World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  “It’s in Donegal someplace, isn’t it? It’s up north. It’s like a Rockaway Beach, I think. What’s Bundoran got to do with it? Is that where the rat-fuck Monsignor is going?”

  “No, I don’t know where he’s going. I was just wondering. I heard somebody mention the place and I was wondering.”

  “Well, I got no money,” Johno said. “If you want to go, then go. You sit next to him and hold his hand for the two of us. Make sure it’s his hand too.”

  “I don’t feel like going alone,” Dermot said.

  In the kitchen that night, Dermot mentioned the tour. His wife frowned. His mother-in-law said, “By airaplane? Oh, Jesus, I’m afraid of them. I’ll go by boat before I die. I want to go on a cruise without being stuck in a wheelchair with the plaid blanket tucked around me. But oh, Jesus, not by airaplane.”

  Why bother even talking, Dermot said to himself.

  One night two weeks later, a sergeant from the 106th Precinct in Ozone Park, Nativity Parish, called Dermot at home. He said he had gotten Dermot’s number through the precinct. He said, “We have been receiving a number of calls from a woman who identifies herself as your mother. The woman in question lives on Ninety-seventh Street. That is your mother? In that case perhaps you should know that we have been receiving these calls. She calls in regards to an animal, a cat or a dog, scratching the floor in the apartment upstairs from her. We send an officer up of course. He hears no noises. Then she will call again later for the same thing. Apparently, she is just looking for somebody to talk to, and I thought I’d let you know about this. The calls are coming quite frequently and the men keep reporting back on them to me.” The sergeant spoke in these flat mechanical words, and Dermot thanked the sergeant and said he would do something about it.

  He called his mother. When she came on the phone, after five rings, the voice was high, whisky-defiant. “Yea-yes,” the voice snapped. Dermot hung up without speaking.

  A couple of days later, a patrolman at the precinct called him. The patrolman worked the switchboard. He said the sergeant had instructed him to remind Dermot about calling Mrs. Davey. He said the sergeant sounded as if he wanted the job done. “Gettin’ a lot of calls here,” the patrolman said. “She ought to call the Sanitation.”

  “What do you mean?” Dermot asked.

  “Give the wops somethin’ to do.”

  Dermot called his mother. She was out someplace. His sister spoke to him in that high, nervous voice of hers. She said she would have the mother call Dermot back.

  Two days later, when Dermot was in the middle of dinner, the call came.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  There was no sound on the phone, only breathing. He knew who it was.

  “Yeah,” he said, softer this time.

  “You never see me,” she said. He could hear her crying through the whisky.

  “Well, what can you do?”

  “I’m all alone.”

  He muttered something and she kept sobbing and he said he would see her within a couple of days. He hung up. He was disturbed and he showed it. “I never even tell you,” Dermot’s wife said. “She calls here all the time.”

  He sat alone in the kitchen with cigarettes and coffee. Dermot Davey has not had as much as a swallow of beer inside his house in his life. He drinks only in saloons. His mother drinks only in the house. You drink, at home, you’re an alcoholic, Dermot always told himself.

  Three days later, his mother called the house again. Dermot came on the phone with a bright voice.

  “Punk,” she said.

  “Oh come on,” Dermot said.

  “You punk.”

  He didn’t talk.

  “Bum.”

  He held the phone and looked at the ceiling.

  “You’re a punk and you come from a punk.”

  Dermot hung up and took the phone off the hook. His mother was fifty-four. He wondered what she would be like at sixty-four.

  In the basement that night, before dinner, one of the girls began howling. Dermot walked to the basement staircase and looked down. Kim, the six-year-old was standing on the bottom step.

  “Kelly and Jane Leary locked me out,” she said, sobbing without tears.

  The door to a storeroom in the basement opened. The oldest daughter, Kelly, eight, looked out. She was grinning.

  “We did not, she could come in.”

  Kim turned and ran to the door. Kelly slammed it in her face. Kim began screaming. Dermot didn’t say a word. He went down the front hall and stood outside with a cigarette. It was hot and tasteless. His wife opened the front door and told him dinner was ready. Dermot did not answer her and he did not come into the house for an hour. Later, in the middle of the night in the living room, he decided he had to do something. Sitting alone, with his religious training, he believed it all be to the work of the Devil. Torment him, have others misunderstand, frustrate him, lure him, trap him. Catch another strong body and soul and shove it through the Gates of Hell. He began to think of an old saying. The Devil you know is better than the Devil you don’t know. The trouble is, Dermot thought, he did not even know the Devils in his own life. Somehow, he had to put his hand on the evil in his own life.

  He got dressed and went out. McLaughlin’s, on the avenue, was still open. It was two-fifty-five a.m. Dermot began drinking straight shots with beer chasers while the bartender sat and watched television. A German shepherd was asleep in the middle of the room. The bartender had a drink with Dermot at four a.m. Then he shut the lights off. He and Dermot had another drink in the darkness. Dermot only grunted to the bartender. By the time he got home to bed, it was after four-thirty.

  He dreamed of a hockey game at Madison Square Garden between the Detroit Red Wings and the Rangers. Before the game, when the teams warmed up, there was trouble. Each team skated in a circle and, at the part of the ice where the circles passed each other, in the middle of the arena, the players were sticking out elbows and jabbing each other with their sticks. When the game began, Gordie Howe of the Red Wings hit a slap shot and it missed and he became angry and hit Rod Selling of the Rangers in the face with his stick. Selling went down. Howe tried to jump on Selling’s face with his skates. When the referee came up to stop the fight, somebody, punched him and knocked him down. Now both teams were fighting and fist fights were starting all over the arena. Men were punching each other and tumbling into the aisles. In the upper tier, a man stood up with a small boy held over his head. He threw the boy off the upper tier. Policemen ran up, firing guns at the man. Outside on Thirty-fourth Street, there was a traffic jam. A cabbie jumped out with a tool in his hand. He reached into the car in front of him and hit a man on the head. The traffic patrolman ran up to the cabbie. The cabbie hit the patrolman. The patrolman went down. He pulled his gun and fired from the ground and the cabbie went down. Screaming. A loud scream. Now all of Thirty-fourth Street was filled with people kicking at each other. The fighting spread off Thirty-fourth Street. Black men were running down Seventh Avenue, in front of the Americana, in orange light from torches. Inside Madison Square Garden, Dermot gripped his seat. He was in the upper tier. The upper tier began to go out like a swing. Now it pulled back, far back, and everybody in it began to spill out of the seats and Dermot looked down, far down at the ice, it was so far down it was a tiny oval, and he saw little policemen on the ice skidding and falling as they shot at people who were lying on the ice. Now there was a tangle of people fighting. In Washington, two men with attaché cases walked past each other in a building hallway. They dropped their attaché cases, black cases on white marble floors, and they lunged for each other and one of them got his leg out and tripped the other, and the minute the guy was down, the man on top of him, a gray-haired man with thick eyebrows, began slamming the head against the white marble floor until the head split open and blood ran on the white marble. First just a finger of blood. Then a circle of blood becoming a pool. The gray-haired man pulled the head high up, his knuckles tense as he gripped the hair, and th
en he brought the head down, brought it down with his shoulder blades, jerking to give leverage, and the head hit the marble in a spray of blood. Little gray tufts, pieces of brain spit out from the head and into the blood. A uniformed guard came running down the hall, his feet echoing on the marble. The gray-haired man turned to face the guard and the guard shot him between the thick eyebrows. Down the hallways, in brown wooden chambers, men were fighting in dim light while desks fell over. Now, in the dream, the men fighting had on uniforms and they were thin Americans with long noses, hands out and fingers spread as they went for each other’s faces. Then the men fighting had shaved heads and the backs of their necks were creased with fat. They were grunting in Russian. A Russian got free and began punching buttons and an American got free and began turning keys in boards covered with blinking lights, and missiles, white with frost, roared through the black night in the sky. Dermot was on a catwalk hanging from the ceiling at Madison Square Garden and there were all little bodies, like dead rats, far below him and the black metal catwalk creaked and one end of it started to break. Dermot was on his belly on the catwalk. He was taking out his pistol to shoot himself before he fell. This woke him up.

  He sat on the edge of the bed with the nerves in the inside of his elbows throbbing. His head was fuzzy from the whisky. The inside of his mouth was sour from too many cigarettes.

  Before he went to Rockaway the next time, Dermot went to the bank, the Ridgewood Savings Bank, on Myrtle Avenue. He kept some of his money, forty-five hundred dollars, in the Ridgewood. Most of his money, sixteen thousand dollars, was in the mother-in-law’s account in the Richmond Hill Savings Bank.

  The Ridgewood Savings Bank has as its centerpiece an enormous mural rising two stories to a cathedral ceiling. The mural is of an angel with a halo of sunrays standing against a misty sky and with one hand clutching part of an American flag. The angel’s other hand rests on a white headstone with the inscription:

  Saving Is

  The Secret

  Of Wealth

  The lines are always long at the bank. On the days when interest is recorded, the lines go out into the street. The Germans in Ridgewood do not trust the bank. They want the interest posted in their bankbooks. A few times a year, the interest-posting day coincides with the day rents are collected. A passerby would suspect the bank to be under siege.

  It took Dermot a full half hour on the line before he could withdraw three hundred dollars. He drove to the travel service in Jackson Heights and bought two tickets. While he was there, he looked up Bundoran on the map. The travel agent told him the train from Dublin to Belfast, and then a car rental, was the fastest way. He drove over to Johno’s house.

  He handed Johno the ticket. “Forget about the money,” he said. “We’ll even it up with a score someplace. Even if we get off and sit in the waiting room in Shannon for fourteen days, it’s worth it. We hold hands with the Monsignor all the way to Ireland. He’s our insurance policy. We’ve got the perfect excuse to hang around him.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Johno said. He fingered the ticket. “Yeah, but I need more than this.”

  Dermot did not answer. He was not going for any more money.

  “Christ, I need a few bucks. Can’t be a hump walkin’ around fuckin’ empty.”

  Dermot said nothing.

  “Fuck it,” Johno said. He got his coat and went out with Dermot. They rode over to the Falls Pub on Greenpoint Avenue in Sunnyside. Once, when Johno had been in the Sunnyside precinct, he had done the owner, Jimmy McManus, a favor. Over the years, McManus was always good for a twenty, sometimes as a gift. Now Johno wanted to borrow one hundred and fifty dollars. That figure made Jimmy McManus’s blue eyes glaze over. He was not listening. Then his eyes came back into focus.

  “Could ye not do somethin’ in return?”

  “Holy Christ, Jimmy, are you kiddin’. What is it?”

  “Bring a piece of machinery to my brother-in-law,” Jimmy said.

  “Hey, we’ll bring him a whole fuckin’ arsenal.”

  McManus went into a drawer behind the bar and took out a sheet of writing paper with a big Rheingold letterhead. He carefully printed the name and address of his brother-in-law. The lettering said: JOE O’NEIL, O’HAGAN’S PUB, LESSON STREET, BELFAST.

  “It’s just a wee little way down the street from the Falls Road, you know,” Jimmy McManus said. “Everybody in Belfast knows of the Falls Road.”

  On the day Dermot Davey left for Ireland, he went to Criminal Court in Manhattan to pick up a pistol from Jack Sherdian, who worked out of the 32nd Squad and was in the Police Department Gaelic society.

  He found Jack in the R.O.R. room behind the arraignment part. He had his prisoner being interviewed by one of the hippie law students who work in the R.O.R. program. R.O.R. stands for “release on recognizance.” If the people working for R.O.R. can write down enough good things, to show roots in the community, on the sheet going to the judge, the prisoner can be released without having to put up cash bail. The police hate the program automatically.

  Jack Sheridan had arrested this black prostitute, and he was standing behind her while the whore sat at the table and talked to the R.O.R. girl. The R.O.R. girl was in a yellow T-shirt. On the front of it was this big drawing of the alligator from the Pogo comic strip. She was going out of her way to be nice to the black prostitute. The whore said to the girl in the Pogo shirt, “Put down that this man says he wouldn’t ’rest me if he could stay with me. And I let him stay with me and he still ’rest me.”

  Jack Sheridan said, “Hey, I’ll kiss your ass.”

  “Then you put down that beside takin’ my body, the man take my money. And he still ’rest me.”

  “Hey, I’ll kiss your ass, I’ll kiss your ass,” Jack Sheridan said.

  The black whore turned around and looked right at Jack. She said it loud so everybody in the room would pay attention. “You had your chance to do that last night when you had your head between my legs.”

  Jack Sheridan stood there with everybody looking at him. Sheridan started to say something back to the whore but he didn’t. Then he and Dermot went into the toilet. Sheridan still had the whore’s words sticking into him. He was more concerned with that than he was with handing the gun to Dermot. It was a police .32 in a holster. Dermot put it onto his belt.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What?” Sheridan said.

  “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing this for.”

  “Then don’t do it, give me the thing back. I mean, Christ.”

  “You know, I think I will,” Dermot said. His hands went to his belt. “No. Thanks, Jack, I promised. So I’ll do it.”

  “Well, Christ, don’t go hangin’ around now,” Sheridan said.

  “I’m leaving tonight,” Dermot said.

  “All right. Just don’t be hangin’ around.”

  When Sheridan was finished with court, he and Dermot went over to Carmine’s. Carmine’s is always the same. At two-thirty in the afternoon, when there were only police brothers at the bar, somebody went over to the juke box and punched the numbers N-5 and P-5. The same record sides have been on N-5 and P-5 on the juke box in Carmine’s since anybody can remember. Carmine’s is the bar on Bayard Street, behind the Criminal Court building in Manhattan, where the cops and court attendants go. With the courts back in session for the afternoon, the only ones at the bar were cops who had finished up in court before lunch. Carmine’s smells as if it has river water in the basement. A couple of drinks and you don’t notice the smell any more. The place is kept very dark in the daytime. A lot of the guys have been up all night and the last thing they want is bright light stinging their eyes while they drink. The first of the two records to come on the juke box was N-5. The rule in Carmine’s is that this record must always be played first. The N-5 record was Kate Smith singing “God Bless America.”

  Sometimes it takes a little while for the music to get through to all the guys drinking and bullshitting. This
time Kate Smith did only the first two words of the song, “God … bless …” and Jack Sheridan picked it up as loud as he could, and Jack Sheridan can be very loud. “A-mer-i-cuh …”

  Everybody started singing. There wasn’t a place open at the bar, so there was a solid line of brothers, holding their drinks and singing this hymn. “Brothers,” sometimes it sounds a little strange to use that word because the Black Panthers and the Communists say it so much. But when you work in a job where you can get hurt, killed sometimes, it is natural that guys should be very close and call each other brothers. A few drinks had taken the empty feeling out of Dermot’s shoulder blades and instead of being depressed like he’d been for the last few weeks, he felt good and proud. As the song went along, all the brothers at the bar pulled themselves together while they sang. Stomachs were sucked in. The chins came up as high and as far out as they could go. This made the flesh underneath the chins pull a little tighter and not look so bad. Most cops are fat and look at least five years older than they are. When Dermot sucked in his stomach, his shoulders came up and one of them brushed against the shoulder of Jack Sheridan. He never moved and Dermot never moved and they stood there with their shoulders touching and they sang “God Bless America.” At the end, when you get the idea that Kate Smith is putting her whole life into the notes, Jack Sheridan’s fingertips held Dermot by the elbow and they sang the last lines together from the bottom of their stomachs.

  There was a cheer when the music stopped. The brothers were putting their glasses down all along the bar and the ones sitting on barstools were getting up. Carmine, the owner, came through the swinging doors from the kitchen and stood in his apron. It takes a couple of seconds for the inside of the juke box to work its way around between records, but everybody was getting ready for P-5 to come on. Jack Sheridan looked around the place and saw three lawyers sitting over coffee in one of the booths along the wall opposite the bar.

  “Everybody up!” Jack Sheridan yelled at them.