Tales of River City

by Frank Zafiro

  No law was interested in me.

  At least I would see the uniforms coming. If one of Sinn Fein came at me, I might not know until the last moment. Still, much of the foot traffic consisted of very French-looking people. I didn’t see many faces that could have been Irish. And none of them seemed to pay me any mind.

  Maybe I’d gotten away clean.

  I forced that thought down. When I made it to Uncle Terry’s, that’s when I could afford to think about being safe. Until then, thoughts of safety only clouded my thinking, made me less sharp. And until I was clear, I needed to stay alert.

  For an hour, I sat and watched. Every minute or so, I turned a page of my book, just in case someone was watching.

  The boarding call came first in French, then in English. I stood and waited in line. My heart beat faster as the line moved, thudding in my temples as I handed the woman my ticket.

  “Merci,” she said in a sing-song voice and handed me back the stub.

  I resisted the urge to run down the loading tunnel.

  Get on this plane, I thought. Fly to Vancouver. Start a new life. Forget everything and everyone back in Ireland.

  Easy.

  Behind me, I heard the steady, thundering footfalls of a large man walking with purpose. The flimsy tunnel shook with his every step.

  Shit! I was so close!

  I took a deep steady breath.

  Decision time. He sounded big. Too big to fight. Nowhere to run. Only chance was to bluff. Go with the flow.

  I let out the breath and prepared myself.

  The big man brushed past me and continued speed walking down the tunnel.

  “Feckin’ Jaysus,” I sighed.

  The flight attendant glanced at my boarding pass and directed me to my row. I slid my small bag into the compartment above the seats. Then I settled into the window seat and pretended to read my book.

  A woman and her young son sat next to me. I ignored them.

  Twenty minutes later, the plane took off, leaving the lights of Montreal behind.

  I tried to sleep. There was nothing I could do if someone on the plane was after me, anyway. If it was the law, there was nowhere to go or anything to do until we landed. And if it were someone from the Cause? Well, I didn’t think anyone was going to hurt me while I was sitting next to a mother and her child.

  Sleep was fitful. I kept seeing faces. Sean. Niall. Conor. I saw the flat face of a mummy with dancing eyes. Speeding cars. Shattered glass. Guns.

  Blood.

  I woke. The woman and her child were staring at me, slack-jawed.

  “What are ye looking at?” I snapped.

  The woman looked away but the child continued to stare.

  I turned my gaze to the darkness out my window.

  I needed a new life.

  The descent into Vancouver was bumpy, giving the brat next me something new to worry about, but we landed safely enough. I retrieved my small bag and traipsed down the aisle with the rest of the cattle. At the door to the airplane, the flight attendant wished me a good evening. Even though her eyes settled on me, I was sure she didn’t actually see me. The thought gave me some comfort.

  Traffic both sped up and spread out once we reached the tunnel. In almost no time, it opened up into the airport proper. I kept pace with the crowd, watching for uniforms. More than that, I watched for anyone looking at me. British Columbia had far more Irish roots than Quebec and the faces in the crowd reflected that. I didn’t think anyone would make a move in the airport – too hard to get a weapon in – but they might pick me up there and tail me elsewhere. The sooner I knew that I was marked, the better.

  “Tara Kelly,” a voice announced over the loudspeaker. “Miss Tara Kelly, please come to the customer service kiosk.”

  My stomach tensed. A trap? Tara Kelly was the code name that only Uncle Terry was supposed to know. My passport read Angela Quinn. So if someone else knew about Tara Kelly, then maybe the game was up.

  Or maybe Terry had left me a message.

  Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he just be here?

  I strolled along, thinking.

  What was the best play? The smart play?

  I was in the country now. No customs to pass through. All I had to do was get in touch with Terry and get to his place in the little burg of Rossland. It might not be a metropolis, but it was safe. It was where my new life waited.

  What waited for me at the customer service kiosk? A message from Terry? A cop? A killer?

  I didn’t like the odds.

  I kept walking.

  Outside the airport, I hailed a taxi.

  “Where to?” he asked, resetting the meter.

  “I need a motel room,” I told him. “Someplace away from the airport.”

  He drove wordlessly for fifteen minutes before pulling into the parking lot of the Star-lite Motel. “This suit you?”

  “It’ll do.” I pulled out the small roll of cash from my pocket and peeled off several bills. “Keep the change.”

  He nodded his thanks and I slid out of the cab.

  Checking in was quick, though I got some guff because I didn’t have a credit card. I figured that might be a problem, so I’d undone the magic button on my blouse again. A hundred bucks and some cleavage seemed to be the going rate for a deposit on a motel room in Vancouver.

  I waited in the room an hour, making frequent checks out the window into the parking lot. I didn’t see anything suspicious. That sense of having made it started rising inside me again. I beat it back down. Once I was in Rossland. Then I could feel that way. Once I was Tara Kelly, complete with a Canadian birth certificate, a driver’s license and a new life. Not until.

  After the hour, I left the room and walked a half block to a pub.

  Bar, I reminded myself. Or tavern. Not a pub.

  Inside, the late evening crowd created a steady buzz, but it wasn’t overwhelming. Just enough noise to camouflage, not loud enough to be dangerous. Perfect. I’d hidden in plain sight in places like this all over Ireland.

  I stepped up to the bar and asked for change.

  The bartender laid the coins on the bar. “You want something to drink, too, eh?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’ll ya have?”

  I almost ordered Guinness. Instead, I glanced up at the “Kokanee” neon sign behind the bar. I ordered one.

  “Bottle or tap?”

  “Bottle.”

  He popped the top and set the bottle before me. I paid him, took my bottle and made my way to the pay phones near the restrooms. The cold glass felt good in my hand.

  I dialed Terry’s number from memory. The ring in my ear was different than the telephones back home.

  Home.

  I let myself a slight, ironic smile.

  Canada was home now.

  Terry didn’t answer. After eight rings, his answering machine clicked on. I thought about what to say while his voice filled the phone. When the beep sounded, I let the sound of the Vancouver bar filter into the receiver. Then I hung up.

  “That’s an interesting smile,” a voice said.

  I glanced up, prepared to tell the fella to take a hike. Instead, I was struck speechless. I found myself looking at the most beautiful man I’d ever stood next to. He wasn’t handsome in the sense that movie stars were handsome. His hair was a little tousled and he had a rough look about him. A small scar on his chin was accentuated by several days’ growth of beard.

  All of that was nothing next to the look in his eyes when our gaze locked. The smoldering passion and the promise of forever radiated from his deep brown eyes. My stomach flip-flopped. My knees trembled.

  A slow, knowing smile spread over his face. “That smile says a lot about you.”

  I shook myself from my reverie. A rush of heat washed upward from my body to my face. “Is that so?” I asked him, trying to inject confidence into my voice.

  He nodded. “It is.”

  I lifted the beer bottle to my lips and took a long swallo
w while I watched him. I don’t know if I did that because I wanted the cold beer to cool me off or if it was part of the seduction dance. Maybe both. All I knew for sure was the something had clicked the moment I saw him. The fear of the chase went away. The fear of being alone left me. I knew in that moment that I would be with him until I died.

  Three swallows of beer did nothing to cool me off or to clear my head.

  “You can’t hide that smile,” he said. “Even when you try.”

  “Oh, yer a romantic one, aren’t ye?” I answered him.

  He cocked his head at me. “Aye,” he replied, his accent horrible. “That I am, lass.”

  I broke into a small chuckle. “That’s awful. It’s like a form of racism or something. I ought to slap ye for it.”

  He proffered his cheek.

  Instead of slapping him, I reached out and let my fingertips and palm caress the stubble there. His eyes remained locked on me. The intensity pounded in my head, tingled in my chest and loins. The effect was overwhelming.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me.

  “Shae,” I answered, without thinking. Gone was Angela Quinn. Gone was Tara Kelly.

  He reached up and covered my hand with his own. “Shae,” he asked. “Do you want to get out of this place? Go somewhere that we can be alone?”

  I thought about it for the barest of moments. What if we were some kind of cop? Not a chance. IRA? Not likely.

  I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know anything about him.

  And I didn’t believe in love at first sight.

  I didn’t have time for any crushes, either.

  Go with the flow, lass.

  Did I want to be alone with him?

  “Aye, Laddie,” I said. “I do.”

  I had the sense to go to his motel room instead of my own, though even that much thought process was a struggle. We burst through the door and were on each other with deep, frantic kisses. Clothing fell away, some gently, some torn. The hungry, selfish, grasping caresses of a first time were all we knew.

  The world outside grew small, then disappeared. That motel room became the world.

  The physical and the emotional melted into each other.

  His skin tasted so good.

  My breath caught.

  Pleasure washed over me.

  And again.

  Time passed. Stood still.

  We were one.

  Inseparable.

  Later, we lay on the bed on top of tangled sheets. He made a joke about wishing he still smoked. I thought it was the funniest thing ever said.

  “My mother warned me about this,” he said.

  “What’s that? Meeting strange women and deflowering them?”

  He smiled. “Somehow I don’t think any deflowering occurred tonight.”

  “Perhaps not. What did she warn ye about, then?”

  He adjusted his body position, turning on his side to face me. “You have to understand. My father, he was German and Hungarian. Very practical. Always a planner. Very organized and disciplined. But my mother, she was mostly Italian. She was the romantic.”

  “She teach ye that pick-up line?”

  His face fell. “That was no line.”

  I kissed him. “Sorry, Laddie. I was just playing with ye.”

  He nodded that he understood. “She did teach me about romance, I suppose. Mostly I took after my father. He always used to tell me that all of the love songs on the radio were really just part of a government conspiracy.”

  “Conspiracy?”

  “Yeah. According to him, all of those songs were secretly designed to make us fall in love and get married so that the government could get you to pay more taxes.”

  I laughed. “That sounds like something a government would do.”

  He smiled. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Especially the English,” I said.

  A question formed in his eyes, but he left it unasked. “The thing is,” he said, “my mother didn’t agree. She said that the love songs were there to remind us why we got married in the first place. Why we fell in love.”

  “Ah. A true romantic, she.”

  “She was. And she warned me that someday, when I least expected it, I’d be hit by the thunderbolt.”

  I smiled. I didn’t have to ask what that meant. My mother had never warned me about such things, but I sure as hell knew it when it happened.

  After that, the words just spilled out of both of us. There was no pretense. No filter. As much as we rushed to know each other physically, our conversation roamed far and fast in an effort to know each other factually.

  I learned he was an American from River City, Washington. He had no family left. I told him where I was from in Ireland and that only Uncle Terry remained in my family. We shared childhood stories. Dreams. We danced slowly up to the present day, nary a lie between us.

  “Did ye find work here in Canada?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I got in a little bit of trouble, so I had to leave town.”

  “Law trouble?”

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t really illegal. Just a little bit...funny.”

  “Laddie, people don’t leave town over something that’s only a little bit funny.”

  “They don’t, huh?”

  “No. And they definitely don’t leave the country over it, either.”

  “No? How about an entire continent? Do people do that?”

  I was silent for long moment. Then I took a deep breath and I told him everything. I told him about growing up Catholic in the Northern Counties. About my mother getting sick when I was nine and dying at the hospital while my father and I were on the train to come and see her.

  I didn’t stop there. I described the day I waved goodbye to my father. He waved goodbye from the street, his hat cocked on his head in that jaunty way he wore it. He smiled at me like only a father can smile and only at his daughter, at that. Then a car drove past with two men in it. The passenger leaned out and called his name. When he turned away from me, there were two sharp cracks. His head jerked back. His body pitched to the ground. The car accelerated away, leaving me alone with my own screams.

  “That’s awful,” Laddie said, squeezing my shoulder. “Who did it?”

  I shrugged. “I never knew for certain. Could have been the English. Could have been Sinn Fein, thinking he was collaborating with the English. Or any number of other possibilities.”

  “What a mess,” he whispered.

  “We have a saying in Northern Ireland,” I told him. “It says that where the Troubles are concerned, if ye’re not confused, ye don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I believe it. Did you ever find out who the men were? Did you get them back?”

  I shook my head. “No. Don’t go looking for a happy ending, Laddie. This is real life. And it’s an Irish story, not a Canadian one.”

  “I’m American.”

  “Even worse. You and your Hollywood.”

  We fell silent, both lost in our own thoughts.

  “You want something to drink?” he finally asked me.

  “That’d be grand.”

  He sat up and pulled on his jeans. “I’ll get some ice.”

  I watched him grab the plastic bucket. The silhouette of his body seemed familiar to me somehow. Comforting.

  “Be right back.” He slipped out the door, propping it open slightly with the swinging lock fixture.

  I lay in the darkness, the smell of sweat and sex hanging over me. I wanted to berate myself for falling into bed with this strange man, and an American at that. But it felt too right. Too perfect. So I tried to convince myself that it was only a one-night stand. A night to forget. Or to remember but not speak of.

  That didn’t work, either. I knew the same thing lying in bed that I knew standing in the bar the moment I met him. I was his until I died. And he mine.

  I cursed in Old Irish and rubbed my eyes.

  The door rattled and a black silhouette stepped through.
r />   “Good,” I said. “I’m dying of thirst.”

  He’d taken the two strides to the bed before I realized it wasn’t Laddie. “You greedy bitch!”

  The voice had the barest hint of brogue. Probably a cousin of someone back home, I thought absently.

  “How’d you find me?” I asked coolly.

  “What? You think you’re so smart? Think we couldn’t follow you here to Vancouver? You think you can hide in a big city like this? After what you did?”

  He was an amateur. A pro would have already shot me and been out of the room. He must have picked me up at the airport somehow. Someone figured out I was headed to Vancouver. But who?

  And did they know about Uncle Terry? Or had they gotten to him already?

  “Traitorous bitch,” he growled at me. “Turning on your own people.”

  “Go feck yerself,” I told him. He’d probably lived his whole life here in Canada, far from the Troubles. What did he know of what went on over there? How many loved ones had he lost? He was just some eejit cousin of some other eejit back in Ireland.

  “What did you say to me, you bi–”

  I rolled off the far side of the bed, holding the pillow. As soon as I hit the floor, I tossed the pillow up into the air toward him.

  He fired. The heavy clacking of the gun’s slide mechanism overshadowed the spitting sound of the silenced rounds.

  Another moment and I was at his feet. I drove my shoulder into him hard, striking him behind the knee. His arms windmilled as he fell backwards. I jumped on top of him, grasping for the gun.

  He threw a wild punch that grazed my forehead. I jabbed my thumb into his throat. He squealed and punched again. That one caught me flush in the jaw and lifted me backward. Stars flashed in my head.

  I landed on the carpet with a heavy thud. The bright flashes faded to twinkle. My jaw throbbed.

  “Fucking bitch!” he yelled, scrambling to his knees. “I’m going to blow your—”

  His words were cut off. A rasping gurgle escaped his lips.

  I shook my head to clear it. In the darkness, I could make out Laddie behind the intruder. His arms wrapped around the man’s throat like a boa constrictor. Both of the intruder’s hands flailed at Laddie’s squeezing arms.