Mohawk

made a wrong turn and found himself not in the lobby but in a dark corridor. Then he took another turn and was outside, the stars overhead sectioned into grids by the steel rafters above. He tripped, got to his feet, fell again. The ground was wet and dirty. When he emerged, the rent-a-cop grabbed him roughly. “You got no business in there,” he said dutifully. “No business at all.”
    “I got lost,” Dallas choked, the smell of the dead fire deep in his lungs, black char all over his hands and clothing.
    The cop shoved him in the general direction of the parking lot. “Well, get unlost, for Chrissake.” Lost? Crazy was more like it. In his long and varied career in enforcement; he’d studied people carefully and concluded that most of them were full of shit.

61
    People in Mohawk still talk about the events leading up to the Randall Younger trial. Headlines in the
Mohawk Republican
, television coverage on all the tri-city TV stations and, in general, a circus atmosphere. Cameras everywhere and the issues all but lost as revelation followed closely upon revelation. It was alleged by the tanneries that Rory Gaffney, his son William and Randall Younger had been engaged in transporting stolen leather. The man who owned the van reported it stolen as soon as he heard about the trouble, but the police were suspicious and after an hour or two of interrogation he withered and directed them to the shack across the tracks from the tannery. The police chief suggested he state unequivocally that Officer Gaffney had no part in the thefts, and he complied.
    Coincidentally, just as the pre-trial publicity was nearing its height, a long awaited, federally funded study was published, officially linking the abnormally high incidence of cancer, leukemia and Lou Gehrig’s disease in Mohawk County to the tanneries and mills. Numerous charges of illegal chemical dumping in the Cayuga Creek as well as citations for unsafe working conditions in the shops were specified and substantiated. One mill was closed down by the state and twoothers closed voluntarily under the onslaught of the
Republican
’s editor, for many years the sole enemy of the tannery owners. The old arguments—that a coalition of shopowners had deviously and systematically prevented clean industries from entering the county, preferring decline to competition—were raised and examined, this time in the big city papers. As outrage and animosity toward the tanneries mounted, Rory Gaffney, who’d apparently been stealing from them for years, was elevated to folk-hero status, and the men who for decades had drunk draft beer with him at Greenie’s began to recall fondly the many times Old Gaff had taken on the owners and shop stewards, very nearly unionizing the men. None of this boded particularly well for Randall Younger, who stood accused of snuffing out this simple and noble flame. Those prone to moralizing saw parallels between the fate of Rory Gaffney and that of the Kennedys, struck down by outcasts unworthy to shine their shoes.
    Once the Gaffney myth was gaining decent momentum, however, there was a third revelation, this one made by none other than The Bulldog, “Your Hostess” at The Grotto, beloved wife of Harry Saunders. Indeed, Harry was probably the motivating force behind his wife’s revelation. She had first met Rory Gaffney when she was just a girl, living with her mother and older sister in Cresson, a tiny community in central Pennsylvania. The sister had been married but left her husband—a godless man, she said—to live with those who cared something for her. It was this sister’s husband who appeared on their doorstep one afternoon, and with him a seventeen-year-old boy who said nothing at all and stared at nothing at all out of swollen eyes that were little more than slits. The boy frightened hermore than the man, she said, because she couldn’t think why he was the way he was, and if anyone else knew, they wouldn’t tell her. She concluded that he must’ve been visited by God, and guessed that it must be God he was looking at through the slits, which was why he was so puffy all over. But as the days passed, the swelling lessened and his eyes opened a little and he began to resemble a boy. At night she heard the arguments between the man and her older sister, him saying that he had a good mind to take her back and show everybody what her running off had done. That if she couldn’t help heal her own flesh and blood, he’d make