Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  “Did you shoot out the streetlight?” Peg asked.

  The boy nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I wanted it dark so when Billy came home the police wouldn’t see him. I didn’t know it was you, Billy. I thought you’d have your hat on.”

  “The police were here tonight,” Peg said. “He was very impressed.”

  “What’d they want?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t come in. They just stopped out front and shone their searchlight in the front window. We had all the lights out, because George got a call they were coming to see him.”

  “Him? What the hell they want with him?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Were they looking for me, too?”

  “Only George, from what we heard. But they never came in.”

  “Where is George?”

  “He went out for a while.” She turned her head away from her son and winked at Billy.

  Billy went to Danny’s bedside and poked a finger in his ear.

  “Thanks for the protection, kid, but you scared the bejesus out of me. I thought I was bushwhacked.”

  Daniel Quinn reciprocated the remark with a smile.

  “You got a hell of an aim with that pistol. That’s gotta be twenty-five yards, anyway.”

  “I had to hit it thirty-two times before it busted.”

  “An eye like that, you’ll make a hell of a dart shooter.”

  Daniel Quinn reciprocated that remark with another smile.

  Billy went to bed after he poured himself a glass of milk. Peg told him George had gone to Troy to stay at the Hendrick Hudson Hotel under the name of Martin Dwyer and would stay there until someone called him and said it was all right to come home. Billy pulled up the covers and thought of taking a trip to Miami or New York, if this was how it was going to be. But where would the money come from? Clean out the kid’s bank account? He’s been saving since he was in first grade. Probably got fifty by this time. Hock George’s golf clubs for train fare?

  Billy had a vision of wheat pouring into a grain elevator.

  He saw Angie in bed with his twins.

  When Billy was a kid he had no attic, no pile of toys, no books. He didn’t want books. Billy played on the street. But now Billy has a trunk in this attic with his old spikes and glove in it, and old shirts, and pictures Teresa took of him in his bathing suit out at Crystal Lake. What the hell, it’s his attic.

  The kid was protecting himself and his mother. George was gone and Billy wasn’t home. The kid must’ve felt he was alone.

  Billy thought of the carton of tuna fish Toddy won at a church raffle and how he took a taxi and left the tuna on Billy’s stoop because Toddy never ate fish.

  Billy thought of all the times he’d been suckered. In high school, it was a blonde who said she would and then didn’t after it took him two days to find somebody who’d sell him cundrums. Plenty of bums stiffed him on horse bets, but then Pope McNally, a friend of Billy’s all his life, welshed on a fifty-dollar phone bet and said he’d never made it. And that whole Colonie Street bunch. Presents at Christmas and your birthday, and in between you couldn’t get a glass of water out of any of them. You think you know how it is with some people, but you don’t know. Billy thought he knew Broadway.

  He listened to the night and heard a gassy bird waking up. The light of Sunday morning was just entering the sky, turning his window from black to dark blue at the bottom. The house was silent and his brain was entering a moment of superficial peace. He began to dream of tall buildings and thousands of dice and Kayo and Moon Mullins and their Uncle Willie all up in a palm tree, a scene which had great significance for the exhausted man, a significance which, as he reached for it, faded into the region where answers never come easy.

  And then Billy slept.

  Free the children. The phrase commanded the attention of Martin’s head the way a war slogan might. Stop the fascists.

  Charlie McCall was the child uppermost in his thought, but he kept receiving images of Peter as a priest in a long, black cassock, blessing the world. He’d be good at that. Free Peter. Let him bless anybody he wants to bless.

  It was three o’clock Monday morning and Martin was sitting alone in Morrie’s DeSoto in an empty lot on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, Patsy’s loaded pistol in his right coat pocket. Hudson Street was deserted, and in the forty minutes he’d been sitting here, only two cars had passed.

  This was the finale. Perhaps.

  With Morrie, he’d left Albany and driven to Red Hook and then onto the Taconic Parkway. They stopped at the second gas station on the parkway and waited half an hour by the pay phone for a call. The caller told them to go to the Harding Hotel on 54th and Broadway in Manhattan, check in, and wait for another call. They did. They listened to “The Shadow” on the radio, and dance music by Richard Himber and the orchestra, and ordered coffee and sandwiches sent up. They played blackjack for a nickel and Martin won four dollars. Jimmie Fiddler was bringing them news of Hollywood when the phone rang and Morrie was given a circuitous route to deliver the money. Change cabs here and then there, take a bus, take two more cabs, get out at this place and wait to be picked up. Morrie was gone two hours and came back with the money.

  “They threw it at me,” he said. “They looked at it once and saw right away it was marked.”

  Martin called Patsy, who took two hours to call back. Go to a Wall Street bank on Sunday morning and the manager will give you new, unmarked money. Martin and Morrie slept and in the morning went together to the bank. They were watched, they later learned, by New York detectives, and also by the kidnappers, whose car Morrie recognized. With the new money, Morrie set off again on a new route given in another call. He was back at noon and said they took the money and would call with directions on where to get Charlie.

  Martin and Morrie ate in the room and slept some more and exhausted all card games and the radio. Martin ordered a bottle of sherry, which Morrie would not drink. Martin sipped it and grew inquisitive.

  “Why did they pick you, Morrie?”

  “They know my rep.”

  “You know them?”

  “Never saw any of them before.”

  “What’s your rep?”

  “I hung around with guys like them a few years back, tough guys who died with their shoes on. And I did a little time for impersonating a Federal officer during Prohibition. I even fooled Jack Diamond with that one. Our boys had the truck half loaded with his booze when he caught on.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He congratulated me, with a pistol in his hand. I knew him later and he bought me a drink.”

  “Were you a street kid?”

  “Yeah. My old man wanted me to study politics, but I always knew politics was for chumps.”

  “The McCalls do all right with it.”

  “What they do ain’t politics.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “They got a goddamn Roman empire. They own all the people, they own the churches, they even own most of the Jews in town.”

  “They don’t own your father.”

  “No. What’d he tell you when you talked to him?”

  “I already gave you that rundown. He said you two didn’t get along, but he gets along with your sisters.”

  “When my mother died, they worked like slaves around the house for him. But he was never there when I was a kid. He worked two jobs and went to college nights. I had to find a way to amuse myself.”

  “You believe in luck, Morrie?”

  “You ever know a gambler who didn’t?”

  “How’s your luck?”

  “It’s runnin’.”

  “How’s Charlie’s luck?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “You saw him?”

  “They told me.”

  “And you believe them?”

  “Those fellas wouldn’t lie.”

  To free the children it is necessary to rupture the conspiracy against them.
We are all in conspiracy against the children. Fathers, mothers, teachers, priests, bankers, politicians, gods, and prophets. For Abraham of the upraised knife, prototypical fascist father, Isaac was only a means to an enhanced status as a believer. Go fuck yourself with your knife, Abe.

  When Martin was eight, he watched his mother watching Brother William chastising fourth graders with a ruler. She watched it for two days from the back parlor and then opened her window and yelled into the open window of the Brothers School: If you strike any more of those children, I’m coming in after you. Brother William closed the window of his classroom and resumed his whipping.

  She went out the front door and Martin followed her. She went down the stoop empty-handed and up the stoop of the school and down the corridor into the classroom opposite the Daugherty back parlor. She went directly to the Brother, yanked the ruler out of his hand, and hit him on his bald head with it. She slapped him on the ear with her left hand and slapped his right shoulder and arm with the ruler. He backed away from her, but she pursued him, and he ran. She ran after him and caught him at a door and hit him again on his bald head and drew blood. Brother William opened the chapel door and ran across the altar and escaped. Katrina Daugherty went back to the classroom and told the boys: Go home and tell your parents what happened here. The student who was being whipped when she came in stopped to thank her. Thank you, mum, he said, and half genuflected.

  The last time Martin went to Hibernian Hall for Saint Patrick’s Day a woman danced for an hour with her mongoloid son, who was wearing a green derby on his enormous head. When the music stopped, the boy bayed like a hound.

  The call about Charlie came at midnight. Go to Hudson Street near the meat market with your friend and park in the empty lot. Your friend stays in the car. You walk to Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue and get a cab and go such and such a route. You should be back in maybe an hour with the property.

  Martin felt the need to walk. He got out of Morrie’s car and crossed the empty lot. He looked across the street at a car and saw its back window being lowered. Resting on the window as it rolled downward were the double barrels of a shotgun. Martin felt the useless weight of Patsy’s pistol in his pocket, and he walked back to the DeSoto.

  At four-fifteen a taxi pulled up to the lot and stopped. When two men got out, the shotgun car screeched off in the direction of the Battery Martin opened the back door of the DeSoto and helped Charlie Boy to climb in and sit down. Martin snapped on the interior light and saw Charlie’s face was covered with insect bites. The perimeter of his mouth was dotted with a rash where adhesive tape had been. He reeked of whiskey, which Morrie said the kidnappers used to revive him from the stupor into which he had sunk.

  “Are you hurt anyplace?” Martin asked him. “This is Martin Daugherty, Charlie. Are you hurt?”

  “Martin. No. They treated me all right.”

  “He’s hungry,” Morrie said. “He wants a corned beef sandwich. He said he’s been thinking about a corned beef sandwich for three days.”

  “Is my father with you, Martin?”

  “He’s in Albany waiting for you. Your mother, too. And Patsy. Your whole family.”

  “It’s good to see you fellows.”

  “Charlie,” said Martin, “the whole world’s waiting for you to go home.”

  “They hit me on the head and then kept me tied to a bed.”

  “Is your head all right?”

  “One of them put ice cubes on the bump. I want to call up home.”

  “Were they tough on you?” Morrie asked.

  “They fed me and one of them even went out and got me a couple of bottles of ale. But after I’d eat, they’d tie me down again. My legs don’t work right.”

  Martin’s vision of his own life was at times hateful. Then a new fact would enter and he would see that it was not his life itself that was hateful but only his temporary vision of it. The problem rests in being freed from the omnipotence of thought, he decided. The avenue of my liberation may well lie in the overthrow of my logic. Not until Charlie Boy was kidnapped did Patsy and Bindy think of electrifying the windows of their homes. Given the benign nature of most evenings on Colonie Street, there is a logic to living with nonelectrified windows. But, of course, it is a dangerously bizarre logic.

  “It’s time to move,” Martin said, and he put out the car light and sat alongside Charlie Boy in the back seat. Morrie took the wheel and moved the DeSoto out of darkness onto the West Side Highway. It now seemed they were all safe and that no one would die. History would continue.

  “Stop at the first place that looks like it’s got a telephone,” said Martin, to whom the expedition now belonged.

  We move north on the Henry Hudson Parkway. When we free the children we also drown Narcissus in his pool.

  On the day after Charlie Boy returned home, Honey Curry was shot dead in Newark during a gun battle with police, Hubert Maloy was wounded, and ten thousand dollars of ransom money, identifiable by the serial numbers of the bills as recorded by the Wall Street bank, was found in their pockets.

  When Charlie Boy was returned to Patsy McCall’s cabin in the Helderberg Mountains, Morrie Berman and Martin Daugherty became instant celebrities. The press tracked them everywhere, and even Damon Runyon sought out Martin to interview him on the climactic moments on Hudson Street.

  “Martin Daugherty,” wrote Runyon, “climbs out of the DeSoto with the aim of stretching his legs. But he does not get very far with his stretching before he is greeted by a double-breasted hello from a sawed-off shotgun peeking out of the window of a parked car. Being respectful of double-breasted hellos of such size and shape, Martin Daugherty goes back where he comes from and ponders the curious ways kidnappers have of taking out insurance on their investments.”

  Eight hours after Charlie Boy’s return, the Albany police arrested Morrie Berman at the ticket office in Union Station, just after he had purchased a ticket to Providence. He was taken to the McCall camp for interrogation, and, Martin later learned, dunked in Patsy’s new swimming pool, which was partly filled for the occasion, until he revealed the kidnappers’ names. Curry and Maloy were among the names he disclosed, along with the nicknames of four hoodlums from New Jersey and Rhode Island.

  The Newark shootout proved not to be the result of Morrie’s disclosures, for no amount of dunking could have forced him to reveal a fact he did not know. He thought Maloy and Curry had gone to Providence. Maloy, under interrogation on what he erroneously thought was his death bed, said his flight with Curry from Greenwich Village to Newark was his own decision. He was tired and did not want to drive all the way to Rhode Island at such an hour.

  None of the kidnappers had been in Newark before, during, or after the kidnapping. None of them had any way of knowing that the hangouts of criminals in that city had been under the most intensive surveillance for several days.

  When Martin heard of Billy’s status as a pariah on Broadway, he wrote a column about it, telling the full story, including how Berman saved Billy’s life in a brawl, and wondering: “Is betrayal what Billy should have done for Berman by way of saying thank you?” He argued that Billy’s information on Newark, and only Billy’s information, brought Maloy and Curry to justice and saved the McCalls ten thousand dollars. Yet even this was not a betrayal of Berman, for Berman had told Billy the truth about Newark: Maloy was not there, and had no plans to go there.

  “Though I doubt he believes it,” Martin wrote, “Billy knew Maloy would go to Newark at some point. He knew this intuitively, his insight as much touched with magic, or spiritual penetration of the future, as was any utterance of the biblical prophets which time has proved true. Billy Phelan is not only the true hero of this whole sordid business, he is an ontological hero as well.

  “Is it the policy of the McCall brothers to reward their benefactors with punishment and ostracism? Is this how the fabled McCalls gained and kept power in this city of churches for seventeen years? Does their exalted omnipotence in this city now
have a life of its own, independent of the values for which so many men have struggled so long in this country? If the McCalls are the forthright men I’ve always known them to be, they will recognize that what is being done to Billy Phelan is not only the grossest kind of tyranny over the individual, but also a very smelly bag of very small potatoes.”

  Emory Jones refused to print the column.

  “If you think I’m going to get my ass into a buzz saw by taking on the McCalls over a two-bit pool hustler,” he explained, “you’re a certifiable lunatic.”

  Martin considered his alternatives.

  He could resign indignantly, the way Heywood Broun had quit The World over the Sacco-Vanzetti business. But this was not in character for Martin, and he did like his job.

  He could send the column in the mail to Patsy or Bindy, or handcarry it to them and argue the case in person. Possible.

  He could put it in the drawer and forget about it and recognize that children must free themselves. True, but no.

  The condition of being a powerless Albany Irishman ate holes in his forbearance. Piss-ant martyr to the rapine culture, to the hypocritical handshakers, the priest suckups, the nigger-hating cops, the lace-curtain Grundys and the cut-glass banker-thieves who marked his city lousy. Are you from Albany? Yes. How can you stand it? I was there once and it’s the asshole of the northeast. One of the ten bottom places of the earth.

  Was it possible to escape the stereotypes and be proud of being an Albany Irishman?

  Martin awoke late one morning, hung over and late for a doctor’s appointment. He dressed and rushed and when he stripped for the examination by the doctor, a stranger, he could smell the stink of his own undershirt. He yearned to apologize, to explain that he was not one of the unwashed. Sorry I stink, Doc, but I had no time to change. I got up late because I was drunk last night. Oh yes.

  The quest to love yourself is also an absurd quest.

  Martin called Patsy and told him he was wrong in what he was doing to Billy.

  “I am like hell,” said Patsy, and he hung up in Martin’s ear.

  Mary Daugherty agreed with Patsy McCall.