Button Man

by Paul Lyons

  No hurry, no worry, Hawk tells himself. It’s too late for Flo to come pottering around, watering the plants, cheating the gods at solitaire. Harold, the only other one with the key, is sweeping up the pieces in New Orleans. Once the money’s in the safe there won’t be anything to look guilty about. He was in the neighborhood and dropped in to water the plants and have a Fresca. This warm and kind impulse just came over him. Hawk can lie back against Sammy’s cushioned couch, ice to his pulsing eye.

  Now he takes out his dinky pen flashlight, puts it in his mouth like some kind of cat burglar. Some burglar. He’s a guy who puts money back in safes. He makes his way from the couch to the TV. He fingers the little sponge pad on Sammy’s desk next to the adding machine. The old man dabs his finger on the sponge each time he ruffles a bill when counting out, so he won’t accidentally pay more than he owes.

  Now that Hawk has made up his mind he wastes no time, pushing aside P. T. Barnum’s face before the poster can wink at him again, raising the key to the safe. The door pops open, and he reaches into his seersucker for the money. Then he puts the packets in neatly, the way he remembers finding them, a queasy remorse like letting go of something he suffered for as he replaces them—one packet, two packets, three, four—and he’s quits.

  And then he hears a noise, and he freezes.

  The bedroom door opens and before he can move the lights click on and there’s old Sammy. He’s wearing a white Hanes T-shirt and Mount Sinai hospital pj’s, and he raises one withered arm and points an accusation he can’t yet shape into words. His legs are so skinny out of the bottom of the pj’s that it looks like it would take him five minutes to walk from his bedroom to the living room. There’s a look of stricken incomprehension on his scrunched face, wounded, perplexed, shaken, like he might have a relapse.

  “Sammy, I thought you were in the hospital,” Hawk says, imagining the fool look on his face.

  “Hawk?”

  Sammy sees perfectly well who it is.

  “Is that you?”

  A puzzled frown deepens the creases of the old man’s face.

  “Hawk, what in the world …?”

  Sammy’s look flickers between confusion and outrage.

  “Jeez, hey, Sammy, it’s you. I thought I saw a ghost. You don’t know how glad I am that you’re home from the hospital and okay,” Hawk says, shutting and locking the safe. “I never doubted you’d be back on your feet.”

  Hawk looks down at his tall-ships key ring, winds out the safe-key duplicate, lays it on the TV under a framed display case of Kennedy buttons. The buttons are arranged like a family tree in all sizes. Every Kennedy who ever ran for office.

  “I was going to go see you tomorrow in the hospital. I had no idea you were out. They said in New Orleans you went back in for another follow-up procedure.” He half turns his face, tears welling. “We called the hospital every day.”

  “I heard about that,” Sammy says, and nods.

  Having accomplished what he came to do, it’s like Hawk has forgotten that he’s standing in the man’s apartment by his safe, choking his little plastic pen flashlight in his hand.

  “Hawk, what are you doing with your flashlight in my safe?” Sammy asks. “I don’t understand.”

  Hawk gulps, face flushed.

  It might be one of those rare occasions you hear about when the truth is safer than a fairy tale.

  “I was putting money back in the safe, Sammy.”

  “In my safe you’re putting money back?”

  “I overheard about the safe when you were talking to Harold. In the hospital.”

  “You overheard?”

  Hawk can’t look the old man in the eye.

  He shifts from foot to foot, not sure what to do with his hands.

  “I heard where the key was when you told Harold. I didn’t mean to hear but I couldn’t unhear it. I was just standing there with the plant and the Cuban. You know, it was rolled by Cubans but is it a Cuban cigar?”

  “In my safe.”

  “Sammy, I needed the cash, as back-up. In case.”

  “In case of what you needed it?”

  “I thought maybe I could improve my odds with a short-term loan and you’d be no worse off. Believe me, it was an emergency, a contingency plan. I couldn’t bother you about it until you got better. I had to do something.”

  “What emergency?”

  “The kind where you gotta have money. You’re desperate. My foot. The guy made me cut off my own toe.”

  “Your toe?”

  “With a small shears, Sammy. I owed him.”

  “You mean a loan shark?”

  Like the man had heard they existed but couldn’t get his mind around the fact that one of his boys had dealt with one.

  Hawk nods.

  The old man has on his irritating sour expression. His head shakes involuntarily. His eyes twitch.

  “It was that Earth Day show. I borrowed for it.”

  “I thought … I thought that maybe you had put something aside from your hard work over the years. I advised you about investing so much in that show.”

  “I should have listened.”

  Hawk nods again, looks at the ceiling with his palms up.

  “This gangster, he makes you cut off your own toe?”

  Hawk points to his foot. “New Orleans—you know, we get thrown in the can. Then the FBI and Norman. You heard about it. ‘Fiasco’ is what one of the Feds called it. I couldn’t make payment.”

  “So you steal from me? After all these years of working together you would steal from me?”

  “Borrowed, Sammy. You were in the hospital. No one would know the difference. I borrowed what I needed and now I paid it back.”

  “I always told you not to associate with those people.”

  “You were right.”

  “Look at yourself.”

  “Sammy, I wouldn’t steal from you, you know that,” Hawk says. “I came here and put the money back. Every cent. You can count it.”

  “I’m in the hospital,” Sammy says, his head rocking on his neck, “and you’re here, in my apartment fooling with my money, walking around with the key to my private safe in your pocket.”

  “Sammy, there’s the key”

  “Now you return it. No, I can’t accept this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry because you’re caught. I don’t accept your apology.”

  Hawk’s exhausted, drained from the night.

  He thinks of the look Nelson gave him when he left, like someone who’d always believed he couldn’t be hurt in a real way. Banged up, battered, yes, but threatened with death by slow leakage, no. Fitz will be beginning a long evening, maybe getting the freckles removed from his face one by one. Carla may have walked clean out of his life.

  Hawk’s throat constricts.

  “You always said you wouldn’t lend me money.”

  “Now you understand why,” Sammy says, coughing heavily.

  “Take it easy, Sammy.”

  “I should take it easy. You associate with criminals and the next thing you’re a thief. You think, why not? It’s an emergency. The drug addict robs a store because it’s an emergency.”

  “Come on, Sammy.”

  “You’re so desperate you ‘borrow’ from your friends without asking them. You’re not a bad guy, Hawk. The drug addict isn’t a bad guy either. Next thing you’re locked up in the penitentiary for twenty years. You were a boy selling slices of pizza for nickel and dime tips and I told you these things. It must be very painful to you.”

  “My toe hurt like crazy during the show.”

  The old man’s eyes smile sadly, pouches of flesh under them, and the skin slack around his working jaw.

  “I mean, to have become this way.”

  “What way? Look, I put the money back.”

  “The money you’d stolen.”

  “I was always going to put it back, Sammy. Give me a polygraph,” Hawk says.

  “Polygraphs are for anim
als. You can’t look a guy in the eye, what are you?”

  “I’m looking you in the eye.”

  But in truth Hawk can’t look the old man in the eye.

  Of course Sammy believes Hawk and of course it doesn’t matter.

  Even back from the brink of death, and after all their wheeling and dealing together, Sammy can’t turn his head on this. They both know it and know that Sammy has to say what he does.

  “Hawk, you know I can’t have anything more to do with you. Just get out.”

  28

  READY TO TURN

  It’s drizzling at first and then there’s a downpour and wind skate-dances rubbish over the pavement. Hawk stands in the street waving at cars until he’s soaked.

  Finally, a Gypsy cab stops. On the ride to the IHOB the turbaned driver keeps speeding straight into the closing mouth of watery red lights, only just as he does they turn green. Each time Hawk tenses, anticipating the sudden stomp on the brakes and his head starts to whip backward, and a few times they slow a little, threading through traffic. Only the driver has it timed cold and they go about a hundred blocks, almost to the IHOB door, seeing red, but just making it into the green every time, and Hawk takes this as a sign that things may be ready to turn his way.

  At the club, soaked seersucker carefully folded under his arm, Hawk shakes hands with Marcus the Doctor, who looks up from the backgammon chouette, concerned at the sight of Hawk’s latest black eye.

  “It ain’t nothing, Doc,” Hawk says, and goes to the phone.

  One of the CLEAN SWEEP kids answers.

  Carla was there earlier, brought by a neon sign and hooked it up. Afterward she split and Seymour and Mikey went out.

  “They leave together with Carla?” Hawk asks.

  “Nah, it was ’bout fifteen minutes apart. The lady was in a hurry to be gone.”

  When someone’s bleeding all over your apartment, taped to your kitchen chair, it’s probably better, no matter how much you want to, not to talk about it. What night is it? The place feels all distant action, muffled sounds of card chatter and dice, the IHOB packed and with something like a welfare-check Friday-night hop. There’s a couple of juicy-looking backgammon games, including the ten-dollar Bulgarian chouette.

  “Seen Philly?” Hawk asks No-Way José.

  “In the back, Señor Hawk,” No-Way says. “Where you been?”

  “Here and there. You got something I can wear until my T-shirt dries?”

  “I may have a few things in your size.”

  “I ain’t looking to buy nobody’s clothes.”

  “You in or what, Hawk?” says Larry Lawyer.

  “How about a cigarette, someone?”

  “Gimme me ten bucks and I’ll buy you a pack,” No-Way says.

  “Just bring me a Diet Coke,” Hawk says.

  “With cyclamates,” says Jersey Joe.

  Phil the Pot’s playing fifty-hundred Hold ’Em with burly connected guys who look like they swim off Brooklyn in December. There’s about ten grand in chips in front of each player. Tuna adjusts his visor and then deals. Phil might be the tightest player Hawk’s seen. He’ll throw away hand after hand, his ass pure leather. There are types who will imagine their way through a hand and there are locksmiths. You could lose your mind railbirding Phil.

  “Hey Philly,” Hawk says. “I bought your prescription.”

  “Yeah. What’s with the shirt?”

  “No-Way loaned it to me, you like it?”

  “Not much.”

  “Me neither,” Hawk says, takes a sip from his Diet Coke from a bent straw, and then puts Armand’s thirty-five hundred on the table and counts out five hundred more.

  Philly gives the damp-at-the-edges money an inquiring look, reads in Hawk’s face that it’s all there, and slips it in his jacket.

  “So Phil,” Hawk says. “I’ve been wanting to say something to you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re even.”

  “I’m happy for you, kid,” Phil says. “Really I am.”

  “Thanks, Philly,” Hawk says, and takes out the Amtrak number. “Hey, put a fiver on this number for me.”

  “Maybe your luck’s ready to turn.”

  “Like yogurt,” Fat Frankie says, who’s followed Hawk from the backgammon game.

  “Three players call. Option on the blind,” Tuna tells Herb. “Check or raise.”

  “Bueno, no check,” Bitter Herb says, and tosses in a hundred. “No-Way, get me the three-eight exacta at Monticello for five hundred.”

  “You got it, Bitter.”

  “Put ten bucks on it for yourself.”

  “One hundred to call, Philly,” Tuna says.

  Philly looks up like Tuna’s some nut job who just spoke to him on the bus, frowns, then, “yeah, yeah, yeah, Bitter Herb,” and he picks up a black chip and puts it back down and shakes his head and then looks around the table, like he’s about to fall asleep with his eyes open, and then picks up his stack of black chips and shuffles them with one hand and then takes one off the top and then another and says, “Herb’s and one more.”

  Out in the backgammon room members of a Bulgarian chouette catch sight of Hawk and start yelling and gesturing him over. All drunk and gleaming from the airline-size bottles of whiskey always rattling around in their jackets, like you could slap the whole table with a backgammon DUI. God, the game looks fat.

  “Good evening, gentlemen and Frankie,” Hawk says.

  “Roll the lousy, stinking dice, Larry,” says Toothless Jersey Joe, laying down a fifty-dollar bill that Larry adds to his roll.

  “Thank you, I appreciate your business. Joe, did I ever tell you that you’re an excellent client.”

  “Hawk, I haven’t seen you since I loaned you twenty dollars,” Toothless says. “You still look the same.”

  “What have you been into, bro?” No-Way asks Hawk, “You don’t call or write for a week and then you come in here like this with two watches.”

  “He’s got too much time on his hands,” Jersey says.

  No-Way holds up Hawk’s wrist.

  “Where’d you get that Rolex, man? The sucker looks almost real.”

  “Hey, I bring nothing but the finest gifts for my friends,” Hawk says, and takes off the plastic Dolly Parton watch and hands it to No-Way.

  Larry cubes the field and Simon from the Shoe Store passes and Fat Frankie yells, “I take,” and grabs the cube and brushes past Simon to sit, and Marcus Welby stands next to Hawk and puts his arm on his shoulder, watching Larry on roll, yelling “monkey” when he rolls, “open the cage and let the monkey out,” a ring of kibbitzers touching his arm now for luck and muttering Idi-amin-da-da while he sits there in some kind of dice-rolling zone, haloed by cigar smoke, game galloping before him, walking the dice in his mind. Sometimes it happens.

  “Larry, you carving up my good friend Frankie?” Hawk says, but now Larry only holds his index fingers to his lips.

  “Sit your lame sucker ass down,” Fat Frankie tells Hawk.

  “I got business to take care of.”

  “Make sure you have clean underwear when you’re done,” Frankie says.

  “Look,” Hawk says. “Don’t none of you go anywhere.”

  “Where else is there to go?” Toothless Jersey Joe says.

  Hawk can’t think what he’ll do with Ginsu, whether there’ll be life left in the leaky man or not. Out in the street gliding-gliding for the subway to do whatever it is that he’s got to do next, he’s hardly even thinking about Ginsu bleeding away.

  The thought of Carla storming out of his life, maybe forever, flushes his face.

  And his heart pinches for old man Sammy.

  Christ, the old guy looked ready to lunge and kiss him hard on the lips like don Michael kissing brother Fredo in Godfather II. And as Hawk walks with his stomach dropping away, he imagines Sammy, alone in the apartment in his monogrammed Mount Sinai hospital pj’s. No doubt he has a set of matching towels and sheets. How long does Sammy wait
after Hawk brushes past him to shamble over to the safe on those stick legs of his? You can see the old guy alone there at the desk checking his papers and his boxes of money. Relieved that his envelopes are still sealed, yeah. Does he count the cash? Eight-to-one he knows the figures to the dime.

  Hawk passes a man in the subway lying with vomit spilling out of his mouth like a comic book bubble. With his dinner written in it, Hawk thinks. Pigeons pecking toward it. Hawk gets caught putting money back in the safe, of all things. Like Doc always says when the correct backgammon play doesn’t pan out, No Good Move Goes Unpunished. Maybe Hawk should have kept a grand or two of Sammy’s as severance pay.

  Out of the subway, he walks with pep in his step toward the loft he’ll have to vacate. Neighborhood he’ll probably vacate. With its free night music. Groups huddled in the doorways with quarts of Bud drumming on garbage cans, barbecuing burgers over trash can fires, hitting drumsticks together to taped music and joint laughter. Spray paint on the side of every business. Restaurants where you couldn’t understand the menu and ordered blind and got pickled lamb’s ears or something, with fries and a lemon on the side. Barbed wire coils up around alleys. And the cans man out most mornings, disdain writ large on his face, with his, “Hey button man, I woke my ass up to fifty-seven dollars while your sorry ass was asleep.”

  So many nights Hawk’s stopped in old-man’s bar after a bad poker loss to chase his pint of stupidity with a shot of recognition, tossed a few quarters to the homeless who wait outside for generous drunks. So many nights Hawk’s walked these streets seeing clearly that he wasn’t as good a card-player as he thought, was overmatched and should find other ways to make the night hours get lost, shorten the interval before whatever was going to happen next. Only in the morning, mixed with loss and hurt and shame and loneliness, he’d think maybe he had it in him to learn, rise, and beat them at their own game, and even realizing that this was your basic home recipe for more defeat, it might be that he loved the game itself, and why should he leave things that he loves just because they seem bound to cost him?