The Irishman nodded finally. “Sure, why not?”
Eddy waited upstairs for the man, and had a pint of Guinness on the table waiting for him when he came to sit down. The man had showered and had on fresh clothes. Eddy wondered if he lived here. He knew Molly rented out a couple of rooms upstairs, they were no more than single rooms with a shared bath, though.
“You want anything else—a whiskey maybe?”
“No thanks, I don’t touch the hard stuff.”
Eddy nodded. He didn’t touch the hard stuff either, mostly because there was a time he had touched it far too often.
Molly came over and put a plate with steak and fries on it in front of the man.
“Ye all right then, Mick?” she said, handing the man silverware wrapped in a cloth napkin.
“Aye, I’ll do, Molly. Thanks for the food.”
“Ye’re welcome, laddie.” She put a hand under his chin and turned his face up to look at her. “Ye’ve not a mark on ye,” she said, sounding pleased. Eddy was struck speechless. Generally speaking, Molly was about as sweet as a grizzly bear with a hangover. She walked off back to the bar sashaying a little, and Eddy couldn’t suppress a look of astonishment.
The Irishman noted it. “She likes to mother me,” he said, “I think it’s because I’m Irish.”
Eddy, who had seen the look on Molly’s face didn’t think mothering was exactly what she had on her mind.
“I didn’t know there was a kitchen in this place,” he said.
“There isn’t as such,” Mick replied, “Molly insists on feedin’ me after a fight, she knows I don’t eat ahead of time as my stomach is too wambly for it. Help yerself to some chips if ye like.”
Eddy took a couple and was surprised at how tasty they were. He wouldn’t have pegged Molly for a good cook.
The Irishman stuck out one big hand. “Sorry, I don’t know where my manners are, I’m just always famished after a fight. My name’s Mick Flaherty, an’ yers?”
It was a challenge—Who are you and what the hell do you want with me?
“Edward Two Feet Walking,” he said.
“That’s an interesting name,” Mick said and took a drink of his beer.
“It’s because I was always wandering off even as a baby, my mother was forever tracking me down. I always wanted to see what was over the next horizon, and then when I found that horizon I wanted to see over the next, so I just kept walking. And that is how I got my name. I even signed up to go to Vietnam because it was another horizon. Which just goes to show you how stupid a wandering man can be.”
He had been purposeful in mentioning ‘Nam. He wanted the man to know he understood fighting because he was pretty damn sure this man knew violence outside of the ring too, and had for a very long time.
“I’ve seen ye on the buildin’ site?” It was a question and it wasn’t. Eddy already had the sense that this man didn’t miss much. “An’ at the mission?” Eddy revised his opinion, the man didn’t miss anything.
“Yes, you have.”
“So has the good father told ye my story then?”
“Yes, he did. He was pretty brief in the telling.”
“That’s because the story is just that short.” Mick’s voice was abrupt. “So is that why ye asked me to have a drink—because ye think I’m a lost soul?”
“And if it is?”
“I don’t need yer pity, man.”
“Did I say I pitied you?”
“Fair enough.”
Eddy might not pity the man in front of him, but he did feel a certain sorrow for him. He was very familiar with the territory of the lost. He had been lost himself for a very long time and the path back to life had been thorny and steep and painful.
“What do the doctors say—on the odds of your memory returning to you?”
“They don’t know really, it’s a crapshoot. I might get everythin’ back tomorrow or I might get some memories back but not others an’ then I might not ever get anythin’ back at all.”
“You’re Irish, clearly. So maybe that’s where you start. Figure out if that’s where you were living when this happened. Eventually, even if your memory doesn’t return you’ll find out who you were. There are all kinds of ways to be lost, man, but there’s just as many ways to be found.”
“Ye sound like ye’re speakin’ from experience.”
“You could say that, I suppose. I did three tours of Vietnam because once apparently wasn’t enough for my insanity. I came back and found out I didn’t have a home anymore. I didn’t fit in the white man’s world, and I didn’t fit in the Indian world anymore either. I had to go on a long trip, physically and spiritually, before I felt like I belonged again, because I realized a man has to belong to himself before he can be a part of anything larger.”
“Are ye from here?”
Eddy shook his head. “Is anyone from San Francisco? It’s one of those places, you know, it’s the edge of something and not just the continent, it’s a beginning and an ending. San Francisco was a point of disembarkation for soldiers coming back from ‘Nam, some got here and just stayed. When you’re already half a ghost you know there ain’t nothing for you back home because it’s not real anymore. Who you were doesn’t exist and the new person you’ve become has no place, except in streets like these and other places where nobody cares who you are or where you’ve been.”
“So where did ye come from originally?”
“South Dakota—a reservation there to be exact. I’m a full-blood Sioux.”
“Do ye miss it—yer home?”
Eddy nodded. “Sometimes, but it’s like I said, I didn’t belong there anymore. Tomas Wolfe had a point with that whole, You can’t go home again line.”
“Well, I hope the bastard was wrong about that,” Mick said and took another bite of steak.
Just then a breeze entered the pub. It smelled of jasmine oil and hash. Every man in the place looked up as if they sensed the disturbance about to enter their midst. Molly Malone’s wasn’t the sort of establishment that attracted too many women. Other than fight junkies, or rather Eddy thought, watching the woman’s eyes light upon the big Irishman, fighter groupies.
The flotsam and jetsam of the 60s had caught up hard when the decade changed and the world suddenly seemed a colder place. But in San Francisco the 60s lingered, even if it was a more tired and tarnished version. The woman who was now standing looking around the dim murk of the pub was one of the bits of flotsam which had caught up on the reef of disillusionment and found her way to the city by the bay. Eddy knew her because he recognized so many of the lost. He didn’t particularly like her, though.
“You know her?” he asked the man. The topic could hardly be avoided as all conversation had ceased when the woman had come in the door.
“Aye, she’s been in most nights after the fights. I’ve talked to her a bit.”
“She’s trouble and not,” Eddy said, “the good kind.”
“How so?” Mick’s tone was merely curious. He hadn’t looked at the woman more than once, though her eyes had not left him even as she ordered a drink up at the bar.
“She used to follow the Grateful Dead, and I heard she traveled with the Rainbow Family for a bit, too. I think she found them a little too tame though. I’ve heard rumors that she lives in some rambling old Victorian house out in Marin County that her grandmother left her.”
“So why is she trouble?”
Eddy opened his mouth to answer and then promptly shut it for the woman had drifted over to their table, the jasmine and hash smell of her overwhelming. Bridget Lee was the sort of woman who could render a man mute. She was one of those fiery redheads with milky skin and eyes like sapphires—sapphires fractured with splinters of gold. Tonight, she wore a green dress that set off the flames of her hair and turned her skin to a fine porcelain in the low light of the pub. All around her shimmered a mantle of restlessness, true restlessness, the sort he understood all too well; it was a trait that could ruin a life, forcing a pe
rson to move on before ties were forged or roots were allowed to grow and mingle in the soil of family and country.
“Hey, Irish,” she said to the big man. She had one of those voices that was like a breeze from some exotic place, low and throaty and making promises even when she was saying something prosaic.
“Hey yerself,” he said. He was friendly but it was guarded and Eddy noted he didn’t ask the woman to sit down.
Sexual lust, blood-lust, sometimes it was the same thing, especially when you had the women hanging around who were fight junkies, willing to do anything for the bruised and bloodied warriors of the ring at the end of the night. He wouldn’t have thought that was Bridget Lee’s scene. It was lust, though; there was no mistaking the look on her face for anything else. She touched the man lightly on his arm, and even so small a gesture held a wealth of invitation.
“I’ll be up at the bar,” she said, “if you find you want some comfort.”
“What makes ye think I’m in need of comfort?”
She smiled, the cigarette smoke that always wreathed the bar, coiling around her red hair. “Aren’t you?”
“Thank ye, I’m flattered, but no, not tonight.”
It was polite, it was also dismissal. Bridget colored a little, but then Eddy saw the look that passed through those gold-splintered eyes and knew that dismissal to her was merely a challenge. She walked back to the bar and sat down. She probably thought the man would reconsider before the night was done. She might be right, too, for Mick’s eyes followed her as she walked away. Eddy knew fighting often sharpened the other appetites, particularly the primal ones. It was what a warrior wanted after battle—a woman’s touch to wash away the blood, a woman’s body to take away the pain. When the man looked back his eyes were hollow. There was a deep longing there, but not for the woman who had just boldly offered herself for the night.
“Not many men would turn a woman down who offers to warm their bed, especially not a woman who looks like her.”
The Irishman looked down at his plate and shook his head. Eddy noticed that there was a ring on his left hand now. He wouldn’t have worn it during the fight, of course.
“You married?”
“Aye, I think I must be. The ring is one of the few things I carried from my life before into this one. I feel married, if that makes sense.”
“It does. I think our cells and bones have memories, too. Those aren’t so easily banished.”
Mick looked up again, and the longing was gone from his eyes as though he had banished it through force of will.
“So is this city where ye found yerself again?” he asked.
“Yes. The story is a little more complicated than that, mind you. I found myself by looking after the lost. Ironic, but true. There are a lot of veterans here and just a lot of lost souls who need help. They need someone to aid them in figuring out the system, or maybe with luck figure out how to get back on their feet. I’m not naïve, I know I ain’t no ministering angel or anything and most of the people I help are going to end up back on the streets, shooting smack into their arms again or whatever their poison of choice might be. But that’s okay, if I help them find a hot meal once a day or maybe get one off the streets for good then it’s worth it.”
“Is that what ye do, collect lost souls?” The question was asked lightly, but the look in the man’s eyes was hard enough to light a match on.
Eddy shook his head. “No, I just do what I can. I feel for them because there’s always a reason they got lost in the first place. Some people stop looking for the lost ones, or they look for a few years and then give up in despair, then they try again for a few more years. It’s a heartbreaking cycle, and there’s always the tug of war in a person’s life too—do they really want that lost one back? Because maybe they make trouble every time they’re home. Maybe they break hearts worse when they are present than when they’re lost. So I look out for them, and if someone comes looking I can help there too.”
“Ye must stay awfully busy between that and the construction.”
“Well, you know collecting lost souls doesn’t pay real well. So I work construction Monday to Friday and I work the streets on evenings and weekends.”
“So why the interest in me?”
“I think it’s because you remind me of myself.”
Mick raised his eyebrows at that statement and swallowed the last of his beer.
Eddy shrugged. “I know anger when I see it, it’s like snakes in your head, man. I told you I was in Vietnam, so maybe you’ll understand when I tell you I know blood and rage. I just thought maybe you could use a friend, someone who understands anger that eats you.”
Mick startled a little and then he smiled, cautiously. “Aye, I suppose I could,” he said.
“All right, then.”
Eddy thought if the man knew the real reason he had approached him he would have thought he was plumb loco. You could hardly tell a man that your brother, dead now for some time, had come to you in a dream and told you to befriend him. No, you couldn’t tell a man such a thing, you could only do as your brother, even if he was dead, told you to do.
Chapter Forty-five
The Dream
HE HAD THE DREAM the night he met the Indian man, as though the rage had ebbed low enough to allow something else in while he slept. He’d had it before, it was always the same. He was in a boat, a black boat with red-brown sails—a mainsail and two smaller foresails. The boat had a clean entry to it and cut the waves like a hot knife through butter. There was earth in the boat with him, solid clean rectangles of it, and the scent of it was soothing, dark with an edge of smoke to it. The boat went easy and so he could watch as the land came into view in front of him. Cliffs soared high against a silver-cloud horizon, gulls flying like small dipping arches in front of the great limestone face, dark and thick with acid green moss. Time came heavy with such a place, for there was wear on the rock, long ages of it, it was a land that knew itself intimately in joy and sorrow. Even in the dream he could feel his heart pounding with fear and excitement. He longed to reach the shore, but was afraid of it too. Why he should fear it, he did not know.
At some point in the dream, he realized there were oars in the boat and he picked them up, though they felt incredibly heavy and awkward in his hands. Still he managed to wrestle them into the sea and then he began to row. Sometimes in the dream he would make progress and at other times, he would not, he would just spin in frustrating circles. Regardless of whether he managed to get the boat to move, he never reached the shore, for just as he could smell the land, thick and sweet as honey in his nose, the weather came racing over the cliffs, the clouds dark and boiling with rain and wind. The storm came then, and pushed him back out to sea, so far that he could not see the shore and there was only water all around him, waves as high as buildings arching over him and crashing down, soaking him, the water in his eyes and lungs, so he had to fight for breath. Eventually the boat began to founder and break apart and he slid into the water, scrabbling at the pieces of wood, trying to grasp anything that would keep him afloat. But the wood dissolved into the raging grey waters, and there was nothing left for him to hold.
It was then he would awaken, just as he began to drown.
Chapter Forty-six
The Fighter
POST FIGHT EXHAUSTION, adrenaline down, muscle and bone starting to feel the beating they had just taken. He sat on the little bench in the tiny locker room, if so small and grotty a hole could be dignified with such a name. He had won, though he never found the fleet nature of victory to hold the same satisfaction as the bloody journey which got a man there. There was a part of him, small but growing, that wished he didn’t need the fighting. Tonight he felt tired, both in body and spirit and his knee felt like it was on fire. It had taken every ounce of willpower he had out there to keep from limping.
Men often wanted to fight him. He suspected this had likely always been true for him. His size and something about him made them want to use him a
s a proving ground for their own masculinity. Finding the fights had been no problem. He’d asked around, but was careful about it, and one night when he’d gone into Molly Malone’s just looking for a pint and something to eat he knew he’d found that which he had been seeking.
The redheaded woman had been there watching him tonight, watching him like he was the answer to a question she had been asking herself for years. He wondered how she’d bribed her way in; it wasn’t really a female-friendly atmosphere after all. He understood the appeal though, it did something to some women. It was, he thought, the primal nature of it. It was blood and sweat and sex and testosterone and a sort of dark thrumming magic that came alive in the pit, as if life in the cave were only a few feet back and the memory of it no more than yesterday’s.
Eddy had been there too. The two of them had become friends after that first drink. He had to admit to himself it was nice to have a friend. Even if said friend made a man roam the streets on weekends handing out blankets and food and listening to people’s problems. The truth was he didn’t mind, in fact he had found a real satisfaction in the work. He knew what it was to be homeless; he understood when a man was down that far it was hard to rise up. For the women it was even worse, as the risk of rape was ever-present. Some men assumed every homeless woman was a prostitute, albeit one they didn’t feel the need to pay. Some of the lost lingered with a man—their stories, their pain, their humor in spite of the direness of their situations. There was one woman who had been wandering barefoot through Golden Gate Park last weekend despite the fog and cold that had permeated the day. He’d stopped to watch her, shivering, cold even inside a decent jacket. She was older, maybe early forties, sometimes it was hard to tell. There was a prostitute they regularly checked in on, who he had thought was nearing fifty, but Eddy told him no, she was just twenty-eight years old.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 49
