Life and Death of a Tough Guy (5 page)

Joey’s face had flushed at the Spotter’s easy confidences. The Spotter, a cigarette dangling from his thin mouth, almost felt like laughing. Here was another punk acting like he’d been handed the big red and white peppermint stick. For the pure hell of it, the Spotter said, testing Joey, “Bet I could trust you with a gun, kid?”

Joey nodded, his gray young eyes shining, and suddenly the Spotter’s heart, that sick heart of his, tightened in his chest. Here was another punk ready for anything, the Spotter thought. All these God damn punks were strong as horses. Smart or dumb, they were ready. “Not so fast,” the Spotter said, thinking that for himself going fast was over with forever. He tilted the derby on his head back on his forehead, his sunken eyes searching the young face across the table, and suddenly his exposed forehead seemed too broad as his peaked face seemed too meager under the full-blown yet rigid contours of that black iron kelly, its blackness shadowed now in the searching, pale and envious eyes.

The kid noticed nothing. All he could think of was that the Spotter didn’t hold his being a jewboy against him. “I’ll do anything you say, Spotter,” he said gratefully.

“Why?”

“Because you’re one fair guy.”

That the Spotter was — in his way.

During the next few months he brought the kid along like a prizefight manager with a good meal ticket. When the kid showed up after the flu had knocked him for a loop, the Spotter treated him to a pick-me-up over at Quinn’s. A glass of milk, a raw egg broken in, laced with two inches of cognac. He had one himself, Spotter Boyle, although the flu epidemic hadn’t been able to squeeze a single bug into his skinny frame. He loaned the kid a few bucks in the lean stretches between jobs and always he was saying, “Use the old bean. You got no police record, so keep it clean, kiddo.” When Joey complained how sick and tired he was living at home, the Spotter shook his head. “You blow out now and your ole man, he’ll go to the cops. Steer clear of trouble, kiddo. You stick around ‘til the ole man gets sick of you and tells you to go to hell. He will, too. Use the old bean, kiddo.” He was grooming Joey Kasow as a stick-up artist, the Spotter was, but he was still leery about giving the kid a gun. Shoot a storekeeper and the coppers buzzed out like flies. The Spotter was always warning the Badgers with guns, guys like Bughead. “Don’t pull the trigger unless the guy’s got a gun too. Let them cops keep warmin’ their feet. Remember there’s nothin’ like a killing to put a firecracker under their fat ass.”

With the first warm days when the amusement parks opened again, the Spotter suggested that Joey practice shooting out in Coney Island or across the river in Palisades Park. “You get the feel of a gun that way,” the Spotter said. Joey asked Georgie to keep him company Two or three times a week they shot at lead ducks and clay pipes. “There goes a Hudson Duster,” Joey’d grin at Georgie when he scored a hit. Hudson Dusters and coppers, all the enemies broken into pieces like the clay pipes they shattered with their bullets. And in the spring, too, as the Spotter predicted, Joey’s father’d finally thrown him the hell out of the house. It happened during the week of Passover when Mr. Kasow asked his son to come with him to the synagogue. Joey refused; he’d refused every year, but this time his father didn’t beat him or shout or curse. In a quiet voice he had parted with his oldest child while his wife and younger children wept: “Go your own way, Joseph. You are no son of mine.”

That was the signal for Georgie to blow, too. “A bad end to yuh, yuh scut!” Georgie’s father had bellowed at his son. The two kids moved into a furnished room on Forty-Sixth Street, off Eighth Avenue, a room not much bigger than two closets joined together: small and yet big as the world.

• • •

It was a world sick of war and when the armistice was announced, the first false armistice, the people of New York went wild with joy. Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. A paper rain of torn newspapers fluttered down from the windows. Whistles and bells split the air shaking with the voices of a multitude. “Down with the Kaiser!” they shouted while the signs in the stores proclaimed
Closed For The Kaiser’s Funeral
and a thousand flags danced the red, white and blue of victory.

“Down with the Kaiser!” the crowds shouted at the shrine of pylons and palms on Forty-Second Street that had been named a Court of the Heroic Dead. And all night long colored searchlights played on the weeping, laughing, praying, screaming, drunken faces.

“Down with the Kaiser!” those crowds cried deliriously and if someone, some bluenose, had cried, “Down with Drinking!” the crowds, even the drunks, would have agreed with equal moral fervor. All over the country prohibition sentiment had mounted with the war fever. Sober soldiers were good soldiers, the temperance ladies had stated with temperate tears in their eyes. The country needs the grain, the patriots had thundered, and weren’t most of those brewers and distillers Huns anyway? “Down with the Kaiser…. Down with Whiskey….”

It was a war to save democracy, a war to usher in utopia, a shortcut to a better world.

Marching down all the avenues of the cities, the returning doughboys paraded, and state after state voted prohibition. In the saloons, the heroes of the Argonne and Chateau-Thierry swallowed their beers and whiskies in big gulping drinks and killed the Huns all over again. And over in Hell’s Kitchen, Spotter Boyle lay awake at nights thinking that a big change was coming sure as fate, and it might be a good idea to get a wad of dough together. There was nothing like green money to help a guy in the clutch, was the Spotter’s ten commandments.

The Spotter put a gun into Joey’s hand and sent him out on his first armed robbery.

Joe Kasow, age sixteen and a half, had graduated finally out of blackjacks into the champion class where a finger on a trigger could cut anybody down to size.

After Joey’s third gun job, the Spotter knew the kid had a cool head on his shoulders. “Another guy might’ve pulled the trigger when that crazy wop butcher took a poke at Georgie,” the Spotter praised Joey, and to demonstrate his appreciation, he brought him up to a tenderloin sporting house. There, in a parlor hung with plushy curtains and shiny with gilt mirrors, the Spotter asked the madame for Nora. To Joey he said, “She’s the one I always have. What’s good for me’s good for you!” The Spotter winked slyly, his lips stretching in a man-to-man smile. But behind his pale blue eyes, like some calculating prize fight manager, he was wondering if he couldn’t use Joey good but good. He’d been thinking lately of sticking up a gambling game or two. True, the Hudson Dusters were protecting a lot of poker parlors down the West Side, and if anything went wrong, he was risking a gang war, but if the risk was big, so was the money….

A blonde woman in a flame-colored evening gown walked into the parlor. “Spotter Boyle himself,” she said with a smile.

Joey stared at her. He’d had two-dollar whores, he’d had free stuff — but this was a woman! She was tall, her breasts were full and creamy, a million dollar dame. He’d seen women like her in Quinn’s backroom, on the arms of the Broadway swells in the burlesque shows, in the penny movie machines, in his dreams.

“You haven’t been around in a dog’s age,” the tall woman was saying to the Spotter.

“I’m a man with three wives,” he joked. “Nora, how ‘bout bein’ good to Joey here?”

Her golden head moved on her powdered neck, she smiled at the kid who was holding his cap too tightly in one white-knuckled fist. “I’m old enough to be his mother, Spotter.”

“You oughta know, Nora,” the Spotter said maliciously. “Poysonally I thought you were under thirty.”

“Bye-bye, Spotter,” she smiled. “C’mon,” she said to Joey. He followed her out of the parlor. Her golden hair, the back of her neck, her naked white shoulders, her wide hips sheathed in flame-red silk, burned in his eyes. She stepped into a bedroom where only the big bed, without a blanket or a spread, covered by a fresh white sheet, had a plain workmanlike look to it, like the bed in a hospital. The dresser glittered with mirrors, the chairs were studded with brass tacks, the lamps fringed with strings of colored glass beads. She shut the door. “Under thirty! The nerve of that Spotter bastid.” She glanced at Joey. “How old’re you?”

“What the hell do you care,” he said flushing.

She glanced at the kid indifferently, not seeing him any more as a separate person. To her, he was neither young or old, goodlooking or ugly. Just another marcher in the male parade in and out of this room. “Put your clothes on that chair,” she said, and without another word, silently, efficiently, like a hospital nurse, she slipped out of her evening dress and onto the bed.

He hadn’t budged, some inner ear still deafened by that question of hers.
How old are you? … I’m old enough to be his mother…
. He dropped his cap on a chair, he wanted to say something. What? He felt dizzy. Out of the corner of his eye he glared at her full heavy body, strangely faceless like the whitish headless body of a pig in a butcher window. His mother’s face flitted over to that naked body, vanished, but he remembered. Images of his mother’s breasts accidentally seen, images of his mother’s body haunted him.

“I ain’t got all night,” she said without emotion. It was as if she’d never spoken. Or as if the waiting body, this apparatus of flesh had jingled out words only because somewhere a coin had been dropped in. “I ain’t got all night.” She had recited the whore’s words as if under the big breasts where her heart had been scooped out there was now a little hidden phonograph.

“Aw ri’,” he muttered and began to undress. She was silent, he was silent. The silence roared,
I’m old enough to be his mother. Mother, mother, mother
, his own heart echoed insanely. He stood up, and the bed and the woman on the bed lifted like a wave, and on the wave she was naked, with only the face dressed up, two round circles of rouge on the cheeks, lipstick on the lips.
Old enough to be his mother…
. “You hoor!” he shouted.

She thought she knew what was wrong. Another kid rushing a mile a minute into being a man. She thought he needed babying. The painted lips parted in the imitation of a loving smile. “Don’t you wanna kiss me?” she said, her words cloying and sweet like the titles of the silent movies.

The gray eyes of the kid didn’t seem to be focused on her. She realized he wasn’t looking at her breasts or thighs. He wasn’t looking at her at all but at some shadow that had crept into the room, the shadow of his hate.

She had seen that look before, on the faces of the wild ones, the woman-beaters, the perverts. Then she thought angrily what a fool she was to let a kid worry her. Still she felt she had to snap him out of it. She cupped her breasts with her hands in a gesture that was almost automatic like the movements of a wax fortune teller in an amusement park. Waxy whore’s hands under waxy whore’s breasts while her eyes, human, still worried, waited for his eyes to find her.

They found her. She sighed, she lifted her arms to him, offering herself to another customer. She stopped being a woman who was a little afraid and again became a bed-machine.

Joey felt himself falling down a hot and panting darkness although the light glowed through the colored stringed beads of the room lamps, falling through the darkness of forgotten roofs where the stars, like bright beads, lay tangled in dark and wanton hair, falling, falling, through the mother darkness, through the woman darkness, falling….

• • •

When the Spotter thought it over, he nixed the idea of sticking up poker games protected by the Hudson Dusters. Why should he? There was the East Side, free and clear. True he’d have to use the old bean and locate the joints. But that was what a bean was for. The Spotter snooped around and got all set. Then Clip Haley, Ted Griffin, Sarge Killigan, Lefty O’Connor and Billy Muhlen, the dutchie, stuck up a poker game on Rivington Street. Three thousand bucks plus watches and rings was what that little job was worth. “We don’t want ‘em to remember our mugs,” the Spotter said. So for the next job, he picked a new bunch led by Bughead. This job, too, went off like a song. “We better lay low a while,” said the Spotter.

It was summer before he was ready again. “This is a job for three guys,” he said to Joey. “The idear’s to get there ‘round seven before the game gets goin’. Should be only the house guys, two of ‘em. You’ll say Davey Finkel sent you. That’s how I got in. This Davey Finkel, he runs a saloon on Allen Street.” The Spotter was a great believer in knowing exactly where you were. He had Joey con the neighborhood and the sidestreet where up on the third floor of a tenement lady luck could be chased with a pair of galloping dice. Joey reported back to the Spotter who said, “Now let’s see who ain’t been in on any of this East Side stuff. You’ll need a coupla guys — ”

“How about Georgie?”

“You and Georgie’re glued together ain’t you?”

“We can do it ourself. We don’t need no other guy.”

“You sure, Joey?” The Spotter grinned. “Or you only want one guy so you get a bigger split?”

On a warm August day, the two Badgers hit the East Side. Sheenieland, Georgie was thinking, while the gray eyes of Joey Kasow glinted with the same sense of difference that showed in the Irish kid’s blue eyes.

East Side, West Side, two sides of the poor man’s coin. Pushcart peddlers lined the curbs shouting their wares in Yiddish. A beggar tap-tapped down the crowded sidewalk, his cane striking the stone heart of a world with eyes. A mob of small punks tailed two soldiers. “Hymie,” a small voice shrilled. “Why doncha lemme see der medal again, oney dis time, Hymie.” Sewing machines hummed in sweatshops above the stores on the street, still taking a stitch out of the long day.

The two Badgers turned into a narrow vestibule, walked up three flights to the crap casino spotted for them by Spotter Boyle. Joey pressed the doorbell. His finger felt stiff, frozen. He stared down at it as if it were some strange sixth finger that had come with the gun in his hip pocket. He heard footsteps behind the door. Felt his body stiffening, tensing. He glanced at Georgie standing there like a brick wall except for the spreading nostrils on his pug nose, as if Georgie were sniffing out the smell of those unseen footsteps.