Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  “You’re drunk!”

  Jackie sat up in bed, those lovely breasts lifting their nipples to his hungry hands like young deer welcoming the dawn in the Pines.

  “Aw, Jackie. I jus’ wanta—I mean—”

  “Get out. I don’t let anybody touch me while he’s drunk.”

  Jesus, who could he tell? Who would believe they killed poor old Sunny Dan? Who could believe what these IRA communist bastards were pulling off? A million and a half Mafia bucks worth of heroin or cocaine or some goddamn thing. To buy missiles to shoot down British planes and helicopters. His Uncle Bill, his Uncle Desmond, up to their eyes in a deal like that? Bill said it was to clear his goddamn gambling debts, he didn’t give a shit for the IRA. So what? So you cleared your lousy debts and gave Ireland to these communist bastards?

  Except they weren’t bastards. His mother was in love with that smoothie, Tyrone Power O’Gorman. She was in the sack with him every night. The other guy, Billy Kilroy, he was like Minus One Haines, the little marine in his Parris Island company. Minus One had been a loser from the start. He tried so goddamn hard but he never made it. You could see why. Someone had told him he was a loser from birth. Kilroy was a loser from Belfast.

  Mick reeled back to his car. Who could he tell? No one left now but the Professor. You couldn’t tell the FBI. You couldn’t tell the state cops. They’d put Uncle Bill in jail. He didn’t want to see Uncle Bill go to jail. He didn’t want to see him go down for the count. He just wanted to tell someone. It was exploding inside him.

  He found the Professor at the Golden Shamrock, half in the bag as usual, holding forth on the failure of Western civilization. Mick tried to tell him what was happening. Alex Oxenford was not having one of his better nights. Instead of listening to Mick, he started telling him to stop drinking, to straighten out his head once and for all and do something with his life beside drive around in that stupid patrol car.

  “Listen,” Mick said. “Somethin’ really bad’s goin’ down, you get me? It’s so bad I need advice.”

  “You’ve never taken any advice from me before,” Oxenford said.

  “I know. Because I thought you were full of shit most of the time. But now I need to talk to someone.”

  “Try Father Hart. Or your mother.”

  “My mother!”

  Mick drove into the Pines to Pop Oxenford’s. He got the old man out of bed. He had done it before, when he first came back from Nam and thought about killing himself. He’d go out there and sit and talk to him with the gun on the table. Pop was the only one who knew the whole story of him and Trai and the court-martial. Pop was the only one who knew what had happened when the photographers and newshounds had come rushing to Binh Nghai to tell everyone how the Viet Cong had overrun the fort.

  As if the VC had ever overrun anything. They shot people in the dark, but it was the NVA, the goddamn North Vietnamese, who did the overrunning. Anyway, it didn’t matter, six marines were dead, his men, and he should have died with them. The next day Phac told him about Trai and her father. It drove him crazy. He told the reporter from the LA Times to hang around, he’d see some fireworks tomorrow.

  That night Mick and Phac waited in the safe hooch down the river where Trai met Le Quan Chien and blew about twenty holes in him. The next day at noon Mick walked up to Trai’s hut with Le’s head in his hand and threw it in the door and asked her how much she was going to pay him.

  The reporter took it all down, his cameraman took pictures. It didn’t matter, Mick was crazy with grief and revenge. That night he watched Phac hang Trai’s father in the ruins of the fort. Next Phac started tying a hangman’s knot around Trai’s throat.

  No, Mick had said, no, and backed it up with his M16. He had let her live for some crazy, romantic reason. For the way she had cried and followed him into the lane saying, “I didn’t love him. I loved you.”

  A month later with the fort rebuilt and the VC on the run—without Le Quan Chien they fell apart—the big shots in the dry-cleaned uniforms arrived from Saigon with the reporter’s story in their hands. They asked people in the village if it had happened, but no one remembered anything. No one but Trai. She told them it was true. She tried to tell them it was her fault, but that was the last thing they were interested in hearing. They just wanted to confirm that Sergeant Michael Peter O’Day was guilty as charged of mutilating an enemy corpse.

  “Mutilating?” Mick said. “Mutilating? I cut off the son of a bitch’s head and I should have cut off his balls too and made her cook them for supper. I hung his goddamn corpse in the village square and let it rot there for a week. What else do you want to know?”

  It was perfect. He got exactly what he wanted, what he deserved, a dishonorable discharge. It was for the wrong reason, of course. But if they had given it to him for the right reason, he would have shot himself in Nam instead of waiting to think about it until he got home.

  The unreeling stopped. Mick stared into Pop Oxenford’s lined, solemn face in the lantern light. He felt as if he had been underwater for an hour. As if he had drowned and been pumped out and brought back to life somehow.

  “Aw, Pop, Pop, why am I tellin’ you all this again? You’ve heard it.”

  “Hey, Mikey, a man my age don’t sleep worth a damn. It’s the most entertainin’ story I’ve heard since Alf Burns shot twenty-two holes in one of them goddamn Navy blimps during World War II. Thought they was lookin’ for his still. Alf hadn’t even heard about the war. He never read a newspaper in his life.”

  “Pop, what the hell do you make of all this?”

  Mick had told him the story, somewhere between the time he had said good-bye to the Professor and the unreeling of Binh Nghai. “What the hell should I do?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Nothin’? The Professor says they’re goddamn communists.”

  “The Professor always was full of shit. Funny how you can spot that. I saw he was full of shit when he was six years old. I spotted that exactly right. I spotted him from the start.”

  “Nothin’?”

  “Just play the game through. You owe that much to your uncle Bill. He took a lot of heat when he put you on the force. You owe him somethin’ for that. You don’t owe the Professor nothin’. He’s never done a thing for you but shovel shit in your ears. That’s all he’s good for. So bring the stuff ashore. Finish the job. But when it’s done, get the hell out of here and take that Jewish piece with you. Maybe marry her.”

  “She hates my guts, Pops. She’s still fighting the goddamn Vietnam War.”

  “So are you. Maybe if you stop, she’ll stop.”

  “I don’t love her, Pops. There’s only one woman in this lousy world I love. You know who she is.”

  “I was the same way at your age. Loved a married woman. But I didn’t let it stop me from livin’.”

  “You’re not Irish, Pops.”

  “Thank God for small favors.”

  A SLIP OF THE TONGUE

  Wearing his best black suit, a red rosary entwined around his bony old hands, Sunny Dan Monahan lay in the parlor of Corrigan’s Funeral Home in a steel-lined mahogany casket that was worth $6,000. The undertaker had rearranged his face to remove the terrified expression he was wearing when he died. He looked contented, as if he were thinking back over his long life and finding little to complain about.

  The old and the middle-aged Irish-Americans of Paradise Beach and a few of the young turned out to pay their respects to the fallen chieftain. Dick O’Gorman sat beside Barbara O’Day and listened to endless anecdotes about local and national elections that meant nothing to him. The stories were mostly about stealing votes in clever ways, by bribing or intimidating election officials.

  This was apparently a form of heroism among the American Irish. The more votes they stole, the greater the feat. It was amazing how they had carried intact to America the corrupt habits they had acquired from English landlords in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Another set of stories was less
surprising to O’Gorman. These were tales of largesse, of money loaned and favors done, a son placed in a government job, a brother-in-law rescued from a jail sentence, an aged mother admitted to the city hospital free of charge. They might have derived, with the details changed of course, from the Ireland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the heads of great Irish families presided over miniature kingdoms, with hundreds of relations, followers, poets, musicians, in their retinues.

  Sunny Dan had no poets, but the people who sang his praises in the nasal accents of North Jersey were sincere. It made O’Gorman wistful that he had been born too late to witness and perhaps enjoy this chapter of Ireland’s diaspora. While he listened and smiled, he kept seeing and hearing Tommy Giordano’s loathsome face. To O’Gorman it was the face of capitalism in all its naked venality. The Irish-American political machines had been a feudal interlude that the ruthless who-gets-what of capitalism had swept away.

  What would Barbara O’Day think of him if she discovered he had sacrificed her father to this Sicilian Moloch? She must never find out, as least as long as Dick O’Gorman was in America. And in Barbara, of course. She had fled to him for solace last night, when they were alone in the big house. Solace and something deeper, something unspoken that he was uneasily waiting to hear tonight.

  “I don’t think much of this fookin’ wake,” Billy Kilroy said. “You can barely find a drink.”

  By Irish standards, Billy was right. Corrigan’s Funeral Home had no facilities for serving liquor, and it was considered unseemly to drink in the same room with the corpse, a prohibition that astonished Billy. But a steady supply of liquor was supplied to all comers in Corrigan’s office, where Wilbur Gargan, gigantic proprietor of the Golden Shamrock, had set up a temporary bar.

  At 9 P.M. Father McAvoy arrived to say the rosary. His pants were a size too large for him and so was his coat. He was a makeshift priest if there ever was one, with his wan, humble face, his routine pieties. Father Hart was still a sick man. He sent his apologies. Father McAvoy would say the funeral mass tomorrow.

  At ten, after the last of the mourners had departed, Barbara and her sisters said a final prayer before Dan’s bier and then went home. Once more, Billy and Mick continued their drinking at the Golden Shamrock or elsewhere, and O’Gorman had Barbara Kathleen to himself. She was as wild as a teenager until he subdued her. For a few minutes she lay contentedly in his arms. Then came the unspoken thing he had sensed, between the wildness and the final surrender.

  “I have enough money now. Enough for both of us. This house is worth two hundred thousand dollars. He’s leaving most of it to me. My sisters don’t need it. We can go away. You can get a divorce in Nevada for almost nothing.”

  A cold wind blew in O’Gorman’s mind. What would this woman say and do when she found out that Dan had mortgaged the house to Tommy Giordano? She would kill him and he would not blame her. She would order her behemoth ex-marine son to kill him. Strenuous efforts had to be made to prevent her from finding out this appalling truth until O’Gorman had left America with the weapons, the wonderful weapons that would shoot down British helicopters and, if this failed to produce a troop withdrawal, British commercial planes.

  “How I’d love to go with you tomorrow,” he whispered. “But there’s something I must do first. I think I’d better tell you who I really am. I’m a colonel in the Irish Republican Army. Billy and I are here to buy guns that will be smuggled ashore here in a few days. A week’s time at most.”

  “You lied to me?” she cried, sitting up in bed, her fists clenched. He had never seen such ferocity in a woman. “That stuff about your wife was a lie?”

  “No,” he said, drawing her down against him again, confident of his mastery of the female. “That was true and now I’ll tell you another truth. I’ll go with you. Wherever you say. I’m sick of the killing. I’m ready to quit the business. But I have to fulfill this last contract. Otherwise they’d come after me. They’d track me down and kill us both.”

  “You’re not lying?” she said, almost hysterical. “I couldn’t stand it if you lied to me too.”

  Thirty years apart, the two loves, one American, one Irish, were still fused in her mind. The female of the species was far more incomprehensible than the male.

  “I’m not lying,” he said, and almost believed it. O’Gorman had told so many lies to so many women, he no longer thought of them as untruths. They were gifts, lovely illusory pearls of hope with which he draped their willing bodies for a while. Only much later would they perceive their beauty.

  Oh. Oh. Oh, spoke Deirdre in the eternal silence. You faithless bastard.

  Hearts were made to be broken, O’Gorman replied. Your IRA heroes have broken my heart and I am breaking yours. It is a triumph of justice, not revenge. Yes, when you considered the size of O’Gorman’s heart, its desire to embrace not merely Ireland but the whole battered, bleeding world of the poor, the hungry, the oppressed in its thwarted embrace, a thousand broken female hearts were justified. None of their little hearts or minds nor all of them together, including yours, my sowish wife, can approach the power and the glory of the revolution Dick O’Gorman dreamt and lost.

  Yes, lost. He faced in the silence the other thing he had seen when he’d confronted Tommy Giordano. The knowledge that the IRA were turning into thugs just like this man, extorting money from businessmen, taxi drivers, even the working poor, and spending it as they pleased. They were a long way from living in Giordano’s Italianate splendor, but he saw in communist Ireland’s future the same corruptions that had made the revolution a bitter joke in Russia, China, Cuba. Limousines and vacation houses and seven-course dinners for party members, hovels and gruel and ten-hour days for the rest.

  Maybe, incredible thought, he was telling Barbara Kathleen the truth. Maybe he was truly sick of it all. Maybe he was ready to go with her to Bermuda or Miami or Los Angeles and spend the Mafia’s million and a half dollars. Maybe Deirdre and the IRA deserved this ultimate act of unfaith.

  He grew hard again at the very thought of it. He placed Barbara’s hand on his pulsing member and whispered one more O’Gorman truth. “There’s your promise. Your promise and your fulfillment, my darling.” With exquisite care, he slipped it into her depths, into the inner world of pleasure and pride that obliterated for a little while the outer world of humiliation and frustration.

  As he stroked her, another meaning grew in O’Gorman’s mind. He was fucking them all in this supremely symbolic act, not merely Barbara Kathleen’s innocence, which deserved to be fucked because it was innocence, but the Irish-Americans who had fled the challenge of agonized Ireland to make money in America; fucking America too because these fugitives and their progeny were no longer Irish—the immense quantities of money and meat and milk and sweets they had consumed in a century had turned them into Americans, quantifiers of greed in the name of more greed and power and pleasure.

  In his Irish soul O’Gorman fucked all these things, invented by England and reinvented, polished, emblazoned, perfected, by their American capitalist descendants. He fucked this daughter of Moloch on behalf of the wretched of the earth, but ultimately out of an ancient Irish refusal to accept the world as created because in his soul he envisioned an immensely better one, a world of exquisite purity and perfection inhabited by saints.

  Ahhhhhh. His semen gushed into her body, the second coming, the best, the most prophetic kind. There you are Kathleen, there’s O’Gorman’s promise.

  The next day, Billy Kilroy groaned and whimpered about his hangover. Mick glowered at O’Gorman, making him regret he had not taken the precaution of retreating to his own room last night. The limousines ferried them to Corrigan’s for one last look at Sunny Dan. Barbara and her sisters wept and the coffin lid came down. They drove to the packed church and stood, sat, knelt, as Father McAvoy droned through the mass.

  He continued to confirm the impression O’Gorman already had: the fellow was a hopeless clod. He had trouble finding some of t
he prayers in the big, gold-trimmed altar missal. He knocked over the chalice and spilled some of the wine on the altar linens. But his sermon was touching; he pictured Dan before the bar of heaven, telling God that he had done his best to practice the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, especially charity.

  The interment was in a cemetery in the city, where the Monahan family had a plot. O’Gorman and Kilroy rode with Barbara, Mick, and the priest, McAvoy. No one had much to say until they wound through the city’s black ghetto again. Barbara said the littered streets and wrecked houses made her glad they had fled to Paradise Beach. Mick said nothing.

  The cemetery itself was a dismal sight. Many of the tombstones had been knocked over or defaced. Especially shocking was the desecration of the mausoleum of the city’s erstwhile leader, Frank Hague, who had built the political organization that had once ruled the state. The stained-glass window had been smashed, the sides spray-painted with incomprehensible slogans such as 77X-YANI. O’Gorman asked Mick what they meant and he just shrugged.

  At the grave, a thin, balding, sour-mouthed man in unpressed corduroys and a dirty sweater approached Barbara. “Sorry for your trouble,” he said.

  She stepped back as if she was afraid he might touch her. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You too, Mick,” he said.

  Mick looked at him as if he were an insect he might squash. “Thanks,” he said.

  Afterward, rolling back to the shore, O’Gorman asked Barbara who he was. “My husband,” she said.

  “He’s Mick’s father?” O’Gorman said, pretending he knew nothing about the true story.

  “Yes,” Barbara said in a small voice, almost a whisper.

  “He must have inherited all his muscles from your side of the family.”