The Styx Read Online Free PDF

breath stream out in jets of white into the single room. He did not move his head, putting off what he knew would be some pain from the fracas of last evening. He shifted his slowly improving eyesight to the door opposite. The locks were set. Maybe he had not been as drunk as his pasty mouth indicated.
    He lay there several minutes, planning what he’d have to pack—a few articles of clothing that he’d splurged on by having the washerwoman downstairs clean and hang out to dry. He stared at the old dresser drawer where a small leatherette held several keepsakes, including the papers his parents had kept and their documents from Ellis Island, their photographs blurred to sepia with age. And once it held his father’s watch. The sight of Danny slipping it out of the drawer the night he left came into Byrne’s head again. When their father died—their mother told them he’d been crushed under the wheels of a delivery wagon on his way to his job as an apprentice steamfitter—Michael had known that she’d lied. He was convinced that his father was alive because he knew the old man never went anywhere without the Swiss-made watch that he’d brought with him from Dublin and rarely let out of his sight.
    Byrne shifted his eyes again, looked up to the single eastside window in the room and tried to will the light of a late sunrise in through its dirty panes. He thought of how proud his father had been to move them into this, the second floor of a building where they’d started out in the rat-infested basement, then to the top where the rickety stairs and lack of heat was the next stop for the poorest. Year by year his father had muscled and scrapped and used that optimistic smile of his to make friends, find connections, and get into a better job. The steamfitter job was one he’d been vying for, one to pay the forty-eight dollars a month they’d need to rent a flat farther north in a better neighborhood. But after two years there, the old man had started to change. The smiling eyes began to go dull at dinner. The full-throated Irish brogue that told wonderful stories at night went hollow and finally quiet. One night, Michael had risen from his cot to use the tenement’s hallway bathroom and saw his father sitting up, staring out the only window of the apartment at a view that only contained the brick wall of the building across the street. His parents never argued those last two years. No complaints from his mother. No recriminations from his father. Then the man who’d broken his back, and perhaps his soul, to raise them, was gone.
    Byrne could see the vision of his father that he’d formed in his own head afterward, the one of his sinewy, 140-pound body lying in the middle of the filthy street, the indentations of horse hooves carved into his skin, his legs twisted at impossible angles. But in the vision, now a million sleepless nights perfected in his mind, Michael never saw a mark on his father’s face, never a change in his absorbed and intelligent eyes.
    Of course, Michael had never really seen the body, had in fact never been to a funeral ceremony or a gravesite. All he and Danny were left with was the watch, the only thing of value their father had brought on the “Coffin Ship” from Dublin, with its plain ivory face and oval halo of silver. And that’s how he knew his mother had lied.
    Byrne gathered himself—he hated the cold—and then flung back the blanket and stood. The cold wood floor stung as he knew it would. He’d gone to sleep last night with his pants on and they would have to do for his journey. To his surprise he found that he’d actually taken off his shirt and hung it on the bureau. But when he held the bone-white garment up he could see even in the bare light that there were blood stains at the left shoulder, and that wouldn’t do. He reached into his pocket, came out with a stick match, and lit the kerosene lamp on the bureau top. The flame crawled up the mirror before him.
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