Paradise Alley (16 page)

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He couldn't get his mind past how the reb soldier had fallen. Like a thing. Like a bullet or a shell fragment, random and unthinking and blindly destructive.

One moment he had been running across a field, as alive as Tom was himself. Scared but exhilarated, too, once Tom's bullet had pegged off to his left. Trying to remember just what it was he was supposed to be doing, Tom knew, trying to get to a low spot in the farmer's wall.

And then—that lieutenant had stepped forward and he was no longer a man at all. Just a dead thing, falling to earth.

“Did ya see how they came? Did ya see it, then?” Snatchem asked him for the hundredth time that day, still shaking his head in disbelief.

“Yes, I saw it, George. I saw it all right,” Tom told him softly, chewing on a straw. Wishing he had a smoke to roll.

That was the thing about the army. Things just weren't to be had sometimes, and usually when you needed them the most. Not like in the City, where maybe you couldn't afford what you wanted but there was always
some way
to have it, if you wanted it bad enough—

They were sitting in a haystack, a few miles from Harrisburg, in a field outside the operating hospital. Trying to stay upwind from the
stench of the surgical tents, the plague of flies swarming around the buckets full of lopped-off arms and legs.

Tom still thinking about the reb he had picked up. Still unable to get his mind around how the man had fallen. Like a thing. The bayonet in the man's dead hands ripping through his leg the way he had seen so many things, so much lead and iron and steel, rip through men and horseflesh—

“Did ya ever see that many in your life? Did ya ever see 'em come like
that?
”

“No. No, I never did,” Tom repeated patiently.

For the truth was, he never had seen anything like it. The rebs' charges were usually ferocious, disordered things. That was what made them so terrifying. The men busting loose like wild dogs, as if they could not be held back anymore. They would come screaming and yelling their terrible yell—moving over the ground with incredible, unnerving speed.

On the last day, though, they had marched out as if they were on parade. Banners waving high, in one long, orderly wave after another, some of the officers even on horseback. Moving out silently and deliberately across the road, and down into the fields.

Their own ranks had fallen silent as they watched. Giving over their jeers and chants for the moment, maddened though they still were over the bloody fighting of the day before, and all the defeats and deprivations they had had to endure trying to run down these rebel sons of bitches for the past two years.

Then the hares had come, streaks of brown and white, running flat-out before them. How anything had remained alive out there, in those fields between the lines for the past two days, Tom did not know, but there they were, bursting out through the wheat and the high grass. Running in their zigzagging, flat-eared, panicked rabbit way.

A few of the men laughed and pointed to them, making as if to spear them on their bayonets. The veterans watching more soberly. Thinking of how the rabbits, and the birds and the deer had burst out of the Wilderness when Jackson had turned the flank at Chancellorsville, catching them at their supper bivouacs—

The men kept coming out from the trees. One regiment after another, marching in stately procession. They had been stunned by the sheer, pointless beauty of it. The rebs had even stopped to dress
the line, when they were still only halfway across the flowing green-and-gold fields. Each man reaching out to touch the shoulder of the man next to him, and drawing up to fill the gaps left by those who had been already cut down. The rebs still took their time about it, even as the cannon balls and the sharpshooters' bullets continued to punch new holes in the line, like a man kicking the slats out of a picket fence, one at a time. Moving at their own, mysterious pace until at last their exercise was complete, their ranks presenting a tidier, better packed target for the canister and their muskets than ever before. And on they came, men moving out of the grass. Men and grass.

“What were they thinking of?”

“I don't know,” Tom told him. “I don't know as anyone was thinkin' anything at all, from what I seen of it.”

“They could've had twice that many. Twice that many men, an' they still wouldn't a taken a position like ours.”

“No.”

“Did they think their big guns killed us all, then? Did they think that big noise made us all run away?”

The bombardment before the assault had been endless. More guns than Tom had ever heard before, rattling his teeth. Making the ground shake from across the slight valley and the sunken road where they were lined up, axle to axle, in front of the trees. But nearly everything they fired went high. Spreading havoc in the back ranks, among the general staff and the artillery caissons, but whistling over where
they,
the infantry, lay flat on their bellies, deafened and shaken, but shielded by the low stone wall. Even sharing a smile or two at the distress of their commanders and the artillery men, scrambling and diving for cover, and trying in vain to hold on to their horses.

“Officers,” Tom said.

“What?”

“Officers,” he repeated. “You saw it at Fredericksburg. Same thing, only on their side. Officer gets some idea in his head.”

“But it didn't make any sense!”

“It don't have to make sense. They're just officers, for all their airs. It's like with the boys down the Black Joke. Someone gets an idea goin' an' then the rest go along, whether it's a good one or no. An' then it all gets carried away.”

The whole thing had been carried away.
Three days,
out there in the terrible sun, and the heat and the flies. It was a wonder any of them had come through it at all. His face shoved into the loamy, black Pennsylvania dirt, hoping some chance shell wouldn't land on top of him. Thinking how good the soil was, no wonder the neat Dutch farms they passed looked so fine and prosperous. The horses shiny with fat, barns built like Fifth Avenue mansions, the strange, pagan symbols over their doors—

“Willya look at that. Wedged right in there.”

Snatchem was worrying over his hand now, the other object of his preoccupation. Picking at it for the thousandth time, the minié-ball fragment lodged in his palm, neat and firm as a diamond set in a ring on the dollar side of Broadway. Stuck in a web of bones, it had had just enough momentum to catch there, spreading the fingers out so he couldn't make a fist, but not enough force to go on through. The surgeon couldn't pry it out, though he had tried with the red-hot pincers until Snatchem was screaming in pain. He offered to amputate the hand, then shrugged and turned away when his offer was declined. There were legs waiting to come off—

They were lucky, the two of them.
They both had good wounds. Not so much to really cripple a man, but enough to end their campaign—at least for now. It was the Invalid Corps for them both, and a few months of guard duty somewhere until their enlistment was up. No more chasing Bobby Lee back down into Virginia.

A good wound—though Tom was surprised by how it had hurt. The steel had plunged through the muscle of his calf. Much more painful, at least at first, than when he'd been shot back at Fredericksburg, and the ball had punched a hole out his back the size of a man's fist—

The reb, falling like any other spent shot—

He had heard the veterans talk about it, but he had never seen it himself. Picking out one man on a field.
It wasn't what you were supposed to do.
The officers told them again and again not to aim. What they wanted was massed volleys, fired in time, into massed flesh.

But it had happened anyway. Tom had spotted the man a hundred yards out from the wall, once the rebs' spectacular, parade-ground
line had dissolved. The few grey soldiers left had made a final rush for the wall, and Tom had picked him out. Skin burned nut brown from so many days tramping the roads of Maryland and Pennsylvania. A lean man, with a stubborn chin and small eyes. Wearing a pair of purloined red Zouave pants, and the regular grey See-cesh infantry cap on his head. No shoes at all—

Tom had led him, waiting for his shot. The man crossing the last few yards after having come so far, after coming all the way across the murderous, mile and a half of open fields behind him. Running for the waist-high stone wall behind which Tom stood. Running as fast as he could now, not yelling, the way the rest of them had started to, but simply running with his mouth open, with his head lowered and his bayonet held out, belt-buckle high.

The reb had looked up then—and seen Tom there. Tom was sure of it, even through all the smoke from the guns, and their volleys. The man's stride breaking for just a step or two, a dozen yards from the wall, as he spotted Tom's musket lined up on him.
Seeing his own death, standing up right before him.
But still he came on, there was nowhere else to go—

Tom had fired then—and missed him. The shot whistling a little wide to the left, Tom cursing his damned, shoddy piece. The reb pulled up for a moment, then came on faster than ever, reprieved. Tom knew, he had felt it before himself.
The wild, ecstatic hope growing in you that of course you wouldn't die, there were so many other
b'hoys
to die, why the Christ should you?

Tom was still ready for him, fixing his bayonet. His gun a spear now, every bit as ancient and reliable. Setting himself in a half crouch, behind the wall.

Goddamn all farmers, with their fences and their walls. Hang up a man like he was stuck on flypaper. But they were good things to be behind.

The man went up the wall. Tom waiting, watching as the reb tried to clear it all in one great leap, not quite making it, his feet slipping at the top, staggering, leaving himself wide open. Tom was crouched down a little more, timing his thrust—when the lieutenant stepped up from out of nowhere and shot the man in the head.

Shot him right through his reb infantry cap, and the man toppled down. Falling too suddenly for Tom to get out of the way. The bayonet
in his dead hands tearing through Tom's calf, piercing his flesh, staking his leg to the ground where he stood.

Tom was just able to swing his own musket around, knock the dead man's hands loose from his gun before the weight tore the muscle off his leg. Then he had to drop his own weapon, in the midst of the battle, and use both hands to pull the musket out of his leg. Screaming from the pain, directing a string of curses at the lieutenant who had already moved off, oblivious, in the din of the fight. Remembering himself enough to snatch up his own gun again so that he stood there with two spears now, one in each hand, and howling like a dog.

The pain had been unbearable. Afterward, though, what had bothered him most was not the meddling of the lieutenant, or the close thing it had been, or even the wound, painful and dangerous as it was. It was, instead, the way that the reb had become a dead thing all at once, a mere projectile. That was what Tom couldn't get over. The man, alive, going up over the wall, dead before he came down. Transformed into another mindless thing of destruction, a fate, a chance. No more than that.

“Did ya ever see such a thing?”

Snatchem shook his head, asking him again.

“No. No, George, I never did.”

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Dolan could hear the screams of the animals long before they got to it. He could smell them, too, the stench of piss and manure, intestines and blood. And then he knew where he was, knew what they were passing:
The Place of Blood.
The roost of slaughterhouses by Houston and Attorney, where his sister's husband, Tom O'Kane, had once gotten him work sweeping the entrails and hooves and ears into the gutter with a birch broom.

There had been something even worse, that he remembered. Not the blood, or the shit—which was, after all, what half the City smelled like anyway—but the smell of fear. The blind, ignorant helplessness of all those goats and sheep and cows, penned in right on top of each other. Waiting and bleating in their own lots, while they could hear and smell the others of their kind being slaughtered next door.

It looked much the same now. The butchers standing outside, to watch the great herd of men pass by. Cleavers and knives still in their hands. Bearded, expressionless faces, arms folded. Their aprons covered with faded red and yellow stains, spread over and over each other like jism stains on flophouse sheets. Some of the men called to them and they came, too, throwing off their aprons and joining in. The thick knives still clutched in their hands, waving them about as if they were off on a holiday.

Dolan walked dully along with them, still in a sort of daze, from the whiskey and seeing Patrick on the street, and all his unfamiliarity still with people. The familiar sight and stench of The Place of Blood confusing him all the more—making it seem like just one more dream from the prison.

He was still ignorant as to where they were headed. He knew it had something to do with the war, from the cries of the men around him, though just what they meant, he could not imagine.

“Three hundred dollars! That's what we're worth to them!”

The war.
He had hardly been aware of it before his ship had reached Galveston, and slipped past the blockade there. He didn't bother with newspapers, and on the boat he kept to himself. Bunking alone in a corner of the coal room where it was too hot for the other men. After those winters in the Sierras, he thought he could never be too warm again, not even here, in New York in July. Just like he thought he could never be too full again after Ireland.

It was only too late you learned about anything, and only then through not having it—

After his escape attempt it had taken him fourteen years to get out of the penitentiary. Fourteen years, for the crime of being in a Montgomery Street pool hall at the wrong time. He had taken it all—the beatings from the guards, and the cold and the snow that blew in through the chinks in the stockade in the winter, and the rain that came through in the spring. And when he thought about it, when he could think about it at all without breaking down into a rage, he thought that it was, after all, no worse than the poorhouse in Cork city.

They walked on up past the slaughterhouses, and the sausage-making shops. The putrid barrels stuffed with offal, waiting to be cleaned for sausage skins. Everything in a row, ready for the degradation of the body down to nothing. The tanners with their reeking, green hides hung out to cure in the sun. The fat-rendering plants, where men with long paddles churned piles of bones and hooves in smoking iron pots. Boiling it down to soap and dye and ash—

They passed the Armory, and the Union Steam Works. There was a police guard outside the Armory, which he expected, but also one outside the Steam Works. The mob jeering and yelling, the cops standing
rigid and unresponsive outside their posts, caps pulled down low over their foreheads, the brass buttons shining on their blue uniforms.

He remembered the officers in the poorhouse, self-important in their shabby green tunics. Sometimes the other men and boys would trade them turnips for poteen—any food at all being worth more than gold—and then they would climb over the wall into the girls' yard with their clear little bottles. He never did himself, he was always too hungry to give up one of his turnips, even for that. But at night he would climb up and see them at it: the shadowy figures pushing and grunting, up against the brickyard wall.

It was all done quietly, so as not to wake the priest who was in charge of the house. There was hardly any talking, just the rustle of clothes and bodies, an occasional groan or sob. And once he had seen his own sister, Kathleen, up against the wall, the dark shape of a man leaning into her. As he watched she had pulled her head away to the side and coughed. Then she had plucked the bottle out of the pocket of the man who was on her, and taken a long, hard draw on it before she put it back—vanishing back into the blackness of his embrace.

It had been the same thing in the yard in California. The men on their knees, in front of the guards.
He
had never done such a thing, he had sworn to himself he would kill a guard with his knife before he did that, though he knew that was a lie, too.
After fourteen years he would have done anything necessary, anything at all to survive, even that.

The truth was that no one had ever tried to make him. He knew that he must have seemed too hideous, and he was content to remain so, with his jagged teeth, the old scars crisscrossing his head. Content to ward off trouble just through how he looked and acted, growling like a dog at the guards or the other inmates if they got too close. Trying to keep them off, to keep down the insistent urge to smash, and kill. To keep down the even more insistent need to die before he could get back to the City, and settle what was his—

Then one day it was over. Then some day marked on a calendar, after fourteen years, he was a free man, and they gave him back his clothes—the old jacket and pants he had once worn in New York, now holey and hanging loose on him—and a new silver dollar, and told him he was free.

He had walked on out of the stockade, started back to San Francisco on the back of the sutler's wagon. It had taken two weeks, getting the mules to push through the foothills, stopping at every post and new town on the way. More than once he had considered simply killing the sutler—selling off his goods and eating his damned mules, making his way back to San Francisco with some money in his pocket.

But he was barely able to walk free anymore, after so many years of wearing the chains and wife around his ankles. Not able to trust his reflexes, to even trust himself to think straight yet. Forcing himself to wait until he could get down to the waterfront, get his wits about him, get a ship back east again.

Even then, the night before he was to sail, he had stayed up in his flophouse room, down by the Embarcadero, nursing a bottle of camphene whiskey. Thinking of how long it would be, the sail down to Panama, then across the Strait by mule again, and back up through the Caribbean. The same way he had come—and all because he had thought he was meeting the brother.

All the endless passages, and the waiting—just to get back to the same place.

It occurred to him to just give it up. To sign on with a clipper out to the China Sea, or the Sandwich Islands, where Mose the Bowery Boy himself had gone to set up shop. To find someplace, so far away he could forget all about
her—
and about his treasure, and how they had sold him, and all that he was owed. To find someplace so far away he would have no means of getting back.

Or better yet, to do himself right here, this night, in his flophouse room.

But it was
his.
That was what made him stay up, kept him from touching the whiskey bottle again so he didn't get too black. The cabinet of wonders was still his, and
she
was his, and he was due that, he would have that much coming in this world at least, and if he couldn't have it, there would have to be an accounting.

The crowd kept moving uptown, drifting slowly to the west, over to the Third Avenue. Most of them turned off when they reached Forty-sixth Street, but he kept going, on up to where he remembered that Pigtown lay.
Just as glad to be rid of the mob, almost alone now.

He wondered idly over just how many blocks there were—over how far the City had moved since he had seen it last, pulling itself up the island like some wounded beast. Many of the streets he passed were still almost empty, a brownstone mansion or a squatter's shack standing here and there, behind cordons of white string that laid out where the next block, the next curb would go. Along the Fifth Avenue there was what appeared to be either the ruins or the beginnings of an enormous cathedral, its great dark stones covered with yellowed, rain-starved vines and weeds.

Just like the abbey outside Cork, where they had seen the studiolo man—

But he walked on, up to Fifty-ninth Street, and there he saw it, just as he remembered. The huge, slate-grey boulder that marked the beginning of Pigtown. His mind reeling just to see it again after so long a time, after thinking about it for so many years.
He had come all the way back.

Remembering himself, he crouched down behind the boulder, then crawled silently up its side. Thinking to spy it out first, to spy
them
out—though as he remembered, too, the niggers' village was still more uptown, and to the west.
Still, it was better to be careful—

He climbed up over the rock and saw before him—a lawn. A real lawn, such as he had seen only once before, on a deserted Cork manor he had trespassed on as a boy. The grass green and manicured, looking soft and undulant as a bed. And all around it was a fairy-tale land, like nothing he had ever seen in the City, or even back on that lord's manor in Cork.

It was as if someone had built the land, had laid it out and sculpted it with their hands as carefully and precisely as they might build a house. Everywhere, around the perfect grass, there were gently curving raked lanes, and lily ponds. There were bridges with intricate, crafted iron railings, and charming little shingled sheds, and here and there were planted clumps of slim new sapling trees. And all of it, no matter which way he looked, seemed to draw his eye away, toward a distant green vista opening up to the north. To where there were still more patches of gorgeous new lawn, more trees, more sinuous, raked lane.

Everything else—everything that he remembered—was gone. Not just the gulleys and the dirt tracks of Pigtown—the makeshift
homes with stovepipes for chimneys, the scraped dirt yards holding hogs and chickens and the vicious, clamoring dogs.
But the land itself was gone.
The sagging, rock-strewn ground. The bent cottonwood and ailanthus trees, stagnant black ponds of black water.
All gone—
as surely, again, as if some great hand had simply wiped it off the face of the earth.

Dolan did not know what to make of it, wondering if he had gotten it wrong somehow.
But no—there was the great, grey rock; the sign for Fifty-ninth Street, no more than a bunch of deserted lots though it was.
He was here, all right, back where he had started from.
But where was here?

He staggered out over the perfect lawn. Abandoning his caution for the moment, looking for some trace of what had been—something to guide himself by. But it was all gone. And not just Pigtown, with its clumsy shacks—the hogs rooting among the discarded bottles, the broken plates and knives and bones that surrounded each shanty like a fairy ring of garbage. As he walked up one of the meandering lanes with its quaint little cast-iron bridges, he could find no sign of the Nigger Village, either. The whole town, with its neat white saltbox houses, and its two churches—vanished just as completely, replaced by only more immaculate squares of turf and the freshly planted sapling trees.

At every curve and path, he noticed, there were little signs pounded into the grass, and he went to read them, thinking they might provide some clue as to where everyone had gone or at least who now owned this place. Yet all they said was the same, two runic words:
keep off.

Instead he dropped to his hands and knees on the ground. Trying to sniff it out, to smell some hidden indication of what had happened here. To smell
them
out.