Seven rings it took; I counted them. I knew my Uncle Al would be boiling, this hour of night, but even he would have to admit this call had a reason.
Finally he answered. I recognized his voice, sleepy and irritable. “Lo? What? Who the hell?”
“Uncle Al,” I said. “It’s me, Charlie.”
All at once he was wide awake, and very formal. “Albert Gatling is not in,” he said.
I said, “Uncle Al? Didn’t you hear me? It’s me, your nephew, Charlie Poole.”
“Albert Gatling is not in,” he said. “He’s out of town.”
What was going on? I said, “What are you talking about? I recognize your voice, you’re Uncle Al.”
“Albert Gatling,” he said, “is in Florida. He’ll be there at least a week. This is the butler talking.”
“Let me talk to Aunt Florence,” I said. I didn’t know what Uncle Al was up to, but Aunt Florence would snap him out of it. Aunt Florence is my Uncle Al’s wife, and my mother’s sister. Uncle Al is actually only my uncle by marriage.
“Albert and Florence Gatling,” he said, “are both in Florida.”
“Uncle Al,” I said, and he hung up.
That is, I thought he’d hung up. But then when I tried to call him back, there wasn’t any dial tone or anything, no sound at all in the telephone. I knew what that meant, it meant those guys had cut the wires outside so I couldn’t phone for help.
What was I going to do? I had these wild visions of getting the frying pan from the kitchen, and hiding behind the door at the head of the stairs, and when they came in I’d let them have it, bonk, bonk! But that was no good. Even if I wasn’t afraid to do something like that, and believe me I was far too afraid to hide behind the door at the head of the stairs even if I had a machine gun, but even if I wasn’t afraid, that was no good. Because all this was was a simple mistake, and once it was all straightened out everything would be okay again, same as before. Except if I were to do something to one of those guys, like kill him or hurt him bad so he went to the hospital or something like that. I mean, even though it would be self-defense and the result of a mix-up that wasn’t my fault at all, I would still be in trouble with the organization.
The way it worked out, they could shoot at me or whatever, but I didn’t dare do a thing to them. Not a thing. Not if I wanted to go on living the same old life like always.
On the other hand, I didn’t dare just sit here, not if I wanted to go on living period.
So what to do?
This question was given a sudden sense of urgency because of the crash from downstairs that meant they’d just come in the back door. Two, three minutes, moving along cautiously like they naturally would, and they’d be up here, right up here in front of me. And if Patrolman Ziccatta should all of a sudden walk into my living room after two-thirty in the morning, it would be the very first time.
What I had to do, it was clear as could be, what I had to do was get out of here. What I had to do was get to Manhattan, and to my Uncle Al’s apartment, and find out what was going on, and make him help me correct this no doubt honest mistake before I turned out mistakenly killed.
But there was only one way down from here, and that was the staircase, and the odds were very heavy that those two guys were already occupying the staircase, coming up.
I looked around the messy living room, feeling frantic, wishing there was a dumbwaiter so I could go down to the basement, or a chimney so I could go up to the roof, or anything at all so I could get the dickens out of here.
Well, of course there was something.
The window.
I looked at it. Was it possible? Was there any chance at all I could go out that window and survive?
Well, on the other hand, there was no chance at all I could stay inside and survive, so that pretty well decided the issue.
I jumped to my feet and ran over to the bedroom doorway and shut the door. There was no key in the keyhole, but the sofa was right next to the door, and I pushed it over in the way in hopes it would anyway slow them down a minute. Then I turned the lights out and went over to the front window.
Outside, there was nothing but the dark and windswept street. A page of the Daily News blew by. I opened the window and felt the cold breeze and realized I was just in my white shirt and apron, and my jackets were all hanging in the bedroom closet.
Well, it was too late to go back for them. I took my apron off and sat on the window sill, and as I lifted my legs over I heard the door at the head of the stairs crash open.
There was a kind of a ledge under the window a couple of feet, with metal letters along it that said ROCKAWAY GRILL. I stepped over the W and on the other side there were only a couple of inches to spare. I bent down and grabbed the letters and brought my other foot over, and AWAY gave away, and down I went.
It was only about a ten-foot drop. I landed on hands and knees, and AWAY went clattering away, and just a second or two later so did I.
Chapter 2
I suppose it would be fair to say that all my life I’ve been a bum. First, when I was a kid growing up, I was a bum on my mother. Now, these last few years I’ve been a bum on my Uncle Al.
It was just my mother and me while I was growing up. My mother worked for the telephone company, it used to be sometimes it was her voice on some of those recorded announcements all about how you just dialed a particularly stupid number, and she made pretty good money, the telephone company isn’t all that bad to work for. Later on she wanted me to go to work for the company too, but somehow or other I just never felt right about it. I had this feeling, I guess, I’d wind up being thrown out on my ear, and it would be a bad reflection on my mother and all, still working there.
Anyway, the jobs I did get, after I got out of high school and the Army wouldn’t take me because of this something or other in my inner ear which I didn’t know anything about before then and which to this day has never once bothered me, the jobs I did get I never lasted with, not one of them. I’d work a month or two, and then I’d loaf around the house a month or two. And my mother, she was in the habit of supporting me anyway, she’d done it all my life, so she never complained about me being home and not working or making any money. She’d been my sole support because my father disappeared the day after my mother found out she was pregnant with me, and my father has not been heard of from that day to this, and it is my mother’s theory that he’s in jail or worse.
In any case, it got so I was twenty years of age, twenty-one, twenty-two, and I was still a bum, loafing around the house all the time, reading science-fiction magazines, not settling down or accepting my responsibilities or doing any of those things my Uncle Al likes to talk about as being the attributes of maturity, and I’d had eleven different jobs in three years, and the longest I’d stayed at any of those jobs was nine weeks. My mother got me a couple of the jobs, and Uncle Al got me a few more, and the rest I got through the New York Times.
And then one day Uncle Al came around and he said he’d finally found the job that was perfect for me, it was the job I’d been born for, and it turned out to be running the Rockaway Grill out in Canarsie, which is a section way out at the end of Brooklyn that vaudeville comedians used to make fun of all the time. New Jersey and Canarsie, those were the two places vaudeville comedians used to make jokes about. Anyway, this job was I was to run the bar all by myself. I could open at any time before four o’clock in the afternoon, and close at any time after midnight, the actual hours were up to me. I would work a seven-day week, but I’d get paid a hundred and twenty dollars a week and I’d get this three-room apartment to myself upstairs.