Cairo By Midnight
A short story by Patrick Michael Finn

Many years before at the kitchen sink, his Aunt Sophia had told him to always keep away from the gypsies and tinkers who cruised along the canal at dawn looking for anything discarded, babies included, but usually furniture or bottles or scrap metal. If he couldn't keep away for whatever reason, then the tinkers, but for the love of Christ he should never step an inch near a gypsy. Not even a woman one. Especially not a woman one.

Daniel wondered how he would know who was a gypsy and who was a tinker, but only wondered, for asking such a thing might have made her pinch the skin on the back of his neck. "Ah ah ah!" she would say, one note for each pinch.

She could read his wonder, and pinched him anyway. "Ah ah ah!" He was eight years old then and her orphan nephew, and pinch or no pinch, his wonder was answered.

"The Dwyer tinkers ride in a Cadillac along the canal. That's how you'll know. Fifteen of them in that automobile—some in the trunk. Dwyers. Filthy thieves. And by their eyes. Dead hard blue and pink from all that potato booze they make and sell and drink themselves."

She was speaking at the dishes she scrubbed, her voice louder and motions more severe as the substance of what she said snatched her reason and made her visibly angry. Daniel, eye-level with her tumbling hips, stood twisting the dish towel that dangled by his feet.

"The gypsies, you'll know them easier than you'll know a tinker. In their truck that rumbles and smokes and makes the whole neighborhood smell like hell. All of them born whores and criminals, from Egypt. You know where Egypt is? And that makes them a Jew, Arab, and Negroid wrapped up in one—one whore and criminal. And that's worse than any tinker could ever imagine to be. They have a Negro's dark stupidity in their eyes; a Jew's cunning tongue to cheat a beggar out of his last nickel, a poor mother out of her last drop of breast milk; an Arab's skin fit for traveling at night in shadows so they won't be caught stealing babies or hubcaps."

Daniel was not eight nor in the kitchen anymore. And though dawn had just blued across the water, he could clearly make out the shape of the tinker Cadillac, the Dwyer Cadillac, idling and moon white down Moen Street, headlights dim yellow. It jerked to a halt and a door flew open and a black dog was pushed out. Laughter came from the car and stopped when the door was pulled shut. The tinkers drove off one way and the black dog lapped the other.

Tommy Dwyer must have been driving. He loved to steal dogs from backyards and set them free along the canal. There were no longer fifteen tinkers who cruised the canal roads for garbage, only four, and they only cruised anymore to set their stolen dogs free. They bragged about it, Tommy Dwyer, James, Terry, John, at the Red Rose of Tralee, where Daniel had gotten a job sweeping after it was agreed by everyone, Sister Gesowina, Father Zajc, that high school was simply not for everyone. Especially not for Daniel. So he swept the Red Rose of Tralee instead and heard the Dwyers talk about their pussy, their Balmoral trifecta wheels, and the dogs they stole. How a kingdom of free dogs was ganging under the Rock Island Line bridge and learning to talk like real people.

"I can't help myself," Tommy would say to his brothers and to whomever else was in the bar, because his voice, though rough from whiskey and weed, always carried as though spoken with a full lung's stregnth from the middle of an empty warehouse, no matter where he was. "I can't help myself. Them dogs." This eldest of the Dwyers would laugh then usually. "They just jump on in and I drive them off. Off. They just jump on in and I set them free. That's the duty I got."

The Dwyers would light filterless Camels and Chesterfields, sip from their glasses of cold, sweaty Old Style. There was, of course, variation to the way these words and actions were demonstrated night after night, but Daniel would always have to stop listening at some point. Half of him had to stop listening because Gorman, the barman, would snap Daniel out of his broom-propped listening trance with a clap and say, "Hey, Chubby, let's move!" And the other half of Daniel would stop listening because Tommy Dwyer would say something that provoked in Daniel that feeling, that dizziness just like when he stood too quickly after waking up, and that heavy, tender ache deep that started down between his legs and shot up into his stomach. It was a haziness that had lately come over him, weighted with something both significant and incomprehensible:

"No animal should belong to anybody."

****

The dark broke gray-blue above the Rock Island line bridge that stretched over the canal an angular monster of rusted, oily iron. It was Sunday and in a couple hours the steeples silhouetted against the sky's new light on the other side of the canal would ring out the first of the day's services. Daniel wouldn't be attending any of them; he had his boat packed and hidden under the bridge, where he'd never in fact seen that gang of dogs Tommy Dwyer always talked about. He believed him though, and figured stray life had somehow gotten to them, and imagined the dogs one by one running toward the canal wall, leaping over it, and sinking into the pulling current of the bottomless waterway.

Daniel pulled his boat out of the bridge darkness and dragged it by ropes along the canal wall. It was heavy with what he'd brought that morning and crammed into its narrow stern: a bag of dago bread, two tins of fish, three pairs of pants, a liter of soda, five spools of string, and the foot-tall creamy plaster Virgin that stood sad-eyed and praying on a twisted serpent; something about the Virgin's downcast sorrow stirred up the dizziness, the loin ache, and as Daniel pulled the boat he had to look away because it seized him wildly enough to make him groan out loud and stumble.

The night was slipping further away and things began to take detail and definite shape in the new light of dawn. Daniel lifted his boat over the wall and tried to lower it gently into the waterway, but its weight pulled it from his control and landed with a splash that lashed him fiercely across his face, in his eyes and mouth. He gagged when he saw what swam in the murky, oil-filmed current: ripped panties, used rubbers, stained napkins; an entire sick sea life of the human body and its fornication.

"Might make Cairo by midnight if you hoist off right now," a voice called from behind him. It was Cervenkova, an older guy on disability from the copper foundry, who ambled down the hill from the lot behind the Slovak tavern, a fishing rod in one hand, rusted tackle box in the other. Unlike Daniel, obesity was not something Cervenkova had carried since birth; it had come upon him in mid life and draped him with strange disproportion: his head, arms, and legs had a normal leanness that mismatched the enormity of the gut that hung inches over his belt, front and back. He looked to Daniel much like a picked-up frog: twiggy legs dangling from a massive, larger torso.

Cervenkova peered over the wall. "Christ Jesus, what is this?"

Daniel held the ropes and pulled his boat in from the current; it knocked against the wall and splashed the things he'd packed. "My boat," he said. "It's my boat."

"Your boat? Oh, fatso, you can't get in that. It's half a goddamn water heater."

Mishka Romani, a gypsy Daniel's age, had told him it was a boat and sold it to him for fifteen dollars. Now Daniel hated Romani, and a hot pink anger of embarrassment flushed his face and pressed his teeth together.

"It'll tip the minute you get in. You'll drown. Do you know how fast that undertow is? Water'll fill your lungs and they'll pop like rubbers. Besides," he said, "this water's all wrong. Watch." Cervenkova reached over the wall and stuck his hand below the surface; he took it out, dripping, and within minutes his flesh was splendid with red speckles of a rash; he sighed and shook his head. "See what I mean? Raw sewage. Chemicals. Oil. You name it, it's in there."

Cervenkova wiped his hand on his pants and then knelt on the grass and rooted through his rusty box. He chose a shimmering silver luer with red eyes and an opened mouth, fixed it on the end his line, then stood and cast it out long to a spot half-way to the other side. "I been fishing here for fifty years and never got a strike," he said, and spat. "Not even a goddamn tap. You don't wanna go out in that water. Nothing in it lives but shit and garbage. Why you running anyhow? Your Aunt Sophia, Uncle Stashu, they'll miss you."

Daniel didn't answer but held his grasp on the end of the ropes. He could ignore with ease, for ignorance was a force that had surrounded him like a great cold blanket long since he'd been orphaned to the care of his relatives. At seven he'd watched his mother's face blacken when cancer of the tongue spread throughout her entire head, finally plunging into her brains. His father took a month off work to recover, and spent most days stumbling from tavern to tavern, drinking and weeping, "I ain't got no language, I ain't got no language," until patrons started complaining that he was a bring down, and every barman from Rockdale to Preston Heights gave him the eighty-six. He froze to death in the doorway of Saint Sabina's, his stiff fingers clutched around ann empty jar of white Dwyer poiti'n.

Sophia and Stashu, his great-aunt and uncle, were the only relatives who didn't avoid Daniel with the strange staring silence he later came to understand as fear; fear that he had something to do with the passing of his parents. Daniel often wondered if everyone was right in evading him, wondered if he did indeed carry some spiritual virus that made death contagious, because evasion carried its weight outside the family. Children on the street who recognized him from school and who would smile and try to talk to him were always steered away by their mothers; eventually these same children would only glare at Daniel in the classroom, whisper to each other and point.

Daniel learned to greet the silence with silence. Whenever teachers asked him questions he only blushed and stared down at his desk. For a while he was granted this fault as a symptom of the chaos he'd witnessed, but soon the teachers demanded participation, and when he offered none they became furious. Sister Innocent often kept him after class to make him stare at the hideous painting of Christ on the wall in the back of the room.

"Look at it," she'd snap. "Don't close your eyes. Remember Christ died for you. You."

The painting depicted Christ tortured before His crucifixion, cloaked in purple cloth the Roman soldiers had given him, crowned with thorns, a reed between his bound hands; a puppet King of the Jews. They'd beaten Christ with whips before costuming Him in quack regality, and in this painting His arms and chest were seeping through sores of hanging flesh, and the white bones of His knees exposed. It so turned Daniel's stomach to have to stare at this that some nights he couldn't eat.

"What the hell is it now?" Sophia would ask. "Eat."

"I can't."

She'd pinch him, then bark across the table in the old language to her husband, Stashu, who, red-eyed and sluggish, would be laboring his fork into his downturned mouth.

"Eat your goddamn food," he'd say without looking at Daniel, with a tone that suggested his acrimony stemmed not from his nephew, but from his wife's constant badgering; an annoyance he learned to elude by playing barbudi with the Greeks in the quarters above their market on Cagwin Street, drinking Dwyer white lightning, and gorging gypsy girls against the dumpster behind the Red Rose of Tralee.

But that image of the beaten, seeping Christ was something Daniel carried long after those nights he couldn't eat. It came forward toward him like a flash when, years later, he too had found a dark comfort away from Aunt Sophia, the severe antithesis to the neglect he usually faced; it came onward, the tortured Christ, when he lay hand and commenced silky release in the darkness of his own bedroom, the sin he was accused of when she'd stick her twisted, bitter face in the doorway and say, "Keep your hands above the covers. What are you doing under there?" But it had always already been done, the hot lashing under the sheets that Daniel knew was as well a lash in the Lord's flesh, and empty path toward a torture worse than that of the pathetic-eyed Christ who waited in his imagination to be decloaked and shoved down the road to Golgotha.

****

Cervenkova reeled in his line and from it dangled a shrivelled, yellow rubber, dripping from the mouth of the luer. "Ha," he said. "I only wish I could be that sinful. Can't get it up anymore since the accident." He was still smiling when he plucked it from the hook and tossed it back in and brushed his hand across his shirt, but the smile vanished into a hard sneer when the low rumble of a smoking truck sounded from behind on Moen Street. It was the Romani truck, the gypsy truck, idling along the curb while two boys, one of them Mishka, ran alongside picking up bottles, tires, anything, and handed these things to two women in the back. As always their clothes matched their skin and hair, faded browns and blacks, ragged and smeared with oil.

"Goddamn gypsies," Cervenkova said. "I wouldn't fuck a gypsy with your dick."

Daniel didn't want Mishka to see him, didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was attempting to float away in not a boat, but half a goddamn water heater; so he faced the low sun that in shape and light was obscured by smoke from the copper foundry a mile or so up the canal.

Cervenkova glared and straight, clenched dentures showed from behind his parted lips; he'd gotten a steak knife from his box and held it at his hip. "Fuckin cunts," he whispered. "I'll bury all of 'em."

The truck rolled past and cut up the street toward the Slovak tavern. Cervenkova dropped the knife into the box and cast his line back out, though not as far as he had before because a two-barge coal scow was coming from the north. Warning horns and drop gate bells sounded from the Ruby Street bridge.

"Goddamn gypsies," Cervenkova said. "You know where gypsies are from?"

Daniel closed his eyes and let a slow gasp roll from his mouth; he leaned forward and rested against the canal wall; the ache was spreading to his legs, the dizziness to his chest where it grazed his heart and called him closer to that responsibility he didn't understand. "Egypt," he said. "They're from Egypt."

"Egypt? That's an old wives' tale, fatso. They ain't from Egypt. They ain't from anywhere. There's no history with them," he said, and coughed. The color of what he brought up and spat on the ground had no name. "How can you give a sack of stealing shit history? And why would you want to? Only thing that matters with them is that they're tumors that gotta be cut out before the whole goddamn neighborhood goes." Cervenkova caught himself; it wasn't the memory of his dead mother that gave Daniel the fogginess in his gaze, the slump in his shoulders, but this was how Cervenkova read him. "Hey," he said. "Sorry. I didn't mean anything about real tumors, you know. Sorry," he said. "But anyway, they don't come from Egypt."

Daniel pitied Sophia, that her hatred for the swarthy Romani tribe had stemmed from something that was only an old wives' tale. One night earlier in the year, the night of Shrove Tuesday, a gang with sticks and chains had gone bum wilding in the rail yards, clubbing hobos across their throats, tossing bottles of gasoline and battery acid into abandoned freight cars where it was said gypsies were living. From the kitchen window Daniel had watched the orange smoke rise from the yards and tower into the black winter sky. Three women had been burned terribly, one blinded, and when Aunt Sophia heard this she laughed bitterly and said it was a blessing their lives weren't taken, a benediction that the whores would be branded with affliction for the rest of their days.

But Daniel that night had even darker things on his mind.

The next day was Ash Wednesday and in the morning the whole school went to mass for the dispensation of ashes. Daniel was already weak from the black fast, mumbling the Responsorial Psalms and heavy with a hollow, gaseous pain in his empty stomach. Christ was watching him from His crucifix the entire time; watching him with sad blue eyes surrounded by drops of blood that dripped from his thorn-crowned skull. Daniel had recently learned from his Uncle Stashu on a cold drunken night that there was more to the crucifixion than he'd been taught, more than was ever shown in painting and sculpture, and this knowledge expropriated and brought him into a closer communion among agonies with each ounce of seed he spilled from himself. Uncle Stashu had been in the kitchen late by himself, smoking in the dark after Aunt Sophia was asleep. Daniel went down for water and found Uncle Stashu staggering against the counter with his cigarette. He wanted to tell Daniel about it, the real crucifixtion, what really happened, and Daniel listened, the ache between his legs crawling up his back while Uncle Stashu, very drunk, pulled him closer and whispered about the same aches Christ had when they hammered him to the cross. Then he reached out for that same ache in Daniel, and when Daniel broke away the old man sobbed and knelt on the kithen floor in the dark, and Daniel went back to bed and knew his Uncle Stashu would never remember what had happened. Because he never did. He just always forgot.

After Ash Wednesday mass on the way back to class he wiped his ashes away; they were to remind him of the impending darkness everyone faced in death, a reminder Daniel didn't need.

Later that afternoon, when Sister Gesovina asked the class to share with her the significance of Ash Wednesday, Daniel raised his hand.

"Daniel?" Sister said. "You've something to say? Stand, please. Stand and tell us what you think."

Everyone turned around to watch him; he'd never before said a word and some of the students, their foreheads smudged with thumb-shaped soot, laughed because they were sure his silence had its roots in simple stupidity.

Lent, Daniel told the class, was the season to remember Christ's death.

Sister Gesovina nodded, smiling.

But what many people didn't probably know, Daniel said, was that Jesus wasn't crucified with a cloth around his waist like in all the pictures and on the cross in church. No. The Romans nailed him up naked so that all the people on the ground who were watching could see his prick and balls.

Sister Gesovina closed her eyes and gasped. "Daniel," she said. "Sit down."

He didn't, and went on, louder, clearing his throat and straightening his back so everyone could hear him. Some students laughed, but most of them whispered Oh, my God and looked at each other with wide eyes and mouths. After the soldiers put spikes through Christ's wrists, they nailed His feet to the plank one over the other, but up high on the wood so that His knees were bent, forcing blood into His organ and making it stick out all hard for everyone to see.

"Enough!" Sister screamed, marching toward the back of the room. "Get out!" She grabbed at him, and with both hands Daniel embraced her arms and pushed her against the wall so that she collapsed and cried out.

And when the soldier lanced Christ's side to make sure He was dead, it wasn't water that squirted out; He shot His sperm out onto the face of the same soldier, making him curse and plunge the lance into Christ's right eye. Blood should have come out but all His blood was gone, so plain water poured from the hole.

Sister Gesovina cried out for help, and Daniel kicked her in the stomach. Father Zajc had been summoned from the hallway, and he stepped into the room right as Daniel brought his foot back for another swipe. "You magnificent bastard!" the priest yelled, and brought Daniel down with a punch that split his nose and upper lip.

There was a conference with Daniel's aunt and uncle, where it was decided Daniel would never return. Stashu had given up for Lent the white lightning, cards, and fucking, and was acrid as all hell because of it. Both of them beat Daniel that night, flogged him in the bathroom while they sobbed, that he could say such things about Christ on a holy day of obligation, that from shame they'd never be able to return to the parish where they were married, where their children had been baptized.

****

Waves of the wake of the coal scow lifted Daniel's boat and tossed thick slaps of inky water into the bottom.

"I'm telling you," Cervenkova said. "Forget it. You won't make it in that thing." He reeled in his line and cast it back out, far, since the scow had passed and was floating south. "It's finished. Go home." Something about this statement tickled the man; he bent back and let a sticky laugh kick from the back of his throat.

The things Daniel packed were drenched; the things he'd chosen carefully in the gloom of his sleepless night after returning from his final shift at the Red Rose of Knock; the things he'd stuffed in a garbage bag while Aunt Sophia and Uncle Stashu were still asleep; the things he'd taken out of the house after he closed up all the windows and turned on the gas.

"My sweet shit!" Cervenkova gasped. "Fifty years!" Something had snagged the luer and pulled. "My sweet shit, I got something!" Cervenkova hopped onto the wall; the rod buckled as he cranked in the line. Four yards from the wall the fish leaped above the surface, ball-eyed and mouth agape, and looked like a horrid green arm reaching from the water for help. "Christ shit," he said, his mouth stammering. He yanked the rod back so the end was hook-shaped and shaking. It was as if the world had stopped for a moment whatever it was doing to allow Cervenkova's delight full immersion as fifty years of ill success was pitched by the hooked, flailing torment of this stray fish, for the wet flapping was the only sound, amplified by its solitude.

Daniel pushed him in with both hands, flush against the sagging rear of his gray trousers. Cervenkova grasped the pole two handed even in mid air, feet, then inches, from the water. There was a yelp that might have grown to a holler had his voice not been stifled by the smooth, moving current of the surface; he went under quickly, the undercurrent yanking him into the bottomless leagues of shit and garbage, oil and chemicals. The waves he left behind thinned in an outward circle, got smaller, and were gone.

And so was Daniel's boat. He'd neglected the ropes and saw it floating away and tipping to one side, until finally it was filled and as well went down without pause.

****

Three blocks down Moen Street, the Dwyer Cadillac rolled up alongside the curb. Terry rolled down the window and Tommy called across to Daniel from behind the wheel; they were dressed up in old suits, unshaven. "Hey, what the fuck you doing out?"

Daniel shrugged. "Walking."

"Walking," Terry said.

"You wanna make fifty bucks?" Tommy said.

Daniel got in back with James and John, neither of whom had on ties, and looked like they were about to sleep.

They drove fifteen miles away from the city and left the expressway on a Wilmington byway that ran between endless acres of corn. Tommy pulled the car onto the gravel road and parked. James and John were snoring.

The other two Dwyers got out of the car and opened the rear door and motioned for Daniel to follow. They walked back to the trunk, and Terry Dwyer opened it.

The boy gypsy boatseller Mishka Romani lay half wrapped in a bed sheet, twitching. Blood seeped from his ear, and when he opened his mouth pink bubbles dribbled out.

Daniel covered his mouth and stumbled backwards.

"Tommy hit him," Terry said. "We were going to mass. He hit him up on Cagwin."

"Shut the fuck up," Tommy said, and kicked his brother on the leg.

They stood there for some time looking into the trunk. A wet airy sound was coming from Mishka Romani's mouth.

"See," Tommy finally said. "We can't leave him like this and I've already done plenty for a Sunday morning." He handed Daniel a razor. "Just cut his throat please. He won't be missed."

After that, Terry patted Daniel on the shoulder and told him not to worry. "On the beaches in California they have caves where they can raise children from the dead."

They got back into the car and the two Dwyers in the back seat woke up. Tommy asked Daniel if he could miss work for a couple nights, since it wasn't a good idea to head back, not for a while. Daniel told him he quit the night before, and everyone in the car said that was real good, and then it was decided they'd drive south and probably make Missouri by noon.