Shamrock Alley (6 page)

“Just use your head and clean yourself up. You got a clean slate as of right now, but that don’t mean it can’t get dirty again real easy.”

“Oh, I’m through with it,” she said. “I said I was, didn’t I? I got a baby to worry about.” Her back to him, she fumbled with some plastic baby bottles and carried them to the sink. Lost in concentration, she turned the water on but did not move. “Really, though. Thanks.”

“Don’t make it be for nothing.”

“Right.” She turned and dried her hands on a dish towel. “Baby’s crying.”

“Oh …” He stepped toward the door. “I’ll go.”

Again, she struck him as impossibly young, impossibly naïve. Nothing more than a child.

“Well … thank you.”

He nodded and slipped out into the hallway.

Manhattan has a way of leading its occupants to certain destinations without said occupants necessarily realizing he or she has been led. This was how John felt when he found himself standing outside NYU Downtown, his father’s hospital, later that afternoon.

Inside, nurses filtered in and out of the IGU like women to a confessional—somber and desolate, incapable of or unwilling to meet a stranger’s eye. Occasionally, a patient wearing a white paper gown and a lost expression would shuffle down the corridor like someone uncertain of their own destination. Mostly, it was silent.

His father’s room was at the end of the hallway, the door closed. There was a single window beside the door, its blinds drawn. A steel water fountain hung from the wall. He went to it, stared at it for a long time, then bent and drank.

His father. A host of images rushed him—of thoughts and memories, of notions and ideas and complications. For an instant, John almost recalled last night’s dream, but it vanished too quickly. His father. Life had thrown the old man a curve and, in doing so, had caused the old man’s only child to stumble as well. Standing outside his father’s hospital room door now, the hallway so bland and so dry, the sunny slats in the blinds nearly taunting in their proximity, John folded his hands about his chest and leaned against the wall. Stared at the scuffs in the floor tiles. Stared at the wood pattern of the doors along the hallway. Looked up at the light fixtures in the ceiling.

In his mind, he saw the old man as he’d once been—virile and resplendent with strength, alive with a youthfulness that challenged both nature and God. And he had been all of those things not very long ago, which was the most frightening part. In a way, it was not the man’s inevitable death that troubled John most; rather, it was the unexpected rapidity with which it was conquering him.

There’d been an old photograph his father had kept on a shelf in the garage when they still lived together in the tiny house in Brooklyn—a photograph of his father in his shiny overalls and fireman helmet, FDNY etched in bold white letters across his broad chest. It was the man in that picture that John always remembered when he thought of his father—a man who never asked for favors, never required the approval of anyone other than himself, whose every move was pre-planned, calculated, and executed to perfection.

A family of two, they shared a home absent of a mother’s warmth. Their relationship had been close yet strained, his father inexorably strict. When John had become an agent, his father had showed little enthusiasm. He’d hoped John would have been a lawyer, a doctor—anything better. Not some glorified policeman with a college education.

“Why risk your life when you could have the world?” his father had asked him one evening.

“It’s a good job,” he’d explained. “This is what I want.”

“You have a degree, a college education—”

“Which you need,” he’d responded, “to get on the Service.”

Unimpressed, his father had waved a hand at him and turned away, mumbling, “You need a college education to take a bullet for the president?”

Now, with one hand, John pushed against his father’s hospital door and crept inside the room.

Recumbent and defenseless, almost indistinguishable from the plaster walls and the disposable bedclothes that encased him, the old man slept. His hands lay twisted and gnarled above the white sheet, his knuckles like the turns in a hangman’s noose. The skin around his eyes had soured to a dark purple, the eyes themselves sunken into the deep ocular pockets of his skull. He was a child’s crude rendition, this old man—his arms riddled with thick blue veins; the honeycombed bulb of his nose slowly receding into his face; the cobweb wisps of angel hair thinned to nonexistence atop his head. A network of broken blood vessels stretched like the roots of an ancient tree across the upper part of his chest. His cheeks had developed a white spray of beard, fine and powder-like. He smelled of medicines and ointments and glucose and, faintly, of urine. Yet, upon closer review, there lingered the underlying presence of Old Spice and Listerine.

Beside his bed on a small fold-out night table were his reading glasses, a few paperback westerns in an oversized font, an iron crucifix, and a gold pocket watch. The watch hadn’t been wound in days and had ceased working. Beside the table loomed large, intricate machines and IV drips on steel poles; the catheter tube and bag; a tangle of colored wires leading to a mysterious nowhere; a plastic cylinder that breathed. These things were not silent—they hummed and beeped and buzzed and hissed and rattled. They were, in truth, more alive than the man they supported.

For a long time, John stood by the doorway, taking in the room and its sole occupant with passive detachment. At one point, he considered winding the old man’s watch—something about its dormancy irritated him—but found he could not move, could not force his eyes away from the starched topography of his father’s bed sheets. That this old man—that his
father
—was here in such a way begged for mourning.

He summoned the visage of his father in a time before the trick of cancer or the magic of death had ever corrupted their lives. He saw him as almost all young boys see their fathers—great and brooding and darkly enigmatic, the possessor of all things strong and powerful, all things superhuman. A small house in a squalid Brooklyn neighborhood with worn carpets and rusted hammers and screwdrivers in every kitchen drawer. A baseball bat and muddy sneakers on the back patio. A motherless home, where the absence of that essential female entity clung like a physical thing to every wall, every bed, every washed and unwashed piece of laundry; where the only evidence of such a woman’s existence was a black-and-white photograph at the top of the stairwell, just a few short feet from his own bedroom door. In it, a pale-skinned woman reclined on a hillock of grass in Central Park, a coquettish smile tugging at the corners of her lips. He saw his father coming through the back door and into the kitchen, his face and shirt covered with grime, his boots caked with soot and mud, and as he made himself a fresh pot of coffee, he’d say, “Some fire tonight, Johnny. Flames licked the sky.” And John would imagine the flames as tall as skyscrapers bursting through the night in a dazzling display.

The old man stirred.

“Pop,” John said.

It took a few moments for the old man’s consciousness to take over. Once his eyes opened, there was a split second of confusion in his stare that was nearly childlike. His rough hands ran along the fabric of the sheet. He looked like someone just brought back to life.

“Pop,” he repeated.

“Johnny.” The word came out abrasive and uncomfortable, stretched to near incomprehension. The old man ran his tongue out over his cracked lips, priming himself for better articulation. “You’re here.”

“You feeling all right?” He remained just inside the doorway. With a clammy hand, he pushed his hair from his face.

“Is it late?”

“Late? No, Pop. Do you want something? I can get a nurse.”

“No nurse.”

“Water?”

“Nothing.” His eyes could hardly stay open, an effect of the morphine. “Katie, she’s been—”

“She’s been here,” John said quickly.

“She’s been …
okay?”
the old man finished.

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, Pop, she’s been real good. She’s feeling fine.”

“That baby’s gonna be a boxer.”

“That so?”

“Dreamt it two nights in a row. Means
something
, don’t it? Big, strong heavyweight. You just wait and see. Come in the goddamn room, John.”

He did, moving quickly to the table beside his father’s bed. For want of something to occupy himself, John picked up his father’s pocket watch and began winding it. This close, he could hear the rasp of the old man’s breathing. It was a doomed sound, redolent with the stink of death.

“You’re taking care of yourself?”

“Yeah, Pop.”

“On the job …”

“Yes.”

“Ahhh. You don’t look so well. You look too tired. I can tell you’re not sleeping. Sleep’s important. You work crazy hours. It’s not healthy. You should sleep more.”

“I’ve been busy at work,” John told him. Then regretted it.

“But you should spend time at home.
That’s
important.”

John set the watch back on the night table. “Katie’s been complaining to you about me now?” he half joked.

“She sneaks me in your dinners when you don’t come home to eat them. So keep it up then. She’s a good cook.” The old man smiled, the thin skin at the corners of his eyes split and fissured.

Staring at the crucifix on the night table, John could feel his father’s eyes on him. The morphine hadn’t numbed all the old man’s senses. Again, he felt like a child beneath the storm-cloud parasol that was his father’s shadow.

“The baby will be here soon,” said his father. There was a certain gravity to his tone now. “You need to think about what you’re going to do.” After a hesitation, he added, “With your job.”

“Pop,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck while he craned his head back. “We’ve been through this …”

“What you do … it’s no way to raise a kid.”

“You did it.”

“You can do better than me.”

“My job’s got nothing to do with who I am at home,” he said.

Silence fell on the room. John stood there seemingly forever, not saying a word, feeling like the incapable little boy he’d always felt before his father.

“You don’t have to come here,” his father said after a while, and with so much of his old self that his voice chilled John, “if you’re too busy. I understand. These doctors and nurses, they’re good here. They keep an eye on me. You don’t have to come when you’re too busy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You know what I mean. You’ve got things you need to worry about instead of worrying about some old fool in this damn place.”

“Stop it.”

“I just want you to know I understand.”

“Don’t be that way. There’s nothing to understand,” he said. “I wanted to see how you were feeling.”

“How I’m feeling …” The old man chuckled and wheezed while fanning one skeletal hand above his head, as if to say,
You see these wires, these machines? That, my only son, is how I’m feeling
.

John sighed and slipped his hands into his pockets, took a step away from the bed. “Is there anything I can get you before I go?”

His father watched him with sober eyes. Once, those eyes had been dark brown, almost black. Now they were dull gray, like ash, and seemingly too close together on his face.

“You wound the watch?” the old man asked.

“It’s wound.”

“Then no,” he said, “there’s nothing I need.”

Later, out in the hallway, John found himself staring out the window through the slits in the blinds. The day had cooled, and the sun had settled behind a stand of buildings off to the west.

He stood, unmoving, for a long time.

D
ETECTIVE
S
ERGEANT
D
ENNIS
G
LUMLY OF THE
N
EW
York Police Department was nearly killed twice on his way to Pier 76. First, his sedan blew a flat on West 34
^th
Street and as he stepped out of the vehicle to inspect the damage, a taxicab nearly split him in two, swerving at the last possible moment and sparing his life. The wind from the speeding cab caused his jacket to billow and his equilibrium to fail him, sending him reeling back against the hood of his sedan. Taking slow, labored breaths, the detective sergeant righted himself and, knowing very well there was no spare in the sedan’s trunk, cursed once under his breath before hailing a cab.

A few minutes later, as the cabdriver was preparing to park off Twelfth Avenue, a rust-colored van slammed into the back of the taxicab, sending Glumly’s teeth rattling in his head and causing him to bang his knee smartly against the plastic knob of the manual window roller. The sudden reek of burnt rubber and oil penetrated the cab. Glumly heard the hiss of radiator steam.

“Jesus
Christ,” he
breathed, startled, his mind unable to come up with anything else.

The driver was less confounded. “Sons of bitch!” he shouted out his window.

Dennis Glumly was fifty-one and in good shape. He exercised regularly, ate properly, and took a dump twice a day with the devotion and punctuality of a devout religious fanatic attending Sunday mass. From the cab, he sprinted across the street and headed in the direction of the Hudson River. A native of the city, he barely registered the amphibious, musty stink of the river, and he hurried up to the inland walkway leading toward the piers at a constant runner’s pace, his breathing unaffected.