Billy O’Malley bragged that the Marine Corps was the real thing, the Navy was easy stuff compared to the Corps, and John laughed when everyone else did and he drank beer over the burning taste of vomit deep inside his throat. He felt warm and safe and wildly happy when his Uncle Peadar flung an arm around him and said, “Oh, Christ, he’s a good kid though, isn’t he? Ah, what wouldn’t we all give to have our Johnnie the Fireman, may he rest in peace, just get a look at him. He turned out all right, after all, didn’t he?”
John O’Malley always knew that he was stupid. He knew that he seemed to see things in slow motion, to continue looking at what was already in the past. He knew he was always just a little out of step, but he bore the slightly out-of-focus feeling with patience and acceptance. When others made fun of him and played tricks on him, he responded with a sweet smile across his broad face, ready to join the laughter because when he did, the laughter of the others turned friendly and the teasing was usually less cruel and more approving.
He wondered what it felt like to be smart, to grasp things, to understand mysteries. He knew that most others did not live surrounded by puzzlement. He knew that when the others filed into the classrooms, seated themselves casually, good-naturedly clowning until the instructor showed up, none of them felt that terrible stomach-aching twist deep inside that he felt. None of them felt sweat, smelly and thick, down the inside of armpits and center of back. For John O’Malley the code classroom was exactly the same as any classroom at St. Simon’s: threatening, frightening, a place where he would be revealed once more.
He looked around, a ready smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. He admired the way some of the guys were able to distinguish themselves, even though dressed exactly like everybody else. Some turned the collar of the denim shirt up just slightly along the back of their necks. Some angled the heavy white duck hat over one eyebrow; others shoved the hat back so that it clung precariously to the crown of a newly Navy-shaved skull.
He wished he could be like that, jaunty and calm inside, not all jumpy and feeling like he had to pee. John O’Malley’s hat sat squarely across his broad forehead, just the way they told him it should.
The instructor arrived and he was a dapper guy in crisp fatigues that could stand all by themselves. He called the roll and they answered “Yo!” in that sharp way they had learned was the Navy way. Even John could do that, though it didn’t make him feel any more comfortable. The instructor lugged a box to the top of his desk and had the first man in each row come forward and count out enough tapping devices for the others in the row. The instructor warned that nobody was to touch the device, just leave it alone for now.
The sounds of clicking and tapping filled the room. Even John lightly fingered the flat little key and depressed it a few times.
“Okay,” the instructor said after a few minutes, “what the fuck does it take to convince you jerk-offs that I’m not kidding?”
His face convinced them, and his voice and the threatening tension of his body. They all clasped their hands in their laps as he said to do. Over the blackboard in the front of the room was a shade and the instructor hooked his index finger into the small metal ring and pulled, unrolled the chart to reveal the dots and dashes. John O’Malley felt panic, sick, familiar: the classroom part of himself. It thudded in his chest and down into his stomach. The chart was terrifying, foreign, incomprehensible, unknowable.
“Now this here is what the Morse code looks like,” the instructor said, “but it’s pure shit to think you’re gonna learn anything from looking at a chart even though I’m gonna give each of you a small card with the code on it to study. What you’re gonna do,” he told them, “is you’re gonna listen.” He stressed the word and it reverberated in the air as he yanked on the metal ring and sent the chart spinning out of sight. As it disappeared, John O’Malley felt a nameless sense of relief.
“You’re gonna listen and listen and listen. You’re gonna close your goddamn eyes and listen!”
Dot dash; dash dot dot dot; dot dot wait dot; dash dot dot. The electrical sounds buzzed through him, not just through his brain, but through his body, his chest and stomach and arms and legs. He could feel the sounds at the tip of his fingers, at the ends of his curled toes. He saw the letters beneath his closed eyelids, actually saw them as they flashed through him. He chanted in unison with the others, identifying the sounds as letters. His voice rose strangely strong and certain and an odd sense of elation filled every part of John O’Malley’s being.
By the end of the introductory lesson, John had absorbed the entire Morse alphabet, effortlessly, naturally, as though all his life he had been waiting for some special language, some clarifying magic which would render the whole mysterious world comprehensible at last.
Through some freak quirk or accidental arrangement of nerve endings, through some blood-born never-before-encountered natural instinctive rhythm, he, of all of them, had a positive genius for codes.
The instructor said he was a wise guy for failing to answer truthfully when the class was asked if anyone knew the code already. A few of the other guys convinced the instructor that John O’Malley didn’t lie, not ever. They also had to convince John O’Malley that the code, the dashes and dots and pauses and flickers, did not speak to anyone else the way it spoke to him.
The magic sounds, which spoke to him more clearly than anything he had ever encountered before, were truly a special gift. In his bunk that night, the other guys threw sounds at him, beeps and clicks. With a sense of awe and bemused admiration, they heard him respond accurately, astonishingly.
He lay awake that night, afraid to sleep. He moved his eyes from side to side, traced the sagging bulges of the mattress inches over his face, blinked himself awake time and again so that he wouldn’t fall asleep. Because, he reasoned, if he fell asleep, he might lose the gift; it might all drift away. And he had been waiting too long.
But it didn’t drift away. It became firmly fixed in his brain and he devoured codes like sustenance, was the first in the class to raise his hand, shyly, to hand in the decoded message which had flashed, singing, through his brain.
The instructor discussed John O’Malley with the Senior Coding Instructor and they went over John O’Malley’s records. It was decided that he was one of those rare flukes that turn up from time to time: a nearly retarded boy, messing up at almost everything he touched, but with an absolute gift for codes.
They jumped him into advanced code classes, threw the most complicated codes at him. It was all the same to John O’Malley.
The Senior Coding Instructor scratched his chin and said, “I guess it’s because the rest of his head is so damn empty. All his concentration goes into what he hears on the earphones. I guess it’s something like the way a blind man can concentrate on sound. Ya know, nothing to distract him.”
Cables were sent, thousands of miles away, about John O’Malley’s rare and perfect gift. After his leave, because of his facility, he was to be given a very special assignment.
TWENTY-NINE
KIT O’MALLEY CAREFULLY STRETCHED her pistol-holding hand along the branch of the huge old tree and aimed directly into the window of Eileen Fahey’s living room. She closed one eye, sighted, and systematically shot all six of the stupid girls dead as they bobbed and ducked into the pan of water and came up with apples stuck in their mouths like pigs.
What a dumb way to spend Halloween. Kit remembered all the things she and Bobby Kelly had planned to do. It hadn’t been much fun doing them with some of the other boys; it just wasn’t the same. Bobby Kelly had the mumps and there was a whole year of anticipation shot to hell. He’d tried to sneak out the fire escape but his father caught him and whacked him, because, he yelled, “A sneak is a sneak, mumps or no mumps!”
Kit fingered the heavy stocking filled with flour which was tied around her waist; that was for thumping people. Her water pistol was filled with Waterman’s ink; there was a bag of rotten eggs, carefully collected, one at a time, fro
m the refrigerator over a period of weeks. She squinted at her Mickey Mouse watch; she still had an hour until she had to be home. Her limit was nine o’clock because it was a special night. She’d run the streets with the boys, knocking over ash cans in front of apartment houses where the janitor was known as a rat, making as much commotion as possible. She’d marked sidewalks and gutters with chalk and hunks of coal; she’d had a few thumping fights with opponents bigger than herself and considered herself victorious.
But there had to be something more, to make up for Bobby Kelly having let her down.
Her eyes moved from Eileen Fahey’s dumb party to the tin shack on the big lot across the street. The plan came to her, full-blown, as though long conceived and just waiting for her to recognize it. She would blitz the shack; singlehanded she would mess it up so badly that the big guys would talk about nothing else until next year.
Carefully, she eased herself down the branches to the ground. Her heart pounded with building excitement and her mouth went dry from self-inflicted fear. She scanned the block, snatched up her bag of eggs, darted in the shadows to the edge of the street, waited until a car went by, ran across the street and leaped into the shadows on the edge of the lot. She climbed the hill in the big lot, breathless, body close to earth in a slithering motion. She willed herself to become invisible: no one could see her or know of her existence.
She crept to the edge of the silent shack and listened, then released her breath. The world was different from up here, strange and unfamiliar. She pressed her ear against the side of the shack and counted to ten, then waited again and surveyed the shack carefully.
It had been put together from bits and pieces of whatever materials a neighborhood of growing boys could scrounge. There were tin walls and a cutout window with a real wooden window frame. Instead of glass, the window had cardboard panes which kept out nosy people. The roof was flat, either tin or heavy cardboard.
Carefully, Kit O’Malley transferred her water pistol from her right hand to her left. She reached out, tested the doorknob. It turned with a creaking sound and the door opened inward with a sudden lunge. Kit found herself inside a dimly lit room, about ten feet by ten feet. The light came from a small electric bulb which dangled at the end of a cord which had been strung over a hook on the ceiling. The question of how they had ever managed to get electricity into the shack never even occurred to Kit.
She was more immediately concerned with what Timmy Mulcahy was doing here and how to get free of his grasp.
“What the fuck do you want here?” he demanded thickly as he bent her left wrist almost off her arm. “C’mere, lemme get a look at you, kid. Who the hell are you?”
The heavy odor of beer came not only from the row of empties along one side of the room but from Timmy Mulcahy’s breath and from the sweaty odor of his body. Kit tried to pull free but Mulcahy held her in a terrible grip.
“Hey, come on, Mulcahy. Come on, will ya? Look, let go. It’s me, Kit O’Malley. You know me. Let go, will ya?”
He leaned into her face, his hand went roughly to the back of her head and he jerked her face toward the light so abruptly that her sailor cap fell to the floor. His small eyes narrowed, then widened in appreciation.
“Hey, yeah. I know ya, don’t I? You’re that little girl plays ball so good, right? Hey, what the fuck you doin’ dressed like a sailor boy anyways?”
“For Halloween, ya know. I’m wearin’ my brother’s Sea Scout shirt and my cousin’s sailor cap. Hey, look, Mulcahy, let go of my arm, huh? You’re hurting me.”
He tightened his grip and moved closer to her face and said suspiciously, “Yeah? Well, what the fuck are you doin’ here? What’s in that bag? What are you up to?” He shook her with each question.
Kit began to feel afraid. It was one thing for boys her own age to use rough language around her or to jostle her. It was another thing for a grown-up man like Timmy Mulcahy. She moved, an inch at a time, tried to get nearer to the door, which Mulcahy had slammed shut.
“I was just going to...kind of...you know, just Halloween stuff. I was gonna shake some flour around and smash some eggs on the wall and stuff like that. You know, Timmy, for a Halloween joke on the big guys.”
He released her, folded his arms across his chest and flung his head back with a snapping motion so that the heavy hank of greasy black hair was off his forehead for a moment before it fell back again. He studied Kit appraisingly.
“Hey, you know something, kid? You got real balls planning to do something like that”
“Well, look, I won’t do anything now. I mean, okay, I got caught and fair is fair, so I’ll just leave.” Instinctively, she added, “See, my three friends dared me to do this, and they’ll be wondering what I’m up to if I don’t get back down from the lot, Mulcahy.”
He didn’t seem to even be aware of her rush of words. He seemed to be thinking about his own last remark. He made a strange laughing sound down in his throat. “Hey, kid, don’t you get it? Ain’t that funny? You hear what I just said? Shit, I just said you got real balls planning to do something like that.” He stopped laughing suddenly and lowered his head to peer at her through his hair. “You ain’t got no balls at all, have you, girly? Huh, have you?”
Kit looked around quickly, searched for escape. There were no real windows; they were covered dummies. There was just the one door and Timmy Mulcahy’s massive bulk covered it completely. On the walls were calendar pictures of half-naked women and a few dirty words neatly printed and repeated with artistic flourishes and a few dirty drawings in crayon. There were some dirty old couch cushions against one wall. And the line of empty beer bottles.
Kit dove for a bottle, clutched it by its long neck. “Get outta my way, Mulcahy.”
Mulcahy, lost in his own contemplation, might have been deaf. “If you ain’t got no balls down there, girly, then what have you got, huh? Let’s have a look at what you got there, kid.”
He moved so ponderously, so irrevocably that she hadn’t time to elude him. The bottle flew harmlessly from her hand as he knocked her to the hard-packed dirt floor. She felt the bulk of her water pistol press into her buttock, felt the rough, coarse, sandpaper hands grab at her as she whirled and twisted and kicked.
There was a sudden explosion of shock in the pit of her stomach and her breathing stopped. She could neither inhale nor exhale or move or make a sound from the sledge-hammer impact of Timmy Mulcahy’s fist.
“Now keep the hell quiet, you little bitch,” the dark reddened face over her said. “I’m gonna see for myself what the fuck you got down there.”
There were parts of it she would never remember, a totally blank passage of time during which she somehow found her way down the hill of the big lot, crossed the street, walked through the darkness of the small lot, climbed a fence which separated Dr. Fineman’s tiny back yard from the lot and fell in a huddle against the back door of the doctor’s house.
She remembered that the dog, Murphy, came over to her and that she reached up and wrapped her arms around his bobbing, nodding head and hid her face against his acrid fur.
That was where Mrs. Fineman found her, bleeding, torn, gray with shock but adamantly refusing to release her rigid grasp of arms and locked fingers which held the dog close to her and kept others away.
It took Brian O’Malley three days to get Timmy Mulcahy.
Had he caught him on the night of the rape, there was no question but that he would have killed him. Dr. Fineman and Dr. Mahoney both sensed that immediately. They fed him a couple of shots of cheap abrasive whiskey, handed him a lit cigarette, tried physically to restrain him.
“We’ll not let you go running off into the streets the way you are now, Brian,” Dr. Mahoney told him. “We’ve your family to think of if you’re not sane enough to think about them yourself.” The large hand was firm on his shoulder and only released him when Brian sat down on one of the stiff wooden chairs in the doctors’ inner office.
“Now, Brian,” Dr. Mahoney said
carefully, “you could arrest him, you know. That’s one alternative.”
Dr. Fineman’s bushy black brows shot up; he yanked the short cigar from between his teeth. “One alternative?” he asked his colleague. “Are there alternatives in this situation? The man’s committed an act of criminal sexual assault on a fourteen-year-old child. O’Malley’s a policeman; he knows the law. What are the alternatives to arresting this bum, Peter? I’m really curious.”
Mahoney cursed softly, then jabbed an index finger at Fineman. “You’d have the child subjected to a courtroom trial? After what she’s been through?”
Fineman lit a match and puffed the dead cigar to life until clouds of foul smoke surrounded him. “No, not necessarily a trial. I don’t think it would ever get that far. But, God, this bum should be arrested and charged. It can be handled discreetly. Look, I’ve got a few friends who could see to it—”
Brian stood up and towered over the doctors. “Fuck your few friends, Dr. Fineman. Look. You both mean well. Okay. Take care of my sister. I’ll take care of Mulcahy.”
Mulcahy disappeared for a while and Brian’s search became not so much a physical thing as a carefully controlled emotional ordeal. He took time off from the job, used some overtime that was coming to him, pleaded family illness, and devoted himself to searching and waiting. Mostly waiting, because he considered Mulcahy an animal, and with an animal’s instinct, he would head for home.
On the third night, Brian watched as Mulcahy finally returned to his family’s flat on Park Avenue and East 180th Street. He felt no change in the dead, still calmness of his brain as he leaned into the wooden doorframe of the tenement next to Mulcahy’s and waited. It would have been so easy, right there, in the rain-empty street to confront Mulcahy; his fists clenched and unclenched as he watched his prey lean heavily on the doorknob, then shove himself through the creaking, battered front door.
Brian lit a cigarette and breathed evenly. Now he knew where Mulcahy was, that he felt it was safe to return home, that he was no longer wary. There was the sound of a train as it roared down the tracks of the Central. It was a short train, just a few cars with a few vague passengers returning from Manhattan, heading to Westchester, peering blankly out toward the dark walls which lined their passage.
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