owney’s father was comfortable with it.

  “This is the first I heard of it,” the contractor said.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Owney’s father said.

  “Get it fixed now?” Owney said.

  The contractor exhaled. “You’ll have showers tomorrow.”

  “We’ll hold you to that,” Owney said. His father nodded.

  “So hold me. Then take a shower.”

  The next morning, Owney stepped noiselessly toward the bedroom door. A bundle stirred in bed. “You have to leave me the car,” she said.

  “I know. You told me last night.”

  “I got to go to the doctor’s. You can’t forget.”

  “What do I forget? My father’s picking me up outside.”

  “I’ll come for you at three-thirty,”
she said.

  Later, when Owney came out of the hole and into the cold afternoon, there was thick mud clinging to his hands and his face and inside his shirt, on his chest and stomach. At the hog house, there was a crowd at the entrance to the shower room. “It don’t even drip,” one of them said.

  Owney’s father stood outside the hog house. “I’ve got to make up my mind,” he said.

  “To do what?” Owney said.

  “To strike the place right now, have no night shift, or to wait until we come back tomorrow. Have this shift start the walkout.”

  “Fuck. Nobody’ll get paid,” Owney said.

  “What’s that got to do with it? Are you supposed to be yellow, sit there do nothing when the guy gives you no water,” the father said.

  “No, I know what to do with the bastard,” Owney said.

  “Do you?” the father said.

  “I’ll fix him and maybe we don’t have to go out and lose money,” Owney said. “Give me like two hours. I’ll call you.”

  The father shrugged and Owney walked over to the contractor’s trailer. One of the bosses on the job, Podhoretz, sat at the desk.

  “Deutscher just left,” Podhoretz said.

  “He told me come for dinner. Me and my wife. Now I lose the address.”

  “He told you dinner?”

  “He’s got a nephew going to get drafted. He wants me to talk to the kid.”

  “Deutscher didn’t mention that to me.”

  “What’s he going to do, talk about something personal? His nephew is scared to death. I’m going to give him some real draft counseling.”

  “How could you do that?” Podhoretz said. “You went all through the thing. How can you tell somebody else how to cheat?”

  “I’m not. I’m going to teach him how to make the war go fast. I’m going to teach him how to kill a lot of guys at once.”

  “Oh,” Podhoretz said. He began going through a folder.

  “I also want to teach him to make sure and listen to them as they go. The blood gurgles like a bitch. It’s great.”

  “Oh,” the man said again. Hurriedly, he wrote an address on a slip of paper. Seventy-five View Lane in Dobbs Ferry, which is in Westchester. Owney took the slip and got his clothes and walked down to the car in his work clothes.