A crowd starts laughing around me like flapping vultures, yet I still have no way of knowing who it is that’s grabbed me. My eyes finally focus on the face of the man holding the gun to my nose. It is my uncle Joseph, looking scraggy as usual and drunk on top of it all.
“Well!” he yells, as the men around him continue to laugh. “Hand it over’r else!”
I don’t move. I just look in his eyes with the sternness that’s so new to me. As a reaction to my stoic response, he pulls the trigger in my face.
“Click,” the gun says to me, nothing in the chamber and the dark crowd laughs it up again.
“Have a seat, bhoy,” Uncle Joseph announces, pushing a man out of the way and clearing it for me. “Come, come. Set down next to yer ol’ uncle. . . . Me nephew from Clare!” he announces to the world with his glass high in the air.
I sit to his left, facing him as he looks toward the barkeep. He can’t sit still for a moment and continues cajoling the men around him in a state of drunkenness. I notice that he enjoys some sort of status among them. Honorless as it is to me, the men of McAlpine’s see him as a leader, just like Dinny said.
“He wants to join the ILA!” he blares. “Works as hard as any man dat ever broke bread, this one does!” then leads a cheer that was popular in those days. “International Longshoremen Unite!”
“A drink fer me nephew!” another grandiose announcement.
Within a moment, a whiskey is placed in front of me. I have no choice but to throw it down as he eggs me on.
“Anodder!” he yells.
“What’s happened with my da?” I interrupt. “Do you know if he was in the Dublin rising?”
“Drink yer drink, kid,” ignoring me. “Ye found yerself a new home here.”
“What’s happened with your brother?” I demand. “Is he still alive? Have you heard anything since the rising about him?”
Frustrated, he slams his drink down on the bar as it spills over his hand, “And what’ve ye been up to ye’rself since last we jawed, hey? What is it den? Ye beggin’ on the street now? Werkin’ fer the Whitehanders?”
“I’ve been working on the docks up in the Navy Yard where they don’t bother me, long as you pay tribute,” I lie, just as Dinny coached. “Red Donnelly’s a good guy, he pays his dues and goes about his own up there.”
“Pays dues to the wrong kind. The ILA’ll help a man, Whitehanders’ days are numbered.”
I don’t say anything back and when he looks over to me again his face is awash in shame.
“That’s nice then, real nice. I guess ye t’ink I’m a wort’less ol’ drunk, do ye? Ye do . . . ! I don’t care, bhoy. Fine. I’m sorry I gave ye the boot like I did, I’m sorry fer that. I’ve been t’inkin’ about it and, yeah. I was wrong. Did all go well after that then?”
“Fine,” I said, then lie some more. “I don’t hold it against you. I was stupid then, you know? I didn’t know anything. I still don’t. But I’m trying. I’m trying to learn something.”
“That’s a good lad. Yer fadder raised a good bhoy in ye. A good lad!”
I look around the bar. Most men are paying no attention to us any longer. The drunkenness has taken over and there doesn’t seem much guard to anyone. We are sitting toward the middle of the bar, only about fifteen steps to the front door through a dense crowd of torn-seamed union men. Smoke settles toward the roof from the many pipes and paper cigarettes and every man holds at least one drink in his hand.
“So, have you any letters from my ma?”
“Yeah, plenty. I didn’t open ’em . . . Well, I opened one of them. On accident ’cause I t’ought t’was fer me since the letter had gotten wet so yer name was wiped off it clean . . . So I opened it and after, I realized. . . . Anyhow, she says she misses ye and wants to know if ye can send ’er money, maybe.”
I thought for a moment, almost bubbling up in cry.
“I was goin’ to send’er some money, ye know,” he slurred. “But I didn’t have much extra on me, so I figured I’d wait ’til ye send some and I’ll add to it, yeah?”
“Uncle Joseph,” I say with as much persuasion I have. “You have to help me. I have to get my mam and sisters here. Do you remember Abby and Brigid? Do ye? They were just tykes back before you left for New York.”
He winces while looking away, bobs his head.
“Uncle Joe, I’ll join the ILA and be your best man here. Please help me, though. There’s a war coming. You know what the Brits do when you stand up to them. I’m afraid for the girls’ fate, Uncle Joe. My da sent me here for a reason. When they had that funeral for O’Donovan Rossa in Glasnevin last year, it was then my da decided to send me here. And send me here only to bring my mam and sisters he did, after the uprising . . .”
His face went sour, “Why ye so werried about that? Ye didn’t come all this way to werry, did ye? This is a new life, kid. No more farmin’. No more wet shoes all day and all night. No more barren country and small town minds. This is New Yark, kid. We’re home now and there’s a lotta money to be made here in arganizin’. I’m clearin’ t’irty dullers per week just in recruitin’ alone. I met King Joe too, the vice president o’ the ILA and he says T. V. O’Connor wants to meet me too! Congratulate me for takin’ over for Thos Carmody here in Brooklyn. Why don’t ye work wid me, kid. Let’s do somethin’. Ye know there’s a rumor o’ a million dullers bein’ sent our way by the Germans fer a general strike. We might do it, ye know! Can ye imagine Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey longshoremen strikin’? We got a great opportunity here. The shippers and the stevedorin’ companies would have no choice but to raise our wages to whatever we demand. They can’t stop the war effort because they don’t pay the longshoremen a right wage! They’ll have no choice. Its big money, kiddo! Our day is comin’! Forget about the past and the old and the women. They’re a burden on ye, and they’d burden me too. I’ll not help ye bring them here. . . . Just send’m money here and there and leave’m far from us, bhoy.”
Then I see Petey Behan and the others outside the bar talking with the same bouncer that greeted me. I turn to my uncle desperately. “What happened with my da? Uncle Joseph, I need to know what happened to my da. Did he join the uprising? Is he in hiding? What happened! Won’t you please help me get Mam here.”
Disgusted that I am unaffected by his recruiting speech, he turns his back to me and looks away. I can hear men laughing with a sinister accent behind and to the side of me. A second later, he turns back round, “Yer da’s dead! A dead man! Killt en Dooblin like all de other Fenians o’ the auld world. Dead! Yer ma an’ sisters too! Ye heared me? Dead! All of ’em!”
He turned again to the tender and sits coolly.
There was only one other moment in my life when everything stood still: the moment my first child was born and, of course, at this very moment here. I can picture it as I sit here at the typewriter punching words out in front of me, pausing now. Closing my eyes: the darkness of the bar pervaded much of that night. There was almost no light in there at all, no electricity at all along the old waterfront of the time. None. Just darkness. Like a forgotten time so long ago. Happily forgotten in the darkness and the fading of ancient memories. I can hear the clanking of bottle to glass though, the old man behind the bar with his big, bushy mustache from another century, the smell of pipe-smoked tobacco, and the cheap clothing of immigrant labormen huddling in the tiny bar shoulder to shoulder. I can see my uncle’s bald spot too, his back turned to me in true dishonor. And I remember too, that urgent feeling to prove my own honor. “Mystifying,” I say aloud, shaking my head. These men with broken beaks and broken backs lining up for a drink long after the shape-up whistle had rung out in the morning. It’s always mystified me. The humble beauty of it. They were all wounded in some fashion, physically and more. I can hear them singing in that silent moment. Their well-journeyed souls unkempt and uncared for. I knew then that I was alone in the universe. Like a man knows and finds out along his own travels. And I knew that no one was allowed to l
ive alone in such a place as New York where every other saloon you walked by had a piano man plucking the same old nostalgic tune, “The Sidewalks of New York.” Standing still in my memories, I cry at the loneliness of the place. At the contest of it where oftentimes loyalties were more powerful than family. My friends were now my family, and family is survival. It really was that simple. The clan mentality, clans existing to fight together for survival in an unforgiving circumstance.
I look up.
The bouncer starts walking toward me through the din of sounds and right behind him sneak Petey and the others. Some other drunken longshoremen start yelling that the kids are storming the place. The bouncer turns around and I know that in any second all hell is about to break out.
In one motion, I stand up and yank my left elbow down, pushing my uncle Joseph’s head to the bar, then I rip out my knife as I’d practiced many times over, and reach back. I reach back farther. Reaching back so far and so high that I probably looked like a baseball pitcher for the Brooklyn Robins. When I come down, I hear a gunshot in the air. But that doesn’t stop my momentum. I come down so hard with that knife, just like Harry the Shiv had told me, going straight for the neck. The knife comes in so deep that I can feel the hilt of the blade press squarely against his skin. It had gone through the back of his neck, out the front and stuck into the mahogany bar with a banging sound. Maybe more like a deep thud on the bar that makes the drinks around us jump in a scare.
Then I remember seeing Timothy Quilty decking men twice his age, left and right. He was a real puncher, that kid. Every man he hits goes to the ground. Another gunshot rings out and next thing I know, Matty Martin grabs me by the collar as I stand over my dying uncle, stuck to the bar by the knife in his neck. Just for good measure, Petey Behan comes up from under the darkness or someone’s armpit and sticks his own blade into my uncle’s side, reaching out from below. Another gunshot rings out from Matty’s snub .38 and down goes another man. A riot breaks out, but no one can see who the enemy is, and with everyone drunk to the gills, it takes many of the men several moments to realize what is happening. Some smart ones start stealing drinks from underneath the tables where they hide, like it isn’t such a big surprise to be suddenly overcome with a shooting brawl in the place. Others just start punching anyone around them to protect themselves as they’ve been ready for a rollick after their third drink anyhow. Now they jump at the commotion and give a licking to anyone around them.
A bottleneck is created since there is only one exit. Men start to realize that those who came in shooting and stabbing are trying to make it out the same exit as them. This fact puts a spook in them. Finally, someone throws a chair through the front window with a big splash. I look back one more time at my uncle who is alone in the room save three men that lay on the ground either knocked cold, or dead. The old scrag knows he is dying and doesn’t have a say in it. Stuck to the bar, I see him reaching back with the tips of his fingers for his chair so he can sit and wait it out in peace, I supposed.
When we finally make it outside, Matty yanking on my collar, I see the remarkable faces of Cinders Connolly, Petey’s big brother Joey Behan, Dance Gillen, and Dinny Meehan. When they see me and Matty exit the saloon among the chaos and the mayhem, they motion to each other. “They’re all out, the boys are out!”
Flame throwings being his expertise, Cinders has lit the rag that sticks out of a glass bottle of gasoline, then runs toward the bar and whips it inside the open front window. Behind him come Joey Behan and his, then Dance sprints up with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on his dark face with the last as Dinny is directing traffic. After Dance throws his flaming bottle, which explodes with a big huff inside McAlpine’s Saloon, he screams at the top of his lungs and tackles two or three frantic men running from the flames. The force that he uses in hitting men is so vicious and comical that he can bring four men to the ground with the punishing blow. Stomping on one after another, I run by him a little dazed.
Connolly comes running up to Matty and myself and asks where my uncle is and what has passed. Matty speaks up and tells about how I’d speared him like a fish.
“Is ’e dead? Dead?” Connolly frantically asks.
“Dead, oh he’s dead a’right!” Matty laughs. “Real dead!”
When the fireworks begin, the Whitehanders all start yelling in congratulatory tones, then heel-toe it out of there in a big hurry. I’m not sure if it was the rollick in the air and the rumpus among us, or just an anger that comes bursting out of me, but at that moment I search for Petey Behan among the running crowd and the blazes. When I find him, I sprint full speed at him, just like Dance Gillen does, and I tackle Petey with a thump.
“That’s what’ll happen with you too, you son of a bitch, you!” I scream and batter him for a good few punches until his big brother grabs me. “Don’t ever . . . !” I scream, but can’t get all the words out. “Ever . . . ! I’ll give you one of these real hard if you ever think of putting yourself over me again!”
“Jesus Dinny, why the hell’s this kid gone crazy abusin’ Petey?” Joey asks while holding me as tight as he can so I don’t kill his little brother right then and there.
But I have grabbed ahold of the coat by the collar and refused to let it loose. I see Petey’s eyes light up in anger. He yanks at my hand while his brother tries pulling me away.
“Let it go, kid!” the older brother yells in my ear.
Cinders Connolly, suddenly on my side yells also, “You let it go, Petey.”
“Fuck no,” Petey grits, then yanks at my hand again.
I have that coat so firm in my hand that it’s the death grip. I’ll not let it loose no matter if Dinny himself demands it of me. I yank back hard while in Joey Behan’s hold, and soon I can hear the alpaca’s seams come loose at the shoulder.
“Let it go!” Petey yells and takes a swing at me, which lands on my arm.
I kick up at him as his brother tries pulling me backward and soon enough the coat gives way, tearing into pieces.
“Ya’re a fookin’ asshole!” Petey yelps, throwing down half of the useless coat.
Dinny Meehan smiles and in a moment we are all running back up north for the Bridge District as Cinders Connolly looks back in awe at the flaming night sky.
CHAPTER 21
Donnybrook in Red Hook
“WAKE UP!” DINNY BELLOWS, ENTERING THE room. “Wake up boyos, time to get up! Let’s go, we gotta big day in front of us. You’re official kiddos now! Wake it up!”
He jumps on the bed where huddled close are myself against the wall, Timothy Quilty and Matty Martin in the middle, and Petey Behan straddling the edge. We are sleeping as quietly as growing young teenage boys do, but with our boots still at the ready. All four of us. The previous night our apparent initiation and with congratulatory drinks at the Dock Loaders’ Club afterward, we drunkenly agree that killers sleep with their boots on, so we keep them laced.
It’s true. We are Whitehanders now. Like real men. I not nearly as thrilled as the others of course, and as the pitter-pattering of the rain at the sill argues against Dinny’s exuberance, I try to turn to the wall.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Dinny yells, pushing on our chests and slapping our faces in the dark morning.
I open my sandy eyes and look up to Dinny holding a candle to his face in the darkness, standing above me on the bed. His smile has never been wider. He bounces on the bed and Petey falls off, still asleep.
“We got places to be, boys, now get yourselves up,” Dinny encourages.
As Matty and Tim get out of bed, I see Vincent Maher appear with a wooden box in his hands. He whispers to The Swede and an approaching Dinny that it was outside on the stoops, empty and wet.
“Ybor Gales,” Dinny reads the smeared but colorful papering around it.
Before The Swede cusses Lovett, Dinny hushes him so as not to let the young ones hear of dissension in the gang. But I know it means Lovett got the job done. And in his way, sends the message that h
e, Bill Lovett and his own crew, take the credit for it. Without tribute to Dinny’s hand. It means that Lovett’s act is seen as bravery and daring among his own men, traveling to Dinny’s home to make a point about his gang’s accomplishment. It means treachery to The Swede though. To Dinny, a demand for honor by the old ways. The ways that Dinny too honors.
“He’s got disrespect,” The Swede mumbles, pointing at the box in Dinny’s hand.
Unfazed, Dinny looks away. “He knows what sway is.”
I hear them whispering, The Swede angrily, but act as though I can’t.
“It’s all about the Leighton brothers,” The Swede growls. “As long as Pickles sits in Sing Sing and Darby’s eighty-sixt, he’ll never get wit’ us. Even after givin’ it to McGowan like they did.”
“He’ll never be wit’ us,” Dinny whispers while looking over at me. “Just have to keep him weak.”
I’m the last out of bed, but when I finally raise myself I head to the bathroom and open the door where standing three wide over the toilet and pointing their peeing puds at it are the sleepy-eyed young gangsters little Behan, Martin, and Quilty. In a rush, Sadie shoves a piece of toast on my chest with egg stuffed in it, scruffs my hair a bit, then doubles back and looks at my face. “Y’even look bigger, William.”
It is the first time she ever called me William. And it wasn’t until that very moment that I realized I was taller than her, as I must have grown three inches in the four months that I’d been sitting at her table.
Next thing I know and we’re all sprinting down the stairwell with a cluttering, then striding with a furious pace up Henry Street in the cold, rainy morning air with the gray sky above none too happy neither. Since most of us have holes in our boots, we jump the rain-dotted puddles from the cobblestoned street to the broken-paved sidewalk. Little Petey screws on his tough face again while Quilty, the tallest of the kid clan, dangles behind wiping the sleep from his eyes.
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