Light of the Diddicoy (5 page)

“Yeah, kinda. He's done work wit' both the Whitehanders and the Jay Street Gang back before the Jay Streeters agreed to work wit' the Whitehanders. He had to do a job once too, my brother. Him and Wild Bill Lovett together, they stole a bunch o' stuff from a warehouse and then sold it to someone in Manhattan. Like a real job, ya know. They made real good money doin' that. My brother said he got twenny dollars pullin' that off. And he did it with five other guys who all got twenny dollars too. Dat's what we're gonna do, me and Pegleg an' us. So if yas wanna real job, just ask me. But ya gotta be tough, see. If ya ain't got tough, ya better go'n get it.”

Lying across the hardwood floor with the rest, I shared bits of bread with a thin four-year-old that refused to speak. Unable to close her own mouth, or unaware it was open, she just looked at my hand every time it disappeared inside my pocket, then poked me on the leg for more bits.

Appearing from the dark and standing over me, Behan says to me, “Hand over the coat, it's my place to be askin' for it.”

I look up at him. “This is my coat.”

Next thing I know he's dragging me across the entire room by the collar and trying to shake me free from the thing with a couple kicks to my side and some more shaking. Instead of fighting back, I let it slide through my arms and look up.

“I was the first one here,” he says, making a big scene of it in front of the little ones. “I got rights to charge rent and seein' as though I know y'ain't gotta a penny to ya name, I claim dibbies on this here coat.”

I watch him disappear to a corner farther away from the glim of the dying flame in the barrel. The wee one I was just feeding then realizes I have no more bread and gets herself up to find a corner to sleep in too. Eventually I do the same.

The week before Christmas and wandering through the maze of buildings by daylight, I walked around a snowy corner and was surprised by a man running for his life, striding desperately past me. On his coattails are two others whom I recognize immediately from the docks: Tuohey the pavee fighter and The Swede whom you never can forget once you put eyes on him.

“Ya fookin' better run, Leighton,” I hear The Swede yell as the three men continue running toward the middle of the street, moving to the opposite sidewalk. “I catch ya and ya pay for ya brother's ills!”

A main thoroughfare is Fulton Street. It has a terminal and used to be the road that lead to the Fulton Ferry for the Manhattan crossing. In 1915, though, it was next to the Empire Stores, the port warehousing structure scurrying with workers winching pallets of tobacco through the iron-shudder windows above. It ran parallel with the Brooklyn Bridge where the three-story Sands Street train station fed the elevated trains that snaked through the neighborhoods and across the bridge to Park Row, in Manhattan. A city on its own, Sands Street station also housed Richie “Pegleg” Longergan's gang of cutpurses and pickpockets. With such dense commuter transience, it was the perfect headquarters for a gang of teenage thieves. Of course, among this gang was Petey Behan. Himself the thief of my much-needed coat.

A week or so after that, I am wandering over by Jay and York streets on the east side abutment to the Manhattan Bridge with the belly falling out of me in hunger. After long bouts of fasting in the desolate wind and dry crisp air, it begins to seize up in me. I can feel my eyes in my face glowing with visions. New splendors come across my mind and just as soon as they swirl beautifully around my imagination they disappear, and I became enraged under faulty logic. No money and no plan, I am alarmingly unafraid of my fate and when reason does come over me, my stomach turns in concern while my eyes light up in fear.

I go back to Water Street ready to grovel back into my uncle Joseph's good standing and a woman answers the door.

“Don't know any Joseph Garrity, child, must o' moved out,” and the door closes.

At Front Street just a few blocks away, I see playing among the garbage and muddy puddles in the cobblestones a motley band of eight or nine shanty children, parentless in the long misshapen shadows of late afternoon. A few of them have their feet dangling in the sewers where the excrement of neighbors mingles in the mud and whatever else accumulates in the rectum of the streets. Remarkable though was, next to the ragged kiddies, a lounging horse that had finished her last breath and lay there on her side retired from her slavery. With a gaping mouth, staring eyes, and a mountainous rib cage in the air with a thin layer of skin over her, the old girl was a daunting figure there in the road sprawled aside the impervious imps and refugee nurslings. The eldest boy stands over the others with a cap over his eyes and his hands in his pockets keeping at a stern stare on me, shoulders hunched under two floppy suspenders. A bit younger than myself, he is the most like a parent among them and orders the others around, ballyragging them for saying dumb things. I feel sad for the beast and believe he does too, so I ask him whose draft horse it was.

“Well it ain't yours is it?”

The youngest, barely able to speak, spoke up to me, “The butche's on he's way ter pick up da ol' nag and make a . . .”

“Shaddup!” the eldest says to the nursling, then motions for me to keep moving.

The child looks up behind him to the eldest and scowls. The type of scowl a four-year-old shouldn't know how to cast just yet.

“G'on, don' get ya'self thinkin',” the eldest reiterates.

A day or so later and still without even bits of food in me I go back to Borough Hall and wander around some more. Hoping maybe someone will see me this time. I think of a plan. Rather, of needing a plan. Needing to come up with some sort of resolution where my daily routine will be more fruitful. A plan is a fine idea. If only I can get something to eat so I can think more clearly so I can make this plan. Snowflakes begin to populate the air like floating crystals. It's all dreamy inside me and I stare ahead while my thoughts turn soft again, lucid. I allow myself this purposely. Irresponsibly. Without the wool coat, I stuff my hands deep into the pockets of my trousers and shiver obviously, significantly. It is Christmas Eve, so I say a prayer and think about the warm choruses sung on such a night at the church of Clooney back home to celebrate the birth of Christ together. I think about my mother too, and sisters so far away.

Moments later I am overcome with distress. Distraught by pookas whispering in my ear and cursing the fact of it being so cold. I walk with a wild pace looking around everywhere for loose morsels or opportunity like a gull circling behind the ferry's foam. I walk myself right out of Borough Hall and toward Columbia Heights. When I see a lazy dray with a cover over the back, I sneak up behind it regardless of consequence and rip open the sheet.

“Hey! The fuck's wrong wit' ya?” the driver belches.

I look at him with cat's eyes and scurry off.

“Kid!” I hear a yell from across the street, then see a young man crossing the cobbles in my direction. “C'mere, yeah. C'mere. What ya doin'?”

He looks healthy, fit. Maybe twenty-two years old. Handsome and with his cap over one eye and a toothpick out the other side of his mouth, he walks with a rhythm. I recognize him, but can't remember from where. I stand still, hoping he can lead me to some food.

“Yeah, ya stealin' in my neighborhood widout me knowin' first? Is that it?”

I look at him.

“Ya ain't gonna answer me?”

“I'm not.”

“Oh yeah? Wha's ya name?”

“Liam Garrity.”

“Garrity?”

“Garrity.”

“Joe a relation o' yours?”

“Uncle, but I swore him off as he did me.”

“You got nowhere to go?”

“Not yet.”

“How old are ya?”

“Still fourteen.”

“‘Still fourteen,' he says,” laughing at me, then looks around.

“What are ya, right off the boat?”

I don't answer.

“Listen, come wit' me. Ya hungry? Come wit' me. I gotta be somewhere an' ya can come wit'. C'mon,” then grabs my arm and walks me quickly through the cobbles toward the sidewalk.

After a few minutes of walking I ask his name.

“‘What's my name,' he says,” again making fun and repeating.

“Guy, just call me Guy.”

“Guy?”

“Yeah, or Patrick Kelly, like everyone else around here.”

I would get to know him quite well over time, his real name was Vincent Maher and he walked me into a flower shop and dropped some coins on the table, left with a bouquet. “Ya ever been to a wake?”

“Uh . . . I have.”

“Good, le's go.”

“What if I don't want to?” I stop.

“C'mon, only one better place to catch a girl, dat's a weddin'.

Wakes? They get all lathered up about 'em, girls do. And dis guy dat died's got t'ree sisters. T'ree of 'em, let's go. They got scoff there.”

“Scoff?”

“
Fooooood
, shit kid, ya don' know nothin' do ya? I can tell ya hungry, though, as there ain't a lick a manhood on ya, fookin' scrawny as ya is. Jus' follow me kid, I'll take care o' everythin', don't ya worry. C'mon.”

“Who died?”

“A guy.”

“How'd he die?”

“Screw got'em.”

“What's that?”

“Shaddup.”

As we walk away, he takes off his trench coat and drops it over my shoulders. A few minutes later and we come upon a throng of half-frozen men and women and their children standing in the street in front of a wood-framed, four-story tenement. Maher grabs me by the lapel and pulls me through it as most step aside when they see him and his side-cocked cap. We thump up a thin stairwell together, dark as a forgotten cave. The dusty steps creak in their blackened wood and Maher whispers down, reminds me to keep my mouth buttoned. On the second floor the banister is gone other than some shardlike stalagmites sticking up from the planks. I hold onto the wall instead where I feel the rotted and exposed studs and downstairs I can hear the hum of the crowd reflect from the entrance and up through the stairwell. We hear keening coming from behind a closed door above us and the hushing coos of loved ones like pigeons on a wire. When we make it to the third floor we take a left and pass the doorless lavatory. Maher knocks lightly with a knuckle, then checks up the stairwell toward the top floor in the black.

I huff from the stairs, not so much from being winded but because my body is beginning to give way for not having slept in some two days. And for the hunger, which leaves me only with emaciated energy. With no bed or rest in the coming, my stamina is discouraged though the food is just behind the door, so I am told. Beginning again to dream with eyes open, my thoughts are tumbling from one topic to another and nothing much seems so real or connected, though I try with all I have not to reveal my mind's unsound movements.

“Who is it?” whispers a man from behind the door.

“Maher.”

The door opens and a giant leaning figure stands in our path. I know right off who it is from the white hair and the scary look on him. “Who's the kid?”

“C'mon, would I bring any touts around here? I needa talk to Dinny 'bout this one. Let us in.”

The Swede bends down from the door frame to whisper in the dustwood hallway, his neck arteries seizing in blue and red, “Ya fookin' stoopit, ya not gonna bring no fookin' stranger in here . . . who says ya could. . . .”

“Listen, lemme talk wit' ya a second, c'mere,” Maher says as calm as anyone could be under such a threat. “Stay there,” he whispers back to me, then disappears behind the door with The Swede.

Two minutes and the door opens up violently.

“Put ya hands up,” The Swede says walking from the door and confronting me.

“Sheesh,” Maher mumbles.

The Swede pushes me against the wall and cups his large hand into my loins and squeezes, then searches underneath me in the back, pats my chest and thighs, his hands easily wrapping around my reedy waistline.

When we come in the door to the kitchen I can't find the scent of food, instead only of fresh-cut wood and flowers that can't quell the rattles in my shrunken belly. I am told to take the coat and hat off and we then walk softly into the opening to the diminutive parlor. Supported by four tattered wooden chairs, there is a long yellow pine coffin stretched under the drapeless window reaching into the middle of the room. Topper shut.

Dinny Meehan glances at me directly in the eye then gave attention back to the woman whose faint hands he holds between the span of his brawny shoulders. She snuffles and her nose and cheeks are blushed with the cry. His gentle confidence attempting to assure her of a sanity in this world, he whispers to her in the sunlight dust. Stacked behind them in the close-shouldered room are thickets of bursting bouquets contrasting the dull grays and dark colors of the parlor. Maher adds his to the confection, gives a distant hug to the mother of the dead. The only light in the entire flat comes from the cloudy window and the dull glim of the gray Christmas Eve day outside.

Three sisters sit on the faded and torn navy blue sofa by the coffin, the youngest on the arm and a widow sat looking out the window in a long stare under an awning bower of lilacs and assorted flowers, her two fatherless dawdlings running from the back room to the kitchen unattended. Six broad men stand at varying heights at the women's opposite like high-rises wedged together in a dumbstruck skyline, hat in hands, thin black ties between tight jacket lapels. The Swede at the pinnacle, his long needle face topped with white feathers like a towheaded city savage. I recognize others from the docks, the pavee fighter Tommy Tuohey among them.

Maher and I take our place in the room's saturnine reserve cast by a dead man's presence. At my side, a pair of eyes look at me in the hush. It is Harry “The Shiv” Reynolds, who I know as the dockboss at the Atlantic Terminal known chiefly as the bloodculler of Columbia Street's bulkhead. My stomach makes a curling sound and I am overcome with a terrible cramp in my bowel. Reynolds looks at me again, then steadies himself.