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know each other in line. After a moment, one of them elbows me behind him so he can be on the side of his buddy and I having to force myself back into line again from behind.
    The man with men parting around him is, of course, Dinny Meehan, leader of the White Hand. And though it was many years ago, I remember it as if it were happening now and right out in front of me.
    It was then, as Dinny Meehan strode through the dock aisles, that I finally figured out that the group called Dinnies were really his own: Dinny’s men, that is. And along the line he stalked like some rogue general inspecting his indigent battalion of scamps and scallies queued up as well as they could but stung with the hunger and the cold.
    He stands there in my mind as if it were today. Bold and humble, a man of his time and mine. He is standing there ahead of me, scanning the bodies and the faces of the hopefuls in line. Erect like a gypsy traveler appraises a piebald vanner mare with a keen, scrutinizing eye before arguing price. He even asks to see some of the men’s teeth and if they possess all the digits on their hands. Behind him, a pier reaching out into the East River becomes filled with a backing ship and four guiding, noisy tugs. This man Meehan did not walk with the gruff demeanor of his roughneck toughs who make order on the labor lines. Instead, he answers his men’s questions with a nod or a softly spoken “Nah,” or a gentle “Yeah.”
    His clothing, though a bit patchy, clings to his muscled shoulders, chest, and upper arms and down toward his flat stomach and punchy legs. His boots are soiled, as are all the other men’s, and he has the face of a hardened laborman with a wide jaw and the small ears of a fighting dog. His brown hair falls back over the top of his head without the spit or oil some use, though shocks of it are left over his temple and down close to his ear on one side. His eyes though, that’s what made Dinny Meehan. His eyes are a very intelligent green and made of a nice shape both mean and understanding.
    At the time, no one had to tell me who the tribe-head here was. He carried the weight of the responsibility of things on the Brooklyn docks in his eyes, he did. As had all chieftains among their clan in the olden days back home when they ran wild through the glens, heathers, bogs, and boreens.
    Up and down the line bark his boyos. Attacking a loosened piece or a scowling laborman here and there. Hissing at them in the morning wind. Pushing them off balance if they sneer too much. The dockboss of the Baltic Terminal was John Gibney, “the Lark.” His right-hand man standing behind him is the slick-haired Big Dick Morissey with the chest of a black ape and the forearms of an anchor chain. Also there, tightening up the line, is the gangly white-haired dooker with the long arms and club fists, the one everyone calls The Swede. And finally Vincent Maher, a handsome masher who was a bit younger than the rest and who smirks with the sport of a skirt chaser yet walks with the same authority as a man in the inner circle of Meehan’s larrikins.
    From behind with a scare and pushing passed me without mention of a pardon is another taller sort that doesn’t have the shoulders of Big Dick or the vulgar bearing of The Swede. This man who leapt through the line from behind me came straight to the ear of Meehan and overhearing him as I did, was taken by the fellow’s accent, which can’t be mistaken for anything other than that of a true Irish traveler. A native of the country roads of Ireland where they claim no territory as their own and wobble about in covered wagons pulled by gypsycobs from riverside to horse fair. This traveler, Tommy Tuohey is he, a type I knew all too well as coming from the clans of fist fighting and knavery who sleep their drink off under the big aimless pale starry and mooned sky. With logistics at hand, Tuohey speaks to Meehan as he’d just come