A Galway Epiphany
Page 15
“You will?”
“On one condition.”
He agreed foolishly fast, said,
“Name it?”
I said,
“Phenobarbital.”
Now I had his full attention. He asked,
“What on earth are you planning? You’re not going to kill yourself just when we are bonding?”
He really did need a wallop to the side of the head. I lied,
“I’m going to go to the farm, reconcile with Keefer, bring a celebratory bottle of bourbon. The devil child likes a wee dram. She’ll get a real kick out of her dose.”
He gave a smile that lurked somewhere between the sacred and profane, very unpleasant. He asked,
“But won’t you kill your buddy, your bro”—he leaned heavily on the sarcasm—“too?”
I gave him a nasty smile right back and, when I put my mind to it, I can go dark with the worst of them. I said,
“He regards Sara as if she were his own. When he sees her go, he’ll murder me and come looking for you also, I imagine.”
He rubbed his hands in glee, said,
“You’re quite the evil little fooker, aren’t you?”
I said,
“I was taught by Jesuits and one important note.”
He was reveling in this, the bad bastard, asked,
“Pray tell.”
I said,
“You ever refer to Keefer as my bro again I’ll kick the living shite out of you.”
He laughed, said,
“Scary. Anyway, back to the issue. I can get Seconal, crush up ten, you’d kill them both and maybe all the animals on the farm.”
I asked,
“Where is the Church currently on suicide and priests?”
He was wary, tried,
“We, or rather they, regard it as a mortal sin.”
I was no wiser, pushed,
“But do priests their own selves kill themselves?”
He was now very antsy, said,
“Well, I’m no expert but drink is a form of slow suicide.”
Before I could ask more, he said,
“Kiki wants to meet you.”
Lord wept. I snarled,
“What? You’re a dating bureau?”
He gave me a patient look, said,
“The poor woman is lonely.”
I stood up, said very quietly,
“Time for you to fuck off out of here.”
He put his arms out, asked,
“Hug?”
I could only think he was on serious medication.
The Hummingbird
At the exact moment of death
You lose twenty-one grams
Which is believed
To be the weight of your soul.
It is also the exact weight of a hummingbird.
The Galway Arts Festival was in full show; Burt Bacharach was headlining.
On a Sunday night. Now, I don’t know how God feels about ol’ Burt but here’s the thing. The three weeks preceding the festival we had scorching heat, a rarity of biblical proportion for the city and, worse, humidity.
The Sunday night after this heat wave, the heavens opened, thunder, lashing rain that made you reach for holy water.
I went to the exhibition that people told me was
Unmissable.
Beautiful.
Awesome.
Sam Jinks on his second visit to Galway with sculptures made from human hair, wax that eerily seemed like skin, and shown in a black space lit only by the exhibits.
I know how fucking contrary I am but the exhibits freaked the shite out of me. I’ve seen too many bodies in morgues to actually go see it in a festival.
I know, I know, art is to provoke, so it sure as hell did that.
But being some kind of masochist, I wasn’t done. Oh no. I went to a play based on Rosemary Kennedy, her years of confinement in a madhouse, with a soundtrack of discordant music shredding my nerves.
I swore to readdict myself to Xanax.
“There is no refuge from confession
But suicide, and
Suicide is confession.”
Daniel Webster.
Bizarre as it sounds, this was printed on a T-shirt worn by Malachy as we met to discuss the details of his murder/suicide.
I said,
“What the fuck, are you advertising your imminent death?”
He was offended, said,
“I bought you a T-shirt too, do you want to see it?”
Fuck.
I said,
“Go on then.”
Just a tiny bit curious, God only knows what this was.
He handed me a black T, XL, with gold writing; it read
Dead is
Not always
The worst thing
Stephen King.
I was lost for words, none of them containing any hint of thanks, said,
“I’m lost for words.”
He was delighted, urged,
“Put it on.”
I figured he’d lost any vague semblance of sanity, tenuous as it was in the best of clerical years. I asked,
“You mean, like now?”
He did.
I didn’t put it on then or ever.
But was he finished. Was he fuck?
He reached into his priest suit (ash-sprinkled collar—at least I’d prefer to think ash rather than dandruff), took out a flashy decorated box and, I kid you not, with a freaking bow, said,
“’Tis to mark our bond.”
I admit to once seeing an episode of Friends, where Joey is wearing a godawful chunky bracelet and gives Chandler an identical one, saying cheerfully,
“We’re bracelet buddies.”
And Chandler ruefully concedes in horror with,
“And that’s what they’ll call us.”
I said,
“Can I open it later?”
Bitter disappointment flooded his face, so I said,
“I’ll open it.”
Did, to find a heavy hummingbird on a silver chain. He said,
“That bird marks the moment between life and the transition to eternal life.”
I said,
“Wow.”
Thinking,
Won’t eternal life for a suicide, especially a priest suicide, mean eternal roasting in hellfire?
I said,
“You’re full of surprises.”
He put a hand to my shoulder, said,
“This week is my birthday.”
The Ellison Epiphany (No. 5)
I was in my apartment reading The Weight by Andrew Vachss, an author who never ceases to amaze me. He is a
Stone warrior.
A granite poet.
Champion of the marginalized.
Never-ending pursuer of pedophiles.
He was that rare event, a writer I admired as much for his art as for his crusades for justice.
A gentle knock on my door. I almost didn’t hear it. Anyone comes to my door, they come banging and walloping. I opened the door to a waif, a pixie, a dote in miniature.
Ceola.
Keefer’s girlfriend. I had met her only once, when she hugged me at the farm and whispered she was so glad I was there. I’d felt then that something was seriously amiss but Keefer had run me off.
Now here she was.
Her face was tired, distressed. She was dressed in mid-Goth/grunge style: short battered black leather jacket, jeans with more holes than WikiLeaks, Doc Marten worn-to-bits boots, a T-shirt with a faded Brian Jones picture and the logo/question:
“Who murder-dah Brian?”
I thought it was simply a misspelling but learned later, after Ce
ola’s death, that it was patois.
I urged,
“Come in.”
She did.
She looked around, and I saw it briefly as she might, a basically bare space with a bookcase, books of course, my Garda coat on the one hook, large TV, boxed sets close by. She said,
“Pretty Zen.”
I said,
“Pretty poor, is what.”
She smiled, though her heart wasn’t much in there. I offered,
“Drink?”
She lit up, near gasped,
“Gosh, yes.”
Sounded like,
Golly gosh!
Her accent was mid-Atlantic with a tiny hint of newly acquired Irish lilt. I got us healthy drinks—in that I mean large pour, no ice. She took a fine dollop of hers, asked,
“Mind if I roll up?”
She meant actual tobacco and rolled a cig with fast practiced moves, then lit up with practiced ease. I waited until she was ready, then she said,
“Thank you for letting me in, for the drink, for . . .”
Paused.
“For not being a bollix.”
I smiled, asked,
“What’s on your mind?”
She finished the drink and cig, seemed to chill, then said,
“My real name is Ellison Riley. My mother is Romanian, my dad is Scottish.”
She continued,
“I was almost a professional violinist but dope got in the way.”
Then she smiled, added,
“Dopes too.”
I liked her sense of humor. She’d fucking need it.
I poured her another Jay and she knocked that back too. I didn’t advise caution. I mean, seriously, me? I asked again,
“What’s up?”
Sounding like a lame ejit, but I felt we were drifting off point.
She went very quiet then.
“Keefer has become besotted by Sara. He is convinced she is the daughter he never had and the sly bitch plays him like, if you’ll excuse the awful pun, a fiddle. She hates me, and I know because she told me so, said she would get rid of me ASAP. I can’t tell Keefer as he already thinks I’m jealous of her, which maybe I am. I had a Siamese cat named Concerto—do forgive all the musical references. Concerto was a gift from my old music tutor. I loved her like a baby.”
She stopped, then regrouped, said,
“You can guess the next bit.”
Alas, I could, said with a heavy heart,
“She killed the cat.”
A sob escaped her. She said,
“That knife with the serrated blade, she gutted her, then last night I woke to find her holding that blade to my throat. She whispered to me in Romanian. She is fluent in many tongues, none of them civil. She said,
“Leave tomorrow, cunt.”
Phew-oh.
I asked,
“What are you going to do now?”
She sighed deeply, said,
“I’m going to take a few days to pull myself together, then I’ll go back there, face the bitch down. I can’t leave Keefer with her. Eventually she’ll take him out. It seems to be her gig.”
I said,
“You could run.”
Sounded good to me.
No.
She wouldn’t do that, said,
“Romany blood doesn’t run.”
Then she looked directly at me, asked what I dreaded she would ask. She asked,
“Will you come with me?”
Ah, fuckit.
Less out of courage but more to not appear weak in her eyes, I said,
“I will.”
She threw her arms round me and near shouted,
“Thank you, Jack, thank you so.”
Everybody was hugging me these days, which made a change from them shooting at me though in some ways I was more comfortable with beatings.
Recently, I’d reread Donato Carrisi’s The Whisperer.
Those lines hit me like truth,
“You have to be careful with illusionists. Sometimes evil deceives us by assuming the simplest form of things.” I thought of Sara and her Guatemalan blue light trick.
Sara posing as a child. What could be simpler?
Carrisi had added,
“The details, the nuances, the shadow surrendering things, the dark halo in which evil hides”
“The dark halo” described the aura of Sara to a chilling degree.
A Stained White Radiance.
James Lee Burke.
The above title suggested so many things, but mainly innocence corrupted and, for some oblique reason, it spelled out Malachy in all his misguided actions.
The very echo of those words reduced me to a state of lost despair.
Malachy’s birthday was fast approaching, and I had to kill him?
Kill a priest, even if that’s what he wanted?
I was forever damned in troubled faith, as the poet Ciannath De Brun had written. And damned in every spiritual fashion under a judgmental sky.
Why I drank.
Ceola had gone to chill in Oughterard, a tranquil place of cozy pubs and friendly locals. When she returned we’d head to Keefer’s . . . and kill Sara?
A fierce amount of killing ahead and the weather was blistering hot—had been for three clammy weeks.
We Irish, we love sun, as we like anything scarce, like money, but with climate change Europe was baking, and London had Boris Johnson as new prime minister, who sacked all his opponents.
Calling him a buffoon, scandalizing about domestic battles, did not deter the fact that he was a dangerous buffoon.
I digress, as the lit gang says.
’Twas not the humanity but the freaking humidity that was busting our balls. We were beginning to buy fans and inquire about air-conditioning.
I met with Dysart, who also wanted to kill Sara.
Not a popular girl.
We were to meet in Naughton’s, always called by the locals O’Neachtain’s, the Irish lilt giving it a hint of Celtic smarm and, sure enough, you saw lots of ponytails, even on the women. I think I saw some tie-dyed clothing but I don’t want to overwork the metaphor lest I lapse into bad poetry and qualify for an arts grant.
God forbid.
I was nursing a finely drawn pint when I saw Hayden, a crime writer of mid-list merit, meaning he sold fuckall. He had a clouded backstory of jail time in South America and carried an air of impending doom like a shadow of smoke.
We had met a few times, and got on well enough, neither of us borrowing money as is the mode in arty circles. He seemed to less like me than tolerate me.
He asked how I was.
I gave an Irish answer,
“Fair to middlin’.”
He smiled, long familiar with Celtic evasiveness. I echoed,
“And your own self?”
He continued the Irish vibe with a question to a question.
“Do you speak Spanish?”
Like fuck, I mean,
“Seriously?”
I said with fierce conviction,
“Why?”
He was amused, not a neighborhood he much inhabited, said,
“I know you like quotations so I have a fine answer to your query.”
He quoted,
“Le gusta este jardin?
Que es suyo
Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!”
I saw Dysart approach. I asked Hayden,
“You want to have a drink with an ex-priest?”
He laughed and, as he moved away, said,
“Not even with a priest who isn’t ex. See you again, Jack, and the quote is from Malcolm Lowry.”
Dysart was dressed in black, like a mourning crow, the heat wave not on his radar.
His face was drink-red and his eyes were slightly out of focus. Without preamble, he ordered,
“Double scotch.”
He didn’t offer me so I said,
“Bad hair day?”
He seemed to have made the mistake of cutting his own hair and had attempted the so-called buzz cut. It might have passed comment if he was an eighteen-year-old marine. He paid for the drink with a crumpled ten euro, ordered another. I said,
“Fuck sakes, easy.”
He turned on me, snarled,
“Don’t lecture me, Taylor.”
I finished my drink, asked,
“You get my Seconal?”
He reached in his pocket, pulled out a tattered envelope, said,
“There’s thirteen there. Should be unlucky for some poor bastard.”
I took the envelope, put it away; to an onlooker it looked like a drug deal, which it was. He said,
“One hundred euros.”
I asked,
“You take MasterCard?”
He looked like he might hit me, said,
“Do not fuck with me, mister.”
I said,
“We’re going to the country on Friday so pack your Glock.”
Threw him. He mustered,
“Friday? I’m not ready. I need two days without booze.”
I told him about Ceola, stressed the urgency of us going to the farm. I said,
“Here’s the plan. Ceola, me, and, if you’re sober, you go to the farm, take the girl without hurting anyone, bring her back here. I’ll get in contact with Monsignor Rael. Let the Church deal with her.”
He didn’t like it, tried,
“Keefer won’t let us.”
I said,
“Ceola will persuade him. If not, we use the minimum of force, take her against his will.”
He wasn’t happy.
I said,
“Noon on Friday. Be ready.”
I was leaving when a thought occurred. I asked,
“Why are you drinking like a lunatic?”
He said,
“To stop the nightmares of what I’ve seen of Sara’s trail of terror.”
I asked,
“Did it work?”
Sighed, as only the true, 100 percent blue alky can, said,
“Made it more vivid.”
Thursday, the day before we went to the farm and, I hoped, as they say in the U.S., weren’t about to buy the farm, I packed for the trip.
What do you need for a jaunt to the countryside to
Kidnap/kill a child?
Use force to restrain my best friend?
Rescue my falcon?