Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  What was he doing? Why had he said that? Too late to take it back now. His fingers tightened as the fella in the love nest rose and walked slowly up to the bar, muddied shoes coming to a stop not two feet away. Before Niall saw the man’s face, it was the shoes he couldn’t tear his eyes away from. They were obviously expensive, and had once been lovingly made somewhere in Gucci-land, where it never snowed or rained. Now they looked crap, with the little brass horseshoes across the last looking like dull key chains. The tie around his neck, dyed a kind of dusty gray by sweat and sun alike, might once have been royal blue.

  “Did you say three friends?” asked the rumpled man, who had risen from the enclosure, and the sheer emptiness of his voice finally made Niall look up and examine his face. It had once been handsome, with that high brow found mostly on the fortunate, but wrinkles now made it older than what might have been a good thirty-five years. Deep bags under his eyes were as distended and dark as ripe figs. This was a man, thought Niall, whom life had kicked right in the heart and then made sure to cut it out afterward for good measure. He couldn’t get a read of the fella’s eyes, because whatever light might once have emanated from them had been turned off from the inside and the cord yanked out permanently.

  “Yes, three of them,” lied Niall, keeping both hands steady. The man behind the bar had begun to shift his weight to the balls of his feet. This could end badly right now, old son, thought Niall, and felt his own body twitch with fresh rivers of adrenaline, which made him woozy and nearly high with pre-explosive excitement. “But I don’t think they’ve made it here yet. They said for me to meet them here, when this place opened up.”

  “Lucky for you, then, that we never closed last night,” said the bartender, sliding a fresh pint in front of Niall and the man with the hollow eyes.

  “What are their names?” asked the man with the faded tie, his voice nearly begging for an answer. His mouth was open in supplication, and it frightened Niall more than it made him wonder which one of them he should try to hit first if that big fella behind the bar came out with a bat or some other foul surprise. “Please,” persisted the man. “You see, I had three friends once too, ya know.” His voice seemed to run out of air as he looked at the beer and added, “Funny how things work out. Funny . . .”

  “Easy, Finbar,” said the bartender, with surprising tenderness, including Niall in a stare that was meant to tell him that the figure in the Guccis ignoring the fresh pint in front of him might not be quite right in the head. “You ask everybody that who comes in here. This nice young man was just leaving.” Another Hollywood denture smile that seemed considerably less patient with strangers who couldn’t even be counted on to arrive with a decent cover story. “Weren’t ya?”

  “Thanks for the pint,” said Niall, hefting his soaked bag and making for the door. The despondent guy with the wretched tie seemed familiar, but not enough to trigger a memory. Niall passed the old engagement booth, feeling both men’s eyes on his back like darts, and realized that Fiona and her sisters had once sat exactly where the broken man had just nursed his cigarette moments ago and waited for Jim to spin his tales.

  It was only as Niall emerged out in the narrow main street that it struck him who that disheveled creature was.

  Fiona hadn’t just broken Finbar’s heart. The way she’d died had ensured he’d never grow a new one.

  Castletownbere was still silent as darkness faded into silver out across the bay. The IRA volunteer’s stony face looked as unsmiling as ever, even from a distance. The crêpe cart had finally escaped its noose and was being carried toward the wharf by a stiff offshore breeze that shook bicycles parked in racks. Niall squinted against the low sunlight, which rose just above Bear Island and crawled onto the moss-covered walls of a nearby roof, dyeing it dusty pink. He was going to slump in an alley nearby and try to sleep when he saw a Garda patrol car rolling slowly up the street, driven by a humorless-looking woman with her chin buried in her uniform blues. Niall sighed and began walking back out of town. There had been a sign near the road earlier, he remembered, barely visible by the dull orange streetlight. It had said something in Irish next to the words BED AND BREAKFAST.

  He knew he was just being twitchy from the mad motorcycle ride. But the eyes of the town all looked at him as he went. What will I answer the next time someone asks me why I’m really here? Niall wondered, and found he couldn’t answer it himself.

  THE WOMAN CUTTING up strips of salmon for her guests’ breakfast looked outside at the breaking dawn and, almost as if by instinct, put the boning knife down.

  A sorry-looking figure came walking up her driveway, carrying something on its back. She was sure she had seen that same young man trudging by on the coastal road a few hours earlier, headed into town. When it was still dark, his chin had hung lower on those skinny shoulders, but the slouching gait was the same. At the time, she had stared out her bedroom window and dismissed him as one of those drugged-out kids come for that damn punker music and throwing up in her rosebushes on their penniless walk home.

  Bing-bong went the doorbell, and she turned her head. That damn tramp stood outside the frosted glass, shuffling his feet as only the truly destitute could.

  Laura Crimmins had lived her whole life in the modest split-level house by the bay where she was born. She was a mannish woman of indeterminate age, with larger upper arms than most of the fellas. Her shock-white hair was worn short to the head, and she preferred to treat guests at her tiny bed-and-breakfast cottage with a sharp dose of so much motherly friendliness at all times that they never saw how close she was to crying. Clark, her husband of thirty-eight years, had been dead just long enough for her to learn how to smile without anger at the ladies nodding silent pity at her down at the SuperValu. She wiped the knife and put it in her back pocket before going to answer the doorbell. Father Malloy would have called this situation “an opportunity for kindness.” Laura agreed. But if she didn’t like the look on the stranger’s face—and all the neighbors said she read them better than cards in a deck—he wasn’t stepping foot inside. After that Jim business, everyone looked twice now before they crossed the street, didn’t they?

  “Come about a room?” said the poor fella outside, and Laura felt genuine pity. He was practically a boy, with one shoe forever opening its mouth to speak, too.

  “Right this way, my dear,” said Laura, putting a hand on the young man’s shoulder and feeling the water pressing through from the inside. It was happening again, even if she had promised herself to take on no more hard cases. Because despite his eejit T-shirt with that wretched monkey on it, this boy seemed utterly lost. “Yer drenched, poor lad,” she said, already the mother she hadn’t had occasion to be for many years. “Now, I want you to go into number eight and wash up. I will leave dry clothes for you outside the door. I want no argument.”

  Niall smiled in thanks and nodded his head. Perhaps, he thought, the myths about Munster folk being a suspicious and curmudgeonly lot were about as true as the legend about fairy unicorns roaming free next to them. “Ah, thanks a million,” he said, squishing past. He turned, a look of apprehension on his face. One hand dove into a jeans pocket, fishing for whatever money was left. “What’s the tariff?”

  Laura took another hard look, past the wet hair and the carefree smile. She saw something beneath the eagerness to please. A defensive barrier, made from something she couldn’t figure out yet. It could withstand temptation and flattery, though, she was sure of it. Whatever this young man harbored wouldn’t encourage him in the dead of night to open the door to her quarters that had STAFF ONLY printed on it, ready to cut her throat. His hair was too damn long. But this boy was solid. “Say, thirty euro per night, and I’ll make ya breakfast, as well?” she said, feeling the still-cold blade next to her butt cheek.

  “Brilliant,” said Niall, and walked over to his room. Then he stopped and turned.

  “Was there something else?” asked the innkeeper. The young man’s face looked like someone had jus
t walked over his grave.

  “This might sound odd, but . . . have you ever heard of a young girl riding a black motorcycle near these parts? Quite fast, like. And—erm, dangerous?”

  Laura shook her head, eyes on the ceiling as she appeared to search her memory. “Och, no. Nobody like that.” Then she lit up in a smile. “Is that a friend of yours I should be making up another room for?”

  “No, just someone I met,” Niall said, waving both hands in apology. “Thanks again. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Laura watched him go inside his room and close the door behind him. Then she locked the front door and daubed her index finger in the Virgin Mary pool of holy water that hung by the mini-altar on the wall. Black riders. Never heard of such a thing, not around here. Still, everything was possible. She made the sign of the cross as she looked outside.

  Because despite a gut feeling telling her this kid was honest enough, whatever haunted him surely wasn’t.

  NIALL HAD SAT at the tiny desk for just a few moments when Jim stirred inside him again.

  He took out the plastic bag that contained his precious drawing paper and withdrew a single sheet. Fiona’s diary already lay opened on the bed next to him, dog-eared in places where there was a scribble he couldn’t quite decipher or where he’d found what could be an important clue to how the story might have continued. For instance, she had drawn crosses and check marks in the margin in several places, but it didn’t appear to be connected to any one direction that Niall could figure out.

  On one separate page, Fiona appeared to have made some kind of crude map of the area, with an X through a few towns, leaving others unmarked: Castletownbere had two crosses, while Drimoleague deserved just one. Niall guessed that meant both Sarah and Tomo had died in the first, while the Holland widow merited only one marker. Adrigole, Eyeries, and Bantry were unblemished. Question marks dotted almost every other town nearby, as if roving death on a motorbike stalked sheep, goats, schoolboys, and fair maidens of the distant past. Despite his own creative imagination, Niall had to frown at that. It was all too perfect. But as much as he wanted to doubt Fiona’s ever-decreasing sanity inside her aunt’s murder house as she had jotted her version of events down for him to read, there had still been a real wolf out there, hadn’t there?

  Jim hadn’t just bragged about hammering Tomo to death, Niall’s good sense told him. He looked again at Fiona’s testimony about where he had committed either acts of love or of a darker nature, and her story seemed logical again. Niall felt the seanchaí’s presence very closely, as if he were standing outside the windowpane even now, breathing on the glass and writing his name in the hot breath. Niall flipped back to the final page again. “Murderers,” Fiona had said they vowed to become, but did she and her sisters ever have the time to fulfill that promise, before Aunt Moira turned out their lights?

  There was that stirring again, just as he’d felt from the balls of his feet to the top of his head that first night at the post office. It was almost a pain inside his skull, so forceful were the images contained therein, tapping on the bone from inside to be let out and play.

  This time, a hand grew, almost without Niall’s help, on the middle of the blank page.

  It was soon connected to a leather-jacketed arm, which became a whole man, lunging forward for someone, mouth half open. Niall drew the fingers longer than he’d wanted, but they fit with the slender legs, rendered in mid-run, thigh muscles visible through the ripped denim. Jim’s eyes, strangely, were the last thing to become animated, but they were too dull and lifeless. He erased them and tried for a genuine set of wolf eyes, but that looked even worse, like a bad Japanese anime cartoon. Niall was about to try rendering Jim’s prey with the well-chewed charcoal pencil, when the door swung open behind him without warning.

  “Can’t have ya running around catching pneumonia, now can w—”

  Mrs. Crimmins cut herself off in mid-sentence, and Niall threw the diary on top of the half-finished drawing, a second too late for privacy. He read something in his hostess’s eyes that the bright smile couldn’t quite cover up fast enough. She’d seen a brief flicker of what swam around in his brain. And nobody—except, perhaps, that famous American comic book artist Todd Sayles—was allowed to see that.

  “Thanks so much, Mrs. Crimmins,” said Niall, seeing the neatly folded clothes in her arms. “That’s too kind.”

  Mrs. Crimmins set down a pair of men’s jeans, a sweater, an overcoat, and a pair of barely used boots at the foot of the bed and wiped her perfectly dry palms in the apron, as if to wash herself of the items forever. “Not at all, young man. Not at all.” She turned up the warmth dial in her eyes, as if she’d never noticed a thing. “And will you be having breakfast tomorrow?”

  “Yes, please. Is half eight all right?”

  “Salmon and eggs at half eight, my love,” repeated Mrs. Crimmins in her singsong incantation that signified professional distance, exiting the room quickly. She shut the door without a sound.

  Niall sat there a moment, feeling like his mother had just surprised him with a porno mag in his free hand. He brushed aside the diary and looked at the unfinished sketch. He’d gone about this all wrong, as usual. It wasn’t just the wolf from earlier that he’d failed at. If you can’t properly imagine what the predator is chasing, how can you ever hope to make his desire lifelike? Niall rose, locked the door, and sat back down. Mrs. Crimmins probably thought he was some pervy artist, but it was too late to change that now. He bent over the paper and tried to imagine how it might have felt to have Jim’s hand seizing his own neck right before squeezing the life from it. He remembered Sarah McDonnell’s earring and her lifeless feet, Tomo’s shattered face. “How are you going, ladies?” the storyteller had asked with a grin, before setting to work. And Mrs. Holland, if Jim had been her murderer, may have got herself no flirting hellos at all.

  Something began to happen.

  A female form appeared under Niall’s pencil, just ahead of Jim’s lunging hands.

  Her shoulders came first, twisted as she ran, and sprouted a slim back, hips, and legs, kicking against the pursuer’s grip. Why am I so drawn to all this? Niall asked himself, but felt the answer coming in the shape of a lovely brow and a set of wide-open blue eyes, rather than intellectual thought. Now the entire composition made more sense, with prey and predator entwined in a dynamic dance of death.

  But even if the wolf was human this time, the eyes were still wrong. Niall erased them yet again and tried for a narrow, hungry gleam to go with the murderous pose. He added dark shades to make the rest of the face disappear. Shit! Now Jim looked sleepy, not dangerous. Niall put down the pencil, disgusted with himself. Maybe bringing evil to life meant actually having to touch it in the flesh first?

  The only real death Niall had seen had been when little Danny Egan from across the street had come out second in a game of chicken with a bus. They had both been around eleven or so, and Danny had just left Niall’s house, where they had tried to tape their hurling sticks the way the pros did it, ten thumbs and all. Niall’s mum had called after him not to run across the street, and her voice was cut off by the thudding noise. From the front yard, Niall could clearly see the naked legs beneath the undercarriage, one shoe still untied. They had looked like wax.

  That same night, feeling like a ghoul, Niall had taken pencil and paper and stolen underneath his blanket with a flashlight. The adults had talked about “the tragedy” and “a young life snuffed out,” but those words didn’t kick-start any feelings inside himself, just a thick, aching sense that none of it had seemed real.

  So he put pencil to paper and watched something happen he barely understood, even now. A pair of shoes became two real legs, fused to a real boy’s prone body. He began to feel pangs of fear and loss. Danny, his best friend, was dead! By the time he was finished, bus on top of Danny’s unseen torso and a garda added in the drawing for good measure, Niall was sobbing so loudly both his parents came to see what was the matter.

 
; The pen and pencil had become magic. Everything else since then, to Niall, had been an echo of the real world that existed only in two dimensions.

  Niall got up and walked over to the window, where the sun now rose high above Bear Island, transforming it back into a peaceful tourist trap. No wolves lurked anywhere, even those wearing jeans. There was no opportunity to meet anything dangerous. Perhaps, he thought, he’d made a mistake coming out here. He lay down on the bed just for a moment, testing the springs. Tomorrow, he’d begin exploring the tracks of the wolf, beginning with that school. Perhaps, he imagined, Fiona had left something behind she didn’t even think to include in the diary.

  Soon, he was asleep. And in his dreams, the black gate opened, sending an army of mounted cavalry into the world, each horseman armed only with the deadliest smile in creation.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  The voice was brisk as a cold shower and about as pleasant. Niall stood in the empty classroom at Sacred Heart Primary School, hunched over at least the eighteenth teacher’s desk in as many minutes that afternoon, and had just put his fingers on an old copy of a book called Lost Treasures of the Pharaoh when it dawned on him that he wasn’t alone. He raised his head and was greeted by a set of eyes that demanded nothing less than unwavering answers.

  “Are you that Mr. Breen?” the little girl wanted to know, heels together like a drum majorette. “That would make you our third substitute teacher this month.”

  Niall regarded the spit-shined patent leather shoes and the fingers clutching her desk set and didn’t need to think twice to know the identity of his inquisitor.

  “You must be Mary Catherine,” he said, trying not to grin at her like some kind of weird stranger with candy.