the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl didn’t need (or want) any strong-arm protection offered up by the likes of Tommy Coleman.
She despised Tommy Coleman.
She caught Ruby Pearl’s big arm in midair, before he could strike her, and she just sneered up at him like he was nothing, lower than a worm, a mesomorph, holding him fiercely, digging her fingers into the flesh and muscle and tendon in the seam of his thick wrist, the electric ganglionic nerve, smelling on him the overpowering smell of dead animals, her crazy smile, if you can call it that, a smile, God, could you believe it? In his cell Tommy grinned to himself as he remembered how beautiful she was!
Tommy was left to standing and staring. There was nothing for him to do, just look on and grin, Ruby Pearl dispatched just like that. Everything taken care of by this beautiful girl, neat as a pin.
Nevertheless, Tommy felt like he needed to make his presence known, and then he was of a mind to have a word with old Ruby. After all, he, Tommy, had got up and crossed the room this far, might as well go all the way.
Butcher Boy Ruby Pearl, wobbled from beer and oysters, toughest of the tough, roughest of the rough, whirled, rubbing his wrist where his bleak mort had pinched him, or whatever she’d done, and turned on Tommy, now focused in on this nemesis, glaring at him as a man glares at another when it is understood between them that their manhood is at stake.
Ruby Pearl knew Tommy Coleman, knew him all too well, knew how crazed and dangerous he was; loathed him. Loathed Tommy as Tommy loathed him.
“Pearl,” Tommy spoke.
“Step back, Coleman,” Ruby countered, “before I punch your parking railing through your face.”
“Don’t you know that’s no way to treat a lady, boyo?”
“I ain’t no b’hoyo of yours. Don’t call me no b’hoyo, b’hoyo! I’m Ruby Pearl, Bowery Butcher B’hoy. Mr. Pearl to the likes of you, Coleman.” And advancing on the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, he growled mightily, “Go back to the street, you. Make money, and leave me to deal with the likes of this nickey. I don’t want you to see what I’m gonna do to him.”
“Mr. Ruby Pearl, you don’t belong down here in this part of the city,” Tommy Coleman said. “This ain’t your neighborhood, this ain’t your ward. I think you better go home, back to your Bowery ways. Before you can’t, boyo.”
“Meaning what?” Ruby Pearl was not a man to step down lightly. “I’m here to see my mort. On her invitation. This is a free nation if you know it or not, you little Irish runty pig.”
Ruby was over six feet two inches tall and weighed more than two hundred and twenty pounds, with the torso of a side of beef. He grew up on the street. But sometimes the biggest and the strongest, the slyest and the most adept, cannot win. Looking around him, Ruby knew when he was put down and could not persevere. Even against a straw-weight lad a foot inferior, a hundred pounds lighter than he.
Tommy’s gang, Tweeter, Pugsy, Boffo, a dozen others, their hands on their slungshots and daggers, surrounded him.
“You’ll get yours, Coleman,” Ruby growled, looking from one to the other. “I’ll be back one day to dispatch you to hell, or I’ll meet you on the streets and grind you into the paving stones then. You know that, don’t you, wee one, when you don’t got your life preservers around.”
“I’m not scared, mate,” Tommy told him.
“Neither am I,” retorted he.
All in attendance at Mudd’s Mansion that night, every single one, pressed forward one step to witness what was to transpire.
“One last thing, Mr. Pearl. From now on, stay away,” Tommy warned, spitting on the floor between Ruby’s feet for punctuation. “This here mort is not your mort no more.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Pearl said. “Now you’re telling me stay away from what’s mine.”
“I don’t like no man who hits no woman.”
“No? Well, it ain’t no secret I don’t like you, Tommy b’hoyo. And I don’t much like no Irish pig runt rat telling me what to do.”
“Stay away, Ruby. Stay away if you don’t want to be took out.”
RUBY PEARL SWORE up and down the Bowery that vengeance would be his. He enlisted the other local native gangs to join his throng of Butcher Boys: the True-Blue Americans, the American Guard, every last stick and straw of the rest of the Bowery russers, making threat to march on Tommy Coleman’s wedding, the festivities of which were to be held in Paradise Square, and fillet Tommy on the spot in front of his new bride, making her a widow.
Armed guards, all emanating out of Eire, and all over six feet tall, were volunteered, primarily out of the ranks of the Plug Uglies and Kerryonians, to protect the nuptial celebration. These giants, in their reinforced stovepipe hats and hobnailed boots, were located strategically on the Five Points side streets and alleys and around the wrought iron fence that surrounded the square, as added deterrent, per Tommy’s orders, a rusted but workable cannon placed on Cross Street facing east.
But all was quiet and the wedding went off without incident.
Still, a small, festively wrapped box came, delivered by a toothless old woman in a yellow head rag. In it was the carcass of a dead white piglet, and a note that read: IT’S NOT OVER YET, with no signature, no nothing, but Tommy Coleman needed no signature to know the low style of a Bowery Butcher Boy.
After Tommy Coleman married the sister of his late brother’s late wife, as it turned out, some citizens of the metropolis were not exactly in his corner. The doomed romance of his brother and his new wife’s beloved sister hung over many. Her parents were desperate for fear that the terrible scenario would be played out again, and before the marriage, in their most intimate moments, even she, the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, said to him that she was repelled at the same time as attracted.
Now people were saying that she was even prettier than her sister, prettier than the Pretty Hot Corn Girl. Her head could be turned. She was not above that.
Many gossips said Ruby Pearl had put out the word right after the romance began: Any Bowery Boy or True-Blue American found buying an ear of corn from the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl would find himself answering to the Butcher Boys.
After Tommy had won the hand of his future intended, it proved more than a victory for him, it was a statement, because not only had he vanquished his rival, Ruby Pearl, domo of the hated Bowery Butcher Boys, but also (maybe even more importantly) it was wider acknowledgment to all that a brash, clever rogue the likes of Tommy Coleman might live a life of leisure off the steaming ears sold out of that cedar bucket.
No
