Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

McDonnell is a beast of burden. He is six feet four inches tall, and he weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. He speaks English with such a thick brogue that even his own countrymen can barely understand him. He is fifty-two years old, partially balding, with tiny black pig’s eyes beneath a lowering brow, a bulbous nose he clears by seizing it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, holding the calloused palm away as daintily as though he is lifting a demitasse, and then snorting snot into the mud. He has a huge beer-barrel belly as hard as concrete, and is often daring the other men to punch him as hard as they can in the gut. He laughs a great deal, but seemingly without humor, the laughter unprovoked by incident or event; he finds life either terribly comical or utterly mystifying. Because he is so stupid, he often cannot tell the difference between a well-intentioned compliment and an insult, and is quick to answer any supposed affront with his fists. He is a perfect foil for Francesco’s plot.

The lunch hour comes at twelve noon. The foreman blows his whistle into the tunnel, and the men drop their picks, grab for their lunch pails, and begin to disperse. Even when the weather is good, they drift from their work areas to eat in other parts of the tunnel, the theory being that a change is as good as a rest. But this week in particular, when the mud is everywhere underfoot, they search out niches in the rock walls, higher stretches of ground, overturned wheelbarrows, the insides of carts, anything upon which they can spread their sandwiches and coffee safe from the slime. Francesco waits until all the men have wandered off, and then he moves swiftly to where McDonnell has dropped his pick — he has been watching McDonnell all morning, and knows exactly which pick is his. He lifts it from the mud, wipes the handle clean with the sleeve of his shirt, and takes a penknife from his pocket. Quickly, he carves the initials P.H. into the handle, and then drops the pick back into the mud. The explosion comes shortly after lunch.

“What’s this?” McDonnell says.

Francesco, working some distance away, continues chopping at the solid rock wall of the tunnel. There is a sense of rising excitement in him, coupled with an uneasy foreboding. Suppose this backfires? But no, it cannot.

“What in holy bloody hell is this ?” McDonnell bellows.

There is not a man in the tunnel who does not know of Francesco’s run-in with Halloran two months back. With great relish they tell and retell the story of how Halloran carved his initials into the little wop’s pick handle and then traded his own broken pick for the undamaged one. McDonnell is a notch above a moron, but he has heard the story, too, and what he sees staring up at him now from the handle of his pick are the initials P.H.

“Where’s Halloran?” he shouts.

He does not ask Halloran for an explanation; he never asks anyone for an explanation. He knows only that Halloran has equated him with the puny wop and is trying to pull the same trick a second time. Francesco watches as McDonnell seizes Halloran by the throat and batters his head against the rock wall of the tunnel. He watches as McDonnell, one hand still clutched around Halloran’s throat, repeatedly punches him in the face, closing both his eyes and breaking his jaw and splintering his teeth. He watches as McDonnell picks up the other man effortlessly, holds him over his head for an instant, and then hurls him some ten feet through the air to collide with the opposite wall of the tunnel. Then he watches as McDonnell takes the pick and with its P.H. initials, breaks the handle over his knee, and drops the halves on Halloran’s bloodied chest

“It wan’t comical,” he says to Halloran, but Halloran does not hear him. Halloran is unconscious and bleeding and broken, and will in fact be taken to the hospital, not to report back to work till the middle of August, by which time Francesco will have left the subway-building business for good. In the meantime, he looks at Halloran lying in the mud, and he watches as the men begin to gather around him, and there is a tight grim smile on his mouth; he is from the south of Italy, and revenge is nowhere sweeter.

A conversation between my brother Tony and me, many years later. Tony is seventeen, I am fifteen. We are sitting on the front stoop of our house in the Bronx. Ten minutes earlier, I’d made casual reference to our grandfather’s tale of revenge, which we’d both heard many times. Tony suddenly expresses a skepticism I can only link with his present anger at Grandpa. Tony wants to join the Air Corps; Grandpa has asked, “Why? So you can go bomb Italy?” But Grandpa has prevailed, and my mother has refused to sign the permission papers for enlistment. Tony blames Grandpa for this, and now refuses to believe a story he has accepted as gospel since he was five.

TONY: It just doesn’t ring true, Iggie, that’s all.

ME: Grandpa swears it happened.

TONY: Why didn’t McDonnell suspect that maybe Grandpa was the one who’d carved those initials into his pick?

ME: Because he was dumb.

TONY: He was smart enough to remember the story about Grandpa and Houlihan, and to...

ME: Halloran.

TONY: Halloran. He made that connection, didn’t he?

ME: Come on, Tony, a caterpillar could’ve made that connection. The man’s initials were carved into the pick! P.H. So McDonnell automatically...

TONY:... automatically went after Halloran and beat him senseless.

ME: Right.

TONY: I don’t believe it.

ME: Well, I do.

TONY: What if I told you that June of 1901 was the sunniest June in the history of New York City?

ME: Grandpa says it rained for twelve days and twelve nights. It went into the records, he says.

TONY: Have you checked the records?

ME: No, but. . .

TONY: Then how do you know Grandpa wasn’t lying?

ME: He never lies, you know that. Anyway, what’s the rain got to do with the story?

TONY: I’m only trying to show you that if part of the story is a lie, maybe all of it is a lie.

ME: It sounds like the truth. That’s good enough for me.

Which, in a way, is exactly how I feel about this narrative. If it sounds like the truth, that’s good enough for me. You go check the records, I’m too busy, and I’m too blind. I haven’t the faintest inkling whether June of 1901 was the wettest June on record or the sunniest. When you find out, let me know — though frankly, I don’t give a damn, If you’re willing to compromise, I’ll say it was the cloudiest June on record, how’s that? The floor of the subway tunnel was covered with mist , okay? The Spanish-American War took place in 1794, Pope John was a Protestant, we got out of Vietnam with honor, astronauts are lyric poets, and my mother is a whore. Who cares? The truth I’m trying to deliver has nothing to do with careful research meticulously sandwiched into a work of fiction to give it verisimilitude or clinical verity. The only truth I’m trying to convey is this: it’s a lie. All of it.

That’s the tragedy.

In contrast to the miserably wet June that year, the beginning of July was sunny and hot. The Fourth fell on a Thursday. Today, this would mean a four-day weekend, but in 1901, when men were working a six-day week, Independence Day was only a one-day respite from the almost daily grind. Francesco had been in America for the celebration of Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays (which meant nothing to him) and for Easter (which he had spent in the hospital recuperating from Halloran’s attack). The Fourth was special to him only in that it promised widespread celebrations on the order of La Festa di San Maurizio in Fiormonte.