“Really?” Two other kids gaped as the light from the fire lit their faces orange in the dark.
“Yeah,” Behan says. “Beat ’em wit’ his own fists and then shot ’em with a gun right in the face. An I-talian kid that thought he could steamroll Pegleg into sellin’ junk for him. Just kilt ’em dead. The cops caught up to Pegleg too, but they let’m go.”
“They let’m go?”
“Yeah, they couldn’t make it stick. My brother’s a Whitehander too.”
“He’s one of Dinny’s?”
“Yeah, kinda. He’s done work wit’ both the Whitehanders and the Jay Street Gang back before the Jay Streeters agreed to work wit’ the Whitehanders. He had to do a job once too, my brother. Him and Wild Bill Lovett together, they stole a bunch o’ stuff from a warehouse and then sold it to someone in Manhattan. Like a real job, ya know. They made real good money doin’ that. My brother said he got twenny dollars pullin’ that off. And he did it with five other guys who all got twenny dollars too. Dat’s what we’re gonna do, me and Pegleg an’ us. So if yas wanna real job, just ask me. But ya gotta be tough, see. If ya ain’t got tough, ya better go’n get it.”
Lying across the hardwood floor with the rest, I shared bits of bread with a thin four-year-old that refused to speak. Unable to close her own mouth, or unaware it was open, she just looked at my hand every time it disappeared inside my pocket, then poked me on the leg for more bits.
Appearing from the dark and standing over me, Behan says to me, “Hand over the coat, it’s my place to be askin’ for it.”
I look up at him. “This is my coat.”
Next thing I know he’s dragging me across the entire room by the collar and trying to shake me free from the thing with a couple kicks to my side and some more shaking. Instead of fighting back, I let it slide through my arms and look up.
“I was the first one here,” he says, making a big scene of it in front of the little ones. “I got rights to charge rent and seein’ as though I know y’ain’t gotta a penny to ya name, I claim dibbies on this here coat.”
I watch him disappear to a corner farther away from the glim of the dying flame in the barrel. The wee one I was just feeding then realizes I have no more bread and gets herself up to find a corner to sleep in too. Eventually I do the same.
The week before Christmas and wandering through the maze of buildings by daylight, I walked around a snowy corner and was surprised by a man running for his life, striding desperately past me. On his coattails are two others whom I recognize immediately from the docks: Tuohey the pavee fighter and The Swede whom you never can forget once you put eyes on him.
“Ya fookin’ better run, Leighton,” I hear The Swede yell as the three men continue running toward the middle of the street, moving to the opposite sidewalk. “I catch ya and ya pay for ya brother’s ills!”
A main thoroughfare is Fulton Street. It has a terminal and used to be the road that lead to the Fulton Ferry for the Manhattan crossing. In 1915, though, it was next to the Empire Stores, the port warehousing structure scurrying with workers winching pallets of tobacco through the iron-shudder windows above. It ran parallel with the Brooklyn Bridge where the three-story Sands Street train station fed the elevated trains that snaked through the neighborhoods and across the bridge to Park Row, in Manhattan. A city on its own, Sands Street station also housed Richie “Pegleg” Longergan’s gang of cutpurses and pickpockets. With such dense commuter transience, it was the perfect headquarters for a gang of teenage thieves. Of course, among this gang was Petey Behan. Himself the thief of my much-needed coat.
A week or so after that, I am wandering over by Jay and York streets on the east side abutment to the Manhattan Bridge with the belly falling out of me in hunger. After long bouts of fasting in the desolate wind and dry crisp air, it begins to seize up in me. I can feel my eyes in my face glowing with visions. New splendors come across my mind and just as soon as they swirl beautifully around my imagination they disappear, and I became enraged under faulty logic. No money and no plan, I am alarmingly unafraid of my fate and when reason does come over me, my stomach turns in concern while my eyes light up in fear.
I go back to Water Street ready to grovel back into my uncle Joseph’s good standing and a woman answers the door.
“Don’t know any Joseph Garrity, child, must o’ moved out,” and the door closes.
At Front Street just a few blocks away, I see playing among the garbage and muddy puddles in the cobblestones a motley band of eight or nine shanty children, parentless in the long misshapen shadows of late afternoon. A few of them have their feet dangling in the sewers where the excrement of neighbors mingles in the mud and whatever else accumulates in the rectum of the streets. Remarkable though was, next to the ragged kiddies, a lounging horse that had finished her last breath and lay there on her side retired from her slavery. With a gaping mouth, staring eyes, and a mountainous rib cage in the air with a thin layer of skin over her, the old girl was a daunting figure there in the road sprawled aside the impervious imps and refugee nurslings. The eldest boy stands over the others with a cap over his eyes and his hands in his pockets keeping at a stern stare on me, shoulders hunched under two floppy suspenders. A bit younger than myself, he is the most like a parent among them and orders the others around, ballyragging them for saying dumb things. I feel sad for the beast and believe he does too, so I ask him whose draft horse it was.
“Well it ain’t yours is it?”
The youngest, barely able to speak, spoke up to me, “The butche’s on he’s way ter pick up da ol’ nag and make a . . .”
“Shaddup!” the eldest says to the nursling, then motions for me to keep moving.
The child looks up behind him to the eldest and scowls. The type of scowl a four-year-old shouldn’t know how to cast just yet.
“G’on, don’ get ya’self thinkin’,” the eldest reiterates.
A day or so later and still without even bits of food in me I go back to Borough Hall and wander around some more. Hoping maybe someone will see me this time. I think of a plan. Rather, of needing a plan. Needing to come up with some sort of resolution where my daily routine will be more fruitful. A plan is a fine idea. If only I can get something to eat so I can think more clearly so I can make this plan. Snowflakes begin to populate the air like floating crystals. It’s all dreamy inside me and I stare ahead while my thoughts turn soft again, lucid. I allow myself this purposely. Irresponsibly. Without the wool coat, I stuff my hands deep into the pockets of my trousers and shiver obviously, significantly. It is Christmas Eve, so I say a prayer and think about the warm choruses sung on such a night at the church of Clooney back home to celebrate the birth of Christ together. I think about my mother too, and sisters so far away.
Moments later I am overcome with distress. Distraught by pookas whispering in my ear and cursing the fact of it being so cold. I walk with a wild pace looking around everywhere for loose morsels or opportunity like a gull circling behind the ferry’s foam. I walk myself right out of Borough Hall and toward Columbia Heights. When I see a lazy dray with a cover over the back, I sneak up behind it regardless of consequence and rip open the sheet.
“Hey! The fuck’s wrong wit’ ya?” the driver belches.
I look at him with cat’s eyes and scurry off.
“Kid!” I hear a yell from across the street, then see a young man crossing the cobbles in my direction. “C’mere, yeah. C’mere. What ya doin’?”
He looks healthy, fit. Maybe twenty-two years old. Handsome and with his cap over one eye and a toothpick out the other side of his mouth, he walks with a rhythm. I recognize him, but can’t remember from where. I stand still, hoping he can lead me to some