Exile on Bridge Street (32 page)

I look back at Petey with Tommy Tuohey on my thoughts. And I think of how much bigger I am than Petey now and all the time Tommy spent teaching me to fight. To fight Petey after I'd been beaten. To fight Petey, that's what Tommy taught me to do. And so I look at him again, little Petey Behan and his supposed tough self. Stare at him, do I. None too concerned this time about another challenge, me and him.

“Whatcha lookin' at?” he says.

“I'm lookin' at you and I don't like the look on yer face.”

“So come take it off.”

“Hey,” Cinders yells toward me.

“I'll feckin' take ye down, I will,” I say to him, throwing my drink to the ground and standing up.

“Today ain' the day for this,” Beat scolds.

Red Donnelly picks me up over his head by my hips as everyone in the bar quickly stands, Cinders and Dance and Dago Tom and Philip Large and others between me and Petey, so quickly that neither of us have time to fight.

“Where ya goin', Poe?” Petey says, jumping up to everyone's shoulders so he can see me. “Poe. Nice fookin' name, Poe. Ya fookin' idiot.”

“We're not done, ye'n I,” I yell.

“Anytime.”

In Donnelly's arms, he and Henry Browne walk me right out the front door, “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Came from Tommy,” I say pacing.

“Tommy'n the drink too, eh?” Red says. “Go'n go for a walk, William. Walk it off.”

“I'm not feckin' round with people no more,” I yell.

“I know, I know,” Red says.

“Feckin' tired o' this place. Fuck you,” I yell up toward the Manhattan Bridge, which muffles my screaming with a passing train,
cha-chum, cha-chum, cha-chum
, rumbling and rumbling and shaking everything, then I whisper to myself, whimpering angrily. “Damnit. . . . Goddamnit.”

“Walk it off, guy.”

And so I do. I walk away. Walk and walk for hours at a time in the unsettled air, wind and bright breeze on my face. The cold. Always the cold and the wind. Always. I find my way to other drinking holes, and drink. And drink and sleep overnight on a bench in a saloon by Atlantic Avenue and Harry's place. Then wake up and do it again, hardly understanding what I am so angry about in the first place. Just angry. Deeply angry. And confused. For so long I'd worked to bring my mother and sisters here and now I feel I don't deserve them. That the things I've been a part of are horrible things. Shameful things and the dirt of death defiling and covering me. Hovering over me everywhere I go. That I grew up a good Roman Catholic and was taught what is right and what is wrong and still I was a part of murder, looked the other way in the deaths of others too.

I am ready to punish myself or anyone that crosses me. I spend all the cash I have on me and drink on credit, food foreign to me. I bite at the coarse liquid that chars my throat and fires my soul. Sitting still I am reeling and dizzy and stung with great barbs of rage, and I hope that any man round me has an ill word so to excuse my fraying with him. When uncle Joseph's face pulls up in my mind I close my eyes tight at the grisly and grim ways of the world. My own family, was he. The picture of his bony hips and bald spot haunting me. His bloodshot eyes and his drunken laugh. Mostly though, I remember the moment I looked back at him after I pushed a knife through the back of his neck, sticking him to the bar. Looking back to see him pull the chair quietly under him to wait out the last seconds of his life. How scared he must have been to die. How horrified he must have been when we set the saloon alight with him still alive in it. God how he must have suffered. And all because of me. Me.

* * *

N
IGHT
AND
FRIGID
DARKNESS
PIERCED
BY
the break of day and a floating afternoon all mix together and still I am run through with anger and madness and guilt and visions. I dream of holding Emma McGowan. Between death and living, sleep and wakefulness I can't tell. Can't see where I am. Drinks going down. Drinks coming up. A cement pillow, I dream. Of kissing her before she slips into unconsciousness. And I take her away for the gentle summer rain. The warmth of a humid rain on our northern bodies. And the flashing chance at the bliss of her trusting me, the kiss of her mouth. Trusting me so instinctively that she is ready to give herself entirely. I can see it in her and there is really nothing more beautiful in this life than what's in Emma's eyes. Her lips are round and they are soft on mine and she offers me her skin and there is no poetry better than this. Her love. Her body a treasure. Pressed against me, hip to hip. And as I make love to her I look and notice she is not there, and all that I hold in my hands, and that which had been close against my body was only the memory of her. My hands empty, filled only with imaginations.

“Wake up, asshole,” a man says to me.

I smile, grab him by the throat and pull him to the ground by the coat. Punching and punching. Kneeing him in the face. Never letting go of him. Never letting go.

“Break his fingers, for fuck's sake,” another man says. “Get him out.”

And then I am again in the wind, stumbling. Onlookers staring at me. Gawking. Skirting out of my way.

“A drink,” I tell another tender.

He sets me up and soon enough I am on the ground again. Death all round my mind. Faces and galleries and zoo bars in my memory and missing fathers and insane mothers and wayward children and Dinny Meehan haunting me and the butcher's apron flying above Ireland. My mother and sisters screaming as British soldiers kick in their door, licking their lips.

“William?” I hear Harry Reynolds's voice.

“Wha?” I say, sleeping on the ground of some saloon.

“C'mon, tomorrow's a big day.”

“No.”

“C'mon, tomorrow's Sunday.”

“Today is Sunday.”

“No it's not, tomorrow is.”

“The Lonergan funeral.”

“That was a week ago. The big day's tomorrow. Sunday. Tomorrow. Let's get ya ready.”

I just cry. So angry, I cry. Confused. Undeserving as I am. Shaking my head and covering my face on the floor and bleating and blubbering and acting the fool. Harry yanks me up by the coat.

“Why did I survive and she didn't?” I ask.

“Ya didn' really know her all the way,” Harry says coldly. “Think of it that way. Ya mother'n sisters, though—ya know them all the way. Drink this water and get some sleep.”

“Does Dinny make people stay here? In Brooklyn?”

“Why do you say that?” Harry asks, quickly looking toward me.

“That's what Mrs. McGowan told me.”

Harry turns his jaw, looks away.

I lie down, the engine in his room again put back together, the trunk of wood now in the perfect shape of a proper hobbyhorse for a young boy. With two wood-crafted curved runners for rocking back and forth, it looks as good a quality as any I'd ever seen. It's even been lacquered in different shades with little leather reins to hold onto and the face of the horse is in the shape of a smile.

I bathe in a wood-slat tub in the parlor. Sponge off. Shave. Cut my hair. Drink more water. Coffee. Eat a meal.

“Ready?” Harry asks.

“I think so,” sitting on my cot with a bowl and spoon in my hands.

* * *

S
UNDAY
AND
WE
ARE
AT
THE
Atlantic Avenue Terminal, which is empty. I follow him through the maze of dock sheds, pier houses, the hodgepodge of odd storage units, worn wharf planks and wobbling empty steamers anchored by hawsers wrapped tight round cleats and all connected somehow, some way, and blocking out the general public from the jungle of the waterfront world where we reside.

Waiting for us is a tug and a paid driver for a taxi ride across the shipping lanes. The wind and mist in our faces and the skyline to our north, we lean forward, our elbows on knees as the vessel's stern is deep in the water churning below and behind us. Pegged, the mechanical engine struggles. Gargling with all its might, yet we move at the slowest pace.

“Why is Brosnan breaking ties?”

“Dunno,” Harry answers quickly.

“That Waterfront Assembly meeting they had the other day? Remember?”

“Yeah.”

“I bet it came out of that Waterfront Assembly meeting, like he was told to get in step or get out of the way. And all that in the papers too, about unsolved crime and . . . murders.”

Harry doesn't answer, but he nods, which means that although he does not want it to be true, it is.

“And Father Larkin too. They reigned him in too, I'll bet.”

No answer.

It's been more than three years since I've seen Lady Liberty this close. It's a different statue altogether now than when I was an unplanned immigrant coming from a feudal, agrarian past among the grassy hills of County Clare, Ireland, back in October 1915. She seems damaged now. Run-through herself, and hurt, and as we pass her I see she is pockmarked and wounded. Although I know it's from the explosion on Black Tom's Island and the weather always beating on her, I feel like she has changed. She still stands, yes, but more astute and with a heavier heart. Wary, yet wise. Angry and aching.

I think now, in my old age, of this exact day I tell you of now. Sitting upright, wiping away my old man's tears. The old memories that remain. Romanticized surely, but there they are. Seeing the statue on the island up close. Then Ellis Island again for the first time since 1915. Harry's profile and stern kindness. The mist in the air. All these memories. Always there.

The mother. Too many teenagers pull away from their mother, but I was the opposite. I missed her so much. Missed my family. And so a new family had adopted me in the interim. A family of men had brought me in and gave me a place in life. A wage to earn. A roof and food. But I think of my mother and her love for me. I think of her. And I think of how sad it made me to see my mother and sisters again after so long a wait. How different they were, also wary and wounded.

Their dresses are gray and long and handwashed too often and fraying. I am struck by how small the three seem. Ireland's diet during the war not much accommodating the physical growth in people, their clothes hang about them drably and they have that unplanned look about their eyes, staring at skyscrapers to the north and the sea air new to their noses—so many thousands of miles away from the only place they've ever known, and at the end of it, they are bitten by the ancient Atlantic crossing that our people have known so well. Tired and bedraggled, they look malnourished, pale and with windswept manes, but with flinty-faced pride holding high in them still.

My God how I remember how they looked when first I see them again after close on four years. I can't write at this moment and instead walk away for a tissue, my hands shaking like a helpless old fool. It took me this long to write this story, and now I know why. It's so close to the bone of me. These memories that I rush out here for you to breathe in. I sit back down and sigh deeply, try again to finish.

It isn't so much what my mother says, but rather her facial features and gestures and glances that catch me by surprise. Remind me for the first time in so long of my childhood growing up on the rainy farm out in the middle of the Irish countryside. And they have the smell of turf fires on them and soup and Ireland altogether. The smell of memory.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph and Bernadette and John and . . .” my mother's voice summons every honored saint the church has, and there are a lot. “My bhoy. My bhoy, William James. We did it. We did it. We did.”

“We did,” I say, my face filled again with tears.

Abby and Brigid holding their hands over their mouths around us, hoping for some kind of welcome, but unsure if I am willing to touch them. Feeling as though the time is appropriate for such a thing, I open my arms to them and they jump into us. Harry leans against a wall watching us closely, tugging on his nose with a nervousness that I don't recognize from him. But he watches us and in trying to discourage any emotion, he crosses his legs and arms and looks down the long hall filled with others greeting their own people for the first time in many a year, employees walking by without notice, selfish in their New York City faces. I hold close to my family, mother on my chest, a sister on each arm until we begin coming into the recognition that we should get moving to the moment's concerns.

Gathering herself, my mother peers up at me, “Look at the size o' this one, won't ye? And with muscles abound, bhoy. Ye been werkin' hard, haven't ye?”

“This is Harry Reynolds, Mam,” I say, waving him over. “I work with him a lot. He's a good man. Helped me out quite a bit.”

Wiping tears from her eyes, she greets him and cordially he receives Abby and Brigid too as my mother offers an apology, “I'm so sorry for all o' this, Mr. Reynolds . . .”

“No worries,” he smiles, which reminds of what my mother said to me before I left, so I repeat it now to her.

“Not to werry, Mam.”

“Ya're in good hands wit' William,” Harry assures.

“You're home now,” I say as Harry and I pick up their tattered bags and rags. “Let's get moving—we still have to take a boat and a couple trolleys.”

“Ye know, William, ye're bigger than ye're own big brother, ye know it? Ye are too,” she says as we move toward the landings. “Ye were such a humble bhoy, ye were. So good, too. Sweet apple-cheeked little William followin' his da round the place, never once givin' me the lip. Ye should know, Mr. Reynolds, the bhoy was as gentle as the River Shannon is shy. I couldn't know how he's seen here in New Yark, but the bhoy was a pleasure round the home.”

“We like'm here too,” Harry smiles at my mother.

From the island, we get back on the tug and allow the women to ride inside the pilothouse with the driver while Harry and I ride in the back with the wind and the mist. I don't know why I think it remarkable, but Harry's facial features haven't changed at all. I suppose my surprise is only due to the big excitement I have with my mother and two sisters' arrival and everything else, but there is a safety I feel in Harry Reynolds's subdued strength. A safety that influences my behavior in front of my mother and sisters, even.