The O'Briens by Peter Behrens Read Free Book Online

neighbourhood. He smelled blood and offal and heard the crying of animals. The city had a killer side.
    At last he came out to the Hudson. Steamers with raked funnels, barges, and luggers with dirty sails were moving up, down, and across. The brilliant sheet of New York Bay opened to the south. The pungency of creosote, timbers, and low tide was exotic, exhilarating. A new world it was.
    He started walking south past a set of ramshackle wharves. Streetwalkers stood at the corners and waited in bunches outside taverns. Their huge hats had little sprays of flowers attached, and they held Chinese umbrellas against the wild beat of the sun.
    At the corner of 12 th Street a girl hooked his arm and whispered, “Hey, sojer, fifty cents and we’ll have a nice time.” But he shook her off and kept walking, startled by the light in her pale green eyes.
    He had more or less accepted the obligation to save himself for marriage, but it was stunning to realize that handsome, well-dressed women could be bought for little more than the cost of breakfast. Even stranger to think that the girl he must marry someday, who would bear his children, must be alive now somewhere, thinking and breathing, waiting for him without knowing who he was. As he waited for her.
    He thought of the globe the old priest kept in his study. The Pontiac, no bigger than a speck of sawdust, was tucked into a bend of a thin, filigreed line labelled in minuscule letters: “Ottawa R.” In those days the size of the world had been a relief to contemplate, however abstractly. Now it was anything but abstract.
    Dirty gulls stalked the planking of the 10 th Street pier. The ticket seller said he had just missed the Hoboken ferry. He could see it out in the river, thrashing its way across to New Jersey and the Penn Central Depot.
    â€œWhere are you headed, sir?” the ticket seller asked.
    â€œChicago.”
    â€œThe four thirty-five? You’ll still make your train. Next ferry’s in an hour. Plenty of time.”
    Joe looked down at a small excursion steamer berthed on the downstream side of the pier, loading passengers — men in ice-cream suits and spats, women wearing summer dresses. Their chatter sounded gay and excited, as though it were Dominion Day or the Queen’s Birthday and they were on a holiday excursion. The deckhands brown as bears.
    A boy thrust a bill into Joe’s hand —
    O’CONNOR’S HOTEL,
    W. Brighton Beach
    Coney Island
    SEASIDE ACCOMODATIONS,
    OCEAN VIEWS BATHING
    All meals,
    Reasonable.
    STEAMERS DEPART & RETURN 10TH ST. PIER
    ON THE HOUR
    As he watched the last people boarding the little steamer, its whistle spat two impatient shrieks.
    No one was waiting for him across the river. No one in Chicago, Minneapolis, Winnipeg, or Calgary. Once he reached the West he would have to start becoming someone, to build something out of nothing. Out of the Pontiac, the backbone of hardship, the memory of rough hands tying bootlaces. These things were all that held him together now.
    He wanted to be alone with himself, to block out the world for a few days. He’d come out stronger; he knew he would.
    Picking up his grip, he hurried down the steep ramp and boarded the little paddlewheeler. After paying the fifty-cent fare, he went forward to stand in the bow. A moment later her lines were thrown and she backed off the wharf and began slipping downriver, past the black butts of wrecked piers.
    The air was active, like steam gushing from a kettle. Joe watched flights of black ducks streaking over the surface of the bay as the little steamer slipped below the palisade of grey buildings that punched into Manhattan’s sky like curled fists. Now no one knew him in the world, and he was both frightened and excited by his freedom.
    ~
    On Coney Island he took a room at O’Connor’s Hotel: four dollars a day, breakfast included, dinners extra. In flaring sunlight he walked the beach wearing his straw