In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  He hadn’t spoken beyond please and thank you and had eaten lightly of the supper that was offered. He’d helped with the cleanup and then lain down on the cot allotted to him for the night, turned his back on the room and gone to sleep. By dawn’s light the man was gone. He had not expected to see him again, yet on the next cold night, there he was. Father Jan wondered where he went on the other nights, for he always appeared to be clean and well enough groomed. Scary as hell, with those dark, forbidding eyes and powerful body, but clean and always civil, even if there was an air about him that made the other people in the shelter steer clear of him.

  He had very few belongings, but that wasn’t unusual for a man without a home—a canvas bag which he wore slung across his chest, with a change of clothes and a battered copy of The Odyssey in it, which Father Jan had seen him reading at night if there was a light handy by which he could see the words. He wondered if the man identified with Odysseus and his long journey home in some way. He was curious what his story was, for he didn’t seem to carry any of the usual crosses of the homeless—chronic addiction, abuse, mental illness—or at least not in any way Father Jan could discern, and he had gotten rather good at guessing people’s stories over many years of priesthood and running the shelter. He didn’t ask the man though, for he had learned long ago that people either wanted to tell their story or they didn’t, and he suspected the man fell into the latter category.

  He didn’t see him for a few weeks after that, when he heard from others in the shelter that the man had a job fighting. He wasn’t sure what that meant until he heard just where the fights were held. He understood then why many of the shelter people gave the man a wide berth.

  The next time the man showed up was the night the boiler broke down. The boiler was old and on its last legs and it gave out with a wheezing clang that shook the walls of the building. The night was bitterly cold and the shelter was crowded. Father Jan couldn’t find a repairman willing to come before morning for the weather was unprecedented and his wasn’t the only boiler needing emergency attention. He sighed, while he was a handy man when it came to the various ailments of the human soul, he was hopeless with machinery of any sort.

  The big man came up beside him just as he was rolling up his sleeves in the hope it would make him feel more capable of tackling the boiler.

  “If ye have a toolset, I can maybe fix it for ye. I won’t guarantee it, but I’ll have a look an’ see what I can do.”

  “Do I look that dubious about my ability to fix it?” Father Jan asked, smiling.

  “Aye, ye look a wee bit like a bushman confrontin’ civilization for the first time.”

  Father Jan did have an antiquated toolset and he handed it over happily, following the big man down to the boiler room where the boiler was so ominously silent that he was certain nothing short of divine intervention would ever get it working again. Apparently the man was an angelic emissary, for within an hour he had the boiler rumbling and throwing out heat like a forge.

  “You have some experience of machinery?”

  The man shrugged. “I didn’t know if I could fix it to tell you the truth. I just had a sense that I should try and see if I was able.”

  “Come up, I’ll make tea,” Father Jan said. The man nodded, which surprised him, and followed him up the stairs and into the small kitchen off the supply closet.

  Father Jan made tea in the Polish manner, which required two pots and an enormous amount of tea leaves. He brewed the tea in a small pot and then poured it into a larger pot and diluted the incredibly strong brew with more boiling water and milk. He brought the large pot to the table along with two chipped mugs and a bowl of sugar in case the man preferred his tea sweet. Father Jan watched the man out of the corner of his eye as he did all this, and noted how restless he was. Some part of him seemed to always be in motion, hands drumming on the table or his one foot tapping the floor. And yet, there was a stillness at the core of him that seemed to watch and wait.

  “Wow,” the man said after his first swallow, “that’s got a real kick to it.”

  Father Jan took a few swallows of his tea, relishing the heat of it on this chilly night. He leaned back in his chair, his cowboy boots tilted up as he relaxed.

  “You will forgive my curiosity but I should like to ask where you stay on the nights you don’t come here?”

  The big man regarded him, the dark eyes looking him over and assessing his trustworthiness. When he spoke his voice had an edge to it, as if the information didn’t come easily to his tongue.

  “I sleep out, there are places even in the city where a man can sleep relatively safely. Safer than most shelters, an’ I don’t like to ask for a bed if I don’t need it. I shower at the Y an’ wash my clothes often enough so that I don’t feel like I’m a cave man entirely.”

  “Forgive me, but you don’t seem like a man I’d expect to find on the streets.”

  The man shrugged and Father Jan felt the suppressed power in so simple a gesture.

  “If I had a story, I’d tell it to ye,” he said, wryly.

  Father Jan raised a bushy eyebrow at him. “Everyone has a story; it’s only whether you are comfortable in the telling of it.”

  The big man shook his head. “No, not everyone. Well, here it is as such, Father, I don’t know who I am. What little I do know is because it was told to me by doctors. I was brought off a ship into a hospital in New York five months ago. They didn’t know if I’d live. I’d been unconscious apparently for some time. I was in and out of consciousness in the hospital for a few weeks. I’d been beaten an’ shot as far as they could tell, the ship’s surgeon had attended to me as best he could an’ then a couple of sailors dropped me off at the hospital. The doctors at the hospital said it was blows to my head that caused the trauma an’ apparently knocked loose my memory.”

  Father Jan felt a look of incredulity spread over his face. The man noted it; it appeared he didn’t miss much.

  “Aye, I know what ye’re thinkin’. It’s more common than ye’d imagine, though.”

  “What do the doctors say about your memory?”

  “Well,” he laughed, but there was no humor in the sound, “they have a name for it, just not a cure. They say I ought to be dead, an’ it’s only that my skull is so thick that it prevented the bullet and the beatin’ from killin’ me. It’s called dissociative fugue, for all the good it does me to know the name, when I can’t even recall my own life. My mind might return one day, an’ it might not. They can’t tell me anythin’ definitive on that score. Some things are there—like fixin’ the boiler for instance, I just had the sense I could do it.”

  “Do you have a name?” The priest asked.

  “Aye, not one that’s mine really, it’s Mick—Mick Flaherty. It’s what one of the nurses called me—Mick because I’m Irish. I know that I’m Irish at least. I can’t get identification, not without a social insurance number, an’ I can’t get one of those without a history. Fortunately, I can still get work because a lot of the construction projects around the city don’t require ID; they’re happy enough to pay off the books.”

  “Did you pick Flaherty? Or did the nurses pick that for you too?”

  “No, I picked it. It was the first Irish name that came into my head.”

  “Maybe it has meaning for you then,” the priest said.

  “Maybe, it doesn’t feel quite right, the shape of it in my head. But I like how it feels on my tongue, an’ I had to pick a name of some sort.”

  “So do you not have the money for more permanent shelter?”

  The man named Mick shook his head, placing his big hands on the table and stretching them, fingers digging into the scarred surface. “I’m not entirely skint, but I like to be outdoors as much as I can. I work construction partly for the reason I told ye—because they don’t care if ye’ve a social insurance number an’ partly because it’s outside. I can’t take the lights an’ noise of confined spaces for very long. It’s why I don’t come in here unless
it’s too cold to stay out-of-doors.”

  “Some of the people here tell me that you fight at Molly Malone’s.”

  The big man looked wary and Father Jan thought he might have pushed things a comment too far.

  “Aye, I do. D’ye have an issue with that?”

  “No, only I wonder, particularly when you’ve had such serious trauma to your head, why would you invite more?”

  The man named Mick took a deep breath and then leveled a dark look at Father Jan that made the priest wish he hadn’t asked the question. “I get this terrible black anger sometimes. It comes over me an’ takes possession like a demon would. The doctors say it’s not entirely uncommon in someone with my condition. Mood swings, rage, depression an’ so on. For me mostly it seems to be anger. Maybe anger that I can’t remember my past. The fightin’ is a way of dealin’ with the rage. No one gets hurt who didn’t sign up for it. The doctors told me if I was a hot head in my life before then the injury makes it worse. They said anger has a quick ‘on’ button with head injury, it just flashes up an’ takes over. The front part of my brain, the bit that says ‘no, don’t do that, it’s a bad idea’ doesn’t work as well as it ought to. The neurologist I saw told me the front part of the brain is like a thermostat on a furnace, controllin’ the heat that the furnace can reach, so basically my thermostat is pretty faulty.”

  “Do you have any sense of your life before this happened?”

  “Sometimes,” the big man said, “I have dreams that haunt me durin’ the day, they’re so vivid an’ they hang in the air for a few seconds after I wake, but I can’t grasp on to them quick enough to remember them. When I try they seem to disintegrate in the air, it’s like tryin’ to grab onto a bubble and feel its shape in yer palm. It bursts at the slightest touch.”

  “Do you think you lived in Ireland before this? Have you thought about contacting the police there maybe, see if someone might know who you are?”

  “I don’t know, an’ truth be told I’d hesitate anyway because someone clearly wanted me dead, didn’t they? Until I know why an’ what happened to me, I don’t know that it’s safe to try an’ find out who I was. I don’t know where to begin to tell ye the truth. My memory only goes back as far as the hospital in New York. I made my way here on a bus a few months ago. I figured if I was goin’ to live outside as much as I seem to need to, I’d better find a nicer climate.”

  Father Jan wasn’t surprised. San Francisco had long worked like a magnet and those who were lost or sad, or wanted to leave behind who they had once been, were like so many iron filings that could not resist the lure of this city by the sea.

  “There are a lot of people here in this shelter tonight who would like to forget their past, forget who they are and what they’ve done. It’s why some of them drink or do drugs. It takes away the pain for a bit of whatever it is they want to forget. Maybe you forgot because you needed to.”

  The man shook his head. “Sometimes I feel like Odysseus, an’ I’ve come ashore in the land of the Lotus Eaters an’ eaten of the flowers. Trust me, Father, if I knew how to come back to myself, I wouldn’t hesitate.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  Molly Malone’s House of Blood and Pain

  MOLLY MALONE’S IRISH PUB was in the Tenderloin district, where long ago many of the Irish had settled when they had come in their droves to this city by the bay. Molly Malone herself was a more recent arrival having come over from Cork when she was just a slip of a thing. Now she was on the wrong side of fifty, with hennaed hair and a look that could cut a man dead in under a minute. Rumor had it she had once been a rich man’s mistress and before they’d parted ways he had set her up with this pub. She still worked behind the bar most nights and it was her and her alone who decided who was allowed down the back stairs behind the bar. If Molly didn’t like the look of a man, he was denied entrance pure and simple. Eddy’s face was one she knew and liked, so she gave him the nod and opened the counter flap without so much as removing the cigarette that dangled from her lip.

  Eddy had come to watch the big Irishman fight. He’d seen him a time or two around the construction site and then heard about the fighting from the men he worked with. As he went down the narrow stairs the smells of sawdust and spilled beer, sweat and slick sticky blood rose up to greet him. He felt the kick of adrenaline that a fighting pit always gave him.

  Here the pit was just a big room which ran under the entire pub and a little beyond. The floor had a thin layer of sawdust, mostly to soak up the beer and the blood. There was always something—a ring, a platform, a field with boundaries, a battlefield bounded by stone walls—but all were merely a stage, for fighting was nine parts spectacle and showmanship and one part brutal, bloody savagery.

  He knew the things that kept you upright in the ring, the strangeness of it, the urge to half kill a man with whom you had no real beef. Sometimes men did die in the ring and yet even with that knowledge there wasn’t fear; there was adrenaline and sometimes rage and the strange stillness that came over a man before a fight. He knew that many people believed fighting was uncivilized and not a natural thing. But he thought for most men it came as naturally as breathing, that it was simply part of the human animal, an ancient part that everyone held in their blood marrow.

  The Irishman had just come out into the light, his opponent one of those brute looking men with a shelf for a brow and small mean eyes. The opponent had tattoos down both arms and a big tiger across his back. He was taut and curled, bouncing on the balls of his feet. The Irishman on the other hand was loose, assessing his fellow combatant with eyes that were almost blank in their lack of expression. The referee, a little guy named The Cowboy for reasons Eddy had never been able to fathom, was talking to them now, the three heads together. Then they broke away from each other and the fighting began.

  He knew boxing; he had boxed for years and had in his turn taught it to young boys on the reservation where he’d grown up. When you were on the bottom rung, you needed to know how to fight your way up, actually knowing how to physically fight was never a bad skill for a man to have in an often hostile world. Bare knuckle fighting was a beast of another nature though. It was fast and dirty and bloody. Some fights only lasted a couple of minutes; most might go about twenty if the opponents were evenly matched. Which was not the case here at all. The bald man with his tattoos was in way over his head. The big Irishman was doing little more than playing with him, tapping his face or stomach now and again, but the bald guy was already bleeding from his nose and one of his eyes was swelling up.

  He looked the Irishman over. Fighters usually weren’t so tall, most men fought better with a lower center of gravity. Clearly, his height was not a problem for this man. He had an air around him of barely leashed brutality. He had a reach on him as well that kept the other fighter at bay much of the time. The only way to really hit him hard enough to make a difference, Eddy thought, would be to get in under those arms, otherwise it was hopeless. The man had an incredibly powerful hit on him.

  He didn’t think he’d seen raw, pure anger like this more than a couple of times. It was the eye of the tiger that the best fighters had, that strange calm fury that existed at the center of the hurricane just before it unleashed its rage and destruction. The Irishman was keeping it chained right now, but Eddy could feel it coming off of him the way he could feel steam coming off a pipe that contained boiling water. He wondered what it was that had given the man this sort of anger. The bald man had managed to get in under the big man’s arms, and was trying to maul him which didn’t seem to faze the Irishman much. The ref merely pulled them apart and told them to start again.

  Gleaming with blood and sweat, the two men faced off again. Eddy didn’t think any of the blood belonged to the big Irishman though. Someone, somewhere had taught this man how to box, because he knew how to throw and hold a punch and how to reserve his energy for when it was truly needed. He also was using a flurry of lightning-fast combinations that only someone trained to box wou
ld use. Most bare knuckle fights were more like barroom brawls contained in a small arena.

  It was here in the middle of a bout that a fighter could lose his heart, lose his drive and go down for no real reason other than the middle minutes could take a man down and make him believe he couldn’t last the distance. In boxing the middle rounds were the no man’s land of fighting, a place a fighter could get lost and lose his shot at winning. The bald man was tiring badly already and the Irishman seemed to be drawing the fight out so that his opponent wouldn’t collapse on him, but it was no more than a cat toying with a mouse that it would eventually kill at its leisure. He could have knocked the other fighter down any time he wished, but it was clear he wanted to just keep fighting for as long as he could keep the other man up on his feet. The fight was at the forty-five minute mark by Eddy’s reckoning and that was about twenty minutes longer than it should have gone.

  And then he quickly finished it, as if he felt some mercy for his opponent, with an uppercut to the man’s jaw. The man went over like a tree that had been axed for a good hour and then felled with one last stroke. The hit was hard; it must have felt like a mule kick to the man’s jaw. The big Irishman looked around, his eyes like black fire, hot and consuming, and his stare was a challenge, like he was seeking another man to beat. His eyes met Eddy’s a few seconds later. Eddy held the look but didn’t respond to the challenge of it. The man glared and then suddenly smiled.

  He thought he recognized a kindred spirit in him, if such a term could be used for a man to whom you were drawn because he was lost and angry. He walked over to where he stood.

  “Can I buy you a drink, man?”

  The big Irishman looked him over, suspicion in his face but curiosity as well. Eddy knew he wasn’t the usual rough-faced white man that habituated this place. He merely stood and took the man’s scrutiny. At five ten he was a good six inches shorter than this man, and he was on the lean side because he didn’t remember to eat more than once in any given day. He had a neatly-bound braid that fell half way down his back. He wasn’t a big man, but like this man in front of him, men tended to give Eddy a wide berth.