I was in Flower Hospital for three weeks, which beats bein’ in the morgue for three days anytime. I only remember the last week or so—I guess I was off my nut half the time, babbling about my mother and dear old Ireland and whatnot, the kinds of things a mug babbles about when he thinks he’s had the course. They tell me the sawbones tucked right in, digging six slugs out of my gut, suturin’ up arteries and stuff. Five of the bullets was buried too deep and so they decided to leave ’em inside me as a souvenir. They say every last one of the shots just missed tearin’ apart a vital organ or two, and that while I was carved up inside like a Christmas goose, almost everything was able to be put back in relatively good working order. They said it was a miracle.
I dunno about miracles; I left that department to Ma. Frankly I didn’t believe in ’em. I’d seen too many mugs clipped with a stray shot and die right on the spot, while other bastards you could beat half to death and the next day there they were, big as life. The way I figured it at that moment was that me and Fats, or Little Patsy, or whatever he wanted to call himself, was square. We’d each tried to more or less kill each other—although I took it as a fault on his part that he needed a couple of mugs to help him out—and Providence or Fate or Lady Luck had decreed that so far we was fightin’ a draw, which I was determined to rectify, for sure doesn’t the Deity, like the Tiger, hate a tie. Kissing your sister, as the man said.
I didn’t want for company. Ma and May were there every day, even when I was unconscious, and I have a sneaking feeling that a prelate from St. Mike’s might’ve waved some holy water my way. I was bandaged from my chest to my jewels, and May helped the nurses change the dressings. Even out as cold as a tomato can, I could feel her hand in mine, long into the night.
Art and Johnny were there every hour of every day, standin’ guard outside the door. In gangland you always got two shots at your target: once on the street and once in hospital, so it had become the custom to have a couple of triggermen standin’ near your bedside full-time. They felt terrible about what had happened, but I told them, once I could talk proper again, that it wasn’t their fault, but from now on they should consider themselves on permanent detail, and they did.
My case officer was a sweet little onion of a nurse, a colleen from County Tipperary named Mary Frances Blackwell. I thought that was pretty funny because Blackwell’s Island, in the East River, was where the penitentiary was back then, the nuthouse too, but she didn’t think it was funny and after a while I didn’t either. On the rare occasions when my room wasn’t crammed with family members, gang members, bulls or simple well-wishers, Mary Frances was there ministerin’ to my every need but one.
Not for want of tryin’. One night in my second week, when my head had more or less rejoined my body, I found Mary Frances lyin’ beside me.
“You’re going to make it,” she said. “I can feel it in my bones.”
I tried to contact various parts of my body, with no luck. “I wish I could feel my bones,” I said. “Not to mention yours.”
She giggled a little the way Irish girls do when a lad’s said something naughty. “Fresh.”
“Guilty as charged,” I breathed. “Throw myself upon the mercy of the court.”
“You’re lucky this court shows mercy,” she said, opening her mouth and pressing her lips against mine. I took a deep drink of her and then settled back, pooped. Her hand was moving over my body, my poor shot-up body, and it pains me to relate to you that said body wasn’t respondin’ to a woman’s touch in the way that it would have just a fortnight or so prior.
Some dames mighta up and left right then and there, but not Mary Frances. She gave me one of those smiles she doled out to patients, and then she gave me one of those special smiles she didn’t dole out for every Tom, Dick and Harry. And boy oh boy did it ever feel good, even though I knew there wasn’t going to be any payoff. They say that nice girls don’t do it, but in my experience the only girls you’d ever want to have anything to do with do it and how.
“How was that?” she said, rising. There was color in her cheeks now, that glow that women get when they’re being women.
“What do you want?”
What a thing to say. “Whattya mean, what do I want, ya dumb ape? Nothin’, is what.”
She rose up on one elbow and pulled her nurse’s uniform back in front of her. I had to admit she was plenty fetching. “You paddies are all alike. We’re either the BVM or a two-bit whore, Mother Mary or Mary Magdalene. There’s gotta be somethin’ in between.”
“If there is, I ain’t met it yet.”
This time it didn’t matter whether I was an invalid. She smacked me but good right across the gob. “You just did.”
She started to rise, but even in my condition I managed to get my arms around her and bring her down for another kiss.
The thing about broads is there’s a short time for talkin’ and a long time for action, and luckily I was experienced enough to know the difference. That was also the night I learned that package or no package, there was still a passage that ran straight to a woman’s heart, and it was up to a clever lad to find it.