Callous, page 2
OK.
So Keegan set the troops to implement a brief campaign of intimidation: kill his dogs and leave his cat strung up outside the front door.
Basic stuff.
Didn’t work.
So then, a mild beating.
Nope.
Wouldn’t budge, said,
“Over my dead body.” Seriously?
Keegan could arrange that but decided to handle it his own self.
Because
Because
He liked it.
Didn’t use the water method but opted for mano a mano.
To keep his reflexes sharp.
Did misjudge his opponent
Badly.
And.
Got the shite kicked out of him.
Fox had been a pro boxer.
Four thundering punches laid Keegan flat, ribs definitely broken, the nose too (again!), an eye that was going to be hard black, but, apart from the agony—which was, it must be said, a bastard—it was the shame and anger at having so badly miscalculated.
He put up a hand, trembling, managed,
“Enough, you got me beat.”
Fox, triumphant in victory, sneered,
“Limp away, you worthless piece of shite.”
Keegan got unsteadily to his feet, woozy, put out his hand, said,
“No hard feelings?”
Fox spat in his face.
Keegan didn’t wipe the spittle, let his head hang down as if totally ruined, moved his hand to his back, extracted the long Bowie knife favored by the Zetas, and in one rapid move, gutted Fox like a fish, stood back to escape the torrent of blood, said,
“Nobody, no bollix, spits at me.”
Then kicked Fox in the face, said,
“Like I said, no hard feelings.”
Dere’s no guy
Livin’
That knows Brooklyn
Because it’d
Take a lifetime
Just to find
His way
Around the fucking town
—Thomas Wolfe,
Only the Dead Know Brooklyn
What do you do when you’ve washed out of:
The cops?
The priesthood?
You do.
Drugs
And
Jameson.
I was in such a state of despair that I drank Protestant whiskey.
Black Bushmills.
I drowned myself in the Hasid area of Williamsburg. Something about the fundamental neighborhood of Hebrew conversation spoke to the hellfire basis of my Catholicism.
Does that make sense?
Only if you apply Irish logic with Brooklynese riding point.
In
The
Fall
Seldom with the heart,
Sometimes with the soul.
Few
Fall at all
In the dark.
In the fall,
I fell
Furthest
Of all.
—Kate Mitchell, Brooklyn diary, 2019
Kate came to in a puddle of piss and vomit.
Lifted her head from the mess, groaned, retched, looked ’round, even though it hurt to raise her head.
Gave a tiny sigh of relief. She at least was in her apartment. How she got there was lost. She managed to stand up, grab a near-empty bottle of tequila, swigged delicately from it. It hit her stomach like acid and she threw up again.
Checked her clothes, a Ramones tee, covered in blood? Once-white skinny jeans, covered in grime. Her clutch bag was on the bed. Begging the God she only half-believed in, opened it.
Phew-oh.
Credit cards, MetroCard, many hundred-dollar bills?
Whoa, what?
Ben Franklins?
Christ, was she hooking?
Most days, she came to praying/pleading with a God of torment that she hadn’t been raped. This kind of money was horror of a whole different kind.
No way was it what her dead dad would have sneered,
The result of honest toil.
She hadn’t shot up for nearly a week, and fought the heroin withdrawal sickness with buckets of booze. The ferocious urge to fix now was screaming, Just a taste.
Fuck, yeah, sure, and slap-bang to the five-hundred-bucks-a-week monkey. She wept, bitterly.
On her right arm was a tattoo of an angel.
Zadkiel.
Angel of Mercy
Love.
Compassion.
Every time she glanced at it, she snarled,
“Yeah, right!”
Under a small statue of Saint Jude was her rainy-day stash.
Five oxy tabs.
She muttered,
“This is the day.”
She lay on the couch, let Gretchen Peters sing softly in her buds, nearly missed the slight plop of mail. She thought,
Bills and threatening letters, final notices on all my appliances, especially my credit card.
When the oxy kicked in and a cloud of bliss enveloped her, she made some coffee, even managed to shuck a cig from a crumpled pack of Camels, she drifted over to the door, picked up a lone envelope.
Irish stamps.
Say what?
Ireland?
WTF?
She poured some more coffee, the oxy really kicking in, settled in her chair, and opened the letter.
“Sweet Jesus,” she gasped.
The letter was from a lawyer in Galway, Ireland.
Informing her of the death of her aunt, Mary Casey.
And.
A bequest leaving her the cottage in Claddagh, where her aunt had lived.
She was delighted, amazed, thrilled, and truly stunned.
She ran her fingers along her angel tat, said,
“Thank you, Zak.”
She realized this was a second chance. Well, maybe a ninth one, but who was keeping score? She swore, standing like Scarlett O’Hara.
“I’ll be better now.”
Hmm.
She had a passport, a stack of unexplained money, and no ties. Like, none.
Go!
Her mind screamed.
She would.
She would just up and flee.
Already she felt renewed. So, OK, the oxy helped, but something deeper, a sense of steel hovering over her usual bewildered self.
Her favorite brother, Colin, was due back from deployment in Afghanistan and would be well mind-fucked. She’d write him, offer to share a little home in the west.
Colin, born in America of Irish stock, had the completely unrealistic view of Ireland as Nirvana.
So what?
So fuckit.
She’d make it so.
Their last time together, the night before he shipped out, he’d confessed,
“I’m starting to like the killing.”
She’d help him heal. By Christ, she would.
She thought of her younger brother Patrick, always present by his absence.
She smiled, if ever there was an Oirish thought, that was it. Patrick, with his Down syndrome features, a beacon for bullies, he’d come home from school, asking,
“Sis, what’s a Mongol, a retard?”
Colin, always a hothead, tearing out of the house, laying waste to all the shitheads who taunted Patrick.
Mitch, the fucking saint.
Colossal pain in the ass, always with the lame,
“Turn the other cheek” shite.
Until.
Yeah, until he spent a year as a beat cop on Park Slope and Williamsburg, then he morphed into a cynical thug. Anger leaking out of his every pore.
Then the asshole became a priest.
For crying out loud.
She’d said to him,
“Gimme a fucking break, padre.”
Colin, always privy to some secret source of amusement, said to him,
“Couldn’t hack it as a marine, huh?”
Dad, dead way too early.
Mom, a crushed, Valiumed wreck after Patrick died.
She often moaned to her own self,
“It’s not that I do drugs; it’s that I don’t do enough of them.”
Word.
“I wasn’t sure exactly where I was
Or why
But something smart and mean took over.
Something that I knew would keep me alive.
If
If I let it.”
—Claire DeWitt,
in The Infinite Backdrop by Sara Gran
“Ta tu an bas agam,”
Said my mother.
You are the death of me. As she lay dying.
Gathered around her bed were a priest (not me, as priest); Colin, my marine brother; and me, the object of her dying scorn.
The priest administered the holy oils, which, they say, ease the dying, and give an acceptance, a grace even.
Nope.
Not a chance.
She took Colin’s hand in hers, said,
“Ta tu and mac is fear.”
You are the best son.
Then she let out the tiniest breath, died. The priest turned to me, said,
“You should be ashamed of yer own self.”
I snarled,
“Don’t you start.”
He had that old Brooklyn spirit. Never walk away from a fight, said,
“You want to say that outside, you heathen?”
Colin, big, sun-blasted from Afghanistan, towering over us, said,
“Much as it would be a kick to see two priests duff it out, maybe now is not the time.”
He put an arm on the priest’s shoulder, said,
“Let me see you out.” Not a request.
* * *
Boerum Hill.
Writers, right? You think Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, but do you think dive bar?
Worse, cop dive bar.
Me ’n’ Colin, after the funeral, that’s where we ended, because what do you do after a funeral?
Drink and bitch.
It’s like tradition. Piss and moan. The bar there is called Al’s.
There is no Al.
There’s barely a bar.
Shebeen, more like, with Bud and bourbon. Nowt else, save attitude. It’s a mean place for mean cops.
Perfect.
Colin was wearing his combat jacket, his master sergeant’s stripes, torn off but still legible, barely, like a prayer never answered, a faint echo of what might have been.
He had his army boots, dusted and worn. I had my old barn coat. Once I think it might have passed for leather. Cop pants, cop shoes. I kept thinking I was wearing my clerical collar, the memory of it like a scar.
We looked like bad dudes.
One of us was for real; the other was still in the bleachers.
The place was jammed, a juke hammered out the Pogues, then the Clash, then the Pogues all over. We stood at the ramshackle bar; the guy behind it was once a Hells Angel, now serving booze to cops.
Go figure.
He kept a sawed-off and a hurley nearby, in plain sight, a sign above them saying,
your choice.
He barked.
“Gents?”
Colin said,
“Boilermakers.” What else?
We got behind those, felt the false warmth kick. I noticed a dog-eared paperback in Colin’s jacket, asked,
“What you reading?”
Colin fetched it out, handed it over. What was I expecting? To my disgrace, I expected a Spillane, even a Sheldon; shame on me. Saw,
Drive your plow
Over the bones
Of the dead
By Olga Tokarczuk.
Colin did that finger sign to the bar guy, another round, then to me,
“Suckered you, huh?”
I didn’t reply. Saw on the dust cover that the author was a Nobel Prize winner. I tried,
“How’d you mean?”
He reached into the top pocket of his jacket, took out rolling leaf and papers, fixed a smoke. The no-smoking rule didn’t carry traction in this no-man’s territory. He lit up with one of the ol’ army-issue Zippos, then, to my astonishment, passed it to the surly bar guy, who muttered,
“Class.”
He fast rolled a second, fired up, inhaled deep, and here’s the fuck of the thing. I’d half hoped it was for me. Reading my thought, he said,
“You don’t serve drinks.”
As if that made any sense at all.
Then, indicating the book, he expanded,
“You thought: A grunt, army dumbass, so some tit-and-ass shite.”
Before I could protest, he said,
“Army lit, like Tim O’Brien. Being a marine isn’t just point and shoot.”
He raised his glass, said,
“To the horrors of peace.”
I noticed two obvious off-duty cops sending looks our way. One, a burly beer-fucked guy, was muttering darkly to his buddy. I knew it wasn’t anything complimentary.
I asked Colin,
“We heard you were MIA for a time.”
He shrugged, chugged his drink, said,
“My unit went off radar for a seek-and-massacre gig.”
Before I could ask if I even wanted to know, he said,
“I’m going to Ireland.”
I went,
“What?”
He gave the tiniest of smiles, not a gesture he had much recent practice with, said,
“Kate surfaced in Galway. Our aunt?”
Pause.
“Died.”
Pause.
“Left Kate a cottage. Kate asked me to come visit, maybe even share.”
I was hurt, offended, rejected, angry, managed,
“She invited you?”
He shrugged, said,
“Well, buddy, she sure as shit wasn’t ever gonna ask you.”
Fuck.
I tried,
“Why not?”
He noticed the burly cop heading our way, said,
“She hates you, bro, and six o’clock, we got incoming.”
The burly cop approached, all bristling aggression. He noticed Colin’s army jacket, stopped, then,
“Thank you for your service, son.”
Colin tipped his glass in acknowledgment; the guy looked at me, said,
“Pity about the shit company you’re in.”
Colin said quietly,
“Dial it down, buddy.”
The guy said,
“This garbage got his partner killed, then ran from the force.”
Colin sighed, said,
“You need to very discreetly fuck off.”
The guy, slightly flustered, tried,
“Got no argument with you, soldier.”
Colin turned away; you’d be silly to think he was done.
The guy thought he was done, pushed,
“This cowardly punk needs to leave.”
Colin said, almost in a whisper,
“Or what?”
The guy, now all booze macho and stupidity, said,
“Or I’ll drag his sorry ass out.”
Colin, in a fluid movement, lashed out with the palm of his hand, hitting the guy close to the carotid artery.
There was a moment of pure stillness, then the guy dropped to the floor like the proverbial sack of dumb potatoes. Colin glanced at the guy’s crew, asked,
“Any takers?”
No.
We left after another brew, got outside, and I said,
“Jesus, you might have killed the guy.”
Colin rolled another cig, said,
“I sure hope so.”
Back at the family home, that sounds almost normal, as if we’d been happy there.
Like fuck.
I brewed coffee. We sat at the large wooden table in the kitchen. Patrick’s name was gouged in to the wood. I covered it with a coffee mug. It was not a topic either of us could talk about. I asked,
“Is Kate clean?”
He gave me an odd look, almost impossible to read, but it held a hint of menace, said,
“Yeah, she kicked the H, still drinks, but in Ireland, that’s almost mandatory.”
I gave that some thought, asked,
“You think she might be up to a visit from me?”
He moved the coffee mug, traced Patrick’s name with his finger, said,
“No.”
Fuck.
He stood up, did one of those neck movements that fit guys like, said,
“Our aunt was murdered; I’m going to find the guy who did it.”
I was dancing along the precipice of rage, asked,
“No one told me.”
He chuckled, said,
“Bro, it’s a family gig, and you?” Trailed off.
I snarled,
“The fuck is that to mean?”
He leaned on the table, his size and intensity were like a storm hovering. He said,
“You were a cop, a priest and, in truth, our family isn’t real hot on either.”
Now I stood, anger leaking all over my face. I snapped,
“Dad was a cop.”
He laughed.
“I rest my case.”
When all this was Bay Ridge.
He was masterful, my father.
He didn’t say
When it was white,
Or
When it was Irish,
Or
Even the relatively tame,
When it was safe
No, when all this was Bay Ridge. As though it were an issue of geography
—Tim McLoughlin,
“When All This Was Bay Ridge”
Kate Mitchell surveyed her new home in the Claddagh, Galway. She’d arrived a week earlier and was in a shell-shocked state still. The cottage had been vandalized, the utilities shut off. Rain pelted down as if it were personal.
