The Styx

by Jonathon King

  “Your party has just become a bit more interesting,” Brennan said, turning to his commander with a glint of excitement in the widening whites of his eyes. At that the lot of them broke into a jog, their matching brogans slapping the uneven cobblestone of the streets and heading for the edge of Tompkins Square.

  At the first cry of impending violence, they stopped. Despite the efforts of the city when they revamped Tompkins Square Park to bring an open space to the jumbled stacks of tenements and street markets of the Lower East Side, the place at night was nearly as dark and shadowed as the alleyways around it. The new electric lights at all four corners did little more than add a luciferian flicker to the winter-bared trees inside the square. Some of the men went to their haunches, a tactic Byrne himself had taught them. Still, he and big Jack remained upright, using the night sight they’d gained from their childhoods on these streets to make an assessment.

  “There, on the left,” Jack said, his finger pointing to the north side of the park where they could now make out the flame of a torch.

  “Aye and there on the South side,” Byrne said, pointing out the torchbearer on the opposite side.

  With that little light as a backdrop they could see the outlines of bobbing heads but the number was impossible to count. They could also make out the occasional flash of metal, maybe a pipe, maybe a long blade.

  “Could be a dozen a side, maybe more,” Jack said. “Five Points boys to the south.”

  Brennan could hear the disgust in his friend’s voice. The Five Points Gang had been growing in viciousness and number since both of them were kids. If Brennan and Byrne had not been saved off the streets by a well-meaning New York City cop, they would have been sucked into the gang life just like the others they grew up with in the Gas House District. And the Five Points would be their natural enemy.

  But from here they stood back and watched the dark gap between the torch flames begin to close, step by step, the silence of night now starting to fill with the shouts and curses of gang members stoking for the fight. When they heard the first guttural thump of flesh against flesh, all of Byrne’s crew came to their feet, squinting into the dark to their right. Byrne knew the tactics of the Five Pointers. They would have sent some of their gang out to either side of the park’s edge to flank the Alphabet City boys.

  “Aye, ya little bastard,” came a shout followed by the rustling of fast feet in the dry winter leaves. The Pinkertons now stood tall and almost instinctively closed ranks, shoulder to shoulder as the sound came closer. Then as if from behind a black tree came the rolling form of a small human being, spinning, head over hips and then gaining its feet for only a second before the man chasing behind sent a boot crashing against the boy and knocking him again to the ground.

  “Ya shite! Ύou warned ’em ahead of time didn’t ya, ya little prick?” the big man yelled, re-cocked his leg and sent another toe into the boy’s ribs. The muted squeal of pain came out from between the child’s teeth, and from ten yards away Byrne recognized the tousled mop of reddish hair. “Screechy,” he called out once before bounding up over the curb and into the park.

  The Five Pointer’s leg was again at the ready and the boy had curled to a ball, his elbows over his ears to protect his head, when the whipping sound of thin metal swept through the cold air and a shaft caught the gang member on the outside tendon of his support leg and dropped him like a sack of grain.

  “Christ, Screechy, you should know how the hell to keep out of the big boys’ brawls by now,” Byrne said, standing over the both of them now with a metal baton in his hand that he’d pulled from his waistcoat. The boy peeked up at Byrne between skinny forearms and a smile started to come to his eye but quickly changed when they both heard the rustle of leaves. The Pinkerton detective’s baton was still pointing down when a fist crashed against his temple.

  Byrne rolled away at the last second and the punch caught him but had lost most of its force. The quick move also caused his attacker’s weight to carry him past and Byrne used his pivot to bring the baton across the back of the man’s head. He went face first into the dirt. But a companion was on Byrne immediately. Reinforcements had followed, but so too had Byrne’s Pinkertons and the row was on.

  He woke, as usual, freezing his ass off and dreading the darkness that would surely greet him as soon as he could pry his crusted eyes open. Byrne pulled the blanket tighter, curled his shoulders in and felt the pull of his clothes against the bed linens. He found the strength to move his feet and was relieved to find that he had at least taken off his brogans before climbing into bed. Yet, he still winced at the thought of putting his feet to wooden floors that were chilled like pond ice and then slipping his feet into frozen shoes. Which then, he thought, was going to be warming which?

  He finally gained the willpower to force open his right eyelid and spied the dull light seeping through the northern window of the room. But when he squinted, he felt the small crackle and pull of blood-caked skin at the side of his face and quickly recalled the slam of a fist against his temple last night, his own retaliatory swing of his baton and the blur of adrenaline and the scrape and shove and wrestle of bodies and shouts and whistles of a familiar chaos.

  Christ! He let his fingers come out from under the blanket and immediately probed around inside his lips, touching and counting his teeth, feeling for unnatural gaps and then recalling big Jack’s toast to his smile, before the row, before he and his boys had left most of the Five Points flank men lying in the rotting leaves moaning from the precise whippings from their batons. None of his own men had suffered more than minor bruises, and to avoid any more confrontation, they’d grabbed Screechy by the scruff of the neck and hauled him back to McSorely’s and forced him to drink a pint of lager and ordered several more rounds for themselves.

  “Aye, Michael,” Brennan had said. “My forewarnin’ to anyone worth a listen about that steel whip of yours shoulda reached that Five Pointer puttin’ the boot to young Screechy.” Brennan had leaned in conspiratorially. “And I swear I heard Danny’s voice comin’ out of your own mouth when you sent the boy packin’. Just like your old brother done to you when you were just a straggler on the gang fights.”

  Byrne had tipped his last mug to mark the memory then barely recalled making his way in the dark with Brennan to his tenement south of Hamilton Fish Park. There was a blurred recollection of hugging his mate in a farewell while the both of them stood staring at the lights strung above the newly finished structure of the Williamsburg Bridge.

  “You get out, you lucky bastard. Get out of this city before the bloody rats eat us all,” Jack Brennan had said. “Go on to Florida, wherever the hell that is, and make a life for yerself away from this place.”

  Now it was his day of leaving. Yet he did not bolt from bed. He had plenty of time. Late morning train out. He lay still instead, watching his own breath stream out in jets of white into the single room. He did not move his head, putting off what he knew would be some pain from the fracas of last evening. He shifted his slowly improving eyesight to the door opposite. The locks were set. Maybe he had not been as drunk as his pasty mouth indicated.

  He lay there several minutes, planning what he’d have to pack—a few articles of clothing that he’d splurged on by having the washerwoman downstairs clean and hang out to dry. He stared at the old dresser drawer where a small leatherette held several keepsakes, including the papers his parents had kept and their documents from Ellis Island, their photographs blurred to sepia with age. And once it held his father’s watch. The sight of Danny slipping it out of the drawer the night he left came into Byrne’s head again. When their father died—their mother told them he’d been crushed under the wheels of a delivery wagon on his way to his job as an apprentice steamfitter—Michael had known that she’d lied. He was convinced that his father was alive because he knew the old man never went anywhere without the Swiss-made watch that he’d brought with him from Dublin and rarely let out of his sight.

  Byrne shift
ed his eyes again, looked up to the single eastside window in the room and tried to will the light of a late sunrise in through its dirty panes. He thought of how proud his father had been to move them into this, the second floor of a building where they’d started out in the rat-infested basement, then to the top where the rickety stairs and lack of heat was the next stop for the poorest. Year by year his father had muscled and scrapped and used that optimistic smile of his to make friends, find connections, and get into a better job. The steamfitter job was one he’d been vying for, one to pay the forty-eight dollars a month they’d need to rent a flat farther north in a better neighborhood. But after two years there, the old man had started to change. The smiling eyes began to go dull at dinner. The full-throated Irish brogue that told wonderful stories at night went hollow and finally quiet. One night, Michael had risen from his cot to use the tenement’s hallway bathroom and saw his father sitting up, staring out the only window of the apartment at a view that only contained the brick wall of the building across the street. His parents never argued those last two years. No complaints from his mother. No recriminations from his father. Then the man who’d broken his back, and perhaps his soul, to raise them, was gone.

  Byrne could see the vision of his father that he’d formed in his own head afterward, the one of his sinewy, 140-pound body lying in the middle of the filthy street, the indentations of horse hooves carved into his skin, his legs twisted at impossible angles. But in the vision, now a million sleepless nights perfected in his mind, Michael never saw a mark on his father’s face, never a change in his absorbed and intelligent eyes.

  Of course, Michael had never really seen the body, had in fact never been to a funeral ceremony or a gravesite. All he and Danny were left with was the watch, the only thing of value their father had brought on the “Coffin Ship” from Dublin, with its plain ivory face and oval halo of silver. And that’s how he knew his mother had lied.

  Byrne gathered himself—he hated the cold—and then flung back the blanket and stood. The cold wood floor stung as he knew it would. He’d gone to sleep last night with his pants on and they would have to do for his journey. To his surprise he found that he’d actually taken off his shirt and hung it on the bureau. But when he held the bone-white garment up he could see even in the bare light that there were blood stains at the left shoulder, and that wouldn’t do. He reached into his pocket, came out with a stick match, and lit the kerosene lamp on the bureau top. The flame crawled up the mirror before him.

  The reflection was of a man with dirty-green eyes and high cheek bones. The aquiline nose was slightly bent, broken only once by a beer bottle, and the ears were somewhat large but pinned back as if in perpetual full charge. There was a dark streak running down the left side of the muscled cables of the neck, which appeared to start somewhere inside the light brown hair. He followed the trail up to a slick, sticky mass just above the ear. He touched the spot with his fingertips and could feel the sharp flash of open nerve endings but did not flinch. Byrne had always had an unnatural threshold for pain. He probed around the area a bit before determining the wound was minor and then went to the large metal sink that had been installed only a year ago when plumbing came to the building. He’d run a basin full of water and set it inside yesterday, not trusting that the pipes bringing water to the second floor would not be frozen in the early morning. Indeed, he now had to crush the top skin of thin ice on the porcelain, and then he dipped a rag and began cleaning the rip in his scalp that had likely come from a ringed fist or some lucky swat of a length of pipe during the fight last night.

  He gathered the rag and the basin, moved to the bureau top and began washing his face with the now blood-tinged water. The crusted scrape on his left cheek came clean though raw, and the grime of soot, constantly in the city’s polluted air, wiped off as well. He found both a bar of lather soap and a small bristle brush and lathered up his slight whiskers. He then bent to retrieve the single-bladed knife he always carried in a sheath strapped to his ankle. The instrument was small enough for concealment and had many uses, some routine, some that just happened to come along. He shaved himself clean. He would be meeting his new bosses today. Better to present his best. When he’d finished, he cleaned the blade and put it back in its holster and then packed everything he owned into a single old leather satchel. The fact that he had so little made no impression because no one he knew had much more. He donned the warm coat given to him by the same Pinkerton supplier who gave them all their shoes, took one last look around the apartment, to absorb its memories and its lessons, and locked the door behind him. The landlady would know soon enough when the rent was due that he had gone.

  Outside, an early morning gloom was on the day, though it was always hard to tell whether it was the cloud cover or the density of coal smokeand ash hanging in the air. When Byrne stepped off the threshold he nearly bumped into old Mrs. McReady, who was mumbling and moving her equally old produce cart into position for the day. The woman was bundled in layers of dull and worn clothing that as far as Byrne could tell never varied, whether worn in the heat of summer or the freezing nip of winter. He had known the woman all his life and long before she’d lost her mind.

  “Pardon, Mrs. McReady. Didn’t mean to startle you,” Byrne said, using a touch of the old country in his voice for her, a holdover that he tried to avoid when speaking to anyone else in the city who might take a dislike to him because of his heritage.

  The woman looked up into his face with milky eyes and an illusory recognition.

  “Danny, me boy. Good mornin’ yourself and how is it you’re so late gettin off to school?” she said, mistaking him for his brother as she always did and chastising him though he had not been school aged for a good ten years.

  “No school today, Mrs. McReady, and it’s me, Michael.”

  The old woman huffed at the correction, whiffed her hands and turned to wrestle with the handles of her cart, the diameter of the wooden posts thicker than her own tired legs. Byrne swung his satchel over his shoulder and helped her move the cart to the position where it had sat every day for two decades.

  “Bless you, Mikey, but don’t touch my cart again boy or I’ll tell your mum and she’ll whip you solid,” the old woman snapped. Byrne would have laughed at the threat but for the image of his mother that instantly jumped into his head. She had never touched him in anger, and in her last years she’d barely had the strength to stand.

  “I’d appreciate you not telling her, ma’am,” he said to Mrs. McReady.

  “Aye, this one time, boy.” She reached in under the canvas that covered her cart and withdrew a small green apple and pressed it into his palm. “Now get on with you, you’ll be late for school.”

  Byrne hugged the old woman, squeezing the rumpled bundle hard but was still unable to feel the bones hidden somewhere inside that magically kept her upright.

  “So I’m off,” he said as she stood there, her eyes gone vacant, looking befuddled and slightly stunned by the odd recognition of a man’s arms around her if only for a second.

  Byrne started north on Pitt, the sky in the east showing just a smoldering of light as if the sun was being held down by some giant gray fabric. The air was moist and the cold penetrating, the only advantage of winter was that the garbage and sewage in the streets was frozen, which kept the stench at a minimum. Though the streets were still empty of people, Byrne walked along the edges of buildings, head down and eyes up. By habit he knew that in these neighborhoods you did not draw attention to yourself regardless of your errand. As he skirted the western edge of Hamilton Fish Park he could make out the huge arch of the gymnasium, the place where New York Police Captain John Sweeney had found him and big Jack and others when they were boys and drafted them into a yet unofficial junior police crew. It was in that gym that Byrne had learned the use of the telescoping baton. Captain Sweeney had given him rudimentary anatomy lessons, nerve points on the human body, weak spots where grown men could be struck and quickly rendered harml
ess. That knowledge and his own mechanical perfection of the balance and design of the steel baton had impressed Sweeney and had saved Byrne’s ass more than a few times on the streets.

  When he and Jack Brennan were seventeen, Sweeney pulled them aside and told them he could pave their way into the city’s police department. The pay would be minimal, but they’d have a chance at regular jobs, a perk that few like them could get without being beholden to the neighborhood bosses.

  “You’re smart boys. You know the streets and the characters out there. We need young men like yourselves to tap into what’s going on so we can clean out some of the vermin, you know.”

  When Byrne took the offer to his brother, Danny scoffed in his face.

  “I’ll make more money in a week on Broadway than you will in a year,” he said and Michael knew it was true. By then Danny was working as a barker out in front of the follies and running a gambling table in the basement of the place at night. Since they were kids Michael had tagged along but only watched, careful to stay out of slapping range of his brother’s hand, but soaking up the atmosphere, the gestures, and the faces of pimps and prostitutes, opium sellers and dice shooters. He could still recall the day Danny was up on his soapbox while Michael sat on his heels in a nearby alcove. In his memory, he was filing away the details, the way his brother used his arms and hands to articulate his pitch, the voice he used, so different than his normal conversational voice, the eye contact, picking through the potential buyers versus those too smart or to conservative to take a chance. He memorized what clothes Danny wore, gaudy jackets and vests Michael had never seen at home that were either borrowed from other barkers or kept somewhere secret so their parents wouldn’t know. But when Michael’s eyes got to his brother’s feet he noted that he was wearing mismatched socks—one checkered and one blue—and when he looked down at his own feet, he was wearing the exact same pair—one checkered and one blue.