Light of the Diddicoy Read Online Free Page B

trash and rails under the eyes of uncaring subway standers.
    Through the littered train yard he limps. On a wooden leg with an empty shoe nailed to it, he goes without a fear in him. Jumps on a hitch between an old rusted-out train that lay forgotten for over a year, he then emerges into the waterfront neighborhood: a place most New Yorkers only notice from a train window, as yet another slum down by where the ships let off. When he gets to Hicks Street, he swings to the right and waves one arm in the air for balance but soon slows to cut through a tract of browned winter grass near Middagh Street scattered with the rustling rubbish from the restless night.
    When upon he come to the old brick building that houses the picture frame factory, he flattens his back along its side to hide himself in the shadows, to rest a moment and calm his breath. The boy can hear the hearthy laugh and hearty lilt of old William Brosnan, head patrolman at the Poplar Street Station. The station stands opposite the factory by way of back doors, separated only by a thin garbage-strewn lot. As young Richie stands erect upon the brick wall, a long glim of yellowed light appears where Brosnan flicks the ash off his black cigar. Through the crack in the door Lonergan hears Brosnan’s brogue as he chews the fat with patrolmen Culkin and Ferris of the local Bridgetown beat, the old Fifth Ward.
    What brings Richie Lonergan out this night is a homeless laborer at the picture frame factory who spends his nights there for a portion of his earnings. Dumbly leaving his bicycle out back, Richie eyeballs it from around the dark corner. Richie inches closer to the back door of the factory, closer also to the lawmen of the Poplar Street Station across the way. His breath cools in the smoky cold, and he pulls the cap down tighter over his flat-stone cement eyes and sandy hair. He feels the wind biting at his ears and imagines that the yellow glim of light gives off a warmth. And if it is only his imagination, at least that somewhat warms him even. The boy hadn’t the thought to beat his way out of a bad situation, but if pressed, he can summon the cudgel from his pant leg and put a man to God’s path if he steps between him and his take. Copper badge or not, though he prefers not for it’s a long bit on Blackwell’s Island for a teenager to do a thing as that. True too that Brosnan knows him since he was only a child and had more than once put the manacles on him. Even monikered Richie the name the papers love to flap him with, Pegleg. For it was Brosnan himself who’d first responded after the trolley sliced the bottom of Richie’s leg off when he was only of eight years fetching bread for his poor old Ma. Brosnan and Bill Lovett too, who helped calm the squirming child that stared at his own blood and limp leg lying motionless between the tracks. An accident so deeply set in the back end of his youth that he rarely thinks on it himself, though others always seem to wonder and whisper about it.
    Richie peers around the brick building and hones in on the bicycle, then listens implicitly to the sounds animating the night; the clopping in the distance of old nags pulling their loads along the rocky cobblestones to deliver fish and vegetables and the like for the morning’s market; the plucking of standup pianos in local saloons where suds wet the insides of late-night merchant marines and happy barkeeps; the bellowing of old Brosnan again laughing brusquely, mixing in a few jokes before again to blast open an uprooting bellow on the other side of the glimmer at the back door. Richie hears too the rumbling tracks above like rolling thunder in age-old lores where gods show their disapproval of mortal sins by the distant cannonades and clapping above. When the time seems right, Richie limps to the back of the factory, dragging his wooden leg behind, clicks the kickstand back on the bicycle, and walks to the front as though the bike were his