Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “The speech was Devlin’s; I think he got carried off by his own grandiosity.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “D’ye think he’d be ashamed of me?”

  Pat turned his head sideways and looked at his brother, “Devlin?”

  “No.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Aye.”

  “He loved ye Casey, he always forgave us our mistakes, he’d of forgiven this as well.”

  “I did it for all the wrong reasons, I did it because I was angry at him an’ scared of havin’ to be the man. I can’t bring the last five years back Patrick but ye have to believe that if I could I would.”

  “Then don’t go back.” Pat’s voice was barely above a whisper, as if he were afraid that if he said the words too loudly, his brother would be certain to refuse him.

  “I’m not goin’ back in the way that ye think, Pat.”

  “That’s what frightens me.”

  They were both silent for awhile after that, knowing that if they proceeded down that path they’d end up in another fight and neither had the strength for it at present.

  “I hope he has stars wherever he is,” Pat said, offering a simple truce.

  “An’ a big damn telescope,” Casey added.

  “It was an astronomer,” Pat sat up and put his arms around his drawn up knees, “that made me realize how angry I was at the two of ye.”

  “How so?” Casey asked.

  “When that man in California discovered quasars in ’63. I was so excited an’ I ran into the backyard where Daddy used to sit with his tea after dinner to tell him. I was standin’ in the alley before it hit me that it wasn’t my yard an’ there was no daddy to tell things to anymore.”

  “An’ no brother.”

  “No, no brother,” Pat agreed.

  “Quasars, eh?” Casey chuckled, “Takes a damn object a billion light years away to get yer attention.”

  “Daddy would have loved that. Think of it, out there as far as we can see are these ancient lights, light that has taken a billion an’ a half years to reach our eyes an’ we are witnessing the birth of the universe by looking so far back in time that our minds cannot even comprehend the vastness of it. When they were closer, can ye imagine, the sky must have seemed like it was on fire.”

  “An’ not a soul here to witness it,” Casey reached across the small divide between him and his brother and took Pat’s hand, remembering how small it had once been, how it had been engulfed in his own as they crossed streets and walked to school. He felt the breadth of it and the strength and knew with a sadness that shook him to his core that he could no longer protect his brother. Not from life, not from love, not from himself.

  “Are ye still my brother, Pat?” he asked and could not keep the tremble of doubt from his question.

  There was a quiet that stretched far and deep before Pat’s words travelled back to him, soft and firm, “Pari passu.”

  Casey sighed, “Ye know I could never get my head around those Latin phrases the way Daddy an’ yerself could.”

  “Side by side, my brother, side by side.”

  When at long last they felt the need to leave the damp, cold couch of ground and begin the long limping trip home Pat turned to Casey, eyes fathoms deep and said, “Brother or no, if ye break her heart, Casey I will kill ye.”

  Casey nodded, “I think ye would at that. For now though can we just get home?”

  “Aye, let’s go home,” Pat said and for one moment, it seemed very possible that they might both get there and find, for a time, some measure of peace.

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, he’s not dead but he’ll not be runnin’ round the ring again anytime soon, or I miss my guess.” The answer came from the mouth of Dannyboy Kilmorgan, a fighter of legendary reputation, who had almost thirty years previous gone out a winner and spent his time since running Belfast’s most popular gym. Sixty-five if he was a day and used to the inescapable brutality as well as the delicate finesse of his sport, still he’d never seen such precise and emotionless violence as he’d witnessed this day. And from such an unlikely source, though perhaps not so unlikely, he thought uneasily as he watched the source of the violence, still bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet as if electrically charged, not a glimmer of sweat on the man after five ugly rounds.

  Danny’s gym was famous for being neutral ground. If you came through his doors you came to box, you left your grudges, whether personal or political outside and if you were foolish enough not to you’d soon join them—outside on the pavement. Today, for the first time, Danny wished he’d turned a man away purely on appearance. For the Reverend Lucien Broughton sent a chill right to the marrow of Danny’s old, unromantic bones. Killer instinct was a term bandied about a lot in the gym and generally was meant as a compliment conferred upon a lad who had both the talent and the drive to go the distance. Today it had assumed a completely different meaning.

  He’d been very doubtful at the Reverend’s appearance, thought the man was too small and finely built, very little muscle was apparent under his phosphorescent white skin, his bones as delicate as those of a young girl. Appearances had never been quite so deceiving. He’d put Gillybear Reese in the ring with him, so called because of his girth and sweet-natured face. Gilly’d wear him out and only rough him up enough to make him realize boxing was perhaps not his natural vocation. After the first round, Gilly was exhausted and had received two uppercuts to his jaw that had knocked him to the canvas. At the end of the second round he’d a great deal of blood to rinse out along with the spit. By the third round Gilly was no longer playing but could not manage to get around the Reverend’s light-bodied dance. Lucien was fast, accurate and had a steely-eyed strength behind his blows that was deadly. By the fourth round, fighters were drifting away from their exercises and own sparring matches to witness the massacre. The fifth round was a travesty that Danny had been grateful to see end. Gilly, who possessed the unassailable head of a mule, was out cold on the canvas and the Reverend Broughton was still high and tight on his feet.

  Lucien took in the glares and furtive angry glances he received with a cool smile. “A man,” he said as he climbed nimbly from the ring, “should be prepared to fight if he gets in the ring. I am prepared.” Danny had been tempted to put the gloves on then and there and teach the Reverend a thing or two, but had refrained. He was happy to see the back end of the man when he re-emerged from the locker room, impeccable in white linen and gray flannel and took his leave of them.

  Later when it was determined Gilly had sustained no permanent damage and Danny had retired to his office to sort out his bookwork, his co-manager Tiny Brown, a wee dark nut of a man, had entered waving a sheaf of paper.

  “Did ye see this? The nerve of the bastard after knockin’ Gilly cold.”

  “Did I see what?” Danny took the sheaf of papers and felt a ball of ice begin to form in his intestines as he looked them over.

  “He’s runnin’ for this district? That’s crazy, the like of him won’t get elected here, nine tenths of the neighborhood is Catholic.”

  “Aye, but who’s to run against ‘im?” Tiny asked practically.

  Danny pursed scarred lips and frowned down at the flawless picture of the Reverend in front of him, underlined in bold letters by the improbable tag line, “A Vote For Lucien Broughton is a vote for your conscience.”

  “He’ll win by default,” Tiny said craftily.

  “Quit hintin’ about Tiny, just say it, someone is goin’ to have to go an’ give the boy on the hill a talkin’ to.”

  “Aye,” Tiny agreed, a small smile adding to the numberless creases in his face.

  “An’ I suppose,” Dannyboy Kilmorgan, never one to turn from a fight, sighed from the depths of his flattened knuckles, “it’ll be me makin’ the trip up.”

  “I suppose ‘twi
ll,” Tiny said with satisfaction.

  “A Mr. Kilmorgan in the kitchen to see ye,” Maggie said to Jamie, one rainy afternoon later, with a face on her a prune would have had difficulty imitating.

  Jamie, knowing Dannyboy wouldn’t leave the confines of the comfortable kitchen, the only room in the house he claimed where he didn’t feel like he ought to be bowing and scraping, followed Maggie’s stiff back down the hall and into the warm kitchen fragrant with the smell of lemon poppyseed cake baking in the oven and a pot of Earl Grey steeping on the sideboard.

  “His Grace Lord Kirkpatrick will see ye now, Mr. Kilmorgan,” Maggie said with sweet hostility.

  “Mr. Kilmorgan?” Jamie lifted his eyebrows at Dannyboy, no stranger to the kitchen of the Kirkpatrick home over the last twenty-two years.

  “Aye, she gave up callin’ me Dannyboy when I asked fer salt on my food last Christmas.”

  Maggie did not even deign to look over her shoulder, though the carrots she was slicing got an audible and protracted thumping from the knife.

  “Seasoning is an insult to the chef’s abilities,” Jamie said, trying not to laugh.

  “D’ye suppose a man might have hope of a wee slice of that cake,” Dannyboy said in a wheedling tone, winking at Jamie.

  “That would depend,” Maggie said, knife continuing its vigorous dance, “on precisely where ye’d like it.”

  “I always did say that’d be yer cookin’ that would get me to bed in the end,” Dannyboy said.

  “Ye’ve high aspirations in this life for such a battered old specimen,” Maggie retorted, spilling the abused carrots into a simmering pot of broth on the ancient Aga.

  Dannyboy eyed Maggie’s squat stature and ample backside appreciatively, “A mite more wide than high, I daresay.”

  “Dream on old man,” Maggie said equably and then as Jamie shook with suppressed laughter, “an’ if either of ye laugh ye’ll feel the sharp side of this knife along with yer cake.”

  “There’s somethin’ I’ve come to discuss with ye,” Dannyboy, never one to waste nor mince words, came directly to the point, shoving a piece of paper across the table at Jamie, who looked it over with no change of expression and handed it back.

  “Yes, I’ve seen it.”

  Dannyboy sighed; this was exactly the reaction he’d been fearing. How far he could push any advantage he might have from this point was debatable. Not very far he’d guess from the obstinacy, refined as it might be by the boy’s practiced concealment that had settled quickly on Jamie’s face.

  “D’ye know what it will mean to the people in that neighborhood?”

  “Why,” Jamie asked revealing a small frustration, “does everyone seem determined to act as though he and I are the only options in this game?”

  “Because if ye were thinkin’ clearly, ye’d see that ye are.”

  “Dannyboy come on, it’s a strong community with solid political ties. Can you honestly tell me there isn’t a Nationalist candidate who could stand against this man?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Danny insisted stubbornly, “I’ve a feelin’ that if this man wants to win he will, regardless of the tactics he’ll have to use to pull the vote his way. Christ, boy this is Ulster, ye know the candidates are rarely the result of a fair vote.”

  “If you’re so certain of that why come to me?”

  “Because ye could beat him, there’s no question of support, they loved yer daddy—”

  “Exactly,” Jamie said quietly, “my father, not me.”

  “An’ to be blunt, yer rich an’ pretty enough to get past the Protestant voters.”

  Jamie smiled, not entirely amused by the assessment, but taking it, as he did most things, in the spirit it was intended.

  “Flattery, in this case Dannyboy, isn’t going to get you what you want.”

  The soft soap having failed Dannyboy thought he’d best get straight to the hard tactics. “Ye used to be a fighter. What happened to that boy who wasn’t goin’ to be done down by any mealy-mouthed dirty streetfighter.”

  “That was boxing,” Jamie said, “which is not a metaphor for life, even if no one in that gym of yours realizes it.”

  “Don’t be throwin’ yer high-minded words at me.” Dannyboy said with a look that had, in the past, reduced two hundred pound brutes to jelly. “Boxing is life. An’ life, in spite of the flowers an’ poetry, is a fight from the first minute to the last. Now will ye put the gloves on an’ get in the ring or will ye hide behind yer books an’ words an’ be a coward,” Dannyboy drove the flat of one meaty fist onto the table in an effort to drive home his point. This earned him a sharp cuff across the ear from Maggie as she’d just set the tea down and he, in his desperation, had sent boiling liquid in ten directions across the table.

  Jamie, sopping up the fragrant liquid with a tea towel, was saved from answering. Dannyboy saw from his silence that he would have to resort to his final plan of attack, all out, no holds barred, pleading. It wasn’t a position he’d often found himself in and wasn’t one he’d cared for on the few occasions the necessity had arisen. He was rescued from contemplation of it by the entrance into the kitchen of a girl. Dannyboy, who was fond of saying of himself, that he was tough as ‘chewed leather left to dry in the desert’ felt weak and dizzy as though some huge fist had driven him in the solar plexus.

  “Got your coriander, and the thyme and even a clutch of bergamot,” the girl said, putting a damp bag onto Maggie’s immaculate counter, “but I couldn’t find so much as a twig of aroo-goo-lah,” she laughed and turned his way, “I have trouble getting my mouth around some words.” Dannyboy, still searching for his breath, thought there were many better uses for such a mouth than pronouncing long, foreign words. He immediately felt like a lecherous old man and turned to distract himself with the tea. In doing so, he caught a glimpse of Jamie’s face, naked with a yearning that made Dannyboy feel as if he’d stumbled drunk into the sacred inner chamber of a temple. The emotion stayed there until the girl turned and faced Jamie, who blinked and swiftly resumed his polite façade.

  “Are you going to introduce me to your guest?”

  “Of course,” Jamie said, “how remiss of me. Pamela O’Flaherty, this is Dannyboy Kilmorgan, the greatest Irish fighter who ever graced the ropes. Dannyboy, Pamela O’Flaherty, my—” he paused, face still pale, “houseguest.”

  “In perpetuity,” she said with a light mockery, “at least that’s what he’s afraid of.”

  “I have,” Jamie said, “no such fears at all.” His smile, though genuine, seemed much more akin to pain than joy.

  Dannyboy had taught Jamie boxing from the time he was ten years old right up until he went away to Oxford and to England, a move Danny had been disapproving of. In those years he’d come to respect the slim, golden-haired boy who had never, though baited, teased and taunted, for his face, his brain and his wealth, let anyone get the best of him. He’d even become a good boxer, skilled with his fists, quick with his feet and always leaving his opponent with his dignity intact. A gracious winner, an able opponent he was finally and, Dannyboy had to admit, satisfyingly well-matched. Perhaps even, he thought as he saw the girl meet Jamie’s eyes in a strange look, outclassed, outflanked and with luck, outmaneuvered. He quite suddenly saw an angle that hadn’t occurred to him before, an angle that until the last two minutes would have been dismissed as a complete impossibility. Dannyboy smiled and sat back in his chair to enjoy the fresh tea Maggie had brewed. Life, like boxing, occasionally presented a man with a clear field and well-defined options.

  Pamela had picked dreamily at her dinner and then vivisected her lemon poppyseed cake into twelve equal pieces as if she sought the answer to a riddle within its air laden interior.

  “An’ me havin’ won three firsts wid this cake an’ she doesn’t even try a bite,” Maggie said clearing away the dishes with an aggrieved air.

  “
I wouldn’t take it too personally, Maggie, she fell asleep beside her plate a couple of minutes later,” Jamie said, sipping contemplatively at a California wine he’d been sent in the hope that he would market it throughout Europe under the auspices of Kirkpatrick Distilleries.

  “Well I suppose the child did drag in at such an unholy hour, lookin’ as if she’d been dragged twice backwards through the knothole.”

  “When did she get back?” Jamie asked, sniffing the wine and classifying its topnotes as flowery but not overtly so.

  “Round noon, went straight upstairs an’ showered then came down to see what I needed for the meals an’ set back out.”

  “Pat bring her home?” Jamie asked lightly.

  “No, ‘twas his brother,” Maggie carefully stacked the translucent white china, smattered with tiny shamrocks, on a tea tray.

  “His brother?”

  “Aye, he walked her right to the door, bit bigger than Pat, bit more in the way of a man an’ less boy than his brother. Friendly sort, dark an’ bold-lookin’ if ye like the type,” Maggie, hefting her tea tray with a filmy smile, appeared as if she liked the type rather well.

  “Did he mention his name?” Jamie asked sharply enough to cut her reverie in half.

  “Aye, said it was Casey—Casey Riordan. Ye’d do well to keep an eye out for our girl, the young one didn’t worry me but this one means business.”

  “Means business,” Jamie echoed to Maggie’s back as she headed back to the kitchen to wash china, “what sort of business?”

  Maggie turned her short bulk in the doorway of the dining room, “the sort of business men generally have with women,” she said dryly.

  “That’s preposterous, she’s still a child,” Jamie said with a laugh that was distinctly lacking in humor.

  “Aye well, I suppose that would depend on the viewpoint yer bent on takin’.” Maggie said and waddled off to her kitchen.

  Jamie, taking his last sip of wine thought that it tasted suddenly quite bitter.

  ‘Never heard ye speak of where yer from or yer family.’