Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (23 page)

The lights in the pool room went out just as the Doc lined up for the next shot. I’ll get candles, said Daddy Big. Don’t nobody touch them balls. Which balls are they, Daddy? Footers
asked in a falsetto. Billy remembered Footers just before the lights went out, licking a green lollipop, and Harvey Hess, his thumbs stuck in his vest, nodding his approval at the Doctor burying
Billy. Daddy Big liked that development too, the string of his change apron tight on his gut, like a tick tied in the middle. Behind Billy stood Morrie Berman, who was again backing Billy. Morrie
had given Billy fifty to bet on himself with the Doc, and also took all side bets on his boy. Billy heard Morrie softly muttering unhhh, eeeng, every time the Doc sank one.

Maybe a hundred men were standing and sitting around the table when the lights went. Billy saw Martin come in late and stand at the back of the crowd, behind the chairs Daddy Big had set up.
Daddy Big lit four candles. They flickered on the cigar counter, on the edge of a pool table covered with a tarpaulin, on a shelf near the toilet. Many of the men were smoking in the half-darkness,
their cigars and cigarettes glowing and fading, their faces moving in and out of shadows. Here was the obscure collective power. What’ll they do if I fink? Will I see my father? Some of the
shadowy men left the room when the lights went out. Most of those with chairs stayed put, but then some of them, too, went down to the street, needing, in the absence of light, at least an open
sky.

“Tough shot you had,” Morrie said to Billy.

“The toughest.”

“You’ll pick up. You got what it takes.”

“That Doctor’s hot as ten-cent pussy.”

“You’ll take him.”

“Sure,” said Billy.

But he won’t, or else how can he do what he’s got to do, if he’s got to do it? Wrong-Way Corrigan starts out for California and winds up in Ireland. I guess I got lost, he
says, and people say, Yeah, oh yeah, he got lost. Ain’t he some sweet son of a bitch?

Through the front window of Louie’s, Martin saw that the lights were out on Broadway and in the station. He saluted Billy across the candlelight and went down to the
street, which was dark in all directions. He walked to the corner of Columbia Street and looked up. Pearl Street was also dark, candles already dancing in two windows up the block. He walked back
and into Becker’s and headed for the phone, past customers drinking by the light of the old kerosene lamp that had sat on the back bar for years, unused. Now it illuminated Red Tom’s
mustache. The test of a real mustache is whether it can be seen from behind. Red Tom’s therefore is not real.

The city desk told him that lights were out all over the city and parts of Colonie, Watervliet and Cohoes. All hospitals had been called an hour earlier and told a power failure was possible,
and not to schedule any operations unless they had their own generators. Nursing homes were also alerted. But the power company said it hadn’t made the calls. Who had? Nobody knew.

Martin went back to the bar and ordered a Grandad on ice and looked at the photo behind the bar. A new star shone on the chest of Scotty Streck, brighter than all others. In the kerosene
lamplight the men in the photo moved backward in time. They were all smiling and all younger than their pictures. They were boys and young men under the shirtsleeved, summer sun. None of them was
dead or would ever die.

“Lights are out all over town,” Martin told Red Tom.

“Is that a fact? I was listening to the radio when they went. Dewey was on, talking about Albany.”

“Albany? What was he saying?”

“He mentioned Patsy, and that was all I heard.”

“Did he mention Charlie Boy?”

“Not that I heard.”

Martin gulped his drink and went outside. People were clustered under the canopy at the station, all cabs were gone, and a West Albany trolley was stalled between Maiden Lane and Steuben Street.
Martin could see it in the headlights of cars. The night was a deep, moonless black, with only a few stars visible. It was as if rural darkness had descended upon the city. Faces were
unrecognizable three feet away. Albany had never been so dark in Martin’s memory. There were gas lamps in his boyhood, then the first few electric lights, now the power poles everywhere. But
tonight was the lightless time in which highwaymen had performed, the dark night of the century gone, his father’s childhood darkness on new streets cut out of the raw hills and the grassy
flats. A woman with a bundle came by, half running toward Clinton Avenue, pursued by the night. Alongside Martin, a match flared and he turned to see Morrie Berman lighting a cigar.

“What news do you hear?”

“Only that they’re out all over town.”

“I mean about the McCall kid. You fellows at the paper turn up any news?”

“I heard there was another ransom note.”

“Is that so?”

“Signed by Charlie Boy. I didn’t see it, but from what I gather there’ll be another go-between list in the paper tonight.”

“They didn’t like us on the first list?”

“So it seems.”

“You hear anything else?”

Dark shapes moved in behind Morrie, and Martin withheld his answer. The shapes hovered.

“Let’s take a walk,” Martin said and he took a step toward Steuben Street. Morrie stepped along and they moved south on Broadway, candles in the Waldorf, a bunch of men on the
street in front of the Monte Carlo. They stepped around the men in the light of a passing auto. Martin did not want to speak until they had turned the corner onto Steuben. They passed
Hagaman’s Bakery and Joe’s Bookshop on Steuben Street, where Martin knew his father’s early novel,
The Mosquito Lovers
, and the volume of his collected plays were sitting
in faded dust jackets in the window, and had been for months, ever since the success of
The Flaming Corsage.

“So what’s the secret?” Morrie asked.

“No secret, but I don’t want to broadcast it. I know you’re a friend of Maloy and the news is they’re looking for him. And Curry.”

“Why tell me? They got a lot of friends.”

“You asked for news. They’ve both been out of town a week.”

“So that ties them in?”

“No, but even their families don’t know where they are.”

“Hell, I saw Maloy two or three days ago on Broadway. They’re apt to be anywhere. Maloy’s crazy and Curry’s a moron. But they wouldn’t mix up in a thing like this,
not in their own town.”

“Nevertheless, they’re looking for them.”

“They’ll turn up. What else do you hear?”

“The note said they’d starve Charlie Boy till the ransom was paid.”

“Tough stuff.”

“Very.”

Up toward Pearl Street, a window shattered and a burglar alarm rang and rang. Martin saw a silhouette running toward him and Morrie. The runner brushed Martin’s elbow, stepping off the
curb as they touched, but Martin could not see the face.

“Somebody did all right,” said Morrie. “Ain’t that a jewelry store there?”

“Right,” said Martin. “Just about where Henry James’s grandmother used to live.”

“Who?”

“An old-timer.”

And on the other corner, DeWitt Clinton lived. And across the street, Bret Harte was born. And up Columbia was one of Melville’s homes, and on Clinton Square another. An old man had
answered when Martin knocked on the door of the Columbia Street house and said, yeauh, he seemed to remember the name Melville but that was next door and they tore that house down and built a new
one. Melville, he said. I heard he moved to Troy. Don’t know what become of him after that.

Martin and Morrie neared Pearl Street, the glimmerings of light from the cars giving them a fragmented view of the broken window in Wilson’s Jewelry Store. When they saw the window, they
crossed Pearl. Martin looked down toward State and saw a torchlight parade coming north in support of the nomination of Millard Fillmore. The John G. Myers department store collapsed into itself,
killing thirteen and making men bald from flying plaster dust. Henry James, suffused in the brilliance of a sunny summer morning, walked out of his grandmother’s house, opened the front gate,
and floated like a flowered balloon into ethereal regions. Martin walked in the phosphorescent footsteps of his father and his grandfather.

“Where the hell are we walking?” Morrie asked.

“Just around,” said Martin. “You want to go back down?”

“I guess it’s all right.”

They walked to Clinton Square, where two more trolleys were stalled on the bend. A siren screamed and stopped, back near Steuben and Pearl. Martin and Morrie, their eyes grown accustomed to the
darkness, watched the shadowy action in front of the Palace Theater, hundreds waiting to go back inside and see the rest of
Boys’ Town
with Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan, the
miracle man. There is no such thing as a bad boy.

“They got some kind of light in the Grand Lunch,” Morrie said. “You want some coffee?”

“No, you go ahead. I want to watch the panic.”

“What panic?”

“There’s got to be panic someplace with this much darkness.”

“Whatever you say. See you down below.”

In the Sudetenland only last week when Hitler arrived, at nightfall there was an epidemic of suicide.

In France in 1918, Martin had heard a man scream from the darkness beyond a farmhouse where a shell had just hit. Help me, oh God, oh heavenly God, help me, the man yelled, and then he wailed
his pain. Martin nudged a corporal and they crawled toward the voice and found an American soldier pinned between two dead cows. The top cow was bloated from inhaling the explosion. Martin and the
corporal could not move the bloated cow so they pulled the squeezed man by his arms, and the top half of him came away in their grip. He stopped screaming.

Martin crossed Pearl and went into the K. of C. and called the city desk by candlelight. Viglucci said there was still no explanation for the blackout, but up at Harmanus Bleecker Hall the
audience had panicked when the lights went. People shoved one another and Tip Mooney was knocked down and trampled.

Punishment.

“This bum’s a Cuban and so’s one of the broads,” said Morrie as Billy and Martin followed him down two slate steps to the basement doorway beneath the
high stoop. Morrie rapped and the pimp peered out in his puce shirt, his hair brilliantined, his shoes pointed and shiny, both ends of him gleaming in the harsh backlight. The lights of the city
had come back on an hour earlier.

“Hey, Mo-ree,” the pimp said. “Whatchou lookin’ for?”

“Pussy,” said Morrie.

“You in the right place.”

The pimp, the same man Red Tom threw out of Becker’s, had a face as pointy as his shoes and resembled Martin’s long-snouted animal child. Why should the likes of him concretize a
Daugherty abstraction? But why not? Ooze to ooze, slime to slime. Brothers under the sheets.

Two young women sat at the kitchen table drinking sarsaparilla out of jelly glasses. Knives, forks, glasses, and dishes sat in the sink. The stub of a candle stood in a pool of dry wax on a
saucer. The pimp introduced the girls as Fela and Margie. Fela, obviously
La Cubana
, was dark, with hair to her kidneys. Margie had carroty red hair, redder by blood weight than Mary
Daugherty’s crop. Both wore brassieres, Woolworth couture, a size too small, shorts to mid-thigh, with cuffs, and high heels.

“They got shorts on,” Morrie said. “Last time I saw a whore in shorts was Mame Fay’s.”

“I know Mame,” said the pimp. “She’s got influence up in Troy.”

“She used to recruit salesgirls in the grocery marts,” Billy said. “She tried to hawk a friend of mine.”

“She’d give talks in the high schools if they let her,” said Morrie.

“Young stuff is what Mame likes,” Margie said.

“Yeah,” said Morrie, licking his lips.

“Talk is gettin’ hot,
hombres.
Young stuff right in front of you. Who’s ready?”

“Don’t rush me,” said Morrie.

Billy pulled up a chair between Fela and Margie and looked them over. Martin felt a thirst rising.

“You have any beer?”

“Twenty-five cents,
hombre
.”

“I’m a sport,” said Martin, and the pimp cracked a quart of Stanwix.

“Those broads up at Mame’s,” Morrie said, “took their tops off when we come in. I’m the best, one of ’em says to us, so take me. If you’re the best,
says the other, how come your boyfriend screwed me? You? says the other. He’d screw a dead dog with the clap, but he wouldn’t screw you. And then they went at it. Best whore fight I
ever saw. Bit one another, blood all over the joint, one of their heads split open. Me and Maloy laughed our tits off.”

“We don’t fight,” Margie said. “We like one another.”

“That’s nice,” said Morrie, and he put his hand inside her brassiere. “Soft.” He laughed, found a chair, and sat down.

“Maloy,” said Billy. “What the hell is he doing in Newark?”

“Who said he was in Newark?” Morrie asked.

“I thought you did.”

“He ain’t in Newark.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s someplace else.”

“How do you know he ain’t in Newark? I heard he was in Newark.”

“What the hell’d he be in Newark for?”