Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  For instance one night in my room I smelled cigar smoke and heard voices, so I went into the corridor and stood in the hall just outside the slightly open door of Mr. Berman’s room that he had turned into an office and I peeked in. Mr. Schultz was in there in his bathrobe and slippers, it was very late and they were talking softly, if he’d caught me there was no telling what he would do but I didn’t care, I was one of the gang now, I was running with them, I told myself what was the point of living on the same hotel floor with Dutch Schultz if I didn’t take advantage of it. At least my senses were still sharp, and that was something, I stepped back out of sight and I listened.

  “Arthur,” Mr. Berman was saying, “you know these boys would go to the wall for you.”

  “They don’t have to go to the wall. They don’t have to do nothing but keep their eyes open tip their hats to the ladies and don’t goose the chambermaid. Is that too much to ask? I’m paying them, ain’t I? It’s a goddamn paid vacation, so what are they complaining about.”

  “No one has said a word. But I’m telling you what I know. It’s hard to explain. All these table-manners kinds of things are getting to their self-respect. There’s a madhouse about twenty miles north of here. Maybe you should let them blow off steam once in a while.”

  “Are you out of your mind? All this work, what do you think happens they get into a goddamn bar fight over some whore? That’s all we need, a run-in with the state troopers.”

  “Irving wouldn’t let that happen.”

  “No, I’m sorry, we’re talking about my future, Otto.”

  “That is correct.”

  There was silence for a few moments. Mr. Schultz said, “You mean Drew Preston.”

  “Until now I had not been introduced to the lady’s full name.”

  “I’ll tell you what, call Cooney, tell him to get hold of some stag films and a projector and he can drive them up.”

  “Arthur, how shall I say this. These are serious grown men, they are not deep thinkers but they can think and they can worry about their futures no less than you worry about yours.”

  I heard Mr. Schultz pacing. Then he stopped. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Nevertheless,” Mr. Berman said.

  “I’m telling you, Otto, it doesn’t even take money she’s got more money than I’ll ever have, this one is different, I’ll grant you she’s a bit spoiled, those kind always are, but when the time comes I’ll slap her around a little and that is all it will take, I promise you.”

  “They remember Bo.”

  “What does that mean? I remember too, I am upset too, I am more upset than anyone. Because I don’t go around talking about it?”

  “Just don’t fall in love, Arthur,” Mr. Berman said.

  I went very quietly back to my room and got into bed. Drew Preston was in fact very beautiful, slender and with a clearly unconscious loveliness of movement when she was thoughtless of herself as she would be when we went out into the countryside, like the drawn young women in the children’s books in the Diamond Home broken-down library of books no newer than from the previous century, kind and in communication with the little animals of the forest, I mean you’d see that on her exquisite face in moments of her reflection when she forgot where she was and who she was with, and that raised generous mouth curved back like the prow of a boat, and the clear large green eyes that could be so rude with intense curiosity or wickedly impertinent lowered under a profound modesty of lashes. All of us were subject to her even the philosophical Mr. Berman, a man older than the rest of us and with a physical impairment that he would have long since learned to live with and forgotten except in the presence of such fine-boned beauty. But all of this made her very dangerous, she was unstable, she took on the coloration of the moment, slipping into the role suggested to her by her surroundings. And as I thought about this I thought too that we were all of us very lax with our names, when the pastor had asked my name to enroll me in Sunday school I gave it as Billy Bathgate and watched him write it that way in the book, hardly realizing at the time I was baptizing myself into the gang because then I had an extra name too to use when I felt like it, like Arthur Flegenheimer could change himself into Dutch Schultz and Otto Berman was in some circles Abbadabba, so insofar as names went they could be like license plates you could switch on cars, not welded into their construction but only tagged on for the temporary purposes of identification. And then who I thought was Miss Lola on the tugboat and then Miss Drew in the hotel was now Mrs. Preston in Onondaga, so she was one up on everyone, although I had to admit I had probably gotten the wrong impression when I took her back to the Savoy-Plaza and the lobby clerk had greeted her as Miss Drew not necessarily because that was her maiden name, although for all I know in that walk of life the married women keep their maiden names, but because as an older man in professional service he might have known her since her childhood and though she was now too grown-up to be called simply by her first name, she was too fondly known for too long a time to be called by her last. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to get anything straight, not even monickers, maybe that was my trouble that I needed to know things definitely and expected them not to change. I myself was changing, look where I was, look what I was doing, every morning I put on glasses that magnified nothing and every night I took them off at bedtime like someone who couldn’t do without them except to sleep. I was apprenticed to a gangster and so was being educated in Bible studies. I was a street kid from the Bronx living in the country like Little Lord Fauntleroy. None of these things made sense except as I was contingent to a situation. And when the situation changed, would I change with it? Yes, the answer was yes. And that gave me the idea that maybe all identification is temporary because you went through a life of changing situations. I found this a very satisfying idea to consider. I decided it was my license-plate theory of identification. As a theory it would apply to everyone, mad or sane, not just me. And now that I had it I found myself less worried about Lola Miss Drew Mrs. Preston than Mr. Otto Abbadabba Berman appeared to be. I had a new bathrobe, maybe I should put it on and after Mr. Arthur Flegenheimer Schultz went back to bed I would go knock on the Abbadabba’s door and tell him what X meant. All I had to remember was what had gotten me to this point in the first place, the innermost resolve of my secret endowment. That must never change.

  TEN

  I slept to an unaccustomed late hour, which I realized at once when I woke and saw the room filled with light and the white curtains on the windows like movie screens with the picture about to start. The chambermaid was running a vacuum cleaner in the corridor and I heard a chain-drive truck coming around the back of the hotel to make a delivery. I got out of bed and felt very heavy in the limbs, but I did my ablutions and dressed, and inside of ten minutes I was on my way to breakfast. When I got back to the hotel Abbadabba Berman was out front with the Buick Roadmaster at the curb, he was waiting for me. “Hey kid,” he said, “come on we’ll go for a ride.”

  I got in the back and found the only available seat was in the middle, between Irving and Lulu Rosenkrantz. It was not a comfortable place to be, after Mr. Berman got in the front and Mickey started the engine, Lulu leaned forward and I could feel the tension in him as he said, “Why does this little shit have to go with us?” Mr. Berman didn’t bother to answer but looked straight ahead and Lulu banged back into the seat beside me, giving me a murderous look but clearly talking to everyone else as he said, “I’m fed up with all this crap, I don’t give a pig’s fuck for any of this.”

  Mr. Berman knew that, he understood, he did not have to be told. We drove past the county courthouse and as we did an Onondaga police car backed away from the curb and swung out behind us. I glanced back to make sure and was about to say something when my instinct told me not to. Mickey’s pale blue eyes appeared regularly in the rearview mirror. Mr. Berman’s shoulders barely rose above the front seat, his panama hat was horizontally forward of where it should have been because of his humpback, but to me this was the depo
rtment of canniness and wisdom, I knew somehow the police car behind us was something else he knew and didn’t have to be told.

  Mickey drove across the rattly boards of the Onondaga bridge and out into the country. Everything looked baked and bleached in the high noon and it was hot in the car. After ten or fifteen minutes, he turned off the paved road into a farmyard and nudged through a protesting squawking flutter of chickens and past a gamboling goat or two and around a barn and a silo and then picked up speed down a long bumpy dirt road, with rocks making a popping against the tires and a big plume of dust billowing out behind us. He pulled up in front of a hut fenced in with chain link. A moment later I heard the brakes of the police car and a slamming door, and a policeman walked past us and unlocked the fence gate with its sign that said KEEP OUT and swung it open and we drove in.

  What I’d thought was a hut was in fact a long barracks sort of structure where the Onondaga police took their pistol practice, the floor was dirt and at the far end the wall was earth, a big pile of it having been shoveled up into a sort of hill or berm, and there were overhead wires attached to pulleys at either end of the building like clotheslines. The cop pulled some paper targets out of a bin and clipped them to the lines and ran them to the berm and then he sat by the door leaning his chair back on two legs and rolling himself a cigarette, and Lulu Rosenkrantz stepped up to the railing without ceremony, unpacked his forty-five and began blasting away. I felt as if my head had burst, I looked around and saw that everyone else was wearing leather earmuffs, and only then noticed a clump of them on a table and quickly availed myself of them, clutching my hands over them for good measure while crazy Lulu shot that target into smithereens and left a smell of burning powder in the air and the echo of high-caliber concussions that seemed to press the sides of the building outward and suck them back in.

  Lulu hauled the target back and didn’t bother to study it but pulled it off and clipped on a new one and yanked it back down to the end and proceeded to load his pistol hurriedly, even dropping cartridges in his haste, he was so eager to go at it again, and again he shot off his rounds one after another like he was in an argument and jabbing his pointed finger for emphasis, so that a continuous roar filled the shed, it was all too much for me, I went out the door and stood in the sun leaning against the car fender and listened to my head ringing, it rang in several different notes simultaneously, like the horn of Mr. Schultz’s Packard.

  The firing stopped for a few minutes and when it began again I heard the discreet shots of careful aim, a shot and a pause and another shot. After this had gone on for a while Mr. Berman came outside holding up two of the white target sheets and he came over and laid them out side by side on the hood of the Buick.

  The targets were printed in black ink in the shape of a man’s head and torso, and one of them was peppered with holes both inside and outside the target area with the biggest a kind of jagged shell hole in the middle of the chest, so that I could see the sun reflected in the car hood underneath. The other target had small precise holes arranged almost like a design, one in the middle of the forehead, one where each eye would be, one in each shoulder, one in the middle of the chest and two in the stomach region just above the waistline. None of the shots had missed the target area.

  “Who is the better shooter?” Mr. Berman asked me.

  I replied without hesitation, pointing to the second target with its unerring carefully placed holes: “Irving.”

  “You know that’s Irving?”

  “He does everything this way, very neat, and with nothing wasted.”

  “Irving has never killed a man,” Mr. Berman said.

  “I wouldn’t like to have to kill a man,” I said, “but if I did I would want to know how like that,” I said, pointing to Irving’s target.

  Mr. Berman leaned back against the fender and shook an Old Gold out of his pack and put it in his mouth. He shook out another one and offered it to me and I took it and he gave me his matchbook and I lit both cigarettes.

  “If you were in a tight situation you would want Lulu standing up for you and emptying his barrel at everything in sight,” he said. “You would know that in such a circumstance it is all decided in a matter of seconds.” He flipped out his hand with one finger pointing, then flipped it again with two fingers pointing, and so on, till the whole claw was extended: “Boom boom boom boom boom, it’s over,” he said. “Like that. You couldn’t dial a phone number in that time. You couldn’t pick up your change from the Automat.”

  I felt chastened, but stubborn in my opinion too. I looked at the ground at my feet. He said, “We are not speaking of ladies’ embroidery, kid. It don’t have to be neat.”

  We stood there and he didn’t say anything for a while. It was hot. I saw way up a single bird circling, way up high in the whiteness of this hot sunless day, it dipped around like a model glider, and it had a red or rust tone to it, lazing about up there drifting one way and then another. I listened to the pop pop of the pistol fire.

  “Of course,” Mr. Berman said, “the times change and looking at you I see what’s in the cards, you’re the upcoming generation and it’s possible what is required of you will be different, you would need different skills. It is possible everything will be smooth and streamlined, people will work things out quietly, with not so much fire in the streets. We will need fewer Lulus. And if that comes to pass you may not ever have to kill no one.”

  I glanced at him and he gave me a little smile with his V-shaped mouth. “You think that’s possible?” he said.

  “I don’t know. From what I can see it don’t seem too likely.”

  “At a certain point everyone looks at the books. The numbers don’t lie. They read the numbers, they see what only makes sense. It’s like numbers are language, like all the letters in the language are turned into numbers, and so it’s something that everyone understands the same way. You lose the sounds of the letters and whether they click or pop or touch the palate, or go ooh or aah, and anything that can be misread or con you with its music or the pictures it puts in your mind, all of that is gone, along with the accent, and you have a new understanding entirely, a language of numbers, and everything becomes as clear to everyone as the writing on the wall. So as I say there comes a certain time for the reading of the numbers. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “Cooperation,” I said.

  “Exactly. What happened in the railroad business is a perfect example, you look at the railroads, they used to be a hundred railroad companies cutting each other’s throats. Now how many are there? One to each section of the country. And on top of that they got a trade association to smooth their way in Washington. Everything nice and quiet, everything streamlined.”

  I inhaled the cigarette smoke and there was an undeniable opening-out of excitement through my chest and into my throat like the looming of my own power. What I was hearing was prophecy but of an inevitable event or of a planned betrayal I wasn’t sure. And why did it matter as long as I knew that I was valued?

  “But anyway, whatever is going to happen you must learn the basics,” Mr. Berman said. “Whatever happens you have to know how to handle yourself. I already told Irving he should show you. As soon as they’re through you’ll take your turn.”

  I said, “What, you mean shoot?”

  He was holding out in his palm the Automatic I had bought from Arnold Garbage. It was all cleaned and oiled, not a speck of rust, and when I took it I saw the cartridge clip was locked into place and I knew from the heft it was loaded.

  “If you’re going to carry it, carry it,” Mr. Berman said. “If not, put it somewhere else than the bureau drawer under the underwear. You’re a smart kid but like all kids you do dumb things.”

  I will never forget how it felt to hold a loaded gun for the first time and lift it and fire it, the scare of its animate kick up the bone of your arm, you are empowered there is no question about it, it is an investiture, like knighthood, and even though you didn’t invent it or design
it or tool it the credit is yours because it is in your hand, you don’t even have to know how it works, the credit is all yours, with the slightest squeeze of your finger a hole appears in a piece of paper sixty feet away, and how can you not be impressed with yourself, how can you not love this coiled and sprung causation, I was awed, I was thrilled, the thing is guns come alive when you fire them, they move, I hadn’t realized that. I tried to remember my instruction, I tried to breathe properly and plant myself in the sidearm stance and sight down my arm, but it took all that day and in fact the rest of the week of daily practice and a lot of sprays of earthclots brittle as crockery before I brought it around and turned that piece into the familiar of my own hand’s warmth and got it to hit where I looked, and my natural athletic genius of coordination, the spring of my juggler’s arm and the strength of my legs and my keen eyesight asserted themselves to their natural levels of achievement and I was hitting the target to kill whoever it was with every little pressure of my index finger. In a few short afternoons I could take aim and place the shot in the center of the forehead, either eye, the shoulders, the heart, or the belly, as I chose, Irving would pull the target back and take it down and put it down measuredly on the table over the previous target and the holes would match up. He never praised me but never did he seem to get bored with instructing me. Lulu didn’t deign to watch. He didn’t know my plan, which was to have Irving’s techniques of accuracy so governed by my skills that I could lose the form, drop my arm, snap point like Lulu in the punishment of his blasting rage, and make the same holes in the same places. I also knew what he would say if I did this, that shooting at paper targets didn’t mean shit, let me go out on a job with someone rising from his chair in the restaurant and people’s guns coming round in my direction looking big as field eighty-eights, looking in their barrels as wide and deep as a big bertha on a railroad flatbed, let me see what I could do then.