He came out of the bathroom where he had dressed so as not to disturb Sadie, something that had never concerned him before. She was already awake, but still lying in the bed, smiling at him. “Good morning, lover,” she said.
“How’re you, sweetie?”
“I’m just fine. Just fine. A couple of more nights like last night and I’ll feel so wonderful I won’t be able to stand myself.”
“Well, there’s always tonight,” Cubbin said and winked.
“Is that a promise?”
“It’s a promise.”
“Give us a kiss,” she said and Cubbin bent over the bed and kissed her for a long moment, enjoying it thoroughly.
“Do you have to go?”
“I have to go vote.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”
“We’ll have lunch together though.”
“Good. Bye, darling.”
“Bye.”
Cubbin entered the living room of his suite where the four men waited for him. He looked at them and thought, well, I’m not going to have them hanging around anymore either. Maybe Kelly, though. Kelly’s all right. But not Fred Mure. Fred goes tomorrow. As for Imber and Guyan, they’ll just drift off, no matter what happens.
“Now,” Cubbin said, smiling brightly and clapping his hands together lightly, “let’s go vote for a good man.”
“Just wait a couple of minutes, Don,” Fred Mure said, “while I go get the elevator.”
They left the Hilton and drove south and then west through Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle. Cubbin was in the back between Imber and Guyan. In front was Kelly with Mure at the wheel.
“Right over there where that new building is,” Cubbin said after a few blocks, “that’s where Old Man Pettigrew’s Business School used to be. He’s the one who got me the job with the union. ‘They do a lot of swearing and dirty talking,’” Cubbin said, in a perfect imitation of the long-dead Pettigrew. “That’s why I got the job, because the old man didn’t think a girl should be around all that cussin.”
They rode for another three blocks in silence until Cubbin said, “And right over there, where that parking lot is, that’s where the old Sampson Plant used to be before they tore it down. In the summer of thirty-eight I spent forty-one days in that place and God, it was hot. We lived on hot dogs and beans that they used to send up to us in a bucket that we lowered out of the window with a rope. It was a sit-down and the old man sent me in to sit with them and I never spent a more miserable forty-one days in my life. I remember at first that there were a couple of babes that got in at night and took care of anybody who had a quarter, but after a few days they had to lower their price to fifteen cents. Jesus Christ, they were ugly.”
Cubbin lapsed into silence for a few minutes. Then he said, “God, Pittsburgh’s changed. This used to be one real tough town.”
“We’re going where it’s still tough, Don,” Imber said.
“You mean across the river?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah,” Cubbin said, “it’s still pretty grim over there.”
Across the Monongahela, Fred Mure drove the green Oldsmobile through gray, tired-looking streets. At a red light, a woman of about fifty, dressed in a shapeless brown coat and clutching a six-pack of beer, looked casually into the back seat, and then looked again, a smile brightening her already seamed face. She waved at Cubbin and called, “Hi yah, Don.”
Cubbin grinned, rolled the window down, leaned over Imber, and called back, “Hi yah, pal.”
“I’m votin for you today.”
“Good for you, I’ll need it.”
“Ah, you’ll win all right.”
“Let’s hope so.”
The light changed to green and Mure drove on. “Who was that?” Imber asked.
Cubbin grinned happily. “I haven’t got the vaguest idea.”
Local Number One’s hall was on a side street, across from a row of two-story buildings that had shops on the ground floor and apartments above. The union hall, built of red brick, was two stories high, and looked as if as little as possible had been spent on its design.
Outside the hall on the sidewalk, television crews from the three networks were already set up. The elected officials of Local Number One waited on the steps for Cubbin as a fairly steady stream of union members filed in and out from the polling booths. The stream was steady because it was in their contract that they got three hours off with pay to vote in their union’s biennial elections.
The cameras followed Cubbin as he left the car and walked up the steps to shake hands with the local union officials. As he turned from them, an old man of about seventy wearing day before yesterday’s whiskers and a worn gray topcoat stepped up to Cubbin, threw his arms around him, kissed him wetly on the cheek, and in a choked voice said, “God bless you, Don Cubbin, because you’re a good man.”
Cubbin couldn’t help the tears that came to his eyes. He brushed them away with his left hand and used his right one to shake the old man’s hand. “Thanks, pal,” he said. “Thanks very much.”
“How much did he cost you, Charlie?” the NBC news man asked Guyan.
“Fifty bucks,” Guyan said.
“That’s all right, we’ll still use it.”
Kelly Cubbin and Fred Mure waited outside together for Cubbin while he voted. Oscar Imber and Charles Guyan chatted with the TV newsmen who had decided that they would get some more film of Cubbin as he came back down the steps.
“Can I ask you something, Kelly?” Fred Mure said.
“Sure.”
“Is your dad mad at me?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“He’s been acting sort of funny the past couple of days.”
“How funny?”
“Well, he’s hardly drinking anything at all.”
“Don’t you think that’s an improvement?”
“Yeah, I guess so, but he don’t seem his old self for some reason.”
“I haven’t noticed.”
“Maybe I’m just oversensitive.”
Kelly grinned. “Yeah, Fred, maybe you are.”
Inside, Cubbin voted without hesitation for himself and his slate, shook some more hands, signed one autograph, and then headed back for the entrance. He paused at the top step to wave at the cameras and then started down them slowly.
The first bullet hit him in the shoulder and a moment later the second went into his stomach, ricocheted off something, and lodged finally in his right lung. He started to fall, but caught himself, and managed to stagger down another step, thinking only: This can’t be happening. Not to you.
And then because he knew he had to fall, he thought: Do it right. Do it like Cagney used to do it. Then the pain hit again and he went down, folding up first, then unfolding, then turning, and finally sprawling face-up on the sidewalk, eyes open and staring right up into the turning cameras.
Kelly was the first one to reach him. Cubbin looked up into his son’s strained face and he knew that he had to say something, something that the kid could keep, but the only thing that he could think of to say was something that represented nearly forty years of regret, but it was all that he could think of, except for a mild curiosity about how he would look on television that night. So he said it, the two words that made up the name that symbolized the might-have-been world of Donald Cubbin.
“Bernie... Ling,” Cubbin said and then he died.