The stuff that walked off those boats and trucks fed Dogtown for decades. Not just the dockworkers or drivers, either. Guys who worked in the factories, making costume jewelry, tools, and just enough to cover the rent, they knew they could buy their kids a new pair of sneakers from the back door of the Glocca Morra. They could get canned goods, booze, cigarettes without paying retail to make the rich Yankees richer. Later, when the factories moved south and the buckle on the Rust Belt got tighter, guys couldn’t cover the rent and those back-door sales were a matter of survival. Men who would have put a bullet in their heads before they took food stamps would go to Marty to find out what had come off the trucks and the boats that week. Cans of soup, cans of tuna, cans of stew grew legs and walked off the docks onto family tables.
That was Marty back when his neck was thick from swinging his longshoreman’s hook and his fists. Back when he had his pride.
“You’re going to the clambake, right?” Danny asks him now.
“I don’t know.”
“You should come,” Danny says. “Get out, it will do you good.”
Friday nights Terri usually manages to drag Marty down to Dave’s for fish-and-chips. Marty’s had fish-and-chips every Friday night since Danny can remember, a break in his otherwise steady diet of bacon and eggs, corned beef hash, and booze.
“I don’t know,” Marty says.
Ned don’t say anything. Ned rarely does.
One hard case, Ned Egan. When he was a kid at St. Michael’s, the priests and nuns beat him half to death trying to straighten him out. The sister would make Ned stretch his hand out on the desk, then slam the edge of a ruler down on his fingers, and he’d just look at her and smile. He’d get home, his old man would see the welt on his hand and figure that Ned had done something to piss off the sister, so he’d lay Ned down on the bed and bring a razor strap down on the backs of his legs until Ned cried.
Problem was, Ned wouldn’t cry and his old man wouldn’t give up. Those days, no one had heard of Child Protective Services, it wasn’t even a concept, so Ned took some ferocious beatings. He’d go to school the next morning with blood leaking through the backs of his pants legs, which would stick to the seat of his chair whenever he went to get up. The teachers learned not to call him to the blackboard those days so as not to embarrass the boy.
When Ned was fourteen, his old man picked up the strap and told him to lie down but Ned swung on him instead, put him on the floor, then ran out and tried to join the merchant marine. They laughed at him and told him to come back in four years. So Ned lived on the streets for a while, until Marty Ryan had a cot put in the storage closet at the Gloc, let the lad sweep up the place for a bowl of lamb stew or shepherd’s pie or whatever was left over at night.
One afternoon, Ned’s old man came into the pub with a ball bat in his hand and announced he was going to teach his no-good son a lesson he’d never forget. Marty was sitting in his booth and quietly said, “Billy Egan, unless that lesson is how to hit a curveball, I’d suggest you turn around and walk back through that door. I’m a bit short of cash now to have a mass said for you.” Ned’s old man turned milk white and walked back through the door. He knew just what Ryan was telling him, and he never stepped into the Gloc again.
The day he was sixteen, Ned quit school, went down to the docks, where Mr. Ryan got him his union card. Ned started swinging the hook, made a decent wage, got himself a little apartment on Smith Street and bought his own groceries. His father would see him in the neighborhood, he’d cross the street. His mother wrote him a letter when the old man died.
Ned didn’t write back. Far as he was concerned, Marty Ryan was his father.
Now Danny says to his dad, “I’ll drive you over there.”
“Ned can bring me.”
“I’ll drive you,” Danny repeats.
Marty’s in his midsixties but he acts more like he’s in his eighties. What the cigs and booze and bitterness will do to you, Danny figures.
To Marty, anyway.
Danny remembers him lashing out, screaming, You’re just like your mother! You got that bitch’s blood! In that quiet clarity before passing out, Marty muttered, I didn’t even know I had you. I went to Vegas, had a fling with a broad I met at a bar—a year later she shows up with a kid. You. Tells me, “Here, here’s your son. I’m not cut out to be a mother.” Only truth ever came out of her lying mouth.
Truth also that Marty loved her. Kept her picture under his bed. Danny found it there one time, looking for Playboy magazines—tall, statuesque showgirl with red hair, green eyes, long legs, big tits. It was only later, during one of Marty’s drunken diatribes—this time show-and-tell—Danny realized it was his mother.