Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  One last drive of the nail and Pat let go of the board now fastened in place. He watched his mother tap each nail for insurance.

  “All right, Paddy boy—if we blow away, we tried.” A wild, raw breeze tunneled down Willis Avenue. The skies were slate gray and wind picked. The pressure was dropping and the air felt heavy, almost tropical. “Let’s board the door and we’re done.”

  “Is the hurricane gonna break the windows?”

  “I don’t think so, love. I’m more worried about after the storm. People go nuts, Paddy, for no reason. And the police will have their hands full.” Hannah had said enough to scare the child and stepped back. “Now, don’t worry, nothing bad’s gonna happen. Just a little protection from something blowing in and to keep the crazies moving past.”

  They boarded the glass in the door, and Pat followed his mother back inside the grocery. She threw the dead bolt, but Jack had a key. They gathered candles and Tommy, the guard cat, who had already hunkered down behind the baking soda and was in no mood to be disturbed. He scratched and hissed at Hannah, but she ignored this and carried him up the stairwell.

  “Knock it off, Tom-cat. Paddy, check the back door.”

  Pat had done so twice, and he did again. He peered through the beveled glass above the knob and worried about the small chicken coop in the back. His mother had three hens, Aoife, Oona, and Grainne, and when last he checked they appeared content to sleep through the storm. The wind hollered at the back door, and Pat ran up the stairs to the hallway. He knew his way through the darkness to the apartment door. The Malones lived in a railroad flat above the grocery. One Seventy-Three Willis Avenue had been built after the Tenement Acts, but that didn’t stop the four-story walk-up from falling down around them. Hannah was filling pitchers of water from the tub. Their faucets weren’t on a pump—his father, Jack, had yelled at her about this—but she hoarded water all the same.

  “All right, Paddy, all we’re missing is this storm.” Hannah stacked the pitchers on the ledge by the tub and poked her head toward the window by the fire escape. “Maybe it will jog.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “The Lord loves every last-minute fool.” Hannah shook her head, arguing this point with herself. “He’ll be here. A little late to help, but don’t worry. He’ll be here before the bad stuff passes through.”

  Pat’s bedroom lay off a foul-smelling air shaft hidden behind a slim, smeared window. He checked his contraband—comics, candles, and caramels—and lay down on his bed listening to the wind whistle overhead. Hannah ferried back and forth, muttering prayers and curses, and finally retreated to the kitchen to start dinner. Better to light the gas now and boil everything. Before it gets bad. And before this man shows up in God knows what state of lunacy.

  An uneasy hour passed, and the apartment darkened as the long, swift bands of the storm swiped at the city. Here it came now, and with it, coughing on the landing and a turn of the key. Jack Malone barged in.

  “Hannah? Paddy? Where is everyone?” The door creaked open a second time. “Katie, bar the door, for Christ’s sake. This wind. Family, we have company.”

  Hannah and Pat appeared in the hallway, and there was Jack, stooped, wheezing, with a sailor of the British navy standing behind him.

  “There they are. Hannah, this is Tom Donovan. Paddy, come meet your long-lost cousin. His ship is in, and I found him as they were closing down Feely’s for this blow.” Jack still hadn’t caught his breath as he missed the hook with his cap. “Come in, come in. Before we gust away. Nowhere to go during this feckin storm.”

  The two of them wafted into the living room on fumes of booze and tobacco ash. Hannah kept her distance and glared from down the dark hallway.

  “Pat, shake Petty Officer Donovan’s hand. He’s in His Majesty’s Navy. Family from Cork, like us—what ship did you say you were on?”

  “The Halcyon.” Donovan grabbed Pat’s hand with his big clammy palm and lurched toward him. He was a sailor all right. Blue jean collar, bell-bottoms tucked into once-white wool socks, and the dark trimmed cap. Just like on a box of Cracker Jacks, except his cheeks were more red with booze than windburn from the North Atlantic. “Hey, little man, whaddya say? You a Yankees fan?”

  “Dodgers.”

  Donovan, the son of a Liverpool Corkman, had clearly run through all his American baseball knowledge and screwed up his face. “Dodgers? What the hell is that, Jackie?”

  “Ah, don’t worry about the boy. He’s a real con artist. Come sit and take it off.” They parked on ends of the couch as the wind shook the windows. “This storm ain’t so bad. Wouldn’t want to be in City Island right now. Tide coming in high.” Jack started feeling his pockets for his smokes and something else. He sprang back up. “It’ll jog in a couple of hours. But they closed down the El, and our man here—did I tell ya his family is from Carrigaline?—can’t get back to the city. Now, my old man worked for the Donovans, who did the pottery, you know, the eggcups with those little shamrocks on ’em, my mother loved those eggcups from Carrigaline. Hannah, do we still have those eggcups? I also need a couple of jars.”

  “Jack, calm down and sit down,” Hannah yelled from the kitchen.

  “Ah, this nervous woman, Tommy, I tell ya, no fun. My old man worked with a Frankie Donovan.” He turned toward Pat with his crooked drinking smile. “And now that’s Tommy’s grand-uncle. How’s that for a small world? Practically kin.”

  Jack pulled a bottle of Seagram’s from the pocket of his work pants and slipped into the kitchen, leaving Pat to stare at the blood-eyed not-so-able seaman on the couch, who sat there in a bloated stupor, staring back. Hannah hissed threats at Jack in the kitchen, and thirty seconds later, Jack yelled, “Enough!” and stalked back into the living room. He went over to the sideboard and brought out two Carrigaline eggcups, into which he poured shots of whiskey.

  Jack coughed and cleared his chest, then lifted his eggcup to Tommy’s. “May the devil never make a ladder of your backbone.”

  Jack quaffed it and then fell into the grooves of his green leather wingback, his eyes unfocused and rolled up toward the rattling of rain at the windows.

  “This hurricane ain’t much. Over before they realize you’re gone, Tom.”

  “No worries.” Donovan belched. “I’m taking my leave. They won’t miss me.” Pat didn’t quite know what to make of that and wondered what the punishment was for desertion. Firing squad? He was not opposed.

  “Here’s one more. Mud in your eye.” Jack slapped the eggcup on the end table like he was betting the house with it. “I’ll tell you, when I was over there they never had a good count of us. They kept better track of the bullets than the boys. For damn sure.” Jack was about to revisit some dark trenches of memory as Seaman Donovan belted another eggcup of Seagram’s and stroked his throat as it went down. He was shifting his boots on the floor, not sure what to make of this storm or his port in it, when suddenly the couch poked him hard and sharp in his ass. The sailor jumped up.

  “Ah, sorry, mate, the damn cat. His name is Tommy too. Hannah, why didn’t you leave this foul beast locked in the store?” As Donovan rubbed his rear end, Jack stuck his head down at his feet to take a look, then laughed like a devil who had planned it all along. “Pat, son, grab the feckin cat out from under there.”

  Pat squeezed by the sailor, who almost fell into the coffee table. Ignoring all of this, Hannah came into the room, took up the eggcups and replaced them with mule mugs, and returned to the kitchen entirely fed up. Pat crouched down and found Tommy jammed under the coils of the couch, hissing, ears pinned back. He looked up at his father, who was wheezing with laughter.

  “He won’t come out.”

  “It’s not up to him, now, is it?” Jack poured another round in the mugs. “Come on, Pat, take him by his scruff and yank him out of there.”

  The rain pelted the windows like shrapnel. Pat took another lo
ok at Tommy the cat and with eye contact tried to make it clear it was him and he meant no harm. Pat reached in, and that’s when Tommy bit him.

  It was no warning bite—with the storm, his dislocation, and the dark boots of the drunk stranger, the cat was terrified. His fang sank right into Pat’s middle finger. Pat twitched, and then Tommy grabbed with his claw and brought the boy’s hand closer. Before pain could even bloom across the boy’s face, the cat had finished his attack and bolted along the baseboard. Pat yelped in shock and pulled his hand back out, his wrist raked and scratched, his finger pulsing with dark blood.

  “Goddamn it.” Jack threw back his whiskey and stood, inspecting his son’s finger. “Now what have you done, Pat? Jesus. He mangled ya good. Go put it under the sink.”

  Hannah dashed into the room. “For the love of God . . .”

  Pat stood there, his finger shaking and dripping with blood. He wasn’t going to cry. The sailor took his arm and raised it. “Keep it above your heart,” he said in an annoyed, flat voice.

  “That’s it! I’m getting rid of that fuckin’ cat. It’s gone mad.”

  “Stop it, Jack.” Hannah brought a tea towel to Pat’s finger, and they headed toward the bathroom. “Your horseshit antics caused this.”

  These words set off the dark fury in the man, and Jack charged into the bedroom, retrieving a pillowcase. Jack came back down the hallway, growling: “Where is it? I’m gonna drown him in the fuckin’ river.”

  Through tear-blurred eyes, Pat witnessed this from the bathroom. “No, Da. It was my fault,” he cried weakly, and Hannah held him. The wind wailed.

  “Tom, hold the bag while I get this piece-of-shit cat. Where is it?”

  The sailor held open the pillowcase as he slumped all fluthered back down on the couch. “Take it easy, Jackie.”

  “Where is it?” And then Jack Malone spied the tail behind the radiator. He snatched Tommy by his back legs and into the pillowcase he went, tufts of calico swirling across the living room. Hannah ran cold water over Pat’s cut. It was a small but deep puncture, and it began to pulse with pain. Taking the pillowcase back from Donovan, Jack started on a coughing fit that ended with a long gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle. He was cruelly calm. “Once a cat bites, it can’t be trusted. It’s gone mad.” He looked down as the cat clenched and clawed from inside the pillowcase. “Let’s go.”

  “In the middle of this?” Donovan slurred. “Are you gone in the head?”

  Hannah reached into the cabinet for the iodine. Pat could only hear the helpless, terrified Tommy growling from the other room. “It’s not your fault, Paddy,” his mother whispered.

  “Fine, you’re fuckin’ useless too.” Jack hacked hard and swallowed his sputum, his anger beyond the pale. “Fuckin’ cat does fuck-all. Rat shit strewn all over the fuckin’ store.”

  Jack Malone lurched to the door with Tommy the cat howling for his life. Down and out of the building he went. Through gale-force winds Jack reeled his way toward the Willis Avenue Bridge to drown the animal in the boiling brown chop of the Harlem River.

  Hannah locked Pat and herself in the bathroom, where they wept with the rain. The deserter Donovan passed out on the couch. Hannah found herself between despair and desperation—half wishing that her brutal husband would throw himself off the bridge too. Paddy sat on the toilet as the iodine burned into his cut. He looked up at his mother, heartbroken, washing all the blood away.

  “Paddy, what in Christ’s name are we going to do? He’s sick. He’s sick, and I don’t know what to do.”

  * * *

  Pat shook his head as he finished his second whiskey. At this point he was maintaining a dull, drunken hum. Who was it who said the only relief from mental anguish is physical pain? Not true at all. Pat knew the two compounded. Say what else, but Pat as an actuary understood a lot of the likelihoods of the universe. Could there be surprises? Flukes? Sure. He scanned a Daily News sitting on the stool next to him. Some senator running for president plagiarized in law school. No one cares. It’s like that story in the Dallas papers where the minister tried to kill his wife. Strangled her in the driveway. He’ll get away with it. The senator too. But over the long run, the anomalies flattened and vanished. Follow the arrow of time, and every variable recedes to its limit—once assets become liabilities. Pat ordered a fresh—Let’s call it third and final—whiskey and studied it. All the unseen motion in that glass, and over time the ice melts, the glass breaks, the bar rots, the building’s mortar cracks, the street sheared by the schist of the island, and it all folds back into the dark, unbearable heat of a planet that winks out after its star decays.

  Pat was comfortable around numbers and probabilities, having learned them early on the ledgers of his father’s corner grocery. During the Depression and then the war, everyone in St. Jerome’s parish was on the pad until payday. Even then bookkeeping was a form of risk assessment—Mrs. Reeves owes $6.35, but Mr. Reeves was at the door of Feely’s bar, so good luck with that. During tough times, Pat learned that most people pay, are honest and proud, and you spent 90 percent of your time chasing the other 10 percent who are not.

  His father, Jack, was a Corkman who fought in World War I to gain citizenship. He enlisted with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, heralded by Joyce Kilmer and made famous by Jimmy Cagney. Gassed badly at Lunéville, John Malone compounded his terrible respiration with smoking, and then drank to overcome the wheezing. He died when Pat was fourteen, leaving him and his mother with the store and little else. Hannah sent Pat to Cardinal Hayes, where he aced the math exams under the Christian Brothers, which led to a scholarship from Fordham. He majored in statistics, which his uncle Dermot, a sandhog, counseled was a ticket for creating bullshit rather than shoveling it.

  After Hannah sold the grocery, Pat held more hard-labor jobs in high school and college than he cared to remember. But with that, along with the veteran pension, they got by. He graduated from Rose Hill and landed an entry-level spot in payroll for American Airlines. Then years of night school, again at Fordham, for actuarial science and a JD. He worked his way up the back office, married Anne, moved them to Fordham Hill, and got Hannah out of the South Bronx and into a postwar on Kappock Street in Riverdale. She died of a coronary the winter before Anne became pregnant with Dan.

  Pat looked up at the bar mirror and rubbed the stubble on his cheek, flushed from this new stint of drinking. At the end of the day, Pat believed, the average man, the best he can do is not be a burden. He had a disease, like many, and he had his vices, yes, but an hour or two at the bar was not going to upset the mortality tables of the AMR Corporation.

  Okay, one more.

  “You all right there, buddy?”

  “What now?” Pat snapped out of his reverie.

  “You okay? You’re kind of hunched over there mumbling to yourself.”

  “Sorry, bad day.”

  “No problem, but I think we’re done here.”

  Pat had a thought to argue and then groped for his wallet. “That’s fine. Sorry.”

  “Just disturbing the peace a little.”

  “Blessed are the peacemakers, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Pat blinked—Besides entropy, that’s the answer, right? “Nothing. Just the second coming. That would be the only other way this ends.”

  The bartender was having none of it. “Okay, chief. Time to go.”

  “I’m going.” Pat stood up with this resolute courage that it all made sense now. “My father—”

  “All right, professor, out of here . . .” The bartender started to come around the side of the bar.

  “I’m leaving. Take it easy. Okay, wait.”

  But a meaty paw was already locked on his arm above the elbow. Out of dark habit, Pat reached for his drink—Still a couple good belts left in that glass—but he was pulled away from it, and the glass went crash
ing to the floor. The other patrons went silent and watched. A bit of slow motion and blur followed as Pat was returned to Forty-Fourth Street.

  “Did I pay you?” he asked, upset at himself.

  “You did. Now go home, chief.”

  “Did I tip you?”

  “Sure you did.” And the bartender disappeared back through the door.

  “See you in the funny papers.” That’s that. Pat mimed the raising of a fedora and stumbled back toward Times Square. Fine then, time to stop drinking. Time to head to the Marriott for a few hours of shut-eye before the flight back. He looked down at his Timex. Eleven twenty-five! He’d forgotten to call Anne. Shit. Where did the time go? Time indefinite. Have a disease. A chronic sclerosis of the body. Have to be up soon. Such an idiot. Sleep it off on the plane. Then shave and a coffee and ready for the lion’s den.

  Pat walked as straight a line as possible across Times Square. With a half-lidded eye he registered the statue of Father Duffy, the chaplain to his father’s regiment in World War I. All Jack Malone would ever say: The hero priest. Busy converting the heathens before the army buried them. A good man for the cloth. He kept up hope when there should have been none.

  Pat then swiveled around to give his regards to George Cohan. So here Pat was, at the crossroads—the pulsing, sclerotic heart of the city. And here were these two statues, monuments to his father’s generation. The priest and the patsy, fitting tributes to the Irish American. Sure, boyo, we likes to fight and pray and warble out a tune for our spuds. Pat felt sick—hungry but too tired, too nauseous, to eat. This is sloppy and stupid, just like fucking Jack Malone. Forget him, forget all your troubles come on get happy. Get ready for the judgment day. Calm down, stop spinning. Remember Father Arnall at Hayes: “Cease to be whirled about.” Marcus Aurelius. Don’t puke. Reel it in. Don’t get sick.

  And so, utterly exhausted, Pat crossed Broadway muttering to himself, “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, and I thank you.” He reached the revolving door for the Marriott, poured himself into his hotel bed, arose before dawn still drunk, grabbed a fetid taxi, and hurtled toward the dark wheel of the terminal at LGA.