Billy Bathgate Read Online Free PDF Page A

“For God’s sake!”
    “He covered everything,” Irving said. “That’s what I liked about Bill. Nothing left to chance. After the first year we didn’t even have to carry cash. Everything on credit, like gentlemen. Yes, Bo?” I heard Irving say from the top of the ladder.
    “Put me out, Irving. I’m begging you, put a muzzle to my head.”
    “Bo, you know I can’t do that,” Irving said.
    “He’s a madman, he’s a maniac. He’s torturing me.”
    “I’m sorry,” Irving said in his soft voice.
    “The Mick did him worse. I took the Mick out for him. How do you think I did it, hanging him by his thumbs, like this? You think I held him for contemplation? I did it, bang, it was done. I did it mercifully,” Bo Weinberg said. “I did it merci-ful-ly,” he said, the word breaking out of him on a sob.
    “I could give you a drink, Bo,” Irving called down. “You want a drink?”
    But Bo was sobbing and didn’t seem to hear, and in a moment Irving was gone from the hatch.
    The pilot had turned on the radio, twisting the knob through static till some voices came in. He kept it low, like music. Peopletalked. Other people answered. They warranted their positions. They were not on this boat.
    “It was clean work,” Irving was saying to the pilot. “It was good work. Weather never bothered me. I liked it all. I liked making my landing just where and when I’d figured to.”
    “Sure,” the pilot said.
    “I grew up on City Island,” Irving said. “I was born next to a boatyard. If I didn’t catch on when I did I would have joined the navy.”
    Bo Weinberg was moaning the word Mama . Over and over again, Mama, Mama .
    “I used to like it at the end of a night’s work,” Irving said. “We kept the boats there in the marine garage on a Hundred and Thirty-second Street.”
    “Sure,” the pilot said.
    “You’d come up the East River just before dawn. City fast asleep. First you’d see the sun on the gulls, they’d turn white. Then the top of the Hell Gate turned to gold.”

TWO
    I t was juggling that had got me where I was. All the time we hung around the warehouse on Park Avenue, and I don’t mean the Park Avenue of wealth and legend, but the Bronx’s Park Avenue, a weird characterless street of garages and one-story machine shops and stonecutter yards and the occasional frame house covered in asphalt siding that was supposed to look like brick, a boulevard of uneven Belgian block with a wide trench dividing the uptown and downtown sides, at the bottom of which the trains of the New York Central tore past thirty feet below street level, making a screeching racket we were so used to, and sometimes a wind that shook the bent and bowed iron-spear fence along the edge, that we stopped our conversation and continued it from mid-sentence when the noise lifted—all the time that we hung out there for a glimpse of the beer trucks, the other guys pitched pennies against the wall, or played skelly on the sidewalk with bottle caps, or smoked the cigarettes they bought three for a cent at the candy store on Washington Avenue, or generally wasted their time speculating what they would do if Mr. Schultz ever noticed them, how they would prove themselves as gang members, how they would catch on and toss the crisp one-hundred-dollar bills on the kitchen tables of theirmothers who had yelled at them and the fathers who had beat their ass—all this time I practiced my juggling. I juggled anything, Spaldeens, stones, oranges, empty green Coca-Cola bottles, I juggled rolls we stole hot from the bins in the Pechter Bakery wagons, and since I juggled so constantly nobody bothered me about it, except once in a while just because it was something nobody else could do, to try to interrupt my rhythm by giving me a shove, or to grab one of the oranges out of the air and run with it, because it was what I was known to do, along the lines of having a nervous tic, something that marked me but after all wasn’t my fault. And