Jig

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Harry’s waiting for you.’

  Patrick Cairney looked over Celestine’s shoulder. His father appeared in the doorway, smaller than Cairney remembered him, shrunken, his silver hair thinner than before and his eyes, under the great overhanging forehead, set in deep shadow.

  ‘Let me hear it, Pat,’ Harry Cairney called out in a voice that was curiously cracked.

  Patrick Cairney hesitated before he sang. ‘You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,/You’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg –’

  His father sang the next two lines hoarsely. ‘You’ll have to be put with a bowl to beg,/O Johnny, we hardly knew ye!’

  ‘With drums and guns, and guns and drums,/The enemy nearly slew ye –’

  ‘My darling dear, you look so queer,/O Johnny, I hardly knew ye!’

  Then the old man was laughing, and Patrick Cairney climbed the steps quickly, thinking how the way they greeted each other never changed. It was a ritual as well preserved as his father’s mythical vision of Ireland. And Patrick found it empty and meaningless, a routine first developed in his childhood. It had been embarrassing even back then. Now it was worse because it was forced and ridiculous. Both men embraced, then Harry Cairney stepped back and said, ‘Let me look at you, Pat. Let me take a good long look at you. You’ve put on some muscles since I last saw you. It must be all those Irish potatoes you’ve been eating.’

  Patrick Cairney glanced at Celestine, who was coming up the steps. She said, ‘Did somebody give you permission to come out here into the cold, Harry?’

  Cairney winked at his son. ‘She never lets up,’ he said. ‘She keeps an old man in check.’

  ‘Somebody has to,’ Celestine said. She slipped her arm through Harry’s and she smiled at her stepson. It was a good smile, the kind Patrick Cairney thought you could bask in on a chilly winter’s day. Like having your own private sun.

  ‘Now let’s all go indoors,’ Celestine said. She shivered as she ushered Harry inside the house.

  ‘I’ll fetch my luggage,’ Patrick Cairney said.

  He went back down the steps to the Dodge Colt. He reached inside and lifted his bag from the rear seat. He closed the door. He saw the black security jeep appear on the shore of Roscommon Lake, idling between bare trees.

  John F. Kennedy Airport, New York

  The man from the State Department was called J. W. Sweeting. He wore a three-piece suit and his hair was immaculately brushed over his broad skull. He had a brown leather briefcase with his initials embossed on it. He sat in the arrivals lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport and studied the man he’d just met from the London flight. The Reverend Ivor McInnes was big, weighed somewhere in the region of two hundred and twenty pounds, none of it flab. He had a large, craggy face that was handsome in a fleshy way. He was about fifty, Sweeting reckoned. The eyes were green and lively and burned into you whenever you looked at them. The British press called him Ivor the Terrible, which Sweeting thought he understood. There was the scent of brimstone hanging all around the Reverend McInnes. Sweeting knew he wouldn’t like to sit through one of McInnes’s sermons, which would be all thunder and spit. And yet like many people before him J. W. Sweeting realised that there was something attractive about McInnes, a certain quality of roguish charm which, as a political tool, could be extremely useful. It was easy to imagine Ivor swaying large crowds, shaping them any way he wanted.

  Sweeting tapped his briefcase. ‘I’ll go over the conditions of entry for you,’ he said.

  McInnes smiled. ‘No need, no need,’ he said in an accent that reminded Sweeting of a Liverpool rock singer. ‘I know them all. Your embassy people in London, the gargoyles of Grosvenor Square, already put me through their wire-mesh procedures.’

  Sweeting rubbed his embossed initials with a fingertip. ‘In case there’s any misunderstanding, Reverend, you were granted an entry visa on the condition that you refrain from speaking in public places or giving inflammatory interviews to the press. State is adamant about that.’

  McInnes swivelled his green eyes up to the high ceiling and looked very impatient. ‘I know all this, young man.’

  Sweeting sighed. It was the sigh of a man carrying out his duty regardless. ‘You are to refrain from all and any public assemblies. You are also ordered to refrain from addressing any private assemblies, clubs, and associations, organisations, and the like, which are considered partisan in nature. You are prohibited from activities designed to raise funds for any partisan organisations with which you might be associated in Northern Ireland.’

  ‘Can I actually breathe?’ McInnes asked. ‘Or am I forbidden the use of your air as well?’

  Sweeting ignored this. ‘You are also deterred from making political statements concerning British or American policy in Ireland, the Irish Republican Army, the conditions of Irish political prisoners in British jails, and any remarks, ambiguous or otherwise, about the Roman Catholic Church.’

  ‘Did somebody tear up your Constitution? Did somebody just decide to disregard that wonderful document in my case?’ McInnes was looking amused rather than annoyed.

  Sweeting went on, ‘Your stay is limited to ten days and restricted to New York City and its environs. Any other movements must be cleared in advance with a representative of the State Department. To wit, me. And I’ll turn down any and all requests you might make. Is all this clear?’

  McInnes nodded. ‘Loud and clear.’

  ‘Any violation of these conditions will result in your expulsion from the United States. Between you and me, I think you’re lucky to get this visa. The fact is, State pursues a policy of fairness towards both sides in the Irish question. If we let in, say, a priest from Tipperary, then we can’t keep out a minister from Belfast. Even one whose own church has rejected him.’

  ‘Are you a Catholic?’ McInnes asked.

  ‘Is that relevant?’

  McInnes grinned. He had strong white teeth. He brought his face very close to Sweeting’s. It was a characteristic of his, this closing of the distance between himself and his listener, and it forced an uneasy intimacy on whoever Ivor was talking to. ‘I have this reputation, Mr. Sweeting. They say I hate Roman Catholics. I admit I have my differences with the Church of Rome, friend, but as far as individual Catholics are concerned, I don’t hate them. They’re misguided people, that’s all.’ McInnes paused. His grin created little squares of puckered flesh all across the expanse of his face. ‘My own church failed to understand that, Mr. Sweeting. They interpreted my objections to Rome as attacks on individual Catholics. Which wasn’t what I intended. Far from it.’

  Sweeting stepped back a pace. McInnes had been talking very loudly and several people were staring at him.

  ‘You’re misunderstood, is that what you’re saying?’ Sweeting asked.

  ‘I’m damned in certain quarters whenever I open my mouth.’

  ‘Maybe you should keep it shut more often,’ J. W. Sweeting said.

  Ivor McInnes smiled. He placed one of his big hands on Sweeting’s shoulder and rocked the man from the State Department very slightly back and forth. Sweeting once more stepped away. McInnes reminded him of one of those TV salesmen who pitched Herbalife or urged you to send your dollars to some church beamed into your living room from a satellite in the sky. He made you feel you were the most important thing in his life when he talked to you. It was the way the green eyes concentrated on your face and the easy manner, the quiet little touches, the familiarity. He was convincing, Sweeting thought, but so were all the blow-dried evangelists of the air-waves. Where McInnes had the edge over his electronic rivals was in the way he looked – he was rumpled instead of embalmed in polyester, and his silver hair had never been styled beneath a dryer but was unkempt and grew down over his collar.

  ‘You’re not a stuffy little man, are you, Mr. Sweeting?’ McInnes said. ‘I thought everybody in the State Department had had their sense of humour expunged at birth. I thought they had their wit circumcised along with their foreskins.’

/>   J. W. Sweeting passed the palm of one hand over his forehead. He was inexplicably nervous all at once. In theory, he should have loathed a man like McInnes. In practice, he was finding it difficult. The green eyes suggested amusement and a benign tolerance for the sorrows of the human condition, and the smile, that big wide-mouthed expression, was magnetic. What Sweeting had expected to encounter was a hateful bigot, which would have been easy to handle. McInnes didn’t come across that way at all. Indeed, he appeared reasonable and easygoing, a man given to instant friendships, huge handshakes, intimate gestures. A man who played on your sympathies by insisting, with a down-turned mouth, that he was misunderstood by his enemies, which was a terrible cross he had to carry. He was goddamn likeable.

  McInnes rubbed his chin. ‘You’re not a bad fellow, Sweeting. And because I like you I’ll make life easy for you. I’ll go along with all your restrictions. I’ll whistle any tune you care to hear whether I like it or not, because I’m not here on any political mission. I’ll tell you something else. I smell The White House behind all these conditions of yours. I smell Tommy Dawson at work.’

  ‘Like the State Department, the President is neutral in the Irish question,’ Sweeting said.

  McInnes laughed. It was a curious sound, a throaty wheeze. ‘Neutral? Tommy Dawson’s a black-hearted Catholic Irishman who makes pilgrimages to the dear little town of Ardare in the Republic of Ireland where his grandparents were born. He’s about as neutral as the Pope, Mr. Sweeting. And he hates anybody from the North. He hates Ulster.’

  Sweeting wasn’t going to be drawn into the question of Thomas Dawson’s Irish heritage or the matter of his sympathies. He returned to the only subject he was interested in. ‘If you restrict yourself to the research you say you want to do here, then we’ll get along just famously.’

  McInnes nodded his head. ‘What could be more peaceful and worthy than writing the saga of Ulster labourers in the history of the American railroad? All that sweat and toil. All the sadness of the immigrant worker. The longings. The hopes. The dreams. By God, it’s a rich tale. And a complicated one. Besides, I’m a minister without a congregation, and a man has to make a living somehow.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Sweeting said. He thought of how, in support of his visa application, McInnes had submitted a copy of a contract with a small university press for his projected history. It was one book Sweeting would manage not to read, if indeed it was ever likely to see the light of publication.

  McInnes picked up his suitcase from the floor. ‘I’m booked into the Essex House on Central Park, Mr. Sweeting.’

  ‘I know,’ Sweeting said.

  McInnes winked at the man. ‘I thought you might.’

  Wildwood, Long Island

  Big Jock Mulhaney drove his four-wheel-drive vehicle slowly over damp sands. He had a view of Long Island Sound, which looked dismal and abandoned in the sullen light of afternoon. He wore a thick flannel jacket and waterproof pants, and he had a baseball cap pulled down squarely on his head. It wasn’t the kind of clothing he usually favoured. His tastes ran to rather bright three-piece suits, large checks and flashy herringbones, accompanied by wide-knotted neckties. But today he wasn’t travelling in his usual environment either, which was bounded by his penthouse over union headquarters in Brooklyn and the midtown Manhattan clubs he patronised, where his fellow members regarded him with all the suspicion Old Money has for the nouveau riche. He was viewed, he knew, as an upstart, a man who didn’t belong in the more rarefied heights of society. He was a brawler, a climber, a loudmouth, and he suffered from the most heinous condition of all – which was naked ambition – but there was a certain shrewdness to him that nobody disrespected.

  Now, as the four-wheel-drive vehicle slithered into ruts and a vicious wind stirred the waters of the sound, Mulhaney wondered if it was bad judgment to be out here at all. For one thing, expanses of nature made him nervous. He couldn’t take too many trees. He couldn’t stand silences and great spaces. For another, he wasn’t sure he should be meeting with Nicholas Linney anyhow, but who else was he going to confide in? He couldn’t go to Harry Cairney with his theory unless he had some backing. So he needed Linney’s approval and support.

  Besides, there was another reason for his uneasiness, one he didn’t want to think about. It was the simple fact that he had recently been obliged to cover some very bad investments with money that had been earmarked for Ireland. It wan’t any great sum, a mere $450,000 skimmed from his total contribution of $1.9 million, and he was going to return it next time funds were raised, and nobody was going to find out about it anyway – but just the same the mere prospect of discovery made him feel apprehensive. What if one of the other Fund-raisers found out about the shortage? Hell, that would make Big Jock the prime suspect in the hijacking of the Connie. How could it not? A man who could ‘borrow’ from Irish funds for his own private purposes wasn’t a man who could be trusted. It had been a stupid thing to do, admittedly, but he’d been pressured by creditors, and he hadn’t been thinking clearly, and he didn’t want any kind of public scandal attached to his name. Thomas Dawson had recently announced a committee of inquiry into the financial practices of unions, and Mulhaney didn’t like the idea of coming under the scrutiny of a bunch of congressional jerk-offs who were bound to ask tough questions. He’d covered his shortage this time, and so had spared himself some potential embarrassment, but he’d done it only at the expense of the Irish. But it wasn’t something he intended to continue doing. Fuck Tommy Dawson, he thought. Always pointing a mighty finger at the unions, slinging accusations, digging for dirt.

  Mulhaney’s vehicle became bogged down in the soft wet sands. He switched off the engine and stared the length of the beach. What if this Irishman they were all so goddam afraid of found out about the shortage? He shook his head. The Irishman wasn’t going to get within a hundred miles of him, so he wasn’t going to worry about that notion.

  He got out of the vehicle and turned the collar of his jacket up against the whining wind. In the distance there was the sound of gunfire, a constant rapid knocking that was muted by the churning waters. He walked a little way. He moved awkwardly because the heavy sands inhibited his progress, and every now and again spray splashed up and blinded him. Christ, he hated this place. He stopped and removed a small silver flask from his pocket. He opened it, sipped some cognac, then stuck the flask away again. Ahead, a hundred or so yards along the seafront, he could see Linney’s Land-Rover, which had been painted in camouflage colours. The trouble with Nick Linney, Mulhaney thought, was the guy was some kind of nut. He read Soldier of Fortune and believed every word of it. He was into weaponry and combat and guerilla techniques, and he went through the pages of Soldier of Fortune with a big yellow marker in his fist, circling stories and advertisements that interested him.

  Mulhaney kept walking. Now he could see Linney lying flat on the sand. The sound of gunfire was constant. Blap-blap-blap. As he got closer, Mulhaney noticed the targets Linney was using. Close to the shoreline, the guy had set up row after row of cantaloupes, and he was currently blasting away at them. Every now and then one of them would explode and rise up in the air in pulpy smithereens. Linney was from outer space, Mulhaney thought.

  ‘Nick!’ he called out.

  Linney stood up, raised one arm in greeting. He was dressed in combat clothing. He even had a beret, which he wore at a precarious angle. Mulhaney noticed the heavy army boots. Grenades lay on the sands alongside an assortment of weapons. Jesus, the guy was a one-man militia.

  Linney stared in the direction of the cantaloupes. Then he held out the weapon he’d been using as if he wanted Mulhaney to inspect it and give it some seal of approval. Mulhaney wasn’t happy around firearms.

  ‘The M-16A2,’ Linney said proudly.

  Jock Mulhaney nodded. The melons, most of them shattered, were being sucked at by the tide.

  ‘Feel it, Jock.’ Linney thrust the weapon out in the manner used by gun freaks the world over when they’re in ap
prehensive company. Cavalier. A little too casual.

  Mulhaney held the gun for a moment before returning it. He wondered how Linney got hold of weapons that private citizens weren’t supposed to have. ‘Yeah. Feels solid,’ was all he could say.

  ‘Excellent piece,’ Linney said. He pointed out some features, such as the new muzzle brake/compensator and the integral brass deflector, and Mulhaney made humming sounds, as if he might be remotely interested. Mulhaney hoped that if any one of the Fund-raisers ever found out about the ‘borrowed’ cash it wouldn’t be Nick Linney.

  Linney swung the weapon back towards the rows of cantaloupes and fired off a couple of shots. Mulhaney watched one of the melons explode and then hit the water, carried away like a mutant jellyfish.

  ‘Very nice, Nick,’ Mulhaney said.

  Linney smiled, then put the gun inside his Land-Rover and lit a cigarette. There were oilstains on the backs of his fingers. He smoked in silence for a time, his face turned out towards the waters, before he tossed the cigarette away and looked at Mulhaney.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Jock?’ he asked.

  ‘You have to ask?’

  Nicholas Linney beat the palm of one hand upon the panel of his vehicle. ‘I get the impression you suspect me, Jock. I got that feeling when we were at Roscommon.’

  Mulhaney shook his head. ‘I considered it, I admit.’

  ‘And you changed your mind?’

  Mulhaney took his flask out again. He wished he’d brought a cigar with him to complement the flavour of the cognac, but he’d left his case behind. He swallowed, offered the flask to Linney, who declined.

  Mulhaney said, ‘Yeah. I changed my mind. Which is why I drove all the fucking way out here to see you.’