Exile on Bridge Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

Petey and try going round him, but he won’t let me, keeping me at bay with his left hand on my chest, his right fist held down behind him. I swipe at his left hand in anger and we stand chest to chest in front of the grocer woman, who calls back to her sons inside. Petey pushes up to his toes to get his face closer to mine while I lean into him. Bitterness fires inside me with my pumping heart and I imagine grabbing his throat and kicking him wildly. We then push each other away, but somehow I am punched in the mouth with a swiping swing that doesn’t have much power behind it. The grocer woman yelps for her boys to hurry and when they come out of the store they stop to find Richie Lonergan’s face, who they know very well and are in no hurry in confronting.
    I feel at my mouth and there is a bit of blood on my fingers from it. And I feel the eyes staring at me too. All of them. Petey is at the ready with his fists and teeth clamped closed while the others turn toward me too, Timmy, Matty, and Abe Harms. Richie stares down the brothers from the grocers and I know quickly that I am in a bad place. Outnumbered and with no help at all, my loyalty tied closely to Dinny Meehan, theirs to Bill Lovett. The divide among us now feeling greater than it ever has been.
    Feeling alienated by the Lonergan crew, I look away angrily. It’s all too much for me, and if I’m to think clearly, I don’t long to choose Dinny’s side at all, even though he’s vowed to help me get my mother and sisters to New York. Greater on my mind than any of it is what is happening in Ireland, my true home. The great country I was born to defend. My mind turns away from all of these demanded loyalties in Brooklyn to defending the motherland, particularly when she calls for me at her greatest time of need in this springtime of her awakening, 1916.
    And with Petey ready to fistfight me and everyone staring, I decide right here and now that I am not for Brooklyn in the first place. Any of it. And that I am to be back home, to my birth land where the earth is always under my feet instead of cement and brick.
    â€œFuck off,” I yell to Petey, point at him and Timmy and Matty and Abe and Richie. “The whole lot of you. I don’t need any of this.”
    I turn and sprint. Back across York Street and jump ahead of a slow-moving trolley. I refuse looking back. Just run with tears of fury coming off my eyes. The shame of my uncle’s death and of being jailed and alienated by everything else. The only things that slow me are McGowan’s old boots that Dinny gave me, and the heavy thoughts weighing me down. The thoughts somehow pushing up from a dream I’d had of the small crack I saw on the cement floor of the jail cell. That the crack opened into a great fissure that separated us by a flood, which opened into an ocean. Sent us to different sides, forcing us all to choose. I keep running, though, as fast as I can. All the way to Sands Street do I run, thinking in my head that I need nothing of the gang, having chosen my side. They don’t care about what is top on my mind. Don’t give a single care about my family caught in the coming troubles of war back home. My mother, who looked at me with the hopes of the Savior Himself when I left, is now the only person on my mind.
    I couldn’t have known it at the time, but I know now that she hoped for me to save her from the coming storm. She knew it was coming. Somehow she knew. She always knew things. She felt it coming last October, 1915, when I left Ireland. I’m sure of it. I can see it on her face now, in my memory. As I sprint along the sidewalks and storefronts, running and running, I think of her. Harder and harder I run to drive out my fury. And I think of her. My own mother. Caught in a rebellion among a war and no one seems to have the worry or the care of it. As I run up to the third level I think of her more. She looking up to me in a hope and I