Divide the Dawn- Fight

by Eamon Loingsigh

  Get up, the voice says again.

  Thos blinks when he hears a woman’s scream. He then hears a man’s voice calling down from above. It is the man and woman who were kissing in the window, “Sir, are ya ok? Ya musta fell from the roof, should I call a policeman? Sir, can ya hear me?”

  Thos blinks again, I’m alive, I knew it. I knew it. This is not real.

  Raindrops force his eyes closed. He tries to squint to see where he is.

  Get up.

  Why?

  Ye’ will soon find out what ye were chosen for.

  Chosen, he smirks. I shouldn’t be alive. It’s not right. I think I died on the battlefield and this. . . this is a dream. A nightmare. There’s something wrong with me. I’m sick or something. I have no energy. I can’t move.

  Ye will feel better soon, let’s go.

  I can’t.

  Get up, Thos.

  My back. It must be broken.

  Get up. Ye made a deal with Dinny Meehan. A deal is a deal.

  A deal. The day the Mullen widow gave birth to a boy Thos had sat with Dinny Meehan upstairs, above the Dock Loaders’ Club. Thos had never made such a deal as this one. He told Dinny that, when the time comes, the ILA would back Wild Bill Lovett, but that hadn’t surprised the gang leader at all. He wanted three things in return; the murder of Tanner Smith and another man and all of the Marginals that still report to Tanner, who will also join the ILA.

  A baffling deal, it is. Illogical. A deal that means almost assuredly that Dinny Meehan will lose his power over Irishtown. A deal that admits defeat. Without any allies, his followers will be overrun. Beaten. Murdered by the Black Hand, the ILA, the police, Wolcott’s thugs and Lovett’s soldiers. Five to one, no one can get out alive against those odds. What does the fight even matter any longer? What anything matters to Dinny Meehan, Thos cannot know. Thos Carmody, the man who knows all the angles and sees five moves in advance cannot see Dinny’s endgame here. Because there is none.

  Get up, the wind says.

  I just want to die.

  Ye can’t yet. Ye’ve more deaths to add to yer confirmed kills.

  How many?

  Four more, until yerself will become the hunted.

  Who will kill me?

  I will, o’ course.

  Thos wipes the rain from his eyes to see the old man who will take his life. His white hair shimmers in the wet wind. His aged face contrasts the youth in his eyes. Those eyes. Thos recognizes those eyes hidden in the folds and wrinkles, though he can’t seem to put a name to the face.

  What will you kill me with?

  A pencil, the old man answers, then reaches into his pocket and produces it to show Thos. The English have robbed us for centuries at pencil-point, an’ I wield it now, the first o’ me kind.

  Instead of sneaking through the window as was the plan, Thos comes to the front door.

  “What happent?” Lefty whispers as Thos stumbles and falls into the foyer.

  What did happen? Thos wonders, then raises his head, “I fell.”

  Lefty chuckles, “Jesus, ya look like a drenched alley cat, Thos.”

  “I’m fine,” Thos walks through the front door and collapses into a chair and looks upstairs. “They still up there playin’ cards?”

  “Yeah.”

  Just then Dinny walks in through the foyer with Costello and stands between Thos and the door, then grabs him by the arm, “Ya gonna walk upstairs or I gotta carry ya?”

  “Dinny?”

  “Well?”

  “No, a deal is a deal. I can do it,” Thos turns his eyes back up to Dinny. “Are ya gonna kill me? Was that the plan all along? Ya make a odd deal like that, I suspect ya got somethin’ else in mind. Am I right?”

  “Ya mistake me for a liar,” Dinny says. “I make a deal; I stick to it.”

  “There’s nothin’ to gain from a deal like that. All ya get is five guys an’ Tanner dead. I don’ got the energy for the rest o’ it.”

  Lefty comes to stand above him, “Dinny’s gonna win that fight against Bill, get it? Dinny’s never been beat in a one-on-one.”

  Thos shakes his head in disbelief that anyone would think anything will get resolved by a fistfight.

  Dinny tightens his grip on Thos’s arm and looks up. “Ya go up those stairs an’ there’s no turnin’ back, understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ya ready then?”

  Ready to die, yes I am. For what I have done? Yes.

  Thos pushes up from the chair and wobbles.

  “We’ll go in first. Wait until ya hear us kick the door in, then come up the stairs. Got it Thos?”

  Thos nods as Dinny, Costello and Lefty slowly ascend. Two minutes later, the door bangs open upstairs and there is a scuffle.

  Thos puts a hand on the banister. This was meant to happen. Three years earlier he had walked into the Marginal Club on Hudson Street, walked upstairs and without his knowing it, his life would change. He had no idea Wolcott had hired Dinny Meehan, who hired Tanner Smith to kill him.

  Now look. Strange changes.

  Tanner had saved his life by banishing him. But Thos had the audacity to refuse to go along with the deal and never hired him into the ILA, as was agreed.

  I deserve to die. I deserve this.

  As he takes the first step, a banging sound comes through the foyer door behind him.

  “Police, open the door!”

  The police? The couple who saw me fall, they must’ve called the cops anyway.

  Thos turns back to the stairwell and ascends them as fast as he can, leaning heavily on the banister.

  “Police! Open up. Now!”

  Upstairs the door is left half-open and six men stand over Tanner Smith whose face is bleeding.

  “Fuck, ya gotta be fookin’ kiddin’ me, Carmody?” Tanner turns white when he sees the specter of Thos Carmody lurch in. “Oh fookin’ Jesus on a stick he looks a ghost! What’s wrong wit’ him?”

  Thos leans on the door frame and points behind with a thumb, “Tunics are here.”

  “Hurry up, Thos,” Lucky waves him in. “We ain’t got all mornin’. Hurry up. Get ya pistol out, Thos.”

  But I thought I was gonna die?

  “Think about my wife an’ my Ma, Din. I’m sorry. I’ll turn myself in t’day to the police. I promise I will. I’ll turn myself in an’ I’ll take care o’ Pickles in Sing Sing. The trial was postponed anyway, I got time now, see? That’s what I was thinkin’. There’s still time, Din.”

  As Lefty kicks Tanner, Thos collapses on the floor.

  “Prop him up in a chair,” Dinny orders, then turns his tortured face away. “Ya broke my heart, Tanner.”

  “Look Din, I can still—”

  “It don’ work that way. Ya just don’ inspire people, ya know? Even ya own men have turned against ya,” Dinny sweeps a hand round the room. “In these days, loyalty must be proven.”

  “Well ya can’t kill me.”

  “Twice now ya’ve shown that ya don’ believe in me, but ya’re happy to take what ya can. Happy to lie. I hired ya to kill this guy,” Dinny points at Thos. “When ya played that wrong, I gave ya another chance, an’ again ya showed no honor. That’s contagious ya know, dishonor. When men see ya flaunt me, well, ya understand how dangerous that can be. For the White Hand. For all the peoples o’ Irishtown that depend on us.”

  “Thos ain’t loyal to ya, Din. I can promise ya that. Thos fookin’ Carmody’s playin’ ya, Din. He chose Lovett’s side.”

  Dinny turns to Thos, who leans sideways in a chair, exhausted.

  “Thos has a role to play, but yours is ended.”

  “Din what can I do?”

  “I need men for what comes. Thos needs men too. We thank ya for them.”

  The sound of rain fills the void when silence takes the room. Somewhere far off thunder moans and through the window, above the city, a half moon cuts the night sky between the churn and twist of low, gray clouds.

  The silence is then broken by the muffle
d banging sounds from downstairs, “Police, police! Open up this door.”

  “Have ya ever had to do somethin’ that was against all ya know?” Dinny turns his back to everyone and stands in front of the rain-streaked window. “Have ya? Ya’re on top of a cliff an’ if ya jump, ya die. But everyone says that to jump is the only way to survive,” Dinny turns back to us. “From the moment o’ birth we’re told god is above pullin’ the strings, but ya never see him.”

  Thos struggles to sit upright as a battering ram slams into the door outside with a slow, banging rhythm.

  “Sometimes we have to do things we don’ believe in,” Dinny’s voice is a low grumble as outside the gloomy sky crackles again. “Loyalty is the kin o’ honor. When I was eleven years old, ya saved my father an’ I from certain death by givin’ us a loan an’ sendin’ us to Brooklyn. But that was just the beginnin’. We took a ferry that overturned an’, well. . . Since then I have lived by a code: He who helps those in need, shall have my undyin’ loyalty. Ya taught me that. An’ it was that code that won Irishtown.”

  Tanner simpers, “Ya gotta have loyalty to ya own code, Din. If not, then what?”

  Dinny nods, “Thing is. . . In the world we live in, when one person wins, another must lose.”

  Do you really believe that, Dinny Meehan? Do you?

  “That’s the game,” Dinny continues. “An’ Tanner, ya’ve beatin’ me twice.”

  Tanner pleads, “No, that’s not true. Everyone can win. This is America!”

  Wrong, a myth. The game is fixed. One person dies, another lives. Yet to transgress mortality. . . But how? Thos thinks back on his biblical studies at St. Veronica’s. It is heretical to attempt a mortal transgression. Only Jesus had the power to resurrect, like Lazarus of Bethany and. . . Himself.

  “To create is to truly rule,” Dinny’s middle and ring finger go to his temple as he turns back to the window. “The thing that’s drivin’ me mad. . . What does it mean that I have to kill the man that taught me about loyalty?”

  “Din, ya don’ gotta do that. That. . . that’d make ya evil an’ that’s not what got ya to where ya are, right? Ya’d turn ya back on ya own morals just so, what? So ya can keep power?”

  Dinny pushes his fingers harder into his temple and grits his teeth, “Sometimes ya gotta jump off a cliff. Thos?”

  “Yeah,” Thos struggles to respond and pulls back the hammer of the pistol in his pocket. Cocked and ready.

  “Shoot him in the back,” Dinny says. “Then we’ll go out the window.”

  I don’t have the strength to go out the window. This is it for me. This is all.

  “Shoot him in the back so that the streets will know him for what he was.”

  “No!” Tanner yells. “Don’ do it—”

  Lefty and Costello and three others wrestle to put Tanner on his stomach. They hold his arms from behind and place their boots into the back of his neck.

  “Stop, stop!”

  Thos pushes up from the chair. I don’t even have enough strength to pull the trigger. He shuffles over to Tanner with the pistol extended. His back hunched like an elderly man. Raindrops fall from his cap onto Tanner, whose feline eyes peer out from the raised collars.

  “No, Thos I’m sorry! I was just playin’ the game, but I lost. Ya won, Thos. Just lemme go! I’m sorry. I was wrong!”

  The quick explosion in the room opens a red stain in Tanner’s back as the pistol drops to the floor.

  Downstairs the outside door is broken down and the voices of the patrolman are louder now as they pound on the foyer door, “Open up! In the name o’ the law’r!”

  “Pick up the pistol, Thos. Put one in the heart an’ he’ll die. In the middle o’ his back, to the left,” Dinny says.

  “Hurry up,” Costello demands.

  Tanner kicks and screams and gurgles.

  “Don’ make him suffer too much,” Lefty grumbles. “Pick it up.”

  Thos leans down, but falls to his knees.

  “Get up,” Dinny says. “Get up.”

  Thos picks up the warm pistol and shuffles on his knees toward Tanner and the men who hold him down. Over Tanner’s back the pistol shakes in his hand. Thos squeezes the trigger, but can’t snap it back. He takes a deep breath, then squeezes again with all his might.

  The second shot, at point blank, goes through the left side of Tanner’s back.

  In the heart, Thos thinks. He’ll be dead soon.

  “Let him go,” Dinny orders.

  Tanner turns slowly to his side. He points at Thos as he gasps for air, then makes a fist and holds it over his forehead. A cough sprays blood. Tanner pounds the flat of his fist on the wood floor as his mouth gulps for air, but comes up empty.

  Still no breath, how long can he hold out?

  Thos flops on his side next to Tanner and the pistol falls out of his hand. As his eyes close his body relaxes. Drifting. Drifting away, he begins to sleep as all the men round him try to rouse him awake. Except Dinny Meehan, who watches him from above. Then all goes black.

  When Tanner Smith dies, oxygen blasts into Thos’s lungs like gale force winds. His eyes bolt open and he quickly sits up on his elbows to look round the room. All have left to flee from the police, but Dinny Meehan still stands by the window. Next to him Tanner’s bloodshot eyes stare through Thos and into a great and brief distance.

  Thos stands. His back straightens. His wounds no longer pain him. His knuckles crack as he balls his hands into fists.

  I have never felt so alive. So powerful. So unbelievably immortal. What? What happened?

  “Welcome back Thos,” Dinny speaks without looking back.

  “What happened? I’m transformed. I can feel every muscle in my legs, my chest, my arms. Oxygen! Oxygen flows through my blood like a rushing river. Ya knew all along, didn’ ya?”

  “A deal is a deal.”

  “I thought,” Thos can hardly believe how quickly the words come out of his mouth. “I thought my cruelty and my heartless decisions were killin’ me. That all the men I’d murdered had come back round to haunt me. That all the game-playin’ angles had turned back against me. But it turns out—”

  “It turns out that in this world, cruelty an’ heartlessness is beneficial, yeah,” Dinny finishes Thos’s sentence as if he’d plucked the words out of his mouth, though he says them with much less vigor and much more gloom.

  Thos’s face grins and grits with a greedy lust like a first fix, “I didn’. . . I didn’ know. I didn’ want to believe that. But this is just a dream or somethin’, right? It’s not real,” He stands behind Dinny at his shoulder in front of the window. “I know that I’m in-dream an’ time stands still where I’m dyin’ on the battlefield because I both conceive an’ perceive this world at the same time. This is a future that never occurred. But now I know that I cannot control the events. This is not my world, it’s yours.”

  “No,” Dinny says . “I did not conceive this world. I have a role, just as ya do. No more.”

  “Then who is in control? God?”

  “An’ they call ya the prodigy,” Dinny moves off from the window and looks down at Tanner Smith’s body. “The blood feud is over. His soul writhes inside ya now.”

  “I can feel him.”

  “Ya own it. His strength strengthens ya. Only a woman’s love could save him now, an’ no woman could ever love Tanner Smith,” Dinny looks up to Thos. “More importantly, ya’ve proven ya’self. Ya survived an’ ya journey continues.”

  Tingles shoot up and into Thos’s body as the ram pounds at the door downstairs. Vigorous energy vibrates in waves through his fingertips and muscles like the sheets of rain outside that wash against the window.

  “Where are we?”

  “Some call it the Otherworld, some call it a ghost story.”

  “Where does it end?” Thos asks.

  “End? Well ya know what must be done next, at least. Ya need to kill again, remember the deal we made?”

  Of course I do. The deal I thought was illo
gical.

  Downstairs the patrolmen finally break through the foyer door. Chairs are overturned and footsteps pound up the stairwell.

  “Tanner’s body?”

  “Leave him. We’ll go out the window.”

  “An’ the voice that I hear. In my head. Am I. . . am I mad?”

  Dinny does not answer.

  Thos stands over Tanner’s body as he takes a deep, powerful breath and jumps out the window to swiftly climb the fire escape up to the roof just as the door busts open.

  “Stop, halt!”

  Divine Providence

  Captain Sullivan, Patrolman Ferris and New York Police Commissioner Richard Enright and even Mayor Mike Hylan stand round the casket behind a black Fresian-drawn hearse carriage. An American flag is draped over half the casket. An Irish tri-colour covers the other half, even as Ireland is not a country.

  At the sight of the casket Doirean pivots and buries her face into Daniel’s chest. Feeling the eyes upon him he wraps an arm round her shoulder and stares back at the slew of policemen and their wives and children while a foghorn moans dully out on Wallabout Bay.

  “I’m sorry, Doirean,” the scent of lilac comes to his nose when he whispers to her. “I’m so sorry.”

  “My sweet child,” Father Larkin approaches in mourning garb at the bottom step and then, without being prompted, proclaims, “God found it in himself to devote half o’ mankind to the creation o’ the garden, so he did. She is the vessel o’ life an’ must tend it gently, the other half is devoted to destroyin’ it.”

  He looks smugly at Daniel, then with a ring-laden hand outstretched he speaks up to Doirean. “I’d be honored to escort ye to St. Ann’s while yer husband walks with the casket.”

  “Father, where is Johanna Walsh? I need her on this day. I have no one to talk to.”