The Death of an Irish Tinker

by Bartholomew Gill

  “I walk away, down the road to the next pub. I wait in the bar. When I see you, I come out to the car and take her into the lounge. I order two lemon sodas and sit with her. I make sure she sits upright, doesn’t nod off. If need be, I walk her around. You show up, we leave.”

  “Good lad. Remember now, this could make you or break you. I know it’s distasteful, but it’s probably the most important thing you’ve ever done in your life. And like me, you’ve no choice, really, but to do it right. Now, off with you.”

  As the boy walked away, Bresnahan got a look at his face, which looked enough like Oney Maugham to be her brother—or Mickalou Maugham’s son—apart from his two-colored eyes. They, of course, were like Oney’s mother. And while somewhat gaunt, the boy—Sean by name—was squarely built with narrow hips and long, thin limbs. And he was handsome in the extreme.

  When the man opened the car door to get back in behind the wheel, his passenger said, “At the Traveler camp, when we do them other Knackers, that scut is mine.”

  The car door closed.

  Reaching between the seats, Ruth Bresnahan slowly pulled her clothes and her purse toward her. The leather bag was heavy, weighted with the 9 mm Glock that she kept in a zippered side pocket. She might still be unclad, but she no longer felt naked.

  Oney Maugham could not believe what she was seeing when the boy walked into the bar. It was as if the clock had been turned back: Her father had been cloned but given her mother’s two-color eyes.

  Otherwise the boy looked in size and shape—his face, his hair—like the very same Mickalou Maugham who had peered out at Oney from album covers for all of her sixteen years. Those were the only good images of her father she possessed, all that she remembered of him.

  Then, then—come here! Oney could have died happy right there. Wasn’t this boy one of them, a Traveler? And not like the other Traveler boys at the bar, who were either too shy to dance or into the drink, which was unacceptable in her crowd, as Oney now thought of the girls she was with.

  No. This boy was different. Hands in pockets, not caring that he was being stared at, which he was, he came right over to the table. And he was gorgeous, there was no other word for him: dark with chiseled facial features, square shoulders, and a nice tan that was set off by a fresh-pressed white shirt with three buttons open.

  Oney peeked into the vent; yes, he had a hairy chest. When she glanced up at his face, those eyes that were so different yet so familiar were staring at her. Blushing, mortified, she wrenched her own eyes away.

  “How yiz?” he said in a low, subdued, and (to Oney) very romantic voice, his eyes still taking them in one at a time. “How yiz feelin’?” It was an NA set phrase. And then, turning to Oney’s new friend with the Mohawk: “There’s Rita. How’s Rita?” She was like the leader of their pack.

  “Sean McDonagh,” Rita said, studying him for a while before moving over so he could sit beside her. “Still in the Hope House?”

  He nodded, his eyes again moving along the line of young women.

  “Still clean?”

  Again.

  “How long is it now?”

  “Eleven months. Plus the detox. Make it a year.”

  The girls thumped the table. “Good man,” said one or two.

  “How do you feel?”

  His two-color eyes swung to Rita, and he tilted his head slightly to the side to mean not good, not bad. “Real, I guess.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Rita demanded. “What’s wrong with real? Sure, you’re not thinkin’ of going back out and using again?”

  Sean McDonagh—who could only be one of the McDonaghs who were now being so helpful to Oney and her family—shook his head. After a while he added, “It’s just…my life is missing something. I dunno what.”

  Oney was not the only girl there who had an idea of what. Again she had to pull her eyes away, just to gather breath.

  A barman now appeared, and Sean McDonagh placed a twenty-pound note on the table and ordered a round. “Whatever they’re having and some crisps. Or a menu? Are yiz hungry, girls? I am. Order what you like.”

  He seemed so calm and casual and open-handed that Oney couldn’t take her eyes off him. Nor could she speak when he pointed at her and said, “You?” as the barman was taking their food order.

  She only waved a hand, blushing again. Eat? She’d choke if she tried.

  They spoke of this and that—the “program,” people they knew, places they’d been—waiting for the food, and Oney tried to control her emotions. She’d had crushes before on boys in school, but the way this came on, how she was attracted to him, was something almost scary. Just glancing his way made her heart race.

  After they ate, the band began playing, and most of the girls got up to dance, mostly with each other, and Oney kept hoping that Sean McDonagh would not ask her to dance, since she couldn’t. Or at least couldn’t dance like the others out on the floor.

  But he didn’t either. Or wouldn’t. And Oney began praying that there’d always be somebody else at the table and not just her. But after a while they found themselves alone.

  “You have a name?”

  “Oney,” she managed to say. Now she couldn’t look at him, and she looked everywhere but.

  “Oney what?”

  “Maugham.” It sounded like a cry for help.

  “Any relation to the Mick?”

  Her eyes flashed at him. “My father.”

  He straightened up a bit and smiled. He had a nice smile. “You’re jokin’.”

  Oney shook her head; she could feel the bright patches on her cheeks. They were burning.

  “Then you’re Princess Oney.”

  She cocked her head and chanced to look at him directly, put out now that he seemed to making fun of her. “Excuse me?”

  “Well, if your mother and father were the King and the Queen of the Buskers, I’d say that makes you a princess. Unless, of course, you’re trying to remain anonymous.”

  “Are you having me off?”

  “Not that I know of. D’you dance?”

  Oney panicked. A slow song was just being played, and she’d hate herself—tomorrow, the next day, for the rest of her life—if she said no, and he never asked her again. She managed a shrug.

  “Want to dance?”

  She shrugged again. But when he took her hand to lead her out of the booth, she felt dizzy. And her body, like a traitor, was actually shaking and stiff when he put his arms around her.

  “Are you cold?”

  She pushed him away. “If you make fun of me, I swear, I’ll walk away and never speak to you again.”

  He waited for a moment, regarding her, then said, “Relax. We’re only having a dance. It’s simple, like floating. I won’t bite you.”

  Yet, thought Sean McDonagh, again taking hold of her and beginning to dance. Already he was hating himself for what they would do to her the moment he got her to the car. Which was what?

  Shoot her up, whack her with a bolus load, and then fill her clothes with more to carry on. It might take hours, but they’d hold her down and force a little on her first, showing her how it was done: the spoon, the match, the needle. The mix they’d use would feel like sex but better, and they’d jack it in and out of her until she nearly passed out.

  But the feeling, the euphoria, the ecstasy would be retained in memory, never to be expunged, and she’d go back to it again and again and again, trying to recapture that first high and never succeeding. And given her parents and who she was—a susceptible Tinker, like McDonagh himself—there’d be no going back until she bottomed out or died. More probably the latter. One way or another, intravenous drugs were mostly fatal to beautiful women, since few men ever wanted to hear them say no.

  And no woman she. Yet. She was still a child for however long it took him to get her out into the car park. Which is what drugs did: relieved you of your youth, your innocence, your joy and spirit.

  Why her? he asked himself as he felt her warm, soft, yo
ung body relax and move into his own. Because somebody in her family had offended some Dublin dealer or gangster, McDonagh assumed, having seen it before. It was punishment of the dirtiest kind, meant to send a message to others who would brook their authority.

  Gearmen were sent out, dope laid on, mounds of it if necessary. And then withdrawn, only to be restored for considerations. He could only imagine what they would be for the person in his arms. Up until her early death, which at least would be a release.

  They had come for him particularly. “It’s you,” the Monck had told him. “Nobody else. He wants you.”

  “He? He who?”

  With a backhand swipe, the Monck had knocked McDonagh to the floor of the halfway house that he and Baileys—they called the larger, older man, like the liqueur and the pub—had barged into. “He who a junkie fook like you need never know, that’s who.”

  “But why me?” he had complained. “Why not somebody who’s out there?” Using, he meant. And you could control absolutely. “I’m clean. It’s over for me. I want to stay clean.” And return to health and life and maybe even university. Someday. He didn’t have to rush. And couldn’t, not having the money.

  “Because I say it’s you, you Knacker scut, and if you don’t, I’ll fookin’ kill yeh myself.”

  And would, Sean McDonagh was sure, the Monck being responsible for more than a few deaths of people he’d known.

  Dancing on, now with the girl’s lovely head against his chest, he asked himself if he’d had any options really. Not then, not with the two of them standing by the door and the Monck with a gun under his jacket, McDonagh had been sure.

  Or even later in the car, say, when they’d pulled up at a light. He might have hopped out and run into a field, but how long could he keep that up with no money, no clothes, and his two-color eyes, which would give him away no matter where he went?

  Which thought made him realize suddenly the whys and wherefores of the situation. The big man, the “bigger than me”—Baileys had said—was the Toddler, who had murdered Mickalou Maugham, it was said in the Traveling community, and had tried to murder Biddy Nevins because (it was further said) she had seen him murder another man at the top of Grafton Street.

  And here was his daughter in Sean McDonagh’s arms. Why? Because—he leaned back so he could look down on her; he smiled, and she smiled back—he looked so much like her father with her mother’s two-color eyes. McDonagh had long known of that too, the families being close.

  The Toddler, who was the worst of them all, which explained the fear that he had felt in the Monck and Baileys. It was said not a gram of heroin was sold in Ireland that the Toddler hadn’t brought in and that he was one with the police.

  McDonagh eased the girl’s head down on his chest and twirled her around. Once, twice. He was a good dancer, and it was true, he could float.

  Mickalou Maugham. When he was a child, McDonagh’s mother and father could sing his songs, verse after verse after verse, and the old mainly instrumental music that Maugham had saved and recorded from the Gaeltacht and other Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland, Cornwall, and Brittany was always playing in their caravans. He’d even visited them once, when McDonagh was maybe six; Sean could still remember the crowd that had surrounded the tall dark man and the hooley his music had inspired.

  The music had stopped, yet they were still holding each other. The other girls, Rita and the other young ones she had come with, were looking at them. Watching, waiting maybe for something like a kiss. Then, of course, he could take her outside. Without them.

  Instead McDonagh lowered his head to her ear. “Tell Rita I told you the Toddler knows you’re here. He sent some men down here to shoot you up.”

  She pulled away from him. “What d’you mean?”

  “Just tell Rita, she’ll know. But tell her as well she’s to do nothing stupid, that I’ll take care of it if I can. And if I can’t, she’s to know it’s the Monck and Baileys. Acting for the Toddler. Got that?”

  She blinked. “I think so. Are you jokin’?”

  He shook his head. “And also you’re the finest Traveling girl I’ve seen in many a long day, and I hope to see you again.”

  Her face darted at his, and she kissed him hard on the mouth. Even their teeth clashed. Before she turned and rushed back to the others, who clapped, applauding her derring-do.

  Passing by the bar, McDonagh found a large, heavy, empty whiskey bottle in a litter bin and made straight for the back door. It had been awhile since he’d been in a serious fight, but the other two were old, heavy men, and during the last year McDonagh had regained most of his strength. And his quickness. He was quick if nothing else.

  Also, he’d have the advantage of surprise. They’d never think he’d have the courage to attack them—skinny, junkie Knacker scut that he was.

  The Monck would have a gun for sure, he decided, walking across the dark parking lot toward the car on an angle that would keep him from being seen. Baileys maybe not. He’d whack the Monck in the face, then gouge him and try to get his gun. And if he did, he’d shoot them both, right there. No questions asked.

  The rage that he thought he’d come to terms with—at himself and his addiction and all the years he’d wasted and been exploited and conned and abused—now boiled up in his throat. Why hadn’t he considered fighting back before? Why had he accepted the lie that they were powerful and he weak, just because he had succumbed to an addiction over which ultimately he’d had no control once the stuff was in him?

  Holding the heavy bottle by its neck behind his back, McDonagh wrenched open the passenger door of the large American car, frightening the Monck. “Christ, the fook you doin’ back here? Where’s the girl?”

  When the Monck leaned out to look toward the pub, McDonagh whipped the bottle with all he had, dashing its square corner against the Monck’s forehead. It bounced off and did not break. Again. It did. Using the jagged end, he then chopped down again and again, gouging, hacking, twisting, digging it into the fucker’s fat face.

  Who roared and batted at the bottle with his left hand, his right jumping into his jacket for—McDonagh saw the handle even before it was out—a large black automatic.

  He gouged again, but still the gun came up. Which was when the Monck’ s head exploded and something struck McDonagh’s chest, knocking him right off his feet and up against the next car. He couldn’t see; he couldn’t stand. He slid off the car onto the macadam, and everything went dim and grainy.

  Ruth Bresnahan had to leap over him. Bending at the waist, her Glock in both hands, she shouted, “Drop the gun!”

  But the car lurched forward, then swung around, spilling the dead man from the passenger seat. It bolted across the parking lot, scattering the girls who had been running toward them. And Bresnahan dared not fire. The car jounced out onto the road and disappeared into the night.

  One girl screamed. Oney Maugham threw herself down on the young man who’d been shot and was covered mainly with the other man’s blood.

  “Call the guards, call an ambulance!” another shouted, as she ran toward the crowd that was now gathering in the car park door of the pub.

  The girl with the bright green Mohawk raised a boot and began stomping the gory head of the dead man. “Fookin’ fucker fook!”

  Remembering what the two men had discussed earlier, Bresnahan pulled her away. “What’s the fastest way to your camp?”

  The girl looked down at Bresnahan’s gun, as though seeing it for the first time. “Who are you?”

  “Guard. Can you take me there? The quickest way.”

  “Why?”

  “Because those men were also planning to murder Ned and Maggie Nevins. For the Toddler.” And the survivor now could not very well return to Dublin having accomplished nothing. The Toddler would not allow it.

  The girl blinked, then spun around and dropped down by the dead man. She pulled the gun from under his jacket.

  “I’ll take that,” said Bresnahan.

  “Th
e fook you will.”

  Bresnahan did not hesitate, feeling incompetent that she had let the shooter escape without at least firing at him. Like a club, her free hand came down on the girl’s wrist, the gun clattering on the tar. Howling, the girl crumpled to her knees.

  Bresnahan snatched up the weapon. “Now, get in the fookin’ car and show me the way.” When the girl hesitated, Ruth grabbed the green mane and pulled her to her feet. “In!” She shoved her into the passenger seat, and slammed shut the door.

  “The rest of you, help him!” She pointed at the courageous wounded boy.

  Reaching the Traveler camp, Baileys knew what he had to do and where. He had scouted the place earlier, paid fifty quid to a Traveler drunk in the nearest pub for the information. Unlike the Monck—whose plan Sean McDonagh and the dance had been—it was how Baileys worked: efficient and informed.

  And he hardly slowed down, since he had long ago learned there was only one way to approach these people. Hard set and dead on. They respected nothing and nobody—not bureaucrats, not the police, not even priests anymore. Only superior force, which he had in the boot of the car.

  He didn’t even much care if he was seen; at least then he’d have to be identified, captured, charged, and tried. But if he came back empty-handed, he’d be dead, summarily, the Toddler having made it plain. “I haven’t asked much of you ever, my man,” he had said from the Royal Dublin Hospital two days ago. “It’s all been one way, me providing you. Now there’s something you and the Monck can do for me. Yourselves, since I want it done right.”

  Wrong. But at least he could put the blame for the mistake on the Monck and McDonagh, since with any luck at all they were dead. And he could always do the girl again. Himself.

  After skidding to a stop in front of the caravan with the tarp-covered Mercedes by it, Baileys jumped out and moved directly to the boot of his car. A collection of maybe a dozen men and boys were sitting around a campfire about a hundred feet off with bottles of Guinness in their hands, watching him now. Closely and intent.