Life and Death of a Tough Guy (10 page)

“Lissen, Bug — ”

“Yuh heard me! Get out!”

“The Spotter won’t like it — ”

“Never mind the Spotter, jewboy! Get out!”

Killigan spoke, Georgie said something, but what they said blew away like smoke, less than smoke as the Bug pulled his gun from its armpit holster. “Get out!” he shouted at Joey, and grinned with a clownish and cunning hatred. “Wasn’t he once a hobo?” he asked everybody and nobody. “Walk back to Noo Yawk! Hit the road, jewboy!”

Sarge Killigan said, “Bug — ” Georgie said, “Bug — ” And that was all they said. The swinging point of the gun knocked all the rest of what they wanted to say down their throats. Ted Griffin, the ex-pug, stayed where he was and Lefty with the black patent-leather hair looked as if he were off in Hoboken somewhere. The Bug’s gun, the Bug’s roving eye, the Bug’s reputation had them all licked.

“Put a leg on!” the Bug ordered Joey.

Joey walked to the sofa for his overcoat, wishing to God he had a gun cached in his pocket. A gun anywhere! Oh, he’d been kidding himself about the Bug. He, the smart guy, and Georgie the dumb guy! Georgie was right! The Bug hadn’t been given his name for nothing. When the little screw broke in the Bug’s head, the bugs had to come out, and the Spotter didn’t count, nothing counted. Except a gun. Joey dug his overcoat out from among the pile on the sofa, swearing to himself he’d get himself a gun first thing.

“Don’t pick no pockets!” the Bug clowned, drunk with his own humor, a mad funny man. He said, “That jewboy’d pick his old man’s pants, pick his old lady’s drawers!”

Joey dropped his overcoat. He pivoted slowly on his heel, he looked at the Bug, seeing Ganzer the gambler, seeing no man’s face, seeing a man with a gun. And the possibilities flicked before him like so many hidden cards all the same kind: the ace of spades. Knuckle down, he thought. What else could he do? Nobody’d blame him. The Spotter’d be with him. But knuckle down once, meant knuckle down twice. Meant the Bug’d be on his neck for keeps, meant the Bug’d always be yapping jewboy. Yellow jewboy, yellow…. “Without that gun you couldn’t make me get out,” he heard himself saying.

The Bug rushed to Sarge Killigan and passed him the gun, passed away the iron ruler he’d held over all their heads. Right away Sarge Killigan shouted, “Now let’s cut out all this stuff, Bug!” And Georgie shouted, “Bug, you’re twice Joey’s size!” And Ted Griffin jumped to his feet, “Georgie’s right!” And even the silent Lefty said, “Yeh!”

The Bug spun around, sneering at his critics. “He asked for it, didn’t he?”

“Yeh, I asked for it!” Joey heard himself saying and didn’t believe he was speaking. For how could a guy sell himself out? He knew he didn’t have the ghost of a chance against the Bug, but he couldn’t back out now, he couldn’t be yellow now.

“Joey!” Georgie protested.

“I asked for it,” Joey said. “Damn right!”

They were all on their feet. Nobody stepped between the Bug and Joey. Only Georgie grabbed at Joey’s elbow to stop him from fighting. Joey shook him off.

This night, the stakes were bigger than all the money on the table. And he had to play. There was no quitting in this fight of a lifetime: Joey Kasow, A Regular Guy vs Joey Kasow, The Yellow Jewboy. The whole damn mob was going to know once and for all he wasn’t scared of nobody, not even of the Bug.

“You’re gonna get a kiss of this,” the Bug grinned and lifted his fist. If a screw had broken in his head, it’d mended in jig time for the Bug now stripped out of his jacket and vest. Clothes were clothes and no sense wrecking them.

Joey pulled off his own jacket and vest, flung them into the Bug’s grinning face. The Bug swatted at the flying cloth, he kicked at the jacket when it fell to the floor. “Jewboy!” the Bug cried. “I’ll kill yuh!”

“It ain’t fair,” Georgie groaned, but nobody heard him. Sarge Killigan, Ted and Lefty were staring intently at the Bug and Joey like fight fans at the bell. The Bug charged, Joey sidestepped, hitting out with his right at the blonde head hurtling by. The Bug wheeled, his cheekbone red from the kid’s knuckles and before he could get going again, Joey plunked his right to the Bug’s chin. The Bug only grinned as if to say: I’ll take all the Sunday punches you can deliver. Lips white, but grinning, the Bug rolled forward slowly like a street grader into Joey’s flying fists.

He’s too strong, Joey thought in a spasm of self-pity, knowing that sooner or later the Bug’d clip him one.

Clipped he was. He tasted the blood in his mouth and, dizzy, he backed away from the fists swinging a mile a minute. His shoulders touched the wall, and still dizzy from the Bug’s haymaker, he forced himself forward, to attack, like a fighter bouncing off the ringside ropes. He caught the Bug on the ear, on the nose. And caught a fist on his own forehead. He sucked in mouthfuls of air he couldn’t hold, fighting without breath, feeling his punches floating away from him, light and inconsequential, soap bubbles made out of his knotted fingers. He dodged, he was past the Bug. Safe in the middle of the room, he turned. The Bug was advancing on him like a butcher with two meat cleavers in his fists and himself the meat. For a split tenth of a second, Joey was a detached eye. He couldn’t win this fight, this fight was lost before it started. Knew too that Bug’d lick him but the Bug wouldn’t be the winner.

Joey swung his right, his left, his right, and the Bug chopped him down.

Down he went, down and down….

• • •

Joey taking on the Bug in a fair fight made a story and a half. Up at the Young Democrats they batted it around. It traveled on the good old tin-ear express out to the Spotter’s speaks, and from there all over the West Side. He wasn’t popular, the Bug, and his KO. of Joey was just what could be expected. But what couldn’t be figured was Joey’s nerve.

“Joey, he says, ‘Put down that gat and fight like a white man!’ ” the insiders with the inside dope gave it out. And in their enthusiasm they built the Bug up to Jack Dempsey’s size, and sliced Joey down to a flyweight.

“That Joey don’t weigh a hunerd ten pounds soakin’ wet!” And if Joey did scale a hundred and fifty, what the hell was a lousy forty pounds when nobody could deny that Bughead Moore was big as a house, besides being a pain in the neck.

“The Bug’s a prize bastid, but I don’t want this to go no further,” the Spotter said to Joey in his office at the club.

“Better tell that to the Bug, Spotter.”

“I told’m! I told’m twice!” the Spotter had emphasized. “I told’m if he even looks cockeyed at you he’s through. And that goes for you.” And he had looked with those pale eyes of his that rarely saw cockeyed at the quiet kid. “You didn’t have a gun on you up there in the sticks, did you, Joey?”

“I don’t own no gun, Spotter.”

“You’re gonna get one now,” the Spotter had guessed; and when the kid didn’t answer that one, the Spotter said, “I don’t blame you, but keep on bein’ smart like you were up there in the sticks. You’re aces high with everybody so don’t spoil it. You come see me out my hotel, Joey. Around eight. Thursday. And don’t buy no gun. Let me treat you for Christmas, Joey.”

Thursday! Joey walked on air all that week. He couldn’t believe his luck. A guy had to be somebody to rate an invite to the Spotter’s hotel. And his own gun! When he climbed up the subway stairs to Times Square Thursday night, he almost laughed out loud. The Broadway lights whirled in his sight, a pin-wheel of glitter, with himself the center of all brightness. He hurried four blocks north to Forty-Sixth Street, turned up to the Spotter’s hotel.

The Hotel Berkeley was another narrow-fronted off-Broadway stone box like a dozen others in the sidestreets between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Two pillars flanked the entrance, the name of the hotel carved above the door and looking as if it had been borrowed from some mausoleum: BERKELEY. Through the dingy lobby, forgotten schemers and dreamers had flitted on their way to the rooms upstairs; vaudevillians hoping to make the Palace around the corner, actresses seeing their names in lights, gamblers and con-men, and now a kid from a furnished room on Twenty-Fourth Street. On his way, up. Up into the cloudland floating above Broadway.

“This is doctor’s prescription whiskey” the Spotter said upstairs in his room, setting the bottle down on the table. “It’s been cut, not much, but it’s been cut. You haffta go to Montreal for a straight drink. Or gay Paree,” the Spotter added, who not so long ago had seen days when he couldn’t have raised the fare between New York and Brooklyn. He patted the bottle, a Broadway princeling in his black silk robe, his feet in black slippers. “Help yourself, Joey. I don’t drink, you know. God damn doctor’s orders.”

Joey poured himself a couple of inches, swallowed it in one shot.

“Help yourself!” the Spotter said, studying the kid in the chair before him. He recalled how he’d first brought Joey into the Badgers and how Clip Haley’d beefed. Now Clip was dead and buried, and a lucky break that was, for otherwise the Spotter might’ve been hiring somebody to get rid of Clip. The Spotter refilled Joey’s glass and on the impulse he lifted it to his own lips. He tasted the whiskey, just tasted it, and then passed the glass to Joey. “Don’t squeal on me to the doctor,” he smiled, but felt a pang like some dark hand pressing down against his heart.

“Joey, I been thinkin’ how you handled the Bug,” the Spotter said when he was seated in an easy chair. “You done what I would’ve done. Joey, I gotta gun for you here like I said. And you’re gonna be good with it! Remember what you told me — how you fired at that guy over the East Side? Sure, he had a table in front of him, but a good shot would’ve got him. I gotta phone number for you, Joey. It’s a cop, a Jersey cop who’s on the payroll of a beer-maker I know in Jersey. This cop, he got his own pistol range in the cellar of his house. He rents it to guys, see?”

Joey nodded and the Spotter continued, “Remember this, Joey. Don’t carry your gun ‘cept on a job.”

When Joey left the Spotter’s room, walking under the carven legend BERKELEY, he felt as if he owned the whole damn town. In his jacket pocket, under the cloth of his overcoat he carried his deed of title — written in iron.

But only the Spotter, sleepless in his bed, knew that iron was like any other ink, with all inks fading in the wash of time.

The Spotter couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of Joey and as he brooded, his left hand glided under his pajama top to his beating heart. Steady, it beat. Steady, steady. A fake, the Spotter thought: One punch from the Bughead’d be enough to finish me. An old bum like me, worse than an old bum, I’m only thirty-one. Thirty-one and made of paper, my heart bad, my stomach bad, while a kid like Joey goes around shaking off punches like Jack Dempsey himself. Smartest shellacking he ever took, that one from the Bug, he proves to the gang he’s game. He’s got ‘em all behind him. Smart, smart, like me, only I’m smarter than any Jew who ever lived. Okay, he’s packing a gun now, just like Al Capone. I give it to him myself and I’ll bury him myself if I have to. That Al Capone was nothing ‘til Johnny Torrio give him his chance, another tough wop over the East Side, the Five Points gang, and now Al Capone’s one of the biggest guys in Chicago, with Johnny Torrio playing second fiddle….

The man in the bed stared into the darkness, this sleepless midnight into which he sank night after night as if in a breathing coffin. Then, the long thin fleshless body under the blanket shook with the silent, the almost silent, laughter of those who cannot sleep nights. The Spotter thought: the trouble with Johnny Torrio, he didn’t know how to handle Al Capone, or how to bury Al Capone.

• • •

Maybe it was the holiday air, the green fragrance of the Christmas trees for sale on the sidewalks, maybe it was the soft snow blanketing the streets, maybe she was sorry to see Joey’s bruised face — “Some gangsters beat me up,” he’d told her cunningly. “They tried to rob the warehouse where I work.” — maybe it was the lonely winter nights, the white stars glittering lonely too, and yet splendid like the most wonderful of all snowflakes, never-melting, but whatever it was, Sadie Madofsky finally agreed to go to a movie with Joey.

He was waiting for her in front of Cavanagh’s steak house on Twenty-Third Street, watching the trollies jangling down Eighth Avenue, the people buying tickets at the Grand Opera House. He whistled joyously, certain he was in the home stretch with that redhead now. So she didn’t pet and didn’t smoke and ten to one her worst drink was a cup of hot chocolate. And tonight she had to be home by ten from the girl friend she was supposed to be visiting.

For her kind the Spotter’s boys had a sure-fire treatment. Rape, the coppers described it in their books. And yet, as Joey waited for her, the store windows yellow and cheerful like street bonfires in the cold night, he was thinking that anyway she didn’t stay awake nights figuring out how to be a golddigger. She was just a dumb cherry, the dew was on her a foot thick, but she must like him for real to be meeting him tonight….

Once a week, all through January, he met her in front of Cavanagh’s. He began to feel that maybe a golddigger wasn’t so bad after all. For he hadn’t had as much as one willing good night kiss out of Sadie Madofsky. “I’m no hundred yard runner,” he protested that night as they hurried down the dark street to her father’s store. At the door, she searched in her bag for her key while he stared at her, frustrated, his breath freezing before him. In a minute she’d be gone. What the hell was he breaking his neck for over this God damn girl? This God damn jewgirl, he thought venomously peering at the lettering on the dark plateglass. To his burning eye those letters spelled out JEW TAILOR. And suddenly out of nowhere, as if their faces were somehow reflected on that same plateglass, he thought of his family. Pack of Jews, he cursed to himself. He heard Sadie’s key grating in the lock. Christ, if he had the guts he’d push her inside. He could keep her from yelling for help all right, all right.

He seized the girl, kissing her on the lips, kissing a mouth of ice. Disgusted, he let her go.

“Joey — ” she said angrily, but whispering her anger.

“We won’t wake the neighborhood, don’t worry! Beat it!”