Peter and I used to laugh about that, but sometimes the laughter would catch in our throats. Even then I think I knew that we had led a sheltered existence, to which the Villa had only added; and the inklings that our life was somehow a lie had begun to take shape in my youthful consciousness.
On the Monday morning after the Danny McGovern wake, the O’Sullivan family sat in their kitchen, having breakfast—or at least, the men in the family sat: Annie O’Sullivan was at the counter, preparing sack lunches for the boys. Sun, made brighter reflecting off snow, lanced through the windows, dust motes floating like pixie dust.
Peter was chomping at his last piece of crisp bacon, and Michael was slathering honey from a honeycomb on a piece of almost-burnt toast (the way he liked it), when their father put down his empty coffee cup, saying, “Peter, I’m afraid I have to let you down.”
The younger boy frowned. “What do you mean, Papa?”
Papa’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Can’t come to hear your choir tonight, at the Villa. I have to work.”
A meaningful glance flicked between the two boys, and Peter asked innocently, “Work at what?”
From behind them, at the counter where she was wrapping sandwiches in wax paper, their mother snapped, “Work at putting food on your plate, young man.”
She always sounded more Irish when she scolded.
Their father had a somber look, but with a twinkle in his eyes, he asked the younger boy, “Am I forgiven?”
Peter thought about it, took another bite of bacon, chewed, said, “Well, okay. Just see it doesn’t happen again.”
And Papa laughed, and so did Peter. Michael smiled, but he had a funny pang—it made him sort of…jealous, or envious or something, to see how Papa and Peter got along, so free and easy. Almost like they were friends.
“Michael,” Papa said, turning his attention to his older son, the laughter over, “you and Peter help your mother…There’s time enough, before you have to head to school. Clear off those plates.”
Then the man of the house was on his feet, heading out, pausing only to pat Peter’s head, saying, “Good boy,” and then was gone.
Michael’s feelings weren’t hurt. He knew younger brothers always got more attention—they were the babies. But when the boy returned to the honeycomb for more sweetness, he made a nasty little discovery in one of the tiny holes: a dead bee.
Peter was already up and using his fork to clean the remnants of his breakfast off his plate and into the waste basket; but Michael sat there frozen, hypnotized by the dead insect. Something about it…something about it…
“Michael?” his mother prompted. “Your plate?”
“Huh? Oh…yes. Sorry.”
And he got up and cleared his plate into the trash—and threw his toast away, too.
At the Villa, in history class, Michael sat at his desk toward the back, gazing out the window at the gray trees clumped with snow, a few brown leaves clinging desperately to skeletal branches. He was thinking about the dead man with the pennies on his eyes, and the dead bee, and the dead leaves…and it seemed to him suddenly that death was everywhere.
Being a child, he wasn’t depressed by this realization; more, disappointed…
After school, after his paper route, Michael glided into the driveway on his bike, surprised not to be greeted by his brother’s usual snowball assault; he looked at the garage and thought about his father and how Papa’d said he had to work, tonight. Would he take his gun? Was this another mission? The boy went into the house, looking for his brother, but didn’t find him.
“He’s out in back,” his mother told him.
Michael found Peter sitting in one of the swing-set swings, gently swaying, lost in thought. The older boy sat next to his brother, the chains screaking, snow getting shaken off just from the gentle motion.
“You know what I wish?” Peter said.
“No. What do you wish?”
“I wish we could go on one of Papa’s missions with him. That would be keen, really keen.”
Michael didn’t admit he’d been having the same thought; instead he just said, “He’d never let us.”
Peter gave his older brother a sharp look. “He’s going on one tonight.”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s just, you know, ‘work’ work.”
“You said he did missions for Mr. Looney…”
“It’s not always missions. Some of it’s just…work like a job.”
Peter summoned up a taunting little smile. “Are you chicken?”
“No! And don’t you puck-puck at me! I’ll hold your face down in the snow if you puck-puck at me.”
“I’m not puck-puckin’…puck-puckin’.”
“Watch it! Watch it…Anyway, you know he wouldn’t take us.”
“We don’t ask! We just…tag after.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I dare you to do it!”
Despite the hurling down of that ultimate kid gauntlet, Michael shook his head. “You got a screw loose, sonny boy! Anyway, you have your choir concert tonight, at the Villa.”
Peter thought about that. “You don’t have a concert.”
“No…but I have to go. Mom said.”
Peter thought about that, too. Then, excited by his own ingenuity, the boy suggested, “Tell her you have to study for the big math test.”
“What big math test?”
“The big math test you’re gonna pretend you got! Gee whiz, Michael, sometimes you’re so stupid…”
The older boy bristled. “I’m not stupid. And I’m not chicken, either…Will you cover for me?”
“You bet!”
“Like Tonto for the Lone Ranger?”
Peter was nodding. “Like Tonto.”
And the two boys shook hands—like men.
Night had fallen—and a light rain had begun to fall, as well—by the time O’Sullivan left the dry warmth of his home for the wet chill outside. The Clemens family—who had a girl Peter’s age, also in the choir—had already picked up Annie and Peter to take them to the Villa for the concert. Michael was staying behind, up in his room, getting ready for some test or other.
In his dark topcoat and fedora, O’Sullivan strode through the drizzle to the garage, stepped inside, and moved to the rear of the building, to the cupboard, which he kept locked. Using a small key on his chain, he opened the doors and revealed boxes of ammunition, several handguns, and a black hard-shell case that might have, but did not, house a musical instrument. With the weapon within the case in mind, he also selected, from back on the upper shelf, two circular magazines—each drum containing one-hundred .45 caliber cartridges, the same as he used in his handgun of choice, the Colt he’d brought back from the Great War.
Carrying case in hand, cartridge drums stuffed under an arm, O’Sullivan shut the cupboard up, relocked it, walked to the garage doors, which he swung open; he got into the front seat, behind the wheel, reaching back to place the black case on the floor next to the rear seat, setting the drum-style magazines atop it. Then he started up the vehicle and the green Ford sedan rolled out into the light rain. He paused only to get out and close the garage doors again, unaware that—in the back of the car, inside the compartment under the rear seat—his son Michael, Jr., had stowed himself away.
The rain began to gather intensity, at first tap-dancing on the roof of the Ford, then drumming on it. O’Sullivan drove slowly—the streets were wet and slick, their surface a black mirror throwing streetlamp glow and the headlights of other cars back at him. Still, it took less than ten minutes to guide the Ford from the O’Sullivans’ residential neighborhood to the downtown of Rock Island.
When O’Sullivan pulled up in front of the Florence Hotel, Connor Looney was waiting, watching, just inside the lobby doors. The lanky Connor—in a black raincoat, his fedora snug—ran to the car, as if he could beat the rain there; and practically threw himself into the front seat.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’m early,” O’Sull
ivan said.
As the car pulled away from the curb, Connor checked his watch. “Damn thing must be running fast…Or maybe it’s just me.”
O’Sullivan glanced at Connor, who added, “I live for this.”
They were less than five minutes away from the warehouse district, even in this weather.
“Hell of a night,” Connor said.
O’Sullivan threw him a hard look. “We’re just going to talk, remember?”
Connor glanced in back. “Is that why you brought your violin?”
O’Sullivan said nothing.
“You just like to be prepared,” Connor said. “Like all Boy Scouts.”
For a minute or so, the only sound was the wheels on wet pavement, the patter of raindrops on the roof, and the sloshing of gathered water in gutters.
“Man lost his brother,” O’Sullivan said. “We settle him down. Tell him what he wants to hear. And move on.”
“’Course. But let’s not talk his ear off, drag this out all night—I got to get myself back downtown. There’s some skirts need liftin’.” The sleepy-eyed Connor plucked a flask from inside his dark topcoat. “Want a snort?”
O’Sullivan shook his head. The last thing Connor needed was a snort—O’Sullivan could tell this one wasn’t the man’s first of the night. But at least the volatile younger Looney appeared to be in an even temper. Right now he was singing, “T’aint Nobody’s Business If I Do,” which even made O’Sullivan smile, a little.
As the Ford jostled over the slick streets, the lid of the rear seat lifted, slightly, and the boy hidden away in the compartment got an inadvertent glimpse of the hard black carrying case resting on the floor, stuffed between the seats. The boy had only seen the inside of that case once, when—spying with Peter on their father—he’d watched Papa open it and assemble the parts within into a fearsome weapon.
He knew it was what the G-men on the radio and at the movies and in the funnies called a “tommy” gun—why its name was Tommy, the boy had no idea. Stuffy inside the cubbyhole, he pushed the lid up, just enough to let in some air—but also to have another look at that hard-shell case before him…knowing what lay within.
Up in the front seat, Papa was driving and Uncle Connor was riding—Michael had recognized the unpleasant man’s voice all too readily. They weren’t talking anymore, though Uncle Connor was singing a jazz song; he seemed in a good mood.
Sitting on top of the hard-shell case were two round metal canisters—each about the size of a can of tuna fish, maybe a little bigger, bouncing a little as the car rolled over the pavement and its occasional potholes. The canister had something to do with the tommy gun—that time he and Peter had seen Papa assembling the weapon, the drum had been the last puzzle piece to get locked in place.
Michael was pretty sure the canister had something to do with bullets. He lifted the seat lid a few more inches; the canisters, jostling gently with the rhythm of the car, were easily within his reach…he could take one and look at it for a second and put it back, no one the wiser…
That was when his father took a corner a shade sharp, and one of the canisters slipped off the black case, hitting the floor with a metallic klunk. With one hand on the wheel, and both eyes on his driving, Papa reached his other hand back, and Michael let the lid softly shut, not seeing his father fishing for the case, finding it, steadying it.
Connor asked, “Want me to get that…?”
“No,” Papa said. “It’s all right.”
Again the boy lifted the lid slightly, peeked out, and saw the tommy gun canister balancing on end, like a little wheel, on the floor next to the case. His father’s hand found the other canister, atop the case, and was now feeling around for the other one.
Michael reached for the canister, to put it back where his father would expect to find it, only the drum began to roll, with every bump of the road. Finally, as his father took another corner, the canister glided into Michael’s grasp!
The thing was heavy, much heavier than Michael had ever imagined, but he managed to put it back on top of the hard-shell case.
But as he drew his hand away, ready to slip back down into the darkness of his hideaway, Michael noticed a slot in the circular can: a bullet was showing! He’d been right—it was bullets, bullets for the tommy gun…and reaching out tentatively with a forefinger, like every child who ever touched a hot stove, the boy put his fingertip against the cold metal of the bullet…
…and the bullet popped out!
He caught it, watching as another bullet jumped into the slot. With his shoulder, he kept the lid up an inch or so, to let in enough light to see his prize. The bullet in his palm was two shades of metal; the Lone Ranger used silver bullets, but this bullet was made of something else.
Its lights doused, the Ford pulled down a narrow alley between brick buildings in an industrial area, though the boy—tucked away in his dark box under the backseat, his father’s bullet tight and cold in his clenched hand—didn’t know that. All he knew were sounds, like the hammering of rain on the Ford’s metal roof, and the slice of sight he gave himself by lifting that lid a crack.
Then the car rolled to a stop, and Michael heard first Connor’s door opening and closing, then his Papa’s, footsteps slapping at water-pooled pavement. And the back door opened, his father leaning in.
Michael eased the lid shut, returned to the womb of darkness, shivering, not just with the cold of the night.
The boy could hear that hard-shell case snapping open, followed by mechanical clicks and scrapes and clacks of machine-made parts fastening into other metal parts. That last metallic crack, Michael just knew, was that canister of bullets snapping on, like a terrible, wonderful period on the end of a sentence.
Then that was followed by another sharp closure—the back door shutting—making Michael flinch in his cubbyhole. The boy knew he shouldn’t be here—even sensed, to some small degree at least, the foolhardy dangerousness of his own mission. But he was nonetheless as thrilled as he was frightened. What brave thing was his father doing on this dark rainy night? What injustice was he righting?
Michael waited forever—perhaps as long as a minute—and pushed up the seat lid and pulled himself out from the seat, staying low. The sound of raindrops assailing the Ford was louder out here, like God had his own tommy gun. Peeking over the front seats, the boy looked out the rain-streaked windshield into the night.
Blurry as his view was, Michael could tell he was in an alley, a wall of brick on his either side. But where was his father, and Uncle Connor?
There they were! Down standing under a yellowish lamp over a back entrance to the building. Was it a warehouse? Uncle Connor was knocking on the door; Papa was standing just behind him, with something at his side—the tommy gun? To get a better look, Michael crawled carefully up and over into the front seat, trying not to make noise, though the pounding rain would have covered most anything. He got too close to the windshield, though, his breath fogging it, and when he wiped his own haze away with a jacket cuff, Papa and Uncle Connor were gone, the yellow lamp glowing alone in the night, like a drenched firefly.
As would most any kid, even in a situation like this one, Michael got quickly bored. First he got into the driver’s seat, and pretended to steer the car, making his feet reach down for the pedals, fooling with the gear shift stick. When he tired of that, he was back to being just another kid stuck in a car waiting for a parent.
He had come to watch his father “work”—to observe the dangerous, unfathomable things Papa, the war hero, did for Mr. Looney. And inside the brick building, Papa was on one of those missions Michael and Peter had speculated about, deep into so many nights, sometimes till after ten.
So, decision made, jaw firmly set—he was his father’s son, after all—the boy stepped out into the pelting rain and sought to do what he’d done so often: spy on his mysterious old man.
He tiptoed through the puddles, making little splashes, hugging the nearer brick wall, staying in the shadows, i
n case Papa and Uncle Connor came back out, unexpectedly. He wasn’t afraid of being left behind—the boy knew Rock Island well, from his paper route, and he could find his way home, though in this rain he might catch his death. But a cold was a risk worth taking…
At the door, he could hear voices within, muffled, faint. No good. He needed to see inside, and looked around for a window to peek in, or…ah! Just down the alley a ways, was another door, a smaller one, the bottom of it not snug, the wood rotted away, allowing light to spill out into the wet alley like glowing, glistening liquid.
He knelt there, as if at an altar, and peered under the generous gap, which gave him a view inside a huge, gloomy warehouse, a mostly empty expanse but for stacked crates and boxes and two men, out in the middle of the big room with its brick walls and concrete floor.
One of the men was sitting in a chair, arms in his lap, in a brown topcoat and no hat; the other was Uncle Connor, in his drenched raincoat, standing in front of the seated fellow, walking back and forth a little, getting water on the floor, talking while the man in the chair—was that Mr. McGovern from the wake? Fin McGovern, the dead man’s brother?—just listened, though he was looking at the floor, not at Connor.
Michael could not see his father, unaware that O’Sullivan was standing to one side of the door under which the boy peeked. And of course O’Sullivan—cradling his Thompson submachine gun in his arms like a baby—knew nothing of the boy’s presence, though he had noted the two figures in the darkness of the warehouse, undoubtedly two of McGovern’s cronies, who would be well armed, themselves.
Both father and son, from their similar vantage points, listened and watched while Connor Looney talked to Fin McGovern, voice loud and hollow and ringing in the big room.
Road to Perdition Page 5