Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  “He knows somethin’,” Sport said. “He knows how to shoot you in the leg.”

  “How was his broad?” Billy asked.

  “She wasn’t his broad.”

  “He thought she was.”

  “She was hot,” Morty said. “Hot for everybody. Gimme his gun.”

  “Whataya gonna do with it?” Sport asked.

  “Give it to the cops.”

  “I didn’t call the cops,” Sport said.

  “They’ll turn up at the hospital.”

  “Cops’ll want witnesses,” Billy said. “You got any?”

  “You saw,” Morty said.

  “Who, me?” Billy said.

  “Who’s your friend there?” Morty said, looking at me.

  “I never saw him before,” Billy said.

  “What’s your name, bud?”

  “Bud,” I said.

  “All I can remember is my money,” Billy said.

  “I was out in the kitchen when it happened,” Sport said.

  “You bastards.”

  “Pay the man, Morty,” Sport said.

  “I got no more cash,” Morty said. “You come to the game, Billy, I’ll back you for what I owe you.” He turned to Sport. “He comes to the game I’ll back him for what I owe him.”

  “You on the level?” asked Billy.

  “Would I lie at a time like this?”

  “You only lie when you move your lips. Where you playin’?”

  “Tuesday eight o’clock, Win Castle’s house.”

  “Win Castle, the insurance guy?”

  “He asked me to run a game for him. He likes to play but he needs players. You play pretty good.”

  “You’ll back me?” Billy asked.

  “Up to what I owe you,” Morty said.

  “Here’s the ambulance,” Sport said.

  After they packed Morty off to the hospital I told Billy, “You get me into that card game and I’ll make sure you get your money from Morty.” Then I explained my talent with cards to him, the first time I ever told anybody about it. Giselle knew I gambled but she didn’t know there was no risk involved, that I could cut aces and deal anybody anything. I told Billy how I’d practiced for months in front of the mirror until I could no longer see myself dealing seconds, or bottom cards, and that now it was second nature. Billy was mesmerized. He never expected this out of me.

  “They shoot guys they catch doin’ that,” Billy said.

  “They shoot guys anyway. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “You really good? You know I can spot cheaters.”

  “Come over to the house I’ll show you. I can’t show you in public.”

  When we got to Colonie Street Billy was vigorously aloof, refused to look at anything in the parlor in a way that would give the thing significance. He came here only when he was obliged to, and left as soon as possible. Now he let his gaze fall on the chandeliers, and sketches, and ancestor paintings, the framed old photos, dried flowers, the bric-a-brac on the mantel, the ancient furniture, the threadbare rugs, and the rest of the antique elegance, and it was all dead to him. He sat in the leather chair by the window where Peter always sat to watch the traffic on Colonie Street, took a sip of the beer I gave him, and then I told him, “You look like your father.”

  “They always told me that,” he said.

  “I met him just once, in 1934, when your grandmother died. I have some old photos of him upstairs. He’s in a baseball uniform, playing with Chattanooga in the Southern League.”

  “He managed that team,” Billy said.

  “I know. You want to see the pictures?”

  “It don’t matter,” Billy said. “I know what he looked like.”

  “He looks very young. My father did a sketch from one of them, a good sketch. In the dining room.”

  “Never mind that stuff. Your father wouldn’t let him in this joint when he came home in ’34.”

  “That’s not how it was,” I said.

  “Just get the cards,” said Billy, and I knew we’d come back to Francis before long. Billy was intimidated by the house, by the memories of his father’s exile from it after his marriage to Annie Farrell, and by his inexact knowledge of Francis’s peculiar visit here when Kathryn died. But here he was, on deck for the family luncheon with the lawyer that would take place in another hour or so. My father, when we organized this luncheon, thought it essential that Billy be present to hear whatever was going to be said, even if he didn’t care about any of it.

  The gathering had to do with money, but Peter was tight-lipped about specifics. He knew he was seriously ill and he was putting what was left of his life in order, the way I had put his Malachi Suite in order (with the Leica I’d given Giselle in Germany, and which she gave back to me when I undertook the job), numbering and photographing the hundreds of sketches, watercolors, and oils that my father was obsessively creating, and which had sprawled chaotically in all the upstairs rooms until I put everything into categories.

  Peter did not consider the Malachi Suite finished, and I wasn’t sure he ever would. Two days ago he had asked me to hang one of the oils over the dining-room table, the first time he’d exhibited any of the work anywhere in the house outside his studio. It was the painting he called Banishing the Demons, and it showed Malachi and his co-conspirator, Crip Devlin, shooing invisible demons out of Malachi’s cottage, with five others, including a woman in bed, as terrorized witnesses. It is a mysterious and eerie painting, but Peter gave me no explanation of why he wanted it on the dining-room wall.

  “Where’s your old man now?” Billy asked me.

  “Upstairs sleeping,” I said. “He gets up at dawn, works till he drops, then goes back to bed.”

  “Another screwball in the family.”

  “Without a doubt. You gettin’ hungry?”

  “In a while.”

  “We’ll have lunch. Molly is bringing food, and Giselle’s due in on the noon train. You never met Giselle, did you?”

  “I heard about her. I seen that stuff she did about your father in a magazine.”

  “She’ll be here. So will Peg.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “A get-together.”

  “I’ll get outa your hair,” Billy said.

  “Not at all. You stick around. You should be here.”

  “Who says I should?”

  “I do.”

  “You wanna show me your card tricks, is that it?”

  “Right,” I said, and I found the cards in a cabinet and we went to the dining-room table, site of two notable crises in the life of Billy’s father; and I wondered if Billy knew anything about the day Francis fell into the china closet. Billy took a long look at the sketch Peter had done of Francis and then we sat down with the cards. When I started to shuffle the deck I realized Billy was the only man I trusted totally in this life. After he confessed to me that he never knew how to do nothin’, I felt bonded to him, and to his father, in a way that seemed new to me; and as I performed for him with the cards, I knew I was going to tell him about my nosedive in Germany. I dealt us both a hand of blackjack.

  “Was that straight or seconds?” I asked him.

  “Seconds?”

  “Wrong.” And I turned up the cards to show him the ordinary cards I’d dealt. Then I dealt again, asked again.

  “Straight,” he said.

  “Wrong again,” and I showed him the ace and king I’d dealt myself.

  “You’re good,” he said. “I can’t see anything.”

  “The best ones you never see.”

  “Why you doin’ this shit? You got a brain. You don’t hafta cheat cards.”

  “You’re right, Billy,” I said. “I don’t have to cheat at cards. But it’s a talent I acquired early, the way you learned how to play pool when you were in short pants. We tend to use our talents, don’t we? We also tend to follow our demons. We’ll do anything to gain a little power over life, since none of us know our limits until we’re challenged—and that’s when th
e strangeness begins.”

  Billy just stared at me. He didn’t know what I was getting at, but he’d understand. He was uneducated, but he was smart as hell.

  “There I was,” I said, “a little kid backstage, watching Manfredo organize his magic, putting birds in the hat, rabbits in the armpit, cards up both sleeves. He was a whiz, and I wanted to know his secrets. He’d shoo me away so he could be alone with my mother, but I’d insist on another trick, more know-how, and he’d always give in to get rid of me. By the time I was seven I was learning the key-and-lock trick, and by nine I could deal seconds and read the marked decks Manfredo used in his act. He even taught me how to palm cup-poker dice, control two out of five dice in your hand, but I never liked the game.

  “Cards were my game and look where they led me. You knew I’d gotten into trouble in Germany, but you didn’t know I was part of an international currency scam, did you?” Billy looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. I was rising in his esteem: more of a screwball than he thought.

  “It all started with an army card game I played in,” I said, “first to finance my love affair with Giselle, and then to support our marriage, all of which led me to conclude that there are no rules; that anything can develop out of anything, chaos out of conjugality, madness out of magic . . .”

  I’ll talk now about that game and its consequences, because that’s where things started going down. My fellow players were the Captain, Walt Popp (we played at his apartment), Archie Bell, a warrant officer with the worst body odor I’d ever smelled, Herm Jelke, a nasty second-lieutenant runt with a Clark Gable mustache that made him look like a wax dummy, and my kid cousin, Dan Quinn, Peg and George’s son, who had written about poker as a sports writer and for which reason the Captain, considering him an expert, invited him.

  I’d gotten Quinn into our section after he’d finished basic training in a heavy-weapons company. He was a corporal, the only enlisted man in the poker game, and he played well and honestly and had a good time and lost. I didn’t want him playing at all, but there he was.

  I won money regularly for months, not a great deal, but enough to handle my scaled-down plan for keeping Giselle dazzled. She and I focused on the restaurants of Frankfurt, all of them within range of my military wages, even the Bruckenkeller and the outdoor café with violins at the Frankfurter Hof. We took day trips to Wiesbaden and Bad Nauheim for the baths and the Spielbanks, where we swam, bathed in steam, and spectated at the roulette and baccarat. We wandered the ruins of Frankfurt and took pictures of each other standing in the rubble of the opera house, or in somebody’s exploded parlor, or on the altar of a church with no roof, or in Goethe’s bedroom, or trying to find Schopenhauer’s old digs in Sachenhausen. I recounted Schopenhauer’s argument for Giselle: that the body is the objectification of the will. Tooth and penis, eye and vagina, were all created by the needs of the soul, no? Well, maybe. But Schopenhauer loathed women and called his white poodle Atma, the Soul of the World. I told Giselle she was the soul of my world, vividly isolating life for me: golden hair with violin, perfect knees crossed for wild arousal as taxi moves along Hauptwache. Phantom queen as art object. Clearly an existence such as hers was not happenstance. Clearly some arcane will had divined this glorious object in order to reflect what will demanded beauty must become. Schopenhauer had a point.

  “I love the way you talk to me,” she said.

  In these rapturous days she and I came to understand each other ever more intimately, finding where our intensities lurked, how soon boredom enveloped us, and why. Her goal, she said, was freedom, and she felt free with me.

  “I think I want to be with you from now on,” she said.

  I took kindly to this idea.

  “Life traps you,” she said. “It trapped my father when the Gestapo shot him for hiding two Jews. But they didn’t kill him; they just shot him and left him there in the courtyard, and he became an invalid and made my mother his bedside prisoner for three years, until he finally died.”

  “You don’t want to be a prisoner,” I said.

  “I think not.”

  “Did you love your father?”

  “Tremendously. But it was pitiful how my mother withered. My brothers took her gallery away from her in 1948. She had Picassos, Van Goghs, Mirós she’d kept hidden all during the war years and she wouldn’t sell them. My brothers couldn’t stand that money being there, inaccessible to them.”

  “You didn’t want the money?”

  “I wanted my mother to keep everything, but they got the paintings away from her and sold them. And then she died too. A prisoner with no money.”

  “But she loved your father.”

  “I suppose she did.”

  “Then she was a willing prisoner.”

  “I couldn’t say. She did her duty, as you military people say.”

  I vowed not to become a prisoner. I vowed not to let Giselle become one. I vowed I would have money enough for us to live idyllic lives of love and freedom. I vowed to keep her with me now and tomorrow; always now, always tomorrow. That was my best-laid plan, and the reason I again became a poker player.

  I preferred five players to six or seven, for I handled the cards more often. I told my fellow gamesters how great a player I was, how I knew cards. I told them how Nick the Greek, by the third card in a five-card-stud game, could call everybody’s hole card, and that I was Nick’s spiritual disciple. I intimidated them, and I became the one to beat. When I lost they were buoyant at the braggart’s fall. That was my method, of course, putting their money where my mouth was.

  I didn’t mind keelhauling Popp, who could afford it, or Jelke, who was a schmuck, but I trod lightly with the Captain when I nailed him (“With all due respect for your rank and position, Captain, I must raise you thirty dollars”), for he was angry enough at me already and I didn’t want to be sent down to a line company. I had to keep an eye on Quinn’s earnestness, and watch over Archie too, but Arch was a sap gambler who didn’t mind losing.

  The game went on for months and slowly I built a bankroll to finance my addiction to Giselle’s joys. We played for scrip, the dollar-equivalent currency the army had used since 1946, but sometimes players used German marks, at the legal rate of four marks to the dollar. The Captain often played with marks, for he was getting fat from his black-market deals. His sisters in Bridgeport sent him huge cartons of tea, coffee, cocoa, and cigarettes, and he’d sell it all to Germans at quadruple his investment. I’d done a bit of that too, but it smacked of grocery clerking, and so I concentrated on the game and sold my scrip winnings for the street price of five marks to the dollar, a modest profit, but the way to go as long as Giselle and I were cultivating rapture on the German economy.

  And then Italy loomed, for I’d proposed to Giselle and told her we’d honeymoon in Venice. To do this right I needed dollars, not marks, and I mentioned during the game that because of stateside publicity on military black marketeering, the army was hovering over us all, their gumshoes noting who exchanged how many marks for how many dollars in excess of our monthly wages. I wondered out loud where to change marks for bucks outside army channels.

  “I know somebody,” Archie said. “Not a very savory character.”

  “Who is he?” asked the Captain before I could ask.

  Archie said his street name was Meister Geld, and that he could be reached through the Rhineland Bar, off Kaiserstrasse near the Hauptbahnhof, an arena of whores, beer halls, and black marketeers. But, said Arch, if you’re in uniform they won’t let you in. I was ready for that. The uniform was required everywhere in Germany but I’d picked up civilian clothes for traveling, and had also bought a cheap blue German suit, a chalk-stripe double-breasted with ridiculously wide lapels. I’d bought it one size too small so whenever I put it on I ceased looking American and could pass for a working-class German. The suit seemed just right for living anonymously, or hanging out in an off-limits bar, which is what the Rhineland was.

  Six years after the surre
nder Germany remained treacherous, full of entropic hatred. Some of the hate eventually found outlets: packs of GIs breaking fascist heads during binges of vengeance; GIs found face down in the gutter with two broken arms, or floating in the river with a knife in the back, or a slit throat. Too many killings and maimings took place in or near the Rhineland, a watering hole for unreconstructed Nazis, so the MPs put it off limits. A weathered sign in English was tacked to the door of the club:

  Dear Mr. G.I. Sorry but you cannot come in.

  Tonight is open only to club members.

  The Manager

  I went in and ordered a schnapps and sat across from a chesty, frizzy-haired woman I took to be a whore. She smiled at me and I smiled back and shook my head no. When the bartender brought my drink I asked him about Meister Geld and he said, “Nicht verstehen.” I repeated the question in French and invoked Archie Bell as my contact, but the barman still didn’t get me. The woman came to my table and asked in French what I wanted and when I told her she said the barman didn’t know anybody by that name but she did, and then in English asked, “What you want with Meister Geld?”

  “It has to do with money,” I told her.

  She made a phone call and came back and said she would take me to him. I drank my schnapps and we went out. It was April in Frankfurt, a sunny day with a bit of a nip to it, and I made a mental note to buy a lighter-weight German suit for the summer.

  “You speak bad French,” the woman said, taking my arm. “Why not speak you English to the man?”

  “I didn’t want him to know I was American.”

  “But you look like American, speak German like American, have American haircut. The man said polite, please leave, American.”

  I shrugged and wondered was my disguise also transparent to the MPs? I walked with the young woman, who, erect, had a provocative shape and sprightly gait. The phrase “abundantly frolicsome” occurred to me. I asked her how long she’d been a whore and she said she’d worked as a mechanic for the Luftwaffe during the war, now repaired auto engines, and only sometimes worked as a whore.