Then he tossed his plate on the ground.
—Now I’m done.
When the tall one got up, the smiling man winked at Billy and rose as well.
Ulysses watched the two of them walk away, then he sat on the tie where they’d been sitting and stared across the fire at Emmett, pointedly.
—I know, said Emmett. I know.
Woolly
If it had been up to Woolly, they wouldn’t have spent the night in Manhattan. They wouldn’t even have driven through it. They would have gone straight to his sister’s house in Hastings-on-Hudson, and from there to the Adirondacks.
The problem with Manhattan, from Woolly’s point of view, the problem with Manhattan was that it was so terribly permanent. What with its towers made of granite and all the miles of pavement stretching as far as the eye can see. Why, every single day, millions of people went pounding along the sidewalks and across the marble-floored lobbies without even putting a dent in them. To make matters worse, Manhattan was absotively filled with expectations. There were so many expectations, they had to build the buildings eighty stories high so they would have enough room to stack them one on top of the other.
But Duchess wanted to see his father, so they took the Lincoln Highway to the Lincoln Tunnel, and the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, and now here they were.
If they were going to be in Manhattan, thought Woolly as he propped up his pillow, at least this was the way to do it. Because once they emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, Duchess had not taken a left and headed uptown. Instead, he had taken a right and driven all the way down to the Bowery, a street on which Woolly had never been, to visit his father at a little hotel, of which Woolly had never heard. And then, while Woolly was sitting in the lobby looking out at all the activity in the street, he happened to see a fellow walking by with a stack of newspapers—a fellow in a baggy coat and floppy hat.
—The Birdman! exclaimed Woolly to the window. What an extraordinary coincidence!
Leaping from his chair, he rapped on the glass. Only to discover when the fellow turned about that he wasn’t the Birdman, after all. But having been rapped at, the fellow entered the lobby with his stack of papers and made a beeline for Woolly’s chair.
If Duchess was, as he liked to say, allergic to books, Woolly had a related affliction. He was allergic to the daily news. In New York City, things were happening all the time. Things that you were expected not only to be knowledgeable about, but on which you were expected to have an opinion that you could articulate at a moment’s notice. In fact, so many things were happening at such a rapid pace, they couldn’t come close to fitting them all in a single newspaper. New York had the Times, of course, the paper of record, but in addition, it had the Post, the Daily News, the Herald Tribune, the Journal-American, the World-Telegram, and the Mirror. And those were just the ones that Woolly could think of off the top of his head.
Each of these enterprises had a battalion of men covering beats, questioning sources, hunting down leads, and writing copy until well after supper. Each ran presses in the middle of the night and rushed off delivery trucks in every conceivable direction so that the news of the day would be on your doorstep when you woke at the crack of dawn in order to catch the 6:42.
The very thought of it sent chills down Woolly’s spine. So, as the baggy-coated fellow approached with his stack of newspapers, Woolly was ready to send him on his way.
But as it turned out, the baggy-coated fellow wasn’t selling today’s newspapers. He was selling yesterday’s newspapers. And the day before yesterday’s. And the day before that!
—It’s three cents for yesterday’s Times, he explained, two cents for two days ago, a penny for three days ago, or a nickel for all three.
Well, that’s a different kettle of fish altogether, thought Woolly. News that was one, two, and three days old didn’t arrive with anywhere near the same sense of urgency as the news of the day. In fact, you could hardly call it news. And you didn’t have to receive an A in Mr. Kehlenbeck’s math class to know that getting three papers for a nickel was a bargain. But, alas, Woolly didn’t have any money.
Or did he . . . ?
For the first time since putting on Mr. Watson’s pants, Woolly put his hands in Mr. Watson’s pockets. And would you believe, would you actually believe that out of the right-hand pocket came some rumpled bills.
—I’ll take all three, said Woolly, with enthusiasm.
When the fellow handed Woolly the papers, Woolly handed him a dollar, adding magnanimously that he could keep the change. And though the fellow was pleased as could be, Woolly was fairly certain that he had gotten the better part of the deal.