I'll Pray When I'm Dying Read online

  I’ll Pray When I’m Dying

  Stephen J. Golds

  Published by RED DOG PRESS 2021

  * * *

  Copyright © Stephen J. Golds 2021

  * * *

  Stephen J. Golds has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  * * *

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  * * *

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-914480-26-3

  * * *

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-914480-27-0

  * * *

  www.reddogpress.co.uk

  Contents

  Seaport Boston, USA

  London, England

  South Boston, USA

  London, England

  Boston, USA

  London, England

  The North End, Boston, USA

  London, England

  South Boston, USA

  London, England

  South Boston, USA

  The North End, Boston, U.S.A

  London, U.K

  Charlestown, Boston, USA

  Salt Lake City

  South Boston, U.S.A

  Salt Lake City, U.S.A

  Epilogue

  Authors Note

  Acknowledgments & Thanks

  About the Author

  Dedicated

  to

  Those

  Who

  Count

  “Yesterday, upon the stair,

  I met a man who wasn’t there!

  He wasn’t there again today,

  Oh how I wish he’d go away!”

  * * *

  Antigonish – William Hughes Mearns

  * * *

  “In the desert

  I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

  Who, squatting upon the ground,

  Held his heart in his hands,

  And ate of it.

  I said, “Is it good, friend?”

  “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

  * * *

  “But I like it

  “Because it is bitter,

  “And because it is my heart.”

  * * *

  In the Desert – Stephen Crane

  Seaport Boston, USA

  Monday, February 18th, 1946

  Everything started to rot with a photograph in a newspaper.

  The bar awash in a dim cool. The only light filtering through grimy windows that occasionally flashed black with the passing-by of pedestrians on the street outside. An automobile horn blasted insanely somewhere. A radio playing static softly at the end of the bar top. Dead noise.

  Ben Hughes stared at the picture of the young boy on page four of the Boston Herald. Something like a bullet in the back. A blade across the throat. A headache like a hammer blow to his skull and the start of a fever boiling underneath his clothes.

  SNORT

  A muscle in his cheek twitching.

  SNIFF

  The boy in the ink spotted photograph. Wide eyed and toothy grinned. Freckles. Cow-licked hair. Nine years old. The son of a well-to-do upper-middle class family.

  A heavy, frigid, solid mass spread in Ben’s guts. A poisonous kind of sudden emptiness.

  He scratched at his face and neck. Suddenly itchy. Blinked slow. Closing his eyes briefly and then snapping them open again to escape the memory that burst, scurrying within the darkness behind his eyelids. Pinched the crease in his slacks with trembling fingers and readjusted the newspaper on the bar so it was in line with everything else. Symmetry. Order. He knocked on the oak bar top. Touch wood. Trying to focus on the words printed beneath the photograph. The boy’s irises screaming, empty, black holes assaulting his concentration in a heavy, stinging rain. Distorted images passing through his head like the headlights of a speeding hearse down a black street.

  He caught his own murky reflection in the mirror at the back of the bar shelves. His eyes cast in shadow. The image contorted into something else. A black figure. Ben looked back down at the newspaper again.

  SNORT.

  Trying to read the words. Concentrate on the facts. Focus on the real. The now. Slow his heartbeat down. Counting to seven. Slow. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Breathe.

  The child had disappeared two days ago while out playing in the park with the family’s maid. She’d gone to buy a baked potato from a street vendor for the kid and when she came back, he was gone. No witnesses. No ransom notes. Nothing. Just gone. Another child. Vanished into the vapor.

  SNIFF.

  Ben tried to remember how many children had been in the newspapers since the end of the war? How many had been the talk of the precinct? A lot. Too many.

  SNIFF.

  Knowing what made the headlines was usually only the tip of the iceberg.

  SNORT.

  Like cockroaches, if you glimpsed just one, there were another hundred of the filthy fucks hiding in the darkness you only witnessed once you’d taken a torch to the grungy corners and squalid crevices. Crawling on their bellies and scurrying around spreading sickness. Missing children were a plague. A disease that wasn’t ever talked about. An epidemic. Black Death. A lot of the children reported missing had been poor negroes from the Eastside. Not one of those pitiful bastards had even made the newspapers. Fucking Boston. A city of missing children’s posters pasted to tenement walls, ripped to shreds by the wind. Backwards and inbred little shithole.

  Ben pinched at the crease in his slacks again. His eyes stung. Clenching his jaw so hard his gums ached. Skull pounding.

  SNIFF. SNIFF. SNORT.

  He shuddered, took off his hat and placed it on a sheet of carefully laid napkins. Picked up the sterling silver flask his mother had gifted him when he graduated from the police academy and shook it at Sammy the bartender. His eyes flickering over the inscription etched into the metal ‘Love Always, Mother’, and then the boy’s face ripping through his conscience. His guts clamped up and he winced. Sammy took the flask and refilled it from the bottle on the shelf marked by a piece of white tape that read ‘B.H ONLY’. Brought it back over held aloft with a thick manila envelope which he waved in the space between the two men. Thin lips opening and closing.

  “Ben, you listening to me here?”

  “What?”

  “I said, you get a chance to watch the Red Sox lately? I caught a game last week. The fucking—”

  Ben cut the bartender off by holding a hand up.

  “Don’t attempt to small talk me, Samuel. You know I couldn’t care less about the Red Sox or a bunch of yokels hitting a ball with a piece of wood and running around in circles like morons. Get straight to the point would you.”

  “Well, I guess,” Sammy swallowed. Straightened. “I guess I was just wanting to ask about who exactly this envelope is going to this time, Ben? All this bullshit-bad blood between your man Stevie Wallace and the guineas, Phil Buccola… I got you coming in, and then twenty-five fucking minutes later the greasers from the North End are coming around here wanting to get paid as well. I’m at a fucking loss here. They broke Fergus’s jaw last week. Poor guy’s scared to leave his mother’s house. I can’t get anyone else to help out behind the bar now.”

  Sammy wiped his hands up and down his grimy, stained bar apron. Ben peered at the yellow-brown stains smeared there, quickly turned away. Tried to focus on the words typed below the boy’s picture in the newspaper ag
ain but found himself dragged back to the boy’s eyes. Cast in ink shadow. Black gaping holes. Empty graves. Just a scared, lost kid. Painfully familiar.

  Counting.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  Knock on wood.

  “Do I even remotely resemble an Italian to you, Samuel?” Ben said, his eyes not leaving the boy’s face in the photograph.

  “What? No, course not, but…”

  “We are still currently located in Seaport, Boston, are we not?”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course Seaport but…”

  “Stevie’s still in possession of Seaport and Southie. I make collections for Stevie. You pay Stevie because your bar is located in Seaport. That’s why I am here in this shabby little pit you dare deem a drinking establishment. To collect. I’m not here because I enjoy being in your company. Now, that’s not all too dreadfully complicated to comprehend for your thick skull, is it, Samuel?”

  “Well, what am I supposed to tell the dagos when they come sniffing around here asking, shoving me about? I need that kind of trouble like I need another asshole to shit out of.”

  Ben cringed. Exhaled hard through his nose.

  “You communicate with Leary at that time and he’ll remedy it. The Italians shouldn’t be encroaching onto Stevie’s territory anyway, and they’re going to get their grubby little hands caught in the cookie jar sooner or later.”

  “Talk to Leary? Why I gotta talk to that exiled IRA maniac? What’s going on with Stevie, anyhow? There’s a lot of rumors flying about, Ben. They true? I don’t know what to think over here.”

  “And what are the rumors, Samuel? Enlighten me, why don’t you?”

  Sammy pulled at the sweat yellowed, crumpled collar of his shirt and smacked his lips together “people are saying he’s sick, is all. In the head. That kind of sick.”

  “Stevie’s as fit as a fiddle. An Olympian. You’ll talk to Leary because I told you to talk to Leary. Stevie doesn’t have time for your kind of petty bullshit, Samuel. He’s got more entertaining things to do. You speak to Leary. Clean?”

  “What?”

  “Clear. Are we clear? Clear.”

  “It’s a lot of fucking hassle is what it is. I’m paying protection ain’t I? What is it that I’m paying hand over fist for here if I still got these kind of problems? I got a family to feed, Ben. I got kids.”

  “I see. I see. You’ve got kids,” Ben knocked on the picture in the newspaper with his fist. “Children like this little one?”

  The bartender gawked at the headline in the newspaper, sucked air through a gap in his front teeth. Cords in his neck standing out like the roots of a grotesque tree for a moment. Ben continued, still not looking Sammy in the face. “Perhaps, this filthy little brat’s father didn’t pay what he owed either. Perhaps, he was complaining too much, too. Yes? So, stop giving me this kind of fucking grief and just pay the fucking fee that is owed, Samuel.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ben. We’re pals ain’t we? Known each other a long time. Since we were kids ourselves. No need to go and get all heavy like that. Go and threaten a man’s kids. It’s not right. Not right at all.”

  Ben still didn’t look up from the newspaper and the bartender placed the flask in front of him on the bar with the thick manila envelope beside it, shook his head slightly. Brought over the bottle and then went back to wiping down the back shelves with a stained, crusty brown rag that made Ben feel itchy underneath the fabric of his linen shirt. He took a long hit of the flask. The whiskey burning its way down his throat. Cleansing. He peeped at the newspaper again, his heart still palpitating, making him breathless. He drank deeper from the flask. Trying to work himself through it.

  Counting. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Counting to seven made things normal. Ordered. Lucky seven.

  Reset.

  Restart.

  Breathe.

  SNORT. SNORT. SNORT.

  After a moment, he picked up the light brown envelope, weighed it in his palm, slipped it into the side pocket of his grey, tailored jacket. Squinting at the newspaper and trying to calm himself on the printed words of the missing child’s article again. He couldn’t. A hot sweat trickling down his chest and stomach. The child’s eyes a midnight sable and gasping. Ben drained the remaining contents of his flask and attempted to blink away the thoughts of his own childhood. The thing that had crawled and scurried through the empty hallways and doorways of his childhood home. Darkness.

  SNORT.

  SNIFF.

  SNORT.

  SNIFF.

  SNORT.

  SNIFF.

  SNORT.

  He snapped his head towards the slovenly man further down the bar sniffing and snorting incessantly. Like a pig. Something akin to Chinese water torture. Every sniff, every snort, every grunt an icepick chipping away at Ben’s exhausted consciousness. He had tried to drown it out. Endure it. Ignore it. He couldn’t any longer. Finally having enough, he closed the newspaper with hands that shook and folded it on the bar. Placing it perfectly straight so it was in line with the symmetry of the bar-top, his hat and the flask again. Symmetry. Order. He twisted slightly on the stool to face the man. A construction worker in faded denim dungarees, sweating up the place. Tufts of his greasy, shit-colored hair sticking out wildly from his head like an insect’s antennae. Twitching. The man had a thick mustache like Ben’s father had had.

  A flash of memory, a razor strop ripping into the flesh of his back and legs, drawing blood, made him wince. All those nights he slept on his stomach. His pillow soaked with tears. Just a scared, lost kid.

  He twisted further on his stool, scratched at his chest suddenly feeling completely empty inside. Hollow. As though he’d been eaten from the inside out. A shell.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me. I beg your pardon, friend,” Ben said, clearing his throat.

  The small, ugly man fixed small, ugly eyes on Ben.

  “Yeah? What?” he picked at his nostril and flicked something to the floor. Ben placed a fist to his lips, swallowed slow. Blinked heavily. Breathed.

  “Marian White,” Ben croaked, running his fingers through slick, blonde hair and then pinching the creases in his slacks. The suddenly rough fabric unbearable against his skin. Irritated. Itchy.

  “What?” the man dug into a nostril with his finger a second time and examined what he found between his fingertips.

  “Marian White,” Ben frowned.

  “Wrong guy, pal,” the man shrugged and wiped his hands on the bar edge.

  “No, no, no. Do you know of her?” Ben’s eyes felt very wet, slippery inside his skull and he wondered if he was going to cry. The missing boy’s face hacked and cut into the very tissue of his brain. He had been working so damn hard to get his problems under control, to manage his behavior, incorporate it into his daily life and now everything had gone to fucking shit because of that one single picture in the fucking newspaper. As damaging as a bullet to the back of the head.

  “Who?” the man grunted.

  “Marian White. Are you familiar with her?” Ben spoke slowly. Enunciating every word clearly.

  “Nope, never met her. Never poked her, neither. Not yet, anyway,” the man hahaha’d.

  “Yes, very quaint. That charming Boston humor.” Ben gritted his teeth. “Marian White was a young negro woman.”

  “White?” the man gulped at his beer, burped. “What a name for a spook, huh? White? They always got names like that, don’t they? White, Chalky, Milky. It’s like the hebes with their gold and silver and rubies and what not, ain’t it? What the hell is this country coming to? I don’t even know anymore,” the man sneered, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Fingernails black, caked with dirt. Ben’s stomach flipped. Flesh screaming.

  “That’s not currently relevant to what I’m telling you. Marian White was a negro woman who got the electric chair in nineteen thirty-nine in Mississippi. Dreadful fucking inbred, hellhole that the state is,” Ben said.

  “Yeah, that right?” the man g
ulped at his pint glass again. Beer dribbled down his greasy chin. “Good! Should do the same with the lot of them, I say. Fry the whole lot of them.” He placed down the glass on the bar top loud and went back to fingering his nostrils.

  “I always felt she got the chair rather unfairly. Twelve jurors and every single one of them a white man. Justice is blind they say. More like a dumb bitch, I say. Anyhow, they gave her the chair. Old Sparky. Just like that,” Ben clicked his fingers together. “A poor negro girl. Twenty-two years old. Twenty-two years old. Electrified to death. A crying shame, a crying shame,” Ben said, shaking his head.

  “What are you? Some kind of dark meat lover? That it?”

  “That’s neither here nor there and none of your fucking business, friend. Anyhow, do you know what her crime was? Of course, you don’t. A fellow as brainless and ignorant as you appear to be, wouldn’t, would you? I’ll elucidate for you, shall I?” Ben waited for him to respond. The man stared with eyes like rotten broken eggs. Ben went on anyway, “she murdered her husband with a knitting needle. Slid it straight through his eyeball and up into the soft mush of his little brain as he slept one night,” Ben gestured the actions of the murder on his own face and then squeezed his hands together to stop the trembling there. “She turned herself into the law the next morning and gave a full confession,” he said shrugging. He knocked his fist on the bar top again. Touch wood. The shakes eased off.

  “Crazy shine bitch, I say. Does this little story have a fucking point, pal, because my patience is running kind of short over here and I just finished the night shift.”