Billy Boy
By Thomas J. Hubschman
Copyright © 2011 Thomas J. Hubschman
Published by Savvy Press at Smashwords
All rights reserved.
All the characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Savvy Press PO Box 63
Salem, NY 12865
ISBN 978-0-9826069-3-3
CHAPTER ONE
The Off Track Betting parlor on the corner of Brooklyn’s 12th Street and 5th Avenue didn’t attract many local shoppers. But it had its loyal contingent of pensioners, laid-off truck drivers and a small but active fellowship that convened there for something other than the action at Belmont and Hialeah.
The OTB especially came in handy for Billy Conover when he wanted to cop an ounce of pot or a handful of Black Beauties. This morning he had a hangover which only a mega-dose of ups could cure. Coffee did little more than make him mobile, and his mother’s carping merely drove him out of the house in search of relief.
“Tito around?” he asked a methadone junkie who had been a dope fiend when Billy was still sucking his thumb. Fat now and permanently stoned on the legal dose he picked up at his clinic, chased down with a pint of cheap wine, the meth-head held court at the OTB like a veteran warrior, one of few survivors of a generation decimated by overdoses, gunshot wounds and AIDS.
“Try Manny’s.”
Billy noted with satisfaction the quiver of apprehension in the man’s eyes. He had been causing that reaction ever since people realized he was crazy enough to do anything. “Hey, Billy, jump off the roof!” And he would do it, usually landing on his feet but sometimes not, it seemed to make little difference to him. The other kids had made fun of his recklessness, but over the years his willingness to take any dare—“Swallow this pill, Billy” “I bet you can’t drink a whole quart of booze”—gained him a useful reputation. If your enemies thought you were crazy they left you alone. He had had few fights in his twenty-three years, and those were mostly of his own choosing.
Fifth Avenue was awash in sunlight. Having little in common with its namesake in Manhattan, no Tiffany’s or Brentano’s, no Sachs or Lord & Taylor, it was a shopper’s avenue nonetheless, albeit one of discount clothing stores, cheap furniture outlets and mom-and-pop luncheonettes. For better-quality merchandise, locals shopped the malls in Jersey and Long Island where they could find bedroom sets that didn’t fall apart before the last payment was made and suits and dresses they could wear to a wake or wedding without anyone snickering behind their backs. Everyone else, especially those getting by on a laborer’s or welfare check, had to make do with whatever the discount stores had to offer. When Billy’s father was alive, before the blacks took over downtown Brooklyn, his mother did her shopping at A&S and Martin’s. Now, thanks to a heart condition, she was lucky to get down to Fifth Avenue a couple times a year to pick up a new pair of slippers or drainboard for the kitchen sink.
Manny lived on Fourth Avenue, the major traffic artery through that part of Brooklyn. The only stores there were auto-parts outlets and bodegas. The tenements above them were occupied by Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and other Latinos. Billy had been to Manny’s before, had even made it with Manny’s sister on one of the family’s sweet-and-sour-smelling cots. That was more than a year ago, and although the girl who was only fourteen at the time promised not to tell, he was concerned what Manny’s reaction might be if she hadn’t kept her word.
A note scribbled in magic marker on the mailboxes indicated the bells were out of order. The main entrance door was ajar. He pushed it open and entered a dark hallway smelling of last night’s rice and beans and the morning Bustelo. Dark halls were hangouts for junkies and other ne’er-do-wells, but this one looked empty, so he headed up the gloomy stairway.
The climb made his head throb more insistently. His evening had started out innocently enough, a few beers on the sidewalk outside Scully’s, the major social institution in his neighborhood, not excepting the busy church two blocks away. He was a rare visitor to either anymore, unwelcome at the bar because of his bent for provoking dissension just for the fun of it, and he hadn’t seen the inside of Holy Family since Father Tim was curate back during Billy’s brief career as a Boy Scout.
When his money had run out and nobody in Scully’s was willing to stand him to another quart container, he decided to take matters into his own hands at the twenty-four-hour grocery across the street. The store was run by Pakistanis—a dry cleaner had stood there until the neighborhood began gentrifying a few years back—and they kept a sharp eye out for thieves. But after midnight there was only one man on duty, the theory being no one would try to rob the place with Scully’s right across the street. The theory was sound except it didn’t account for people like Billy whose skills as a shoplifter were mediocre but whose nerve made up for any lack of talent. After sending the clerk off to find a box of extra-strength tampons, he filled the inside of his jacket with cans of beer and walked out of the store. By the time the clerk realized what had happened, Billy was three blocks away and already consuming his ill-gotten gains.
Later in the evening he returned to Scully’s and found a couple old schoolmates willing to buy him a quart just to keep him quiet. He drained it on the sidewalk in full view of the grocery he had robbed earlier. When the clerk spotted him and then began cursing him in vigorous Urdu, Billy waved back cheerfully and called out that he didn’t need the tampons after all, it had been a false alarm.
The stairs creaked irritably under his year-old sneakers. This was actually a more solid building than the one in which the Conovers lived, had lived for Billy’s entire life. But the mere fact it was inhabited by Latinos, smelled of their cooking and other alien habits, made him feel like he was in a slum. There were no Spanish surnames on the broken mailbox in his own building on 16th Street, and just one Italian. The other tenants were old-time Irish or new people—musicians, office workers—doubling and tripling up in the rundown railroad floor-throughs. The new people came and went, paying top dollar for the same apartment Billy and his mother and sister lived in at a fraction of their rent. The dirty oilcloth was peeling off the crooked stairway and the Conover apartment hadn’t been painted for more than a decade. But it never occurred to him that he lived in the same conditions as these Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, for the simple reason he was white and they were not.
He knocked gently at a door on the top floor, waited a few seconds and knocked again harder. There was no radio playing—a sure sign someone was home. He knocked again, then pounded with his fist until the door shook. He could easily have kicked it in, but if he was right about somebody being home they might not take kindly to a stranger busting down their front door, especially if they had a gun.
“Shit,” he said loud enough to be heard through the thin wood. His head felt even worse than it had earlier. Even more important, he was slipping into the deep gloom that had stalked him ever since he was a kid. It had been to keep that dark cloud at bay that he set off on last night’s drinking bout. Now only ups would dispel it.
He started back down the stairs. The only option left him was to return to the OTB and try to cop off one of the regulars who were usually unwilling to deal to him. Lost to these concerns, he didn’t notice the three young men heading up the stairs until he had come face-to-face with them on the second landing. They eyed him with the cautious looks of predators sizing up a tasty but possibly dangerous prey. He suppressed an urge to simply push his way past them. Then a better idea occurred.
“Up against the wall!”
He grabbed the first, a thin Latino, and spun him around against the peeling plaster.
“Now! Or I blow your heads off.”
The other two didn’t hesitate.
He frisked them quickly, found three switchblade knives and some loose joints, then edged toward the stairs.
“I see you fuckers on my beat again, I haul your asses down the precinct. You got that?”
Three heads nodded reluctantly. By the time they dared look around, Billy was half a block away.
Rosemary Grady, known to her various paramours and clients as Rosy-O, Sweet Rosy O’Grady and Rosy O’Blowjob, was on the phone to her former classmate Cathy Conover. Her older child was taking a bath in the old tub you could only reach by walking out onto the top-floor landing of the brownstone where she lived. The baby was snoring in a Port-a-Crib nearby.
“Danny Matthews says he saw Jinny just half an hour before it happened,” she said, her voice hoarse from crying. “He says she looked a little high, but not that bad. Not, you know, like she was gonna O-D or anything. I talked to her mom this morning. She says Jinny had a heart condition. A murmur or something. I never heard nothing like that, did you? I mean, everybody knows Jinny was using crack. Even I knew it, and I hardly get out of the house anymore.”
Cathleen replied that Jinny’s death was such a shock she didn’t know what to think yet. But in reality she was only surprised her childhood friend had survived as long as she did. Jinny started using drugs in seventh grade. By the time she was fifteen she was turning tricks on Bartel Pritchard Square just two blocks from her home. By then Cathleen was a sophomore at St. Saviour and had more friends in upscale Park Slope than she did in her own neighborhood. But she wasn’t going to risk Rosy’s ire by telling her Jinny McCormick only got what she had so long been asking for. In a few years Cathleen would be free of 16th Street, just as soon as she could afford a share in a Manhattan apartment and still have a few dollars left over to give to her mother. Till then, though, she had to pretend she was still one of the girls.
“The wake’s tonight,” Rosemary said, more than a trace of apprehension in her voice. Wakes weren’t her favorite social activity, at least not when the corpse was a close contemporary whose life style didn’t differ much from her own. “Ain’t that kind of quick? I mean, since she only died last night? But I guess we gotta go.”
Cathleen pictured the scene at Roche’s Funeral Parlor: half a dozen weepy friends, themselves just a pipe or two from sharing Jinny’s fate; the usual pack of red-eyed aunts, uncles and cousins who were no more surprised by how Jinny’s life had ended than Cathleen herself was. But she had to make an appearance, even if it meant pretending she wasn’t revolted by all those half-stoned unwed mothers and ex-juvenile delinquents.
She got rid of Rosemary and took a quick look at the roasting chicken she had started for her mother. Mrs. Conover suffered from angina, which was why the apartment looked the way it did despite her daughter’s attempts to maintain some kind of order. A large living room at the front of the apartment doubled as her brother Billy’s bedroom. Cathleen’s own small room was located off a long narrow corridor which opened into a dining area. Her mother had set up a narrow cot for herself on the other side of the heavy, dark dining table which hadn’t been used since Jack Conover died several years earlier. The kitchen looked out on the gray backs of the buildings on 15th Street. Every other building on 16th Street, a dozen or more tenements, was laid out the same way. When she was a little girl spending most of her time at home or in one of her friend’s apartments, Cathleen assumed everyone lived in a similar arrangement.
There was no time to wait for the chicken. She hurriedly changed out of her work clothes and into the black dress she had bought three years ago for an uncle’s funeral but which had come in handy several times since.
“You’re off to the wake then?” her mother asked. An interior window that helped provide some ventilation on hot summer nights connected the two women’s sleeping areas and was left permanently open. After the lights were out it encouraged mother-daughter conversations, which could seem difficult under the glare of a lamp.
“I’ll be back in half an hour. The bird’ll be done at quarter-to.”
“Tell Jinny’s mother I’m sorry for her trouble.”
“I will,” Cathleen said, pulling at the zipper of her dress. Narrowly built, she was a trim size six, with a small waist and long perfect legs, the only obvious legacy from her mother’s side of the family. The Donovans were big-bone, wide-hip people, but their women had the finest calves in Brooklyn.
“Your brother might turn up at Roche’s himself. See that he comes home with you.”
“I’ll try.”
“Do better than try. He was out all night again. I’m afraid he’s in with a bad crowd.”
“Billy’s twenty-three years old,” Cathleen said, trying to free the zipper from a snag. There was no use asking her mother to help. Apart from the angina, which kept her flat on her back most of the day, the woman was also nearsighted but too vain to wear glasses. “If you didn’t baby him so much we’d all be better off. Whatever happened to the job Uncle Pat was supposed to find him?”
“Your Uncle Pat talks big, but it’s mostly hot air.”
“Maybe that’s where Billy got it from,” Cathleen said, finally yanking the zipper free.
“The boy tries. He really does, Cath-a-leen. There’s just no jobs to be had. Look at the newspapers.”
“It would help if he went back to school and got his diploma.”
“He went down to John Jay just the other day. They told him he has to wait now for the next semester.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Cathleen emerged from the bedroom, where there was scarcely enough room for her twin bed and a chest of drawers, and presented herself for her mother’s inspection.
“How do I look?”
She did not ask from vanity but merely to find out if she had gotten her clothes on straight. But her mother was amazed as always by her daughter’s beauty. Try as she might, she could find little resemblance between the girl and herself. Yet she felt no resentment on that account. Her husband had not lived long enough to become a source of bitterness to her, as had the spouses of so many of her friends. She was grateful for this living remembrance of the man who, she acknowledged even when he was alive, was a better-looking man than she was a woman.
“Swell. “
“Then, I’m off. Don’t forget the chicken.”
“I won’t.”
“You took your medicine?”
“I did. I’m all set till bedtime.”
Cathleen started down the long corridor, then did an abrupt about-face and deftly squeezed around the old Victorian table to give her mother a kiss.
“See you later, love.”
By seven o’clock there was already a group of Jinny’s friends gathered outside the funeral parlor, conveniently located across the street from the parish church. Patty Brodigan had showed up in a black miniskirt and tights that she sometimes wore to Manhattan discos. Mary Dempsey did Patty one better by wearing black peddle-pushers, a first for Roche’s. The funeral director and his granddaughter, a slim attractive blonde who graduated Holy Family Elementary a couple years ahead of Jinny, watched from inside the glass entrance door. Celia Roche had handled this type of funeral often enough to know what the course of the evening would be like: for the first half-hour the immediate family would have the deceased to themselves. Then uncles, aunts and cousins would start to arrive. Finally the dead girl’s friends would work up the courage to come inside, approach the viewing room nervously and at the first sight of the coffin all burst into tears. They were a nuisance because they disturbed the other rooms, though it was a rare night anymore that Roche’s had more than one body on view, much of the business having gone to the suburbs.
By the time Cathleen arrived, the sidewalk mourners had moved inside and were weeping quietly at the back of the room. The McCormicks were seated in the two front rows on metal folding chairs, whispering among themselves like wedding guests waiting for the bride to arrive. Jinny herself, what was left of her after she had been gutted and stuffed with excelsior, lay in her coffin, her lips looking redder than they should, her already full eyebrows heavily penciled over, making her seem as if she were pondering some question—how many Tuinols she had popped before her last jolt of crack.
Cathleen approached the casket and knelt down on the cushioned kneeler. But as she began her Hail Mary she found that what at first had seemed an authentic if badly made-up version of her childhood friend, up close was clearly a fraud. The rougey woman in the coffin was not Jinny but a chimera conjured up by the mortician’s art. The real Jinny had looked a good ten years older, and a hard ten years at that.
She fixed her eyes on the portrait of Christ at the back of the bier and kept them there until her prayer was over.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. McCormick,” she said, taking the hand of a stout, black-draped woman who used to offer her milk and cookies when Jinny and she were in kindergarten. Mrs. McCormick nodded her appreciation without raising her reddened eyes, her two good teeth gnawing her bottom lip as if grief could be masticated like a tough piece of meat. Cathleen went down the line, recognizing all the faces, if not every name—father, brothers, younger sister, even aunts and cousins.
When she reached the last family member, her obligation was formally fulfilled. But custom required she spend some time keeping watch with them. She could park herself on a hard metal chair and kill half an hour chatting with one of the deceased’s gabby aunts. Or she could join her contemporaries sobbing quietly at the back of the room. Neither alternative appealed. She was not in a mood for pretending Jinny’s death was an act of God, and she had little in common with her old classmates since their paths had divided several years earlier.
Even so, she couldn’t sit by herself. That would only encourage the notion she was someone who thought herself above them. She decided on two former Girl Scouts standing apart from the others, little lace handkerchiefs pressed to their faces.
“She was so young and pretty!” one of them, a tall skinny girl who used to live on Milky Ways, greeted Cathleen as their cheeks brushed. Cathleen glanced back at the coffin and recalled the sunny pig-tailed Jinny who used to play tag with her in the schoolyard. When you saw someone a couple times a week, if only to say hello to, you didn’t notice the minor erosions that were draining vitality from flesh, the consequence of too many crack vials and barbiturates, not to mention the quickies in parked cars to raise money for the next high. Suddenly she found she too was crying. Whatever these young women had be-come, they were once full of hope like herself, and but for the grace of God she could have shared their fate.
But the mood of moist reconciliation was suddenly broken by a disturbance outside in the reception area. A moment later her brother Billy made his appearance in tattered jeans and dirty denim jacket, his hair scarcely combed, and at least a day’s growth of beard. Even from a distance, his eyes seemed unnaturally bright, with a familiar pinwheel look. At first, Cathleen tried to continue her conversation. But the exGirl Scout, like everyone else, was waiting to see what would happen next. Billy was impossible when he was high, sometimes impossibly sweet, but more often just plain impossible.
He stood for a moment, not quite steady, thanks to the quart of beer he had used to wash down some pills. He seemed not to recognize anyone, and for a brief moment, his sister dared hope he might simply walk out again. But then he sniffed hard, hunched his shoulders and lurched toward the open coffin.
Despite his disheveled state, she could not help but note the good-looking young man underneath the dirt and drugs. Handsome was too mild a word. He had been a beautiful little boy and had become a beautiful young man, though God knew you had to look hard to see it when he was in the condition he was in tonight. She didn’t understand how he could look like that and live the kind of life he did. Not just Jinny, but half the people she grew up with had become dissipated by the time they reached their twenty-first birthdays. Yet, Billy seemed to thrive. And he had the personality to charm the pants off virtually every woman he met and get around most of the men as well. Between his blarney and his looks, he could have gone far. Instead, he chose to become the social pariah she was looking at.
He hit the kneeler in front of the coffin with a thud. Then he stared intently at the face of the corpse as if expecting to begin a dialogue with it. Everyone watched the two dissolutes, one dead, the other still breathing, confront each other. Would he break down and cry? Would he try to embrace the corpse? But after a few moments he merely rose, took a shaky step backward, and, as if with a great act of will, focused on the line of black-draped McCormicks.
He started with the hefty alcoholic brother and worked his way down the row until he reached the diminutive grandmother, solemnly shaking each’s hand and offering an inebriate word of sympathy.
When he was done with the family he turned toward the other mourners, spotted a familiar face at the back of the room and stumbled toward her.
“Rosemary!”
Rosemary Grady had arrived just as Billy finished visiting the bier. She had prepared for the occasion by downing a couple shots of Jack Daniels but hadn’t worked up the nerve yet to approach the coffin.
“Rosy, I’m sorry about last night,” he said loud enough to be heard at the reception desk. “I meant to come by, I really did, but I forgot I had a previous engagement.”
“That’s okay, Billy,” Rosemary said, trying to ease away from her sometimes lover. She actually hadn’t seen him in a couple weeks and, as far as she could remember, hadn’t made any date with him for last night.
“You know I’d never stand you up like that if it wasn’t something important,” he went on, putting his hand on her shoulder, as much to steady himself as to emphasize his point.
“Sure, Billy. But you gotta excuse me now. I need to pay my respects, you know?”
“Rosy, you’re a sweet girl,” he said, still not letting her by. “And you still give the best goddamn head in all of Brooklyn.”
Everyone heard. Only the oldest old woman did not know what he meant, and no one was eager to satisfy her urgent inquiries.
Rosemary began to weep with humiliation. But Billy mistook her tears for grief and decided to console her with a beery embrace.
Jinny’s oldest brother Mick gently raised his great bulk off his chair in front of the bier and quietly padded toward the back of the room, his face as blank as if he had nothing more on his mind than the men’s room. But when he reached the doorway he paused and, without saying a word, slapped his great paw on Billy’s neck. Then he gently turned him around and planted his fist in his face.
A gush of bright blood spurted from Billy’s nose. He staggered back to the wall where, with its help, he was able to stay on his feet.
“Get the fuck outta here,” Mick hissed at him, panting hard. He poked a blunt thick finger into Billy’s chest and added, “Next time I see you, you wish you was dead.”
Billy was tending to his bleeding nose but found time to reply, “Sure, Mick, sure,” as if the will of Mickey McCormick were all he ever considered.
Rosemary stepped forward and began attending to his injury as if he had sustained it defending, not impugning, her honor. But her gesture seemed to infuriate Mick all over again—he was a regular visitor to her “blowatorium,” Billy’s epithet for her apartment on 16th Street, but was unaware that so were half the other young males in the neighborhood.
Billy seemed to be paying no attention to the freshly erupting McCormick. But just as everyone was anticipating another, possibly lethal blow, he abruptly jammed his hand into the bigger man’s midsection and brought his knee up smartly into his groin.
Mick collapsed into a great ball of pain, unable to breathe, much less speak.
The mourners regarded the helpless giant writhing on Roche’s tasteful gray carpet, then looked up to see what Crazy Billy would do next. But they found that, like Jesus amongst the hostile Pharisees, he had disappeared from their midst.
CHAPTER TWO
When Billy left Roche’s he headed for Brendan McCauley’s apartment on 16th Street. Brendan and he had strung beads together in Miss Shapiro’s kindergarten, where she once caught them trying to get Hilda Weisman to show them her nipples. In third grade they helped drive Mr. Fanazio to early retirement and brought Miss Johnson to the brink of a nervous breakdown when she arrived one morning to find her frogs cut into pieces and the class rabbit’s back legs missing.
Later they attended Bishop Dodge High School just across the Prospect Expressway. In those days, their favorite hangout was Green Wood Cemetery, a huge park-like piece of land, which abutted the school’s back door. The cemetery was a refuge for teenage lovers and other absconders from justice. One weekend a Jewish boy from Borough Park, the cemetery’s southern perimeter, and an Irish-Catholic girl from Park Terrace executed a suicide pact there. They were found comatose among the gravestones, intentional overdoses. The boy pulled through, the girl didn’t. Billy’s class happened to be studying Romeo and Juliet at the time, but the young priest teaching the course was reluctant to allow any connection between the day’s lurid headline and the offspring of the Montagues and Capulets. Suicide was a mortal sin.
When Billy insisted on the comparison, the priest told him to save the discussion for religion class. Billy told the priest he was an asshole. The priest sent him down to the principal’s office, an easygoing duffer just a few months away from an eternal golf game at the diocesan retirement home. The principal spoke gently but backed up the younger priest and suggested Billy’s choice of words was excessive. Billy told him he was an asshole too.
Brendan’s reason for expulsion was more serious. He was caught walking out of the school after hours with a TV under his arm. When challenged by the school guard, he hit the man in the face with the TV, breaking his jaw.
Brendan quickly learned a more efficient and less risky way of removing people’s property from their homes and businesses. He made a few slip-ups along the way, but the time he spent on Riker’s Island only honed his skills so that after each release he was able to practice his craft with less liability. What he learned he passed on to Billy, who was a far more willing pupil for Brendan than he had been for Father Gaffney. Brendan’s forte was planning and direction, Billy’s execution, especially when the assignment required derring-do. He delighted in scaling the backs of buildings which neither Bell Telephone nor the Fire Department willingly took on. He especially enjoyed sneaking into bedrooms late at night and making off with any wallets and jewelry lying about. The riskier the plan, the better he liked it. Thanks to Brendan’s discretion, Billy never got a chance to show just how truly imprudent he could be. And since neither ever did anything without the other, Billy had been protected so far from his own more outrageous instincts.
“What happened to your face?” Brendan asked when Billy arrived with blood still streaming from one nostril.
“Got hit with a truck name of Mickey McCormick. That’s okay, though. Mick is singing in a higher key than he used to.”
Brendan shook his head as if bemused by the quirks of an irrepressible younger brother. But there was nothing familial about the two young men. Billy was blond and pink-skin, Brendan dark-hair and ruddy—not homely but with none of Billy’s angelic looks.
“Don’t get blood on the carpet,” Brendan said, returning his attention to a basketball game on the TV.
Billy lay down on the cot that doubled as Brendan’s sofa and tilted his head back to stop the flow of blood. He spent as much waking time in this room as he did in his mother’s apartment, and it felt even more like home. But he couldn’t live without a woman to look after him, even if it was one with a heart condition. Brendan, by contrast, had been on his own since he was sixteen. His mother didn’t even live in the neighborhood. He collected rents for her and was supposed to look after the building, though the tenants had long since given up expecting any janitorial services beyond his pushing the garbage cans out to the curb twice a week. But nobody was late with the rent more than once.
“Who’s winning?”
“Boston. The Knicks can’t do nothing right.”
“Figures.”
Brendan took another swig of beer, having apparently forgotten Billy’s adventure in the funeral parlor. But then he asked, “Cath-a-leen there?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Right, like you wouldn’t like to get inside her pants.”
“Who said anything about getting inside her pants?”
“I know how your dirty little mind works, McCauley. Forget it. Cath-a-leen’s a fucking lady. She don’t go out with scumbags like us.”
“Speak for yourself, kid.”
“I’m speaking for both of us.”
“Is that right?”
In one motion Brendan was out of the broken armchair he had been straddling and was on top of Billy.
“Jesus Christ, can’t you see my fucking nose is bleeding?”
“What makes your sister so special, Billy? Didn’t I tell you she already put out for me?”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Twice.”
“In your fucking dreams.”
“One of these days I’m gonna get the whole thing.”
“You wish. How about getting off my chest before I fucking bleed to death?”
Brendan stared down at the pink cheeks streaked with bright blood, and grinned.
“Better stuff some toilet paper up there before you bleed all over my expensive furniture.”
Brendan’s lust for Billy’s sister was a running joke between them and a sure-fire way of riling Billy. He was never quite sure how serious Brendan was about his designs on Cathleen. Nor did he know why he should care. He never kept tabs on the men Cathleen went out with from her office, except to assure her they were all pansies. But that was just to get her goat. In reality, he wanted her to find a nice rich guy and settle down, preferably taking their mother with her, even though that would leave him on his own without any legal means of support.
Apart from Cathleen, Brendan showed little interest in the opposite sex. Skin flicks from the video store seemed to satisfy all his sexual needs—nasty stuff too rough for Billy’s tastes. Occasionally he dropped by Rosemary Grady’s or one of the other sure things in the neighborhood, but as far as girlfriends were concerned Billy had never seen or heard of any. Ever since he was a kid, Brendan had been totally independent. Self-sufficient. Like Billy himself would like to be.
“Jimmy Duggan says there’s some good shit on 17th Street. From Afghanistan,” Brendan said at the next commercial break.
“Thanks, I’ll pass.”
“Scared?”
“Let’s just say I’m getting prudent in my old age.”
Brendan laughed at the idea of Billy Conover becoming prudent about anything, least of all drugs. Billy had OD’d twice on smack, his heart stopping the second time for several minutes in the ER. Afterward, he told Brendan he had seen his father and Jesus beckoning to him in white robes. But when he awoke to find a plastic tube stuck up his penis, another in his arm and a powerful pain in his chest where two interns had been pumping his chest, he only grinned up at the white coats and quipped, “What’s up, Docs?”
Even so, the OD took some of the wind out of his sails—not because he had a cardiac arrest but because of that vision of his father waiting for him on the other side. As a Catholic he feared death because death could mean hell—was more likely to mean hell if you had done some of the things he had done. If he really was dead for the few minutes it took the doctors to get his heart going again, then what Jesus and his father were calling him to was the Day of Judgment. And he had no illusions that in the hereafter he could get away with the kind of mischief he had been able to persuade the cops and judges to overlook in this life strictly on the strength of his lily-white good looks and Irish moniker.
His mother was already asleep by the time he returned home, thanks to medication she received regularly from Dr. Mendelbaum, the family physician since before her husband died. She visited his office every month. He checked her blood pressure, listened to her heart and wrote a prescription for more angina pills and tranquilizers. She paid him out of the money Cathleen gave her. Most of her welfare check went toward paying the rent—rather, one third of the rent, which was all the Department of Social Services allowed her—with a small amount left over for food and other expenses. She also got food stamps but sold them to a neighbor because she was ashamed to use them on 9th Avenue where everyone knew her.
Billy gently closed the thin entrance door behind him. There was no light showing—it was past midnight—so he figured he had slipped in undetected. He tiptoed into the living room and lay down on the old sofa. But he had no sooner gotten comfortable than the bare overhead bulb suddenly came on and his sister appeared under its blinding light like an avenging angel from the Old Testament. Her hands were placed squarely on the hips of her pale blue nightgown, making her look a little flatfooted for an emissary of the Almighty. She had no makeup on, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the brilliance surrounding her, he was amazed to find her skin was no longer the immaculate perfection he remembered it to be.
“You realize you humiliated me in Roche’s tonight?” she said as he was still marveling that his beautiful big sister was beginning to age. “Don’t you have any shame? Don’t you care about my feelings at all?”
“Piss off, Sis,” he replied, turning away from the light and the human decay it had revealed. “He got what was coming to him.”
“What about me? Did I get what was coming to me too? How do you think I felt, seeing you walk in there unshaven, not even dressed properly. Drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk, just a little high.”
“Do you think I want to be known as your sister? Do you realize I had to apologize for what you did? How do you think I felt?”
“You don’t have to apologize for nobody,” he said, his face to the wall, hugging the greasy pillow which, along with an old navy blanket, were the only bedclothes he slept with.
“Look at you. You’re twenty-three years old. You’re not a kid anymore. But do you have any kind of a job? No. Do you care? No. You should be ashamed of yourself. Why, I couldn’t even bring anyone into this house if I wanted to.”
“Like one of those fairies you go out with?”
There was silence for a moment. He knew the look on her face had changed from outrage to hurt, an alteration he had been able to effect at will ever since they were kids. But there would be no wrestling match as there might have been five or ten years ago, just the bitter complaint of an unmarried woman with a sick mother and shiftless brother on her hands.
“You got a fucking nerve.”
He turned to face her. Her complexion seemed ravaged by dark blotches, old acne scars, and a dried-out look he associated with much older women.
“You’re a disgrace to this family,” she said.
“Fuck you.”
“Daddy would turn over in his grave if he could see what you’ve become.”
“Leave Daddy out of it.”
“Do you care what he would think? Do you really? If you do, why don’t you go back to school and make something of yourself instead of hanging out with criminals and junkies? Do you think you’re special just because you’re a little smarter than most of the retards you associate with? Well, I’ll tell you something, Billy Boy, you’re right down there on the same level with Jinny McCormick and your pal Brendan. You’re a bum is what you are. A bum, plain and simple.”
“How would you like a fucking smack in the mouth?” he said, raising himself on one elbow.
“Why don’t you try?”
“What’s going on in here? Why are you two fighting?”
Their mother stood in the narrow doorway, supporting herself against the skewed frame, dressed in a faded housecoat. “Do you know what time it is, for the love of God?”
“Your charming son just got in. You can thank him for waking you.”
“Bullshit. I was tryna get some sleep when she comes in here and starts calling me names.”
“I didn’t call you names. I just told you what you are.”
“Please,” their mother said, clutching the front of her housecoat, “don’t fight. You’re brother and sister.”
“Don’t you even care about your own mother?” Cathleen said. “Do you realize she has a heart condition because of you?”
“Cath-a-leen, my heart’s been bothering me for years.”
“Ever since your darling Billy started getting thrown out of every school he set foot in.”
“Piss off. If you want to be a nun, why don’t you join a convent?”
“If I did, who would look after you, never mind who would take care of Mom?” Cathleen said, standing over him the way the nuns used to do. They carried yardsticks in those days to whack you over the hands or clout you across the back of the head when you least expected it. But first they stood over you just as Cathleen was doing now, glaring down and telling you how, by talking in class or punching your neighbor, you were slapping Jesus in the face as he hung dying on the cross for your sins. Then they whacked you, to give you a small taste of what a crucifixion was like, a mere suggestion of the suffering you were causing the Lord God Almighty. It hurt like hell, but Billy had always refused to show pain. He even defied the nuns by sticking out his tongue or, when he was older, by telling them to go to hell. Surprisingly, the more he talked back, the less they hit him. But his impudence meant his mother was sure to be called in, and after one too many incidents she was told she had better find another school for him.
“I can’t even think about getting married. You’re still too much of a baby to look after Mom.”
“That’s as good an excuse as any,” he said, turning back toward the wall. “I feel sorry for the poor bastard has to put up with you for a wife. I’d rather be boiled in oil.”
“Children, please,” their mother said. “You’re all you have, just the two of you. You mustn’t...fight....”
She clutched her chest more tightly and grimaced. Cathleen rushed to support her.
“Billy!”
He jumped off the sofa and ran to get his mother’s medication. Then he and his sister helped her back down the long corridor and laid her gently on her old cot just as if there had never been a cross word between them. They had become used to her attacks—or at least understood what was happening and knew what to do for her. But there was always the danger this was the one that would kill her and, as semi-orphans already, her chest pains always sobered them out of their selfish quarrels.
When she was breathing easily again they kissed her and vowed they wouldn’t fight anymore. Then they returned to their respective bedrooms. But no sooner was Billy resettled on the sofa than he heard the shuffle of slippers across the room’s worn carpet.
“You see what you’ve done!” his sister hissed.
“Piss off, Cath-a-leen.”
“Someday you’ll be the death of her.”
“I said, piss off!”
“And I hope you burn in hell for it!” she said, barely dodging the dirty pillow he let fly at her.
He tried to sleep but couldn’t. He could have stayed at Brendan’s but didn’t want to watch his friend cook up his daily dose of heroin, a ritual as predictable as halftime for the basketball game he was watching. But he felt equally uncomfortable in this house where he had been raised. This was the room his parents had used as a bedroom when his father was alive. Even then it had to double as a living room—they slept on a high-rise—while he himself enjoyed full occupancy of the small bedroom where his sister now slept. In those days, Cathleen spent her nights in the doorless dining room where their mother now had her cot. Back then the new red sofa was only a place for him to doze off when he was allowed to stay up late to watch a Christmas special on the family’s small black-and-white.
After his father died he gladly gave up his bedroom to Cathleen, even though it meant abandoning his sports posters and a view of the busty Puerto Rican across the airshaft. Assuming a place on the sofa meant he was taking on the role of man of the house. He loved the old slipcovers, which still smelled of the uncles and aunts who used to visit them. He liked the dirty, once-cream-colored walls and dark worn rug. He was even attached to the faded portrait of Jesus hanging between two drafty windows that looked out onto 16th Street. When he was younger, he offered prayers to it, asking the Savior’s and his dead father’s help to be a better boy.
But tonight he felt like a stranger in this room. There would be no sleep for him after what his sister had said. He would lie here until the sky grew pink over the parking lot across the street. Then there would be more recriminations before Cathleen left for work, along with suggestions from his mother that he call up an uncle to ask if he could use an extra hand around the shop. She would even offer to make him breakfast and, louse that he was, he would let her, when it should have been he cooking for her. No, he decided, better to go back to Brendan’s—or anyplace other than here.
Except for Scully’s the streets were deserted. The bar drew customers not only from surrounding neighborhoods, it hosted uniformed police and firefighters by the hundreds whenever a fallen comrade was waked in one of the local funeral parlors. On those occasions dozens of police cars, some with license plates from New Jersey and Connecticut, double-parked along 9th Avenue, half the cops packed into the bare-bones tavern, the rest spilled out onto the sidewalks, each with a quart container of beer in his fist. Apart from a few bottles of hard liquor for the shot-and-beer crowd, beer was the only drink you could purchase in Scully’s. Asking for a mixed drink there was like asking for caviar at a hotdog stand.
Billy headed down the block in a darkening mood that only a handful of amphetamines could lighten. He didn’t need his sister’s harping to know he should be holding down a job. But where was he supposed to find one? It was humiliating to ask relatives for work, especially when they already treated you like some kind of bug and didn’t even speak to you except as a favor to your mother. Besides, why should he spend his days screwing desks together, when he was smarter than ten factory workers put together? It was easier for a girl. All she had to do was learn how to type and any business in the city was looking to hire her. But who wanted a high school dropout like himself for anything but grunt work? He would rather join the Army if it came to that than kiss somebody’s ass for minimum wage.
“Billy Boy!” someone called from a midnight-blue Trans Am. The windows were heavily tinted, but the driver’s was rolled down halfway to reveal Tommy McCready, a classmate from Billy’s Bishop Dodge days. Tommy’s father owned two junkyards, so there was never any question of his own son going jobless. The elder McCready had also had the foresight not to die prematurely. “What you up to, Billy?”
“Same ol’ same ol’, Tommy Boy. A little of this, a little of that,” he said, stepping closer to the car.
“How’s your gorgeous sister? Still busting chops?”
“She gets her licks in. But I keep her in line.”
Like Brendan, Tommy also had the hots for Cathleen although she was a year older than them.
“Where you headed, Billy? Wanna take a ride?”
He glanced at the backseat windows, but the tinted glass didn’t give a clue to who might be behind it. Even so, he said, “Why not?”
The car’s interior was maroon velour, the roof off-white. The air was thick with pot smoke.
“This here’s my boy Joey”—Tommy pointed over his shoulder at the muscular young men seated next to Billy—“and Frankie.”
“Pleased to meet ya,” Joey replied, offering a thick hand. Frankie raised a clenched fist.
“Interest you in a beer?”
“Sure, why not?” Billy said as Frankie dug between his legs and came up with something imported—they were all the same to Billy—then handed him the stub of a marijuana joint.
“How about dessert? Joey, show my friend Billy what’s on the menu.”
After some hesitation, Joey produced a handful of variously colored pills and capsules.
“What have we here?” Billy sorted them out carefully on the young man’s palm. “Do I get to pick one from column A and one from column B?”
“Take whatever you want,” Tommy said.
Billy selected a familiar-looking red-and-yellow tablet and a brown one he did not recognize. He downed them with a swig of beer.
“This here’s Bruno,” Tommy said rather as an afterthought, indicating the young man riding shotgun. Bruno didn’t even bother to glance at the new passenger.
They drove along the southern perimeter of Prospect Park passed the small Quaker Cemetery whose high fence kids still climbed just as Billy himself used to do, surprised sometimes by groups of Haitians or Dominicans on the other side offering blood sacrifice. In the morning, park rangers found both used condoms and decapitated chickens, along with the occasional goat’s carcass.
When they turned onto Ocean Parkway, Billy asked what their destination was.
Frankie said, “Nigger hunting,” and raised a Louisville slugger off the floor.
“Any niggers in particular?”
Frankie nodded toward the front seat. Bruno turned his head halfway and said, “The nigger that give me this.”
A nasty wound, half-bruise and half-scab, covered most of an otherwise unremarkable profile. The eye itself was barely open.
“You in, Bill?” Tommy asked.
The dope was beginning to take effect. Streetlight reflected in the parked cars along the parkway seemed like moonshine on a dark ocean. He and his companions were buccaneers sailing the blue main in search of plunder and a ripe wench or two. He wished Brendan were with him. But then he remembered that by now his friend was in the warm arms of his White Lady and wouldn’t care if Billy existed or not.
“Sure, what the hell. A little nigger-hunting can be very bracing.”
CHAPTER THREE
There was hardly anyone out on the pedestrian mall beside the parkway. In good weather the benches were filled with Orthodox Jews from nearby high-rises, old-country types who worshipped the sun till their skin turned a wrinkled mulatto-brown. He and Brendan used to ride out to Coney Island on the parkway’s bike path to pick up Puerto Rican girls. When the girls’ boyfriends showed up, Billy scared them off with one of his crazy-acts, speaking in tongues and pounding his chest while frothing at the mouth—his specialty, and a marvel to those who knew he was only faking—shouting all the curses he knew in Spanish, Yiddish, Italian and Gaelic, and some he didn’t know. If that didn’t work, he took off his pants and began eating sand or swung like a demented ape from the beams beneath the boardwalk. When all else failed he yelled “Rape!” until the intruders left or the police showed up.
“Whereabouts these niggers live?” he asked as they turned onto one of the alphabet avenues—N or M, he couldn’t tell.
“Flatbush,” Tommy replied. “East Flatbush. Somewheres around there.”
By now Billy was so high he didn’t care where he was headed. Any place was better than listening to his sister’s diatribes. With luck, he would only return home after she had left for work and not have to confront her again until the next evening.
When they turned onto Flatbush Avenue the scarface in the front seat murmured, “Somewheres along here.”
A few blocks along they spotted four young blacks congregated near an intersection. They looked young to Billy, younger than anybody in the car. Old enough, though, to have weapons, guns even. In a fair fight they would be no match for baseball bats and Irish savagery. But who had a fair fight anymore?
“That’s them,” Scarface said, leaning forward eagerly. “Anyways, close enough.”
Billy felt some of the same giddiness he felt when he was about to step through somebody’s bedroom window—a mix of terror and intense, an almost orgasmic excitement. A voice in his head whispered he didn’t have any quarrel with these black kids. It was the same voice that also warned him he had no business taking other people’s property or, for that matter, yanking his wiener after the lights were out. But over the years the voice had become merely a part of the experience, just as a certain kind of music went with horror movies he enjoyed. The voice didn’t stand a chance against the rush of adrenaline he felt.
“I got the one in leather,” he heard Frankie murmur as if he were offering words of love in his best girl’s ear.
“You want a bat or chains?” he asked Billy.
“A bat, I guess. Is it a righty or lefty?”
Frankie handed him a thick Louisville Slugger without taking his eyes off the dark prey on the sidewalk. By now, the black kids had caught on that something was up. But the code required that they not just cut and run unless the car belonged to the police. They were, after all, black kids in a black neighborhood, even though it was one in the morning and the streets were deserted.
Tommy double-parked the Trans Am as if he were just stopping to pick up a pack of cigarettes. Then he got out of the car, keeping something—it looked like a blackjack from where Billy was sitting—concealed behind his back. The black kids watched carefully but still didn’t move.
Bruno opened the door on his own side of the car. He showed no weapon but, once outside the car, his hand dropped into the pocket of his leather jacket.
“Watch our backs,” Billy heard someone say as Tommy and Bruno walked toward the four kids on the corner. When they were halfway there Frankie said, “You guys follow me, but one at a time,” and stepped out of the car, keeping the baseball bat concealed behind the door.
By now the black kids were shifting about nervously, their eyes fixed on the two whites approaching them. If they ran now and their visitors turned out to be cops, they could be shot down and a story made up later that they had fled resisting arrest. But if they didn’t make up their minds soon they might suffer an equally bleak fate.
“What are you waiting for, you dumb yams?” Billy whispered, his heart pounding.
Tommy had come within a few feet of the intersection. Bruno was half a step behind. Billy remained by the car, his own bat concealed behind the open car door just as Frankie was doing. Tommy said some-thing to one of the black kids but was too far away for Billy to make it out. One of the kids, the oldest-looking, took a step forward as if to reply. Bruno advanced as well. The young black seemed to be trying to engage Tommy in a discussion. He was so intent on making his point that he was ignoring Bruno. By the time his friends alerted him to the danger, he was facing a large automatic pistol aimed squarely at his forehead.
For a moment, he stared back at the weapon defiantly. Then he started taking small backsteps as if confronting a poisonous snake that could be avoided by not making any sudden move. But Bruno matched each backstep with a step forward. The other blacks broke and ran.
Realizing he was out of room, the young man began protesting, addressing all his words now to Bruno who still had the automatic aimed at his brow.
Tommy stepped forward and swung wildly with his blackjack. The black kid staggered backward but did not fall. Tommy was advancing for a second try when a shot rang out so loud that Billy thought somebody must have set off a cherry bomb. The young man tumbled backward and fell into a heap against a gated storefront, his forehead oozing blood.
Bruno remained standing over him as if contemplating a second shot. Tommy grabbed his arm and yelled, “You stupid fuck! You know what you just done?” But Bruno looked as if he could stand there for the rest of his life relishing his handiwork. Tommy had to forcibly turn him back toward the car, open the door and push him inside. Everyone else was already waiting inside. Tommy paused only long enough to take a quick look around, then drove off at high speed.
They headed north on Flatbush, running every red light. Billy knew the only danger lay in being spotted by a police car, but they made it to Prospect Park safely.
Bruno was sitting expressionless in the front seat. Billy himself had watched the killing with no more sense of reality than if he had been looking at TV or a movie. Even after everyone had piled into the car and he glanced back for a last look at the bundle of limp flesh that had been a human being, he was more impressed by the rapidity with which a living creature could be reduced to nothingness than by the consequences which might lie ahead for himself. Even now, he still felt nothing for the dead youth. He wondered as the car sped past the bare trees in the park if he would feel any different if the victim had been white.
“I’ll hop out any place along here.”
Tommy darted an angry glance in the rearview mirror.
“What I mean is,” Billy amended, “I think we should split up.”
Tommy abruptly hit the brake.
“A couple youse get out with Billy. Bruno, give Billy the gun.”
“What’re you crazy? I paid four bills for this piece.”
“Give him the fucking gun!”
Bruno passed the gun to Billy.
“I really need this,” Billy said.
“Bury it. If we get picked up, we didn’t even see you tonight.”
Billy put the gun in his jacket and was out of the car before Tommy came to a full stop. At Tommy’s urging the two other occupants of the back seat followed. They looked lost, though Billy knew exactly where he was—north of the carousel, not far from the zoo. He pointed west. “Go that way.” They hesitated. He put his hand into his jacket pocket. “Go, or I blow your fucking balls off.”
He headed into the woods next to the road. It was all uphill and darker than he would have believed possible. He slipped several times in the damp leaves. At the top, a fallen tree blocked the path. He started around it but, feeling the heft of the gun against his side, decided this was as good a spot as any to stash it.
He rubbed the barrel and grip against the leg of his pants to get rid of fingerprints, then looked for a burial place. The ground was cold and hard. All he had to dig with were sticks and his bare hands. He wanted to bury the gun deep, a foot or more, but had to be satisfied with less than half that depth. He could always come back later and do the job properly. He spread dead leaves on the spot, then climbed over the fallen tree and started down the other side of the hill. The ground in the wide hollow below was covered by a deep blanket of mist. He hesitated, having seen the same phenomenon several years ago when he took Suzy Meegan here to unburden her of her virginity. One moment he was on top of her, too whacked out on Tuinols and cheap booze to care where or who he was with, and the next a white shroud was closing around him. He got so scared he climbed off her and began yanking up his pants as if his mother had just busted them.