Irish Chain

by Earlene Fowler

  “Nice to meet you,” I said to her mother, then turned to Mariko. “Hello again. I love your sweatshirt.” It was a bright turquoise painted with a pale Santa Fe-style cow’s skull. “Mariko and I met recently,” I explained to Russell. “A student of hers ... well, never mind, it’s a long story. She was kind enough to let me interview her for the Historical Society book.”

  “I heard you were roped into working on that project,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I think it’s great.”

  “You would. Really, I am enjoying it when I can get to it. It would be more fun if they weren’t pressuring me to finish so quickly.”

  “Ah, deadlines,” Mariko said, laughing. “Where would Mylanta be without them?”

  “Did you look over the copy of your story I dropped off at your office?” I asked Mariko.

  “Yes, I made a few additions if that’s all right.”

  “That’s great. I have fifty pages to fill and, as I told you, time is running short.” I turned to her mother, remembering that Mariko said she might talk with me. “Mrs. Yamaoka, would you consider talking to me about your memories of San Celina during the war?”

  “I would like that,” Mrs. Yamaoka said in a clear, vigorous voice that didn’t seem to fit her eighty-odd years.

  “Great! When would be a good time for us to talk?”

  “How about Monday afternoon? That gives me time to ...” She paused. “How do you say it? Find my thoughts.”

  After agreeing on a time of two o’clock and getting directions to Mariko’s house, where her mother lived, Mariko and Mrs. Yamaoka excused themselves to go to the festival.

  “Alone at last,” Russell said, pulling his chair closer and leaning toward me. “Now tell me the real story behind the retirement-home murders. Egad, if this keeps up, we could start having one of those sick Hollywood-type tours—famous murder spots in San Celina county. You, naturally, would serve as tour guide.”

  “I really am getting a rather gruesome reputation, aren’t I?” I said, ruefully. “Sorry, but I don’t have much to tell you. All I know is what I read in the newspaper.”

  “Cut a curious and bored old man some slack. I know you and the head gendarme have a slightly more than professional relationship. Brighten my day, Ms. Harper, with a tasty tidbit of tawdry doings among the elderly.”

  “Look, forget that. I swear I don’t know anything, and Chief Ortiz and I are no longer a society-page item. You know, I’ve been meaning to call you. I was wondering if I could prevail upon you to read through my chicken scratches before I turn them into the Historical Society.”

  “I’d be happy to,” he said. “How is it coming?”

  “Okay, I guess. Between that and the job at the museum and all the other complications in my life, it seems like I don’t have two minutes to call my own these days. That’s why I haven’t been in touch with you.”

  “Well, you must rectify that in the near future,” he said, patting my hand. “I miss our conversations. How’s the bovine business?”

  “Up and down. It’s not as bad as Daddy would lead you to believe, but it’s certainly not what it used to be.”

  “Not much is, my dear, not much is.”

  “Speaking of how things used to be, can I pick your brain for a minute?”

  “Whatever’s left of it after thirty years of academia is yours.”

  “You lived in San Celina County during the war, didn’t you? Were you old enough to remember much?”

  “I was but a lad in short pants, but yes, I remember it vividly. Why do you ask?”

  “I have a question for you. What do you remember about Brady O’Hara during that time?”

  He looked at me shrewdly. “What exactly is it you want to know?”

  “What was he like? Was he a nice man? Did people like him?”

  He tilted his chair back and folded his hands across his small paunch. “Did you know my father was mayor of San Celina during the war years?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “That meant we had a lot of people come to dinner who were very powerful in city politics.”

  “Would one of them have been Mr. O’Hara?”

  “Of course. Granted, I was thirteen at the time, so you have to take into consideration that any adult other than a man in uniform didn’t interest me much, but he does tend to stick out in my mind.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He was adamantly for the relocating of the Japanese. Right from the beginning, even before Pearl Harbor. Ranted and raved about it more than once at our dinner table. And he wrote a plethora of letters to the editor of the Tribune on just that subject in the months preceding December seventh.” He took a sip of his coffee. “What does this all have to do with his murder?”

  “I’m not sure, yet. Look, can you keep a secret?” I was dying to tell someone what I’d found in the ledgers.

  “Nasty old gossip that I am, I can usually keep myself from babbling out of turn if absolutely required. Out with it, young woman. I haven’t heard a succulent piece of scuttlebutt in ages.”

  I told him briefly about the loans in the ledgers, watching his face the whole time.

  “Certainly odd,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Not at all what you’d expect of Brady. But do you think it has anything to do with why he and poor, unfortunate Rose Ann were murdered, and more importantly, have you informed your inamorato of any of this?” He pointed out the window.

  Across the street, Gabe, wearing the same uniform of navy windbreaker and snug Levi’s as his young officers, had his mouth pressed up to a compact walkie-talkie. I watched him check the patrol officers’ work, loping through them in the loose-limbed walk he adopted whenever he wasn’t wearing a suit. He wore the Timberland hiking boots I’d talked him into buying a month ago.

  “You can’t wear those old topsiders all winter,” I’d said, on our first clothes shopping trip together. “Especially with no socks. How about these? They’d be very warm.” I held up a pair of black Tony Lama bullhide boots.

  He’d kissed the top of my head and laughed. “Querida, I’ll put on a pair of cowboy boots the same day you wear a red leather miniskirt and four-inch heels.” We compromised on the hiking boots.

  I sucked on my bottom lip and turned back to Russell. “He’s not my ... whatever you called him. We’re not seeing each other anymore.”

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled serenely.

  “Oh, keep quiet,” I said irritably. “I think I’ll go wander around the festival some more. If it’s okay, I’ll drop those pages off at your house sometime next week.”

  “Fine.” He gave me a measured look. “Benni, whatever it is you’re doing, just be careful.”

  “All I’m doing is what some very special teacher once told me, something about faithfulness to the truth of history involving more than research. Some nonsense about imbuing themselves with the life and spirit of the time, being a sharer of the action.”

  “Ah, yes, Francis Parkman. Virile old fellow. Lived with the Sioux Indians for a time. Was also known to be quite batty. Well, in all fairness, I must counterbalance those meanderings with words from the great G.K. Chesterton himself, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.” He reached over and patted my hand. “Your curious mind made you one of my best students, my dear, but sometimes the past is best left in the past.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing, Russell, but I can’t help wanting to know why a man who distrusted the Japanese so, whose brother was killed by them, would turn around and for years after that be their biggest benefactor. Don’t you find that odd?”

  “In my advanced years and small accumulated store of wisdom, I have learned to not question the oddity of man’s behavior, but to accept the good of it and mourn the bad.”

  I stood up. “Well, I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  “I’ll be anxiously awaiting your phone call.”

  Outside, I was alternately relieved and disappointed to find Gab
e gone. I had nothing to say to him, yet I longed to hear his voice. I started walking listlessly back toward Bonita Street and the festival, when Miguel called to me.

  He jogged toward me, his nightstick bouncing against his thigh. His jacket blew open revealing the leather shoulder holster hugging his chest. If someone had told me fifteen years ago that the eight-year-old boy I caught cheating at Old Maid would someday be keeping law and order in the streets of San Celina, I would have choked with laughter.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Know what?” The sober look on his young face frightened me. “Miguel, what is it?”

  “Aaron. He’s in the hospital. I guess he had some kind of attack.”

  “Oh no, when? Does ...” I started to ask if Gabe knew, but caught myself. Of course he knew.

  “A half hour or so ago. The chief just got word. He’s on his way over there. Look, I have to get back. I just saw you and thought you’d want to know.”

  “Thanks.” I turned and walked back down the street toward the festival. What I really wanted to do was go to the hospital and be with Gabe and Rachel, but I also knew how awkward it would be. It would be obvious to her something wasn’t right between me and Gabe and she didn’t need any other pressures right now. On the other hand, I didn’t want her to think I didn’t care. Debating what I should do, I took a short cut to Bonita Street through Gum Alley, a forty-some-year unofficial city landmark. The city council’s annual vote to clean up the gum-ladened walls was always met with virulent protest from two generations of gum-chewing artisans. The two-story brick walls of the alley were decorated with a sticky collection of colorful flowers, hearts, initials, greetings, philosophical maxims and fraternity symbols. I glanced up, as always, to make sure the “JH lvs BR—1975” in traditional Bazooka-pink still held its spot. Perched on Jack’s shoulders, it had taken me almost an hour to create.

  For the rest of the afternoon, while helping sell pots, quilts and wooden toys, I worried about Aaron. The parade always started promptly at 6:31 P.M. when the Mystik Krewe of Mardi Gras blew the official Mardi Gras trumpet, so around five-thirty, people started claiming spots and setting up lawn chairs along Lopez Street. I decided that once the parade started, after seeing Elvia’s float, “Harry’s Blind Book Krewe,” I’d stop by to the hospital. Surely Gabe and I could maintain an amicable manner long enough to visit Aaron.

  I was folding up the unsold quilts when a voice with the same tonal quality of tin foil across the teeth whined, “I want one, Eddy. Please, pretty please.”

  Walking around the corner of the booth was a bubble-haired, tiny-waisted lady in her thirties with hair as red and shiny as a grocery store apple and probably just as natural. She unfolded a queen-sized maroon and black quilt, letting the edge of it scrape the pavement.

  “Careful,” I said irritably, lifting the edge and brushing it off.

  “Eddy,” she whined again. “I want it. It’s only four hundred dollars. It’ll match my bedroom and you won all that...”

  “Sure, why not?” Her companion stepped out from behind the side of the booth. I looked up into a face I’d seen way too often in the last month.

  “Enjoying the festival, Edwin?” I asked politely, trying not to show I’d heard his companion’s comment about winning money.

  “How much did you say the quilt was?” he asked, looking down at me, his voice cool. He pulled out a thick roll of bills.

  “Four hundred dollars,” I said.

  He peeled off eight fifties and handed them to me.

  “Oh, Eddy, thank you, thank you,” the woman gushed, hugging the quilt to her chest as I wrote out a receipt. “He’s such a generous man,” she said to me. “You should have seen him today. It was like he was psychic. I took my manicure money and put ...”

  “Dodie, I don’t think Ms. Harper is interested in what we did today.” He grabbed her arm and pulled at her to leave.

  “On the contrary,” I said, holding out his receipt. “I could use a little extra money myself right about now. Who looks good in the fourth tomorrow?”

  He frowned and pulled again at Dodie’s arm. “Let’s go. We want to get a good spot for the parade.”

  “Don’t you want to know the pattern of the quilt you just bought?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t, but thinking some things are just too right not to have a divine hand in them somewhere.

  “Oh, yes,” his date crowed. “What is it?”

  I looked Edwin straight in his protruding eyes and grinned.

  “Spiderweb,” I said, smiling sweetly. “The pattern’s name is Spiderweb.”

  Edwin shot me a furious look before pulling Dodie into the crowd.

  “What was that all about?” Malcolm asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was just bored and teasing some twerp.”

  “Better be careful,” he said. “You know how weird people get around Mardi Gras. Jon’s on a double shift down at the emergency room tonight.”

  “Poor guy.” I had met his sister’s husband at the last co-op potluck. A tall, easygoing black man, his specialty was emergency medicine. He had worked at County-USC Medical Center in Los Angeles for ten years until burnout from gang warfare sent him home to San Celina.

  “Yeah, well, they need the money. She’s pregnant again and the ultrasound says it’s twins.”

  By six o’clock, thirty-one minutes before the parade was due to start, it was already dark. We packed up all the unsold items and Malcolm loaded them in his pickup to take back to the studios.

  “We can dismantle the booth after the parade,” he said. “There’s an hour before the Masked Ball, so we’ll have plenty of time.”

  “I can do it,” I said. “I’m not going to the dance anyway.”

  He looked at me in sympathy. “Chief stood you up, huh? Want me to see if I can scrounge you up a date? I think I saw some desperate-looking characters down in line at the Mission Food Bank.”

  “Look, pal, when I need help in the romance department, I’ll put an ad in the Personals,” I said, throwing a pot holder at him and laughing.

  A light rain started ten minutes before the parade, but it only seemed to dampen the streets, not anyone’s spirits. In the dark, the painted faces and feathered masks seemed to multiply, and in the misty shelter of the foggy night the crowd became louder, acted bolder. The various Krewes were lining up their floats; screams of liquor-induced laughter and carefree tossing of cheap plastic necklaces and the coveted Mardi Gras doubloons had already started. The police had replaced their dark windbreakers with yellow slickers and were strolling up and down the street, asking people to please stay on the sidewalk. I pushed through the throng, trying to maneuver a spot where I could catch a glimpse of Blind Harry’s float, a contraption shaped like a huge sparkly book. A young man in a metallic brown wig, wearing a suede Daniel Boone outfit and a stiff cardboard canoe strapped around his waist, fell against me, pushed by the crowd.

  “Sorry,” he said, swinging his boat around and smiling. “Canoe forgive me?”

  “It’s okay,” I said, smiling back. After I was elbowed in the ribs by a clown, accidentally tripped by Richard Nixon and had beer spilled across the front of me by a man in white face wearing a green top hat and tails, I decided that Elvia would just have to show me pictures of the float. I pushed my way to the back of the crowd and started walking toward my truck. Luckily, the municipal parking lot where I’d parked exited to a side street that completely avoided the parade route. I’d stop by the hospital and see how Aaron was doing, then head home. I cut through Gum Alley to avoid the crowds.

  “Happy Mardi Gras!” A blond half-drunk Indian brave in a full feather headdress with red and yellow lightning bolts painted on his cheeks offered me a strand of shiny pink carnival beads.

  “Thanks,” I said, reaching out for them.

  He pulled them back, staggered a little, and gave me a lascivious smirk. “You have to earn them, darlin’. What’re yo
u going to do to earn them?”

  I leveled a cold look at him and showed him a fist.

  “Good enough for me, lady.” He tossed the beads at me and walked away muttering. “Criminy, some people just don’t know how to have a good time.”

  I picked them up off the ground and slipped them around my neck. If Aaron was feeling okay, I’d give him the beads and tell him the story. He’d get a big kick out of it.

  I was almost to the end of the alley when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Thinking it was another Mardi Gras crazy, I started to turn around, a retort all prepared.

  “Don’t!” the low, disguised voice said. A cold damp hand grabbed the back of my neck. Something hard and metallic poked into my side. I froze, my heart a hard knot in my chest.

  “All I have is ten dollars,” I said. “You can have it. Just let me go.”

  The hand tightened. There was an overpowering smell of wet rubber as strong fingers dug into the side of my neck. I gagged low in my throat.

  “No,” the voice said. He pushed me through the alley, the hard object jabbing my side, toward the back of a sandwich shop. A trio of garbage cans overflowed their metal sides. The thick odor of rotting vegetables and old meat caused me to gag again.

  Oh, God, please help me, I prayed. Frightening images spiked like electric currents through my mind. Break away, part of me said. Run. Wait, another part cautioned. It might be a gun. You could die.

  “Take the money, please,” I said, despising the begging tone in my voice. I reached for my pocket.

  “Stop!” the voice said and jerked my neck. The wet rubber slipped against my skin. I bit my tongue. Tasted blood. White-hot anger burst out of me.

  “No!” I yelled. I wasn’t going to be killed or raped. Not without a fight. I twisted my body, tried to stomp the top of his instep and screamed from the bottom of my toes.

  “No!” he echoed and grabbed my shoulders. We struggled in an awkward dance. I caught glimpses of a rainbow metallic wig and a grotesque rubber mask.

  “Hey, what’s going on back there?” a deep voice called from behind me.

  The mugger shoved me into the trash cans. Something sharp scraped across my temple. I heard a rustle in the trash. Just before my head hit the pavement, I screamed again.