Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  He looked away. And now I was startled to hear the song in a strong baritone, hoarse with defiance: Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singing low, bye bye, blackbird. Dum de dum de dumdedum, yah dah dee, yah dah dee, bye, bye, blackbird. No one here can love or understand me, oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me. Dum de dum, light the light, I’ll arrive, late tonight, blackbird, bye—and he shook his head with his eyes squeezed shut to reach the high note at the end—byeeee.

  Then his head slumped and he hummed the tune to himself more softly, as if he was thinking again, almost not aware of humming through his thoughts and when he left off and began to talk again he was no longer talking to me but to some additional Bo sitting beside him perhaps in perfect elegance at the Embassy Club, drinks in front of them, while they reminisced: So I mean the guy is up there behind locked doors in the Grand Central Building, what is it, the twelfth floor? people everywhere and you know he has to have a roomful of guns and an outer office and an inner office, in this very legitimate well-cared-for building that straddles Park Avenue at Forty-sixth. So these are the conditions. But they know that and they know it is difficult, the man Maranzano has been in the business his whole life, it is not a sucker’s proposition we are talking about and the Unione knows for this job they need the ace of spades. And Dutch comes to me and he says look Bo you don’t have to do it this is their special Italian thing they like to clean out their generations every once in a while, but as a favor they have asked for you, and it wouldn’t hurt us to be where they owe us a very big one so I say of course, I mean I was honored, of all the guns it’s my gun they want, it was like I did this and I was in glory for the rest of my days, this one thing, like Sergeant York. You know I love to be reliable. I mean I like wining and dining and laying pretty women, I like the ponies I like the crap table, I like to come into a room cut an indolent swath, but under that I like best of all to be reliable, that is the purest pleasure, the pleasure of my purest being where someone will say not this one not that one, but Bo Weinberg, where someone will ask me and I will nod yes and it will be done as smoothly and quickly and easily as that nod, and they will know that and consider it done, as it will be, so when they read about it in the newspapers a day later, a week later, it’s another unsolved mystery of a self-ordering world, another sweet tale of the tabloids. So I go to the meeting and I won’t say his name but he’s there and he says in that voice of a healed cut throat what do you need, and I say get me four police badges that’s all. And his eyebrows go up but he says nothing and the next day they are in my hands, and I get my guys and take them to the haberdashery and we all dress ourselves like detectives in those raincoats and derbies and we walk right into the joint and flip open our wallets police you’re under arrest, and they all go to the wall and I open the door the guy is behind his desk rising from his chair very slow on the uptake the man is seventy seventy-five he doesn’t move too good I stand and brace myself on the front edge of the desk and I place the shot cleanly in the eye. But here is the funny part that building has marble halls and it sounds like no-man’s-land it sounds through the open doors down the halls the stairwells the elevator shafts the shot heard round the world and everyone scrams, my guys, the hoods against the wall, everyone is running like hell and grabbing elevators and leaping down the stairs three at a time. And by the time I get out of there with this hot piece in my pocket doors are beginning to open up and down I hear those panics you know when people know something terrible has happened and they start shouting, and I lose my head I run down the stairs, I run up the stairs, and I get lost in this fucking building winding around corridors looking for exits walking into cleaning closets, I don’t know I get lost, and somehow, somehow, when I get to the bottom I am not on the street I am in Grand Central Terminal and it is five six o’clock in the evening the place is like grand central, people in every direction making trains, standing waiting for the gates to open, the train announcements echoing in all that noisy mumble, and I attach myself to the crowd waiting for the five thirty-two and I slip the piece in some guy’s pocket, I swear that’s what I did, in his topcoat, he’s holding his briefcase in his left hand he’s got his World-Telegram folded for reading in his right hand and just as the gate opens and everyone presses forward in it goes so gently he doesn’t even feel it and I saunter away as he gets through the gate and rushes down the ramp for his seat and, can’t you see it, hello dear I’m home my God Alfred what’s this in your pocket eek a gun!

  And he is laughing now, tears of laughter in his eyes, one precious instant in the paradise of recollection, and even as I’m laughing with him I think how fast the mind can move us, the way the story is a span of light across space. I know he certainly got me off that boat that was heaving me up and down one foot at a time through an atmosphere rich in oil, I was there in Grand Central with my hand delivering the piece into Alfred’s coat pocket but at the same time with my hands on the starched white tablecloth fiddling with the matchbook in the Embassy Club of the smart life, and the skinny girl singer doing “Bye Bye Blackbird” and outside in Manhattan the idling limousines at the curb sending their thin exhaust into the wintry night.

  I became the object of his baleful stare. And what are you laughing at, he said, you think it’s funny, wiseass? The story was clearly over, as in juggling when the ball you throw up finds the moment to come down, hesitates as if it might not, and then drops at the same speed of that celestial light. And life is no longer good but just what you happen to be holding.

  You think it’s funny, wiseass? He was a man who in his day took care of a great many people. May you last that long in your season till the last minute of your life at threescore years and ten. Then you may laugh. He was a greaser of consequence, Maranzano, not some piece of crazed slime like Coll who you couldn’t ever put enough bullets in. Not like Coll that mick fuck of a child-killer for whom one death was not enough. But I killed Coll! he shouted. I turned him to spit and shit and blood in that phone booth. Brrrrupp! Up one window. Brrrrup! Down the other. I killed him! These are facts, you miserable wretch of a kid, but do you know what it is to do that, do you know what it is to be able to do that? You’re in the Hall of Fame now! I killed Salvatore Maranzano! I killed Vincent Mad Dog Coll! I killed Jack Diamond! I killed Dopey Benny! I killed Maxie Stierman and Big Harry Schoenhaus, I killed Johnny Cooney! I killed Lulu Rosenkrantz! I killed Mickey the driver and Irving and Abbadabba Berman, and I killed the Dutchman, Arthur. He stared at me his eyes bulging as if he was about to break the ropes that bound him. Then it was as if he could not look at me anymore. I have killed them all, he said bowing his head and closing his eyes.

  Later he whispers to me take care of my girl don’t let him do it to her get her away before he does her too, do I have your promise? I promise, I tell him in the first act of mercy in my life. For now the engine is idling and the tug rocks wildly in the wash of the ocean waves, I never knew they made a point of being out here too even bigger more ferocious with their own life in the middle of nowhere. Irving comes down the ladder and Bo and I both watch him in the economy of his movements swing open the double doors at the rear of the cabin and step outside and hook them fast. Suddenly the clean rage of air has blown out the smell of the oil and cigar, we are outdoors in here, I see the height of the heavy seas like gigantic black throats in the dim cast of our cabin light and Irving is at the stern rail, which he unhooks and lifts and stows neatly to the side. The boat is yawing in such a wallow that I have gone back to my position on the side bench, which I affix myself to by bracing my heels against a steel deck plate and clutching the bulkheads on either side of me. Irving is a true sailor mindless of the rising and falling deck and no less of the splashing he has taken about the legs of his pants. He is back inside, his thin gaunt face is splotched with sea spittle, his thin hair glistens on his shining scalp, and methodically without asking my help he jimmies up one end of the galvanized tin tub and jams a dolly under it and shoves and bangs the dolly further and further un
der the tub to where he can use the leverage of his whole weight to hold down the dolly with one foot and pull the tub up on it, an oddly dry scraping sound reminding me that if it were a sandpail and nobody’s feet were in it, it could be turned over and tapped and leave whole a perfect cement sculpture of an overturned laundry tub perhaps even showing the embossed letters of the manufacturer. Bo’s knees are now raised to a painful angle and his head is even lower, he is just about folded in half, but Irving fixes that next, after he jams wood shivs under the four rubber wheels of the dolly, he opens a steel tool kit and removes a fisherman’s knife and cuts Bo’s ropes, and lassoes them off and helps Bo up off the kitchen chair and stands him up in the tub on the dolly on the deck of the tugboat here at the very top of the Atlantic Ocean. Bo is shaky, he moans, his legs are buckling he lacks circulation and Irving calls to me, tells me to support Bo’s other side, and oh this is just what I prefer not to do in my criminal training, exactly this, feeling Bo’s palsy arm around me, smelling his hot breath, the sweat under his arm all the way through his black jacket on my neck, his hand fluttering grabbing my head like a claw, clutching my hair, his elbow drilling into the flesh of my shoulder, the man in his heat and animation resting his weight on me moaning over my head and his whole body in tremors. Here I am supporting the man I am helping to kill, we are his sole support, he holds on for dear life, and Irving says it’s all right Bo, it’s okay, and as calm and encouraging as a nurse, he kicks out the right stern shiv, we are facing the open deck you see, and commands me to do likewise with the shiv on my side, which I do quickly and accurately and we roll Bo on the dolly quite easily with the sea’s help to the open hatch, where he lets go of us and grabs the framework standing now there alone his cement tub vehicle shooting back and forth like roller skates he can’t quite manage yelling ohh ohhoooooo, his body twisting from the waist as he struggles to keep himself vertical and Irving and I stand back and watch this and all at once Bo learns the control, and manages to diminish the roll of the rubber wheels and with his legs locks his cement tub in some relatively governable slightness of motion and he trusts himself to look up and finds himself facing an open deck and a sea higher than he is and then lower than he is in a night of raging black wind, and his straining arms are being pulled out of the sockets and he takes great deep breaths of this awful wind and night and I see the back of his head moving and his shoulders and his head is up facing into this world of inexplicable terror and though I can’t hear it for the wind I know he is singing and though I can’t hear it I know the song, it is blown away by sea wind, his farewell chant, the song in his mind, all anybody ever has, and so Bo Weinberg was on his own in catastrophic solitude when the pilot engaged the engine and the boat suddenly shot forward and Mr. Schultz in his shirtsleeves and suspenders appeared and came up behind him and lifted one stockinged foot and shoved it in the small of Bo’s back, and the hands broken from their grasp and the body’s longing lunge for balance where there was none, careening leaning backward he went over into the sea and the last thing I saw were the arms which had gone up, and the shot white cuffs and the pale hands reaching for heaven.

  TWELVE

  When I was through she didn’t say anything. She handed me the wine bottle. I tilted my head up to drink from it and when I looked again she was no longer sitting beside me but had slid over the mossy bank and was by means of crevasses in the rocks and the small pine saplings growing from them lowering herself down the side of the gorge. I lay on my belly and watched. When she was two-thirds of the way down the mist enveloped her.

  I wondered if she was going to do something really stupid. If I had told my story too well. I had not included everything, that for instance when Irving and the pilot were talking in the wheelhouse Bo Weinberg begged me to go below and see what was happening to her. I had done that and heard a little, not much, because the boat’s engines were so loud down there. I listened for a few minutes outside the door of the cabin where Mr. Schultz had taken her and then I had gone back up to the deck and told Bo she was all right, that Mr. Schultz was pacing back and forth and explaining his point of view. But I had just wanted to make it easy for him.

  “You wanted life?” I had heard Mr. Schultz shout. “Here, Miss Debutante, this is it, this is what it looks like!”

  And then I couldn’t hear anything for a while. I hunkered down in the passageway and just before I was about to give up I put my ear to the door and I heard his voice again: “You don’t care for what’s dead, do you? I’m telling you aside from the actual details he’s dead. Can you understand that? You can forget the dead, can’t you? I think you’ve forgotten already, haven’t you? Well, I’m waiting, it’s either a yes or a no. What? I can’t hear you!”

  “Yes,” she said, or must have. Because then Mr. Schultz said: “Ahh, that’s too bad. That’s too too bad for Bo,” and then he laughed. “Because if I thought you loved him I might have changed my mind.”

  I grabbed her skirt and shook it out and tossed it over the side and watched it float into the mist and disappear. What was I expecting? That she would find it, put it on, and climb back up? I was not acting sensibly. I dropped over the side and turned my back to the gorge and went after her. It was harder than it looked, I found that out almost immediately with my head barely below the edge when the root I put my foot on broke away and I almost fell. I didn’t like staring at rock face three inches from my nose. The rocks were scratching the shit out of my elbows and knees. I was in a panic of descent, I don’t know what I feared, that she would just leave me there forever, that someone would find her, take her, do something bad to her. Some woods maniac just waiting for the opportunity. But it was more than that, that she would find him, that oblivious to the uses that could be made of her she would somehow hone in on him wherever he was skulking, in whatever foul den. Some of the pine saplings had stickum on them which glued up my hands and helped me to hold on. I felt the heat on my back, the farther I descended the hotter it was becoming. In one place there was a ledge and I stopped to rest: the sound of the water was mountainous, like coal pouring down a chute. Getting off the ledge was harder than getting on. Below it there were fewer and smaller saplings to hold on to. Soon there were none and I held on by sticking my sneakers in cracks and clutching outcroppings with my fingers. Then all at once it clouded up, it was chilly, and I realized there were boulders to stand on, and so, bit by bit I climbed down these piled boulders to the bottom and stood in a white mist with the sun high above me diffuse and pale.

  The waterfall was to my right about twenty or thirty yards, it was the last and longest fall of the water and had not been visible from the top. It came home to me that falling water is what makes gorges, I mean this could not have been news to anyone but it was practically the first bit of nature I had ever seen in operation. I have read about dinosaurs too but that would not be the same as finding the bones of one. The water coursed swiftly past where I stood on a steeply tilted bank of sand and rock, the channel couldn’t have been more than six or eight feet wide but it was the widest here of any place that I could see right or left. Her skirt lay on the ground where I had flung it. I rolled it up under my arm and I headed to the left away from the waterfall, and soon I was on boulders again, jumping from one to another with the water boiling beneath and around them, this was all in a generally downhill direction, I felt as if I was descending into a pore of the planet, and then I came around a bend and was looking down at a cantilevered ledge shaped like an enormous arrowhead, and piled on it were her clothes and shoes and socks. I leapt down and ran to the edge, I saw below me a clear black pool of water entirely still except for a silver rim of spill off at the far side.