On the fifth of February Dermot walked into the 125 at three-thirty in the afternoon. He was listed for a four-to-twelve. He didn’t even get to the desk. A pink-cheeked fat guy from the Internal Affairs Division stepped right out from the desk and told Dermot he was detailed to him. They drove to a white stone building attached to the Poplar Street house. The pink-cheeked fat guy held the door for him. They went into a room upstairs with six or seven guys in it. Johno was over in the corner. The pink-cheeked fat guy closed the door. There was a mirror on the door. Dermot knew it had to be that the nigger was on the other side of the one-way glass, looking in on them. The lawyer’s name was Nussbaum. He handled most of the tough trials for PBA members.
“If we shot the fuck, we’d be up for a medal,” Johno told Nussbaum.
“Well, I don’t know if that would be so good either,” Nussbaum said.
“Be better than this,” Dermot said.
“Suppose you shot him and somebody saw you shoot him?” Nussbaum said. “Let’s start talking about where we are now, not where we could be. First, can either of you get any help?”
“A good rabbi,” Johno said.
“The only thing better would be two of them,” the lawyer said.
Dermot began to think. He knew the people who would know his name would be useless. Johno was talking about captains and inspectors he had known over the years. Dermot knew they would do nothing. Dermot began thinking of the first time he was in Room 615. The Monsignor’s gentle handling. The word “confession” ran into his mind. That was one thing Dermot had learned forever in grammar school. Always go to a priest and tell him you did wrong. The priest would be almost elated. And he would immediately look to help. Whenever Dermot was in trouble with the nun in class, he would go to one of the priests and tell him something. Tell him anything. Once, he told the priest he had been stealing things. The priest patted him and went to the nun in Dermot’s class. For weeks, the nun let Dermot get away with almost anything. Dermot remembered this. He began to think about the Monsignor. He mentioned to Nussbaum that both he and Johno had been in the Counseling Unit.
“Gold,” Nussbaum said.
“That good?” Johno said.
“The only thing he could do for you is save your life,” Nussbaum said. “Let me tell you, I had a Puerto Rican woman claiming she was pregnant by one of the men. The Puerto Rican had a landlady backing up her statement that the policeman came to the house every day and went to this Puerto Rican woman’s flat. The man’s captain appeared as a defense witness at the departmental trial. Here’s what he testified. He said it was impossible for the man to make the woman pregnant because the man was a good Roman Catholic with five children at home. If he ever fucked this lousy Puerto Rican he would have worn a condom. The patrolman was too good of a Catholic to get inside a Puerto Rican and then go home and sleep with his wife. The trial board asked the captain what the patrolman was doing in the Puerto Rican’s apartment so much. You know what the captain said? ‘The man has a problem with the drink.’ That’s all the board had to hear. They had the out. They whipped the man over to Straight and Narrow and in six months he was back on regular tours.
“What this story means to you is that the best chance against any offense, particularly a sex offense and most particularly a sex offense when there are Irish Catholics on the trial board, is to cop out to alcoholism. It’s way easier to be guilty of misuse of whisky than misuse of the prick.”
The lawyer only had to say it once. Dermot and Johno knew that if they could not work themselves out of the trouble they were in this time, they both might as well be dead. Without a pension, Johno would wind up sleeping in the streets. Even for Dermot, it was too late to think of anything else except his pension. Half pay for life after twenty years. Every two weeks, Dermot Davey received a check of $387.90. The check represented two things to him. Food for his family. And fourteen less days to wait until he could go out on pension. He knew it was bad to be this way at twenty-nine, to be looking forward, awaiting the day when you are forty-one.
He thought about what he would do then. Security was a business that always would be, Dermot thought. He would be at an airport probably. Sometimes he thought about a bar with a screen door open and sunlight coming onto the floor. A bar in Florida. He liked that. Other times, when he was depressed, he kept thinking of faces of bank guards. Retired New York City policemen who are bank guards stand by the glass counters, putting pens back into the holders, and the pens are black and shiny and the guards are enveloped by a thick layer of dust that stays on them until a mortician rubs it off.
2
DERMOT DAVEY COMES OUT of St. Monica’s Parish in Jamaica, in Queens, in New York City. He was living now in Holy Child Parish, in Richmond Hill, in Queens, in New York City. Richmond Hill is only twenty-five minutes away from Manhattan. But everybody in Queens always thinks of Manhattan as another place. The people say, “I’m going to the city,” or, “I’m going to New York.” Queens begins at the East River, directly across the water from midtown Manhattan. In Manhattan, you have the United Nations building on the water, sun exploding on the windows, sprinklers throwing water on the lawns and gardens. Directly across the river from the United Nations is the Pepsi-Cola plant in Long Island City, in Queens, its red neon sign bare and ugly in the daylight, eerie at night, in the smoke rising around it.
Eddie Kieran, who lives next door to Dermot on 109th Place, was standing outside one Saturday night having a cigarette while he waited for his wife to fall asleep upstairs.
“Where’d you go?” he asked Dermot.
“Picked them up at the Maspeth Bingo,” Dermot said.
“Oh, somebody says you went to the city,” Eddie Kieran said.
“City? I haven’t been to New York with Phyllis in, what, six months?”
“Oh, so you just went to the bingo.”
“Picked them up at the Maspeth Bingo. What did you do?”
“Done nothin’. Went to her mother’s.”
Kieran had on a brown windbreaker with GROVER CLEVELAND HIGH lettering on the back. It is the jacket he wore on his high-school baseball team. Eddie is thirty-nine and he takes very good care of the jacket.
“Another couple of weeks,” he said. He was swinging his arm in a circle.
“For what?”
“Jones Beach Softball league. The start, anyway. The first meetin’s and that.”
“You play again this year?”
“What’re you, kidding? Play every year.”
Eddie took a drag on the cigarette as if he were a general. When he talks about playing ball he always is like this. Otherwise, Eddie is afraid of speaking to people. He had a job as a laborer at St. John’s Cemetery. People looking for gravesites asked him too many questions. He quit and now works nights in a bakery. He puts jelly buns into paper bags and loads them onto a delivery wagon.
“I think I’m gonna play short this year,” Eddie Kieran said.
“What’d you play last year? I saw you play shortstop.”
“That was only the one game, against the Grumman. I played centerfield all year. I could throw, for Christ’s sake, I was the only one could throw. The one game there, Mahon from the West Babylon, I threw a strike on him at the plate. What a fuckin’ throw.”
He took the cigarette and threw it out into the street. It made a little red arc in the darkness under the big old maple trees along the sidewalk.
“The fuckin’ school is breakin’ my back, too,” Eddie said.
“What do they want now?”
“The same fuckin’ thing. They want her to go college. Fuck them.”
“How much would it cost you?”
“She got a fuckin’ scholarship to the place.”
“Which place is it again?”
“The Middlebury. They give her a scholarship for speakin’ fuckin’ French. That ain’t it. For Christ’s sake. Let her go out and work and help out at home. What is this here, a fuckin’ paradise I got?”
“Wh
at’s the wife think now?”
“She ain’t allowed to think, I’ll do the thinkin’. I just wish the fuckin’ schools would butt out. This here woman at the high school. Fills my daughter up with a lot of bullshit. I tell them all. I tell them, I didn’t go to no college. It was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my daughter. We got no money. Let her start bringin’ home a coupla dollars. Bucks. That’s what we need. Bucks. That’s what we need. Bucks. Not some fuckin’ French.”
They were standing on a street of dusty wooden houses with gingerbread all over them. Small patches of lawn, are in front of each house. Most of the lawns are more rutted dirt than grass. The houses are separated from each other by common driveways, so narrow a car can barely fit between the houses as it inches back to the garages in the back yard. Most men when they bring their wives home on a Saturday night open the door at the front of the house and the wives get out. The man takes fifteen minutes inching his car into the driveway. Then he comes out and stands on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, waiting his wife out, waiting for her to be undressed and asleep by the time he comes into the house so they will not have to as much as talk. On the blocks in Richmond Hill on a Saturday night you always can see pinpoints of cigarettes in the darkness in front of the houses.
The house Dermot Davey and his wife and three daughters live in is owned by his mother-in-law. Dermot lives on the top floor, his in-laws downstairs. The house is tan, with green trim. The house is in the middle of the block. At one end of the street is the main avenue, Jamaica Avenue. El tracks run on top of Jamaica Avenue. A throw-up-green El with rust coming out from under the ties and black pillars lining the sidewalk. At the foot of each pillar, the crevices and ledges are stuffed with cigarette and candy wrappers. The light comes through the slats in the tracks and falls on the street in wavy rectangles. The El is old and noisy. Often, as trains clatter along it, bolts loosen in the tracks and drop through to the street; two stories below.
Under the El, yellowing attached two-story buildings of Jamaica Avenue push the street into even more dreariness. As you come up Jamaica Avenue from Lefferts Boulevard, a main cross street, you pass a wallpaper shop, a Cheap John’s Bargain Store, a wedding photographer’s shop, two real-estate offices with nervous young men sitting at scarred desks, a candy store with plastic toys in the window, an old A&P supermarket, several bars, Irish dungeons, with withered old men sitting in them and staring out at another day wasted. Once it becomes dark the doors to the bars are locked. The bartender lets in customers he knows by pressing a buzzer under the bar which automatically unlocks the door.
While Dermot and his next-door neighbor stood on the sidewalk, it was still early, before midnight, on a weekend night. Nearly all the houses were dark anyway. Dermot knew that day or night made little difference in the activity in the houses. In the daytime, the people were afraid to come to the door if the doorbell rang. They stayed back in the kitchens, peering down the hall. Nearly everybody in Richmond Hill has a dog. On Dermot’s block, the people were buying big German shepherds. Black gums wet and flapping, yellow teeth bared, nose thrashing against the inside of the storm door, the dogs answered the doorbells for the people.
On this night, there were lights in the Laurino house in the middle of the block. On Saturday nights, the Laurinos always go to New York for plays and things like that. Laurino is an accountant. His wife, Laura, used to be a schoolteacher and now she substitute-teaches once in a while.
One time, Dermot and his wife went to a party in their house and late, while everybody was going home, Dermot was pouring himself another drink and Laura put a hand on his wrist. “You’re too young to be drunk like this,” she said. Ever since then, whenever she sees Dermot on the street she looks at him carefully. He turns his face from her as much as he can.
Next to Laurino, where Jackie Collins lives, is a different story. He drives a truck for Piel’s Beer. His brother delivers for New Arrival Diaper Service. The two of them are always together at one of the bars on Jamaica Avenue. Jackie Collins in a zipper jacket with PIEL’S stitched across the back and his name, JACKIE BOY, stitched on the front-breast pocket. And his brother in a zipper jacket with NEW ARRIVAL DIAPER SERVICE stitched across the back and his name, EDDIE BOY. In the summers, Jackie works overtime. He goes to the race track as much as possible. In the winters, work is slow. He hangs out in bars. Dermot always notices his wife walking on Jamaica Avenue with her head down. She doesn’t want storekeepers to notice her and come running out with one of her bad checks in their hands. The only time Dermot notices her picking up her head is when she passes the Blue Marlin or McLaughlin’s or JB’s, and she does this because she is looking for her husband. It is easy to spot him, in his PIEL’S zipper jacket. Usually he is right alongside his brother, in his NEW ARRIVAL DIAPER SERVICE zipper jacket.
The other people on the block are older. Toner, across the street, has a good job in the Fire Department, driving a Battalion Chief. Toner has fourteen months to go on his pension, thirty years. His wife never leaves the house. She keeps sending neighborhood kids down to the corner for ice cream and stays inside with the curtains drawn, watching television. The house is a mess and the furniture torn. The wife, when you see her in a house coat once a week or so, seems to be nearing three hundred pounds. The Taylors live next to the Toners. Taylor is a retired bank teller. The women on the block all say they see him naked and hiding behind trees at night. The rest of the people on the block Dermot knows only by name. They all are in their sixties. One of them, Mrs. Metcalf, a shriveled woman, stopped him one day when she heard that Dermot’s wife had gone to the hospital during the night to have her first baby. Mrs. Metcalf said, “Did her water break?”
“I guess so,” Dermot said.
“That’s bad, dry babies is very hard to have,” Mrs. Metcalf said.
Dermot’s mother and sister lived in Ozone Park, less than ten minutes away from his house in Richmond Hill. He had not seen or spoken to his mother in the last three years. Since the christening party for Dermot’s third daughter, Tara. His mother had arrived for the party with her eyes bloodshot, her lip curled. She started an argument with Dermot’s mother-in-law. The argument started for the same reason his mother’s fights always start, whisky. Dermot’s mother-in-law looked to him for help. He walked out of the house and went down to the avenue, to McLaughlin’s. While he was there, his mother left the christening and went home. Dermot’s mother-in-law came down to McLaughlin’s to get him back. He said something fresh to his mother-in-law. She walked out of the bar. Dermot never went back to the christening party.
In the days following this, he first tried to call his mother and hammer at her, but he found he was always stopping short of calling her the one word, drunk, which kept running through his mind. He decided not to call her or take calls from her. Dermot still had a marriage at that time. He knew his mother was capable of keeping two families at once living in the misery of whisky rages. He stopped going to visit her although she lived only ten minutes away. Once in a while over the months, Dermot’s mother called his house. The voice snapping, “Let me speak to my son.” If he was home, Dermot would grab the phone and hang it up. That would start her calling every ten minutes until either she fell asleep or Dermot took the phone off the hook. For the three years this went on, Dermot knew that his sister, living with his mother in a four-room apartment, was giving up her years and her nervous system so the mother would not have to live alone. The mother continually tried to pick fights with neighbors, who by this time did not speak to her. When his mother would be sober, she would not understand why people ignored her. Depressed, she would start the cycle of drinking and fighting again.
Because of age differences and because of the occupation—policemen rarely speak to anybody but policemen, and policemen’s wives rarely speak to any other women but policemen’s wives—Dermot and his wife had little to do with the people on the block. Most of the policemen with whom Dermot works live out on Long Island. They live
in places called Deer Park and Massapequa Park, in split-level and ranch and Cape Cod houses costing twenty thousand dollars. The houses have lawns that the policemen mow in the summer. The houses have walks that the policemen shovel in the winter. There are barbecue stands covered with plastic in the back yard and a picnic table with a garden hose on it and the television set always is on and the cop leaves the house for only three reasons. The ride to the supermarket with his wife. The ride to the hardware store by himself. And the hated trip, the ride on the Long Island Railroad to the job in Queens. For eight hours a day the policeman patrols streets he hates, watches people he despises and, if the people are black, people who make him apprehensive or even afraid. Many of the policemen who still live in Queens live cheaply with parents or in-laws. The one Dermot Davey knows best in Queens is Johno O’Donnell.
When he was straight, before he began swallowing too much whisky, everybody always said Johno was one of the best cops they had seen. Johno had two citations. The one Dermot knew by heart—Johno had told it to him so many times over so many drinks—came from a payroll holdup of a bakery plant in Long Island City. The plant was on a dead-end street. A girl inside the plant had been able to sneak a call. Johno was in the first car to respond. The holdup men were coming out the metal door from the factory office. They jumped back inside. They were either going to take hostages or shoot it out from inside. Johno was out of the car and had the factory door open and was firing so quickly up the metal staircase that none of them got past the first landing. One was shot in the back, another in the leg, and the third quit.
If you saw Johno stumbling around Glendale and Ridgewood, you would have trouble believing it. But once Dermot had seen the Johno the old-timers talked about. There was a call from Schmidt’s Restaurant on Myrtle Avenue. Dermot was driving Johno in the sector. When they arrived, a German waiter was standing with a group of women around a booth. The waiter was wringing his hands. In the booth, slumped against the wall, her legs on the seat, was a heavy woman with frightened eyes. They had a coat thrown over her.
World Without End, Amen Page 5