Button Man

by Paul Lyons

  The customer looked at Sammy and then left.

  “Hey kid,” Sammy said, “how you doing?”

  “Hey gramps. I’m doing just fine.”

  Sammy’s nose wrinkled again as if on its own.

  “You want a slice?”

  “You can bring me a cup of coffee, kid. Black.”

  Hawk crumpled the customer’s plate and flicked it into the trash from fifteen feet.

  “Five bucks I do it again,” Hawk said, and pocketed the dime left where the customer’s plate had been.

  “I don’t gamble, kid,” Sammy said. “I’m a businessman.”

  Hawk set down the coffee.

  “I’ve been watching you. You look okay on your feet, you work a good day, and you’ve got a bit of a mouth.”

  Fucking pervert, Hawk thought.

  “Listen, kid, the streets are full of money,” Sammy said, leaning forward. “You know those spic fruit vendors on the corner?”

  “I’m part Puerto Rican,” Hawk said.

  “Then I’ll spell it out slow. What do you think those guys take home every day?”

  “I got no idea.”

  “They walk around looking like they’re homeless but they take home two to four hundred dollars every day. I know ’cause I count the boxes. I find out how much fruit to a box, how much a guy pays for the box. There’s money in the streets is all I’m saying.”

  Sammy swabbed an imaginary pizza counter. His eye twitched.

  “What do you make here, kid?”

  “Pizzas. Stromboli.”

  “I mean how much cashola?”

  “Thirty-forty bucks.”

  “For twelve-fourteen hours?”

  “Hey, the hours are bad but the pay’s lousy.”

  “You could walk with a hundred, minimum, every day you sell my buttons. I’ve got boys selling all over the city.”

  And old Sammy held open his jacket, like a Times Square “Rolex” salesmen, only the lining of the jacket was pinned with anti-Nixon buttons: NIXON BUGS ME; CAN’T LICK OUR DICK; BEHIND EVERY WATERGATE STANDS A MILHOUSE. The old man looked ridiculous with his pin-striped suit open and a wide-ass grin. Only Hawk found himself laughing at the slogans: NIXON KNEW AND AGNEW; DICK NIXON BEFORE HE DICKS YOU.

  “Think you could sell a few of these?”

  “Maybe I could sell a few.”

  “You keep thirty-five cents for every button you sell. At the end of the day I pay out in cash money. You put up nada.”

  “This button-selling legal?”

  “Not to worry, kid,” Sammy said, and put down fifty cents for the coffee and a dollar as a tip. “I never lost a boy yet.”

  4

  THE PROBLEM WITH FINGERS

  “The problem with fingers,” Armand says, “is it’s a cliché.”

  Hawk looks at his own knuckles, puffed and discolored from punching them against each other or against lamposts or mailboxes or hydrants and scratched and pricked pink from button pins.

  Armand sits on a chair in the kitchen area of Hawk’s loft, scowling at the boxes and loose merchandise, and then at his manicured fingernails around an Arturo Fuente. Mr. Skinhead stands beside him with his tattooed head, a quart carton of skimmed milk in hand. A few dozen of the heart-shaped, apple green Earth Day helium balloons nose along the ceiling, trailing strings. Hawk often stands by the window with a helium canister inflating them, watching the street hustlers below. The balloons drift about the room at night like sawed-off faces, and then droop downward for days.

  “I thought you understood,” Armand says. “If we don’t honor our obligations, there’s a penalty. You didn’t apply for the no-penalty payback plan. If there’s no penalty, no one would pay.”

  “I hear you,” Hawk says.

  “ABC TV said Americans spend 15 percent more than they earn each year, which means they’re just paying the vig.”

  “I’ll have a package of money for you after next week,” Hawk says. “I’ve got a beautiful show in Atlanta.”

  “Hawk. Take off one of your shoes.”

  Armand picks up a Statue of Liberty lamp and shakes his head at Hawk’s Daffy Duck-shaped phone that quacks instead of ringing.

  “Why don’t you sell some of this junk?”

  “I try,” Hawk says. “It ain’t like I collect it.”

  Mr. Skinhead looks like he wears half a soccer ball on his head, only it is his head with the pattern of a soccer ball tattooed on it. How could you figure Armand going into business with this pentagon-headed jerkoff Hawk knows from years in the clubs when he dealt ludes and wisecracked games. Armand said they were assuming control of a moving business, pianos and stuff, with their employer Fives’ blessing.

  Whatever he didn’t collect came out of his pocket.

  “Armand, come on. A week’s all I need.”

  “Take off your shoe, Hawk. I gave you several weeks already.”

  Hawk mutters as he pulls the unlaced sneaker off his tired foot, trying to still his hand. He’d thought of Armand as someone he could reason with, though influenced by TV mobsters, like any gangster you’d meet. At the thought of which Hawk chuckles. Just the other night at the IHOB this angular Cuban guy who plays a low-level gangster-turned-snitch on Kojak walked out of the back behind Bitter Herb.

  “What’s he doing here?” Toothless Jersey Joe asked. “Wasn’t that guy killed in the last episode?”

  “Only wounded,” Fat Frankie said. “They shot him in the arm.”

  “That’s why he’s in here,” Larry Lawyer said.

  “What the fuck you grinning about?” Mr. Skinhead says, and walks over and lays a small pair of shears on Hawk’s thigh.

  “Nothing,” Hawk says. “Look, this don’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t?” Armand says.

  “I’m on my feet all day. If I can’t work, how do I get your money? I’m paying doctor bills, how am I gonna pay you?”

  “Don’t pay the doctor,” Mr. Skinhead says.

  “Listen, Hawk,” Armand says, calmly. “I hear you dropped four bills last night on one roll of the dice at backgammon. What do you think I’m going to do when you ask for another week?”

  “This guy rolls a fucking eight-to-one shot on me. He picks up a cigarette from the ashtray and blows smoke into the rolling cup and covers it with his hand and shakes the cup and bumps it on the table. You never seen such shit.”

  Larry had stared at him across the table, looking like the rich Eddie Murphy in Trading Places. He crunched a potato chip and the smoke swirled out of the cup followed by tumbling dice. Monkey, Larry yells. One die stops in the smoke. Five. And Hawk pleads, Help, Backgammon Gods, it’s Hawk, and the other die dances over the cork, hits the divider, kicks out, and spins to a stop. Snowflakes, three players yell at once, and it all comes back: Marcus the Doctor massaging his shoulder and saying, Tough beat, kid. You gotta pay a few people, and Toothless saying, His name is Crime, he doesn’t pay, and Hawk muttering about his luck, and Frankie saying, You know what, you’re really a great player. You just had bad personal luck the last ten years, and Simon from the shoe store saying, Good players roll good, bad players roll bad.

  Now Armand’s snapping his fingers in Hawk’s face and saying, “You’re someone who seems to keep missing the point.”

  Hawk holds his shoe in one hand, sets it by his foot.

  “The sock comes off too. Look, Hawk. I don’t gamble. No cards, no horses, no bingo. I don’t even buy a lottery ticket.”

  “The Connecticut Lottery’s at twenty-seven million. There’s guys selling dollar tickets for three dollars a pop all over Broadway. They take the train to Connecticut and come back with a hundred tickets.”

  Armand flicks his ash into a Mickey Mouse coffee mug.

  “I called Frankie’s place and he says you’ve been throwing a party, like you got flippers instead of hands.”

  “They say, ‘Hawk brings his own tartar sauce,’” Mr. Skinhead says.

  “Armand, I work fourteen-hour days to ge
t your money.”

  “Hawk, you need to learn fiscal responsibility. You do a thing with a negative result a few times, you’re supposed to change your behavior. Put the shears around your toe.”

  Hawk looks at the nasty beak.

  “What’s this show in Atlanta?” Armand asks.

  “We’re selling buttons at the Democratic convention.”

  “The Democratic what?”

  “Convention,” Hawk says. “They come from all over the country, these delegates, to choose the candidates for president. Every four years. It’s a three-ring circus. You watch the conventions on TV? You look at the stage, the audience, the people in the streets, and they’re covered with buttons.”

  “That a fact?”

  “Yeah. Look, it’s always good for a few grand.”

  Armand frowns.

  “I got eleven hundred. It’s more than half a payment.”

  “Give me what you’ve got.”

  “I got unlucky this weekend. You invest in balloons at two festivals, three months apart, and get rained out of both! What’s the odds on that? You saw how it rained.”

  “Unlucky, Hawk? You’re not smart. Next time you think about gambling with my money, you think about your toes. Go ahead, now.”

  Hawk opens the beak of the shears and inserts the little toe of his left foot between the blades. He feels that icy thrill in his groin like when you’re about to jump from a high place. He read in one of the magazines lying around the IHOB that if you could jump from thirty-two feet you could jump from any height.

  5

  MARCUS WELBY

  Hawk called the IHOB asking for Marcus as soon as Armand and Mr. Skinhead left and luckily the good doctor was playing in the Bulgarian backgammon chouette.

  Hawk hopped and hollered and pressed a clump of Goofy and Pluto towels where his toe had been and the skin was scalloped. He took a slug of Jack Daniels and splashed some onto his foot, like in Westerns. Then he cut a piece of towel and duct-taped it tight to his foot, warm blood seeping out as he wound the tape around.

  In the cab to the IHOB, between thinking how you’d explain an absent toe, Hawk can’t stop feeling that cold thrill up his spine before he did it. The breath stuck in his throat and his stomach dropped when he gripped the shears and flexed their jaws.

  Pain radiates up his leg and he remembers nights from a week ago: Zoey sound asleep on a cot, wheezing a little, her face tucked into her pillow making her small features smaller, Curious George Visits the Zoo open by her head after him reading to her. Carla the other night on top of him, her womanness having its way, sweaty skin slurping his skin, her hand covering his mouth as she presses him into the futon. And then, well, he must have lost it, because the cabbie’s pounding his shoulder and yelling about Hawk getting blood all over the seat and his cab not being an Econo Lodge.

  “You see that lame-ass, cock-sucking four horse lay down in the stretch,” No-Way’s yelling when Hawk limps into the IHOB.

  No-Way has a cot in the back, sweeps the place, reheats old pots of Maxwell and yells “fresh coffee,” runs bets to Philly from the big game in back. If you leave your coat in the place he’ll sell it back to you in the morning at a reasonable price.

  “The horse was twenty-to-one,” Toothless Jersey Joe reminds No-Way.

  “The horse don’t know it’s twenty-to-one.”

  “Some horses know,” Hawk says.

  “Cheesus,” No-Way says. “You shoot yourself in the foot or something?”

  “Is there a doctor in the house?”

  “Lie down on my cot and I’ll see if the Doctor’s available,” No-Way says.

  Marcus keeps a first-aid kit at the club for special cases. II Doctore: officially retired, ambulance corps in World War II, surgeon at Lenox Hill, professor at Columbia Medical School. He prescribes for the regulars, mostly Slavic and eastern European backgammon degenerates who can’t read the label off a pill jar. Not a clock person among them. They don’t have to be anywhere. They sit up all night gumming Garcia Vegas and slapping checkers against cork backgammon boards and getting ashes all over the place.

  “In America you put your ashes in these,” José says, slamming down fresh ashtrays.

  From No-Way’s cot Hawk can hear them arguing and insulting each other. Below the weather maps in an old Daily News there’s a piece about the Iranian plane the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down, July 3 in the Persian Gulf, having mistaken it for a fighter jet. It made your own toes look like a minor thing. President Reagan declines comment. Vice President Bush says the United States won’t apologize. Two hundred and ninety roasted. An ad says Yoga for Models and Strippers. The forecast says hot and sunny.

  Doc leads Hawk from No-Way’s cot to a poker table in a sideroom and gives an avuncular glance over his bifocals and shakes his head and frowns when he sees that Hawk’s toe just isn’t. He’s unshaven, in a blue turtleneck, and he looks like a shaggier, older Robert Young. Hawk sits with his foot propped on a Glad bag and newspapers on the table, while Doc pulls latex gloves from a box and tightens his disposable apron.

  Blood still dribbles out of Hawk’s foot.

  “To quiet it,” Doc says to himself, and hums, “flood in lido-caine to numb the nerve. Then get in there and debread it. Pick out remnant bone and stuff, nibble it clean, and make sure there’s skin to close the thing. Then we drape her.”

  And he hums and fusses, di-di-dee-dum-dum, and Hawk grips the arms of his chair while Doc preps and then stitches the wound closed.

  “Doc, you’re the best,” Hawk manages.

  “You’ll have to keep her dressed. I remember there was this guy in the Army got his toes clomped by a horse and got gangrene and I had to take off his toes. Later on I heard that he got around fine, wore cotton balls in his shoes. He developed corns, tailor’s bunions, and kept needing to have them trimmed.”

  Hawk nods and grimaces as Marcus finishes the wrap.

  “You got something that’ll let me work?” Hawk asks. His shirt is sweat-soaked and he’s dizzy. “I’ve gotta be able to work on my feet in a couple of days.”

  “It’ll hurt, kid, but I’ve got something that will help. You get a loose pair of high-tops. You get some slipper socks.”

  Fat Frankie sticks his head into the poker room, face puffed and shiny and his shirt unbuttoned to his tattooed gut, and catches sight of Doc’s bloody latex gloves: “Yo Marcus Welby, I told you I didn’t want you performing any more rectal examinations in here.”

  “He uses his tongue for those,” calls Larry Lawyer.

  “You of all people shouldn’t talk,” Marcus tells him.

  Hawk hops to the phone, foot throbbing, to call Carla. He hates that he’ll have to cancel their plan to meet at her workplace over on Tenth Avenue. Luckily, her boss, Carlos, got in a rush order and it looks like she’ll be working all night.

  “Hey, you gotta take the work when it’s there,” Hawk says.

  He’ll tell her about his little accident another time.

  “You should take her someplace romantic,” Fat Frankie says when Hawk hangs up.

  “Like right here,” Larry Lawyer says.

  “Can I get you something for the pain, Señor Hawk?” No-Way says.

  “Just a lemon with some tea in it.”

  “Mida, you know who’s going to win the Yankee game tonight?”

  “I do know, bro, but I can’t tell you,” Hawk says. “I’m sorry, but I was sworn to secrecy. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  6

  THE MUSEUM OF BUTTON HISTORY

  Old man Sammy takes the same route whenever he walks anywhere in his Morningside Heights neighborhood. It might not be the shortest way, but it’s the one he takes. Maybe the route used to run past a cigar shop or there was a bad block he wanted to avoid. Maybe it’s for luck.

  You never saw anyone nurse a cigar like Sammy. He’ll have it perched in one side of his mouth and the thing will look stone cold out. Then, his leathery cheeks puffing like fish gills, there’ll be
a wisp of smoke, a tiny glow. He’ll take a few draws, exhale the smoke. Then he’ll let the thing nearly die again.

  Sammy has a face full of schemes and triumphs, like in the game of life he’s got the house percentage. He wears glasses with thick gold gridwork supports that ride down his nose when he does the ledger at a show and there’s always a hint of Seagram’s about him.

  “It’s Seagram’s No. 9 makes me smell so good,” he cackles. “Just nick ’em, trim ’em, boys. Small items at affordable prices.”

  Hawk limps into Sammy’s apartment with a three-day stubble and a painkiller buzz. He shakes hands with Norman and kisses Flo’s cheek. Old Flo’s wearing blue polyester slacks and a black button-down shirt tied in a bow at the waist. Her hair’s jet black against her wrinkled face and she has on dark blue mascara. One smart old broad. After six cards at gin Flo knows seven of the cards in your hand. Good thing they never play for more than a penny a point. Sammy’s against gambling among his boys. If he hears you bet twenty bucks on a ball game, he says, “That’s a piece of change.” He could have thirty thousand on the table in front of him and he’d say it. A connoisseur of the meaning of a dollar, like millionaires who take out reading glasses to scrutinize a breakfast check of $8.95. Flo’s back is stooped now but she has the outline of a slinky kid, and teeth, she says with a nasty smile, “like the stars that come out at night.”

  “Every morning I do the Jane Fonda workout for my bum,” she says, “and then I walk with hand weights around Central Park Reservoir. If you don’t watch your figure no one else will. Mario, darling, save that plastic fork for me, okay?”

  “Look what just swooped in,” Mario says. “Hawk’s here, the streets are safe.”

  Hawk tells the button gang that, drunk, he stepped on a broken bottle in his house and practically cut his toe off so he needed twenty stitches. The last is almost the truth. He’d like to tell the whole truth. Only Sammy says if they associate with criminals he won’t do business with them.