Max heard him go down the stairs, and he heard the clanging of the screen door as it shut behind him. In the ensuing quiet, Max could faintly hear the chittering of birds by the feeder on the back porch. Somewhere out front a car door slammed and an engine whirred softly off into the distance. Max looked at the file for a moment as it lay on the desk, then he turned it towards him and read the lettering in the seal on the front:
The Tournament
Team Blue
(USA)
Maxwell Haulden
Striker
————
Max was unique among his colleagues: he never once doubted what he was told or what he read about the Tournament, even that first time in his grandfather’s study. In five years, under the leadership of Johnnie Northern, and side by side with Nikkie Hix, he had become a ruthless striker. In all that time he never told his mother what he was doing or where he went on his extended trips. He only ever said that work called him away. They were alike in more ways than he knew, Max and Nancy, because every time he said that he was off, as he did when his pager buzzed this fifth and most recent time, she never asked questions. She hugged him and told him to be safe, and every time she said it, Max was again reminded why he could never tell her what it was that he really did.
There was nothing remotely safe about it.
Chapter Nine
IT WAS SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Belfast when Ian Finn’s pager went off. He didn’t have it on him. He never carried it on him when he was working out back, and at the time he was smoking a cigarette and sitting on a dark brown tarp, leaning against the sun warmed side of his father’s work shed taking a break. He’d been up since Mass at six in the morning. A long time.
The muggy fall weather made him sweat and the flashes of wind had then dried it alternately throughout the late morning and past noon so that his pale brow was gritty and his shirt was wet in some places and tracked with white salt lines in others. Work dust and flecks of dried paint peppered his hair as if sifted there. He was stripping the shed’s ceiling; it hadn’t been touched in a long time. Where he pushed his damp hair out of his eyes it dried wildly in big curls that looped about and behind his ears and halfway down his neck. As he smoked he watched the sun wane across the town, illuminating one side of each of the weatherworn single-story houses and rain-stained brick buildings seemingly at random, as if highlighting particular pieces of some industrial art show. He crossed his thin arms around himself and inhaled deeply in one side of his mouth before exhaling around the cigarette. His dark green eyes, muted always by the soft black bags that hung below them, reflected nothing. Not even the setting sun seemed able to pass through to them.
The shed behind him had stood derelict for five years until Ian decided to do something about it. In the last two years it had taken to slouching slightly to one side as if drunk. The lead-based paint his father coated it with a decade ago bled into the ground and was slowly killing the grass in an ever expanding circle. By now the building itself looked contagious.
As he smoked he was thinking of what Father Darby said to him that morning, in passing, as he and his mother were leaving the gray stone church with the rest of the congregation, filing slowly out under the carved eaves, their once sharp masonry now blunted by rain and time. They all thanked the old priest, as was the custom for as long as Ian could remember. As Ian received his blessing, Father Darby briefly touched him on his shoulder. “Keep your eyes open,” he had said, quietly. “I think it’s almost time.”
Only Ian heard him, and Ian simply nodded, crossed himself, and walked out into the growing light to catch up with his mother.
Everyone knew that Ian was close to Father Darby. He’d known him for almost a decade now, but none could guess at the true relationship that Ian had with the slightly stooped, white haired priest. Although Ian had been involved in St. Mary’s church from a very young age, for a long while he only ever garnered a gracious nod or a blessing from Father Darby. In all those years he hadn’t the slightest idea that the man was watching him very closely.
As a child, Ian was often teased about his father. Ian and his classmates were all far too young to understand why Peter Finn was in jail, but they still ridiculed Ian. No doubt most of the children had been told by their parents to avoid Ian, and so they did, but they weren’t told why. Some thought Ian’s dad was sick, and Ian by proxy. His hitched left arm, a minor birth defect, contributed to these fancies. Some feared to touch Ian in case they contracted his ‘wonky arm’.
He could move his left arm in exactly the same way as his right if he concentrated fully upon it, but when he left it to its own devices it tensed up and cocked itself awkwardly as if he were wearing an invisible sling. Over the years he’d tried to hide it, and in turn had developed a slightly hunched walk. When in school, Ian frequently caught the tail end of exaggerated shows the other kids put on to mock it.
Youth was hard on Ian, but he did befriend one child, a younger boy named Toby. Ian was walking home from school one day when Toby caught up with him. Ian, unused to company, stopped dead in his tracks and looked down at the small, mousey boy.
“Hello,” the boy said.
Ian looked from Toby back down the street the way he had come, and then back at Toby again.
“Hullo,” Ian said.
“You’re Ian Finn.”
“I am.”
“My name is Toby.”
Ian said nothing.
“My mother told me about you.”
“And what’s that she said?” Ian asked, halfheartedly stepping forward a bit, having long ago tired of the action needed to back up his words.
“Said your father’s a patriot,” Toby said, backing up a bit and hunkering down in front of Ian as if he’d heard a loud noise and didn’t know where from. Ian stopped and stepped back. He looked down at the ground, confused and slightly ashamed for the cowering boy. Both were silent.
“D’you live over there?” Toby asked, pointing down the road, still hunched.
“Yes.”
“So do I.”
And so they became friends.
But Toby was too small to help Ian in the schoolyard. When the other boys tried to bait Ian into fighting, Toby slinked back into the wall and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye. Ian expected this, however, and never held it against him, but Ian wouldn’t allow himself to do nothing, even if it was only to vehemently repeat You don’t know my father again and again. He was often galled by a particularly spiteful and vicious boy named Matthew, who worked himself into a splotchy faced redness as he berated Ian, smiling ever broader as he went.
“I know he’s in The Maze,” Matthew said.
“You know nothing about him.”
“That’s all I need ta know”
“You know nothing about him,” Ian repeated wearily. He would often be sitting during these interchanges, his back against the brick wall of his classroom, and the boys would look down on him. He sat simply, his knees propped up near his chest where he could rest his gimped hand upon them and it would look normal. It was a vulnerable position, but Ian’s apparent lack of concern confused Matthew. Matthew could strike out at Ian if he wanted, he could spit on him or kick him easily, but the ease with which he could do it was the very thing that kept him from it.
Ian rarely looked at Matthew and his posse when they taunted him, but he always looked at whomever he addressed. He would squint into the light and peer up, always seeking direct eye contact. His eyes betrayed nothing: no fear and no hate. This also disconcerted his aggressors. After Matthew had the last laugh, he and the rest of the boys would generally leave him alone, and Toby would come wandering back to sit down next to Ian again in silent companionship.
During the early spring of his final year in middle school there was a particularly long stretch of gray and rainy days. Ian awoke to rain, trudged through it to school, listened to its patter on the windows during class, and walked back home in it. For three straight weeks every jacket was damp, every cor
ridor thinly tracked with mud and water, every window fogged and dripping, and it gnawed at everyone, students and teachers alike. Despite the weather the teachers made the kids all go outside for recess, more for their own sanity than that of the students.
During these recesses all of the students huddled under the overhanging eaves of the buildings and doorways. It wasn’t long until Matthew and his friends, bored and uncomfortable, sought out Ian and Toby where they stood quietly talking and gazing out into the mist. Toby was biting his nails and spitting them out over the rail. The playground stood empty and muddy, its metallic structures dripping. The students all hung about its edges as if it was a cordoned-off police zone.
Matthew came up behind Toby and pushed him out under the roof runoff and held him there. Toby, too startled to say anything, sputtered and paled instantly.
“Hey, you all right there Tobe?” Matthew said, laughing and rubbing hard on Toby’s head. Toby scrunched down.
“Didn’t see ye there, mate,” Matthew said. “Here, come back a bit, outta the rain.” He moved Toby behind him and patted his head in mock affection. Then he stepped up next to Ian.
“Hello Ian.”
“Didn’ have ta do that Matthew.”
“Hard ta find room around here.”
Ian shook his head and looked out into the rain.
“It’s terrible they make us sit out here, right Ian?”
“It’s not so bad.”
“I bet they don’t even make yer dad run around the yard on days like this, eh?”
Ian was silent. Around him conversations tapered off. Toby moved under the doorway behind everyone, wiping his coat and eyes and smoothing his hair. Ian couldn’t tell if he was crying or just wet.
“It must be hard, being a criminal. Days like this.”
“Shut yer mouth, Matthew.”
“You only ever get that one jumpsuit, can’t get it wet.”
“I said shut your mouth.”
“One day you’ll probably end up in there with him.”
And Ian hit him.
Ian stepped out into the rain and drove his shoulder back under the eave and into Matthew’s chest. Matthew staggered back into the wall and his head snapped back into a window, feathering it around the break. In a flash Ian’s bad hand was at Matthew’s throat and his other was pushing hard on his face, as if he was trying to force his head back through the glass. The window creaked and moaned. Matthew didn’t have time to react initially, but now he tried to fight back. His hands flailed around Ian’s grip and his feet slid about on the gravel below, fighting for purchase. He tried to raise a knee, but Ian pressed himself into him, almost as if he was about to kiss him. He placed his thumb over the slight pit in Matthew’s throat and suddenly his bad hand quickly seized up, closing off Matthew’s airway. Ian never blinked, but Matthew’s eyes rolled wildly, resting again and again on Ian’s bum left hand.
“Why the surprise Matthew? It’s gimp, not dead,” Ian said, looking at his own hand as if it was something foreign and beyond his control. Ian’s voice wavered when he spoke because he was close to tears and his mouth was set in a strained frown in fighting to keep them back. He looked more sad than angry.
Behind Matthew’s head the pane of glass popped and cracked, but then several teachers descended upon them and Ian was pulled away from Matthew. Matthew was coughing violently and hugging himself and everyone else in the yard started yelling and pointing, describing the fight to everyone and no one. As Ian was pulled inside he never took his eyes off of Matthew. Suddenly Ian started to cry, and then Toby cried.
Ian was suspended for a week, but his mother wasn’t angry. She only told him that he needed to guard his feelings and that what people said meant nothing. She said his father would have been proud, but this only made Ian feel worse because he wasn’t sure if he wanted his father to be proud of him. Ian wasn’t sure of his father, and he hated people like Matthew all the more for making him aware of it. In truth, Ian knew little about his father. His mother rarely spoke of James’ incarceration, having deemed Ian too young to understand the politics. The few times he’d broached the subject directly, most often after schoolyard altercations, Mary Finn had replied truthfully and simply that some people thought James was a hero, but some also thought he was a criminal, and one day Ian would have to decide for himself. This only confused Ian further, so he dropped the subject. Instead he stole his first cigarette from Mary’s purse and went out to his father’s old shed and smoked it and looked up at the cobwebs in the ceilings and absently shuffled around the gardening tools with his feet. The cigarette burned his throat, but he finished it and buried the butt outside under the dead grass so his mother wouldn’t know.
Four months later Father Darby first came to see Ian. He never recalled speaking directly with the priest for more than a few minutes, so Ian was surprised to see the man, already old, walking towards where he sat with Toby. The two were throwing pebbles at a hitch in the splintering wooden fencing that surrounded the school’s parking lot. Classes had finished, but Ian lingered to kill time between when he got out of school and when his mother finally got home from working at the stationary store in Castle Court where she was the cashiers’ manager.
“Good afternoon boys,” Darby said, looking at both in turn before glancing about at the mostly empty car lot. Although people still moved about here and there inside the school buildings, most of the rooms were dark. Ian could hear the faint hum of a vacuum cleaner somewhere inside.
“Afternoon Father,” Ian offered awkwardly. Toby nodded his small head by way of greeting.
“Getting late,” Darby said.
“We were just about to take off.”
“Need a ride?”
“It’s only a few blocks. Thank you though.”
“I heard you’re still having some trouble at school.”
Ian looked down briefly and then focused on the hitch in the post that had been their target.
“Sometimes,” he said.
“What about?”
Ian was silent.
“Ian, your father—”
“My father is a good man,” Ian said suddenly.
“... He’s more than that. James is a good friend as well. And a patriot.”
Ian looked at Father Darby for a moment. Beside him Toby coughed briefly.
“You know my father,” Ian said, more a statement than a question.
“I do. You’re right handed?” Father Darby asked, as if it was the natural progression of the conversation. Ian wrinkled his brow.
“What?”
“You write with your right hand?”
“Course I do.”
“But you choked that Matthew boy with your left hand. ‘S what yer mother says.”
Darby started towards Ian and Ian involuntarily stepped back. Both froze and Toby got up and scampered a short distance away. A hot August breeze gusted low across the blacktop parking lot, scattering small bits of sand and fluffing Father Darby’s sparse white hair. Ian heard small bits of windblown debris clack against Darby’s thick eyeglasses. Ian blinked rapidly.
“It’s all right son, I just wantae see yer hand.”
“Why.”
“I think I can fix it.”
“I’m allrigh’ with it.”
“Are you sure?”
Ian looked at Toby. Toby already had his backpack on.
“Fix it how? It’s already ‘bin looked at.”
“I would pay for it. All of it.”
Ian narrowed his eyes.
“I’ve spoken ta yer mother. And yer father.”
“You spoke to my dad.”
“I did.”
“Are you lyin’ to me.”
“I don’t lie. Ever.”
“That so.”
“It is.”
“Well.”
“I just would like tae see it. If I may. Nothin’ more son. I promise.”
Ian said nothing.
“May I?”
“My
mother? You talked to my mom?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” Ian said finally.
Darby moved over to Ian and reached out with both hands to touch his left arm. Ian slowly held it out to him with considerable effort. It still hitched up slightly. Darby cradled it in both hands like a small animal, moving it slightly about to the left and right and extending it. All the while Ian never took his eyes off of Darby’s face.
Darby turned Ian’s hand palm up and took his index finger and traced a particularly defined muscle that ran from the crux of Ian’s arm towards his pale, veined wrist. At the halfway point Ian snapped his hand back very quickly: One moment Darby held it, the next it was back across Ian’s chest like he was preparing to ward off a strike.
“Sorry,” Ian said. “That wasn’t me. It was, I mean, but it wasn’t. I didn’t mean to do it.”
“That’s all right,” Darby said, smiling broadly. “That’s perfect, Ian. Perfect.”
————
“Your pager, Ian!”
Ian peeked from around the shed. His mother stood in the doorway, a faded blue smock strung around her hips, hung low and folded over itself so that its ties brushed the linoleum floor just inside. She was splashed with something white, either paint or flour, and she wore jeans and bright red clogs of the type used often in gardening work. Ian smiled despite himself.
“Shut that damn pager up!” she yelled.
“What?”
“Are you smoking?”
“Yes.”
She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head at him.
“You could at least lie about it.”
“I don’t lie. I believe you taught me that one,” Ian reminded as he gently crushed the ember out on the tarnished broadside of his old silver Zippo lighter. The rest of the cigarette he stuck behind his ear for future use.
“Well at least do something about this pager. It’s like an alarm or something.”
Ian quickly righted himself from the shed.
“My pager? Wait, my pager?” he asked, pointing at himself.
“Who else owns a pager these days? Stop it or I toss it!”
The Tournament Trilogy Page 8