Billy Bathgate Read Free Page A

high seas.
    “You can crack a window, kid,” he said. I did this with alacrity, turning and kneeling on the bench and sticking my hand through the curtains and unlatching the porthole and pushing it open. I could feel the night on my hand and drew it in wet.
    “Isn’t it a black night though?” Mr. Schultz said. He rose and moved around to Bo, who was sitting facing astern, and hunkered down in front of him like a doctor in front of a patient. “Look at that, the man is shivering. Hey Irving,” he said. “How long till it hardens up? Bo is cold.”
    “Not long,” Irving said. “A little while.”
    “Only a little while longer,” Mr. Schultz said, as if Bo needed a translation. He smiled apologetically and stood and put a companionable hand on Bo’s shoulder.
    At this Bo Weinberg spoke and what he said was genuinely surprising to me. It was not what any apprentice or ordinary person in his situation could have said and more than any remark of Mr. Schultz’s to this moment gave me to understand the realm of high audacity these men moved in, like another dimension. Perhaps he was only admitting to his despair or perhaps this was his dangerous way of getting Mr. Schultz’s sincere attention; I would not have thought of the possibility that a man in his circumstances would feel he had a measure of control over how and when his death would occur. “You’re a cocksucker, Dutch” is what he said.
    I held my breath but Mr. Schultz only shook his head and sighed. “First you beg me and now you go calling me names.”
    “I didn’t beg you, I told you to let the girl go. I spoke to youas if you were still human. But all you are is a cocksucker. And when you can’t find a cock to suck you pick up scumbags off the floor and suck them. That’s what I think of you, Dutch.”
    As long as he was not looking at me I could look at Bo Weinberg. He certainly had spirit. He was a handsome man, with smooth shiny black hair combed back without a part from a widow’s peak, and a swarthy Indian sort of face with high cheekbones, and a full well-shaped mouth and a strong chin, all set on the kind of long neck that a tie and collar dresses very nicely. Even hunched over in the shame of his helplessness, with his black tie askew on his wing collar and his satiny black tuxedo jacket bunched up above his shoulders, so that his posture was subservient and his gaze necessarily furtive, he suggested to me the glamour and class of a big-time racketeer.
    I wished now in some momentary confusion of loyalties, or perhaps thinking only as a secret judge that the case had not yet been made to my satisfaction, that Mr. Schultz could have some of this quality of elegance of the man in the tub. The truth was that even in the finest clothes Mr. Schultz seemed badly dressed, he suffered a sartorial inadequacy, as some people had weak eyes or rickets, and he must have known this because whatever else he was up to he would also be hiking up his trousers with his forearms, or lifting his chin while he pulled at his collar, or brushing cigar ashes from his vest, or taking off his hat and blocking the crown with the side of his hand. Without even thinking about it he tried constantly to correct his relationship to his clothes, as if he had some sort of palsy of dissatisfaction, to the point where you thought everything would settle on him neatly enough if he would stop picking at it.
    The trouble may have been in part his build, which was short-necked and stolid. I think now that the key to grace or elegance in any body, male or female, is the length of the neck, that when the neck is long several conclusions follow, such as a proper proportion of weight to height, a natural pride of posture, a gift for eye contact, a certain nimbleness of the spine and length of stride, all in all a kind of physical gladness in movement leading to athletic competence or a love for dancing. Whereas the shortneck predicts a host of metaphysical afflictions, any one of