Exile on Bridge Street

by Eamon Loingsigh

  “Was Non Connors started that,” Cinders said, tucking a thick strand of light-brown hair behind a shorn ear, then turns back talking to the fool-mute Philip Large.

  But the men only look at each other and know that not even Cinders Connolly can be sure. But Beat McGarry tells me the truth of it in a whisper.

  “Helen Finnigan. The Swede’s sister Helen got kidnapped by The Black Hand a few years back, true thing,” he assures. “Down Red Hook where The Swede had a few followers before The White Hand took power. Dinny appeared out from Irishtown and offered The Swede to come into the fold o’ The White Hand if he paid the ransom, which he did. Afterward, Dinny and The Swede and a few of us raided a place owned by The Black Hand and stole all the money back. In their own fookin’ neighborhood too. A guy got killed, but ya know? That’s what happens. But The Swede? Reunited wit’ his sister, a love grew between the two that was as unholy as it was genuine. The girl hadn’t been seen in many months after Dinny an’ us got her back until one Sunday morning she showed up at St. Ann’s wit’ a newborn. And there ya have it.”

  “The Swede’s the father?”

  Beat looks at me from the side of his face, “Seems that way, uh? The Swede loves his family. Maybe loves it too much, ya know? The man’s heart is all twisted up like a vine, thorny and beatin’ blood. Never knew a man so mad and full o’ love too. He’d do anythin’ to make sure food’s on the table, rent paid. Any fookin’ thing. Ain’ no different than yourself, really.”

  “Jesus,” I say. A man so furious about family. To the point of perversion even, is The Swede. I see him now for the first time edging through the crowd and our eyes. They can say what they will about The Swede, but there is not a man more loyal to Dinny Meehan than himself. No man as loyal to his family either. That is The Swede.

  Outside, Big Dick holds the door open for the man with all the eyes on him to pass through. Across the street The Swede can smell the dung and sweat of horses mixed with the grainy scent of hay. Above, the giant Manhattan Bridge pushes through the sky its vigorous metallic channeling of sound over the water as if the air is being sucked through a chamber of reverberations.

  “I’m goin’ wit’,” The Swede says to Big Dick, who nods as the five begin walking toward the Sands Street Elevated Station.

  Slowly The Swede walks with a gentle stride unlike the others as they ascend the long stairwell outside, walk past two platforms and finally board the Fulton Street Elevated, which takes them south through the neighborhood. Wobbling along slowly through the façades of tenements and factories, they look into the windows of second and third floors as the train moves along the buildings only a few feet away from the tracks where the poorest live close to the elevated rails.

  The Swede’s long frame and limbs are not made to be stuffed into a mass transit passenger car and Big Dick too, in his width and size, is crammed into close quarters. When people walking by can’t get through due to the massive frames of them, The Swede refuses to move and instead the passersby are told to go back. The youthful men are recognized as the old Irish maulers from the docks that everyone hears of but don’t know much about.

  The Swede’s long, gaunt face seems stretched to the point of irregularity to them. His white hair and white eyebrows too, ghoulish even. Large, muscly hands spread wide across his torn trousers and the onlookers, too, see the windswept faces of them, the shining blue, silver, and glim-green eyes wild and pursuant.

  At Boerum Place, dusk takes on the day as they look down street level. Below, blooming street lamps are aroused and blink and twinkle to the surface as the four surround The Swede, who walks carefully, consciously avoiding any contact. At the end of the stairwell he stops the others with his sullen, pained eyes, “I’ll stay here. I’m no help t’day.”

  Big Dick gives him a black cigar and matches, “I’ll go wit’ ’em and it’ll be done, like done.”

  The Swede slowly bounces his head in agreement and trust, “You gotta pistol?”

  “Yeah, a .38,” Dance says.

  “Don’t use it ’less ya have to.”

  And within a few seconds, the four disappear in the crowd walking the two blocks to Hoyt Street, where once the Red Onion Gang ruled before being brought under The White Hand umbrella.

  The sound of their train pulling away and the screeching of brakes from another elevated train stopping at Elm and Duffield Streets ring in the background. Ignoring them and anyone else, a man drapes a rug from his window above, airing it out. When the four reach the makeshift saloon at the corner at Hoyt Street beneath a brick tenement, all four walk in casually. Big Dick looks through the smoke and population to see if there is a back exit, though there is none. Quickly, Dance motions to the others and points to Garry Barry’s back, sitting at the bar with a thin girl at his left side and his right-hand man to the right.

  Big Dick touches Eddie and Freddie and whispers down into their ears. Without hesitating, he then pushes his way through the crowd and wraps his bulky arm around Barry’s neck, pulling him from behind and toward the door like a big cat drags away its prey. When the thin girl notices what is happening, she announces it into the air with a scream.

  Barry’s right-hander jumps to attention but is quickly pushed off balance and clapped by a looping fist and a quick left sent by Dance Gillen, both landing squarely.

  “Fookin’ nigger can’t stand among us and . . .” a man yells until Eddie and Freddie throw him to the side, boot him in the back and head for good measure.

  Barry is dragged outside backwards kicking and holding onto the door frame in a panic, breaks a small window with his hand hoping beyond all hope that someone will help him. Anyone. Unable to scream since Big Dick’s hold is so powerful, he spits into the air to get as much attention as he can possibly muster out of mere desperation. A few seconds later and Dance comes running through the doorway onto the sidewalk and kicking Barry in the kidney and thighs. Eddie and Freddie follow, rushing through the doorway with fists loaded and swinging through.

  “Hold ’em up, hold ’em,” yells Dance.

  Crashing a right cross over Barry’s left cheek, he catches his balance. Big Dick’s hold is so tight that Barry’s head doesn’t even move as it is struck with clubbing fists.

  “Drop ’em,” Dance yells.

  As Barry is felled, saloon patrons make for the exit frantically. Emerge from the Hoyt Street saloon onto crackling glass at the entrance outside, the weak knocked to the ground and holding onto the doorframe, sprinting in many directions outside. Slipping. Running. Faces flushed they rush past the four that clout the screaming man on the pavement. Up above, multiple heads pop out of tenement windows to see what the calls for help are about. Five or six children watching the large adults brawl, looking to see if their father is among them.

  Big Dick jumps on Barry and Dance among the grappling. Barry’s pant leg being held, he jumps up and pulls to free himself. Ducks under Big Dick’s tackle and scampers out to the street where all can see the half-black man run him down only seconds from breaking away.

  “Garrett,” the thin girl howls after tumbling into a pile of glass on the pavement, trampled by knees as others trip over her and sprawl to the sidewalk.

  “Oh my God,” another woman yells from across the street with a baby swaddled between her and its grandfather.

  Eddie and Freddie each hold the sleeves of Barry’s coat, tearing it while he hysterically tries getting away. Big Dick bowls into him, driving him to the ground as onlookers cross the dirty street aloof, their conversation only stemmed for a moment.

  Another woman looks away after seeing Barry’s head bounce off the cobbles, eyes rolling back.

  For the next few seconds, the four men stand over Barry and kick him in the face and back and stomach until he can no longer move. Taking off his hat, Dance Gillen jumps in the air, feet high, and lands on the face and stomach simultaneously. Struggling to get his balance after the impact, dancing as he’s known to, he takes to the air for another. As Big Dick
, Eddie, and Freddie start running toward the Boerum Place Station, they both look back to Dance.

  “Let’s go. Let’s go.”

  Looking up, Dance notices he’s been left alone with Barry, looks down one last time and instead of pointing the .38, aims his boot for Barry’s nose.

  “Red Onion Gang, eh? Garry fookin’ Barry? G’night,” Dance says.

  The swinging boot not only breaks Barry’s nose, it breaks three bones in his face and sinus cavity. Dance then jumps over him and catches the others down the dark street, lit only by the halos of gaslight lamps over the cobblestones as the day is divided by night.

  The thin girl, who just moments before was drinking with Barry, sits down next to him after the others have run off. Her palms cut by glass, dress spreading wide along the pavement, her scent is of alcohol and cigarette smoke.

  “Oh no, no, no . . . no,” she cries as blood runs from his mouth and nose onto the cement. “Why would they do such a thing to you, Garrett? Why? What did you do?”

  Garry Barry’s breathing is irregular. Snorting desperately through the ringing concussion, one dead eye open and staring. Snorting every few seconds out of sheer instinct. Snorting as blood and bones bubble and rattle through the sinuses.

  CHAPTER 18

  Against All I Know

  DINNY MEEHAN AND HIS COUSIN MICKEY Kane walk into the Marginal Club, home of Tanner Smith’s small gang. Lefty, guarding the door, looks up from a table and before he can stand, is punched in the ear from the side, then in the ribs from behind with a low right hook that is brought up for a third blow under his jaw, dropping him to the floor.

  Mickey opens Lefty’s coat and takes out the gun, hands it to Dinny who holds it in his left hand, then reaches into his own coat and takes out a second gun and walks upstairs slowly. Mickey following him, watching behind with his own weapon hanging at his hip. Dinny opens the door on the second floor. Tanner looks up from the table, “Din?”

  “Sit down, Tanner.”

  “What’s the deal wid ’is?”

  Dinny walks over and rests one gun on Tanner’s nose, puts the other into his belt. Mickey reaches into Tanner’s coat and takes out the Nagant seven-shooter.

  “King Joe says he don’ wanna hire ya, Tanner,” Dinny says. “Seems as though Thos Carmody don’ really like ya much. And since Thos has the king’s ear, ya’re out.”

  “What are ya . . .”

  Dinny unscrews the rod on the gun, rotates it to the side, then pulls it toward the nose. Pushing the brass-encased bullet through the loading gate, he stands it upright on the table in front of Tanner.

  “Only way back in’s through me, and since ya can’t be trusted, ya’re out. We’re square now, you’n me. Ya helped me get to Brooklyn back when I was a kid. Now I just saved ya life because ya should be right now dead.”

  Tanner looks up at the two, “I known ya since ya was a bug. You too, Mickey. We’re fam’ly. . . .”

  “Ya go to the wrong side an’ we’ll kill ya,” Dinny says. “I see ya gettin’ comfy wit’ the Cunard people or the Silver Star or police or anybody I don’ like, I’ll send Mickey alone next time. And don’ try an’ get back at Carmody either—us’n him are yoked up now. We’re goin’ on strike soon, but you? Ya’re out. Ya got a problem wit’ that, ya take it up wit’ Thos Carmody.”

  “I think I will,” Smith says.

  Mickey Kane puts his gun away, reaches across the table with a tight-fisted swing at Tanner’s mouth, and kicks him in the ass after he is felled, then throws the table across the room and the chair as the two leave.

  With a pained look on his face, Dinny looks back at Tanner Smith on the ground by the overturned table and bites his lip, shakes his head in disbelief.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Ritual

  UNDER THE TENEMENT AWNING OF LOW-RISE, wood-framed houses pushed against each other over by where the bridges reach deep into the neighborhoods and where elevated trains pass every fourteen minutes off Johnson Street comes a terrifying sound from 113. A woman’s screeching from within one of the open, empty windows. Walking by, some stop in wonder. An old man with a cane has stopped his shuffling and tilts his ear to the air. The screaming endures. Mothers from each tenement stop their washboard laundering within their homes to hear. Stop their rocking chairs. Stop their hungry husbands from making love to them in the April mid-morning. Stop their window-smoking and shoosh children from their questions for to listen to the banshee inflections, as they know it themselves like some horrid ritual in this place where the peasants have settled from countries that flung them of their borders.

  It comes down the stairwell, too, as the draft horses puff their necks high, snuffling and stamping at it. Three energetic, wagging dogs have come to a halt and look in the hole where the wretched song comes from the black of the doorway. Cheering children look behind them, over their shoulders and drop the rock that has outlined on the sidewalk their game-playing and men in their window chairs pull from their facial hairs, look out over Johnson Street.

  “Mikä se on? ” says a long-bearded man.

  “почему она кричит?” asks a bulbous-armed woman.

  And finally after some long minutes of the ancient maternal lilt from within the stared-upon building emerges another mother in her peasant gray housedress—this one Irish. This one screaming as they all do. As if it’s the first child ever died in the world. Holding its distant body close to her chest as its limbs flail in her desperate strides.

  “Thomas,” Mrs. Lonergan tries to wake him.

  Young Anna, following her mother and seeing it all, holds her own face and stops on the sidewalk, bends down to her knees. Bends to the god of death. The cruel god and taker of innocents.

  Mrs. Lonergan in her stride falls with the boy held to her, plunges into the cobbled street, scraping her knees and elbows bloody. Bloodying the skin on her shoulder. Her sack dress hiked high, up to her torso and her legs are open in the air wagging for all who’ve stopped to see her. They see underneath her. Where that child, dead in her hands now, had emerged alive six years ago. His shoeless foot swollen and gangrenous. His open-mouthed stare evacuated of all the stirring of life. Gentle now, his smile is without the guile and treachery this city offered him.

  CHAPTER 20

  Save Our Souls

  MAY, 1917

  ALONE, DARBY LEIGHTON HAS HIS BACK to the Atlantic Basin as he stands on the bulkhead of Commercial Wharf among the dock’s warehouses. Ahead of him on Imlay Street are the twin, six-floor masonry block-and-mortar structures of the New York Dock Company. His sallow cheeks a sign of malnutrition and with bright eyes, a pale broth of color in the skin and a great concern for his surroundings, Darby Leighton has the look of a lost soldier.

  Through the wind in his ear, he can hear men speaking. He looks to the north where two jump-formed annex silos above four wood-cribbed bins and grain depots have only a few men there. They are deep in thought of their work under the clanking chains of the grain elevator, ignoring him. On the other side of Imlay is Van Brunt Street where just beyond to the east is the great contiguous crush of immigrant tenements. Italians bearing down on the South Brooklyn levee. Massing in endless enclaves, sections and wards only put to an end where the land meets water. Pushing them closer and closer. Closer still as they multiply and reduplicate in immense breeding surges, still hungrier children who see the waterfront hard-strung riches with resentment and lustful craving. Won and run by white men in their neighborhood.

  A cluster of dogs trot the pavement back and forth, weaving amongst each other, tails in the air happily. Red Hook a terror to defend from incursion or raid, the three north–south streets curve east into Brooklyn, providing multiple entrances and exits for enemy forays. Behind Darby Leighton, five ships await their unloading in the basin and yet Red Hook’s northern terminal is empty of all labor men. Not one longshoreman has shown on this morning. Not even has an unwelcome Italian surfaced, as they regularly do from Union, Sackett, and Degraw
Streets. The pier house supers are missing too. The stevedoring company left without notice and there are none of the warehousemen Wolcott and the New York Dock Company had redirected to the docks over the last few weeks.

  The terminal is empty of the boisterous men that work here. Abandoned of all its life like shore-water sucked out to sea ahead of a disastrous flooding. Like the work of some terrible creator or pagan artisan. Darby Leighton, like anyone would, saw in this the work of Dinny Meehan, the man who lives in the silence of things. Perpetually waylaid. In the void where everyone knows his name, yet no one knows his name. With many men following him as if he is more a driving force behind a certain behavior than a man of blood and skin. Darby shakes his head, exhales out the nose.

  “What’re we waitin’ for?” screams a hand from the deck of a barge. “You got men’re what?”

  Ahead of Darby there are at least eight entrances to Truck’s Row where the multitude of automobiles are lined up for loading the ship cargo. Teamsters stand on the running boards with the doors open, staring at him, waving their hands at the ships that need unburdening, yet it is only he who stands between the vessels heavy with cargo and the empty automobile trucks.

  Darby Leighton’s eyes remain calm. As men yell from both sides, still his eyes are calm. Calm as they’ve always remained. As calm as when he arrived from East London five years old with his older brother, Pickles, and fatherless. Calm as when he watched Pickles push a knife in a man’s stomach so deep that the hilt came back bloody. Calm even when he lived under a pier in Brooklyn with Coohoo Cosgrave and Dinny Meehan himself, and McGowan. Calm as when he watched Coohoo, The White Hand Gang’s first leader, lose the plot, screaming over and over, “My soul is pure, a cloud in a mountain shroud. My soul is pure, a cloud in a mountain shroud,” and ran into an engine repair shop and drank from a five-sixton jug of oxalic acid, eating out his insides in front of Darby’s serene, unaffected eyes.