Rich Man, Poor Man by Irwin Shaw

Author:Irwin Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Open Road

Chapter 6

I

He had pissed blood in the morning, but not very much and he wasn’t hurting. The reflection of his face in the train window when they went through a tunnel was a little sinister, because of the slash of bandage over his eye, but otherwise, he told himself, he looked like anybody else on the way to the bank. The Hudson was cold blue in the October sun and as the train passed Sing Sing he thought of the prisoners peering out at the broad river running free to the sea, and he said, “Poor bastards,” aloud.

He patted the bulge of his wallet under his jacket. He had collected the seven hundred dollars from the bookie on the way downtown. Maybe he could get away with giving Teresa just two hundred of it, two fifty if she made a stink.

He pulled the wallet out. He had been paid off in hundreds. He took out a bill and studied it. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, stared out at him, looking like somebody’s old mother. Lightning on a kite, he remembered dimly; at night all cats are gray. He must have been a tougher man than he looked to get his picture on a bill that size. Did he once say, Gentlemen we must hang together or we will hang separately? I should have at least finished high school, Thomas thought, vague in the presence of one hundred dollars’ worth of history. This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank. If this wasn’t lawful money, what the hell was? It was signed in fancy script by somebody called Ivy Baker Priest, Treasurer of the United States. It took a someone with a name like that to give out with double talk about debts and money and get away with it.

Thomas folded the bill neatly and slipped it by itself in a side pocket, to be put with the other hundred-dollar bills, reposing in the dark vault for just such a day as this.

The man on the seat in front of him was reading a newspaper, turned to the sports page. Thomas could see that he was reading about last night’s fight. He wondered what the man would say if he tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Mister, I was there, how would you like an account of the battle right from the middle of the ring?” Actually, the reports of the fight in the papers had been pretty good and there had been a picture on the back page of the News of Virgil trying to get up the last time and himself in a neutral corner. One newspaperman had even said the fight had raised him into the ranks of the contenders for the title and Schultzy had called him all excited, right before he left the house, to say that a promoter over from England had seen the fight and was offering them a bout in London in six weeks.

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