Eddie's Shorts - Volume 4

by M. Edward McNally

  Wayne concludes his talk with the cops, just to what ends I don't really hear. I'm still standing there so he puts an arm on my elbow and we walk out together, out the dock door and down to the parking lot. There's still a squad car there, along with Wayne's dusky Beemer. Geri and her escort are already gone.

  The last two cops are still inside, so it's just me and Wayne in the lot. He asks if I need a ride somewhere, and I tell him no, my car is just behind that warehouse. He nods, then asks why I had parked way over there if I was just coming back for my house keys.

  I go blank, and just look at my boss with my mouth wide open, sure the other shoe is about to fall right square on my melon. But Wayne Kirkson just gives a tight little wince that I guess is as close as he can get to a smile without hurting his face, and nods at me. He tells me to go get some sleep, reminds me that tomorrow is going to be busy if we want to close out that Eagle order. Then he gets in his car and leaves.

  It is a fair walk back to my car. Across the dark parking lot and around the side of the massive warehouse, invisible but a huge presence in the dark, I have time to think about things. Things like small angers and jealousies that keep the regular guy in line. Things like honesty and betrayal, truth and consequence, loyalty and stupidity, and all that crap that I suppose is better left to the Philosophy majors who take shitty jobs for a summer, rather than to the kind of guy that has to work that same job to live.

  Justice in Ireland

  Class trip to the zoo in Topeka. Second grade, third grade, something like that. Anyhow, there had been this one lion - one guy lion lying among the others - name of Sidney (a sign said this, Sid didn't introduce himself). She can remember thinking he didn't look real, didn't look a thing like the lions she'd seen on TV (which may have been only cartoons at that point), because Sidney had one screwed-up head of hair. Mane. It wasn't a billowing-brown-crown-thing at all, it was just...a mess. Mashed down on one side like Sid had slept on it in the dirt, which was probably the case. Sid had not looked all that sharp in any event, a little groggy and bleery-eyed, and he didn't do a whole lot except yawn from his spot in the shade, while the passel of kids pointed at him through the bars, laughing at his poor, flat head. Some of the boys called, "Here, lion-lion-lion," like Sid was an oversized cocker spaniel, beckoning him towards the two rows of bars and the cement moat in between. They waved small buck-and-a-quarter sacks of popcorn, but Sid wasn't buying. He just stayed splayed in his shade, and looked balefully at the yammering munchkins until they lost interest and moved on to the monkey house.

  All of this runs, in some fashion, through Just's mind as she appraises her head in the bathroom mirror. Just out of the shower, sure, but it's still a damn mess. An off-brown thicket, shorter than she had wanted the 'stylist' to go. Like you could call any barber in Ireland a stylist. Not long enough to lie flat without being beaten into submission, but not short enough to stay put without the sides frizzing out. She looks like that whooped lion in Topeka, Just thinks, but she says only, "I hate my head."

  She says it loud enough that Molinder must hear her out in the bedroom, but she gets no response from him. Not that she expected any, not on the first try. Molinder asserts (as often as possible) that anything not worth repeating is really not important, and so he refuses to acknowledge anything that is said only once. He says it cuts down by half the amount of life lost in banal conversation. Banality is the bogeyman of Molinder's existence.

  A month ago Just would have gotten a response, but a month ago it wasn't Molinder out in her bedroom. It was Dev, and he would not have been about to let slide a comment involving Just's head. "Odd," he might have said after a considerate pause. "I've always been rather...fond...of that." But then again, a month ago was also two weeks before this particular nefarious haircut and one week before last Monday's visit to the doctor, so the whole damn thing was a moot point to begin with. But considering it all does irk Just enough to grab a durable plastic brush and yank it roughly over her head until the vagrant coiffure submits to her will and effort.

  Understated make-up in the bathroom, she stops herself before coloring the eyes abnormally dark. Then on to the closet for clothes. Molinder is still lying on the bed, smoking, with an ashtray balanced on his hairless chest. Something about the pink tone of his skin makes him look like a newborn, at least between the angry red tufts of hair at his chin and groin. His eyes are green (he's the goddamn Irish poster child) and currently loosely focused on the smoke issuing ceiling-ward from both his cigarette and narrow nose. The stereo is on lowly across the room - one of his - something Clannad-ish. The vocals are high and indecipherable, and Just cannot tell if Molinder is hearing them, much less listening.

  Dressing, Just asks if he's going to a reading tonight. She waits just a moment before repeating the question.

  "Hmm? Oh, surely." Molinder grounds out his cigarette in the ashtray. It looks oddly like he's trying to drill it into his chest. "Out at The Fen, pair of native-speakers from the West."

  "They're reading in Gaelic?" Just asks. Molinder nods.

  "Entirely. You'd no doubt be bored dead."

  Just finishes dressing, appraises herself in the mirror on the back of the closet door. Blue dress-suit, she's had it since when. Texas? Still fits, though. For now...

  She focuses on Molinder's reflection.

  "I guess I'll see you afterwards, then?" Patterns of speech, changing? Ending every sentence with a, “then?” Been in Ireland too long, has yourself, then?

  Molinder tries to shrug lying on his back, almost upsetting the ashtray, but he quickly braces it with two thin fingers of a long hand.

  "As you wish," he says, nonassertive and noncommittal. He should have that written on his forehead. "I should be back before too late."

  Just nods at the mirror. She gets her briefcase, which does double duty as a purse from beside the bed, and as she's leaning near him Molinder licks two fingers, faintly stained with paint under the nails, reaches out to her, and flattens a last rebel strand of hair behind her ear without a smile, only an intent narrowing of his artist’s eyes. It flusters Just, and she only nods at him before leaving, before heading around the mountains of styrofoam hamburger shells in her living room, and down the back stairs. She leaves with the odd sensation that she has forgotten something - is leaving before she is ready.

  *

  Dublin is old. Horse-cart and foot traffic old, but Just drives the cramped streets from Sandymount to the office. The train is nearby. Faster. Less hassle. But she's an American. Goddammit.

  *

  Glen is rumpled to the point of looking like he's about to cave in on himself, suck in the building, the whole business park, in a black-hole implosion. Five minutes after Just reaches her office, her boss materializes in a client chair, elbow on her desk, palm against his forehead, fingertips poking through the last, lonely hairs on the top of his head. Sarah and Austin see him from the hall and come in, then the Vet's - Craig and Jason - show up in the doorway. The entire Yank contingent of Sanctum Pharmaceuticals, Ireland. Once they are all present, Glen raises his face and announces, "They're kicking our ass."

  Solemn nods around the room, except from Just, and Austin. She has known Glen longer than the rest of them, through seven years in Texas before Sanctum ever went International. She knows Glen has a deep Henny-Penny streak at his core. Austin, the twenty-five year old Finance wiz, is 180 degrees more Pollyanna.

  "Aw, c'mon Glen," Austin says. "Don't you think you're taking this a mite too serious? Nobody's even made an offer yet."

  "Then you tell me," Glen turns to Austin and leans forward, speaking low enough that the others have to strain forward to hear. "Where the hell is O'Shea? Beehan? Gormley?"

  "Sick?" Austin shrugs.

  "Bullshit," Glen shakes his head slowly. "Look, the Paddy crew already know what's going on. I'm telling you, some European company has been sniffing us out, and the locals know it. It's all this Pan-Europa, EU, touchy-feely movement. Trust me, these freaking pe
ople will jump at the chance to kick Sanctum right the hell out on our red, white, and blue butts."

  "Jeeze, pard," Austin says, two words that only make sense out of the mouth of a native Texan. "C'mon. We were up twelve percent last quarter alone on gross. No way Sanctum is going to hock us off."

  "You're not hearing me!" Glen rockets out of his recline and drags his chair up to the edge of Austin's. "The Paddys are selling our numbers to the Belgium...ites...? Belginians...? What the hell are these people called?"

  "Belgians," Just says. "Like the waffles." She is only listening with half an ear. Her eyes are out the window, looking down towards the Liffe, two blocks away. One corner of the fortified compound that is the Guiness Brewery is visible across the river, a darker black than the grey streets around it. If her father could see this view, he would probably get misty-eyed and start singing.

  "Great. Fine," Glen rants on. "The freaking Belgians. They're getting everything we put up last quarter because the Paddys are giving it straight to them. Because they want us to be bought out by some European company, because they are all fired up about the whole pro-Europa thing!"

  "How many ‘theys’ is that?" Austin asks, still rocking his chair back and forth. Just is acquainted with Austin's chair rocking: For five months now she has been listening to the whine of springs from Austin's office next door, broken at least twice daily by the solid crash of chair hitting floor and the ding of a phone hauled off the desk by the cord, followed by a long stream of impressive Tey-has oaths. A small pleasure, but then her mother always told her those were the best.

  Glen continues, damning to the ages a long line of Belgo-Gaelic conspirators that are apparently directly to blame for his ulcers, numbers three to five. Just stands up, and nimbly sidesteps the vindictives flying from the Misunderstood American. It is clear the rumor mill is going to be the only thing working at Sanctum this fine morning, and Just exits her own office almost totally unnoticed.

  *

  Just has never been a big believer in interior monologues. Not that she has never experienced them, just that she is a bit leery of internal questions like Should I? Shouldn't I? Is this right? Is this wrong? Because whenever she sits down and seriously formulates a question like that, starts responding to it, she eventually finds herself in a place where her head is arguing with her head and she thinks, Whoa. This is what crazy people do.

  So when part of her mind asks her: “Just, just where the hell do you think you're going?” she doesn't answer, just maneuvers her auto through the tight grey streets and halts with the rest of the traffic at lights. She shouts out the window with the rest of them, things like, "One side, ya bastard!", "Shove off, Jack-O!" and, "Is there any particular shade of bloody green you're waiting for?"

  Been here too long.

  In this way, and mercifully without thinking, she finally escapes Auld Dublin Towne and is moving southerly on a wide road with buildings disappearing in the rearview, replaced with long, green murals of hillsides inhabited by spectral white shapes munching at the turf between collapsed stone walls, centuries-old. Remembers her to a time (as a Mick would say) when Dad took them all on vacation, and they drove through some shaded southland valley. Dad rolled down the window and hung an arm out into the rushing air, gathered all those purple mountain's majesties into his palm and smiled at them, at Just and her brother Patrick, over the seat back. “This,” he said, "this, is why Virginians love Virginia!"

  But they weren't from Virginia. Of course Dad refused to accept the fact that he had been born in Chicago, Illinois, and instead took nourishment from those older places where his folks had been from. Killarney. Limerick. Just had visited both on coming to Ireland, found Killarney too touristy; Limerick, too much like any other working port-town. The fact remained that Just and Pat had been born in Kansas, where you could be blindfolded and driven a hundred miles in any direction, unmasked to look around at the blowing wheat and say, "Yup, still in Kansas." The soft mountains of Virginia scared her and Pat; they thought there was something wrong with the earth. No matter which way they looked, they could not find the horizon.

  Too much thinking, Just reprimands herself. The ground flinging by just outside the windows is not Kansas, Virginia, nor anywhere else on the North American continent. Maybe, originally, that was its charm, but it has been lost. She was thrilled by the differences when she first went to Texas too, right after school, got the job with Sanctum Pharmaceutical in El Paso. The sand and scrub was weirdly beautiful, for all of two weeks. Then she was calling home and saying, "Dad, this is the only place in the world uglier than Kansas."

  When the Ireland thing opened up, when Sanctum Int'l came into being, Just was the first in line. She came over and was literally struck dumb by the beauty of the land, was amazed by driving her car over the ancient wrinkled ground, feeling the rise and fall of swells and hillocks and vales down in her stomach. After Kansas and West Texas, everything here was just so...unflat. And so gorgeously green. You couldn't walk fifty feet without hitting some shaded creek or stream, but they weren’t creeks and streams, they were glens and rills. All you had to do was stand on a rise and look out over it all to understand why somebody would blow up a car to keep this their own. You could see why everybody from here, no matter how far removed in generations, thought they were a poet.

  And that last thought was probably aimed at Molinder, which made it unnecessarily mean. Let alone the fact that all that green background had quickly become redundant, the fallen ruins of old castles, just mileage markers. All the romantic background was really just a postcard photo:

  Wish You Were Here. Wish Somebody Was. Somebody Else.

  *

  A few weeks ago, Just had demonstrated the limits of her own poetic appreciation for both she and Molinder.

  It was another dramatic reading, done by some sort of acting troupe with a bar name attached. The players had closed with a thin-bordering-on-emaciated, dark haired young man uttering a long speech, while the rest of the company tried to set him on fire, symbolically, with red and orange fan-blown tissue paper.

  Walking home, Molinder had deigned to step momentarily down from his transcendental plane to soberly ask Just what she thought of it all.

  "Oh, well, it was really very moving," Just had assured him. "Though I have to tell you, I didn't really follow the whole part about 'Mannequins.’"

  Mannequins? Molinder asked, and Just nodded. "Yeah, you know, the whole part about, 'My people have been bitten at the wrist by mannequins, have grown hard with mannequins'..."

  Molinder stopped walking. Looking back at him, Just thought she had never seen cheeks sucked so far into the sides of a skull.

  "That was," Molinder ground out between his perfect nibbled teeth, "Manacles. Man-ac-les."

  Just had started to laugh and cover her mouth, but a glance showed her that Molinder would by no means see the humor in that. She swallowed the laugh so that it almost hurt her stomach, then walked on beside him, feeling a weird flashback to walking into church beside her father, trying to look serious to every face while Dad tickled her under the arm. But Molinder wasn't tickling.

  *

  She leaves Dublin, City and County, and enters into County Wicklow. There was some song about it that Dad used to listen to, something about walking past Portlaishe Prison, something about giving the Wicklow Boy His Freedom. She's not sure why the Wicklow Boy was locked up, but assumes it had something to do with being Irish. She is sure Molinder would know.

  That is about where the voice kicks in again, the interior-monologue she doesn't believe in. It asks her something like: “Just, where do you think you're going? You're in Ireland, and as opposed to American Highways, these roads don't lead from one place to everywhere else. They go somewhere specific.”

  She's not about to dignify that with a response. She has no destination in mind (she assures herself), though she has been on this same road a time or twenty before. True, she is not driving out on business, not headi
ng down south to New Ross or Waterford to talk to the reps or explain to some farmer in person why Sanctum Sheep Dip beats holy hell out of the competition, but neither is she headed for some shitty cottage just outside Shillelagh, County Wicklow.

  She assures herself of that. But isn't really surprised when she takes the Shillelagh exit. Without an interior monologue, most actions simply wind up being done by habit.

  *

  A block over from Grafton street there is this little hole-in-the-wall place called the American Cafe. Just avoided it like the plague for the first month she was here, but then driven by either boredom or homesickness, found herself entering the Cafe before a voice she refused to listen to talked her out of it.

  It was even worse than she'd imagined. The cracked walls were covered by NY Yankee pennants and Dallas Cowboy posters, and Garth Brooks was blaring from speakers positioned all around the room. There were fifty hammered Americans in the place, jumping around and screaming, and Just stayed only long enough to worm her way to the bar and order a Coors. Then she thought better of it and headed for the door before the beer reached her.

  Near the blessed portal, Just was elbowed savagely in the back by an incoherent line-dancer, and she stumbled floorwards, saved only by the timely intervention of a guy with close-cropped brown hair who caught her by the shoulders. His haircut made his ears look somehow frail and bent back, exposed as they were, and as Just looked up at him he reminded her oddly of the puppet figure of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that was on TV every Yuletide Season, back in America.

  "Y’okay?" the guy asked her, a couple words just flip and smushed together enough to make her further homesick, until she realized they'd been delivered in a brogue thick enough to choke a Kildare pony.

  "Fine," Just said, standing up while the guy finally released her hands and stood in front of her with his grin widening. His ears actually were sort of oversized, which lent a comic edge to anything his broad white smile might have implied in a bar at nearly midnight. Just stood there too long, wondering if there was a polite way to tell a guy he reminded you vaguely of Dumbo, and then he saved her by thrusting out a hand and offering, "Devlin."