Abe coolly whispers, “Do it.”
The bound man chats away blindly, “Figlia, figlia. . . figlia, figlia.”
There must be a better way to help my family without ruining another’s.
He lowers the gun as the wind ripples through his clothing.
“Bill,” he turns his head toward them. “Bill there’s gotta be another—”
But Bill storms over and takes the gun from him, “That was ya only chance.”
The blinded man turns his head toward the words he does not understand. Still on his knees, he smiles at Darby in thanks. With the cold barrel no longer pressed
to the back of his head, he is relieved. But without his knowledge Bill points the gun at his temple and fires.
A deep crack bursts open the morning with the sound of the .45 caliber. For a few seconds there is no reaction. Darby blinks and falls back into the snow. Next to him the crier spurts out a red stream from the side of his cranium. Then it stops. Then again it squeezes out the pressure, raining red onto Darby until he squirms to back away.
Above, Bill’s eyes are wild with frenzy and his gritting teeth almost look like a smile. With a burst of energy he turns the gun to the translator and blasts another charge. This one into the man’s chest, which flares his white linen shirt open in a red splotch and fells him backward into the water with a ker-plunk.
The Italians lined up along the seawall lower their heads in prayer and supplication in the foreign tongue. One man screams as Bill ravenously gnashes his teeth and walks toward them with his hand cannon loose in his right hand. The screaming man loses his balance and sways backward, then tumbles into the turbulent channel; his hands and feet tied behind him.
Caw-caw, Flynn howls. “Look at him. Looky there, he’s tryna swim. He looks like a flounder wit’ palsy,” caw-caw.
Darby wipes the dark blood from his face with frozen fingers. He looks at the clumps of red gooey warmth that rushes down his hands as it spreads into the fabric of his sleeves.
Is this my blood?
In his shock he had forgotten already until a dim and bubbly spurt struggles out of the open skull in the snow next to him. Only then, when he sees that death had plunged a busy hand into the Italian’s brain, did he remember.
“Watch out ya fuckwit,” Darby is told as Connors and Lonergan drag the dead and blindfolded man by the belt buckle. Darby kicks backward through the snow to move from their way with red palm prints spotted on the front of his linen shirt. At the bulkhead they toss the body in with the others as if he were not a father of a little girl, but a beat cigarette.
“Load the rest o’ them up in that automobile truck,” Bill orders and points at the teamster that had been detained. “Drive these half-niggers back across the Gowanus Canal an’ leave them there, bound as they are, understand?”
The teamster does understand and runs to assist in loading the human cargo.
“Darby,” Bill stands over him. “Get up.”
Darby does as told.
Bill tucks the .45 in his belt and takes a long sniff, “Good day for ginzo-huntin’.
They got half the men they’d normally have at the Erie Basin due to the weather. But weather is our greatest ally. We can storm the South Terminal wit’out much o’ a fight, but ya’self? Y’ain’t to come wit’ us.”
“But—” Darby comes to his feet.
“Shaddup an’ listen. To win wars ya need more than just soldiers, ya need eyes. An’ ya need them behind enemy lines in reconnaissance missions. Ya lived in the shadows six years, now be an agent for me from there.”
Darby’s eyes swim with tears of happiness.
“First part o’ ya mission: Ya get up into the enemy, understand? Ya sow doubt amongst Dinny’s ranks. Make them believe it’s in their interest to think o’ themselves an’ their fam’ly’s safety now. Make them see death, an’ tell them we are comin’ to the Dock Loaders’ Club.”
“Really?” Darby asks as Abe Harms sidles up behind Bill.
“Sneak up an’ get word to one ‘o them that we come under a white flag, no weapons. We come to talk. They’re too choked up wit’ honor an’ the Brehon codes to kill a war vet’ran, so I’ll be safe.”
Darby looks to Abe, Your whispers go into Bill’s ear and out his mouth now, I see.
“If silence is the gate that guards Irishtown, we’ll slip inside an’ slit their throats in their own home,” Bill says, then holds up two fingers. “Second part: Get ya brother outta prison. I want them soldiers he can give us. Tell him I ain’t happy he won’t give them soldiers to me now on credit, but I know he knows I wouldn’t need him no more. Startin’ tomorrow we’re loadin’ an’ unloadin’ ships,” Bill declares. “Ya will get a stipend for bein’ my agent. But ya don’ get Pickles out? I’ll cleave off ya twig an’ berries, understand me nature boy?”
Abe gives a single snigger at that.
“I understand, Bill.”
“Go to Dead Reilly’s office an’ start workin’ wit him,” Bill orders. “Keep payin’ him the money Dinny’s wife gives ya.”
I have to find Sadie now, Darby’s stomach turns. Where could she be?
“Darby,” Bill takes Darby’s lapel in his fist, which he lets loose almost immediately; a restless look upon his face. In fact Bill appears to have a burst of energy and strength he hadn’t had since he appeared after the storm.
Darby stammers, “Wha. . . What’s the third part o’ the mission?”
Two Shit Hounds slink behind Bill and sit at his feet, ears down, tails wagging. The big brown one is closest to Bill’s knee. That one moves its eyes coldly to Darby and shows him teeth in a low growl.
“I can trust ya?” Bill looks up and down Darby, unsure of the answer himself. “This last part is, eh, sensitive.”
“Yeah Bill, ya can trust me.”
“Ya do good things, ya can move up in rank an’ distinction. An’ if ya keep ya mouth shut about this, I won’ make ya take a brodie off the Brooklyn Bridge,” Bill says with black eyes, then shrugs and tilts his head. “The higher ya rank, the more ya make.”
“I can do this,” Darby assures him.
“C’mere,” Bill takes him by a shoulder away from Abe and peeks behind him, then whispers grimly into Darby’s ear. “Did ya ride Anna?”
“What? Me?”
“Ya spent time wit’ her while I was gone, breakin’ windows an’ whatnot, I hear.”
“No Bill, she’s not like that.”
“She is like that, she admitted it. A man rode her an’ gave her money for it. If it wasn’t ya, who was it?”
“I dunno Bill.”
“I thought ya knew things?”
“Well I. . . I don’ know that.”
“After yaz broke the window at the Meehan brownstone, where’d she go?”
“I eh, I—”
“Well find out who rode Anna so I can kill that man, got it?”
How do I do that?
Bill cranks his head up to the sky, then down to Darby’s eyes, “Now move underground from here on out an’ report ya findin’s directly back to me, understand?”
“Right,” Darby says with a distant smile. “I’ll fight for ya until ya sittin’ in the catbird seat above the Dock Loaders’ Club, King o’ Irishtown.”
“I ain’t no king,” Bill says with a gruff sadness. “Kings claim god’s divinity, but there ain’t no god. I know that from what I seen in France. We’re just bags o’ electricity runnin’ around untethered, is all. There’s somethin’ else out there though. I dunno what it is. Somethin’ cruel an’ indifferent. But it found me. It brought me to this moment, an’ it keeps showin’ me signs o’ good favor. It ain’t no god though, not like we know. We don’ need god, anyhow. We need discipline. I ain’t no king. I’m a captain Darby, nothin’ more than a captain.”
Bill turns round and walks away with Abe toward the water and barks orders at his lieutenants. Suddenly the Trench Rabbits run into formation under the morning moon for the battle to take the rest
of South Red Hook. Illuminated by a rising sun in the blue sky, they begin to march in step.
As the soldiers about-face and move south with Lieutenants Connors and Flynn leading the way, Bill yells back to him, “Right the lie, Darby! Right the lie an’ ya will change the past.”
Sublime Surrender
“Nothing beautiful can grow out of this trash heap, this forsaken industrial port city,” Neesha whispers in Anna’s dream. “But somehow. . . the most beautiful girl in this world, sprouted right out of the cement.”
She lay over his powerful shoulders like a fur stole. In Anna’s dreams her fox-colored hair floats round his neck, across half his face and meets behind his back as she flows about him. Bulbs of daffodils and amber water lilies have drifted into her hair too and cover her breasts from his watchful, amber eyes. And in her dreams Neesha lives again, even as she knows her love is gone forever.
I’m dreaming, but I don’t care. I don’t care.
She blinks and reaches up to him until her hands disappear in his flaxen mane. Neesha tilts his head and speaks these words, “I am the prince, but I will be king. The lion of Irishtown. But you must crown me, Anna. It’s up to you. You have the will of a prophetess, and the future is yours to shape. Make me king and you will be Queen of Irishtown.”
“I. . . I have heard this before,” Anna furrows her brows to try to remember, but cannot. “But what does that mean? How do I make ya king if,” she blinks again and exhales. “If ya only live here now?”
“No, I exist inside another.”
“Another? Who?”
“I can’t tell you, you have to find me for yourself.”
“How do I do that?”
“First you have to surrender to keep me alive, only then can you crown me.”
Outside the snow storm rages. But inside their bodies are warm together. When dawn finally shows through the window in a faint orange light amidst the terror of the black and snow-specked night, he says, “You must let go. To keep me alive, you must trust me. You must surrender in order to live another day. To get rid of me, they will call you evil. They will say your heart is black as coal. They will name you a slattern, but you must keep your heart open for me. I am Neesha, your love. Surrender to me. It’s the only way. But if you listen to them, they will take the thrown away from us. Surrender to me Anna. It is a surrender so sublime that the world will quake at your approach and our reign will begin.”
Am I going mad? Anna wonders.
She bites her lip as she looks up, her wild red hair caressing the nape of his neck and his elegant face like the motion in a great ocean’s current.
“I can’t,” she finally says. “I don’ wanna let go. It’s the only thing that serves me now. I’ll never let down my defenses, that is who I am. I surrender to no one.”
“Don’t let me die, If you close me off you will never find who I am inside of now.”
“I don’ wanna surrender to nobody. Men always want me to do that,” her temper flares and blue flames flicker in her eyes. “Why must ya be the same as all the rest, even in dream? I don’ wanna love, ever again.”
Anna rears back, afraid he will leave her if he sees her angry. She softens her voice and holds his face in her hands, “But ya can stay here, right here in my dreams, for always an’ ever. I’ll visit ya every night. Right here, in the past. An’ in my dreams we can live together forever, warm against the storm. I. . . I don’ want a future out there.”
“That is not how it works,” Neesha answers.
“So tell me then—”
“Continue on, and ya will learn, I promise,” says he. “Surrender, and you will find me. Shut me out and—”
A flash of yellow and orange light bursts through the window as outside the wind whistles and the slanting snow buries the city. Anna turns her eyes to the window and holds up a hand to shield them from the bright light.
“What is that?”
When she looks back at her lion, he has changed. He now wears a black mask with a grotesquely phallic nose; limp and long-sloped. She can still see his mouth, but it too has changed. A mortal scar has appeared over his upper lip and one side of his face is pockmarked with hundreds of small, open wounds as if a shotgun’s pellets had strafed him. Another bullet scar streaks over his ear by the temple where hair can no longer grow.
“Neesha? Neesha! What happened to ya?”
He does not answer.
Just then the window explodes and she is covered in snow. The wind whisks her hair away from his face to reveal the weeping wounds. A viscous-like red string mixed with pus sloughs off his open scar and stretches in a goopy string as he holds her down. Anna turns her head so that it doesn’t land on her face, but she can’t stop it.
It’s about to break, she realizes, but she can’t move from his grip.
“Stop!”
“Anna,” he grows over her, stronger than ever before. The string of bloody pus gathers at the end, then separates and falls through the air toward her face.
“No stop! Stop it!”
“Anna!” His voice changes, and turns into her mother’s voice.
When Anna looks up again her mother stands over her and jerks on her shoulders to wake her up.
“Anna! What’s wrong wit’ ya, Anna”?
Her mother’s face is also disfigured, but hers is from the burning grease her father had thrown at her years ago.
“Was it ya face I saw’r in my dream?”
“What dream, Anna? Ya’ve been talkin’ nonsense all morn.”
She sits up and looks round.
I was sleeping right here on the floor on Johnson Street? How did I get here?
“Anna child, there’s three childers need diaper-changes. Be a doll an’ help ya poor ol’ Ma, would ya? Now that the man has helped us, we don’ need to move. We can stay here, we can.”
I must have been sleeping for days.
“Where have ya been anyhow, Anna. Anna, do ya hear me? Answer me, Anna.”
“Ma, how long was I out?”
“‘Bout an hour ‘bout. They tried to hide from me, them slatterns. But I saw’r them, I did.”
Grace and Kit, damn them. They must have left me here. They left me.
“Where’ve ya been Anna? Ya was gone durin’ the whole o’ the storm, then ya show up here drunk as a shithouse rat wit’ them two slatterns. Anna, are ya listenin’ to me? Are ya gonna be a drunk like ya drunkard father? Is that it? An’ why’s yer jaw all black an’ blue, eh? An’ who bought that dress for ya, Anna? Eh? It’s a beautyful dress, I’ll give ya that, but I think ya’ve pissed in it. Who bought it for ya?”
“I’m not druuuunk,” Anna’s voice howls in a high-pitched yawing sound.
I shouldn’t be here, she wipes sleep from her eyes.
“Stop bein’ such a pill, Anna. Help wit’ the diapers now, come now. Ya can’t sleep the day ‘way. I’ve been to Holy Communion wit’ Father Larkin already. An’ he has things to say concernin’ the state o’ Irishtown these fateful days.”
“Of course he does, wit’ a flock o’ bleatin’ widows an’ mournin’ mothers crowdin’ his pews? He’s a regular shepherd, ain’t he?”
Anna stands and bends her back. Her head pounds to the rhythm of her heartbeat and her thoughts are displaced by the pain. She holds onto the back of a chair and shakes her head, then turns to her mother, “Ma, what did ya say about the man? Do ya mean Dinny Meehan?”
“Oh child, don’ say his name aloud. But yes, he gave us money s’mornin’, so he did. The Dock Loaders’ Club was overwhelmed by our numbers an’ when he was released—”
“He was released?”
Mary stands up straight, “He was, an’ so all the fam’lies appeared—”
“Ma, Bill’s back ya know.”
“Well surely I heard it.”
“Bill’s gonna win Irishtown,” Anna leans on the chair with both hands now as spots appear in front of her face. “Richie pledged himself to Bill an’ when Bill wins, Richie will become a dock
boss, or maybe even an enforcer. He’ll make enough—”
“Child, don’ beg for breeches from a bare-arsed man,” Mary interrupts. “Bill might have a hist’ry wit’ our fam’ly, but it’s not him who has helped us t’rough the years. Why fix what ain’t broke, Anna?”
“Yeah an’ look at us,” Anna spreads her arm along the tiny, first floor room. “We’re just drowin’ in dime, aren’t we Ma?”
“Well enough to keep the wolf from the door, at least,” Mary stamps a foot. “An’ what about ya’self? Where was it ya got the money to pay rent while the man was in jail? How’d ya get the dime for that dress, Anna?”
I have to get away from here. I have to go back to Grace and Kit at the Henhouse. Why did they leave me here?
“I have to go, Ma.”
“In this shnow? Anna, It’s freezin’ outside. Ya’ve no coat on ya’self. Help me wit’ the childers, Anna. Ya’re me eldest daughter an’ ya’re under me roof here. Anna! mind ya place!”
When the door closes behind her, Anna sighs and takes her first step in the snow.
At least I have these Hanan boots. Thanks for that at least Dinny Meehan.
The door opens again behind her, “Anna Lonergan ya get back here now. Don’ leave ya poor ol’ Ma alone wit’ all these childers now! Anna!”
Anna now runs with the wind. Through the snow she sprints as fast as she can. A half block past the Lonergan tenement on Johnson Street where the slanted approach to the Manhattan Bridge reaches above. Then she sees the cold eyes that stare out from tenement windows.
They think I’m psychopathic. Good. Fuck them. But I should’ve listened to my mother and grabbed that coat, damnit.
Two blocks away and she can see that her mother does not follow, so she slows her pace. Men who shovel heavy snow from the sidewalks stop and stare as she walks by. She can feel their eyes grope down her gown at the waist and hips, then move up to her breasts. A shiver runs down her shoulders and just as she crosses her arms to ward off the cold, she slips in an ice patch on the pavement. Before she realizes anything, the back of her head smacks the icy, unforgiving slate of the sidewalk.
The next thing she knows, a man helps her up by the arms and back, “Ya uhright, eh. . . mam?”
Divide the Dawn- Fight Page 12
