Exile on Bridge Street (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

The Butcher's Apron

A
PRIL
, 1916

“L
IAM
,”
A
VOICE
SAYS
TO
ME
, and I feel a poking in my back. I sit up and open my eyes and see the bars, zoo bars they seem, and on the other side of them is Head Patrolman William Brosnan in dark police blue, his face covered by an open newspaper, legs crossed on the angled desk. The thudding pain through my head begins to beat. I want only to sleep away from things. To let myself off from this. Sleep being my only escape. I lie back again.

I am among three other teenagers sleeping off a drunk, curled up and rag-haired and open-mouthed on the cement floor. Inside the cell and awake next to me is the bony face of Richie Lonergan staring forward on a bench and stern and untroubled by guilt. Next to him is the long Cinders Connolly, dockboss of the Fulton and Jay Street Terminals with his toothy smile and hair falling in thick shards over the shorn sides above his ears.

“They let us starve,” I mumble, falling asleep on the cold pavement floor behind bars. I can't really say why that sentence comes to my lips. But it does. It comes as if it had been whispered in my ear while I slept. Or told me so many times as a baby that it has become so ingrained that there is no stopping it from bubbling, circling through the many thoughts that cross my dreaming mind confusedly. A backdrop. In the distance but always there. April of 1916 being a month and year never to be forgotten, true, but the long history behind it. Deep in our minds. There for us. Always. “They let us starve.”

I dream off. Into the black I go; the bright of day is painful to my eyes; I am then enclosed in a constant rain. A crack in the cement floor where I lie, and in my dreaming becomes a great fissure where we are all separated by a flood that opens into an ocean until I flinch and wake. Open my eyes again. Feel the great pain in my temple and the back of my head. I try to remember why I am in a cell, but my head cannot configure and organize my thoughts. Still dazed. The guiltless childhood gone from me now. Behind me. Brooklyn has its way and takes my purity. The tender boy wrenched open by crime and orphaned by a watery divide. I roll over to my back and lay a hand across my forehead, putting things together best I can.

After beating every man not associated with us, then burning Red Hook, hilarity and drinks ensued the previous night. Our songs bouncing off tenement walls as we strode through them with starry-eyed children in windows watching the midnight celebrants. Watching their heroes in their bands and bunches gloating and crowing at the night, and for taking back power on the waterfront from all those that had challenged us. The rarest of all things Irish being victory, Dinny Meehan's name once again rings out in triumph. His name repeated over and over throughout the night, even though no one ever admits to knowing him.

Then we were arrested. A customary thing for the gang, but the first for myself.

“Ya ain't learned to hold the drink yet,” Cinders says, leaning toward me with a smile, elbows on knees, the gang's youngsters Petey Behan, Timothy Quilty, Matty Martin, and I in various states of awakening on the cell's floor. Abe Harms, Richie's best friend is sitting next to him on the bench whispering whispers to him, as he's known to.

I look back again toward Richie, who has only one leg. Richie Lonergan is the leader of us teenagers not only because his mother and father were in gangs, which makes him royalty, but because he is the fiercest fighter among us and has the coldest of looks in his gray-eyed stare. He even put one of Dinny's dockbosses, Red Donnelly, to sleep in a fistfight that I saw with my own eyes. But Abe Harms gives Richie his ideas through whispers and is always at his ear. In the cell among us there are some eight other men of differing ages and languages. Three of color and plaintive and soliciting barefaced pity from Brosnan and Brosnan's son-in-law, young patrolman Daniel Culkin.

Stretching along the floor and holding my head in pain, I look up to the bars holding us in, and up again I look to the cutting shine and buzz of electricity exposing me to its unnatural light, a knife through my throbbing head. Lying there, I can't remember all that happened over the previous days, only flickering memories that dance remorsefully in my mind. Death and violence still so new to me. And under the cover of the silence that binds all of us in the gang, protects us even, the idea of death churns and circulates in me with the alcohol strewn and diffusing in my blood. Shame colors me, and my thoughts are blackened with the guilt of killing. Killing. Shame cataracts over me. Crushes me. My shy and youthful West Ireland nature bared out. Here now caged by law. My head aching and flat on the hard floor, I cover my eyes from the drone and hum of the straining light above that exposes me. Buzzes in its false burnished shine and bares me to its bright brandishing. Electricity still so rare in the waterfront neighborhoods I'd lived in since emigrating and which did not exist on the farm where I was raised in County Clare, Ireland. I want nothing more than for it all to go away so I can wake again far from here. Far from the terrible things I've done. Far from the thoughts too of my dead uncle, of whom I simply cannot allow myself to think.

The bars that hold me are a sign, I know. A notice of my fault and sinful acts. I am a criminal among criminals. An animal of men, even as I am not yet a man. Still, the world finds me and places me here. Somehow knows that my thoughts flash with the culling of blood and acts of fire and violation. Seeing it in my eyes. Finding me, as law is known to do, locking up offenders.

Of a sudden there are slurs between Richie Lonergan and two other men within the narrows of our cell and quickly we all rise from the cement floor, fists at the ready. I am dizzy and tingling and almost lose my breath, but hold my hands clenched, black spots appearing in my speckled vision.

Cinders is between Richie and the others with his wide hand spread open across the teen's chest as he warns off the two men. Patrolman Culkin is clanking on the bars with a blackjack and a melee between prisoners is somehow avoided. Richie then sits down among the cover of our numbers unaffected by the excitement. Unaffected by anything, ever, it seems. By the look in Richie's gray, high-cheeked eyes, he'd have as much issue in killing a man with his fists as hammering a hot rivet into a steel plate.

A few moments later I watch as Richie unplugs the strut of wood at the end of his leg, unravels the adjoining straps underneath his trousers but does not complain of pain nor discomfort. Just lets the leg breathe and sit there, laying across the bench dumb and limp, scarred where it was hastily sewn shut above the knee when he was eight years old, iron trolley wheels severing it downright. The flat look in his bone-drilled eye sockets revealing a great shortage of the humility and diffidence in which I was raised and know. He and many others reared by families starved out of Ireland during the Great Hunger causes me to think that it wasn't only food they were shorted, but coming across left them barren of the great modesty we are known to possess. Lost to distrust forever and carried down to his generation.

“Are we getting out of here?” I ask, crouching against a wall and pushing hair out of my face.

“We'll be out soon,” Cinders assures with his toothy grin, long broad shoulders leaning forward, coat a size too tight, which reveals his bony wrists and knuckly, muscular hands. A gentler soul, Cinders always has kindness for the people he feels a kinship toward, but to him outsiders can never be trusted and beating them into their place with fists or a cudgel is part of being the dockboss of the Jay Street Terminal and the Fulton Ferry Landing.

“Will we?” I ask.

Cinders nods. Seeing that I am anxious and burdened with fear, he leans close to my ear, “Just don' say nothin'. Ya don' say a thing to these tunics. Don' answer the questions, just say ya don' know. Nothin' else. Ya never heard o' nobody named Joe Garrity. Ya don' even know anyone named Liam Garrity, right? Ya don' know no one named Dinny Meehan and ya don' even know me either. . . . I don' know you. What's ya name?”

“Patrick Kelly,” I say, having been trained to know the answer to that question.

“Petey? What's ya name?” he whispers.

“Patrick Kelly,” Petey Behan says, yet leers in my direction.

“Who's Dinny Meehan?”

“Don' know,” we all whisper back like good students.

Cinders smiles again, nods and looks out the bars toward Brosnan and Culkin, “Everyone's Patrick Kelly.”

Through the bars I look toward Brosnan myself, the Head Patrolman at the Poplar Street Station. He looks back toward us with a look of concern over his newspaper. He is a man on the take, Brosnan is. But no one talks about it. When we burned Red Hook and took back the docks on that day for legends, he was paid to look the other way until after we'd finished. Then he came with the cuffs and a big black Irish cigar hanging out the side of his head. We called his like “tunics,” because that's what they wore, big blue tunic coats like the bobbies in London. An Irishman from Dublin, he spends his take on his pregnant daughter—Patrolman Culkin's wife. His relationship to Dinny is complicated though, but officially they are enemies, Brosnan seeing Dinny as a low-classed Famine-Irish descendent, Dinny seeing Brosnan as a “souper,” which in the old country referred to those who were bribed out of their Catholic religion, toward English Protestantism for a bowl of soup to quell the rattles of hunger. Giving away our sacred ways to the enemy of us. The enemy who let us starve if we didn't turn. That's how we all felt about an Irishman who wore the tunic of Anglo-Saxon law. British or American, didn't matter.

But the concern in Brosnan's wrinkles is valid. A patrolman's salary is barely enough to pay for a working class tenement, the cheapest rooms in the same neighborhood that is run by Dinny Meehan's men. Not only is he reliant on Dinny's money so he can one day retire, but he also has no choice but to accept Dinny's handouts. If refused, his safety walking around the streets of Brooklyn after dark could not be guaranteed, as Dinny Meehan controls everything there. Everyone pays Dinny Meehan tribute. For most people, paying tribute to Dinny means giving part of their earnings. For patrolmen, it means accepting money.

When, one day, great change comes to New York as it has all along, and the rising current against gangs in Brooklyn sweeps William Brosnan in, his loyalty to the vows he has given to the letter of the law will be questioned. When this happens, he will be made to choose between the law that employs him, or to Dinny Meehan. Brosnan knows that if and when change finally comes to Brooklyn and the gangs are outlawed—as they already have been in Manhattan—a terrible and bloody surge will separate us all. A surge that could easily take his life, or that of his son-in-law Culkin. Or any of us.

From my cell I watch Brosnan look away from the newspaper for a moment, worried. The black cigar wriggling from the side of his mouth and the forehead of him made long by the comb-back, wet-black hair. He knows what Patrick Kelly means. He knows because he's Patrick Kelly too. Right along with us, even though he is not as vigorous and dependent to loyalty as we are. He knows the consequence of spiting that code, too. Our code put forth by Dinny Meehan and the violent and looming men around him that enforce it, such as The Swede, Vincent Maher, and Tommy Tuohey and many others who will never bow to Anglo-American law. Never, for it's bred in them.

Yes, the worried wrinkles on Brosnan's face as he looks upon us are valid, surely. Because when the time comes that he must choose, both himself and his son-in-law will be caught in the rising flood and the ripping currents of clashing wills. The tumult of change is forever hardest come in the old insulated neighborhoods of New York City. “Here t'is,” Brosnan's voice booms out, pulling the newspaper back up to his face. “Listen to this headline: ‘Riots on the Brooklyn Waterfront Claim Six Lives: Seventy-Nine Reported Injuries: Two Missin'.”

Brosnan reads on of “the staggerin' evidence of this borough's gang infestation” and how two men were murdered on Tuesday in a Red Hook saloon that was torched afterward, four more in front of the New York Dock Company and then yesterday “a band o' men moved from pier to pier and laid down their own brand of law, culminatin' in the fire-bombin' o' the New York Dock Company's land holdin's and the International Longshoremen's Association stronghold at the Red Hook docks” and the next part he reads makes Cinders chuckle, “We believe we have the leader in custody; his name is John ‘Non' Connors.”

“Why do they think Non's the leader?” Tim Quilty asks next to me, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “He's one o' us, he ain't no leader.” Cinders shooshes him.

“'Cause that's what they was told, right, Cinders?” Petey says from the floor, not so much a question as an indictment. “Right, Brosnan?”

“Shut ya head.” Patrolman Culkin stares at Petey through the bars and out of the side of his head, the police cap tilted over an eye. Crossing in front of Brosnan on the other side of the bars as us, Culkin wields his blackjack and points it at Petey and threatens to take him out of the cell for a ripe beating. But Petey Behan never stops talking. He is the blathering type, to be sure. I look at him with his wide shoulders and short build standing next to Richie and Abe now and threatening Patrolman Culkin in kind. Being short always seems to make Petey more aware of other people's weaknesses. Mine being fear, he pounces on me for it. But we are on opposite sides for many reasons, Petey Behan and myself. He, along with all of Richie Lonergan's teenage followers were always closer to Bill Lovett's side, while it is to Dinny Meehan I pay respects, along with most others. Years earlier Lovett was the leader of the Jay Street Gang, Jay Street running parallel to Bridge Street, where Dinny's White Hand Gang was headquartered. In a deal making Lovett the dockboss of Red Hook, Dinny enveloped the members of the Jay Street Gang into The White Hand before I ever arrived in Brooklyn. But Bill Lovett would never be as loyal to Dinny as his other dockbosses. And neither would Bill's followers, like Petey Behan and the other boys.