Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (2 page)

Billy found the pocket in the second game and rolled 226. But Scotty had also discovered where the pocket lurked, and threw 236 to increase his lead to seventy-nine pins. Now in the eighth frame
of the final game, the match was evening out, Scotty steady with spares and doubles, but his lead fading fast in front of Billy’s homestretch run toward perfection.

Word of a possible 300 game with a bet on it drew the bar stragglers, the fag-end bowlers, the night manager, the all-night pinboys, even the sweeper, to alleys nine and ten in the cavernous old
room, spectators at the wonder. No one spoke to Billy about the unbroken string of strikes, also bad luck. But it was legitimate to talk of the bet: two hundred dollars, between Morrie Berman and
Charlie Boy McCall, the significance being in the sanctified presence of Charlie Boy, a soft, likeable kid gone to early bloat, but nevertheless the most powerful young man in town, son of the man
who controlled all the gambling, all of it, in the city of Albany, and nephew of the two politicians who ran the city itself, all of it, and Albany County, all of that too: Irish-American
potentates of the night and the day.

Martin knew all the McCall brothers, had gone to school with them, saw them grow up in the world and take power over it. They all, including young Charlie Boy, the only heir, still lived on
Colonie Street in Arbor Hill, where Martin and his father used to live, where Billy Phelan used to live. There was nothing that Charlie Boy could not get, any time, any place in this town; and when
he came into the old Downtown alleys with Scotty, and when Scotty quickly found Billy to play with, Charlie just as quickly found Morrie Berman, a swarthy ex-pimp and gambler who would bet on the
behavior of bumblebees. A week ago Martin had seen Morrie open a welsher’s forehead with a shotglass at Brockley’s bar on Broadway over a three-hundred-dollar dart game: heavy bettor,
Morrie, but he paid when he lost and he demanded the same from others. Martin knew Morrie’s reputation better than he knew the man: a fellow who used to drink around town with Legs Diamond
and had hoodlums for pals. But Morrie wasn’t quite a hoodlum himself, as far as Martin could tell. He was the son of a politically radical Jew, grandson of a superb old Sheridan Avenue
tailor. In Morrie the worthy Berman family strain had gone slightly askew.

The bet between Charlie Boy and Morrie had begun at one hundred dollars and stayed there for two games, with Martin holding the money. But when Morrie saw that Billy had unquestionably found the
pocket at the windup of the second game, he offered to raise the ante another hundred; folly, perhaps, for his boy Billy was seventy-nine pins down. Well yes, but that was really only twenty-four
down with the fifty-five-pin spot, and you go with the hot instrument. Charlie Boy quickly agreed to the raise, what’s another hundred, and Billy then stood up and rolled his eight strikes,
striking somberness into Charlie Boy’s mood, and vengeance into Scotty’s educated right hand.

Martin knew Scotty Streck and admired his talent without liking him. Scotty worked in the West Albany railroad shops, a short, muscular, brush-cut, bandy-legged native of the West End German
neighborhood of Cabbagetown. He was twenty-six and had been bowling since he was old enough to lift a duckpin ball. At age sixteen he was a precociously unreal star with a 195 average. He bowled
now almost every night of his life, bowled in matches all over the country and clearly coveted a national reputation. But to Martin he lacked champion style: a hothead, generous neither with
himself nor with others. He’d been nicknamed Scotty for his closeness with money, never known to bet more than five dollars on himself. Yet he thrived on competition and traveled with a
backer, who, as often as not, was his childhood pal, Charlie McCall. No matter what he did or didn’t do, Scotty was still the best bowler in town, and bowling freaks, who abounded in Albany,
gathered round to watch when he came out to play.

The freaks now sat on folding chairs and benches behind the only game in process in the old alleys, alleys which had been housed in two other buildings and moved twice before being installed
here on State Street, just up from Broadway in an old dancing academy. They were venerable, quirky boards, whose history now spoke to Martin. He looked the crowd over: men sitting among unswept
papers, dust, and cigar butts, bathing in the raw incandescence of naked bulbs, surrounded by spittoons; a nocturnal bunch in shirtsleeves and baggy clothes, their hands full of meaningful drink,
fixated on an ancient game with origins in Christian ritual, a game brought to this city centuries ago by nameless old Dutchmen and now a captive of the indoor sports of the city. The game abided
in such windowless, smoky lofts as this one, which smelled of beer, cigar smoke and alley wax, an unhealthy ambience which nevertheless nourished exquisite nighttime skills.

These men, part of Broadway’s action-easy, gravy-vested sporting mob, carefully studied such artists of the game as Scotty, with his high-level consistency, and Billy, who might achieve
perfection tonight through a burst of accuracy, and converted them into objects of community affection. The mob would make these artists sports-page heroes, enter them into the hall of small fame
that existed only in the mob mind, which venerated all winners.

After Billy rolled his eighth strike, Scotty stood, danced his bob and weave toward the foul line, and threw the ball with a corkscrewed arm, sent it spinning and hooking toward the one-three
pocket. It was a perfect hit, but a dead one somehow, and he left the eight and ten pins perversely standing: the strike split, all but impossible to make.

“Dirty son of a biiiiiitch!” Scotty screamed at the pair of uncooperative pins, silencing all hubbub behind him, sending waves of uh-oh through the spectators, who knew very well how
it went when a man began to fall apart at the elbow.

“You think maybe I’m getting to him?” Billy whispered to Martin.

“He can’t even stand to lose a fiver, can he?”

Scotty tried for the split, ticking the eight, leaving the ten.

“Let’s
get
it now, Scotty,” Charlie Boy McCall said. “In there, buddy.”

Scotty nodded at Charlie Boy, retrieved his ball and faced the new setup, bobbed, weaved, corkscrewed, and crossed over to the one-two pocket, Jersey hit, leaving the five pin. He made the spare
easily, but sparing is not how you pick up pinnage against the hottest of the hot.

Billy might have been hot every night if he’d been as single-minded as Scotty about the game. But Martin knew Billy to be a generalist, a man in need of the sweetness of miscellany.
Billy’s best game was pool, but he’d never be anything like a national champion at that either, didn’t think that way, didn’t have the need that comes with obsessive
specialization. Billy roamed through the grandness of all games, yeoman here, journeyman there, low-level maestro unlikely to transcend, either as gambler, card dealer, dice or pool shooter.
He’d been a decent shortstop in the city-wide Twilight League as a young man. He was a champion drinker who could go for three days on the sauce and not yield to sleep, a double-twenty
specialist at the dart board, a chancy, small-time bookie, and so on and so on and so on, and why, Martin Daugherty, are you so obsessed with Billy Phelan? Why make a heroic
picaro
out of a
simple chump?

Well, says Martin, haven’t I known him since he was a sausage? Haven’t I seen him grow stridently into young manhood while I slip and slide softly into moribund middle age? Why, I
knew him when he had a father, knew his father too, knew him when that father abdicated, and I ached for the boy then and have ever since, for I know how it is to live in the inescapable presence
of the absence of the father.

Martin had watched Billy move into street-corner life after his father left, saw him hanging around Ronan’s clubroom, saw him organize the Sunday morning crap game in Bohen’s barn
after nine o’clock mass, saw him become a pinboy at the K. of C. to earn some change. That was where the boy learned how to bowl, sneaking free games after Duffy, the custodian, went off to
the movies.

Martin was there the afternoon the pinboys went wild and rolled balls up and down the middle of the alleys at one another, reveling in a boyish exuberance that went bad when Billy tried to scoop
up one of those missiles like a hot grounder and smashed his third finger between that onrushing ball and another one lying loose on the runway. Smash and blood, and Martin moved in and took him
(he was fourteen, the same age as Martin’s own son is this early morning) over to the Homeopathic Hospital on North Pearl Street and saw to it that the intern called a surgeon, who came and
sewed up the smash, but never splinted it, just wrapped it with its stitches and taped it to Billy’s pinky and said: That’s the best anybody can do with this mess; nothing left there to
splint. And Billy healed, crediting it to the influence of the healthy pinky. The nail and some bone grew back crookedly, and Martin can now see the twist and puff of Billy’s memorable
deformity. But what does a sassy fellow like Billy need with a perfectly formed third finger? The twist lends character to the hand that holds the deck, that palms the two-finger ball, that holds
the stick at the crap table, that builds the cockeyed bridge for the educated cue.

If Martin had his way, he would infuse a little of Billy’s scarred sassiness into his own son’s manner, a boy too tame, too subservient to the priests. Martin might even profit by
injecting some sass into his own acquiescent life.

Consider that: a sassy Martin Daugherty.

Well, that may not be all that likely, really. Difficult to acquire such things.

Billy’s native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests
designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city’s life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy
Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like
other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover
there on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.

Billy went for his ball, kissed it once, massaged it, chalked and toweled his right hand, spat in the spittoon to lighten his burden, bent slightly at the waist, shuffled and slid, and
bazoo-bazoo, boys, threw another strike: not
just
another strike, but a titanic blast this time which sent all pins flying pitward, the cleanest of clean hits, perfection unto tidiness,
bespeaking power battening on power, control escalating.

Billy looked at no one.

Nine in a row, but still nobody said anything except hey, and yeah-yeah, with a bit more applause offered up. Billy waited for the ball to come back, rubbing his feet on the floor dirt just
beyond the runway, dusting his soles with slide insurance, then picked up the ball and sidled back to the runway of alley nine for his last frame. And then he rolled it, folks, and boom-boom went
the pins, zot-zot, you sons of bitches, ten in a row now, and a cheer went up, but still no comment, ten straight and his score (even though Martin hadn’t filled in any numbers yet) is 280,
with two more balls yet to come, twenty more pins to go. Is Billy Phelan ready for perfection? Can you handle it, kid? What will you do with it if you get it?

Billy had already won the match; no way for Scotty to catch him, given that spot. But now it looked as if Billy would beat Scotty without the spot, and, tied to a perfect game, the win would
surely make the sports pages later in the week.

Scotty stood up and walked to the end of the ball return to wait. He chalked his hands, rubbed them together, played with the towel, as Billy bent over to pick up his ball.

“You ever throw three hundred anyplace before?” Scotty asked.

“I ain’t thrown it
here
yet,” Billy said.

So he did it, Martin thought. Scotty’s chin trembled as he watched Billy. Scotty, the nervous sportsman. Did saying what he had just said mean that the man lacked all character? Did only
relentless winning define his being? Was the fear of losing sufficient cause for him to try to foul another man’s luck? Why of course it was, Martin. Of course it was.

Billy threw, but it was a Jersey hit, his first crossover in the game. The ball’s mixing power overcame imprecision, however, and the pins spun and rolled, toppling the stubborn ten pin,
and giving Billy his eleventh strike. Scotty pulled at the towel and sat down.

“You prick,” Morrie Berman said to him. “What’d you say that to him for?”

“Say what?”

“No class,” said Morrie. “Class’ll tell in the shit house, and you got no class.”

Billy picked up his ball and faced the pins for the last act. He called out to Bugs, the pinboy: “Four pin is off the spot,” and he pointed to it. Martin saw he was right, and Bugs
moved the pin back into proper position. Billy kissed the ball, shuffled and threw, and the ball went elegantly forward, perfect line, perfect break, perfect one-three pocket hit. Nine pins flew
away. The four pin never moved.

“Two-ninety-nine,” Martin said out loud, and the mob gave its full yell and applause and then stood up to rubberneck at the scoresheet, which Martin was filling in at last, thirty
pins a frame, twenty-nine in the last one. He put down the crayon to shake hands with Billy, who stood over the table, ogling his own nifty numbers.

“Some performance, Billy,” said Charlie Boy McCall, standing to stretch his babyfat. “I should learn not to bet against you. You remember the last time?”

“Pool match at the K. of C.”

“I bet twenty bucks on some other guy.”

“Live and learn, Charlie, live and learn.”

“You were always good at everything,” Charlie said. “How do you explain that?”