Al lived then at Gorney’s Hotel, which was not quite the worst hotel in Gibbsville. He never went near his home and did not go out of his way to speak to any of his brothers or sisters if he saw them on the street. They did not try to persuade him to come home, either. When they needed money badly they would send one of the younger lads to the poolroom and Al would give the kid a five or a ten, but Al did not like this. It put him off his game. After giving away a five or a ten he would get overanxious in trying to make it up, and the result would be he would lose. He wished the old man would support his family himself. And what about Angelo and Joe and Tom; they were all older than Tony—Al. And Marie, she was old enough to get married and the other kids didn’t have to go to school all their life. He didn’t. The old man ought to be glad he didn’t have to work in the mines. Al knew that the old man would have worked in the mines, and glad to get the bigger wages, but all he could do was navvy gang work. Even so, the old man ought to be glad he had outdoor work instead of mucking in a drift or robbing pillars or being on a rock gang in tunnel work. That kind of work was hard work. Or at least Al thought so. He never had been in the mines himself—and never would, if he could help it.
One afternoon Joe Steinmetz didn’t come to work and he didn’t come to work. Joe did not like the telephone, because it interfered with a man’s privacy, and the next day when he again did not show up, Al took the Chevvy up to Point Mountain, where Joe lived with his wife. There was a crêpe on the door. Al hated to go in, but he thought he ought to…. It was Joe, all right. Mrs. Steinmetz was alone and hadn’t been able to leave the house except to have a neighbor get a doctor. Joe had died of heart disease and was good and dead by the time the doctor had sent the undertaker.
Joe left everything to his wife. She wanted Al to work for her, keep the poolroom going, and at first he thought it would be a good idea. But a few days of taking the day’s receipts all the way out to her house showed him he didn’t want to work for her. She offered to sell the good will and fixtures for five thousand dollars, but Al never had had that much money all at once in his life and there were only two ways he could borrow it: from the banks or from Ed Charney. He didn’t like banks or the people who worked in them, and he didn’t want to ask Ed. He didn’t think he knew Ed well enough to ask him for money. Anyhow, not that kind of money; five grand. So the poolroom went to Mike Minas, a Greek friend of George Poppas’s, and Al went to work for Ed Charney. He just went up to Ed and said: “Yiz have any kind of a job for me, Ed?” and Ed said yes, come to think of it, he had been thinking of offering him a job for a long time. They agreed on a fifty-dollar-a-week salary, and Al went to work. At first he merely drove Ed around on business and pleasure trips; then he was given a job of some importance, that of convoy to the booze trucks. He would follow two or three Reo Speedwagons, in which the stuff was transported. If a state policeman or a Federal dick stopped the trucks, it was Al’s business to stop too. It was an important job, because he took a chance of being sent to prison. When he stopped, it was his job to try to bribe the cops. It was an important job, because he carried up to ten thousand dollars cash of Ed’s money in the Nash roadster which he used on these trips. It was up to him to use his head about bribing the cops; one or two of them wouldn’t be bribed, but most of them would listen to reason unless they had been sent out to pinch a truck or two to make a showing. He had to be smooth in his bribery offers to some of them. Some of them would take anything from a gold tooth to ten thousand dollars, but hated to be approached in the wrong way. On the few occasions when the cops refused to be bribed, it was Al’s job to get to the nearest telephone, tell Ed, and get Jerome M. Montgomery, Ed’s lawyer, working on the case. Al never was arrested for attempted bribery. In fact he was so successful generally that Ed took him off the convoy job and made him a collector. Ed trusted him and liked him, and made a lot of money for him, or gave him a lot of money. Sitting there at breakfast on this Christmas morning Al Grecco could write a check for more than four thousand dollars, and he had thirty-two one-thousand-dollar bills in his safety deposit box. For a kid of twenty-six he was doing all right.
Now Loving Cup suddenly was standing at his table. “On the phone, you,” said Loving Cup.
“Who is it? Some dame?” said Al.
“Don’t try and bluff me,” said Loving Cup. “I know you’re queer. No, it’s a party I think they said the name was Jarney or Charney. That was it. Charney.”
“Wise guy,” said Al, getting up. “I’ll cut your ears off. Is it Ed?”
“Yeah,” said Loving Cup, “and he don’t sound like Christmas to me.”
“Sore, eh?” Al hurried to the telephone. “Merry Christmas, boss,” he said.
“Yeah. Same to you,” said Ed, in a dull voice. “Listen, Al, my kid got his arm broke—”
“Jesus, tough! How’d he do that?”
“Oh, he fell off some God damn wagon I bought him. So anyhow I’m staying here till he gets the arm set and all, and I won’t be down till I don’t know when. Annie is all hysterical and yelling her head off—shut up, for Christ’s sake, can’t you see I’m phoning. So I’m staying here. Now listen, Al. Do you have a date for tonight?”
“Nothing I can’t break,” said Al, who had no date. “I had a sort of a date, but it can wait if you want me to do anything.”
“Well, I hate to ask you, but this is what I want you should do. Drive up to the Stage Coach and stay there till they close up and keep an eye on things, see what I mean? And tell Helene I’ll be there if I can make it, but you stay there anyhow, will you kid? There’s fifty bucks in it for you on account of lousing up your date. Okay?”
“Kay,” said Al. “Only too glad, Ed.”
“Okay,” said Ed. “Just stick around and keep an eye on everything.” He hung up.
Al knew what he meant. Helene was not a teetotaler by any means. In fact Ed encouraged her to drink. She was more fun when she drank. But she was liable to get drunk tonight, because it was Christmas, and Ed didn’t want her to become reckless with the spirit of giving.
3
Anyone in Gibbsville who had any important money made it in coal; anthracite. Gibbsville people, when they went away, always had trouble explaining where they lived. They would say: “I live in the coal regions,” and people would say, “Oh, yes, near Pittsburgh.” Then Gibbsvillians would have to go into detail. People outside of Pennsylvania do not know that there is all the difference in the world between the two kinds of coal, and in the conditions under which anthracite and bituminous are mined. The anthracite region lies roughly between Scranton on the north and Gibbsville on the south. In fact Point Mountain, upon which Gibbsville’s earliest settlement was made, is the delight of geologists, who come from as far away as Germany to examine Gibbsville Conglomerate, a stone formation found nowhere else in the world. When that geological squeeze, or whatever it was that produced veins of coal, occurred, it did not go south of Point Mountain, and coal is found on the north slope of Point Mountain, but not on the south side, and at the eastern face of Point Mountain is found Gibbsville Conglomerate. The richest veins of anthracite in the world are within a thirty-mile sector from Gibbsville, and when those veins are being worked, Gibbsville prospers. When the mines are idle, Gibbsville puts on a long face and begins to think in terms of soup kitchens.