Crazy by William Peter Blatty Read Free Book Online Page B

illegal “numbers takers” recorded their customers’ bets so that if challenged by a cop they could quickly erase them with saliva and a handkerchief, the only difference between Olsen and any other numbers taker being Olsen seemed to favor forest green ink.
    “Hey, how’re they hangin’, El Bueno?” he said with this twisted smile and pin-lights for eyes like Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death when he cackles, “I hate squealers’ mothers,” having just pushed an old woman in a wheelchair down a long flight of stairs to her death.
    “What’s up?” he went on. “You just takin’ the air?”
    “Pretty much, Mr. Olsen.”
    “Me too.”
    Which was a joke, as I knew he was probably on his way to some more of his numbers clientele, including maybe a stop to collect protection money from some poor old immigrant shopkeeper he’d previously bamboozled into thinking that he was in the Mafia.
    “Didn’t see you at the last three meetings. Sick or what?”
    I didn’t tell him the real reason. Every troop in the city took a nickel in dues but Olsen had upped it to a dime. Pop had already been stuck with the cost of my spiffy Scout uniform that he bought from this ultraexpensive Boy Scout Trading Post on Park Avenue and 32nd where there was always a security guard and with the clerks and the customers tiptoeing around on this thick plush carpeting and talking in barely a notch above a whisper so at first you thought you must have blacked out and somehow wound up in a wing of the Museum of Natural History where in these lit-up thick cases made of glass instead of caveman tools there’d be these hatchets and compasses and knives with the Boy Scout logo on them. I’d sometimes go in there and moose around with my nasally whistling, avid, warm breath condensing on the tops of the glass display cases as I ogled stuff I knew I couldn’t ever buy. I did notice that neckerchiefs were very expensive.
    “I had this bad cold,” I told Olsen.
    “For six weeks?”
    “It was severe.”
    Olsen stared at me unblinking like some cobra at a mongoose who’s just told him, “Hey, let’s take a little break for a second, okay?” and then he finally said, “Right” in this quiet, dead tone and then stood up and lurched off down the walkway with a “See you next meeting.” As he loped like some tall, gimpy werewolf in his daytime form, I kept staring at his wide-brimmed Boy Scout hat and imagined the scene at his next “appointment,” where he’d be holding out the Scout hat upside down while collecting protection money from the same Chinese laundry guys we kids used to hassle, only this time with a minor variation inasmuch as when Olsen held up his hand with his fingers and thumb splaying out, now the gesture meant “Pay or Die on Friday.” I often wondered if after they’d paid him he gave them all merit badges in life-saving.
    Spreading my arms out on the back of the bench, I looked out across the river, wishing Foley were with me as I thought about a lot of those balmy summer nights when he and I would be glued to one of these benches watching bobby socks and saddle shoes slowly drifting by, or we’d be going through this booklet Get Tough that we’d chipped in to buy and was filled with these highly educational and, to Foley, deeply inspiring photos and sketches of British commandos breaking somebody’s arm or his leg or maybe gouging out his eyes with their thumbs covered over in the same rubber caps that Miss Doyle always used when she’d be slowly turning pages in her ledger. We were acutely security conscious. Though we talked about other stuff too. Sometimes scary kinds of stuff. Like God. Like what if God hadn’t created the worlds and there was absolutely nothing in existence, which discussions were always pretty short, I’ll admit, since almost immediately at this thought our puny minds would short out and sort of gasp and want to throw up amid a shower of crackling electrical sparks like a couple of stymied