by Fred DeVecca
At the pub, we pushed several tables together and all sat down, the rushing of the river behind us loud and clear through the windows. Robbie was talking about having to repair the roof on his yurt, which was damaged in last week’s storm. Brian asked where one obtained yurt-repair parts. Stanley suggested the Yurt Mart. I said I preferred Yurts-R-Us. We all laughed.
Then the singing started. Some sea chanties at first, then a few tearjerkers about dead dogs and dead babies. I led us all in “Sorrows Away.” The harmonies shook the rafters. As Danny began leading us in singing “Ale, Ale, Glorious Ale,” two figures entered the room—Mooney and VelCro.
They sat at the table next to ours. Mooney was in his brooding hipster black watch cap and matching black shirt and jeans. VelCro had on her usual diaphanous scarf-as-veil and sunglasses, but otherwise she wore a different costume—a long, flowing, flowered and colorful peasant skirt and matching frilly top. On her feet were hiking boots and blue-and-green-striped knee socks.
Her garb did little to hide her stunning beauty, with wisps of red hair curling out from the edges of her veil. Still, her body carriage and demeanor did not support the image of stylish, upscale starlet. Instead, it helped her fade into the Shelburne Falls goatherd-as-heartbreaker aesthetic. No one would ever discern a Hollywood vixen through those duds and in that tiny, frail, unsure-looking child.
They were both sipping from glasses containing clear, fizzy liquid, with lime on the rim. VelCro had a bowl of nuts in front of her. She’d slowly picked one up, gaze into it as if it revealed the world, and then put it into her mouth.
That’s when I saw it: she was the Nutting Girl made flesh. She didn’t seem like the type to go throwing her nuts away for some jovial, singing plowboy, but she had the look of someone who could, in an instant, toss everything in the world away and be gone. Just as she had a few weeks before when she disappeared into my theater.
The way Mooney kept her close told me he saw it too. He leaned in toward her when he spoke and touched her on the shoulder. Once, he brushed a wisp of red hair from her eye.
The singing continued. Mooney even gamely joined in on the choruses.
Slowly, the rest of Mooney’s people arrived. It was the entourage I had seen him with that first day in town, all ten of them, dressed in mandatory West Coast black. They set up camp by pulling a few tables together beside Mooney and VelCro. Now we had a crowd crunched together like sardines there in the tiny back room of the West End.
There were two contrasting tables squashed together—the Morris guys in whites and the film crew in blacks. A bond of sorts was forming between the “black table” and the “white table,” a bond forged by song. I was sure they had never before heard the songs we were singing, but the choruses were easy to pick up.
Michael sang “South Australia,” which is better known to the public at large, and they joined in on this too, even getting a little rowdy and demonstrative on the “heave away, haul aways,” brandishing beers in the air, spilling more than a few suds.
“Didn’t do this stuff in the monastery, did you?” said Stanley.
“Well, actually … yes, we did. Where do you think I learned to sing?”
“Wasn’t that like all Gregorian chants or something?”
“No, we sang lots of stuff.”
“Songs about ale and pirates?”
“Not so much. We did sing about dead babies though. And dead dogs.”
It went on till quite late, the two tables communicating wordlessly. Well, wordlessly unless you count the words in the songs. We never spoke to them and they never spoke to us. Instead we sang. Some things transcend speech. Like music. Like song. That’s something I learned in the monastery too.
I never approached Mooney’s table—I was having too much fun—and neither he nor VelCro approached me.
Well after midnight, as the party wound down, I was navigating my way back from the men’s room, located inconveniently through the kitchen and down the stairs. At the top of the stairs, away from the rest of the group, stood Mooney like God making sure no riffraff snuck into heaven.
“This is a fun town. We like it here. We’re coming back. We’re going to shoot the film here.”
“Good. Make us look cool.”
“We’ll do that. You want another job?”
“I’m retired, Mooney.”
“You made yourself un-retired before. I need you to do it again.”
“What for? The girl’s not missing.”
“I want her to stay that way. I want you to keep an eye on her when we shoot.”
“She must have bodyguards, right?”
He nodded. “Sure, up the wazoo. And assistants, and companions, and aides, and friends, and boyfriends, and girlfriends, and hangers-on, and assorted people who I don’t know what-the-hell they do. But she doesn’t have anyone like you.”
“You mean a washed-up alcoholic, depressed and desperately lonely former detective and monk?”
“Yeah, exactly. A washed-up alcoholic, depressed, desperately lonely former detective and monk who knows every person and place and corner in this burg, who knows if something looks off-kilter, or sees something that shouldn’t be there, or feels vibes that just aren’t right. And who’s already proved to me he knows what he’s doing. Someone very much like you.” He paused. “I pay very well too.”
I didn’t ask how much.
“Don’t you want to know how much?”
“When I work, I don’t really do it for the money. I generally do it as a favor for people I like. If they pay me … great. If not, well, I survive.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“I hardly know you, Mooney.”
“I like to be liked. What can I do to make you like me?”
I remained silent.
“I’m covering your bar tab tonight. I got it. For you and your whole crew. Tell them to drink up.”
“That’s great, Mooney. Thank you.”
“The high school is getting a new scholarship fund to send poor kids to college.”
I looked at him quizzically.
“I got it. It’s on me. Check with your school board. They’ll confirm it. Sent them the check yesterday.” He thought for a moment. “Well, actually, they might not confirm it. I did it anonymously. I don’t need the glory. Told them to keep my name out of it. But I can show you the canceled check when I get it if you want. If you need proof.”
“I don’t need proof. I trust people. You’re a hell of a guy, Mooney.”
“Yeah, I am. Think about a price. Everybody’s got a price.”
What was my price? I hadn’t thought about that for a while. I’d have to cogitate over it.
I made the five-minute walk home up the Hill of Tears, ran Marlowe around in the yard, read some James Joyce, and fell asleep. I told myself I wouldn’t think about Mooney’s offer, or Mooney’s question, until the next day.
I didn’t feel like thinking just yet.
Chapter Seven
Strange and Wonderful Things
The next day, once again, thoughts of the increasingly enchanting Clara began to eclipse thoughts of Mooney and VelCro, and my walks past her house became even more frequent.
I walked by in the morning, and around noon, but at 9 p.m., I lucked out. It was dark, but lights were on both downstairs and up. I turned my head to the right, hoping to see a lovely face appear semi-magically out of a window. Instead, the lovely face—or at least the woman with the lovely face—tapped me on the shoulder.
There she was, Clara, holding a bag of groceries, carrots peeking over the top with their green leaves looking perky and fresh, just like she did.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I replied.
“Imagine running into you in this neighborhood.”
“I just live up the hill.”
“Well, then, it’s your ’hood too. That must be why you walk by here twenty times a day.”
We stood there. I smiled at her.
“Want
some carrots?” she asked.
It would be hard to say no to her, so I said “Sure.” In truth, I didn’t like carrots.
“There’s wine in here too. Wine and carrots?”
Now that, I had to say no to. “I’ll stick to carrots, if you don’t mind.”
“How could I mind? More wine for me.”
Soon we were seated on a comfy couch as Clara sipped chardonnay and I munched a crooked organic carrot. Penelope sang sweetly in the background. Our bodies weren’t touching, but I could feel Clara’s warmth and an occasional wisp of softness on my arm.
I didn’t know what to say. I’m not great at small talk. I preferred big talk—who are you, why are you here, why am I here, what makes your essence, what moves your soul, what do you see as the true nature of God?
“Mmm, good carrot,” I said.
“I’m a nurse,” she replied. “Weren’t you going to ask?”
“Oh, sure.”
“I mean, isn’t that usually the first question people ask—what do you do?” She giggled. “We’ve chatted before, but until now, we’ve never really tried to get to know each other. So, yeah, before you ask—I’m an emergency-room nurse.”
“That’s good. I like nurses. But somehow I feel like I already know what you do. You’ve raised a good kid, you chase birds around.”
“What do you do?”
“Nothing. I’m retired.”
“You run a movie theater.”
“Yeah, I guess. That’s mostly fun, a hobby. I don’t consider that a job.”
“And you chase birds around too.” She smiled, revealing a small but endearing gap between her front teeth.
“I like birds.”
“Me too.”
We had birds in common. And carrots. And I liked her forthrightness, her graceful movements. Nothing self-conscious about her.
“I was there the night you died,” she said.
And something else.
I did not reply.
“Yeah. You were dead when they rolled you in. They froze you. And then they stitched you back up.”
“And here I am.”
“And here you are.”
And there we both were.
I took a bite of carrot. We both laughed. Her laughter was open and natural, musical. Like her.
“I was shot. One day on the damn job and I was shot. Nobody gets shot in Shelburne Falls.”
“Is that why you retired?”
“That’s why I retired as a cop. That’s why I retired from pretty much everything. Dying pretty much takes the wind out of your sails. I was a cop for one day. Then I was a detective for twenty-five years.”
She leaned forward, giving me a whiff of her clean scent—soap and maybe a scented shampoo. “What kind of detective?”
“A private one. A very private one. I was licensed for a few years. Then I let that lapse. I just couldn’t follow rules anymore. Couldn’t do much at all anymore. But, finding things? That I always could do. So I kept doing favors for friends. Sometimes they paid me. Sometimes they didn’t. Now I’m retired from that too.”
I could see her hesitation. Perhaps she didn’t know how much to ask. Finally she asked, “What was it like to be dead?”
“Can we talk about birds some more?”
“No.” She kept her tone light and playful, waggling an index finger and slowly shaking her head.
“Carrots?”
She inclined her head. “If you want.”
“No. I’ll talk about being dead.” I crunched on the carrot before continuing, “It wasn’t like anything. I don’t remember anything.”
“And how about coming back to life?”
“Nothing. I just woke up a couple days later with my chest sewed up.”
“And life since then?”
“Same as life before then. It’s life.”
She frowned, a bit disappointed, perhaps. “No insights?”
“I’m alive. That’s an insight. I could tell you that now I see every day as a gift, but that’s too tidy, isn’t it?”
“Too tidy for you.”
“I always saw every day as a gift. That’s not too tidy for me.”
Penelope chirped. I took a bite of carrot. Clara sipped her wine.
“It’s a miracle that I’m sitting here with you,” I said.
“No, Frank, it’s science. I’m a medical person. It’s pure science that they knew where and how to stitch you up. They knew how to freeze a heart and unfreeze it.”
“My heart’s been frozen and unfrozen many times.”
“Yeah, mine too.”
“But yes, I understand about the science,” I said. “That’s not what I’m talking about, though.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her hand grazed mine.
“That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the miracle.”
She touched my hand again, stroked my palm and each individual finger. “Yes. There are miracles, Frank. But these things are not miracles.”
“What are they?”
“They are strange and wonderful things.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Miracles are rare. They seldom, almost never, happen. Strange and wonderful things? They happen all the time.”
I told her about my other miracle. “I was blind once,” I said.
This statement normally shocks people, mildly at least, but not Clara. She just looked at me and said, “Okay, go on.”
“I had a degenerative condition. My eyes got worse and worse. Then I went totally blind. I was blind for three years. Then one day I woke up and I could see. Just like that, I could see again.”
She was still looking at me, and this time she did not have to tell me to go on.
“The doctors had no explanation. It was a miracle.”
“Okay,” she said, “maybe it was. I don’t discount any possibility in this big, weird world. But as I said, I’m a medical person and I need to hear more scientific details before I can concede that it’s a miracle.”
“But it was just one eye, Clara. Only one eye regained sight. I’m still blind in the other one. What the hell is up with that? Are there half-miracles? Or are miracles like being pregnant—it’s either a miracle or it isn’t?”
“I can’t answer that,” she said. “Miracles seem to be your field, not mine.”
“I don’t know the answer either,” I said.
We continued talking about miracles and strange and wonderful things.
Other miracles occurred that night.
We were sitting very close, and then we touched some more, and then we kissed.
Then, my shirt was off and she ran her finger slowly, gently, across the jagged scar running up my chest.
We lay there on the couch. I was close to another human, a beautiful one.
We made love.
Then it was morning and I left, fairly flying up the Hill of Tears.
Chapter Eight
Yes
Real life tends to crowd miracles away, and the next night I was sitting at the bar of the West End Pub. Mooney, who was there when I arrived, sat next to me.
It was a tiny L-shaped bar, and we were nestled in the corner next to the door they never use. Mooney handed me an inch-thick stack of white sheets of paper, bound together by two brass clasps. On the cover, it read A SHOUT FROM THE STREETS—an original screenplay by Nicholas Mooney.
“Read it.”
“Okay. But why? I’m not making the film and I’m not a film critic.”
“But you know film. I want to hear what you think of it. Anyway, if you accept my offer, it’ll help you do your job. We’re going to shoot the whole thing in town. You’ll be able to spot most of the locations from reading the script. Besides, I’ll fill you in on specifics as we line things up. Knowing the locations is important for what I want from you. So you can know what to look for in each one and be prepared.”
“I like the title.”
“It’s from James Joyce.”
“Funny. I was just reading Joyce.”
“You know Ulysses?”
“As well as any duffer can. It takes a lot to really know that book.”
“It’s essentially Homer’s Odyssey brought to early twentieth-century Dublin, with Leopold Bloom on a day-long odyssey through the streets and pubs. I’ve modernized it, set it in Shelburne Falls, and given Bloom a sex change. He’s now a twenty-one-year-old woman.”
“VelCro?”
“How did you guess?”
“Mooney, I gotta tell you, that sounds like it’s gonna suck bad.”
“It’s good. I’m a good writer.”
“I know you are. I love your stuff. But everyone has their limits. I mean … Joyce? Come on.”
“Just read it.”
As I sipped my club soda and idly stirred it, I was starting to come around. I could see VelCro pulling this off. She was that good. I couldn’t picture anyone else doing it, though.
“Okay, if you got Bloom a twenty-one-year-old woman, who’s his wife, Molly, and who does her soliloquy? That makes the whole book. How do you work that out?”
“Molly is Molly. Leopold, or Leonora in the film, is a lesbian. She’s married to Molly. We have that now in case you haven’t heard. Gay marriage?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about it. I live in Massachusetts. It still sounds like it’ll suck. Who plays Molly?”
“Julie. You, and most people in the world, call her VelCro. I call her Julie. People close to her call her Julie.”
I thought to myself, Maybe someday I’ll know her that well, and then I said, “Wait a minute. She plays both parts?”
“Who else could do justice to that soliloquy?”
“Nobody. But how are you going to do that?”
“They’re not in many scenes together,” Mooney said, “and it’s an easy effect to do. Remember Nick Cage in Adaptation? And did you see The Social Network? The Winklevoss twins? Fincher used the head of one actor but he had two different actors’ bodies. He scrubbed out one of their faces and digitally superimposed the first guy’s head. Filmmakers can work miracles now.”
“I prefer to think of them as strange and wonderful things instead of miracles.”
“No. We can do miracles.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “I see miracles everywhere. But not in the movies. Maybe in how people respond to movies. But not in making them.”