Paradise Alley (70 page)

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65
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He stood out in the street, helpless. Not knowing what to do, watching in horror as the mob tortured O'Brien.

An officer, no less. And an Irishman at that.

He was stunned by everything he saw around him now. The drunken, reddened faces. Breaking into homes, smashing and burning everything in sight.

Even the machine, the Black Joke itself. Smashed beyond repair, and tossed into the gutter like so much trash.

Even his own men—swarming over any house they could loot like so many murderers. And those who had remained loyal, who had followed his orders and tried to put out the fires, had only seen his authority overturned. The machine smashed, and its hoses cut. The water, the lifeblood of the City, draining uselessly into the gutter.

They had looked to him, as usual—then, seeing him helpless, had walked away. Back to their own homes, their own wives and children—or off to see what they could loot for themselves.

Everything, beyond his control.

He hung back by the stoops, hands in his pockets. Watching O'Brien writhe in pain before him. Men and women and even girls, now, laughing as they cut him to pieces.

There would be payment for this, he was sure of it.
And how was it ever to be rebuilt?
How were they to have any organization again,
instead of a useless mob of jackals? There had to be some way—some way to get back out ahead of the crowd again. Some way to give them what they wanted, without wrecking the whole damned town—

He thought of that tart down in Paradise Alley, from the other night. The one who had laughed in his face, and locked him out in the street.

They would like that well enough. And what was she? Just some whore. Nobody's house and property—

He stood up, a plan beginning to form in his head.
That was the key.
Lead them to what they wanted to do, without bringing on some fight with the army or the police, a fight they were bound to lose.
Just give them what they want.

He noticed the reporter across the street then—Greeley's man, that damned Robinson. Now he looked as sick as Finn felt himself, watching them torture poor O'Brien.
Well, he had tried to warn him.
A reporter, though, that was bad. Taking it all in, writing it down for later—

To his consternation he saw Robinson turn, and notice him in turn. He had even started across the street toward him, before Finn had time to turn, and duck away behind his
b'hoys.

Now he would see him here. He would see, too, how little power he had here—even worse than if he had blamed him for the whole riot.

That was the first thing. They had to put out the eyes of the enemy—of the Greeleys, and the Republicans. They had to shield the people from their crimes.

He gave Robinson a look, tried to warn him off again—the reporter looking perplexed.
Well, how many warnings could the man expect?
Finn turned to one of his shoulder hitters, pointing out the reporter.

“
Here now,
” he told them, already beginning to shout. “
Don't that look like a spy for the police? Or Greeley?
”

He had all he could do not to laugh, watching Robinson skedaddle. Trying not to look too much at O'Brien, who was nearly dead anyway, poor man.
His body could be dumped somewhere it would never be discovered. The whole crime only a rumor.

He hitched up his galluses, trying to stoke up his confidence. There were things that had to be done, and he was the one to do them, a leader of men. He rubbed his hands together, thinking again of that damned whore in Paradise Alley—

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66
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Crouching behind the street-cleaning machine, I loosen the spigot on its water barrel like a farm boy milking a cow. Greedily lapping up what water is left. Spilling more out into my hands, rubbing them over my face. (No doubt, this is the first time this machine has ever truly cleaned anything.)

Keeping my eye on the darkened corner, the bar, across Ninth Avenue. Listening for their steps—the ones who chased me here. Listening for
him,
that monster from the park—

From my hiding place, I can watch all the ignorant armies as they parade back and forth through the night, their torches raised high. Still set on some original act of destruction, some fresh looting.

It is no easy task. The City is a picked skull, but the maggots are still in the streets.

All I want is to be back home—to be back with Maddy, now.
How I have let her down.
But I do not dare to move—scared of the City, the hum of the mob still. I can do nothing but crouch here, holding my pistol. The footsteps that followed me have fallen away. But I still cannot know if
he
is out there somewhere, just around the next corner,
waiting.

And what is there to report from all this? What is the
news?
The depredations of man? These mindless cruelties, endlessly repeated?

Hiding behind a street cleaner, I wait in ambush for another man.

• • •

Across Ninth Avenue now, I watch a large white man—a bricklayer or a hod carrier, his bulk partly hidden under the eaves of the tavern. Whenever a black man comes by, he runs out at him, knocking him down in the street, grabbing and biting at him like an animal. The black man grappling desperately with him, finally pushing him off and running for his life, the bricklayer lunging after him. He bites off part of an ear and a cheek before the next man can tear himself free—stumbling on down the street, sobbing in fear and pain. The white man shouting after him.

“Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Oh, you better not put any niggers to work!”

The big white bruiser finally falls silent, lying prone for a while where he is, out in the middle of the street. Then he gets up, moves back into the shadows of the tavern. Waiting to set upon the next Negro who happens by.

I want Maddy. I want to go to her, to have her with me—even to take her to my home.

I know I should go to her, to shelter her, God only knows how she is faring. But I cannot. The night crawls by, deep in the midnight hours, but I cannot go back out there, into that despicable
City.
My legs are paralyzed beneath me. I can do nothing but huddle behind this broken bucket.

I have seen the crowd, and I despise it. I am terrified by it. Knowing, even now, that I will still witness it, write about it, with a drunkard's compulsion. But I will not be bound to it, by anything or anybody—not even Maddy. I will not be a part of it. I want only to hide from the dissonant hum, the terrible, meaningless drone of massed humanity.

I will not be a part of it.

•
67
•

It must have been Ruth who had sold him. His wife.

He told himself now that he was sure of it. Figuring it out as he kept lurching around the town with the mobs. The sign still over his chest and still no good idea of how to find her, anyway—

Worse yet, he was sure he had noticed the mobs beginning to abate. Falling away with the goods they had looted. Still drunkenly shouting their ridiculous rallying cries—but no one else came.

“Sold! For three hundred dollars, when a nigger gets a thousand!”

And why not? Three hundred dollars was a good price for a man—more than any of them were worth. No doubt a nigger could do a better day's work.

But before they were all gone—before the police and the soldiers finished them off—he had to find Ruth.
But how?
He wandered away from the crowds, trying to think it through. Walking until he found himself at a river—which one, he wasn't even sure. Aware only of the blood-red sun that hovered above the water.

It must have been her.

Only she could have seen how agitated he was, coming back to their shanty in Pigtown that night. He should have left the City at once, he realized that now. Instead he had lost his nerve, fled back to her, and their home.

She wasn't the sharpest one, but she noticed things. Women always did.
He had thought he would be all right, after all, she couldn't even read the newspapers that he had her buy. But she must have had a look at his swag while he slept—must have gotten wind of the murder from the talk on the street.

He should never have let her go out, even to get food. Better yet, he should have battered her head in the moment he had stepped through the door—

Instead he had sat. Too nervous to stick his head outdoors for more than a few minutes at a time. Afraid even to take his loot—the fine watch and chain, and the beautiful dog-headed walking stick—out to a fence or a popshop, from the fear they would be recognized. Afraid some one of his old companions from the river gangs, the Break o' Day Boys or the Swamp Angels, might have gotten word of it, and would sell him for a nickel, just on suspicion.

He knew that he should move. Go over to Jersey, or up to Providence, or even Boston, as soon as he had the chance. But he couldn't, afraid that if they were looking out for him he would surely be caught trying to leave the City. Picked out of a crowd by someone he knew—

So he had sat, and waited. Drinking too much, clouding his judgment by the hour. Until they had everything arranged for him, luring him out with the perfect excuse.

Telling him that the brother was still alive. Jesus, but that was a dirty thing. They deserved to get it in the neck for that alone, if nothing else. How could he have gone for such a thing?

But by then he had spent nearly two weeks sitting in the shanty. Sneaking over every night, when he thought she was asleep, to stare at Old Man Noe's eye, still snugly encased in his thumb gouger. Trying to peer deep inside it, having heard that a dead man's eyes contained the very last image he had seen.

Dolan had always doubted that, figuring that otherwise every murder in the world would be solved—and sure enough, he could see nothing, no matter how hard he stared. The orb before him looking back, dark and blank and perfectly objective. Reminding him of something else—

The box.

Dolan had remembered then, uncovering the cracked and half-wrecked cabinet of wonders. Pulling back its black shroud to see there
the very same eye—almost.
The eye of a giant.
That was how the studiolo man had billed it, although in fact it didn't seem even as big as a normal man's eye, now that he had the example before him. What he had stared into for so many nights, on the road and in the belly of the ship—that single eye behind the glass, staring back from its own perfect world. Always tracking him, pitiless and unblinking.

Yet he realized it was not even a real eye at all. For unlike Noe's he could see, deep within the iris, a tiny, wavering image—an image of himself, in the artfully painted glass. Staring back at his own self, haggard and fearful.
The image of the murderer.

And after that, he had chosen to believe them. After that he had gone along, and let them gull him, get him on that boat.
Out to see his brother. Out to sea, his brother—

He might as well have believed they were taking him to Heaven. Instead there had been just Tom, and her black man, whose name he didn't even know, in the boat. Throwing the burlap sack over his hat, bagging him like a fine rabbit. By the time he came to, his shanghaiers were well out past Seagate, and when he had struggled they had put the boot in, knocked him senseless again.

The ship was some wormy bucket, worse even than the
Birmingham
had been. Refitted just enough to get it to Panama, with a load full of shovels and mining pans, canvas pants and bags of flours.
Pure gold—
to be sold at a thousand percent markup to the prospectors. His new masters had worked him like a dog, kept him belowdecks whenever they came near a port. He had been sick all the time, the voyage nearly as bad as the Atlantic crossing, and when he refused to work they had whipped him to within an inch of his life.

He had thought about trying to jump ship when they finally got to Panama. But he still had no money and all around him, on the docks at Colon, he could see white men dropping like flies from the yellow jack, lying facedown in the mud. He decided to go on to San Francisco, where they promised to pay him at least. Hightailing it across the Isthmus with the rest of the crew, as fast as the mules could move him.

And then, on the way up the coast to California, he had almost forgotten himself, and enjoyed the sail. The weather was warm, and he had picked up a little seamanship for the want of anything else to do.
Learning the stars, and how to navigate by them. He had even found himself thinking that he might ship out again, once he had his money.

He still did not forgive them. He still wanted what he was owed, his woman and his treasure.
But it had occurred to him that he should just keep going. The sailors talking about what the South Seas were like, and China, and the East Indies—

And what would he be when he got to such places? Something different—without a past.

But then they had struck anchor in San Francisco, and the next morning he had awakened to find the ship deserted. Everyone else, the captain and the entire ship's company, had already gone off to the goldfields without so much as letting him know. Their cargo had vanished as well—their ship just one more planting in the forest that all but filled the harbor now. So many abandoned ships lying at anchor—their crews gone off to find their own fortunes—that he had made his way to land by leaping from deck to deck.

But the gold was not for him, that was a ben's game, he was sure. For the next day and a half he had wandered around the waterfront, trying to figure out what to do.
How to get back, or get out, he still wasn't decided.
How to do anything that might gain him a little real money, not gold dust—

That was when he had wandered into the pool hall on Montgomery Street. Not even having any definite plan in mind, he had never had any aptitude for the game.
That was the problem. He was just that—the rube, waiting to be taken.
There had been some argument, a shot had been fired, over just what he still did not know. But the next thing he realized, he was being pulled up before a judge, then shipped off to the penitentiary, from where he had been so foolish as to try to escape—

He stumbled back from the gleaming, red river, still unsure of what he would do. Walking blindly back through the dusk—ignoring the little wars raging all around him, from block to block.

There was a noise—a throaty, guttural sound like something a dog might make in its death throes. He had come upon another mob, gathered around some fresh entertainment, and going up to investigate he saw that they had an army officer stretched out upon the pavement. The man's body tortured nearly to death, but still not dead. His
face beaten in with rocks and clubs, his legs and arms cut and burned with oil—

The same officer he had smashed.

He had walked in another circle, only coming back to the block where he had been.
They must have been tormenting the man for hours,
he realized. Some of them still kicking at him, others holding back a priest who was trying to have him moved inside. The women mocking him where he lay, and telling coarse jokes. The children on the street running tentatively up, slashing at the man with knives or scissors, then screaming delightedly and dashing back again.

The officer himself, meanwhile, was unable to speak or even to move anymore, under their blows. Yet still he groaned and twitched from time to time, still alive.

It was so hard to die.

Dolan remembered a man he had rescued once from a fire, in the dead of winter. He hadn't even meant to do it, but the next thing he knew, he was running into a burning building, with an ax in his hand. Tearing up a wobbling staircase until he had found him, trapped beneath a beam.

He had been as dark as the ace of spades. A sailor, as dark as the nigger in the boat, the night he was shanghaied.
Yet Dolan had cut him out, without a moment's hesitation. Risking his own life, the lives of the other men from the fire company to save him. Hauling him out of the building just before it collapsed on them all.

The others had been amazed that he would do such a thing. He had been amazed himself. He had simply wanted to cut the man loose, that was all—

He looked down at the twitching body of the officer now, and fingered the blade in his pocket. All it would take was one swift plunge and he would be finished. Let the others raise what hell they might, he would face them down. Then he could walk away. Retrace his steps back to the river, perhaps.
Wade on in and let it cover him. Be off this damned island, once and for all—

He began to shove his way forward through the crowd. Unbending the blade in his pocket, ready to strike—when before him, on the ground, the officer groaned once more and died. It was over just that quickly. The mob letting the priest through now—bending their necks, instantly as docile as lambs before him again. He ordered
them to take the body into a house and they did as they were told. Six of them meekly carrying the officer's body away, treating it almost delicately now.

Dolan began to back away with the rest of the crowd. Seething with envy for the dead officer.

He was already dead himself. That was what he kept forgetting.

They had slid him out the black gable, right into the lime-strewn soil, but he had risen. He had been stranded out on the roads, with not a thing to eat in ten counties, but he had walked out. He had been stuck in the bottom of that boat, with no good water to drink, and then shipped to California, but he had lived. He had come back, he had done too much to live again, to simply go off now and disappear without claiming what was his.

His wife. His treasure, and his wife.

She was his, as surely as if they had read out the banns. He had saved her life back in that village, with the dogs ready to finish her off. He knew she had resented him, how he had taken her for his pleasure then, just pushing into her. How he had treated her ever since, coming home with the blood leaping in his veins, in his fists.

She could resent what she wanted, she was still his.
He had gotten her off the damned island, hadn't he, and away to Amerikay. She only thought she knew what he had done to live. She had been fortunate enough just to get there near the end, when the roaming pack of dogs had come.

He still had to find her. Even now that the mob had ripped everything up, it had not flushed her out—her or her nigger lover. The answer descended upon him like a revelation, leaving him all the more livid that he had not seen it before.