Ben and the Crooked Mile

Ruby met them in Pennsylvania Station wearing a borrowed hat and carrying a paper sack containing stockings, a toothbrush, and a kitchen knife.

“The knife?” Ben asked.

“I couldn’t find my umbrella.”

She embraced Lillian, inspected June, then touched the bruise spreading across Ben’s jaw.

“You went to the ocean.”

“It was closed.”

They found rooms through a woman Ruby knew in Chelsea. Nobody asked for surnames. June slept for fourteen hours. Lillian placed the account book beneath a loose floorboard and insisted Ben eat something before proposing anything foolish.

Unfortunately, food had never improved his judgment reliably.

“We need a newspaper,” he said.

“The police?” Ruby asked.

He told her about the lieutenant’s name.

Ruby poured coffee.

“Then we need a better newspaper.”

The sportswriter Ben knew was called Frank Malloy. He occupied a corner stool in a tavern where the proprietor kept his unpaid tab beneath a religious calendar, apparently seeking assistance.

Malloy examined the book through spectacles repaired with black thread.

“Figures aren’t proof.”

“Tell my creditors.”

“I need the boy who carried the messages. Somebody who saw money change hands. Dates I can check.”

Danny was somewhere in Pennsylvania. June knew the nightclub’s accounts. Ruby knew customers who had boasted about certain horses losing.

For three days, they assembled the parts.

Ben discovered that honest work contained an extraordinary amount of waiting.

On Saturday, Mickey Glass found him outside a bakery.

Eddie Crumb stood beside a delivery wagon, eating a roll.

“You look tired,” Mickey said.

“I’ve taken an interest in public affairs.”

“Voss wants his property.”

“So I hear.”

Mickey offered an envelope.

Inside lay a ticket for Monday afternoon’s racing and a folded sheet naming a horse. Beside the name was a figure: fifteen to one.

“Put two hundred on it,” Mickey said. “I’ll stake you. You hand over the book, everybody forgets.”

“Everybody?”

“The women go where they like. The boy too.”

Ben looked toward Eddie, who brushed crumbs from his coat and would not meet his eyes.

“Why the horse?”

Mickey shrugged.

“You like horses.”

That was what made it ugly. Mickey understood him well enough to package surrender as a lucky break.

Ben took the envelope.

Back in Chelsea, Ruby watched him study the racing sheet.

“Is it a good horse?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would it matter?”

He folded the sheet smaller.

Three thousand dollars. A proper apartment. A dentist. Enough left to lose slowly, like a respectable man.

He could hear the crowd already. Hooves gathering speed. A grandstand rising as one enormous creature. For years, he had mistaken that sound for the future calling his name.

“I’m afraid,” he said.

Ruby sat beside him.

“So am I.”

She did not tell him which choice to make. He wished she would. He resented her for refusing, then understood what she was giving him.

On Sunday morning, Ben went to Malloy’s apartment carrying the book.

Danny was there, newly arrived and pale with exhaustion. June sat at the kitchen table, identifying entries while Malloy wrote. Lillian had brought receipts from the nightclub, each one showing deductions Voss had invented.

Ben put Mickey’s envelope beside them.

“He offered this yesterday.”

Malloy read the note.

“Will you say so publicly?”

Ben looked at Danny.

“Yes.”

The first story appeared Monday. Others followed. Voss’s racing business unraveled under witnesses who discovered they were less frightened together. The lieutenant was suspended. Mickey shut the cigar shop and disappeared, leaving a cabinet full of cigars nobody wanted.

Nothing happened quickly enough to resemble justice in a picture show.

There were interviews, denials, a window broken in Chelsea. Ben spent two nights behind a borrowed door with the kitchen knife on his knee.

But June found work singing somewhere that paid her directly. Danny returned to horses under a trainer Malloy trusted. Lillian began saving for a boardinghouse near the water, with locks she would choose herself.

In June, Ben took a job receiving deliveries at a restaurant.

On his first payday, he walked past a bookmaker and stopped.

A race was crackling through the radio inside. Some poor hopeful beast was making its move around the turn.

Ben stood long enough to feel the old hunger wake.

Then he bought fresh flowers.

The flowers cost more than he intended. He nearly chose a cheaper bunch, then caught himself calculating how much the difference might return at favorable odds. The florist waited while Ben finished arguing silently with himself. Finally, he paid her and asked for the blue ribbon.

Ruby opened her door in a housecoat, suspicious of the bouquet.

“What happened?”

“I got paid.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

She moved aside.

Over supper, Ben told her about the horse he had almost backed. He described its breeding, its chances, the extraordinary certainty that had come over him.

Ruby listened, smiling a little.

“Did it win?”

Ben reached across the table for her hand.

For once, he had no idea.