Collected Fictions Read Online Free PDF Page B

single-handed.
    For every obstreperous customer he subdued, he would cut a notch in the bludgeon he carried. One night, a shining bald spot leaning over a beer caught his eye, and Eastman laid the man's scalp open with a tremendous blow. "I had forty-nine nicks in me stick, an' I wanted to make it an even fifty!" Eastman later explained.

    RULING THE ROOST
    From 1899 onward, Eastman was not just famous, he was the ward boss of an important electoral district in the city, and he collected large payoffs from the red-light houses, stuss games, streetwalkers, pickpockets, loft burglars, and footpads of that sordid fiefdom. The Party would contract him when some mischief needed doing, and private individuals would come to him too. These are the fees he would charge for a job:

    Ear chawed off....................................................................$ 15.
Leg broke...............................................................................19.
Shot in leg..............................................................................25.
Stab........................................................................................25.
Doing the big job....................................................…..........100. and up.

    Sometimes, to keep his hand in, Eastman would do the job personally.

    A territorial dispute as subtle and ill humored as those forestalled by international law brought him up against Paul Kelly, the famous leader of another gang. The boundary line had been established by bullets and border patrol skirmishes. Eastman crossed the line late one night and was set upon by five of Kelly's men. With his blackjack and those lightning-quick simian arms of his, he managed to knock down three of them, but he was shot twice in the stomach and left for dead. He stuck his thumb and fore-finger in the hot wounds and staggered to the hospital. Life, high fever, and death contended over Monk Eastman for several weeks, but his lips would not divulge the names of his assailants. By the time he left the hospital, the war was in full swing. There was one shoot-out after another, and this went on for two years, until the 19th of August, 1903.

    THE BATTLE OF RIVINGTON STREET
    A hundred or more heroes, none quite resembling the mug shot probably fading at that very moment in the mug books; a hundred heroes reeking of cigar smoke and alcohol; a hundred heroes in straw boaters with bright-colored bands; a hundred heroes, all suffering to a greater or lesser degree from shameful diseases, tooth decay, respiratory ailments, or problems with their kidneys; a hundred heroes as insignificant or splendid as those of Troy or Junin*—those were the men that fought that black deed of arms in the shadow of the elevated train. The cause of it was a raid that Kelly's "enforcers" had made on a stuss game under Monk Eastman's protection. One of Kelly's men was killed, and the subsequent shoot-out grew into a battle of uncountable revolvers. From behind the tall pillars of the El, silent men with clean-shaven chins blazed away at one another; soon, they were the center of a horrified circle of hired hacks carrying impatient reinforcements clutching Colt artillery. What were the protagonists in the battle feeling? First, I believe, the brutal conviction that the senseless, deafening noise of a hundred revolvers was going to annihilate them instantly; second, I believe, the no less erroneous certainty that if the initial volley didn't get them, they were invulnerable. Speculation notwithstanding, behind their parapets of iron and the night, they battled furiously. Twice the police tried to intervene, and twice they were repelled. At the first light of dawn, the battle died away, as though it were spectral, or obscene. Under the tall arches raised by engineers, what remained were seven men gravely wounded, four men dead, and one lifeless pigeon.

    THE CRACKLE OF GUNFIRE
    The ward politicians for whom Monk Eastman worked had always publicly