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

by Cindy Brandner

  “The streets will do that to a woman—drugs, sex with strangers—it all tells on their faces. Mostly it’s the heroin.”

  Mick had watched the barefoot woman, as she wove in and out of the oak trees as though performing some sacred rite, her long black hair wearing a net of mist pearls. She was tall, her face weathered but still graceful like she had once been the queen or empress of an ancient land told about in an old tale. She was terribly thin, as if she only ate enough to just keep herself alive. He had asked Eddy about her, knowing he would know her story. Eddy knew everyone down in the Haight and the Mission and they all knew Eddy and trusted him, too.

  “They call her the Banshee down here. She cries when anyone dies, it’s this horrible keening. It’s totally unearthly at night, it puts a cold arrow through a man’s heart.”

  “What’s her story?” he’d asked, watching the woman as she swayed back and forth beneath a fall of hanging moss, like she heard beautiful music in her head.

  “I don’t know, nobody does. She has, literally, never spoken to anyone down here that I know of. If you talk to her she will just give you a thousand-yard stare, look right through you and out the other side. There was a preacher used to come down here and talk to people, he made the mistake of touching her when she wouldn’t respond to anything he said. She stabbed him. Cut him pretty bad actually. She’ll take food and water from me sometimes, but not always. I think something really terrible happened to her in the past and she’s haunted by it. If you’re going to offer her a blanket or some socks, just keep a safe distance from her.”

  He’d nodded, and dug through the bag he’d loaded up at the mission that morning, until he found a thick pair of wool socks that had been knit by a group of nuns who ran a soup kitchen down on Polk Street. He found a pair of boots he thought might fit her, too.

  He had approached with the boots and socks held up, so she would know his intent and hopefully not panic. “If ye sit on the wee bench over there,” he’d said, “I’ll put them on for ye.” He didn’t think she would be able to manage with her chilblained hands. He’d made a note to find gloves for her; they’d just given out the last pair to a man in a wheelchair who was panhandling on Larkin Street. He’d knelt down on the wet ground, the cold seeping up into his knee immediately. She had come and sat down, elegant despite her bare feet and dirty skirt. She’d looked at him curiously and then put one foot up as daintily as the empress in a fairy tale he had imagined her to be. He’d rubbed her foot first to get the circulation going. Surprisingly her foot was not as cold as he’d expected it to be. He’d rolled the socks on making sure to align them just right, so that the boots would sit comfortably over them. She’d continued to sit quietly while he put the boots on and tied them neatly, so that they were snug but not tight. He had the sense that she wouldn’t like anything constrictive which limited her movement. He understood that all too well.

  “There, that ought to feel a wee bit better when ye’re walkin’ yer miles each day.”

  She’d surprised him then, by leaning forward and gently brushing her hand across his forehead, like she was trying to wipe away the cobwebs that obscured his mind. And then she had smiled and truly looked at him, and he saw clearly the woman she had once been long ago, locked away inside the woman she was now.

  She hadn’t spoken, though he had not expected her to. He’d stood and her eyes turned away from him toward the trees and wet raw earth of the chilly spring day. He’d returned to Eddy who was standing with a stunned look on his face.

  “Holy shit, if I hadn’t just witnessed that with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.” Eddy shook his head. “You got some kind of magic mojo goin’ on there, man.”

  Mick had shrugged, the touch of the woman’s fingers still cool on his face. Strangely, his head had felt clear. Not that memory had rushed back suddenly to fill his dented skull, only that it felt as if there was room for it should it wish to return one day.

  He liked it, working with the homeless. It somehow made him feel less alone and lightened his own burdens. Because if there was one thing that was true, it was that there was always someone with a story sadder than your own, and a wound in their heart that wanted to swallow the world with its darkness.

  A man walked into the little changing room, snapping his attention back to the here and now. He didn’t like anyone catching him unawares, it always gave him a sick jolt of adrenaline and caused him to wonder what had made him this way, wary and afraid of anyone catching him off guard. This man wasn’t unfamiliar. Mick had seen him at fights before, a few where Mick had merely been a spectator and four in which he’d participated.

  The man looked like money. Flashy money, but money, nevertheless. His clothes were tailored and cut from expensive cloth. The coat alone would probably pay for six months on a room in the Tenderloin. He wasn’t tall yet he managed to make himself seem big enough. He had brown hair slicked back and blue eyes that were just a little too pale for his skin tone. All four of his fights that the man had watched, Mick had won.

  “Can I have a word with you?”

  “Aye,” he said, looking steadily at the man, “ye can.”

  The man stuck out one hand. “Hale is my name, Elijah Hale.”

  Mick took the man’s hand and shook it. “Mick Flaherty.” The man squeezed his hand a little too hard, as if he were making some show of strength. Mick sighed. He met far too many of this kind in the fight world. They were never the fighters but rather those who watched and believed they too could find glory in the ring or the pit, that they too could hurt another man until he was so exhausted that he begged by his very silence for mercy. They were wrong, but it never did any good to tell a man so.

  “Ah, you’re Irish, well that explains it.”

  “Explains what?” he asked, voice muffled by the tape he was pulling off his hands with his teeth.

  “Why you’re such a no-holds-barred fighter in the ring. So many of the great fighters were Irish—Dempsey, Sullivan, McGuigan, Conn—just to name a few.”

  “An’ what do ye think bein’ Irish has to do with it?”

  “Everything. It’s why so many of the great fighters are black in this country—or come from the lower classes—blue collar working stiffs.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s because your fucking necks have been under someone’s boot for so long, all you have left is rage. It’s the one emotion left when everything else has gone for shit. It’s that lush, beautiful rage. You have to know what it is to be down so far you can’t fucking see up anymore, all you can do is fight your way back and hope to hell the light is still there.”

  “Is there a reason for this stirrin’ oratory?” he asked. He was tired, his post-fight adrenaline long gone now.

  Hale laughed, an unpleasant sound that did not invite one to join in his jollity.

  “I see, you’re a no-nonsense, get-to-the-fucking point kind of a man. I like that. I can work with that.”

  Mick was wishing this man was a no-nonsense, get-to-fucking-point kind of man, because he was starting to weary him with his talk.

  “I want you to fight for me,” Hale said, as if he was conferring some great honor.

  “For you?” Mick asked, uneasy. There was only one reason a man would want him to fight and that was money. A deal like that was never to a fighter’s advantage, not at this level leastwise and it more often than not included taking the occasional dive.

  “Yes, it’s a side venture of sorts.”

  He reminded Mick of the old time hucksters, just a bit smoother and infinitely oilier.

  Fighting in and of itself wasn’t illegal—what was illegal was the gambling that inevitably went along with it. Molly gave him a cut of the night’s profits when he fought in the pit below her bar, but what this man was talking about was something else entirely. It sounded like a bad idea, absolutely rife with the possibility for legal problems. There were things to consider though. He had medical bills from his weeks in hospital that would make a
banker weep for their size. He wanted somewhere to live come the winter this year too. Somewhere he could sleep out on the porch if he needed to, but somewhere nevertheless. And one day if he found out who he was, he wanted to possess the means to go home.

  “What kind of money are we talkin’ about here?” he asked.

  “Depends on the fight and the odds. Two thousand, five thousand, maybe more if you keep winning.”

  Mick just barely refrained from letting his jaw hit the floor.

  “Per fight?”

  “Yes.”

  Temptation wore a thousand faces and this one was looking directly into his soul.

  “Aye,” he said, feeling unutterably weary. “I’m interested.”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  The Ghosts That We Are

  May 1976

  THEY WERE SITTING HIGH in the hills above the bay, looking across to the lights of the city, the scent of the dark pines below them mixing with the salt and cold of the sea. It was a rare clear evening after several nights of being socked in with fog, thick as pea soup and the leading cause of traffic accidents in the county. The fog could kill here.

  “You feeling ready for the fight?” Eddy asked, his back up against a large boulder, his black hair like a blot of ink in the night. Mick heard the hissing pop of a beer can tab being flicked open.

  “Aye, ready as I can be.”

  Hale, true to his word had arranged a fight for the following week. It had been three weeks since the man had come into the locker room with his proposal. Mick had used the time wisely. Other than work and helping Eddy down in the Haight and the Tenderloin with his lost souls, he had been training hard—running miles into the hills around the city and out into the winding green lanes of Marin County. Eddy was working as his trainer in the evenings. He was like a drill sergeant, showing no mercy, demanding endless sit-ups and push-ups, making him work the heavy bag and the speed bag until he was sweating and trembling and ready to drop on his knees and beg for mercy. He was in terrific shape though, the best since he’d awakened in that grim hospital bed in New York. He was a little more nervous about this next fight. His opponent was a black guy out of Oakland and he was reputed to be tough as hell and quick as fury.

  Eddy took a long swig off the beer he was holding. “It looks like a fucking fairyland over there, doesn’t it? I guess it was at one time. I was here in the late ’60s a few times and there was something special then; it was a fairyland fueled on acid and psychedelics but you could feel the hope of an entire generation like it had distilled down to something pure—something so pure that if you mainlined it, it would kill you. But what a high, man, it was incredible. I saw Jefferson Airplane in the park one time, Janis Joplin too—man that lady could sing, she made you feel her pain right down to your roots, way deep in your marrow. The fairies that dwelt here were the singers and the bards and the shamans and the mystics and the windy-footed children who came from all over this country, fleeing what was broken in their homes, praying to find something whole in this city. Maybe that’s why you wound up here, instead of staying in New York, maybe every lost soul comes here hoping to find something to make them whole.”

  “Ye think it’s not a fairyland anymore?”

  “You can ask that, man, after the day we just had?”

  “Point taken.”

  It had, in point of fact, been a tough day. They had gone to visit some veterans who were living in a dilapidated flophouse in the Haight. Mick thought they were probably squatting there because it sure as hell didn’t look like a place where a landlord ever came by. A skeleton had greeted them in the upper hallway, a man with so little flesh that he appeared like skin stretched tight over unforgiving bone, as though the dim light in the place should shine right through him. He had been in a panic, grabbing at Eddy’s arm and dragging him down the hall to a sty of a room. It was, Mick thought upon entering, one of Hell’s inner circles. Around them were bodies, men barely alive, strung to the fulcrum of the world by the dark thread of heroin. It was like walking through a cemetery where the grave digger had neglected to do his job for several weeks. The room was littered with needles, white powder, filthy sleeping bags, empty beer cans and rat droppings. The man who the wraith from the hall wanted them to see was a young soldier—or he had been once, for he still wore the shreds of a uniform. Now he was a bundle of bones and fever and abscesses and dark veins running with infection. He lay in a pool of fetid sweat, curled around his pain and screaming, eyes sunk so deep in his head that he appeared more skull than face. Mick had carried him out, and it was like carrying bones and air, the only weight that of pain and dirty blood. They had taken him to a doctor who would look at him, help him and not fuss. It was one of the leftover free clinics from the ’60s and the doctor who worked there was one that Eddy knew and trusted. The soldier had died later in the afternoon.

  “Not my first casualty,” Eddy had said flatly. “Probably not the last either. People die down here and go to their graves nameless, nobody knowing who they are, who they were. It’s fucking depressing. Or sometimes we do know who they are but no one in their family cares anymore and so they get cremated and buried where ain’t nobody ever gonna visit their graves.”

  Sitting here now, Mick could still smell the man’s blood and sweat on his clothes. He had held him in the back seat of Eddy’s beat up old Pontiac while they raced to the clinic which was only a few blocks away. It had been too far.

  They had driven to the hills because they both knew it was either that or go get shit-faced in a bar, which wasn’t a wise move for either of them. So here they were, with a cold wind washing their skins and a six-pack of beer within reach.

  “Some days it’s too much, another day I could brush it off. You can’t be sensitive and work on these streets; now and again though someone gets under your skin—maybe it’s because he’s a soldier or was at some point. I understand how he ended up in that shithole of a room, shooting smack into his body until it killed him. I almost was him.”

  “Vietnam?” Mick knew Eddy would either speak of it or he would not. His only responsibility was to listen if the man wanted to talk.

  “Yes. Vietnam, fucking Vietnam. That bitch is always gonna be the most important woman in my life. She is always gonna be the one that changed everything and affects everything I do, every decision I make for the rest of my life and sweet Jesus, how I hate her for it.”

  Eddy looked out over the black water to the lights of the city, his gaze distant and, Mick thought, seeing another country entirely, one thick with green and with air that was even wetter than a foggy night here in San Francisco.

  “I was in a Marine Corps Force Recon unit, part of a four man team that they’d insert into enemy territory to scout things out. They’d take us in by helicopter, drop us and leave. We’d be out there for two weeks at a time. There was no medic and no backup if things went squirrely. We didn’t even eat our C-rations for fear our scent would give us away to Charlie. Sometimes we’d be only yards from the enemy, watching him, certain he was going to find us, see us, kill us in some god-awful way and no one would ever find our bones or know our fate. We lived in our spines; everything was instinct, right on the edge of our nerves. You live that way enough, staring into that sort of abyss, you don’t really ever stop peering over that edge, seeing the darkness in everything. I came home and everything was just grey, didn’t know my place, didn’t know who I was anymore. I thought I was doing okay, you know, getting by, working here and there on buildings, walking that highwire on the struts, only sometimes I realized that it was just another way of staring into the abyss and thinking about plunging head first into it. Or sometimes I’d walk off a job, not really even knowing what I was doing, and then I’d wake up in another city two days later without any memory of how I got there. Hell man, I wasn’t even drinking or taking drugs then, and when you black out without any sort of chemical assistance, well that shit is scary.”

  He shrugged, uncomfortable. “I think it’s beca
use you see shit and you got nowhere to put it, you know? We were moving from one village to another one day and this lady comes along crying and she’s holding this little boy, he’s maybe eighteen months old, and at first I think he’s wearing torn up clothes, and then I realize it’s his goddamn skin hanging off him that way. Just in shreds, cuz he’s been burned by napalm that we fucking dropped that morning. And I stop, I just stop right there in the middle of a fucking bombed-out crater that used to be a road, and I’m pouring water over her baby, even though I know he’s doomed, water ain’t gonna help at that point. But I can’t stop, I pour all my rations and then I grab another guy’s like I’m trying to baptize him, or maybe drown him to end his agony. And that was one day, one dying child and one wailing mother—just one when there were thousands. I took uppers to get through the day, downers to get through the nights. It was like living inside a poison flower, caught inside petals that are slowly strangling you to death. The drugs allowed me to breathe and occasionally to sleep without ghosts yelling at me. Every day I’d wonder, ‘Is this the day Charlie gets me, is this the day I drown in my own fear and blood? Is this the day I become a permanent resident of this crematorium they call war? And then it happened. I died there in ‘Nam, poison flower caught me up hard.”

  Mick waited, he knew Eddy well enough now to understand that if the man said he’d died then he had, though dying could take a thousand forms, particularly in a war zone.

  “We got caught out by Charlie one morning; he was up on us before we knew what happened. We got shot, they just machine-gunned us down. It was surreal as it happened, hearing the noise, feeling the adrenaline almost geysering out the top of our heads and knowing there was nowhere to run, cuz they had us surrounded. They killed all of us and then piled us up like we were dead animals in the yard of an abattoir. I was on the bottom of the pile. They stripped us of our helmets and gear and went away laughing. I thought I was dead and found it funny that I could hear them.