“Stabbed two dozen times. He was informing for the troopers.”
“Informing on what?”
“Whores, pimps, that’s all he knew. I wonder what Bindy thinks of it.”
“Ask him. I won’t talk to the stupid bastard. He kept the Notchery open last night. I had O.B. put a prowl car out in front. That’ll stop his traffic.”
“My guess,” Roscoe said, “is they’ll link us to the Dutchman, even if they know better. Coming after that Roy Flinn business, it can’t be coincidence.”
“Sounds like a passion killing, hitting him that many times.” Cy Kelly was coming toward them with chicken in arms. “Here comes the Ruby,” Patsy said. “I gotta pay attention.”
“I won’t see you later,” Roscoe said. “I’m checking into Albany Hospital with these pains of mine.”
“You need any help?”
“Bart’s driving me up.”
“Have him keep me posted.”
The crowd drifted back in from the bar, and Roscoe went to where Bindy was sitting with his driver-bodyguard, Poop Powell, and his handler, a man Roscoe didn’t know. The handler was holding the next battler, a speckled bird with a black breast and dark-brown wings, one of Bindy’s Swigglers. It was Bindy’s pride in this new breed that had led him to challenge Patsy, their first main in a year.
“Bindy, old man,” Roscoe said, “you’re doing okay. I saw that last one.”
“We’re moving,” said Bindy. “What’s on your mind, Roscoe?”
“The Dutchman. He was stabbed dead last night. And a trooper told O.B. he was one of their informers. After that business with Roy Flinn, I doubt this death is a coincidence.”
Bindy just looked at the bird his handler held. It was serene and only half visible in the handler’s arms. Bird, you don’t look like you might be about to die. I’ll bet the Dutchman didn’t either. And certainly not Elisha.
“You ever figure the Dutchman as an informer?” Roscoe asked.
“He’d rat on his mother for a free beer,” Bindy said.
“You have anybody in mind we oughta talk to?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“He hang around the Notchery?”
“He came looking for Pina when she went to work for Mame.”
“Maybe Pina has an idea,” Roscoe said.
“She was all done with him. Leave her out of it. Sit down and watch the chickens. You want some candy?”
He offered Roscoe the half-empty two-pound box of Martha Washington chocolate creams he’d been eating, a remarkable gesture. On a trip to Saratoga with Roscoe, Bindy had eaten an entire box in twenty minutes; and when Roscoe asked for a piece, Bindy told him, “Get your own candy.”
“I’m on a diet,” Roscoe said to the new candy “Who’s your handler?”
“Emil,” Bindy said. “Say hello to Roscoe, Emil.”
“Hey, Emil,” Roscoe said.
Emil looked up and said “Uhnnn,” and turned his attention back to the chicken in his arms.
“Emil’s worked with chickens in New Orleans, San Francisco, all over.”
“This bird got a name?” Roscoe asked.
“This is the Swiggler,” Bindy said. “You ever been swiggled?”
“Not by a chicken,” Roscoe said.
Bart came over to Roscoe. “How you feeling? You want to leave?”
“I feel terrible,” Roscoe said, “but I can’t leave now.”
“I’ll be at the bar,” said Bart, who loathed chickens, even in sandwiches.
Roscoe moved away from Bindy to a center position between the brothers, taking no sides. Jack Gray, Tommy Fogarty’s matchmaker and referee, gave the birds their second weighing-in of the night on the corner scale, the Ruby three pounds nine ounces, the Swiggler three eight and a half, a near-perfect match, and Jack pronounced them ready to fight. Emil took the Swiggler off the scale; Cy Kelly lifted the Ruby into his arms and then both men circled the pit to give the spectators a close look at the combatants. The birds, spurs on, rested easefully in arms, healthy, the color of winners. The betting was six to five on the Ruby, who was a veteran of one fight, which he’d won in the first twenty seconds. The Swiggler was also a one-time winner who had taken some cuts, but danced the better dance.
“Five hundred on the Ruby,” Johnny Mack said.
“You’re on,” Bindy said, and the betting dialogue began, the crowd’s overture of grunts and gestures, fingers raised and fingers back, money, money, and more where that came from, an escalating hum, the electric music of rising expectations.
“I like the speckled, fifty dollars,” a woman said, and Roscoe saw Bridie Martin, who cleaned houses for a living, a durable gambler.
“You got it,” a man said, “but if I win we go for a drink.”
“I’m not fond of knickknacks,” Bridie told her suitor.
“You’re on anyway,” the suitor said.
“Bill your cocks, boys,” said Jack Gray, the third man in the pit. Emil and Cy stood behind their chalk lines, four feet apart, facing each other, each bird held with both hands. They moved the birds’ beaks till one pecked the other, hackles rising, pecked again; and then both handlers crouched behind their lines. Jack said “Ready,” and the birds’ feet touched the dirt, they stood; Jack said “Pit ’em,” and each bird, set free, went at the other’s head, chest, throat, flew up and kicked, up and kicked; and with each kick by those flying needles the bettors roared, they know punishment when they see it, kick, kick, and kicks too fast to see, whap, whap and the Ruby is seriously punched, flies backward, falling, but up again and at that sonofabitch, they’re in a smash-up now, rolling, stabbing each other, then hung, spurs in each other’s chest, thigh, anyplace, and Cy and Emil approach the bundle, disengage the spurs—Easy, boys, don’t hurt anybody.
“Pit,” said Jack Gray, and the handlers took the birds to their lines while Jack counted to twenty.
Bindy said, “Way to go, Swiggler.” And that bird of yours really is a bit of all right, Bin. Patsy, you’re not happy, but what the hell, it’s chickens. You only think you know them.
“I got a hundred to eighty on the Swiggler,” somebody said.
“On,” said Johnny Mack.
“. . . nineteen, twenty,” said Jack, and the electric hum rises again as the birds resume the dance, the Ruby with wings wide to hit the Swiggler from the top down, but where the hell did that Swiggler go? There he is, up, up, and slashing with both feet at the Ruby one’s head and chest, but the Swig feels steel himself—through the throat, is it? And he’s on his side, the Ruby’s beak holding his neck, Break it, Ruby, bust him in two, but the Swiggler rises from below and whack, whack, you bitin’ bastard, and they stick each other and fall over, the Swig bleeding from the throat, and it rattles, but lookit that Ruby fella, gushing it from his chest, pooling.
“Pit.”
“Five hundred to two fifty on the Swig,” a bettor offered.
“On,” said Johnny Mack.
So it’s two to one against, Patsy. Your boy is game, but what about the fabled strength and cunning of those Albanys?
“Give him hell, big fella,” Patsy said.
“. . . eighteen, nineteen, twenty.”
The birds rise, flying up to heaven, high as Jack Gray’s belly, a pair of wild fliers pecking, pecking, popping their wings, born to fly but not far and not high, those bloody heels shuffling now on the way down, faster than angels dance, feathers cut and fluttering, a wing broken—the Swig’s or the Ruby’s? The Ruby’s—but, hey, that won’t stop that Ruby fella; wing or no wing, he’s kicking, on his back and he’s gotcha, Swig, got your eye. Oh, how we all hum as the one-eyed Swiggler moves and kicks, but oh so slowly, where’d he go, that Ruby sucker? He flies at the Ruby, sinks a needle into his heart, yes? No. But it’s close and it’s hung, one more time.
“Pit.”
Pull that needle from the flesh, Cy. How’s your Ruby lad doing? Not well. But we won’t count him out.
“Two fifty to fifty,” said a sport.
r /> “On,” said Johnny Mack.
“. . . fifteen, sixteen . . .”
Patsy cleans his glasses at five to one, and Roscoe knows the gesture means Patsy is worried. Roscoe is worried by the pain in his own chest, maybe what Ruby feels with those holes around his heart. Roscoe has stayed longer than he planned (he does that), but who could leave now? He holds the wooden post by his seat. Don’t fall over, Ros, and, no, you’re not identifying with wounded Ruby. None of that maleficent animal death symbolism, you did that with rats. No more martyrdom to your own ineptitude. But to tell the truth, Ros, if you had any sense you’d be in the hospital.
“. . . nineteen, twenty.”
The noise of this crowd will destroy Roscoe’s hearing. This is a fight and a half, a sweet-Jesus-lookit-that kind of fight, them are dead-game chickens, I’m givin’ ten to one on the Swiggerooney—gutsy bastard, that bird—and, hey, Bindy’s offering fifteen to one now; come on, little chicken.
The pain is gouging Roscoe’s heart, and he again wonders if he’s doing it to himself: all this tension with pimps, cops, lawsuits, whores, votes, birds. Same old story, Ros. You can’t get away from yourself. If he could, if he could even stand up, he’d blow this joint, but he can’t take his eye off the Swiggler, who faces off Ruby boy, both chickens too tired to fly to heaven, so whack that chest, Ruby, knock out his other eye, kill that fucker. But good old Ruby can’t quite. He’s got the Swiggler’s neck, going for the break, “Break it, break it,” and they’re moving, the Ruby’s wing dragging, blood flying. Whose? Who knows? The Swig has a spur in Ruby’s chest, Ruby’s kicking, and they roll, then the Swig’s spur is out but Ruby’s second wing is dead and he’s on his side looking mortal, so up goes Swig, his very last flight tonight, up and then down onto fallen Ruby, and the hum is a roar as the spurs go in, one a heart shot? Did he hit it? Doesn’t matter. He whaps into the Ruby head, straight into the old medulla oblongata, and Ruby is stilled, but on and on the Swiggler stabs.
That’s quite enough now, Swig. Your work is done.
Let’s hear it for the Swig.
And he does crow, for now he knows, and he stands and preens with his own steady blood-flow, where’d you learn to fight like that, young fella? He crows victory. Ruby is dead, long live swingin’ Swig.
And Roscoe saw it all, even Patsy’s head shaking out the loss, and Emil picking up the Swig, who’s still crowing the news in Emil’s arms. Cy Kelly picks up dead Ruby—give him to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Johnny Mack pays Patsy’s debts, and the winners smile as the losers lean back. Bridie Martin collects her fifty, and Tommy Fogarty hands the forty thousand to Bindy, who is halfway out the door as soon as he takes it. Roscoe should follow suit, but Bart is asking, “What’s wrong, Roscoe?”
Roscoe doesn’t reply. All he knows is that people are leaving and taking their noise with them. It’s quiet, which is nice, and the chickens have gone away. And you know what else, Ros? All of a sudden, so has the light.
Roscoe, carrying his valise along the road, came upon an aged billygoat who resembled Elisha. “You may be a goat,” Roscoe said, “but your death doesn’t make sense.”
“Try looking at Pamela’s grab for Gilby as a paternity suit,” the goat said.
“Ah! So you did fall into Pamela’s clutch.”
“You think so? What’s her leverage in threatening a dead goat?” And the goat sniffed at Roscoe’s valise. “What’s in this?”
“It could be money, it could be rocks,” Roscoe said. “My question is, Why do I have all this pain?”
“Pain,” said the goat, “is the only music you ever dance to.”
“I’m tired of it,” Roscoe said. “I must upgrade life.”
“Upgrade life again?” The goat smiled. “Have you heard of the fum?”
“The fum? I have not.”
“The fum,” said the goat, “is a musical instrument that predates the Aeolian pipes. You string clavichord wire across the asshole of a dead cat, and you play it by picking its strings with your teeth. And, Roscoe, I believe if you thought it would improve your condition you’d start practicing the fum.”
“I’m in no position to argue. Care for a treat?” Roscoe put a Hershey bar in the mouth of the goat, who ate the wrapper, spat out the chocolate.
“Cakey action don’t kibble at the Café Newfay,” the goat said.
The needle went into Roscoe slowly, the surgeon aspirating the syringe as he pushed through skin and flesh toward the pericardium, the sac enclosing Roscoe’s heart.
The cardiac monitor and a tank of carbon dioxide for resuscitation sat beside Roscoe, who was strapped to a stretcher in a sitting position. His heart readings as the result of his tamponade were dangerous: paradoxical pulse, high venous pressure, low arterial pressure, muffled heart sounds. The surgeon, fearing cardiac arrest, had reacted with salvational speed after Patsy and Bart Merrigan carried Roscoe into the emergency room. Now the surgeon aimed his needle at Roscoe’s sternal notch, its route anesthetized by l-percent-plain Xylocaine, and as it entered, with difficulty, the leathery, membranous pericardium, six centimeters into the corpus, the pain intensified sharply in Roscoe’s chest and he cried out.
“Good,” said the surgeon. “We hit it.” And he withdrew the needle a few millimeters, until Roscoe’s cries eased. He then aspirated the syringe, drawing out blood from the pericardium. “There it is,” he said.
When Roscoe was X-rayed after the accident, no damage was detected to the sternum or ribs, and after his collapse at Fogarty’s, the X-ray showed no change in cardiac size or shape; nor was congestive heart failure a likely diagnosis. The surgeon chose pericardiocentesis, or the needle, and as he was aspirating Roscoe’s blood into his syringe he was saying that the cause might be an aneurysm from the trauma of the accident, that it could have bled, healed, and, dramatically, bled again, and only if they opened him up, a perilous move, could they confirm that diagnosis.
Roscoe, though sedated, processed this surgical patter with some disquiet. Nothing gets Roscoe’s attention quite like the prospect of his own funeral, especially when he is conjuring the Golden Annals of the Party he is planning to dictate one of these days—Elisha’s story, Patsy’s, Veronica’s, Hattie’s, all of us, how we did what we did, what became of us, and what it meant, including our fraudulence, a golden tool, for none of these lives could have been lived without it, something Roscoe discovered in the Christian Brothers grammar school, when he too-precociously perfected a test, then wrote a brilliant essay, and was accused of cheating, though Brother William, known as Knocko, could not say how he cheated. All he could say was that Roscoe, this inattentive boyo who wanted to be in the woods with birds and game more than in the schoolroom, could not possibly have written this. Knocko, so known for his whacks with the ruler and his use of knuckles on skulls, and who never encouraged his students to be smarter than himself, arranged to prove Roscoe a fraud with a second test. Roscoe, who could have repeated his perfection, or nearly so, chose to write inept answers on the second test, sufficient to pass but not excel (Magellan sailed around the world, from Ireland), and Knocko, plus Roscoe’s parents, who were summoned to discuss the crisis, beamed at his achievement. The boy is normal—wholesomely mediocre. We won’t prosecute him for sinful superiority. It happens to many a lad. He’ll do fine.
So Roscoe as a fraud was a great success. You certainly know how to rise in the world, Ros. A year later, he confessed everything to his father, and Felix was so proud of his boy that he bought him a rifle.
This event would, of course, go into Roscoe’s Annals, which had one fiat: leave nothing out, including old Mr. Considine, the custodian at School Five, where Roscoe went before his father put him in the Christian Brothers grammar school to teach him discipline. Mr. Considine tended the boiler, swept the halls, and opened the doors for the pupils at morning. His white mustache looked like a paintbrush, and he wore a long coat and a hat that had been in style in Civil War days, a relic, as Mr. Considine was a relic, a man whos
e life depended on politics, and who, soon after the Republicans took the city in 1899, was gone. Mr. C, we missed your kindly patience with unruly boys, missed your vast bundle of keys, your painful walk, your missing index finger, your nose like an eagle’s beak. For Roscoe, Mr. C personified all men dependent on the prevailing political wind, and when the wind changed, here came idleness, and the shame of sitting on the stoop, hoping for the dole. This vulnerability Roscoe etched into memory, a principle upon which he, Eli, and Patsy founded the Party. If you’re vulnerable to caprice, we can help you. But if you’re not with us, you’re vulnerable to our caprice.
By late afternoon after his pericardiocentesis, with fifty milliliters of fluid withdrawn from the sac and an indwelling catheter in him for further drainage, Roscoe’s pain and general malaise diminished dramatically, and he received his first visitor: Alex, in his army uniform, a thin private first class.
“Alex, my boy,” Roscoe said, “you’re back, but, God, you’re skinny.”
“I suppose I am, Roscoe, but the same can’t be said of yourself.”
“At it already. No respect for your elders.”
“Haven’t I come to see you? Before my wife and mother? I wanted to have a chat before you died of bloat.”
“Ah, you have a charitable heart.”
“Are you all right or not? As I get it, you were watching a chicken fight and fainted at the sight of blood.”
“A perfect analysis. Too much death in my life. Parallel mortality. So they stabbed me in the heart to ease my pain.” He raised his shirt to show Alex the catheter. “This tube is in here so they can stab me again.”
“Have them put a faucet on it and drain the fat.”
“A compassionate suggestion.”
Alex was six four, usually the tallest man in the room, his hairline not what it was when he left. He had his father’s Roman nose and that loose way of moving his lanky body, plus that widely known ladykiller smile that was all his own. He wore a row of military ribbons on his shirt: the Good Conduct Medal, marksmanship medals, European-theater ribbon with three battle stars, presidential unit citation to his battalion for valor in the Battle of the Bulge, the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, and the Purple Heart.