The Fugitive Pigeon

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.

At first I didn’t think it was a good idea, because I thought my mother wouldn’t want me to move out of our apartment, she’d get lonely or something. But she took to the idea right away, seemed almost too pleased by it, and that’s how I wound up running this bar in Canarsie.

It wasn’t much work to run. No one ever checked up on me to see did I open before four o’clock or did I dip into the cash register from time to time. Then, there were already a few longer-established bars in the immediate neighborhood that took most of the local clientele, so I never did have a crowd in there, not even on weekends. I had a few regulars, and now and then a transient or two, and that was it. The bar lost money and nobody cared. I ran it loose and sloppy and nobody cared. My Uncle Al was right; it was the job I was born for.

Of course, there was the other little part of it. Every once in a while some friend of Uncle Al’s from the organization would come around and give me a package or an envelope or some such thing, and I was supposed to put it in the safe under the bar until someone would come in and say such and such a code phrase, like in spy movies, and then I’d hand over the package or whatever it was. I got something like this to do once or twice a month, and always checked with Uncle Al on it to be sure there wasn’t any problem, and all in all it wasn’t exactly what you’d call hard work.

Then, too, sometimes I closed the bar on a Monday or a Tuesday night, and went to a movie or something like that. I still knew a couple girls I could ask out from time to time, girls I’d known since high school. Generally speaking it was a pretty comfortable life. All I had to do was just drift along.

Until those two guys came in and showed me the black spot. And all at once my drifting days were done.