H. Lovecraft - Brooklyn Noir 2

Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No funeral was held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as a whole. The scholar’s connection with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never emblazoned by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he would otherwise have faced. His own end is not much mentioned, and the Suydams hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle recluse who dabbled in harmless magic and folklore.

As for Red Hook — it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well of Democritus. The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook’s legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand. As of old, more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side, and there are already rumours of new canals running underground to certain centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.

The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance hall, and queer faces have appeared at night at the windows. Lately a policeman expressed the belief that the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and for no simple explainable purpose. Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.

Malone does not shudder without cause — for only the other day an officer overheard a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some whispered patois in the shadow of an areaway. He listened, and thought it very strange when he heard her repeat over and over again,

“O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!”

Brownsville

(Originally published in 1938)

During the cocktail hour, in Brownsville, the cab drivers gather in Lammanawitz’s Bar and Grill and drink beer and talk about the world and watch the sun set slowly over the elevated tracks in the direction of Prospect Park.

“Mungo?” they say. “Mungo? He got a fish for a arm. A mackerel. He will pitch Brooklyn right into the first division of the International League.”

“I saw the Mayor today. His Honor, himself. The Little Flower. What this country needs …”

“Pinky, I want that you should trust me for a glass of beer.”

Pinky wiped the wet dull expanse of the bar. “Look, Elias. It is against the law of the State of New York,” he said, nervously, “to sell intoxicating liquors on credit.”

“One glass of beer. Intoxicatin’!” Elias’s lips curled. “Who yuh think I am, Snow White?”

“Do you want me to lose my license?” Pinky asked plaintively.

“I stay up nights worryin’ Pinky might lose his license. My wife hears me cryin’ in my sleep,” Elias said. “One beer, J. P. Morgan.”

Regretfully, Pinky drew the beer, with a big head, and sighed as he marked it down in the book. “The last one,” he said, “positively the last one. As God is my witness.”

“Yeah,” Elias said. “Keep yer mouth closed.” He drank the beer in one gulp, with his eyes shut. “My God,” he said quietly, his eyes still shut, as he put the glass down. “Fer a lousy dime,” he said to the room in general, “yuh get somethin’ like that! Fer a lousy dime! Brooklyn is a wonderful place.”

“Brooklyn stinks,” said another driver, down the bar. “The borough of cemeteries. This is a first class place for graveyards.”

“My friend Palangio,” Elias said. “Il Doochay Palangio. Yuh don’t like Brooklyn, go back to Italy. They give yuh a gun, yuh get shot in the behind in Africa.” The rest of the drivers laughed and Elias grinned at his own wit. “I seen in the movies. Go back t’ Italy, wit’ the fat girls. Who’ll buy me a beer?”

Complete silence fell over the bar, like taps over an army camp.

“My friends,” Elias said bitterly.

“Brooklyn is a wonderful place,” Palangio said.

“All day long,” Elias said, reflectively rubbing his broken nose, “I push a hack. Eleven hours on the street. I now have the sum of three dollars and fifty cents in my pocket.”

Pinky came right over. “Now, Elias,” he said, “there is the small matter of one beer. If I’d knew you had the money …”

Elias impatiently brushed Pinky’s hand off the bar. “There is somebody callin’ for a beer down there, Pinky,” he said. “Attend yer business.”

“I think,” Pinky grumbled, retreating, “that a man oughta pay his rightful debts.”

“He thinks. Pinky thinks,” Elias announced. But his heart was not with Pinky. He turned his back to the bar and leaned on his frayed elbows and looked sadly up at the tin ceiling. “Three dollars and fifty cents,” he said softly. “An’ I can’t buy a beer.”

“Whatsamatta?” Palangio asked. “Yuh got a lock on yuh pocket?”

“Two dollars an’ seventy-fi’ cents to the Company,” Elias said. “An’ seventy-fi’ cents to my lousy wife so she don’t make me sleep in the park. The lousy Company. Every day for a year I give ’em two dollars an’ seventy-fi’ cents an’ then I own the hack. After a year yuh might as well sell that crate to Japan to put in bombs. Th’ only way yuh can get it to move is t’ drop it. I signed a contract. I need a nurse. Who wants t’ buy me a beer?”

“I signed th’ same contract,” Palangio said. A look of pain came over his dark face. “It got seven months more to go. Nobody shoulda learned me how to write my name.”

“If you slobs would only join th’ union,” said a little Irishman across from the beer spigots.

“Geary,” Elias said. “The Irish hero. Tell us how you fought th’ English in th’ battle of Belfast.”

“O.K., O.K.,” Geary said, pushing his cap back excitably from his red hair. “You guys wanna push a hack sixteen hours a day for beans, don’ let me stop yuh.”

“Join a union, get yer hair parted down the middle by the cops,” Elias said. “That is my experience.”

“O.K., boys.” Geary pushed his beer a little to make it foam. “Property-owners. Can’t pay for a glass a beer at five o’clock in th’ afternoon. What’s the use a’ talkin’ t’ yuh? Lemme have a beer, Pinky.”

“Geary, you’re a red,” Elias said. “A red bastidd.”

“A Communist,” Palangio said.

“I want a beer,” Geary said loudly.

“Times’re bad,” Elias said. “That’s what’s th’ trouble.”

“Sure.” Geary drained half his new glass. “Sure.”

“Back in 1928,” Elias said, “I averaged sixty bucks a week.”

“On New Year’s Eve, 1927,” Palangio murmured, “I made thirty-six dollars and forty cents.”

“Money was flowin’,” Elias remembered.

Palangio sighed, rubbing his beard bristles with the back of his hand. “I wore silk shirts. With stripes. They cost five bucks a piece. I had four girls in 1928. My God!”

“This ain’t 1928,” Geary said.

“Th’ smart guy,” Elias said. “He’s tellin’ us somethin’. This ain’t 1928, he says. Join th’ union, we get 1928 back.”