Don't Stand Out Today
“Do you know this guy?”
Before I parted ways with Tanner, I showed him the business card of the man I'd met at the restaurant down by the Jersey City docks.
“You ran into Silverman?”
“He put his hand on my steak.”
Tanner threw his head back and laughed so hard his shoulders shook.
Fair enough—Silverman, it turned out, was the boss of the Pearl Buttons gang.
“I told him to keep his hands off this business, but I guess curiosity got the better of him and he went looking on his own. Acts like he doesn't care, but what a piece of work.”
The laughter faded. Tanner's face went serious again.
“If he'd known you were the one who killed Goo Goo Knox and Rubber Shaw, Silverman would've bought you that steak. He's got a score to settle with those bastards. Hell, so do I.”
The Gophers, the Hudson Dusters, the Marginals, the Pearl Buttons—every last one of them Irish gangs that had once spilled blood over Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea.
“The Hudson Dusters were so damn big and so full of lunatics that it was never easy.”
Only after the Marginals, Pearl Buttons, Fashion Plates, and the rest of the smaller outfits finally banded together had they been able to stand against the Dusters at all.
“Well, that's over now. After this, you can write the Hudson Dusters off for good.”
Tanner Smith called it good news and went looking for another whiskey. The death threats against him seemed already forgotten.
“Take care of yourself. You've got a better world to stick around and see.”
“Don't worry about me. I'm staying alive long enough to watch how high you climb.”
I left Tanner and climbed onto a streetcar.
Riding along Canal Street, I was finally headed home after three days on the road.
In the original history, Tanner Smith, boss of the Marginals, is murdered that same year—July 26, 1919.
He takes a bullet inside the Marginals Club he owns. The shooters are none other than the Hudson Dusters: specifically their last leader, Robert “Rubber” Shaw, and two of his men.
Five days later, Tanner Smith's boys catch up to Rubber Shaw in Hoboken, New Jersey, and kill him in retaliation.
In that same history, Frank “Goo Goo” Knox is a founding member of the Hudson Dusters and a notorious gunman on Manhattan's West Side.
Goo Goo Knox dies the year after Rubber Shaw—1920—of a morphine overdose. A suspicious death while he was laid up in Bellevue Hospital.
Second floor of the townhouse north of Grand Street.
I came home after too long away, opened the front door, and sure enough Roa came barreling into me.
“Big brother! I almost forgot your face!”
“What's stuck all over your face?”
“Bandages! Hazel-unni made them just for Roa!”
Liam gave Roa a shove with his foot and raised a hand.
“Hey, hyung.”
“You've got bandages on too. Who'd you fight?”
“I popped a pimple.”
“That's not what those are for.”
Bandages weren't a fashion statement, yet both my siblings had plastered their faces with them.
I tossed Liam my bag just as Mother and Hazel—belatedly wearing aprons—came out to greet me.
“Welcome home from your trip, son.”
Hazel looked me over from head to toe, then smiled a little.
“Dinner?”
“Yeah.”
Hazel had slipped into the family as if she'd always been there.
Even without Roa holding her, she showed no sign of wanting to leave.
“By the way—didn't you say making bandages was hard? Why are you handing them out like candy?”
“It's not hard anymore. Maddox built a machine that cuts and sticks them. Oh—and Maddox is going to work in our basement workshop from now on.”
Hazel's thoroughness sent a chill down my spine. She had taken the talent donation Maddox offered instead of a fee and turned it into this. She'd clearly brought him into the basement workshop for the express purpose of building a bandage machine.
For the first time in a while, I sat down to dinner with my family.
“Big brother, Roa knows she's going to school now, okay?”
“Starting when?”
“Next week.”
Roa chewed her meat with pure excitement written all over her face. According to Mother, the third wave of Spanish flu had weakened and settled into a lull, so the decision had finally been made.
“Then we should start cutting mask production too.”
“I was already planning to cut it in half once the New York City order finishes. Besides—we've got the bandages now.”
Mother beamed at Hazel.
“While you were gone, the supplies manager from Bellevue Hospital came by.”
“To the underwear shop?”
“Mm-hm. He brought the free sample bandages we'd given him and asked if we could supply them in bulk. And people from the drugstore chains came too.”
Hazel said two drugstores had shown up: Liggett's Drugstore and Walcott Drugstore.
In sheer scale, Liggett's towered over everyone. Walcott had recently expanded to five stores, but the man was still neck-deep in setting up his antiseptic factory and couldn't throw himself fully into the chain. The fact that he'd still come sniffing after the bandage news said he was a diligent operator.
“So what did you tell them?”
“I told them to sign supply contracts with Free Your Body.”
Mother picked up where Hazel left off.
“We agreed to deliver a thousand to Bellevue Hospital and five hundred sets a month to the drugstores. So right now we're scrambling to design the cases.”
The hospital could take them bulk. The drugstores needed them packaged ten to a box for retail.
Mother and Hazel already had everything moving like clockwork.
Toward the end of the meal, Roa came back with her sketchbook.
“Roa drew this while Big Brother was gone. Well? Doesn't it look just like you?”
That was supposed to be me? Had she drawn it while looking at her teddy bear?
Our Roa needs to give up drawing and try something else.
Or maybe I should just hire her an art teacher.
That night, for the first time in a long while, I sat in the living room and talked with my family until late.
A salon near Chelsea ILA headquarters.
Leaving the vice president out of it, two Italian men sat heads together in a private room. They were officers of the ILA Manhattan branch union committee.
The topic was the wage-hike negotiation for the dockworkers that had been settled only a few months earlier.
“Management wants to walk the raise back.”
“They're tearing up a deal after two months? The rank and file won't take that quietly.”
“Everything changed before and after the talks. From management's seat, they've got nothing left to lose.”
The manufacturing boom that had ridden the war was sliding into uncertainty after the armistice. Production was falling. Export volume bound for Europe had collapsed.
“They're already looking to cut the men they have. A strike would just hand management the excuse they need.”
“If they kill the raise, the vice president won't sit still. He led those negotiations.”
The man who had been listening pushed out his lower lip.
“Paul Kelly? Ancient history. Why do people keep calling the ILA a gang den? He never belonged in our organization in the first place.”
Ironically, these same union officers had deep gang ties of their own. The only real difference was that none of them were a heavyweight like Paul Kelly.
“So what's the plan?”
“We're going to push Paul Kelly out. The work's already started.”
“And the replacement?”
The man drumming his fingers on the table shook his head.
ILA officers had to be vetted with New York politicians. Installing a successor overnight was never simple.
East Coast, West Coast, Gulf of Mexico, Great Lakes, Puerto Rico, and the inland waterways—the ILA (International Longshoremen's Association) had members across a vast territory, and its headquarters in Manhattan, New York, was where every interest tangled into a knot.
“Whoever the new man is, we'll put up someone who listens better than Paul Kelly ever did.”
“Then while we're at it we should clean out those Irish bastards Kelly's been pushing.”
“It has to happen at the same time.”
Italian gangs were already deep in the game. They understood better than anyone what ports and longshoremen would be worth in the new era.
And one month later—February 21, 1919—Paul Kelly was forced out as ILA vice president. Management pressure moved the New York political machine, and he finally lost the internal power struggle.
A handful of papers gave Kelly's resignation heavy play.
They hammered the fact that he had once bossed the Five Points Gang and that the line between gang work and ILA activity had always been blurry; every column declared his ouster justified.
Meanwhile, the story that management had canceled the five-cent raise was buried or watered down.
Some even dragged Paul Kelly back into the frame to attack him for using gangsters to force an unreasonable settlement.
So while the public looked the other way and the workers' rage turned on the ILA itself—
Tanner Smith and Dopey Benny Fein, who had been agitating the men toward a mass strike, were ambushed.
In the gunfight that followed, Tanner took a round in the thigh and Dopey Benny Fein one in the shoulder.
Two of Tanner's men who covered him, and one of Dopey Benny Fein's, died in the exchange.
They were the Union gang's first real casualties.
Kieran threw himself into the funeral arrangements and paid each bereaved family three thousand dollars.
It tightened the gang's bonds and, at the same time, announced that there would be blood for blood.
— Pull every string you've got. Find the shooters and whoever put them up to it.
The ILA was busy installing a new vice president in Paul Kelly's place, and the police investigation crawled.
Unfortunately the Union's own intelligence net was still in its infancy. The whole mess was so tangled that pinning a suspect was never going to be easy.
— Then we run the strike ourselves! Tanner, Dopey—get ready.
— It's Dopey Benny Fein, damn it. And I just got shot!
— You can still stand up, can't you?
On Kieran's orders, Tanner and Dopey Benny Fein made contact with Paul Kelly and began stirring the rank and file into a spontaneous strike that cut the ILA out entirely.
Time passed. March arrived.
The port of Brest, France.
As the thin dawn mist lifted, the silhouettes of the great ships at anchor grew sharp.
Salt air and oil smoke soaked every corner of the docks.
The heat thrown off by tens of thousands of men.
They were American doughboys counting the days until they went home. The harbor was a chaos of their talk, their laughter, their curses, the scrape of gear being dragged, the puff of cigarettes.
In the middle of that throng, three men stood shoulder to shoulder staring at a transport.
The one with the heavy beard jammed his garrison cap back into place, kicked the ground with the toe of his boot, and scowled.
“Damn it, when the hell is this bastard ship gonna take us? What if I just shoot somebody and climb on first?”
“You want to get court-martialed after the war's already over?”
Gavin, Teddy, and David—Union men who had been drafted the moment they joined.
Their uniforms, faded and stiff with dust and sweat, told the story of the months they had lived through.
The day they could finally peel those hated uniforms off was almost here, and that only made them more restless.
“I just want off this goddamn French dirt as fast as possible.”
“Same here. Not that piss-water wine—I want whiskey on the Hudson. Just thinking about it makes my throat dry.”
“Boss'll have it waiting for us the second we land, right?”
“Boss is still a minor. Kid's a damn greenhorn.”
“Yeah.”
At Gavin's words a faint smile touched all three faces.
Plenty of men were counting the hours until they got home and still had no idea what they would do when they got there. Gavin, Teddy, and David already knew exactly where they were going; they didn't have to wonder.
A little farther up the hill above the harbor, another man was sketching the view with a playful hand and wrestling with his own future.
Walt Disney was trying to decide whether to stay in France as an ambulance driver or go home and find new work in America.
At last he made up his mind.
“You're really going to get me a job at a newspaper, right?”
Drift, Union man and fellow ambulance driver, nodded with absolute certainty.
“I already talked to the best paper in Manhattan. What kind of soldier doesn't trust a buddy?”
“I trust you, I do. But no matter how hard I think, I've never heard of the Flea Market. Honestly, the big papers in Manhattan are the Times, the World, the Herald, the Tribune—”
“Things change. These days the Flea Market's the one everybody wants.”
A neighborhood information sheet, they said. He still couldn't picture what that even meant. Whatever it was, he'd find out when he got there.
That day at noon, some nine thousand American soldiers boarded the Leviathan.
The troopship crossed the Atlantic and, roughly ten days later, finally raised the New York shoreline.
As if to make up for the cold, wet French front and the endless rolling of the transport, sunlight shattered across the water and the Statue of Liberty rose in all her grandeur.
“Lady Liberty!”
Someone shouted, and a single roar of cheers exploded across the deck.
“Waaaah! We're finally here!”
New York's great symbol standing tall on Liberty Island. Soldiers cheered, wept, and finally believed they had come home safe.
As the transport pushed deeper into the harbor the scene grew even more alive.
Massive freighters, busy tenders, and the tugs and fireboats that had come out to welcome the men circled the ship.
Fireboats shot powerful jets high into the sky, painting rainbows; tugs laid on their horns in long blasts announcing the return.
Manhattan's skyline sharpened. Along the riverfront the piers and buildings were a sea of welcome placards and American flags.
Welcome Home, Heroes!
Job Well Done, Doughboys!
“Doughboys”—the affectionate nickname for the American soldiers who had gone to war. The homecoming men burned the placards into their eyes, then turned and waved at the dense welcome crowd packing the pier.
Families, sweethearts, friends, people from every kind of organization waving handkerchiefs, shouting, stretching their hands toward the ship.
Whistles and horns, the band, the roar of the crowd—all of it fused into one enormous wall of sound.
The ship finally kissed the dock and the gangway dropped. Under the crowd's roaring welcome the returning soldiers poured onto solid ground.
Gavin and his boys, plus the veterans they had talked into coming along, looked around.
“Where are those friends of yours?”
“Busy running the business, I figure. We know where the office is—they'll be waiting for us there.”
They were pushing through the welcome throng when, as if light and shadow had to share the same space, the far side of the docks was staging the exact opposite of a celebration. Workers with pickets were holding a furious demonstration.
The signs said things like this:
We Are Fighting for the Heroes!
We Will Win That Five-Cent Raise!
For the Heroes' Wage Hike!
“So I guess we're going to be working these docks ourselves soon.”
“But pulling a strike on a day like this? They're asking for a backlash. What the hell are they thinking?”
Gavin and the others wore sour faces—then froze mid-step as if they'd walked into a wall of ice.
“Is that… Boss Tanner on the crutches? And that's Dopey Benny Fein next to him.”
“Wait—that scarf… that's the Boss, isn't it?”
Tanner Smith, Dopey Benny Fein, and the Boss himself with the rest of the crew.
On the day the heroes came home, the Union gang became a true union.
They had always talked about being a different class of outfit from the old gangs. Now the gang had become the most traditional kind of labor slugger, leading a strike.
“……Let's not stand out today.”
Gavin and his party herded the veterans they had sweet-talked and took a wide detour around the whole scene.
“Is it far from here?”
“Yeah. Just keep quiet and walk.”
Drift jammed his hat down low, took Walt Disney with him, and slipped out of the harbor.