“Fookin’ tunics here again,” The Swede says.
“How many?” Dinny asks.
“Two, Brosnan’n his boyo,” comes the voice from behind the door.
“Let ’em in,” Dinny says to The Swede.
And through the open door comes Brosnan with his long tunic and copper buttons, peeking round the threshold, his son-in-law Culkin supporting him. Blackjacks in hand and making a big show of it.
“Dinny Meehan,” says he.
“Say it again,” The Swede dares him.
Brosnan looks over to The Swede and back toward Dinny. “Ye love the fight as much as I do, man. But in this world there’s more o’ the maneuverin’ than there’s the fightin’. Regrettable as t’is.”
“Point, Brosnan?”
“Ye know that stipend ye’ve been givin’ me? Ye’ll now be givin’ it to him,” he says pointing to Culkin. “Double it fer meself. And if ye don’ like them terms, I’ll be happy to give these newspapermen that keep knockin’ on me door a word about ye—all o’ ye.”
“Thought ya was made detective, ain’t they pay more?” The Swede says.
“Well t’is an opportunity of which . . .”
“That’s a word,” Dinny interrupts. “Means weakness, nothin’ else.”
“Ye bowsies are makin’ it hard fer us, ye know. They thought yer ways were over when we locked up Connors as the leader.”
“Why’d they think that, eh?”
“Listen, the risk we’re under is a greater one now. Times’r changin’, but ye tinkers are not changin’ wit’ ’em. Ye stand out like niggers in the bright o’ day when they see ye, all o’ ye. Ye’ll take me down with ye when ye go. I know that.” Pointing again to Culkin, Brosnan goes on. “This young man’s wife is my daughter and though I know ye don’ give a shite fer us, we have our own family to care fer. When the big fight comes, we’ll either die with ye, or be shamed away. Ye know it like I do, man. Yer like passed from this great state o’ New Yark a decade or more ago. From where yer ideas come there’s a bad thing followin’, be sure. Stand up to the Anglo-Saxon and ye’ll be butchered in the onslaught like swine at the fair. Eaten fer the pleasure in it. And here we are standin’ right next ye in their sights.”
“Who ya talkin’ about?” The Swede winces.
“Ways,” Brosnan says. “It’s a battle o’ ways, ain’t it? Yers an’ theirs. Ye don’t know ’em like I do, ye don’t.”
“Who?”
“Them,” Brosnan says in a gravelly timbre, raising his head back and looking down his nose at us and speaking more like a Mennonite evangelical than the Catholic he is. But before he continues, he pulls a tin cigar holder from his tunic and lights a Na-Bocklish. “Ye can try an’ break it down by class’r gender’r color o’ skin, what have ye. Don’t matter, that. The great many of us live and believe the ways like vast subjects to a crowned king or God’s children to the altar. The great masses of us. Each an’ all of us lookin’ to rise up from the doom like Lazarus o’ Bethany, don’t we? Oh they’re comin’. Them. Them up there pullin’ our strings. Them. Up there tellin’ us lowly peasants what’s right’n wrong. Jailin’ us fer what’s wrong, promotin’ us for what we do right. Oh no, they’re no different than ye, Dinny Meehan. They demand loyalty. Demand it. No different really than ye and how ye treat yer followers. Defy ’em, an’ they’ll come fer ye. They’re comin’ now, just slow. Slow an’ sure. Gatherin’ up like a giant swell they’ll swallow ye like the great suck o’ the ocean and leave ye bathin’ in a welter o’ yer own blood and bones, all o’ ye. Oh they’re comin’, sure enough. Slow and sure of ’emselves.”
“Jesus wept,” The Swede says, spooked to the depth of him.
“Eddie, give ’em what they ask,” Dinny says, then turns to Brosnan. “You’re on. Anythin’ I need to know about, ya talk to me.”
“We will,” Brosnan nods with two morose eyes looking at Dinny as The Swede looks away, fear smeared across his startled face.
Sitting in front of me, I can only see the back of Harry’s head, but we both look toward Dinny at his desk, the city over his shoulders. His defiance unchanged by Brosnan’s words and warnings. Always unchanged, is Dinny Meehan. Always who he is and nothing different.
“One thing,” Dinny says pointing toward me. “Give this kid ten percent what I’m givin’ ya. Every week.”
“Fer what reason would we do such a t’ing?”
“We’re related, you’n me. By blood and by money,” Dinny says.
“I’ll not do it . . .”
“He’s from Ireland, remember that place?” Dinny cuts the man off.
“I know it very well. Better than yerself.”
“Well, they’re fightin’ to be free o’ the British and the kid’s got family there. I’d like ya to do your part and give for the cause, like the rest o’ us. He’s treasurer,” Dinny points at me again.
I look at Dinny sideways for he had only minutes earlier offered me a way out of the gang.
Holding the bills Lumpy just handed him, Brosnan yells toward Dinny, “Those men of Easter and their sorry little failed rebellion, that what yer referrin’ to? They caught the pisspots o’ Dubliners, so they did. The damned Fenian fools. T’was Dubliners spat on them in the streets too. Then caught the bullets of law, an’ ye want me to give to their like? And what of all them Irish soldiers fightin’ in France as we spake, what of ’em? Are they nothin’ to ye? They’re Irishmen too.”
“Proof only that they’re as desperate as ever an’ willin’ to take a mere soldier’s pay from his enemy so that he can feed his fam’ly before he’s killed. We know you’re a souper, Brosnan, but if you two walk away from here wit’out payin’ ya ten percent for Ireland, I’ll tell my men to kill ya both right here and now. Bury ya in the East River, copper’n all.” Spit flying from his gnashing mouth. “We’ll deal wit’ what happens afterward, but ya walk in our home wearing the monkey’s tuxedo of a law that don’ benefit our neighborhoods in the slightest, shake us down for a bite at our people’s table, and not give back to our cause, and we’ll fookin’ flay ya both and pike ya up in them tunics as a warnin’ at the gates o’ Irishtown.”
The Swede with his cudgel, Harry with his knife, Tommy’s fists, and Dinny’s gun surrounding them, Brosnan wipes his face with the back of his sleeve.
“Seems ye can’t never take the cottier out of a man, even a generation later,” Brosnan grunts back. “The mind of a tenant farmer and half-blooded raggle-taggle gypsy is the whole rake o’ ye.”
Calmly, Brosnan and Culkin peel a portion of their earnings and hand me it and walk out with Tommy, and as the door opens we see Vincent at the top of the dark stairwell. Brosnan looks at Vincent’s shame-filled face and lowers his own head without greetings, descends the stairs with his son-in-law in tow.
“The fuck you been?” The Swede says.
“Dinny?” Vincent looks up.
“Yeah.”
“First off, uh . . . I was at the Adonis again.”
“For fuck’s sake,” The Swede barbs.
“Honesty is good,” Dinny says. “You found things, though?”
And he had, sitting down where Harry sat he goes on to tell us that he was locked in a room naked and forced to lie on a bed. The whore sent away. Thos Carmody himself had done this to him, Vincent explained, along with the owner of the Adonis Social Club—a man named Jack Stabile and his eldest son, Sixto. That they work with Frankie Yale of The Black Hand.
“What’s that?” The Swede says.
“Yeah, Frankie Yale.”
“Workin’ wit’ the ILA down there? At the Bush Terminal?”
“Bigger than that,” Vincent says. “Yale’s got guys that’re gonna support the ILA when they go on strike, see? So, Carmody’s Irish, right? So Carmody went to Lovett and an offer was given to work together, I-talians’n the ILA’n Lovett’s guys.”
“Ya fookin’ kiddin’ me?” The Swede says.
“But Lovett spit on the offer, says he don’ work wit
’ wops an’ told Carmody to go back an’ work wit’ white men.”
Dinny holds his chin, piecing it all together in his mind.
“Listen, though,” Vincent says. “That ain’t all. Lovett’s workin’ wit’ Wolcott an’ Silverman o’ the New York Dock Company now.”
“For chrissake,” The Swede drops his arms.
“But these guys? Yale, the Stabiles, an’ Carmody? They wanna do business wit’ ya, Din,” he explains, facing the man at the desk. “I-talians an’ the ILA. They’re businessmen, don’t care about Irish’r Italian. Means nothing to ’em. They’re young turks and say you’n them together can squeeze Lovett from the north an’ the south. Squeeze ’em. But the Stabile men, father’n son, they call ’em Pulcinella, Lovett. I don’ know, that’s what they call ’em, like a Pulcinella is some sorta clown’r somethin’ like, ’cause Lovett looks like a clown, right?
“And?”
“The Stabiles say you owe ’em for killin’ their guys back in April and . . . and I-talians live in the neighborhood o’ Red Hook too, but can’t work the docks there. That it ain’t fair to them, but they’ll work together wit’ ya, Dinny. Offer ya a hand for shaking, they just don’ want ya to spit on ’em, like Lovett did.”
“And?”
“Offered me a job in Chicago if you say no,” Vincent says.
“They got lots o’ offers, don’t they?” The Swede says.
Vincent looks from The Swede toward Dinny, “And that Garry fookin’ Barry went to them to kill you for a price as a starker.”
The Swede speaks out again, “Like what’s he thinkin’? Barry? He’s got one follower, Cleary. The fuck’s wrong wit’at guy? Garry fookin’ Barry, Jesus. He still thinks he should be the leader. No fookin’ reasonin’ wit’ that fool.”
Dinny thinks, turns his chair round and looks out the window behind him.
“Everybody’s pickin’ sides, Din,” Vincent says as humbly as he can.
“They’re closin’ in on us again, Dinny,” The Swede says, blathering on and on. “Always closin’ in on us. We shoulda never trusted Lovett. The man wants to take things over.”
“That’s enough,” Dinny says.
“They’re fookin’ closin’ in on us, man,” The Swede says, withdrawing into his own head. Holding it in his hands and pulling his own hair out with straining fists, clump after clump. “They want us dead. Bathin’ in a welter o’ blood and bones. Dead. Dead . . .”
I sit up in my seat and look over to Harry. Watching The Swede lose his sanity unsettles me deeply. I look over to Dinny, who lowers his hands to calm him, but The Swede just paces, his own hair in his fists.
“Jimmy . . .” Dinny tries again, but The Swede erases any words by simply screaming over him, the long face and open mouth like some gaunt wraith of a man panicked by a horror.
“Jimmy, I ain’ gonna tell ya again . . .” Dinny says.
Falling to his knees in front of us, The Swede shakes and wrings and twists, clenching his fingers. Breathing hard and grunting, he slinks his long shoulders, contorting and bending his great frame so that with the flat of his fists, he beats on the floor like a child. He whispers something unheard to himself. Just speaking out from somewhere in him. Somewhere far away. Lurching and twitching from some invisible implosion in his soul and rupturing heart, his elongated limbs waving like live wires flopping in the street from downed electric poles.
I had never seen him nor any other man act in such a way. And for less than a second he looks at me, then looks away muttering again. From that look I draw an ominous feeling and stand from my chair as if it were a primitive, rote response to the look in his eyes. We all stand. And as we do, The Swede looks up, jumps from his knees, and grabs Vincent by the coat and pulls him to the ground as I watch without movement. A moment later he appears above him with Vincent’s gun in his hand. He turns it around awkwardly and holds the trigger with a thumb at his own chest. He pulls back the hammer, face red with long tears streaming down the cheeks. Backs away.
“I ain’t goin’ t’rough this no more,” he says, still backing away, then seemingly arguing with something that is not there, he turns his head angrily and mutters. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”
In anticipation he yawps in the air and pinches his face as he pulls the trigger and just as I hear the clap of the gun, Harry jumps and pushes The Swede’s hand upward. The bullet then comes out of the back of his shoulder knocking against a wall flaccidly and landing on the floor next to Lumpy, spinning. The Swede falls to his back on the ground and quickly there is a puddle behind him, the room filled with the heavy scent of iron in the blood and gun smoke.
Dinny jumps from his desk as Harry rips the gun out from The Swede’s loosened grip. Dinny pulling him up, then pulls down The Swede’s tie and shirt and looks to see where the bullet passed through. A small red dot appears just under the clavicle, and gently coming up through it is blood that seemingly defies gravity. The blood is wiped from the hole and again there is only a dot slowly being obscured by the flooding blood again.
Lumpy picks up the damaged bullet and tries to hand it to Dinny, but he is ignored.
“Is he gonna die?” Vincent asks, shaken.
“Needs a doctor,” Harry says.
“No,” The Swede pleads. “No hospital. No, no, no. I won’t go to no hospital. No doctors. Just take me to my sister, Helen. She’ll take care o’ me like I know she can. Helen can take care o’ me just like she did last time. Dinny? Dinny?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry, Din,” The Swede says, his eyes glassy.
“Don’ worry ’bout it, Jimmy. We’ll take ya to Helen so ya can get better and be close to ya fam’ly.”
“No hospital,” The Swede begs from the floor.
“Jaysus,” Tommy mutters.
“No hospital,” Dinny assures.
Picking up the gargantuan, crumpled spider by the limbs and torso, Dinny along with Vincent, Tommy, Harry, and even Lumpy go out the door and negotiate the steps in the dark stairwell and are enveloped by the voices of drinkers who find out who caught the shot of a gun upstairs.
And I don’t know why, but I do not follow them. I stay. Away from them. For the next hour, I stay in the second-floor room by myself. The empty office. Standing with my hands in my pockets, I look out the shutter windows over the water. The quiet. I hear the city swooshing mildly in the distance, the stable permanence of sound, the invisible human fracas that babbles gently in the background. But in here I feel the quiet. Try and let all of our problems flatten out for a moment, I sit in Dinny’s chair. At his desk and close my eyes. Close them.
CHAPTER 13
Scalpeen Memories
JANUARY, 1917
JANUARY AND THE BITE IS MURDEROUS. The whipping wind whistles off the water where under the bridges we huddle, hands covering ears. The sky is as hard looking as the cement under our feet, and the same color too. Broken only by the Brooklyn Bridge above us, that sky over the city is as mean and thoughtless as some of the men that show hungry on the docks looking for a day’s wage. Same look in the gray eyes of them.
From inside the tenement walls come skirling flue pipes wheezing in the gales, and glims of light flash through crevices as if the tenements, whelmed with many families, were out to sea rudderless. Children bunch in front of the coal fire and the potbelly stove, if they have it. In memories, and the bones of our memories where reside the unconscious thoughts and recognitions in the marrow, is a feeling where remembrances are signaled when our bellies rattle with the hunger and when the weather attacks the skin.
It is a silent song that voices rarely dare to share, and no one cares to disturb the silence of it, for it is no more than a cognizance in our blood. But we all knew it as it truly is: the past speaking to us. Coming out in our eyes and our need for fight. We know, even as most stories were withheld us due to the shame of our caste, we know of and are haunted in the mind’s eye of our fathers and our mothers and theirs, the elements hard on our bodies and
the hollow yearn for alimentation. Evicted from the land. Evicted from our community and the closeness for which our people so long had found strength. Remember in us the scalps dug in the onset of winter under some stray hill a few miles from the icy Shannon. And the scalps and lean-tos of the shanty emigrants of Jackson Hollow south of the Navy Yard here in Brooklyn. And those shoeless and gaunt in Darby’s Patch before Warren Street was ever paved and before Dinny Meehan had come to it. The seasons of cholera and yellow fever that swept through Irishtown from the human cargo dumped on the shoreline, amassed there.
Unsaid. Simply known, we work in the wintry conditions and the empty air that strips the body to a barrenness where survival is top of the mind. Just how we like it. With two bailhooks, I dig into the work. Piercing wheat sacks. Picking them up with my back and legs and thrusting them up into a train car shadowed by the long torso of a transport steamer. Dinny working right alongside us, watching over us and reminding us that in this work we live. Down here. Below the Anglo ascendency and his laws, forever. Forever reminding us where we come from. Forever living by the underbellies of ships, outside in the weather, with memories remembered only in the distance of our blood.
* * *
AFTER A WORD WITH DINNY, TOMMY Tuohey heads south alone. A man of any and all weather, Tommy strides down Columbia Street. Down Furman Street where to the right is the shit-green New York Harbor, and left is the bluff that separates the Brooklyn waterfront from the old Dutch and English mansions of another time, now divided and subdivided for the peasants and the newly arrived. He passes the old Penny Bridge on Montague Street that now brings the workingmen from the street grade above to the warehouse and pier house roofs below to the blacked-out area where the ships let off and the gangs that take to their ways there.
Of course, Tommy knows nothing of such histories, for he lives only in the felt memories of his own blood and in the weather on his own skin too. A free man who lives in the love of the company of others and in the contests of will and individual struggle, ignorant by nature and by choice of the constructs of the settled people, and seeks only work for his next meal and drink and talk.
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