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Didn't want to be your ghost, didn't want to be anyone's ghost.
But I don't want anybody else
I don’t want anybody else.
After we kill the D’Alessio family Al says that we should spend the night in town. He says it will look suspicious if we leave right away. And he says he wants to find some more fun. He wants to know if the drinks in Philadelphia tastes different than in Atlantic City. "And the girls too," he says. He grins at Jimmy. Jimmy shrugs.
"Nucky wants us back by midday tomorrow."
"We’ll make it, no problem," Al tells him. He looks at me. "You comin’?" He looks away. I look at Jimmy and I nod. As we walk through the streets it begins to rain. I pull my hat down so that the mask won’t rust. Al finds an inn on Race Street that has drinks and girls. We go inside and Al buys three glasses of whiskey. "To a day’s honest work," he says, holding up his glass. He laughs. Jimmy touches his glass to Al’s and drinks it down. I set mine on the bar. I can’t drink it like that. Al looks at it. "You gonna drink that or what? Paid good money for it."
I shake my head. Al snorts. "Lay off, Al," Jimmy says. He looks into his glass, but there’s nothing left. Al holds up both hands.
"Ain’t mean nothin’ by it," he says. "But enough with the conversatin’." He looks around and sees a woman in a red dress. He waves at her. She comes over and stands beside him.
"Hi," she says to him. "You boys looking for a good time?"
"Always," Al says. "And just what did you have in mind?" She leans forward and whispers in his ear. He grins again. "I like the way you think," he says. "Shall we continue this conversation upstairs?" She takes his hand, and he gets up. "C’mon, Jimmy, have some fun," he says. "This ain’t a place to be sittin’ around thinkin’ deep thoughts."
"Yeah," Jimmy says. He doesn’t move. Al looks at me again for a moment. Then he leaves. I push my drink towards Jimmy. "Thanks," he says, and drinks it. I wonder if he’s thinking about Chicago. He lived in a place like this when we met. He seemed to enjoy it there. I don’t think he likes it here. He didn’t talk a lot in the car on the way from New Jersey. Al talked, but he just watched the roads. Now he’s looking at his glass as though it’s a window too.
A woman comes up to him. "You havin’ a bad night, baby?" she asks. She puts her hand on his arm. He looks around at her. "I bet I can get a smile outta you." She smiles, too red. "Why don’t you come with me." She looks at me and her smile slips.
After a moment he gets up. "You all right here?" he says to me in a low voice. I nod. "I’ll be back." He follows her out of the room. I stay where I am. The room is full of low voices, laughs like sudden small bells. Men play cards in the corner and smoke cigars. None of the women come over to me. The bartender glances over.
"You want something?"
I don’t know what to say.
"Another?"
I nod, but I don’t know why. He refills my glass. He looks at my face. "Get that in the war?" I nod. "Grenade?"
I have to swallow twice before I can speak. "Bayonet."
"Hmm." He lifts his arm. He’s missing three fingers and a scar winds down to his elbow. "Tried to catch it like it was a goddamn baseball. Clever, huh?" I don’t say anything. "Hard to remember what the point of it all was from this side of it, ain’t it," he says. I look down at the whiskey in the glass, bright gold. My own eye looks back. I shake my head.
Someone turns on the phonograph across the room. A few of the women begin to dance. The man playing cards laugh and clap. After two songs, Jimmy sits down next to me again. He signals the bartender. "Make it a double," he says. He lights a cigarette.
"You didn’t like her?" I ask.
He shrugs again. "Wasn’t in the mood," he says. "Been a long day." He falls silent and smokes. Maybe he’s thinking about Pearl. The bartender brings his drink and he downs it. A woman comes into the room with a girl. The girl has bows in her hair. The woman whispers in her ear. She pushes her towards a man sitting near us. The girl talks to him. She smiles at him, but it’s like a raincloud. They go upstairs together. Jimmy watches them leave. "How old you think she is?" he says suddenly to me.
"I don’t know," I say. "Young."
He keeps looking at the doorway even though they’ve gone. He breathes out smoke. Then he turns and puts both elbows on the bar. "You know my mother had me when she was fourteen?"
I didn’t know that. "You mean she...had to work in a place like this?" I ask.
He shakes his head. "No. She was a...special gift from Nucky to my father. The Commodore. That’s what he liked. Nucky needed a favor, so he brought her to him. Nice business deal, right?" His laugh is like the ashes falling from his cigarette. "I guess I’m just a bill of sale."
I push my drink towards him again, and he takes it. "But your mother...she’s still carin’ for your father?" I was at their house the other day. Jimmy was there for her. Now I think he must have hated it there too. But he always takes care of people.
"I don’t get it," he says. He drinks the whiskey. He shakes his head slightly as it hits him. "I don’t know why she doesn’t hate him. She acts like he’s her kid too, you know? Like she’s always gotta forgive him." His words are starting to slow and blur. "Same with Nucky. She should wanna kill that son of a bitch. He just handed her over like she was a stack of cash."
"Do you...hate him?"
"Which one?" he asks, and he laughs again. Now it sounds like drowning. "I don’t know. I don’t know my father. I mean, he didn’t raise me. I never really thought—I never wanted to think he had anything to do with me." He puts out his cigarette. "Nucky...I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I hate him. I can’t tell anymore. Now that I know why he bothered with me all these years..." He shakes his head. "It’s not the same."
"He trusts you," I say. "He asked you...to do this. To come here and take care of things."
He snorts. "I don’t think knowin’ that someone’s good at killing people and lovin’ ‘em are the same thing. He just gets me to do what he doesn’t have the stomach for." Darkness settles behind his eyes, like the sun behind a cloud. "Ever since I came back, he’s used me for stuff like this. I guess he thinks that’s what I am now. Guess he’s got a point."
"You lived," I say. "Maybe he thinks...he thinks you can handle anything now. He wasn’t over there. He doesn’t know." Know what, I’m not sure.
"I don’t think he cares," Jimmy says. "He doesn’t ask about it. He doesn’t wanna know why I’m good at...all this." He waves his hand. "It’s just enough that I do it. I don’t even know why," he adds. "Doesn’t really make sense. Over there I didn’t have a choice, but now..." He leans his forehead on his hand. "You’d think I’d never wanna touch one of these fuckin’ things again." His other hand goes to his pocket, where I know his Colt 1903 is resting. "But it’s like...it’s like I can’t put it down now. And I’m not...I don’t even know how I’m s’posed to feel about it anymore."
I look down at my hands. Earlier today I held a shotgun. I killed Ignatius and his little brother Pius with one shot each. Pius was crying as he tried to load his revolver. I aimed for his face. And all I could think about was how I prefer the tight trigger of the 1917 Enfield rifle. I know I should feel something else. But I can’t find it anymore. It’s like searching through a big, pitch-dark room for a lost thing. "Nothing," I say. "You feel nothing." Jimmy nods slowly.
The phonograph is still playing, and one of the women is singing along. But all the roses with their spirits high remain to love until they droop and die. And dear, why shouldn't it be just so with you and with me? Jimmy signals to the bartender for another drink. The bartender glances at his face. "You sure about that?" he asks.
"Just pour it," Jimmy snaps, and he does. He drinks it down and flinches a little. Then he turns and looks at me. He doesn’t look away. He never does. The first time we saw each other in the hospital in Chicago, he didn’t look away for a long time. "Thought I loved him," he says after a minute. "I thought it was him, and Angela, and my mother. And then Tommy. Figured that was enough for one person. Now they’re all just..." He waves a hand like he’s trying to get rid of the smoke. "None of it meant anything."
"Your boy doesn’t hate you. He couldn’t." I tell him. "You’re not your father."
"She was gonna take him from me," he says suddenly. When he looks at me again, his eyes are on fire. "Angela was gonna leave me, she was gonna go to Paris with that woman and take Tommy with her. And leave me with what, huh? Why does she get to have him? I gotta lose her, and I gotta lose him too?"
I don’t understand. "With a woman?"
He puts his head in his hands. His fingers press into his slicked-back hair. "Yeah, she...she loves her, or something." He reaches into his pocket with shaking fingers and takes out a letter. Its creases are worn, like he’s read it over and over. "She...while I was away, they...I don’t know." He shakes his head, running his hand over his face. "She said she can’t live with me anymore. She said she’s always afraid when I’m around."
I know what he means. It’s a strange thing to be feared. Especially when you weren’t before. I came back with so much less of myself, but people treat me as though I brought something back. Something way more than they can understand. They don’t seem to know that they frighten me as well.
"She says..." He lowers his voice, though no one is near us. "She told me I...you know, yell at night. In my sleep. In German."
I nod. Sometimes I do too. Odette told me. I can’t yell, though. She said I was just talking. I told her I was sorry. "Ain’t your fault, I expect," she said, but she turned away from me as she put her dress back on. "Must have been terrible over there." I didn’t want to tell her. She didn’t need to know those things.
Jimmy knows, though. "She said Tommy’s afraid of me too. I don’t...I wouldn’t hurt him. Not ever. I’m trying to be good for him, you know? I’m tryin’ to give him a good life. But she was just gonna take him," he says again. "And I’d never see him again. All the way to France. Fuckin’ France." He shakes his head slowly, like it’s too full. He puts the letter back in his pocket. "Of all the places."
"But she came back. Maybe she...changed her mind."
"Maybe. Or maybe she didn’t have a choice. Maybe she’s willin’ to take scared if it means food on the table for her boy." He laughs quietly again. "Guess that’s it, really. To Nucky I’m just a knife, and for Angela I’m just—just a payday and a place to sleep. No more’n that."
I look at his face. His eyes are red and bright glass blue. Lines carve his forehead and his hair falls against his temple. His lip is pale at the spot where he bites down on it. I don’t know how to say it. I never do anymore. I can say it in my head, but it falls apart by the time I can get it out. It’s like the words fall out of the hole torn in me on their way down. And then usually people don’t listen because it takes so long. He does, though. He always waits. On top of everything else, he gives me time, and space. He cut out a space for me to be that I didn’t have before. A place right beside him.
"You’re more than that" is what I say. It’s the best I can do. He cocks his head to look at me. He moves his arm to touch my shoulder, and he knocks down a glass. It rolls off the bar and smashes. The bartender frowns over at us.
"Uh-oh," Jimmy mutters. "Guess we’d better get outta here." He starts to get up off the stool and nearly falls. I put my arm under his and help him up. He grips my shoulder tightly. "Can do it m’self," he mumbles, but he leans against me. The broken glass crunches like bones as he steps on it. We leave the saloon and go upstairs. I can hear voices, laughter and squeaking beds. "It was her hair," he says, so quietly I almost don’t hear. "I remembered, when I was over...how it felt. Real long, and smelled like...peaches. I wish she still..." He stops. I find an empty room and take him inside, locking the door behind us. I lay him on the bed. I take his shoes off. He rolls over and hugs the pillow against his chest. "Richard," he says.
"Mmm?"
"Don’t go."
I go over to the window and look out. It’s stopped raining. "I won’t," I say. I close the curtains and sit down in an armchair. We’ll leave early tomorrow for Jersey. For now, I’ll wait here in case he needs me.