“Feels like I should be buying you a drink.” I took the bottle. “You did save my life, but I guess that’s why you’ve been following me.”
“Consider it a peace offering.”
“I never asked how you resurrected yourself. The newspapers said you were dead.”
“I was,” she said. “I mean I still am dead, legally at least in England, and I think Italy, but I’d have to check on that. They keep such poor records there. But that was ages ago, and now I’ve been back for nearly two years, the longest spell, well, in a long time.”
“Since prison.”
“No need to be so pointed,” she said. “That was a lifetime ago.”
“It was,” I said. “My mother’s.”
“I’m sorry over that, but you’re not angry at me or your father.” She took a drink. “It’s strange to think of him as a father.”
“You know he named his horse after you.”
“He always was a bastard.”
The first flurries began falling. A milk truck drove by and I looked around the streets, wondering if we were really alone.
She took the bottle from me. “Your father wants to talk to you, but—”
“Then he can come get me. I won’t turn him in. Not if Seamus puts a gun in my mouth.”
“Keep your head down,” she said. “I’d hate for you to have to live up to that promise. It’s no fun having a gun in your mouth. Awful for the teeth, my husband used to say.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No, your uncle has got a couple of Pinkertons looking to drag you out of town and I don’t think they care if you’re alive or not, because whatever you said to him made him nuts, so take me seriously. This is no fat shoemaker.”
—28—
I walked south on Dartry, and turned west on 11th, a road lined with seamstress’ shops and shoe cobblers. The snow piled up on my coat, while the wind stabbed my eyes and I shielded my face with my hat. My boots cut into the thin, muddy snow and I felt well balanced, like I was more in control of my body than anytime since the war. The soreness in my limbs and torso dissipated in the cold as if I’d been numbed by morphine. A car approached. I kneeled and flicked my lighter as if I was about to smoke, only standing as the car disappeared around the bend.
I surveyed the deserted street. There was nothing obviously menacing, just the same street that had been here since I was a boy. But I felt eyes on me. Pinkertons didn’t sound the bugle before the charge. I walked on and then began to jog, and finally, after I spotted another set of approaching headlights, I ran. I cut north into an alley between Garavogue and MacManus, slaloming between garbage cans in the night lit by a faint moon diffused through the storm clouds. At the end of the alley on 12th street, I listened, but I heard nothing. I stepped into the street, but a turned over milk crate sent me running into another alley. I figured it was just a cat or a coyote, but I couldn’t be sure. I ran until I was out of breath and coughing and spitting down my chin, and I kept running, until finally I reached the cobblestone alley that led to McGuffey’s.
I donned a slicker, and then entered the speakeasy, which was awash in miners and old drunks. I figured they might look at me different, take a swing at me for Forest, so when I stepped into the bar, I braced myself, but instead I was greeted with raised glasses. They were a sad lot to be sure, the horde of unwashed commemorating their fallen leader in hushed revelry and open displays of weeping, yet they seemed happy to see me. I bee-lined toward the bar, nervously sandwiching myself between Jacob and Sam, then took a pint from Lazy Eye.
“On the house,” Lazy Eye said. “All night long.”
I lifted the beer, smelling it.
“Ain’t poisoned kid,” he said. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be holding your throat closed.”
“Then why?”
“Pinkerton killers drink free,” he said. “Them are the house rules.”
A miner I barely knew, a guy named Éamon Magee, recounted to the whole of McGuffey’s how I’d killed Pinkerton Booth down in Rahillville. Said I’d plugged him twice in the face.
“Said you tried to save Ruth and her kid,” Lazy Eye said. “Said it went down ugly, fucking cocksuckers.”
I should have corrected him—it was dishonest not too—but I couldn’t put Mattie’s name out there, and, hell, if it made them all like me a little better, I’d let it lie.
But I didn’t know if my newfound reputation would ease Jacob’s anger. He stared at the blood-damp bar as if he was reading it, while Sam jostled next to me and I bought him a beer.
“That’s awfully kind of you, Neal,” Sam said. “I’m sorry about your mama.”
“I know, Sam. Can I ask you something?”
“As long as it ain’t about my Betty.”
“No, it’s not about her,” I said. “Do you remember my father, you know, before Big Hank?”
In the teetering candlelight, I could nearly see the thin man’s heart sigh. “Them were dark years, real dark. Started believin’ the world was coming to Rapture but now I know this is just the test of men’s faith.”
“I only knew him as a son,” I went on. “And I was wondering what you thought of him before, before everything. Was he like Seamus?”
“I don’t know, Neal. I don’t. For the life of me, I can’t say I ever understood your father and that’s a shame for a me because I once believed I knew the hearts of all my fellow man. Now, I’m not so sure. Not after Betty. Perhaps, it’s true that only the Lord can see into another man’s heart. Only thing for sure is he’s no longer a good man.”
“Shut it, you old drunk,” Jacob said. “Ain’t you one to talk about being a good man.”
We turned to the fat detective. “Don’t matter anyhow,” Jacob said. “Just don’t care anymore.”
“Then don’t be telling me to shut it, Mr. Detective,” Sam said. “I can still put you over the knee as is the God-given right of any father.”
“Ain’t no father,” Jacob said. “And I ain’t no detective, not anymore.” He threw his badge on the ground and moved to get up, to make a scene, I imagine, but he sat back down. He was drunk or tired or both.
“Shit, your old man is good,” Jacob said. “Man stood up, didn’t put up with no guff. Can’t say the same for any of us and what does it mean to be good man but to stand up and say to the rest of us to go fuck a pig and not care what happens after? But all of us just scared. Scared of Seamus, scared of O’Leary. Just a bunch of cowards, all of us.”
Jacob grabbed my shoulder and shook it and I felt the force of his doughboy rage in his palm.
“Fuck you,” he said. “You two-bit propaganda hack.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “You pig cocksucker.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Amidst the ordered chaos of McGuffey’s, where the men wept for the dead, where a detective pondered his guilt, where an old preacher sang sad, silent songs to his departed wife, where a one-eyed barkeep kept watch like a centurion, the bar noise picked up and a Saturday night raucousness overtook the crowd. Festivity blazed through the basement, as everyone reached that perfect state of drunkenness, that feeling after melancholy and before anger, a sort of inebriated crescendo that never lasted longer than a single round, and its resulting merriment could be seen in the suave way a pair of miners threw craps against the back wall, and it could be felt in the shake of Swift Mickey’s crutch when he dropped three Queens during a Poker game, and it could be heard in the beautiful voice of New Sligo’s oldest whore, the fifty-six-year-old patriot Daisy Fisher, who wore garters decorated in the Stars and Stripes. Everyone joined her when she stood upon a table and sang, “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”
I turned to Sam and wanted to say something sweet and meaningful to the old preacher, but he lay upon the bar asleep, so I stuck a rag beneath his head, then pulled out my own walle
t and dropped a ten-dollar bill upon the bar and told Lazy Eye that Sam could sleep for the week.
Lazy Eye took the money and nodded toward the crowd.
“Fucking Irish,” he said. “Pie-eyed at a funeral.”
He was right. It was a funeral, an Irish wake for a dead Jew.
I put my arm around Jacob. “I love you, you corrupt son of a bitch.”
“You’re just drunk.”
“No,” I said. “I really love you.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Been awful lonesome lately.”
The crowd kept on with their mirth, only pausing, only shutting up when they all heard a sharp bell ringing from behind the bar. Everyone turned toward Lazy Eye, who held a double-barrel shotgun like he’d been carrying it all day long.
Two sets of footsteps descended the rickety stairs. The light was dim, just strings of shadow and light dancing across the dirt, but I could see that the pair of men wore black suits.
Pinkertons Burnsides and Garibaldi stopped in the middle of the crowd and glared at the men to give them space. Burnsides took out a sheet of paper. “Tommy Corrigan, Raylen Hewitt, and Neal Stephens,” he said. “They here?”
Blood puttered from the ceiling. Sam wheezed. I looked over at Tommy and Raylen standing against the dartboard, their eyes fixed on the Pinkertons.
“We want no trouble,” Burnsides said. “Just them and we’ll leave you boys be.”
I picked up Miss Constance’s case because I’d already decided no one else was going to die because of me. I stood but something heavy and cold pushed me back. I turned. Lazy Eye’s shotgun rested on my shoulder. I wanted to say something noble, but Lazy Eye took that choice from me. I looked around: slowly, almost imperceptibly, a score of miners inched, hobbled, and limped their way in front of me, so that I could hardly see the Pinkertons. As the blood dripped onto the miner’s slickers like a symphony of tapping fingers, the Pinkertons whispered to one another, figuring on what to do.
Burnsides coughed, then pulled his hands from his pockets, revealing a revolver. “I don’t want no trouble from you, nigger. This ain’t your business.”
A gun fired into the dark. I pulled Sam to the ground as more shots were traded. A miner tumbled over me. I covered the old preacher’s head with my body and looked out as feet shuffled through the blood and I tried to catch of sight of who was shooting whom, but all I saw were boots, as was my lot in life.
The mirror behind the bar exploded sending glass to my back, and Sam, awoken from his dreams of parishioners and lost wives, squirmed beneath me and screamed, “Red Sea. I’m drowning in the Red Sea.”
The gunfire stopped and a humming sang in my ear and Jacob stood in the orange light holding a revolver, with two Pinkertons splayed at his feet.
Lazy Eye laid his shotgun on the bar. “Everyone alive?” he hollered. “Check yourselves for holes.”
I turned to the miner who’d tripped over me—Lyle Macarthur—but he was fine, only falling because of his bum knee. I helped him up, and then walked over to the Pinkertons, their blood mixing with that of the animals. I reached into Burnside’s coat and pulled out his billfold and handed it to Lazy Eye.
“You didn’t have to—”
“Shoot your uncle’s Pinkertons?” Lazy Eye said. “Shit, I’d do that for free.”
Lazy Eye pointed at Jacob. “Take them upstairs and feed them to the hogs. Can’t be stepping over dead Pinkerton all night.”
Jacob hoisted Burnsides over his shoulder, while another miner followed with the remains of Garibaldi.
“Now you.” Lazy Eye pointed at me. “Back here.”
We walked into the storeroom where Lazy Eye handed me a candle, then stooped over trunk, removing a gun and pushing it into my palm.
“Your father came by earlier,” he said. “Said to give this to you if I thought you’d need it. I think you do.”
It was a .36 caliber Colt revolver.
“Whatever your old man has planned, I think he could use your help.” His eyes glanced upstairs.
I retreated to the bar to fetch Miss Constance’s case, but when I picked her up, I heard the grating of glass and I bent over and felt sick and knew she was dead and I was again a photographer without a camera. I imagine I was crying when I laid the case on the bar, taking her out of her home, piece by piece.
I took out the film and Lazy Eye dropped Miss Constance into the trash can. It can end that quickly.
I walked up to Rochelle Street. At the corner, I examined the line of cars. An engine turned over and a car’s lamps illuminated. I walked toward it and stepped onto the road and opened the passenger door of my old car, the one I’d left at the jailhouse. My father was in the driver’s seat.
I sat beside him and the old anarchist drove east toward the plains. I felt my gun. I hadn’t owned one since Belgium, and, like that time, this gun belonged to another man.
Belgium
It was during my third day of searching for Lorraine that I came across the farmhouse with the two dead women in the vegetable garden. The farm stood alone on a short plain enclosed between two hills. At one time, the farmhouse had been painted bright red, but now it seemed rusted in the dusk light, like a locomotive abandoned in the desert. I paused on a hill and took out Miss Constance. The camera’s stout metal frame made a poor weapon. For the first time since I’d followed the French army east during that joyous summer in 1914, I wished I carried a gun.
Beneath the salvo of the German and English cannons and the rifle volley of the men rooted in trenches, a breeze rustled the short spring grass and crows squawked from tree limbs like a shrill chorus; that those limbs appeared aflame as they eclipsed the sun setting into the Somme River Valley; that I’d seen an old man hanging from a similar limb a mile back; that I only had a vague idea of my location gave me pause, but I knew then that guns would always fire, and trees would always burn, and men would always hang, so I walked on because I figured Lorraine might be inside the farmhouse.
Both women had been shot in the head. They lay encased in mud with their knees buckled and stiff as frozen soil. I could see that they’d been kneeling when the shot came. Their blouses—torn at the breast—had been soiled by the constant rains. Their skin was frosted in flies; their eyes hollowed, pecked clean. I covered my face with a handkerchief, and then kneeled in the mud. It was clear that they were mother and daughter. The eldest had the blanched, translucent skin and brittle hair of a woman accustomed to chronic hunger. The youngest looked no older than sixteen: her cheeks blazed with youth and shame, her dress and fingernails stained in blood. I stood, and then wiped the mud from my trousers. I raised Miss Constance and fired.
I stepped onto the porch and pulled at the window shutters, before pressing my ear against the door. Silence. I hesitated, imagining what awaited me on the other side, but the only food I’d seen in three days had been a patch of blackberries that smelled like gas. I couldn’t walk for another night without food, without sleep. Lorraine would wait for me: she’d promised. I opened the door.
An old man sat at the table eating soup.
He held his spoon just below his lips, looking at me like he expected, or maybe hoped, for his own bullet to the head. He wore a mud-caked shirt, with his sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Even in the dim room lit by a lamp, the old man’s eyes were a deep blue shaded by black lids like a lake inside a volcano. He looked at his soup, and then pointed his spoon toward the pot on the counter. I ladled some broth and carrots into a bowl, and then sat across from him. We ate.
The soldiers had ransacked the house. Copper pots lay strewn across the kitchen floor and pillow feathers tumbled and settled on glass shards from shattered picture frames. Only the upright piano seemed to have escaped the barrage. At one time the house must have been cozy and quaint, the kind of home merchants maintained in the country for their summer holidays. But now it looked like the re
st of Belgium, crippled.
The man had tried to clean. He’d swept the glass off of the long Persian rug, which dominated the middle of the room as if the house had been built around it, but you could see that he struggled to survive alone. The lukewarm soup tasted sandy and putrid and the spoon and bowl were caked in dry food. The draft through the old floorboards rustled his limp white hair, and he smelled of piss and dirt.
“You’re an American,” he said. He spoke English with an easy, educated grace. “You were here to steal from me?”
“You can’t steal from the dead.” I waited for the old man’s reaction, but none came.
“Were they English or German or French?” I pointed at the front door.
“I know what you’re referring to,” the old man said. “They were Germans.”
“Were you here?”
The old man picked up his bowl and took it to the kitchen, leaving it in the sink with a score of other similarly dirty dishes.
“No.” He dipped his hands in a glass bowl filled with water. “I was in town.”
We smoked outside. The old man led me to a grassy field twenty yards behind the house, stopping at two mud patches, nearly six feet long and two feet wide, but only an inch or two deep and pooled with rainwater.
“Every morning I dig,” he said. “I dig for two hours, then my back hurts and I go inside and it rains and all my work is gone.”
“Where’s the shovel?” The old man’s fingernails looked like scorched beef.
He looked out to the west at the fading sunlight, which mixed with the smoke of the Somme and turned the sky orange. Gray storm clouds hung behind the light like a cape. “They took it. To dig graves for their soldiers. They took all my tools. My pick, my axe, my hoe.”
I dipped my hand into the mud. It strained through my fingers. The old man laid his hand on my back.
“In the morning,” he said. “Better left for the morning.”
He returned to the house, while I finished my cigarette. I listened to the pounding guns, miles away, and considered leaving. She was heading north and I hoped to catch up to her, but it was near dark and in a storm I’d lose my way.
The Trench Angel Page 17