Paradise Alley (63 page)

“Where is this now, ya say?”

“Ya better be talkin' for real, nigger—”

“I
know,
” he repeated, thinking of the stagecoach line stables he remembered, up by Fifty-ninth Street. Far enough away from the precinct house.

But he had no idea whether they would still be there, or if the stage line had already removed its stock. Not even positive he could remember just where the stables were—

“To
ride.
Enough horses for
everyone
to ride.”

That had done it. The white men veering instantly away from the precinct house, moving uptown, as he directed them. And as if in reaction he also felt a hand on his collar, the breath of a man scored with whiskey on his neck. He was not surprised to catch the hint of the pointed, imperial whiskers out of the corner of his eye.

“You better be tellin' the truth now, nigger. Just where are these horses, anyhow?”

“Ah, go easy on ‘im, Langdon!”

“If he knows so much about it, let him take us to 'em. That way he can explain if they ain't where they're supposed to be.”

The voice as cold and unyielding as the man's blue eyes. But it was exactly what Billy had wanted—what he had wanted all along, even as he pretended to tremble and quiver under the white man's hands.

“Sure,” he told them, trying to make his mouth sound dry. “Sure, I'll show ya.”

They marched him on up to Fifty-ninth Street then. The Southerner with the Louis Napoleon beard frog-walking him the whole way, one hand on his collar, the other on his belt. Digging his knee deliberately into his thighs and joints from time to time.

Billy took it all, making sure to moan and tremble from time to time. Resenting each breath of the man—just hoping that the stables would still be where he thought he remembered them. The horses—any horses—still inside. Thinking of how even if he survived this he still had to get downtown, to his family. And yet at the center he was calmer than he thought he had ever been.

He had got them away from the orphans.
At least he had done that much. It was vital that he still get away alive, that he get back downtown—
get back to Ruth and his children, the boy, Milton, waiting for him there. Strong and willful as a two-year-old colt, but just as innocent.

What would he do without his father? Without someone to guide him through these streets, here in this City where one misstep could kill him—

Yet still there was that spreading, impenetrable calm at his center. Untroubled by any obstacle ahead of him, by even this stranded, drunken old slavecatcher or overseer pushing him up the avenue. Maybe it was just the fine whiskey in him. He had had this same invulnerable feeling before when he was drinking—just fleetingly, just for a few moments before the liquor took its inevitable downward lurch.

But still—he had done this much.
He had gotten them away from the orphans. That was something, anyway. Terrible things might still be done to him, he knew he could still end up screaming for his life or screaming for them to kill him—but there was nothing he could do about that. Being marched uptown, up the island that he had once tried to walk off, he understood, now, that he could never have left them. Not Ruth, or Milton, or his other children. Not any of the small black faces, staring up at him from the dark as he had gone up the stairs.

It was a trap, all right.

They reached the stage-line stables. They were still there, at least, right where he had remembered them, at Fifty-ninth Street and the Fifth Avenue. The doors were chained shut, though, a large, flaking cardinal painted across them, over the words
RED BIRD STAGE LINE.
There was no indication of any remaining horses—no sign of life at all about the stables.

“Sure, horses for all of us,” Langdon, the Southerner, sneered behind him. “What were you tryin' to get us
away
from, nigger? That's what I want to know. What were you lookin' to distract us from, with all that Juba act?”

Maybe it wasn't enough. Maybe he had won nothing, after all.
The thought beginning to seep through him like bad water. Billy could feel the man starting to bend down, certain that he had a knife in his boot he was reaching for. He would wait until he had bent all the way down for it, when he was most vulnerable. Then he would shove an elbow into the man's face, wrest the knife away and do him, right there. He would try to run off north, leading the rest of them farther away from
the precinct house. But even if they caught him, they would still be distracted, entertaining themselves tearing him apart—

There was a heavy knock from inside the stables. Then another sound, like a muffled sneeze. The white men hurried up to the door, pulling and tearing at the chain with whatever knives and spanners they had with them.

“Hey, c'mon, Langdon! Maybe there's somethin' to what he's sayin'—”

The Southerner suddenly straightened up, releasing his grip on him. Pushing past, as intent on the prospect of horses now as the rest of them. They had the chain off, and were peeling back the wide, heavy stable doors. Revealing there a pair of sparkling-new red stagecoaches—and the horses.

There were more than even Billy could have hoped for. Dozens of them, horses of all colors, bay and chestnut, and white and black and even palominos. All standing jammed into their stalls, sometimes as many as two or three in one partition—the drivers and stablehands apparently having shoved them in and fled after the start of the riot, leaving their stock to fend for themselves.

“Horses!”

“Enough for our own goddamned Black Horse Cavalry!”

The Paddies ran to them as if it were Christmas morning. Tearing down the stall doors, leading their mounts out into the street. Climbing up on them at once. A few of them bothered to throw bridles over their heads, but the rest simply clutching their manes—all of them riding bareback.

“Horses, god
damn
it!”

They were mostly big, heavy animals, bred for hauling wagons and coaches, slow-looking and lugubrious in their stalls. But once they were taken out onto the street and subjected to the touch of the Irishmen, they began to rear and bolt—racing off suddenly, throwing their riders into the street or leaving them holding on for dear life to the reins.

The men didn't seem to care, shouting and laughing as the horses carried them away. Scrambling back up and throwing themselves over their wide backs again and again, even after they'd been dumped on their heads along the pavement. He saw Langdon, the Southerner, clinging to a pale horse that bolted across the street and went smashing
right through the windows of a deserted saloon there. In another moment it was back out, bursting through the swinging doors—Langdon still with his arms clutched around its neck for dear life.

Another man, who actually seemed able to control his horse a little, came riding out on a chestnut mare, blowing on a long brass coach horn he had found. He looked down on Billy, where he was trying to dodge the immense animals careening and clamoring all around him, mouths already foaming at their bits.

“G'wan an' getch yerself one, Juba! You earned it!” he shouted, waving at where the remaining horses were now kicking the bejesus out of the stables, and the remaining stagecoaches, slamming one Irishman after another against the walls.

Billy looked up at the man and smiled appeasingly. He was already backing away, ready to bolt back down to the precinct house. The horses were carrying the rest of the mob off, on up Manhattan, or over into the new park, or away to the west. The Irishmen still roaring with glee, chasing after their runaway steeds. The horse bolted under the man with the horn as well, pulling him away even as he blew out more trumpet blasts.

“G'wan!” he called back over his shoulder to Billy. “Ah, but isn't this the day, when niggers will ride!”

•
59
•

In the summers he had made money killing dogs. The Board of Aldermen paid fifty cents for each dead stray, and there were always thousands of them on the street. Mad from the heat, fighting the pigs for the garbage in the gutter, foaming at the mouth and biting anyone who got in their way—

Yet they always seemed to know when the dog killers were out. They melted away, into the back alleys, and the tenement courtyards and cellars, leaving only the pigs, who were far too valuable to kill for sport.

He had to smoke them out, club in hand. Learning how they thought and moved, cornering them before they smelled him coming.

The same way he had snuck up on the officer as he waved his sword out on the street. Going in through the back door. Moving swiftly across the room of red and amber light, reflected through the apothecary jars. The mob's noise muting his footsteps.

He had taken the sign in his hand, and knocked the officer to the ground with it. Then he had put it back over his neck himself—the mob swarming in on the downed man—

There was usually a crowd when they went to kill the dogs, too. Half of them would be gathered around some boy or his mother, screaming at him not to kill the beloved old family pet. The other half rooting against the animal—hoping to see some kind of spectacle, at least a death.

He dispatched the dogs the same way he had the officer, with his club. One sure whack across the head. A grunt of triumph, then he had walked off again, uninterested in what the mob might do to the man.
Only looking for what was his.

He had been content to shelter in the mob. Absently fingering the sign that had been hung around his chest—the one he had hit the officer with. From time to time, when it seemed right, bellowing out the sentiments engraved there like a wounded bull.

“No draft! No draft! No draft!”

The men and women all around him absorbed in their destruction. Pulling apart houses, hotels, bars, streetcars along the Third Avenue. Pulling up lampposts, and the streets themselves.

Ripping it all up. Ripping it all up, picking it apart. Somehow, surely, this way he would find where they were hiding—

He had wandered along aimlessly with them. Sleepless and light-headed in the heavy, wet heat, his very senses betraying him. Hefting the paving stones, which felt now light as a loaf of bread in his hand—hurling them effortlessly through the windows of the shops, the train cars.

And when the cops had attacked, or the troops had leveled their rifles, he had found that he was not afraid at all. Eager to come to grips with them, to smash and kill, and see the worst that they could do to him. Even when the troops had fired at him, point-blank, he had not been afraid, had not tried to move out of the way. Somebody trying to scramble back down the street had fallen into him, pulled him down just before the volley whizzed over their heads.

He had gotten back up—the block of wood still secured around his neck, the flag still over his shoulders. Trudging on with the mob, watching their looting and marauding with indifference.

Just ahead of him now, two black men were pulled bodily from the basement of a boardinghouse. As he watched they were beaten to the sidewalk, robbed and stripped of their clothes. Still struggling to preserve their modesty while ropes were thrown around their necks. One of them was able to break free, sprinting down the street for his life, cutting his feet on the sharp paving stones, the broken glass with every step, but still running.

The other one, not so lucky, was lifted up to a lamppost, a fire set
under him. Still kicking his naked legs, still struggling. Dolan turned away, brooding—

Ruth. She had betrayed him for a black man. He had to find her just for that, if nothing else—

That was who the darkie in the boat must have been, the night he was shanghaied.
Her nigger lover.
He had figured that much out, over the many years, though he had not seen it at the time. Going on like some poor ben about seeing his brother again. Noticing only at the last moment, in the boat, how nervous the brother-in-law, Tom, was acting. Only then had he understood how unlikely it really was that his brother had survived, that he might actually be waiting out in the fog-shrouded harbor for him, to help him escape.
How he had fooled himself—

Before he could move, the nigger behind him had thrown the burlap bag over his head.
Bagged like a quail in the bush.
Had it been his plan all along, then? It did not seem possible that it was Ruth, her brains so addled before he had ever laid a hand on her.
But to be outsmarted by a nigger—

The one thing he had never been able to figure out was why they hadn't simply sold him, and collected the reward money for Old Man Noe's murder. They could have seen him hanged, and had the cabinet in the bargain.
That would have been the smart play. So why?
Some sort of gratitude for his having saved her neck in the first place? A woman's sentimentality?

Unless it wasn't either one of them. Unless it had all been Deirdre's idea from the start.

She would not have minded seeing him disappear.
Not quite dead, but gone, that would have been her way.
They had always been getting him jobs, Tom and Deirdre. Working on City road crews, or sweeping the floor at The Place of Blood. Getting him into the Black Joke company.

He had never stayed with any of it for very long. Preferring to make what money he could killing dogs or fighting, working construction or running with the river gangs.

What did she care—she or the church she took refuge in? Leaving them all back there, to starve in the workhouse. Leaving him and his Da to walk the capstan, and his sister Kathleen to take it up against the yard wall and their brother, their poor brother Pat, stuck in the idiot's ward. Until it was time to be brought up to the black gable, and slid down into the earth.

He had seen the way Deirdre frowned, the few times he had been prevailed upon to bring Ruth over. Tom, too—both of them staring at Ruth's bruised face, her cut lip. Dolan had always made sure to decorate her real good, before they went. Sitting her down in their parlor, just to challenge them, to see if they would say anything.
Here we are. What are you going to do about it?

Deirdre had never understood it. Nor Ruth herself, quaking when he came in after a fight, never fathoming how much he still wanted to hit and be hit. Trying not to provoke him, to stay out of his way—as if that were possible.
She had never understood anything, it could not have been she who shipped him.

Or couldn't it? After all, she must have been the one who had found his swag. Old Man Noe's watch and fob, and that dog-headed cane, and another thing or two of a more delicate nature.

He should never have taken that off the man.
It was a desecration—and besides, it had ensured that the newspapers would never let the case drop. He had done it out of pique, his wrath over the old man's Yankee presumption, trying to have him arrested. Instead of simply giving him a good crack and running away, he had had to finish him off—but even that had not been enough. The old bastard lying still and broken beneath him, but he had had to pull out his thumb gouger—

He had been scouting the new brush factory in Greenwich Street for weeks. Three stories high, the frame and the brickwork completed, but the inside still unfinished. The firm name already lettered just under the eaves:
Noe's Industrial Brushes, Est. 1848.
Dolan had cracked the casa easily enough. It was a Sunday morning, the quietest time of the week on the street, and he had broken the lock and chain across the door at his leisure, then strolled up the temporary carpenters' staircases.

Yet it had been slim pickings. None of the mammoth black brush machines were bolted to the floor yet. There were no fixtures or furniture, or anything of glass, the floors not even finished.

It was only when he had reached the roof that Dolan had seen something worth the taking. They had already lined the gutters with lead, but it hadn't been soldered down yet. It was an easy enough proposition for him to take the short crowbar, the one that fit in his jacket for just such jobs, and pry it loose. Knowing he could get a good
price for it, selling it to any of the construction yards along the West Side—

He had already pulled out half the curved lead sections from the front gutter when he felt the hand on his collar. Dolan had let it jerk him to his feet, thinking it must a cop. So intent on his work, so secure that he had never even heard the steps approaching. It was the workmen's day off, and there had been no watchman in sight, he had made sure of that. He could only think that it had to be some ambitious new beat cop, looking to land himself in a meatier precinct.

Instead he found himself looking up at a white-haired man in a high silk hat and a frock coat, holding a walking stick menacingly over his head. Old Man Noe himself. The face clenched and livid—not unlike the portraits of General Jackson that hung in every Tammany clubhouse and saloon. He clutched Dolan's collar with surprising strength, shaking the walking stick at him.

“What are you about here, you scoundrel?”

“I just come up, sir, to correct me work from the week,” Dolan pleaded as meekly and fawningly as he could manage. Hoping the brush manufacturer would not be able to tell one of his workers from another. Yet even as he tried to look his most imploring, his eyes had stuck on the glint of Noe's golden, dog's-head cane. The ears like that of a jackal—

“Work!” Noe had sneered at him. “You don't work for me, lad, that's for certain! I've never hired a thief and a liar like you in my life. You're up here trying to steal my gutters!”

“All right, all right, just leave it,” Dolan had told him in his regular voice. Trying to work his collar loose from the old man's grip. The red, unreasoning anger beginning to rise in him when he could not.

Another few minutes and he would have had a good score to peddle. Now he had to listen to this old man, this factory owner, tell him about work.

“Just lemme get outta here an' you can have the damned gutters—”

But the old man did not loosen his grip, instead yanking Dolan around and toward the roof door. Pushing him back toward the stairs.

“The hell you say! You're not getting off this one, you miscreant! I'm takin' ye straight away to the precinct house!”

Trying to keep the red rage down while he let the old man march
him down the makeshift stairs from the roof to the third floor. Still talking at him all the way.

“Tearing up a new factory, for your own pocket! D'ya know how many men a place such as this employs? But that's all your sort thinks about, just what you can steal from it—”

So he would just take him off to prison now. After the workhouse, and that damned boat, drinking water out of iodine barrels. After all that he had put up with, to live even after he was dead. They would wall him up in a prison, and make him work just for them. Damned if they would.

“You'll see, they'll set you to it up in Ossining! No easy job tearing up gutters there! They'll have you breaking rocks, and walking the capstan—”

They were starting down the stairs to the second floor then, and on the next step, Dolan stuck out a hand, grabbing onto the wobbly carpenters' banister. He pivoted about, drawing the crowbar from his coat at the same time, and struck down hard—snapping the arm Noe had on his collar in one swift, satisfying blow.

The old man staggered back, and Dolan watched as all the color drained from his face. His eyes widening with fear behind his spectacles, truly understanding for the first time what he had caught.

It was too late. Noe tried to bring the walking stick down on him but Dolan was already moving under it, the cane falling ineffectually on his back and shoulders. He brought the crowbar up again, smashing Noe across the chin, and he fell back over the top stair, landing hard on the floor—but still conscious, still flailing out with the cane. Dolan cursed as it whacked into his shins, nearly knocking him down, and then the old man was scrambling to get up, panting as he tried to lift himself.