Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Police operator fourteen. What is your emergency?” The West Indian voice, rising and falling on the last word, made it sound as e-mer-gen … cee.

  “There is an armed man barricaded in a house at Sixty-two-thirty-five Sixtieth Street in Ridgewood, Queens. The man just called me. Police are outside his house. His name is Ralphie Schmidt. My name is Dol——”

  “You are talking too fast to me.”

  “My name is Dolores Morrison and I am at VA one seven five six two. If you have a pol——”

  “You live at One seven five six two what street?”

  “That was my phone number. Have someone call me right away.”

  “This mon cannot call your house. He got to know de number of de telephone.”

  “I gave it to you.”

  “I am sorry but you did not give me de telephone number. You gave me de number of your house, but you didn’t give me the street de house was on. So you did not give me de phone number or de house number. If I tell the mon to get you, he could not call you up on de telephone because he do not know your number and he could not drive to your house because he do not know. You did not give me de number to de telephone.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You only gave de number to de house. You didn’t give me de name of de street you got your house on.”

  “The phone number is VA one seven five six two.”

  “Stop yelling at me. I hear you. What is your house address? De house can’t tell me where it is. You must do dat t’ing.”

  “I am at Seventy-eight-twenty-eight Seventy-fourth Street in Glendale, Queens.”

  “And de mon is barricaded in your house?”

  “Give me a supervisor, please.”

  “One moment.”

  Dolores waited for about a minute and then a fast voice came on. “Sergeant Duddy, shield number three five seven four.”

  “Ralphie Schmidt of number Sixty-two-thirty-five Sixtieth Street in Ridgewood, Queens, just called me to say he is barricaded inside his house and that police are surrounding it. My name is Dolores Morrison and I can spe——”

  “Just hold for a moment.”

  There was about a twenty-second wait and then another white male voice said, “Detective Cleary. Shield two three eight five.”

  “A man named Ralph—”

  “I have that on the screen. You are Dolores Morrison at VA one seven five six two.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hang up and keep the line clear and I’ll have an officer from the scene contact you. Just hang up and remain off the line.”

  She hung up. The Irish, they’re born for police work, she said to herself. She followed the second hand as it went around the kitchen clock. At one minute and twenty-two seconds, the phone rang.

  “Yeah. Lieutenant Regan, emergency service squad, here. I’m told you have been in contact with Mr. Schmidt?”

  “I have. My name is Dolores Morrison. My husband is Owen Morrison. He was in Vietnam with Mr. Schmidt. He has Mr. Schmidt’s respect. I am going to call my husband at work now and he can get right, over to help you. In the meantime, I’ve asked Mr. Schmidt to please not hurt anybody, or himself.”

  “He’s armed, you know,” Regan said.

  “Yes, he told me.”

  “He fired a couple of shots inside the house.”

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “The girl who was inside the house with him said that he did.”

  “Cindy?”

  “That’s her name.”

  “I wouldn’t believe her in church.”

  “I’m afraid we have to take her word for it.”

  “Do as you like. I’ll call my husband right now.”

  “Then call me back. I’m at a neighbor’s house. I’m at VA one six three eight seven. Got that now?”

  Dolores repeated the number as she wrote it on the pad alongside the phone.

  She then called the hog house, where a voice answered gruffly and then let the phone dangle. Then the voice came back and said that Owney was gone. Dolores began dialing.

  “Yeah?”

  “Brendan’s? Is Owen Morrison there?”

  “Wait a minute.”

  She could see the smoke over the phone and could see the bar crowded as the man called for her husband.

  “Not in.”

  “If he does come in, could you please have him call his home. It’s an emergency.”

  “Sure. Wait just one second while I write this down on my pad.”

  There was a silence. Then the guy said, “Fine. I got it written up for him.”

  “Mayo Inn.”

  “Owen Morrison?”

  “Not in. I can see by looking.”

  “If he does come in, would yo——”

  “Have him call his home. Sure.”

  “It’s an emergency.”

  “Somebody sick?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody hurt or dying or nothing?”

  “No! It’s jus——”

  “Then let me tell you what an emergency is if you got nobody sick or hurt. An emergency is when I don’t have enough money to buy a drink!”

  “A friend of Owney’s is inside his house with guns. The police are all around the house.”

  “Where?”

  “In Ridgewood.”

  “Then what do we care? We’re in the Mayo Inn, Katonah Avenue in the Bronx. Fuck them. Let them blaze away in Queens. We’re drinking in the Bronx.”

  She made three more calls. Then she sat and waited for Owney to call. It was three-fifteen. At three twenty-five the phone rang and she grabbed it.

  “Lieutenant Regan. Emergency service squad. Were you able to contact your husband?”

  “I’m waiting for him to call me now.”

  “I’ll get off the line. You’ve got our number. We’ll send a patrol car for him if you locate him.”

  By four o’clock she had heard from nobody. She called every bar back and then called the number for the lieutenant and it was busy. She called Ralphie Schmidt.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ralphie, I’m just waiting for Owney to call me and then I’ll have him right over.”

  “That’s good. I was just lookin’ down from the attic again. Those fucks all crouched down. They think they’re out of the line of fire. I ought to let them know. I ought to send them a fucking message. Dust ’em off.”

  She could only think of saying his name, but then suddenly she found the words streaming from her. “I love your mother and you love her too and we simply can’t have her hurt anymore, Ralphie. I know that woman was on her knees in church every morning. When the sidewalk was a sheet of ice outside she was there. She walked there. So she could pray for you every day. Ralphie, you can’t hurt that woman. Listen to me. I’ll tell you exactly what to—”

  “I don’t want to hurt my mother.”

  “Then you’ll listen to me.”

  “What do you thin——”

  Ralphie’s voice went off the line. Dolores quickly dialed his number. The call didn’t go through. She tried again. Nothing happened. She called the police lieutenant’s number and the line was still busy.

  At four-thirty, she wrote a note to Owney and put it on the front door. Then she took the baby to her mother’s house.

  “Why so late?” the mother said.

  “I’ll be right back. I just have to go to Ralphie Schmidt’s house. He has a lot of trouble. If Owney calls, make sure to tell him that he better get to Ralphie Schmidt’s house right away.”

  On 60th Street, the sidewalk in front of the Swallow’s Nest was packed, full glasses clutched and necks craning to see up the block. On the far side of the street, two policemen in flak jackets and wearing baseball caps were screaming at a black in a compact telephone company repair truck.

  “Right away,” one of the cops said.

  “I just do what the orders say,” the black repairman said.

  “I’m a police officer. I’m ordering you to fix the lines.”r />
  “I take my orders from my foreman.”

  “You’ll take them from us. You’re interfering with police work.”

  “I’ll drive away, then. Give you all the room you need.”

  “I’ll arrest you and throw you in jail.”

  “Go ahead,” the telephone man said.

  “Fix the lines.”

  “Go ahead and arrest me. False arrest.”

  The other cop tried to talk to him, but the guy shook his head. Finally, face reddening, he yelled, “You fuck!”

  “My orders say disconnect the phone and I disconnect the phone. I got no order says to me, put it back on because a policeman says so. You got to go to my foreman before I move.”

  The cops sounded as if they were being strangled and the phone company guy was glancing down, obviously at forms in his lap. Dolores walked past them and up to a rope barricade a couple of doors down the block. She explained who she was to a patrolman and he took her by the elbow and walked along the sidewalk to the back of a large truck that was parked half on the sidewalk and half in the gutter. On folding chairs in the back were several cops in baseball caps, all leaning around little girl Cindy, who had a large sheet of paper in her lap.

  “You done this good,” she said.

  “That’s his job, doing diagrams of things like banks when they got a hostage situation.”

  “You sure got Ralphie’s bedroom down good.”

  “I’d be surprised if she knew anything about the rest of the house,” Dolores said.

  Cindy looked up with the face of one who was caught. Then she gained confidence from the cops around her and sneered. “Why don’t you go in there and get him if you’re so smart?”

  “We’re going to have to do something,” a man with captain’s bars on his shirt collar said.

  “Can’t you talk to him?” Dolores said.

  “Not on the phone. We use the bullhorn but he won’t answer.”

  “Why can’t you just wait until he falls asleep?”

  “Because we’re going to have to keep a whole block full of people coming from work away from their houses. We’ll go crazy trying to handle that.”

  “Isn’t that easier than having someone shot? My husband will be here by then.”

  “We’ll see,” the captain said.

  “You know so much,” Cindy said, “why don’t you get out there and take care of this thing?”

  Dolores stepped away from the truck and peered down the street. There were policemen on their bellies in the gutter, and others crouched behind stoops. She thought she saw someone up on a roof, but whoever it was withdrew his head quickly. She stepped a little farther away from the truck to see.

  “You’ll get killed!” a voice hissed.

  By Ralphie Schmidt, she thought. She looked at the policemen ducking down, like kids playing war. Behind her, she heard the infuriating voice of little girl Cindy. Playing cops and robbers. Dolores ignored the shouts as she walked across the sidewalk and went up the stoop to the open door of a frame house two doors down from Ralphie’s. She called out as she stepped through the open vestibule door.

  In the living room, a cop was standing with a pained face and a phone to his ear.

  “The whole block is knocked out,” he said.

  Dolores spoke to the woman, who was seated at the dining room table.

  “You got any wash?”

  The woman seemed surprised. “In the washing machine in the cellar.”

  “Do you mind?” Dolores said.

  “Go ahead,” the woman said. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but go ahead.”

  Dolores went down to the cellar and took the wicker wash basket and filled it with wet towels, bedspreads, T-shirts, and sweaters. The wash came to her chest. She put in sheets and several pairs of pajamas to bring the pile nose high. She walked out of the house and onto the empty sidewalk with the top piece of wash, a pair of blue pajamas, and directly underneath them a white bedsheet. She walked along the sidewalk and she now was in full view of Ralphie Schmidt’s windows.

  “Get back!” a voice called through the bullhorn.

  Dolores did not look up or answer. She just walked straight for Ralphie Schmidt’s stoop. As she reached it, she could feel the tension; she now was in his flight circle.

  “Ralphie, you’ll open up. I got my arms full of wash,” Dolores said. “I got to use your wash line.”

  In Ridgewood, where the streets and houses are so clean that people feel the wearing of shoes is a filthy habit, the presence of wash in any form is as important as a religious ceremony.

  As Dolores stood on the stoop, conscious of the guns behind her, but with the wash in front of her, wash that a safety pin could go through, not to mention a bullet, she felt as if she were standing behind something as impenetrable as a mountain. She felt the power radiate from the wash and go through the front door of Ralphie Schmidt’s house.

  Behind which there now was the noise of something being moved. Then more things being shoved. The locks sounded and the door opened partly.

  “Well? I can’t fit through that space.”

  Ralphie Schmidt now pulled the door so open that he was in view of the street.

  “Drop the gun!”

  Dolores placed her body directly between Ralphie and the street outside; she regarded herself as the right color that stills the hand of the hunter. Here was Ralphie, however, gun clutched as if it were sacramental, head held erect as if receiving high religious honors, and for part of an instant Dolores thought of the police at her back being equally proud. Rather than controlling a situation, she would simply be somebody in the way. Shot front and back. As she stepped past Ralphie and he shut the door, she felt easier. A clicking came from Ralphie’s body; she noticed that he had gun belts wrapped around him. Brass in the light. As she walked with the wash basket into the living room, she saw that the couch was badly torn. No, slashed. Insides were all over the floor. Look at them. Glancing up, she saw that there was a long slash through the wallpaper over the couch. Then the back of a stuffed chair was laid open. At the entrance to the dining area she had to step over a chair. There was no table, and the floor was covered with broken china. The dining room table was in the kitchen, pushed against the back door as a barricade.

  “I’m ready for them,” Ralphie said.

  “You can be ready for them, but I’ve got to get my wash done,” Dolores said.

  “I want them to come in on me,” Ralphie said.

  “I want my wash done,” Dolores said.

  She put the wicker basket on the floor and then reached for the window.

  “You got to stay back from the window. Don’t put yourself in the frame.”

  “Ralphie, I’ve wash to hang.”

  She stood full in the window so that whoever was out in the garages at the other end of the narrow back yard could see who it was. Then she pushed up the window and took a handful of clothespins from the cloth bag hanging outside the window.

  “Ralphie, you’ll hand me my wash,” she said. She put three clothespins in her mouth.

  She held her hand out and Ralphie gave her the blue pajamas. She pinned them to the line and then moved them out, boldly, the pulleys on the far end of the line, on the telephone pole flush against the garage, squeaking loudly and comfortingly, sending out her pennants for all to see up and down the line. She hung a bedsheet next. Then she mumbled through the clothespins, “Give me the blue bedspread.”

  She felt the fabric on her hand and she clutched it and pulled it up and onto the line. Her body motions were familiar and the sound of the voice coming out from around clothespins was something that both Dolores and Ralphie had heard as babies, and the wash line squeaked and the wash was fresh to the hand.

  “Next. Give me another sheet, Ralphie.”

  Same sound, same body motion, same squeak. The hand went out to him again.

  “Now give me the rifle.”

  She felt it in her hand, metal on top, wood on the bottom. She
never thought about whether she had a proper grip on it or not; she just raised it up, keeping the barrel pointing up at the ceiling and then at the sky and then she dropped it out the window into the back yard. As she pulled the wash line so that the pulley squeaked and her hand reached back inside the kitchen so Ralphie could give her more wash, the cops crashed through the front door.

  In bed that night, she was more surprised that the police had not been able to talk their way in than she was at her own powers. She wondered if any of the police understood how to put the violence into the recesses and keep it there by performing an act so familiar and serene that physical danger could be removed without bringing around even more force. I know one thing, Dolores told herself. I can handle things better than the police.

  She was still awake in her excitement when she heard Owney open the door. It had to be about one A.M. She threw herself on her side and closed her eyes; she was too disappointed in him to bother looking at him.

  The first thing she felt in the morning was his hand on her side, a touch so soft that of course it was only a dream he was having, or the involuntary twitch of a muscle coated with thick sleep. She shifted away from the hand, which simply returned and slipped persistently under her arm until the fingers touched the rise of her breast. As she sat up and swung her legs on the floor, the hand refused to desist. It was now on her back.

  “Where do you get the nerve?” she said, standing up.

  “I’m trying to make it up to you.”

  “By doing this?”

  “Come here.” He said it with a whine.

  She took her gray plaid robe off the hook on the door and walked out without looking back at him.

  “Come here,” he said again.

  When she kept going, she heard the covers sound. Kicking his feet like a child. He wants to make it up to me. Once, she had reluctantly gone along with the fiction that despite his awakening in a state of hangover, filled with a craving that set fire to his system, he still wanted sex with her for his love of her. It had taken some time for her to admit to herself that his passion was made of alcohol and that his deep admiration for her on these mornings was centered on the great assistance she gave as he satisfied himself.

  She tied the robe in front of her with angry motions.