Emerald Germs of Ireland (12 page)

Some hours later, Pat was in an awful state as he paced the floor of the cantina crying, “This is our fault, Pasty! Ours! It’ll be all our fault if he dies!”

“Why did he have to bring us here in the first place!” was Pasty’s response. “If he hadn’t done that! Pat, I don’t care! I’m getting out of here first thing tomorrow!”

“But he’ll be dead by then! Stop it, Pasty! You hear me? Stop that talk and stop it now, I tell you!”

“The first bus that comes along I’m climbing on it! I’m getting on it, Pat, and I’m going!”

Nobody was more shocked than Pat McNab to hear the sharp, uncompromising crack his palm made across the vivid red cheek of Pasty McGookin’s face.

“Stop it now, Pasty! Stop it, I said!”

The effect on Pasty was quite remarkable. Clearly he had been suffering from hysteria. He calmed down almost instantaneously.

“I’m sorry, Pat,” he said placidly, adding, “But what are we going to do? Honky’s going to die!”

The sharp hammer-clips pounding in the nails of the makeshift scaffold which was at that moment being constructed in the village square copper-fastened Pasty’s anguished appraisal. Perhaps it was merciful that this was the only intimation of Honky’s worsening situation that was to be visited upon them that night, for anything approaching the true facts might well have proved unbearable.

The leather thong binding Honky’s wrists as he writhed upon the badly constructed kitchen chair formed red fleshy bangles that seemed to be on fire. His tormentors had not seen fit to permit him so much as a glass of water in over twelve hours. All they granted him were two cigarettes which were inserted in each nostril and various lung-choking taunts of “Ha ha ha! What seems to be ze problem? You don’ smoke?” which they delivered raucously whilst wiping their eyes and supporting each other physically lest they should fall to the ground in a state of incapacitation from sheer mirth.

Their laughter as Honky passed out yet again was as a coil of wire barbed and rusted that sprang from their crusted lips and leaped through a hole in the roof to cruelly encircle the entire town.

The chimes which emanated from the burnished gold timepiece were oddly haunting as Pat, despondent now in a way he’d never been before in his life, contemplated the faded oval watercolor portrait
within. He felt Rosa’s bronzed hand touching his shoulder tenderly. “Who is it, Pat?” she softly enquired. He put his hand on hers. “It’s Mammy,” he said, and slowly clasped it shut. Rosa nodded. She understood. Then, smoothing her skirt, she lowered her head then raised it and stared with glittering eyes in the direction of the heat-hung horizon. “He was a beautiful man, your friend Honky,” she said. “Ees hard to believe that in the morning he will be litde more than a corpse!”

The distorted image of Pat’s face in the back of the engraved timepiece seemed to mirror the inner state of his soul. In the instant she spoke, he saw himself and Pasty entirely attired in black, hands crossed over their stomachs where they held their silk top hats, as the coffin waited by the open grave and deep male voices rang out, singing:

Pat gripped the timepiece, his fingers entirely closed around it, and sprang suddenly to his feet.

“No!” he cried out. “We can’t allow it to happen! We can’t allow it, you hear me?”

Rosa’s eyes shone with both helplessness and the promise of promise. She spread her nut-brown hands.

“But what can we do, Señor Pat?” she pleaded heartbreakingly. “What can we do?”

It was night. The moon shone. It looked like a sickly eye. The military had occupied the cantina, and inside what could be said to be chaos reigned. Bare-chested soldiers waved carafes of wine and flung their unpolished boots on the tables. Aloft upon a decrepit podium, as he had been instructed, a trembling guitarist frantically sought the minor chords that would save his life, to accompany the words:

A crimson scarf of jettisoned wine curvaceously wound itself around his neck as the air was rent with cries of, “H’ho! Good man! The man from Dundalk every time! Sing up, you boy you!”

The musician complied.

Sadly his efforts were not to satisfy everybody, and a number of bullets embedded themselves in the wall behind him, one or two of them extracting troubling music from a bronze gourd suspended upon the wall, another skimming off the gleaming face of a frying pan. But such discordant notes were heard no longer when a vision emerged out of the all-encompassing cloud of dust and transformed the foul-smelling cantina, the belching, recumbent military men finding themselves in the presence of what were surely two of the most beautiful girls in all Mexico. It was only a matter of moments—they had barely time to get to the bar—before Pat (for it was indeed he—clad from head to toe in Rosa’s finest cheesecloth and linen) found themselves the focus of attention which perhaps only females well versed in certain skills might accept as a matter of course. Initially—not without some justification, surely—Pat was intimidated—not to say mortally embarrassed—by his pigtails—but gradually, with the assistance of some wine, and the flawless tutelage of Rosa—who seemed to be having a whale of a time!—he found himself slowly graduating toward a sense of ease. “Heh heh heh!” snarled the soldier as he gripped Pat by the thigh and rolled his eyes. “Now now!” chirped Pat, tapping him playfully on the nose with his index finger.

The faint echoes of the song drifted out through the open door of the cantina into the clammy cicada-chirping night to the scaffold where Honky awaited his fate, the remnants of one of his cigarettes still clogging up his nose. Deep within his nostril, a tiny speck of tobacco taunted him to within an inch of his sanity, vibrating, teasing—

Had the fly not arrived he might have found it within him to withstand such torment. But this was too much.

“Get away!” he cried (his wrists were handcuffed). “Get away, you bastard! Go!”

He prayed for whatever strength remained within him not to desert him, but it was all to no avail. His head fell upon his chest as though it had been increased to five times its normal weight.

Then—inexplicably!—the insect’s tentative perambulations ceased! Just as it reached the corner of his left eyelid. A sensation close to euphoria took hold of Honky. But then the litde bastard began walking all over again.

The soldier lying prostrate on the bed was feeling very pleased with himself. Rarely did señoritas such as this find their way into the barracks, he reflected. And even more rarely still did they see fit to apply themselves with such fervor to the tickling of—not to mention the cooin into—ears of underling soldiers such as he whose station was fated never to rise above the rank of mere custodian.

‘You señoritas!” he cried with the near whoop of a young boy who has captured a bee in a jar. “You want to be my friends? You want to be my friends? Eh—heh—heh—heh!”

Rosa fluttered her black eyelashes.

“You are the nicest man in the whole Mexican army!” she said.

“Hey, señorita—you know zomezing?” he said. “I like you! You like some more wine?”

The pigmentation of the soldier’s cheeks attained an even more incredulously incandescent crimson. His plump hand huzza’ed uncertainly.

“Come! More wine, señorita!” he gurgled.

And Pat—skipping with tiny litde steps—obliged.

Some thirty-five minutes later, the atmosphere in the room had metamorphosed utterly, as Rosa, holding up her skirt, spat viciously into the face of the snoring soldier. “You son of a pig!” she hissed as Pat nodded. You son of a pig of the mother of a thousand pigs! Raper of virgins! Thiever of sacred objects! Passer of counterfeit money! Armed robber of banks, citizens, and post offices! Bigamist! Kidnapper! Receiver of stolen goods! Murderer! Enciter of prostitution! Perjurer!”

“Come, Rosa! We must not waste our time!” said Pat, turning toward the window and flinging his pigtails and skirt onto the bed.

The cellar was cold and musty and you could have sliced the darkness with a knife, peeled off large chunks of it. The beads of sweat shone on Pat’s face as, breathlessly, he shifted a large wooden packing case marked upon which the word
DYNAMITE
was stenciled in black.

“How are you getting on, Rosa?” he whispered.

Rosa nodded as, with all her strength, placed all the weight of her body behind the Gading gun and heaved with all her might.

“I am doing fine, Señor Pat,” she replied.

“Soon it will be all over,” was the answer she received from Pat McNab.

In the village square, all was quiet. Even the chickens had turned in, and were lying on their sides dead to the world. It seemed like the quietest town in all of Mexico. Until a huge explosion set the sky aflame and the air was filled with the sound of rearing horses. Back in the barracks, the duped soldier leaped awake and reached furiously for his pistol, crying,
“Caramba!”
and pulling on his boots.

What followed was not chaos but something beyond that state for which perhaps there is no word which can truly encapsulate the wild and random—not to say terrifying—nature of what was to subsequently transpire. As, within seconds, the entire village had been transformed from a quiet sleeping town of seeming tranquility to a living, pulsing sheet of flame which might well have served as a depiction of hell itself. And through which the boots of disorientated military now thundered as officers hoarsely cried, “No! Not that way! This way, you fools!”

Until the heart-stopping words, “Look out! Ees a trap!” reached their ears.

“You beesh!” cried the generalissimo’s brother, breaking ranks and attempting what can only be described as a valiant attack, circumscribing huge arcs all about him with a sword, only to be almost riven entirely from head to foot by the hail of bullets which Rosa—to Pat’s delight (for he was jumping up and down, clapping his hands along with Pasty—as though his protracted wearing of pigtails had finally taken their giddy toll)—had ebulliently released from the Gatling gun expertly positioned by her on the hill overlooking the square. In what
seemed hardly the wink of an eye, the dusty main street was piled high with lead-perforated bodies. But just then the church bell pealed and Rosa looked at Pat and Pat looked at Rosa and frantically it dawned on them what they had completely forgotten in their obsessive thirst for retribution.

“Honky!” barked Pat, as he flung a rifle at Pasty and gestured toward Rosa. “Let’s go!” he snapped.

It was heartbreaking to see Honky, a broken man now, being led like the meekest of lambs to the scaffold and the white bag being placed over his head. The gulp he made as the rope’s knot was tightened against his throat seemed to carry for miles across the landscape. The padre stepped back and began to read. Each word seemed black as molasses. Until at last the clergyman cut a cross into the air and said, “May the Lord have mercy on your immortal soul.” Even now, the ungiving sentry who had mercilessly taunted him throughout his incarceration in the stable could not see fit to let the moment pass. “Perhaps you like one last request before you die—a cigarette, no? But zen I forgot—you don’ smoke! Eh—heh—heh!” he sneered through stripped, tobacco-stained teeth.

With all the strength he could muster, from behind the flapping bag (it tickled his nostrils), Honky croaked, “Someday I’ll get even with you, you dying-looking son of a hoor!”

It was to be sooner than Honky could have dreamed as a single shot rang out and instantly severed the rope in two. Who can say whether it was the sudden sense of elation which consumed Honky that was responsible for what happened next or whether its occurrence was inevitable? Regardless, within a matter of seconds, the acerbic sentry was lying on his back and the bagless Honky was squatting astride him administering a liberal number of head butts to the face, raising his head to apply yet another, to his further delight deciphering the familiar figures of his old friends Pat and Pasty (and now Rosa) coming tearing down the road in a buckboard. Hard and fast close by the raised platform of the scaffold, Pat cried, “Jump, Honky!” An instruction with which he more than competently complied to the delight of all, and to which their unrestrained applause amply testified.

Rarely had such a feeling of well being enfolded the village as a
moist-eyed Papa quieted the throng and exultantly declared, “Now you see what happens when you get off your knees, my peoples!”

In that instant, a community once clad only in cotton and ragged linen trousers considered themselves now tailored after the manner of kings. In each set of eyes shone two tiny, triumphant suns.

“Never again must we tolerate such evil in our midst!” said Papa.

As a thousand cheers rose up and myriad trouser legs fluttered as, without the need of further instruction, the what had once been considered “rabble” united as one and charged off in the direction of the military barracks, Papa shaking his head as he took his daughter’s hand, clearing his throat as he began his famous song anew, “South of the border, down Mexico way—”

The farewell was scheduled to take place in the cantina, and once more almost the entire village had deigned to attend. Obviously, because of the size of the building, many had to have admission refused and were heartbroken as a consequence, falling to their knees and weeping in the village square, some even hurling themselves to certain death in the penumbral, engulfing blackness of the well. Pat, Pasty, and Honky smiled warmly as the time came for Papa to rise to his feet. They were stuffed to the gills and had eaten so many portions of blackened beans and enchiladas they felt certain they would burst.