A Long Line of Dead Men

22

"You just missed him," Burke said. "He stepped out not fifteen minutes ago. But he'll be along. He said you might be in."

"He did?"

"And that you should wait for him as he'll not be long. There's fresh coffee made, if you'll have a cup."

He poured coffee for me and I carried it to the table where Mick and I usually wound up sitting, over on the side beneath the mirror advertising Tullamore Dew. Someone had left a copy of the Post on a nearby table, and I opened it to the sports section to see what the columnists had to say. I wasn't much better at tracking their sentences than I'd been at following the movie. After a while I set the paper aside and thought about trying Jim Shorter again. Was it too late to call him? I was considering the point when the door opened and Mick Ballou entered.

He stood just inside the door, his hair pressed flat against his skull by the rain, his clothes sodden. When he caught sight of me his face lit up. "By God," he said, "didn't I say you'd be in tonight? But what a fucking night you picked for it."

"It wasn't much more than a fine mist when I came here."

"I know, for was I not out in it myself? A soft day, the Irish call it. A fucking downpour is what it's turned into." He rubbed his hands together, stamped his feet on the old tile floor. "Let me get out of these wet clothes. Catch a cold this time of the year and the fucker's with you till Christmas."

He went into his office in the back. He sleeps there sometimes on the green leather couch, and keeps several changes of clothing in the oak wardrobe. He has a desk there, too, and a massive old Mosler safe. There's always a lot of cash in the safe, and I can't believe the box would be all that hard to crack. So far no one has ever been fool enough to try.

He emerged from the office after a few minutes with his hair neatly combed and wearing a fresh sport shirt and slacks. He said a few words to one of the darts players, laid a gentle hand on the shoulder of an old man in a cloth cap, and slipped behind the bar to pour himself a drink. He threw down a quick shot to take the chill off, and I could almost feel the warm glow radiating outward from the solar plexus, providing comfort, warming the body and the soul. Then he refilled his glass and brought it to the table along with a fresh cup of coffee for me.

"That's better," he said, dropping into the seat opposite mine. "Terrible thing, being called out on business on a night like this."

"I hope it went well."

"Ah, 'twas nothing serious," he said. "There was this lad who lost a few dollars gambling, and gave a marker for what he owed. Then he decided he'd been cheated, and so he made up his mind that he wasn't going to pay the debt."

"And?"

"And your man who'd taken his marker offered it for sale."

"And you bought it."

"I did," he said. "I thought it a decent investment. Like buying a mortgage, and deeply discounted in the bargain."

"You paid cash for it?"

"I did, and sent Andy Buckley to talk to the lad. And do you know, he still insisted he'd been cheated, and thus owed nothing, no matter who might be holding his marker. He said there was no point in discussing it, that his mind was made up."

"So what did you do?"

"I went to see him."

"And?"

"He changed his mind," Mick said.

"He's going to pay?"

"He's paid. So you might say it was an excellent investment, offering an attractive return. And it's matured early."

He is a large man, my friend Mick, tall and heavy, with a head that would not look out of place among the ancient sculptures on Easter Island. There is a primitive and monolithic quality to him. Years ago, a wit at Morrissey's after-hours described Stonehenge as looking like Mick and his brothers standing in a circle.

It may be fitting, then, that he is just about the last of a vanishing breed, the tough Irish criminals who have been drinking and fighting and raising hell in the West Forties and Fifties since before the Civil War. Various gangs and mobs held sway- the Gophers, the Rhodes Gang, the Parlor Mob, the Gorillas. A lot of their leaders were saloon keepers, too, from Mallet Murphy and Paddy the Priest to Owney Madden. They were as cheerfully vicious as any group New York ever saw, and they might have made a more lasting mark on the place if they hadn't had such an all-consuming thirst. According to Mick, God created whiskey to keep the Irish from taking over the world. It had certainly kept the Hell's Kitchen hoodlums from taking over the city.

A few years ago some newspaper reporters started calling the current crop "the Westies," and by the time the tag caught on there was hardly anybody left to pin it to. The neighborhood bad guys were mostly gone- dead of drink or violence, doing life sentences somewhere upstate, rotting away in the back wards at Manhattan State Hospital. Or they were married and living somewhere in the Jersey suburbs, getting fat and sluggish, running crooked auto-repair shops, rigging the games in church Las Vegas Night fundraisers, or working all week for their fathers-in-law and drinking themselves sodden on the weekends.

Mick, the son of a woman from County Mayo and a father born in France, not far from Marseilles, was a man who drank whiskey like water, a career criminal, a brutal killer who would costume himself for a night of slaughter in the butcher's apron his father had worn, then wear the same apron to mass at St. Bernard's. There was no reason why we should have become friends, and no way to explain our friendship. Nor could I find an explanation for these long nights of ours, when the stories flowed like water or like whiskey. He would drink for both of us, filling his glass time and time again with the twelve-year-old Jameson. I would keep him company with coffee, with Coca-Cola, with soda water.

Maybe, as Jim Faber has suggested, it was a way for me to have the drink without the hangover, to recapture the sweetness of saloon society without risking a seizure or liver damage. Maybe, as Elaine proposed, the two of us had a long karmic history together, and were just renewing the ties that had bonded us in innumerable past lives. Or perhaps, as had sometimes occurred to me, Mick was at once the brother I never had and the road I'd left untaken.

And maybe we're both just men who like a long night in a quiet room, and a good story or two.

"You recall," he said, "when I went to Ireland the year before last."

His lawyer, Mark Rosenstein, had sent him out of the country to avoid a subpoena. "I was going to join you," I reminded him, "but something came up."

"Ah, we'd have set the heather blazing, yourself and I. They're a curious people, the Irish. Did I tell you about Paddy Meehan's pub?"

"I don't believe so."

"Paddy Meehan kept a public house in West Cork," he said, "and I believe it was a right hovel, though I never saw it in those days. But your man had an uncle in Boston, and the old fellow died and left a daicent sum, as I heard it called."

"Left it to Paddy, I suppose."

"He did, and himself showed a cool head for business for the first time in memory. He invested the whole lot in improvements to his place of business. He had the walls paneled in knotty pine, and he had chandeliers installed and fitted with dimmer switches, and over the door he had a new electric sign hung. A right wonder it was, visible for miles." He smiled, savoring the memory. "And he had the wooden floor covered with the finest linoleum, and bought new tables and chairs, and truly spared no expense. But most wonderful of all in this little country pub were the two new doors standing side by side on the back wall, each with a sign on it in the old Ogham script. One door was marked 'FIR,' the Gaelic for Men, and the other 'MNA,' for Women. And there were those silhouettes of a man and a woman, such as you'll find on airport rest rooms, for the benefit of tourists who couldn't read the Gaelic."

"He put in bathrooms."

"Ah, you would think so, wouldn't you? Quite the fellow was Paddy Meehan. When you walked through either door, FIR or MNA, you found yourself standing in the same five-acre field."

He told another story about Ireland, and that reminded me of something that had happened years ago at an Emerald Society dinner. The conversation found its own pace, with stretches of silence interspersed. Outside the rain poured down.

"Did I ever tell you," he wondered, "about Dennis and the cat?"

"Not that I remember."

"You would remember," he said. "Even if ye drank you'd not likely forget this one. Oh, he was a lad, Dennis was."

"I remember Dennis."

"We were raised decently, you know. I was the only one turned out bad. Francis became a priest. Now he's selling automobiles in Oregon. Makes a change, eh? And John's in White Plains, a pillar of the fucking community."

"A lawyer, isn't he?"

"Law and real estate, and it spoils his breakfast every time there's a story about myself in his morning paper." His green eyes sparkled at the thought. "And Dennis," he said, "was what you'd call happy-go-lucky. No harm in him, and no darkness, either. Of course he had a liking for the drink."

"Of course."

"He liked his few jars. Fresh out of high school he went to work for Railway Express. Midnight to eight five days a week at their central depot, and he never missed a night's work, and he was never without a drink from the moment he punched in until he walked out into the light of dawn. Every one of them drank like that, and when they weren't drinking they were stealing, and when they weren't doing that they were figuring out what to steal next. The company's out of business now, and it doesn't take a genius to tell you why."

"I guess not."

"But the finest thing that ever happened there," he said, "was when they had the cat. This woman owned a prizewinning cat, a Persian, I believe it was. One of the longhaired sort, at any rate. She'd had a wooden crate specially built for the cat, and brought it to one of the receiving stations for shipment to California."

"And they stole the cat?"

"They did not. Why would anyone steal a cat? All they did was drop it, crate and all. The fine crate shattered, and the cat stood in the wreckage and looked around at these drunken idjits, and in a flash it was gone. So what do you think they did?"

"What?"

"They reassembled the crate. They got a hammer and nails and put it back together again, and a fine job they did, to hear them tell of it. But when they were done the cat had not reappeared, and who could blame her? Well, they could hardly send an empty crate to San Diego, and so the whole crew of them stalked through the warehouse, calling 'Here, kitty kitty' and making little mewing noises."

"That must have been something to see."

"If the cat saw it," he said, "it took care not to be seen in return, for never a hair of the creature did any of them ever take sight of again. But they did find another cat, a nasty old tom blind in one eye and missing an ear, and his dirty old coat matted and scabby with mange. He made his home in the warehouse, don't you know, living on rats. And small children, I shouldn't wonder."

He smiled richly at the memory. "And it was Dennis who solved the problem," he said. " 'It says Contents: One Cat and that's all it says,' he told them. 'She put a cat in the box, she'll take a cat out of the box. What's her problem?' And so they placed the old tom in the crate and sealed him up, and off he went to California."

"Oh, no."

"Ah, Jesus," he said. "Can ye picture it, man? The poor woman herself opens the crate and out leaps this wee savage with an evil glint in his good eye."

" 'Oh, Fluffy,' " I said, pitching my voice as high as it would go, " 'what have they done to you?' "

" 'Ach, Fluffy, I hardly knew ye!' "

" 'Was it a hard trip, Fluffy?' "

"Can you see it, man? Oh, you should have heard Dennis tell it. He told it much better than I ever could." His face darkened, and he took a long drink of whiskey. "And they called him for Vietnam," he said, "and the damned fool went. I'd have got him out of it. I told him I'd get him out of it, there was nothing easier, all I had to do was make a telephone call."

"He wouldn't let you?"

"I want to go, says he. I want to serve my country, says he. Dennis, says I, let someone else go. Let the fucking niggers serve their fucking country. They've got more to gain and less to lose than yourself. But he wouldn't hear of it. And off he went, and he died there, and they shipped him home in a body bag. Sweet Jesus, what a fucking waste."

"Why do you suppose he went, Mick?"

"Ah, who can say? He was home on leave before they shipped him overseas. I told him if he wanted to get out now it would take more than a phone call, but 'twould be easy enough to get him out of the country. He could go to Canada, or to Ireland. Mickey, says he, what would I do in Canada? What would I do in Ireland? What did I ever do here? And he gave me this sweet smile, a smile to break your heart. And I knew he was going to die over there, and I knew that he knew it."

I thought for a moment. I said, "You think that's why he went?"

"I do."

" 'I have a rendezvous with death,' " I said, and quoted the few lines I remembered of the Alan Seeger poem.

"That's it exactly," he said. "A rendezvous with death. He had a date and would not break it, the poor lad."

A little before two, Burke shut down the taps and sent the handful of customers on their way, all but the little old man in the cloth cap. He stayed put on his stool while Burke placed the chairs on top of the tables so they'd be out of the way when the floor was mopped first thing in the morning. When he was through he brought over Mick's bottle and a thermos of coffee, setting them within reach on the next table.

He said, "I'm off, Mick."

"Good man."

"Mr. Dougherty's still sittin' there. I'll walk out with him, shall I?"

"Ask him if he'd rather stay until the rain lets up. He's no trouble. Just lock up, and I'll let him out when he's ready."

But the old fellow didn't want to stay past closing. He followed Burke to the door and they went out together. Mick turned out all the lights but the one over our table, came back and freshened his drink.

"That was Eamonn Dougherty," he said. "He never set foot in here, and then in the early spring they closed the Galway Rose on Eleventh Avenue. The building's scheduled for demolition, or maybe they've already taken it down. I haven't been over there to see. Dougherty went every day to the Galway Rose, and now he's here every day. He'll sit for eight hours and drink two pints of beer and never say a word."

"I don't believe I know him."

"Why should you? He was killing men fifteen years before you were born."

"Are you serious?"

"We talked of West Cork," he said, "and Paddy Meehan's pub and its improvements. Eamonn Dougherty is from Skibbereen in West Cork. During the Troubles he was with Tom Barry's flying column." He sang: " 'Oh, but isn't it great to see / The Auxies and the RIC / The Black and Tans turn tail and flee / Away from Barry's coll-yum.' Do you know that song?"

"I don't even know what the words mean."

"The Auxies were the Auxiliaries, the RIC was the Royal Irish Constabulary, and you know who the Black and Tans were. Here's a song you'd understand without a glossary.

On the eighteenth day of November

Outside of the town of Macroom

The Tans in their great Crossley tender

Came hurryin' on to their doom

But the boys of the collyum were waiting

With rifle and powder and shot

And the Irish Republican Army

Made shit of the whole fuckin' lot.

"It was a bloody massacre, and trust the fucking Irish to write a song about it. Eamonn Dougherty was in the middle of it. Oh, he did his share of killing, that one. The British had a price on his head, and then the Free State government put a price on his head, and he came here. A relative got him a job unloading trucks in a warehouse, though you wouldn't think he had the size for it. Then he was a taxi dispatcher for many years, and he's long since retired. And drinks his two pints of beer a day, and says not a word, and God alone knows what goes on in his head."

"When you first started talking about him," I said, "I found myself thinking of another little old man. His name was Homer Champney."

"I don't know him."

"I never knew him myself," I said, "but he started something. Or continued something, it's hard to know for sure. It makes a hell of a story."

"Ah," he said. "Let's hear it."