World Without End, Amen by Jimmy Breslin

Author:Jimmy Breslin [Breslin, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4535-4
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

9

HE WOKE UP WITH Deirdre’s hands digging into his coat sleeves. Her face was down inside the top of her parka coat. Somebody in the street was screaming without stopping. He was either on the sidewalk outside the window or in the gutter. No farther away. The more he screamed in the street, the more Deirdre’s fingers dug into Dermot’s coat. There was plenty of shooting at the end of the block. Single shots and then little bursts of triple-tonguing of automatic fire. He did not want to move a fraction of an inch, but the screaming was loud and ceaseless.

“Let’s go, I have to see,” he told her. Her hands came off his arm. She shivered and hunched herself more into her coat. He moved his head up the wall, the plaster like ice cubes pressed to his forehead, until the edge of the window sill hooked into his cheek. He fingered the blinds and looked out. The guy was in the gutter, on his back, the top half of his body rocking from side to side while he screamed. The legs were still. A couple of others were on their bellies, trying to drag him. Something buzzed and whined into the bricks right under the window. Dermot’s head jumped back a foot. When he came back to the window the ones on their bellies in the street were motionless. Dermot saw there was no fucking around now, they were shooting pretty good from up at the Falls Road. Then one of the three got into a crouch and got his hands under the screaming guy’s shoulders and he began pulling him backward, like he was walking a wheelbarrow. The other one came off his belly and grabbed the body under the rear end, and they got to the corner quickly. There must have been shots close to them, because they all seemed to jump while they were going past the edge of the saloon.

Dermot crept the few feet to the staircase and went up the little flight of steps. At the top there was a one-or two-step turn and two doorways, one to the front bedroom, the other to the rear. Not bedrooms really, a pair of freezing closets under a low ceiling. The beds in the rooms were almost flush against the doorways. Martin and the little girl were crouched on the end of a bed which came almost to the window over the street. They acted like they were watching a football game.

“Go away from there!” Dermot snarled.

“Go where?” Martin said. ”Just get your head down.”

In the back bedroom, one of the babies was standing in a crib which barely fit between the end of the bed and the wall. The baby’s hands chased the reflection of the fire on the next street as it snaked across the wall over the crib. The reflection kept moving in the water which streamed down the wall in the coldness. The mother was in bed with a dark coat buttoned to the neck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.