by Ken Bruen
“Isn’t it dangerous?”
He laughed, said,
“God, I hope so.”
She now flat-out fucking adored him. He asked,
“You like movies?”
Oh, yeah.
He said,
“I liked They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
She didn’t know it, said,
“Loved it.”
He knew she lied, but so what?
He said,
“I’m working on a new version, They burn horses, don’t they?
She sat up, went,
“Whoa, what?”
He said,
“We have two guys in common who busted our balls.”
When she said nothing, he said,
“The deadbeat drunk Taylor and his sidekick, a psycho biker named Keefer.”
She was very attentive now, said simply,
“And?”
He got out of bed, stretched, said,
“Those assholes hang out on some version of a ranch or farm outside town.”
He turned, stroked her cheek, said,
“At the risk of mutating an American saying, I intend for them to ‘buy the farm.’”
She stroked the long nasty scar all down his right leg, said,
“Count me in, lover.”
He began to dress, carefully, as if it were important.
Perhaps it was.
He reached in his jacket, took out a long match, handed it to her.
She said,
“Lemme guess: We’re a match.”
An almost satanic look flitted briefly across his face, then was gone.
But
She’d seen it.
As the saying goes,
“Once seen!”
She was Californian, knew her satanic shit, knew it close.
He asked,
“Know what that is?”
Fuck, she thought, this is thin ice, tried,
“A long match.”
He snarled,
“Don’t be frivolous.”
She was just a wee bit afraid but she knew she could break his neck fast; being a prison chaplain has its perks. Letting a trace of edge leak over her own tone, she said,
“It’s a fucking long wooden match, with a red tip.”
She nearly added,
And how drearily phallic.
But bit down.
The guy had cash so she could play it a little, said,
“It’s your calling card.”
Bingo.
He planted a wet kiss on her cheek.
Downstairs, Brid, listening, wearing a T with the hashtag, “MeatToo.”
Spat.
Twice.
“What I would call a supernatural and mystical experience
Has
In its essence
Some note
Of a direct spiritual contact.
Liberties
A kind of flash or spark which ignites an intuition.”
(from a letter by Thomas Merton to Aldous Huxley)
Cynics pointed out that Merton died as the result of an electric fire that flashed or sparked.
A disillusioned ex-priest postulated,
“Did Merton have a final epiphany before he burned
Or indeed
As he burned?”
I was in Ollie Crowe’s bar in Bohermore. The talk was of the murder of Clodagh, a lovely woman in the Midlands. She seemed to have the Irish dream: three gorgeous boys, a devoted husband who was not only a school vice principal but a major figure in the GAA, active in the community.
But.
Beware that fucking but.
He seemed to never leave Clodagh’s side, even went with her and her sister to select Clodagh’s wedding dress.
Creepy, right?
He would never allow Clodagh to have even a cup of tea with her beloved mother without him present. He was, as they say, stuck in everything.
Clodagh, deeply troubled, told her mother that he was in trouble at the school for missing money and something of a sexual nature. He had been wearing Clodagh’s underwear and admitted he watched porn obsessively but Clodagh asserted he was getting counseling.
Yeah, right.
The night before he was due to return to work to, as they say, face the music, he crept up behind Clodagh, who was at the computer, planning a family holiday. He took her head nearly clean off with the ax, then he went upstairs, cut the vocal cords of the eldest boy lest he alert the two younger lads who shared a room; a knife was used, and the coroner stated there were signs of defensive wounds.
Fuck.
He then went into the other children’s room and slit their throats; they were six and four. Back downstairs to transfer his wife’s money into his account, then calmly wrote a five-page letter (that, even three years later, Clodagh’s family have not been allowed to see in its entirety).
Gets worse, if possible.
His brother was to have his car, and he demanded that he not be forgiven.
As Brenda Power wrote in the Sunday Times to that last bit,
“Don’t fucking worry!”
She also added, to the pride of the pub, May he rot in hell.
A-fucking-men to that.
She ridiculed the notion that he’d snapped.
It was obvious he’d been planning for months as, months before, he moved the furniture so that Clodagh would be sitting with her back to him when he attacked her. He was a big man and she a petite woman.
The piss-poor coward.
But what irked her and only one other brave journalist was the
Rehabilitation of the predator syndrome.
This was all the rage, if you’ll excuse the horrendous pun. In this case, the priest praised the killer as a community person, a committed family man (seriously, like fuck that), a pillar of the community.
Clodagh’s mother and sister broke their silence to appear on Prime Time, beg the powers that be (and don’t) pleading for the why of it; his five-page letter still hadn’t been released to them.
Clodagh’s mother revealed in heart-wrenching detail the morning she went to Clodagh’s house, with a feeling of dread, a note on the door, warned,
“Call the police.”
I had to literally shut my ears, it was so agonizing to hear. There was a man sitting next to me. He looked cold, freezing. He asked me,
“Where would I get a hot water bottle?”
I said,
“1957.”
March 4, 2019:
Keith Flint took his own life; the video of his band Prodigy’s “Firestarter” is a sight to behold.
Luke Perry died, from a stroke at fifty-two; his career had recently rebooted with Riverdale.
The inventor of spell check died yesterday. May he roost in piece.
The Children
Children of the Galway miracle.
Bannered the red top papers.
In bold emphatic headlines, they screeched,
Where are they?
Who are they?
Where did they come from?
The journalists had no answers to the above
But
They speculated wildly; it’s their raison d’être.
Later, oh, so much later, they would be known as
“The children of the lie.”
Sara and Salazar were not siblings, but they were related through
Brutality
Pain
Abuse
Torture
Terror.
Sara was part of the above in a sly, subtle fashion.
Sara was sixteen or eighteen but, in the ways of the world, she was middle-aged.
She had developed a chameleon ability to alter her appearance so that she always seemed younger then she was. The drug Eltroxin kept her body as a perpetual girl. No physical development. She found it worked to lower the defenses of the predators and she viewed the world as dominated by the predatory.
She was intent on being the most ferocious of that breed.
Salazar was small and traumatized.
To Sara, he was disposable, as were all the others.
They had been thrown together when a line of refugees were swept up by U.S. border guards then, in a series of errors, they were put on a boat to Europe, landing in Greece, on the island of Kos, where Concern, the Irish charity, rescued a group of children.
More travel. The children had bonded by then and it was just taken as fact that they were siblings. Sal didn’t speak, ever, such was the degree of his trauma. Sara protected him with a ferocity that was almost lethal. She knew how to handle a blade and was rarely without one. Her appearance of utter innocence lured many to mistake her as not only younger but harmless.
She’d been reared in Guatemala and her proudest memory was the trick she’d learned with blue light and a tattoo that spiraled up her left arm. It was of a cobra about to strike and when she bent her arm it gave the illusion of the snake in motion.
She had in her journey three previous “siblings.” She’d slit each one’s throat when they annoyed her.
Sara adapted fast to new surroundings and in the Galway refugee center the inmates were shown a series of religious movies by a bored and misguided nun.
In rapid succession Sara saw such gems as:
The Miracle of Lourdes.
The Secrets of Fatima.
Medjugorje Wonders.
Saw an opportunity.
Then found a leaflet about a dying Irish village, Ballyfin, desperate for a miracle. She knew she’d found her final nirvana.
Persuaded Sal to actually speak, just one sentence, and short,
“La Madonna”
Sara had once actually had a sort of mother, at least a woman who lived long enough to name her. In the days before she died (during an attack among the refugees by a cleansing squad), she had told her of Camargue.
The Camargue in southern France, an hour’s drive from Marseille, or if you are fleeing then maybe a lifetime.
A group of people constantly on the move or run has its antecedent in
Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
A region of
Gypsies.
Lagoons.
Black bulls.
Flamingos.
White horses.
It possessed a ferocious kind of beauty that was almost threatening in its fierceness.
So many displaced persons fled there that it was known as the Gypsy Pilgrimage.
According to legend, the Three Marys, witnesses to the Resurrection, were set adrift in a boat from Palestine in AD 45.
With them was their servant Sara.
Sara remained in Camargue, built the church, was buried there.
Every year, bands of Gypsies crowd into the church to pay homage to Sara.
The woman, before she was murdered, said to Sara,
“You will be the one the Gypsies,
The outcasts.
The discarded will worship you but you must give them a miracle.”
In Guatemala, Sara found the blue magic trick of light, knew she just had to wait to find her very own Camargue.
Along the way, she found her own murderous nature; she would be the legendary Sara, with a killer twist.
I’d been watching Durham County.
Fuck, it was dark, darker even than Ozark.
Weird things had happened to me since/because of my accident.
My limp had virtually disappeared, my bad hearing had improved significantly, and the phantom pains in the mutilated right hand were definitely gone.
Miracles?
Fuck knows but I knew enough to ride any gift horse for all it’s worth.
And okay, I’ll fess up: I did a Matt Scudder, meaning I gave tithe to the Church.
And golly, gosh, as fools say, I recited the Our Father daily.
I even added the Protestant rider to it,
“For thine is the kingdom,
And the power,
And the glory.”
If God turned out to be Protestant, I’d be covered and, God knows, bigger turnarounds have occurred. Look at Brexit.
But how was the three-pronged investigation proceeding?
Keefer had met and threatened Benjamin J., our suspected arsonist; he also met and threatened the wife beater/killer.
My part, find the children. Nope.
Not yet.
Monsignor Rael, the Vatican hatchet man, was almost daily harassing me, stressing the amount of money he’d given me.
Maybe I should have gotten Keefer to threaten him.
I continued to exercise ferociously to regain some muscle and energy, and, hold the goddamn phones, I was even taking “African mango.”
It supposedly had terrific restorative powers.
Mainly, it was cheap, like my own self.
Twenty-third of March, we got a few days of nigh summer weather.
As I said, weird all round.
Salthill
In Irish Bóthar na Trá is a seaside area in Galway.
Lying within the townland of Lenaboy.
In the 1930s
Salthill was known as
“The village.”
The Salthill church was built as an outside church in 1938.
In many ways, the whole area of Salthill is other.
If you were born in the actual city, chances are you would never set foot in that church.
I never did until after I met a man named Morgan.
I have not been there since.
One of the great joys of Galway is to stand on the sand at Salthill, gaze out at Galway Bay, imagine the U.S. just over the frontier, to have that almost pleasurable yearning, for what I’ve never known, and maybe that’s part of the appeal.
Early March, who you gonna see?
Dog walkers. Dogs are not banned from the beach until June. People should be banned the rest of the time. Galway City Council were busy fighting over the fact that there were no more graves available in Bohermore (unless you came from money and influence, preferably both).
Bids were already in from firms to have a state-of-the-art crematorium.
Burn, baby, burn.
Dare I say, my dad would have turned in his grave?
I’d burn for sure, before and after.
I’d like to be thrown in the bay.
Especially as I’d thrown various thugs in there over the years. I kid thee not at all.
At the kiosk end of the beach were the stricken remnants of a hen party, a sad to saddest sigh. You could almost smell the Jägermeister, the de rigueur bombshell drink. I needn’t worry about them for a bit as no stir from the scattered bodies.
A man was watching me from the promenade, as if contemplating me or the ocean or both; he definitely seemed to be on the verge of some quandary.
Finally, he hopped from the prom onto the beach, walked determinedly toward me. I hoped I wouldn’t have to kick the shit out of him. It was not only too early but too peaceful.
So far.
Reaching me, he asked,
“Jack Taylor?”
Never, ever a good start. I always wanted to go movie-wise, snap,
“Who wants to know?”
He put out his hand, said,
“I’m Stephen Morgan, and I need your help.”
I sighed, thinking,
Aw, just fuck off.
But went with
“Sorry, I’m all out of helpin
g folk.”
Didn’t faze him. He reached in his jacket, a fine Hugo Boss leather field jacket, took out a stack of notes, large denomination, said,
“Take this, just a few days of your time.”
I took the money. Maybe I could buy a jacket like his. I asked,
“What’s the problem?”
He took out a packet of Marlboro, offered me one, I took it, and he fired us up with a well-bruised Zippo, said,
“I was off them for twenty years.”
Like I gave a fuck, but I said,
“Like the rest of us poor fucks.”
He was in his late forties, jet-black hair in need of a cut, a face that had endured sorrow and recently. He had a look of Tom Hardy but way thinner. His voice was more from learning than genes. He said,
“My daughter, Meredith, has suffered horrendously from trolls, one in particular who goes by the hashtag diebitchsoon.
At first I thought he was speaking German until I broke it down.
Die.
Bitch.
Soon.
Jesus wept.
I asked,
“What age is Meredith?”
He looked like he was having either a stroke or a heart attack, or both.
I put out my hand, held his shoulder, took my emergency small travel flask out of my 501s, said,
“Drink this.”
He looked amazed, asked,
“You carry booze?”
I tried a smile, said,
“And a good thing I do. Drink.”
He did.
Then coughed and shuddered, gasped,
“The fuck is that?”
“Salvation.”
He near whispered,
“Meredith was eleven.”
Past dreaded tense.
Few minutes later, he stood almost straight, said,
“I have tried everything to find out who the demon is, but no luck.”
I asked,
“The Guards?”
He scoffed, near spat, said,
“Cyberbullying they told me is rampant.”
Indeed.
The papers carried horror stories of such daily.
He said,
“Meredith gave me a navy wool tie for my birthday. It was kind of a joke as she knows I hate ties and she had it inscribed with it’s not my thing.”
Fuck.
I said lamely,
“Sounds like a great girl.”
“Was, she was a great girl, the best.”
Oh, God, but I had to ask finally as the past tense again came up.
“How do you mean?”