Patrick Quinlan - Smoked

So don’t look out at the water, he told himself. Which was silly, of course. It was like telling somebody not to think of the color red. Then of course all they can think about is the color red. Red barns and red apples and red fire trucks and red stop signs and bright red cherries. Don’t look out at that view – the one some people raved about, how it took in the vast blue sky, and the sweep of the city’s skyline along the harbor, green islands and white sailboats in the distance.

Smoke looked.

He was high above the water. Way down below, he saw the tanker pulling through the bridge and into port. The deck of the tanker was about to pass through the opening. If Smoke were to somehow fall from that height, he imagined, he would smash like a tomato against the solid decking of that tanker. It would be a sickening five second fall, followed by a wet thud as the liquid insides of his body splashed in different directions much to the chagrin of a few startled Chinese sailors.

They’d probably laugh about it later.

Remember the suicide, he thought. Remember the suicide. Three years before, just after Smoke had settled here, a distraught mother of five had walked out onto the bridge. She had been put off welfare some time before, and had ground out a slow struggle on a work program. But she hadn’t cut the mustard. Work just wasn’t for her, not at the age of thirty, not after twelve years, her entire adult life, on the dole. Her electricity had been cut off, so she and her children were now sitting in the dark with no money, no prospects and most of all, no lights.

She walked out on that bridge, and without so much as a scream or a speech or a final telephone call, she climbed the very low fence at the top. It was little more than waist high. Smoke had noticed it several times. To his mind, it was so low a person could practically fall over it, never mind climb over.

As traffic screeched to a halt all around her and people came running to stop her, she leapt to what she thought was a certain death. A crowd of people gasped as she fell away and seconds later, hit the water far below.

And lived.

Without so much as a broken bone, or even a sprained ankle.

In fact, a young carpenter on his way to work acted without thinking, and jumped off the bridge in a desperate bid to save her life. And lived. Without a scratch. When the Coast Guard fished the two of them out of the water, the young man told the waiting reporters that the jump was the most fun he had ever had.

None of which made sitting there any easier on Smoke. He knew it intellectually. A person could live after falling from that bridge. But his body knew different. A fall from that bridge and he would be fish bait. And curiously, he felt drawn, compelled even, to the edge of it. The worst of his dislike of heights was the madness that gripped him – it made him want to jump.

Smoke’s grip had tightened around the wheel and he heard his breath coming in shallow gasps. He was mouth-breathing, never a good sign. He tried to loosen up and relax, but gripped the wheel harder than ever. A bead of sweat rolled down to the end of his nose. It wasn’t even hot out. His heart skipped a beat. His stomach lurched and did a lazy barrel roll.

He saw himself hit the deck of that tanker again.

“Shit,” he said through clenched teeth. “Shit on this.”

It had happened more than forty years earlier, back in Hell’s Kitchen.

He could see those days like they were yesterday. The five-story walk-ups they all lived in – tenements, the newspapers used to call them. All along Ninth Avenue, clothes were hung out to dry on the fire escapes. There was a constant buzz of sound, day or night, punctuated by the odd shouts or screams. The Irish, the Italians, all poor, all cramped together, and now the Puerto Ricans coming in. Smoke couldn’t remember a time when there weren’t Puerto Ricans, but his mother – all the grown-ups – talked like the spicks had never existed just a few years before.

Smoke was still Wally O’Malley then, and he was already running with the wrong crowd. In Hell’s Kitchen there was no other crowd.

Born with a bum leg, there was a lot little O’Malley couldn’t do. He couldn’t play stickball. He couldn’t fight – in a fist fight, his leg would give out from under him.

But there was one thing he could do…

It was a hot spring day. The boys stood out on the corner of 53^rd and Ninth, laughing and joking. O’Malley was with them. They leaned against the lamppost or the wall, cigarettes hanging from twelve year-old mouths, wearing stove pipe jeans, sports shirts with collars turned up. The teacher would wring your neck for a turned up collar in school, but there were no teachers on the street. They patted down their slicked back hair, every strand in place. Very carefully, very precisely cool. Squinting and watching the cars cruise the Avenue. Talking, talking, talking that good bullshit.

“You seen the tits on Maggie Lefferts?”

“Maggie Lefferts? Shit.”

“You seen the ass on that spick girl in class? Jesus. Now that’s a nice ass. What’s her name?”

“Yeah, but whaddya gonna do? Fuck a spick girl? You know what I’m saying? Who gives a shit what it looks like if you can’t get at it?”

Artie Mulligan came walking up the block. O’Malley could see from half a block away that something was wrong. He was walking…wrong. Then he saw the blood streaming down Artie’s face. Artie Mulligan – twelve years old and already tougher than leather, a born leader of men, shot dead in a tangle with FBI agents eleven years later – Artie had gotten a beat down.

He stood among them now, his eyes on fire.

“Motherfuckers.”

He leaned on a car and lit a smoke. His hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking. O’Malley noticed, not for the first time, how skinny Artie was, how small. Size didn’t mean shit.

“Who did it, Artie?”

“Ace McCoy, Phil Evans, some of those.”

The boys looked at him and nobody said a thing. Ace McCoy was 16 years old. His whole crew were fifteen, sixteen, just about to cross the threshold into manhood. In a year or two they would go to work on the docks, or join the Army, or get on board as street muscle in man-sized rackets – in a few years they’d be doing man-sized prison terms. If they weren’t men yet, they were about to be.

Artie stared right at O’Malley. Wally O’Malley was high up in Artie’s brain trust. More than that – O’Malley was Artie’s brain trust.

“What can we do?”

O’Malley shrugged. Then he smiled. “I have an idea.”

The older boys had a clubhouse they kept in a vacant lot between two buildings. The clubhouse was made of wooden pallets stolen from the docks on the river. The pallets were tied together with rope. The roof was a slab of sheet metal placed on top of the pallets, and the furniture was discarded rubber tires. The clubhouse slumped in the back of that vacant lot, hidden by the weeds, but all the neighborhood kids knew it was there. They also knew not to mess with it, or go there at all.

“I need gasoline,” O’Malley said. “And motor oil.”

A pint of gas, a pint of motor oil, that was all. The boys could siphon. The boys could steal. They had it in an hour. Then they gathered some rags together and two empty Coke bottles. O’Malley showed them how to make firebombs, two to be exact, with the gas and oil mixed together, the gas-soaked rags stuffed into the bottles, a long piece of rag blocking the neck and poking out as the wick for each bomb.

“Why the oil?” Artie said.

O’Malley smiled. “It makes the gas sticky.”

He wasn’t there when they bombed the clubhouse. He couldn’t run away if it came to that, so he waited at home for the news. He sat on the Murphy bed in the tiny railroad apartment, watching a cockroach move along the wall. From where he sat the pungent odor of burning tires came through the open window and reached his nose.