Fighting Words Read online

  “Good to see you, Father,” he said, a grin breaking out as he nodded at O’Carroll. “What ails you on this?”

  “Porto sancto,” O’Carroll said.

  “Ad porto sancto,” the man said. “Learn your grammar.”

  “Ad porto sancto.”

  “Come in.”

  O’Carroll brought Myles into a basement apartment consisting of three small rooms. In each room, bookcases filled with trinkets lined the walls. In room number one, tin beer mugs, elegant harps, and jars of fresh soil covered the musty shelves. Labels on the jars listed the names of counties in Ireland. The second room boasted a tambourine, a harpsichord, and several violins. The final room included a table with three chairs.

  The short man urged Myles and O’Carroll to sit down. Here, the bookshelves were stocked with locked chests. Myles noted that most of the chests were covered with complex swirls.

  “It’s Irish,” Myles said. “Everything here is Irish.”

  “Correct,” said O’Carroll.

  “Here’s how this works,” said the short man. “I sell you something from my stores. At no point now or till the end of time do you ask me where it came from. At no point do you tell anyone that you came here. Am I clear?”

  “I think he understands,” said O’Carroll.

  “Let the kid speak.”

  “I get it,” Myles said.

  “Glad to hear it,” the short man said. He removed a chest with an engraving of a white cow above the keyhole. He fished through his pockets and pulled out a ring that must have held a hundred keys. After cycling through them, he opened the chest. Inside were three pieces of warped, tangled metal.

  “Know what these are?” O’Carroll said to Myles.

  “No,” Myles said.

  The short man picked up one of the metal pieces and cradled it gingerly in his palm.

  “Trinkets?” Myles asked.

  “Trinkets!” the short man said. “Ha. Very funny. These ‘trinkets’ are ancient relics.”

  “Ah.”

  “That’s right,” said O’Carroll. “Know them well. A man I know discovered all three in the soil near the monastery at Kells. Is Kells a familiar name to you, Myles?”

  Myles remembered his visit to the place. He had been nine years old. Decked out in a brown robe, he’d kneeled on the stone floor of the sacred monastery and prayed for the safety of his people.

  “I know it, yes,” he said.

  “Then its import is clear.” O’Carroll picked up the relic on the right of the chest. As he turned it in the light of the gas lamp, the relic’s tarnished metal glinted, just barely. It was twisted in an elaborate knot, a shape familiar to Myles from his trips to the church. To him they always looked like snakes getting lost.

  “If worn correctly, it works as a barrier,” said O’Carroll. “Store it in your pocket for a full day before the fight begins. At some point in that day, make sure to pray three times. If you do all this, your opponent won’t be able to hit your most vulnerable spot. Am I clear?”

  Myles felt a tingly feeling radiate outward from his ribs. He thought of asking if the relic was working right then.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said. He reached out to take the trinket, but before he could grab it, O’Carroll closed his fist and pulled it away.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” he said. “My friend here cannot give out such valuable treasures on commission.”

  “Mouths to feed,” the short man said.

  “Twenty dollars,” O’Carroll said. “I recognize the price is steep, but safety is a valuable commodity.”

  The muscles in Myles’s face began to tighten and strain. Twenty dollars? He’d need to make three times what he normally won fighting to win that back. To earn enough money to bring over his family, he needed five times the average payout.

  Was this the price of a blessing? He reached into his pocket and pulled out three weeks’ earnings.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Like half the people Myles knew in New York, he had trouble finding time in his day to make true friends. When he wasn’t scrounging for money, he was searching Lower Manhattan for decent work, or else clearing the rats from his cramped, dusty apartment. Most of the storekeepers he knew refused to hire Irish, and those few that did never paid as well as the Woodrat. When Myles had time off, it seemed disrespectful, even sinful, to waste it having fun.

  The free time Myles spent in the Wood-rat was a rare exception to the rule. As the club was sort of his workplace, Myles felt comfortable relaxing there. He justified it by telling himself that he was scoping the place out, even when all he was doing was chugging bottles of flat soda at a table. Even though some part of him knew he was lying—and even though that same part knew it made no sense—the sight of Oakley and Tracey reassured him that he was being responsible. Thinking of the money he made for them, he could manage to breathe easy.

  Three days after he purchased O’Carroll’s relic, Myles nursed a glass of chilled cider at a table with Eddie Leary. He thought of Eddie as an acquaintance, though he knew that Eddie likely saw Myles as more of a friend.

  “It’s a crying disgrace, I tell you,” Eddie said. He was talking with Myles about a new law that punished citizens for loitering. “It’s clear why they did it, you know that? These thugs want to keep us Irish from getting together in gangs.”

  “The police have real crimes to think about,” said Myles. “Do you think it might be in your head?”

  “Not a chance,” Eddie said. “How many people stand around in ‘groups of six or more’? Why did they choose that number? It’s Irishmen looking for jobs, I tell you. They want us off the streets.”

  At the bar, Tracey poured a beer for a customer with a spindly mustache. When Eddie said “the Irish,” Tracey rolled his eyes.

  “New laws,” Eddie said. “No Irish in decent neighborhoods. No Irishmen looking for work. Soon enough. they bar us from entering the country. It’s a war, Myles. But you know and I know that nobody is brave enough to fight back.”

  “What do you mean by they?” Myles asked. “These people are not like the English.”

  “They aren’t, but they wish they were,” Eddie said. “They want us out of their country.”

  Oakley traded slips of crumpled paper with a man in a suit by the door. The man offered Oakley a cigar, and Oakley tucked it away in his pocket. Were the slips of paper odds? Was the man in the suit a bookie? Perhaps he was simply a brewer giving Oakley a receipt. It was strange, or at least it seemed that way to Myles, that he let his life depend on men whose business practices were a mystery. Oakley sold drinks and hosted fights, but Myles wondered what other kinds of activities kept the Woodrat safely in the black.

  “My brother says I’m crazy, but I’m not,” Eddie said. “I’m just a man who refuses to live with his eyes closed.”

  “Fair enough,” Myles said, hoping to change the subject. “Say, what do you know about the old pagan myths?”

  “Pagan?”

  “The old Irish myths,” Myles said. “You know. Before Saint Patrick. In the days when Ireland had druids instead of priests.”

  “Can’t say I think much about it,” Eddie said. “Those were unholy times.”

  “I don’t deny that,” Myles said. “What I want to know is how much about them you learned.”

  “Not much,” Eddie said. “I remember a teacher who told me they worshipped animals. ‘Don’t we now?’ I said. Told her that her students felt the same way about dogs and sheep. But I can’t say I heard much about anything else.”

  “What do you think they were like, at a guess?” Myles said. “Do you think they understood magic?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Eddie said. “That stuff is balderdash, the talk of false idols. Now stop trying to bring up unholy subjects before you besmirch his name.”

  Eddie spat into a nearby tin pot. Myles stared at the table. Eddie was right. It was wrong to pry into ancient magics, but what else was Myles supposed to do?

  At home, the
relic lay on his nightstand, taking up space beside a statue of the Virgin Mary. Up until that moment, he’d figured O’Carroll’s blessing marked the relic as holy, but now he wondered if its pattern was an insult to God. As a shiver ran through him, he vowed to stash the relic in his closet and repent.

  CHAPTER TEN

  That night, as he lay on his bed, Myles drafted a letter to his youngest sister back home. Every week, he wrote a letter to a different member of his family. Now it was Orla’s turn to hear about his life in the States. Most weeks, the letter was easy, but this week he struggled to describe his thoughts and feelings to his sister. He hunched over a sheet of paper and tried to do them justice.

  Orla my dear—

  I write to you this evening with very exciting news. It seems that I may have the money I promised this week. On Monday, the bar at which I work is having a celebration, and if all goes well …

  “A celebration?” Myles questioned aloud his words. In the rest of his letters, Myles left out exactly how he earned his money, writing only that he worked in a bar for men who made fun of his name. In the days leading up to the big fight, however, it seemed cruel to keep the threat to his life from his family. What if he died in the Woodrat? What if his injury forced him to go back home?

  He imagined his mother weeping over his body, laid out on the floor of their home in a mummy’s wrap of bandages. Even if the fight didn’t kill him, the shame of hurting his mother would be too much for Myles to bear. He balled up the paper and tossed it in the box he kept in place of a trash can. Opening to a blank page in his notepad, he tried to start again.

  Dear Orla—

  How are you? I read in my last letter to Mum that your dance teacher believves you have talent. I always thought so—I remember you skipping about the house like a Russian ballerina—and I must say your brother is pleased to get word that you want to pursue it. New York dancers are wonderful—not quite as exciting as Paris but wonderful regard-less—and the halls they perform in are the biggest you’ve seen in your life—I swear just one could house a hundred families. Hope things are well and your cough is doing better …

  Dancers? What if this letter was the last letter Myles ever wrote? He put the letter aside and opened to a new page in his notebook. This time, he went for honesty:

  Orla—

  I’m writing this time because I need to ask you a question. It’s an odd one, to be sure, but I trust you, as a young and virtuous girl, to tell me the truth in your heart. A priest in the city has given me a trinket which he says could help me earn money. I need this money—Lord knows I do—but I worry the trinket may harbor unholy magics. If you were in my place, what would you do? Will the Almighty understand how badly I need this help?

  “Could help me earn money.” Dishonest.

  Instead of balling it up, Myles tore the letter in half, then shredded it into quarters and from there into eighths. He shoved the fragments of the letter off his bed and watched as they whirled to the ground. He got up and stepped over the clothing and trash on the floor of his cluttered apartment. He went through his front door and made his way to the stairwell. Outside, he sat on his stoop and rested his head in his hands.

  Orla McReary. His baby sister. She was the only sibling he still thought of as a child. He looked up at the sky, surrounded by a ring of tenement rooftops, and wondered aloud what his sister deserved to hear. He expected no answers—nothing ever came to him the moment he asked the question—but he hoped that a prayer might sprout into a virtuous plan. Lowering his forehead to his knees, he clasped his hands together. All around him, neighbors talked, horses whinnied, and policemen chatted under streetlights. He raised his head and took in the dust and noise of the city.

  Upstairs, Myles sprawled on his bed. The ceiling of his apartment was covered in stains, the work of the person who’d lived there before him. He stared at a sooty black swirl until it appeared to move on the ceiling. He closed his eyes and hoped silently that the answer would arrive in a dream.

  It came to him just before he drifted off for the night. When Myles was a boy, his father used to tell him about channeling, about getting faraway people to hold conversations with you by learning to write in their voice. The technique seemed mystical, like the relic itself, but if his father suggested it, Myles knew it had to be safe. Myles tore a new sheet of paper from his notepad and wrote in Orla’s voice.

  Myles—

  I know it is very hard for you to make a hard choice like this but you are a good brother and I think the Lord understands that. I think he knows what you do for us, and I think he knows you want to see your family, I know it must sound very strange to you but I believe in my heart that Father O’Hanlon knows what you do is a holy thing. Your sister loves you and Mummy and Daddy miss you and we read all your letters out loud over dinner every time they arrive in the mail. I had a tooth fall out the other day and Mummy told me if one more falls out she promises to knit me a new sweater and I want a new sweater because it has been very cold lately.

  The point I am trying to make is I think you are doing the right thing and everybody misses you and Daddy says he is proud. Then again Daddy said he was proud when I lost my tooth so maybe it isn’t very important what he said. I love you and I think you should keep doing what you are doing and stop feeling so sad about it all the time. Hope to hear from you soon.

  —Orla

  P.S. I don’t know if I told you but Mummy and Daddy are teaching me how to cook and I made a nice mash the other day. It was tasty.

  Myles read the words of the letter aloud in Orla’s voice. He folded it in half and set it down on the table. Lying back on his bed, he looked again at the ceiling. This time, the swirling pattern didn’t move, no matter how long he stared.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  On the day of the fight, Myles arrived at the Woodrat with less than an hour to spare. He fingered the relic in his pocket every few minutes on the walk from his apartment to the club. In line with O’Carroll’s instructions, he’d kept it in his pocket for twenty-four hours, even sleeping on his side at one point so it didn’t poke him through his pajamas.

  When he got inside, he saw a massive crowd, speckled here and there with faces of people he knew. A few seconds after he stepped through the door, one of the onlookers peered over and pointed.

  “Hey, boys! All hail the Scrawny One!” A loud, raucous cheer rang through the club, the kind of cheer that sounded a bit too much like a boo for Myles’s comfort.

  He waved. A disorderly man somewhere in the club hurled an empty pint glass at the wall. Even from the entrance, Myles could tell that Tracey was up to his eyeballs in work. Mayflower chewed on a sarsaparilla root and talked with a man in a bowler hat. Myles skirted around the crowd and found Oakley behind the bar.

  “About time!” Oakley said. “Another half hour and I thought we might have a riot.”

  “Apologies,” Myles said. “I got a big dinner to get ready.” He was lying—it was hard to even finish the beef liver he’d bought from his butcher that evening.

  “That’s a good enough reason, I suppose,” Oakley said. “How are you? I got you some cod liver oil if you need it to wake you up.”

  “I’m fine,” Myles said, wishing he could run out back and throw his guts up. “How’s Carly?”

  “Raring. I put him back in the storage closet to do whatever he does. There’s a rumor he likes to rub butter on his chest.”

  “Butter?”

  “To help deflect punches,” Oakley said. “Speaking of which, if you want to try it, I’ve got this bucket of bacon grease.”

  “Really?”

  “No!” Oakley said. “Myley, you can’t be this gullible. It gets me worried sometimes.”

  In front of the bar, the crowd of spectators split into two factions. The factions gathered on two opposing sides of the floor. One side included the men Myles knew. The other side consisted of all strangers.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Uptown versus downtown,” O
akley said. “The Bowery versus Harlem. Keep an eye out for jokers flinging bottles.”

  Myles stood on tiptoe and peered around the room. “No bottles,” he said.

  It was hard not to notice the differences between the two sides. Men from the uptown group wore sawdust-covered suits and finely trimmed mustaches. They stretched their blazers as their fists pumped in the air. The men from downtown had full beards and dowdy clothes. One man was so disheveled Myles wondered if he was homeless.

  The downtown faction included Eddie. That was good. There were men in the crowd Myles hadn’t seen in months. Ted Fiorello was cheering for Myles, in spite of the fact that Carly was Italian, like him. Myles felt warmth for these men, who had chosen to put their money on him in spite of Carly’s unblemished record. He wanted to thank Ted and Eddie and John Barings Brown and Willington Kepler and Hermann and—

  Father O’Carroll. By a wall near the downtown men, the father was talking with a man with bad acne. His collar was off, and he was dressed in black shoes; black dress pants; and a sharp, clean blazer. Myles tapped Oakley on the shoulder.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who’s what?” Oakley said.

  “That man.” He pointed to the man with bad acne.

  “Not sure,” Oakley said. “But he’s in a bad way. That man he’s talking with is a scoundrel. I told him over and over to keep his mug on the streets.”

  “You kicked a priest out of your club?” Myles asked

  “A priest?” Oakley said. “Arnie Wilkins, a priest. That’s a laugh. That guy is the biggest con man this side of Broadway. I saw him try to sell the Hudson River to a pair of deaf kids from Boston. He doesn’t get me, because I can see through him. But I hate when a man like that takes money from honest customers.”

  Myles felt his chest burn. “I thought that man was a priest.”

  “Lord, is that what he told you? I guess we do need to work on your gullibility. Last news I heard he was selling baldness cures from a wagon on Staten Island.”