Very Old Bones by William Kennedy Read Free Book Online

horseroom. And the chiselin’ bastard owes me back wages and two horse bets.”
    “How much?”
    “About a grand. Little less, maybe.”
    “That’s a lot.”
    “He said he went dry, couldn’t pay off, said he’d pay me later. But then he went off with Lulu and now he’s runnin’ a floatin’ card game and he don’t
listen. I oughta cut his heart out, but it’s even money he don’t have one.”
    Billy stopped talking, stopped looking me in the eye. Then, with his voice in a low register and on the verge of a tremolo, he said, “You know, Orson, I never could hold a job. I never
knew how to do nothin’. I couldn’t even stay in the army. I got eye trouble and they sent me home after eight months. The horseroom was the longest steady job I ever had.”
    “Something’ll turn up,” I said.
    “Yeah? Where? I could always get a buck around Broadway but now there ain’t no Broadway.”
    Yeah.
    Put a star on Billy’s Broadway.
    I drank the beer Billy bought me, drank it in silent communion with his unexpected confession. Billy—who had been inhaling money for years in bowling alleys, pool rooms, and card
games—was he unemployable? Was he really a man who “never knew how to do nothin’ ”? It’s true Billy found straight jobs laughable, that he left as many as he was fired
from, once even calling the foreman of a machine-shop paint gang a moron for presiding over such labor. Liberated by such words, Billy invariably wended his way back to the cocoon of Broadway,
within whose bounds existed the only truly usable form of life; or so Billy liked to believe.
    I was making a decision about telling him my own tribulations when the door opened and Buffalo Johnny Rizzo walked in, a fashion plate in blue seersucker suit and white Panama hat with a band
that matched his suit. He stood in the doorway, hands in his coat pockets, looked us all over, opened his coat and took a pistol from his belt, then fired two shots at his most favored target:
Morty Pappas’s crotch, which was forked east toward Broadway, from whence Johnny was just arriving.
    Billy saw it all happening and so did I, but Billy acted, lifting his cane from its dangle on bar’s edge into a vivid upthrust and sending Johnny’s pistol flying, but not before
Johnny got off two shots. Morty fell from his bar stool with a crumpling plaster thud, his crotch intact but one bullet hitting his good leg, and the other lodging in the neck of the stuffed cow
over the back bar, victim yet again of inept shooters.
    Sport quickly retrieved the flown pistol and Johnny just as quickly moved toward the aging Sport to get it back and try again for Morty’s gender. Billy and I both stepped between the two
men, and Sport, still a formidable figure with the arms and fists of the light heavyweight he had once been, said only, “Better get outa here, John.”
    Buffalo Johnny, his failed plan sinking him into the throes of social wisdom, looked then at the fallen and bleeding Morty; and he smiled.
    “Boom-boom, fucker,” he said. “Boom-boom. Boom-boom.”
    And then he went out onto Broadway.
    Except for Billy and me, the customers at Sport’s saloon exited with sudden purpose after Buffalo Johnny left the premises. Sport drew new beers for us as we gave aid and
comfort to Morty Pappas in his hour of pain Sport then called an ambulance and together Billy and I organized Morty on the floor, propping him with an overcoat someone had left on a hook during the
winter. Sport made a pressure pack on the wound with a clean bar towel.
    “So, ya bastard, ya saved my life,” Morty said to Billy between grimaces of agony.
    “Yeah,” said Billy. “I figure you’re dead you’ll never pay me what you owe me.”
    “You oughta pay him,” Sport said, putting a new beer in Morty’s grip.
    “I’ll pay him all right,” and Morty put down the beer and reached for his wallet, a hurtful move. “What do I owe you?”
    “You know what you owe me,” Billy