World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  Dermot’s car outside was alongside a tree with a puddle spreading from the trunk. He was walking around the puddle when the car began waving and the lights at the entranceway began waving and he felt everything rushing from the back of his head and he put his hands out to stop himself from falling face first into the tree. His palms went against the trees and held him up. He lost a couple of seconds. Then he felt his feet splash in the puddle. His arms were held out stiff. The arms began trembling badly. Dermot hung his head between his arms to try and get rid of the dizziness. In the rain with his head hanging between his arms and the first thirteen years of his life telling him to say a prayer from the Baltimore Catechism. He did not feel well enough to pick out words.

  A few minutes later, when he felt clear, when he could hear and feel the rain, he picked up his head. All he could see was Tara standing on the stoop with her thumbs in her ears and the other fingers clenched in her hair, pulling at it, trying to punish him for not taking her to the puppet show. He got into the car and drove for a while on the black twisting road. His head suddenly became light and he pulled the car into deep grass on the side of the road. He woke up in daylight, damp and shivering. He did not want to drive any more. He stepped into the road and began hitching.

  The second ride, a lorry, brought him into Derry. Morning light put streaks of silver into the slate-gray of the river. In the saloon, a man was in the back room, a room with a dart board. The man read a newspaper in the light coming through a skylight.

  “Jesus Christ,” the man said.

  “Davey around?” Dermot said.

  “Jimmy? He had to go away to Bundoran. Go for his mail. Be two hours yet.”

  The man shook his head as he looked at the paper again. “Christ, it was a fooker.”

  “Bad night?” Dermot said.

  “They be all fookin’ bad from now on.”

  “What time did it start last night?” Dermot asked him.

  “Christ, they was out of the house soon as it became dark, you know.”

  “They heard about it in a hurry, I guess,” Dermot said.

  “Heard what?”

  “The thing last night.”

  “What did they fookin’ have to hear? They was too busy doin’ it.”

  “I mean, the girl got shot last night.”

  “Which girl is it?”

  “At the election meeting.”

  “Oh, that one. She’s a fookin’ Communist. She’s from Derry, you know. I’m sorry she died. Still was a fookin’ Communist. We care about freein’ Ireland. We’re green, not fookin’ red.”

  Dermot spread change on the bar, picked out a sixpence, and went to the phone on the wall. He called the City Hotel.

  “El Humpo! Where have you been?” John had a night’s sleep in his voice.

  “What’s doin’?” Dermot said.

  “What’s doin’? Reading the newspaper and waitin’ for you. Listen to this thing. A woman in Letterkenny was too old to take care of her property. The weeds covered her doorway. Nobody could get in or out. Do you know what the judge had them do? He had them tie a goat on her front lawn. How do you like it? Jesus Christ, you ought to read the papers here. Oh, God bless our people.”

  “I’ll be down in a couple of minutes,” Dermot said.

  At the end of the long narrow smoky street leading to Derry Free Corner, Eddie Canavan was against the wall of a building. He had his hand inside his jacket. Two young boys stood with him, smoking cigarettes. A car came along Rossville Street. Eddie Canavan stepped out and held up his hand. The car slowed. Eddie Canavan slapped the hood of the car. The car stopped. He walked around to the driver’s side. Eddie Canavan inspected the car. He kept one hand inside the jacket. The man driving the car stared at the hand.

  Canavan nodded and straightened up. The car went on. Eddie Canavan waved to somebody down the narrow street in the Brandywell.

  Canavan nodded to Dermot. “Clompin’ down now,” he said. “Be doin’ things the way they should be from now on. This is now a military operation.”

  He took his hand out from inside his jacket and ran the hand over his hair.

  “Here ye be!”

  Finbar’s son J.J. came out of the crowd on the corner. Eddie Canavan walked back and stood at the wall with the two very young boys.

  “Oh, it got to be fookin’ rough last night,” J.J. said.

  Dermot didn’t talk.

  “Jesus Christ, where were you? It got good and fookin’ rough.”

  Dermot tried to walk past him.

  “Where ye goin’?”

  J.J. kept positioning himself directly in front of Dermot.

  “You said you’d listen to the record for Tony Bennett.”

  Dermot said nothing. J.J. ran across the street to the bookmaking shop. Dermot started up the hill toward the wall. Footsteps pounded up from behind him. J.J. came alongside Dermot holding out a brown cardboard jacket with a record inside.

  “I’m going home,” Dermot said.

  JJ.’s left eye slid back and forth. “To New York!”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you’d see Tony Bennett for me!”

  Dermot went through the arch on the wall and started to turn down Magazine Street, to walk to the hotel without having to pass the old building where Deirdre lived, and J.J. had him by the elbow.

  “You said,” J.J. said.

  Dermot was sleepwalking, and J.J. led him down Butcher Street to an electrical and television shop in the town square. From the shop it was straight down the hill to the arch in the wall and the City Hotel. Dermot was looking down the hill when a loud crash of an organ came out of the stereo. A British voice said, “Lou Gray Music proudly presents an original composition by Mister J.J. Davey. It is entitled ‘Jeanie.’” There was another loud crash of the organ.

  “Jean-nie …”

  Dermot barely heard the words. They were being sung to a flat tune. There was a final crash of the organ and the record was over.

  J.J. grabbed Dermot’s arm. “Did ye not like it?”

  “I couldn’t make it out so good,” Dermot said.

  “Christ! I fookin’ told you it needs a Tony Bennett arrangement.”

  “I don’t know,” Dermot said. “I couldn’t make out the tune.”

  “Oh, I didn’t write the music,” J.J. said. “I only wrote the words. That’s what I mean. It needs Tony Bennett to get a big arrangement. This time just listen for the words.” J.J. put the record on again. The organ crashed and Lou Gray’s voice came on. When Lou Gray started the song, J.J. began to sing with the record, sing in the same tuneless sound.

  “Jean-nie

  I stand with you

  In the shadow of the wall

  Everything seems new

  My love for you is all

  Jean-nie.”

  J.J. stood looking at something that was far away and his fingers tapped on the cabinet of the stereo. The organ music on the record of Lou Gray of London crashed. Lou Gray sang the song a second time. J.J. sang with him, sang his song that had no music. J.J. did not hear Dermot tell him that he would be back, that he just was going to walk down to the hotel. Dermot walked out of the shop and went down the hill to the City Hotel, down a hill he would not come up again. J.J. Davey stayed in the shop and looked at things very far away and sang his song that had no music.

  epilogue

  IN MAY OF 1971, the year after, on a bright, soft afternoon, under a sky washed clean, Dermot Davey was walking out of court, coming out of the side entrance, starting up Queens Boulevard to get the Q-19 bus home. Traffic on the boulevard was stopped and, with no noise from cars and busses, the shout stopped Dermot in his tracks.

  “El Humpo!”

  Johno hung in the doorway of the Pump Room across the street. His stomach was enormous in a tan sweater.

  “Come on, hump.”

  It was two in the afternoon and the bar was empty. Johno was set up for the day. Cigarettes and lighter on top of the cigarettes on one sid
e. Wet bills and change in front of him under the glass. Wooden bowl of peanuts on the other side.

  “Let’s do some drinkin’,” he said.

  “I got like four dollars to my name,” Dermot said.

  “We’ll get lucky,” Johno said.

  They drank beer until five. They had three dollars and change between them. A couple of lawyers came in after court.

  “Counselors!” Johno said. The lawyers bought a couple.

  Dermot moved over into the corner of the bar so she wouldn’t see him when she passed the window on her way into the apartment house. The bar emptied at six-thirty. Johno lumbered to the men’s room. On the way back, he stopped to talk to somebody in the dimness up at the other end of the long bar. He stayed there for a couple of minutes. The bartender brought Dermot a bottle of beer. “This is on the gentleman at the other end,” he said.

  Dermot walked up into the dimness. Johno had his head down, next to a black man. The black man was hunched over the bar. His hand shook as he picked up a drink.

  “This is Dick, he got a problem here,” Johno said. “He’s a good fella and he got a bad problem. Big problem. Giant problem.”

  “What is it?” Dermot said.

  “He goes with the Bailey girl. They got the jury out right now.”

  Dermot knew the case. Bailey was a black dame in Elmhurst, near where Louis Armstrong lived. She and her husband broke up and they found her little girl strangled. They had her on trial for homicide. Nigger murder, Dermot thought, means nothing to them.

  “How the hell they could say she killed that kid,” the black guy, Dick, said.

  “I wish you luck,” Dermot said.

  “They told me not to come near across the street,” the black guy said. “They let her call me up here on the phone before. Her and the lawyer. They just sittin’ upstairs in an office waitin’. They told me don’t come near the place. You know, I could make it worse.”

  “The jury didn’t go out to dinner,” Johno said. “They must be close to something.”

  “Christ, I guess so,” Dermot said.

  Johno came around Dick. He put his hand on Dermot’s arm. “Go over there and give us a reading, will you?”

  Dermot took his tunic out of the checkroom and went across the street. The courtroom was on the third floor. The attendant standing in the hallway said the assistant district attorney and his detectives were in Luigi’s. He was going to call them when the jury came back.

  Dermot came back to the Pump Room. He sat at the window and stared down the boulevard toward Luigi’s.

  “Come on over here,” the black man called.

  Dermot just waved. “He can’t, he’s got to watch,” he heard Johno telling the black guy.

  Dermot was on his third bottle of beer since he’d come back from the court when he saw them, six of them, the three assistant district attorneys walking first, the detectives following them. They walked across Queens Boulevard quickly, their arms swinging. Dermot went out the door after them.

  Upstairs, the hallway was empty. The attendant said, “You comin’ in, I’m going to lock it.”

  “I don’t want to come in and get stuck,” Dermot said. “Just look out and tell me what it is.”

  The attendant shrugged and closed the door after him. Dermot stood at the window smoking a cigarette and watched the last of the spring evening fade on Queens Boulevard. The red neons over the Pump Room were on.

  The courtroom door came open.

  “Manslaughter One,” the attendant called. The door shut.

  Dermot came out of the courthouse alone and on the run. There was a break in the traffic and he ran across Queens Boulevard in full stride, his face becoming red, his mouth open to breathe, his feet coming down sloppily. He came up the steps and into the bar on the run.

  “Manslaughter One,” he called out.

  In the dimness at the end of the bar he could see the black face looking at him. The face looked puzzled.

  “Manslaughter One,” Dermot said again.

  Johno put his arm on the guy’s shoulder. “Jesus Christ,” Johno said.

  The black guy kept looking at Dermot. “They must be crazy,” he said.

  “Well, that’s it,” Dermot said.

  The guy looked down at his drink. “Manslaughter One.”

  “Drink up,” Johno said.

  A few minutes later, the black guy picked up his cigarettes. “I got to go around the corner to the lawyer’s office. Thanks for the help.”

  “Hey, Dick,” Johno said.

  “What?” Dick said.

  Johno dropped his head. Dermot heard him saying, “I mean, look what the guy went over and did for you. I mean, he had to see somebody over there himself.”

  Dermot got up from his stool. He walked back to the men’s room with his heels making noise so he would not hear Johno talking to the man. He leaned against the door and smoked a cigarette. When he came out, the black guy was gone. Dermot felt better about that.

  “El Humpo!”

  He picked up Dermot’s glass. There were some ten-dollar bills under the glass.

  “I told you we’d make a score!”

  “I never figured we’d score off some nigger in here,” Dermot said.

  “Hump!”

  Dermot picked up his drink and drained it. The ice came against his teeth and the Scotch tasted good. He put the glass down and picked up some change and walked over to the juke box. While he was at the juke box, he began to think about calling the girl upstairs.

  A Biography of Jimmy Breslin

  Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and one of the most prominent columnists in the United States. Known for his straightforward reporting style that relates major news to the common man, Breslin published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, in addition to writing columns for newspapers such as the New York Daily News and Newsday.

  Born in Queens, New York, Breslin began his long newsroom career in the 1940s, lying about his age to get a job as a copyboy at the Long Island Press. He got his first column in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, where he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedy’s assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point of view of the President’s gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He also provided significant coverage of the civil rights turmoil raging in the South, and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.

  In 1969, Breslin ran for city council president on Norman Mailer’s mayoral ticket. The two campaigned on a platform arguing for statehood for New York City and for banning private cars in Manhattan, among other issues. Breslin placed fifth in the primary election, garnering eleven percent of the vote. He later quipped that he was “mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed,” referring to a law in place at the time that prohibited the sale of liquor on election days.

  In the early 1970s, Breslin retired from newspaper journalism to write books, beginning with The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1970), a national bestseller that was adapted into a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. By this time Breslin had also published Sunny Jim (1962), about legendary racehorse trainer Jim Fitzsimmons, and Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963), about the disastrous first season of the New York Mets baseball team. He also wrote How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), about the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s subsequent impeachment, a prevalent topic for him in the early 1970s.

  Breslin returned to column-writing later in the decade, taking jobs first at the New York Daily News, then at Newsday. As always, he covered the city by focusing on ordinary people as well as larger-than-life personalities. His intimate knowledge of cops, Mafia dons, and petty thieves provided fodder for his columns. In the late 1970s, his profile was so high that Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz sent him letters, to boast about and publicize his crimes.

  Known for being one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslin’s years of insight
ful reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, awarded for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Among the work cited when he received the Pulitzer were his early columns on the victims of AIDS and his exposé on the stun-gun torture of a suspected drug dealer by police in Queens. Although he stopped writing his weekly column for Newsday in 2004, Breslin continued writing books, producing nearly two dozen throughout his life. These include collections of his best columns titled The World of Jimmy Breslin (1969) and The World According to Jimmy Breslin (1988). He passed away in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight.

  Breslin as a young man with his sister Diedre.

  Breslin writing at home in Forest Hills, Queens.

  Breslin chats with Robert F. Kennedy, who was campaigning in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential race.

  Breslin (right) and columnist Red Smith both writing for the New York Herald Tribune during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

  Breslin in Ireland in 1971, while writing World Without End, Amen.

  Breslin with Bella Abzug, a New York congresswoman and social activist.

  Letters from David Berkowitz, a.k.a. Son of Sam, delivered to Breslin at the New York Daily News offices. Son of Sam sent letters to Breslin during his killing spree in New York City in the summer of 1977. These letters were later used in the Spike Lee film Summer of Sam (2008).

  Breslin with grandson Dillon Breslin in June 1980.

  Breslin in the New York Daily News offices with publisher Jim Hogue (left) and editor Gil Spencer (right) after the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986.

  Breslin (far left) with the crew of his television show, Jimmy Breslin’s People, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill (fourth from right) in 1986.

  The Breslin family in 1989.