The Trouble Boys Read online

His father patted his shoulder. “Cheer up, lad. It’s only for a little while. We’ll find a better place soon.”

  Colin’s disappointment only grew when they entered the building and he discovered that even if it was ugly it was not even their own house. There were other people who lived there, too. One of the apartment doors was wide open and Colin could see an old woman and man playing cards on a table inside the cramped room. The woman gave him a toothless smile and he recoiled. The long, dim hallway held a feeling of entrapment, like a big dog in a little cage. The smell of cigarette smoke and brewing coffee, as well as another, stronger, less pleasant odor, were present. His granny’s stone cottage in Kilrea was small, but it had a fireplace and was warm and inviting. Colin followed Maureen and Danny behind their father up the stairs.

  “Hello,” Colin’s father called out once they’d entered an apartment.

  Footsteps hurried out from somewhere inside the small rooms. Colin’s mother stood in front of the four of them. She kissed Colin on the forehead. She hugged Maureen and Danny. Her face was flushed, and she had dark circles under her eyes, but it wasn’t unusual for her to appear that way. To Colin she still looked as pretty as she always did.

  “How was your journey?” she asked Colin and Maureen. Danny and their father moved the luggage from the hallway, which had a damp smell, into their apartment. Michael had insisted he didn’t want to leave their belongings out in the hall, and Colin wondered if his father feared someone might steal them.

  “It took too long, and I’m hungry,” Colin answered his mother’s question.

  Líadan smiled at him. “I’ll make some sandwiches for all of you.”

  “Can we buy them instead?” Colin asked. “I want an American sandwich.”

  Líadan laughed a little. “There’s a shop around the corner. You can go outside and buy some if your brother comes with you.”

  Colin looked at Danny. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Get something for me and Da and Mam too,” Maureen said.

  Colin noticed his mother and father hadn’t unpacked some of the wooden crates and trunks they had left home with months ago. His father’s elaborate red accordion case inlaid with brass looked untouched.

  His mother took money out of her red apron and handed it (Colin saw it was a genuine American dollar) to Danny. Then she turned to Colin. “Lads, have fun. Button your coats. And Danny,” she said, looking at him again, “keep this money in the bottom of your shoe. This is New York and one can never be safe.”

  What his mother had said frightened Colin.

  “Why did we come here if it isn’t safe?” he asked Danny on the way out of the building.

  “We came here so Mam could get better, and because it was her dream.”

  “Is it Da’s dream as well?”

  “Who knows? He’s trying to find work, but he does whatever she wants.”

  2

  The Bowery Neighbourhood, Manhattan, 1937

  In New York, a boy named Johnny Garcia was Colin’s only friend. “I’ll take pity on you,” Johnny had told Colin a few minutes after they met for the first time outside Colin’s building. Johnny had introduced himself to Colin and had said he also lived in the apartment building. Colin had seen Johnny around the neighborhood but they had never spoken. He seemed friendly enough, so Colin started talking to him.

  “Why would you take pity on me?” Colin asked.

  “You’re a big guy but you’re soft. Without my help, it’s obvious you’re going to get yourself killed around here someday,” Johnny said matter-of-factly. “These guys who live here, they won’t just mess with you, they’ll kill you if you ain’t careful.”

  Colin looked at Johnny, shocked. “I was already beaten.”

  “When? In this neighborhood?”

  Colin shook his head. “On the journey over here.”

  “Did you retaliate?”

  “No. He was older than me.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “Why? It was long ago anyhow.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Johnny put his arm around him. “Suppose you were to run into this guy again someday and he remembers you, what are you going to do then?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “See? That’s why you always have to retaliate. Because if you don’t then they think they can keep kicking your ass.”

  Colin had never heard anything so harsh being uttered by someone his age before, but he hadn’t made any friends since arriving in New York a year ago and he wanted Johnny to become his friend.

  “He will?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re darker than the people we have back home,” Colin observed.

  Johnny glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You look like coffee with milk, is all I meant. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be mean. My mam loves to drink coffee with milk.”

  “Your mam? What the hell is that?”

  “My mother. That’s what we call mothers where I’m from.”

  “Ireland?”

  Colin nodded.

  “Okay, Irish, so you say I look like coffee with milk? Then I think you look just like the milk.”

  Colin laughed, and Johnny did as well. “I think I’m going to like you, Irish.”

  Johnny was a change from everything Colin had ever known before. He’d been born and raised in New York and had never once been out of the city. Johnny was an only child who lived with his mother, Annette, upstairs from Colin. Johnny’s father was serving time in prison for killing another man in Brooklyn, and Johnny hadn’t seen him in years. Johnny was a few months older than Colin, but they were in the same year at school.

  Johnny was half-Cuban in a mostly Italian, Jewish, and Irish neighborhood. Colin would help Johnny when the older boys, sometimes even the adults, played cruel pranks on him, such as spraying him in the face with beer from a can, and calling him names like ‘chocolate bar’. They even said his mother should be the only one allowed to live in the building because she was Irish and Johnny should be forced to live somewhere else. But Colin supported Johnny, and he admired how Johnny remained strong and never let anyone bring him down.

  One day, Johnny called for Colin outside their building as Colin left for school with Maureen.

  “You’re going to school today?”

  Colin nodded. “Aren’t you?”

  “Not today. My mother already left for work and won’t notice if I don’t go. Do you want to not go with me?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Why would you want to go to school anyway? It’s full of girls.” Johnny glanced at the pretty Maureen and smirked.

  “Be quiet, Johnny Garcia. Colin’s going to school, and you should be going with us,” she said.

  “I don’t have to if I don’t want to.”

  “Oh, what do you know anyway? You’re just a little boy!”

  “You’re not a very tough guy if you let your sister speak for you,” Johnny said to Colin. “O’Brien, didn’t I tell you that you won’t make it around here unless you’re tough?”

  Colin looked over at Johnny, who was bolder than him, and wanted to ask exactly what he meant. Colin knew his father wasn’t a tough man. He had been told by others over the years that his father was a large, serious man but soft – not a man devoted to the cross, but not one of the tough blokes either. But his father seemed to have done all right for himself. Did you really have to be so tough to survive? And what exactly did tough mean? How tough did you have to be? Colin guessed he’d have to be tough – whatever that meant – in the Bowery to survive. After all, Johnny seemed to know everything, from what was under girls’ dresses, to why Colin’s boozy uncle Rick had headaches in the morning.

  Maureen grabbed Colin’s hand and pulled him along to school. “All right, I’ll go with you,” Johnny called out and followed them. Colin could tell Johnny fancied Maureen.

  Life in New York wasn’t what Colin had expected for his family or for himself. Life in New
York wasn’t easy for them, almost as hard as it had been back home, perhaps even harder in some ways. The Great Depression intensified some of the city’s lifelong residents’ dislike of immigrants, and Colin’s father had trouble finding consistent work despite great effort. Back at Granny’s, the children had gathered around him as he played the accordion in the evenings, but he hadn’t removed the instrument from its case once since coming to New York. Colin’s mother, who’d sometimes worked as a hairdresser in Kilrea, seemed to have no interest in finding work in New York. There wasn’t enough money for her to see a doctor, or enough for the family to move back to Kilrea. There was barely enough money for them to survive. And when they received word in the post that their granny had died, they lost their connection to home.

  Colin’s family was living in their own apartment, but they rented by the week, and the family had to share a bathroom with the three other families on the floor. The building was noisy all the time with adults yelling, and laughing and crying children, and the sounds of people making love through the walls.

  In the autumn and the wintertime, the landlord sometimes purposely forgot to heat the building to save money; and in the late spring and summer, the tenement had a constant stench. It was the stink of its occupants’ sweat, and garbage tossed into the hallway and down the stairwell. Even if you opened a window, there was the rank scent of the warm city, of trash left on the busy sidewalks and streets, and the noise of cars speeding past the building and sometimes hitting a neighborhood child or a pet cat.

  Uncle Rick had come to the United States five years before Colin’s family, and Colin knew Rick was part of the reason for his father agreeing to move their family to New York in the first place. Rick was married to a kind Polish woman named Georgette. He owned and operated O’Brien’s pub just outside the Bowery. O’Brien’s was frequented by Irish dockworkers, petty thieves, and assorted locals who told tales so complicated and untrue that they took hours to narrate them and seconds to change them.

  When he saw Rick now, Colin thought how much he looked like his uncle. They had the same eyes and the same laugh, and customers in the pub would comment how they could be father and son. Colin’s father and Rick had always laughed at this.

  Rick was Colin’s only uncle in America. He had uncles in Ireland, but even if they all came over here, Colin felt that Rick would still be his favorite. Rick cracked jokes that always made Colin laugh. Colin wanted to grow up to be a publican like Rick, or maybe a policeman.

  Colin’s father didn’t drink at the pub, but even at a young age Colin knew Rick was always at his pub and that if Colin’s father wanted to see him then he had to go there to do so. Rick took much pleasure in the drink. He drank while tending the bar. When Rick drank, he would sing in an off-key voice, and Colin found it amusing. Colin learned what drunk was early on, and how some people became angry when they picked up the bottle, and some became friendlier, while others got ill and some of them passed out. Women who drank would sometimes throw themselves at men, and some men did the same to the women. Mostly people yelled more when they drank.

  “Colin,” Uncle Rick said loudly when Colin went inside the pub with his father.

  It was early in the afternoon, and Rick’s face was already ruddy with the drink. He was a large man, tall and broad-shouldered, like Colin’s father. His dark O’Brien hair was tinged with silver. “You’ve grown since I last saw you.” He grinned.

  “Since yesterday you mean?” Colin said sarcastically.

  Rick chuckled. He looked at Colin’s father. “It really does seem like he’s getting bigger every day. Maybe he’ll be a boxer someday. Soon he’ll be as tall as us.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Michael said.

  Colin ran behind the bar and gave Rick a hug. Rick pretended to groan as he raised him high up into the air, and Colin smiled at his uncle. Rick smelled smoky like his pub.

  “Interest you in a drink, Mike?” Rick put Colin down as he spoke to Michael.

  “You know I never touch the stuff.”

  “Do you want a cup of milk, Colin?”

  Colin pouted at his uncle and shook his head.

  Uncle Rick chuckled. “Would you like a ginger ale, Colin? Michael, do you want one too, then? Or maybe Colin wants a beer himself?” He winked at Colin. “You’re getting on to be ten years old, aren’t you, lad?” He glanced at Colin’s father. “I reckon our da gave us our first taste of the drink when we were around your age, Colin. Isn’t that right, Michael?”

  Colin’s father touched his shoulder with his large hand and looked at his brother. “Colin’s not having that kind of a drink.” He used a firm tone.

  Rick’s posture tensed. “All right, then, Michael. I’ll get you two those ginger ales.”

  In turn, Colin looked up at his father for his approval, and his father smiled. Colin nodded yes at his uncle.

  “Come on then, sit down.” Uncle Rick gestured to the bar. Colin waited for his father to sit and then he sat.

  “You still smoke, don’t you?” Rick asked Michael with a sparkle in his bright blue eyes.

  Colin’s father nodded.

  “Me, too,” Uncle Rick said. “Do you know what’s interesting? I bought this wonderful box of cigarettes the other day from Daniel. He’s selling them for the Dubliner who lives below you.”

  Michael stared at Rick and didn’t say anything. Colin couldn’t tell what was going on between his father and uncle. He didn’t know if Rick was trying to pick a fight with his father.

  “Did you know Danny’s been working for that fella?” Rick dried a mug with a clean rag and the motion caused it to squeak.

  Colin’s brother Danny was now fifteen years old, strong and tall for his age. He had left school and planned to enlist in the Air Force.

  “I’m aware of it, yes,” Colin’s father said to Uncle Rick.

  “What do you think of the Dubliner, Mike? Do you think he’s crooked like they say in the neighborhood? Some say the cigarettes he sells are stolen.” He set the ginger ales on the bar.

  Colin’s father handed him one of the drinks.

  “I’m not sure exactly what that man does. But you know, Rick, it’s not the job I’d wished Danny had taken, but at least he’s doing something with his life – and he needs to do something to keep him out of big trouble. Of course it isn’t my first choice for him. But he’s not been going to school, and he needs to do something for money. I told him that if he won’t finish school then he needs to earn money.”

  “Make him go back to school, then.”

  “If only it were that easy. The school doesn’t want him back because they say he fights with the other lads too much.”

  “Does he always win?”

  Colin’s father nodded. “The girls like him though.”

  Rick laughed. “I bet. Handsome devil he is.”

  Colin’s father managed to laugh only a little. “I don’t know, though, Rick. Sometimes I feel like New York is the devil and he’s pulling my family into his clutches.”

  “It’s different here from home, that’s for sure. I have an idea. Why doesn’t Danny come work here with me? I’d pay him fairly.”

  Colin’s glass of ginger ale started to topple and his father reached out to balance it.

  “Thanks, but I don’t want Danny around the drink all day.”

  “Really, Mike, you’d rather have him working for a possible

  crook instead of his uncle?”

  “No, that isn’t it at all. I just don’t want him surrounded by drinking all day,” Colin’s father stated again, this time more firmly. His pale face turned red.

  Colin felt that the relationship his father had with Uncle Rick was typical of Irish brothers, one where there was plenty of fighting and rivalry, and, of course, love.

  “You’ve become a saint in your old age,” Uncle Rick remarked to Colin’s father.

  Michael laughed slightly but Colin could tell the remark had irked his father.

  Colin took another
drink of his ginger ale. He eyed his father and uncle. The postures of both men were now tense and Colin moved in to diffuse the situation. He didn’t want it escalating into a full-scale fight. He knew Irish brothers well because he was one himself.

  “Uncle Rick, you said you could take me to play baseball in the park like the American boys do, and I want to do it tomorrow.” Even then, Colin was good at easing conflict.

  Uncle Rick looked across the bar at him and smiled. “Sure we can, Colin. A promise is a promise. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  Colin grinned. His mother had mentioned Rick had boxed competitively all over the world in his younger days, until he’d damaged his ‘knockout’ arm in a pub brawl when he was twenty-three. He had come to New York to start over, like Colin’s family had.

  “How’s Georgette?” Colin’s father asked Uncle Rick.

  “She’s doing very well.”

  “Is the baby coming along all right?”

  “Yeah. She’s about six months along, so the time’s almost here. I hope it’s a boy myself, Mike. If it’s a girl then I’ll be having to keep an eye on her all the time when she gets older. God bloody well knows I’ve sometimes been a bastard to women myself in my younger days, and I wouldn’t want no fella treating my daughter the way I treated some girls as a lad. You’ve gotten lucky with Maureen. She’s a pretty girl but you’ve had no trouble with her.”

  “And don’t I know how lucky I am. Maureen’s smart and she’s strong.”

  “Perhaps she’ll become a nun.”

  Colin’s father chuckled. “I doubt that.”

  “How’s Líadan getting on these days?”

  Rick asked about Colin’s mother often. Sometimes he’d give Colin’s father a bottle of beer to take home to her.

  “Sometimes she seems fine, but then sometimes, well, you know.”

  “Must be hard to keep up with her moods,” Uncle Rick observed. Colin’s father nodded but didn’t say anything.

  Rick glanced over at the ticking clock on the wall. “It’s a few minutes after four. The after-work crowd should be coming in soon.”