Therefore, I had also decided that someone was going to have to be around to pick up the pieces when both Monk and Kelly finally fell, and furthermore, I had determined that someone was going to be me. The old ways were not my ways, and at the rate things was changing, what gangland needed was someone with youth and vision, both of which I possessed in abundance.
My philosophizing was interrupted by a spatter of blood and a piece of tongue, which I noted came from Monk’s jaw. Kelly had caught him coming in, trying to duck under a left jab but getting caught flush with a right uppercut, and one of Monk’s teeth went flying, not that he was likely to miss it or that it would alter his appearance to his disadvantage. By my reckoning, the two men had been fighting for nearly an hour and while it was pretty clear they were both tiring they had plenty of gumption left and they flailed away at each other like a couple of madmen. It wasn’t exactly a Marquis of Queensberry bout, and so there was a great deal of hair-pulling, nose-tugging, eye-gouging, kidney-slugging, ear-slapping and so forth, in addition to the punching and pummeling. This was where Monk was in his element, and every time he managed to get his mitts on Kelly’s formerly elegant person, the damage done was considerable.
It was about this time that Eat ’Em Up Jack and Razor Riley jumped into the makeshift ring, which was mostly delimited by cow pies and some straw. For a moment I thought they was going to go at it, but they was only calling a temporary halt to the proceedings, to allow the combatants a breather. Although it was damn cold in that barn, both Monk and Kelly were stripped to the waist and sweating like pigs. Somebody dumped a bucket of water over each of them, although where they found water that wasn’t frozen I have no idea. Each man was given five minutes to catch his breath and to have his second provide what little medical attention was possible, and then someone else clapped his hands and shouted, “Fight on, lads!” and fought on they did.
Among the many things I learned from watching this spectacle was that having a few rules makes for a better fight, which is why nobody pays to see a barroom brawl, but millions are willing to fork over some dough for a proper heavyweight duel. The spectator quickly tires when there’s no way to tell who’s winning, for not even the amount of blood on each man is a true indicator of advantage, since it can just as easily be the other fella’s. Well into the second hour, I found myself wishing that one or the other of them would end it, and while I was rooting for Monk, at this point a Kelly victory would also mean getting back to the city and a cozy evening with Freda.
At this very moment weren’t my prayers answered: With a last great roar of pain and anger and anguish and pride the two enemies threw themselves upon one another, tearing and biting. Monk had sunk his teeth into one of Kelly’s ears (tearing ears off was a great sport back then, especially when women was fighting each other) and was fumbling with his fingers for Kelly’s eyeballs, while Kelly had Monk’s jewels in one hand and was punching him in the liver with the other. Everybody present knew that this was it, that either Monk or Kelly would have to fall, and there wasn’t a sound in the barn, other than the noises that men make when they’re animals.
Well, they both fell, Kelly with his eyes still in his head and Monk with his bollocks still attached to his groin. I don’t know whether it was the wounds or the exhaustion that finally brought them both low, but suddenly there they were, flat on the floor. For a moment nobody could say nothing, just the sounds of collective hearts beating and sinking.
Then Plunkitt stepped forward, looming over the fallen Hectors like a victorious Achilles, which in a sense he was.
“That’ll be all for today, boys!” he exclaimed, very merrylike, as if he’d just been to the circus, or out to Coney of a summer’s afternoon. “’Twas a fine account you both give of yourselves, and now’s the time to bury the hatchet all around.” To be sure, Monk and Kelly were insensible to this plea but their gangs weren’t, and I could see in all their faces the dawning realization that the real chief in the room was neither Osterman nor Vacarelli but Plunkitt and, behind him, Big Tim and the Tiger, licking their lips and smacking their chops, with the whole town spread out before them like one great hot meal ready to be devoured.
Still unconscious, Monk and Kelly were bundled into waiting transports, whose horses lugged them away. Plunkitt was saying something to the rest of the gangsters, about how it was now going to be business as usual once more, only different, but I paid him no mind, for the growl in my belly reminded me I was hungry.
Chapter Nine
I was at Monk’s bedside when he finally woke up. The big blue pigeon named Hilda was roosting on his shoulder, as if her master had just decided to take a nap and the bird didn’t know what else to do except remain in place and wait for developments. Two or three cats curled at his feet, their meowing muffled by the bedclothes. We were in his flat, above the pet shop on Broome Street, and I could faintly hear the sounds coming from the street, although they were hardly loud enough to wake a sleeper, much less the dead, since it was a cold day and the windows were shut tight, as tight as such windows could be shut, against the elements. I thought he might die, or perhaps was already dead, when he suddenly lurched bolt upright, tossed over the covers and started shouting.
“Ya yeller bastard,” exclaimed Monk, swinging wildly with his right. “Fight like a man.”
When Monk suddenly started awake, I had been busy taking inventory of his newly missing body parts. His left earlobe was gone, as well as a good chunk of his right nostril. Clumps of his hair were also absent and I think he was missing a fingernail or two, but they may have been a casualty of earlier frays. This of course was in addition to all the razor scars, bullet holes, knife wounds, bite marks and other manifold disfigurements that marked him like a Red Indian brave.
I was about to tend to him, to try and do something to ease his condition, when the door to his bedchamber swung open and who should be standing there but Plunkitt. “Leave him be, lad,” he counseled. “For sure, after such strenuation, he’s just venting it out, and who wouldn’t?”
After sweeping away a pair of turtles, George Washington P. took a befouled cane chair and lit his pipe in the airless room, the better to contemplate what was left of the great Monk Eastman. I couldn’t figure out why he was there, since he had taken so little interest in the outcome of the fight. Later on I learned that the art of saying almost nothing was the hallmark of a Tammany man, and that was another lesson I took to heart.
“Who do you think won, sir?” I ventured to inquire after a decent interval. Monk had flopped back with a groan and was snoring soundly once more.
“Won, lad?” asked Plunkitt, as unmoved and indifferent as Sitting Bull, smoking his Virginia and thinking his thoughts, whatever they happened to be. Finally he sent a plume of smoke my way. As I was coming out of the fog, I heard him say: “Why, nobody, that’s who won. You seen it with your own eyes.”
“What do you mean?”
Plunkitt looks at me, exasperated. “I mean it don’t matter. Monk didn’t emerge victorious, nor did Kelly, and dat’s da end of it. If you’re as smart as I suppose you to be, Mr. Owney Madden of Tenth Avenue, you’ll soon enough see the wisdom of my sentiments.”
This remark set me to pondering, which I did as best I could over the racket that the sleeping Monk was setting up in his combative slumber.
Plunkitt took a deep breath of whatever fresh air was left in the room. “In this great city of ours, there’s Democrats, God bless ’em, and unfortunately Republicans. Come election time, there’s not a man on this here island second to GWP in ardor for the rightness of the Democratic cause in general and Tammany’s way with it in partic’lar. But once da fightin’ is done, why then, lad, business has got to go on, win or lose, and as stupid as the Republicans may be, them’s that made a profession of the political calling understand this as well as I do. Me and the Republicans are enemies just one day in the year—election day. Then we fight tooth and nail, and all’s fair, even what ain’t. Whatever it takes is
what we do, be it compromising a married fella or rattin’ out a stooge what thinks he’s high-and-mighty and holier than the pope in Rome.”
“Rattin’s never right,” I interrupted.
“It ain’t rattin’ when you rat on a rat, and don’t you forget it,” says Plunkitt. “Meanwhile, the rest of the time, it’s live and let live with us, because sure don’t ya know there’s plenty to go around if nobody gets greedy.”
This went against everything I had learned thus far from the Gophers and from Monk: that you fight your enemies and hate them; beat them and thump them and kill them if necessary, and never let them get the best of you. That what they said of the patron saint of the old Five Points, Fatty Walsh—“He never knew when he was beat”—should be said of all of us. That it was humiliation beyond all understanding should a man of the opposite and contrary persuasion get the drop on you, or steal your gal, or rob your stuss game, or insult you in a thousand ways for which the code of honor of the streets demanded satisfaction. And now here was this grand muckety-muck from 14th Street come to say that all of that didn’t matter a jot or a tittle. I couldn’t accept what he was saying. “That ain’t right,” I squeaked.
“It’s better than right. It’s politics.” The great man’s pipe had finally gone out, and he was searching for his pouch and plug. “On election day I try to pile up as big a majority as I can against Wanamaker in the fifteenth. Any other day, George and I are the best of friends. You see, we differ on tariffs and currencies and all them t’ings, but we agree on the main proposition that when a man works in politics, he should get something out of it. Politicians have got to stand together this way or there wouldn’t be any political parties in a short time. Then where would we be?”
Plunkitt gave up his search for a refill, rose and stood over the body of the fallen Monk and tousled his hair, as if Eastman were a child. “Just like him, is where,” he said. “Beaten, bloodied, friendless and alone.”
Now, I may have been inexperienced, but I could sense the man’s meaning as plain as if he had just spoken his mind bluntly: as far as Tammany was concerned, Monk and the Eastmans was finished, and Kelly too, because if there’s one thing politicians cannot abide, it’s a draw. Someone has got to win and someone has got to lose, and the public has got to see, appreciate and respect the difference. Monk and Kelly each had lost by not winning, and by not losing either.
“You’re a bright lad, Owney the Killer,” said Plunkitt by way of a valedictory. “And I hope and trust you’ve learned a lesson or two tonight” He donned his hat and drew his cloak tightly about his person, ready to venture out into the cold night. “Now forget about this one and go home to your mother and your brother and your sister. Take care of them, boy; it’s the calling the Good Lord above has give ya, and on that you’ll surely be judged. For by the looks of ya, rendering unto Caesar is not going to be a problem; it’s the rendering unto God that may give ya some small difficulty along the way.”
I sat there alone, in contemplation. I knew that Monk’s henchmen—Kid Twist, who had sprung him from the Jersey jail in Freehold the year before, and Richie Fitzpatrick—were probably already tending to details on the street and plotting how to succeed the boss. There’s nothing as ineffective and useless as a leaderless gang.
Which was the same problem with the Gophers. It was all very well for Plunkitt to proclaim that the Irish was born to lead, and maybe that was true over at the Wigwam. But on the West Side, leaders was in damn short supply no matter what race they was. You could rely on Razor or Goo Goo or One Lung or Happy Jack to fight like the very devil when they were battling the coppers or the railroad pigs, but the big picture, the long range, eluded them entirely. And it was for this reason, I felt, that there were splinter gangs all over the West Side—not just our rivals the Dusters but the Marginals and the Pearl Buttons, not to mention the gangs that was mostly on our side, like the Gorillas, the Rhodes Gang and Parlor Mob. Whereas, with strong leadership and five hundred guns to back it up, the Gophers by rights should be running the entire West Side and after that who knew?
At that moment I decided that Razor had to go, and with him Happy Jack, Goo Goo, One Lung and whoever else got in my way. I knew Chick, Billy and Eddie would back me up, plus I had made friends with another tough kid named Tanner Smith, who was starting to run with the Marginals, sworn enemies of the Hudson Dusters and therefore one I felt was on my side.
Dawn was gloaming through the dirty panes when Monk finally awoke from his long enforced slumber. I could see him looking around, strangely calm, figuring out where he was and then, when he had satisfied himself on that score, who he was with and who was with him. Which was only me.
“Own,” he finally croaked, and raised his right hand as if to pat me on the head.
“Right here, Monk,” says I, bright-eyed and smiling. I knew that Monk, who had survived worse than this, didn’t want no tears or weaklings in his presence. “You licked that dirty dago but good.”
And then I did something I never would admit to a living soul for all these long years, not to Freda, nor Marty nor Ma nor even May: I threw myself on his breast and cried like a baby, for sure wasn’t Monk a Da to me and more. I’d seen one Da die and had no hankerin’ to witness another, so to tell you the truth, I’m not sure who I was crying more for that morning, not that it much mattered. My tears were occasioned not only by my memories and his condition but by his prospects, which I hadn’t the heart to tell him, not then and not later, figuring that deep in his heart he must have known them as well as I.
Monk said nothing more as the light illuminated his ravaged phiz, but lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying as hard as he could to stare into his future and seeing nothing but the darkness looking back at him.
Chapter Ten
I watched over Monk that morning, the false winter sun as perfidious as ever, promising light and warmth and only half coming across through the dingy panes. He heaved and rolled and flopped like the Teutonic in rough seas, now shouting and now quiescent as the mood took him. There was nothing much to do but sit and wait and watch and wonder, and I did plenty of all four.
Flopping, I came to know, and in fact already had reason to know, was the sign of the dead man: the collapse, the bounce of the head, the jerk of the body, the spine twitching, the mouth agape, the breath seized and labored, grasped and expelled, a fixed fight to the finish and everybody betting the wrong way except God. I’d seen this act before, which didn’t make me like it any the better, and once again viewing Monk I beheld my Da…
Liverpool was no fit place to take a young bride. The town was full of rough and resentful laborers whose job it was to service the great ocean liners which plied the Atlantic trade from France to England to Ireland to America, and all other manner of dockside life, which as you may know is not always Of the highest quality. Liverpool was a place from which to escape as quickly as possible—so you could get back even quicker, board the ship and whither away.
It was here that Francis and Mary Madden got their first taste of life abroad, when Francis’s pocket was picked just moments after they disembarked from the packet boat. He had turned to assist Mary with her steamer trunk, bending forward at the waist, when along came a fellow whose fingers found their way into and out of Francis’s waistcoat with a speed that could hardly be credited.
Now, there were few young men who could run faster than Francis Madden, especially when he had the wind up. Mary had spotted the reprobate almost at once and was pointing furiously in his direction. For aside from the few shillings she had in her pocket, all the money they had in the world had been in Francis’s purse, which even then was fast disappearing along the quay.
Francis took out after his quarry like a man possessed. He was not about to let some miserable little sod put paid to his glorious dreams at such an early stage, and soon enough had taken the light-fingered wire down. It was with more than a bit of surprise that he heard the lad cry out in the accents of west Ireland.
/> Listening to my mother recount this tale more than a decade later, I was astonished to hear in her voice some trace of sympathy for the gonoph, just because he was Irish. To me, he deserved not understanding but a good hiding, his race be damned.
The lad was not about to submit to the tender mercies of Francis Madden without a struggle, which commotion soon enough attracted the attention of a policeman, who had been trolling dockside looking for newcomers to shake down. His solution was to lay about with, his truncheon more or less indiscriminately, which gave the thief an opening to duck away from my Da, which left him to face the wrath of the law alone.
Now, given that in Ireland the law was pretty much always your enemy, Francis harbored little hope of being able to explain things to a British copper in a civil way. Nevertheless he tried, dodging the blows from the daystick and attempting to get a word in edgewise. The copper, however, was having none of it, and kept flailing away, which left Da to approach the problem as one of fisticuffs and not discourse; and when an opening in the policeman’s guard presented itself, he decked his man with one well-aimed blow.
That was the signal for a general melee. The English side being in the majority, the Anglo-Saxons quickly began to carry the day over the Celts, as history informs us.
So it was that Mr. and Mrs. Madden spent their first night in England as guests of the Liverpool magistrate’s court and then, after a bit of legal business that neither of them fully understood, of the central receiving gaol, to which each was remanded for the night for the crimes of vagrancy and disturbance of the peace.
The next morning Mr. and Mrs. Madden were informed that, having been convicted of a crime, they must pay a fine before being permitted to go about their business. Which misdeed carried with it a financial penalty that, by an amazing coincidence, nearly totaled to the penny the small sum of money that they had left in their possession. They were allowed to retain just enough scratch for two fares to Leeds on a train leaving that very hour.
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