Exile on Bridge Street (10 page)

“I'm here. I saw it,” he says.

I squint at him, focus, but then change my mind again. It actually is Dinny Meehan. Not Harry after all.

“Dinny?” I say, wiping the blur from my eyes.

But Tommy and Paddy and Richie and Petey and everyone else look at me with castigating glances, half-smiling smirks, “Who's that?”

“Harry and Dinny,” I say under my breath, shaking my head in a befuddled state, falling backward in the chair. “Harry and Dinny and . . .”

CHAPTER 5

Abattoir and Exodus

J
ULY
1916

“S
ADIE
!” D
INNY
YELLS
FROM
A
BACK
room of the Meehan brownstone on Warren Street, then stands in front of her and I; wearing an undershirt, his broad arms and heavy chest block my view of Sadie.

“Yes?” she asks.

“Nevermind. . . . Ya remember each stop, yeah?” Dinny asks me while putting three envelopes on my chest.

“I do.”

“Make sure ya tell her she's pretty and . . .”

“The young man knows what to say,” Sadie says, moving in front of him with a smile. “But the most important fing is to listen, William. Always listen to a gal, if nuffink else. Ask questions, then listen and show that yu like the person she is—'at's more important. Now come 'ere so I can finish up on the sides.”

Sadie pulls my ear down and I can feel the cold scissors on the side of my head. She was the one that nursed me back to health after my uncle left me for the streets last year. She was the one that gave me life again and also who stepped up in my mother's absence. Good Sadie. Sadie Leighton, cousin of Pickles, and Darby, who'd come to Brooklyn as youngsters before she had arrived from the Irish enclaves of East London, eventually allowing herself to be won over by Dinny Meehan, becoming his wife. Bearer of her husband's many secrets, many sins, and his son too, L'il Dinny. She looks at me and smiles, then runs water over her hand from the sink, which is always colder in the mornings, then mixes the cool water with petroleum jelly and runs her fingers through the top of my head.

“Yu gonna look so much be'a after this, William,” she says, concentrating on my hair. “Got a bit scruffy, yu did.”

“Do you think me good-looking?” I ask.

“O' course,” she smiles. “And wif 'is new 'air style, yu'll knock 'er down. More important than looks is personali'y, yu know. Gals like a man wif personali'y more'n they like 'is looks.”

I feel my nose, which is bent and painful.

“Still a bit swollen,” Sadie says looking at it with my head in her hands. “It'll get be'uh, just give it some time. This cut though, in yu eyebrow 'ere. It's a deep one. 'At'll be a scar no doubtin' it. Look 'ere, Dinny got yu a coat for today, put it on, eh? And 'ere's some flowers for the lucky lass too.”

I stand in front of the foggy mirror in the kitchen with my puttied hair, shaved on the sides and the back, bruised face, new coat, and a fistful of lilacs and dandelions and carnations and lily of the valley for decoration.

“A real gentleman wif a New Yoork 'aircut too.”

“But I don't know if I like Anna Lonergan,” I whisper to Sadie.

She stands next to me in the mirror, adjusts my tie. She blows some hair off my shoulder and gives an awkward smile. I can tell she does not agree about this matching either, but won't say it. Though she knows that I can see it on her. Gives me her thoughts by the look on her face, purposely.

I look to her, “Did you used to care for Vincent like you do me?”

Sadie laughs, “Vincent didn't need much lovin'. Full o' vinegar, 'at one. Carryin' on like 'e knew sumfin'. Prancin' like a roosta' in the coup, cursin' an' all. 'E never needed much from me. Just a mum for a bit 'til 'e grew ou'a needin' one.”

I was third in line, Vincent being just ahead of me. It'd become a tradition: Dinny finding street gamins, bringing them to his home to raise, turning them into his family with Sadie's nurturing. All three of us were so different though, myself being consumed with the idea of bringing my mother and sisters to New York. Vincent intent on sacking as many girls as he could and . . . I turn to Sadie again, “What was Harry like when he was brought in. He was first right?”

“Ma,” L'il Dinny interrupts, tugging on her in front of the mirror.

“Oh look,” she says sarcastically. “The rattlin' in 'is belly begins and 'at's when 'e comes to realize 'ow much 'e looves 'is mum, eh?”

She bends down and picks him up and as I watch them doting over each other, I eventually come to understand that she is not going to answer the question on Harry, instead quickly changing the topic.

“Did yu know Dinny's got two sista's in Albany?”

“Uh, no I didn't know . . .”

“We're not movin' to Albany,” Dinny interrupts from the bathroom.

“Just a visit's all I ask for, Dennis . . .”

“Let's go,” Dinny appears in the kitchen, waving me out.

Outside in the predawn shade, Vincent looks up from the stoops as Dinny hands me one more envelope, though this one is empty. “Listen. Ya listenin'? I need ya to go to the corner o' Bridge'n Tillary before the bike shop, yeah? Take the streetcar to the stop at Adams, walk east on Tillary but don't go south o' there, that's Camorra, south o' there.”

“All right.”

“When ya get to the Tillary Street Abattoir, ask for Feinberg. David Feinberg, and give'm that envelope. Just tell 'em it comes from Bridge Street and he's got one mont' to pay. He'll know who's sendin' ya. One mont', that's all ya gotta say,” Dinny explains, holding up one finger. “Then go to the bike shop wit' the flowers, got it?”

“I do, but it's empty,” I say holding the envelope.

“S'posed to be, a'right? A'right, ya look good. Everythin's good,” he says. “Ya feel good?”

“I think so.”

Vincent chimes in, “A bull don' go runnin' after one cow, remember that. He walks down and gets 'em all.”

“He just means relax, is all,” Dinny says, then pulls out a piece of plumber piping and opens up the new coat I am wearing, fits it into a newly stitched area that holds it perfectly. “Ya won' need it, but just in case. Ya got quite a bit o' dime on ya.”

“Nice hair,” Vincent says, smiling. “Now ya look like one o' us.”

“Big day, let's see what ya can do,” Dinny says. “What I tell ya about things?”

“What?”

“What I tell ya?”

I search, “Don' quit?”

“Right,” Vincent agrees. “Don' fookin' quit, that's all ya gotta know. Show up everyday. Do it. . . . I been there. Where you are now? I been there. Ya just gotta fight through shit. Ya wanna quit, ya don't. Keep goin'.”

Next thing, all I see are their wide shoulders walking away. Through darkness beneath the washing halo light of the low lampposts, turning collars to the damp and cold and dropping down onto the narrow cobbles, they walk toward the water again as most of the city is deep at sleep.

It is May and the rains begin to descend from the cement gray sky and down onto New York kicking up city dirt in the morning and coal dust, opening the cakes of crusty mold between walls and windows and summons the scent of street oils with the river's brine churning too, lumping up in the nostrils. A smell I'd never had back home. A smothering thing for the first few minutes of a downpour as it stirs in the sinuses and in the mouth. But as I come to Bridge and Tillary, a different odor comes on me. A great smell of carrion rot and the iron in blood from a fresh kill. Here there is a small field with fenced pens and a long, wooden, one-story edifice darkened by the rain. The abattoir is on a raised plain of ground and below pink streaks run from it through the street where the rainwater and the sanguinary viscera mix together, descending as if the slaughterhouse itself is bleeding or weeping ruddy tears. Low-hunched dogs circle the structure with eyes of great suspicion, nosing the air for the blood in it. With flowers in hand, purple and yellow and white bulbs that offer color to the dusky grays and the blacks in my view, the wind and rain falling on my new haircut, I tilt my head to keep the drops from my eyes and jump over pink and red puddles. Hitting a pocket of air thick with the smell of death, I stop in the street and gag uncontrollably from the belly up. Though nothing comes of it, my mouth waters with sputum and the horrible taste in the air.

I look up and see a man wearing boots to his thighs and a cutlass in his hand. He is at his work as thoughtlessly as any other man of labor, and he holds a sheep from behind, between his knees, raises its head, and slices open the neck. Held up by the fleece atop its head, the animal wiggles uselessly until it is flung in a pile of others for immigrants that consume hogget and mutton. The gaggle of live sheep watch the man at his work, baaing mawkishly and seeing their brethren slain, and still willingly step forth for their own turn. Ready to die or ignorant of it, I can't tell. But the look in their eyes angers me and I think of the words of one of those dead rebelpoets in Dublin who himself so happily gave his own blood to stir that of the many, “the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed by the red wine of the battlefield.” His sacrifice inspiring an entire generation of men and women, fathers and mothers, and even myself as I'd have willingly given my blood too had I not been blockaded. But these animals die for nothing. Don't care either, and I hate them for it, as it scares me deeper than anything else in the world—dying for nothing at all. Just dying like they don't mean anything, like a child dying with no mother or father to cry for them, bury and honor them.

The sad-eyed beeves of cattle and the fretful instinct in the face of the fowls and swine lead me to the notion of death being everywhere around me. I can smell it and feel it as it calls for me, for all of us. I stand there in the street with the staggers, this hell and all the thoughts of death surrounding me.

“What ya lookin' for?” says the butcher in his long boots.

“Feinberg,” I say, walking up to the pen with my flowers.

He looks me over until I say, “Bridge Street.”

He tells me to wait, slops through the deep red puddles and disappears inside the flooded house. Up close, I see piles of viscera to one side, offal on the other. A loose-necked sheep hangs upside down and is peeled from hind to head by another man who looks sideways at me; he is Hebraic in his features, with a great skepticism in the eye that no foreday rain could purify by ablution.

The blood-slaked ground here on Tillary Street warms the cold heart of Brooklyn too, for everywhere people fight and kill for their place so that they can feel the pride of victory in the comfort of kin meeting ends. Dignity. New clothes. Good neighborhood. Status among other men. Food in stomachs, and through organizations—legitimate or not, split most often along ethnic lines—we war against each other for sway and command in a place that can't support the many of us. Particularly so on border neighborhoods there are violent paroxysms, such as this neighborhood where the Irish in the north and west meet the Jew from the east and the Italian of the south in a city still dominated by the governance of the old Anglo-Saxon ascendency above us all.

Eventually a smallish, balding man of some sixty years emerges from the fetor of the body's blood in the showery breeze.

“Feinberg?”

“Who's asking?”

“I think you know who it is,” I say, certain he recognizes my dialect. From my back pocket I hand the envelope to him over the paling and chicken wire, “One month.”

As I walk away, he raises his voice at me and says the words he knows he shouldn't. “Dinny Meehan.”

I turn round.

“You tell Dinny Meehan he'll have to come find me in prison. Twenty-five thousand dollars a year I pay to the inspectors of the State Board of Health. Then I have to pay you, then I have to pay those Geppetto Italians and don't forget I have to pay my own too. And the union. It's not worth it. Go fuck yourself, Dinny Meehan. Tell him that, why don't you?” He throws the white envelope into a rain-dimpled puddle, holds ten shaking fingers up to me angrily. “That's how many butchers have been arrested in the past two weeks for paying bribes to inspectors. I'll be next. Any day now will be the warrant issued by the commissioner. So you tell him, ‘Fuck you Dinny Meehan.' Now get off my property, you bastard child you.”

The man with the cutlass of a sudden comes toward me from within the pen and I jump backward. Losing my balance, I put one hand to the ground to stop myself from falling while the other holds tight on the flowers. Quickly I wipe my wet hand on the back of my trousers and reach into my coat pocket for the piping, look back over my shoulder as I run out of the blood and mud down toward Tillary Street. He does not follow me, however, and from this house of death do I take leg bail north on Bridge Street, happy I'm unharmed.

On Sands Street at the bicycle shop I look at myself in the glass. I have no idea what any girl would see in me. I have nothing to offer, my face is mangled, and I'm a parentless child. On top of it all, I've just had my intestines scared out of me at the Tillary death house. I see no point in courtship. And I don't see that I have the personality that Sadie says I need so to impress a girl. I push my hair back with wet fingers.

“How are things, Mrs. Lonergan?”

“They're good, child,” she says with Mr. Lonergan behind, many children running inside. “Come in, come in.”

“Can I speak with Anna?”

“About what?”

“Well . . .” I try to avoid stating the obvious and also to avoid looking at her maimed face.

“The man,” she says, referring to Dinny. “He'd like ye to spake with Anna, is it?”

“He would.”

“Oh,” she says, turning her head to reveal the burns and scars, waving Anna over.

“Here, I got these for you,” I say to Anna as she walks up.

Taking the flowers, she looks at me. Her face is beautiful, I can't deny it, and somehow, even without makeup or even a shapely dress or hat, she still appears like she was made for pictures. Like her mother, her hair is bunned atop the head and her neckline showing the softest skin without a cent of jewelry on her. There is a bit of the tomboy in her that's left over from a Brooklyn childhood, but at some point she could no longer deny the beauty that rose up and out of her, changed her. Likewise, the contrast of the soft pouting bottom lip on her contradicts the stern upper lip that eventually wins over, “Why are you giving me these?”