The Night Listener and Others

by Chet Williamson

  “We’re Irish-Americans, Tim Corcoran, and I for one am proud of it. That fuckin’ Jack is just playin’ with us for the money.”

  “Hey, our sound is bigger and better than ever before. Jack sings well, he fiddles well, and he drums well, and if it weren’t for him we wouldn’t have this gig.”

  Hugh drank his pint straight off and slammed the glass back down on the bar. “Goodie for him,” he snarled at me, and walked out.

  I finished my own pretty quickly, and nodded when Kevin offered me another. I was surprised and dismayed. I’d never seen this side of Hugh Kennedy before, and I’d known him for years. I tried to tell myself that maybe he’d had too much to drink, and that he’d be okay tomorrow. Kevin commiserated with me about it, and told me not to worry, that all lads fight now and again, and we had another few drinks together, even a few after the place closed.

  By the time I staggered in the door of our apartment it was nearly four o’clock, and Molly was sitting on the sofa, a book in her hand. “Why aren’t you in bed?” I asked, trying not to sound too peeved. I knew I’d had too much to drink.

  “I woke up at three and you weren’t home. I started to worry and couldn’t sleep.”

  “Well, I’m home now and I’m fine.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Did you drive home like that?”

  “I took it slow and I was fine. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  She stood up and walked toward the bedroom. “I’m going to bed.”

  I realized that I couldn’t do the same until I took a shower and scrubbed the smoke smell out of me, but I was too damned tired and probably too drunk to do it, so I just kicked off my shoes, fell onto the couch and fell asleep. The next morning Molly bitched that the smell of Mooney’s Pub had gotten into the sofa cushions as a result.

  Hugh and Jack and I rehearsed the following Wednesday evening, and to my surprise Hugh was his usual charmingly acerbic self. He acted as though he’d never gotten angry at Jack, and once Jack got over his initial caution, the rehearsal went fine. We added a drum break on “The Rising of the Moon” and a fiddle line on “The Ballad of William Bloat,” and shared a few beers and a few jokes before the evening ended.

  We played “Bloat” in the second set the next Friday night, and the crowd howled at the end. It’s about a man who cuts his wife’s throat with a razor and then hangs himself with her bed sheet out of guilt. The wife survives because The razor blade was English made/But the sheet was Belfast linen. It’s damned funny and filled with nationalist pride at the same time.

  And speaking of nationalist pride, I was keeping a weather eye on Hugh. Things went fine for the first and second set, but at the closing number of the third, I glanced across Hugh toward Jack, and was alarmed to see that his face had gone weak around the eyes and chin, and he was looking at Hugh like a whipped dog. We were singing “Legion of the Rearguard,” and had reached the lines, Pledged, they’ll defend you, through death or prison cell/Wait for the soldiers of the Rearguard, when it happened. I couldn’t see Hugh’s face, and when I could take a breath I turned away from the mic and barked his name.

  Hugh jerked his head around, and his eyes were filled with such fury that I involuntarily drew away from him. Then he turned back to the mic and threw the anger into the lyrics of the song, and we stormed on. Even Jack got into it, and we ended with a righteous rage that brought a moment of numbed silence from the crowd before they exploded into applause. We all relaxed, and Jack looked like a man who’d been lost in a dream.

  He set down his drum, climbed off the stage, and headed for the rear, and I put a hand on Hugh’s shoulder. “What was that about?” I asked.

  “He did it again. Gave me that look, that high-and-mighty, you-dumb-Mick-go-ahead-and-die-for-Ireland look.”

  “Come on, you can’t be serious.”

  “I’m fucking serious. He does it again, it’s gonna go hard with him.”

  “Let’s just get through the last set, all right?” I probably sounded like I was begging, but I didn’t care. “And we’ll work this out later, because apparently it’s something we need to work out.”

  Hugh snorted and walked toward the back of the room, and I sat at the bar until it was time to go back for the last set, tossing down two pints in quick succession. Hugh and Jack came back at different times, and when we were all on the stage I tentatively nodded and we went into a set of reels.

  Jack’s fiddling was spot on, and Hugh’s whistle hugged Jack’s line in harmony so closely that I wondered if I had imagined the rancor that had passed between them not twenty minutes before. Both men smiled and nodded at the audience when we were through, and I thought maybe we were going to get out of the evening without any blowups.

  Then we played the rebel song, “The Rising of the Moon,” and the world ended.

  The exact spot was where I sang, Death to every foe and traitor, forward strike the marching tune …ack just dropped his bodhran on the stage with a loud thud that made the audience start, and stepped down to the floor, threading his way through the tables toward the back. In another instant Hugh was after him, still clutching his whistle in his fist.

  I stood alone on the stage, strumming the chords, but the lyrics,…and hurrah me boys for freedom …ust trailed off and died as I watched my partners vanish into the smoke, dozens of heads turning to watch them go. I set my guitar in its stand and followed. As I passed Kevin behind the bar, he looked at me as if to ask what in the bloody blue hell was going on, and I merely made a pacifying gesture with my hands, indicating that everything would be all right, even though I had no idea if that was true.

  I also had the odd sensation that the smoke itself was trying to slow me down, that it was thick to the point of being palpable, and had become one with the tables and chairs and bodies that filled them, blocking me from getting to the door, through which I was sure that Jack and then Hugh had passed. In spite of it all, I finally pushed through the old wooden door to the outside, and the cold air was like a splash of water in my face. Looking down the street, I just caught a glimpse of Hugh quickly rounding a corner as though in pursuit of Jack, and I ran after him.

  I’d had too goddamned much to drink, and I stumbled a few times, but kept pushing on until I’d rounded the corner and entered Mooney’s parking lot. At the far end I saw Jack standing at his car, trying to get a key in the door lock, Hugh running up to him. I saw Jack turn, and then saw Hugh’s fist with something that gleamed silver in the light of the street lamp strike Jack in the chest. Jack fell back against his car, and Hugh bore down on him so that they both went to the ground. Hugh’s arm pistoned back and forth, and I realized with a dull shock that Hugh was ramming his tin whistle into Jack’s chest over and over again.

  I’d like to say that I ran to him and stopped him, but I think I was afraid. Instead I walked slowly toward the two of them and stopped when I was close enough to see Jack lying on his back, the space below his sternum soaked with blood, and Hugh ramming his whistle into the hole he had made. Hugh was singing, with a stab and a grunt on every downbeat:

  “Death to EV-ry foe and traitor, Forward STRIKE the marching tune…”

  Jack was making no sound at all. His eyes were wide open, and he was looking upward at nothing.

  “Hugh! “ I said, and Hugh stopped the movement of his arm and sat back heavily on the blacktop. He looked at the wet and bent whistle as though he had never seen it before, and then looked up at me in surprise, and down again at Jack, who had stopped breathing, stopped living, then looked at the whistle again, until at last it all came clear, though it made no sense.

  “What…” Hugh whispered. “Did I…?” The words choked off, and he coughed a cough layered with phlegm. For several seconds he hacked that awful, rattling cough until he nearly fell over. Then his eyes grew wide, and he pushed himself to his feet, spitting something thick and wet onto the blacktop.

  I drew back, wondering if he would attack me next
, but instead he fixed me with a look of confused terror, and ran to the exit of the lot and into the street, still holding the whistle. I saw lights cut across him, heard the sounds of brakes screaming, and saw Hugh stop as, a moment later, a dark SUV pounded into him, sending him flying like a hurled-away toy.

  By the time I got to him, the van had sped away, and Hugh was lying on his side by a parked car. His chest seemed crushed, and his neck was crooked at a terrible angle. He was still holding that goddamned whistle. He looked at me, and then something dimmed in his eyes.

  I was horrified, I was drunk, I was…oh Christ, too many things to think straight. All I could think about was getting away from there, getting away before whatever had gotten Jack and Hugh got me too. Somehow I found my car and got it started, then drove home, too fast for safety in my condition, but too slow to be noticed by any trooper watching for speeders. They’d have enough to do looking for the bastards who’d hit Hugh.

  The same bastards who’d saved the state a trial. They’d find Jack, and find the whistle in Hugh’s hand, and figure it all out. I knew I should stay, that I should try and explain what had happened, who had killed whom, but I wanted away, I wanted home, I wanted Molly to hold me and tell me it would all be all right.

  But she called me a drunken asshole when I went in, and the more I tried to explain the angrier she got, and I tried to tell her I wasn’t drunk, that the evening had kicked the drunkenness right out of me, but she laughed like a cold heartless bitch who didn’t give a shite what had happened to my friends, and I felt like that poor, damned William Bloat who’d died cursing the Pope, and who had a wife, the curse of his life/Who continually got his goat /So one day at dawn, with her nightdress on …

  .…He cut her bloody throat.

  We were arguing in the kitchen, and I just got too mad, too frustrated, and I grabbed a knife from the wooden block and I hit her with it.

  She didn’t even cry out. There wasn’t a noise except for the sound she made when her head hit the floor, like wood on wood, and the bubbling sound. I stood there as she bled to death, beyond my help, beyond any 911 call, her throat opened as wide as a singing mouth, singing loud into the smoke of Mooney’s Pub.

  I knew then that it was the smoke, that smoke that had been breathed in and out in Mooney’s for over a hundred years, traces that were still there and would never go away, smoke that had coated the lungs of those old Irishmen, my ancestors and Hugh’s, men as dumb and prejudiced in their way as those who had hated them were in theirs.

  Men who hated the English, who mistreated their wives and children, who had anger and violence in them, as does any race forced from their native land by the rich and powerful, men who were hated for being dumb Micks, and in their turn hated the Niggers and the Hebes and the Polacks and everyone who wasn’t Irish, but especially the Limeys, oh hell yes, the fucking Brits, and even sometimes their own wives who wanted them to work harder and spend less of their money on the drink and more of it on their families.

  And those hatreds, alive for all those years in the smoke of Mooney’s Pub, had found new homes and new sympathies in a couple of latter-day Irish-Americans, who sang of those old hatreds with all their talents until their pretended fervor grew real, and the smoke drifted up into their brains and made them like the worst of their fathers. No wonder Mooney’s pub bands couldn’t stay together, I thought, and almost smiled. Almost.

  So it’s clear now what I have to do:

  He took the sheet from his wife’s cold feet/And he twisted it into a rope/And hanged himself from the pantry shelf/An easy end, let’s hope.

  But it won’t be from the pantry shelf. It’ll be from one of the crossbeams at Mooney’s Pub, just before sunrise, about five or five-thirty, after the ambulances and police cars have left the area. Kevin once told me where he kept the key hidden, in case I ever forgot and left an instrument behind that I needed.

  I think the only way to dissipate the smoke in Mooney’s Pub is to close it down forever, and I can do that by opening it up, with a gallon of gasoline and a match. And when everything is ready, I’ll light that match and throw it from my chair atop the table, and when the flames jump up I’ll kick the chair away, and hope I go fast so I don’t feel the fire.

  That’s what I think, but maybe that’s all shite. Maybe Hugh just fucking hated Jack, and maybe I wanted to kill Molly for a long time.

  But then I think of her smiling at me, loving me, and I know that that’s not true. So it’s the right thing I’m doing then, to scour the smoke from Mooney’s Pub by making more smoke from a fire fresh and cleansing, with myself, bedeviled and wicked and foolish, becoming a part of it all, as we drift away in the high air and the sunlight and blessed quiet.

  From the Back Pages

  From “Headquarters Chat,” Detective Story Magazine, July 15, 1919:

  “DEAR EDITOR: I am thirteen years old, and I read every page of every story of your wonderful magazine. The stories have inspired me to want to be a detective myself when I am grown up. I like murder stories best, but what I don’t like is when the villains get away and there are more stories about them later. I don’t think it’s good to show them getting away. They should be caught and then escape at the beginning of the next story.

  “I want to get a tattoo of an open eye, like the Pinkerton Detective Agency has saying they never sleep, and like is on the dollar bill, but my parents say that I have to be on my own before I get one. Thank you for such terrific stories.

  “Jim Shepard

  “134 N. Lincoln Street

  “Omaha, Nebraska.”

  We can always use more detectives, Jim, so good luck to you! With you on the job, maybe those villains who get away at the end of every story will be captured. But your parents are right about that tattoo, and you may change your mind when you are older.

  From “Ask Adventure,” Adventure, February 10, 1925:

  Good Book on Taxidermy

  Always a handy thing to have around:

  Question :—”I would like to know the title of a good book on taxidermy, with particular attention to tanning and preserving skins.”—B. D. WHITWORTH, Chicago, Ill.

  Answer, by Mr. Belford:—A fine overall book on taxidermy, with a thorough chapter on tanning all types of animal skins and hides, is C. K. and C. A. Reed’s Guide to Taxidermy, available at bookstores or directly from Mr. Chas. K. Reed, Worcester, Mass.

  From “The Camp-Fire,” Adventure, September, 1934:

  “The Camp-Fire” is usually filled with stories about our adventurer-writers, as it has been since its inception, but every now and again, we get some communications from some long-term readers who are pretty adventurous themselves. Such a reader is B. D. Whitworth, whom we hear from every year or so. Mr. Whitworth is a hunter-adventurer who roams these great forty-eight states bagging big game, such as elk, mountain goat, and deer. He wrote us first in 1925 when he bagged his first trophy animal in the state of Washington, and later in 1926 (North Dakota), 1928 (Montana), 1929 (Wyoming), and 1931 (Idaho). Just this year he reports bringing down another prize in Colorado. Mr. Whitworth tells us that he never returns to any previous hunting sites, because of the many new and exciting vistas the country presents. The fortunate Mr. Whitworth is a traveling man whose business takes him all over, so that wherever he hangs his hat is home. He also reports that he has started to write fiction, and we hope that when he has something to offer, he will send it to Adventure for our consideration…

  From “The Madman Who Collected Women” by D. B. Worth, Terror Tales, January 1935:

  …“Joan!” Dan cried, straining against his bonds, and just starting to feel them give way under his tight muscles.

  “Yes, Mr. Beecher,” cackled Dr. Schwarzenwald as he tossed the sheet aside. Next to him, the naked girl, her nubile body spread-eagled on the operating table, writhed in terror. The wires that held her cut into her pale flesh, and trickles of blood ran down her shapely arms.

  “Don’t worry, dear!” Dan called to h
is fiancée. “We’ll get out of this!”

  “Nein, schweinhund! “ Dr. Schwarzenwald said, and the gibbering dwarf at his side capered up and down, his beady, piggish eyes drinking in the sight of the unclad beauty just an arm’s reach away. “For once that Gunther and I have done our work with our instruments of art…” He held up what looked to Dan’s horrified gaze like a scalpel. “… your lovely Joan Simpson will be added to my collection, and what remains of her—and you —will be dissolved in the acid pit!”

  Dr. Schwarzenwald flung back a trap door on the floor. Though Dan couldn’t see into it, he could see the noxious green fumes rising from it, and knew that it would devour his body in seconds.

  “And then,” the crazed Prussian continued, “the wunderschon Miss Simpson will be with me forever, as are these other beauties! Gunther! “

  The barked command sent the hideous dwarf scampering to a long curtain at the end of the room. He whipped it open, and behind it Dan saw a sight that set Joan screaming in horror and made his own heart pound like a piston in his manly chest.

  A dozen glass cases held the skins of as many young women. They were each draped over a wire framework, roughly human-shaped. It was as though the women had been flayed in one piece, their flesh then preserved and put on display. Long hair hung from the tops of the heads, and Dan could see fingernails still attached to the dangling strips of skin that were the unfortunate victims’ fingers.

  “You, Fraulein Simpson, will now join my parade of beauties!” the madman crowed in dark triumph. “But for the best result, the procedure must be done while you still live! Gunther!”

  Dr. Schwarzenwald bent with his scalpel over the girl’s heaving chest, and the dwarf bounded to his side, placing his hands over Joan’s lily-white breasts, as though to stretch the skin taut over her heart for the doctor’s blade.