Your son Billy saved my life, Daddy Big told Francis. Turned me upside down and kept me from chokin’ to death on the street when I got sick. I died anyway, later. But it was nice of him, and I wish I could take back some of the lousy things I said to him. And let me personally give you a piece of advice. Never inhale your own vomit.
Francis did not need Daddy Big’s advice. He did not get sick from alcohol the way Daddy Big had. Francis knew how to drink. He drank all the time and he did not vomit. He drank anything that contained alcohol, anything, and he could always walk, and he could talk as well as any man alive about what was on his mind. Alcohol did put Francis to sleep, finally, but on his own terms. When he’d had enough and everybody else was passed out, he’d just put his head down and curl up like an old dog, then put his hands between his legs to protect what was left of the jewels, and he’d cork off. After a little sleep he’d wake up and go out for more drink. That’s how he did it when he was drinking. Now he wasn’t drinking. He hadn’t had a drink for two days and he felt a little bit of all right. Strong, even. He’d stopped drinking because he’d run out of money, and that coincided with Helen not feeling all that terrific and Francis wanting to take care of her. Also he had wanted to be sober when he went to court for registering twenty-one times to vote. He went to court but not to trial. His attorney, Marcus Gorman, a wizard, found a mistake in the date on the papers that detailed the charges against Francis, and the case was thrown out. Marcus charged people five hundred dollars usually, but he only charged Francis fifty because Martin Daugherty, the newspaper columnist, one of Francis’s old neighbors, asked him to go easy. Francis didn’t even have the fifty when it came time to pay. He’d drunk it all up. Yet Marcus demanded it.
“But I ain’t got it,” Francis said.
“Then go to work and get it,” said Marcus. “I get paid for what I do.”
“Nobody’ll put me to work,” Francis said. “I’m a bum.”
“I’ll get you some day work up at the cemetery,” Marcus said.
And he did. Marcus played bridge with the bishop and knew all the Catholic hotshots. Some hotshot ran Saint Agnes Cemetery in Menands. Francis slept in the weeds on Dongan Avenue below the bridge and woke up about seven o’clock this morning, then went up to the mission on Madison Avenue to get coffee. Helen wasn’t there. She was truly gone. He didn’t know where she was and nobody had seen her. They said she’d been hanging around the mission last night, but then went away. Francis had fought with her earlier over money and she just walked off someplace, who the hell knows where?
Francis had coffee and bread with the bums who’d dried out, and other bums passin’ through, and the preacher there watchin’ everybody and playin’ grabass with their souls. Never mind my soul, was Francis’s line. Just pass the coffee. Then he stood out front killin’ time and pickin’ his teeth with a matchbook cover. And here came Rudy.
Rudy was sober too for a change and his gray hair was combed and trimmed. His mustache was clipped and he wore white suede shoes, even though it was October, what the hell, he’s just a bum, and a white shirt, and a crease in his pants. Francis, no lace in one of his shoes, hair matted and uncut, smelling his own body stink and ashamed of it for the first time in memory, felt deprived.
“You lookin’ good there, bum,” Francis said.
“I been in the hospital.”
“What for?”
“Cancer.”
“No shit. Cancer?”
“He says to me you’re gonna die in six months. I says I’m gonna wine myself to death. He says it don’t make any difference if you wined or dined, you’re goin’. Goin’ out of this world with a cancer. The stomach, it’s like pits, you know what I mean? I said I’d like to make it to fifty. The doc says you’ll never make it. I said all right, what’s the difference?”
“Too bad, grandma. You got a jug?”
“I got a dollar.”
“Jesus, we’re in business,” Francis said.
But then he remembered his debt to Marcus Gorman.
“Listen, bum,” he said, “you wanna go to work with me and make a few bucks? We can get a couple ofjugs and a flop tonight. Gonna be cold. Look at that sky.”
“Work where?”
“The cemetery. Shovelin’ dirt.”
“The cemetery. Why not? I oughta get used to it. What’re they payin’?”
“Who the hell knows?”
“I mean they payin’ money, or they give you a free grave when you croak?”
“If it ain’t money, forget it,” Francis said. “I ain’t shovelin’ out my own grave.”
They walked from downtown Albany to the cemetery in Menands, six miles or more. Francis felt healthy and he liked it. It’s too bad he didn’t feel healthy when he drank. He felt good then but not healthy, especially not in the morning, or when he woke up in the middle of the night, say. Sometimes he felt dead. His head, his throat, his stomach: he needed to get them all straight with a drink, or maybe it’d take two, because if he didn’t, his brain would overheat trying to fix things and his eyes would blow out. Jeez it’s tough when you need that drink and your throat’s like an open sore and it’s four in the morning and the wine’s gone and no place open and you got no money or nobody to bum from, even if there was a place open. That’s tough, pal. Tough.
Rudy and Francis walked up Broadway and when they got to Colonie Street Francis felt a pull to turn up and take a look at the house where he was born, where his goddamned brothers and sisters still lived. He’d done that in. 1935 when it looked possible, when his mother finally died. And what did it get him? A kick in the ass is what it got him. Let the joint fall down and bury them all before I look at it again, was his thought. Let it rot. Let the bugs eat it.
In the cemetery, Kathryn Phelan, sensing the militance in her son’s mood, grew restless at the idea that death was about to change for her. With a furtive burst of energy she wove another cross from the shallow-rooted weeds above her and quickly swallowed it, but was disappointed by the taste. Weeds appealed to Kathryn Phelan in direct ratio to the length of their roots. The longer the weed, the more revulsive the cross.
Francis and Rudy kept walking north on Broadway, Francis’s right shoe flapping, its counter rubbing wickedly against his heel. He favored the foot until he found a length of twine on the sidewalk in front of Frankie Leikheim’s plumbing shop. Frankie Leikheim. A little kid when Francis was a big kid and now he’s got his own plumbing shop and what have you got, Francis? You got a piece of twine for a shoelace. You don’t need shoelaces for walking short distances, but on the bum without them you could ruin your feet for weeks. You figured you had all the calluses anybody’d ever need for the road, but then you come across a different pair of shoes and they start you out with a brand-new set of blisters. Then they make the blisters bleed and you have to stop walking almost till they scab over so’s you can get to work on another callus.
The twine didn’t fit into the eyelets of the shoe. Francis untwined it from itself and threaded half its thickness through enough of the eyelets to make it lace. He pulled up his sock, barely a sock anymore, holes in the heel, the toe, the sole, gotta get new ones. He cushioned his raw spot as best he could with the sock, then tightened the new lace, gently, so the shoe wouldn’t flop. And he walked on toward the cemetery.