Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  Speechless with fury, O’Gorman obeyed and drove back to McBride’s. He left the car keys with Desmond’s pachyderm of a wife and stalked up Delaware Avenue toward the beach. If he had the money, he’d go to Barbara Kathleen Monahan O’Day and say, Run. Run with me for the far horizon. Run with me to Shangri-la, if it only lasts a month or a year. Run with my life in your arms to someplace where happiness is still possible, where treachery and hatred and betrayal are unknown.

  Simultaneously he imagined himself on the beach, hurling invectives across the ocean at those swivel-headed patriot morons on the IRA’s ruling council. Jesus God! Here, if ever, was the end of faith, the end of hope.

  But not the end of O’Gorman, perhaps. Instead it might be his liberation. It might be the end of dear Deirdre’s moon face and perpetual affirmations of the cause, the end of her idiotic image of herself as Queen Maeve in a scullery, perpetually sending forth her errant warrior to battle for Ireland. The end of her stupid forgiveness and the beginning of O’Gorman’s apotheosis as a free man.

  Maybe he would run for the far horizon with Barbara Kathleen, money or no money.

  “Mr. O’Gorman.”

  It was Father Hart on the porch of his rectory. “What luck. I’ve just been going over the plans for the feis with Father McAvoy and Desmond McBride. I was going to show them to you tomorrow. Would you like to take a look at them now?”

  “Why not?”

  Desmond McBride was looking haggard. He wasn’t sleeping nights either. Father McAvoy gazed at O’Gorman, the priest’s potato face more than justifying the famous phrase “I come from Mayo, God help us.” The Irish countryman was unquestionably one of the most stupid beings in the history of creation, and an Irish country priest was one notch lower on the scale, below stupidity in a boggy region where brain cells did not even exist. Why had he spent twenty-five years of his life trying to free these people from their spiritual chains? It was hopeless.

  They presented O’Gorman with the plans for the feis. They were going to have clog dancing and step dancing. Irish and Scottish band music, and pipe-band competitions. There were three Irish harpists he had never heard of and the likes of Joe Burke, Jack Conn, Mike Rafferty, Maureen Doherty, and a dozen other fiddlers, pipers, and singers whose names were equally mysterious. Liz Carroll had Chicago in parentheses next to her name as if that proved some sort of authenticity. In the mood he was in, O’Gorman would not have been impressed by the immortal John McCormack himself on the roster.

  “It looks grand,” he said. “All you need is a bard.”

  He was being sarcastic but they took him seriously. “We were hoping you could recite some poetry in Gaelic. Or perhaps young Kilroy could do this and you could translate it,” Hart said.

  “A capital idea. Except that Kilroy’s Gaelic consists of untranslatable epithets,” O’Gorman said.

  He finally agreed to recite in Gaelic and translate too. He devoutly hoped to be long gone by the time the festi-valists began their spurious jigging. Over the hills and far away with Barbara Kathleen. They could have their stupid culture, which had been effectively aborted in 1690 on the Boyne. He was through with this ridiculous artificial respiration of a ghost. He would thumb his nose at the whole thing and go to Hollywood and write movie scripts. He would lie beside his swimming pool in the sunshine and hump Barbara Kathleen and dozens of starlets until the San Fernando Valley was home, as the song promised it would be.

  Father Hart was pouring whiskey, a beatific smile on his adolescent face. O’Gorman noticed that the other priest, McAvoy, was drinking ginger ale. “To Ireland,” Hart said, raising his glass.

  “I don’t need whiskey to drink to that,” Father McAvoy said, his potato face bright with equally brainless patriotism.

  O’Gorman raised his glass and drank off his dollop. But he was toasting a little bit of heaven named Barbara Kathleen Monahan O’Day.

  THIS IS THE END MY FRIEND

  “Car twenty-six,” Tom Brannigan said in his official voice. “Prowler reported at two three five Maryland Avenue.”

  “Roger,” Mick said. “I’m at Baltimore and Virginia. On my way to investigate.”

  Maybe this would be some real police work, though Mick doubted it. Twice so far tonight he had made speed runs to Leeds Point in response to frantic calls from Jackie Chasen. She was spooked by every noise. He had gotten her a new dog, a Labrador retriever the size of a Honda, but she was still spooked.

  The prowler on Maryland Avenue would probably be imaginary too. It was funny, the way people were jumpier during the winter, when the town was practically deserted, than they were during the summer, when the crowds poured in and it was much harder to keep track of what Bill O’Toole called “potentials.” During the winter no stranger could drive into Paradise Beach without a readout of his license plate within a half hour.

  Still it was good to get his mind off the mystery of what had happened to Joey Zaccaro and his money. As far as Mick could see, there was only one explanation. Joey had been shot by a fellow member of the Mob who had heard about the money he was carrying around. By this time, Bill O’Toole had explained what was cooking between him and Joey and the two Irishmen.

  Uncle Bill too was inclined to think it was a Mob double cross. But he was keeping an eye on the Irishmen, especially the older guy, Tyrone Power, as Uncle Bill called him. He was too smooth for Uncle Bill. He never liked smoothies. He was a rough diamond himself.

  The explanation had restored some of Mick’s confidence in Uncle Bill. He was not selling the town out to the Mob. But Mick continued to have grave doubts about helping the IRA, even if they were Irish. The Professor kept telling him they were no different from the Viet Cong, guys who shook down civilians at gunpoint and shot their enemies in the dark in the name of some crazy vision of communism.

  At 235 Maryland, Mick loosened his Colt .38 in his holster and slid out of the car. He had checked the block as he came down it, and no strange vehicles were in sight. Most sneak thieves were outsiders who arrived on wheels to loot the summer houses that were closed for the winter. It was unusual for a thief to try to break into an occupied house. In fact, it did not make much sense. The stuff people left in their summer houses was amazing. Silver and TVs and stereo sets. A fast worker with a van could make three or four thousand dollars if he hit the right house.

  None of the houses on Maryland, especially 235, looked right to Mick. They were all four- and five-room shacks, most of them occupied by retirees who had winterized them. At 235, white-haired Joe McCaffrey met him at the door gripping a baseball bat. “I heard a noise in the backyard. Somebody bumpin’ into a garbage can. I went on the back porch and there’s this guy in a black suit tryin’ to jimmy the lock on the screen door. I asked him what the hell he thought he was doin’ and he dodges toward the garage. I’m afraid he’s stealin’ the stereo out of my van.”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  Mick moved up the driveway staying close to the house. The guy could be a psycho with a gun. They had a half dozen active nuts in Paradise Beach, guys who’d been let out of mental hospitals ahead of time. One or two were dangerous.

  The garage door was closed. If the guy was trying to steal a car stereo, he was doing it the hard way. McCaffrey was on the back porch now. “You got a remote for the garage?” Mick asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hit it.”

  The garage door rattled up to the roof. Mick crouched beside an azalea bush and waited. Nothing. He beamed his flashlight into the garage. Only a 1985 Chevette and the Volkswagen van McCaffrey used to run day-trippers to Atlantic City during the summer.

  Mick checked the backyard next door and several nearby yards. He could remember playing ring-a-levio in these yards when he was a kid. In those days the houses were closed for the winter and there was no end of places to hide. Now all these old people were living in them. Bill O’Toole said sometimes he wondered if they were running a two-mile-long old-age home. The golden-agers were always calling the
police. If it wasn’t a stroke or a heart attack, it was an argument in which the husband had whacked the old lady with a skillet or vice versa.

  It was amazing how many of them didn’t get along. Uncle Bill said the only thing that had kept them married was the job that separated them for most of each day. Mick thought they were just bored. Getting old was boring. No more sex, your stomach starts to go and you can’t drink, you can’t afford a fast car and can’t drive one anyway—no wonder they whacked each other around.

  Mick got back in the car and spent the rest of the night on the usual rounds. Out to Leeds Point and back along Ocean Avenue and up to Jorgenson’s Pavilion to make sure nobody was stealing the soda fountain and down to the inlet to make sure all eighteen holes were still on the miniature golf course. Around 3 A.M. he got a call from the Golden Shamrock to collect Billy Kilroy. The guy was turning into a permanent nuisance, drunk every night.

  Billy was teaching the regulars a Belfast song when Mick arrived. It was called “The Ballad of William Bloat,” about a Protestant who cut his unfaithful wife’s throat with a razor blade and then decided to hang himself with one of the sheets on their bed. He died cursing the pope, naturally. Eyes dancing, Billy bellowed the last verse:

  “But the strangest turn to the whole concern is only just beginnin’.

  Bloat went to hell but his wife got well and she’s still alive and sinnin’.

  For the razor blade was German made but the sheet was Belfast linen.”

  Billy got a big hand and Mick good-naturedly joined in the applause. “Come on, Kilroy, I’ll take you home.”

  Mick poured Billy into the front seat of the squad car.

  “Marine, huh?” Billy said. “Them’s the best in America, they tell me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me old man was the best in the fookin’ British army. Was in the Irish Guards he was. Soldier of the fookin’ queen.”

  “No kiddin’. Where’d he fight?”

  “Fookin’ Korea.”

  “He buy the farm?”

  “What? We never had a pot to piss in much less a farm.”

  “I mean, did he get killed?”

  “Nah. Died of fookin’ pneumonia.”

  “Rough. How old were you then?”

  “I dunno. A wee brat. I don’t even remember him.”

  “I guess we’re about the same age. I was born during the Korean War.”

  “Where’s your old man? Did he get it in the head out there?”

  “Nah. He lives in Jersey City. My old lady didn’t get along with him.”

  “And they just split up? You’re no different from the bloody Prods.”

  “We don’t curse the pope. We just ignore him.”

  “I’ll buy that, true enough.”

  “What do you think happened to that money?” Mick asked.

  “O’Gorman’s got it. I’ll bet my eyes on it. He’s got it somewhere. But he’s afraid to run because he knows I’ll follow him.”

  “Sing me another Belfast song.”

  Billy let his head fall back on the cushion. In a wailing voice that seemed about five years old, he sang:

  “I am the wee falorie man

  A rattling roving Irishman

  I can do all that ever you can

  For I am the wee falorie man.”

  “That’s the first song I learned. My mother taught it to met.”

  “What’s falorie mean?”

  “How the fook would I know?

  Mick helped Billy into the house and upstairs to his bed. As he went back down the hall, he noticed Richard O’Gorman’s bedroom door was half-open. Odd. Where would he go at 3 A.M.? Mick edged the door open a little more with his foot. The bed was empty. He checked the bathroom. No one there.

  As he went past his mother’s room, he heard a sound. A kind of cry-sigh, long and breathy. Mick felt his hands go hot. O’Gorman was in there with his mother. Suddenly Mick was back fifteen years, listening to The Doors sing “The End,” one of their super-sicko specialties. It was about a hophead who wanted to kill his father and make out with his mother.

  Mick remembered how weird he felt when he heard that song. Sometimes in those years a blind anger at his father would surge through him. Why had he left him at his mother’s mercy? She was always hanging all over him, wanting to know the names of his girlfriends, hinting she’d like to hear a lot more than their names.

  Weird. He didn’t like feeling weird. He had stopped listening to The Doors after that song. For him that song really had been The End. Now he felt weird again. Was he angry at Dick O’Gorman? No. But it made him feel weird.

  Mick finished his eight hours at seven forty-five. He wrote up a report of the prowler but did not mention carrying Billy home. He piled into his Rebel and drove up Ocean Avenue toward Leeds Point. If everything was on schedule, Jackie would be back from her jog on the beach. She would be out of the shower, lying on the bed in her terry-cloth robe, waiting for him. He had made up for that problem in the Pines the other night. More than made up for it. They were back on that nice even keel where she liked it and he liked it and afterward they felt good.

  Nothing sensational, just good. They were no longer trying to set the night on fire. Afterward they would eat breakfast and play some of the old music, the kind Jackie liked now and swore she had hated in 1969. Maybe “Bridge over Troubled Water” or “The Boxer.” She said he was her boxer. He sort of liked it. He liked the idea of “standing in the clearing a fighter by his trade.” The guy sounded like a marine.

  As Mick passed the intersection that led to the causeway, Phac came rattling by in his 1974 Fairlane, on his way to another day aboard the Enterprise. Mick waved to him and suddenly he no longer saw Jackie, he saw Trai. He had to check out that situation. He had to do something about that birdbrain Father Hart. Maybe the Professor was the answer. He at least understood Mick’s connection to Trai. But not even the Professor knew the whole story.

  At the house, Jackie was looking wan. She had not gone jogging. She had seen a stranger wandering along the beach and was afraid it might be a hit man. Mick told her she was being ridiculous. She cried and said she hadn’t slept more than an hour all night.

  “Come on,” Mick said. “Let’s take a shower together.”

  She wanted to and yet she didn’t want to. She wanted Mick to feel sorry for her, to tell her it was awful, what Joey Zaccaro had tried to do to her. But he was not in the mood for sweet talk. What he had heard in his mother’s bedroom made him want to do it like a machine, no words, just bang bang bang. It was wrong, but they took a shower together and Mick lathered her dark pussy with that sweet-smelling violet soap she used and slipped his finger in there. By the time they got to the bed she was wild and it went just the way he wanted it.

  But when it was over, he could see she was unhappy. She wanted something more than a banging. She wanted someone to tell her how to get away from death. The crash in the Miura had not been death, the months in the hospital had not been death. Joey Zaccaro had been death.

  Mick did not know how to tell her that death was bullshit. It was nothing. In Nam he had seen so many guys go from life to death in a second. It wasn’t death that worried Mick. It was how you died. That was crucial. He was convinced that if you died like a man, like a marine, your soul went straight to some kind of heaven. He didn’t know where it was or what it would be like, but you went there. He was absolutely sure of it.

  He didn’t know how to tell that to a woman because death was a different game to them. Death was operations, a breast gone or a hysterectomy like his aunt Helen Gargan. Death was slow and ugly for a woman. For a man, if he was lucky, death was clean, fast, easy.

  He was going to die that way, Mick was sure of it. He did not know when or how, but he knew that he had to die that way eventually to balance things out for the night the 409th NVA blew apart the fort in Binh Nghai while he was down by the riverside with Trai.

  “I swear, there’s nothing to worry about. The mafios
i don’t know a thing. It’s been almost a week now.”

  “Just long enough for them to figure out something’s gone wrong.”

  “So? They’re not mind readers. They don’t know what happened.”

  The telephone rang. Jackie answered it. “Your uncle,” she said.

  “Get down here,” Bill O’Toole said in his chief’s voice. “Get down here right away.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Your ass may be up. Get down here.”

  Still with no breakfast, Mick drove back to headquarters. Uncle Bill was in his office, walking up and down. He looked like he had just swallowed a quart of paregoric.

  “Bo Fallon took your car out.”

  “Yeah?” Bo Fallon took Mick’s car out every day. Bo had been taking it out every day for five years.

  “He opened the glove compartment to get the book for a parking ticket. He found this.”

  Uncle Bill handed Mick a thousand-dollar bill. It didn’t look real. It had some walrus-mustached guy on it.

  “What does it prove?”

  “I don’t know what it proves. But it raises a hell of a lot of questions about you and that Jewish broad.”

  “If we took the dough, would we still be around? We’d be on our way to Mexico or Hong Kong.”

  “You could be playin’ a smarter game. You could be lettin’ one of us, your uncle Des or me, take the fall.”

  “Don’t you know me better than that, Uncle Bill?”

  Bill O’Toole looked at Mick with his police chief’s face. Or maybe his marine’s face. “I thought I did.”

  “Someone planted it. Someone’s trying to frame me—and maybe you.”

  “Who? Who was in that car last night besides you?”

  “The Belfast runt. He said he thought the other guy had the money. Tyrone Power. Why would the runt drop this on me and say that? He sat in the front seat and I didn’t see him go near that glove compartment. He was drunk and sang some song his mother taught him.”