Dead I Well May Be

by Adrian McKinty

  We were alone in the place and there was only one waiter and the cook and the manager, a man called Quinn. None of the three looked or sounded very Italian. I closed my eyes and drifted for a time. Bob was lecturing Sunshine on the benefits of central air-conditioning. Marley was smoking. Darkey was standing at the window. And then to my absolute horror, Darkey called me over.

  He had a cigar, he was half-toasted. I hoped more than me.

  Michael, my boy, come here, he said.

  I came.

  We haven’t really talked, have we, Michael?

  I shook my head.

  Sunshine does all of that, Darkey said sadly.

  Yes.

  It’s a pity, though. I like to get to know people. I like to know who’s working for me, but the higher you go the less you can stay involved in the nitty-gritty. You have to let go, Michael. You have to trust your subordinates. More like Reagan, less like Carter. You get me?

  I didn’t at all, but I nodded.

  Darkey put his head on my shoulders. He was smaller than me, and I’d already slumped over into an uncomfortable stoop to be eye level with him. His hand felt heavy.

  Listen to me, you did a fine job and don’t think there won’t be something extra in your pay packet. Shovel disrespecting me like that. Who does he think he is? Man’s a lunatic. A fucking lunatic. What price loyalty? Look at you. You came from Ireland. From Belfast. I gave you a job and you’ve done a good job. Sometimes it’s lifting people. Sometimes it’s lifting furniture, ha, ha. You have to start at the bottom. Earn our trust. Sunshine gives me reports.

  I see, I said.

  But you see, the thing is, I like you. You and Scotchy. Andy, I liked him. He went out with Bridget, you know. But he wasn’t her type. Not at all. You, I see you, Michael. You are the lad, the original Wild Colonial, but listen. I know you’re good. Scotchy tells me, Sunshine tells me. Listen, Michael, I know you. You’re young, and young is as young does, that’s just the way of it. But I won’t have any trouble. I think I’m a fair man. I think I am. But I won’t have trouble. I come down like the son of Solomon. My father chastised you with whips and I will do it with scorpions. Iron fist only way. Cut out the cancer. If it’s there. Have you seen that film about John Wayne where he’s the boxer?

  No, I don’t think—

  Very good, very good. I’ve never been, but I will one day. Quiet life. You want to settle after a time. You want to settle. How I began is not important. It’s how I’ll finish that’s the key. Construction brings in three times what Sunshine does. You understand?

  Not really, I admitted.

  His hand pushed down on my shoulder. It was actually hurting a little.

  How old are you, Michael?

  Nineteen. I’ll be twenty in—

  See, you boys might have the youth, but I have the persistence, Darkey said and pointed his finger at me. I can outlast all of you. Mr. Duffy, me, we grew up with this. You realize that, don’t you? You, Bob, Scotchy, even Sunshine, you don’t know the half of it. You’re too young. You see that? Intelligence is no substitute for wisdom. Live long enough to get wise, eh?

  Yes, I suppose so, I said, completely baffled and now increasingly afraid. Was this all some kind of horrible joke? Was this the whole point of the evening? Get me to Brooklyn to Darkey’s place, everyone feigns to be wasted, and then Darkey deals his hand. Bob comes over with a knuckleduster. Darkey starts to scream: You think I’m a fucking moron. You think you, some potato-stuffing fucker just off the boat, can pull a fast one on me. Me, Darkey fucking White. You think you can fool me?

  I was pale and sober now. Trying not to shake. Oh, Christ. Was that why they’d ditched Scotchy? ’Cause he might stick up for me?

  I turned round, Bob was walking over.

  I started to feel blind panic. Was there any way I could make a run for it at all? What the fuck was going on?

  I have to make use of the facilities, Bob grunted.

  I’ll join ya, Darkey said, cheerfully. And then I suppose it’s time we should all head on. It’s getting late.

  He gave me a grin and a wink.

  Youth does have some advantages. I can’t stay up all night no more, he said.

  Me neither, actual— I began, but Darkey interrupted me with a shout back to the table.

  Hey, Marley, off your ass. We’re heading. Go and get the van started.

  Marley heard and said: Ok (his only speech in this whole narrative, as it turns out). Darkey went off to the bathroom. I sat down at the table, panting, relieved. I could see now that nothing was going to happen. Paranoia, that’s all. That’s all. I took a drink of someone’s wine.

  You ok? Sunshine asked.

  Aye. Darkey’s in a bit of a mood, though.

  Sunshine regarded me.

  I haven’t noticed anything, he said.

  Sunshine was not to be drawn into any criticisms of Darkey whatsoever. He was loyal. You could grant him that. He’d be the Goebbels poisoning his weans for Darkey, you could see it. I’d be more of a von Stauffenberg character, I was thinking, but wisely I kept these observations to myself.

  How did you get that pay-phone number, Sunshine? I asked him for something to say.

  It’s not important, Sunshine said.

  He wanted to keep it secret. He was clever, I liked that.

  You went to university, didn’t you, Sunshine?

  Yes.

  Where, what?

  NYU, French, Sunshine said.

  Hey, I did French in school. Tu es une salope: I said that to the Haitian woman in C-Town. It was funny, she wouldn’t give me a refund for … but I didn’t finish. I could see Sunshine was not impressed. I went on on a different tack:

  Point is, Sunshine, you’re smart. I mean, what exactly are you doing with us lot?

  Darkey and I go back, Sunshine said, simply.

  Like he saved your life or something. You were drowning in the YMCA pool, he dragged you out, forever loyal, or better. You were the smart kid with the glasses, he protected you from the school bully….

  I was trying to be funny, but Sunshine was not amused.

  What if I said it was something like that, would you believe me? Sunshine said.

  Uh, yeah, I suppose I would, I said, a little embarrassed.

  Let me give you a piece of advice, Michael. Never underestimate Darkey or me, ok?

  Jesus, Sunshine. Don’t get all heavy on me, I was just joking, I said.

  Sunshine smiled.

  Me too, he said.

  To change the subject, we talked movies for a while and I said I liked Orson Welles in The Third Man and Sunshine said I should really rent The Lady from Shanghai.

  Darkey and Big Bob came back. Bob was looking peaky. Darkey came over and slapped me on the back. No harder than was strictly necessary, which was a relief after all his slabbering. He put me in a headlock and made me cry mercy. Again, there was no malice in it, and he didn’t hurt me. But even so, I was still filled with a sudden and dangerous resentment against him. Darkey, all things considered, was a bit of a prick, and I wouldn’t work with him for all the pay in hell, except that most of the time it was Sunshine, not Darkey, who had his steady hand on the tiller. I looked at Sunshine and he looked at me with what I took to be sympathy. Bob did the bongos on my head for a minute, and Darkey laughed.

  He’s a bodh ran, a human bodh ran, Bob said, until Darkey told him to quit it. He let me go.

  It’s pronounced “boran,” you ignorant shite, I said to Bob.

  Sunshine, always eager for a new word, asked me what that meant, and I told him (with a nasty look at Bob) that a bodhran was an Irish side drum, not a bongo drum.

  Darkey paid and left a miserly tip, and we were all about to leave when suddenly a joke occurred to him. Normally, his jokes were of the practical kind, such as telling Scotchy to kick my chair from under me, but occasionally he came up with a good one. Darkey wasn’t an unintelligent man, and often I think he tried to appear heartier and dumber than he actually was.
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  Ok, lads, joke. Everybody sit.

  We sat. Darkey began:

  Old monastery in the west of Ireland. Galway. Two parrots in a cage, and all day long they pray and recite the rosary and twirl the rosary beads in their little claws. Visiting priest is amazed, sees the birds and tells the abbot that they have precisely the opposite situation at the nearby convent, where they rescued two female parrots from a brothel after the police closed it down. Unfortunately for the nuns the parrots say all day long, “Fuck me, please, I’m a filthy whore.” The abbot suggests that they move the parrots from the convent and put them in with the good-living parrots in the monastery. The priest thinks that this is an excellent idea. The foul-mouthed birds will learn by example. Anyway, the two monastery parrots are in their cage one day when the two female parrots are brought in beside them. Both female parrots immediately say, “Fuck me, I’m a filthy whore,” whereupon one male parrot looks at the other and says, “Seamus, you can put the beads away now, our prayers have been answered.”

  We all laughed. Sunshine louder than most, and that, believe me, was a scary thing to behold. Again, Goebbels came to mind.

  They dropped me at 123rd. Darkey got out of the car and shook my hand.

  I can count on you, can’t I, Michael? he said, his heavy-lidded eyes boring into me.

  Without blinking I said, Of course. (I almost added “Sir.”)

  Sunshine was also out of the car. I was bleary from drink, cigarette smoke, too much food, and exhaustion, but Sunshine wanted to tell me well done too.

  I preempted him.

  You know, Sunshine, Shovel didn’t do a damn thing. Not one thing, I said.

  Sunshine nodded. I couldn’t be sure that he could see what I meant, but I didn’t want to go into it now. Maybe Sunshine knew all along, maybe it didn’t matter.

  I walked up the steps to the apartment building. I checked that Rachel’s phone number was in my pocket. It was. I could smell dawn in the air. What a long, weird, awful night. I opened the jemmied door. The hall was full of steam from a broken radiator. Typical and insane that the steam heat would even be on in summer. Of course, in winter … I spat and ignored it and went upstairs. I hoped that I wouldn’t be so hopped up and overtired that I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  I was to be disappointed.

  3: THE NICE PART OF THE BRONX

  S

  sshhhhh, ssshhhh, listen. Blot out everything else. The dark whispering. Can you hear it? Can you hear? Singing truths like apples. In a language that is universal and easy to understand. It’s singing for you. Big man, player, dealer in bruises. Its breath condenses on the mirror and its trace is visible. Curling from the sewers and the gutters and the storm drains, and speaking with the voice of graveyard stone.

  I can hear it. I can feel its breath. Rank and awful. It makes things up: lies, half-lies, stories. It’s hushed but the building’s alert and attends and passes them on. Up the skunk trees, up the brick, through the window.

  You’re a thief, you’re a bully. You hurt people. You’re nothing, a shadow. You’re a fool. A nasty wee piece of work.

  Accusations. From the world out there. Go away. Please. Please.

  But the world out there. It isn’t quiet. It never is.…

  My eyes fill, flutter. I wake.

  It is impossible to sleep. I generate white noise from a fan which on level three does its best to erase the sirens, the crying, the yelling, the music, the nightmares, and—melodramatic but nevertheless true—the gunshots.

  It’s around dawn. I’ve been in bed at most an hour.

  The clunk is the arrival of the Times.

  Jesus. Bad dreams. Not what you’d think, but bad dreams nonetheless. I throw back the cotton sheet and yawn and go to the front door and bring the paper in. I throw the paper at a roach in the hall. I take a bagel from the freezer and put it in the microwave. Something about microwaves, I remember. Oh yes, Scotchy, last night. Where did he come up with that? Wait a minute. Last night. Suddenly I feel the need to sit down in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  I sit.

  Exhausted and nauseated.

  Alone.

  Relax, be calm. Try to breathe. Breathe. I lean on the window and cough so hard my lungs hurt. It goes on for about a minute.

  I’m going to stop smoking, I say.

  The microwave dings. I get up and eat the bagel. You can get six for a dollar, so this one is sixteen cents. And the paper is free for some reason, like the cable. It just keeps getting delivered.

  I tie my dressing gown, make some coffee, and retire to the fire escape. There’s no news. I read the sports section. Things are not going well for the local baseball teams. The leader writer is explaining why the Yankees will never win another championship with George Steinbrenner as the owner.

  Sun is coming up. The day banishing the thoughts of yesterday. I stretch and go back inside and decide to shave and shower. I turn on the water for the pipes to get going and look in the mirror. I was in a fight, so it’s worth doing an inspection. Really, is this the face of a monster? My hair is sandier than it’s ever gotten in Ireland and my stubble is blond too. I study myself. No bruises. Ok-looking, green eyes, good jaw, a wee bit more filled out than I used to be, which is good, because I was always too thin, nice eyebrows, reasonably symmetrical face, bit of a broken nose, though, which fucks things up a bit, but still a decent, dependable-looking chap. Probably, but for the green card problem, I could get a real job, in a real company, for real money. I can do better. I’m not thick.

  I’m not thick, I say aloud.

  I sigh and take out a new safety razor.

  Shave. Stop. I cough and spit. I’m bloody famished. A bagel is just not going to cut it this morning. I take the headlines and quickly dress and turn off the water and open the door, go down the steps, and head for Broadway and the McDonald’s on 125th.…

  It’s definitely early. On the far side of the street there are still homeless men sleeping on filthy mattresses on the sidewalk. I wonder for a moment how they manage to get through a night without being stabbed or beaten. Shit, maybe they have been stabbed and beaten. The homeless camp from here all the way up to Riverside Park and some sleep in the Amtrak tunnel beneath the park. Generally, only the hardiest ones sleep east of here on Amsterdam, and there a few mad souls who make Morningside Park their home.

  If it were me and I was cut off from Darkey and the boys and I couldn’t get home and I had to be on the streets (a recurring fantasy/nightmare of mine, incidentally), my plan is to buy a hammock and attach it to a rope and throw it up over a tree limb, hoist myself up, and sleep up there in the canopy. In the summer you could probably get away with it. In the winter you’d freeze to death. North Central Park is where I’d go, big and anonymous and reasonably safe. For some reason, every time I think of this plan it gives me a great sense of comfort. If all else fails, I can live in the trees of Central Park. It’s a bit silly, but that’s the best I can come up with.

  Down to 125th.

  Past the bodega and the impressively armored Chinky with its steel walls and buzzer to get in and thicker-than-thick Plexiglas counter and vandalproof reinforced iron chairs. When Klaatu and the other aliens finally show up and nuke the world, Mr. Han’s Chinky will, I’m sure, be the only thing left standing amidst the rubble. His food is probably nukeproof too, for it leaves your body about three hours after it enters virtually unchanged by digestive juices. I wave to Simon, who, of course, is up already, but out here in the early light and through that five-inch glass he fails to recognize me.

  McDonald’s is just opening, and there’s me and a line of homeless guys. I order the pancake breakfast and a nasty cup of coffee and sit at the window.

  My “hotcakes” come and they forget the syrup and there’s a whole ta-do while they find it, and suddenly I’m the pushy white guy making a fuss. I’m not the only one, though. Danny the Drunk is here and he’s already plastered. I don’t know how he does it. The man has dedication. He’s get
ting a milk shake for breakfast and paying in pennies and nickels. There’s word in the building that there’s more to Danny than meets the eye, but frankly I don’t much care. I don’t believe in the homeless sage who has attained wisdom by years of hard knocks and brutal experience. Danny has nothing to teach me. He’s a hopeless purple-faced alcoholic, of which I’ve seen plenty in Ireland, and I’m really not bothered if he was the president of some company or one of the Apollo astronauts or a bigwig at MIT. He wasn’t, in any case. He worked for the subways in a ticket booth, but that’s a fact getting in the way of the myth and Ratko, in particular, is always ready to emphasize the mysterious nature of his fall.

  Since we live in the same building, I suppose he feels a kinship. I can smell him getting closer, and then he comes and sits down opposite, the bastard.

  Morning? he says, as if unsure of his bearings.

  Aye, I say, head down, shoveling in pancakes with whipped butter and corn syrup.

  Cold, he says. Whether this is about the air temperature, his milkshake, or my demeanor, I’m not sure, but I say again:

  Aye.

  They have the story about the body on 135th?

  What?

  Your newspaper, do they have that story?

  Uhhh, yes, they do, I mumble reluctantly.

  It was the story I was reading. They found a body on the campus of City College. Black guy, he’d been shot, and maybe that would have gotten it onto page 23 or something because of the college connection but for the fact that his heart had been removed and straw placed in the cavity where the heart had been. It would grip the city for about a day until the next grisly murder came along, which it would—tomorrow. The police spokesman in the Daily News said that in the Jamaican gangs this is what they did with a stool pigeon. It shows that the man had no heart, no loyalty, that he wasn’t a real man at all. A dummy.