Exile on Bridge Street

by Eamon Loingsigh

  Tommy turns on Imlay Street in the morning air, an emissary for The White Hand. A late-night drizzle had turned much of the sidewalks to sheets of ice, and men walk gingerly with their hands on wood fences and brick walls for balance as they make their way along the big buildings owned by the New York Dock Company. Not many of the men in Red Hook own gloves or winter-wear in general and instead stand round donning the same coats they wore at summer, but with long underwear underneath and vest and hat, hopping in place. The breath that comes out of their mass gives them the appearance of ranging cattle and heads of beef. Awaiting the line to be called for to pick men to unload, they stand shoulder to shoulder patting down their upper arms.

  Walking through their gaggle, Tommy Tuohey looks up and points at the barge just dragged up off the Imlay bulkhead, “Who dat spakin’ widda captain?”

  “Darby Leighton,” says a man Tommy doesn’t recognize.

  A tug driver and his son look to Tommy, then turn their backs. The father rushing his son back onboard with a hand under his elbow and quick he is to the throttle and the river.

  “Dat right?” Tommy says.

  “Ya scared?” says another man.

  “Scared o’ what?”

  “Scared? Are ya scared?”

  “I’m not scared of a damn thing. Kinda question’s this, ye feckin’ sausage?”

  “Hey,” yells Joey Behan, Petey’s older brother. “Tommy? That you? What are you doin’ down here?”

  “The fook kinda question’s that?” Tommy says again. “Joey Behan? Ya not s’posed be down here s’marnin’. Ya s’posed to be up Baltic way. Dinny know ye here?”

  “Nah,” Behan says walking toward him. “Ya gonna tell on me, are ya? Ya fookin’ tout. We’re takin’ over now. Ya can go’n tell ya pikey king that, ya fookin’ weaklink.”

  “Ye call me a weaklink, Behan? I’ll kill ye with me fists I . . .”

  “Shaddup,” Bill Lovett says, walking toward the commotion with five or six men round him following in the cold smoke. “’Less ya wanna fight over it. Ya wanna fight over it?”

  “I’ll fight any man with the fists . . .”

  “Then stand up to it then, here I am,” Lovett says, looking up to Tuohey as a crowd gathers round.

  “Richie?” Tommy notices Richie Lonergan coming up behind Lovett. “The feck ye doin’ down here, eh? And all yer bhoys wid ye? Dis a t’ing yer all doin’? Is it?”

  Tommy looks around and sees the golden-haired Mickey Kane who is wearing a fearful gaze on his face, “Mick? What goes here?”

  “I challenged ya to a fight, man,” Lovett says as Darby and the captain watch from the deck above, smoke coming out of their own mouths up there too. “Are ya fookin’ soft?”

  “Fair fight ’tween me’n yerself and ye’d find out what’ll happen, but ye got all yer boyos here,” Tommy looks up. “Who da feck’s dat tall feckin’ gorilla bastard?”

  “Who, him?” Lovett says. “That’s Wisniewski. And the guy next to him’s our new business partner, Silverman. Ya got somethin’ against ’em?”

  “Silverman’s the name o’ him? From the Dock Company?” Tommy says. “Ye takin’ over? Dat what yer after, Bill? Anyt’in’ fer the power is it, Bill? And dis here? James Quilty, fer feck’s sake? Ye t’ink ye’ll get away wid’is do ye? Ye’ll not . . .”

  And without listening to another word, Lovett comes up close to Tuohey and swings a right fist that Tommy ducks away from. But it’s a man behind him that pushes him back toward Lovett, and Tuohey finds himself within the fighter’s circle in the cold.

  “C’mon, Tommy,” Lovett says. “You’n me. Right now. One on one. That’s what ya want, right? One on one, man to man?”

  “Well dis don’t seem . . .” Tommy begins, face reddened. “If t’were only you’n me . . .”

  “C’mon, fookin’ pikey scum,” Lovett yells at Tommy up close, then pushes him with both hands by the neck and face as they both square off.

  “With me bare hands, ye know I will, Bill . . .”

  “Then let’s do it. C’mon.”

  And the men of the circle laugh except for the Lonergan kid and his right-hand Harms, who have a sullen look on their mugs. Of them all, Wisniewski is the biggest with a chest on him like a bull ape, though he is dressed in a fine suit with a kerchief out of the coat pocket. And Silverman, who is almost as tall and even better dressed with shiny hair on a hatless head and a long elegant coat.

  Lovett pushes a left jab toward Tommy who moves to his right to get away from him, as he once taught myself to do. Looking at all the faces and moving round the edge of the circle, Tommy takes his time. He is adept at skipping sideways like a trained fistfighter and avoids Lovett until Frankie Byrne punches him in the ear from outside the circle. Lovett then makes a move, swings a mighty right though it barely touches the side of Tommy’s head, who juts out of the way of it, then lands a quick left to the side of Lovett’s face. More of a push than a punch. The circle shrinks more, crowding the two fighters into each other.

  “Back the feck up, ye fecks,” Tommy yells. “I’ll kill the masses of ye one by one . . .”

  And just as he is challenging the entire circle, John Lonergan punches him from behind in the kidney, Joey Behan grabs him by the neck, while Frankie Byrne kicks a leg from under him.

  “Take’m down,” Matty Martin yells as Richie Lonergan uppercuts Tommy in the face as the older Behan holds him.

  Somehow Tommy breaks free and tries to run through the crowd, punching anything that gets in his way. One man goes down on his ass with his arms spread out, trying to hold himself up by the bodies of others. Petey Behan grabs hold of Tommy’s coat from behind, which begins to tear and others tackle him, kneeing him in the nose three and four times so hard that his head and hair jump at each blow.

  Jidge Seaman brings the heel of his boot down onto the back of Tommy’s head and Sean Healy too winds his leg behind four and five times into his back and neck until Tommy is no longer moving and all laugh as he has begun wheezing and snuffling at each deep breath, smoke billowing, and blood plopping out of his mouth in freezing chunks.

  “Great time for a nap, ya stoopit fookin’ tinker,” Petey Behan says.

  “Shaddup,” Lovett demands, pushing people from his way, then kicking Tommy over onto his back so they can see his face.

  “Oh Jesus,” says one man, shocked at the unconscious staring of Tommy Tuohey below.

  Looking over their work, Lovett pulls out his .45 and holds it at his hip, “This is what happens when a guy from outside comes into our territory. This is ours. No one else’s. Ours. No more do we pay Dinny and them and no more will any of you report to 25 Bridge again. Ya report to me. And that’s the end of it. All o’ ya’s. Anybody comes down here that you don’t know about, take ’em to the ground and ask questions later.”

  And as Lovett is quiet for a moment, the silence of the men appears still, even as the rest of the world keeps going. The ship captain lifts the hatch as he descends inside the barge and with a clang does it drop. Darby Leighton climbs down a rope ladder at that moment too while the moaning of ships of all sizes and stripes roam out on the harbor in the morning cut.

  “Richie?”

  “Yeah?” Richie responds.

  “C’mere,” Lovett turns his gun round and pushes the handle to him. “You and yours are wit’ me now. For good.”

  “Right.”

  “Finish it,” Lovett says.

  Lonergan pulls back the hammer and shoots twice into Tommy’s abdomen, who grunts and turns onto his side, waking up for the pain. Lonergan then limps closer, within the circle, points the barrel at the back of Tommy’s head and explodes half of it open like a dropped watermelon.

  “Mickey Kane?” Lovett yells.

  “Yeah?”

  Lovett looks behind him with anger in his eyes as Lonergan puts the gun on Lovett’s chest, “C’mere.”

  * * *

  “MAN?” BROSNAN YELLS FOR DINNY ACROSS the pier amidst the fall
ing snow. “Hello, man.”

  Dinny emerges above on deck.

  “There’s dead down Red Hook way. Yer’s, I t’ink.”

  Peering down at Brosnan, I see Dinny’s face and with this news I see nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing different than ever I’d seen on his face, as if he knew it was coming all along. Knew it.

  “Well there ya have it,” Cinders says coming up from behind. “That’s where them Lonergan kids went and the rest of ’em. We gonna hit back now, Din? What?”

  Fifteen, twenty men stop working and look up to Dinny when they hear the news. Fifty more as it spreads round. At that moment, Harry Reynolds runs up to the pier and stands next to myself and Brosnan, looking up at Dinny.

  “Man,” Brosnan yells up. “I can’t guarantee what’ll be ordered if there’s another bloodbath down Red Hook, do ye hear me? The papers’ll run wid it. District Attorney’ll have to react.”

  “Shaddup, Brosnan,” Vincent yells. “Ya got no say here.”

  “Where’s The Swede?” Brosnan asks.

  Dinny’s face just looks hard and distant, like he’s not listening up there on the deck where I watch him. Like he’s not there at all.

  “God please don’ let it be Mickey Kane dead,” I hear Cinders mumble under his breath.

  CHAPTER 14

  Hope for Summer

  HARRY IS STONE-FACED LOOKING AT THE third-floor room as next to him I stand in shock at the shape of the place.

  “Well my mam and sisters can’t live here.”

  “He said it needs work.”

  “He did say that, but there’s a huge hole in the floor,” I say, looking down to the second floor kitchen where three dirty-smiled toddlers look back up at me, an older child slumped in another chair. “Broken window over here and the walls look like the inside of a whale.”

  Harry turns on the faucet but only a brackish sludge comes out. “Can’t see how they’re flushin’ the jake in this buildin’. Pipes’re rusted out.”

  “This place is a horror. Fireplace is blocked up and I can hear rats up there.”

  “One block from the park, though,” Harry says, nodding out the kitchen window. “Can see the treetops from here. Look at ’em all.”

  I look, but only see branches frozen and swaying hungrily in the winter-gray backdrop. Brown ice and muddy snow accumulate at the edge of rooftops and cornices, but just beyond I can see the tops of the trees, their beauty distant and only made true by imagining them. Hibernating in the darkness of now with nothing but hope and flights of fancy to make them real. Better days ahead, but stuck in the present, I doubt them. Feel that they’re not to come and yet wonder at the idea that what makes people keep drudging through the muck of now is the chance at better times ahead. Drudging and drudging and most times dying before ever able to reach that summer day when the trees are blooming with color and the heaven we all hope for shines on our loved one’s faces, warm and generous. If it hadn’t been for so much winter that I see and the impotent struggles of bettering ourselves, then I wouldn’t be so filled with the doubt. So much of it. The real truth of things is that hope is always in the distance. In the future. Forever in the distance and many times we never reach it, like Tommy Tuohey. He wanted a family. He wanted a wife and sons and he died unknown.

  I take a deep breath. Exhale outward as Harry looks at me, “It’s just work’s all,” he said. “Work is everythin’.”

  When I look back on it now I’m a bit unsure how I survived at all. A miserable adolescence of course it was. Your happy adolescence hardly being worth your while. I sit back from the typewriter for a moment. Push the pen and paper to the side. An old man with nothing left to him now but prayers for forgiveness, another form of hope for the future. I hold my head in my hands. There were things we had to do to survive. Hard and pragmatic decisions. Good and normal people in bad predicaments, we were. Our art was not based on rejecting our parents’ way of life or born out of spare time—no, our art was that of need. Need to survive. I tell myself this and hold my beads, pray. I wasn’t ready to make the sort of decisions demanded of me back then in my adolescence. But they had to be made.

  To this day I still think of auld Tommy Tuohey standing up to anyone, ready to fight the whole world and getting himself butchered for his bravery. He taught me to fight with my fists, Tommy did. A valuable thing in those days. And he taught me to be strong, too. Dinny sent him to me for a reason, but I’d be incomplete if it was only Tommy that taught me about life. It is at this point in the story when things begin to turn. With Tommy Tuohey gone, Harry Reynolds steps in. Begins watching over me. Influencing me too, under Dinny’s watchful eye. Always in his vision.

  “Ya ready?” Harry asks as he walks past me and toward a broken-glassed window.

  Standing there in that wretched hole of a room, I haven’t a choice but to talk myself out of quitting it all. From just running away. Just going away with myself. “Don’ quit,” Dinny’s words ring in my head. “No one can beat the man outta ya.”

  I want terribly to feel bad for myself, but I just grumble toward Harry, “The people around here in this neighborhood seem humble and kind at least.”

  On one knee by the hole in the floor, Harry starts listing off things, “We gotta go to the lumberyard for four-inch-wide slabs, two inches thick. And studs to support the flooring, some plywood for the walls and ceiling. Then to the plumber. We gotta get measurements of them pipes, fittings, new jake for the lavatory, sink in the kitchen, sand the floors, paint the walls. . . . I got wood glue and a saw, hammers and things,” Harry says looking up to me. “Then when it’s all done, we go to the furniture store.”

  I rub my hand across my face and hair, “I need a mattress.”

  “You can stay wit’ me off Atlantic Avenue ’til we get this place sealed up.”

  I thank him with a lowered head.

  “We’ll need access to their place to fix their ceiling too,” Harry says, looking down through the hole. “Do a little bit every Sunday. You still don’ know when they’re comin’? Ya ma an’ sisters?”

  “No idea,” I say. “Did Dinny tell you to help me?”

  Harry doesn’t answer that, “ Y’ever done work like this?”

  “Repairs? A little on the farm.”

  “We can get Dance to help us out here and there, and James Hart’ll let us use the automobile truck to load up supplies. When ya mother an’ sisters get here, it’ll be like new. I mean,” Harry says, still kneeling down to the hole in the flooring and looking up to me. “I’d like to help, if ya want it. Get it ready for ’em an’ all. I never had a fam’ly o’ my own. Don’t even know what it’s like, but . . .”

  “Dinny says we are a family.”

  “Yeah, not a real fam’ly though. If we had our own fam’ly, we probably wouldn’t be in a gang, right?”

  “Well, that’s not really true . . .”

  “Ya know what I mean, William,” Harry says, standing up and walking toward the kitchen window. “I don’ even know if I’m Irish. Ya know my last name? Reynolds? That’s not mine. It’s the name of the nun that adopted me.”

  “Well you can be a part of my family. I uh . . . I just don’t want anyone knowing about this room that doesn’t need to know about it. I don’t want it getting around where I live. . . . If Lovett and the Lonergan crew find out . . .”

  “No worries. No one knows anything right now except Dinny an’ Sadie an’ the inner circle, but you can trust ’em.”

  “Vincent?”

  “He’ll never say nothin’ to nobody.”

  “Lumpy?”

  “Nah, I don’ think he even knows who you are,” Harry says with a slight smiling. “He can’t keep up wit’ nothin’ except numbers, anyway. And he knows. He knows never to say nothin’ to nobody anyhow.”

  And looking out the window to the barren treetops, I give in entirely. To the treasure of hope, and imagine my own mother living here like it’s a dream. The safety and the calm it might bring. Far from that war and the B
rits.

  Out back at the bottom level there is a small courtyard where children could play, if it wasn’t so cold. And although my two younger sisters Abby and Brigid are getting too old for games, I know that they’ll enjoy the other children from this and adjoining buildings. There is also a stable house about a half block away where four or five horses reside, steam coming from their long heads leaning over the sidewalk. I can’t wait to see what the park will be like during summer. Left to imagine it only. Left to overcome doubt. Hope lands in the summer and if we’re lucky, my mother and sisters will land here too.

  I look to Harry, “I just want you to know how much this . . .”

  “Don’ worry ’bout it,” he interrupts. But there is much to be thinking on. So much in the way of their arrival.

  * * *

  IT IS LATE JANUARY WHEN HARRY and I start spending Sundays in the Prospect Park room and the months drag on. Dinny Meehan—the man that has pulled us all up out of the darkness and given us our lives—is himself dying inside. Without The Swede, who is slowly recovering under his sister Helen’s care, Dinny slowly fades into silence. But worse yet is the silence on his face. The blank look. The distance in him. Something had been taken from him, yet no one knows exactly which thing it is that’s drained him of his color and vigor that so defines him. Some days he sleeps in, even. When he doesn’t show in the morning under the elevated tracks to meet myself and the dockbosses, we are forced to make our own plans for the day. In these days I gravitate more toward Harry Reynolds, who carries on with things and is so generous to me. And he pays me extra too, which is a great help as I spend much of my time planning for the future.

  Red Hook, though, it has gone from Dinny’s territory to seceding entirely. It is gone and no one speaks of it. Least of all Dinny. Here we had for so long fought against the Italians who people the neighborhood tenements down there. Fought against the unions too, and right from under us our own man slips away with it. Lovett and his crew had bided their time well, kept quiet and made their move. At the Dock Loaders’ Club whispers are sent from ear to ear, things like, “Dinny’s always been too good to some” and “He was soft on Bill and it came back on ’em.”