“What paper is that?” somebody said.
Donnelly seemed surprised. “The Wall Street Journal. It’s the management paper they print on Wall Street.”
“Wait a minute,” Owney said. “That letter was attacking them for what they said about the subway workers.”
“Anyway,” Donnelly said, “it was printed in the Wall Street Journal and I congratulate you. Not many union men got access to a management paper.”
“I dis——” Owney stopped his tongue as he was about to slur. He found it amazing that a half drink like he just had out in the hall could put weight on his tongue this quickly. He took a breath.
“The letter took a shot at them.”
“Anyway,” Donnelly said quickly, “it was printed in the Wall Street Journal and I do congratulate you.”
Owney decided that he had this one speech about Meagher in his mind and he wanted to concentrate on it. He was afraid if he started in on the newspaper he would get mixed up with the thing about Meagher. To prevent slurring, he began talking slowly.
“As for doggin’ it on Brother Meagher, I say I did. I complained about short gangs. Then I let it go at that. So I damn near got killed drilling into a hot hole. The hole was hot because nobody washes the thing down. You ask Larry Delaney. I put in a beef.”
“Did Delaney tell the shop steward about it?” Donnelly said.
“I don’t know,” Owney said.
“Isn’t your father the shop steward?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you ought to ask him.”
From the stage, Callahan’s voice boomed, “Look, this is a meeting for the whole union. Not just for you two guys. Tomorrow being Monday, we’ll take care of these disputes over short gangs on the Van Cortlandt job run by Brother Morrison. Jimmy Morrison.”
Owney and Donnelly sat down. Now Callahan said, “We can’t have guys standing around here snarling at each other, like fuckin’ dogs. All right. Now let’s get back to the reading of the letter from the Safety and Health Committee concerning safety and health.”
Suddenly, Donnelly’s arm shot up.
“Brother Donnelly.”
Donnelly again looked around the room to catch as much attention as possible. “Brothers, we’ve been told that the health and safety aspects of this job are costing us money personally. Can somebody please tell me why our union, and therefore the union members, the workers, have to pay for their own safety?”
On the stage, Callahan, obviously pleased, bellowed: “Brother Donnelly, thank you for bringing that there subject up. Because I want to tell you people once again that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that is OSHA, of which we all hear so much about it, well, I just want to say again today that OSHA is nothin’ more than a jerkoff. You know it and I know it. They pull our pricks. We got eleven men dead on this job since we got started. Eleven men. It’s a fuckin’, fuckin’, sad, sad situation. And how many of you ever saw a federal health and safety inspector? Let me see the hands. Let me see one fucking hand go up. You bet, not one. You know why there’s no hands up? Because they got no inspector to see us on the job. We do it ourselves. Thank you, Brother Donnelly, for pointing this out. All right now. The next order of business is to announce to you that we are going to honor Eddie Coffey, from the Central Labor Trades Council, with a pin from this union for his twenty years of service on the council.”
A hand went up.
“Brother Reilly.”
An older man stood up, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth. “Are we honoring Eddie Coffey senior or junior?”
“Senior.”
“Good. I got deep detest for junior.”
Now that the meeting was about to examine the personal aspects of all not present, and soon would turn to those actually in the hall, with the predictable results, Owney got up and walked down the aisle and looked up at the balcony, where he saw Dolores’s face, ready to pull back like a turtle if somebody happened to glance up and see her. Owney gestured toward the door. As he went through the high wooden door, Kellerman was right behind him.
“Cheeky bastard,” Kellerman said.
“Donnelly?” Owney said.
“Who else?” Kellerman said.
“Tried to make me look bad.”
“Jealousy,” Kellerman said.
“I got no time for it,” Owney said.
“Good boy.”
“He’s nothing,” Owney said.
On the way home, Dolores said to Owney, “Who was the guy who stood up and talked?”
“I don’t know. Who?”
“You know very well. The fellow our age.”
“He asked me about my father?”
“Yes.”
“Donnelly.”
“What does he do?”
“Just another guy working. Works the Roosevelt Island job.”
“The way he got up indicated to me that everything was on some sort of a schedule. Don’t you think they must have gone over everything before they walked in there?”
Which immediately drew up the picture of Donnelly, sitting erect, the coffee in his hands, the hands afraid to raise the coffee to his mouth because he was too busy saying yes, and laughing at the most minor of remarks as he tried to please the business agent and his staff in the coffee shop before the meeting. Owney muttered a profanity under his breath.
On Monday morning, Callahan, as business agent, stood with a clipboard, with Owney’s father alongside him, and they counted heads together as each crew went down. Owney said nothing. The father appeared either too busy or too wounded, Owney felt the latter, to talk to him. The reason for the wounding bothered Owney. When Callahan was off to the side talking to someone for a moment, Owney said to his father, “Did you see any houses you liked yesterday?”
“You asked me that on the way here this morning,” the father said. “I told you. We looked.”
The father’s head turned away quickly. Owney, disturbed, went to the lift.
His father didn’t talk to him for the rest of the day. Owney had left the car with Dolores and driven to work with his father. After work, his father got as far as the turnoff to Glendale and then he went another exit and turned in the wrong direction.
“I told her I’d be home. It’s her birthday and we’re going into the city. She likes that.”
“Have one.”
Owney failed to argue. The father drove down the hill to Jamaica Avenue, a street of low, weary buildings with a late afternoon sun coming through el tracks and falling in pale oblongs on the cracked, empty sidewalks. The father stopped in front of a bar that had no name. The door was held open in the warm air by a barstool that had a ripped leather covering.
When they walked in, the barmaid did not move. She sat motionless on a stool by the window with a cigarette in her left hand. A lion’s mane was dyed black and the thin lips were penciled white, a statue with hard lines.
“Dead,” Sharon said.
“Tough day,” Owney’s father said.
“I had to move last night,” she said. “My boyfriend come around with a U-Haul truck. We couldn’t move till late. The landlord goes to Gotscheer Hall every Sunday night. That’s when I moved out.”
“You owe the rent?” Owney’s father said.
“What do you think? What do you think I’m movin’ for at night, to save the couch from the sun?”
Slowly, she slid off the stool. “I made a real big move in my life. I moved from nowhere to nowhere.”
She put small beers in front of them and then shot glasses of bar rye.
Owney threw down the shot, which burned, and took the beer in two swallows. It had that first heavy malt taste, but the second beer she gave him went down cold and quick. He lit a cigarette and stared at himself in the mirror behind the bar. The place was the worst. You got to be eighty to like it in here, Owney thought. He wanted some place with loud, fast noise.
Owney took out his wallet and went through it. One hundred and forty dollars. The bi
lls gave him an empty feeling. When he cashed his check the other day, he remembered putting up forty on the bar and telling himself that was all he was going to spend.
His father, seeing him puzzled by the money, said, “What are you worrying about? I got it.”
“I need some to take home.”
The father went into his pocket for money that was folded in half. He put it on the bar, where it seemed inches high. “Take what you need.” There were fifties and hundreds, easily the most money Owney had ever seen his father carrying.
Looking at it, Owney whistled. Which caused the father’s eyes to flicker nervously.
“She’s putting all this away for a house,” he said.
“But where did this come from, an armored truck?” Owney said.
“I heisted a shipment of bullion,” his father said, attempting to laugh.
“Where did it come from?” Owney said.
“Don’t worry about it. She goes right to the bank with this in the morning. I can’t short her.”
“What are you talking about, short her?” Owney said, fingering the money. “She never saw money like this in her life.”
“Forget about it,” the father said.
“How can I forget about it when it’s jumping up at me?”
“What do you need?”
“I need to know where the money’s coming from?”
“Someplace.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said. Here, what do you need?”
“I need table money, but not from there.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
His father drained a drink and tried to make himself quite busy calling for another.
“The money,” Owney said.
“Let me get my drink.”
“The money comes out of the job and you’re in some swindle with those guys I saw you with at work.”
The father kept his head turned. “You’re daft.”
“You’re taking money for ghost jobs.”
The father now turned and looked directly at Owney. Made the mistake of looking directly at his son. For as he mumbled a reply there was an uncertainty in the eyes that caused Owney not to hear what his father was saying.
“You’re taking it right out of somebody’s body,” Owney said.
The father’s eyes became slits. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll all be all right.”
“What are you doing with those two guys?”
“It’ll be all right. I’ll give them what they want and then it’s over. Don’t talk about it anymore.”
“Don’t talk. What the fuck am I supp——?”
There were footsteps and Owney glanced at the woman walking in. His father’s hand went over the money. A little too much weight was on her face. She carried a paper bag with a package wrapped in meat paper sticking out. She put the bag on the bar and sat on the stool two places away from Owney’s father. She went into her pocket for cigarettes. She said nothing, and the barmaid put a Scotch and water in front of her.
Owney’s father had stuffed the fat roll of bills back into his pocket. He left a few wet bills on the bar, and the barmaid took the money for the woman’s drink out of this. Owney’s father sat looking straight ahead and sucking on a cigarette. He put the beer to his mouth.
Owney picked up his beer and then put it down. “I’m going.”
His father handed him the car keys. “I’m not.”
Owney went past the woman sitting two stools away from his father and he didn’t look at the woman and she didn’t look at him.
“Don’t you want money?” his father called.
“I’ll fucking die first,” Owney said.
Outside, as Owney got into the car, he saw his father turn sideways on his stool and talk to the woman.
He drove toward Woodhaven Boulevard, instead of home, for his stomach was churning and he knew he had to sit alone on the boardwalk at Rockaway and think, or go crazy.
Halfway up the street, sitting at the top of the el steps to the end of a station that was closed, O’Sullivan pulled his silver head back from between the iron spokes of the banister as he saw Owney walk out of the bar alone. His large hands twisted on the taped handle of the baseball bat between his legs. “Just the kid by himself,” he said.
Behind him, leaning against the locked door to the el station, was a young guy in a leather jacket who chewed gum furiously. Standing next to the young guy was Old Jack.
“We do it here,” the silver-haired guy said.
“That’s what I want. I don’t wait no more for these guys. I get them right today,” Old Jack said.
O’Sullivan’s lips compressed. He never took orders well from anyplace, a wop most of all. What can you do, he told himself, take your piece and shut your mouth. They got all the strength.
He peered through the banister spokes and saw Owney drive off.
“There goes the kid,” O’Sullivan said.
“The kid?” Old Jack said.
“Just drove off.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did. You didn’t hear me.”
“That fuck. I want his blood.”
“That’s nice. Who are you going to send, Junior here, down after him? This kid is liable to send Junior back wrapped in a newspaper.”
Junior, chewing gum, muttered.
“Relax, Junior,” O’Sullivan said. Then he looked at Old Jack. “I thought we were here for business. What’s the kid got to do with the money?”
“Nothing,” Old Jack said.
“Then we wait for the father. Put the kid on the shelf for tonight.”
O’Sullivan’s manicured fingers kept squeezing the handle of the baseball bat. He didn’t care that the steps were making his suit dirty. He stared down the metal el steps leading to the street and he remembered the day when he went down another flight of stairs—metal, just like these—with a bat in his hand.
The steps were at the Polo Grounds and they went from the dressing room to the center-field grass. One game in his life, they let him play.
They pitched me outside, O’Sullivan muttered to himself on the el steps.
He didn’t play the next day. After the game, they had the newspaper on the dented tin shelf of the locker, next to his bottles of cologne. He had thrown the paper away in the morning, but they dug it out and left it for him. Remembering this now, he told himself: I brought class to the joint, I showed hillbillies how to smell good; the only thing they ever had on was witch hazel. Let them use my bottles. What do they do for me? They ride me. The story in the paper said that the first baseman just up with the Giants, O’Sullivan, wore more perfume than a labor racketeer, but he was still smelling up the joint. Labor racketeer.
Now O’Sullivan’s hands tightened on the bat. He was as furious about the story in the paper right now as he had been the day it was printed.
“O’Sullivan.” Oh, he remembered how the manager yelled from the office as he saw him, newspaper in one hand, bat in the other, walk out the door and start down the metal steps to the field. O’Sullivan went down the steps and through the outfield shadows and onto the infield dirt. He kept looking up at the press box, which hung from the upper tier. A green tin roof: he remembered that. By the time he was at the pitcher’s mound, he could hear the clacking of the telegraphers sending the stories into the newspaper offices. Labor racketeer. He had on a white Giants home uniform and he walked off the field and through the lower tier and up the ramp, the spikes sounding on the cement in the empty ballpark.
“If you want Woods, he left,” a Morse code operator said when O’Sullivan stepped into the press box.
“When?” O’Sullivan asked.
“Just now. He left on the dead run.”
The next morning, O’Sullivan was gone from the major leagues forever. When his father went to prison, O’Sullivan replaced him in the line-up—as a labor racketeer.
Now, over thirty-five years later, on a late afterno
on in 1971, O’Sullivan sat on the Jamaica Avenue el steps with his hair silver and his face jowly and a baseball bat between his hands. He picked up the bat and waved it. He wanted to do something to somebody right here in broad daylight.
He peered down at the bar where Owney’s father sat. “I hope this guy comes out before it’s dark,” O’Sullivan said. “I don’t feel like playing a night game.”
At nine o’clock she sat at the kitchen table, folding clothes. When her mother had arrived in the morning, they had used the washer in the basement, which was a concession on her mother’s part. Her mother used to live in Ridgewood, which is the home of German machinists, but she liked her clothes touched only by nature.
Dolores opened the dryer, but her mother acted as though the machine was contaminated. Her mother carried the wash up in a basket and hung it on the line running from the window of the small bedroom out to the telephone pole at the rear of the garage: Her mother sat at the window with a cup of coffee and watched the wash as it lifted, curled, and flapped in the breeze running through the small yard behind the house.
When the mother pulled the wash in, she placed the basket in front of her daughter and said, in triumph over the dryer downstairs, “See how good it smells now? Smells sweet. You can’t get that out of a machine with no fresh air circulating inside.”
Dolores was going to ask her mother to examine the air, which had on its lower levels a mixture of natural blue and Maspeth factory smoke, and explain how that could be better for the clothes than a dryer, but raising this would only produce more silent determination. The mother would trudge through the house looking for more things to wash and hang out on the line.
She said nothing and her mother went home happy.
Now, as her husband stood in the kitchen doorway, she was grateful to have the wash, as it gave her something to do with her hands. The notion of throwing something was in her mind an act performed in another time, one done by people with gray hair and sour mouths. Yet at the same time her hands wanted to get something firm and heavy and hurl it at his face.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I’m messed up,” Owney said. “I’ve been driving around for three hours trying to get my head straight.”
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