Paradise Alley (5 page)

Each of them looked relieved to see someone else out on the otherwise deserted street. Waiting where they did every morning, to fill their buckets at the green wooden Croton hydrant that lay beneath the shadow of Sweeney's Shambles.

Paradise Alley was not really a street or even an alley at all. Rather it was a passageway, never more than nine feet wide, that led into the Shambles—the huge, connected double tenement on Cherry Street
that loomed above them, its walls and even its windows perpetually blackened with coal soot. Ruth and her family rented rooms just outside the tenement, in one of the few remaining houses crammed into the tail end of the block, where it slanted down toward the south and west. Most of the houses less than thirty feet deep and twenty-five wide, two stories apiece and another half story, which served as workshops for the tailors and carpenters and shoemakers who had first rented them. Not that there was anyone left on Paradise Alley with such skills anymore—

The Croton spigot was the only one for three blocks, so women came from all over the Fourth Ward—the Jews from the next block, and the women from the tenement, and even Deirdre, swapping stories and telling tales. Most days they liked to extend this chore, chatting and watching idly as their children tried to murder one another in the street.

Today, though, they were more taciturn, almost tongue-tied. Scuffing at the ground with their shoes and fiddling with the wooden buckets. Tersely sharing what bits of news they had.

“I hear they're goin' out at Owen's, and the Novelty—”

“Henry says any shop what don't turn out, they'll burn.”

“They burn the whole town, they can—”

Their voices low and jumpy. Filling the buckets quickly, anxious to be back inside, behind their own shuttered windows and bolted doors.

“Why would men
do
such things?”

“They won't do 'em,” snorted Mrs. McGillicuddy, a towering Kerryonian from the Shambles. She wore her hair tied up in an even higher topknot, against the heat, and Ruth could see the exposed white skin along her neck already turning a bright shade of pink.

“They get in ten blocks of the telegraph office, they'll be shot down like dogs,” Mrs. McGillicuddy insisted, her hands stuck on her hips, as if challenging any of the others to contradict her.

“The same goes for the armory, or City Hall, or any codfish Republican's home. You know it as well's I do.”

“
Then
what'll they do?”

They all fell silent. Knowing only too well what the men were likely to do then, what they did whenever they were frustrated. If they could not get to the mighty and powerful, it was all the more likely they would come on the block. This street of tenements, of whores
and niggers and half-castes, open to all—for all to do as they liked. Yet even as they realized their common danger, their talk became more fractious, echoing the arguments of the men.

“Can ya blame them, though? Three hundred dollars it is, and a man can buy his way out—”

“An' no exemptions for the fire laddies, or the police! No other exemptions at'all!”

The complaints tumbling out. Ruth, and the women of color, and the other white women who were married to Negro men lowering their eyes as if they were somehow responsible.

“I hear the abolitionists is puttin' all the good Irish men in the front lines.”

“
I
hear they're bringin' a hundred thousand freed slaves to the City, to take their jobs—”

“Me sister's husband went for nothin', went off right away an' got his leg shot off in Virginie. What good is he now, I want t'know?”

“Beggin' for money from the City, like some street whore—”

“Can ye blame them? Three hundred dollars an' ye can buy yer way out, just like that! When for a thousand, you can buy yourself a whole—”

The woman trailed off in mid-sentence. The Irish conscious at last of the others in their midst. Ruth took it all in. Saying nothing, but thinking of how Billy would jump up from his chair with the newspaper, dancing about in his rage whenever he read anything about the money.

Three hundred dollars? Three hundred dollars! Goddamnit, but I'd go to the war for half that! For nothin' at all!

She had been hurt, because she was sure that he meant it, and made him stop his talk.

What would we live on, then? Have ya thought a that? What would we live on then?—
though it didn't matter. The government was not taking any black soldiers, for all the wardheelers loved to harp on it in their street-corner orations:

Ya don't see a single black face among the ranks then, do ya? Ya see all the faces of Ireland, doin' their duty an' fightin' for the Union, but ye don' see a black face among 'em. They're just markin' their time, waitin' to take your job, your wife—

“Here's herself now. Up bright an' early for once.”

Even the black women nodded in agreement, happy to change the subject.

“She'll bring the devil down on us today. Wait if you don't see—”

Ruth looked down the street to see Maddy Boyle walking toward them with her bucket. Moving with that free, open-legged gait that made them all stop to watch her, men and women alike.
Maddy the Whore.
She walked with her head down, the usual, slightly lopsided grin on her face, as if she was nurturing some secret joke.

“God bless all here,” she said very loudly when she came up to them, looking them each directly in the face, the edges of her mouth twitching with mirth now.

The women nodded curt hellos, or stiffened and moved away, depending upon their morality. Yet there was something more to their reaction today than gossip and resentment, Ruth thought. They seemed almost spooked by Maddy, shying away from her when she came near like skittish horses.

Men came to Maddy's house—they all knew that. Day or night, brassily ringing the little bell out front, or giving some prearranged tap, as soft as a pigeon's wing upon her door. Butchers and longshoremen, and sailors striding bowlegged down the street as if they could scarcely keep it between their legs. Gentlemen, looking dismayed and furtive. Black men and white men, Irishmen and Yankees. They came two and three at a time, while Ruth wondered if she made them wait downstairs in the kitchen.

And sometimes there were disturbances in the night, drunken singing and fighting out in the street. Ruth always liked to look out from their bedroom window just to see, wondering at the thought of all those men fighting over Maddy. Other families on the street cursed at her from their windows, and threatened to run her out. Maddy held her own, cursing back at them like a sailor until they put out their lights and slammed their windows shut again. They had always been a little intimidated by her. She had some rich gentleman who kept her in the house, and her prices were beyond what anyone on the block could afford. Their sons and husbands acted stupefied when she walked by, the women muttering about her casting spells.

She took her place in the bucket line, still wearing her secret smile
and a fine, embroidered frock. It was yellow as a summer daisy and indecently thin to wear outside. Nothing more than a dressing gown, dearer than any dress any of the other women at the pump owned, but stained with dirt and ash, maybe even a little blood. Maddy oblivious to both how fine it was, and how it looked. When she caught the other women staring at her, she only grinned back, making eyes at them and sticking her tongue out like a madwoman.

“She's the one.” Mrs. McGillicuddy nodded significantly, not bothering to keep her voice down. “She's the one we got to look out for.”

The others all knew what she meant.

“Sure, she'll bring 'em right down upon us—”

Maddy seemed not to hear them, rocking slowly back and forth where she was. Still grinning her little smile, the tongue lolling out of her mouth.
Like a child,
Ruth thought. Then her head snapped up—and she jerked an enormous, ancient pistol out from the folds of her dress, laughing when the women closest to her fell back over themselves.

“What do I care if they do?” she exclaimed triumphantly, turning around and around in the street, waving it at them all. “They'll get more'n they wanted if they do!”

“Jaysus, put that away before y'do some real damage with it!”

Mrs. McGillicuddy tried to sound scornful, but even she could not hide the fright in her face.

“Ya see? The girl don't have a half-wit a sense.”

“She'll bring it all down on our heads!”

That was the fear they shared. Maddy brought men, and men brought trouble. Even so, Ruth had an irresistible urge to go up to her, to ask her about the gun.

“D'ya really know how to use it?”

Maddy turned her gaze on her, and Ruth smiled without thinking. How pretty, how young she still looked, Ruth thought—as opposed to her own self. She doubted if Maddy really knew who she was, for all their years living on the block together, but she smiled radiantly back at her nonetheless, as if they were the oldest of friends.

“Sure, what's there to know?”

Maddy shrugged grandly, brandishing the weapon before her.

“It's a gun, you pull the trigger.”

“And you could kill a man with it? Just like that?”

“In a trice!” Maddy told her. “Just let 'em try a thing with me!”

She handed the pistol over to Ruth, who balanced the barrel gingerly in her palm as she thought about it.

Just one shot. Just one clear shot and that would take care of even Johnny Dolan—

•
5
•

The soft, pink nose nuzzled his cheek, pushing him gently but insistently out of his sleep. He blinked up at a pair of moist blue eyes, hovering above him, sensitive and inquiring.

He swung himself up at once, fully conscious now. The eyes already dropping back, disappointed—but still he swatted at the inquisitive, rubbery nose. The creature skittering away down the alley, oinking querulously.

“Get on with ya!”

He had laid down with pigs before, but there were stories of them eating men who had gotten too drunk in the Water Street alleys. When the beast lingered optimistically, Dolan tossed an empty bottle after it, chasing it off into the street. Then he twisted around, leaning on the brick wall he had been lying against to hoist himself up, grabbing up his bedroll and the little sailor's bag of his belongings. Carefully checking to make sure they were all still there, along with the boots on his feet, the shiv and the razor hidden in their sides and soles, the slung shot in his pocket.

He stretched, and turned back toward the wall to urinate. Studying, as he did, the other still forms that lay in the piled muck and garbage of the alleyway, buried beneath old coats and scraps of newspaper. Wondering if they would be worthwhile. The chances were great they had already been picked clean by a bartender or lushroller, but who knew, maybe the stench had put them off—

He kicked the closest man over with his foot. His face lolled back, yellowed as varnish. An overcoat wrapped around his body, even in this heat. Dolan had rummaged through his pants and vest before he realized he was dead. He stood back up, crooking his head to one side as if to study the man, divine his secret.

How was it so easy to slip off this life?

He kicked at the bum's little feet, as shriveled as the rest of him. Not even a pair of good boots on him, the patent leather worn through with holes the size of silver dollars. He kicked at him once more before he left him.

Lucky for you, then.

He stood at the mouth of the alley. Completely still, the way he always was while he tried to decide what to do next. Giving away nothing, committing himself to nothing, only his eyes flickering all around him, taking everything in.

All of it so much the same, even after so many years. The rancid fish stink of the waterfront, human and animal waste bobbing openly in the water. The aroma of coffee and ginger and cinnamon, nutmeg and lemons and oranges piled up in their crates. The ships tied up to the wharf like so many racehorses, their black bowsprits craning out over the street, straining at their hawsers.

Fourteen years.
Yet here he was again.

His joints and back ached from his night in the alley, and he rubbed the few coins he had in his pocket together, ruminating upon them.
Get a room today or go out looking?
Nice to have a place, a place of his own, even if it was only for a few hours. A hole to rest and figure in, and lay his sailor's bag.

But any place he could afford was bound to be a flea pit, somewhere he'd have to watch his back and his things night and day. Worse yet, it was one more chance for him to be recognized, the other boarders or the proprietor sticking their noses into his business. Trotting off to the police, perhaps, to see if the reward was still good over that business he had had with Old Man Noe, so many years ago.

No, better to keep walking. No sense coming all the way around, five thousand miles, just to end up hanging from a gibbet—

He had made sure to get off the gangplank in a hurry, keeping his eyes down. You never knew who might be watching. The endless, shifting crowds of pickpockets and day laborers and drunkards, killing
time along the docks. Watching, always watching. It was the one thing they had to do that didn't cost money. It would be a mistake to waste money on a bed, for all he knew
they
had already moved on, would certainly have done so if they had any sense at all.

But then, if they'd any sense they never would have crossed him—

Fourteen years.
First the voyage 'round the Horn, then all that time in the prison the Vigilantes had sent him to, in the foothills of the Sierras. Sawing planks or breaking rock, chained to a line of other men. The jail hadn't been that tough, just a stockade of logs, stuck out in the wilderness. Once he had even gotten hold of a file from the sawhouse, concealing the thing up his sleeve. Working assiduously at his irons every night, after the other men in his cell were asleep. Waiting until he was out on a party felling trees before he cut the last strand of metal and simply ran off blindly into the woods, certain that no man could catch him then, no matter what he had to do.

But he had had no food and he couldn't trap any game, what with having to stay ahead of the dogs every day. He had never encountered trees
—forests—
like that before, and before long he had no idea where he was. That was the point of the prison, stuck out in the wilderness so far that no white man could ever find his way back. And every morning there were the dogs again, and the men on horseback. Chasing him farther up into the mountains until finally—starving and bruised, his boots in ribbons, flesh cut and welted by brambles and the whiplike tree branches—he had been run out on a cleared white rock ledge where he had wept, and howled like a wolf in his rage and his frustration.

He had wanted to simply throw himself over the edge, then and there, but he couldn't make himself.
Not so long as they were alive. Not so long as they had what belonged to him.

He couldn't let himself go, not so long as he could think about that. Thinking, that was the damned shame of it. He'd always been cursed with the ability to think, he'd known that since back in the poorhouse in Cork city.

Whereas other men were just insensate lumps of desire, no better than hogs—

Because he could think, he had let them chain him up again and march him back to the prison. He had let them give him six months in solitary, and his sentence doubled for trying to escape.

All that useless time. Thinking about nothing but what it would be like when he got back here, to the City. But what was time, time
or
distance, to the likes of him? Now he had come back, just as he had sworn he would. Now he could think to some purpose, more than just to keep himself alive.

Back to claim what was his—his wife, and his treasure. So where to look first?

He kept still for a little longer, in the shadows of the tavern.
Best to try that niggers' nest first.
The Nigger Village, up in the scrub woods and the swampy lowlands above Fifty-ninth Street, half a mile or so past Pigtown. If they were foolish enough to be there still, thinking they would be protected by
his
people.

Well, they would see about that.
There wasn't a whole city of niggers that could keep them safe from him.

He rubbed the coins together again. Enough for a drink, anyway, though he had no real idea what the price might be anymore.
At least one drink, he should have that just to take the edge off the thinking—

He went around a corner, to the saloon he'd noticed the night before. A name he remembered from the old days, though he wasn't quite sure why: The Yellow Man. He tried to walk over to the bar as inconspicuously as possible, with his head down. Even so, the barman gave a start when he looked up. The other men along the rail backing off ever so slowly, the way they would when they didn't want to give offense—but didn't want to be too close, either.

At first he was afraid he had been recognized, but when he looked into the yellowed, mottled mirror behind the bar, he saw what the truth was. He hadn't looked in a glass since Galveston, had no idea just what he was like now. His tar's clothes filthy from the ground out back. Rough patches of whiskers sprouting along his cheeks and chin, choppy stubs of hair sticking straight up and turning a steely, grey color. His face still lined and jaundiced from the case of the yellow jack he'd picked up in Panama. That had delayed him another three months, even the whites of his eyes turning a jaundiced, yellow shade.

He smiled back at himself in the mirror.
Barely human.
It was just what he wanted. All but unrecognizable, yet fierce and frightening.
This way no one will interfere with me.

• • •

The bar was a rough, dilapidated place. There was an old stove, a few tables and chairs with more men slumped over them. The usual yellowing illustrations of George Washington, and Emmet on the gallows, and Will the Pirate tacked along the walls. He put a coin down, and pointed to one of the barrels stacked up behind the bar and labeled simply “WHISKEY,” hoping to hide his ignorance of just what he should order, or how much it might cost.

The bartender picked up the coin, nodded, told him, “Thirty seconds.”

Dolan had no idea what he meant. All he could do was grunt back at him, making a barely human sound of assent. He was still off, he knew, from all those years in the prison. It was fine that his looks would frighten away the curious, but he was still sunk into himself, still moving and talking almost like an idiot, or a dumb beast. He had to rouse himself, had to match the pace of the bustling, treacherous town all around him—

The barman grabbed a grey rubber hose that hung down from a barrel behind him, just as one hung down from each of the other barrels on the wall, like so many rat tails. He pulled away at it, priming the hose with a steady, masturbatory tug. Until at the precise moment when he felt the whiskey begin to flow he pulled out his pocket watch and handed the end of the hose over to Dolan.

“All right. Thirty seconds.”

Dolan wrapped his lips obediently tight around the hose end—tasting the thick, acrid residue of onions and sausage, all the tastes from the hundreds of other men who had already sucked from the same hose that day.

Then the whiskey hit—wiping out every other sensation in his mouth and throughout his body. It was the harshest thing he had ever tasted, like pure iodine burning out the back of the throat. More camphene than whiskey, over some little time it would strip off a man's insides like paint thinner. Burn right through his gut, wipe his mind blank as a slate.
That would do it, that would stop the thinking.

He hung on, not even pausing for breath, determined to get every last second of his time.
It would do for now.
He kept sucking it down, letting it stir the last flakes of salt cod in his stomach to a boil, wanting
it to churn up his head as well. When at last the barman ripped it out of his mouth, he nearly reached for the knife in his boot, wishing nothing more than to be reconnected to that hose.

Instead, he stood there for another moment, with both hands on the bar while he collected himself, making sure that his legs would still carry him.

“Another?” the bartender offered a little warily, having caught the look in his eyes when he pulled the hose away. But Dolan shook his head.

It was time.
After fourteen years it is time. It is goddamned well past it.
He swung his sailor's bag over his shoulder, and stretched himself like an animal, flexing every part of his body. Then he strode deliberately out of the bar and into the great City, his head glowing beautifully as it swelled and opened before him.