Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “What did the doctor say?” Owney asked Dolores.

  “I’m pregnant, all right.”

  “That’s what he said last month.”

  “He’ll say it next month, too.”

  “Do you feel like taking a ride?” he said.

  “With you? Like that? Yes.”

  She moved over in the front seat and he got in, wearing rain pants and coat, hard hat tipped back so that a smudged forehead showed. He took the parkway to Westchester and then drove through streets of lawns for a half-hour before he found the contractor’s house, a ranch house that reached everywhere and had a flagstone walk. Behind the house, there was a line of leafless trees through which, in the near distance, the Hudson River could be seen. The contractor’s wife, upon opening the door and seeing Owney, was apprehensive. She tried to smile as her eyes first flicked over the muddy forehead and then ran down the caked rain clothes. When she looked at Dolores, the woman put some life into her smile.

  “Let me leave these here,” Owney said. He bent down and pulled off his boots. “You two go right in.”

  Dolores walked into the house and the woman, puzzled, stepped in, too. Owney, his clothes over his arm, his street shoes in his hand, walked in barefoot. The woman saw his muddy feet walk across the foyer tiles and then she sucked in her breath as he stepped onto the living room carpet.

  “Abe!”

  Inside the house, on the far end of the living room, the contractor stirred in the den. He looked out and saw Owney. He stood in the doorway waiting for him.

  “Nice place,” Owney said. He walked past the contractor and went down a hallway. He looked in one door that was a closet and then disappeared into the next.

  In the living room, the wife, a blonde with a few too many years in her face, concentrated on the known, Dolores. “Well, and how are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Take her coat, Roz,” the contractor said.

  “No, thanks. We’ll only be a minute.”

  The contractor stood uncertainly. Then from down the hall he heard the faint sound of water running.

  “I’m glad somebody has hot water,” Dolores said.

  The contractor’s grin showed a mouthful of yellow teeth. “What do you mean?”

  “Hot water for the shower my husband is taking.”

  “You don’t have a shower at home?” Deutscher asked.

  “No, we only have a bathtub. When my husband wants a shower, he goes to work. He loves a shower.”

  The three sat in silence and listened to the faint rain of water coming from down the hallway. Fifteen minutes later, Owney stepped out of the bathroom, a cloud of steam billowing behind him, and walked into the living room smiling. He was dressed in street clothes.

  “Let’s go, Dolores. I feel great.”

  She stood up and he took her by the arm and they walked out. At the door, Owney called in to the contractor, “Thanks a lot. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  All the way to Queens, he and Dolores laughed. When they got to Myrtle Avenue, Owney said he wanted to stop for cigarettes and he pulled in front of Gibby’s.

  “Come on in,” he said to her.

  “I’m too tired,” she said.

  “Have one Coke or something.”

  “Get your cigarettes and we’ll go home.”

  “Just one. Don’t I deserve something for what I did?”

  “Only one,” she said.

  “That’s all. I just want to laugh once.”

  “We just did in the car.”

  “This is different. Come on.”

  When he walked into Gibby’s, Fats was there. He shook his head. “I was just trying to leave.”

  “I’ll drive a car for you tonight,” Owney said.

  He laughed and made a motion with his hand and the bartender brought two big cold beers that caught the light from the neons and looked so pleasant that Owney’s hand couldn’t wait to hold one of them.

  “A Coke,” Dolores said.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot her,” Owney said.

  He swallowed beer and Fats threw most of his down. Then Owney raised his glass again, finished it, and put it out on the bar.

  “You said one,” Dolores said.

  “I didn’t even buy the cigarettes yet,” Owney said. He was halfway through his second beer when the door opened and a guy Owney knew from the neighborhood, Jackie Collins, walked in.

  “I don’t want nothing to drink,” Collins said. “You can torture me and I won’t drink.”

  The bartender put a beer on the bar in front of him.

  Collins stood still.

  The bartender put a shot glass on the bar and filled it with Fleischmann’s.

  Collins picked it up, threw it down, and stood waiting for another.

  Fats clapped.

  “Owney,” Dolores said, “my back hurts sitting here.”

  He handed her the car keys.

  “I just want one more. I’ll walk it.”

  She took the car keys and as she walked out the door, Owney said, “Get dinner ready and I’ll be right home for it.”

  He wound up with Jackie Collins in McLoughlin’s on Bailey Avenue in the Bronx, and from McLoughlin’s Owney went straight to work. He was the first man into the hog house that morning, and he found plumbers packing their tools to go home. Owney walked inside and saw steaming water dripping from one showerhead. He turned them all on. Soon the room was filled with steam.

  Owney stood proudly in the hog house as the men came in for work and immediately noticed the showers. When his father arrived, Owney nodded.

  “Good boy,” the father said. “That’s how you do union work.”

  Alongside the hog house, in the lunch wagon, Owney said, “Ham and Swiss.”

  A man who had been sitting asleep atop a stack of soda cases on one side of the doorway stirred. In his hands was a container of coffee that was nearly empty.

  “Want more coffee?” Owney asked him.

  The man was offended. “I don’t drink coffee. I’m a sandhog.” He leaned out the door, poured the last of the coffee onto the ground, and then held the cup out. “Put in something good,” he said.

  “What?” the woman behind the counter said.

  “Something from a brown bottle.”

  “I got no liquor, Slattery.”

  Owney said to the woman, “Give us a beer.”

  Slattery took the can of beer from Owney and poured it into his coffee container until the beer, slightly discolored with coffee, spilled down the sides. Slattery tried to swallow the beer all at once; his idea was to drink beer, not taste it. As Slattery poured more of the beer into his container, Owney decided that he wanted one, too, and he was about to say this to the woman. But he knew that this was wrong and that he shouldn’t drink before work. In the lunch wagon now he heard this small squeaking sound. Then the opponent, alcohol, was there in front of him, moving easily, one hand beckoning. The opponent looked like Jack McAuliffe, scarred and bony, a couple of hundred fights on his face, and right now his hair matted with blood from a cut on the top of his head, put there by a bite during a clinch. The beckoning hand called on Owney to come in and mix it up.

  Owney put his feet flat and threw a punch at the vision and made Jack McAuliffe go away.

  “Give us another beer for Slattery,” Owney said to the woman. When she gave him the beer, he turned around to hand it to Slattery, but Slattery was too busy swallowing his first beer, so Owney looked at the can in his hand, thought for a moment about drinking it himself, and now he heard the small squeaking sound and had the can up high, with his middle unprotected, and in the excitement of the fight, as he suddenly swallowed, he never felt the kick as the beer went into his empty belly; Jack McAuliffe grunted as he hooked with his left into Owney’s middle.

  The beer went down so quickly that he barely tasted it, which was a shame, he thought, and he also thought it would be better if it was tap beer in a bar and he thought of that for a moment. Then he ordered two more cans
of beer from the woman.

  As they walked through the mud toward the tower and the angry wheel, Slattery began to babble just a little bit. “The freedom. One thing about being Irish. You learn about freedom. You know enough to get yourself a job like we got. Say as you want, do as you please. A man got his freedom.” Now they started up the hill toward the tower and Slattery’s legs became uncertain. “I don’t know,” he said, stopping.

  “What do you need?” Owney said.

  “I wonder where the hell they got a bottle. I need one to keep me going.”

  Owney kept walking.

  Slattery did not move. “I don’t think I can make it unless I get a starter in me.”

  A man in a red shirt and white hard hat was standing at the low wire gate in front of the entrance to the shaft. A face gray from the ruined nights of his own life inspected the men walking up from the hog house. The man was in charge of the union alcoholism program. Unlike politics, where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a President how to act on a public stage, or the sports world, where a first baseman who cannot hit a curve ball goes on to become a great manager, alcoholism programs are run by retired champions. Seeing Slattery, the old ruined face broke into a gentle smile.

  “Slats, you’re going the wrong way for a drink.”

  “I’m going to work, Navy,” Slattery said.

  “You know you don’t want to go down there,” Navy said.

  “I’m a good Irishman,” Slattery said.

  “Oh, I know that.”

  “I’m a good Irishman. I can take a drink.”

  “You sure can.”

  “I’m a good American, too. I go to work in the morning.”

  Navy walked up to Slattery and rested his hands on his shoulders. “You show up on time, anyway.”

  “Then get out of my way. I’m going to work like a man.”

  “You don’t want somebody getting hurt around you,” Navy said.

  “How could I hurt anybody?”

  Navy laughed. “Not while Slattery spends the day at the bar.” He tried to walk Slattery away from the shack, but Slattery’s face, as red as a stoplight to begin with, became more flushed, and his boots, responding to the anger in his head, dug into the earth as if he’d been called upon to defend his faith.

  “Do you want a drink of whiskey?” Navy said.

  “Never. Where is it at?”

  “You take a walk with me and you’ll get yourself one of the best drinks you’ll ever have in your life,” Navy said. Now Slattery willingly walked with him. And Navy glanced at the beer can in Owney’s hand and then at Owney’s face. Owney resented the look. Take care of your fucking old drunks. I’m a young guy having a good time. Slowly, with a flourish, Owney drained the beer. Then he walked up the mud hill.

  When he was dressed, he walked outside and saw Danny Murphy, the numbers runner, who stood in the mud and accepted money from the men who kept walking past him.

  “What are you doing out here?” Owney said, and Murphy glanced at the shed alongside the shaft, his usual place of operation, and answered, “They got a small conference going on.”

  Owney took out a ten and a clump of singles. He handed the ten to Murphy. “I don’t have enough for the bar, so I might as well use it to win a yacht.” He stabbed at a number in his mind.

  “Seven thirty-four.”

  “Where’s it come from?” Murphy asked.

  “Oh, it’s a good one,” Owney said.

  “I asked you, from where?”

  “From the priest at my church. He told me the number came to him in a dream.”

  “Go on.”

  “No, you go on. The man told me he had a dream about seven thirty-four. He wouldn’t know where to go, play a number.”

  “Should I play it?” Danny said.

  “That’s up to you,” Owney said, and he walked away. He knew that leaving Murphy in indecision, and forced to make his own judgment, would cost Murphy most of his salary as a numbers runner for the week, for with nobody looking at him, he would bet his living room on even the report of a priest’s dream.

  As Owney walked up to the shaft, there was the sound of his father’s voice inside the shed. Glancing in the doorway, Owney saw the father standing with his blue hard hat tipped back and his arms folded. The father stared at a large man in his early sixties who had silver hair brushed straight back, wide shoulders, and a red muffin face, which was Irish and made the clothes—black suit, white shirt, white tie—visually wrong. They required a swarthy face arid a different setting, Cicero in the 1930s. Yet the Irish guy wore his attire so proudly that he seemed ready to pose for a mug shot.

  “Now don’t get so excited,” the silver-haired man said to Owney’s father.

  “I’m not excited,” Owney’s father said.

  There was a door to the men’s room and somebody inside called out, “Be nice.”

  “I’m not such a nice guy,” Owney’s father called through the door.

  The silver-haired guy stood up. A manicured hand reached out for the father’s shirt. Owney’s father slapped the hand down.

  Owney stepped into the shack. His father signaled him to get out.

  “Who are you?” Owney said to the silver-haired guy. The silver-haired guy’s eyes became pale blue stones in boiling water. Owney kept staring at him. “I asked you who you are,” Owney said.

  Owney’s father snapped, “I’ll let you know if I need you.” Owney did not move. “I said, that’s it,” the father said again.

  The toilet flushed inside the bathroom and a voice could be heard saying, “I don’ want, no fuckin’ trouble.”

  Owney’s father stared at Owney and caused him to leave the place reluctantly. He was walking through the mud and did not see the inside of the equipment shack, where the toilet door opened and Old Jack stepped out.

  “So what have we got?” Old Jack said.

  “We got a guy with no word,” the silver-haired man said.

  Outside, an engine coughed and then sent fumes into the morning air.

  “Wait a minute,” Owney’s father said. He walked outside and began calling out directions to the men gathered around a motor that was pulling a powder wagon up to the lift.

  Old Jack sat down grumpily. Nice, why don’t guys do the right thing and keep everything nice? He stared at the shack wall and remembered when it all started. What was it, seven weeks ago? Look what happened to the thing already. Old Jack was offended. He remembered Charlie O’Sullivan, face flushed with excitement, running a hand over his silver hair, saying to him one day, “I see a guy last night,” which Old Jack accepted as an introduction to a scheme, which it was. O’Sullivan said the guy was a messenger for Jimmy Morrison of the Bronx tunnel workers, who wanted to make a private deal that would result in three or, better yet, four ghost jobs.

  In all of the labor movement, there are two jobs most prized. One is a job that requires almost no work. This is good, but not as good as the greatest job on earth, one in which nobody comes to work and they give you the check for the nonexistent worker.

  The Bronx larceny was simple. The union sent gangs down a man short here and there, and guaranteed there would be no complaints. Old Jack was needed to tell contractors that if no objections were raised about this little thing, these three or four ghost jobs, there would be true labor peace, particularly with concrete drivers, whose allegiance was to the Mafia, of which Old Jack was a member most proud. It wouldn’t cost the contractors any extra money, for they would merely be sending the same number of checks to the job. They would only give up the right to ask questions. On the other side, this particular corner of the union would work a little short-handed here and there, and in matching silence.

  Both sides were needed for a maneuver that would produce as much as eight or nine hundred a week for Old Jack and O’Sullivan, with the other seventeen hundred for Morrison. Old Jack, who pushed drugs for tens of thousands with the same fervor as he filched a newspaper from
a candy store, loved the idea. Steal anything and steal always. He knew O’Sullivan would kill for any figure; O’Sullivan took twenty-five a month off theatre usherettes and said they should be overjoyed that he didn’t want thirty. As the arrangement involved no wildcat strikes by truck drivers, which would need the sanction of many big Mafia bosses, Old Jack felt he could keep all the money for himself. This meant he was stealing not only from the tunnel job but from the Mafia, too, and if there was one thing he liked better than stealing once, it was stealing twice at the same time.

  Before agreeing to the plan, Old Jack asked O’Sullivan one nagging question. “Why doesn’t this Morrison come to see us himself?”

  “Morrison don’t deal with guineas direct.”

  “Why don’t he talk to you, then?”

  “Because I’m with you, he makes me a half a guinea.”

  “I don’t see enough of honor here,” Old Jack said.

  “He could give us nearly five hundred apiece every week. He only says you were a guinea.”

  Old Jack thought that O’Sullivan passed on the insult too easily, and he also loathed the idea of anything that didn’t involve getting even with Morrison’s kid. He even wondered if somehow this was going to produce another assault on him by the kid. He was so overwhelmed by the instinct to steal, however, that he plunged into the scheme, although with suspicions that made him uncomfortable and were merited.

  One payday a couple of weeks later, Jimmy Morrison sat at the bar alone and exhaled smoke over the four checks he had picked up earlier, in his capacity as shop steward. “It’s a shame guineas have to get money from decent Irishmen,” Jimmy Morrison said to himself.

  The checks on the bar, the first ghost checks, were in the names of Chris McCafferty, at ease in the Bronx; Georgie O’Neill, doing not too much in Windsor Park, Brooklyn; Willie Cunningham, enjoying the Bronx; George Tully, taking it slow in Amagansett, Long Island. Not one would question anything; all would rush in if anything went wrong. There was no charge for using their names. I done enough for them guys, Jimmy Morrison assured himself. Lots of times, he thought, guys went down in the tunnel and did fuck-all and nobody ever complained. He remembered one of his ghosts, Tully, sleeping in a tool trunk during a shot. The trunk and Tully got blown halfway down the tunnel. So nobody misses four guys on a big job.