World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  Larry said he had to take a walk around the area, and the mother’s uncle and Johno said they would rather sit down someplace. Dermot said he’d go with Larry, who said he knew where to pick them up later.

  They came out onto the Crumlin Road at a point two blocks below the church. The entrances to the streets were all barricaded and on the opposite side of the road the streets were covered with British flags and red and blue pennants. At each corner of the streets with the flags, there were five or six guys standing around, one of them always with his hands in topcoat pockets, the same as there were groups at every corner of Catholic blocks.

  “See,” Larry was saying, “this was Pope’s Row. Look at it all burned out.” Stores, two and three in a row, were blackened and windowless. “The stores that you see open are owned by Prods,” he said. At Number 378 there was J. Moorcroft Carpets, the store untouched. “Prod,” Larry said. Then there was The Eagle, Fishmonger and Hot Pies, also untouched. “Prod,” Larry said. David Savage, Hairdresser, was gone and only his sign and a chopped-up floor were left. “Catholic,” Larry said. Next door to it, Jacqueline Fashions also was gone. “Catholic,” Larry said. At 386, John McGinty, Hairdresser, was untouched. “Protestant,” Larry said. The Logue saloon was on the corner. When you looked down the Crumlin Road, for as far as you could see, there were curtains blowing in the second-story windows over Protestant shops, and over the Catholic shops there was black broken glass.

  They were past the church and coming up to the corner when a voice came calling up from one of the Protestant street corners behind them.

  “How’s old red stockin’s today?”

  On the Catholic corner, a heavy-set guy jumped out into the gutter.

  The voice called out again. “Oh, it’s about that time in Rome now. Old red stockin’s, he’s really givin’ it to her now!”

  “Dirty bastards, talkin about our Pope like that,” Larry said.

  “How’s the Immaculate Conception doin’ today?” another voice yelled.

  The heavy-set guy stood in the street, cupped his hands, and yelled down toward the Protestant corners. “How’s about your man Williamson? He still got that nice little boy helper?”

  Larry laughed. “Williamson is the head of the Protestant defense organ-i-zation. He has this wee boy helper livin’ with him.”

  “How’s your man’s little boy?” the heavy-set guy yelled again. He drew the outline of hips with his hands.

  The Protestant corners had become crowded. As the heavy-set guy yelled, they shifted in agitation. When he drew the rear end in the air, the crowd on each corner jerked as if they were on a rope somebody had yanked.

  From down the block a voice shouted, “Old red stockin’s, he’s really givin’ it to her now. He’s all the way up her now!”

  The heavy-set guy’s face became beet-red. He ran into the middle of the street and threw a rock down the hill at the Protestants. Everybody began picking up rocks. Larry was crouched, groping for a rock and cursing.

  “Did you hear what he just said about the Pope? Did you hear what he said about the Pope? That’s our fuckin’ Pope he’s talkin’ about.”

  The first Protestant rock hit the pavement a couple of feet from Dermot, who ducked and headed for the corner. Everybody around him was throwing rocks at the Protestants and they were throwing them back. The shouting became loud and unintelligible. The faces were becoming a deeper red. Spit flew out of their mouths while they screamed and threw rocks at the crowd down the hill. Both groups were edging into the road, walking toward each other. The Protestant crowd was much larger, too large for the Catholics to handle. The heavy-set guy was glancing around. A look of fear came on his face and he ran onto the side street leading to Lansdowne Road. He had his arms held out. Halfway down the short street he threw himself against three guys and began pushing them back. One of the three was carrying a rifle. The other two were putting pistols back inside their jackets.

  “Oh, it’s a good thing we got leadership here,” Larry said.

  “They would have showed those things?” Dermot said.

  “Showed them? Christ, we’d of been in a shootin’ match in two minutes.”

  The heavy-set guy shoved and argued until the three with the guns went back down the block. On the Crumlin, the Protestants were coming up, the crowd moving up a step or so at a time, and then they started to spill out into the street. The Catholics began darting forward to throw rocks. Traffic was stopped. The groups moved at each other gradually for fifteen minutes. They were a block and a half from each other. When this whining sound came from the top of the Crumlin. And down the hill the top of an armored car showed in the Protestant crowd. It came through the crowd slowly, forcing them to get off the road. Another armored car skirted the stalled traffic and ran down the road as the Catholics jumped out of the way. The armored cars met in the space between the two crowds. Jeeps were pulling up around them. Soldiers stepped out and formed a line across the street between the two gangs. The fight was over before it really started.

  Larry and Dermot walked past the house on Lansdowne Road and down the hill to an empty lot. In one corner there was a large green corrugated metal shed. It was the same kind of shack construction companies around New York put up for the offices on the site of a big job. The entranceway was lined, sandbag style, with wooden beer cases. Larry turned sideways and slipped down a narrow passageway between the beer cases. Dermot could barely squeeze through. They came into a large room that was crowded with men sitting on chairs at small tables, drinking from bottles. There were no windows. There was so much smoke you couldn’t see anybody sitting on the other side of the room. Johno and the mother’s uncle were bunched in a corner with a man who had steel-colored hair and deep-set eyes and a false hand inside a brown leather glove. More than a dozen empty bottles were on the small table in front of them. Johno had a full bottle in. each hand. The mother’s uncle dropped down in his chair, his hand went under the table, and he pulled himself up with a bottle of whisky in the hand. Dermot sat down. Larry went over to a small wooden bar against the wall to get some beer. He brought back an armful of bottles. The guy with the false hand knocked all the empty bottles onto the floor. “Give ye some room,” he said.

  “This is a real good cellar club,” Johno said.

  The noise of the talking in the room was very loud, but suddenly the room became quiet and Johno was standing on a chair which was shaking and seemed ready to fall apart. Everybody in the room was looking at him.

  “I came over here from New York with a terrific present for you people,” Johno said. He was swaying on the chair.

  “Look at this!” He whipped out his magazine and held it up. “Italian Playboy!”

  They could not understand what they were looking at. Then, slowly, they began to realize what they had on their hands with Johno. A total lunatic.

  “Naked women and dirty jokes on every page,” Johno said. “Pubic hairs! We can all read it together and jerk off.”

  The noise started up in the room again as everybody shifted around in their seats, talking while they returned to their bottles.

  “A circle jerk!” Johno screamed.

  People were talking loudly. Johno shouted at them. “Wait one minute. I brought something else with me. Look!”

  When he opened Dermot’s coat and pulled the gun out of Dermot’s belt, they all shouted.

  “What would you rather have?” Johno said. “A rotten old gun or the Italian Playboy with the naked women?”

  “Even if the girls were real!” somebody yelled.

  They were all clapping. Dermot reached over and pulled the gun out of Johno’s hand. They all whistled at Dermot. He put the pistol into his pocket.

  “Give me it,” Johno said.

  “I’ll take care of it myself,” Dermot said.

  He left Johno swallowing beer and he walked up the street to the house and went upstairs into the tiny bedroom and went to sleep. The pistol was under the mattress.

&nb
sp; He slept well into the next afternoon. Downstairs, his mother’s uncle and his cousin were looking in at the living room. Johno was on his back on the floor snoring off a drunk.

  Dermot shrugged. He mentioned the errand to Leeson Street. His mother’s uncle looked at the Rheingold stationery. “O’Neill?” he said. “Wee fella called O’Neill? Do go right to the Falls and look for him. Leeson Street That’s another district, you know. We’ve our own command here. But we’ll go to Leeson Street right off.”

  7

  DERMOT SHOULD NOT HAVE had the gun with him at all. Walking on the Falls Road, in Belfast, with a gun in his belt under his jacket, all he could do was be nervous inside and keep going straight. Indecisive walking is evidence in Belfast. The night before, Paddy, a wine victim, had come onto Raglan Street holding a bouquet of flowers—nobody knew where Paddy got flowers in Belfast— and he stood in these clouds in the middle of the street, the flowers held out, his knees melting in the gas. A Saracen came down the street very fast. Paddy wanted to hand the bouquet of flowers to the tank. The Saracen veered a little to make sure Paddy was centered. Paddy was still holding the flowers out when his head hit the Saracen and came off.

  All along the Falls Road the sidewalks were crowded with people out doing their Saturday shopping. Everybody was talking about Paddy. A jeep swung out of the thick traffic and came to the curb. Three soldiers in Scottish plaid caps, black tail ribbons whipping in the wind, sat with their weapons pointing up. An Army truck came in behind the jeep. The truck was filled with soldiers sitting across from each other. The two men at the end sat facing out, their rifles pointing over the tailgate at the traffic.

  Dermot was walking on the outside. His mother’s uncle was in the middle. The old man’s right leg did not bend and he dragged it as they went along. Larry was on the other side. He said the next corner, Leeson Street, was the one they wanted. The cold spring wind blew paper into the coils of barbed wire at the corner. Three soldiers turned their faces from dust swirling in the wind, turned their faces so they were looking directly at the two younger men walking with the old cripple. The three soldiers had on Scottish caps too. The rifles were pointed up, the butts jammed into the space on the right hip between the bottom of the flak jacket and the cartridge belt.

  If the soldiers stopped the three of them, the first pat would have found the police .32 in Dermot’s belt. He had an American passport and a shield to show he was a member of the New York City Police Department. He also knew how the soldiers would respond to both credentials. Push the passport into his mouth and shove the badge up his ass.

  The mother’s uncle kept talking, which was good because it kept the three of them acting natural. The soldiers, short, had cold ridges for faces. “From Glasgow, they are,” the mother’s uncle said. “Glasgow’s only place in the British Isles got organized blackguards. Bloody fuckers probably couldn’t last with an organized gang in Glasgow, they joined up and come over here bullyin’ us.”

  As they came up to the three soldiers standing at the entrance to Leeson Street, his mother’s uncle was muttering in this Northern Irish accent, “Give ’em the warks with a Wabley.”

  At the barricade, he was saying, “We had barbed wire all around the Admiral Bar, place I was born, and it gets to be like the gaslight on the street. You don’t notice it. And it’s only been up since the last time there, the riot in twenty-one. Same trouble, always the same trouble.”

  He kept talking and walking and they went past the soldiers, walked under their rifles and stepped through a space in the barbed wire and started down Leeson Street.

  “I have to be crazy,” Dermot said.

  “As an actual fact, I should have been thinking better,” the mother’s uncle was saying. “I let my mind wander. I keep forgettin’ that I let you go stridin’ around here with the machinery on your person and you don’t even come from here.”

  “I shouldn’t even have the goddamned gun with me in New York,” Dermot said.

  They were down in the middle of Leeson Street before he stopped concentrating on the soldiers behind them and saw what the street was like. Leeson Street is an alley, not a large alley either. The alley runs between red-brick row houses, the smallest houses you’ve ever seen. The houses are two stories, but they are not even as high as a garage behind a house in Queens. He began to measure the row houses while he walked. Each house was exactly four of his steps wide. When his mother’s uncle started to cross the street and head for a boarded-up saloon on the corner, Dermot dropped behind. He put his back against the wall of one house and began pacing. Two steps took him to the curb. The street was six steps wide. The sidewalk on the other side of the street was two steps. The distance from a doorway on one side to a doorway on the other side was ten yards. There was not a tree, bush, or patch of dirt on the block. Not a single flowerpot. Just gray cement running between tiny red-brick houses. The houses had sharply slanted gray slate roofs. From sidewalk to rooftop couldn’t be more than thirteen or fourteen feet. Every four yards on the roofs there was a stumpy chimney with a television antenna lashed onto it. The street was a toy street with toy houses, only it went on and on, with little alleys running across it to form corners. The street, a doorway every four yards, went on until it faded into a haze of coal smoke.

  The mother’s uncle and Larry went into the pub on the corner. When Dermot pushed through the door, which had three layers of plywood, the smell of the saloon came at him like an opponent. It came from damp coal fires along the block, from wet suit jackets at the bar and shoes soaked by rain puddles. Four men in old suit jackets and baggy pants stood in olive-drab light and drank stout from pint glasses at a bar that only came up to the waist. Dermot and his two relatives ordered pints. When the barman brought them over, the smell of his black sweater was stronger than anything the rest of the room had to offer. One old man was to their right, on the side nearest the back of the saloon. To the left was a man with a plaid cap pulled down until the peak touched the top of black horn-rimmed glasses. Wide green eyes stared through the thick glasses. Down at the end of the bar an old man, flesh sagging under the chin, sat with a younger man in a gray cap, who was looking out at the street through a gap in the plywood covering the space where the saloon windows had been. When the young man turned from the plywood to pick up his drink, Dermot could see he was much younger than old clothes and a cap made him look. A kid really. The kid looked up and saw that Dermot was looking at him. The kid’s eyes intensified. He was going to stare Dermot down. The old man, flesh hanging from the neck, sat next to the kid and looked at nothing but the glass. The kid stared hard at Dermot and Dermot looked down at the bar and smiled to himself.

  “Saturday night in Rockaway Beach,” he said.

  “What’s that?” his mother’s uncle said.

  “Nothing,” Dermot said. He looked at the man in the plaid cap. The man was out of a movie about the IRA.

  Nobody spoke. Dermot tried to start the conversation off.

  “How come the bar is so low?” he said to the barman.

  “Because it is,” he said.

  “Oh,” Dermot said.

  “Just as well,” one of them at the bar said. “Anybody here tries bendin’ over the bar, the arse’s come through his britches pockets.”

  Behind the bar was a large blackened metal urn, with metal spigots and knobs everywhere on it. Alongside it were three silver measuring cups and a copper funnel.

  “What’s that for?” Dermot asked.

  The barman tapped the urn. “Geezer for hot water.”

  “What’s the hot water for?”

  “For hot water.”

  “Oh.”

  He was pulling a pint from a small aluminum tap. There were big wooden tap handles still on the bar, but they weren’t being used. In New York, any saloonkeeper with half a brain would fight you in the streets for the wooden handles.

  Dermot asked the barman what the cups and funnels were for.

  He motioned with his head while
he was pulling the pint. “They’re for pouring the dregs from one bottle to t’other. Christ, ye ask so much, what are ye, a policeman?”

  “Oh, Christ no,” the mother’s uncle said quickly. “He’s no policeman.”

  “He’s from New York,” Larry said.

  “New York?” the man in the cap said.

  “New York,” Dermot said.

  “Uh huh,” the man said.

  “A good friend of mine has a saloon in New York, Jimmy McManus. He told me to come in here and say hello. He has a place called the Falls Pub on Greenpoint Avenue in Sunnyside.”

  The guy in the cap turned and looked out at the street again.

  “You don’t know Jimmy McManus in here?”

  “Notatall, notatall,” the barman said.

  Dermot leaned over to his mother’s uncle, who had his small face stuck into the glass of stout. “Let’s get out of here then,” Dermot said.

  The barman quickly asked, “Where do you come from?”

  “Ardoyne,” Larry said.

  The guy in the plaid cap said nothing.

  “Know MacCormack?” the old man up at the end, the one who had flesh sagging from his chin, said. The kid with him did not stare at Dermot now.

  “John?” Larry answered.

  “Aye,” the old man said.

  “Ridder!” Larry said.

  “Aye,” the old man said.

  “Lives next door to us,” Larry said.

  “Oh,” the old man said.

  “I saw Jem this morning. She took the baby to the hospital.”

  “What’s the matter with the baby?”

  “Same as everybody else. Two and a half vomits from the fuckin’ CS gas.”

  The old man nodded. The barman said nothing. The old man in the plaid cap turned and looked out at the street again.

  “I got something here that Jimmy McManus in the Falls Pub in Sunnyside, New York City, told me to bring in here and give to a man named Joe O’Neill,” Dermot said. “I’m going to finish this drink and leave with the thing if I don’t see Joe O’Neill.”