I wasn’t going to go without saying good-bye to my Mother. This entailed being driven down to 34th Street while lying flat on the floor in the back of a car in the dead of night. I got out near the rail yards and dove into one of our old Gopher tunnels, scooted through the usual shite, trotted under 34th Street toward Pennsylvania Station, detoured off to the right, came up the back stairs of 440 and let myself in to my mother’s place.
I featured the bulls staked out for me in the front, and I had to laugh that they would think I’d be so dumb as to fox-trot in my own front door, when there were a million other ways into any dump in the nabe, but how would they know that, they were new Irish, fancy-pants, no pigs in the parlor, lace-curtain with hot water and toilets, and some of ’em even with electric fans to keep ’em cool instead of honestly sweating the way we used to.
I let myself in the front door, waking my mother. “Go back to bed, Ma,” I barked, and she did. My lines was tapped, that I knew. The first call I made was to Joe Shalleek telling him to stall, and the second call was to my sister, May, a few floors below, but her husband, Jack, said she was asleep, and the third thing I did was call Agnes in Hot Springs and tell her I might have trouble making our dinner date next week, but then again I might not.
“What’s the trouble, Owen dear?” she said. Agnes had a kind of sweet disposition that’s hard to find in a woman, but then we were still courting. They’re all lovey-dovey and sweet-talky while you’re courting them, but after the ring, forget it, buddy, you’re on your own.
One little detail I had left out of my relationship with Agnes, which got more serious every time I visited, was the fact that I was still legally married. I’m not sure it would have mattered very much—the crazy kid was head over heels for me—and in fact my bein’ a Catholic was much worse in her eyes, not to mention her old man the Postmaster’s, than being married. There weren’t a hell of a lot of Catholics in Bubbles, not to mention Irish, but there were at least two Catholic churches, and the rest of ’em was all heathen Christian of one sort or another.
I have to admit, I never felt very comfortable around Christians, you know, those kind of Christians. Although I couldn’t prove it, sometimes I suspected that they hated us Catholics more than they hated the Jews, which didn’t seem to make much sense since we both more or less believed in Jesus Christ His Own Good Self, although they were more than a little wobbly about the BVM, which is the Blessed Virgin Mary to you. In fact, I think they even hated us more than they hated the coloreds, especially down South, where the coloreds were at least useful, up to more or less the present day.
Loretta—you remember her—was still alive and living up in Yonkers. I’d sorta lost track of time, but I figured my little girl was almost twenty by now, and there was hardly a month or a year that went by that I didn’t wonder what had happened to her. I knew she was still kicking because she kept cashing the checks I sent her, and I had a coupla photos of her at her First Communion and her Confirmation. Still, I realized that Loretta and I were going to have to have a chat sooner or later, especially if I wanted to marry Agnes, which I was seriously considering owing to the present political situation.
For the truth was I had a tough play to make and I was only going to get one shot at it. It reminded me a bit of the situation way back when I had to wreck the Gophers in order to save them, and it was funny that the same bloke should find himself in the same situation twice, but I guess that’s what keeps the Man Upstairs amused and interested in our little fates.
The outlines of this play were still forming in my mind as I made my fourth phone call, to Vannie Higgins, the flying lobster fisherman on my payroll. He and I both had taken aeroplane lessons from a retired Army flyboy, Major Thomas G. Lanphier, who just so happened to have been a friend of Charles Lindbergh. In fact, I’d bought a plane from Lanphier, which I was hangaring out on the Island. “Feel like a trip, Vannie?”
“Owney?” I’d obviously rousted him.
“Meet me at Roosevelt Field in an hour, and you can forget about the money you owe me.”
“Gee, Owney—have you seen the papers? They’re lookin’ for ya everywhere.”
“What the hell do you think I’m callin’ about?” I snarled.
“Ya don’t have to get sore about it,” said Vannie.
“An hour,” I said, and hung up.
I figured me and Vannie could make Hot Springs in four or five hours, and from there I could plan my next move. I hadn’t thought Roosevelt would move so fast, but a guy with the world in his hip pocket and the White House in his sights is liable to do anything, which reminded me of my fifth phone call, which was by rights to the Dutchman.
This was my luck that night: Dutch was in bed with a broad, answering the phone out of breath.
“What?”
“It’s me.”
A girl’s giggle, faint and vaguely familiar, and then: “Whattaya want at this hour?”
“We got trouble.”
“You’re tellin’—hey, cut that out—me?”
“Roosevelt’s a rat.”
“Knock it off. I’m talkin’ to—”
“You’ve gotta warn everybody. Meyer, Charlie, Frank.”
I heard Dutch hiccup. “Fuck ’em. What’ve they ever done for me?”
“Have it your way. But you might want to think about relocating.”
More noises, sex noises. “I’ll take it under advisement, Counselor,” said Dutch.
“I’m going out of town for a while.”
“Have a nice trip,” he said as he rang off.
The hell with him. I tried.
Hiram took me out to Garden City in a plain old Chevy, which we figured nobody would be looking for. The cops were so used to seeing me toolin’ around in my Doozy, or at the very least a Packard, that a Chevy with a Negro at the wheel and a white man in the backseat, like he was drunk and headin’ home to Long Island after a night out on the town, wouldn’t look too hinky.
“You want I should wait, Mr. Owney?” asked Hiram, anxious. My first instinct was to say no, but things were different now, things were changing on a daily basis, make that hourly, and so I told him to pull the car into the bushes and watch, just in case.
I stood out there in the dark, feeling like a fool. Worse, feeling like an animal—hunted, and in my own town, the only town I’d ever known and ever cared to know. The one I’d traveled so far to get to, and now this—some cigarette-smoking cripple who’d married his own cousin like some hillbilly boy from Arkansas was driving me out of New York. That’s when it struck me that among the Christians, there wasn’t hardly any difference between the toffs and the toilers, between the high life and the low life. When you got right down to it, they all married their cousins, one way or another.
The more I thought about the situation, the angrier I got. I began to feel like one of my mug fighters, like Camera, who’d been told to take a dive—or worse, a coward who was running from a fight. I’d been battling cops all my life, and since when had I run from ’em? Since never is when, and this was no time to start.
This was my state of mind when Vannie finally pulled up. Hiram flashed the lights at me a couple of times, so I knew he was coming, and I was ready for him, a brand-new play in mind.
“You serious about the dough?”
“Why else would I have invited you here?”
“The pleasure of my company?”
We walked together to the hangar where they kept my plane, which was called an Ireland, something I liked. It’s hard to believe now, but back then you could more or less come and go as you pleased, and so the night watchman didn’t see nothing amiss about two fellas taking their flying machine out for a spin. I made sure the flatfoot saw both of us, chatted a bit, small talk, and then Vannie had the craft ready and I said so long, bet you never thought you’d ever meet Owney Madden, eh, and at that the guard’s jaw dropped and I reminded him to keep his mouth shut until we were long gone if he knew what was good for him.
I threw a kit in the crate and stepped in as Vannie fired her up. “Where we going?” he said as the props began to spin.
“Arkansas. You heard of it?”
“Ain’t that kinda far away? I told my—”
“Yeah, you told your mother you’d be home for breakfast. But you won’t be.”
“But—”
“But nothing. You’ll do as you’re told or you’ll be sorry.”
“But I got business—”
“We’ll take care of it.”
“But—”
“Can’t you say anything but ‘but’? Let me put it this way: if I see your face in New York in the next couple of weeks, you’re a dead man.”
That seemed to get his attention. “Okay, you don’t have to get sore about it,” he said. “I was just—”
“Going to shut up. So shut up and listen.”
I gave Vannie his instructions, which was to get himself to Hot Springs and make like we’d both gone. Agnes would “put me up” at her father’s house on West Grand and she’d store my things there, to prove I’d checked in. I’d had the foresight to grab a newspaper on the drive out, so there was even a copy of that day’s Mirror for good measure. As for Vannie, he was to stay down there and make himself as scarce as possible for as long as possible, at my expense of course.
The plane was starting to move as I slipped out and hit the ground. I saw Vannie take off, bank, nearly clip a stand of trees, gain altitude and disappear, and hoped like hell he took my threat seriously. I couldn’t afford any more double crosses, but if he tried to hand me one, I was in a position to do something about it. Unlike with Roosevelt.
Good old Hiram was waiting for me by the time I trudged back to where the car was hidden.
“Have a nice trip, Mr. Owney?” he said.
“Ask me in four or five days, Hiram,” I replied. “Until then, I’m on holiday.”
“Where to now? Where you ain’t gonna be, I mean.”
“How’s the Bronx sound?”
“Good as anyplace else not to be,” said Hiram, starting up the engine.