Together we thrust at the blockade with our shoulders, then follow them up with punches. The momentum it creates allows for our men to fill the space. More then ram into the back of us. When I break the first line, I stumble into the second and take body blows and pot shots off my skull. But from behind I am pushed through again and fall to the feet of their third line. I duck a boot that was about to kick my face and again the push from behind collapses over me, falling forward. Our numbers overpower their organization. Our passion smashes their tactical cohesion. Holes in their lines allow some of us to break through. Within minutes there are four and five men that squirm out and rush to help Harry. Then finally I am out.
Vincent, Eddie, Freddie and Dance plow into Bill and his lieutenants, then ten, twenty more of us plow through to overwhelm them entirely.
“Are ya ok?” I swing round to Harry, who is on his knees now. He grabs hold of my shoulders to avoid falling. His face is painted red. A deep and weeping wound gushes from over one eye that is the size and color of a purple plum. “Harry? Are you ok?”
Harry struggles to bring words to his lips, but finally says, “Ya’re a good egg, Liam. I’m fine, is Dinny alive? I tried to. . .”
Behind us Dinny lies motionless, his face turned away. Body crumpled. As I move to turn him, I am blindsided. Without clear lines now, chaos reigns round me. Harry crawls over and turns him. He wipes mud from Dinny’s face, then sits back on his knees with a hand over his mouth.
“Is he dead?” I yell out, pushing men off me. “Tell me, tell me!”
When finally I am able to crawl to Dinny I see that his chest is moving. Mud obscures his face, but it is clear that he’d been shot. A whole the size of a nickel oozes blood from his cheek parallel to his nose on the right side. The bullet had gone in to his mouth there and had exited through his lower jaw in a downward trajectory. On the side of his neck is a burn mark where the bullet has grazed the skin over his jugular.
“He’s alive!” I yell. “He’s alive! Alive!”
Still the melee ensues all round me until a whistle blows in the distance. Someone is blowing two, three whistles now.
“Why-ooooo,” Whyo screeches out a warning. “Why-ooooo.”
From the east and west more whistles blow. From the north and south too. Ten whistles. One hundred. More! all at once. Men begin to look round at the noise.
“Tunics!” A man screams.
“Tunics, a thousand tunics.”
Every one of them has a blackjack and a revolver. Warning shots explode in the air as they run over the hilly slopes of mud through the puddles with their tunics buttoned high and their caps pulled low. They sprint round the tenements from three sides and across the cobblestoned street.
“Get down!” They yell. “On the ground. On the ground!”
They crash into both gangs without discerning one side over the other. Their leather blackjacks with lead balls at the end whip through the air onto knees and shoulders. Heads and lower backs. One by one we fall as they outnumber us all. As I am at the center of the fray with nowhere to go, I have time to drop to my knees and thrust my hands in the air, only to be toppled by three of them at once. They hold me down on my stomach, until I am about to drown in one inch of muddy water. My hands are quickly tied behind and I am dragged by the shoulders backward to a line. There Bill Lovett sits, who is still alive but exhausted. Through the jumble of legs rushing by me he smiles as if this were the most fun he’d had since the trenches of France. Petey is still knocked out and motionless on his back when two patrolman trip over him while dragging others.
“It’s a fookin’ shit show,” The Swede growls at me from the ground with a tunic’s boot on his neck. “Nobody gets nothin’. That means we assume the Dock Loaders’ Club.” He then yells out for all to hear. “Irishtown is ours! Still ours! The White Hand!”
“It’s Bill’s,” Non Connors yells as he is dragged by feet through the mud. “Dinny cheated!”
One fellow gently strides through the chaos, his tunic too long for him, but is the only clean one left. “Ya don’ know shit, Swede. Either do ya Connors. These streets are mine now.”
That is when I recognize the voice. That voice! Patrolman Daniel Culkin. Suddenly the pain in my knuckles comes alive. The deep bruises in my chest and arm and shins pulse.
“Revenge!” Culkin yells out angrily as the slew of tunics respond with a resounding, earth-shaking battle yell.
“My father can go to his gentle g’bye in peace now,” Culkin calls out for all to hear. “Detective William Brosnan did not give his life in service to the United States o’ America for naught! Let it be heard across all o’ Brooklyn. All o’ New York that the law will no longer be flaunted.”
A round of cheers meets him.
“We will not be cast aside while criminals murder us. For the safety o’ all New Yorkers, the law must reign!”
Patrolman Culkin then turns to Harry Reynolds and drags him to the center.
“No,” Dinny mumbles under his breath. “Let him be free.”
“This one is more than a simple criminal, he is evil an’ un-American!” Daniel turns round so that all can hear him and holds Harry by the back of his collar. “They call him ‘The Shiv’ for good reason. He cut-up Detective William Brosnan, my father-in-law, stuffed his body parts in a barrel an’ dumped him in the East River! But in this country, justice always prevails!”
A thousand voices crawl up through the rain and low cobalt clouds in joyful victory. Daniel then whips the leather and lead blackjack across Harry’s face, dropping him into the mud.
“Detective Culkin!” A tunic calls from behind us.
Detective? I repeat silently. Has he been promoted?
“This one ain’t movin’,” the tunic explains to Detective Culkin. “He ain’t breathin’ either.”
When I turn round, it is the old-timer, Beat McGarry. One of our own. His wrinkly face and mouse eyes have come to rest, but a large blue bruise over a temple is raised and gives his head the appearance of being lopsided.
“I think he’s dead, sir,” the tunic says, pushing the flaccid body with his boot.
Dead? Beat is dead?
The last words I remember him saying; Ya’re next in line, kid.
“Harry,” I mumble with pain in my voice.
But Harry is dragged off.
“Abby!” I turn my attention up to the muddy hillside, but she is gone. Everyone is gone except for those that fought White Hand versus White Hand, lined up in the mud on our knees.
“And this one,” Detective Culkin stands over me.
The sound of leather tightening comes to my ears again. The sound I hate so much. The blackjack droops from the weight of the lead ball inside the spring loaded shaft.
“Kiss it,” Culkin dangles the twelve inch leather in my face. “Kiss it an’ I won’t hurt ya no more. I promise. Just pucker those lips an’ give it some love. I want ya to look at me when ya kiss it, ya hear me? Look up at me, sad an’ obedient.”
“Daniel,” I whisper. “An invisible hand has written the amount of days in your rule, and they do not add up.”
“That was a dumb thing to say,” Detective Culkin raises his weapon in the air and grits his teeth. Behind his head I see it against the slate-colored sky, until it rakes
downward. . .
The Ghost God
She bites at the bloody cuticles with her front teeth and tears a piece of skin off all the way up to her knuckle.
A whisper comes from the black of the stairwell above, “Keep ya head down. Always keep ya head down, Anna. No one knows we’re comin’. Best for them an’ us that we ain’t seen.”
The only light comes through a soot-covered stairway window. Quick as a ghost he slides up the stairs where his shadow gently passes like a flicker, rifling up through the cross’s reflection upon the wall from the window muntins, disfigured and slanted.
He crouches and turns to her with the eyes of a lost soldier, “I’ll go up first, but ya gott
a stay low. Crawl on ya belly. Ya shouldn’t o’ worn a dress.”
I’m not wearing a dress, it’s a skirt. And what else am I supposed to wear? If I wear anything else they’d shave my head and burn me alive or something.
Darby Leighton reaches up through the silence of the top floor and lowers the wooden extension ladder. As it unfolds in three sections, a flight of pigeons flap over Anna’s shoulders and through her hair. She does not scream though and turns her eyes back to Darby with her hand flat against her mouth.
The wood-framed, pre-Civil War building had been condemned and empty for two years and all of the door handles, jake pipes and tin ceiling tiles had been stripped and sold by junk dealers, the bannisters and parts of the floorboards used for firewood. But for Darby it is yet another hidden lair to obscure himself.
I’m the one known for knowing things, Darby had once told Anna. And it was for places like this that Darby had gathered knowledge by observing others like a deviant peeping on the disrobed.
When he opens the roof hatch, she shields her eyes from the sunlight that spills all round her. She then steps forward and puts a boot on the first rung. But when she puts weight on it she can feel that the wood is rotted.
“Hold tight wit’ ya hands when ya step up,” Darby calls down from the roof hatch. “Distribute ya weight evenly. Don’ put all ya weight on the rungs, they’ll bust.”
But when she grabs the ladder a splinter slips into the side of her index finger. Anna grits her teeth to keep silent, pulls the splinter out of her finger with her front teeth and holds the ladder tight with both hands. At the top rung she slips, but Darby catches her by the wrist and hoists her up with a grunt.
He is stronger than I thought. Ligeia must be fattening him up. His eyes are not as dark as they used to be and his lips are not so white and chapped, though he still has that look of bewilderment to him.
On the roof she crawls through the tar and black puddles and sun-bleached rocks to the crumbled cornice along the edge.
The two of them slowly peer through decayed crenelations like scouts along a parapet. Anna’s stomach turns when she sees the cobblestoned Bridge Street below. As the wind sings a mean song in the rooftops and whistles through her hair, she suddenly feels as though she is falling.
“Look, there they are,” Darby whispers.
A big man lumbers across the street behind a tunic in police blue and two others. Behind them is a gang of some twelve more tunics who lead a retinue of some fifty or sixty faceless laborers.
The two boys who serve as scouts outside the Dock Loaders’ Club scream out. Their childish voices reach Anna, “Why-ooooo!” Afterward they run inside when they see the four men approach, while the rest form up across the street with clubs and spades directly below.
“Who are they?” Anna whispers to Darby.
“Look,” he points and whispers. “Some o’ them are wearin’ Brooklyn Grain Terminal jumpsuits. They were recruited!”
“By who?”
As she turns back to the scene below, her gaze fixes on one of the four men ahead of the retinue who holds some sort of sickle at the end of his arm. As if he felt her eyes on him, or knew she would be there, he turns his head up from the cobbled street and finds Anna’s eyes above. Darby and Anna both hide behind the cornice when they realize they’ve been spotted.
Anna begins to shake uncontrollably. She has her back against the parapet wall and her boots out ahead of her on the rooftop gravel. Darby crawls over, but dares not touch her.
“Ya uhright? Anna? Anna, what are we gonna do now? Everythin’s lost.”
She had always welcomed Neesha’s touch. But no one else’s. During her childhood and into her teens she had warned anyone and everyone never to touch her. And no one dared. Not her mother, not her younger siblings unless she touched first, not even Matty Martin, who longed to feel her skin. “Watch out,” her father once told an unwitting customer at the Lonergan Bicycle Shop. “The bitch bites.”
Only Neesha. His hands were large and warm, his eyes the color of morning light. Neesha could touch her. Even with words.
The wind blows through her red hair and with it comes a memory. His words are memories now, and they will live there, and there only, for the rest of Anna’s life. Now his voice is the wind that whistles softly through the rooftops.
“We’re like two lost spirits takin’ wing against the tempest,” Neesha had said to her before he’d died. “My body is strong, sure it is. But ya spirit is so much more powerful than mine. It is a great gift, what ya have Anna. A gift from the gods. An’ if ya lead the way, I will reinforce ya. Together we can cross over to the next world,” he dropped to both knees and held out his palm. Slowly, he looked up into her eyes. “Anna, will ya guide us? I vow to ya, forever and always, I vow ya my soul, however weak it may be, and I vow my body to ya. Take this ring, an’ we will fly together.”
You live in memory now, Anna brushes at her eyes in thought. Not even in my dreams. But why? Why won’t you come to me in dream any longer?
Only Neesha could touch her. When he was alive, the feeling truly was sublime. And when his flaxen mane brushed against her cheek as he took her breast in his mouth, she let go. Surrendered. The deep tingling sensations from his mouth on her breasts had given cause to allow herself to be released from the violent stance she had always maintained. Her muscles had slacked. Her mouth opened to a natural position. When Neesha had slowly mounted her, she allowed him to take down the moistened underclothes that clung to her inner thighs. She was ready, and when she felt his warm breath on her eye and his stubbly cheek, she let go.
What was it? That feeling? Anna thinks. Was it trust? Trust is. . . treacherous.
In her dreams, every time she allowed the beauty of trust to overrun her, she found another man was on top of her. A man with a horribly disfigured face wearing a black mask over his eyes with an obscene nose. Down the middle of his face was a long, blackened wound. On his neck were bloody smallpox sores and over an ear a long bullet scar. The dream had turned to a nightmare when he grunted into her; his wounds weeping into her mouth and creeping down her throat, wending through the whole of her body like an infection. Like death.
She looks down at the wreath-of-vine ring on her hand.
Neesha, come back to me. Something tells me to seek revenge against your murderer. That it would shake you out of the heavens so you can come back to me? Is this true?
“Anna, what’s wrong?” Darby comes closer.
“I. . . I will never trust again,” she points down to the street. “The man down there? That’s the face I saw’r in my dreams.”
“Who, Garry fookin’ Barry? Ya saw’r him in dreams?” Darby signifies his interest with a tilt of his head. “What kinda dreams’ve ya had? Anna?”
Darby’s voice trails away until it becomes a mere echo to her.
On the roof ahead of them an old man appears. He sits slowly rocking in a wooden chair. His hair is white as snow and stands up like a crown swaying in the breeze. His wrinkles are deep wavy lines that make his face appear sorrowful.
“Who are ya?” Anna asks. “Ya’re not Neesha.”
“I’m Darby,” Darby answers.
“Shaddup, I’m not talkin’ to ya. I’m talkin’ to him.”
“Him who?”
Anna, the old man’s wavering voice whispers as the wind gently stirs, mingling with the creak of the wooden rocker. Shake dreams from yer mane. Let it out. Glory in instinct, fer t’is yer instinct that has the right of it. But one thing ya have wrong; Bill does not have Neesha’s soul.
Anna sits open-mouthed as she had when old Mrs. O’Flaherty told her she could shape the future like a prophetess. She tries to place the old man’s voice, but simply can’t connect it.
I’ve heard that voice before.
She turns to look at him,“What do ya mean?”
I can only open the door, ye must enter an’ find out fer yerself.
“Are ya the Ghost God that Mrs. O’Flaherty told
me about?”
I . . . I am trapped here, he stammers. Even as he clears his throat, his voice strains but is so disparately memorable. I did what honor bound me to do, but in so doin’, in the eyes o’ men an’ women, I became dishonorable. Ye see, if the past is as unknown as the future, it is alive, and therefore volatile. But ye can free me. Ye can free us all to become the most powerful person in all o’ Irishtown.
“Me? I’m only a woman. Young an’ damaged.”
An’ ye would not be the first. If ye succeed, ye will have a golden table that overflows with bread an’ meat fer yer fam’ly. An’ if t’were that the whole o’ yer siblin’s were to eat from the table fer a twelvemonth, the bread an’ meat would still be in the same form, so it would. Forever the Lonergans would eat, Anna. Forever and more.
“Ya’re dead, aren’t ya?”
We all die.
“Have ya seen—” Anna’s voice catches. She gasps twice to hold back her grief, then swallows.
Have I seen Neesha, ye ask?
She nods.
Neesha. . . is not dead.
“He’s alive?”
He cannot be dead. Yer love sustains him, Anna. But not inside Bill.
“My love? I’m evil, my heart is black as coal. Everyone says it.”
He lives, my child. He lives because o’ yerself. Ye were asked to surrender. To come out o’ yer hidin’ an’ surrender to yer love. Ye could not’ve known exactly what it meant, yet still ye did it, ye went back to yer fam’ly an’ saved him because o’ it. He lives, Anna, owin’ to the beauty o’ hidden love inside yer heart, t’is true, t’is true.
“Then where is Neesha’s soul now?”
The old man’s crown shifts in the wind as he sits up in the rocker. A flicker of happiness flashes in his sad eyes as he speaks, A great battle is underway in the Otherworld. The archons are turnin’ against the demiurge, one by one. Two are yet to be made, but three have been named. Ye have seen them in dreams! They’re tryin’ to turn ye, Anna. Turn ye away from love forever. Ye cannot let them win. Ye must not lose yer love, we desperately need it. Ye must continue to surrender to it.
Divide the Dawn- Fight Page 63
