Roscoe by William Kennedy Page B

history,” Roscoe said. “Don’t you fellows have a main coming up?”
    “Tomorrow night, up in Fogarty’s,” Bindy said.
    “Been weedin’ out my sick ones,” Patsy said, a chicken under his arm. “One of my tough guys’s got the megrims, feedin’ it too much. And this guy got the
chicken pox fightin’ his friends. His head’s pecked all to hell.”
    The McCall brothers had raised chickens since early adolescence in North Albany. Later, when they moved to Arbor Hill, Patsy kept his coops in a stable next to his house on Colonie Street, but
as the chickens grew in number he was deemed a neighborhood nuisance and told to get rid of them. A politically connected neighbor let him put his coops on the Albany County Courthouse roof, the
beginning of Patsy’s life above the law.
    Patsy put his poxy chicken back on the walk and led the way to the kitchen. Wally Mitchell was lifting a blue roasting pan out of the oven, two cooked chickens in it. He put forks under the
chickens and moved them onto a white stoneware platter. The house smelled like Sunday.
    “Cook those yourself, Wally?” Roscoe asked. Wally’s left ear, from heavy use by others, looked like a partly eaten chicken wing.
    “I don’t cook,” Wally said. “I do the heavy liftin’.”
    Rose Carbone, Patsy’s full-time housekeeper ever since Patsy’s wife, Flora, died, stood at the sink washing a pot.
    “Did you make the gravy?” Patsy asked Rose.
    “I did not and I would not and you know it,” she said.
    “Good,” said Patsy.
    Rose went out of the kitchen and Patsy said, “She’s all right but she can’t make gravy.” He took a tin of flour from the pantry and put the roasting pan with its
drippings on the gas stove and lit the burner. He mixed the flour with some water, poured it into the pan as the drippings began to boil, added salt, pepper, a splash of Kitchen Bouquet, and water
from a kettle, then stirred the mix with a wooden spoon. Roscoe knew better than to try for Patsy’s attention when he was cooking, so he sat at the kitchen table to watch a ritual that dated
to their adolescent fishing trips, when Patsy cooked in self-defense against Roscoe’s and Elisha’s life-threatening concoctions; and again in the army in 1918, when shrapnel knocked
Patsy off his horse; and after his leg healed they made him a cook’s helper. Patsy poured the thickened brown gravy into a bowl and set it beside the chickens.
    Bindy came out of the bathroom into the kitchen. “You see that stuff in the Sentinel ?” he asked Roscoe.
    “I have some serious news on that,” Roscoe said.
    Patsy nodded and put down his spoon and the three men walked through Patsy’s workout room toward the parlor. Patsy punched the hanging bag and bent it in half. He sat in his parlor rocker,
feet crossed on the floor, a book, Hard Times, open on his reading table, and under it the Sentinel. His brown fedora sat on a straight chair by the door under the holy-water font,
which was a Christmas gift from Father Tooher, pastor of St. Joseph’s.
    Roscoe sat in an armchair facing Patsy and Bindy, who weighed three pounds less than a horse and made Roscoe feel thin. Bindy sat on half the sofa, eating peanuts from a silver dish.
    “I just punched out Roy Flinn,” Roscoe said.
    “Nice,” Patsy said.
    “That little pimple,” Bindy said.
    “Veronica’s a nervous wreck. I only went down to yell at Roy, but then he said Elisha owned a block of whorehouses. So I hit him.”
    “Good,” Patsy said.
    “He said we’re in for a dogfight with the Governor. What do you make of that, Bindy?” Control of brothels and gambling had been Bindy’s responsibility since the 1921
takeover.
    “Dogfight?” Bindy said. “I’ll tell him about dogfight. I’ll break both his legs. Put the Night Squad on him, Pat. Break both his legs.”
    “You hear anything about raiding the whores?” Roscoe asked.
    “They been snooping around Division Street,” Bindy said, “but it