‘How much are they?’ he asked.
Flagg looked confused. He held up the batteries. ‘What, these?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I got them back.’
‘How much are they?’
Flagg shrugged, glanced at the batteries. ‘Four bucks for the lot.’
Tommy Doyle extracted a five, handed it to the man. ‘That cover the tax?’
‘Sure.’
Tommy grabbed the batteries, tore open the packages, walked over to the curb and one by one threw the batteries into the sewer.
Red-faced, his chin flecked with spittle, he walked back to where the boys stood, flicked the empty cardboard cards into his stepson’s chest.
‘You’re coming to work with me in the morning,’ he said. ‘All of you.’
Tommy Doyle worked for a company that demolished houses, but took extra work as a landscaper on summer evenings and weekends.
It was clear that Dave Carmody wanted to break rank, perhaps interjecting that he had voiced opposition to the plan to begin with, but one look from Jimmy fixed the words on his lips.
Tommy pointed at Kevin, Dave and Ronan. ‘Seven o’clock sharp. Corner of Twenty-sixth and Christian. You don’t show, I’m coming to your fucking houses.’
Ronan and Kevin got to the corner of 26th and Christian at 6.45, stuffed with breakfast, sugar-rushed. Ronan’s father – who was a cousin to Byrne’s father, Paddy – worked for the company that made Tastykake, and the boys had eaten as many powdered mini-donuts as they could. There was a pretty good chance that they were not going to get lunch.
When they turned the corner, Dave was already there, his jeans laundered and pressed. This was his mom’s work, of course. Dave was going to labor on a landscaping site all day, probably kneeling in dirt, and his pants were ironed.
‘Come here,’ Dave said in a low voice, as if he were passing along state secrets. ‘You gotta see this.’
They walked down 26th Street, across from the power plant to a vacant lot on the corner of 26th and Montrose. Dave stepped onto the lot, jumped up on an old rusted Dumpster which had been pushed up against one of the crumbling single-car garages, pulled out a pair of bricks, reached inside. A few seconds later he drew out a paper lunch bag and jumped down.
He slowly opened the bag, showed the other two boys the contents.
It was a nickel-plated .38 revolver.
‘Jesus and his
parents
,’ Ronan said.
‘And all the fucking saints,’ Dave replied.
‘Is that yours?’ Kevin asked.
Dave shook his head. ‘It’s Jimmy’s. He showed it to me. It used to be Donny’s.’
Donal Doyle, Jimmy’s older stepbrother, was killed in Vietnam. Some said it was all Tommy Doyle needed to let go of the rail and fall head first into the bottle for good.
‘Is it loaded?’ Ronan asked.
Dave pushed the release, rolled the cylinder. Five rounds. He cautiously snapped it back in place, careful to leave the chamber opposite the firing pin empty.
‘Wow,’ Ronan said.
Kevin said nothing.
At that moment they heard the throaty sound of the Doyle landscaping truck’s wired-together muffler coming up the street. Dave put the gun back in the bag, jumped on the Dumpster and replaced the bag in the wall.
A few seconds later, they joined a very morose-looking Jimmy Doyle in the back of his stepfather’s rusting Ford F-150.
Jimmy had a bandage on his swollen left cheek.
No one asked him about it.
The day was hot, humid, dense with dark gray clouds. Mosquitoes by the millions. The landscaping job was in Lafayette Hill, at one of the big homes off Germantown Pike.
Around ten o’clock, the lady of the house, a heavyset woman with an easy laugh and Ace bandages on both knees, brought them frosty tumblers of ice-cold lemonade. None of them had ever tasted anything better.
Twice Jimmy – wielding the big mower around the side yard – came perilously close to flattening the perfectly sculpted spirea on that side of the house. Both times it looked as if his stepfather might run
him
over.
If the lemonade had been a godsend, it paled in comparison to the words they heard around 2.30 from Bobby Anselmo, who was Tommy Doyle’s partner.
‘Let’s pack it up, guys,’ he said. ‘We’re done for the day.’
They jumped out of the back of the truck at just after three, near the corner of Naudain and South Taney Street.
Jimmy was inconsolable. Not because he had been caught stealing and had to apologize for it, or because he had dragged his friends into the matter. That was what friends were for. It was that he had been berated and belittled by his stepfather all day, right in front of those same friends. Jimmy was getting bigger, filling out, and his friends secretly wondered when the day would come when he would brace the old man.
That day had not yet come.
But by these same measures they all knew this mood of Jimmy’s, and it always preceded some challenge, some death-defying attempt at something, some larceny far greater than the one that had put him in his stepfather’s sights to begin with. It was as if there was something slowly winding inside him, ready to spring at a moment’s notice.
Without saying much, the four boys made their way up South Taney Street, heading to the park. Just after crossing Lombard, Ronan stopped, pointed.
‘Who the fuck is
that
?’
They all turned to see what he was pointing at. There was someone standing at the edge of the park, behind a tree.
It soon registered. The wrinkled white suit. The twitchy movements. It was Desmond Farren. Every few seconds he would lean to his right, looking around the tree, then snap his head back like a crazed turtle. For some reason he seemed to be in motion even though he was just standing there.
Without a word of discussion, the four boys headed to the field. It went without saying that they were all suddenly very interested in whatever had drawn Des Farren there.
It was Dave who noticed first. ‘Tell me I’m not looking at what I know I’m looking at,’ he said.
‘Holy
shit
,’ Kevin said.
It soon became clear why Des Farren seemed to be in motion. He
was
in motion.
‘He’s whacking off?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Out here?’ Ronan replied.
They all moved a few feet closer and saw what Des Farren was looking at.
There, sitting in the middle of the field, not thirty feet away, was Catriona Daugherty. She wore a lemon-yellow dress, short white socks, white shoes, the patent leather kind, probably from her First Communion. She sat cross-legged on the grass, oblivious to any impropriety, to any and all onlookers.
‘You sick
fuck
,’ Ronan said.
At this, Des Farren turned around, spotted the boys. He turned and ran, in the direction of the copse of trees next to the ball diamond.
Jimmy reached the man first, on a dead run, and sent him sprawling.
All four boys jumped on Farren and dragged him into the bushes. Jimmy was the first to speak.
‘Kevin, get his glasses,’ he said.
Kevin reached down, removed Des Farren’s dark glasses.
Without advance warning, Jimmy dropped to his knees and hit the man, twice, square on the nose. Fast, well-leveraged punches. Farren’s nose burst in a gummy spray of bright blood. The sound of bone on cartilage seemed to echo across the park.
Dazed, Farren tried to roll to his side. Each of the boys grabbed a leg or an arm, pinning him down.
Jimmy searched the man, emptied his pockets onto the ground. Des Farren was carrying just over a dollar in change, mostly dimes and nickels. In his back pocket he had a SEPTA bus pass, and a handkerchief the color of army fatigues. There was also an Ace comb with a half-dozen teeth missing.
‘What were you doing back there?’ Jimmy asked.
Des Farren’s lips trembled, but he remained silent.
‘Gonna ask again, you warped piece of shit,’ Jimmy said. ‘One last time.’ He straddled the man, bent at the waist. His fists were tightly clenched. ‘What the fuck were you doing back there?’
‘I wasn’t doin’ nothing.’
‘You were watching Catriona,’ Jimmy said.
‘Who?’
Jimmy raised a fist, stopped short. ‘Don’t fuck with me. You know who I’m talking about. The little girl. You were watching her.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You were watching her and you were playing with your puny little dick, you sick motherfucker.’
‘I never.’
‘Admit it and I might let you live today. All you have to do is admit it. Admit what I
saw
you doing. Deny it and I swear to Christ on the cross I will take you apart right here and now.’
‘I didn’t do
nothing
.’
‘Do you know where you are?’ Jimmy asked.
The man just stared.
‘You’re in our park,’ Jimmy said. ‘We want you out of here. We want you out of here, and to never come back.’
‘I’m gonna tell my brothers.’
And there it was.
Jimmy cocked his fist again. He held off, then reached into his pocket, took out his small pearl-handled switchblade, flicked it open.
‘Jimmy,’ Kevin said. ‘Come on, man.’
Des Farren began to sob. ‘Tell… my brothers.’
Jimmy stuck the tip of the knife into the man’s right thigh. Not deep, but deep enough. Des Farren screeched. Blood darkened the front of his dirty white suit pants.
‘That’s
enough
, Jimmy,’ Kevin shouted. ‘Let him up.’
Jimmy hesitated for a few moments.
‘Thought so,’ he said. ‘If you ever come back to this park, if you ever even
look
at Catriona again, I will gut you with this knife and feed you to my dog. Then I will throw what’s left into the fucking river. Hear me?’
Silence.
‘Do you
hear me
?’
Nothing.
‘Take his pants down,’ Jimmy said to Dave Carmody.
‘
I hear you I hear you I hear you
,’ Des Farren screamed.
Jimmy Doyle stood up, closed the knife. The look of relief on Dave’s face was quantifiable.
Before he stepped away, Jimmy said: ‘If you’re even
thinking
of telling your brothers what happened here, think twice, if you can think at all. You don’t know me, you don’t know my family. It will be your last fucking mistake. You Farrens are the lowest form of shanty Irish. You won’t stand a fucking chance.’ He held up the man’s SEPTA pass, handed it to Kevin. ‘If anything ever happens to one of my boys –
ever
– I will come to your house. I will come at night, and I will not come alone. Understand?’
Des Farren nodded, rolled onto his side, held his thigh, sobbing. The blood had trickled halfway down his leg.
Jimmy turned to Kevin. ‘Give him his shit back.’
Kevin dropped the bus pass and the glasses.
‘Now get the fuck out of here,’ Jimmy said.
Des Farren slowly rose to his feet and faltered across the field, toward the Pocket. He did not turn around.
The four boys stood in silence for a long time. Finally, Dave broke the stillness.
‘Jimmy?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Since when do you have a dog?’
They all laughed, but it was a mirthless sound.
As they watched Des Farren disappear into the trees, they each held private thoughts about what just happened, and what might happen next.
The word among residents of the Pocket was that Desmond Farren had been born wrong, something to do with his umbilical cord being wrapped around his neck, which had somehow deprived him of oxygen. None of the boys knew this for sure, but they knew two things about the man as gospel.
One, he was always talking to himself.
Two, more importantly, you didn’t make fun of Des Farren. This was because he was the oldest of the three Farren brothers. The Farrens operated a shabby tavern on Montrose Street, a dive called The Stone.
Since Liam Farren had moved to the Pocket in the early 1940s, the real stock and craft of the family had not been the tavern and hospitality trade, but rather extortion, intimidation and a mad-dog violence that struck fear into homeowners and business owners alike.
In addition to squeezing protection money from local merchants, the Farren brothers had a city-wide reputation as burglars, rivaled only by the infamous K&A gang, a criminal conclave that ran their operation out of the Kensington and Allegheny neighborhood in North Philly.
Even the K&A gang stayed away from the Pocket.
One legend had Danny Farren, a few years earlier, throwing a man off a roof in Point Breeze, but not before cutting out one of his eyes with the broken beer bottle. Needless to say, there were no witnesses willing to put Danny Farren on that rooftop. Another ember of neighborhood fire had both Danny and Patrick following a man home from The Stone one night after he had allegedly insulted a barmaid. It was said that Danny held the man down while Patrick removed the man’s little fingers and little toes with a pair of garden shears.
Both Danny and Patrick Farren had been in and out of jail ever since they were teenagers, but never for the most brutal of their crimes.
It was one of the reasons why, even though he was howl-at-the-moon fucking weird, and smelled like a compost heap, no one gave Des Farren too hard a time.
Until today.
Jimmy Doyle had not only threatened Des Farren, but he had cut him.
It was with these thoughts that the four boys walked back to the avenue in silence and, without a further word, went their separate ways.
The Fourth of July dawned wet and hot. The lines around the best Irish bars were two thick by 6 a.m. Every other bar was jammed by eight. News helicopters hovered over the city.
The whole country was talking about Philadelphia. There was chatter of Boston and New York and Washington DC, but they were fucking losers; everyone in Philly knew this and expressed it to anyone who would listen.
It was the bicentennial of inarguably the most important city in America’s history. Very little of this was lost on Jimmy, Dave, Ronan and Kevin.
Even President Ford made a visit to Independence Hall.
The country was two hundred years old, and the beating heart of it all, the City of Brotherly Love, was electric with energy.