World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  Deirdre was shouting past the soldier to the officer. “Her son’s shot, we’ve got to get her to the hospital.”

  “Yes?” the officer said.

  Deirdre pointed to the mother, who was in front of the house wailing.

  “Her son’s shot.”

  “Yes,” the officer said. He talked through his nose.

  “We’ve to go to the hospital,” Deirdre said.

  “Oh,” the officer said. “Well, actually you are not permitted out of the house.”

  “It’s her son.”

  “Oh. Well. I see. Her son.” His head was craned forward to listen. “If you’ll just stand there a moment,” he said. He walked away, the hands clasped behind his back, leather heels sounding.

  He must have said something to one of the soldiers in the street, because the soldier came running with his arms out. “Back in the house,” he said. “Come now, come now.” Deirdre was saying something and the woman was shrieking now, but two or three of the soldiers pushed them into the doorway. One of them reached for the door. “Two of ’em got it with the same bullet, they did,” he said. “One in the stomach, t’other in the leg, I think.” He pulled the door shut.

  “Now who’s this?” somebody said. Dermot was on his feet now, and soldiers were looking at him through slit eyes.

  “Comin’ out the window, he was,” the soldier standing in front of Dermot said.

  “Fenian bastard.”

  “Go on you fuckin’ Fenian bastard, well do you,” one of them said.

  Dermot brought one hand down to get the passport out of his jacket. “I’m an American,” he said.

  The soldier stopped his arm with the rifle. “Put yer hands back on yer head or ye won’t have a head.”

  “I got an American passport in my jacket,” Dermot said.

  “Who cares what you got ye’re scum to me. Scum, that’s all ye’re, scum.”

  Another soldier poked his boot against Dermot’s ankle. Just enough to sting. Dermot put his hands on the back of his head. In the searchlight, he could see what looked like over a hundred soldiers on this one street alone. They were in groups of four and five. They were standing in this strange light, the kind of light they always have at bad auto accidents and big fires. Light like this always means somebody dead. The soldiers were starting to go inside houses. The officer standing in the middle of the street was sending sergeants running up and down the street. One of the sergeants came up to the soldiers around Dermot.

  “Man from this house here?”

  “Aye, from this house here. Man tried to scuttle out the window.”

  The sergeant walked the soldier into the middle of the street and began talking to him. Dermot did not like it. The minute a policeman gets called away by another one and the two of them stand there talking, with the arrested guy left alone, it means somebody gets in worse trouble.

  A few feet farther down, against the door of a house, standing in a little circle of dark shadows, three soldiers had a man and a young boy up against the wall. The man was small. He had his hands in the pockets of a suit jacket that fitted him like a car coat. The boy with him was about eleven.

  “What’re the hands doin’ there?” one soldier said to the man. “Up on yer head with them.”

  While the man was taking his hands out of his suit jacket pockets, the soldier hit him in the face with a right hand.

  “Fuckin’ Fenian.”

  One of the soldiers said, “Give ’em yer IRA number.”

  “I’m not IRA,” the man said.

  The soldier had his right hand shoulder-high. He made a fist, his hand bathed in the bare light of the searchlights. He dropped the fist out of the bare light into the shadows, into the man’s face.

  “I’ll shoot yer face off,” the soldier said.

  The familiarity of it all began to bother Dermot. A dirty street at night, emergency lights, people screaming, broken glass, uniforms in charge, this was where he had lived his life. He was used to having the responsibility. He was the one who walked down the middle of the street and told people to stand back. Dermot’s head throbbed from the gun butt. But that wasn’t bothering him as much as the soldier threatening him. He’ll do fuckin’ nothing with his gun, Dermot said to himself.

  “Ye saw a soldier murdered today,” one of them said to the man.

  “Notatall, notatall,” the man said.

  “Or were ye too busy helpin’ murder him to see it?”

  “Where’s your head, lad?”

  “On the Sacred Heart, I’m no IRA.”

  “What’s yer father’s IRA number?” one of them asked the boy.

  The boy’s eyes widened but he said nothing. The soldier brought a hand out wide, a little bony hand. The boy started to wince. The soldier held the hand up in the light, showing it to the boy. He brought it down and slapped the boy in the mouth.

  The man had his hands off his head. He held them out like a beggar. “The wee boy. Please, the wee boy,” he said. The soldier slapped the man.

  One of them said, “Fenian fuck,” and went into the pocket of his fatigue pants. His front teeth were missing. He took out a revolver and held it up. It looked like a police .32.

  The soldier cocked the pistol

  “What’s it now?” he said.

  The man had his mouth open but he couldn’t talk.

  The soldier grabbed the boy’s hair. The pistol muzzle went hard into the boy’s forehead. The soldier held the boy by the hair. Dermot had seen it all his life. A gun in a nigger’s ear. The soldier this time had the gun on single action. The trigger did not have to be pulled back against the spring. A flick could make the thing jump forward. The boy was frozen. His forehead was tilted, upward. Saliva bubbled on his lips. The father’s face collapsed.

  Dermot moved as if he were practicing in the Police Academy. The left hand went out to hold off the soldier standing directly in front of him. The right hand went at the soldier with the pistol. He couldn’t reach the soldier with the pistol, but he waved his hand as he reached, to distract the soldier. Eight years of pushing to the front of crowds at accidents, eight years of knowing that if anything happened he was the one supposed to handle it. It became stronger than fear.

  “Shoot me!” Dermot said. Said it like a command. He was going to say, “Shoot me, cocksucker!” but the last word never came out. The official mind cut the last word before it reached the mouth.

  The soldier looked out the corners of his eyes.

  “Shoot me, I’m a man!” Dermot said.

  The soldier who had been in front of Dermot, the one Dermot had pushed off with his left hand, banged the rifle stock against Dermot’s side. The soldier with the pistol pulled it away from the kid’s forehead. He threw the boy’s head against the wall and let go of the hair. His mouth was open, the gaps in his teeth wide. He lunged at Dermot. The pistol came hard into Dermot’s chest. The boy and the father were screaming. The soldier with no teeth snarled something and his small eyes danced under his soup-bowl helmet. He pulled the trigger. The empty pistol made a metallic sound and nothing else.

  Whichever soldier swung the rifle butt around on Dermot did it sloppily. Half the slapping noise came from Dermot’s shoulder coming up as a reflex. The rest of the blow caught Dermot behind the ear someplace and it drove him a step or two to the side and then down on the wet pavement.

  Screams started coming from the windows along the block. Heads came out of second-floor windows and shouted into the bare light. Soldiers began yelling back and the heads sticking from the windows screamed louder.

  A soldier stood over Dermot. “Name?” he growled.

  Dermot’s hand moved slowly. It missed, going inside his jacket for the passport. The soldier slapped the hand away and went in and grabbed the passport. While the other thumbed through the passport, Dermot slid his hand into his back pocket. He brought out the shield and held it up for the soldier. Dermot’s hand was trembling.

  The soldier took the shield from him. He went o
ut into the middle of the street to talk to somebody. A few feet down, the man stood with his arms around the boy, who was sobbing against his chest.

  “God bless ye,” the man said.

  Fuck you too, Dermot said to. himself.

  He could see in the light up and down Leeson Street that the soldiers had men in front of nearly every house. Most of them, were spread, hands against the wall. A couple of men were kneeling with their hands on their heads. In front of one house, a man in a cap with his hands against the wall had a cigarette hanging from his mouth. The smoke was bothering his eyes. The man took a hand off the wall and reached for the cigarette. A stumpy soldier hit the man across the back of the legs with a club.

  One of the soldiers came back to Dermot with the passport and shield. “Which house ye in?” he growled.

  Dermot turned the wrong way at first. Everything spun in the bare light. He turned around again. He was two doorways down from the house. The soldier put the passport and shield into his hand. “Be off with ye,” he growled.

  As Dermot stepped up to the doorway, the soldier took him by the elbow and swung him into it, swung him hard.

  As the door pushed in and Dermot went into the vestibule, Deirdre was coming out, pushing past him, a baby in her arms.

  “The wee baby’s sick,” she was shouting. “He’s to go to the hospital.”

  Dermot stepped into the house. He stumbled over a chair that was upside down and had wet diapers hanging from the rungs. The stairs were covered with thrown clothing. One end of the couch had a broken leg. The woman sat on the end that wasn’t broken. She was holding the other baby and she looked old as hell. The mother’s uncle was on the floor in the corner. The television above him was smashed in. Glass bits were all over the floor and the clothes piled on the floor. There was loud noise upstairs. Dermot looked up. Soldiers were banging with rifle butts to break a hole in the front bedroom ceiling. In the back bedroom a soldier was punching a mattress with a rifle butt until the springs came through. He stuck his hand through one of the holes and felt around. There was more noise at the back door. Two of the kids watched soldiers dump coal out of the bin and kick through it Deirdre was still out in the front doorway. She was yelling very loud.

  The soldiers came downstairs, squeaking and stomping. The last one walking out said, “Scumoftheearth.”

  The mother’s uncle said, “Sacred Heart of the Lord, Holy God, if we’re the scum of the earth, Lord God what are they?”

  “They told me if the wee baby cried they’d stick him with a bayonet,” the woman said. “That’s as true as that Sacred Heart picture.” The picture was knocked off the wall next to her. “The Queen’s Second,” she said. “I’m sure she’s very proud of them.”

  “Silly little bitch, he’s too stupid to know what’s right and what’s wrong,” the mother’s uncle said.

  “So we live in kitchen houses,” the woman said. “So at least they’re clean.”

  After a while she said, “Oh my God Jesus, Martin, where are ye? What did they do to ye?”

  “Listen to your girl there, Deirdre, she’s out there tryin’ for you,” the mother’s uncle said.

  Sticking out of a pile of dungarees and jackets was a wedding album. The white leather cover was yellow. Dermot sat on the floor and opened it. Let’s see what you looked like when you weren’t crying,” he said to her. He read the title page out loud.

  “The marriage of Marie Flynn to Patrick Kelly. At Saint Peter’s Pro Cathedral, July twenty-third, nineteen-sixty. Well I’ll tell you one thing, Marie Flynn. You’re letting the years show top much.”

  “Aye, what’ve I got?”

  “What have these girls got?” He read her the bridesmaids’ names. “Sylvia Flynn, Olive Flynn, Marie Lewsley.” She didn’t answer. He began to turn the pages of the album. White tissue paper covered each page so the pictures were in good shape. In one picture she and her husband sat at a table with a wedding cake, a bottle of ketchup, and a bottle of HP sauce in front of them. The husband looked about sixteen. His neck was so thin the white dress shirt looked like it went around him twice.

  “He looked real young then,” Dermot said.

  “Ah, sure, he was beautiful then.”

  “You got a nice look too. What were you thinking about here?”

  “Ah, just about comin’ to this house.”

  “You moved right in here?”

  “Aye, moved in the next day, we did. We bought it for two hundred pound. We put four hundred pound into it. Ah, I thought we’d come here and have a life together in this house. And look what they’ve done to my house. And look what they’ve done to me.”

  “You were going to stay here your whole life?”

  “Ah, sure, where else would we live? Only so many places for a Catholic.”

  “What’s the husband do for a living?”

  “Asphalter. Well, you know, that’s when he works.” She buried the baby into her. “I wonder where he is. Jesus, if he’s lifted.”

  Deirdre stuck her head in the door. “Come on, come on with you,” she said. “The father too, the father too.” Her eyes were telling them to hurry more than her voice was. The two of them scrambled up.

  A soldier’s voice outside said, “The Royal Horsepital.”

  The mother said, “Oh, the wee ones in back,” and Deirdre pushed her out the door. “Ill keep them organized,” she said. The woman and the mother’s uncle each held a baby and went away with a soldier.

  Deirdre closed the door against the cold. The two kids stood in the room. Dermot sat on the floor. The room was cold and smelly and the walls were wet.

  “You were fantastic,” she said.

  “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here,” he said.

  “You were fantastic.”

  She gave him a cigarette and they sat in the darkness and smoked and said nothing. The pain in his head was making him twitch. He could feel her looking at him. She couldn’t have understood that this was his business, streets like this, and he had done it without thinking. The pain bothered him too much to get into it with her.

  To Dermot, it seemed like a long time later when he felt well enough to speak. “What time is it?” he said.

  “Half four, the last I heard,” she said.

  “And how long are we going to have to stay here?”

  “Could be till Monday morning.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “There was a great big fat man from America who was here with his wife, visiting relatives. The soldiers raided the relatives’ house. The big fat man woke up with a soldier aiming a rifle at his head on the pillow. The fat man had a heart attack right there. He’s still in the hospital. Well, you know, you’re doing better than at least one of your Yank tourists.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.”

  “It’s good you were here, you were fantastic,” she said.

  “That’s not helping my head.”

  “You just called their bloody bluff,” she said. “Fantastic.”

  “I’m used to all of it except getting hit on the fucking head,” he said.

  “The boy will grow up remembering you and he’ll tell his sons stories about you,” she said.

  “That does me a lot of good,” he said.

  She gave him another cigarette. “Do you not go around doing this to people in America?” she said.

  “The hell I do.”

  “Ah, Jesus now, come on. The whole fookin’ police force in America gets medals for shootin’ blacks.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Are not the blacks on the bottom in America?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by the bottom.”

  “The fookin’ blacks are on the fookin’ bottom and the fookin’ police beat them bloody, the same as we’re on the bottom here and the fookin’ police and the fookin’ soldiers beat us and shoot us like animals.”

  “Well, I don’t know what it’s like here, but I don’t do anything like
this,” Dermot said.

  Something came into his mind, an afternoon on Knickerbocker Avenue when this old Jew from the jewelry store was hollering about two spade kids coming around and stealing a new watch. Dermot wrote down the complaint and the description, and later, at a quarter to five, he went past Grover Cleveland High. The schoolyard was crowded with kids playing basketball. Nigger kids playing a nigger game, Dermot remembered. They stand under the basket and jump. You can’t expect them to think out a play. They just do what comes to them natural. Stand around and jump. Nobody jumps like a nigger. Dermot was remembering the crowd around one basket, black hands, a little pink showing, going up for the ball. And a little higher than all the other hands was this one, the fingers spread, the gold watch standing out against the black wrist. Dermot remembered getting out of the car and walking into the schoolyard. He could still see the faces, some of them stopping their game to watch him, others, the fresh spades, not even bothering to look at him. The one with the watch on never looked. All the others playing at his basket stopped to watch Dermot walk up. The kid with the watch kept playing. He threw the ball up against the backboard and then jumped up and tried to tip it in. “Reboun’, reboun’,” he was saying to himself. Dermot remembered how he said to the kid, “Stop rebounding, I want to talk to you.” And the kid said, ‘Talk to me on the reboun’.” Dermot put a hand on the kid’s shoulder and stopped him from going up. The big eyes, with nigger-blood flecks in them, stared at Dermot. “Get your hands off me, mother,” the kid said. Dermot had the index and middle fingers of the right hand spread out, on the ready. He remembered now how the kid never saw it coming. He remembered the tips of both fingers catching moistness as he stabbed at the nigger spade’s eyes.

  He sat on the floor and thought about it for a moment. No, Dermot told himself, that was different from this. That was a nigger kid who stole something.