The Digger's Game

by George V. Higgins

  “That’s another nice car,” the Digger said.

  “And it’s still a Buick,” Paul said, “so it won’t get anybody’s nose out of joint. But it’s the closest thing to a Cadillac that I’ve seen so far.”

  “What do they go for?” the Digger said.

  “Bill treats me all right,” Paul said. “This’ll be the fourth car I’ve bought from him. I suppose, twenty-eight hundred and mine.”

  “He’s using you all right,” the Digger said. “That’s an eight-thousand-dollar unit, I figure, you get it all loaded up. You do all right, Big Brother.”

  “Around seventy-four hundred, actually,” Paul said. “My one indulgence, you know?”

  The Digger looked around the room. “Yup,” he said, “right. Cottage. In the winter, Florida. Didn’t Aggie tell me something about, you’re going to Ireland in a month or so?”

  “October,” Paul said. “Leading a pilgrimage. Something like your Las Vegas thing, I suppose. Except Lourdes is supposed to be the highlight, no naked women and no gambling. Just holy water. Then you get to come back through Ireland and get what really interests you, the Blarney Stone and that idiocy they put on at Bunratty Castle. All that race-of-kings stuff.”

  “Gee,” the Digger said, “I would’ve thought the types out here’d be too fine for that, all that jigging around.”

  “They are,” Paul said. “You couldn’t sell a tour in this parish if you put up ten plenary indulgences. In the summer, God bless them, the envelopes come in from Boothbay and Cataumet. The ones that aren’t all tanned in February, from taking the kids to Saint Thomas, are all tanned from taking the kids to Mount Snow. This is for Monsignor Fahey’s parish, Saint Malachy’s in Randolph. He set it up. Then his doctor told him he’d prefer the Monsignor didn’t travel around too much until everybody’s sure the pacemaker’s working all right. So Monsignor Fahey asked me to take it. Well, he was my first pastor, and he still gets a respectful hearing at the Chancery. I’ll do the man a favor.”

  “Look,” the Digger said, “speaking of favors. I got a problem I was hoping maybe you could help me out with.”

  “Sure,” Paul said.

  “Well, I didn’t tell you yet,” the Digger said.

  “I meant: of course you have,” Paul said.

  “I don’t get it,” the Digger said.

  “Jerry,” Paul said, “am I stupid? Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “God, no,” the Digger said. “You had, what was it, college and then you’re in the seminary all that time. You went over to Rome there, you even went to college summers. Now you got all this. No, I don’t think that.”

  “Good,” Paul said.

  “I never had any education like that,” the Digger said.

  “Because you weren’t interested,” Paul said. “Not interested enough to do what you had to, to get it.”

  “Well,” the Digger said, “I mean, you wanted to be a priest. I thought Ma was always saying, that’s something you get from God. You don’t just wake up inna morning and say, ‘What the hell, nothing to do today, guess I’ll be a priest.’ ”

  “You could’ve done it other ways,” Paul said. “You could’ve finished school in the service. You could’ve finished school when you were in school, instead of being in such a hurry to be a wise guy that you couldn’t bother.”

  “I hated school,” the Digger said.

  “Right,” Paul said. “That’s what I’m saying. Nobody handed me anything I’ve got.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” the Digger said. “You earned it. I know that.”

  “I don’t,” Paul said, “I don’t know any such thing. I think I lucked out. I was in the right place at the right time, two or three times.”

  “That’s just as good,” the Digger said.

  “It’s better,” Paul said, “I’ll take it any time. My problem wasn’t getting it. My problem was keeping it after I got it. That problem is you.”

  “Now just a goddamned minute,” the Digger said.

  “Take two if you like,” Paul said, “they’re small. I’ve been here eight years. Eight years since Monsignor Labelle got so far into his dotage nobody could pretend any more, and they put me in as administrator. That was in November. He was still alive in December, when Patricia was christened. After Christmas.”

  “I thought we might get into that again,” the Digger said. “Funny thing. I did time and then I come out and I never been in trouble again. Governor even give me a piece of paper, everything’s fair and square. But the other thing, I guess that’s gonna go on for the rest of forever, that right?”

  “Keep in mind how you got to be such buddies with the Governor,” Paul said. “And if you want to bring up that Christmas when I was Uncle Father and Daddy both, you can go ahead. I didn’t plan to.”

  “I made a mistake,” the Digger said. “I admit it. I didn’t think it’s a mistake at the time. Now I know. Move over, Hitler.”

  “Come off it, Jerry,” Paul said.

  “Come off it yourself,” the Digger said. “Big deal. I went to a football game. The State’d forget about it by now, they couldn’t prove after eight years I went to a football game and it was a crime. I think probably even Aggie forgot about it by now.”

  “She’ll never forget,” Paul said.

  “You guys,” the Digger said, “you guys know more about women on less practice than anything I ever see. You want to know something? That celibacy thing, I hope you get what you’re after, stop a lot of this pious horseshit about family life we been getting every Sunday ever since I can remember. Serve you guys right.”

  “Aggie’s a fine human being,” Paul said.

  “She is,” the Digger said. “You never saw a better one. But the Blessed Virgin Mary she’s not. You ask me, the Blessed Virgin Mary probably wasn’t what you guys always seem to go around thinking she was. Stomp around the garden reading the black book every day, you get so’s you think that’s what it is. Well, it’s not. It’s what somebody, lived a long time ago, wrote to cover up what he knew and what he thought people oughta be, and they aren’t.”

  “We hear confessions, too,” Paul said.

  “Yeah,” the Digger said, “and who goes? Little kids, didn’t drink their orange juice.”

  The clock ticked several times.

  “You always did have an instinct for the jugular,” Paul said.

  “I always done the best I could,” the Digger said. “Nobody ever bought me a car, I was getting set to go out and hold hands with old ladies.”

  “Now look,” Paul said.

  “Now look nothing,” the Digger said. “Aggie and me, we get along all right. She don’t think I’m perfect. She’s right. I don’t think she’s perfect, either, and she ain’t. We’re a couple of people and sometimes what we do, it doesn’t turn out right. But we get along.”

  “So,” Paul said, “she had your baby and then you couldn’t make Christmas because you wanted to go down to Miami. That was a mean thing to do.”

  “It was,” the Digger said. “Eight years later, I see it now. I had it thrown up to me enough. I asked her, she mind if I went to the football game. ‘No.’ I go. All right, I knew she didn’t like it. But I figure, she don’t, it don’t make her mad enough to say she don’t like it. So I go. Then she gets a whole lot of backer-uppers like you and I get more shit about that game’n I get for stolen goods. The judge was easier on me, and he put me in jail. At least that ended some time.”

  “I tell you what,” Paul said, “let’s act like adults. The game was Kitty Lee. Forget the charming story about the game, all right? Aggie never believed it anyway. I did, but I’m naïve. I was naïve. I believed you.”

  “Well,” the Digger said, “we went to the game.”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “Then in February I had Monsignor Labelle in the ground and I was trying to get this shop on an even keel again. Trying very hard because I’d been a priest sixteen years and this was the first parish I really wanted. Thirty-eight years old, a
nd a prize in my hands if I didn’t mess it up. And you showed up.”

  “I did,” the Digger said.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “Kitty was a year shy of the age of consent when you went off to that game with her, and the Chinese family didn’t take to that kind of mistake, did it, Jerry?”

  “The old man was a little pissed,” the Digger said.

  “That’s a very handy way of putting it,” Paul said. “He’d been to the District Attorney, in fact. So I had to call Eddie Gaffney down at Saint Pius and get him to speak to somebody who knew the Assistant D.A. on the case. And I also had to explain to Eddie why it was that my half-witted brother, whom he’d gotten a pardon for, out of the goodness of his heart, was in trouble again.”

  “Somebody got a thousand dollars for that pardon, I remember it,” the Digger said. “I think it might’ve been Goodness Gaffney’s goddamned lawyer brother up to the State House there, was the fellow, I think about it long enough.”

  “Jerry,” Paul said, “a lawyer represents you, he gets a fee.”

  “Somebody else does,” the Digger said, “it’s a bribe they call it.”

  “I call it a fee,” Paul said. “Since I paid it, I think I ought to get to call it what I like. I thought that was all it was going to take to set you up, so I wouldn’t have to worry about you any more. Then Kitty Lee came along, and I was in for it again. It was harder that time. The Lees were mad, and they were, what were they, anyway, Jerry, Congregationalists?”

  “Some kind of Protestants,” the Digger said.

  “Congregationalists,” Paul said. “Eddie Gaffney had to call Father Wang. Father Wang called the Reverend Doctor Wong. Doctor Wong seriously exaggerated your contrition to the Lees. Where the hell did you meet Kitty Lee, anyway?”

  “Inna bar,” the Digger said. “I was down to the Saratoga, there, she come in with a couple guys I knew. I scooped her. She was a cute kid.”

  “That was a great idea, Jerry,” Paul said.

  “I know,” the Digger said. “I should’ve asked to see her license.”

  “Five thousand dollars for not asking,” Paul said.

  “I thought that was steep at the time,” the Digger said.

  “I didn’t,” Paul said. “If Mister Lee’d wanted twenty, I would’ve given it to him. Statutory rape. Mann Act. Great stuff for me, Jerry. Five thousand was cheap. Dirty, but cheap.”

  “It was still high for hush money,” the Digger said.

  “Maybe,” Paul said, “but it was my check. It was my money. I knew I wasn’t going to get it back. If I’d’ve thought you could get five thousand dollars together in a bank vault with a rake, I might’ve asked you. As it was, I took Mister Lee’s offer before he changed his mind.”

  “Half of it was mine anyway,” the Digger said.

  “Half of what?” Paul said. “Half of what was yours?”

  “The five,” the Digger said. “I’m not knocking you. I appreciated what you did. But half that five, that should’ve been mine anyway. The rest, the rest was yours.”

  “From what?” Paul said.

  “The Hibernian insurance,” the Digger said. “Ma had five from the Hibernians, she died. You got it all.”

  “I was the beneficiary,” Paul said.

  “Sure,” the Digger said, “and she’s inna rest home, I went over there every goddamned morning before I go down the place, I stop at the store first and I buy her a pack of Luckies and the paper. Rain or shine, and I talk to her at least an hour. I think I missed once, the whole eight months she was there. I had the runs and I couldn’t get as far away from the toilet as it would’ve taken me to drive there. I got hell for that, too. Listen to her, day after day, bitching about the way they treat her, they treated her good. That’s a good home. ‘What am I doing here, you’d think I didn’t have a family,’ all the rest of it. Every damned day.”

  “I know,” Paul said, “I caught some of that too.”

  “I got a seven-room house,” the Digger said. “I’m a good Catholic, I got four young kids. Two oldest in one room and Patricia and Matthew in the other one, she keeps him up all night with the crying, makes him cranky as hell all the time, she was just a little kid. They were both little kids, and Aggie’s taking care of both of them, she’s not getting no sleep, I got to listen to Ma. Where am I supposed to put her? She started in on me one day, I was up late and I guess probably I was a little hard on her. ‘Ma,’ I said, ‘you can sleep inna goddamned yard, all right? No, I’ll do better’n that for you. The garage, put a nice cot there. Beat the hell out of the car, but, and I got to warn you, might be a little chilly this time of year. Better wait till she warms up some. Then you can come and live inna garage, all right? Wait till May.’ She got all pissed off, hollering and yelling, raised me from a pup, she wallops the pots over to the Poor Clares, this and that, now she’s old and sick. Jesus, it was awful.”

  “I know,” Paul said, “I got some of it too.”

  “Well,” the Digger said, “where the hell’re you gonna put her? You’re over to Saint Stephen’s then. You put her inna tabernacle, maybe?”

  “Not me,” Paul said, “I could do no wrong. You.”

  “Oh,” the Digger said, “beautiful. I was also getting it when I wasn’t even around.”

  “She was a querulous old woman,” Paul said. “She had a lot of pain. She was immobile, and she’d always done for herself. She was sick.”

  “And when she died,” the Digger said, “she had five thousand bucks which she didn’t leave to me.”

  “Look,” Paul said, “I’ll add some things up. If you want, when I get through, I’ll split down the middle with you, all right?”

  “Deal,” the Digger said.

  “Coughlin nailed me fourteen hundred dollars for Ma’s funeral,” Paul said. “Twenty months before, eleven hundred for Pa’s. I paid it. I looked him right in the eye. I said, ‘You know, Johnny, I thought eleven was pretty high when I settled for my father. This was almost the identical funeral, same casket and everything. I think fourteen hundred’s a little steep.’

  “ ‘I know it,’ he said, in that oily voice he uses when he’s giving you the business,” Paul said, “ ‘but I can’t help it, Monsignor, to save myself. Everything’s going up all the time. I just can’t keep up with it. I sympathize with you, believe me. This is rock-bottom.’

  “ ‘Calling me “Monsignor” doesn’t ease the pain, Coughlin,’ I said,” Paul said, “and I paid him. That was the last time Coughlin saw anything the archdiocese had to hand out. That was the most expensive fourteen-hundred-dollar funeral that devil ever ran, I can guarantee you that.”

  “I thought Dad’s insurance covered his funeral,” the Digger said.

  “It did,” Paul said. “He had five with the Hibernians, too. A thousand from the union. Social Security was a little over two hundred.”

  “So that didn’t come out of you,” the Digger said.

  “Sorry,” Paul said. “I got the canceled check for his funeral, if you’d like to see it. The insurance went to Ma. I never asked her for it. She had nothing else. No Social Security from the Poor Clares, no retirement either. That insurance was all she had.”

  “Bastards,” the Digger said.

  “If they had it,” Paul said, “guys like you’d have to pay for it. Since they don’t, guys like me have to pay for it. No complaint: the Church didn’t treat Ma like it should’ve, and that was bad, but it treated me a lot better’n it probably should’ve, and I took it. So she washed the floor and she walked on it and she slipped and she broke her hip. How many years’d she done that?”

  “Ever since I can remember,” the Digger said.

  “Sure,” Paul said, “you take it in stride. The hospital was thirty-three hundred dollars that I paid, plus whatever she paid.”

  “Hey,” the Digger said.

  “That was before the nursing home,” Paul said. “Flynn runs a good home, as you say. He also charges all outdoors. In two months of drugs and special nurses a
nd the man who cuts toenails she went right through all the money in the bank that I hadn’t asked her for. Then I started writing checks again. Every week, two-fifty-three, two-fifty-seven, two-fifty-six. I figure, thirty-five hundred dollars or so. Okay, want half?”

  “No,” the Digger said.

  “You’re sure,” Paul said. “Eleven for Pa’s funeral, fourteen for hers, thirty-five hundred for her being sick, in the home, plus the thirty-three I paid the hospital, you sure you don’t want half of the Hibernians?”

  “I didn’t know,” the Digger said. “I figured, Ma’s probably pissed off at me, I went inna can. I didn’t know you spent all that dough.”

  “What is it you want, Jerry?” Paul said.

  “Money,” the Digger said.

  “That,” Paul said, “that, I know. When Aggie told me where you were, I went inside the Shrine and offered up a prayer. Before I saw Father Francis. I asked God to grant you a safe return. I also asked Him to keep you out of games you couldn’t afford. I even asked Him to let you win. I was praying for me. I said, ‘God, you’re not paying attention. He’s going to get in trouble. Please get him out.’ ”

  “Father Doherty,” the Digger said, “I got some bad news for you about the power of prayer.”

  “How much?” Paul said.

  “Eighteen thousand dollars,” the Digger said.

  The ship’s clock ticked several times.

  “That,” Paul said, “is a very impressive sum of money.”

  “I think so,” the Digger said. “I know I was impressed. I didn’t really know, you know, how bad it was. Then I get back to the room, and I add everything up. Well, I had an idea. But I add it up, I was, I was impressed. I felt like somebody kicked me in the guts, is how I felt.”

  The clock ticked several more times.

  “I can understand that,” Paul said. “Of course the question is, where’re you going to get the money?”