Chuckle smiled happily.
Bannon made the arrangements quickly and efficiently, barking his commands into the telephone with some hauteur (the three thousand dollars had made him feel slightly less medium than usual). He locked up his office and the two men left his building, stepping gingerly onto the glossy alleyway, their unhatted heads stooping in the sudden heavy rain.
Within seconds two brown-skinned young men with extreme haircuts stood before them. There was a brief pause. Fat Chuckie noticed that the two young men shook their limbs like athletes warming up for a race. The rain ran off their skin like sweat.They seemed coltish, more highly sprung that highly strung.
`Your money,' one of them stated simply.
Bannon almost smiled back. He seemed unscared. He turned the key in the lock of the outer door of his office building. `You packing?' he enquired amiably.
The boy who had spoken first opened his jacket slightly and rested his other hand on the butt of the 9-mm automatic pistol that nestled blackly on his ribs.
`OK,' said Bannon. He passed the boy a small brown leather wallet, which he took with some grace before looking enquiringly at Chuckie. `He's a patient of mine. He's simple. He's not allowed to carry money.'
`Watch,' answered the boy.
Chuckie looked around to see what he was supposed to be watching. Bannon grabbed his arm and slipped off his wristwatch, passing it levelly to the boy.
'Oh, sorry, I ... muttered Chuckie.
'What about you?' the boy enquired of Bannon.
The detective shot out his cuffs on straight arms and showed his bare, watchless wrists.
'OK,' the glistening boy murmured. 'That's about it. See ya.'
The boy and his friend slipped away unobtrusively to wherever they had so noiselessly been. Chuckie had an unreasonable urge to thank them, to shake their hands or kiss them. Bannon walked on. Chuckie stood dazed.
Bannon stopped. 'Let's go, Mr Lurgan.' He grabbed Chuckie's arm again. He smiled almost tenderly. `That's why New Yorkers are always asking you the time. A wristwatch isn't worth the trouble it takes to get stolen.'
`The thing with the wallets. Don't they come back if they find nothing there?' asked the bewildered Chuckie.
`I always leave a few bucks in them and some plastic. Cancelled or out-of-date credit cards. Those kids are too dumb to bother.'
They were very polite.'
They turned into a larger, wider alleyway where the rain battered them with greater freedom. Bannon wiped his face as he walked. `Yeah, well, everybody round here is trying to minimize stress.You piss those boys off or don't help them out, they get real fucked off.You take it easy and so do they. They don't want no executive tension.!
`Fair enough.'
'That's what I always thought.!
`How many disposable wallets do you carry?'
'A couple usually, but I got turned over a couple days ago and that was my last.'
`Let's hope we. . .' Chuckle's voice trailed off as he saw Bannon's face tighten.
He looked in the direction of the man's gaze and saw three young white men walking towards them from the parking lot in which Bannon's car was parked. One of the youths carried a baseball bat.
`Shit,' said Bannon softly.
`Haven't you got a gun? You're a detective.'
`Nah. In this city somebody's gonna take it and blow your eyes out with it.'
The boys stopped a few feet away from them. Chuckie felt a little squirt of urine damp his thigh. He thought about running. He thought about how fat he was.
`Give us your fucking money,' said one of the boys, who had obviously seen the same motion pictures as Chuckie. Chuckie looked sideways at Bannon.There was no help there. I'm going to die, thought Chuckie. Murdered by white guys in NewYork. I'm too Irish for this to happen, he thought. I'm too Protestant.
The three youths were surprised to have their request ignored, but they were experienced enough to attribute this hesitancy to surprise and fear. They underlined the point. The boy with the baseball bat smashed his weapon against the wiremesh fence. The noise was tremendous, heart-stopping.
'The fucking money.'
This lot didn't have too much trouble with stress, it seemed to Chuckie. Desperately, he glanced back at Bannon.
'Hey, guys,' Bannon said sadly, 'don't fuck this guy off.' He pointed to Chuckle. 'He's from Northern Ireland. He's in the IRA.'
There was a momentary pause and Chuckie could see a tiny calculation in the hoodlums' eyes. They looked at each other.
'Say something,' the baseball-bat boy said to Chuckie.
`What would you like me to say?' asked Chuckie, with inappropriate grace and distinction.
'He don't sound Irish to me.'
`He's a Brit or Scotch or something.'
'He sounds like a fat fuck from North Carolina.'
The boys moved closer, ready for battle.
Gripped by lunatic panic, Chuckie suddenly launched into intermittently of the demagogic tones of the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley. 'No shurrender. Not an inch. No Pope here. Home Rule ish Rome Rule. Ulshter will fight.'
The boys stopped dead, frozen in their tracks. They glanced hurriedly at one another.
'I seen this guy on TV. He's a crazy fucker,' said one.
A decision was quickly reached. The baseball bat was lowered. They backed off slightly.
'Listen. No sweat,' said the boy with the bat. 'You guys take it easy.' He smiled uncertainly at Chuckle. 'Hey, power to the people, man. Down with the King and everything.'
They turned and ran off.
Bannon turned to Chuckie. 'Nice routine, Mr Lurgan. Very nice work.'
Chuckie lay down in the rain.
At the airport in San Diego, Chuckie called his mother. There were several banks of payphones and each rank was occupied by men in suits, clutching perfectly serviceable mobile phones, reluctantly having to repeat I love you over the crackle of the lines to California, Boston and Philadelphia. I love you ... I LOVE YOU. It didn't always sound sincere and several of the men were accompanied by lithe young women in costumes of ascending degrees of provocativeness. Chuckie smiled sadly.
'Hiya, Caroline,' he said, when he finally found an unoccupied slot. `How's it going?'
`All right, son:
`How's Mum?'
Caroline's voice grew fainter. `All right.!
'Is she eating?'
'Aye.!
'Is she sleeping?'
'Aye:
'Is she taking her pills?'
`Jesus, Chuckie, do you want to know if she's pissing and shitting as well? Gimme a break.'
`Sorry.'
`Aye, right.!
`What's wrong?'
'What do you mean?'
`Why are you so grumpy?'
`It's hardly even nine o'clock in the morning, Chuckie.What do you want? Heavy fucking breathing?'
`Has Jake been round? asked Chuckie.
`He's here nowI
'Brilliant.'
'I'm away across the street to make my man's breakfast and then get some sleep. I'll get yer man for you.'
Chuckie shoved a great many more dollars into the coinbox. He glanced around at all the other besuited men at the telephones; they looked harassed but glamorous. He wondered if he looked like one of them.
'Chuckle?'
Chuckie was surprised at the warmth that flooded his heart at the sound of his friend's voice. He had not felt lonely until now. Tears sprang to his eyes and his nose itched.
`Hiya, Jake' His voice was muffled in an attempt to conceal his emotion. He had intended a rather swanky, transatlantic, living-out-of-a-suitcase conversation with his friend, but he knew now that it would take all he had just to avoid bawling. `How's Mum?'
'She's a lot better, Chuckie. She's talking more'
Chuckie paused and gulped hotly. `Do you think she'd want to talk to me?'
'She's asleep right now, Chuckie. She sleeps so little, it'd be a shame to wake her.'
`Absolutely.'
>
'What time is it there?' asked Jake.
'It's after midnight.!
'Where are you?'
'San Diego.'
Jake laughed.'Cool,' he said.
'What's funny?' asked Chuckie sharply.
'It's just hard to think of you there'
`What's that supposed to mean?'
'Come on, I just got used to you being around in Belfast. It's not the same without you, Chuckie. Take it easy, I'm being nice'
Chuckie remembered that his friend was looking after his mother. `Yeah, look, sorry, Jake. Thanks for looking after Peggy. I'll see you right.'
'Stuff your money, Lurgan.'
There was a pause. Both men, so far apart, regretted that their conversation had veered this way.
`Have you found her?' asked Jake.
`I'm getting there, a mollified Chuckie replied.
`How d'you like America?'
`It's great. I got mugged twice.'
`That's nice.'
`Hey, Jake.'
`What?ff
Chuckie paused. `I think I love her.'
'I guessed, Chuckie.'
`Right.!
The silence was hilariously manly.
'Hey, Chuckie.'
`What?'
`Roche has been asking for you.'
'Who?'
`You know, the kid, the joke-seller.'
`Well, he can't have me.'
Chuckie hung up. He got a hotel room at the airport. He asked the girl at reception about the street where Max's mother lived. The girl told him it was an easy cab ride. He asked for an alarm call and tried to go to bed. He failed. The flabby clock of his body was lagging and sprinting on its own accord. He lay open-eyed for a couple of hours and then he called a cab to take him into town.
It was nearly three o'clock but San Diego wasn't sleeping. The downtown streets were close to lively. Chuckie went into a bar with two hundred dollars and made some brief friends. He drank numbly, talking nonsense and hearing more. He felt like a small blip on some big screen. He felt empty, deracinated. He missed the Wigwam and Lavery's. He missed Jake, Slat, Septic and Deasely. He missed his mother. He missed Eureka Street. It was as though he missed himself. Those were much of what constituted him.
After an hour he left the bar and walked out into damp San Diego. The sidewalks glittered, wet and marvellous. Though it was late, citizens still walked those streets. The underlit shopfronts were lined with pairs of underdressed women whom Chuckie supposed were prostitutes. These girls wore cheap pendants, which flashed in the street-light. San Diego was a naval base and some of the girls wore T-shirts that bore legends such as `Marine Girls', `Fuck me, the Navy!'
There was plenty of fight too. Every block or so, Chuckie would see a brawl erupt in some bar, on some street. Men kicked each other's heads to pulp, smashed bottles in faces, pulled and used knives. Outside one nightclub, he saw two marines beat a lone sailor. They banged his face against walls and trashcans, they kicked each of his teeth right out of his head.
And there were the noises of the incidents he did not see. The muted sound of war from the interiors of houses, apartments and bars. The dull shouts of angry men and the stifled screams of women. Sometimes he thought he heard gunfire.
The streets were littered with rubbish and bottles. The walls were littered with billboards and mugshots. On one wall he saw a local newspaper hoarding, which carried a giant version of each day's front page. CONGRESS PASSES NAVY BILL. MORE SAN DIEGO CLOSURES. And just at head level as he passed by, near the foot of the giant page, a headline about the murder of two San Diego prostitutes. Whore murders were not important. They were gestures, indications of mood.
Chuckie began to scan the streets in serious search of a taxicab. It was only San Diego but Chuckie was terrified now. He lamented the foolishness of his small-hours adventure. The streets upon which he walked felt splattered with somebody's blood or somebody's semen. He had a sudden and unwelcome sense of how fragile and inappropriate all his chubby, formless Irish flesh was in the midst of all this. He longed for the comfort of familiar Belfast and the understandably butch and brutal Sandy Row. He longed for the safety of some terrorism, some civil war.
It took him an hour to get a cab and he felt that he had walked half-way back to the airport by then. Back at his hotel, he cancelled his wake-up call and almost made a trembling, homesick pass at the bright new girl at reception. Fifteen minutes later, he slept like a dead man.
He woke so late and breakfasted so long that it was nearly five o'clock before his cab rolled up outside Max's mother's house. It was a big house, roughly the same size as the entire compass of Eureka Street. It daunted him badly.
A servant or some kind of housekeeper answered the door and there were a bad couple of minutes while Chuckie explained that he wanted to talk to Mrs Paxmeir about her daughter. There were some more bad minutes when he was introduced to Matron Paxmeir herself and had to explain his mission once more. He was rendered almost speechless by Mrs Paxmeir's appearance, which did nothing to plead his case.
Mrs Paxmeir was a gross facsimile of her daughter. Emaciated, paper-thin, she wore a smile tightened by sunburn and ill-will. Despite her dragonish exterior, Chuckie found himself oppressed by her TV-anchorwoman glamour. She looked like a woman who had never been to the toilet.
She told Chuckie that she had seen Max two days before. She didn't seem to know why her daughter had visited but she seemed conscious that she had disappointed her in some way. That consciousness did not trouble the woman. As she grew older, she said, she found herself growing less interested in her daughter's various dramas.
`I always knew she'd end up with someone like you,' she informed Chuckie.
`Someone like me?'
`Yeah:
`What does that mean?'
`Well, you know, somebody small-town.'
`Thank you.'
They both heard the housekeeper at the door. It appeared that Paxmeir's husband had come home. She seemed to intend being rid of Chuckle before she had to make any introductions.
`I don't want to keep you,' said Chuckle. 'If you could tell me if you have any idea where she went, I'll take my leave. Her grandmother's old house maybe?'
`Yeah, maybe,' the woman replied indifferently.
Chuckie tried to glare at her but failed. He felt a new affection for Max, a new pride in her. With this harpy as a mother, Max was a genetic miracle. It was astonishing that she could walk and talk when she came from such a source. What she was, she had made herself.
Mrs Paxmeir noticed his appraising look. `You think I'm a pretty bad mother, eh?'
Chuckie blushed and stammered. Despite his dislike, he did not want to insult the woman. He intended to marry her daughter, after all. `Hey, listen,' he stumbled, `a friend of mine once told me that the maternal instinct was a fiction.'
`A real bright guy.'
'So so., ,
She stood up on her spindly legs, preparatory to his departure. `You got big feelings for Max?'
'I think so.'
She smiled thinly. `That's not always enough for my little girl. I should know. She's strange that way.You watch your step, Irish boy.' She manoeuvred him through the hallway and opened the front door herself.
`I always do, Mrs Paxmeir. I always have.'
`Call first next time.'
`Absolutely.'
She closed the door behind him. He didn't turn round. Across the street, his cabby waited. Chuckie was glad that somebody cared.
He spent another night at the airport hotel. There was a flight to Kansas City in the morning but he was stuck in San Diego for that night. He clung to the hotel like a piece of driftwood. He ate room-service sandwiches, drank room-service coffee and watched insane hotel television, failing to interest himself even in the miraculous variety of naked young women on one of the cable channels.
Much later he went down to the lobby just to talk to someone. He asked the girl at reception several spurious questions. Joinin
g in the conceit with professional briskness, she answered his questions efficiently but amiably. Then switching into her general-chat mode, she asked Chuckie, with that same efficient amiability, where he came from. He told her.
`Gee, you're Irish. That must be great for you,' she squeaked, with restrained enthusiasm.
`Where I come from, it's not a very distinguishing feature.!
The girl looked question marks at him.
'Well, we're all Irish there.' He realized what he had said.'Or, at least, so some say. Some people say that we're British and some Northern Irish, but on the other He looked at her blank, enquiring face, which registered no distress at his meandering. `Forget it, he said.
`Sure, no problem.' The girl beamed at him. Chuckie was forced to admit that her smile was neither vacuous nor false. Her grace was simultaneously professional and genuine. He had only been three days in America. It was a combination to which he had not yet grown accustomed. Americans were simply frequently in a very good mood.
`Nice talking to you,' she said, with a concluding smile.
Chuckie smiled back at her. `Definitely,' he replied.
Back upstairs, his head on his pillow, his elbow on his gut and his genitals in his fist, Chuckie decided that he liked Americans.
When he woke, he felt differently. Jet-lagged, lonely, Chuckie struggled around his hotel room, washing, shaving, dressing. His mood was inexplicably black. In the bathroom he raged impotently at all the mirrors in which he could see his extra, his unnecessary flesh. His body didn't look like it could do much romantic pursuing. He could hear the usual faint accompaniment of American hotel bathrooms. Through each thin wall, through ceiling and floor, he could hear people brushing their teeth. It had been the same in the hotel in NewYork.This was America. People brushed their teeth all the time and the sound of other people brushing their teeth had always driven him crazy.
Mutinous, ugly, Chuckie checked out and found his flight for Kansas City. As he waited in the departure lounge, he knew why he was unhappy. As he came close to finding her, he discovered that he dreaded it. He was supposed to persuade her to return with him. He could think of nothing to persuade her.
Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other Page 26