Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  “We got trouble, Pop. I’ll tell you about it later,” Mick said.

  They roared back down the twisting sand roads to Zaccaro’s Cadillac. Mick dragged the bodies out and shoved them into the police car. They plunged down the black, atrocious roads for another twenty minutes. Mick stopped, backed up, and turned the car at right angles to the road. The headlights revealed an oozing swamp. Stripping to the buff, Mick waded into it and flung muck over his shoulder for five minutes, then dragged the bodies into the pit and covered them with mud and dead tree branches.

  Behind him, Mick could hear Jackie saying over and over again, “And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion.” It was almost good for a laugh.

  “Oh, Mick, Mick,” she sobbed when he rejoined her in the police car. “Make love to me. Make love to me. I’m so scared.”

  “I’m covered with mud. We’ll go back to the house and take a shower.”

  “No, I want to do it here, now. I need it now!”

  Maybe he needed it too. He dragged her out of the car and practically tore off her clothes. They stood there, naked, in the dark. The cold wind was harsh on Mick’s flesh but it did not chill him. He was numb, thinking and trying not to think about why Bill O’Toole was doing business with Tommy Giordano.

  “Wipe me off,” he said.

  She used his shirt. The wind sighed through the tops of the pines. “Do you hear it?” Mick said, his hands on her breasts.

  “What?”

  “The air tune. The Pineys say it’s the devil playing his violin. If he meets you and you can’t outdance him, you lose your soul. I always thought it was bullshit. Now I’m not so sure.”

  Mick lay down in the backseat of the police car and Jackie mounted him. Up, up, up into her body slithered the tree of life, but this time there was no escape from what he was thinking.

  “Death shall have no dominion,” Jackie whispered. “It won’t. It won’t.”

  It was not good for a laugh. Mick was beginning to think from now on nothing in Paradise Beach would be good for a laugh.

  MIDNIGHT MERRY-GO-ROUND

  “Let’s do it again,” whispered Barbara Kathleen O’Day.

  “My God, you’re an earth mother, Astarte and Circe rolled into one,” O’Gorman said.

  “Roll me over, roll me over, lay me down and do it again.”

  “Shhh, for God’s sake, are you drunk?”

  “Drunk with love.”

  She was as sweet, as sad, as crazed, as any soul in the slums of Dublin. As any in the crooked streets of Derry and Belfast. Were you sent here, O’Gorman? Sent to lift her beyond sadness, beyond the blank monotony of her life?

  She had told him everything in her breathy little-girl voice. The smooth-talking local who had filled her belly with Mick and then sailed away to fight in Korea, the forced marriage to the son of the city’s chief bookmaker, who had slavered after her so long he had no compunction about taking damaged goods, the inevitable separation and the empty years as her parents’ cook and bottle washer while Mick grew into a man who lived by the code of his generation.

  Thirty years of the same same same. Thirty years of mass and Communion and confession with nothing to tell. Thirty years of waiting for something and getting nothing but the same same same. Now I know I was waiting for you.

  He had listened as usual. Every woman a man laid insisted on telling her life story. It was part of the ritual. But this story tore at O’Gorman’s tired heart in unexpected ways. He saw the tragedy of the diaspora, the agony of Ireland being repeated here in America, and no doubt in Australia and Canada and everywhere else the wild geese had wandered. The tragedy of Ireland ridden, ruined by her priests. While it shredded his heart, it gave him a new furious resolve to end it, with the gun and the bomb if necessary. End it for once and for all.

  Yes, in the name of Barbara Kathleen Monahan O’Day he would be Ireland’s new priest, his hands dripping with the blood of the sacrificed. He would resist the mad magic of Joey Zaccaro’s money and continue the blind struggle in the dark.

  Driving. Sometimes Bill O’Toole felt like he had spent his life driving. Forty years of driving these stupid streets as a cop. Driving anywhere, anyplace, on Sunday to get beyond the sound of his wife’s voice. Yak yak yak. Singing that stupid song she had asked the band to play at their wedding: “Marie.” Dancing around the living room half in the bag, trying to get him to dance too.

  Marie, the dawn is breaking. Marie. Marie, your miserable neck will be breaking if you don’t shut up.

  Driving. Like his son, Jimmy: Ace. Driving his plane into the antiaircraft bursts over Hanoi. All right, he died like a marine, but what does that mean anymore? A year later, you had to stand there as chief of police and watch them piss on the American flag on the boardwalk. They did it again the next year. By that time Jimmy and his plane were junk in the jungle.

  Part of the summer of protest against the war. Yeah. Part of making them feel virtuous. They screwed on the beach all night and pissed on the flag during the day. Now they were all on Wall Street making two hundred grand a year. Yuppies. Goddamned traitors making two hundred grand a year. The next thing, one of them would run for president.

  Only the bearer bonds had kept Bill O’Toole sane. Knowing that $5 million was waiting there to be divided between the four daughters of Sunny Dan Monahan and their husbands, when the old gasbag got around to dying. When things got really bad, Bill told himself what he would do with that million dollars. He would quit this crummy job and head for California. Maybe buy a piece of a football team like the Oakland Raiders and meet some power players. Park Marie in some condo in Santa Barbara and spend most of his time in LA on business. Funny business.

  The bearer bonds had been his consolation when he started thinking about all the money Desmond had made from his fish business and Wilbur Gargan had made from the Golden Shamrock while Bill O’Toole lived with Marie on his penny-ante salary.

  The money. Where was Zaccaro’s money? The micks must have done it. Who else knew it was there? Desmond? Gargan? Wilbur wasn’t in on it. No one trusted him to keep his mouth shut in that bar after midnight, when he drank as hard as the customers. Leo McBride and his liberal slut? Where would Leo get the balls to ice Zaccaro and his bodyguard? He hid in Yale Law School, wetting his pants at the mere thought of going to Vietnam.

  Mick couldn’t come. They had tried everything. Jackie had gone down on him and he had gone down on her. Now he had her up against a tree, stroking her from behind, wild, vicious thrusts. She was moaning and sobbing but he couldn’t come.

  The wind whined through the trees. Was it the devil playing the air tune? He thought of Jackie last Sunday after the pistol lesson, lying on the hood of the car, laughing, while he drove around and around the clearing looking up that beautiful snatch. She was the wildest thing he had ever seen. She had money. Why not marry her? he had thought. Why not let her set him up in a garage building custom cars?

  Now this craziness, burying dead men in the Pines. Now he knew he could never marry her. It was the same reason why he couldn’t come. The night, the dead, the darkness, had started the Binh Nghai movie unreeling in his head again. Trai was in his arms beside the river, murmuring pieces of words against his throat. Whispering in pidgin, Me love you, marine. Then some poem in Vietnamese. Something about flowers.

  And all the time, the 409th North Vietnamese Army Battalion was moving into position to attack the fort. All the time while Trai was saying those things to him, she knew what was about to happen at the fort. She had said the same things and more to her Viet Cong lover, Le Quan Chien, earlier in the day in the safe hooch a mile down the river.

  Mick had come that night. He had come like a fish at the bait. He had come and come and come until the darkness blossomed with flame and the explosions of the sappers’ bangalores rolled across the rice paddies and the mortars crumped and the AK-47s chattered and the BAR, the fort’s only BAR, clattered in reply.

  His men, his marine
s, and the PFs were dying and he was out in the dark chasing pussy. That was why he could not come now. He could never come in the dark in the woods again. He went cold with the memory, the unreeling, maddening memory. His prick was a rod of cold iron forever in the dark woods listening to the air tune.

  Desmond McBride was trying to make love to his wife, Teresa. It had taken her by surprise. He had not touched her for at least six months. Not since summer had faded. Desmond was a summer lover. That was the only thing that stirred his sixty-four-year-old blood, memories of strutting down the boardwalk in 1946 wearing his white suit with Teresa on his arm. One of Sunny Dan Monahan’s daughters. Even then Desmond had been more thrilled by Teresa’s lineage than he had been by her shape and conversation.

  The shape tended to be rounded, even then. Teresa had taken after her mother. She had a tendency to gain weight. Poor dear Mrs. Monahan had weighed 380 pounds when she died. Teresa was pushing two hundred and she was not as tall as her mother. What was sister-in-law Barbara’s secret? Desmond mused as he fondled and hoped for an erection. She had never gained a pound. She had the same svelte shape she had displayed when she was eighteen and every male her age on Paradise Beach had panted after her.

  Ugliness and fear were driving Desmond to this extraordinary (for him) winter excursion. These are not erotic emotions and the net result of his fondles was zero. He sighed and scolded his erratic member. It had failed him on his wedding night. It had failed him frequently in their thirty-eight years of wedded semibliss.

  “That settles it, I’m going on a diet,” Teresa said. She always resolved to go on a diet when Desmond failed in the bedroom.

  “It’s all right. I’m just tired,” he said.

  Tired of Black Dick O’Gorman and his slimy little friend Kilroy, with his foul tongue. Tired of the swamp into which his willingness to help Ireland, the land of his ancestors, seemed to be leading him. His brilliant Washington, D.C., son and daughter-in-law with their heads full of advanced political ideas had urged him to do it. But neither they nor anyone else had told him about Joey Zaccaro. What was a respectable man, a patriot who loved two countries, doing in the same room—or bathing pavilion—with Joey Zaccaro?

  In the bedroom down the hall, Leo McBride was having a decidedly unromantic conversation with Melody Faithorne. “If you make another pass at that Irish charm boy, I’m through with you,” he raged. “I’ll file for divorce the day we get back to Washington.”

  Melody had telephoned O’Gorman, suggesting a lunch date at a restaurant in Atlantic City. He had turned her down, claiming jet lag was still debilitating him. She had called him again tonight. Barbara O’Day answered the phone. She said O’Gorman was out raising money for Ireland.

  “Didn’t you hear what I told you in the car?” Leo said. “I won’t let you humiliate me in front of my family.”

  Melody’s answer was a striptease, to a song Janis Joplin had made famous, “Love Is Like a Ball and Chain.” It was marvelously ironic, from her point of view. She chanted other Joplin songs as the clothes dropped to the floor and that exquisite body, the coned breasts, the silken pussy appeared for his delectation.

  Naked, she slithered around Leo, expertly undressing him. He knew what was coming next. That magical tongue was going to rove down his body until her lips found his penis. She would suck and suck until there was a pulsing rod that guaranteed satisfaction. Then she would fall into the bed, a mocking smile on her face, and await his delivery.

  The tongue began its descent. Leo felt desire swelling in his belly. There was nothing, absolutely nothing in this world that could compare to the pleasure, the creamy, dia-pasonic delight of her lips on that priapic organ. But something else, something beyond pleasure, was thundering in Leo’s soul. “No!” he snarled, and cuffed her in the face with his open hand.

  She staggered back, amazed to find her patented formula no longer worked. “No,” Leo snarled again. “I mean it, Melody.”

  Suddenly Leo began to weep. “We never should have come here. You know why.”

  Pounding. Someone was pounding on the front door. Kicking it. Bong bong bong. The intruder had found the bell in the dark. Desmond McBride flung on his bathrobe and rushed to the top of the stairs. “Who’s that?” he cried.

  “It’s me!” roared Bill O’Toole.

  Had he gone to Atlantic City with that mobster? Was there another $10,000 loss to cover? Desmond had done that once. Never again, he had told Brother (in-law) Bill. He had forbidden Sunny Dan to lend Bill a cent. Sunny Dan had wanted to mortgage his house. Without the bearer bonds he was living on Barbara’s teacher’s salary. But he still wanted to play the big shot.

  “I’ll talk to you in the morning,” Desmond said.

  With a tremendous crash the door flew off its hinges. Up the stairs Bill charged shouting, “Have you got it? Have you got the money? Have Leo and Melody got it? Are you in on it with them?”

  In his double bed, Sunny Dan was having one of his golden dreams. It was 1940 or 1944. They were in Philadelphia or Chicago and they had just nominated Roosevelt. A band was playing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Up and down the aisles they pranced, waving their placards. New Jersey had just delivered her votes for everybody’s hero, the sure ticket and the straight ticket, the savior who had led them all to the promised land of the WPA and Social Security and jobs jobs jobs for leaders like Sunny Dan to dole out to the faithful, the obedient, the loyal.

  Roosevelt Roosevelt Roosevelt. The sweetest name this side of heaven. You can have the pope, you can have St. Patrick, you can have Jesus Christ. I’ll take Roosevelt. Someone had screamed that in Dan’s ear in Philadelphia or Chicago while they were parading up and down the aisles.

  There stood the Big Man, their leader, Frank Hague, shaking Roosevelt’s hand, getting the okay for another four years of jobs jobs jobs. The okay for the prosecutors, the judges, all the guys who could make trouble. The fix, the beautiful royal-flush guaranteed fix, was in for another four years.

  Afterward up in Sunny Dan’s room there was Milly, the sexiest little Polack in Chicago, or maybe Grace, the slinkiest little Italian in Philadelphia. Now the band was playing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Sunny Dan was in the saddle, getting his reward for all the hours in the clubhouse listening to the lunkheads and the hours in the parlor and the bedroom listening to Mrs. Two Ton, his wife.

  Grace was wiggling and squirming under him telling him it was the biggest, the best. They had told him the same thing in Paris in 1918. Ooh la la, mon Dieu. Milly was on top now, swearing it was as long as a Lake Michigan ore boat.

  Wham Thump Crash. The dream was in smithereens. Sunny Dan sat up in bed, trying to pull his ninety-one-year-old brain into some sort of working order. He stumbled into the hall in his nightshirt. There were his two sons-in-law, Desmond McBride and Bill O’Toole, the two lunkheads his money and political know-how had put in charge of Paradise Beach, shouting curses and insults at the Irishman O’Gorman, in his shorts and undershirt outside his daughter Barbara’s bedroom. Barbara was screaming and sobbing inside. Desmond was peering into the room, saying something to her about being shocked.

  “Shut up,” O’Toole roared at Barbara. “I’m not interested in what you got to say. I’m not surprised you’re up to your old tricks with this guy.”

  He grabbed O’Gorman and threw him against the wall. “Where’s the money? You got the money? Someone blew Zaccaro and his boy away and the money’s gone.”

  O’Gorman shook from head to foot like a gaffed fish. “I was here all night. I haven’t left the house since you saw me in the door.”

  “Where’s your wonder boy? Mr. Dead-Eye Dick?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not his keeper.”

  “He could be your keeper,” O’Toole snarled. “He could be running for the goal line right now. He could be halfway to Mexico.”

  Sunny Dan got the football slang, but O’Gorman missed the idea of a keeper play entirely. “I don’t have a keeper. I’m
an officer of the Irish Republican Army,” he huffed.

  “Kilroy’s not in his room,” Desmond McBride said. “We already looked.”

  “How much money is missing?” Sunny Dan said. Maybe he could put it all to rights by replacing it. They could mortgage the house. The house was worth at least two hundred thousand. He hated to see all this screaming and yelling in the middle of the night. Poor Barbara didn’t know what was going on and was scared half to death.

  “A million and a half bucks,” Bill O’Toole said.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Sunny Dan said. “Who does it belong to?”

  “Tommy Giordano.”

  Sunny Dan staggered back to his bed. He suddenly felt 191 years old.

  Mostly snookered, Billy Kilroy staggered along the beach. He had fallen off the boardwalk and lay unconscious in the sand for a good hour at least. But that was all right. That had happened to Billy before. It didn’t matter to the Yanks. They expected him to get drunk. They thought it was funny. They thought he was something out of a movie. Especially the big one, the Professor, they called him. Billy didn’t like him. He was a goddamned Englishman. Oxenford. An egg-sucking English name. He didn’t buy him a single drink, typical English tightwad.

  The Irish-American Yanks paid for Billy’s whiskey and listened to his Belfast bullshit. They were good enough sods, even if they didn’t have the political education of a cabbage. They weren’t like the wiseass B-Special he was living with, Mick O’Day. He looked at Billy like a cop. He was trouble; something in Billy’s gut told him Mick was trouble.

  The guns were the thing. Billy told them about the guns they were going to bring back, the right kind of guns this time. Handheld surface-to-air thingies that’d blow the British helicopters out of the air. Maybe blow up an Aer Lingus plane the same way. Show the fog-feeding southies their time was coming too. But he didn’t tell them any of that, it was only what he wanted to say. He only told them enough to keep the drinks coming.