“Of course. I’m a big reader,” I said indignantly, maybe a bit too indignantly.
“Ever been inside?”
“Never.”
“Never?” Touched persisted.
“Well, do you mean jail or prison?”
“Prison.”
“Never. Couple of overnight bins here and there, police lockups, never what you might call real prison time,” I said.
“That’s good, the smart ones never do a day’s time in their lives,” Touched said, beginning to warm to me. He took a knot out of his gray hair and wrinkled his brow, maybe remembering his own numerous stretches in joints and lockups all over the British Isles.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.
“Aye,” he said cautiously.
“What happened to the two geezers who were with Gerry that night in Revere Beach? Are they still inside? I know they shot their guns and I’m sure the peelers lifted them.”
“No, no, both made bail. It was a real fuckup, though. The serious charges are against Seamus. Worried about him.
They’re charging him with attempted murder. Even though it was obviously self-defense. He doesn’t want to plea, wants to fight it, and Gerry says ok. Seamus is a good bloke.”
“What about the other guy?”
“We won’t talk about Big Mike. That weasel went yellow on us, heard nothing from him since we paid his bail, fucked off the next day, didn’t even leave a place where we could forward his wages. He’s gonna cost Gerry fifty thousand if he doesn’t show for court, which he won’t.”
“Don’t blame him getting scared, it was pretty intense.
Local, was he?”
“Aye, ex–Boston PD.”
“There you go, he didn’t grow up with it,” I said, hinting that I, by contrast, had grown up with it.
“I should have been there,” Touched said, clenching his fist at the thought of the assassination attempt.
“I wish I hadn’t been there, except for being able to help Kit,” I said and took a long drink. Touched smiled.
“You did well, anyway, for a civilian,” he said and slapped me on the back.
“It was just something I had to do, get the wee lass out of there,” I said.
Touched leaned over, grabbed my hand, shook it deliberately.
“Well, we’re all happy that you did,” he said.
“Don’t even need to say it, mate.”
Touched reflected for a few seconds, tapped his nose, and pulled his shaggy locks into a ponytail. He tied back his hair and looked at me.
“What do you make of this?” he asked and rolled up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of the legendary Irish hero Cuchu-lainn, the Hound of Ulster. Except that the Cuchulainn of the tattoo did not resemble the famous statue in the GPO in Dublin. This one had been done in prison with a needle and smuggled ink by an artist of questionable skills. With big hair and equine features, he actually bore a strong resemblance to the queen of England—an unfortunate circumstance for Touched, a staunch Republican and anti-Royalist.
“What’s that mean to you?” Touched asked, pointing at the tattoo.
“It’s not Queen Elizabeth, is it?” I couldn’t resist asking.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said furiously.
“Looks like her, or some member of that selective breeding program they have over there for picking the royals. Wait a minute, it’s not the Queen Mother, is it?”
Touched was boiling with rage. I’d pushed him too far. He let go of my hand.
“For your information, mate, that is Cuchulainn, hero of the Táin, Hound of Ulster, greatest Irishman since Finn McCool. Clearly, you are one very fucking uninformed bog Paddy.”
“Sorry, no offense meant, I’m just not a big history buff,” I said.
“Aye, well I can see that,” Touched said, finished his drink, and poured another from the pitcher.
“So in school you never even read the Táin Bó Cúailnge?” he asked after a long pause.
“Sorry, no,” I said.
“Aye, I forgot you said you were a laborer, despite your protestations you probably didn’t learn your letters at all, did ya?”
“I read just fine,” I said angrily, letting him see that I had limits too.
We sat in silence for a minute, Touched glaring at me and shaking his head. I took a big drink from my glass.
But then his anger began to slip and he looked at me and suddenly laughed.
“Well, I suppose it is a bit of a fucking shite tattoo,” he said.
The break in the tension made me laugh too.
“No, it’s good,” I insisted.
“It’s shite. The guy who did it, did a lot of murals but he couldn’t work in miniature. He bollocksed it up.”
“I was only joking with that queen remark. I knew it was Cuchulainn, sure I seen that statue of him on O’Connell Street,” I said.
“Taking a hand out of me were ya, ya wee shite,” Touched said with a huge attractive grin playing over his face.
“A wee bit,” I said.
“Jesus, have to watch you. You’ve got back doors to you, haven’t you? Well, ok, Sean, we’ll drop it now. Change the subject, bit of a sore topic for me and I’m trying to fucking relax.”
“Are you into music?” I asked, trying to think of some other conversational opening.
“Nah. Not really.”
“What do you like to do?”
“You like to gamble?” Touched asked. Touched, I recalled, grew up near Down Royal racetrack. Maybe this was a place to butter him up.
“Well, I haven’t really had much opportunity, but I have bet on the gee-gees now and again. It’s fun,” I said.
“Oh aye? What do you prefer, flat or the fences?”
“Flat,” I said. “Fences is too much of a lottery. Jesus, any punter could win the Grand National, but the Derby or the Triple Crown, that’s more of a science.”
Touched liked my answer.
“Aye, you’re right there, Sean,” he said. “I used to go over to the Cheltenham Gold Cup all the time and then sometimes the Derby. I went to Ascot one time; Jesus, do you know they don’t search you going in there? Talk about the queen. I swear to God, if I’d brought a wee revolver in there with me I could have bloody assassinated half the British establishment.”
He waited to see what my reaction would be. I didn’t hesitate.
“Aye, and half the world would have thanked you,” I said.
He smiled. His large gray-blue eyes relaxing, radiating genuine affection for me.
“I couldn’t then, you see, didn’t have the authorization. Actually had a few problems back in the Old Country. Little local difficulty, had to come to America, you know.”
“What was the problem?” I asked, to see how far he was going to trust me on a first meet.
“Well, since you’ve asked, mate, it was fucked up for a start, totally fucked up. I was sent out here under sentence. Told not to come back,” he said bitterly, his face growing white with anger. I let the rage boil in him for a while and decided to probe a little deeper. I knew the story but I wanted to see how much he would give me.
“Why?” I asked.
“You heard of Corky Cochrane?”
“Yeah, IRA man in South Armagh, everybody’s heard of him. He’s inside.”
“Aye, hardly the most bloody discreet of characters; anyway, I was doing Corky’s ex. Divorced. All legal like and everything. Seeing her. All aboveboard. Jesus, one night, dragged me from my bed down to Corky’s house. His two brothers there waiting for me. Went at me with pistol butts, the bastards, said I’d raped Corky’s old lady or something. Anyway, long story short, either I go to America or England or I was going to get a bullet in the fucking brain.”
“Jesus.”
“Aye.”
“So you came here and started working for Gerry?”
“Nah, I see it more like working with Gerry, subtle difference,” he said.
“I see that,” I
agreed.
Across the bar I spotted Gerry and Jackie coming back from the toilet. They were having a heated discussion about something. Gerry looked pained. Jackie, animated. They had to be talking about sports or kung fu movies or some other tedious thing in which Jackie considered himself an expert.
“Believe me. I’m telling you, corned beef in Ireland comes from Brazil or Argentina,” Gerry was saying despairingly.
“Saint Patrick ate corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes,”
Jackie was insisting. “That’s why you eat it on Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“Hardly likely, since potatoes are also from South America.
There wasn’t a potato in Ireland before the seventeenth xcentury,” Gerry said as he sat down next to us. A look passed between him and Touched that I couldn’t interpret.
“Saint Patrick ate potatoes,” Jackie muttered as he slunk down in his chair and knocked back his beer in one.
“What’s your opinion, Sean?” Gerry asked me.
“What’s the debate?”
“Jackie, bless his heart, believes that you eat corned beef, potatoes, and cabbage on Saint Patrick’s because that’s what Saint Patrick himself ate as he wandered round the emerald isle.”
“Well, I’m no history expert.” I nodded at Touched and he nodded back. “But I thought Walter Raleigh brought back the spud from South America and that was a good bit after Patrick, I believe,” I said.
“You are absolutely right, Sean. And you are put in your place, Jackie,” Gerry said and turned to Touched. “Now let me hope that your conversation with young Sean here was more riveting than mine.”
“We chanced over many subjects, Gerry. I was just finished telling Sean here about me and Corky Cochrane’s old lady,”
Touched replied.
“Oh aye, I remember her, she has the MS now, doesn’t she?” Gerry said.
“No, no, not MS, she has lupus, early-onset lupus,”
Touched said. “Funny story, actually. Tell you, Sean, just before I had to, uh, gather up my stakes, shall we say, she tells me she has lupus. Right, well, I’m a good Catholic and I did Latin to A level, and I never heard of lupus before and I think bloody hell, lupus, she’s been bitten by a werewolf.”
Gerry and Touched both laughed. Jackie did not and I knew that this was a good opportunity to establish a bit of character. It might have been a bit much rubbing it in his face with that Walter Raleigh line.
“I don’t get it, sorry, David,” I said to Touched.
“Lupus, lupin, the wolf, you know? You see, I got it mixed up with lycanthropy,” Touched said.
I looked at him blankly.
“Do you get it now?” Touched asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, it’s not important,” Touched said and raised his eyebrows at Gerry as if to say, nice kid, but bloody hell, could be a bit of a dumbass.
Sonia and Kit appeared, sat down.With the women among the men, the mood changed completely. Gerry became more gregarious, Touched less suspicious. The subject changed to what was playing at the cinema.
We chatted and drank.
I was the last to arrive, so I knew it would be my shout next and when Jackie finished the last of the beer I went to the bar to get a pitcher of Sam Adams. And suddenly, of course, she was there. I hadn’t seen her before, but obviously she’d been there all evening. Watching me. She was wearing skintight black jeans, a black silk blouse, and high heels. She was deliberately, overly made up, but the fake glamour couldn’t hide her good looks. Her shock of red hair and those proud crimson lips that were sipping gin. She saw me but she didn’t acknowledge me. She was talking to a surfer boy and had positioned herself so that she could see McCaghan’s booth quite clearly. I didn’t know how long she’d been there but Simon must have given her the heads-up.
Our eyes met briefly. She looked away and laughed at something the surfer boy said and her laughter came across the room delicately, like a waterfall breaking over the edges of the rocks. I took the pitcher back to the table, more confident and reassured. My guardian angel was on the case, a step ahead, as all guardian angels should be. And when I sat down, Gerry, Touched, and Jackie were all eclipsed. Diminished. They didn’t know who they were dealing with, with their foolish talk of the Cuchulainn of the Uladh and Patrick and potatoes. She was the brains, the spikenard, the white-shirted predator among the thistles. And I was no mean boy. I had been there. To the depths. Mastering the hard places of the nocturnal world. I had brought destruction on greater men than these. Darkey White, Sunshine, Big Bob, all the while careful, professional, ice cold, singing happily the sweet songs of the hammer of retribution.
I was not afraid of them. If anything it should have been the reverse.
* * *
The evening was drawing to a close. I was comfortable and relaxed. Kit, unfortunately, was wedged between Jackie and her da but the center of gravity was at my end of the table.
The conversation drifted among music and movies and television. I contributed now and again but the interrogation phase was over.
I excused myself to go to the toilet. I didn’t need to go to get my shit together or calm my nerves. Gerry was fine and Touched wasn’t the monster of the Six report. Nah. I just needed to take a piss.
This was a scumball bar, but they had tried to gentrify the toilet by putting in electric hand dryers, burlesque prints, and a chalkboard above the urinal for graffiti. The graffiti was stuff about surfers and the Red Sox and there were a few anti-Mexican comments. Above the board and deep into the wall someone had scrawled “Fuck your chalkboard, you yuppie fucks” in six-inch-high letters. I’d bet money it was Touched.
I’d have to ask him about it, I was musing, when, without looking round, I knew Jackie had come in behind me. The kid had a presence and a distinctive smell. Old Spice, surf wax, and zit cream. He was standing there, thinking he was invisible, trying to decide what he was going to say or do.
I took a piece of chalk and wrote: “You like staring at my cock, Jackie?”
I zipped up, turned.
“So you are fucking queer then, are you?” Jackie said, sneering.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I said, neutral, calm.
“Wipe my name off that fucking board,” he demanded, his pupils dilated, ready.
“You wipe it off,” I said with a smile.
“Wipe it or I’ll fucking make you wipe it.”
I let the tension fall from my shoulders and waited for him to come at me. He’d swing first. He’d had about six or seven beers. He’d be slow. I stuck out my jaw to give him a target. He’d come at my head with a big right hook. Just needed a wee bit of encouragement.
“Now you’re starting to annoy me,” I said. “Why don’t you piss off before I have to teach you how to act around your elders.”
“Aye, and before I brain you, you better tell me what you think you’re fucking playing at with Kit,” he snarled.
“I don’t know what you mean, pal.”
“You were all over her, don’t think I couldn’t see it. She’s my girl. You fucking lay off. Ok? Unless you’re looking for trouble, that is.”
I took a breath. What was the right thing to do? What would Samantha want me to do? What would Kit want me to do? Of course I knew. Taking him would be fun but bad form.
“Listen, mate, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Kit is a nice girl, but she’s not my type. I just want a job and a quiet life,” I said, figuring that defusing the situation was probably the better way to go. I stepped backwards to give him more psychic space to think.
Jackie, however, was spoiling for a fight. His blood was up and he was not going to be denied.
“I seen you looking at her, I’m gonna have you, fucker,” he said, squaring up to throw that obvious opening punch.
I backed off again.
“I’m not going to fight you, it’s ridiculous, I don’t want to fight you.”
“Chickenshit,” Jackie said.
<
br /> “Aye, call me what you like, I’m leaving,” I said.
I washed my hands and headed for the door.
“Wipe my name off that board.”
“Piss away off, you wee shite,” I said.
Jackie lunged at me. He did indeed lead clumsily with the right and, in his haste, he caught one foot behind the other and practically fell on me. I stepped to one side and let Jackie’s momentum carry him into the hand dryer. His head banged into the swivel head of the blower and he collapsed to the floor. He scrambled away from me, blood oozing into his left eye from a two-inch cut above the eyebrow.
“Now you’ve done it, you’re in big trouble now, you fucking bastard,” Jackie said and then muttered something in that South Boston dialect I couldn’t understand at all.
He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a flick knife. He pushed the button, revealed the blade, and locked it into place. He staggered to his feet. His jacket was open and I could see that, as I’d suspected, he was packing heat. A little .38 Saturday Night Special, but he was going for the knife, not the gun. Not even Jackie was that stupid. Even drunk he had his limits and this was not meant to be a fight to the death. He just wanted to hurt me. He’d probably try to slash out with the switchblade rather than try to grapple me and stab me. It was good to know.
Jackie was between me and the door, so I was going to have to deal with him one way or another. To give myself more room I backed into the center of the toilet, away from the cubicles.
“Aye, you can run but you can’t hide,” he said, an ugly little grin appearing on his face. His eyes squinting from the blood dripping into them.
“I don’t know what Kit sees in you,” I said, articulating a thought I had been pondering for at least the last couple of hours. And he really was an unattractive creature. Pale, skinny, and not exactly endowed with brains.
Jackie attacked with the knife. He was faster than I’d been expecting and the blade nicked my shirtsleeve. He laughed.
“Have you now,” he sneered.
I moved towards the rear wall. He had a knife but I had all the advantages. He was drunk, I was sober. He was clumsy and I was poised. He had no idea what he was doing whereas I had been bloody sword fighting for a week, had been trained by the army in unarmed combat, and had been boxing shites like him since I was fifteen.
The Dead Yard Page 11