Read Online Streets of Gold by Evan Hunter - Free Book Online Page A

slime. Francesco waits until all the men have wandered off, and then he moves swiftly to where McDonnell has dropped his pick — he has been watching McDonnell all morning, and knows exactly which pick is his. He lifts it from the mud, wipes the handle clean with the sleeve of his shirt, and takes a penknife from his pocket. Quickly, he carves the initials P.H. into the handle, and then drops the pick back into the mud. The explosion comes shortly after lunch.
    “What’s this?” McDonnell says.
    Francesco, working some distance away, continues chopping at the solid rock wall of the tunnel. There is a sense of rising excitement in him, coupled with an uneasy foreboding. Suppose this backfires? But no, it cannot.
    “What in holy bloody hell is
this
?” McDonnell bellows.
    There is not a man in the tunnel who does not know of Francesco’s run-in with Halloran two months back. With great relish they tell and retell the story of how Halloran carved his initials into the little wop’s pick handle and then traded his own broken pick for the undamaged one. McDonnell is a notch above a moron, but he has heard the story, too, and what he sees staring up at him now from the handle of his pick are the initials P.H.
    “Where’s Halloran?” he shouts.
    He does not ask Halloran for an explanation; he never asks anyone for an explanation. He knows only that Halloran has equated him with the puny wop and is trying to pull the same trick a second time. Francesco watches as McDonnell seizes Halloran by the throat and batters his head against the rock wall of the tunnel. He watches as McDonnell, one hand still clutched around Halloran’s throat, repeatedly punches him in the face, closing both his eyes and breaking his jaw and splintering his teeth. He watches as McDonnell picks up the other man effortlessly, holds him over his head for an instant, and then hurls him some ten feet through the air to collide with the opposite wall of the tunnel. Then he watches as McDonnell takes the pick and with its P.H. initials, breaks the handle over his knee, and drops the halves on Halloran’s bloodied chest
    “It wan’t comical,” he says to Halloran, but Halloran does not hear him. Halloran is unconscious and bleeding and broken, and will in fact be taken to the hospital, not to report back to work till the middle of August, by which time Francesco will have left the subway-building business for good. In the meantime, he looks at Halloran lying in the mud, and he watches as the men begin to gather around him, and there is a tight grim smile on his mouth; he is from the south of Italy, and revenge is nowhere sweeter.
    A conversation between my brother Tony and me, many years later. Tony is seventeen, I am fifteen. We are sitting on the front stoop of our house in the Bronx. Ten minutes earlier, I’d made casual reference to our grandfather’s tale of revenge, which we’d both heard many times. Tony suddenly expresses a skepticism I can only link with his present anger at Grandpa. Tony wants to join the Air Corps; Grandpa has asked, “Why? So you can go bomb Italy?” But Grandpa has prevailed, and my mother has refused to sign the permission papers for enlistment. Tony blames Grandpa for this, and now refuses to believe a story he has accepted as gospel since he was five.
     
    TONY: It just doesn’t ring true, Iggie, that’s all.
    ME: Grandpa swears it happened.
    TONY: Why didn’t McDonnell suspect that maybe
Grandpa
was the one who’d carved those initials into his pick?
    ME: Because he was dumb.
    TONY: He was smart enough to remember the story about Grandpa and Houlihan, and to...
    ME: Halloran.
    TONY: Halloran. He made
that
connection, didn’t he?
    ME: Come on, Tony, a caterpillar could’ve made
that
connection. The man’s initials were carved into the pick! P.H. So McDonnell automatically...
    TONY:... automatically went after Halloran and beat him senseless.
    ME: Right.
    TONY: I don’t believe it.
    ME: Well, I do.
    TONY: