Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  “More of the same. There are times when I grow so discouraged I’m ready to walk into the sea like Cuchulainn.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The greatest warrior of the ancient Irish past. Our Achilles. He died fighting the sea, the only thing he hadn’t conquered.”

  She did not know who Achilles was. That was all right. She was innocent culturally as well as spiritually. Perhaps that was the best, the sweetest thing about her. She was unspoiled. They were always the ones who attracted O’Gorman. He yearned above all to touch innocence. He wanted to believe in his own innocence for a little while. He wanted to be told that he was not responsible for the dead children, the amputeed brides, the kneecapped teenagers. He wanted her to whisper admiration for an Ireland that never existed, an Ireland created by his rhetoric. He wanted her to convince him that his soul was not damned for all eternity, as Deirdre had told him more than once.

  “You won’t … do anything like that, will you?” she said. “I thought of doing it once, when I was pregnant with Mick. Somebody must have been praying for me. Somebody wanted me to stay alive. I don’t know why, anymore.”

  He was staggered for a moment to find himself in depths he had not suspected.

  “We all wonder that at times,” he said. “Until we find someone that gives it all meaning. I’ve been searching for that person for thirty years now.”

  “I thought your wife left you twenty years ago.”

  “The previous ten were as empty, with her, as the next twenty without her.”

  “How sad.”

  “Can I come to you tonight? I have nothing to offer you but sadness. But I think you can turn it into joy.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

  Sunny Dan snored. On television the city burned. The money burned in O’Gorman’s mind, a golden flame. Tonight there would be joy. Tomorrow perhaps sorrow, perhaps something even more magical. Salvation?

  He would come to her on his knees, like a pilgrim to the shrine of the Virgin at Knock.

  Oh, oh, oh. You blaspheming bastard. You lost, dangerous blaspheming bastard.

  AT HOME WITH MRS. LAZARUS

  One-two, one-two, one-two-three. Push-ups, sit-ups, deep knee bends, Jackie Chasen finished her last exercises of the day, even though her body sent shock waves of pain racing up various ganglia to the cerebral cortex. She stopped, breathing heavily, and contemplated herself in the full-length mirror. The plastic surgeon had done a good job of rebuilding her face. She recognized herself. But there was a certain blankness, a lack of expression most of the time. The surgeons had removed some nerves that could not be replaced. Only when she smiled was there a resemblance to the old Jackie. So she smiled a lot, even when she did not feel like it.

  Fortunately, most of the time she felt like it. Mentally, spiritually, she was no longer the old Jackie. During the months she had spent in the Atlantic City Medical Center, the New York Center for Reconstructive Surgery, the Leahy Clinic, and other hospitals, she had slowly escaped her previous self. She had been like a snake wiggling out of last year’s skin, a soul groping for a new body. The new body that the doctors had given her, with its plastic kneecaps, aluminum hips, titanium elbows (all concealed by expert bone and skin grafts, of course), added reality to the vision. So did going blond.

  Studying her sucked-in waist, her firm breasts beneath the leotard, Jackie decided it was still a good body. That was another reason not to abuse it. The new Jackie was off dope and booze and was resolutely opposed to junk sex with humanoids like Joey Zaccaro. Although she still despised her mother’s liberal Democratic politics and her late grandfather’s Goldwater conservatism, she now considered herself apolitical.

  The new Jackie was in search of new values, new virtues. She was reading all the books she had ignored in college to protest the Vietnam War and establishment oppression. She had fallen in love with modern poetry, above all the vibrant chants of Dylan Thomas.

  “And death shall have no dominion.” That was her motto, her faith. Life could triumph over death. She had proven it in her own body, her own soul. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.” Like Dylan, she had awakened in her thirty-eighth year to “heaven hearing from harbor and neighbor wood the morning beckon.”

  Clatter. Clump. What was that? Jackie stumbled to the dresser beside her bed and pulled out a pistol. Tiptoeing to the door of her bedroom, she peered across the sunken living room. Her Airedale, Taffy, was curled up on the couch, snoring away.

  Jackie’s heart pounded, her hand shook. She wondered if she could use the gun if Joey Zaccaro or one of his hoodlums came after her. Mick had assured her that Joey would not have the nerve to try anything in Paradise Beach. Just in case, he had given her the gun and taken her out in the Pines one day and taught her how to use it.

  Jackie refused to let fear of Joey Zaccaro drive her out of this house. This was where the transformation from self-destructive, out-of-control bitch to mature woman had begun, and this was where it would be completed. Not for the first time, she reproached herself for going to Atlantic City. That was the old cokehead Jackie, creeping back, contesting the new Jackie for possession of her restored body.

  She was happy, Jackie told herself. She was happy running on the beach each morning and evening, reading her books, watching old movies on her VCR. Now she had Mick O’Day visiting in the dawn. It was great sex. He had a magnificent body. But he seemed to have no interest in taking her back to the girl in white. Whenever she tried to talk about the past, he changed the subject.

  He would not tell her anything about himself, beyond minimum facts, some of which she already knew. He had been an athletic hero at Paradise Beach High School, allstate in football, basketball, and baseball. He had been in the marines and served in Vietnam. When she had begun asking questions, revealing her loathing for that war and all wars, he had told her to shut up.

  Mick was only interested in athletic sex. Jackie wanted love from a man whose intelligence, whose soul, stirred a response in her battered heart. Where she was going to find this spiritual paragon in Paradise Beach remained a mystery. But she stayed here, determined, hopeful, prayerful, even if she did not believe there was anyone who listened to human pleas for divine help.

  Squirming out of her leotard, Jackie stepped into the shower and turned on the hot water. As the jet hit her, she felt a shiver of nerves. When she was alone in the house, she felt jittery in the shower. Was it the scene from Psycho?

  As if her mind had produced the reality, a hand reached into the shower and clutched her by the throat. It was attached to the black sleeve of a raincoat. Gagging, she was dragged into the bedroom by a behemoth in the rest of the raincoat.

  There stood Joey Zaccaro. “How you doin’, beautiful?” he said. “I’m in town on business. I thought I’d pay you a little visit.”

  “She’s some piece,” said the behemoth, who had now lifted her off the ground, his hand still around her throat. Jackie clutched at his wrist. The room began to grow dim.

  “Put her down on the bed, you asshole,” Joey said. “I don’t wanna kill her just yet. First we’re gonna have some fun.”

  They jammed a gag in her mouth—a foul-tasting handkerchief—and tied her down on the bed, her legs spread wide, her arms above her head. Joey began talking about what they were going to do. “First, we’re gonna fuck you until you don’t know who you are. Then we’re gonna play some games with this.”

  He unfolded a long, gleaming knife.

  Joey stood there, the knife in his hand, a sneer on his animal face. Jackie closed her eyes. It was impossible to escape the past after all. Impossible not to pay for her sins. She was going to die in this brutal, disgusting way. Death had final dominion no matter what Dylan Thomas said.

  The silvery crash of breaking glass jerked her head toward the sliding door that led from the bedroom to the sundeck. A pistol gripped by a black-gloved hand appeared through the glass. The pistol did not go off. It jus
t clicked. There was a chunking sound as if something heavy had dropped onto a pillow or into sand. A round red spot appeared on Joey Zaccaro’s forehead. Terror flickered across his swarthy face. The knife slipped from his hand and he toppled onto the bed at Jackie’s feet.

  In front of the bathroom door, the behemoth was reaching for his gun when the pistol clicked again. Another chunking sound, another round red spot on the forehead. The bodyguard thudded to the rug with a strangled snarl of defiance in his throat.

  The pistol, the black-gloved hand, hesitated for a moment. Then the barrel, which had an odd bulge beneath it, swung slowly toward Jackie. She watched, horrified, as it contemplated snuffing out her life too. But there was no click, no murderous bullet. Instead, the gun, the black-gloved hand, withdrew into the darkness. Jackie was left on the bed, shaking and sobbing with terror. She did not believe what was happening to her life.

  But it was happening.

  BURIAL PARTY

  A quiet night—exactly what Mick wanted and needed. Absolutely nothing was happening in Paradise Beach. No aging boozers beating up on their worn-out wives, no kids taunting some retired bozo into threatening them with a gun, no complaints about loud televisions. In the winter, quiet nights were really quiet. Unlike the summer, with drunks galore on the boardwalk and attempted rapes on the beach and wild parties in every other house. Even the quiet summer nights were hairy.

  As usual, Mick’s visit to the Pines had calmed him down. The unreeling of Binh Nghai had stopped for a while. But he was left with a sullen wish to escape the whole lousy setup—his mother, Uncle Bill O’Toole and his crummy marriage, his grandfather with his old jokes—and now these two Irishmen who had suddenly settled into the house. He got a bad smell from them. His cop’s nose did not buy O’Gorman’s story that they were over here to raise money for a Belfast orphanage.

  Jackie Chasen was Mick’s only consolation. When he spun the police cruiser onto the road that twisted around Leeds Point, he saw lights still blazing in her house. She told him some nights she did not get to sleep until dawn. This must be one of them. Suddenly the thought of Jackie’s terrific body beneath him or above him on the bed had irresistible appeal. Balling was a kind of escape, a trip into a world without faces, names, memories.

  Mick raised Tom Brannigan on the radio and told him he was going to check out Leeds Point by foot. He had seen a shadow that might be a sneak thief. It was a well-established code for saying don’t call me for a half hour. As far as Brannigan knew, Mick was taking a snooze.

  He rang the front doorbell. Nothing. “Jackie,” he called. “It’s your friendly neighborhood cop.” Nothing. Slightly alarmed, he went back to the car and found the skeleton key that worked for almost every lock in Paradise Beach. It was useful because so many houses were shut for the winter and they sometimes developed internal problems such as a burst pipe.

  “Jackie?” he called when the door swung open. “It’s me—Mick.”

  He flashed his light down the dark entrance hall. The Airedale, Taffy, was sprawled on the rug in the center of the living room. What the hell was wrong with the mut? Then Mick saw the puddle of blood beside the dog’s slashed throat. “Holy shit,” he gasped, drawing his gun.

  He found Jackie spread-eagled on the bed, her terrified eyes bulging above the foul gag in her mouth. Beside the bed were Joey Zaccaro and a big guy with bodyguard written all over him, both dead with identical bullet wounds in their foreheads.

  Mick untied the gag and the ropes and Jackie told him what had happened. “Put some clothes on. I’m calling Uncle Bill.”

  Jackie was in the living room, weeping over Taffy, when Bill O’Toole charged into the house. He glared at the two corpses and rushed out to Joey Zaccaro’s car. He came back with a wild expression on his face. “Where’s the goddamn money?” he roared.

  “What money? Did you see any money?” Mick asked Jackie.

  “No.”

  “Don’t bullshit me!” O’Toole snarled, grabbing Mick by his shirt.

  Mick tore himself loose. “I’m not bullshitting you. There’s no money.”

  “These guys had a million and a half bucks with them. It’s gone.” O’Toole grabbed Mick again. “I’m askin’ you one more time and I want it absolutely straight. I want it to be the straightest thing you ever said to me.”

  Mick disentangled himself again, totally baffled by O’Toole’s berserk behavior. “There’s—no—goddamn—money.”

  “Then she’s gotta have it.”

  O’Toole glared at Jackie with murder in his eyes. She frantically shook her head, obviously thinking he was as dangerous as Zaccaro. “I didn’t see any money. I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

  “Are you goin’ nuts?” Mick said. “I told you, when I got here, she’s tied up on the bed.” He picked up the knife and practically shoved it in his uncle’s face. “That asshole was gonna use this to carve initials on her. I only wish I got here in time to shoot him first.”

  “It was a put-on,” O’Toole insisted. “She tied herself up and you were too stupid to notice it.”

  “Yeah. And first she killed her dog to pass the time waitin’ for these bozos to arrive, and she plugs them with one bullet each before they can move.”

  Mick took the Colt .38 he had given Jackie out of the dresser drawer. “I taught her to use this gun, which still has six bullets in it. I happen to know it’d be a miracle if she hit a battleship at twenty feet. Calm down, will you, Uncle Bill? I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t like it very much.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down! My life, your life, all our lives are on the line here. Including hers. I’m gonna search this house. Don’t try and stop me.”

  Mick watched O’Toole tear the house apart for a half hour. He emptied closets, he cleared kitchen shelves, he peered into the stove, the oil burner. Outside, he tore apart Joey Zaccaro’s car. He pulled out the seats, he exhumed the spare tire from the trunk. He came back, panting, his eyes even more berserk.

  “Okay. It’s not here. The guy who iced them must have known about the money. He wasn’t just a Good Samaritan tryin’ to protect Miss American Virtue here. I got a couple of other places to look. Meanwhile, you got a job to do. Take these guys and their car and lose them way back in the Pines. Put them into one of those cedar creeks where you can’t see the bottom.”

  “You’re not gonna report this?” Mick said. “I don’t get it.”

  “I know you don’t get it. But you will. As for you,” O’Toole said, turning to Jackie, “you almost got hurt tonight. You know as well as I do that it was your own goddamn fault for screwing a scumbag like this guy in the first place and then takin’ a walk on him. If you don’t like the way you almost died tonight, just say something to a reporter or a state trooper about Joey Zip’s brains gettin’ splashed all over your bedroom. You’ll die in a way that’ll make what Joey was gonna do to you seem like a mercy killin’. I won’t do it. I won’t haveta do it. Joey was a scumbag but he was Tommy Giordano’s nephew. His sister’s only son. Do you know what that means? Do you know who Tommy the Top Giordano is?”

  Jackie nodded numbly. Mick knew too. Tommy was the Mafia boss of New Jersey. Whatever was happening, it was starting to stink. It was starting to stink up the whole town.

  “Okay. Then you got the message.” O’Toole grabbed Jackie by both arms and lifted her off the floor. “Have you got it?”

  “Get your goddamn hands off her,” Mick snarled, tearing Jackie free.

  “You’ve had a lot more then your hands on her,” O’Toole raged. “Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know all the games you midnight-to-eight assholes play? Get rid of these guys before it gets light. I’ll see you at the house later. I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on.”

  He left Mick staring at the bodies. “What is it, Mick? What’s happening?” Jackie said.

  “I don’t know. But I think we better do what he says.”

  Jackie backed Zaccaro’s Cadillac
into the garage. Mick dragged the bodies through the living room and kitchen and shoved Zaccaro into the trunk and the behemoth into the backseat. He threw Taffy’s body on top of Zaccaro. “You’re gonna have to drive the hearse,” Mick said. “Can you handle it? I’m gonna travel fast.”

  “I can handle it.”

  Jackie followed Mick’s police car over the Bay Bridge and up the long, straight highway through the Pines. Mick hit ninety all the way until he signaled a right run and began lurching and bumping down a sandy track at fifty miles an hour.

  They plunged into a hollow and over a hump that sent Mick’s head up to the roof. Behind him he saw the Cadillac suddenly swerve to the right and disappear into the pines. As he slammed on his brakes, he heard it crash into a tree. Cursing, he got out and found Jackie sobbing hysterically, trying to disentangle herself from the dead behemoth. “His arm came into the front seat when we went over the bump!” she cried.

  Belted in, Jackie was unhurt, but the impact had smashed the Cadillac’s grille into the engine. “Get in,” Mick snarled, dragging her to the police car. “We gotta get a shovel.”

  He drove with furious concentration, throwing Jackie all over the car, letting instinct, his knowledge of the Pines, turn them right, left, at twisting intersections in the inky darkness. Finally they hurtled into Pop Oxenford’s clearing, with its littered corpses of old cars.

  Mick ran up to the small house and burst in the door yelling, “Don’t shoot, it’s the cops!”

  Pop was sitting in the easy chair listening to some late-night radio talk show. He gave Mick the shovel with no questions asked, of course, and followed him out to the car, although he was only wearing his red flannel underwear.

  “This is her?” he said, shining a flashlight into Jackie’s face.

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s a looker all right.” He smiled at Jackie. “Oxenford’s the name. I’ve been tellin’ him to bring you out here. But I guess this ain’t a social visit. I guess it ain’t social at all.”