The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1)

by Kaspar Totmann

  The street curved and slalomed, snake-like, into darker territory where a few restaurants and offices were shut down for the night. The streetlamps were spaced far apart, leaving large black pools into which a person could disappear. Mags flew into one, her slapping footfalls on the concrete the only thing left for Izzy to follow. He reached it, the glow of the last lamp cooling behind him. The constriction in his chest worsened and his sides began to ache.

  He rasped, “Mags—stop.” He doubted she could hear it. He barely heard it himself.

  Over a short bridge, he strained past a shuttered seafood restaurant until the sidewalk flattened out again and Noah’s neighborhood rose up on the other side of the street. Ahead, a figure darted into the road, a wild orange tangle floating like submerged seaweed on its head. Izzy dashed past the bandana in the road and went after her across the crest of a hill. Mags hit the other side and kept on the sidewalk there. A bright flash startled Izzy as a vehicle raced up the hill and came right toward him. The headlights subsumed him and he jumped for the weedy median, the car’s horn blaring as it sped by.

  Izzy landed on his right foot and the ankle turned badly. He went down in a heap, the stiff, jagged leaves of the weeds scratching his arms and face. His eyes welled up from the pain and the exertion. Now that he’d stopped, the sweat poured down his face and neck. He could see the interstate now, at the bottom of the rise. It was bright and busy compared to where he sat between north and southbound lanes, looking down from the dirt and dandelions and sandburs. His ankle throbbed dully. Mags was nowhere in sight.

  He could still hear sirens but doubted they were the responders to the rave. It was Saturday night; cops and ambulances would be everywhere. By now they’d be there, though. Izzy imagined quite a lot of the ravers would take off in a hurry in the presence of the APD. The party, he surmised, was over.

  Cautiously he rose, putting the lion’s share of his weight on his good ankle. He tried a couple of steps and the bad one ached terribly. He peered down the hill on the other side, toward South Congress, where it wove south until bending off into the shadows. The club space was not visible from where he stood. He guessed he must have run more than a mile after Mags. He wondered if she was still running, and where she was running to.

  More to the point, what was she running from? She knew Izzy wasn’t anyone who could arrest her or get her into any serious trouble. The only thing he knew about her was well established when they’d met: where she lived, and little else. But the mere unexpected sight of him sent her speeding off, her eyes huge with fear.

  He knew little about her, and she wanted to keep it that way for some reason.

  “Time to join a gym,” Izzy wheezed to himself, and he waited for the sparse traffic to clear before limping back to the sidewalk and beginning the long, painful trek back.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  Noah hurried over from the diverse group of uniformed police officers, paramedics, security guards, and onlookers. Red, blue, and white lights strobed and flashed in the street, forcing Izzy to squint as he lurched into the parking lot abutting the club space. On the curb no less than seven kids, four girls and three boys, were seated with their hands behind their backs, cops lingering near to them speaking into their radios or just keeping an eye out. The oldest among them didn’t look a day over eighteen.

  Izzy and Noah came together between an ambulance and a patrol car and embraced. Several cops and a couple EMTs stopped what they were doing to stare before returning to their respective work. Noah scowled.

  “It’s fucking Austin,” he groused. “It’s like they never saw a couple of homos before.”

  “Cool it,” Izzy said. “I’m too tired to help you fight anyone.”

  He put his arm around Noah’s shoulder, and Noah acted as his crutch up the way to a bus bench. Pasted on the back of the bench was the advertisement for hector gutierrez, attorney-at-law, nearly identical to the billboard Izzy saw earlier in the week. Now he scowled, too.

  “Someone you know?” Noah said.

  “Unfortunately. See if one of those medics can come look at my ankle. I think I twisted it pretty good.”

  “I’d be chuffed all to pieces,” Noah said, “if you managed a please now and then.”

  Izzy blew a thin stream of air from his lungs and deflated against Gutierrez’s face.

  “I’m a shit date, aren’t I?” he said.

  “The worst,” Noah agreed. “What on earth were you running off for, anyway?”

  “Please, please, pretty please ask a medic to come take a look at this goddamned ankle and I’ll tell you all about. With cherries on top.”

  “Overdoing it with the cherries, gorgeous. But okay.”

  The ankle was a bad roll, which the paramedic wrapped for him. He was given Naproxen and a bottle of warm water, and the medic said, “Do the RICE thing. You know.”

  “Rice thing?” Noah asked when the paramedic left.

  “Rest, ice, compression, elevation. He must have recognized me from the hospital.”

  “Ooh,” Noah said. “Famous.”

  “How’s the girl?”

  “Okay. She woke up. Or came to, whatever. They already took her off, but the EMTs said she ought to be fine.”

  Izzy said, “Fine is relative.”

  “If she was drugged,” Noah said, “it could have gotten a lot worse.”

  “Nice people.”

  “Who?”

  “No one,” Izzy said, wincing as he slowly rotated the angle. “Haven’t you figured that out yet? People existe to be predators or prey to one another. Everyone is either afraid or terrorizing the fearful. And if they’re not scared yet, it’s only a matter of time. Fucking hell.”

  He hunched over on the bench and laid his forehead in his palms.

  “And this is the safe city,” he said.

  “I’ll bring the car around,” Noah said, holding his hand out for the keys. “And get you home.”

  Izzy gave him the keys, and Noah gave his shoulder a squeeze before taking off around the corner. A couple of the kids on the curb eyeballed Izzy, knowing he was responsible for the police presence. No one else would have bothered, security included. He was the death of the party.

  He waited for Noah, watching for the car, and tried like hell to keep the anger boiling within him in check.

  Twenty-Nine

  After a shower and a cup of tea, Noah took Izzy to bed and let him sleep. A few hours later, Izzy was startled awake by Noah shaking him by the arms and asking was he all right.

  The digital clock on Noah’s side read 4:00. Izzy sat up, dazed and groggy, and pulled away.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You were screaming in your sleep,” Noah said. “I mean screaming.”

  “Shit,” Izzy said. “I’m sorry. That happens sometimes.”

  Noah switched on the bedside light and gawped at him.

  Izzy said, “Night terrors. I don’t realize I’m having one and never remember it after I wake up. Haven’t had one in—I don’t know, maybe a year. Stress, I guess. I’m sorry.”

  He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat there a moment, collecting himself. He rubbed his eyes, then his temples. Sucked a deep breath into his lungs and expelled it as he rose and walked out of the room in his underpants. He floated into Noah’s kitchen, found a clean glass in the cabinet, and filled it with water from the tap. Noah followed diffidently while he drank it.

  “Stress?” he said.

  Izzy shrugged, gulping down the water.

  Noah said, “Have you ever been diagnosed with anything like PTSD?”

  Dumping the remainder of the water down his gullet, Izzy swallowed noisily and said, “No. And don’t start in on that. Please don’t.”

  “Start in on what? I’m not criticizing you, for Christ’s sake. You of all people should know that. We work with the same people, Izzy.”

  “First of all, no, we don’t,” Izzy snapped, setting the glass on the counter wit
h a thud. “You never see them once they’ve been killed, or overdosed on something, or committed suicide. You don’t treat self-inflicted wounds or the injuries that result from abuse. You’ve never performed a postmortem examination on a fucking friend, knowing you could have prevented it that one time but probably not the next time or the time after that because what the fuck is a survivor, anyway? Somebody who ought to have been a victim, but fate played a cruel goddamn trick on them and let them live with everything that happened? Everything that fucking broke them in the first place? What the fuck is PTSD but the pressure and despair of living on stolen time, Noah? Goddamn it…”

  Noah reached for him, and Izzy batted the hand away, forcing him to withdraw. But Izzy kept swatting at the air, pinwheeling his arms like a toddler having a tantrum, and broke into heaving sobs as he pushed back against the stove and sank to the tiled kitchen floor.

  “Goddamn it all,” he said. “Goddamn me and goddamn you. And goddamn Cynthia for goddamn dying.”

  Noah stepped over to the opposite side of the small, cramped space, up against the pantry door, and lowered down to sit facing Izzy. He didn’t say a word. They just sat there together, on the kitchen floor, in calm silence, until the dark blue of night gave way to the first pink glow of morning in the window of the door between them.

  Neither of them knew how long they sat there, but at that first early light, Noah slid over to Izzy and kissed him softly. He then got back to his feet, started a pot of coffee, and went out to sit on the deck. Some ten minutes later, Izzy appeared with two steaming cups and joined him.

  He said, “I startle easy. It’s weird. Sometimes I practically hit the ceiling when I know someone is in the room with me but they moved suddenly.

  “I have nightmares about fifty percent of the time and occasional night terrors, though those are better than they used to be. I have a lot of trouble getting and keeping close to people and I absolutely loathe touching or being touched by anyone I don’t know.”

  He sipped coffee and ruminated for a moment before going on.

  “I had a lot of trouble being who and what I am for a lot of years. I came out in high school, dated a guy for a while, but then went right back in before I was twenty. I was thirty before I decided I didn’t want to lie to myself anymore, and that I’d been hating myself for being queer because my father hated me for it. And because I couldn’t shake the feeling that the things that happened to me when I was a kid maybe made me that way. That I somehow hadn’t come by it honestly. That probably doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I think I get it,” Noah said.

  “The truth is I have very little doubt in my mind I’d be diagnosed with PTSD if I went searching for that, and probably a mess of other problems and disorders, too. I’d just rather keep my head in the sand when it comes to Isaiah Bishop and worry about everybody else’s problems instead.”

  “I think I get that, too. But you can’t hide from yourself forever.”

  Izzy half-smiled.

  “Says who?”

  “If someone you were working with, a patient or crisis center case, told you everything you just told me, what would you say to them?”

  “That they sound an awful lot like me,” Izzy said. “Listen—I’m sorry I woke you up. And I’m really sorry I snapped and you and broke down like that. That’s…not attractive.”

  “Oh, I’d still do you,” Noah said with a grin.

  Izzy laughed.

  “Pity fuck?”

  “Beats nothing.”

  “What a guy,” said Izzy.

  “I’m here to help,” Noah said. “You haven’t a thing to apologize for, by the way. Lucky for you, I happen to be trained for this sort of thing, and you’re not scaring me off. I like you, Izzy. I like you quite a lot. When you want my help, you’ll ask for it. Until then, you know how that works and where I am.”

  “I’m a fucking mess, Noah.”

  Noah touched his hand and said, “Aren’t we all, love?”

  The proprietress of the soul food joint recognized Izzy when he came in. She said “Welcome back,” and showed him to one of the four tables in the small dining area. He asked for the crawfish etouffe and she promised him extra cornbread for being a return customer. When she went back into the kitchen, Izzy noticed a wizened old man at a corner table, reading the paper and ignoring his lunch, which didn’t look as though it had been touched. His hands shook slightly as he held up the newspaper and peered through bifocals to make out the print. The front page story concerned a sheriff’s deputy gunned down in Houston—nearly two hundred miles away. Izzy wondered if the odd murder in Austin ever made the Houston papers’ front pages, and decided they probably never did.

  He could make out the front of the Lost 40 house through the street-facing windows in the restaurant, and he watched it throughout his quiet lunch. Nobody went in, and nobody came out. The only activity on Rosewood he spied at all was a teal pickup pulling in front of the tattoo parlor, from which a burly old boy in a straw cowboy hat climbed out and went inside.

  Izzy ate his lunch, saving a piece of cornbread for last, to mop up what remained on his plate. Halfway through the old man folded up his paper and silently left. At the sound of the bell over the door, the proprietress called out from the kitchen, “God bless you!”

  It was going on noon by the time Izzy laid waste to everything he’d ordered. He didn’t have a paper to peruse, and the squat house seemed to look back at him from up the street, its two second story windows narrow, inscrutable eyes. Izzy knew the one on the left was in Mike’s master bedroom. Would he have many girls in there now, sprawled out on the mattresses? More importantly, was Mags anywhere inside?

  He paid the bill, received an earnest blessing on behalf of the almighty, and went back out into the afternoon heat. He’d been careful not to park directly in front of the house this time, leaving the Mazda up Chicon Street and out of sight. For several minutes he stood in front of the restaurant, eyeing the house and trying to determine if it had been wise to refuse Noah’s company for this little undertaking. So far he’d managed to court catastrophe everywhere he went with the guy, and he couldn’t be sure this wouldn’t be more of the same. Or worse still. Just once he wanted to spend a normal day or evening with Noah that didn’t involve policemen, paramedics, corpses, assaults, injuries, failed foot chases, or manic-depressive episodes. The way things were going lately it seemed a tall order to Izzy, but he kept his money on vague optimism. Yet for the time being, he was going to court catastrophe all by his lonesome.

  Girded thus, he crossed up to the house, waded through the front yard’s overgrowth, and went silently up the steps to the porch. He had no intention of knocking this time around, which only marginally did him any good last time he came. He tried the door, and found it unlocked. The hinges creaked when he pushed it open. In his ears it sounded loud enough to alert the entire neighborhood. Izzy flinched and stopped pushing, and he squeezed himself through the narrow crack into the foyer.

  In the room off to the right of the staircase a hollow-faced man sat in a metal straight-backed chair up against the wall. He was older, forty or so, with gray at his temples and flecking his long, shaggy beard. The man was smoking a cigarette and muttering to himself. He went quiet when Izzy came in, then offered a sharp nod. Izzy nodded back, and the man went back to his smoking and muttering. His eyes were narrowed to slits, the skin around them creased and pink. Izzy left the door as it was, afraid of making more noise than necessary, and went into the room with the muttering man.

  “Excuse me,” he said, keeping a cautious distance. “I’m looking for someone who lives here.”

  “You’re looking for Jesus Christ,” the man said without looking at Izzy.

  “Pardon?”

  “But he ain’t here no more. Just devils now. Just devils.”

  Izzy said, “Thanks,” and left the room.

  Next he checked the room to the left of the stairs, and the corridor behind it that led to the kitchen
. No one was in either. He saw the backyard for the first time, which consisted of a large concrete slab on the ground about a foot beneath a sliding glass door, and nothing but dirt and occasional patches of yellow grass beyond that. The yard was bordered by a gray, rotting fence, a quarter of the pickets gone. In a far corner a metal tricycle sat, rusting. Izzy went back to the stairs.

  He gazed up from the bottom, recalling when he followed Mags up into the semi-darkness there to speak with Mike. Then, most of the squat’s inhabitants seemed to have sequestered themselves in the upstairs rooms. He presumed the same was still true, and with a deep breath he went up. Like the door, the stairs squeaked and groaned, heralding his ascent. He climbed slowly, and peered around the corner, down the hall, before taking the last two steps. In a movie, he thought, he’d have a gun at the ready. But this was no movie, and Izzy loathed guns. He only hoped whoever was up there shared his convictions on the issue.

  To Izzy’s dismay, every door on the second floor was closed. He’d expected at least Mike’s to be open, down at the end, like it was the last time. He stalled, shifting glances between the front door downstairs and the door at the end of the hall. After a minute his chest began aching and he realized he was holding his breath. He let it out, sucked in a fresh supply, and headed for Mike’s door.

  First he listened to be nominally sure he wasn’t about to interrupt anything too private, and satisfied that he probably wasn’t, he opened the door.

  The room was completely vacant. The mattresses were still there, on the floor, as were the ratty beanbag chairs. But no Mike. No Mags, either.

  Izzy took a look in the closet and attached bathroom. Nothing.

  Back in the hall he strode to the middle and stopped, listening. The first time he’d heard all sorts of activity behind those doors. Today it was dead silent. Izzy started opening them up, and though each room showed evidence of recent habitation—inflatable beds, sleeping bags, random bits of clothing, bottles and toiletries, a one-eyed teddy bear, a Bible and a lot of candles in every room to compensate for the lack of electricity—there was absolutely nobody around. In the whole house, the only human being present was the muttering guy downstairs, who looked considerably older than the squat’s usual occupants.