Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘well, Olivia that summer there, after Joe came back from where he went, when I stayed with Danny there, that time, Olivia, she had some kind of accident. Dislocated her shoulder or broke her arm, maybe; I forget just what it was. Some kind of a swimming-pool accident, I guess, fell off of a divin’-board, something—I don’t really know it was that, I mean; I just know it was something like that. Anyway, what it was was, she couldn’t lift nothin’, couldn’t lift nothin’ up for a while. Which, when you’re takin’ care of dogs all the time like she was, there, she hadda, it wasn’t just somethin’ that she liked to do, you know, there; this was her regular fuckin’ job she did there. Her way, makin’ a livin’, okay? That Joe and her old man, I thought at the time, they were all the ones financin’ her there—this’s long before I ever meet Doug, there, and find out he’s in with them, too—gettin’ her started in, onna career, right after she got out of college. Right after she got out of school.

  “ ‘Well, anyway there, she did have this kid already, a kid that come in all the time, helpin’ her feed them and stuff. They had quite a few dogs there, Ev and Joe did. So she needed the kid to help out. It’s not only that those dogfood bags can be heavy, they are: go fifty pounds at least, all right? You buy the big bags, you got lots of dogs, because them racing-dogs, they eat a lot. And so, liftin’ them, you’re a small woman anyway, this isn’t no June-weekend picnic, even when your arm is all right. Now Mandy, there, she could’ve lifted them all right, I think. Mandy looks like she could lift a car up, so you wouldn’t need a jack if she was with you and you got a flat you hadda change, but she’s not around the place much most days except weekends, so she wasn’t that much help. She’s got her own job, too, I guess. I don’t know what it is. Workin’ on construction, prolly, usin’ jackhammers and stuff.

  “ ‘And then all of the other stuff, too, that Livia hadda do: muck out the kennels and so forth, the runs, and brush them and give them their baths there. ’Cause hey, these’re valuable dogs you’ve got here. These dogs’re worth lots of money. You can’t just let your investment in them go to hell there; you got to take care of your dogs, just like you would anything else. But you see what I mean, this’s lots of work, keepin’ dogs like Olivia is, and it’s not easy work, either.

  “ ‘They used to have six or eight dogs, I guess there, running at any one time, Joey and Ev Rollins, I mean, and then they’ve also, they’ve got some they’re schoolin’; some that they’re breedin’; some that got too old to race, they retired them and bred them until after that they even got too old to fuck much. But one reason or other, quite a few of them, quite a few of their dogs, when they got too old she just didn’t do it, do what they always do. Livia didn’t have them put down.

  “ ‘ “Well, I didn’t want to,” this’s what she told me, at least. Because I asked her there, see, I see this, she isn’t getting that done. Why she wasn’t puttin’ them down. “That’s the reason I’m not,” she tells me. “I am the honcho running this business here. I’m the managing partner of this here entire operation; I am the resident HNIC—I’m the Head Nigger In Charge. I also own part of it, myself, and all of the other investors, all of them also approved. So I think if all three of them say we agree, we’re going to keep some of our dogs around because we feel like it, even after they’ve stopped making us money, because they’ve always been good dogs for us, and we can afford to be good, too, my bet would be: we’re gonna do it. We ought to be able to do that, I think, and my dad and Short Joe, and Dougie, him too, they all agreed with me on that. So we decided we would. And that’s the whole reason for that. We own this business, and we run this business; our very own private business we’ve got here. We can do as we fucking well please.”

  “ ‘Olivia’s really a nice woman,’ Ernie said,” Dell’Appa said. “Ernie gets very earnest when he talks about his Livia, almost eloquent. I think that’s why it bothers him that Livia does not seem to him to be at all of the heterosexual persuasion. He knows it, she’s not, but it hurts. ‘I know she’s a dyke, and her wife or her girlfriend, whatever two broads call each other, her girlfriend looks just like a damned cop, a big fuckin’ cop and a mean one.’ ”

  “My-my,” Dennison said, “his bladder may’ve been full and his stomach empty, too, but he certainly wasn’t giving up on getting to you, was he now?”

  “Ernie was getting noticeably desperate,” Dell’Appa said, “moving around so much he looked like he was trying to bore a hole in the chair, usin’ his ass for a drill.”

  “Not a tool well-adapted to the task, I would say,” Dennison said.

  “Not at all,” Dell’Appa said. “And he did seem to’ve resigned himself to doing this thing that he really didn’t want to do, given the fact that it could be in fact pretty dangerous to sink Short Joe Mossi. So I’d already made up my mind that when I’d gotten enough out of him at least to get a search warrant for Everett Rollins’s office—and when he said that, ‘Dougie,’ I thought I was probably gettin’ pretty close there, I’d let up a little on poor Ernie there just a bit, and let the kid go take a leak. Under a guard’s watchful eye, of course, with no chance at a phone or to chat up his pals. And then too, another factor also of importance, I was reaching the point, too, where even though I’d tapped a kidney on the way in, well, I wasn’t close to desperate but I sort of had to take a piss myself.

  “But that didn’t make Portia right; Portia was still dead wrong: the quality of mercy certainly is strained, at least until you talk. He was getting no lunch, nothing to eat, until I’d gotten everything I’d come for. Prison food’s not that good anyway, and besides, I wasn’t hungry. I’d had a full breakfast, before I left home, bacon and waffles with syrup, stuffing my gut to beat the band. I figured it might come in handy, as indeed it was doing. So I said to him: ‘Ernie, if I could prevent me from taking a leak, when I really did have to take one, I certainly wouldn’t annoy me any more’n I really had to, until I let me get out to the bathroom. So since you have to piss, and I am stopping you, I’m really surprised that you’re doing that, and giving me little cheap shots. Doesn’t seem very smart, from where I sit.’

  “ ‘Yeah,’ he said, slight note of contempt there, and still pretty combative, but obviously swayed by my logic, ‘Well, I think she’s got a very good heart. When I’m goin’ down there to help her out there, the five afternoons and then weekends, I’m still drivin’ the cab over Reno’s? Well, I’m still a young guy and I’m not in bad shape, but that’s a long drive, down to Mansfield and back, and I’m doin’ it every day. Drivin’ down there as soon’s I get up inna mornin’, and then drivin’ back up again, afternoons, and I’m drivin’ the cab all night too. I admit I was gettin’ pretty-near beat. It was really knockin’ me out. And Olivia, she could see this. Even though she has got her own troubles there, she is hurt and she can’t do her work, got her own troubles to think about there, which is why I am doin’ what I’m doin’, that don’t mean she still can’t see that I am really beat. This is beating the shit out of me. But she’s got some compassion, you know? And this, this is unusual.

  “ ‘Like, what most racing-dog people usually do—as soon as a dog’s gotten the point were he’s no good for nothin’ no more, not that this means he’s really real old, like you would look at him and you would say “Hey, now that’s a really old dog you got there,” you know, like you would. You can tell that by just lookin’ at them, their nose-hairs, the fur that they got on their muzzle, there? It’s all turned all white, they’re so old. And like that, that kind of thing. You can tell just by looking at them, that a dog is twelve or fourteen, and that’s pretty old for a dog. But a good racing dog, a competitive dog, well, three years’s gettin’ up there, gettin’ kind of old, and then, four years, well, I mean, like, forget it—by then it’s all over, it’s time; you gotta face up to it: four years is old, really old, for a greyhound to be. So, and there’s some women that I guess adopt them, they got this farm that they run, and they put the retired dog
s up for adoption, free, no charge for them. For people that don’t have a dog of their own at home but they’ve got kids who want a nice dog, a dog they can play with, you know. And who also I would assume live some place ’way out inna country, dog like that needs a place he can run. But most racing-dog people, what most of them do is they just have their too-old dogs put to sleep, except for their personal favorite ones, big winners that won lots of races—them they might keep around.

  “ ‘The others, though, all of ’em, five out of ten of them at least, for them it’s automatic: the old vacuum chamber: put ’em in, take the air out, and boom: that’s the end of them. They went to sleep. Well, it’s not really cruel, you look at it the way that most people who do it, who’re actually doing it, look at it. You got to do that, you’re runnin’ a business, every dog eats a certain amount, and then you got the shots and that stuff? It all costs money, you know. And, hey, all right, huh? You’re runnin’ a business here, not just playin’ with doggies, “Oooh, lookit dah cute little puppy,” that kindah kid-shit, fuck that kindah shit, this’s your way of makin’ a livin’. From breedin’ and raisin’ the dogs, and then racin’ them with other dogs, that is how, all right? That is what you are doin’. Not from you’re lettin’ ’em geddup in your lap, an’ then lick all over your face, always tellin’ them: “Hey, geddoffa couch there, yah gettin’ doghair all over”—no, that isn’t why you’re doin’ this shit; you’re doin’ this shit to make money. Well, then, shit, then what it is—what it’s gotta be, really, you wanna keep runnin’ it there—it’s just like what any business’d be: you got to make money off it. Off what you’re supportin’, what you’re payin’ the money out, that brings more money back in. Or else, if you don’t, there won’t be none for you, after you get through with all of it, payin’ your overhead, takin’ care of expenses, like every businessman has to.

  “ ‘I guess in horse-racing, it’s sposed to be different, at least with the thoroughbreds, there. The real thoroughbreds, at least, Kentucky Derby, the horse-races you see on TV. Probably not so much with the standard-breds there, only with thoroughbreds, this’s where that’d apply: most people in that, they’re not in it expectin’, they’re really gonna make money. Well, the trainers an’ jockeys, the exercise kids, the stablehands, yeah, them, they do. Hafta. Because they’ve gotta eat there. But the owners, you know, nah, not for them; for them it’s not that at all. They’re in it for somethin’ else. They’re in it for the excitement and stuff, and you know, they also really like horses, and they’re also rich, so there’s that. Those people got money to burn there. So they can do what they like, when they want, and then not care what it costs. But most people with racing-dogs haven’t got that, so you see, it’s different for them. They got to watch nickels and dimes.

  “ ‘I know Livia said to me, said a couple of times there, Livia said it a lot: “I know these oldtimers, been at it a long time, experience up the gump-stump. So maybe they’re right, and that does carry them; that really is how they do it. They’ve been flying so long, by the seat of their pants, and, goddamnit, no matter what anyone says, all of that shit, it still works for them. Well, what I say’s ‘Goddamnit, it won’t work for us.’ And I don’t care what anyone says: it’s too late for us now to bother to learn all that outmoded, otta-date shit. We’re gonna come in now, we gotta come in, if we’re gonna compete, armed right up to our teeth, with everything we can bring with us. Because everyone else who’s coming in now, ’S coming in with everything they got, and they’re who we’re not only up against now, in addition to all the oldtimers—they’re who’ll we’ll be up against later, the rest of our lives, and we’re the oldtimers, when all our old-timers’re dead. Not the oldtimers, much as we love ’em; it’s not them we’re competing with now. It is us we’re competing with now, and we got to use what we’ve got. And by that I mean that I think the biggest thing, by far, my father gave me for this, was not with the dogs, growin’ up with the dogs, but when he sent me to college.’ ”

  “Now,” Dell’Appa said to Dennison, “by now I know what this kid’s got, what he knows that I’ve only suspected. Suspected a long time, and strongly, too, yeah, absolutely I have, but still, no more’n that: only suspected. That’s all you can do, far’s you can travel, on what you know without proof. But he doesn’t know, A, he knows what he knows, because he doesn’t know what it means. What its significance is. And he doesn’t know, B, ’til he actually says it, I can actually get him to say it, I’m no better off’n I was before, before I laid eyes on him. But the minute it dawns on him, what he’s got that I’m after, he’s gonna start tryin’ to haggle again, and I’m gonna be back at Square One.”

  “Lovely,” Dennison said. “Don’t you love workin’ without a net down there under you? One false step and you know, and this’s the hardest part, too: as you fall to your death, you’ll be giving the crowd what they came for, and the bastards won’t even say ‘thanks.’ Not so you’ll hear it, at least.”

  “Right,” Dell’Appa said, “so what I’ve got to do here is come at the kid sideways, like one of those old B-Fifty-Two bombers can do, when they’re landin’ into a crosswind and there’s the wheels going straight down the runway but the nose of the fuselage looks like it’s aiming ten or twenty degrees to the left. Or the right, dead on to wherever the wind was. Damndest thing I ever saw, first time I saw that on TV; thing looks like a flying building anyway, it’s so damned big, but there it is, all calm and serene, got more moves’n Bobby Orr had. So I said to him: ‘College’? Is that what she told you, what she had goin’ for her, runnin’ this kennel, was what they taught her in college? Where’d she go, veterinary school, some A and M college or something?’

  “ ‘No,’ he says, ‘no—accounting. Olivia’s an accountant. A real accountant, I mean. That’s what she studied in school.’

  “ ‘Gee,’ I said, still trying my best to seem like I’ve got all the time in the world—after all, I don’t have to pee, ‘that’s not what I’d choose to as a way to prepare for a rewarding career in the racing-dog business.’

  “ ‘No-no,’ says Ernie, ‘that’s not what it is, that she spends all of her time with the dogs. She does a lot of that accounting work. Besides running the kennel days, I mean. Prolly she spends more her time on accounting in fact, ’n she does doin’ stuff with the dogs. The dogs’re just one thing she does.

  “ ‘Livia works very hard. She’s a very hard-workin’ woman. Day and night, work-work-work, she just works all the time, everybody says that. If you don’t see her, you don’t know where she went, well, you just can count on it, there, that wherever she is, that’s what it is that she’s probably doing: Livia’s workin’ again. It seems like she can’t just sit down, you know, have a beer, catch a little TV, just shoot the shit for a while. No, instead all the time what she has to be doin’, always has to be somethin’ that’s work, something she’s got to get done.

  “ ‘And she actually likes it that way. She will even admit it to you: “I got to have somethin’ to do, I go nuts, if I don’t have somethin’ to do.” Like she’s actually proud that she’s like this or somethin’, she don’t think anything’s wrong. When most people would tell you, they see someone like this, someone who’s actin’ like she does, they can’t ever sit down and relax, they would say to you, they would tell you: “Well, then, this person is nuts.”

  “ ‘She keeps all the books for the kennel and so forth, this’s her kennel there, Error, plus she also does all of her father’s accounting work, his law office there, and Joey’s taxes, too, Joey has her do those for him. I have her do mine too, even though mine’re simple, but I feel better havin’ her do it, the deductions and all that shit there. I don’t know about any of that stuff. And she only charges me ten bucks to do it; she don’t even wanna charge that. “Hey, no,” she says, “you helped me out there. Gave me a hand, I was hurt. I’m just repayin’ a favor here, is all.”

  “ ‘I hadda insist on it, payin’ her somethin’, that’s the kind of
person she is. I say: “Livia, no, this isn’t right. You paid me, I did work for you. I won’t feel right, now, you do work for me, and you don’t let me pay you. Next year I won’t feel like I should ask you, I’ll just do the damned things myself. And then I will get myself into the shit, and then it’ll be all your fault. Because you wouldn’t take money from me.” So she says: “Okay, that’s the way that you feel, gimme ten bucks,” and so that’s what I do. But if I didn’t have her to do it, and help me out there, I know what I’d do: all I’d do is fill out the card, even though I would know I was costing myself money doin’ that. But I don’t know about all them deductions and stuff, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable, you know? I wouldn’t feel comfortable doin’ that. I feel better just havin’ her do it, and then I save some money besides.’ ”

  “Right,” Dennison said. “I wonder how many of Reno’s other drivers and flunkies have this lady do their taxes too, not to mention how many of Chico’s. With her working for them Franco and Chico can always be sure that at least their own boys’re not courting tax troubles, they all report income sufficient, and legal, and aren’t gonna get net-worthed on them. That might be an interesting inquiry there, to prevent boredom this winter, time hanging heavy on our hands.’ ”

  “That,” Dell’Appa said, “and a few other things beside that. She keeps the books for a lot of the other dog-people, too, a lot of the other kennels. We’re already sure Reno’s cab company’s Chico’s money-laundry; people who own racing kennels would be pretty good cash-washers, too. Ernie said: ‘About twenty of them, at least, I think, the other kennels, they use her. Plus which, inna wintertime, matter of fact, she prolly does more the accounting stuff there’n she actually spends on the other, doin’ her work with the dogs. During the winter months, startin’ right after Christmas, it’s like nobody sees her at all. Every minute she’s not with the dogs, or maybe doin’ somethin’ that she has to do. All the nights and the weekends and like that. Makin’ out people’s taxes for them.