by Paul Auster
Once I proved my loyalty to him, he didn’t hold me back. By early spring I was already climbing the ladder, and from then on the only question was how fast it would take me to get to the next rung. Bingo paired me with an ex-pug named Stutters Grogan, and Stutters and I began going the rounds of bars, restaurants, and candy stores to collect O’Malley’s weekly protection money. As his name suggests, Stutters wasn’t much on speech-making, but I had a vivid way with words, and whenever we came across a slacker or deadbeat, I would paint such colorful pictures of what happened to clients who reneged on their payments that my partner rarely had to employ his fists. He was a useful prop, and it was good to have him for purposes of either-or demonstrations, but I prided myself on being able to settle conflicts without having to call on his services. Eventually, word got back to Bingo about my good track record, and he moved me up to a position on the South Side running numbers. Stutters and I had worked well together, but I preferred being on my own, and for the next six months I pounded the sidewalks in a dozen different colored neighborhoods, chatting up my regulars as they parted with their nickels and dimes for a shot at winning a few extra bucks. Everyone had a system, from the corner newsboy to the sexton in the church, and I liked listening to people tell me how they picked their combinations. The numbers came from everywhere. From birthdays and dreams, from batting averages and the price of potatoes, from cracks in the pavement, license plates, laundry lists, and the attendance at last Sunday’s prayer meeting. The chances of winning were almost nil, so no one held it against me when they lost, but on those rare occasions when somebody hit the mark, I got turned into a messenger of good tidings. I was the Count of Lucky Dough, the fat-wadded Duke of Largesse, and I loved watching people’s faces light up when I forked over the money. All in all, it wasn’t an unpleasant job, and when Bingo finally promoted me again, I was almost sorry to leave.
From numbers I was shifted over to gambling, and by 1936 I was chief operating boss of a betting parlor on Locust Street, a snug, smoke-filled joint hidden away in the back room of a dry-cleaning establishment. The customers would arrive with their rumpled shirts and pants, drop them off at the front counter, and then push their way past the racks of hanging clothes to the secret room in the rear. Almost everyone who stepped into that place made some crack about getting taken to the cleaners. It was a standing joke with the men who worked under me, and after a while we began making bets on how many people would come out with it on a given day. As my bookkeeper Waldo McNair once put it: “This is the only place in the world where they empty your pockets and press your pants at the same time. Blow your wad on the ponies, and you still can’t lose your shirt.”
I ran a good little business in that room behind Benny’s Cleaners. Traffic was heavy, but I hired a kid to keep it spic-and-span for me, and I always saw to it that butts were put out in ashtrays and not on the floor. My ticker-tape machines were the last word in modern equipment, with hookups to every major hippodrome around the country, and I kept the law off my back with regular donations to the private pension funds of half a dozen cops. I was twenty-one years old, and any way you looked at it I was sitting pretty. I lived in a classy room at the Featherstone Hotel, I had a closetful of suits that a wop tailor had cut for me at half price, I could trot out to Wrigley and take in a Cubs game any afternoon I pleased. That was already good, but on top of that there were women, lots of women, and I made sure my crotch saw all the action it could handle. After facing that terrible decision in Philadelphia seven years before, my balls had become exceedingly precious to me. I’d given up my shot at fame and fortune for their sake, and now that Walt the Wonder Boy was no more, I figured the best way to justify my choice was to use them as often as I could. I was no longer a virgin when I reached Chicago, but my career as a cocksman didn’t get fully off the ground until I joined up with Bingo and had the cash to buy my way into any bloomers I fancied. My cherry had been lost to a farm girl named Velma Childe somewhere in western Pennsylvania, but that had been fairly rudimentary stuff: fumbling around with our clothes on out in a cold barn, our faces raw with saliva as we groped and grappled our way into position, not exactly certain what went where. A few months later, on the strength of the hundred-dollar bill I found in Minneapolis, I’d had two or three experiences with whores, but for all intents and purposes I was still a rank novice when I hit the streets of Hog-town. Once I settled into my new life, I did everything I could to make up for lost time.
So it went. I made a home for myself in the organization, and I never felt the smallest pang about throwing in my lot with the bad guys. I saw myself as one of them, I stood for what they stood for, and I never breathed a word to anyone about my past: not to Bingo, not to the girls I slept with, not to anyone. As long as I didn’t dwell on the old days, I could deceive myself into thinking I had a future. It hurt too much to look back, so I kept my eyes fixed in front of me, and every time I took another step forward, I drifted farther away from the person I’d been with Master Yehudi. The best part of me was lying under the ground with him in the California desert. I’d buried him there along with his Spinoza, his scrapbook of Walt the Wonder Boy clippings, and the necklace with my severed finger joint, but even though I went back there every night in my dreams, it drove me crazy to think about it during the day. Killing Slim was supposed to have squared the account, but in the long run it didn’t do a bit of good. I wasn’t sorry for what I’d done, but Master Yehudi was still dead, and all the Bingos in the world couldn’t begin to make up for him. I strutted around Chicago as if I were going places, as if I were a regular Mr. Somebody, but underneath it all I was no one. Without the master I was no one, and I wasn’t going anywhere.
I had one chance to pull out before it was too late, a single opportunity to cut my losses and run, but I was too blind to go for it when the offer fell in my lap. That was in October of 1936, and I was so puffed up with my own importance by then, I thought the bubble would never burst. I’d ducked out of the cleaner’s one afternoon to attend to some personal business: a shave and a haircut at Brewer’s barbershop, lunch at Lemmele’s on Wabash Avenue, and then on to the Royal Park Hotel for some hanky-panky with a dancer named Dixie Sinclair. The rendezvous was set for two thirty in suite 409, and my pants were already bulging at the prospect. Six or seven yards before I reached Lemmele’s door, however, just as I rounded the corner and was about to go in for my lunch, I looked up and saw the last person in the world I was expecting to see. It stopped me dead in my tracks. There was Mrs. Witherspoon with her arms full of bundles, looking as pretty and smartly turned out as ever, rushing toward a taxi at a hundred and ten miles an hour. I stood there with a lump forming in my throat, and before I could say anything, she glanced up, flicked her eyes in my direction, and froze. I smiled. I smiled from one ear to the other, and then followed one of the most astonishing double-takes I’ve ever seen. Her jaw literally dropped open, the packages slipped out of her hands and scattered on the sidewalk, and a second later she was flinging her arms around me and planting lipstick all over my newly shaven mug.
“There you are, you rascal,” she said, squeezing me for all she was worth. “Now I’ve got you, you goddamn slippery son-of-a-biteh. Where the hell have you been, kiddo?”
“Here and there,” I said. “Around and about. Up and down, down and up, the usual story. You look swell, Mrs. Witherspoon. Really grand. Or should I be calling you Mrs. Cox? That’s your name now, isn’t it? Mrs. Orville Cox.”
She backed off to get a better look at me, holding me at arms’ length as a big smile spread across her face. “I’m still Witherspoon, honey. I got all the way to the altar, but when the time came to say ‘I do,’ the words got stuck in my throat. The dos turned into don’ts, and here I am seven years later, still a single girl and proud of it.”
“Good for you. I always knew that Cox guy was a mistake.”
“If it hadn’t been for the present, I probably would have gone through with it. When Billy Bigelow brought back
that package from Cape Cod, I couldn’t resist taking a peek. A bride’s not supposed to open her presents before the wedding, but this one was special, and once I unwrapped it, I knew the marriage wasn’t meant to be.”
“What was in the box?”
“I thought you knew.”
“I never got around to asking him.”
“He gave me a globe. A globe of the world.”
“A globe? What’s so special about that?”
“It wasn’t the present, Walt. It was the note he sent along with it.”
“I never saw that either.”
“One sentence, that’s all it was. Wherever you are, I’ll be with you. I read those words, and then I fell apart. There was only one man for me, sweetie pie. If I couldn’t have him, I wasn’t going to fool around with substitutes and cheap imitations.”
She stood there remembering the note as the downtown crowds swirled past us. The wind fluttered against the brim of her green felt hat, and after a moment her eyes started filling with tears. Before she could let go in earnest, I bent down and gathered up her packages. “Come on inside, Mrs. W.,” I said. “I’ll buy you some lunch, and then we’ll order a tub of Chianti and get good and crocked.”
I slipped a ten-spot to the maitre d’ at the door and told him we wanted privacy. He shrugged, explaining that all the private tables were booked, so I peeled off another ten from my wad. That was good enough to cause an unexpected cancellation, and less than a minute later one of his minions was leading us through the restaurant to the back, where he installed us in a snug, candlelit alcove furnished with a set of red velvet curtains to shield us from the other customers. I would have done anything to impress Mrs. Witherspoon that day, and I don’t think she was disappointed. I saw the flash of amusement in her eyes as we settled into our chairs, and when I whipped out my monogrammed gold lighter to get her Chesterfield going, it suddenly seemed to hit her that little Walt wasn’t so little anymore.
“We’re doing all right for ourselves, aren’t we?” she said.
“Not bad,” I said. “I’ve been running pretty hard since you last saw me.”
We talked about this and that, circling around each other for the first few minutes, but it didn’t take long for us to start feeling comfortable again, and by the time the waiter came in with the menus, we were already talking about the old days. As it turned out, Mrs. Witherspoon knew a lot more about my last months with the master than I thought she did. A week before he died, he’d written her a long letter from the road, and everything had been spelled out to her: the headaches, the end of Walt the Wonder Boy, the plan to go to Hollywood and turn me into a movie star.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “If you and the master were quits, what was he doing writing you a letter?”
“We weren’t quits. We just weren’t going to get married, that’s all.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“He was dying, Walt. You know that. You must have known it by then. He found out about the cancer not long after you were kidnaped. A fine little mess, no? Talk about hell. Talk about your rough patches. There we were, scrambling around Wichita trying to scrape up the money to free you, and he comes down with a goddamn fatal disease. That’s how all the marriage talk got started in the first place. I was gung-ho to marry him, you see. I didn’t care how long he had to live, I just wanted to be his wife. But he wouldn’t go for it. ‘You hitch up with me,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be marrying a corpse. Think of the future, Marion’—he must have said those words to me a thousand times—’think of the future, Marion. This Cox fellow isn’t too bad. He’ll give us the money to spring Walt, and then you’ll be set up in style for the rest of your days. It’s a sweet deal, sister, and you’d be a fool not to jump at it.”’
“Sweet fucking Christ. He really loved you, didn’t he? I mean, he really fucking loved you.”
“He loved us both, Walt. After what happened to Aesop and Mother Sioux, you and I were the whole world to him.”
I had no intention of telling her how he’d died. I wanted to spare her the gory details, and all through drinks I managed to hold her off—but she kept pressing me to talk about the last part of the trip, to explain what happened to us after we got to California. Why hadn’t I gone into the movies? How long had he lived? Why was I looking at her like that? I started to tell her how he’d slipped off gently in his sleep one night, but she knew me too well to buy it. She saw through me in about four seconds, and once she understood that I was covering up something, it was no use pretending anymore. So I told her. I told her the whole ugly story, and step by step I crawled down into the horror of it again. I didn’t leave anything out. Mrs. Witherspoon had a right to know, and once I got started, I couldn’t stop. I just talked on through her tears, watching her makeup smudge and the powder run off her cheeks as the words tumbled out of me.
When I got to the end, I opened my jacket and pulled the gun from the holster strapped around my shoulder. I held it in the air for a moment or two and then set it down on the table between us. “Here it is,” I said. “The master’s gun. Just so you know what it looks like.”
“Poor Walt,” she said.
“Poor nobody. It’s the only thing of his I’ve got left.”
Mrs. Witherspoon stared at the small, oak-handled revolver for ten or twelve seconds. Then, very tentatively, she reached out and put her hand on top of it. I thought she was going to pick it up, but she didn’t. She just sat there looking at her fingers as they closed around the gun, as if touching what the master had touched allowed her to touch him again.
“You did the only thing you could,” she finally said.
“I let him down is what I did. He begged me to pull the trigger, and I couldn’t do it. His last wish—and I turned my back on him and made him do it himself.”
“Remember the good times, that’s what he told you.”
“I can’t. Before I get to the good times, I remember what it was like when he told me to remember them. I can’t get around that last day. I can’t go back far enough to remember anything before it.”
“Forget the gun, Walt. Get rid of the damn thing and wipe the slate clean.”
“I can’t. If I do that, he’ll be gone forever.”
That was when she stood up from her chair and left the table. She didn’t say where she was going, and I didn’t ask. The conversation had turned so heavy, so awful for both of us, we couldn’t say another word and not go crazy. I put the gun back in the holster and looked at my watch. One o’clock. I had plenty of time until my appointment with Dixie. Maybe Mrs. Witherspoon would be back, and maybe she wouldn’t. One way or the other, I was going to sit there and eat my lunch, and afterward I was going to prance over to the Royal Park Hotel and spend an hour with my new flame, bouncing on the bed with her silky gams wrapped around my waist.
But Mrs. W. hadn’t flown the coop. She’d merely gone to the ladies’ to dry her tears and freshen up, and when she returned about ten minutes later, she was wearing a new coat of lipstick and had redone her lashes. Her eyes were still red around the rims, but she shot me a little smile when she sat down, and I could see that she was determined to push the conversation onto a different subject.
“So, my friend,” she said, taking a bite of her shrimp cocktail, “how’s the flying business these days?”
“Packed away in mothballs,” I said. “The fleet’s been grounded, and one by one I’ve been selling off the wings for scrap.”
“And you don’t feel tempted to give it another whirl?”
“Not for all the crackers in Kalamazoo.”
“The headaches were that bad, huh?”
“You don’t know the meaning of bad, toots. We’re talking high-voltage trauma here, life-threatening toaster burns.”
“It’s funny. I sometimes hear conversations. You know, sitting in a train or walking down the street, little snatches of things. People remember, Walt. The Wonder Boy made quite a stir, and a lot of people still think about yo
u.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m a fucking legend. The problem is, nobody believes it anymore. They stopped believing when the act folded, and by now there’s nobody left. I know the kind of talk you mean. I used to hear it, too. It always ended up in an argument. One guy would say it was a fake, the other guy would say maybe it wasn’t, and pretty soon they’d be so pissed off at each other they’d stop talking. But that was a while ago. You don’t hear so much of it anymore. It’s like the whole thing never happened.”
“About two years ago they ran an article about you somewhere, I forget which paper. Walt the Wonder Boy, the little lad who fired the imagination of millions. Whatever happened to him, and where is he now? That kind of article.”
“He fell off the face of the earth, that’s what happened to him. The angels carried him back to where he came from, and no one’s ever going to see him again.”
“Except me.”
“Except you. But that’s our little secret, isn’t it?”
“Mum’s the word, Walt. What kind of person do you take me for anyway?”
Things loosened up quite a bit after that. The busboy came in to haul off the appetizer plates, and by the time the waiter returned with the main course, we’d drunk enough to be ready for a second bottle.
“I see you haven’t lost your taste for the stuff,” I said.
“Booze, money, and sex. Those are the eternal verities.”