Dermot picked up the pint. He felt his hand shaking so badly he put the glass back down.
“Did you see Whitey Ford pitch?” His father’s voice came from a long distance away.
“Sure,” Dermot said.
“See him much?”
“You know, between television and goin’ to a few games.”
“Ah, now that was a baseball pitcher,” his father said. “He had a head on his shoulders. Did I used to love to see him out there with some big bum of a home-run hitter. Luke Easter. Remember that big dinge? Hated it around the ankles. They all do, but Easter was a special case. Ford used to just stare at the big bum’s ankles and he’d, Christ, he’d start doing a jig.”
“Easter was with Cleveland,” Dermot said.
“Sure he was. A big bum first baseman. Hit the ball eight miles if you let him around on it.”
“Hit a lot of homers,” Dermot said.
“Seen him one day,” the father said, “bases loaded, two out, and here’s Easter up. Ford goes zip. Strike—”
“I’ll have another,” Finbar said. He had drained the glass with a sustained gulp. When the father was at the wooden tap, Dermot picked up the glass in front of him. His hand shook much less now.
“Well,” the father said, “one strike, right?”
“On Easter,” Dermot said.
“Oh, a terrible bum. First pitch was just at the knees. Just enough to get the bum’s feet upset. Now Ford comes right back. Zip. Curve ball outside.”
“He must’ve had five kinds of curve balls,” Dermot-said.
“That’s right, five kinds of curve balls,” his father said. “Oh, of course you’re right. Curve ball outside. But past the knees again. Strike two.”
“Now you’re in trouble,” Dermot said.
“Now the big dinge starts to wave the bat. He figures Ford wastes one now.”
“Into the dirt,” Dermot said.
“That’s right, into the dirt. Of course into the dirt. And here it comes. Fast ball right down the middle. Belt-high. Right down the pipe. See this big dinge standin’ there like he’s made of ice.”
“He got fooled,” Dermot said.
“That’s right, he got fooled. Of course he got fooled. He couldn’t move. Takes a third strike on two out with the bases loaded. You never heard boos like that in you life—”
“Where was the game, in Cleveland?”
“From Cleveland. I saw it on television.”
“They really must’ve booed him.”
“Booed him to death. Poor bum wanted to try and hit the ball. He couldn’t. The crowd didn’t know what Ford done to him.”
They stopped talking. Dermot finished his pint and held it out. The father took the glass and had his hand out for the wooden tap when Dermot said, “Forget the pint. It’s too heavy.”
“Of course it’s too heavy this time of day.”
“Give me a Scotch and water.”
“That’s right, that’s nice and light.”
Deirdre said she’d have another.
Dermot had the drink in front of him as a prop now. He fingered it, looked at it, and tried to think of a question or a remark that would start the thing. He did not want to talk with the others listening. He was thinking about how he could get them to leave.
“You need some ice,” the father said. He went out from behind the bar and walked through a room where there was a dart board in the pale light coming through a skylight. He came back with a small plastic bowl of tiny ice cubes. He put a couple into Dermot’s drink.
“Should’ve seen him a couple of months ago,” Finbar said. “Could hardly walk, he could.”
“Oh, it’s better now,” the father said.
“What happened?” Dermot said.
“Dislocated hip. Ripped ligaments and that. Couldn’t move a muscle for a long time.”
“How long have you been here?” Dermot said.
“Oh, just a couple of months. It doesn’t matter.”
Two men came into the place and Dermot’s father went down to serve them.
“Have you not seen your father in a while?” Deirdre said.
“I don’t know, it’s been a while,” Dermot said.
“Jesus Christ, a long time, isn’t it?” Finbar said.
Dermot didn’t answer.
“Man has to leave the house, he gets the blame,” Finbar said. “Not the cunt drove him out.”
Dermot fingered the glass.
“Jesus, when I met my Maureen, they was screamin’ to me that the father was the worst animal on the face of the earth,” Finbar said. “Night after night, that’s all they was sayin’ to me. Now, one time I happen to meet the man. He says to me, ‘Sit you down, Finbar.’ He says to me, ‘It’s got that I don’t care. I don’t care.’ I talk to him for a wee little while. Turns out he’s a good man. Oh, a good man, all right. So who’s the bloody cunt? Goddamned wifey. Jesus Christ, but the wind blows and she’s angry. My Maureen, Jesus Christ, she still says her father is a shower of bastards.”
“Fookin’ better off without any mother and father anyway sometimes,” Deirdre said. “Ye heard my father makin’ his talk about sodomy? When I was sixteen, I had an affair with a girl and he found out about it. This girl I went to school with—”
“I’ll have a pint,” Finbar said.
“Hey, I didn’t come here to work,” the father said.
“—a good Catholic education we were getting,” Deirdre said. “When my father found out about me and the other girl, he terrorized me. Terrorized me. The fookin’ death penalty for makin’ fookin’ love. The other girl, Jesus, he wanted her burned at the stake. Now you see my father. Sits there all day. He works in the pub downstairs stocking shelves a couple of hours a night. Does nothing else. I feel rightly sorry for him. But I don’t like him. And I don’t like to talk to him. He sits there and keeps bringing up sodomy. That’s his way of getting back at me for having an affair with this girl.”
“He’s a fookin’ fook,” Finbar said.
“Who’s this?” Dermot’s father said. He put the drink down.
“Her father,” Finbar said. “And Maureen’s mother is a fookin’ fook too.”
“Ye got to live with yourself, so ye might as well not have any goddamned people livin’ it for ye,” Deirdre said.
Dermot’s father shrugged. Dermot had the glass to his mouth and was drinking with his eyes closed. The other voices were like shouts in his ears.
“Ever see Marciano box?” Dermot’s father said to him.
“I was way too young to see him.”
“Oh well, it doesn’t matter. What do you think of Clay? Did you see him?” Tiny pieces of fear from the conversation around him were in the father’s eyes.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen each other?” Deirdre said again.
Dermot looked at his father and they did not talk.
“Fook that it matters,” Deirdre said. “Men leave here every day. They go to England to find work. They don’t know how to write and there’s no way to call. Nobody has a phone. They stay there for years and never come back. Some of them come back once, twice a year. A lot of them stay there longer than that. Never a word. Postcard once in a while. Christ, there’s nothing unusual about anything in life.”
Finbar’s throat made a low sound as he finished the pint.
“I’ve got to be going now,” Deirdre said. She picked up her cigarettes.
“To where?”
“We’ve a big meetin’ tonight, you know,” she said. “There’s lots to do.”
“What time is the thing?”
“Oh, ah dunno. Half seven, I guess.”
“It’ll go on for hours,” Finbar said.
“I’ll make it,” Dermot said.
“Ta ta,” Deirdre said. She ruffled Dermot’s hair and left.
Dermot watched her walk out. Young, body-swinging walk. He was telling himself, somewhere under the numbness and embarrassment, about how she acted much older than he did
.
“Ah well,” Finbar said.
Dermot fingered his glass again. He stared at it. He was hoping Finbar would leave now. Then he began to think about what he would say if he were alone with his father. He didn’t know.
“Wup!” Finbar said.
A tall guy with his mouth hanging open was in the doorway. He was dressed in a City Hotel bellhop’s uniform. The bellhop jerked his thumb up.
“Good lad,” Finbar said.
Finbar drained the last in his glass and stood up. “This is the time, Jimmy.”
“Let’s hope,” Dermot’s father said. “Ye want to come?” Finbar said to Dermot.
“I think I’ll stay for a while.”
The yellow-stained fingers wavered as they brought the cigarette to the lips.
“Go with him, you’ll see a few good tricks,” Dermot’s father said to him.
“I was figuring I’d stay and have a few.” “We’re all here all day. Go ahead.”
The kid in the bellhop’s uniform stood in the doorway, the mouth still hanging open.
“What do you have, broads?” Dermot said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ! Birds? We’re doin’ somethin’ important. We’re fixin’ a fookin’ dog,” Finbar said.
Outside, Finbar said to Dermot, “Ye’ve got to promise ye won’t admit ye’ve seen a thing. And ye too,” he said to the bellhop.
“Oh, I wouldn’t tell me own mother,” the bellhop said.
“Fookin’ better not.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t.”
They walked down the empty part of the road, with the hill running to the gray river, and then they came into the smoke of the Brandywell. On a corner crowded with men doing nothing in front of a saloon, Finbar led them down an alley covered with smoke. He tapped on a yellow door which had cheap flowered curtains over the glass top of the door. A man opened the door. He sat in the tiny front room with a greyhound held between his knees. The bellhop took a medicine bottle of colorless liquid out of his pocket and handed it to Finbar. The greyhound’s black nose came out to sniff the bottle. Finbar said he wanted a spoon. The man holding the dog brought out a tablespoon. He pulled the dog’s jaws open. Finbar’s hand was shaking while he poured the liquid onto the tablespoon. The man asked Finbar if he was sure about the amount he was giving the dog. “I know everything there is to know,” Finbar said. He put the spoon into the dog’s mouth and tipped it. The dog’s jaws clamped shut and his tongue started running around while he swallowed. The greyhound’s eyes narrowed for a moment against the taste of the liquid. He ran a paw over his face.
“All right, I’m off,” Finbar said.
“What do I do?” the bellhop said.
“You stay here for a half hour’s time to make sure the dog don’t vomit it up. Deal’s off if the dog vomits.”
“Straight story,” the man holding the dog said.
“I’ll be here,” the bellhop said.
“And when ye leave ye’ll keep yer mouth fookin closed,” Finbar said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t tell me own mother.”
“Fookin’ better not.”
Finbar put the bottle in his pocket. They walked back to the Free Derry Corner. “Now I got to go up in the Creggan and give it to another one,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Strychnine. It paralyzes their fookin’ hind legs. They’ll run in slow motion by tonight. That give us two dogs stopped. Mickey is over Strabane now. Stoppin’ another. Only six dogs in a race, you know. We’ve three stopped now, you know. Mickey’s hound is in fine form. Now if everybody can keep his fookin’ mouth shut we’re going to fookin’ kill a bookmaker tonight.”
“You got a lot of guys in it already,” Dermot said.
“What can ye do about it? Mickey, he’s the bloke with the dog we’re going to win with tonight. Mickey and me been out walkin’ the road for two weeks now. Go out in the mornin’ on the roads where the fellas exercise the dogs. We talk to a man with his dog and we strike a bargain. We give ’em a few pounds to stop his dog in the race. If he was a poor man like these two fellas in town, ten pounds stops his dog. But Jesus, it’s work, you know. Half six in the mornin’ we’re over to Strabane to speak to a wee man with a dog. Then we hadda get the man to put up the money. If you got some loose pound notes with you, we can get plenty tonight. We’re all goin’ to make it big tonight. We’ll kill a fookin’ fat bookmaker. Do ye have a cigarette?”
When he had the cigarette, Finbar said, “Jimmy’s the one with all the money. Gets the wee small envelope from America every week. He’ll make the family fortune for you tonight.”
Finbar said they were leaving at half six from his street. He left and Dermot walked up the hill to the Castle. He wanted to think.
When he walked into the bar, there was a roar. “Hump!” Johno was bent down with his arm around a tiny woman, stumpy traces of dwarf in her. Her face was seamy and her hair uncombed. Her chin barely hooked over the top of the bar. A bottle of brandy was on the bar in front of the tiny woman and Johno.
“El Humpo! I want you to meet my friend. Tell him your name, honey.”
“Attraca,” the woman said.
“No, your real name.”
“Half Gate.”
“Hear that! Half Gate. How’s that for a name, hump?”
She whispered something to Johno and he straightened up and began slapping his hand on the bar. He took Dermot by the shoulder and pulled him close. “Do you know what she said? Tell him what you said, dear. Come on, baby.”
“Yer man here has to lift me on. Youse could get on top.”
Dermot waited until Johno was finished roaring. When it was quiet, he said, “I saw my father.”
“Did you?” Johno said. “Where? At the saloon? Let’s go down and see Dad. Do you want to come and meet somebody’s daddy?” Johno said to the woman.
She shrugged. “Does he not have money?”
Johno laughed until he began saloon coughing. The amount of blood in Johno’s eyes was all Dermot had to see. He did not want Johno coming with him.
Dermot felt a heaviness and burning in his eyes. He told Johno he would be at the hotel. He was hungry when he got to the hotel and the dining room was closed until dinner time. He had the waiter bring up sandwiches, the same tray of ham sandwiches as big as a finger and covered with grass, and coffee. He stretched out on the bed and put sandwiches into his mouth and looked out the window at the Guildhall.
He wondered why people had fathers to begin with. Once the baby is born, all the father can do is hurt, Dermot thought. He was wondering what a father does. Does he teach you anything? The nuns do that. Does he tell you what to do with girls? Dermot never heard of a boy’s father telling him anything about sex.
He remembered when he was in high school and there was this girl, Beverly Kleinstuber, who used to let all the guys come into the vestibule and fuck her when they took her home. She lived in one of the six-family houses on Woodward Avenue. Beverly never brought anybody upstairs and let them get on the couch with her. She had a brother or somebody sleeping in the living room. Dermot met her at a dance at Sacred Heart in Glendale and he remembered taking her home and he began rubbing against her in the vestibule, a small vestibule with a white tile floor. The tile was cold in the winter night. But in the middle of the vestibule floor there was a mat for wiping feet Dermot decided Beverly Kleinstuber could put her rear end on the mat while he screwed her and she wouldn’t catch pneumonia. He hit Beverly with a head-lock and tried to pull her down to the floor. Beverly threw him off. “What are you, crazy?” she said. “At least if we’re standing up and somebody comes home …” Dermot took a shot at her standing up. He pushed against Beverly so hard that her back went flat against the bank of doorbells. She must have pushed in three or four doorbells. The buzzer started sounding to open the inside door. Dermot could hear grumbling inside one of the first-floor apartments. Beverly Kleinstuber smiled at Dermot. “You stupid motherfucker,” she said. She opened the inside door and
went into the house.
Dermot thought of other things a father does. Does he teach you religion? Huh. The other way around. The father is the first in the family to fall away from the Church. Does the father get you a job? That’s a game for rich guys. The average father may get his kid a job and then he may not get his kid a job. Dermot was thinking that you’re probably better off getting your own job than taking one the father gets for you. All he can do is hurt, Dermot thought. Teach the boy to box?
He thought about Tomasullo, who had a gas station on South Road in Jamaica. One day, Dermot and a friend from the neighborhood, George Ercoli, were walking past it when Tomasullo called them over and asked them if they wanted to make a dime. They were about ten then. They both jumped up. Dermot could hear himself saying, “Yeah! Yeah!” And Tomasullo said, “Good. Now have a fight with each other and I’ll pay yez the dime. Just step in there and let me see yez have a fight with each other.” Dermot looked at Ercoli and Ercoli looked at Dermot and hit him in the face. They fought, scrambling, missing and whining and crying, and Tomasullo sat on a wooden Coca-Cola box and watched them. He got up and pushed them apart. “Here,” Dermot could remember him saying, “watch what you can do if you know.” Tomasullo had Ercoli punch with a right hand. Tomasullo showed Dermot how to slap Ercoli’s right hand out with the left forearm and then, in the same motion, with Ercoli’s right hand way outside, to punch Ercoli in the face with the left. “A out-and-in motion, out-and-in,” he said to Dermot. He made Dermot throw a right hand and he was showing Ercoli how to block it and punch off with the block. When he was finished showing the both of them, Tomasullo sat down on the Coca-Cola box again. “All right, the two of yez start fíghtin’,” he said. Both he and Ercoli had tears streaming down their faces. They looked at each other. They couldn’t fight. “Yez won’t?” Tomasullo said. “Then yez don’t get the dime.” He got up and went into the gas station. Dermot started to go in after him and ask for the money. “Get outahere or I kick your ass,” Tomasullo said.
He closed his eyes and he was thinking about Tomasullo and his father, and he fell asleep. When he woke up, it was almost six o’clock. He took a shower and got dressed and went downstairs.
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