Disorderly Men by Edward Cahill

Author:Edward Cahill [Cahill, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2023-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

It made Danny regret the lies he knew he’d write in reply.

That night on the couch he dreamt that someone who looked like Roy Lee—he had the same eyebrows, moustache, and beard—but sounded more like Quinn sat at the piano in the living room at Bacchus playing “Summertime.” The place was dark and crowded with leering, thin-lipped men, and Not Roy Lee’s playing was lousy and his voice was flat. Danny was so embarrassed he looked away. Then Not Roy Lee suddenly stopped playing and cried: “Who do you think you are?” Danny tried to avoid the quarrel and moved to another part of the room, but Not Roy Lee got up and followed him: “Who the hell do you think you are!” Then the woman in the burgundy evening dress came to Danny’s rescue and led him by the arm into the bedroom. But as soon as he saw a jumble of naked bodies there, a molar came loose in his mouth. After he pulled it out, another tooth came out and then another, until he was licking every last one out of his pulpy, bloody gums. He wasn’t too worried, since he thought he heard a siren fading down Eighth Avenue. But feeling so many sharp, boney bits of himself was weird. No one had smashed them out or pulled them out. They’d come out all on their own because something inside him was sick or broken.

The dream woke him up just after five in the morning, stayed with him while he dressed and crept out of the apartment without waking Raf, and lingered dimly as he leaned against an old bishop’s crook on Greenwich Street, sipping a coffee, munching a buttered roll, and watching steam swirl up from a street grate and shuffle off in the wind.

But Danny felt clearheaded and whole again the moment he saw the Nazi Cop come out of the police station and turn east. He looked more rumpled than the night before. His step was slower, his chest seemed a little deflated, and his arms hardly swung at all. Danny trailed half a block behind him as he zigzagged toward Washington Square. It felt like something out of Naked City and he could almost hear the tormented chorus of horns and Paul Burke’s voice warning him about the danger he was courting. But as they went down into the West 4th Street station and walked toward the BMT, Danny found himself feeling more bored than scared. From behind a steel column, he watched the Nazi Cop sit down on a bench in the middle of the platform, fold his arms, and stare into his lap. When a gang of uniformed private school boys made a ruckus, he only smiled at them and shook his head, more like an easygoing uncle than a thug. Once the train finally came, he stepped aside to let people off, gave up the only free seat to a gray-haired babushka, and joined the strap-hangers without so much as a sneer or a snarl.

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