Shamrock Alley Page 5

  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.

 
CHAPTER FIVE

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT DENNIS GLUMLY OF THE NEW York Police Department was nearly killed twice on his way to Pier 76. First, his sedan blew a flat on West 34th 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.

  Pier 76 functioned primarily as the city’s car tow-away pound. Recently, the city had been discussing the relocation of the pound to a more accessible midtown location to make room for the growing string of high-profile condominiums that had begun creeping up the coast several years ago. As a child, Glumly had exhibited a proclivity for all things large and mechanical, and would spend hours at the piers watching the great ships maneuver in and out of the ports, their hulls dull and iron pitted with protruding bolts as big as a grown man’s fist, their wakes white and crisp and frothy. He would try and creep as close as possible to the piers, the pungent stink of fish tremendous in the air, before someone saw him and shouted at him to leave before he got hurt or killed. In all this time, the piers had changed, as had the entire West Side Highway, though there remained an air of nostalgia for him. He was aware of the feeling even now, as an adult and as a cop, searching no longer for great ships and seagoing vessels but for a severed human head.

  Brice was the name of the fellow working at the pound who’d discovered the head, roughly thirty minutes ago. A uniformed officer was with him now, as well as a collection of motley roustabouts in soiled overalls and scarves tucked into the collars of their flannel work shirts. A pound attendant in his mid-thirties, James Brice was clear-eyed and lucid, with a rugged complexion, surprisingly nice teeth, and sideburns that dipped down like twin hockey sticks at the lines of his jaw. In another life, Glumly supposed Brice could have been considered movie-star handsome, though after he’d worked so long on the river, the bitter sea air had managed to harden and manipulate his features.

  To his cohorts, James Brice spoke of the severed head with great fanfare. “I seen a man dead once, but heads that’s on a body don’t look the same as heads that’s off a body. This one just had some look, my God, and I tell you what—whatever the hell’s in that river took with it whatever it wanted. Eyes, lips, nose. Gone. Almost didn’t look like no head at all, not until I hoisted it up onto the docks to see what the hell it was. But, man, you can’t mistake no goddamn head.”

  “You think the body’s down there, too, Brice?” one of the workers asked him.

  “Hell,” said Brice, “could be anything down there—you know what I’m saying? I mean, who even says this is the last head I’ll pull outta there? Couple fishin’ lines, we maybe pull a whole buncha heads out.”

  Some men laughed.

  The head in question was wrapped in a section of tarpaulin on the floor of the pound’s main office. A sallow-looking man named Kroger, introduced to Glumly as the fellow in charge of the pound, stood toward the back of the office, as far away from the misshapen lump on the floor as he could get. Unlike the enthusiasts who had migrated toward James Brice—and Brice himself, for that matter—Kroger looked on the verge of collapse. With his right hand, he supported himself against the office wall, while his left hand fidgeted jerkily with a leather strap that hung from his belt loop. His skin was the color of uncooked fish, and his small, rat-like eyes had to them the irritated squint of a newborn.

  “This ain’t good,” Kroger said upon meeting Dennis Glumly, as if such a declaration warranted reevaluating the entire situation.

  A second uniformed officer unwrapped the head for Glumly. Glumly crouched, examined it with a hand to his chin, and, after a moment, whistled.

  “Christ in a fedora,” he said.

  “Something’, ain’t it?” the officer asked for the sake of asking. “The hell you make of this?”

  “Well, it’s in pretty bad shape. Could have been down there a while.”

  “Fish got to it.”

  “Looks like it’s male—fella in his forties, maybe. What’s this here?” Glumly pointed to a section just above the left temple where the skull had been broken, leaving behind a silver dollar-sized hole in the surface. Behind him, he was aware of Kroger starting to grumble to himself.

  “Shit,” said the officer. “The fella who dragged the thing out of the river did that…”

  “Jimmy Brice,” volunteered Kroger in a dull voice.

  “Said he wasn’t sure exactly what it was when he first saw it,” the officer continued, “so he used some sort of metal hook on a pole to scoop the head out of the river.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake …”

  “Yeah.” The officer almost chuckled.

  “You call for divers?”

  “No.”

  “Call for divers.”

  “You think the body’s down there, too?”

  Glumly stood, popped his back, and peered out at the river through the grime-smeared windows of the pound office. “Who the hell knows what else is down there,” he said.

  The officer tossed a corner flap of tarp back over the head and stood. Scratching his brow, he looked in Glumly’s direction. “What you got on your mind?” the officer said matter-of-factly.

  Glumly just rolled his shoulders.

  He didn’t tell the officer he was thinking about the severed foot uncovered in a dump last month.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN MANY WAYS, COUNTERFEIT MONEY IS LIKE a disease. The bills appear first in an isolated incident, much as a small child in a classroom of perhaps thirty children will all at once come down with the flu. These bills appear throughout the bustle of an enormous city, such as Manhattan, and perhaps fester for some time before they are brought to anyone’s attention. Perhaps at a local dive, a cathouse, an expensive Park Avenue boutique. The bills surface like a sneeze and, sometimes, seemingly evaporate into the air before anyone becomes the wiser. Other times, however, the bills—much like a flu bug—become airborne and spread. Soon, that same viral strain crops up in the immune system of every third or fourth child in the classroom—at every third or fourth city block in some major city. A savings and loan bank on West 86th Street becomes wet with fever, and the federal physicians make a house call. And if the strain is particularly virulent, the physicians—the feds—begin keeping an eye out for it. And they see the disease along Lexington Avenue; they study the malignancy beneath the bleeding sodium lights of Wall Street; they follow it through the neon jungle of Times Square; they are aware of cupped hands and coughing fits throughout the seedy alleyways and busted down tenements along Tenth Avenue; prostitutes, all nylonlegged and leopard prints, find themselves infected with it; a shop clerk finds himself feeling and re-feeling the consistency of the disease, holding it up to the lig
ht, scrutinizing it, suddenly knowing he is in the presence of some crooked man-made plague. And as with any illness, if left unattended, it is only a matter of time until the entire classroom of children is infected—until the entire city is host to the festering sickness.

  And, as is sometimes the case with illnesses, people die.

  Within the filth-infested alleyways and poorly lit, subterranean corridors along Manhattan’s West Side Highway, one man uttered some nonsensical excuse in a shaking voice and was stabbed in the throat. A second man, a bit quicker than his companion, began to run.

  His breath burned his throat. He ran, pushing himself as fast as he could, to beat both God and the devil. At one point he nearly choked on his own laughter, quite certain of his escape. Then he felt something in his right knee snap. With a cry of agony, he collapsed to the trash-littered alleyway, grasping his knee and moaning softly. Hot fluid spread through his leg. Behind him—no, all around him—shadows materialized and solidified, the hint of bodies became actual ones, and footsteps crunched through broken glass along the street.

  “You make us run like that, you shit?”

  Squirming on the ground, the man closed his eyes, did not open them. He could smell the sewage-stink of the street, could smell the alcohol-rich reek of his pursuers. From behind his eyelids, he watched his friend collapse again, dead in the alley, this time in sickeningly slow motion. The memory less than a minute old, he watched again as the knife blade shot straight out and caught his friend in the throat. There was a dull plink! as the tip of the blade pierced through the flesh at the back of his friend’s neck and made contact with the concrete wall of the alley behind him …

  Someone’s booted foot stepped on the ground two inches from his face. He gasped for air, eyes still shut tight.

  “You see this? Now I’m outta goddamn breath.”

  Someone laughed. Nonsensical voices …

  “What—hey, you got—”

  “That’s mine—”