City of Dreams (36 page)

She popped off the piling as if a wharf rat had tugged at her sock. “Tim Riley! Just because I talk to you, it don’t mean you can kiss me.”

“Sorry.”

“My pa would kill me if he knew I was sittin’ with a boy. He’d kill me and cut me up into little pieces and dump me in the river if he thought I was lettin’ a boy
kiss
me.”

“I said I’m sorry. I . . . you just look so pretty.”

She studied him a moment more, like someone trying to decide if she should trust a snappish dog, then she sat again. “So . . . what was you starin’ at out there?”

He pointed down the river to the
Corsair
. “The papers say J. P. Morgan is spendin’ his summer on his boat. Sure would be nice . . . sittin’ out there catchin’ the breeze after work.”

“Sure would be nice to get rich. If you got rich, you could back my show.”

And for a while, the two kids sat there thinking about the future and about the rich man on his boat. Then they walked home together, but when they reached the block, they split up and walked down opposite sides of the street.

“We don’t want your pa cuttin’ you up and feedin’ you to the fish.”

And Tim Riley went to bed thinking of two things: J. P. Morgan’s money and the softness of Doreen Walsh’s cheek.

iii.

It was quiet in the neighborhood for the next week or so.

There was a shooting at the corner of Forty-second and Tenth.

A Negro couple stumbled into a gang on Eighth Avenue, and when the husband took offense at remarks passed about his wife, they beat him almost to death.

A dray horse dropped in his traces on Forty-sixth, and before they could drag the carcass out of the way, the driver of a carriage stuck behind the dray started cussing, so the drayman took an ax handle to the driver’s face.

Uncle Billy disappeared on Thursday, and by Saturday morning, they still hadn’t heard from him. “Another toot,” their mother said.

And a new heat wave boiled into town, bringing humidity so dense that the city air seemed cloudy, even though there were no clouds, and the tenement air took on a taste to go with the smell. Every breath was like sipping a foul soup of oatmeal and cabbage and greasy boiled meat.

So Tim was happy to take his mother’s grocery list and head for the Paddy Market on Saturday night.

That was when all the peddlers on the West Side gathered between Thirty-eighth and Forty-second, under the Ninth Avenue El. They parked their carts. They lit lanterns and torches. And they hawked and haggled and shouted and sold, and whether you were buying carrots or beef shins or big rounds of upstate cheddar, the bargains got better and better as the night wore on, and the shouting and the selling grew more frantic, until not even the passing of the trains could drown out the din.

Tim loved it.

Eddie usually avoided it. But that night, for some reason, he
CLUMP-THUMPED
along with his brother. They had almost reached Forty-first when someone called to them.

It was Doreen. “My ma sent me down to get a dozen eggs for Sunday breakfast. Can I walk with you?”

“Sure,” said Tim.

“So long as she don’t sing,” said Eddie.
Clump-thump-clump-thump
.

“Your brother isn’t very nice,” said Doreen to Tim as she followed.

“I ain’t,” said Eddie. “But I hear you got nice bubbies, so you can walk with us.”

Doreen stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Who said I got nice bubbies?”

“My brother.”

She shifted her eyes. “How do you know what I got that’s nice, Tim Riley?”

“He can see, can’t he?” said Eddie.

Tim smacked the back of his brother’s head and pulled his own hat down over his eyes in embarrassment.

“I think they’re nice, too.” Eddie pulled the harmonica from his pocket. “So I’ll play them a song.”

“A song?” She almost laughed. “Tim, your brother is strange.”

Tim peeked from under the brim of his hat.

Eddie started in on “McNally’s Row of Flats.” It came from one of the big Harrigan and Hart downtown shows. Everybody knew it.

And as if she couldn’t help herself, Doreen started singing:

Down in Bottle Alley, lived Timothy McNally
A decent politician and a gentleman at that

The girl sure loved to sing, thought Tim.

Beloved by all the ladies, the gossoons and the babies,
That occupy the building called McNally’s Row of Flats

She loved an audience, too. Her eyes flashed around at the faces now turning toward them, and she whispered, “C’mon, boys, the chorus. You know it.”

Tim decided that if it would put him back into her good graces, he would sing:

And it’s Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany,
Chinese and Africans and a paradise for rats
,

More heads turned. Passersby slowed to listen. A few even joined in the chorus.

All jumbled up together in the snow and rainy weather,
They constitute the tenants in McNally’s Row of Flats
.

Then Eddie launched into an instrumental bridge, a jaunty Irish reel that he played as fast and furious on the harmonica as if it were a tin whistle.

And when the song was done, a dozen people had gathered around, and it looked as if they came from all the places celebrated in the song. And they were all applauding.

Tim was so surprised that he just laughed. But Eddie was smart enough to take off his hat and make a big show of how hard it was to bow on a crutch. And Doreen was even smarter. She snatched Tim’s hat off his head and held it out.

The kids sang two more songs and passed the hat twice more and came away with seventy-five cents in nickels and pennies.

As another train roared overhead, they divided the money.

“We make a good team,” said Doreen.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “You’re singin’ better.”

“And you’re pretty good on that thing,” she answered. “Even if you
are
fresh.”

Eddie grinned.

“Hey, mutts!” Dinny Boyle and two pals were hanging by a delivery cart on the corner. “It’s good you’re singin’ down here. You sing on my street, you’ll have to pay.”

“Says who?” Eddie’s mood changed in an instant.

“Says Mr. Strong McGillicuddy. He made a rule. Nobody sings on Forty-eighth without they pay the street captain, which, as I already told you, is me.”

“I never heard that rule before,” said Doreen.

“You never sang with these nancy-boys before.” Dinny stepped up from the curb and kicked away Eddie’s crutch, sending Eddie sprawling onto the sidewalk.

“Hey, there!” shouted a woman trundling along with her shopping bags. “Don’t be doin’ that to a cripple, especially one who can play the harmonica so nice.”

“Oooh, jeez, I’m sorry there, lady,” said Dinny Boyle. Then he leaned down to Eddie, who was struggling to pick himself up from the litter of newspapers and cabbage leaves and tobacco spit on cobblestones, and he shouted, “Oopsie-daisy!” Then he spun about, knocked Tim’s hat off, and he and his friends went laughing up Ninth Avenue.

By the time another train thundered overhead, Eddie had gotten up and was thumping down the street.

“Hey!” shouted Tim. “Where are you goin’?”

“I got somethin’ to do,” answered Eddie. “Get the stuff for Ma. I’ll see you at home.”

“Ain’t you gonna go with him?” asked Doreen.

“He gets like that some time. It’s the foot. He gets mad at the foot. Then he gets mad at everybody. You can’t talk to him. You just let him alone.”

Doreen watched him for a moment, then said, “Is it true what Dinny said?”

“About what?”

“About how you’re nancy-boys?”

Tim’s answer was to kiss Doreen right on the mouth. And when he felt her mouth against his, he opened his mouth and touched her tongue with his. He had never known any experience to equal it. His whole being seemed to expand.

“And what do you think you’re doin’?” A police officer came swinging his nightstick along. “Get along with you before I find your parents.”

W
HEN
T
IM CAME
home with the bundles from the Paddy Market, he knew that something was wrong. Eddie was sitting in the front room in the dark. Their mother was slumped in her windowless bedroom, staring at the flickering oil lamp.

“Ma?” Tim put down the bundles.

She gestured to the piggy bank on her dresser. “There was forty-seven dollars in there. I give you two dollars for to buy groceries, so there should be forty-five dollars left. But there’s only thirty-five. Did you take it?”

“Me? No!” Time walked into the front room. “Eddie?”

Eddie just shrugged.

After an hour of interrogation, their mother gave up. She blew out the lamps and told the boys to go to bed. She said she’d expect an explanation in the morning. “And remember, it’s a sin to receive Communion if you been tellin’ lies.”

The boys pissed into the chamber pot. Then they pulled the rolling bed out from under the sofa in the front room. Eddie slept on the inside, facing the wall. Tim slept on the outside, facing the other direction. But it was hot and the street was noisy and Tim’s mind was working, so he could not sleep. He rolled over and lay on his back and stared at the shadows of the street lamps, then he rolled over again, and then again, and that was when he felt it.

He jumped up and reached under the mattress and pulled out a pistol. It had a short barrel, a wooden handle.

“It ain’t loaded,” said Eddie. “I hid the bullets. I took the ten bucks from Ma’s piggy bank and bought the gun from a guy on Fortieth.”

“Ma will kill you.”

“Better her than the McGillicuddys or that prick Dinny Boyle.”

Tim did not grip the gun by the handle. He held it in the palms of his hands, like a living thing. The metal flashed blue in the half-light rising from the street.

“I got it planned.” Eddie swung around in bed and sat up. “We do it late at night, when they’re sweepin’ up, right when a train is passin’, so no one hears the shots.”

“We?”

“
I’ll
do it. They won’t expect a crip to walk in and start shootin’.”

Across the way, somebody threw something out a window and it splashed on the sidewalk. A full chamber pot.

Eddie said, “It’ll be like in the cowboy books. I’ll shoot Strong first, then Slick. Then I’ll shoot the mother if she’s there.”

“And then you’ll run away?”

“I
can’t
run, asshole.” Usually when Eddie said something like that he sulked for ten minutes. Tonight, he kept talking. “But I got it figured.”

Downstairs, a man yelled. A woman yelled back, then she screamed. The Fighting Flahertys were at it again.

Eddie said, “I’ll use the fire escape. You drop the ladder as soon as you hear the shots. And I’ll climb up. Like Pa used to say, my arms are strong from liftin’ my own weight all the time. Then we’ll pull up the ladder and—”

“This is stupid.”

“The McGillicuddys ain’t done, Timmy. You know that. They was lookin’ for that funny money when they come after Pa. They heard about it from Uncle Billy, I bet.”

“But the bonds are worthless. They must’ve heard that from Uncle Billy, too.”

“What if they don’t believe him? They smell money, they’ll never let us rest. And they know you was in the house when they killed Pa, so—”

There was movement in the other room.

“Shit.” Eddie grabbed the gun and shoved it under the mattress.

Their mother shuffled in. “What are you boys doin’ still awake?”

“Can’t sleep,” said Tim. “Mr. Flaherty’s beatin’ his wife again.”

She listened for a moment to the sounds echoing through the tenement, then she looked around, found the chamber pot, and disappeared into the hot darkness.

The boys lay back. They heard their mother adding to the pot in the other room. They heard Mrs. Flaherty crying.

“If you don’t help me,” said Eddie, “I’ll do it myself.”

“What if I could find a way to buy us out of here? What if I had a plan? Would you wait?”

“You promise not to tell Ma about the gun?”

“So long as you promise not to use it.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, their mother gave them the “good conscience” treatment. During breakfast, on the walk to Mass, and all through a stifling afternoon of humid rain, she said nothing about the money. Finally, over a dinner of baked beans, she allowed as how it was possible she had miscounted. Maybe she had been light a ten spot all along.

That, they knew, was another part of the “good conscience” treatment. But the boys held fast and kept quiet.

It was still raining the next morning.

Tim rose early and walked down to the pier at the base of Thirty-fifth Street. On the north side, a freighter was unloading coffee. Teamsters were driving wagons. Longshoremen were shouting. Small ferries were puttering over from New Jersey.

Tim leaned against a tarp-covered pallet and waited.

Around eight o’clock, a black box cab clattered onto the dock and stopped at the head of a gangway. At the same time, a steam launch pushed away from the
Corsair
.

The driver of the cab popped a black umbrella and went down the gangway to the slip dock at water level. About ten minutes later, the umbrella rose above the head of the richest man in New York.

Even if Tim had not known J. P. Morgan by his photograph, he would have picked him out by his imperious gaze, his potent bulk, his Olympian solitude. No entourage of lackeys followed him. No secretary whispered in his ear. Though the dock was busy with comings and goings, no one was audacious enough to approach him. And he offered eye contact to no one. Instead, he kept his gaze fixed on some middle distance, where maybe there was a pile of money that only he could see.

The driver held the right-side door, Morgan stepped aboard, the springs creaked, and the black cab sped off toward Wall Street.

Then Tim Riley went home to refine his plan.

B
Y
T
UESDAY MORNING
, the rain had turned to summer drizzle. The dank overcast lay so low that it was hard to tell where the clouds ended and the river began.