Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  Jimmy Morrison swallowed some of his drink. For all that I done for this union I deserve something nice. He looked down at the checks again. The four checks on the bar totaled $1,974.82. The only trouble was, in a half-hour, he had to meet a guy and hand out $985, to go to Old Jack and O’Sullivan.

  He pushed the four checks at Sharon the barmaid. For cashing services, Jimmy gave her fifty dollars. “I got to meet somebody right away,” he told Sharon. Reluctantly, he left to make the payoff.

  He did this for several placid weeks. And then there was a day when he again sat at the bar, with Sharon across from him, and this time, rather than mutter to himself, he sat up straight and said aloud, “Why should a guinea get money from a good Irishman?”

  When Sharon cashed the four checks, Jimmy Morrison put the money into his pocket and remained on the barstool.

  “You goin’?” Sharon said

  “No.”

  “I thought you hadda meet a guy.”

  “Not this time.”

  Warmth flowed from his pocket and through his body. “I don’t want to go hurting my back hanging storm windows on hooks,” he told Sharon.

  “What is this storm windows?”

  “The storm windows I’m going to have on Long Island. I want the kind that you just slide in.”

  “What Long Island?”

  “I’m buying a house there.”

  “With that?” she said, indicating the money in his pocket.

  “Absolutely.”

  Two drinks later, he told her, “I’m goin’ to live in a house at Exit Sixty-three. I give the guineas fuck-all.”

  He kept all the money that week. He liked that so much that he kept all the money the following week, too.

  When Morrison reneged for the third week in a row, O’Sullivan reported to Old Jack, “He says he’s buying a house and then he thinks maybe he can send us something.”

  “I told you he got dishonor,” Old Jack said.

  Old Jack at first thought he had to keep his fury in secret. If he went back and told subcontractors to stop paying Morrison for ghosts, this would be so astounding that the Mafia would hear of it and convict Old Jack of cheating, punishable by ice pick. After two more weeks went by, however, the thought of Morrison collecting all that money had flames crackling inside Old Jack’s head. Soon, Old Jack’s caution deserted him and now in his fury he appeared personally at the Bronx tunnel job.

  Where, as he sat in the shack, listening to Jimmy Morrison’s shouting outside, Old Jack became livid.

  “When he comes back in, you let me talk to him,” Old Jack said to O’Sullivan.

  “How are you going to talk to this man? He thinks you’re from the sewer.”

  Now Owney’s father walked back in and stood with his arms folded. “All right.”

  Old Jack smiled. He reached out and tried to pinch Jimmy Morrison’s cheek.

  “Hey, keep your hands away,” Jimmy Morrison said, pulling his head away.

  Old Jack shrugged and sat down. “What do we do here?”

  Jimmy Morrison didn’t answer.

  “Two, three, four weeks, you collect all this money on account of us.”

  “That’s thousands of fucking dollars,” O’Sullivan said.

  “You don’t do the right thing,” Old Jack said.

  “We’ll have to see,” Owney’s father said.

  “See what?”

  “See if we really need you. I never made the deal with you myself.”

  “Your man did,” O’Sullivan said.

  “So now I got to see him. I think he made a bad deal. I don’t think you deserve anything. Especially.”

  “What especially?” Old Jack said.

  “Especially that you’re a fuckin’ guinea,” Jimmy Morrison said. “We never had a guinea near a sandhog job in the Bronx and I think we ought to keep it that way.”

  He turned around and walked out on them.

  O’Sullivan kicked the wall of the shack.

  “Be nice,” Old Jack said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “We go,” Old Jack said.

  As they were walking to the car, Old Jack said, “His kid, he was good and fucking fresh to me, too. They think I forget.”

  5

  THE CAGE CAME TO the surface and somebody pulled apart the two wire gates in front of the lift. There were about forty men who got on, with Owney pushing aboard last. The cage had no sides; it was just a metal floor that rose and fell on the cable from the angry wheel overhead. Somebody closed the gates and the cage groaned and the cable whined as the men looked in silence at the sky for the last time. The first shadows started on the metal floor and the cage dropped into the metal shaft and the faces all looking up at the sun now were covered with shadows and then the men stood in darkness as the elevator took them down to their cave, which was nine hundred feet under the streets of the Bronx.

  The lift broke into light and bounced at the bottom of the shaft, and the two gates were opened and the men walked out into a temple of stone that ran the length of two football fields and had a curved ceiling that went as high as a cathedral. Seven stories high, it was forty-five feet wide. The temple had been blasted out of the core of the earth and someday would be filled with huge pipes and two-hundred-ton switches that would route enough water at manageable speed to supply tens of millions living in twelve counties. This switching chamber was designed to last as long as people managed to remain on earth.

  Owney got off the lift and walked through mud water under floodlights that bathed the sullen gray rock walls. Smaller lights were strung along the walls like Christmas decorations, and as the lights ran up the walls, the line of lights became smaller and smaller until at the top, far away from the eye, up along the cathedral ceiling, the light looked like stars at dusk.

  Halfway up the walls on both sides there were ledges that ran the length of the chamber. Standing on the ledges now were large and loud men who became insignificant as they stepped through shadows in this great stone cathedral; no pharaoh, explorer, or conqueror ever had seen or imagined such a sight. Running off the ledges on each side of the chamber were the entrances to seventeen separate tunnels—noisy catacombs, thirty-four of them, enough crevices to hide a great religion from those who would end it by sword—catacombs that were thirty feet high, with rail tracks and flatcars and men standing around waiting to ride the cars along the tracks into the darkness.

  For this moment in the morning, as men stepped off the lift, Owney wanted to stand here on the wet bottom and look up at the stone cathedral ceiling, stand here in his white hard hat, khaki jacket, and yellow rain pants, and lean on his coalminer’s shovel. Breathing air that was dark and flat, he thought of himself as a miner in Kentucky someplace. How you? In New York, nobody even knew that there was this stone cathedral under their feet, or that there were men working in such a place. He found the solitude of being this far underground pleasant for a few moments; no hand or thought from the confusion of life above ground could reach him. If there was no order to the day on the ground above, there certainly was here. All of which faded as he climbed a ladder in the lifeless air to the ledge and then walked to his catacomb. Overhead, in the shadows of the cathedral ceiling, there were many metal straps, Band-Aids, eight and ten feet long, fastened to the rock by one-inch bolts that went ten feet into the rock and were meant to prevent rock from falling. When a piece does happen to fall, it is rarely small: a chip can weigh a ton. At the entrance to his catacomb, Owney walked over to the motor, a squat yellow diesel locomotive, grabbed a handrail, and rode to work hanging on to the motor as it ran down the tracks through a tunnel of gray-black bumpy rock that looked like a shark’s gullet. The mind was numbed by the sameness and shadows and silence of the rock as it passed over him. When Owney looked straight ahead down the tunnel, the rock began to revolve. Cellar air blowing into his face was not enough for a complete breath.

  “The air’s bad,” Owney said.

  “The money’s good,
” the man next to him, Delaney, the foreman, said. A cigarette hung from his mouth.

  The motor ran through darkness and then out into areas bathed in bright light, where sandhogs stood in puddles in the lights and smoked cigarettes.

  “Oh, the money’s wonderful,” Delaney said again.

  Now water dripped from the rock roof, which was supported by iron arches placed only a couple of feet apart. In the spaces between the arches, Owney could see the rock that everybody despised, rock with white streaks that had been shot into it millions of years ago, like soda water, weakening it to the point that like any formation or populace without strength, it is eternally dangerous; let the whitened rock shrug just once.

  For one stretch, the rock was so threatening to the eye that in places where the top of the metal arch was not flush against the white rock, the spaces were packed with wooden planks. Someday, when the miners were finished hollowing, the caves would be lined with six feet of concrete, which would support the rock for centuries. Until then, the miners would labor under a roof they suspected of being a murderer.

  The motor slowed and the tracks ended in rubble and mud water. The miners from an earlier train ride stood at a wooden table that had a coffee urn and cans of evaporated milk. A few yards down from them, exposed by a mean light, weeping in anger, with the water forming a large dark pool at the bottom, was the face of a mountain from a half billion years ago, a mountain that once stood high in a sky afire and then, pulsating with the same pressure that first caused the earth to form, shook all the land around it, creating valleys and fields. Then the mountain dropped, roaring, hot, toward the middle of the earth.

  Here it now stood, a mountain underground with part of its side exposed in the mean light, revealing a striped rock, the light stripes of quartz and feldspar, the dark stripes of biotite mica, rock known to man as Fordham gneiss, which is the way of dealing with anything beyond the feeble limits of logic and imagination—affix a label consisting of a familiar name, thus denying mystery—and all the while deep inside this rock there was a woman who had died young and who now walked tormented at dusk down a road between empty fields as she called for the children she had left at her bedside. Her call was muted, a woman whispering the names of children so softly that the names cannot be heard, but there are times when the woman, engulfed by her sorrow, moans with such an intensity that crows in the field take startled to the air, cawing loudly, and it is at this moment, crows crying, mother moaning, that the rock parts and allows the woman to search further for her children.

  Once, when they blasted into the rock and began one of these catacombs running from the giant chamber, they must have opened on to the edge of one of the fields where the woman walked, for that day, Owney saw her moving about nervously, her shoulder brushing the first layer of rock, a woman in a shawl and a long brown skirt that kicked as she walked. A hand kept tugging on strands of damp tangled brown hair as she looked about.

  “Where are my children now?” she moaned. “Perhaps I must walk all the way to the sea to find them playing on the shore. Their father wouldn’t know. He is a man. He lays in bed and cries for his own loneliness.”

  Her moan rose in intensity as the crows rose excitedly into the freezing sky. Caw, caw.

  But on this morning in the cave, the woman in the rock was silent and Owney stuck his ham and Swiss into a cubbyhole on a wooden bench against the cave wall. Owney saw that there were two empty spaces alongside his sandwich, which meant that he was down in the hole with only a seven-man gang. In the row underneath, there was another space, which meant one of the other gangs was a man short.

  “We’re all short,” he said to Delaney, the foreman.

  Delaney threw a cigarette away and fumbled in his shirt pocket for another. “Slattery got drunk.”

  “What about the second man? And they’re one short in one of the other gangs. You should have hired a shaper.”

  “See your father.”

  “What’s he got to do with me working on a short gang?”

  Delaney turned away and called out, “All right, lads, let’s get at it. One, two, three, lads.”

  Owney walked to the face of the tunnel. Burning along the left side of the cave was the devil’s tongue, a red laser beam that did not diffuse or distort as it silently blazed through the darkness, six feet above the floor and only a few inches from the side of the cave. If the laser was aimed down the center of the tunnel, trains and equipment would stop its beam. Placed along the wall, the laser each day struck the rock at the same spot; a ray from a stopped sun. A lanky surveyor, who had a brown hard hat pulled down over a clean college face, stood at the face of the tunnel, held a ruler into the laser beam, then measured three feet out onto the rock face from the beam, and one foot down. A man with him marked the point with yellow paint. The surveyor looked at a chart. Then he touched another spot. Again, the man dabbed it with paint. The surveyor touched another spot. More paint. Owney stood to the side and waited as the surveyor kept going to the chart, tapping a spot on the wall as the paintbrush dabbed. The painted dots went in a circle around the thirty-foot circumference of the wall. Now the surveyor started a circle of dots inside the perimeter circle. As he consulted his chart more rapidly, there were more dots of yellow paint, forming circles within circles, and a dozen paint spots became half a hundred and then a hundred and finally at the center of the rock face, the dots went into a different pattern, a diamond and, inside the diamond, a large square with four dots inside it. When the surveyor and painter were finished, the rock was speckled with one hundred fifty dots. The miners were to drill a hole sixteen feet deep at each of the painted spots.

  The diagram had been drawn months before by another surveyor, a man so painfully shy that he looked down when others spoke to him and who was so uncertain of his words that he kept a pipe between his teeth, causing the sandhogs to suggest that he was a complete homosexual. Standing outside the surveyors’ trailer, the sandhogs boasted of the damage they could do to each other with their heavy fists; inside, the surveyor they thought was a fag sat at a desk, excitedly biting his pipe-stem as he worked out a method of blowing up tens of tons of rock with a pattern of explosions whose image caused his heart to shriek with joy: one hundred fifty holes drilled into the rock in a pattern, then stuffed with eighteen hundred pounds of explosives timed to go off sequentially. On paper, the surveyor’s diagram resembled a page from a children’s connect-the-dots book.

  When the surveyor in the tunnel was through marking his dots, the miners took over, stepping over the hoses and wires running along each side of the tunnel, walking in the noise of the engine parked on the tracks and the sound of a second motor that pushed a double-decked white metal platform over the tunnel bottom and up to the face of the rock. On the decks sat eight two-hundred-pound hydraulic drills. With a splash, the metal platform stopped in the water at the face of the rock, and foremen throughout the tunnel began calling out Delaney’s “One, two, three, lads.”

  Owney climbed the steps to the top platform of the rig and slapped a hand on his drill, which stood on a Jackleg. Mickey Doherty, the chuck tender, came up and began to inspect the hoses that ran from the drill to the motor on the back of the decks. Doherty worried about the drill, a new model that had been perfected by the Russians. It used high-speed bursts into the rock, relying on cumulative effect rather than the old American industrial style of banging into the rock with a single arm-ripping blow, as if it were the face of a personal enemy.

  For a week, as they grew accustomed to the new drills, Doherty had been worrying that if the Russians were this far ahead in mining equipment, then their bombs might be designed along the same lines: quick bursts everywhere. Doherty’s view of the world always had been that there would be one huge bomb falling into Manhattan, killing the heathens instantly, while his street, just off Katonah Avenue in the upper Bronx, would be touched only by unseen and painless fallout that would produce a slow death for Mickey Doherty, with him sinking a bit each day b
ut never with pain, and with time for the Pope of Rome to transmit through the local parish, St. Brendan’s, a plenary indulgence, which would leave Mickey in peaceful, sainted weakness, able to say only his rosary, and then, bursting with grace, rise one morning into Heaven. That was his old dream.

  His new fear was that the Russian nuclear attack, small, speedy, numerous, patterned after the mining drill, could mean a spray of small nuclear bombs all over the town, including one that would crash onto Katonah Avenue and blow up Mickey Doherty at the precise moment when his soul was covered with the slime of an hour with Marge Ryan, of 239th Street, a woman known to Mickey’s wife as a lonely widow and to Mickey as a girlfriend who would keep a secret. Mickey Doherty saw himself dropping into Hell like a broken elevator.

  Standing on the platform alongside Owney, Doherty looked sourly at the drill. “The fucking Communists.”

  Owney slowly put on heavy ear protectors, which would keep him from going deaf, but also left him uneasy, as there would be no way ever to hear the dead mother moaning louder and causing the crows to shriek—caw, caw, caw—as the rock roof opened up while he stood in the last instant of his life.

  Owney was almost at the cave wall on the right, and he had to maneuver the drill on an angle into his first yellow spots. Doherty, standing alongside the tip of the drill, held a light on the yellow spot. Owney adjusted his protective goggles, switched the drill on, and pushed it against the rock. On the tip of his drill was a one-and-seven-eighths drill bit, with water spraying out of a hole in the bit to wet down the rock dust. A groove on the side of the drill bit allowed water heavy with sediment to run back out of the hole as it was being drilled. This hole on the perimeter was the first of twenty that Owney had to drill this morning, holes an inch and seven-eighths in circumference going sixteen feet into the rock.

  A tunnel thirty feet in diameter running for miles under a city is built by shaving off the face of the rock in fifteen-foot sections. Drill sixteen feet, blast away fifteen, and then start drilling again. Driving tunnel, forty-five feet a day, explosions on two shifts, two hundred twenty-five feet a week, is the order on paper in offices up on the ground. Under the earth, in the flat, dark air, the wet, gloomy rock gave quarter grudgingly, and after each shot, its white-streaked roof caused the miners to take hours throwing up iron arches, packing the tops with wood, losing time so that the tunnel had moved ahead only one hundred nine feet the previous week.