A Moment in the Sun (125 page)

“You’re telling me,” Shoe returns, and then the fourth race ends, Taral picking his nag up by the tail and dragging it into third.

“Money problems or no,” muses Shoe, “he’s a hell of a horse-pilot.”

Shoe takes them on the fox hunt then, in and out of doors, under the stands for a while, lots of nosing out to peep both ways and then wave them ahead. Give the ginks a thrill. They come out by the far end of the paddocks and there is Garvin with little Sammy Chase dressed like Fred Taral—the green silks from the last race splattered with turf, whip resting over his shoulder—deep in conversation. Shoe whistles low and Al pricks his ears up and hustles over, mopping sweat off his dome with a rag. Nobody could sweat on cue like Al Garvin.

“The guy is impossible,” he sighs. “He wants another two beans.”

Shoe is steamed at Al for upping the ante without squaring it beforehand. He’d done it once before, playing the nag-doctor who’d lost his license and was willing to dope the favorite for a modest sum, and almost queered the grift.

“From each of youse,” adds Al.

“Greedy little midget,” hisses Shoe.

“I don’t think that should pose any difficulty,” says the high hat, holding up a hand. If there was anything else quicker than a glacier in the race it would be a tough sell, but everybody agrees it’s strictly Ben Brush and Archduke, with the rest of the tailbangers left back at the gate.

“Also he worries you might be a pair of plainclothes bulls,” says Al. “So he don’t want to meet you.”

The high hat pulls out a card, presents it. “This should allay his fears.” Like a Pinkerton couldn’t print up a phony greeter.

Shoe is able to peep that it says
YARDLEY ENTWHISTLE JR.
with a Philly location and then something about legal services. Shysters make good pigeons cause they think they know all the angles.

“I don’t carry a card,” Fredericks admits, not to the manor born. “But where sporting men gather to match their greenbacks, I am
leg
endary.”

Al nearly chokes on this one, but keeps up his game. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says, “but I’d bet my mother he don’t act so suspicious if we let him sniff the kale up close.”

Garvin can turn on the color if that’s what they’re looking for, give them a story to tell back at the club.

So Yardley surrenders a thin stack of hundreds that look like they been ironed and the Gold King peels off his green from a wad that could choke an alderman and Al scampers back with that and the calling card. There’s a little back and forth and then Sammy snatches the bills, looks over, and raises his whip. A nice touch, the jockey salute to seal the deal.

“The thing is,” confides Shoe as he leads the swells, lighter by several grand, back to the stands, “we don’t any of us want to lay our action with the same book. They get wise and the odds are gonna tumble.”

“I have a personal wager in mind,” winks the high hat, in very high spirits. “A gentleman of my acquaintance who merits a good fleecing.”

Shoe seconds the high hat’s grin. “I’d like to see his face when Taral puts the collar on that oat-burner in the stretch,” he says. “That boy can make a horse run backwards.”

Shoe shakes hands then and thanks them for being so white about the whole deal. He and Garvin and Sammy Chase are at the station waiting for the westbound by the time the post horn blows for the Stakes.

There is always the chance with the Lovesick Jockey that the pigeon will make out, that whatever gluepot he’s put his cheese on will have its best day ever and outrun the favorite to the wire. Ben Brush was small and ugly but nobody’s dog, all heart and flying hooves, and with the Dueling Dinge up on his back he had a shot. As it happened, though, Archduke not only took him but took him from behind in the stretch, Fred Taral driving him through a crowd with the whip and the Duke kicking turf in everybody’s faces by the finish. The Gold King just laughs it off, says We been skinned, buddy, but Mr. Yardley Entwhistle Jr. is honor-bound to fork over another grand or two to the gink he’d planned on trimming. A man without humor, he calls a judge he happened to go to a high-toned diploma mill with and makes noise about heading up a commission to probe and castigate and the judge tells his pals in Albany who get a healthy rake-off from Saratoga and immediately passes on not only a verbal description of the three of them but a drawing—seems Yardley is a wizard with the pen and ink—all so quick that no word goes out, no warning, no Send back the take and we’re square, just they all get pinched stepping out of a Pullman in Poughkeepsie and run before that very same judge.

Not so bad, fixable even, only Al Garvin tends to unwind with a couple shots of the hard stuff after a good score, nerve tonic he calls it, and is so tight he don’t remember Yardley Entwhistle Jr.’s card still sitting in his coat pocket.

“Three years for this?” Shoe complained when Tammany had thrown their hands up and the mouthpieces had said Cop a plea and scarpered with their pay and the judge, Yardley Jr.’s old classmate, settled his hash.

“One year for this,” said the judge, “and the other two for all the things you’ve done we never caught you at.”

Which, strange as it might seem, is some consolation.

Footsteps on the stairway again and the long bar clunking, the litany of cell doors opened till it is his own and Shoe steps out. Dinner is mutton stew today, one of his favorites. Monday is bean soup, ham, and potatoes, Tuesday pork and beans, beef stew on Wednesday, Thursday hash and cornbread, Friday chicken and gravy, Saturday mutton and Sunday just the oatmeal porridge in the morning, chapel, and the long day alone in your cell to think about how hungry you are. Captain Grogan leaves them standing for a long count. Goulash will be getting his two ounces of bread about now, and the gill of water to tease his gullet with. Grogan taps and Shoe half-turns with the others. Double tap and the cons short-step down the gallery.

The mutton is hard to swallow today, tougher than usual. Shoe has grown to hate the back of the head of the second-tier con who sits at the shelf in front of him. Keepers stroll up and down the rows, making sure you keep your jaws working and your glimmers fixed on nothing. They could march you straight from First Work to dinner if they wanted, and save everybody a lot of routine. But routine is the point, to make you feel like a cog in the world’s slowest gristmill, grinding, always grinding, instead of a person with enough left upstairs to have an idea of your own.

He scored an apple last week, first of the fall, traded for a word in Grogan’s ear about who should fill Wiley Wilson’s spot on the bottom row. Wiley had been in since two days before Lincoln was shot. “Or else,” he liked to say, “they would of pinned that on me too.” Wiley locked up in the next cell during Shoe’s first jolt here, and he’d been at Auburn through the yoke and the paddles and the shower-bath torture and finally been made gallery boy on the bottom so he wouldn’t have to deal with stairs anymore. On Wednesday he didn’t step out with the rest in the morning and when Captain Lenahan went in to rap him on the shins with the stick he didn’t twitch. Shoe was on the detail, holding a corner of the blanket they carried him out in, the old man dried out and weighing next to nothing. He’d lived past all his kin, so a couple of the mokes from the south-wing coal gang dug him a hole in the little prison patch and they dropped the body into it.

Pete Driscoll had left the apple in the fold of Shoe’s mattress. Shoe took most of the evening to finish it.

Second Work he is running for Dudley in clerical, who likes to keep you hopping. Get me some water, get me some chewing gum, pull down the shade, pull it back up, run this note here, run that note there, run down to the kitchen and get me some java.

“More when I know it,” Shoe whispers as he doles the kites out in the shops, cons hissing questions at him when their supervisor isn’t looking.

“Shoal-gosh,” says Stan Zabriski in the ironworks. “That’s how you say it.”

“The Hunkie.”

“He’s Polish. You say the
c-z
like a
s-h
.”

“You people expect to get ahead in this country,” Shoe tells him, “you better straighten that out.”

He is less than surprised, proud even, that the scrap of newspaper he left at the broom shop has beat him to the ironworks.

“Telling jokes, he is,” says Sergeant Kelso when he stops by clerical to check on his pay slip. “Sitting up with his hand firm on the tiller of the ship of state. That’s our Mac.”

“You’ve heard more?”

“The wop who drives the breadwagon got it straight from the special edition. They’ve dug out all but one of the bullets and he’s as right as rain.”

“Thank God,” says Dudley, scribbling in his ledger. “If that damn cowboy gets in we’re all cooked.”

Kelso sits on the edge of the desk. “Oh, Teddy’s all right. A bit impetuous is all. The boys on Capitol Hill will cure him of that soon enough.”

Shoe stands by the blackboard memorizing the shift assignments for the next month. Never know what you might earn with that sort of dope to pass out. “So they left a slug in him?”

“Let sleeping dogs lie, says I. If Mac’s not squawking it’s best to leave it sit there.”

“Sit where?”

“If they knew,” says the keeper, giving Shoe an exasperated look, “d’ye think they wouldn’t have yanked it out of him by now?”

As you come in from Second Work there is a bin full of bread and Shoe grabs two slices to take up to his cell, thinking of Shoal-gosh down there sitting on the rivets, pondering his future with an empty stomach. His future that sits only three steps away, on the other side of the barred oaken door. Shoe pulls his rack down and lays out the mattress and blankets and sits on the edge of it, slowly eating the bread and draining the tin cup of warm coffee left on his shelf. They come through twice a night down in the punishment cells, shining the bullseye lantern in on your face and calling your name and if you don’t repeat it right away they come in and kick you where it hurts. What surprised him was how there could be bedbugs when there was no bed, by the third day a lively nest of crotch crickets in his pants. Scratching their bites and finding and killing them became his only entertainment. The Yiddish singer fell apart a week after they fried Kemmler, screaming how his brains were leaking out through his ears and pressing his shit through the narrow slit in his door till the bulls got arm-weary from slugging him and wrote him a ticket to Matteawan.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” Grogan asked Shoe when he finally wobbled back out into the yard, pale and squinting, his teeth loose with scurvy.

“You win.”

“We always do,” smiled the keeper.

There are worse things, he muses, than doing a three-spot in Auburn. It could be your home, like old Wiley, in the slammer so long that everybody outside forgets you. Or you could be stuck on the Row like this Shoal-gosh, listening to the dynamo grind.

A little before lights-out Pete Driscoll gimps down the gallery, pausing by Shoe’s door.

“Garvin says he’ll give you three-to-two the President lives.”

They’ve planted Al in the south wing, but he and Shoe manage to keep a few wagers running—Al lost a bundle to him on Bryan in the last election, everything he’d won on the Gans–McGovern scrap. It helps to pass the time.

“He’s betting on Mac?”

“Says he’ll serve his full jolt in the White House and waltz on back to Canton.”

According to the papers every two-bit croaker in Buffalo stuck their fingers in the guy, searching for the missing slug. Shoe’s own father walked out of the hospital with a clean bill of health from the docs, only to be kayoed by an infection a week later.

“Tell him I’ll take it for fifty.”

Pete limps away, going down the iron steps one at a time. The bulb hanging overhead flickers, then goes out with the light in the rest of the wing as the seven o’clock from Syracuse rattles past outside. Shoe lies on his back in his prison-issue union suit and listens to the prison telegraph. Tapping from above, tapping from below, tapping from all sides, the bars singing with questions. They all want to know, but Shoe has no answer.

He dreams of crows.

LAZARUS

The men don’t want to leave the caves. It is cool inside during the day and there is water running, cold water, in one of them. The American is fevered, mumbling, and sleeps through the first day inside. Fulanito is strutting, proud of his capture, for even if the American is a
negro
he might be worth somebody in a trade. There was trading in the early days of the campaign, when they were still an army, a half-dozen
insurgentes descalzos
equal to one American captain. Orestes comes back to report the American column has in fact marched on over the mountains toward Subig and there seem to be no more behind them. The woman from Las Ciegas brings the American water twice without being told to.

The fever of the
negro
breaks on the afternoon of the second day. Diosdado goes to sit by him.

“Do you understand your situation?” he asks, speaking slowly.

“I got to carry or you gone shoot me.”

Diosdado smiles. “We do not wish to do this. We should be fighting on the same side, you and I.”

“We’re not.”

The man is not stupid. Diosdado asks the woman from Las Ciegas, who speaks Zambal and Tagalog, to bring some of the broiled
kamote
left from the morning meal, then watches him eat.

“Do you like these?”

“Like eatin em more than carryin em,” says the American. “You a general?”

“Teniente. A lieutenant—in name only. As we have disbanded the army, rank is no longer so formal.”

“Where you learn to talk?”

“In Hongkong. From the British.”

He resembles the mountain
negritos
in the nap of his hair and the shade of his skin, but his features are what Diosdado guesses is a combination of the African and the European. The man cocks his head as he looks back, calculating.

“How you mix?”

“In Zambales many of us are partly Chinese. And I have a Spanish grandfather on my mother’s side of the family,” he explains. “You, on the other hand, are a Royal Scot.”