A BUSINESS OF CONSEQUENCE

1st Part

Central Avenue, Hot Springs, Arkansas, Detroit Publishing, 1900

NEW YORK

  1910

“Yer not gonna welch out on us, are ya?” I said, trying my best to intimidate the old geezer. It didn’t seem like I was very threatening to him, even though I’m a big fella—bigger than most of the fellas around here, anyway. I could see the old geezer looking up at me like he wasn’t scared—not like the others we shook down earlier—and it made me want to hit him again.

So I did.

“Jee-sus Christ, Mel, how many times I gotta tell you? Are you simple, or what?” Jimmy yelled, throwing a rolled up wad of paper at me.

He was sitting on one of the restaurant’s six tables, swinging his leg back and forth like as if he was one of those clocks you see on a piano—back-and-forth, back-and-forth—like maybe he was keeping time with some tune in his head that only he could hear. I don’t know, maybe he was whistlin’ Dixie to hisself, or something like that. Not that he’d know it if he heard it.

“If I tol’ you once, I tol’ you a hunnerd times, it’s not welch — it’s welsh. You got it? Welsh? ‘Yer not gonna welsh out on us, are ya?’ Like that. It’s American. You’re saying it like the way they do in Canada,” he added, and I wondered how he knew what they said it like in Canada. He’s never been out of New York, let alone the Five Points.

Jimmy kept looking at me, shaking his head and leaning back on his left elbow, swinging his leg back and forth again. I couldn’t help but look at him, because I knew he was trying hard not to look like as if he was mad at me or something, but he was; I could see it on him. Jimmy was never one to put up with stupid people, and when I told him I wasn’t too good at reading and writing words like I was with reading music, he told me to never mind that, he’d do all the thinking for both of us. He always said the secret to getting out of a place like The Points was to think your way out, just like Charlie and Lance were doing. He was always thinking things up, Jimmy was; I never knew what he was thinking about, and sometimes it worried me.

But one thing at a time.

Jimmy had a habit of squinting out of his left eye on account of how he’d been sliced once, and it was little more than a slit, the way he was looking at me. He had a long scar running down his left cheek, a deep crimson line from his dead, grey eye, to his jawbone—his good eye was brown. The scar was a gift from Legs three years ago. Jimmy had his nose broke once or twice, and his teeth were rotting, so he didn’t smile too much. He was always looking out for me though, saying how he knew what was best for both of us. And back then, who knows, maybe he did; I mean, I didn’t know Welsh was a country, let alone where it was. It made me grateful having Jimmy on my side and watching my back for the most part.

Jimmy was sitting on the table with his back pressed up against the wall, swinging his leg back and forth, like I said, his hat resting on his other knee. He was drinking out of a wine bottle, and in between swallows looking at a cut on his fuck-finger. We’d had a hard day of it, and the nights weren’t going much better for us, but there was Jimmy swinging his leg like as if he was a kid waiting for the trolley bus. The geezer what owned the restaurant was looking at us like as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. We hadn’t even been inside for more than a couple of minutes, and here I’d already hit him three times and kicked him when he was down.

He was a tall, thin geezer--spindly--and spoke with that slow, stubborn speech you might expect from a Jersey farmer. I half expected to see dirt under his nails. His moustache grew out into a pair of grey muttonchops, the kind I remember my dad having--and it made me hate him even more just seeing him–reminding me of how my dad used to beat me until I decided I might have a better chance out on the streets by my lonesome. I was twelve then, and I ain’t seen him since. The ol’ geezer couldn’t help but remind me of a time I was trying to forget. He was more mad at me than he was scared though, I could see that just looking at him, and maybe I might’ve forgiven him for that too, but that he refused to go down.

I had to hit him again.

“Yer not gonna welsh out on us, are ya?” I said, looking at Jimmy, while the ol’ geezer looked up at me from all fours, finally.

“Well? Are you?” Jimmy asked, and the geezer looked at Jimmy before turning back to look at me again. He spat out a huge gob of blood before lifting his head and looking Jimmy square in the eye.

Then he got up off the floor, wiping his bloody mouth on his sleeve.

“Get off my table!” he yelled at Jimmy. “I mean it! Get off! This ain’t your place! You think you can plunk your ass down wherever you want?”

I looked over at Jimmy, and he was cool as a twelve bar riff, smiling that smile of his.

“This is my place!” the geezer went on. “Mine! An’ I don’t have to pay you squat! I’ve got protection.”

“What’s he owe us?” Jimmy asked me as he jumped off the table. He brushed his hat off  like as if he was wiping dirt off it, even though the hat was old and worn out, something he’d found on a dead drunk in an alley over two years ago.

“I don’t owe you nothing! Not a thing! Now why don’t you two peckers do yourselves a favour, and walk yourselves out of here? Maybe I won’t tell no one you roughed me up?”

Jimmy pulled his gun out of his pocket and stuck it in the man’s face. The geezer went quiet, real fast.

“Why don’t you do yourself a favour, and shut the fuck up!” Jimmy screamed at him, pushing the gun into the geezer’s face and forcing him into a chair.

“I don’t care. Do you understand me? We’re taking over the neighbourhood, and it’s going to cost you two bucks a night for us to keep whoever’s bothering you, off your back. You don’t like it? Good. I’d just as soon as kill you than put up with the headache.”

“I’ve got protection!” the geezer stammered.

“Protection? And who’s here to protect you? You mean Jack an’ Frankie? That who you mean? They’re not here, are they?” Jimmy asked, leaning in toward the man like as if he was letting him in on a secret. “They’re never around when you need them, just like them rotten coppers everyone’s so quick to call for. What’s he owe us?” Jimmy asked me again.

I opened the little book I had tucked away inside my coat pocket and flipped through the pages even though I had the page dog-eared. I was just trying to look professional, the way Jimmy wanted me to; it wasn’t as if I didn’t know we were gonna be coming here. I looked at the numbers, looked at the man, and then looked at Jimmy.

“How much?” Jimmy asked, pretending like as if he was interested in what I was gonna say.

“Fifteen bucks.”

“Fifteen bucks? Hear that? Fifteen bucks,” Jimmy said, looking at the geezer. “Is that what you said?” he asked me. “Fifteen bucks?”

“Yeah, but it says here, too—”

“I don’t care what else it says,” Jimmy said real quiet like, reaching out and putting his hand on the book; he patted it until I close it. “I just know fifteen bucks is a lot of money Mel, and I want the money he owes me.”

“Yeah, but Jimmy–” I tried again.

“Tut-tut-tut–again with your second guessing me, Mel,” Jimmy said, looking up at me through his squint eye. “You’re just the muscle. Remember? When I tell you to beat on someone, you do it; I tell you to break an arm, or a leg, you do it. It’s the easiest gig you’re ever going to have—a lot easier than playing that stupid horn of yours, and don’t you forget it. You were made for this sort of shit, Mel—as long as you don’t try thinking for yourself that is—you just leave the thinkin’ to me. That’s why we’re a team.”

I nodded and put the book back in my pocket; I knew he was right. As much as I might’ve liked blowing horn, I wasn’t making a living at it. I made me more money in last two months running with Jimmy, than I made blowing horn for the whole of last year.

“I told you, I got protection!” the geezer said, pushing Jimmy’s gun to the side slowly. He stood up and started walking to the door. Jimmy looked at me, looked at his gun, and then he looked at the geezer again.

“I had the last of the Eastmans on my back tryin’ to leech me dry just three months back, and that got taken care of, if you know what I mean. I don’t need you coming in here trying to shake me down. Now get out!”

He opened the door for us.

“Again with that ‘I’ve got protection’ shit,” Jimmy said, all quiet-like. He had a bad temper when he got quiet like that, and I figured it was only a matter of time before he lost it on the geezer. I thought, good, I wasn’t liking him much anyway—him with his mutton chop sideburns.

“Who’s protecting you? Kelly’s gang? Or do you mean Legs and the Dutchman?” Jimmy smiled. “Fat lot of good they’re doing you.”

“I don’t need the likes of you!”

“There’re all sorts of bad people out there,” Jimmy said, walking toward the door and swinging his gun around like as if it were a toy. “I hear the Rabbits come by the Chinaman’s–-”

“The Dead Rabbits?” the geezer laughed nervously. “They ain’t been around here for years—ever since Monk an’ his gang chased ‘em out.”

“They’re gonna beat on you all the same, and take what you’ve got, just on account of you bein’ such an ornery ol’ bastard,” Jimmy said. He wasn’t even listening to the geezer.

“They don’t scare me none, and you don’t scare me none either—not even with that gun. I been working all my life trying to make this place pay off, and now that I finally got it so I can see me a decent living, you come walking in here and want to take it away from me!”

“Well, if you don’t pay us, I’m gonna tell you right now, you can be damned sure we’ll come back and burn this shit hole to the ground.”

“Get out!” the geezer yelled. I stepped around Jimmy, and headed for the door.

Jimmy put his hand out to stop me.

“Where you going, Mel?” he asked with a tilt of his head.

“I’m leaving, Jimmy. He ain’t gonna give us our fifteen bucks,” I started to say, but Jimmy stood in front of me shaking his head.

“He’s not?” Jimmy asked.

“He’s Jack’s man, Jimmy,” I said, looking at the man. “I can beat him up if ya want, but ya can’t get blood off a stone. Remember?”

Jimmy smiled.

The man seemed to puff out his skinny chest as he crossed his arms and tried to stare Jimmy down. I suppose he was thinkin’ he was gonna get out of it without having to cough up the fifteen bucks, but I knew different.

“That’s not how these things work,” Jimmy said, looking sideways at the man.

“That’s not how what works?” the geezer asked.

Jimmy turned on his heel and pushed the gun into the man’s face again—pushing him as he held his other arm across the man’s chest. The man stumbled backwards, maybe thinking for the first time that this was more than just a simple shake down. Jimmy pushed him back against a table, climbing part way on top of the geezer.

“Open up,” Jimmy said, pushing the gun into the man’s mouth. I watched the geezer piss himself before he pointed to a spot behind the counter. Jimmy looked over his shoulder and nodded at me.

“There’s a loose brick beside the oven!”

That’s when Jimmy pulled the trigger.