Black Irish

by Stephan Talty

  “I know.”

  “Which is why it’s good you’ve come back.”

  Abbie smiled despite herself. She knew there was no guile in the remark. Any son or daughter who came back to their parents was a hero in South Buffalo. If she’d been a black lesbian Communist sworn agent of the Devil, the simple fact that she’d returned and could be seen helping her father down the street would have outweighed all that. The County would have grudgingly welcomed her back. It had a value system all its own, and loyalty was near the top.

  “What about Jimmy’s old crowd, after he straightened out?”

  “They tried to come around and entice him back, but he wasn’t having any of it. And you can be sure”—Mrs. Ryan leaned in, tilting her forehead down as if she were about to impart a secret—“that if they darkened my stoop, I had something for them. Mr. Ryan’s old rabbit-hunting shotgun, brought straight from Connemara.”

  Abbie let it pass.

  “Did they make any threats to Jimmy? Sometimes when you break it off with people like that, they can have trouble accepting it.”

  Mrs. Ryan looked down, considering.

  “There was one. A character named …”

  She searched for the name, her blue eyes scanning the ceiling.

  “Walters, or Williams. Yes, that was it, Williams.”

  “Was he white or black?”

  “Black.”

  “Do you remember a first name?”

  “It began with a ‘G.’ Gerald? Gerard?”

  She looked at the corner of the room and her lips moved.

  “No, Gerald.”

  “And he threatened Jimmy?”

  “It was all so long ago, Abbie.”

  Nothing in the County was long ago. When no new blood flowed in, old animosities and feuds simmered for years, decades even.

  “I’ll look into it anyway.”

  Mrs. Ryan nodded.

  Abbie let her eyes drift to the mantel. Mrs. Ryan’s gaze followed.

  “There were some pictures of Jimmy there the other day.”

  “Oh yes.” Mrs Ryan sprang up, agile despite her age. Abbie followed her to the mantel. There were six photos. The one that Patty Ryan had picked up yesterday hadn’t been returned.

  “There was another one here,” Abbie said.

  “Really?”

  “Jimmy with some friends. I thought it was a good likeness.”

  Mrs. Ryan began to look around the room in confusion. She went to the TV but on top there were only pictures of the children. Standing with her hands on her hips, she turned and surveyed the room.

  Even she’s not that good an actress, Abbie thought.

  “I’ll have to ask Patty,” the old woman said, two fingers to her lips pensively, the hand shaking slightly.

  Abbie touched her on the elbow and Mrs. Ryan turned.

  “I think she has enough to deal with,” Abbie said quietly, inclining her head toward the stairs. “If you could just look around quietly, that might be better.”

  “Course you’re right,” Mrs. Ryan said, almost in a whisper.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AS SHE DROVE RUTTED SIDE STREETS TO THE GAELIC CLUB, ABBIE’S HEAD throbbed. It was like black waves were washing at the base of her skull. Talking about the past always gave her a migraine-strength headache. She rubbed her neck as she navigated down Abbott Road. Then she called Z, still at the office, and told him to run the names Gerard and Gerald Williams.

  As the cars wheels hummed on the road, she thought about Mrs. Ryan. How could a mother be so calm after her son’s death? She seemed more upset by the thought of him stealing a bottle of whiskey twenty years before than by the fact that he’d been tied to a chair, tortured, mutilated, and then strangled to death. What did she have inside her to counterbalance that image? A thing that made sense of the death, that transformed it into something … what? Noble? Inevitable?

  Her father had liked to talk about his work. Ireland and cops. When she was growing up in the house off Abbott, those were the only two things he’d talk to her about. They’d be sitting at the kitchen table, with her dead stepmother’s yellow tablecloth on it and matching dish towels hung below the sink, and he’d say, “When all’s said and done, a cop’s an intruder. He shines a light on all the things you’re ashamed of in your life, and makes you face who you really are. God forbid you have to own up to it yourself.” The job had exhausted him. Forty years on the force and all he wanted was someone to come up to him and say, “I killed the bitch because I’m a vindictive asshole—and, by the way, she wasn’t cheating on me, I was cheating on her. With her little sister.” Or, “The money’s taped behind the toilet. I stole it because I’m lazy and I like nice things.” He swore that the first time a criminal made a full confession right off, he’d let them go with a hundred-dollar bill slipped into their palms. As a tip. It never happened.

  She stopped at a 7-Eleven for a black coffee to clear her head. She kicked the hard slush from behind all four tires, thinking about the Gaelic Club as she walked around the car. It was the next obvious stop. The place was like the mothership of the County. If you wanted to do anything in South Buffalo, if you wanted to get elected or laid or drunk or to show off your new car or to remember what it was like to be young, you went to the Gaelic Club. It was like walking into the lion’s mouth.

  Z called back. No Gerald or Gerard Williams in the database. She told him to play around with the names.

  Abbie angled her car against the Gaelic Club’s warm redbrick exterior and walked to the front. The Club had been a monument to Irish power in the city when the bricklayers and carpenters and construction workers who flocked to an empty lot after work to build it had been young, their backs strong, their hair still chestnut brown or flaming red. They’d still been able, after a full day’s work pouring concrete or laying brick, to come and do it again for a few hours while their families brought them ham sandwiches in cold wax paper and the officers of the Club ferried endless cups of beer. After it opened, the Club had been wall-to-wall with screaming kids running to the pool, the whole building resonating to the game of basketball in the gym, the sound of the ball like cannon shots, audible in every part of the building, while in the bar families ate their fish and chips and listened to the latest singer from Connemara or Dublin on the foot-high stage in the corner of the bar, directly to the right as you entered.

  As Abbie walked into the small foyer, where old notices advertising folk singers or protest marches for the IRA were fluttering on a bulletin board, it was as if her mind was running on two parallel tracks. Now and 1989. In those days, she’d come to the Club on a Saturday afternoon to find her dad, the bar as loud as a carnival, packed with men and women in wool coats, the drapery of the brown and black and checked wool swaying like a theater curtain as people moved. That’s all you saw, this curtain of coats, and at the center of it, always, his right foot in a black leather loafer perched on a three-rung barstool and a Seven-and-Seven in his hand, her father, holding court.

  He would see her, order her a Shirley Temple, and the crowd would move back and allow her in. But her father would never take her up on his lap the way the other fathers did their daughters, or feed her the cherry from the Shirley Temple and stick the tiny pink paper umbrella in her hair after wiping it carefully with a napkin, the way that Mr. O’Neill did with his girl Siobhan. And she would sit there waiting for his eyes to fall on hers, but after that first look, it was as if she’d become someone else’s child. Another listener, another hanger-on.

  She pushed open the glass door. There were three people in the bar: two of them as old as her father, sitting at a small table, and a young bartender. A down-market flat-screen TV was up on the wall, showing a game of Gaelic football—she recognized it at a glance—and the heavy brogues of the announcers called the action. As she walked in, the bartender froze and watched her approach.

  “Hi, Billy,” she said.

  Billy Carney smiled.

  “No fucking way,” he said
, placing his hands on the bar rail and leaning against it. “Abbie Kearney.”

  Billy had been the quarterback of the Timon varsity team in high school. She’d liked him. All the girls had liked him.

  “You really are back.”

  “I’ve been back for a year,” she said, climbing onto one of the rickety stools.

  “Back in Buffalo, maybe. But not here.”

  He pointed straight down at the wooden bar. Back in the County, he meant.

  They shook hands and the touch started a third rail of memory. Weekend nights in Cazenovia Park. A shiver ran down her back.

  “You always keep this place so cold?” she said to cover it up.

  “If I didn’t, the old ones would pass out,” he said, nodding to the two men whispering over amber-colored drinks. Both had heavy wool coats on, even in the bar, and one had some kind of blanket across his lap.

  “And I’m always hot,” he added. “Why pay the gas company?”

  “You were always cheap.”

  He laughed and the sound boomed in the near-empty room. Then he said, “So, how are ya?”

  “I’m a Buffalo cop. What else can I say? My dreams have finally come true.”

  “And I’m a bartender. What a couple of County clichés we are. Only jobs left in this goddamn town. What’re ya having? On the house.”

  “A Diet Coke. Is this payback for junior prom?”

  “What happened at junior prom?” Billy poured the drink, set it in front of her, picked up a pint glass from a dishwasher rack in front of him and began polishing it with a rag. His chin had slid back as if he were expecting a punch, the mouth grinning, the well-known dimples appearing under his cheeks. God, Abbie thought, he’s still a good-looking man.

  “You blew me off. Left me to go in the single girls’ limo, with the ugly ones with braces and Anne Muidy. You remember, the really fat one?”

  “I did that?”

  “Yeah, you did that.”

  “I have no recoll—”

  “Shut up, Billy.”

  He shook his head, laughing.

  “I was an asshole. Sorry, Ab.”

  “Not forgiven,” she said, and took a sip of the soda. No, pop. That’s what they called it in Buffalo. Pop.

  It felt good to be here, near him. She felt like a teenage girl again, but now she had leverage. She’d been places in the world and had a Glock on her hip. Things were a bit more even.

  Abbie looked around. The walls seemed to vibrate with memories. The paintings of Irish martyrs, the scarves with DUBLIN and BELFAST scrawled across them tacked up to the wall, the smell of fresh sawdust and beer—they seemed to have some latent power that pulsed in the air.

  “It’s sad,” she said. “This place always felt like it was the center of the world to me. We’re going to the Gaelic Club. I was all excited. Can you imagine?”

  Billy laughed.

  “But it still has something about it, doesn’t it?” she said.

  Billy looked around the room, and it was as if his eyes were pinched against the sun. “Because it’s dying. Anything that’s dying’s beautiful for a while.”

  “I was shocked when I came back,” she said. “Remember the Last Chance Bar on Seneca Street?”

  “Did I get thrown through the front window of that one?”

  “If not, it would have been the only one on Seneca that you didn’t.”

  He laughed.

  “I went by there yesterday. There’s a hand-lettered sign in the window saying, ‘We sell rabbits and other snake food.’ Snake food.”

  Billy nodded, the grin gone from his face. “Yeah, I saw that.”

  “Half the words misspelled.”

  Billy grimaced. “You know what a few of us are calling this place?”

  “What?”

  “We call it the Rez. Short for ‘reservation.’ ”

  Abbie studied him thoughtfully. “I heard that from some skel on South Park. What’s it mean?”

  Billy looked at the two old men, then leaned in to her. “The County is becoming one big Indian reservation, except with whites trapped inside this time. Businesses have pulled out, the government is MIA, they just left a bunch of poor people here, brought some liquor and junk food in and left us to … I don’t know what.”

  She felt a line of heat across her throat.

  “You mean, like on the East Side? And every other ghetto in America?”

  Billy didn’t quite catch her tone.

  “Yeah. You’re right. Maybe we’re getting a taste of what they did to blacks. Now they want to see if they can do the same to white people.”

  From inside the County, Billy’s theory made perfect sense. At the turn of the twentieth century, Buffalo had more millionaires per capita than any city in the country. It had mansions, it produced luxury cars like the Pierce Arrow, it had power and momentum, it was going to be the next New York City.

  Now parts of it looked like some bombed-out alien planet.

  Watching the place you loved go back to weeds and wasteland could wound you, Abbie thought. She didn’t have the same problem. She’d never quite loved the County. She’d feared it.

  “Well, the apocalypse aside, I’m here on business.”

  Small nod from Billy.

  “Jimmy Ryan,” she said. “You knew him?”

  “Everyone did. He was in and out of this place like he owned it.”

  “What did he do here?”

  Billy picked up a pint glass and began to polish it, watching the rag as it swooped around.

  “The regular stuff. Came in and drank. Helped with the fund-raisers, brought some musicians in.”

  “Billy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Every time you polish a glass, you start lying to me. Have you realized that?”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lying? That’s a strong word.”

  She eyed him. Her ex-husband used to call it “the look that can break rocks,” but she was unaware of its intensity.

  “Jesus, Ab. I’m telling you what I know.”

  “Correction. You’re telling me some of what you know.”

  Billy put down the glass. He glanced at the two old men, then searched under the bar. He came up with the TV remote control and thumbed the volume up. The sound of the announcer’s voice filled the room.

  “Come on, Clare,” Billy called as a man on the screen ran, tapping the hurling ball with the end of his stick. One of the old men looked up, then went back to his whispered conversation.

  “Okay,” Billy said. “A long time ago, Jimmy and a few other guys used to get together in the office and shut the door. They’d be in there for an hour or two. Everyone wondered what they were up to.”

  “What did people think was going on back there?”

  Billy looked at her, then down.

  “If you pick up a glass and start to shine it,” Abbie said, “I’m coming over this bar.”

  “Maybe I’d like that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Trust me.”

  “I don’t know. They said Jimmy made a lot of trips after those meetings.”

  “Trips where?”

  Billy made the County face, a kind of inscrutable half grin, half grimace. It meant yes/no. East/west. It was all in how you read it.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you do that.”

  He picked up a glass, began to shine it, just looking at her, his eyelids half closed.

  “Like the man said, this is where I leave you,” he said. “As bad as this job is, it’s all I got.”

  “Who were the other guys in these meetings?”

  “One was an older guy named Marty. A lawyer. The other two I didn’t know.”

  “That’s funny. Because you know everyone in the County.”

  “Not these two. They came in the back way. You couldn’t go near the office until they were finished.”

  “What’s Marty’s last name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Bil
ly.”

  “Swear.”

  Abbie studied him. He looked back, his eyes wary but friendly, and he flashed his quarterback smile. It carried about half the impact it once did, but that was enough.

  She breathed out, finished her Diet Coke, and picked up her notebook.

  “That’s what I hate about this place,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Even when people are telling you the truth, it seems like they’re lying.”

  Billy shrugged his shoulders, put the polished glass down.

  “Bye, Billy.”

  She hopped off the seat and began to walk toward the door, waving once over her shoulder.

  “What’re you doing on prom night?” he called after her.

  “Sleeping with my gun,” she called back.

  As she walked through the foyer, she glanced back and saw the old men had turned to stare at Billy.

  As she got in the car, her cell phone vibrated in her lapel pocket. She pulled it out.

  “Kearney.”

  “It’s Z. Don’t worry, but your father reported a prowler. Units are heading over.”

  A surge of fear rolled through her.

  “How long ago?”

  “Two minutes.”

  She turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine, shot it into reverse.

  “En route.”

  “Gotcha.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHEN SHE WALKED IN THE DOOR, HER FATHER SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE with two young cops, one black, one white. The black cop half stood as she entered; the white one turned his head and nodded.

  “Detective Kearney, everything’s fine,” said the black cop. She saw “Jackson” written on his nameplate.

  Out of breath, Abbie laid her keys on the table and looked at her father.

  “Someone was jimmying with the door,” he said. “My memory’s slipping but my hearing’s as sharp as a Kilkenny cat.”

  Abbie nodded. Her racing heart began to beat slower. However painful the relationship with her father, the thought of losing him had brought on nothing less than terror.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked Jackson.

  “Well,” he said. “One thing.”

  The white cop stood up and turned toward her. She saw his nameplate: Bianchi.