City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(11)

Marty plays the lotto like he has an in with Saint Jude. Usually he just wins a little beer money, but once he won a hundred dollars and that keeps him at it. He’s sure he’s going to hit the lottery or something and Danny wonders what Marty would do with a few million dollars if he did.

Skinny, bitter old man sitting in that chair in the same red plaid shirt that Terri gave him, what, three Christmases ago? Buttoned up to the neck, with a slice of the white T-shirt showing? Baggy, dirty old khaki trousers that Terri can talk him out of maybe once a month to wash? White socks, sandals?

Marty Ryan.

Martin Ryan.

A goddamn legend.

When Big Bill Donovan came up from New York and told the Providence boys they were joining the New York branch of the ILA, it was Marty Ryan, just a kid then, who sent him packing. Marty and John Murphy, back in the day. They stared New York down and it was New York that blinked, so we have our own union and our own docks, Danny knows. A few years later, Albert Anastasia himself came up, tried to pull the same shit, Marty told him, “We got our own guineas here.”

It was true—young Pasquale Ferri was standing right beside them. They worked it out, Marty and John and the Italians. The Irish kept the docks, the Italians took the trucking, and both unions were run from Providence. Marty and John told the outsiders that “local” meant just that—local. We didn’t leave Ireland to be a colony of anybody’s anymore. So, for years, nothing came into Providence it didn’t come through Marty Ryan, John Murphy, or Pasco Ferri. By truck or boat, didn’t matter. They had their joke about the bite they took, called it “the Paul Revere”—one if by land, two if by sea.

The stuff that walked off those boats and trucks fed Dogtown for decades. Not just the dockworkers or drivers, either. Guys who worked in the factories, making costume jewelry, tools, and just enough to cover the rent, they knew they could buy their kids a new pair of sneakers from the back door of the Glocca Morra. They could get canned goods, booze, cigarettes without paying retail to make the rich Yankees richer. Later, when the factories moved south and the buckle on the Rust Belt got tighter, guys couldn’t cover the rent and those back-door sales were a matter of survival. Men who would have put a bullet in their heads before they took food stamps would go to Marty to find out what had come off the trucks and the boats that week. Cans of soup, cans of tuna, cans of stew grew legs and walked off the docks onto family tables.

That was Marty back when his neck was thick from swinging his longshoreman’s hook and his fists. Back when he had his pride.

“You’re going to the clambake, right?” Danny asks him now.

“I don’t know.”

“You should come,” Danny says. “Get out, it will do you good.”

Friday nights Terri usually manages to drag Marty down to Dave’s for fish-and-chips. Marty’s had fish-and-chips every Friday night since Danny can remember, a break in his otherwise steady diet of bacon and eggs, corned beef hash, and booze.

“I don’t know,” Marty says.

Ned don’t say anything. Ned rarely does.

One hard case, Ned Egan. When he was a kid at St. Michael’s, the priests and nuns beat him half to death trying to straighten him out. The sister would make Ned stretch his hand out on the desk, then slam the edge of a ruler down on his fingers, and he’d just look at her and smile. He’d get home, his old man would see the welt on his hand and figure that Ned had done something to piss off the sister, so he’d lay Ned down on the bed and bring a razor strap down on the backs of his legs until Ned cried.

Problem was, Ned wouldn’t cry and his old man wouldn’t give up. Those days, no one had heard of Child Protective Services, it wasn’t even a concept, so Ned took some ferocious beatings. He’d go to school the next morning with blood leaking through the backs of his pants legs, which would stick to the seat of his chair whenever he went to get up. The teachers learned not to call him to the blackboard those days so as not to embarrass the boy.

When Ned was fourteen, his old man picked up the strap and told him to lie down but Ned swung on him instead, put him on the floor, then ran out and tried to join the merchant marine. They laughed at him and told him to come back in four years. So Ned lived on the streets for a while, until Marty Ryan had a cot put in the storage closet at the Gloc, let the lad sweep up the place for a bowl of lamb stew or shepherd’s pie or whatever was left over at night.

One afternoon, Ned’s old man came into the pub with a ball bat in his hand and announced he was going to teach his no-good son a lesson he’d never forget. Marty was sitting in his booth and quietly said, “Billy Egan, unless that lesson is how to hit a curveball, I’d suggest you turn around and walk back through that door. I’m a bit short of cash now to have a mass said for you.” Ned’s old man turned milk white and walked back through the door. He knew just what Ryan was telling him, and he never stepped into the Gloc again.

The day he was sixteen, Ned quit school, went down to the docks, where Mr. Ryan got him his union card. Ned started swinging the hook, made a decent wage, got himself a little apartment on Smith Street and bought his own groceries. His father would see him in the neighborhood, he’d cross the street. His mother wrote him a letter when the old man died.

Ned didn’t write back. Far as he was concerned, Marty Ryan was his father.

Now Danny says to his dad, “I’ll drive you over there.”