“How bad a poem was it?”
“Oh, horrible, horrible. Blasphemy it was.”
“What did it say?”
She took a drag of the cigarette and looked up at the ceiling, squinting while she spat out the smoke.
“I read News of the World
Because I am bound
By stringent Catholic laws
That say I must
Not have intercourse
Or enjoy by
Any other source
Premarital simple pleasures
And so to the News of the World I go
And sex myself through another girl’s endeavors.”
The mother’s uncle began clapping. “Oh, very good, very good.”
“The News of the World is some kind of a scandal sheet?” Dermot asked her.
“It’s the world’s largest newspaper,” she said. “Comes out every Sunday. Who’s doing it to who. Christ, it’s great.”
“The poem doesn’t seem so bad to me,” he said.
“Well, it was enough to get me banned from teaching.”
“It’s too bad you’re not down in the South,” he said. “At least they respect a poet there.”
“Says who?” she said. “Christ, they’d shit themselves down there too if anybody put this out. The South? Huh. Do you know they’ve just had a major breakthrough in the South? Bishop McBishop there, he finally relented. Now they are allowed to publish Borstal Boy in Dublin.”
“What are you talking about,” he said. “That’s an Irish book.”
“What does that mean? So is The Ginger Man. Christ, they’ll never let that book see the light of day. All over the world it’s a fookin’ classic. If you want a copy of The Ginger Man in Dublin, you have to ask somebody to bring it to you from London. What they need in Dublin is about six months of Mailer walking around abusing them. He’d fix the bloody asses.”
“Mailer?” he said.
“Do you not agree?”
“He’s a fuckin’ nut.”
“A what?”
Dermot had seen Mailer once in his life. Dermot was going through the police gate at Shea Stadium to see a fight and in the tunnel there was a big crowd of police shoving each other. In the middle of them here was this stocky guy with wiry hair, talking in a southern drawl. One look at him told you he could get into trouble in a telephone booth. All the brothers were pushing so they could get closer to Mailer and break his fucking head if he did anything.
“What do you do, come here to teach classes?” Dermot said.
“Political educating,” she said. “We’ve an election.”
“Are you down here getting votes?”
“No, the election we’re in isn’t in Belfast. It’s in Mid-Ulster. Do you know where that is?”
“No, I don’t even know about the election, either.”
“Do they not tell you of the general elections in your New York newspaper? The Parliamentary elections? The House of Commons? Westminster?”
He kept shaking his head no.
“And then they want to govern the world,” she said.
He shrugged. “All I want is another drink.”
“Ah,” she said and smiled. “We have this wee girl candidate and all we ask of the people here is that they control the violence until the election is over. The situation is so fragile. Things could break out any second. But we think we are doing something far more important than violence and we can get so much more done. We no longer can indulge ourselves in violence. We’ve done that for a half century. Now we have to go out and truly bring a government down. You cannot do that with the gun any longer.”
“What we need here is more guns,” the mother’s uncle said. “Give ’em the warks with a Wabley!”
“To shoot the soldiers,” she said.
“Aye, shoot the soldiers.”
“And shoot the Prods too.”
“Aye, shoot, the Prods too.”
“Ah, there’s a good churchgoing Catholic.” She said it softly but her eyes flashed and snapped.
The mother’s uncle put a hand on Dermot’s shoulder. “Well, he brung us a—”
Dermot cut in. “Drink it down, well have another.” He pushed his hand toward the drink.
The door opened and a man put his head in and made a motion with his chin. “Up, let’s be on our way,” Liam the one with the sideburns, said. He was picking up his change. “Good luck,” he said.
“Cheerio,” she said with a wave.
“What the hell is your name?” Dermot said.
“More questions!” she said.
“I at least want to say good-by by name.”
“Name of O’Doherty,” she said.
“What O’Doherty?”
“Deirdre O’Doherty. Cheerio.” She started walking to the door. She stopped for a moment. Then she spun around, the Lenin pin in her hand. She shoved it into his face.
“Boooooo!”
She went away laughing, her hair swinging while she walked. Even with the coat and the slacks she had on you could see she had a strong, young body, one of those with no waist and big curved hipbones. When the door closed behind her, the barroom fell into silence, the energy from her still hanging in the air.
“That’s the first Communist I ever had a drink with in my life,” Dermot said.
“It didn’t appear that it was particularly painful,” the barman said.
“They told us everything about them, but they never told us they were fucking beautiful too,” Dermot said.
The barman clapped. He bent over to get something from under the bar. “Oh, they’re well meant, I suppose,” he said. “They’re here the same reason you are too. For Joe O’Neill. But they think different. They have their wee girl and they’ll try to get her reelected to Commons. Speaks like a marvel, the wee girl does. For that matter, so does this one here. Christ, they can persuade.”
He folded his arms and looked down. “I think the machinery you brought here speaks our language a bit more,” he said.
Dermot held out the glass for another pint and drank it in silence. After you’re on stout for a while, you get over the fact that it’s warm, that it puts fizz in your nose and at first gives you the feeling of swallowing phlegm. By now he had to take a piss. The barman pointed to a doorway in the back room. There was no door, just an opening. He stepped through it and found himself outside, standing in a good rain. He was in an enclosure made up of a cement wall that was almost black and stood seven feet high. The wall separated the open door of the saloon from an alley running between the saloon and the backs of the houses on the street behind the saloon. The wall had a gutter running along the bottom. He stood in the rain and pissed against the wall. The rain came harder and he could barely follow his piss in the rain. He came back into the saloon with the rainwater dripping from his hair. The front of his pants was streaked with rain.
The barman was in the back room, climbing up the stack of Guinness cases to turn on a dusty television set which sat on top of the pile of cases. The back room was stacked from floor almost to ceiling with cases of Guinness bottles. The picture was wavery when it came. The picture came on, horses, their rear ends swinging, walking to the post. The white lettering under the horses said FOURTH AT NEWCASTLE. The picture showed one horse and the white lettering underneath the horse said the horse was Tillinghast and the jockey was Lester Piggot.
“Aye, there’s your man,” one of them at the bar said.
“Aye, that’s him,” the barman said.
Dermot looked up at the set. Piggot was standing in the stirrups on the way to the post. He always rides that way, standing almost straight up. Once he came over to Aqueduct and rode for a whole month. One day Dermot bet a horse called Assigned with Bobby Ussery riding him and Ussery got in the middle of the track all down the back stretch and Piggot’s horse was along the rail. Piggot standing up in the stirrups like a soldier. When they started to come into the turn, Ussery got down flat on his belly and he headed fo
r the rail. The horse came down the hill from the mound in the middle of the track and dropped right into the gutter along the rail. Piggot never knew what happened. Ussery had the horse rolling down the hill and he picked up lengths like nothing. In the stretch, Ussery put his face into the horse’s mane and here was this Piggot still standing straight up. Dermot’s horse paid sixteen-fifty. You never forget what you had a ten-dollar ticket on, and he went home whistling that day. His friend, Herbie, let him off at the corner. His kids were down the block in front of the house. When they saw him getting out of the car, the three of them gave a little skip and came running up the block. Running with their hands out and calling his name once and carrying it for the whole time they were running up the block with their hands out. You know how kids do that, “Daaa … aaaa … deeeeeee.” That was the last time he’d seen Piggot.
He told the barman he wanted another pint, and this time some whisky with it.
He was drinking by himself now. Everybody else was watching the race. He looked up once. All the jockeys were standing up while they rode. He swallowed the whisky. The barman leaned on the back bar and watched the race. Dermot asked him for another whisky and while he was getting it for him, he downed the pint of stout and told him he wanted another one of those too. The mother’s uncle nodded his head when he asked him if he wanted another.
Dermot was taking the pints in big gulps. He had to piss again and went out into the rain and began to lean forward, to put his forehead against the wall, but the smell of the piss coming out of the cement stopped him short.
He walked back to the front of the saloon and looked out at the street. The guy who had been standing with his hands in the back pockets of his dungarees still was leaning in the doorway looking up the toy street to the Falls Road. His shoulder came off the doorway and he stuck his head out. His hands came out of his pockets. He yelled something back into the darkness of the house. He came running into the rain in the middle of the street. His top lip dropped down over the bottom lip and he made a high, clear whistle.
“Wup!” the barman said. He came over the bar and pushed against Dermot in the doorway. The others in the bar left the television and jammed in the doorway around him.
Across the street a woman came churning out of the dark to see. Her tits were flopping inside a brown sweater that buttoned down the front. She fell to her hands and knees and began banging a garbage can cover on the sidewalk. Out of every doorway women were stumbling and kicking at the legs of the children as they stepped over the legs and came out onto the sidewalk to fall down on their hands and knees and bang garbage can covers. Both sides of the street were lined with women. They were banging the garbage can covers in rhythm. There was a clang, clang, clang, each cover hitting the sidewalk at the same time and the noise echoed off the little brick house and filled the street. The women were looking off to one side, the way a dog does when somebody comes to grab a bone from him. They were looking up to the end of the street. At the corner of the Falls Road there was an armored car with two jeeps behind it. The soldiers in Scottish caps were pulling the barbed wire away so the armored car and the jeeps could turn into Leeson Street.
“Let’s get out of here,” Dermot said.
“Notatall, notatall,” his mother’s uncle said.
“Oh, shit, I forgot about Larry.”
“It’s me. Larry must be on the run somewhere. I can’t make it around so fast. I’m stuck.”
“Well, what’s to worry about now anyway?” Dermot said. “They must come down the streets all the time. As long as I don’t have a gun on me, I’m just a tourist. I’m all right.”
“Not on this fuckin’ street,” the barman said. “Any man they see they lift. You could be in all day.”
The street was crowded with women and kids. The garbage can covers kept banging. A girl came out of the doorway next to the saloon, a girl with kinky red hair pulled back and a cigarette in her mouth. She was buttoning a green sweater. Shapeless tan corduroy pants had a zipper fly that was broken. She had the fly bunched together with a safety pin. She pulled the sweater down so that it covered the broken fly. Dark-blue socks were sticking out of the toes of her shiny black imitation-leather boots. She had a garbage can lid in one hand and a stick in the other. She began beating the garbage can cover. Kids started running to her and the women began picking themselves up from the sidewalk and walking to her. They stopped to pick up rocks and sticks to beat on the garbage can lids. The redhead leaned over and spat her cigarette out. She kept looking around. When she saw Dermot standing on the sidewalk, she snarled.
“Come on, you,” she said.
Dermot said nothing.
“Come on,” she said again.
“He’s no business here,” the mother’s uncle said.
“Fuck,” she said to him. “Come on, you,” she said to Dermot.
She was a roughed-up twenty-five.
“Come on, come on, you’re a man, aren’t you?”
The mother’s uncle started back into the saloon. “Get inside,” he said.
“Ginny Ann!” the redhead yelled at Dermot. She began grabbing women around her.
“Ginny Ann!” one of the women yelled at him.
“Ginny Ann, Ginny Ann, Ginny Ann,” the redhead yelled at him in a singsong.
The crowd of women and kids, there must have been two hundred people out there now, all were looking at him and all were chanting, “Ginny Ann, Ginny Ann, Ginny Ann!”
A whine from the top of the street, the armored car starting to move, made them all turn around. The redhead began beating her garbage can cover again with the stick. They all picked up the beat. A kid in short pants ran up the block and threw a rock at a head sticking out of the top of the armored car. The jeeps were coming behind it. The redhead began walking straight up the middle of the street. The crowd followed her. The redhead kept going at the armored car. The soldiers in the car tried to bluff her and keep coming. She never took a weak step. The car had to stop. The soldiers jumped out of the jeeps behind the car, and right away the women were around them. They held the garbage can covers up to the soldiers’ faces and began to bang faster and faster. The soldiers were wincing from the noise.
The mother’s uncle kept shouting at Dermot from the saloon doorway. He went back inside. The mother’s uncle was alone with the barman. The barman closed the door and the place went dark. One shaft of light came from a narrow space between two pieces of plywood covering the front window. The light fell on the middle of the bar. The mother’s uncle put his glass down exactly in the light. Some more light was coming through the open door to the piss wall. Otherwise the whole place was in the night.
The barman put his face against the gap in the plywood and kept looking out. The noise of the garbage can covers was so loud now that it hurt to listen.
“Bloody fuckers,” the barman said.
He pulled the plywood piece out so Dermot could watch with him. The women, they all had wide behinds and fat legs, ankles bulging out of their shoes, were being pushed back by the soldiers, there must have been fifteen of them now. A couple of soldiers began shoving with their hands until they got to the doorway across the street from the bar, the doorway where the guy with his hands in his pockets had been standing.
“Now we’re in for it,” the barman said.
“Who lives there?”
“It’s not who lives there, it’s what’s behind the house. That’s a warehouse around the corner, you can’t see it from here. It’s sealed off so you can’t get at the front entrance. But you go through the house over there. You can crawl from the back of the house, into the back of the warehouse. We got all the stuff in the warehouse.”
“The people in the house can say they don’t know anything about it,” Dermot said. “The stuff isn’t on their premises, is it?”
“Christ, what does it matter about the people in the house? We’ve the machinery for the whole Falls in there. We can’t let them have that. We’re gonna have to have a go a
t them right here. Oh, look at the bloody fuckers comin’ from all over.”
Soldiers were coming from the other end of Leeson Street, pushing toward the house. A tubby soldier was swinging his shoulders and coming through the women. One of the women reached out and slammed the garbage can cover on his face. The tubby soldier got a hand in the woman’s face and pushed hard and she fell back and the crowd of women went berserk and tried to get at him. The tubby soldier kept swinging his shoulders and the women wound up squeezing against each other and popping him out of the crowd and into the doorway of the house.
“That’s it,” the barman said. “There’ll be a go now.”
“Somebody gave them good information,” Dermot said.
“You could buy the whole fuckin’ block for twenty pound,” the barman said.
“They’re goin’ in only one doorway?” the mother’s uncle said.
“Aye. One doorway.”
“Can’t have holes house-to-house any more.” The mother’s uncle was talking as he was moving, bad leg and all, around the end of the bar in the darkness and advancing on the Guinness tap. “Can’t have holes house-to-house. Used to have them like tunnels, you know. Never knew who’d come into your house. Guy fixin’ his fly racin’ from a husband came into our kitchen.”
There was a thump on the ceiling. Somebody was up on the roof of the saloon. The barman left the plywood right away and went to the back of the saloon. Empty bottles began clinking. He came into the light of the doorway to the piss wall carrying two cases of Guinness bottles. He went out the door, came back, and carried out more cases. Out against the piss wall he had two cases on top of each other, in another spot three cases on top of each other.
“Take you man and put him up on this one,” he said, tapping the top of the three cases. “Over the wall he goes. Don’t use this one here.” He tapped the two cases. “I’ll be runnin’ for this one myself. Myself, at least.”
He went back to the front of the place. The armored car still was stuck up the block with a circle of women and children around it. There was another crowd of women, the redhead leading them, pushing against a couple of soldiers, four or five of them, who were trying to keep the doorway across the street clear. The redhead had her garbage can cover a couple of inches away from a soldier’s face. His face didn’t even twitch. He could have been one of those guys who stand in front of Buckingham Palace.
World Without End, Amen Page 17
