Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  You don’t know urgent life if you haven’t heard a gun in your ears, it is the state of being able to do anything, defy all laws, a small window, like a transom, is at the back of the stall, just under the ceiling, I use the chain of the holding tank to haul myself to where I can reach it, it opens down into the room on a pair of elbow hinges, the window is much too small to get through, so I do it feet first, swinging them up and hooking them one at a time, and then twisting sideways and getting my legs through and then my hips then my painful ribs, and then I let go with my arms over my head like Bo going into the drink, I give myself a good crack as I slide out and fall to the ground, it is a ground of crushed cinders, like the bed of a railroad track, and it compacts my legs, I feel sharp pain, I have twisted my ankle, cinders are imbedded in my palms. And my heart seems to have gone awry, it pounds in furious broken rhythms as if it has gone off its shocks, it’s sliding around my chest, lodging in my throat. It is the only thing I hear. I limp I scurry down the alley, holding my gun in my jacket pocket just like a real gangster in action, I peek around the corner of the Palace Chophouse and Tavern into the street and a speeding car without lights a half a block away fishtails and wavers a moment and in another moment it is lost in the shadows of the street, and I watch and wait but I don’t see it anymore. I didn’t see it turn, I step off the curb and stand in the gutter and the long back street is empty under its streetcar wires as far as I can see.

  And what I hear now are my own streaming sobs. I open the door to the bar and look in. The smoke lingers in the blue light and bottleshine. The bartender’s head rises above the bar, sees me and appears to decapitate itself, and that is funny, fear is funny, I gimp my way to the back, turn, come down the short corridor of the visitation, and before I look into the room oh the air is bad burned air and humid with blood, I don’t want to see this vealy disaster, I don’t want to be contaminated by this terrible sudden attack of the plague. And I am so disappointed in them, I peek in, I almost trip on Irving, face down, a gun still in his hand, one leg drawn up as if he is still in the act of chasing them, and I step over him and Lulu Rosenkrantz sits blasted back against the wall, he never got out of his chair, it is tilted precipitously, like a barber’s chair, and held fast against the wall by his head, Lulu’s hair sticks up ready for the haircut and his forty-five caliber is in his open hand on his lap as if it was his penis and he stares at the ceiling as in the intense sightless effort of masturbation, my disappointment is acute, I do not feel grief but that they have died so easily, as if their lives were so carelessly held, this is what disappoints me, and Mr. Berman slumps forward on the table, his pointed back stressing the material of his plaid jacket in a widening hole of blood, his arms are flung forward and his cheek rests against the table and his glasses are pressed under his cheek on one leg the other standing away from his temple, Mr. Berman has failed me too, I am resentful, I feel fatherless again, a whole new wave of fatherlessness, that they have gone so suddenly, as if there was no history of our life together in the gang, as if discourse is an illusion, and the sequence of this happened and then that happened and I said and he said was only Death’s momentary incredulity, Death staying his hand a moment in incredulity of our arrogance, that we actually believed ourselves to consequentially exist, as if we were something that did not snuff out from one instant to the next, leaving nothing of ourselves as considerable as a thread of smoke, or the resolved silence at the end of a song.

  Mr. Schultz lying flat on his back on the floor was still alive, his feet were turned slightly outward he looked at me quite calmly as I stood over him. His expression was solemn and his face was shining with sweat, he had his hand inside his bloodied vest like Napoleon standing for his portrait and he seemed to be in such imperial control of the moment that I hunkered down and spoke to him in the assumption that he was quite rationally aware of his situation, which he was not. I asked him what I should do, should I call the cops, should I get him to a hospital, I was ready for his orders, not mistaking the seriousness of his condition, but half expecting him to ask me to help him up, or to get him out of here, but in any event to be the one who decided what should be done and how. He gazed at me as calmly as before but simply did not answer, he was so extendedly suffering the shock of what had happened to him that he wasn’t even in pain.

  But there was a voice in the room, I heard it now like the wording of the acrid smoke, a whispering it was, too faint to understand, yet Mr. Schultz’s lips did not move but he only stared at me as if, given the character of my feeling, his impassive gaze was commanding me to listen, and I tried to locate the sound, it was terrifying, fragmentary, where it came from, I thought for a moment it was my own breathy intake of stringed snot, I wiped my nose on my sleeve, I dried my eyes with the heels of my hands, I held my breath, but I heard it again and terror made my knees buckle as I realized, swiveling on my heels, that it was Abbadabba talking from his grimace alongside the tabletop, I cried out I didn’t think he was alive I thought he was giving utterance from his death.

  And then it seemed to me quite natural that their division would be expressed at this moment too, between the brain and the body, and that as long as Mr. Schultz was still alive, Mr. Berman would still be thinking for him and saying what Mr. Schultz wanted said, however corporeally dead Mr. Berman might be. Of course Mr. Berman was still himself alive, however faintly, but it was this other idea that presented itself as the logical explanation to my mind. It was perhaps some comfort for the thought that I had myself sundered them. I laid my head on the table alongside his and I will say here now what he said though I cannot suggest the time it took his voice to round itself for each word, with long rests between them as he sought for additional breath like a man searching his pockets for the money he cannot find. While waiting I stared at the blurred columns of numbers on his adding machine tapes that were strewn on the table. There were lots of numbers. Then, to make sure I was hearing correctly, I watched the words form in his teeth before I heard them. It is difficult for me to suggest the sense of ultimate innocence conveyed by his statement. Before he got through it I was hearing the distant sound of police sirens, and it was so arduous for him to speak it that he died of the effort: “Right,” he said. “Three three. Left twice. Two seven. Right twice. Three three.”

  When I realized Mr. Berman was dead, or again dead, I went over to Mr. Schultz. His eyes were closed now, and he moaned, it was as if he was regaining consciousness of what had happened, I didn’t want to touch him, he was wet, he was too alive to touch, but I put my fingers in his vest pocket and felt a key and I removed it, and wiped the blood on his jacket, and then I found his rosary in his pants pocket and I put it in his hand, and then, since the police cars were pulling up to a stop outside, I went back into the bathroom and went through the window again, again torturing my ribs and my ankle, and at the head of the alley the street was filling in with lights and people running and cars pulling to a stop, I waited a minute or two and slipped out quite easily into the crowd and stood for a while across the street in the doorway of a radio store and watched them bring out the bodies on stretchers covered with sheets, the bartender came out talking with police detectives and then they brought Mr. Schultz out strapped in a stretcher and with a blood plasma bottle held alongside by the ambulance attendant, and the Speed-Graphics flashed, and when the photographers dropped their used bulbs in the street they went off like gunshots, which made the neighborhood people jump back nervously who had come out to watch in their bathrobes and housecoats, and everyone laughed, and the ambulance with Mr. Schultz moved off slowly, its siren wailing, and men ran alongside a few steps to look in the rear window, murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed an
d considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen. I drifted to the corner, and then walked quickly down a side street away from the scene, and then made a two-block-wide circuit of the Palace Chophouse and Tavern, and when that yielded nothing, I went out two more blocks and made a bigger square, and by this means found the Robert Adams on Trenton Street, a four-story hotel of pale brick hung with rusted fire escapes. I sneaked easily past the clerk sleeping behind his reception desk and hobbled up the stairs to the fourth floor, and after reading the number on the key I had taken from Mr. Schultz’s pocket I let myself into his room.

  The light was on. In the closet, behind his hanging clothes, was a smaller safe than the one I remembered from the hideout in the house outside Onondaga. I was not able to open it right away. I could smell his clothes, they smelled of him, of his cigars and his rages, and my hands were shaking, I was not well, I was in pain that made me sick to my stomach, and so it took me a few minutes to work the combination, right to thirty-three, twice around left to twenty-seven, and two twirls to the right back to thirty-three. Inside the little safe were packs of bills in rubber bands, the real actual facts of all those numbers on the tapes. I shoveled them out and stacked them in an elegant alligator valise chosen for Mr. Schultz by Drew Preston in the early days of their happiness in the north country. The bills filled it full, it was very satisfying to build this solid geometry of numbers. A great solemn joy filled my breast, in the nature of gratitude to God, as I realized I had made no mistakes to offend Him. I snapped the hasps shut just as I heard the footsteps of several people running up the stairs of the old hotel. I relocked the safe, drew Mr. Schultz’s clothes across the bar in front of it, let myself out the window and climbed up the fire escape, and I spent that night, it was October 23, 1935, on the roof of the Robert Adams hotel in Newark New Jersey, sobbing and sniffling like a wretched orphan, and falling asleep finally in the paling dawn, where to the east, I could see in the distance the reassuring conformations of the Empire State Building.

  TWENTY

  Mr. Schultz had been mortally wounded and he died at Newark City Hospital a little after six the next evening. Just before he died a nurse’s aide brought his dinner tray into the room and left it there, having had no instructions to the contrary. I came out from behind the screen where I’d been hiding and I ate everything, consommé and roast pork and cooked carrots, a slice of white bread, tea, and a trembling cube of lime Jell-O for dessert. Afterward I held his hand. He was by then in a coma and lay quietly with his broad, bare and badly sewn chest rising and falling, but for hours, all afternoon, in fact, he’d been delirious and talked constantly, he shouted and wept and issued orders and sang songs, and because the police were trying to find out who shot him they sent in a stenographer to put his ravings on record.

  I found to hand behind my screen a nurse’s clipboard with some pages of medical record forms attached, and in the top drawer of a white metal table, which I slid out very slowly, the stub of a pencil. And I wrote down what he said as well. The police were interested to know who killed him. I knew that, so I listened for the wisdom of a lifetime. I thought at the end a man would make the best statement of which he was capable, delirious or not. I figured delirium was only a kind of code. My version doesn’t always match the official transcript, it is more selective, being in longhand, there are words misheard, mistakes of my own emotion, I was also constrained not to be noticed by anyone who came at various times into the room, it was busy in there at times what with the stenographer, police officers, the doctor, the priest, and Mr. Schultz’s real wife and family.

  The stenographer’s transcript made its way into the newspapers and so Dutch Schultz is remembered today for his protracted and highly verbal death, coming of a culture where it tends to happen abruptly to men who never had that much to say in the first place. But he was a monologist all his life, he was never as silent as he thought he was or as ill-equipped in speech. I think now, as one who linked my life to his, that whatever he did was of a piece, the murdering and the language for it, he was never at a loss for words, whatever he pretended. And while this monologue of his own murder is a cryptic passion, it is not poetry, the fact is he lived as a gangster and spoke as a gangster, and when he died bleeding from the sutured holes in his chest he died of the gangsterdom of his mind as it flowed from him, he died dispensing himself in utterance, as if death is chattered-out being, or as if all we are made of is words and when we die the soul of speech decants itself into the universe.

  No wonder I got hungry. He went on for over two hours. I sat there and got to know that screen well, I think the material was muslin and it was laced taut on a green metal frame that could be rolled about on four little rubber casters, and his words seemed to paint themselves there on the translucent light of the cloth, or perhaps it was on my own unwritten mind, and I wrote them down, interrupted only by the wearing-down of the lead of the pencil, which I then had to reexpose by picking at the wood with my fingernails. Anyway I’ll enter this here as I heard it delivered between the hours of four and six P.M. of October 24, until the moment before he finally but not for all time fell silent.

  “Oh mama, mama,” he said. “Oh stop it stop it stop it. Please make it quick, fast and furious. Please, fast and furious. I am getting my wind back. You do all right with the dot dash system. Whose number is that in your pocketbook, Otto: 13780? Oh oh, dog biscuit. And when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy. Please, you didn’t even meet me. The glove will fit what I say. Oh Kay Oh Kaioh, oh cocoa, I know. Who shot me? The boss himself. Who shot me? No one. Please, Lulu, and then he clips me? I am not shouting, I am a pretty good pretzel. Ask Winifred in the department of justice. I don’t know why they shot me, honestly I don’t. Honestly. I am an honest man. I went to the toilet. I was in the toilet and when I reached—the boy came at me. Yes, he gave it to me. Come on, he cuts me off, the beneficiary of his will, is that right? A father’s son? Please pull for me. Will you pull? How many good, how many bad? Please, I had nothing with him. He was a cowboy in one of the seven days a week fights. No business, no hangout, no friends, nothing, just what you pick up and what you need. Please give me a shot. It is from the factory. I don’t want harmony. I want harmony. There is none so fair, beyond compare, they call Marie. I’ll marry you in church, please, let me just put it in a little way. Let me into the district fire factory. No no, there are only ten of us, and there are ten million somewhere of you so get your onions up and we will throw in the truce towel. Oh please let me up, please shift me, police, that is communistic strike baloney! I still don’t want him in the path, it is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Put me in control, I’ll throw him out the window, I’ll grate his eyes. My gilt edged stuff, and those dirty rats have tuned in! Please mother, don’t tear, don’t rip. That is something that shouldn’t be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends. Look out, the shooting is a bit wild, and that kind of shooting saved a man’s life. Pardon me I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Why can’t he just pull out and give me control? Please mother, pick me up now. Don’t drop me. We’ll have the blues on the run. They are Englishmen and they are a type I don’t know who is best, they or us. Oh sir, get the doll a roofing. For God’s sake! You can play jacks and girls do that with a soft ball and play tricks with it. She showed me, we were children. No no and it is no. It is confused and it says no. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. And you hear me? Get some money in that treasury we need it. Look at the past performances, that is not what you have in the book. I love the boxes of fresh vegetables. Oh please warden, please put me up on my feet at once. Did you hear me? Please crack down on the Chinamen’s friends and Hitler’s commander. Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast. What did t
he big fellow shoot me for? Please get me up. If you do this you can go and jump right here in the lake. I know who they are they are Frenchy’s people all right look out look out. Oh my memory is all gone. My fortunes have changed and come back and went back since that. I am wobbly. You ain’t got nothing on him and we got it on his hello. I am dying. Come on Missy, pull me out I am half crazy about you. Where is she, where is she? They won’t let me get up, they dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. I am so sick, give me some water. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Mickey please get me in the car. I don’t know who could have done it. Anybody. Kindly take my shoes off there is a handcuff on them. The pope says these things and I believe him. I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers. It isn’t worth a nickel to two guys like you and me, but to a collector it is worth a fortune. It is priceless. Money is paper too and you stash it in the shithouse! Look, the dark woods. I am going to turn—turn your back to me please, Billy I am so sick. Look out for Jimmy Valentine for he’s a pal of mine. Look out for your mama, look out for her. I tell you you can’t beat him. Police, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. You want to talk, talk to the sword. Here is French Canadian bean soup on the altar. I want to pay. I am ready. All my life I have been waiting. You hear me? Let them leave me alone.”