Chapter 31
M ICHAEL SULLIVAN WOKE with an awful shudder and a start and knew immediately he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. He’d been dreaming about his father again, the scary bastard, the boogeyman of all his nightmares.
When he was a little kid, the old man had brought him to work at his butcher shop two or three times a week in the summer. This went on from the time he was six until he was eleven, when it ended. The shop took up the ground floor of a two-story redbrick building on Quentin Road and East Thirty-sixth Street. Kevin Sullivan, Butcher was known for having the best meats in all of the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, but also for his skill in catering not just to the Irish but to Italian and German tastes.
The sawdust on the floor was always thick and swept clean every day. The glass in the windows of the cases sparkled. And Kevin Sullivan had a trademark ? after he presented a customer’s meat for inspection, he smiled, and then took a polite bow. His little bow got them every time.
Michael, his mother, and his three brothers knew another side of his father though. Kevin Sullivan had massive arms and the most powerful hands imaginable, especially in the eyes of a young boy. One time he caught a rat in the kitchen and crushed the vermin in his bare hands. He told his sons he could do the same thing to them, crush their bones to sawdust, and their mother seldom went a week without a purplish bruise appearing somewhere on her frail, thin body.
But that wasn’t the worst of it, and it wasn’t what had woken Sullivan that night and so many other times during his life. The real horror story had begun when he was six and they were cleaning up after closing one evening. His father called him into the shop’s small office, which held a desk, a file cabinet, and a cot. Kevin Sullivan was sitting on the cot, and he told Michael to sit next to him. “Right here, boy. By my side.”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Michael said immediately, knowing this had to be about some dumb mistake he’d made during his chores. “I’ll make up for it. I’ll do it right.”
“Just sit!” said his father. “You have plenty to be sorry for, but that’s not it. Now you listen. You listen to me good.”
His father put his hand on the boy’s knee. “You know how badly I can hurt you, Michael,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
“And I will,” his father continued, “if you tell a single living soul.”
Tell them what ? Michael wanted to ask, but he knew better than to say a word, to interrupt his father once he had begun to speak.
“Not a solitary soul.” His father squeezed his son’s leg until tears formed in Michael’s eyes.
And then his father leaned forward and kissed the boy on the mouth, and did other things that no father should ever do to his son.