Exile on Bridge Street (13 page)

“Ye're next,” Tuohey thumbs toward me. “Let's go.”

I smile and shoulder through him and The Swede for the honor to stand at the bar with Dinny. He shakes my hand before staring ahead with elbows on the bar, “How you?”

“I'm doing well, thanks.”

“Drinks tonight, eh?”

“Maybe too much,” I say.

“Things?”

“About what exactly?”

“Anythin' I need to know?”

“Don't think so.”

“Heard about that Feinberg feller?”

“What about him?”

“Took him down. He was sellin' diseased meat all along to local butchers. Payin' the State Board o' Health to look the other way. People in Brooklyn been shittin' their intestines out 'cause o' him. Now they closed the abattoir.”

“Oh.”

“Heard from Petey?”

“Eh, no.”

“Not even a smirk, right?”

“Nothing.”

“They been whisperin' things, Lovett'n them,” Dinny says under his breath. “You seen Darby Leighton around?”

“Darby Leighton? I haven't at all.”

“Ya ever see that one, ya let us know. He's been banished for good, all right?”

“Alright.”

Dinny nods at my agreement, then returns to the topic of Lovett, pushing hair off his temple, “That's the one thing I never expect from Bill and them. The silence. Silence an' whispers from that group o' larrikins? Nah.”

“They got somethin' brewin',” The Swede mumbles over his shoulder to us, then turns back to the crowd.

“Nothin' from Wolcott? Silverman?”

“No, uh . . . Silverman is Wolcott's guy, right? Silverman and Wisniewski?”

“Right,” Dinny agrees. “My cousin Mickey's seen Silverman hangin' around the Imlay docks lately. . . . Stormy down there, Red Hook.”

“Not lately,” The Swede mumbles again over his shoulder. “All them guineas and Dock Company schemers and Lovett and his rowdies, and now they're all mum like mice?”

“What about union boys, you seen any movement? ILA? Wobblies?” Dinny asks.

“I haven't.”

“Heard anythin' about Thos Carmody?”

“Tanner Smith took care of that situation, from what I remember.”

“Thos Carmody better be dead,” The Swede says.

“No body's been found though,” Dinny mumbles.

“Thos Carmody better be dead,” The Swede asserts again.

Dinny and I both have our elbows on the bar next to each other looking forward and covered by Tommy, Vincent, and The Swede. Dinny looks at me, “Heard ya gave them flowers to the McGowan girl.”

Feeling the drink and dizziness in it, I look away.

“Hard keepin' things together. Ya don' see it much . . . difficult though, keepin' it all together.”

I nod.

“I don' want ya to give up on Anna, a'right? It'd be a good thing, bringin' us all together. Lonergan fam'ly's got eight boys in it, young bucks. Be good to bring us like one family, don' ya think?”

“It would, sure.”

“So why not do it?” The Swede says. “Think it's easy keepin' it all together? Easy for you. Just show up and ya get all the benefits, but ya don' want nothin' to do with helpin' out. We all got fam'lies, ya know, y'ain't the only one. They're closin' in on us. All of 'em. We need to get bigger. Ready for 'em when they close in.”

“A'right,” Dinny says to The Swede.

“True. They wanna take us down, I can feel it . . .”

“Who?” I ask.

“They all do, look around,” The Swede says whispering, though his eyes are blown open and face shaking.

Vincent tries changing the direction with a smirk, “I'll take ya down to the Adonis Social Club before ya take the plunge wit' Anna or the McGowan colleen. Get a taste, yeah? Ya gotta know what ya gettin' into before ya get in it, ya know? The Adonis? It's like a fookin' buffet o' skin . . .”

The Swede interrupts, “Ya want us to help ya, ya gotta help us too. Y'ain' gonna marry no McGowan girl, don' listen to Vincent. Listen to me . . .”

“Hold on,” Dinny says, turning me back toward the bar, away from the others. “Lovett's got his idears. We gotta think 'bout things. How they're gonna play out. What about him cuttin' a deal wit' the ILA? If they want sway here in Brooklyn and they offer him things? What about Wolcott and the Dock Company? Red Hook's important and Lovett knows it. He could make a deal wit' them if he wanted to, right?”

“You don't trust him,” I say, hitting the whiskey glass.

“Nah, not at all. He's mannin' a border on two fronts—Red Hook wit' the I-talians, and the Lonergan fam'ly. If he wins over the Lonergans, then he's got all five o' Richie's followers and a bunch o' young bucks in his younger brothers, plus anyone else among us that might see Lovett offerin' up opportunities. Then what? Ya gotta war. If we win over the Lonergans, Lovett's weakened and we can avoid trouble.”

I don't say anything, wanting not to commit. I understand the logic, but what he is asking me to do is weighty.

Dinny leans back into me, “Least tell Mrs. McGowan what ya intentions wit' her daughter are, yeah?”

I nod at that, and look at Dinny's face. He seems to have conceded defeat in my marrying Anna. How he plans on winning the Lonergans over though, I do not know. The Swede growls and grits his teeth, turns away from me.

“Tomorrow ya work wit' Tommy. Ya need some more time wit' him. Man can fight. Ya saw here tonight? Did ya?”

“I did.”

“Tomorrow then.”

“What time?”

“Morning time. Meanwhile, I found a place for ya ma an' sisters,” he says out of a sudden.

“You found a place for them?” I ask, slurring heavily and feeling myself losing balance.

“Over by Prospect Park, on this side of it. Eighth Avenue, nice neighborhood. The place gotta be cleaned up, but. . . . Needs some work, true. Rent's paid for a year. After that, you can pay the rent yourself. But when your family gets here, they'll have a home.”

I look at Dinny and my first instinct is to thank him, but all I can give is a half-hearted smile because of what he has asked of me. To kill a man. To marry someone I do not love. In return I have benefited, it is true. But these are dire demands, and it's widely known that a favor from Dinny Meehan means an oath of loyalty. The price of this gift, then, a home for my family is, well, an amount I'm not so sure I can pay. I know that it is considered disrespectful and selfish and unappreciative, but the only thing I can say to Dinny in return, through my blurring vision and slurring of words, “I'll not kill another man as long as I live.”

“Get 'em a place for his ma and that's his thanks,” The Swede says.

Dinny looks away, then back at me. Unaffected by what I've just said to him, he drinks a drink.

“Ya like fireworks?” he says casually, eyes green in the enveloped saloon light of amber and black. A child's eyes. An ancient's eyes. Sometimes I wonder if he ever really did exist, Dinny Meehan. I even doubt it at times, it was so long ago that all this passed. But there he is in my thoughts, sitting here now with nothing left but memories to feed my old mind. So many memories and passing faces, but some faces stick forever. Can't be forgotten, like Dinny's. His eyes too, that saw right through me, for a man who does not believe in time is a man sees straight to the soul of us. A cross. A fire. Water, sin. He smiles at me from the bar. Hand on my shoulder impressing upon me his understanding, foreknowledge. Even precognition, as if he were some seer. The gold glazing light of the mutton-fat flame shining generously on his beautiful, august face and autumnal-brown mane. The light oscillating along his features with the spectral drafts in the air. A bard of acts, not of recounting, but of creating and fashioning. Shaping our surroundings at his order like some artificer.

And from there I can't remember much. I don't know if even I thanked him. I don't know even what his reaction was. For the rest of that night there are only images.

Looking away, I see into darkness. Camney's Saloon is as full of the old-world shade as any place where the water meets rotting wooden piers in Brooklyn. The light is sparse and I can see the embers of a pipe, darting red-flare trails through the wetted, wooden night. A candle's flame lights little circular areas between the tender and his patrons, but their faces quickly fall back as they move in and out. Faces embraced by the moving shades of black shadows and where men's accents take over because of my limited vision. I drink from the harsh liquid that burns in my mouth and down through the throat, spreading like a coat of thin lava through the innards.

“We're all lost here,” I say to Dinny, though I don't remember his reaction, whether it was a smile or a nod.

Drunk and dreaming of better days, am I. Latching onto the unlikeliness of love and Emma McGowan. In hope I stretch myself to believe in it, even as I don't have the ability to understand what love is in my young years. But we have our dreams. Dreams of living the gentlelife where there is not so much struggling, but stuck in this wilderness of freighters and dock sheds and one-room tenements where mothers lose their children to insanity and pain, fathers dissolve into the night one way or another. Living in a time when we'll not share our stories of struggle for the fact that we commit horrible things to get by. That our children, and their children will only guess as to what we did to put food on our tables, for we'll lie about what harm we done. Cover it in darkness and silence and it's at this moment, sitting in Camney's Saloon on a Saturday night that the idea of my telling this story could only be allowed the light after my own passing. After I've gone on because of the shame of my state. Of our state. But as they say, it's a late day for regrets. Just as we don't know the stories of the families of the Great Hunger, you won't know much on the stories of the Brooklyn waterfront of the Great War. Not until I'm dead will I allow my story come up, at least.

And as I go down, holding on to a man's shirt and the bar for balance, drunk and undone as I am, I look up. Look up to see cruel eyes. A face from a gallery. As if it were down a dark hall. Deranged and irrational eyes I see beyond the shoulders of Vincent Maher, Tommy Tuohey, and The Swede. Eyes that move from Dinny's back down to where I now reside among the peanut shells and boots. I see him. I watch him side his glinting weapon. Shining in the old-world shade before it's sheathed in the grommet of his trousers. He then turns away, gone into the black. It was the face of Garry Barry, though I can't speak for I am so mangled by the drink. A killer looking to alter the fate of time to his will. Though no one notices Barry in the black, Dinny is covered by his loyal guard and the assassin is unable to penetrate them to slay our king. And me in no state to caution him.

“Too fookin' young to be drinkin' that hard,” The Swede muses.

“Oop we go, bhoy,” Tommy Tuohey laughs, pulling me up by the arms, my shirt collecting around the shoulders, exposing the lank of my torso.

But I can't stop thinking about the eyes I saw in the darkness. The meanness in them. The deprived reason in them. The horror in them that outlines the face. I had heard about Garry Barry from Beat. That when Barry was a baby a tenement collapsed on him off Court Street. Seven people died, but the child was found in the debris bleeding from the skull and ears. Beat said it was that injury what made him sick in the head, since he always thought of himself differently than others saw him. Since the beginning he felt he should be the leader of the gang, yet no one else felt that way. Still, he was ready to risk everything to become leader. Only thought of one thing, ever. To be a leader of men, regardless of how absurd it was to the reasonable mind. Fixated on the one thing only—illogically fixated. When Dinny took over in 1913, Barry claimed to be the leader of the Red Onion Gang, a smalltime clan that sometimes won the right to charge tribute off the Baltic and Atlantic terminals. But four other young men claimed to be the leader too, none of them accepting the others' leadership. Making deals, Dinny ate up all the old gangs along the waterfront under The White Hand's name and Barry was mentioned as a possible dockboss. But instead, Barry challenged Dinny to fight for leadership of The White Hand—a nonsensical claim. Of course Dinny wiped him up and Barry lost his chance at becoming a dockboss. He was banished to the fringes of day labor, always trying to win back his rightful demand of heading the gang—a mindless insistence altogether.

“Instead, Dinny made Harry Reynolds dockboss of the Atlantic Terminal after . . .” Beat trailed off.

“After what?” I asked.

“After somethin' happened between Dinny and Harry Reynolds. Anyway, Garry fookin' Barry is a guy ya need to stay away from. Fookin' dicey, that guy.”

And I feel Beat's words to be true in this case, seeing Barry's eyes here at Camney's Saloon. Scaring me wordless. Puts a fear in me so deep and so overwhelming that I feel myself begin to vomit. The watering in my mouth again and the seizing in my stomach. The shot of heat emitting from me like a yellow fever jumping out. Every moment I see those eyes and the shaded face that hold them, yet those eyes are not particular to Garry Barry, but in all men of my time. Disturbed to the depth of me, those eyes can be found in myself as well. That horror that resides in all men is in me too. And I know it.

An explosion far away shakes the bar bottles and the windows in their frames. A second explosion shakes the place again as men begin pushing to get outside to see what is occurring out there.

“We're under attack,” a man yells.

Dinny smiles, then orders another drink before looking over to me as I hold a spittoon in my grasp to vomit in. Smiling only, Dinny is. Knowingly.

The saloon is all but empty within moments and yet still more shells burst out in the water, zipping and screeching in the night. Tailing off in spiraling whistles. Tommy and Vincent pick me up under the arms again and behind us are Dinny and The Swede. We come down the block toward the water where everyone else is heading through the maze of puddled alleyways between pier houses and docks, and we jump up onto a train platform, one after another in our suits and ties and boots. Out through a doorless opening for a wooden stairwell and down to a pier where I can see through watery eyes an orange blaze beyond the Buttermilk Channel and Governor's Island. I am unable to fix a gaze on it for too long without my need to retch, but here and there I can see hundreds of miniature shots going off before three, then four loud ones that blow long flames of red and orange in every direction against the night sky above Jersey City, out across the way. Even engulfing Lady Liberty in smoke, whizzing shrapnel. Pinging off her body after a splitting concussion. Harbor lights blink open and crank sirens fill their lungs as spotlights feel through the clouds and firebells clank off the water. When another explosion lights up the sky, black smoke can be seen billowed upward, the burst of orange light coming up through the black, burnishing the west. The night has come alive, but I can only see it through wet eyes that make the orange and amber comets smear across the dimming penumbra.