Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  "The canaries die."

  "That's right. Maybe that's why they don't use them anymore. They haven't in years. But we still live in 'Canaryville.'"

  He'd taken her for such a knowing girl that this display of naïveté charmed him. Did she really believe miners would stop using canaries because their function killed them? Did she really believe, for that matter, that Canaryville had taken its name from such a poignant cottage industry? He liked her and showed it when he said, "It's a sweet, melancholy story."

  "It's true! I've seen pictures of my grandmother by her cages!"

  Dillon laughed. "Now those I know about, the cages."

  "Well, why do you think it's called Canaryville?" She stopped walking and waited for him to stop too. A new, high-toned pleasantness had bloomed between them.

  Dillon knew better than to spoil it by offering his far cruder—and, to him, truer—explanation. Seeds in manure was for the blottos in Doran's, who loved to emphasize that the shit eaters were English. He answered lightly, with the first other thing that came to mind. "I thought it must have been Capone or Dillinger or someone. Don't the hoods use the word 'canary'? Of course, when they do, they mean rat."

  Cass's face darkened, a sudden shift in mood, which Dillon regretted. She said, "They would say that's what you are."

  "Except they never heard of me."

  "They will now."

  He shrugged. "Another reason to blow Canaryville. I shouldn't have gone back once I started coming up here for those bottles. You were smart."

  "But you're the one who's been going to school all this time."

  "Just another way of collecting bottles."

  "But how did you do it? You've been working at the yards all this time? And you made it to law school?"

  Dillon resumed walking. She was asking where he'd gone to college, what had qualified him for Loyola. And he did not want to tell her.

  Cass followed, perplexed that he'd hopped away like a skittish cat.

  It was Dillon who stopped again. He would not treat the largest part of his own biography as shameful, even if everyone else who knew him did. He said, "I did my undergraduate studies in theology and philosophy at a place called Quigley."

  Cass looked at him blankly.

  "That's the seminary."

  "I know it is."

  "I was studying to be a priest. The Church gave me my entire education; it's why I have one. At the last minute, just before my vows, I quit." He waited for her to flinch or blush or look away. But she did none of those things. "I got my job at the stockyards, and started at Loyola the next year."

  Cass smiled. "And you've been collecting bottles ever since."

  Dillon nearly blurted out, You mean you're not shocked?

  She touched his arm. "I used to think I would be a Sister when I grew up." She felt closer to him than she had before, the generosity his story implied, and also the suffering. Her eyes glinted when she added, "But then I realized I was grown up. I mean, I am."

  "You are."

  Now, because of the affection she saw in him, affection for her, she did blush. "What next? You're almost finished, aren't you?"

  "I'll take the bar. But there are still no jobs, not even for lawyers." His mind flew for an instant to what the dean had promised, the interview with Lambert, Rowe.

  Would he call himself John? Well, hell, maybe he should.

  He turned from her and stared back at the wall of downtown buildings. The nearest was the pyramid-roofed Drake Tower, where he had thought to take this woman dancing, only he couldn't dance, he couldn't pay the cover.

  In his face, as he looked back at the city, Cass saw the hint of the ache that made her want to understand him. All that he'd been through, all that he had done and failed to do—but what Cass saw was an image of him as a young boy collecting bottles here and wanting only, as she had herself, to be close to God.

  She had hardly given a thought to his situation, so full of her own grief had she been. It shocked her to see only now what this man was doing for her. "And your chances of getting a job are even worse, aren't they?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "As a lawyer. That list of Buckley's 'Special Friends.' They're the people who hire lawyers in Chicago."

  It was true, of course. Not even Swift's would hire a man who'd made enemies of Kelly and Nash. Dillon was as capable of feeling the job-panic as anyone, and it amazed him now to realize how unprotective of his future he had been. What he wanted to protect was this woman.

  Touching her arm, he turned her back toward the city, to walk. "I can always collect bottles."

  "Are you really so unafraid?"

  He did not know what to say. They continued to walk, Sean holding her arm. As man and woman, they had no training in speech of this kind. But Cass had broken the silence even as it had begun to flow back toward them. He was unprepared to feel this connection, a connection of common history and of wanting to break out of it.

  "I am afraid," he said finally, "but not in any way that presents me with decisions. I'm not afraid of a man like Buckley. And I'm not afraid of losing a job I haven't been offered yet."

  "So?"

  Dillon laughed. "You want me to say what I am afraid of?"

  She laughed too. It did seem ridiculous, as if they were school chums daring each other into some display of intimacy. But she had the sense also of standing with him on the edge of a very real taboo. In moving into an active assault against Buckley, they were violating the rule of their kind: at work and on the street and even in church, the message was, Suffer in silence.

  But it was more than what they'd just begun with Buckley. They were close to some violation with each other too, something personal.

  "I'm afraid of the water," Dillon said as he grabbed her hand and forced her into a run with him. At first it took a great effort, running through the sand. Cass pulled her hand free—to refuse his impulse, he thought. But she stooped quickly and removed her shoes, then took hold again, and they were off, heading for the gentle surf. He hadn't run like that in years, and soon it was as if they had left the ground together.

  Running hand in hand, with the same wind in their faces, the same sand springing beneath them—it was a purgation, a ritual action dividing the first phase of their relationship, when a focus on who they were to each other was out of place, from the second, when nothing else would be as important. No wonder gravity fell away! No wonder it felt like flying!

  At the water Dillon stopped, but Cass, letting go of him and veering away, kept running along the shallows, soaking her stockings, splashing the hem of her dress. Dillon was aware all at once of how much farther into the moment she had gone. He was still in his damn shoes. He was still dry.

  She came back laughing. "You are afraid of water?"

  "I never learned to swim."

  The simple admission jolted Cass. She heard it for the preamble it was. She stopped laughing.

  "I was out there on a boat once, a measly rowboat. My friend"—Sean stared out at the very spot—"my friend stood up and the boat tilted. He fell out. I tried to pull him back into the boat. Then I fell out. I thought we both would drown."

  "But you didn't."

  "No." Dillon had never described that event to anyone, not even his mother. His friend and he had not mentioned it again. "We hung on to the boat until somebody came along. We didn't drown because it wasn't that dangerous. But you asked me what I am afraid of. You're standing in it."

  Cass looked down at her feet. "Oh, my..." She stepped out of the water, wringing her hem with her free hand. She looked up at him. "Are you afraid of drowning, or only of getting wet?"

  She meant nothing by the question, but its relevance slapped him. Despite appearances, he was getting wet, with her. He did not answer.

  The sudden gravity of his silence drew her. She straightened again, aware that, after all, he had something more to say.

  "Back there at Loyola, I listened to the priest and the cop tell you they were sorry abo
ut your uncle. I realized I had yet to tell you that I am sorry too. I sensed how important he was to you." His words hung in the bright air between them. The breeze flapped Dillon's tie up into his face. He caught it and buttoned his jacket.

  Cass caught her breath, to be back to that. "He'd become my father to me, my second father. Now I've lost him too."

  "I know what you mean. That is, I ... I wanted to tell you how, about a hundred years ago when I was maybe ten—it was the same summer I was out here in that boat—I came home and found the breakfast dishes still in the sink. My mother wasn't there. My sister told me she was at the trolley shed on Archer Avenue where my father worked. I ran there. I found my mother sitting on the step of the shed's main door, dry-eyed, stunned-looking. Before I could ask what had happened, she told me to get home and watch my sister. I asked her what had happened. She wouldn't answer me."

  "What was it?"

  "My father had gone to work sick. He took a nap in the shade of one of the idle trolley cars. He was asleep when some other driver got in to move it, not knowing my father was underneath." Dillon looked sharply away. His eyes went to the skyline, the Drake, the huge Palmolive Building topped by the Lindbergh Light.

  When Cass touched his arm, it seemed she could feel the blood pulsing through the sleeve of his coat.

  "I never saw him again. I never saw the ... remains." He looked back at her. "I think that's why I felt ... Maybe I sensed your uncle was someone's Pa, and I could do for him what I never got to do for my own. I don't know." Dillon closed his eyes.

  Cass could have touched his chest, which moved, just perceptibly, as he breathed. He seemed the very soul of self-possession to her. She said quietly, "I wondered why you are with me in this."

  "Now you know, and now I know too."

  Sean put his hand on her shoulder, pressed it lightly, the most natural thing in the world, a chaste communion. If they had broken something, it was no taboo, but the habit—the false taboo of their kind—of solitude.

  "You are a good man, Sean," she said. He did not answer.

  They stood like that, in the wind, at the edge of the lake, her feet wet, his not, the weight of the city accumulating against them.

  ***

  After walking Cass Ryan to the Switchboards Building, Dillon set off for the stockyards, intending to work the rest of his shift. Not that he thought he could slip back into his old routine, but he had yet to imagine an alternative to it. His long-standing fallback plan to stay on at Swift's remained in place, the beam of his ambition, even if he had sawed half through it. For now that meant donning his overalls, holding Hanley's tools, breathing through clenched teeth; the years had given him nothing if not will.

  The South Side El was uncrowded in the middle of the day, yet its run out of the Loop, past Soldier Field and the fairgrounds, down to Archer, seemed to take forever. Approaching his own district, Dillon couldn't help but see the rickety wooden rear balconies of the tenements lining the tracks as the slatwork, yes, of cages. He felt like a pigeon compulsively heading home—pigeon, canary, sparrow, rat—without a thought as to whether it was where he wanted to go. When he saw the great, familiar billboard, "We Feed The World," he imagined those scrawny brown birds, a wing of them, darkening the sky, swarming down on the dried crusty piles overflowing the collection pens.

  He laughed at what Cass had said. He had seen the "canaries" with his own eyes, would see them this afternoon. They were the opposite of the martyr birds whose memory the martyr women of St. Gabriel's revered. He chastised himself for the rush of disdain he felt, as if the extremes represented by Cass's story and his weren't the limits of the world to which he was born; as if its people were only either scavengers or victims. What about St. Bede's sparrow?

  Dillon's mind went at last to Dr. Riley. When you strike at a king, you must kill him. He felt a pang that the blunt, avenging weapon he and Cass had raised above Raymond Buckley—how bold of them!—was the timid, wet-eyed Riley himself.

  He checked his watch. It would add less than half an hour to his tardiness—tardiness again!—to go to the yards dispensary first, to put a firm hand on the man's shoulder. Dr. Riley, more than any of them now, was the sparrow. And if he was the sparrow—Dillon wished for a way to say this to him—he was soaring.

  The dispensary was housed in a low, one-story whitewashed building behind the looming fertilizer factory. A pair of brick smokestacks towered over the medical hut, spewing gas. As Dillon went through the flimsy glass-paneled door into the clinic itself, the stench of an am monia-based disinfectant hit him. But it smelled sweet compared to the air outside.

  A man in a black rubber butcher's apron and knee boots was sitting on one of the benches in the hallway, cradling one arm in the other. Blood showed through the heavy gauze bandage below his elbow. Dillon caught the poor bastard's eye and nodded as he passed. The nurse was behind a table near a door that led to the examining room, but she was fingering through a drawer of folders. Dillon went by without her seeing him.

  Dr. Riley was alone in the room at a small metal desk in the corner. He was bent over a sheaf of forms, pen in hand. One wall was lined with shelves holding various-sized bottles, cartons and packed bandages. On another was a pair of charts, one showing the entire human anatomy, the other a page of text labeled "Eight Kinds of First Aid That You Can Do."

  "Hello, Doc."

  Riley started. Fresh blood splotched the left sleeve of his frayed white coat. As he capped his pen, his hands shook. "What happened? What'd they say?"

  "It went the way I hoped. Father Ferrick—"

  "Did they arrest Buckley?"

  "Not yet. Cass Ryan made the charge. They'll have to get a statement from you first. They'll want the..." He glanced over at the shelves. Which bottle? Which beaker? "Specimen."

  "They can have it. Then I'm out of this, right?"

  "You'll have to say where you got it. They'll take your statement now, and then they'll ask you to repeat it at the hearing."

  "I thought all I had to do was give it over." Riley scraped his chair around to look at a small white cold-cream jar on the window sill. His voice cracked when he faced Dillon to ask, "When will this hearing be?"

  "Soon, I hope. That's up to them." Dillon crossed to the window and picked up the white jar. "Is this it?"

  "In formaldehyde."

  The heft of the jar reminded Dillon of a baseball. "Who ever heard of such a thing?"

  "I'll tell you, if I'd of known who that piece of cartilage belonged to, I'd of flushed it down the toilet."

  "You could still do that. You could have done it anytime." Dillon reached a hand behind his own neck to rub it, aware of the tension he felt. He saw how scared Riley was. "Why didn't you?"

  "I wish I had."

  The man's fear so openly displayed made Dillon see his simple courage, and Dillon realized that this was nothing new. Riley had been living by it somehow all his life. Otherwise he would not have been able to swallow his terror now.

  Dillon turned back to the window sill, to replace the jar. He looked out at the broad cinder-paved avenue that ran between the fertilizer factory and the Armour cannery. In the distance he saw the top of the Stone Gate, that Druid dolmen that so weighed on all those Irish. A tractor was hauling an overloaded offal cart toward the bins, and had to swerve when a forklift backed out of its shed. Up the wall of the nearby factory, he saw a Negro coughing at a small window on the third floor.

  And then he saw the two coming. The policeman was no surprise. Dillon didn't know him, but even from the distance of fifty yards he read the rank insignia that marked him as a captain at least, one of Eddie Kane's deputies, no doubt. It was the sight of the other man, the civilian, that set off the alarm, for Dillon remembered at once where he had seen him—at Raymond Buckley's elbow at the Stockyards Inn. This bastard had ushered Buckley's vassals in and out of the Sirloin Room.

  Dillon turned back to Riley and forced himself to speak calmly. "I see them coming now, Doc, the policeman and a
lawyer or somebody. I've had a second thought about how this thing should go. Will you play it my way?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm not ready to trust these people yet." Or you, he might have added. Dillon knew better than to say that their bold move against Buckley had already been betrayed. So much for Father Ferrick's old friend.

  "How are we going to do this thing if we can't trust somebody? What are we supposed to do, bring Buckley to trial by ourselves?"

  "I'm asking you to trust me for now, Doc. Just me."

  Dillon slipped the cold-cream jar into his coat pocket, then took his coat off and slung it on the bentwood rack in the corner. As he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, he squinted at the doctor. "What would you be checking me for? Maybe I've got a bad cough or something."

  Riley's eyes slowly focused. "A cough?"

  "Maybe my chest hurts bad when I cough. What would that be?"

  "Pleurisy, maybe, or TB. We've had TB, you know."

  Dillon picked up the stethoscope. "Check me over, Doc. We want them to think you're just checking me out. I'm nobody to these two."

  Riley deftly hooked the stethoscope around his neck.

  "But what can we give them? They've come for the evidence, that's what they'll be interested in."

  "Evidence?"

  "The piece of cartilage, the ear." Dillon's eyes bounced off his coat on the rack. "We can't give that to them yet. While we see how they're playing this, we have to give them something else."

  "A base on balls."

  "Sort of, yes." Dillon openly surveyed the various bottles. "Something they can look at as the thing you took from Foley's throat." Something, he added to himself, they can throw down the gutter and think it's gone.

  Riley's hesitation lasted only a moment. He moved Dillon aside to get at his counter. "This is what we want," he said, reaching for a quart-sized metal canister. He twisted the lid off, then fished in the vinegary liquid with two nicotine-stained fingers. He pulled out a shriveled walnut of flesh and held it up in triumph.