Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  Oddly enough, I detected this same attitude in the cop who came every day to open the gate and sit back on the two rear legs of his tilted chair and roll his cigarettes, it was only after my second day shooting I realized he was the chief, he had this braid on his cap none of the others in town had, not even the sergeants, and the arms in his short-sleeved shirt were an older man’s arms of former muscle, and his abdomen slumped, I had thought a police chief would have something better to do than personally unlock the gate of the firing range for the city folks who’d paid him off and hang around to enjoy the show, but in Onondaga he had all the time in the world and it had nothing to do with the responsibilities of his office, he was watching a boy, and even as I fired my clips, I thought of the chief behind me with the slight smile on his lips, another man imbedded in his institutional job out in the country, like Father Montaine, with a very low visibility in the world but quite comfortable even so and satisfied with the rewards of his life, the smoke from his shag cigarette keeping me in mind of his presence like some farmer’s on his porch sitting for his amusement to watch the passing parade.

  But for the first time since coming to Onondaga County I felt I was doing proper work, those few days of squeezing off rounds, I could hardly wait to get out there, and in the evenings I came to dinner hungry, with my ears still ringing and memorial pungencies of burned gunpowder sputtering in my brain. Clearly they were bringing me along, and I could reflect how organized everything really was in the apparent chaos of Mr. Schultz’s life, how patiently they were dealing with everything, from the present exigencies of the law to the anticipated needs of the future, they were managing their business interests from a distance, establishing a presence in this county seat of the north country, adjudicating their own internal problems in their own way, and also he had brought along someone pretty for the ride. It was a kind of juggling, wasn’t it, keeping everything in the air. I really liked pistol-shooting, I thought I was probably the youngest expert marksman in the history of the rackets, I’m not sure I went so far as to swagger, but at night in bed I thought of neighborhood louts chasing me down Washington Avenue, how if that happened now I would stop in my tracks and turn with my gun in my hand and my arm pointed and watch them skid, brake, and tumble all over themselves even crawling under cars to get out of my sights, and the picture of that made me smile in the dark.

  But nothing else I could think of doing with that gun was anything to smile about.

  I should say here that there were things going on behind the life I am describing, business things that I wasn’t directly involved in. Mr. Schultz was still collecting on policy, he was still selling beer and running the window washers’ and the waiters’ unions, once or twice he disappeared for a day or two and went down to New York but by and large he ran things long-distance, which couldn’t have been a terribly comfortable way to do business if you happened to be by nature suspicious as he was and distrustful of all but your closest associates, and of them too when they were not where you could keep your eye on them. A lot of time I could hear him screaming on Mr. Berman’s special phone, the walls were too thick for the words to be heard but the pitch and timbre and intonation came through clearly and like the man who woke up when the train didn’t go past his window I would have been startled if one day passed not carrying his raised voice.

  Mickey was gone a lot making the long drive to New York and back in a night and a day, and sometimes other men in other cars appeared whom everyone seemed to know but me, they would take their dinner with Irving and Lulu at the other table, I would say I saw two or three new faces a week. From all of this I began to appreciate the size of the operation, that the weekly payroll alone must be considerable, and from my vantage point Mr. Schultz would have to be now holding his own after the losses he had suffered as a lammister. It was difficult to judge these things because he portrayed himself so consistently as someone wronged, or double-crossed, or taken for a chump. Mr. Berman pored over the books constantly, and sometimes Mr. Schultz joined him, they really put in the time, usually late at night, and on one occasion I passed the open door of Mr. Berman’s office and saw there for the first time a safe, and some deflated canvas mail bags lying on the floor beside it, and it came to me that all the money was ending up right here across the hall from me, a reality that I found unsettling. Apart from the token sums he had deposited that day for political purposes, Mr. Schultz did not keep a bank account, because bank records could be subpoenaed and assets confiscated and tax cases made against him, it was a simple precaution, the case the Feds had now was based on adding-machine slips and policy records taken in a raid on the 149th Street office, which was bad enough. So it was essential accounting practice that everything was done in cash, cash for the payouts, cash for the payoffs, cash for the payroll, it was a cash business and the profits to Mr. Schultz were in pure cash and I dreamed one night of a great tide of cash coming in and going out and what was left on the beach Mr. Schultz ran along and scooped up in packets, which he stuffed into a burlap bag like potatoes, knowing it was a dream as I dreamed it because it put the country at the seashore but realizing in the dream, which is to say reading it for the truth of the matter, that he had been doing this for some time and he had to have accumulated many many burlap bags of culled cash, or cold cash, and then it turned into a gold cache, but I didn’t know in the dream where it was hidden, any more than I knew when I awakened.

  Around this time, Mr. Schultz’s lawyer, Dixie Davis, whom I had seen that time in the numbers office, came up from New York and arrived at the Hotel Onondaga in a Nash sedan driven by a member of the gang I didn’t know. Dixie Davis was my model for a good dresser, I had gotten my wing-tip shoes from seeing his and now I noticed his country summer shoes, which had a kind of mesh on top, they were brown with this cream-colored mesh going from the laces to the tip and I was not crazy about them although they were probably cool on the feet. He was wearing a double-breasted very light tan suit, which I liked, and a striped tie of cotton colored pale shades of blue and gray and pink, which I thought was smart, but best of all was the straw skimmer on his head, which he put on as he emerged in a crouch from the car. I happened to have been coming downstairs and so I saw Mr. Berman, himself no slouch at color combinations, greet him just outside the revolving door. Dixie Davis had his briefcase with him and it looked fat with the mysterious problems of legal life. He was somehow different from what I remembered, perhaps in anticipation of meeting Mr. Schultz he seemed to lose his self-assurance the moment he pushed into the lobby, he took off his straw hat and looked around somewhat nervously and held his briefcase in both arms, and though he was smiling and being jolly I saw that he was city pale, not handsome as I remembered under that pompadour haircomb, but somewhat toothy, and unctuous in his deportment, he had one of those smiles that went down at the corners of his mouth, what we in the Bronx called a shit-eating smile, and it was on his face as he passed with Mr. Berman into the elevator.

  Mr. Schultz was going to be tied up for the afternoon so he told Drew Preston to put in the time acting like my governess. She and I had a conference standing outside the little Indian museum that they had in the red stone courthouse around the back down some basement steps. “Look,” she said, “it’s just a few headdresses and spears and such and there’s no one there anyway to see what a good governess I am. Let’s go for a picnic instead, is that all right with you?”

  I said anything was all right with me as long as it didn’t involve education. I took her down the side street to where my secret tea shop lady made up such good things, and we bought chicken salad sandwiches and fruit and napoleons, and then she bought a bottle of wine at the liquor store, and we set out uphill through the east side of the town into the mountains. This was a longer hike than I expected, I had done most of my exploring north and west into the farmlands, but hills always look closer than they are, and we were well beyond the end of the paved streets and still going up in wide spirals on a dirt road with the big hill b
ehind the Onondaga Hotel looking just the way it did from my window, close enough to touch but just as far away, even when I turned around and looked down at the roofs of the city and saw what progress we had made.

  She strode out ahead of me, which ordinarily would have brought out my competitive spirit, except I enjoyed watching the flex of the muscles in her long white calves. The minute we were out of the town limits, she had unwrapped and removed her governess’s skirt and flung it over her shoulder, which stopped my heart beating for a moment, but she had a pair of walking shorts underneath, the hippy kind of shorts girls wear, and she was walking with a very attractive leggy stride, a smart practiced walk, head down, her free arm swinging, each buttock of her shorts rising and falling in a way that very quickly became reliably familiar to me, she was making good time uphill, her long legs her little feet pointing in their low-heeled shoes and white anklets, and then the road leveled and we were out of the sun into the shade of pines, and here the road petered out into a path and we struck off into woods, an entirely new world, very soft underfoot with a thick cushion of dried brown pine needles, and dry twigs cracking in the stillness, a brownish world with the sun breaking up high above us in the high-topped evergreens so that only speckles of it or small patches managed to reach the forest floor. I had never been in woods of such extent before, I mean there were dirt lots in the Bronx with weeds growing like trees all twisted and jungly but there wasn’t enough extension of them to get lost in them, not even the wilder parts of the Bronx Zoo gave me the sense I had now, of being inside something, as in a cavern or a cave, I had not realized that about forests that you would be walking down at the bottom of them.

  Drew Preston seemed to know where she was going, she found what she said were old logging trails, so I followed her trustfully, and we passed into small sun meadows that I thought might do for a picnic but still she didn’t stop but kept going in a generally uphill direction, and then I knew we were really in the hills some miles from the town because I heard the sound of water, and we came to the Onondaga River, which here was shallow and not much wider than a brook so that you could walk across it on the rocks imbedded in it, which we did, and I thought then she would want to stop but she kept going away from the river steeply uphill in a dark woods and I was thinking of beginning to complain, the socks in my new sneakers rubbing up blisters and the gnats itching my bare legs, for I was in my new Little Lord Fauntleroy summer shorts of linen and my short-sleeved polo shirt of blue-and-white stripes that she had chosen for me, but we came to a large flat natural park of brown woods, and here the sound of water became louder, and she was some yards ahead of me standing still now finally and silhouetted in a corona of dazzling light, and when I came up to her I saw we were at the edge of a great sunlit gorge of falling water, falling so thick it was white and thunderous breaking on tumblings of boulders all the way down. This was where she chose to have the picnic, seated with our legs hanging over the root-tangled and mossy banks into thin air, as if she had known all along this place was here and exactly where to find it.

  We unwrapped our sandwiches from the wax paper, and laid the picnic out behind us on her skirt, which she had spread on the ground, she unscrewed the cap from the bottle of New York State red wine and had the tact or carelessness to assume I would naturally take my turn drinking from the bottle as she did, and so I did, but only after removing my glasses, and we sat in silence eating and drinking and staring into this very amazingly beautiful roaring gorge of washed white boulders streaming with sun. At the very bottom there hovered a perpetually shimmering rainbow as if not water but light was pouring and shattering into its colors. This had to be the most secret of places. I had the feeling that if we just stayed here we would be free, Mr. Schultz would never find us because he couldn’t imagine such a place existed. What new assumption was I making now in this romantic setting? What could I have been about to declare when I turned to her only to realize this was not a shared silence between us? She sat with her shoulders rounded in some clearly deepening meditative privacy and forgot me and forgot to eat and, holding the bottle in both hands between her knees, forgot to give me any more swigs of wine. The advantage to me in this was that I could stare at her without attracting her attention and first I looked at her thighs, you know the way thighs broaden in the sitting position especially when they are not overly muscular, and in this unsparing sun they were soft and very milk-white girl’s thighs with the thinnest bluest veins of such tracing delicacy that it was with some shock I realized she was younger than I had taken her to be, I didn’t know her age but the company she had kept and the fact that she was married had made me think of her as an older woman, it had never occurred to me she might be as precocious in her way as I was in mine, she was a girl, clearly older than I but still a girl, maybe twenty, maybe twenty-one, this Mrs. Preston with the gold band on her finger. You could see that just looking at her skin in the sun. Yet she lived a life so beyond mine in practiced knowledge that I was a child beside her. I don’t mean just her free access as a great beauty to the most advanced realms of power and depravity, she had chosen this life for herself when, perhaps for her same reasons of staring meditation, she might have chosen life in a convent, say, or to be an actress on the stage. I mean rather how she knew this place would be here. How familiar woods were to her. She knew about horses. I remembered her invert husband, Harvey, had mumbled something about a regatta. So she probably knew about sailing and oceans too, and beaches to swim from with no crowds on them and skiing in the European mountains of the Alps and in fact all the pleasures of the planet, all the free rides of the planet that you could have if you knew where they were and had the training to take them. This was what wealth was, the practiced knowledge of these things so you could appropriate them for yourself. So looking at her now I had revelation of the great expanse of my ambitions, I felt the first acute pain of this same knowledge, which was an appreciative inkling of how much I had so far missed and my mother had missed and would forever miss and how much the little dark-eyed Becky was doomed to miss if I didn’t love her and take her with me through all the chain-link fences I had to get through.

  I now found myself painfully conscious of Drew Preston, I was impatient of the solitude she made for herself, it seemed to me a slight. I found myself waiting upon her, waiting for her attention, which I wanted very badly but would not abase myself to demand. I was at this point up to her profile. The heat of the hike had matted her hair off her forehead and I saw the whole line of it, a bone-white curve smooth as sculpture. The sun’s rays coming up off the boulders allowed me to see through the transparency of her eye to the green oval iris with its golden lights which blurred into radiance, and the whole orb seemed to magnify and I realized she was crying. She cried silently, staring through her tears, and she licked the tears at the corner of her mouth. I turned away as you do in intimate and uninvited witness of a terrible emotion. And only then did I hear her sniff and drink it in, like a normal sniveling human being, and she asked me in a choked voice to tell her how Bo Weinberg died.

  I didn’t want to talk about it any more than I do now but I did and so I will, this was the time I told it so now I have to tell it again.

  “He sang ‘Bye Bye Blackbird.’”

  She stared at me with the water roaring and the rainbow shimmering below us. She didn’t seem to understand.

  “‘Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singing low, bye bye blackbird,’” I said. “It’s a famous song.” And then, as if I thought I couldn’t make it more clear, I sang to her:

  “‘Make my bed and light the light,

  I’ll arrive

  Late tonight

  Blackbird, bye bye.’”

  ELEVEN

  He begins humming it early on while Mr. Schultz is down below with her, and I stand halfway between the upper decks hooked by my heels and my elbows on the bolted ladder, which rises vertically and falls vertically as the tugboat rides the waves or drops between them. And it is as
if Bo has heard it in the throbbing of the engine or a phrase of the wind, in the way that mechanical or natural rhythms around us take on the character in our minds of a popular song. He raises his head and tries to square his shoulders, he seems to have found strength from the distraction of singing, the assumption of your control in song, as when you hum while you are busy with some work of quiet concentration, and his wits were somewhat recovered, he cleared his throat and sang a bit louder now but still wordlessly, and he only stopped in order to look as much behind him as he could, and not seeing but feeling I was there he called to me, hey kid, c’mere, talk to old Bo, humming again while he waited confidently for me to appear in front of him. And I didn’t want to become any closer to this situation than I already was in the same deckhouse as this dying man, his state seemed to me contaminating, I did not want any part of his experience, neither its prayers nor appeals or plaints or last requests, I did not want to be in his eyes in his last hour as if then something of my being would go down with him into the sea, and that is not a pretty thing to confess but it was the way I felt, entirely estranged, being no saint, nor priest of absolution, nor rabbi of consolation, nor nurse of ministration, and not wanting to participate in any conceivable way with anything he was going through, not even as a looker-on. And so of course I had no alternative but to come down from the ladder and stand on the rolling deck where he could see me.

  He nodded his head peering up at me from under his brow, he was uncharacteristically messy, everything awry, his dinner jacket, his pant legs, his shirt half pulled out, his jacket bunched up behind him as if he had a hunchback, his thick black shining hair fallen off to the side, he nodded and smiled and said, the word’s good on you kid, they have high hopes for you, you know that, anyone tell you that? You’ve a runty little fucker aren’t you, you’ll never be fat your whole life, you grow another couple inches you can fight in the featherweight class. He smiled with his even white teeth from that swarthy face, the high cheekbones elongating his Siberian eyes. Little guys make good kills in my experience, they go up on it, you see, it’s an upward stick, he said lifting his head sharply for a moment to represent the knife, you use a gun it kicks up so that’s to your advantage too, but if you’re as smart as they say you will get to where your nails are manicured and a pretty girl sits by your chair and cleans under them every day. Me I am six one but I always killed smartly, I did not torture and I did not miss, the guy has to go? boom, you put his lights out, tell me who it is Dutch, boom, it’s done, that’s all. I never liked anyone who enjoyed this work apart from the pride of doing something very difficult and very dangerous very well. I never liked the creeps, I’ll give you some advice from the old Bo. This man of yours ain’t gonna last long. You see his behavior, he is a very emotional man, an untrustworthy maniac fuck who doesn’t give a shit for other people’s feelings, I mean people who matter, people who are as tough as him, and have better organizations and I’ll tell you just between us better ideas for the future than this wildass. He is obsolete kid, you know what that means? He’s all finished and if you’re as smart as they say you are you’ll listen to me and look out for yourself. This is Bo Weinberg talking. Irving upstairs knows and he’s worried but he won’t say anything, he’s too far along he’s ready for retirement he’s not going to change his colors now. But he has my respect and I have his. What I’ve done in my life, my achievements, the quality of my word, Irving respects these things and I bear no brief against him. But he’ll remember, you’ll all remember, you too kid, I want you to look on Bo Weinberg for your own sake and understand the terrible usage of such a man, look him in the eye if you can so you will never forget this as long as you live because in a few minutes, in just a few minutes, he will be at peace, he will be over it the ropes won’t hurt he won’t be hot or cold or scared or humiliated or happy or sad or needful of anything anymore, this is the way God makes up for the terrible death, that it comes in time and the time goes on but the dying is done and our persons are at peace. But you kid are a witness and it’s tough shit but that’s the way it is, you’ll remember and the Dutchman will know you remember and you can never be sure of anything again because you are doomed to live in remembrance of the foulness done to the man Bo Weinberg.