Roscoe

by William Kennedy

  He finished her off, then left her to sleep away her loathing. He walked out the back door of the main lodge and into the woods, took a circuitous path to the boathouse, and when he looked back at the city of Tristano he could not see any aura of fantasia, nor could he believe there ever was such a thing. Your only fantasia, Roscoe, is your gullibility.

  He untethered the outboard motorboat and rode it almost across the lake, where it sputtered and stopped, out of gas. He dropped anchor, dove into the water, swam the last hundred yards to the steamer dock, then walked to the railroad station at North Creek. With damp money he bought a ticket back to Albany, where ecstasy was the impossible love of Veronica, plus two dozen oysters at Keeler’s.

  “You were always a malicious bitch,” Veronica was saying to Pamela in the courtroom, “but this is an evil act.”

  “I only want what is mine,” Pamela said.

  “Gilby is not yours and never was.” Veronica turned to see if the boy was still at the table, and lowered her voice. “Do you even know who his father is?”

  “Oh, I do indeed.”

  “Your dead Russian never accepted him.”

  “What is your point, Veronica? Do you have secret information about his father? By all means, let me in on it.” Pamela was smiling.

  “You won’t get this boy.”

  “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  “Veronica,” said Roscoe, “there’s nothing to be gained by this. She’ll do what she’ll do, and we’ll overthrow it.”

  “Still slobbering after her,” Pamela said, “like the fat little Roscoe you always were. And still so insufferably smart. But you know better than anyone what you’ll never have and never be. I love how that must torture you.”

  “My torture ends, Pamela,” Roscoe said, “when you leave the room.”

  Gilby stood up from his chair and Pamela walked to him.

  “We will be together, my darling one,” she said for all to hear, and she embraced him. “I love you and I’ll take care of you forever.”

  “I don’t even like you,” Gilby said.

  Pamela stood away from him.

  “You will,” she said, “you’ll love your mother. Remember that I love you.”

  “You’re not my mother,” Gilby said.

  “Cut your losses,” Roscoe said to Pamela. “Go home and put a dagger in what’s left of your heart.”

  In Pamela’s face Roscoe saw raw malice, malignant need. Elisha was right: she was desperate, would do anything to attain her goal. But despite this lawsuit, her goal wasn’t necessarily Gilby’s custody. She confirmed that when she whispered to Veronica, “It’s a wise child that knows its father.”

  Roscoe sat alone in Keeler’s Sadler Room, beneath a W. Dendy Sadler print of twelve happy and fat old monks being served a sumptuous supper by six sullen and thin young monks. When he ate, Roscoe identified with the fat monks. On the room’s walls were dozens of other Sadler prints of eighteenth-century English men, and now and then women, always celebrating or ritualizing, or pensive or bereaved, amid food and drink. Roscoe dipped an oyster cracker into his cocktail sauce, well into his second splendid bottle of Cheval Blanc, and five oysters into his second dozen of bluepoints. Would he go for a third dozen? He would consider it, for this might be his last meal in the civilized world. Now he stopped dwelling on oysters to consider the news just given to him by O.B., who was sitting across the table with Mac, the odor of witch hazel, O.B.’s aftershave lotion, mixing with the aroma of cocktail sauce, not a happy fusion. The news also was not happy: the Dutchman, proper name Vernon Van Epps, a pimp with a nightclub, had been found murdered in his flat upstairs over his Hudson Avenue club, the Double Dutch.

  “Two dozen stab wounds, back and chest,” O.B. said.

  “I’m cheering,” Mac said.

  “Don’t cheer too loud,” O.B. said.

  “He was a worthless bag of chicken guts,” Mac said. “They should bury him in pig shit.”

  “You didn’t care for him,” Roscoe said.

  “He was a no-good fat fuck,” Mac said.

  “Keep this up,” O.B. said, “they’ll lock you up for it.”

  “What’d he do to you, Mac?”

  “He took Mac’s girlfriend off the street and put her to work in his bar,” O.B. said. “Then she wasn’t Mac’s girl anymore.”

  “Are you talking about Pina?” Roscoe asked. “Giuseppina?”

  “Pina,” Mac said.

  “She’s a working girl,” Roscoe said. “She’s been on the street ever since I know her.”

  “Right,” Mac said, “but she came home to me.”

  “Touching,” said O.B. “The Dutchman was informing for the Governor’s people. He probably told them about the Division Street payoffs. The troopers found him dead.”

  “Who said he was informing?”

  “A plainclothes trooper, Dory Dixon. He’s an inspector and was making it his investigation. Our beat cop, Eddie Miller, saw trooper cars and called the desk. I went down and they got guards at the Dutchman’s door. ‘Wait a minute,’ I say, ‘this is still Albany. Who the hell are you to set up guards without us?’ Dixon says somebody killed their informant. ‘Maybe so,’ I say, ‘but they killed him in my town, and this is my investigation from this minute on, and my coroner is in charge, and the coroner, as you goddamn well know, can arrest you if he’s in the right mood, so get your troops the fuck out of here and if you’re nice I’ll let you sit in on the autopsy.’ He was boiling, but he pulled off his guards. I called Nolan and he came down and took the body over to Keegan’s.”

  “They probably think we did it,” Roscoe said.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” said O.B.

  “We didn’t, did we?”

  “Not that I know of,” said O.B.

  “You tell Patsy?”

  “I couldn’t find him. That’s why I came here.”

  “He’s up in Troy for a chicken fight. He and Bindy are going at it.”

  “You want me to go up and tell him?”

  “I’ll go,” Roscoe said. “I was going to sign myself into the hospital after my oysters.”

  “Them goddamn things’d put anybody in the hospital. What do you mean, hospital?”

  “The pains from the accident. They don’t go away.”

  “You go to the hospital, then. You go, and let me find Patsy.”

  “No, I want to see him and Bindy both on this.”

  “You got a ride to Troy? You want a car?”

  “Bart’s coming here to take me to the hospital.”

  “Where’s Manucci?”

  “He went to New York to get Alex. You have a clue who did this?”

  “Anybody can stab a pimp,” O.B. said.

  “Pimps need to be stabbed,” Mac said.

  “Whoever it was knew him pretty well. He was in bed, naked.”

  “You find the weapon?”

  “We found a lot of clean knives,” O.B. said. “No money in his wallet. The whole place ransacked. He must’ve had five thousand dirty pictures.”

  “Robbed and stabbed,” Mac said, “and he dies naked, broke, full of holes, and covered with blood. I like it.”

  The Game Game

  Patsy and Bindy McCall were born into short-heel cockfighting, “short-heel” referring to the modest inch-and-a-quarter length of the needle-pointed spurs, or gaffs, their birds wore to fight. The boys’ grandfather, Butter McCall, had owned the Bull’s Head tavern on the Troy Road, where chickens and bareknucklers battled from mid-century; and their father, Jack McCall, grew up serious about chickens. Then, in 1882, Butter sold the tavern to Bucky O’Brien, who kept on with the ’knucklers but didn’t like chickens. Elisha’s grandfather Lyman also bred birds and fought them at the Bull’s Head, which was where the first interlocking of the McCall and Fitzgibbon families took place, the alliance that would control city politics far into the next century.

  Jack McCall, after his father sold the Bull’s Head, fought his chickens at Iron Joe Farrell�
�s cockpit in the North End. Patsy and Bindy learned the game there and matured into dedicated breeders, eclipsing their father’s local fame. Roscoe entered this world through Felix Conway’s tie to Iron Joe, which was strictly political. The only animals that won Felix’s attention were the horses that pulled his beer wagons; and he liked his chickens roasted. Roscoe, passing time at Iron Joe’s, developed friendships with Patsy, Bindy, and also Elisha, who fought a few birds as a boy but faded away from the fighting to become, like Roscoe, a spectator at the McCall brothers’ rivalry, and at their battles with other chickens of the world.

  At their peak, Patsy and Bindy probably owned eight hundred birds. Patsy’s Albany and Half Albany strains developed into some of the great fighters of the Northeast in the late 1920s and 1930s; and Patsy claimed his fighters were the best in the world. Some agreed he had a claim. Bindy’s strain was subordinate until the late 1930s, when he crossbred his Whitehackles and Spangled Blues with Spanish cocks from Cádiz and Jerez, birds he bought and flew up from Puerto Rico. He then began beating the best, including Patsy’s, which intensified the chicken wars on into the present moment.

  To Roscoe, spectating at cockfights was a lifelong education in tension, cowardice, unpredictable reversals, and courage. The birds, bred for battle, fought for neither God nor glory, neither to eat nor for love. They fought to conquer the other, to impose death before it was imposed. Just like politics, Roscoe decided, but without the blood. Well, sometimes there’s blood.

  One idea defined the purpose of this sport: to have, to understand, and to witness gameness, and to profit from it psychically or financially, or both. Roscoe had watched Patsy test a Blueface stag for gameness out at his country place, setting six birds to fight the Blue, who battled for five, or ten, or maybe twenty minutes against each one of the six in sequence, without a rest. They tore him, pecked holes in his head, disabled one wing, blinded both his eyes, riddled him with their spurs till he was all but bloodless, yet he kept fighting, hurt all six, and died only when he could no longer kick, or stand. He gave one final peck at enemy number six just before his body finally failed his spirit. Patsy bred his Albanys from this brave stag’s relatives and created a line of suicidally aggressive winners, one of them the granddaddy of the Ruby, Patsy’s bird in the next fight.

  But winners did not win by suicidal aggression alone. As usual, winning could also be begat by imaginative fraud. “Forty-five years of teaching by crooks,” Patsy once said to Roscoe, “means you always have to come up with an ace.” How did the crooks do it, and how did Patsy show his ace? Let Roscoe count the ways. The instant a crooked handler (the other fellow’s or yours) touches a chicken, he can secretly break his thigh with a thumb, or incite pain by pressure on his kidneys or his vent, or rub his eyes to blind him. Or, if your bird is hung up with the other bird’s spur in his chest, when the handler separates them he can wrench the spur so your bird’s flesh is torn open and he’ll bleed to death fighting. Your handler can do the same to your own chicken, if you prefer to bet against yourself. You can also train your bird to lose: practice him with muffs so he becomes a coward, take away his protein or his water, give him a candle to study all night before a fight to paralyze his pupil, give him diarrhea with Epsom salts, drug him with cocaine, tie his spurs so they’re too tight, or too loose and fall off, or so their angle will make him miss his target; and if an eye is gone, pit him on his blind side so he can’t see the enemy. Or, conversely, put curare on your bird’s spurs to paralyze the enemy; put grease, or drops from a heated lemon skin, on his head to make it slippery, so the enemy’s bite won’t hold; put cocaine or Xylocaine on his feathers so when the enemy bites his mouth goes to sleep and precision is skewed; put grease or flour or stove black on your best fighter’s head to make him look sick and people will give you the long odds; feed one of your cowards tomato juice to give him a suntan, the color of winners, but bet him to lose. If you have patience, create a bleeder out of one of your best fighters: slowly feed him an anticoagulant—coumadin, say—until a tap on his hip or thigh raises a hematoma; and then you’re ready. Collude with another owner and both birds will wear spurs one-sixteenth of an inch shorter than regulation, so your bleeder won’t be able to hit, fatally, the carotid artery of his enemy, but when he himself is hit he will bleed. His neck will swell with blood and he’ll be cyanotic, presumed dead. The savvy handler will quickly massage the blood out of his neck in the ring and revive him before he goes into irreversible shock, then will do it again at the first-aid bench, and the bird will recover, but now be known as a loser. Take him off the coumadin and fight him again, with long odds against him now as the loser; but this time he’ll be wearing proper-length spurs to kill, he will have fought and lived, and he will think with the serrated edge of a survivor. When he makes his kill, collect your winnings.

  The chicken war between the McCall brothers was taking place at Fogarty’s, in South Troy, which was, in the opinion of cockers east and west, north and south, the most famous cockpit in the Northeast, maybe in all of America. Tommy Fogarty, a grocer, butcher, and hotel owner who became superintendent of the Public Market under Troy Democrats, grew up at cockfights, illegal then and now. But, since he opened his pit in 1917, he’d never been raided. He functioned in the Irish neighborhood that bordered Troy’s nineteenth-century riverfront iron foundries. By the mid-1920s, cockfighters high and low, lumber handlers, lawyers, ironworkers, bankers, bricklayers, politicians, judges were streaming into South Troy with money and chickens, for this had become headquarters: more big-money mains fought here than in all other pits in the U.S. and Canada put together, so they said. Under Fogarty’s twelve 100-watt pit lights, there strutted, bled, and died the gamest chickens mankind could breed: forty-four one-thousand-dollar mains, some drawing crowds of a thousand, almost one main a week in 1928 alone, the pit’s peak year. Even now, in 1945, a waning year for the sport, seventeen mains had been held, and it was only August. Tom Fogarty’s reputation for fairness, and his intolerance for cheaters, made his pit a place where cockers challenged the best, and where they expected and got a fair deal.

  Patsy, who met Tommy Fogarty when they were boys, had fought chickens in the Fogarty pit since it opened. If Patsy had a friend closer than Roscoe or Elisha, it was Tommy. The most honest man alive, his knowledge of chickens uncanny, Patsy said—he can feel a young chicken and tell how firm his flesh is, how strong his thighs and his beak, how muscular his breast will be, how much of a truly coiled spring he will or won’t become when he’s ready to fight. All his life Patsy never found a handler that smart. Maybe five times a week he and Tommy talked on the phone about breeding, feeding, and fighting chickens—cockadoodledoo, Patsy called it.

  Bart Merrigan let Roscoe out of the car near Fogarty’s door, and went to park in an abandoned foundry lot, a hundred cars here already. A pair of Troy detectives sat in their sedan, guarding Fogarty’s peace. Roscoe, using the cane Bart had bought him, walked slowly into what was once Fogarty’s four-story hotel, now only a place where favored chicken-fighters could stay, and then into the barroom, Kayo Kindlon behind the small bar reading The Sporting News, nobody drinking, the fights are on. Roscoe went through the back hall and into a separate wooden structure with exposed, unpainted beams, and a circular dirt pit twelve feet in diameter, with a padded canvas wall three feet high encircling it. Maybe five hundred men and three dozen women sat on wooden bleachers watching the fight in progress, the crowd bigger than usual, for it wasn’t every night you saw the McCall brothers, their bankrolls, and their fierce breeds of chickens, fighting each other.

  Roscoe saw the blur of two birds in the air, one falling, bleeding from the head, and landing on its back, a wing twisted outward. Patsy and Bindy were faced off across the pit, Bindy smiling. Roscoe sat down beside Tommy Fogarty and shook his hand.

  “Seven to six, Patsy,” Tommy said, “but Patsy’s chicken is on his back.”

  “What’s the bet?”

  “I’m holding forty thousand,
and the betting’s heavy.”

  “They’re fairly serious.”

  “There’s sparks tonight. They’re not talking.”

  “It’s been going that way,” Roscoe said.

  Cy Kelly, Patsy’s white-haired handler, who worked mornings as Judge Rosy Rosenberg’s clerk in Albany Police Court, stepped into the pit and folded the fallen bird’s wing under his side, then put the bird on his stomach. But clearly he could not stand. Even so, Bindy’s bird kept his distance from Patsy’s downed bird, whose head followed his enemy’s every move. Then Bindy’s bird feinted, and Patsy’s thrust his bleeding head at the comer with fierce strength, a game but fatal move. Bindy’s bird, with wicked speed and unexpected strength, caught that extended neck in a bill-hold and worked it, worked it, finally snapped it. Then he stepped on the corpse and crowed victory. Some of the crowd roared.

  Seven to seven.

  Roscoe edged his way to the first row of the bleachers, where Patsy was sitting between his driver, Wally Mitchell, and Johnny Mack, who ran the White House on Steuben Street, Albany’s oldest gambling parlor. Johnny, Patsy’s personal bookie, was paying off bets against Patsy’s dead chicken.

  “How’s life, John?” Roscoe asked.

  “Life looks dead, Roscoe, but there’s always another chicken.”

  Some of the crowd moved to the bar for a ten-minute drink, and Cy Kelly carried the dead bird to a corner where the corpses were stacked.

  “I hear you’re winning,” Roscoe said, sitting behind Patsy.

  “Not with that one. What’s with the cane?”

  “Protection against women who find me irresistible. Anybody tell you yet that somebody murdered the Dutchman?”

  Patsy shook his head and waited.