He dreams about it, though, the night before the funeral, the waking hours before they put Pat in the dirt again. In his dream Pat reaches up like Help me pull me up out of here pull me up out of death and Danny, he grabs for him but Pat’s hand falls off in his hand and Danny trudges brokenhearted home and lays the hand on the kitchen counter and tells Terri that’s your brother and there’s no gold.
The funeral is so sad.
Danny can barely make himself get out of bed in the morning, he so much don’t want to face it.
But he goes down to the shore and picks up Marty and Ned, then back to the house for Terri, and they drive out to the cemetery.
And there’s Liam standing there stiff with rage and guilt, Pam beside him knowing people are blaming her, maybe she’s blaming herself, too. And Cassie, sober—surprising, given the situation—and she makes it through the eulogy without crying and says, “He was the best of us and the last.”
Leave it to her to make poetry of it.
Leave it to her to be right.
Danny takes Marty by the elbow and starts to walk him back to the car, to the wake that’s going to be as brutal as the burial. Where they’ll all get drunk and tell maudlin stories about Pat, and Marty will sing old songs. As he’s walking away, Danny notices that Pam is beside him. She looks at him and says, “Pat never said an unkind word to me.”
Danny feels the weight come onto his shoulders, feels autumn turn to winter right there.
Because now they’re without a leader.
Oh, John will still be the boss in name, or Liam might try to pick up the mantle, but that’s never going to happen.
Which leaves me, Danny thinks.
Because there is nobody else.
It started with a sunny day on the beach, he thinks, and ended up with you throwing cold dirt on your best friend’s coffin.
He yearns for summer and sun and dreams of a warm sea.
Part Three
The Last Days of Dogtown
Providence, Rhode Island
March 1987
. . . oblivious, blind, insane, we stationed the monster
fraught with doom on the hallowed heights of Troy.
Virgil
The Aeneid
Book II
Twenty-Four
Providence is a gray city.
Gray skies, gray buildings, gray streets. Gray granite as hard as the New England pilgrims who hacked it out of the quarries to build their City on the Hill. Gray as the pessimism that hangs in the air like the fog.
Gray as grief.
The unrelenting gray sorrow Danny has felt since Pat’s death. Sorrow he almost wears, like clothes he puts on when he wakes up, like he’s seeing the world on one of those black-and-white TVs he had when he was a kid.
Danny turns the collar of his leather jacket up as he walks to the Gloc. He isn’t Danny Ryan the longshoreman, the collector, the hijack guy—he’s Danny Ryan the man who has to step into Pat Murphy’s big shoes.
Someone has to, and it sure as shit isn’t going to be Liam.
Liam, fucking Liam, of course wants to go out and kill everyone. Well, he wants other people to go out and kill everyone; he didn’t want a big part of that himself, just wanted to push the buttons.
Danny talked him off the cliff. “We can’t respond right now.”
“They killed my fucking brother!” Liam said.
“I know that,” Danny said. They killed my fucking best friend, he thinks. “What I’m telling you is we don’t have the guys right now to go all D-Day.”
And he’s grieving, for Chrissakes, his heart is freakin’ broken. His pregnant wife is grieving, too, and he has to look after her. And then there’s his in-laws—Catherine is a mess and John, John is about catatonic. In no condition to run the business, never mind command a war.
So it falls on Danny.
Danny has to run the day-to-day—the docks, the union, the loan-sharking, the boosts, it all drops on his shoulders. A hundred freakin’ details a day it seems, from making sure the right guys got picked on the shape-ups to seeing that collections got made, cash distributed, envelopes delivered to the cops and judges they had left. He has to assign tasks, mediate disputes, make rulings.
Bernie’s been a big help with the numbers, and Jimmy takes up a lot of the slack, but it’s still Danny who’s in charge.
Danny who has to run the war.
Thing of it is, the fighting dies down for a while.
Part of it is exhaustion.
Both sides are just flat-out tired, worn down.
Then there’s the public perception.
People would put up with a gang war—it had entertainment value—but the brutal murder of Pat Murphy was too much. A guy getting dragged down a street in the middle of the city? Parts of him scraped on the asphalt?