The Power Of The Dog (11 page)

Callan grows up on bloody fables.

Cuchulain, Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, Roddy McCorley, Pádraic Pearse, James Connelly, Sean South, Sean Barry, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Bloody Sunday, Jesus Christ.

The rich red stew of Irish Nationalism and Catholicism, or Irish Catholic Nationalism, or Irish National Catholicism. Doesn’t matter. The walls of the small West Side walk-up and the walls of St. Bridget’s Elementary are decorated, if that’s the word, with bad pictures of martyrdom: McCorley dangling from the Bridge of Toome; Connelly tied to his chair, facing the British firing party; Saint Timothy with all them arrows sticking out of him; poor, hopeless Wolfe Tone slicing his own neck with a razor but fucking it up and severing his windpipe instead of his jugular—anyway, he manages to die before they manage to hang him; poor John and poor Bobby looking down from heaven; Christ on the Cross.

Of course there are the Twelve Stations of the Cross in St. Bridget’s itself. Christ being whipped, the Crown of Thorns, Christ staggering through the streets of Jerusalem with the Cross on his back. The nails going in his blessed hands and feet. (A very young Callan asks the sister if Christ was Irish, and she sighs and tells him, No, but he might as well have been.)

He’s seventeen years old and he’s slamming beers in the Liffey Pub on Forty-seventh and Twelfth with his buddy O-Bop.

Only other guy in the bar besides Billy Shields the bartender is Little Mickey Haggerty. Little Mickey’s sitting at the far end of the bar doing some serious drinking behind an upcoming date with a judge who’s a lock to put him eight-to-twelve from his next Bushmills. Little Mickey came in with a roll of quarters, all of which he fed into the jukebox while pressing the same button. E-5. So Andy Williams has been crooning “Moon River” for the past hour, but the boys don’t say nothing because they know all about Little Mickey’s hijacking beef.

It’s one of those killer New York August afternoons—one of those “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” afternoons—when shirts stick to backs and grudges just plain stick.

Which is what O-Bop’s talking about to Callan.

They’re sitting at the bar drinking beers, and O-Bop just can’t let it go.

What they did to Michael Murphy.

“What they did to Michael Murphy was wrong,” O-Bop says. “It was a wrong thing.”

“It was,” Callan agrees.

What happened with Michael Murphy is that he’d shot and killed his best friend, Kenny Maher. It was one of them things; they was both stoned at the time, flat ripped on Mexican Mud, the brown-opium heroin that was making the rounds of the neighborhood at the time, and it was just one of them things. A quarrel between two junkies that gets out of hand, and Kenny whacks Michael around a little and Michael stays pissed off and he goes out and gets a little .25-caliber target pistol and follows Kenny home and puts one in his head.

Then he sits down in the middle of fucking Forty-ninth Street, sobbing because he killed his best friend. It’s O-Bop that comes along and gets him out of there before the cops come, and Hell’s Kitchen being what it is, the cops never find out who canceled Kenny’s reservation.

Except the cops are the only people in the neighborhood who don’t know who killed Kenny Maher. Everyone else gets the word, including Eddie Friel, which is bad news for Murphy. Eddie “The Butcher” Friel collects money for Big Matt Sheehan.

Big Matt runs the neighborhood, he runs the West Side Longshoreman’s Union, he runs the local teamsters, he runs the gambling, the loan-sharking, the whores, you name it—except Matt Sheehan won’t let any drugs in the neighborhood.

That’s a point of pride with Sheehan, and a reason he’s so popular with the Kitchen’s older residents.

“Say what you will about Matt,” they’ll say. “He’s kept our kids off of dope.”

Except for Michael Murphy and Kenny Maher and a few dozen others, but that don’t seem to make no difference to Matt Sheehan’s rep. And a big part of Matt’s rep is due to Eddie the Butcher, because the whole neighborhood is scared to death of him. When Eddie the Butcher comes to collect, you pay. Preferably, you pay in money, but if not, you pay in blood and broken bones. And then you still owe the money.

At any given point in time, roughly half of Hell’s Kitchen owes money to Big Matt Sheehan.

Which is another reason they all got to pretend to like him.

But O-Bop, he hears Eddie talking about how someone should take care of that fucking junkie Murphy, and he goes to Murphy and tells him he should go away for a while. So does Callan. Callan tells him this because not only does Eddie have a reputation for backing up his bad words, but Matty’s put the word out that junkies killing each other is bad for the neighborhood and bad for his reputation.

So O-Bop and Callan tell Murphy he should split, but Murphy says fuck it, he’s staying where he is, and they guess he’s suicidal over having killed Kenny. But a few weeks later they suddenly don’t see him around anymore so they figure he got smart and took off, and this is what they figure until one morning Eddie the Butcher shows up in the Shamrock Cafe with a big grin and a milk carton.

He’s like showing it around, and he comes over to where Callan and O-Bop are trying to have a quiet cup of coffee to work on a hangover and he tilts the carton down so O-Bop can see and he says, “Hey, look in here.”

O-Bop looks in the carton and then he throws up right on the table, which Eddie thinks is hysterical, and he calls O-Bop a pussy and walks away laughing. And the talk in the neighborhood for the next few weeks is how Eddie and his asshole buddy Larry Moretti go to Michael’s apartment, drag him into the shower and stab him about a hundred and forty-seven times and then cut him up.

The story is that Eddie the Butcher goes to work on Michael Murphy’s body and cuts him up like he’s a piece of pork and takes the different pieces out in garbage bags and scatters them around the city.

Except for Michael’s cock, which he puts in the milk carton to show around the neighborhood lest there be any doubt about what happens to you when you fuck with one of Eddie’s buddies.

And no one can do anything about it, because Eddie is so connected with Matt Sheehan and Sheehan has an arrangement with the Cimino Family, so he’s like untouchable.

Except six months later, O-Bop’s still brooding about it.

Saying it’s wrong what they did to Murphy.

“Okay, maybe they had to kill him,” O-Bop is saying. “Maybe. But to do him that way? Then do what they did, showing that part of him around? No, that is wrong. That is so wrong.”

The bartender, Billy Shields, is wiping the bar—which is like the first time maybe ever—and he’s getting real nervous listening to this kid bad-mouth Eddie the Butcher. He’s wiping the bar like he’s going to perform surgery on it later.

O-Bop sees the bartender eyeing him, but it doesn’t slow him down. O-Bop and Callan have been at it all day, walking along the Hudson toking on a joint and drinking beer from brown paper bags, so while they’re not exactly wasted they’re not exactly all there, either.

So O-Bop keeps it up.

Actually, it was Kenny Maher that gave him the name O-Bop. They’re all in the park playing street hockey and they’re taking a break when Stevie O’Leary, as he was still known back then, comes walking up and Kenny Maher, he looks at Stevie and he says, “We should call you ‘Bop.’ ”

Stevie’s not displeased. He’s what, fifteen? And getting tagged by a couple of older guys is cool, so he smiles and says, “ ‘Bop’? Why ‘Bop’?”

“Because of the way you walk,” Kenny says. “You bounce on every step. You sort of bop.”

“Bop,” Callan says. “I like that.”

“Who cares what you like?” Kenny says.

Then Murphy busts in, “What the fuck kind of a name is ‘Bop’ for an Irishman? Fuckin’ look at him with that red hair. He’s standing on the corner, cars stop. Look at the fuckin’ white skin and the freckles, for Christ’s sake. How can you call him ‘Bop’? Sounds like a black guy. This is the whitest guy I ever seen in my life.”

Kenny thinks about this.

“Has to be Irish, huh?”

“Fuck yes.”

“Okay,” Kenny says. “How about O’Bop?”

Except he says it with the stress on the O, so it becomes O-Bop.

And it sticks.

Anyway, O-Bop keeps it up about Eddie the Butcher.

“I mean, fuck that guy,” he says. “So he’s hooked up with Matty Sheehan, he can do anything he wants? Who the fuck is Matty Sheehan? Some lace-curtain old drunk Harp still crying in his beer about Jack Kennedy? I gotta respect this guy? Fuck him. Fuck the both of them.”

“Steady,” Callan says.

“Steady my ass,” O-Bop says. “What they did to Michael Murphy was wrong.”

He hunches over the bar and goes back to drinking his beer. Turns sullen, like the afternoon.

It’s maybe ten minutes later when Eddie Friel walks in.

Eddie Friel is a big fucking guy.

He walks in and sees O-Bop and says, real loud, “Hey, pubic hair.”

O-Bop doesn’t sit up or turn around.

“Hey!” Eddie yells. “I’m talking to you. That is pubic hair on your head, isn’t it? All curly and red?”

Callan watches O-Bop turn around.

“What do you want?”

He’s trying to sound tough, but Callan can hear he’s scared.

Why not? So is Callan.

“I hear you have a problem with me,” Friel says.

“No, I got no problem,” O-Bop says.

Which Callan thinks is the smart thing to say, except Friel isn’t satisfied.

“Because if you got a problem with me, I’m standing right here.”

“No, I don’t got a problem.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Friel says. “I heard you was going around the neighborhood running your mouth about you have a problem with something I may have did.”

“No.”

If it wasn’t one of them murderous New York August afternoons it would probably end right there. Shit, if the Liffey was air-conditioned, it would probably end right there. But it ain’t, it’s just got a couple of ceiling fans giving a bunch of dust and dead flies a lazy merry-go-round ride, so anyway, it doesn’t end right there where it should.

Because O-Bop has totally backed down. His balls are like lying on the floor, and there’s no need to push this any further except that Eddie is a sadistic prick, so he says, “You lying little cocksucker.”

Down at the end of the bar, Mickey Haggerty finally glances up from his Bushmills and says, “Eddie, the boy told you he don’t have no problem.”

“Anyone ask you, Mickey?” Friel says.

Mickey says, “He’s just a boy, for Christ’s sake.”

“Then he shouldn’t be running his mouth like a man,” Friel says. “He shouldn’t be going around talking about how certain people got no right to be running the neighborhood.”

“I’m sorry,” O-Bop whines.

His voice is shaking.

“Yeah, you’re sorry,” Friel says. “You’re a sorry little motherfucker. Look at him, he’s crying like a little girl, and this is the big man who thinks certain other people got no right to run the neighborhood.”

“Look, I said I was sorry,” O-Bop whines.

“Yeah, I hear what you say to my face,” Friel says. “But what are you going to say behind my back, huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Friel pulls a .38 from under his shirt. “Get down on your knees.”