40 Patchtown

by Damian Dressick

  I nod real slow and grab up the next case of empty liquor bottles and heave it up onto the mixing table. I can’t let Angelo get no kind of clue ’bout none of this. He finds out I talked about a murder in confession or anyplace else, he’ll shoot me quick as look at me.

  I drop the spare funnel down into the mouth of one of them gin bottles and pick up a gallon jug of the Ashtola bathtub. I hoist it up and start pouring, keeping my eyes on that clear liquor draining down outta the funnel.

  It’s almost like I come to myself driving the horse wagon. I’m way outta Dago Town, over on the East Side of Windber, in the middle of Eighth Street. I can barely remember Angelo stomping back upstairs or even filling up the rest of them liquor bottles. It’s just like all of a sudden I got the reins clutched in my hands and I’m creeping the horse wagon down past the rectory of the Polish church.

  I haul back on the reins jerking the horse to stopped at the corner of Main Street. I climb down outta the wagon. Standing there under the gas lamps, staring at the sidewalk planks and the meat market hedges and the patchy brown grass running up from the sidewalk to the rectory and the church, I’m thinking about Buzzy zipping around that Ford, dodging McMullen’s bullets.

  It’s almost like I can see him clear as moonshine, running up Eighth Street fast as the wind and then laid down dead on the brown grass with the blood leaking outta him and the breath already gone, he’s flat on his belly and he’s still. I can smell the gun powder filling the air thick as sulfur smoke off the bony piles and I can hear them Pinkertons laughing, joking about who’s gonna pay for beer.

  I shouldn’t have never gone to that Hungarian priest. I know it. Standing here right where Buzzy fell, I’m getting to feel he was right about a whole bunch of stuff. That this whole world is rigged but good, and that’s just fine for the Johnny Bulls and the operators, but if you’re just some dumb pollock or dago that don’t count for nothing—well, good luck.

  I snatch up a chunk of splintered wood from the edge of one of the sidewalk planks. It’s rough to my fingers and smells like creosote. I break off a strip ’bout the size of a stove lighting match and stuff it down into the pocket of my coat. Then I climb back up onto the buckboard and give the horse a slap with the reins.

  When I get back to the rooms above Leone’s, I come in quiet. The whole place is dark, and I can hear my ma snoring like an overstoked train. I pull my shirt off and hang it over the back of the chair and lay myself down with Frankie and Johnny on the mattress next to the window.

  Frankie’s woke up by the feather tick getting pulled off of him when I settle myself in. He asks where I been, and I just tell him I’m home now. I touch the top of his head, running my fingers through his hair quick, like petting a dog. I tell him that he oughtta roll hisself over and that he outta get some sleep.

  Twenty

  Saturday night, me and Pauline been setting in Muscatella’s Restaurant for over an hour and I ain’t said more than two words. Pauline’s told me how her aunt’s on the mend back in Allentown with her pa’s family. She’s told me about her pa cutting them pine logs up the Millionaire’s Camp and how he got the two of them moved over to Cesri’s boarding house after he earned a few bucks. She said about how messy them boarding house fellas is and talked about the way she’s been cleaning and cooking over there to help out with the cost of them staying on.

  I just been fidgetin on my chair, watching her lift that long spaghetti into her mouth or snap her teeth into them meatballs. Pauline asks me questions ’bout my ma and Lottie, ’bout the strike, ’bout living in Dago Town, but I mostly just keep staring down into my own plate of sausage and red gravy.

  “Did I do somethin to make ya mad?” Pauline says finally. “Cause if yer just gonna set here and not say nuthin, I can walk myself back to the boarding house where they’s pigs, but at least people talk to each other.”

  It counts for a damn lot, this dinner with Pauline going well, but I just can’t seem to make anything to come out of my mouth. It’s like all the words I’ve got are hibernating or maybe they’re scared stiff that if they come mumbling out, somebody else will end up killed by the Pinkertons.

  I’m looking round the dim light of Muscatella’s, at the red and white tablecloths and all the men in their suits and women in their fancy dresses. They’re chowing down on beef steaks and pork chops, but my stomach’s fierce roiled and my mouth is plumb empty, no sausage and nothing to say.

  “Ya didn’t do nothin to make me mad, Pauline,” I says finally.

  We set there for another minute before Pauline asks if my tongue’s out on strike. Truth told, I ain’t got no idea what to say to Pauline or anybody else. I ain’t said hardly a word to anybody since I learned the what’s what from Angelo.

  I shuffle the pieces of sausage round on my plate till Pauline finishes up her spaghetti. When she clatters her knife and fork down on the plate, I jump a little. I ask her if she wants ’em to bring her some coffee.

  Pauline says she don’t want no coffee. She frowns, asking me if I got bad nerves about tomorrow, it being the day that Charlie Dugan’s due to come back to Windber.

  “He’s supposed to be bringin them newspaper men back from Philadelphia to write about the strike,” she says. “My pa says the union’s gonna have a whole bunch of men there at the train platform when they come in.”

  “That’s what I hear,” I lie.

  “Yer gonna be there, ain’t ya?”

  “I dunno,” I says.

  Pauline’s glaring at me, asking me what the hell do I mean saying, “I dunno.”

  “My pa said ya spoke up for us to stay on strike, Chet. That other men wanted to quit, but ya said we had to stick it out.”

  I understand what Pauline’s trying to tell me, but it’s hard to imagine men wanting to listen to a fella so stupid he give his own brother up to the Pinkertons.

  “Pauline,” I ask her. “Have ya ever had somethin happen that just takes the bones outta ya?”

  Pauline softens up the way she’s looking at me. She lets her hands drop down onto the tablecloth and lace together like she’s praying. She pulls her top lip down into her mouth with her teeth. “When I was eleven, my mother got the influenza,” she says. “Months after she passed, I felt like a dog wandering round hungry. Sniffing the ground all over the patchtown trying to catch the scent of people that long moved away.”

  My throat goes tight and my eyes fill up. I snatch my water glass and pull a quick sip into my throat, but it don’t do no good.

  “It’s like that with your brother, ain’t it?” she says.

  I just sit there not moving, trying not to start up crying. Pauline moves her hands across the table so they’re setting on top of mine.

  “I’m sorry for sayin what I did ’bout Buzzy when I met you, Chester. I was mad as hell about what happened down the train station and looking for somebody to yell at that could hear what I had to say. I couldn’t be that mad and remember Buzzy was a person that you loved, a person that was gone.”

  I just can’t listen to this. I pull a fifty-cent piece outta my pocket and flop it down on the table. I tell Pauline that I’m sorry but I gotta go. I push myself back from the table and hoof it out of the restaurant onto Twelfth Street. I zip up the sidewalk in the cold and pull myself up into the wagon.

  A minute later, Pauline comes marching out of Muscatella’s and heads straight up the street. Grabbing hold of the buckboard, she hoists herself up onto the seat next to me and grabs hold of my hand. She pulls open my fingers and presses the change into my palm.

  “Ya forgot this,” she says.

  I close my hand around the coins and shove ’em down into my pants pocket.

  “It was me that got Buzzy kilt,” I tell her.

  She looks at me queer, like she knows I ain’t making a joke, but can’t quite figure what I’m saying either.

  “How ya mean, Chet?” she asks.

  I let my breath go and tell Pauline ’bout the whole business—the dago, the beatin
g, how we didn’t know them scabs was tricked into coming to 40. Then I tell her how I give Buzzy up in confession to the Hungarian priest.

  “That’s how they knew to come for Buzzy?”

  I nod my head and we just sit still there in the wagon outside of Muscatella’s. The air is icy and our breath is thick as smoke. Pauline shuffles herself over, pushing the weight of her body up against me.

  “Ya can’t blame yerself for what happened to Buzzy, Chet,” she says. “Berwind havin that priest in his pocket, there’s the real sin.”

  “I know it,” I says.

  And it’s true, I ain’t such a fool as not to be able to see that this patchtown life twists things till they ain’t got no shape at all, but knowing it in my head ain’t the same thing as being able to let it go.

  “I don’t know what to do, Pauline.”

  “Yes, you do, Chet. Ya need to get back on the picket line. Getting the union in here is the only thing gonna stop them Berwinds from doing whatever they want to us, turning us into whatever they want. Ya know that, don’t ya?”

  I nod and let go of Pauline’s hands and take hold of the reins. I roll the wagon down 15th Street past the Big Office and the Arcadia Theatre where they’re showing a picture called The Immigrant.

  “I’m sorry ’bout this evening, Pauline,” I says. “I’m sorry it was such a bust. I figured we’d have some kind of fancy dinner then go to the pictures and watch Charlie Chaplin.”

  “That woulda been real nice,” she says.

  Pauline smiles at me when I heave up the reins and we jerk to stopped at the door of Cesri’s boarding house. She scoots over across the buckboard of the wagon and puts the palm of her hand down flat on my knee. When she slides her face in close to mine, my heart is racing like a mule trying to outrun a mine fire.

  “Chet,” she says real soft. “It was nice anyway.”

  Pauline touches her lips to mine. I let go of the reins and for a minute it’s like all the stuff running round my head drops down into a deep shaft falling fast and quiet. Leaving me alone.

  Twenty-One

  Thinking on it the next morning, tucked under the feather tick, I figure that Pauline’s one hundred percent right. No matter what happened with that priest, or what them Cossacks done, I can’t be missing Charlie bringing them reporters back to Windber. How am I gonna hold my head high as a miner, if I ain’t there to tell them newspaper men how we been out on strike against damn Berwind?

  I yank on my trousers and shoehorn my feet into my brogans, and I haul my dupa out into the cold down Somerset Avenue toward the Windber Station. The wind’s funneling up Twelfth Street, swirling the coal dust into whirlwinds of soot. I’m putting one foot in front of the other and steeling myself up for them Cossacks, thinking about how they come in and trapped us down the 40 station when we stopped them from bringing in any more dago scabs.

  But when I turn the corner outta the lee of the alley onto Twelfth Street, I can see this Windber Station picketing is a whole ’nother animal. First off, even though the locomotive ain’t due for another hour, the whole railyard and Berwind Park back behind are both lousy with Pinkertons.

  Them bastards are everywhere. Twirling their clubs and fiddling with their heavy pistols, they’re shouldering miners off the sidewalks, poking at them, telling them where to stand and shouting for them to move along, spitting tobacco at their boots. Pulling every kind of penny ante shit, them Cossacks are giving their damnedest to stir things up. It’s like this time they been out and out ordered to get our boys riled to beat the band.

  Folks gathered round the Windber Station seem different too. Where down 40 everybody was all like one bunch of miners, here it’s like there’s two whole different kinds of people what’s grouped round watching out for this train.

  Pushed close in to the platform, it’s nothing but diehards clustered together down near the tracks. Booted out back in April or May, a lot of these fellas ain’t been no place but on the picket lines for the last ten months. Their coats is thready and stained and ragged up round their bodies and their grimy caps is set cockeyed on their heads. With their hands in their pockets and puffing out steam, they’re either pinched-lip quiet or grumbling mean. Staring east down the tracks, these strikers are dead serious. Everything they got is tied up with Charlie’s train steaming down the tracks and them reporters telling the world the way we’re getting robbed.

  But a couple dozen yards back from the station, milling round the green and loafing on Main Street, the rest of the crowd don’t look half so bad off. Some are the fellas that first took day work in lumber camps or men who been working more and more in the little mines towards Somerset since the weather started to go south. Others ain’t even miners at all, just folks curious to get a look at Charlie Dugan or, more likely, them reporters.

  Threading my way down through the crowd on the lookout for folks I know, I give a wave to Mikey and his pa over near the edge of the green by the white painted bandstand. They’re shooting the breeze with Fatty Papinchak and a couple of the men what’s left living in them company houses down 40.

  I see Stash and Baldy too. They’re leaning up against the wall of the Palace Hotel with the rest of the Eureka 37 crew. Ten in the morning, but every one of them look like they been in the liquor since before breakfast. Maybe it was breakfast. Their jackets is bulged out with bottles and tools, and they look ready to kick up dust at the drop of a hat. I don’t even let on that I see ’em and just keep walking, moving closer to the platform.

  I don’t know whether it’s the look of my new clothes or if maybe the time I been gone feels longer to them than to me, but when I get up into the crowd near the tracks most folks don’t say nothing to me at all. And even the ones that do are looking down their noses, saying nothing but, “Howdy Stranger” and shit like that.

  It ain’t till I finally find Mr. Paul that anybody even looks really glad to see me. He’s off to the side of the brick station building huddled with a couple motormen and some loaders from out Mine 35. He pumps my arm like he’s drawing a five-gallon bucket of water and tells them fellas that we was over in the 40 Tent City together. They gimme the nod, but keep walking round trying to stay warm in their thin coats.

  When I ask Mr. Paul what he thinks of all of this, he keeps his tone low and shakes his head.

  “I don’t like it one bit, Chet,” he says. “Them guards is out for blood today. They know they can show them reporters some kind a riot and it’s gonna be all over for us and some of these miners what come down here to raise hell, they still can’t see they’re just screwing theirselfs.”

  Mr. Paul says no matter what, he’s glad I come down to the station. I tell him I’m glad I come down too, tell him that I really want to see Charlie coming back to Windber.

  “I got to tell ya though,” I says to him, “I’m glad this train’s scheduled for morning. I can’t be here all day. I got a delivery to make.”

  Mr. Paul nods a little uncomfortable and just says that we gotta do the things we gotta do. I nod back at him, but no matter what happens I had better be back at Angelo’s by two o’clock. He’s giving me twenty dollars for running out to Ashtola to pick up this week’s load of bathtub from them shiners. I wanna be as good a union man, but I can’t be giving the high hat to no twenty dollars.

  When the train whistle sounds, we push forward, close to the tracks, so we’re bunched up near where the train stops. The crowd is thick and there’s a good many folks I guess, but it sure don’t look like much if you was around for the big picketing we had going way back in April and May. Them early strike days, three times a week, three or four thousand men might come up to the Windber Patchtown mines from all over Somerset County. Every mine entrance they’d be shouting and yelling so loud you couldn’t hear a stick of dynamite if it was blowing off your own britches. Signs would be flung up and men would raise hell something fierce, throwing eggs and pennies, vegetables, anything. Back April, we was really letting them Berwinds know that we was bring
ing the union into these Windber coal fields Hell or High Water.

  Now, I don’t know there’s more than five hundred men even come out for the picketing and I don’t see hardly no signs at all—just a couple of union organizers from up Cresson holding bed sheets that got “Welcome Back Charlie” and “OUT ON STRIKE” writ on them in barn paint.

  Looking around through the crowd, I see something else that’s funny. There ain’t no police around. I don’t mean Pinkertons or agency men, cause with Cossacks on every damn corner they’re thicker than coal slurry. But running my eyes down Main Street and through the Miner’s Park, I don’t see none of the Windber police walking a beat nowhere. I don’t even see a single Stater lurking round neither. It makes me nervous. Something ain’t right here.

  I try to say something to Mr. Paul, but when the locomotive screeches round the bend, the yelling starts up. Between all of the men chanting “UNION! UNION!” and the roar of the train, I can’t get nothing across.

  But when a dozen horse Cossacks come riding out of the 15th Street alley, we all get the picture right quick. High on them quarterhorses, the Cossacks force themselves between the folks hanging back and the strikers up close in near the tracks, trying to corral us just like they done down the 40 station.

  Knowing better than to stick around this time, Mr. Paul shouts to the other fellas from 35 to get moving and grabs hold of my elbow pulling me along with him. We hammer our way through the thick of miners to the edge of the crowd where them horse Cossacks has formed up a wall.

  Tall enough to see over most everybody’s heads, Mr. Paul tells me how they’re running everybody off behind us.

  “They don’t want nobody to see what’s gonna happen here, Chet.”

  We try to push our way between the Cossacks, but they ain’t having it. They stomp them horses forward, damn near on top of us, while the Cossacks further back drive their horses through the folks behind.