CHARLES COULDN’T HELP BUT THINK THAT IT WAS ALL GOING SO WELL until they killed that man.
July had slipped into August, and the brick and stone that made up the city sucked in the heat of the sun all day to slowly exhale it at night. People slept on roofs and fire escapes, trying to catch any breeze that made it through the gauntlet of tenements. Every window was wide open. The residential streets were crawling with little boys sent out with the family growler to get cold beer at their neighborhood saloon.
Charles was happier than he had been in a long time. He stored away any amusing or interesting incidents that occurred so that he could recount them to Aidan once they were together. He found himself eavesdropping on the conversations of others just for this purpose. Though he had less cash in his pocket these days, it didn’t seem to matter. What difference did it make? He was filled with an unfamiliar optimism. Though times were lean right now, he somehow felt, knew, that the future was bright, filled with possibilities. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he knew that Aidan wasn’t quite as satisfied, but it was easy to ignore that when he was feeling so sure of all the good things to come.
“Problem is,” expounded Charles as they took their shoes off in the Public Garden to cool their toes in the grass, “there just ain’t enough people stupid enough to pass out cold in a nice, out-of-the-way place. Sailors do it sometimes ’cause they’re all turned around, ain’t familiar with all the twisty streets, can’t find their way back to the flophouse. But most mugs that live somewhere in the city, they find their way home, those bastards.” They both lay back in the grass with their hands under their heads, elbows pointing out.
“But you were doin’ this before I met you, right? How come it worked better then?” asked Aidan.
“It didn’t. It ain’t never been enough so I don’t hafta grab my dinner off a pushcart or look for supper in a barrel half the time.” In truth, since he teamed up with Aidan, he had been forced to do these things even more often, but he never considered dissolving their arrangement. He didn’t want to go back to the way it was before, whole days going by without a conversation, never sharing a meal or a drink with another soul.
“Listen,” said Charles as they looked up into the branches of the tree above them, “all we need is a little better luck than we been havin’. It’s gonna work out.” And he really believed it. All this hot weather meant booming business for the saloons—beer consumption was always at its highest during the peak of the summer. Their luck was going to turn, Charles just knew it.
And their luck did turn, but not in the way that Charles predicted.
One humid Saturday night in mid-August, the boys were once again scouting without success. Aidan was beginning to doubt the viability of their whole enterprise, but he kept his thoughts to himself. In the mornings he had started to look around for a legitimate job, an effort he had chosen not to mention to Charles. If he did find a job, it would cut into their afternoons together. This isn’t what Aidan wanted at all, but there just wasn’t enough money dropping into the biscuit tin, no matter how many shoes he shined. He told himself that there was really nothing to tell Charles—he hadn’t secured a job, not even close. But the truth was that he was afraid to tell him that he was even looking, suspecting that Charles would lash out at him, considering this a rejection. In Aidan’s fantasy, he would find not one but two legal jobs, and the two of them could work side by side. But so far he couldn’t even find one. And Aidan wondered how Charles would fare working for someone who would tell him what to do. It didn’t sound like Charles.
Charles decided to call it a night, and Aidan didn’t protest. They ambled up the street, both of them glum and kicking stones off the sidewalk in frustration.
“It’s early,” commented Aidan.
“Yeah.”
“Hungry?”
“Nah.”
At the end of the block, the commercial district ended, and the West End began. They both stopped. “Let’s keep walking,” said Charles, and instead of walking to Aidan’s tenement, they turned and entered the upscale neighborhood of Beacon Hill.
They’d only gone three blocks when Charles froze in his tracks and put his arm across Aidan’s chest.
“What?” Aidan whispered. His heart started hammering in his chest at the thought of the police close at their heels—but then he remembered that they hadn’t rolled anyone tonight. He strained to hear whatever Charles was hearing. And then he heard it: the not-too-distant sound of someone vomiting.
“C’mon,” said Charles, and they crept to the end of the block.
As they approached, the sounds got louder and seemed to be coming from directly around the corner of the building. Then the retching stopped, followed by a moan, and then nothing. They both peeked around the corner and saw a man on one knee, bracing himself with a hand against the side of the building. Aidan could see the sweat that had darkened his white shirt in patches under his arms. The man sat and wiped his mouth with his hand, his jacket crumpled beside him. The stench of whiskey and bile sat heavily in the humid night air.
Charles pulled Aidan into the doorway of a tailor’s shop. “This here’s tricky business,” he whispered to Aidan. “He’s pretty out in the open.” The side street where the man was sitting was neither a full-fledged street nor an alley. It was only wide enough to admit one vehicle going one way, and the broad sides of the buildings lining it were punctuated with doors, mostly service entrances.
“What are you doing?” whispered Aidan. “This ain’t the waterfront. You said we was done, that we weren’t having the luck tonight.”
“I thought we was done. But this just fell in our laps.”
“This is a respectable neighborhood.” Aidan wasn’t sure why this made a difference, but it seemed riskier to do their business here.
“And that mug is as drunk as a two-bit sailor. Listen, if he gets up and wanders home, it wasn’t meant to be.”
As they waited for the man to decide whether he would stand or topple, it came to Aidan that there was something very wrong with intentionally heading toward the sound of retching. To Charles, all sorts of sounds in the city nighttime spelled opportunity—a man pissing in an alley mumbling to himself, an argument between a john and a whore, vomiting—and Aidan had seen Charles’s face brighten when he heard these noises. It seemed to Aidan right now that Charles made his living not in the street but in the gutter, and that Aidan had joined him there—had asked, almost begged, to join him there. But this could change. Tonight, on the stoop, they would talk. Aidan would get a pail of beer for the two of them, and he would make Charles see that if they put their heads together, they could find another way. They could start all over—they could be anyone. With this resolve, Aidan felt a weight lift off him, and now he was impatient for this business with the man on the sidewalk to be done, one way or another.
Ten minutes later, their patience paid off. A peek around the corner proved to Charles that the man had nowhere urgent to go. He was leaning up against the wall like a sack of potatoes, out cold. The door next to him, the one he must have come through, was partially propped open, and Charles could hear the sounds of an upscale drinking establishment—the clink of glasses and the din of conversation and laughter, minus the more rowdy eruptions of the waterfront saloons.
They had to move fast or risk someone else coming across their discovery. Aidan stayed on the main street, his alarm rock in his hand, while Charles moved around the corner, staying clear of the door. He delicately reached into the man’s exposed pocket and drew out a fat roll of bills in a large money clip. He knew it! They were due for a break and here it was, what looked like the most money he’d ever taken out of a pocket in his life. But there was something else in the pocket, and after stuffing the roll of bills in his pants, he reached in again and drew out a beautiful and expensive ivory-handled folding knife, the type of knife that you’d see in a shop window at the very center, on the highest pedestal, surrounded by fine but lesser knives that served only to make this knife look more regal by comparison. Charles felt a little dizzy as he contemplated these twin prizes, but as exciting as the money was, it was the knife that mesmerized him, brought him back to the day he had stolen his pocketknife. Here was a knife ten times greater than that one, and it was as if Fate had set up this sequence of events: finding a good knife and having no one to tell, meeting a friend when you had thought you didn’t need friends, and then being able to present this king of knives to your friend, so he could appreciate not only the beauty of the knife but the beauty of being able to share such good fortune. He knew without a doubt that this knife should belong to Aidan, that Fate wanted it that way; it was crystal clear.
“Sully!” he whispered forcefully. Aidan appeared around the corner, and Charles opened the knife to display it in all its glory, glinting in the gaslight. It looked brand-new and sharp as a razor. “It’s yours,” he said, solemnly and with great satisfaction.
Aidan stepped closer to see the knife, but before he could even reach out for it, Fate added an extra event in the sequence that Charles had not foreseen. The man woke and grabbed Charles’s ankle, and in surprise, Charles twisted to face him, which was when his other foot slipped in the vomit on the sidewalk. Losing his balance, Charles fell forward onto the man, and the knife slipped through the white shirt into the man’s belly like it was a well-cooked yam.
Aidan watched in stunned silence as Charles scrabbled frantically to get off the man, but the man had now grabbed Charles by the arm and, despite the knife protruding from his gut, was holding on with an iron grasp. Aidan pried the man’s fingers from Charles’s arm and lifted him off the man. The cloth surrounding the knife was a blooming rose of blood. The man started wheezing and moaning.
“Jaysus, Charles, we gotta do somethin’!” Aidan exclaimed in a high voice that he didn’t recognize as his own, but he could see that Charles was unsteady on his feet and his face was draining of color as he stared at the man’s wound. “Holy Mary Mother of God,” said Aidan, panicking, hyperventilating. He reached down and pulled the offending knife from the man’s belly, and a rush of blood spilled onto the sidewalk. He dropped the knife in horror, realizing he’d just done more harm than good, and he felt Charles slump against his shoulder with a moan. “Shit shit shit!” Aidan exclaimed. Never had he expected anything like this. As much as he’d imagined all the bad things that could happen to the two of them as they pursued their dangerous livelihood, in every scenario it was Charles who would figure a way out, Charles who would know the best thing to do in the worst situation you could find yourself in. But now Charles was unable to stand upright, undone by the sight of all that blood, and Aidan had no idea what to do.
Aidan yanked Charles away from the bloody scene and slapped him hard across the face. When Charles looked more focused, Aidan stared him in the eye and said, “We gotta go, now,” and pulled him across the street. Walking even a few steps seemed to bring Charles around, and by the time they reached the other side of the street, he no longer needed Aidan’s support. All right, thought Aidan, now we’ll get out of here, and Charles will feel right as rain and he will know what we have to do next.
Just then, Aidan heard a woman scream from across the street. He spun around to face her even as he realized that this was exactly the wrong thing to do. She was standing in a doorway a few feet from where the man lay in his own blood, her hands to her face, mouth open. The woman looked up and locked eyes with Aidan, who was partially blocking her view of Charles. Aidan felt Charles tug hard on his arm, and they both bolted down the narrow street, turning the corner at full speed, but not fast enough to avoid hearing the woman cry out, “Lord in heaven, he’s dead!”
They ran a few blocks, and then Charles pulled Aidan into an alley where they stopped to catch their breath. In their only lucky break of the night, they encountered no police officers or sober citizens in the blocks they ran.
“Jaysus fergive us, Charles, but what the hell are we gonna do?” asked Aidan as he took off his cap and wiped his brow. He looked as if he were trying very hard not to cry.
“I’ve got a plan,” Charles said evenly as he took deep breaths—but he didn’t. He felt confident, however, that he would soon come up with one, and Aidan needed to think there was a plan so he didn’t fall apart. Looking at Aidan straight now, he saw what their first step needed to be. “Sully, we gotta change these shirts,” he said, and Aidan looked down to see what Charles saw. There were two smeared, bloody handprints on the front of Aidan’s shirt, as if the man had grabbed him from behind, although Charles figured that Aidan must have wiped his own hands on his shirt without realizing it. Charles’s shirt was even bloodier.
“All right, we go to your place, and you grab us a couple of shirts.” It wasn’t much of a plan, but Charles had from here until Chambers Street to come up with the next step.
When they reached Aidan’s building, they went around back and plucked two shirts off the clotheslines that were about the right size. Aidan went to stuff the bloody shirts in the tenement’s trash barrel, but Charles grabbed them.
“I’ll get rid of these. You don’t want these near your place,” said Charles, and Aidan nodded stupidly. “Okay,” he continued, “you wanna stay low tomorrow—don’t go out and black no boots or nothin’, no runs to the store for your ma. Tell her you ain’t feeling good if you hafta. Then meet me . . .” Charles stopped to think. “There’s a pawn shop right on Fulton near Richmond. Tomorrow, four o’clock.”
“Why are we going to the waterfront?”
“Because we’re gonna go talk to Bess.”