Zwerfster Chic

by Billie Kelgren

  We arrive at an ancient farmhouse, built almost entirely out of rocks and twigs and moss and the shit you find at the back of the freezer, sitting somewhat forlornly atop a rather bleak and barren knoll that overlooks a valley where sheep run like packs of wild dogs and everything is so verdant that I wonder if the Irish travel board just goes around the country and paints things a brilliant, blinding green for the sake of us tourists because it’s what we expect of Ireland. Maggie hangs out the window as she beckons to Uncle Brick (I think that’s what she called him but her accent is rather impenetrable), a lumbering sort of man who’s stomping his way up from a paddock with his hands deep in the pockets of his coveralls. He stops and watches us in bewilderment as Maggie brings the little car around in a looping circle of the muddy courtyard. She climbs out and calls to him, waving him over enthusiastically, wanting to show off what she’s brought back from the city.

  He smiles in a manner that probably reflects the befuddled expression I’m displaying as he shakes hands with Mia. (He first wipes that hand clean on the leg of his coveralls, which are clearly not clean.) He then turns to me, thrusts his huge, not-so-clean hand out so that it hovers right before my face, and says “Feckin’ Jaysus, this wee thin’ is a dark’n, ain’t she?”

  Dragging Uncle Brick off by the cuff, Maggie speaks at him with a brogue so thick that I cannot understand the words but I understand the intent. After that, the only thing I get out of him is a sheepish grin, which I don’t mean to sound cute.

  “I am certain that you’re with the CIA.”

  Jesus, woman! Even if I were, do you think I’m going to just give up? Spill all the state secrets simply because I can no longer endure the badgering?

  A few times, I seriously consider it.

  I glance over at Uncle Brick, who leans against the large stone farmer’s sink, resting an open bottle of Heineken on top of his stomach as he stares at the slate floor beyond his feet. I can’t see his face clearly, not in the light of the single fixture that hangs down from the low ceiling near the middle of the kitchen, because even though he leans a little lower than his full height, his head is still higher than where the light can reach. He’s a good foot-and-a-half taller than me, and two feet wider. He has to dodge around the fixture whenever he crosses the room.

  The kitchen is massive, but most of it is in shadows where I search occasionally in the hope of finding Mia. I haven’t seen her or Maggie in some time. They had disappeared, going to check on Grams in the front room where an immobile woman sits under a pile of quilts and afghans, quietly watching an old CRT television with the sound off because she’s lost her hearing anyway. They have to check, Maggie said, that a log hasn’t rolled out of the small fireplace, crossed the small room, and set Grams on fire, which has happened on more than one occasion from what I can tell.

  So why are they taking so long? Are they trying to put Grams out?

  Auntie Beth repeats her accusation — for about the hundredth time — pointing her long, bony finger at me and peering down its length as if it’s a rifle and she’s shooting the spy. She’s holding herself up with one arm propped on the edge of a free-standing piece of furniture — a dish cabinet or something of that sort — that’s pushed up against the wall on the other side of the circle of light. She’s nothing more than a shape, a form without detail except for the sheep-shit-covered pair of wellies on her feet. Those I can see.

  I had politely declined the Heineken Uncle Brick had offered me earlier, and now I wish I hadn’t. I’m too tired to be drinking, but I’m also too tired to put up with this shit.

  Why isn’t Uncle Brick saying anything? He’s obviously embarrassed. I can sense it by the way he’s slouching. His shoulders started to sag about the time Auntie Beth started on her third tumbler of whiskey — the tumbler she holds carelessly with the fingertips of the same hand she’s using to point at me. The liquid sloshes, glowing from the light that the cut crystal captures and amplifies so that it illuminates the underside of her chin, making her ancient face even more scary. Auntie Beth is somewhere between eighty and a hundred and fifty.

  I still haven’t figured out how, exactly, Auntie Beth and Uncle Brick are related, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t married to one another. Not even brother and sister — they’re missing that extra bit of closeness that comes from a shared childhood. Maybe cousins. Or maybe Mr. Auntie Beth, the late diplomat husband, was Uncle Brick’s brother, meaning these two are related only by law. But then, who is Grams? And how does Maggie relate to all of them? Maybe this old sheep farm is really a madhouse and she’s its director.

  Auntie Beth is now saying that she’s certain that I’m “one of the chaps,” the phrase her husband used when referring to supposed CIA operatives in East Pakistan back in the 1950s. He would point out all the “American chaps” to his wife, as they sat in the tea rooms of South Asia, so she says she knows how to spot one now. I doubt very much that I look like anyone she might’ve seen back then, except for maybe the person serving them their tea or gin and tonics. Her husband was “one of the lads,” meaning MI6, by his own admission, but I’m guessing that he was MI6 like everyone in the Army is Special Forces.

  “They let your type in now,” Auntie Beth informs me.

  It began as a joke, Byr accusing me of being a Fed of some sort. It would change, day-to-day — DEA, FBI, ATF. He would make little jabs and smile about it, ask what the plans were for the week — surveillance, raids, going before Congress to explain another embarrassing fuck-up. Kel grinned as well, but you could never tell with him because he was always grinning, even when he was coming down on someone.

  I had been with the organization for nearly eight months, so this sudden fun at my expense quickly became tiresome. All I could do, though, was grin and bear it because I didn’t want to look like I was protesting too much. It never really went so far as to make me concerned. Kind of like how you stumble upon a weakness or secret of one of your sisters and run it mercilessly into the ground until someone starts to cry. Or they do it to you. In the end, they say that they really didn’t mean it, but you know, down deep, that they really did. But in this case, there was no Mom to run to to tell them to stop.

  I didn’t know until the investigation afterwards, as I lay in the hospital, that Byr was a 35M — Human Intelligence Collector. He was trained to fuck with a person’s head.

  Mom has always hated the name Tyrone. She finds it offensive, along the lines of Uncle Tom, Toby, and Kunte Kinte (though she loved Roots). She says it has taken on a connotation of ethnicity that doesn’t actually exist, that the name is really Irish in origin. Dad once called it False Ethnicity, a play on False Equivalency that amused him because he’s an engineer. A petroleum engineer, which is why he traveled to South Africa in the first place, to help with the early natural gas exploration off the Cape back in the sixties. (He was a rarity at the time, a black engineer, so the project manager for the team thought it would be good to bring Dad along because he believed the South Africans might be more comfortable if they included a black man, because this project manager was an idiot.) Anyway, the look he received down the length of the dining room table from Mom brought an end to his participation in that conversation. After he finished his dinner, while Mom still had us trapped there, he snuck off to the den to watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island — the black-and-white ones because he thought the show became somewhat silly when it switched over to color.

  I always wonder what Mom might make of Byrone’s name, which, according to him, came about because his mother always wanted a son to name Tyrone (it’s ethnic, I guess) and she was infatuated with Barry White while she was carrying him. (One guy in our group — I don’t remember his name, it was something stupid like Bork, or Pork — made the mistake of hinting at Barry White’s involvement in Byr’s mother becoming pregnant with him in the first place. A slight tilt of the head from Byr sent Kel over to this guy and put a round across the side of his thigh. Fucking idiot.)

  Shit, when Aunti
e Beth starts going on about the dark boys who were the servants in their home in East Pakistan, I wish Uncle Brick would just get over himself and say something. Any damned thing! (Though I keep imagining that anything he might add to the conversation would primarily consist of “Feckin’ Jaysus…,” which, at this point, would not only be acceptable but I’d say downright appropriate.)

  The dark boys were even darker than me, according to Auntie Beth. She’s on her fifth glass of whiskey, at least, and I’m hoping that the next swallow will finally shut down her brain and send her sprawling onto the slate. This woman’s stamina is amazing. And the cabinet she leans against is made of much sturdier stuff than it looks.

  She tells me of how they had one dark boy who was very lovely. Very precious to look at. He would help me undress, when it was hot and Colin was away on duty. She pauses to cool her leathered cheeks with the side of the tumbler. Not that anything untoward happened, mind you. Such things were never done back in the day. Not with the darkies. At least, not among proper women of the Empire. (Yes, she says “of the Empire” and, yes, she means “white.”) Her tone, though, hints that she kind of wishes that she hadn’t been so proper, back in the day.

  Holy shit! We traveled over three thousand miles to end up in the kitchen of a regret-filled, horny old racist sheep farmer.

  Jesus, Grams better be crispy cinders at this point!

  Mom always considered it unfortunate, my coming to the States about a year after the original airing of Roots. She thought it would’ve been perfect in helping me assimilate into black American culture, to have an understanding of what it meant to be a minority in my new country and still have pride in my heritage. I really didn’t understand, seeing that I didn’t speak English when I first arrived, only Afrikaans. I also couldn’t point out to Mom that I was coming from a country where Blacks and Coloureds were the majority and still were treated like shit.

  Anyway, when it finally came on in reruns, I experienced the entire series with the benefit of my Mom, over my shoulder, providing commentary, explaining the subtleties of the American language that were still beyond me. Up until that point, that entire year, she seemed to keep me at a distance. What few hugs I received were stiff and awkward. She still didn’t know what to make of me. During the week of the show, however, she touched me lightly on my shoulder, to draw my attention, which led to even greater familiarity between us so that by the end, when she took me in her arms and held me with a vaguely warm-hearted hug, I started crying. She thought I was overwhelmed by the show.

  It was also the beginning of my life-long infatuation with LeVar Burton, so that half a decade later, when Reading Rainbow appeared on PBS, I was watching it every day, from high school on through into college. His smile was my guilty pleasure. I didn’t watch him on Star Trek, though, because, you know, it was science fiction stuff, but I sometimes found Dad watching it in the den and I would pause when the guy LeVar played came on. But it really wasn’t the same person. I couldn’t see his eyes. Maybe it was his eyes that I found so enticing.

  Anyway….

  “You are with the CIA. I know it.”

  Fucking kill me!

  Or kill her!

  Jesus, I miss the feel of a weapon on my hip.

  The next time I call Bouchard, I’m thinking of telling him that I give up. I’m coming home because East Boston is far preferable to this. I still don’t know what the fuck we’re doing — there, or in Belfast, or in Dublin. What do they think Mia is up to anyway? Bouchard never told me. He told me very little because he — or they, or the Pope — do not want to prejudice my reports. So how am I supposed to know if my standing here, taking this shit off this old drunk, means a damned thing to anyone but me?

  “She’s not CIA.”

  I jump, not expecting to hear anything coming from behind me, and Mia coos an apology when she sees how much I’m startled. She and Maggie enter together but Mia comes around the massive table I’m leaning against and takes a place at my side, putting her arm across my back so she can rest her hand on my good shoulder. Maggie crosses under the light to Uncle Brick, accepting two bottles from him and bringing one over to Mia. She then steps back, waiting, as they all are, because of the way Mia had made the statement. There’s a sense that she has something more to add. They’re watching her, watching me, and I can only glance around at the shapes of people in the shadows. Auntie Beth is leaning forward in anticipation, or the alcohol’s finally getting the better of her and she’s about to land flat on her face. I’m hoping for the latter, even if it’s mean, but she shows me that it’s the former by lifting her tumbler in front of her face and peering down that damned finger at me again.

  Say it, you horny old woman! “Pew! Pew!”

  “She’s FBI.”

  There’s a moment where no one responds, until Uncle Brick gives a snort and shakes his head in disbelief as he takes another swig from his bottle. Auntie Beth smiles, her face looking demonic the way it’s half in the circle of light, jabbing her finger in my direction to say I told you so. Maggie stands there, in the middle of the floor, looking around as though she’s just found herself the only one in the room who isn’t in on the joke.

  I pull the hair on my left side forward, hiding the scar that must be standing out dark and terrible because I can feel my face become pallid. My fingers are suddenly numb, swollen. I don’t look at Mia, so I can’t see whether she’s being serious, but she lets me know with a gentle squeeze of my shoulder.

  She’s serious.

  5

  Dundalk — Larne — Cairnryan — Newcastle upon Tyne — North Sea

  When Mia comes in, some time after the scene in the kitchen, she comes over to where I lie on the floor and surprises me, her face hovering over mine. She’s crouching down, beyond the top of my head, so we’re looking at one another upside-down through a long, dark tunnel created by her hair. She regards me, as she does, and I remain quiet, but she has to hear my heart pounding because it’s the damned loudest thing in the room. She’s waiting for me to say something.

  “How long have you known about me?” I ask quietly.

  She gives me a look of feigned surprise and asks, “Do you really think I’m so silly that I would not check up on you? There’s a wiki page, you know.”

  I take a moment to think upon this and am about to say something else when she quickly leans down to give me a peck on the forehead.

  “Now go to sleep, bokkie.”

  And that’s all that’s said about the matter.

  Some time after the lights are out, while I lie there and the house cracks and pops as it cools, there’s movement — a door opening, creeping down the hall, the door to our room hissing on its hinges. Maggie wakes Mia using that fake whisper where the words are flattened but the volume is as loud as normal. After a few moments of exchange, Mia and Maggie leave the room together and the floors creak up the length of the hall until the door at the far end closes, three times, because it’s not set right in the frame.

  I lay there, marking time — one of the more useful, most used skills learned in prison — trying to figure out my next, best course of action.

  And I wonder what they’re doing.

  In the morning, as it just becomes light outside, she returns and slips back into bed. For a while, I listen to her slow, steady breathing as I wait for it to become brighter outside than inside the room. I sneak off to the bathroom and when I come out, Mia is gone, so I creep downstairs and find her sitting in the kitchen at the big table. The room looks very much different — sort of dim and fuzzy, desaturated of color by the morning light pressing in through the thin curtain covering the window over the sink. Things are smoky, but not as scary; dream-like, but no longer a nightmare.

  I can't look at her, so I go over and peer out the window and see that the sun is still beyond the horizon. I ask if she wants to go for a walk, to watch the sun rise over the Irish countryside, and I catch myself laughing, because it’s not a phrase I imagined myself ever saying
. She smiles warmly at me because I have finally broken the last of the tension that lingers between us. She says that she would love to and we find heavy coats hanging from pegs along a short hallway that we take to wrap ourselves with. They stink of sheep, of course. Everything stinks of sheep.

  As we’re turning ourselves around in circles, trying to figure the best way to get outside, Maggie appears, sees what we’re doing, and asks to join us. I hesitate, because I really wish she wouldn’t, but after giving me a glance, Mia invites her along. We then spend the entire walk down the long jagged dirt-and-gravel drive to the front gate with the three of us in a row — Mia in the center, Maggie on her left, with her arm slipped through Mia’s and doing all the talking, and me on the right so that my hair falls between me and them.

  I kind of hate Maggie at this point.

  I remember the Pan Am bags — the tall blue ones with long handles that people wore over their shoulders so that the bag was jammed up under their armpit, pressed into their side like it was stuffed full of cash and jewelry, or hash and heroin. I guess they could’ve been full of cash. Maybe that was how money was laundered back in the day, before there was an internet to move it about electronically. Maybe they did it all by Pan Am bag.