Free Exile on Bridge Street by Eamon Loingsigh Page B

faces and who has been known to punch the life out of people with a single looping and crushing swing, such as a Calabrian that stood up to him named Giovanni Buttacavoli, chronicled by the newspapers and word of mouth.
    The three bodyguards stand watch around him while his dockbosses enforce his tribute along the waterfront docks, as has been done since their fathers and grandfathers arrived seventy years earlier. Dinny Meehan at the center. Nameless and faceless, if you ask about him. Yet seemingly always there at the center of our arrival and rule over Brooklyn longshore labor. He being our nous, embodying our intellect and knowledge, both a guide and creator even. A man whose reputation stands so far above the rest of us that some argue, such as Beat McGarry, that he is more than just a leader of labormen, but a man who saved Irishtown and the old ways from the waves of time and change that crashed across New York at the same moment he surged to power like sparse light from darkness, a countercurrent.
    Staring at me, Dinny Meehan does. And even though he is protected by many, he is not fragile by any means. Looking at him is to feel it, and I can see that he is by far the fiercest fighter of them all. Wide-set eyes, muscular brows, broad jawline and shoulders with small ears and a tree-trunk neck—that of a mauling dog. Ever since he’d taken power on the docks in 1913, he has been challenged one on one to some fifty or sixty fights and still now, undefeated. Perfect. All knockouts, and with only cement or cobblestones or pier planks to catch his flaccid victims. Russian, Italian, Polish, Black, or Jew. Irish even. The biggest, rowdiest fighters Brooklyn could muster from any reach. Not one even lasting a full minute before Dinny comes to the inside of them, blasting through their bodies and eventually up through the face and jaw, the odds so much in his favor that no bets are even taken any longer. Staring at me. Through me, with his green-stoned eyes from his desk and me there, long and skinny and young and unknowing, I open my mouth.
    â€œI just want to know about my family.”
    â€œLittle fuck,” Vincent mumbles. “I told ya to shut it.”
    I look back at the man, Dinny Meehan at his desk, where all attention is directed. He has only twenty-seven years, yet somehow his patience comes to the fore. It was he that brought us all together out of nothing, so I’ve been told. He who now feeds the poor where this country chooses to ignore them. Just like the British had when we died of the starvation. Here, he finds them jobs, rooms, brings them as one in a second-floor saloon by the docks amidst the filth of factories, the fires of foundries and the enormous transience of the elevated trains and bridges reaching deep into the leaning tenements of the bulging underclasses. All of this on him, and still he looks to me with a great tolerance, patience.
    â€œConnolly,” he says after a good long silence.
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œWhat was it ya said to all the new boys just the other day when . . . when all o’ ya was outside just before we took back Red Hook?”
    â€œI told ’em to listen to Richie. That any order Richie gives, treat it like it comes from Dinny.”
    Dinny nods.
    â€œAnd what was it ya said to all the new boys just this mornin’?”
    â€œGo to the Lonergan bike shop ’til ya hear word from us.”
    Nods again. Adjusts his shoulders inside the coat and swivels his neck. I look away from him for a moment. The top of his desk empty of all papers. All evidence. Dust accumulating on the most of it.
    Dinny clears his throat and eventually speaks in a low tone, “I made a commitment to you.”
    I listen.
    â€œThat,” he looks away, then looks back at me. “That I take seriously. If I were a man who said things he didn’t mean, no one would care a shit for me. I take the things I say, the commitments I make, as somethin’