Mile High Read Free Page A

to drink for the rest of his life, from the day he set foot in America. If the same jolly stranger spoke to him twice Paddy would stop what he was doing and stare the man down. If it happened a third time he would hit the man with a short piece of lead pipe he kept in his trousers, because crimps are brutal men, then sell the man to Ma Steinet, getting five dollars. After three of Wood’s men went down under Paddy’s pipe and disappeared he thought they had crossed him off as a seafaring prospect, but his employer told him that he had been called uptown and told to fire Paddy or lose his license. That was that. Mr. Wood was very offended. When the Hilda M. Hess , the Antarctic whaler that was lying out in the upper bay, was loaded and ready to leave port, Mr. Wood had said that Paddy would be on it.
    â€œWhat’ll I do?” Paddy asked.
    â€œGet inland. Go to Pennsylvania.”
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI’m goin’ inta politics here.”
    â€œOver Mr. Wood’s cold body, you are.”
    â€œI’m young. I’ll wait. I ain’t goin’ ta wait until I go vomitin’ around the world in a whaling ship.”
    Paddy never returned to the farmhouse. He knew Wood’s crimps would be waiting for him along that dark road. He went straight to Ma Steinet, an evil-smelling old woman but Wood’s competitor.
    â€œWood’s crimps are after me.”
    â€œYou’re not the first.”
    â€œHe got me outta me job.”
    â€œGo find a priest. Why tell me?”
    â€œI want a job. But not on no ship.”
    She stared at him unpleasantly.
    â€œI use me eyes,” Paddy said, earnest and unsmiling. “I’m a good crimp. Put me on as a runner.” The runners were rowed out to meet the incoming ships, as far out in the harbor as they could get to, to board them with grapnels, then go into the foc’sles with booze and even go aloft with the crew to help them stow the muslin. They’d tell the sailors anything to get them to jump the ship when it docked, then to move them, drunk and helpless, into the boss crimp’s boardinghouse.
    â€œYou’d fall outta the rowboat,” Ma said, but she admired the way he never smiled but just jutted his fat lips outward and stared through her with hard eyes to some distant objective. She could feel the coldness of him, strong enough to put out a fire. “All right. You can be the drayman,” she told him. Drayman was low man in the crimping trade. When the runners got the seamen ashore the draymen moved their gear to the boarding-house, then after Ma had signed them on an outgoing ticket, the drayman carted the doped, drunk and sometimes dead bodies back to the wharves, now stripped of their money and their gear.
    Paddy took the job. He got a dose of pox his second night in one of Ma’s boardinghouses and never touched a street whore again for the rest of his life. Ma paid him room and board and three dollars a week and Fernando Wood forgot about him. Good luck continued. Young Bill Tweed, leader of the Cherry Hill gang, had founded the Americus Vespucci Volunteer Fire Company. Because of Paddy’s strength he won himself the right to wear one of Bill Tweed’s red shirts and became a star member of the Americus Engine Company Number Six, known all over the city as the Big Six, champions for outracing and outmaneuvering any volunteer fire company in Manhattan; fighting it out with fists at the water hydrant if the race was close. It was thrilling to see them race against the Eight Company down Broadway, the great red-shirted men teamed like horses to drag the engine—its box brightly emblazoned with the head of a snarling Bengal tiger—with Big Bill Tweed jogging beside them and blowing his silver trumpet, while fire buffs and children tumbled and ran all around them. Their fame spread far beyond the city. When Millard Fillmore became president they were