Divide the Dawn- Fight

by Eamon Loingsigh

  Cinders answers Dinny, “The McGowan’s left the city. I couldn’t stop them. Rochester, I think.”

  As Tanner hands money to the needy, the mendicants send humble thanks to the white hand that feeds.

  “Did you know that Garry Barry is alive?” I come to Dinny’s ear. “And he is working with Wolcott and the Waterfront Assembly?”

  But he seems overcome with the idea that the McGowan family left Brooklyn while he’d been incarcerated.

  “I know you and McGowan went way back,” I speak up after swallowing my shyness. “Too brave, too pure they say of him. But he’s been dead for almost four years. You did right by him. You buried him with dignity and took care of his family. You even found them all jobs. But we have important things—”

  “Sadie an’ my son?” He interrupts. “Where are they?”

  “They are out on Long Island. Darby and Anna hounded them while you were gone and broke the window in the brownstone,” Through the crowd Harry glances over his shoulder at us from a distance. “That’s when we saw Barry and Wiz the Lump.”

  Mrs. Lonergan’s boisterous voice breaks in again for Dinny’s attention, “Thank ya so very much, man. An’ what ’bout the bikecycle shop eh?”

  “That biddy ol’ hag ain’t worth a flamin’ bag o’ dog shit to us now,” The Swede puts in for Dinny’s consideration. “Her husband an’ her eldest son are both Bill’s now. Let that bicycle shop pay its own way.”

  “Tanner,” Dinny calls out. “Give her some extra for the bike shop. Two mont’s rent. She’s got a business to run.”

  Tanner nods his head and peels off a few more bills for Mary as she leaves us with a pug ugly smile and handfuls of cash.

  For once I agree with The Swede’s logic. Over the crowd I look with a cold eye, for some here would take the Hanan boots, the handouts of cash and our good will and ask Bill Lovett to better it.

  At that moment Burke comes round the corner with twenty men behind him.

  “Let Bill come for us now,” The Swede clutches the handle of a wooden cudgel. “An’ we’ll cut him down in the snow.”

  Little Riddle

  “Kill, kill!” Non Connors yells over his shoulder and thrusts a cudgel into the air.

  Darby Leighton strides through the deep snow at the ass end of Bill Lovett’s new gang. As the wind lashes at the florid bruise over his eye he blocks the gusts with the back of his right hand. Through his fingers he eyes the Statue of Liberty between a brick rail house and a decrepit clapboard stable. But his hands burn like ice in the cold, so he shakes them out and pushes them into trouser-pockets. Under a flat cap tears freeze on his cheeks when the wind rushes over the snow.

  I have to convince Bill I can be his Fifth Lieutenant, Darby’s thoughts race as he struggles against the elements. He has to understand. I have a family to support now. Everyone has a role already, but me.

  Inland, on the left is the corbeled brickwork and arched windows of the half-buried Pioneer Iron Works factories.

  Empty this morn. Everything is empty this morn. Even my stomach.

  Up ahead Connors again belts out to a solemn morning, “We’re gonna fookin’ grind them down to dust! Whose territory is this?”

  “It’s ours!” fifty men chant back. “Always been ours.”

  “Who do we name for losin’ this ground?” Connors calls out again.

  “Meehan! Dinny fookin’ Meehan!” they raise rope in response, and kitchen knives, spades and blackened two-by-fours pulled from burnt-out storehouses.

  You’re not supposed to say that name, the thought comes to Darby as a matter of routine.

  “We take this back t’day,” Connors growls through clenched teeth, the veins in his neck coursing blue with aroused blood.

  “Kill, kill, kill!” the gang hoarsely chants in the bitter cold.

  Bill’s gang is lined up in phalanx formation from sidewalk to sidewalk between the buildings and cuts through the snow like a spear through white skin. At the head of them all is Bill Lovett with his weather-worn sheep’s pelt over a pressed Army uniform. He is flanked by his lieutenants on the left and right—one-arm Joey Flynn, Frankie Byrne, the limping Richie Lonergan and a rabid Non Connors goads the crowd with hymns to homicide.

  The grunts who form the weight of Bill’s force follow along. Many deem themselves the Trench Rabbits and have taken up the moniker proudly. The crew of teens that follow Richie Lonergan includes Abe Harms the little German Jew, Petey Behan the Cutpurse, Matty Martin and Timmy Quilty, but since there are so many Tims and Toms and Jims and Johns, the men call him Timmy Bucks, since he has a face-full of buck teeth. Lagging behind them all like a lost soldier, Darby pulls up the rear.

  The angry mob passes P.S. Thirty, but the primary school is barren of children on this day. On the right comes the Lidgerwood factory. Inside, foundries normally melt steel into liquid and cast it. An assembly line then manufactures electric hoists for miners in Pennsylvania or even loggers out in Washington State as well as heating boilers for ships and modern buildings. But today it is vacant as if the industrial age had ended and only the shells of buildings past remain.

  “Kill!” Connors yells into an echoless air. A shirtless blacksmith holds crucible tongs and watches the men pass from arched iron double-doors as steam emits from the forge and furnace inside the brick facade.

  Four wild hounds slip by Darby and hop through the snow baying along to the men’s song, joyful to join the hunt. Bill had fed them enough meat scraps to whet their love for blood, and to assert his status as pack leader. Just as he’d done with his new gang members. Just enough to want for more.

  “Kill, kill!” The incessant chants goes on as Darby’s stomach bubbles in fitful churns at the words.

  “My god,” he mumbles as John Lonergan, Richie’s father, thrusts a stevedore’s hook in the air. “Someone will be killt today.”

  “Vhat did you say?” Abe Harms falls back to Darby and pushes a broom handle into his chest. “Here, you need a veapon.”

  “Does it really need to come to this?” Darby leans his windburnt face down to Abe and speaks in a lowered tone.

  But Abe does not respond in-kind and moves his close-cropped eyes away from Darby, “Keep your head up, Leighton. This is the best thing that could have happened to you.”

  “I don’t need advice from a teen,” Darby shoots back.

  “Yet you ask,” Abe coolly glances upward. “Vhat opportunities did you have after Mickey Kane took over Red Hook? You had none. And now you valk among Bill’s men pouting like a petulant little parasite. Are you just a hanger-on like shit on a dog’s tuchis?”

  “I ain’t poutin’,” Darby snaps back and picks at the icy tears stuck to his cheek. “I just don’t think it needs to get bloody.”

  The thought of blood makes Darby’s stomach churn again. When he witnessed his brother Pickles go hilt-deep with a knife in a man’s belly back in 1910, Darby had turned as white as the dying man. And when he watched Bill’s gun transform Sammy de Angelo’s face into a meaty ruin, he felt the tension in the body loosen and—

  Oh, Jesus on the cross, Darby grits and winces just thinking about it.

  After he witnessed that murder up close, Darby stood woozily until his stomach threw its contents out of his mouth so quickly that it shocked him. And when he smelled the deep scent of iron and saw the puddle of blood slowly spread round de Angelo’s collapsed head like a red halo, his legs wobbled, his body shook and all went black. Moments later he was awoken to men dragging him, while a cacophonous roar had taken over one ear that dogs Darby to this day. That was back in 1917, Bill’s first revolt against Dinny Meehan’s White Hand Gang.

  How much blood must be culled in the second?

  Abe leans into Darby’s good ear as if to answer, “Vhen the resources dvindle, the cruelest zurvive and the compassionate must step aside. Those who have the ability to plunder and kill at will may live longer days than those who hesitate. It may be a hard truth, but in the grand zcheme of things,
Bill Lovett is doing great acts of benevolence.”

  “I’m sure Mickey Kane’ll take great solace in that,” Darby counters.

  “In this vorld men like you and I must find a vay to become valuable. Parasites will be purged. Here, a man is judged by his value. And value you have, Darby Leighton. You are marked, you know. You have a very important role to play. More important than any of us, except Bill. Do you even know vhat it is? Your role?”

  I will be Bill’s Fifth Lieutenant, and you will be my underling.

  But instead of admitting his desire, Darby says, “I know all the narrow alleys and courts, back entrances, dark corners an’ hidden passages through the mazes all along the waterfront from the Navy Yard down to Red Hook. I know where Detective William Brosnan goes to collect his stipend from Jonathan G. Wolcott’s lump, Wisniewski. I know where Vincent Maher goes to get his cock stroked and I know where Liam Garrity’s mother and sisters live.” Darby eyes the short teen. “I know all the comin’s an’ goin’s o’ the White Hand an’ if a slattern farts in Brooklyn, I can tell ya if ya she puts butter on her potatoes or milk, so don’ pretend I don’ know that rightin’ the lie about my brother Pickles an’ gettin’ him outta Sing Sing is in Bill’s best interest, as well as yours and mine.”

  “Good, good. Then the only question is, can you accomplish this? Because vhen ve look into your bevildered eyes, we do not know if you can. And if you are able to do it, then you must know how to leverage it for your benefit. Do you know how to do any of this? I can help you, if you require it. You need but ask, and I vill be there. There is great danger ahead. Mortal danger to your person.”

  And now he threatens.

  Darby leers wordlessly back at Abe, a wee fellow with little eyes and little teeth, a floppy cap and the round shoulders of a nosey little mole, yet his words are sharp as shanks.

  Is this little mole on my side? Or is he my competition?

  “I don’ need ya help,” Darby says. “But ya can bet ya bottom dollar on this. Bill hasn’t been in Brooklyn for close on two years, an’ watch. . . when he needs to know somethin’, he’ll come to me. Not some cagey foreigner.”

  Abe says, “Didn’t you come here from London vhen you vere young?”

  “I was born Northern Ireland,” Darby says proudly.

  “But are you Catholic-Irish?” Little Abe’s breath is cool as winter mint on the ear. “Or maybe worse than a Jew, are you a Prod?”

  “Keep guessin’. At some point ya might get somethin’ right,” Darby says. “Knowin’ things is what I’m known for. It was me who got my cousin, Dinny’s wife Sadie to pay for Dead Reilly, Dinny’s own attorney. Now we got a retrial for Pickles in May. What’ve you done for Bill?”

  The men call out ahead, “We take back what is ours t’day! Kill! Kill!”

  “Yez, yez, you have convinced your cousin to turn on her husband. Zuch a talent you have,” Abe says in a tone that is half-whisper, half-indictment. “But it is not talent alone that has convinced Zadie Meehan to help free Pickles, I vould bet. There is more to it than that. You must know zomething, yez. Zomething that she is deeply ashamed of. A zecret, maybe. Yez, zecrets are more valuable than zlungshots. Zecrets are as dangerous as a drunkard with a loaded pistol. I vill give you this, if you truly do possess the ability to vield that type of cruelty, Darby Leighton, you may yet zurvive. Blackmailing your own kin? A lethal veapon indeed. Tell me, what shame do you hold over poor Zadie’s heart?”

  “Ya sponge up lies like a bride does seeds; hopin’ they quicken,” Darby waves him off. “Keep guessin’.”

  “You are a ztrange man. Cruel, yet naive enough to believe you can trust Dead Reilly.”

  “His motives are easy to read. He may play both sides, but we’ll see how that shakes out. I tell ya what though, the man knows his way outta a murder conviction. But if ya do get convicted, he’ll lower the sentence. Shit, if ya broke a mirror, Dead Reilly’ll get ya off wit’ only four years bad luck. He’s got value for us. But ya gotta give him the dime. The dime is all. Point is, I’m the one turnin’ Dinny’s pockets inside out. What were ya doin’ when I was buildin’ Bill’s army? Ya’re known only for whispers, secrets and rumors, but everyone knows whispers are louder than screams around here. How’s Bill gonna trust a fella who can’t speak his mind aloud?”

  Abe leans in again with a furtive smile, “Is it ztupidity, or a lack of common zense that allows you to believe a vhisper is more zuspicious than a shadow? Charity requires hope for the latter.”

  “I need no charity,” Darby snaps back as he trudges through the snow.

  “No I zuppose you have been very busy,” Abe turns his head sideways. “You’ve even found time to make a daughter, yez?”

  Darby chews on those words.

  I should’ve never spoken about Colleen Rose openly. I can only hope that this little mole does not find a way to use her against me. Or worse; find out who her mother is.

  “Darby, Darby my little friend,” Abe tisks him with soft horse-clicks and a calm authority. “If you were given two bits every time you didn’t know vhat vas going on, you’d vonder vhy you had zo many bits. You do not know the Irish, even though you are one, zupposedly. The Irish have a head-full of ghosts. It can happen to anyone though: Irish, Italian, German, African, Indian. It makes no matter. When an entire generation zuffers great tragedy, war. . . Your people call it An Gorta Mór, yez? The Great Hunger? The famine?”

  “Don’ call it famine,” Darby corrects. “It weren’t no fookin’ famine.”

  “The next generation and beyond experience living nightmares, and in zleep the dead visit in dreams. These are zad times your kind lives. Dark times. Times of mystery and zuperstition. But you have zpent too much time alone in the shadows, Darby Leighton. I speak vith you not as an enemy, but to help you, yez. Now listen to this. Think on this, I ask you. Think of who it is that has power among Bill’s men. Mathematics advises that the power of numbers is ztrong. And zo is the power of love, for there is nothing zo assured than a red-haired girl’s revenge.”

  “Whose revenge?” Darby asks. “For what?”

  “First you must lower your voice, my friend. Think on this, I ask you. You are zmart, believe it or not. You can zolve this little riddle, I’m sure you can, yez. Listen to the words I give you. Very important, yez. Ve all hope for your zuccess, yez ve do.”

  As the fervor of the Trench Rabbits ahead wanes over the long push through the snow, Darby leans down into Abe’s ear, “Who wants revenge?”

  “Darby, Darby, my little friend,” Abe’s eyes slowly move up to meet his. “You have zeen much from your place behind blind corners and atop factories, it’s true. But even you have missed the beauty of hidden love inside the heart of an evil little girl, think on this, I ask you.”

  “Riddles ya got?”

  Abe shrugs one shoulder and tosses his hand at the wrist. “Ve need your help, Darby. But you don’t listen vell. You can’t see vhat is happening below the zurface. Vhen a riddle is zolved there is a zubtlety that is understood, and the expanse opens. Only then you vill see the bigger plan at vork. Only then can you help us.”

  I’ll have to outsmart this one in order to get ahead, Darby bites his lip. But can I do that? I’ve revealed too much to him. If I am to become Bill’s Fifth Lieutenant, I’ll need an edge. I’ll need to. . . kill someone.

  At that moment Darby sees the quizzical eyes appear in the low-rise tenement windows above. A yawning, rusty wind rushes through the narrow alleys as the eyes look down at him and the gang that pushes through the cold morning snow. Yet they fix on him, mostly. Or so Darby believes.

  They know me. They know my struggle. Those eyes know everything about me.

  Hunger bites at the inside of Darby’s stomach. He hasn’t slept all night and a euphoria swims up his body in strange pulsing surges as the eyes watch him.

  Should I even be here?

  But Darby is having another spell. He places a palm on his temple. When he is nervous or anxious, the sp
ells come to him. Overtake him and fill him with dread and despair and guilt and terror and. . .

  Hopefully it will soon pass.

  But his teeth chatter and his eyes flick back and forth.

  Please make it go away. Please, please.

  He shivers under the eyes that stare. The eyes that watch. He hears his mind replaying the riddle: The beauty of hidden love inside the heart of an evil little girl, the words repeat, overcoming his own determination to stop them.

  Up in the windows, the needy eyes stare. Those eyes. Those judging eyes send wiry tendrils through his body as he slides his flat cap low over his weatherworn face. Between the buildings one block away the brackish green channel slaps hard against the bulkhead and sends saltwater and foam spraying into the snow.

  Non Connors’ voice rips through Darby like the sound of two ship hulls scraping and shearing against each other, “Fookin’ beat them down to a whimper! This is our territory!”

  Darby’s feet and legs are wetted through to the skin and the only thing that stops him from feeling completely frozen is that he keeps moving, trudging, yanking and pulling at his legs through the thigh-deep snow.

  Then he notices Abe’s eyes on him too. He gathers his thoughts and turns to the little narrow-eyed teen, “An’ what’s ya value? What is it that ya want?”

  “I vant zimply to help Bill to the zecond floor of the Dock Loaders’ Club, leader of the White Hand. The man in control of Irishtown and all the incomes from the terminals and territories,” Abe says as if he’s memorized the response.

  “An’ how ya gonna help him win it?”

  “Best vorry how you yourself can help Bill vin Irishtown,” he says without looking. “You are the one marked for greatness, not me.”

  High in the blossoming blue morning sky languishes a white three-quarter moon as if it had waited for Darby to notice all along.

  The morning moon, he beams.

  When Darby was a boy his Aunt Rose had taught him moon phases, which had been taught to her by her Romani father in Ireland.