A Long Line of Dead Men (27 page)

"Thirty-two."

"I was twenty-five, and a loutish piece of work I was. They'd never have had me in their club, or any other decent association of men. But that's a club I'd have joined if asked."

"So would I."

"And never missed a meeting," he said. "Standing together. Bearing witness. Waiting for the man with the broad ax."

"The man with-?"

"Death," he said. "That's how I envision him. A man with his arms and shoulders bare, wearing a black hood and carrying a broad ax."

"Elaine would say you were put to death in a past life, and the man you just described was the executioner."

"And who's to say she's wrong?" He shook his big head. "Sand through an hourglass. Eamonn Dougherty, the fucking Scourge of Skibbereen, sitting on his barstool watching the years slip past him. He outlived the Galway Rose, the murderous little bastard. He'll outlive us all, with his wee cap and his two pints of beer." He drank. "A long line of dead men," he said.

"How's that?"

"Ah, it's a story. Do you know Barney O'Day? He used to come to Morrissey's."

"I never met him there," I said, "but I knew him when I was at the Sixth. He managed a bar on West Thirteenth Street. They had live music, and sometimes he'd get up and sing a song."

"Had he any sort of a voice?"

"I don't think he was any worse than the paid entertainment. I used to run into him at the Lion's Head, too. What about him?"

"Well, it's a story I heard another man tell at a wake," he said. "It seems Barney's old mother was in hospital, and he was at her bedside, and the dear told him that she was ready to die. I had a good life, says she, and wrung all the joy I could out of it, and I'm not after havin' machines keepin' me alive, an' tubes stickin' out of me. So give us a kiss, Barney me lad, says she, as you were always as foine a son as a mother could ask for, an' then tell the doctor to pull the plug an' let me go.

"So your man gives her a kiss and goes off to find the doctor, and tells him straight out what the old woman wants him to do. And the doctor's scarcely more than a boy himself. He hasn't been at it long, and Barney can see he's got no stomach for this sort of thing. He wants to be prolonging life, not cutting it short. He's troubled, and Barney's a gentle soul himself, for all the bluster he puts on, and wants to spare the man some agony.

" 'Doctor,' says he, 'put your mind at ease. It's not such a terrible thing you have to be doin'. Doctor, let me tell you somethin'. We O'Days come from a long line of dead people.' "

Outside, the wind blew up and drove rain against the windows. I looked out and saw cars passing, their lights reflected in the wet pavement. "That's a wonderful story," I said.

"Ever since it was told to me," he said, "I've carried the line around with me. For don't we all come from a long line of dead people?"

"Yes."

"Your tale of the club put me in mind of it. Thirty-one men, and one by one they go to their graves, and the last man left starts it all over again. A long line of dead men, stretching back through the centuries."

"All the way to Babylon, rumor has it."

"All the way to Adam," he said. "All the way to the first fish that grew hands and hauled himself ashore. Is some bastard killing these men of yours?"

"It looks that way."

"Can you tell who it is?"

"No," I said, "I can't. It's one of them or it's not, and either way it makes no sense that I can see. One of them gave me some money at the start, and I worked hard for it, but I don't know that I did anything useful. And now they've gone in together to give me more money, and I took it, but I don't know what the hell I'll do to earn it."

"You'll find him."

"I don't see how. I don't even know what to do next. I haven't got a clue."

"Just wait."

"Wait?"

"How many are left? Fourteen?"

"Fourteen."

"Bide your time," he said. "And when there's but one of them left, arrest him."

And, a little while later, he said, "They've a memorial in Washington, a wall with the names of all who died over there. You've seen it?"

"Only in photos."

"I thought, What the hell do I want to go there for? I know what it looks like. I know his name. I could print it out if I cared to, and hang it on a wall of my own. But something made me go. I can't explain it.

"I rode down on the train. I took a taxi from the station and told the driver I wanted to see the Vietnam Memorial. It wasn't far at all. It's just a wall, you know, with a simple shape to it. But you said you've seen photographs, so you know what it looks like.

"I looked at it and I started reading the names. 'A long line of dead men.' That was a long line of dead men. Thousands of names in no particular order, and only one name among them that meant a thing to me, so why was I reading the others? And how would I ever find his in the midst of them?

"I overheard someone telling someone else where to go to locate a name, and I stopped reading the names and went over to the directory and found out where his name was. I was afraid they might have left it off, but no, it was there, all right. And I found it on the wall. Just his name, Dennis Edward Ballou.

"I looked at that name," he said, "and my throat closed up, and I felt an awful fullness in the center of my chest, as if I'd taken a blow there. The letters of his name blurred in front of me, and I had to blink to clear my vision, and I thought I might weep. I haven't done that since I was a boy. I'd taught myself not to weep when my father hit me, and it was a lesson I learned too well. I'd have been glad of a few tears that day, but I'm long past them. They've dried up within me, they've gone and turned to dust.

"But I could not get away from that great fucking monument. I read his name again and again, and then I read the name before his and the one after, and then I walked along and read more names. I was there for hours. How many names did I read? I could not hope to tell you. And from time to time I would go back and find his name again, and look at it.

"I'd thought I would stay the night, see something of the city. I'd booked a room at a hotel across the street from the White House. But I was at the wall until the sun went down, and then I walked until I came to a bar, and I went in and had a drink. Then I went to another bar, and another, and then I bought a bottle and took a taxi back to Union Station.

"I took the first train out, and I left the bottle unopened until the stop at Wilmington, Delaware. Then I broke the seal and had a drink, and by the time we were back in New York the bottle was empty. And I might have been drinking well water for all the effect it had on me. I caught a cab at Penn Station and came right here, and Andy Buckley was waiting to tell me there'd been a phone call from a friend of ours in the Bronx. A fellow we needed to find had been seen going into a certain house off Gun Hill Road.

"So Andy drove, and we went up to Gun Hill Road and found this fellow. And I beat him to death with my hands."

"Tell me," he said. "What was your father like?"

"I'm not sure I know. He was dead before I was grown."

"Was he a cop himself?"

"Oh, God, no."

"I thought perhaps it was a family thing."

"Not at all. He did, oh, different things."

"Did he drink?"

"That was one of the things he did," I said. "He mostly worked for other people, but a couple of times he was in business for himself. The one I remember best was a shoe store. That was up in the Bronx. It was this two-story building, and we lived upstairs of the store."

"And he sold shoes."

"Children's shoes, mostly. And work shoes, those steel-toed boots they wear on construction sites. It was a neighborhood store and people would bring their kids in once a year for new shoes, and there was an X-ray machine you stood at and you could see the bones of your feet and tell if you needed new shoes yet."

"Couldn't you just pinch the shoes and see where the toes reached to?"

"I guess you could, and I guess that's why you don't see those machines anymore, but they were the latest thing when he had the store. I wonder what all those X rays did to your feet. Nobody worried about them at the time, but nobody worried about asbestos then, either."

"If you live long enough," he said, "you find out there's nothing on earth that's good for you. What became of the store?"

"I guess it failed, or maybe he sold it. One day we had to move, and that was the last I saw of the store. I went looking for it years later and the whole street was gone, bulldozed and paved over when they widened the Cross-Bronx Expressway."

"Is that where you grew up? The Bronx?"

"We moved around a lot," I said. "The Bronx, Upper Manhattan, Queens. My grandparents on my mother's side lived in the East New York section of Brooklyn, and a couple of times my parents separated and we wound up living with them. Then they'd get back together again and we'd start over in a new apartment somewhere."

"How old were you when he died?"

"Fourteen." I'd switched some time ago from coffee to Perrier, and I picked up my glass and took a good look at the little bubbles. "He was riding the subway," I said, "the Fourteenth Street line, the Double-L train. They just call it the L now, they took one of its letters away. I suppose it's an economy move.

"He was riding between two cars. He'd gone there so he could smoke, and he fell, and the wheels tore him up."

"Ah, Jesus."

"It must have been quick," I said, "and he would almost have had to be drunk, don't you think? Who but a drunk would think it was a good idea to ride between the cars like that?"

"What did he drink?"

"My dad? Whiskey. He might have a beer with his meals, but if he was going to drink it was whiskey, whiskey and soda. Blended stuff. Three Feathers, Four Roses. Carstair's. I don't even know if those brands still exist, but that's what he drank."

"Mine drank wine."

"I never saw wine in the house. For all I know, my old man never had a glass of wine in his life."

"Mine bought it by the gallon. He bought it from a man who made it, another Frenchman. And he drank marc. Have you ever had that?"

"I'm not even sure I know what it is. Some kind of brandy?"

He nodded. "After you've made wine, you make a brandy from the spent grapes. The Italians make much the same thing and call it grappa. By either name it's the nastiest thing you could ever have the misfortune to drink. I had some in France, in the town where he was born, and it was all I could do to swallow it and keep it down. It was still another French immigrant he got it from. There were a lot of the French in this part of the city, you know. They worked in the hotels and restaurants, many of them, and some like my father worked in the meat market." He took a drink. "Did he hit you, your father? When the drink was on him?"

"Jesus, no. He was the gentlest man who ever lived."

"Was he then."

"He was a quiet man," I said, "and he was sad. I suppose you could say he was despairing. When he drank he would get happy. He would sing songs and, I don't know, just be silly. Then he would go on drinking and wind up sadder than when he started. But I never saw him get angry and I certainly never knew him to hit anyone."

"Mine was quiet, too. The bastard never said a word." He filled his glass. "His English wasn't good and he had a thick accent. You were hard put to understand the man. But he spoke so rarely it scarcely mattered. He was free with his hands, though."

"He hit you?"

"He hit all of us. Not her, for I believe he was terrified of her. Like an elephant afraid of a mouse, him a big hulking brute and herself a wee slip of a woman. But she could do more damage with her tongue than he ever did with his fists." He tilted his head and looked up at the stamped-tin ceiling. "I got my size from him," he said, "and I got it early. He would beat me without a word and I took his beatings without a word, and then one day when I was not quite sixteen it was a time too many, and I didn't even flinch when he slapped me but stood my ground and hit him with my closed fist, hit him right in the mouth. He stood wide-eyed at the wonder of it and I hit him again and knocked him down, and I picked up a wooden chair and held it over my head, and I was going to hit him with it, and I might have killed him that way. It was a heavy fucker of a chair, for all that my anger made it feel as light as balsa wood.

"And he broke out laughing. He was sprawled on the floor with blood running out of his mouth and I was about to break a chair over his head, and he was laughing. I had never heard the man laugh before, and as far as I know he never laughed again, but he laughed that day. It saved his fucking life, and saved me from as black a sin as a man can commit. I put the chair down and took his hand and drew him to his feet, and he clapped me on the back and walked off without a word. And never hit me again.

"A year later I was living in a place of my own, collecting on the waterfront for a couple of Italians and stealing whatever I could. And a year after that he was dead."

"How did he die?"

"A blood vessel in the brain. It was very sudden, no warning. He was almost twenty years older than my mother, and older when he died than I am now. The man was forty-five years old when I was born, so he'd have been what, sixty-two when he died? He was working when it happened. He'd been to mass that morning, so I suppose he died in a state of grace. I don't know if that truly makes a difference. I know he died with a cleaver in his hand, and wearing a bloody apron. I kept them both, you know, the cleaver and the apron. I wear the apron when I go to mass. And there have been times I've found a use for the cleaver."

"I know."

"Indeed you do. He went to mass every morning, and I don't know why he went or what he thought it did for him. I don't know why I go, either, or what I think it does for me." He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Your mother's not alive still, is she?"