Emerald Germs of Ireland (22 page)

Timmy shook his head wistfully.

“No, Sergeant,” he explained, adding regretfully, “I think they’re from the north.”

“I’ve got to get to the Copacabana Club,” continued Pat in a strange, almost toneless voice. “I’m playing in the Copacabana tonight, you see! Yes!”

Timmy Sullivan took him by the arm—he regarded Pat as an extremely valued patron—and said, “Of course you are, Pat. Come on home now like a good lad.”

The whole of Pat McNab’s body—his being, indeed—seemed washed in a sad, ineffable blue light.

It was some weeks later as Pat was sitting at the counter in Sullivan’s listening to what could fairly be described as the worst band in the world—a Casio organ and drum-machine combination—surging toward the chorus of a rapturously received number, oblivious of the fact that they were, along with Timmy Sullivan the proprietor, responsible for the almost lapidary grayness that seemed now to film itself across the eyes of Pat McNab as he contemplated his perspiration-saturated and heavily fingerprinted glass of Macardles Ale.

“Oh, aye!” continued Timmy Sullivan, flicking his tea cloth across his shoulder, obliquely, with arched eyebrow, observing Pat, whispered, “Gave him a right bloody going over too! Hasn’t been the same since it at all. Couple of nights back, couldn’t shut him up! Literally, couldn’t shut him up! Him and the moon! Wanted to talk all bloody night about it! And now, if you mention it, he just looks at you.”

Timmy Sullivan wiped a glass and stared (futilely) once more at his lone, silent patron. “Doesn’t want to talk about it at all!” he asserted. “Funny the way people are, isn’t it? What do you say, Josie?”

Josie Jones considered for a moment or two but in the end made no reply, simply turned the slim tube of his cigarette in his fingers and raised it to his lips. The band—the Two Lads—were about to conclude, but the resurgence of enthusiasm for their efforts persuaded them otherwise, the dinner-jacketed lead vocalist gathering a handful of air and sending his microphone skyward as from the depths of his throat unfurled each word, a sputnik coursing spaceward

as Pat McNab made no move, in his eyes reflected the tepid bubbles of a Macardles Ale which might have been all of three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away.

T
here are so many theories with regard to “perception” and the relationship one might contrive with the “ineluctable modality of the visible” that if we were to go into it here in terms of attempting to understand Pat and how it affected his life around this time, it is likely that we would be expostulating until the proverbial “kingdom come.” Suffice to state, perhaps, that the “bending” of reality or the realignment of the world around him in a peculiarly familiar yet unfamiliar way came about as a result of the recurrent, almost tropical weather conditions which had been prevailing in the area, the heat at times so thick you could almost slice it into large gungy slabs, his consequent fondness for alcohol, and the residue of slightly dislocated, pleasurable yet uneasy feelings which remained in his psyche some months now after his “Mexican adventure” with the redoubtable Pasty McGookin and his associate Honky McCool. Which may go some way toward explaining why Pat was smiling to himself—a jerky, elastic smile, it has to be acknowledged—as he came past O’Hare ‘s Bush one ordinary unspectacular evening in June. Muttering to himself glumly—for that was how he felt, regardless of any expressive, seemingly optimistic gesture—”Ho ho. Welcome to Gullytown. The famous metropolis where things can get so exciting you have to be careful in case your heart might stop on the spot!” He shook his head and laughed at nothing in particular. For the tiniest of seconds he fancied he espied a small bird sporting startlingly technicolor plumage singing in the heart of the oak tree up ahead, but when he looked again there was nothing to be seen. “No! Nothing at all!” he
continued. “After all, what do you expect? I mean, we are talking about Gullytown here!” Such conversations—effectively with no one, or thin air, perhaps—might seem pointless, but they had the effect of cheering Pat up slightly, and he was on the verge of extending and expanding upon the subject—virulent denunciations of his native heath—when suddenly he found himself distracted by the sharp squeal of brakes and to his amazement out of a cloud of dust not a hundred yards from where he stood (close by Hudie Maddens barn) descried a large American car (a polished black sedan in fact) shooting toward him. He could not be quite sure whether someone had shouted “Look out!” or “Move, buddy!” or whether it had been his own reflexes which alerted him in the nick of time, but as he composed himself and climbed—twig-specked and not a litde muddied—out of the ditch into which he had been thrown, he instinctively crossed himself, realizingjust how lucky he had been, steeling himself as best he could to assimilate the bizarre tableau which had now begun to assemble in front of his eyes. For a split second a wave of feverish, almost exasperated lassitude comparable to that which had become a frequent visitor of late in the hot, troubling nights threatened to overcome him once more with its oily, insistent whispers: “You’re at it again, Pat—imagining things.” As did the fleeting, phantom figures who now passed across his subconscious—Pasty and Honky McCool—nestled in each of their palms a deadly, pulsating root. No less significant in this regard the shocking screech of the sedan’s brakes as they slammed into the base of the oak which only minutes before Pat had passed!! It soon became clear that this was no tenebrous shadow play upon the stage of a wounded, ultrasensitive psyche. As Pat reflected, in literally a nanosecond from his vantage point, close by the ditch, “Anybody who thinks that it is is going to wind up dead! History!” A huge plume of steam was rising now from the crushed bonnet of the car—it had folded like paper—and leaping from die interior and rolling over before landing expertly on two feet was a large man in black glasses clutching a revolver in a frantic, two-handed grip. Within the vehicle, the remaining passengers, including the driver who was clutching a black briefcase firmly (also frantically) to his chest, were as spectral masks pressed to the window.

“Step out of the car!” the gunman cried (yelled). “Step out of the car!”

Another man—smaller, attired in a silk suit and a porkpie hat, which became dislodged and subsequently rolled into a cowpat—fell from the car and shouted, “Take him, Jacy! Splatter his brains all over the tree!”

“Shut the fuppag! You hear me? Get the fupp over here!”

The door swung open and the driver appeared still clutching the briefcase to his chest. Behind the hedge, Pat’s face was drained of all color.

“Now hold it, Jacy! There ain’t no need for this. You don’t think we can work something out? Why, sure we can!”

Two sharp reports from the unmoving revolver ended both the sentence and his life. Pat could not believe the amount of blood that gushed from his mouth in a great big crimson arc. It was the most crimson blood Pat had ever seen. The other man ran to the corpse as it fell to the ground.

“Jesus, Jacy!” he cried. ‘You’ve killed him! What’s Bobbie-Ann going to say?”

Jacy slid his gun inside his pocket and spat.

“Fug the shut up!” (Pat wondered, initially, was he hearing it right, but then became satisfied that these indeed were the words uttered.) Jacy continued, You listening’ to me? Since we left Mary’s, that’s all you been sayin’! You got nothin’ else to say? You know what I think of Bobbie-Ann? You know what I think of that fuccamackin’ cockamacka? This is what I think!”

Pat winced as two more shots found their way into the chest of the already dead man. Jacy fell to his knees and, flicking open the catches on the briefcase, began to marvel at its contents—numerous stacked wads of pristine dollar bills—crying ecstatically, “Ha ha! See how you like this, Bobbie-Ann! See who’s Jackass Fughpig No-Dick now! Ha ha!”

In his excitement, Jacy had forgotten about the sole remaining occupant of the car, whose hand was now slowly moving inside his coat as he edged his way across the upholstery. You slimy fuggerball!” he cried as he rolled out onto the road.

The metal of the gun barrel gleamed sprightly in the sun.

“No! Don’t, you fool!” cried Jacy and his henchman instantaneously.

More metal shone.

“Don’t!” shouted Jacy.

But it was too late. Three whistling reports left three bodies lying in
the sun. A slight wind flapped the crisp banknotes in the glittering shaft of a dead afternoon sun.

It seemed to Pat that in that moment the beat of his heart had slowed down to about one-third of its normal pace. It was as if the whole world behind the hedge had become a giant, vibrating heart going bump bump over and over. He felt his forehead tingle with sweat. Tiny needles. He gasped. All around him everything had changed. It was as if the entire world had been given a new coat of paint. But a paint that could blind you. His heart beat again and there was a strange taste in his mouth. He knew he was faced with a stark choice. Briskly, he began his walk toward the open briefcase.

The figure bursting through the underground in Mackie’s Wood a mile from the town might have been some hunted, feral creature. Resonant in its ears the sound of pounding feet, the relentless staccato of fuzzbox guitars. There could be no denying now the sweat which rolled down Pat McNab’s face. Tiny needles no longer. In large, coursing rivers it wound its way, until his entire mouth seemed filled with perspiration. Upon his face, great streaks of mud, his hair aloft as like some startling regiment of twigs. “No!” he cried as he raised his forearms, to protect himself, as he thought. But there was no one to be seen. Pat’s heart beat again. “What have I done?” he repeated as he fell behind a tree (a large, spreading tree, fortunately, affording him much cover). “In God’s name what have I done?”

For Pat to avail himself of some “mushies,” as Pasty and Honky McCool had been known to refer to them, a neatly ordered assembly of which conveniently presented themselves to him as he rested himself beneath the spreading boughs, would have been foolhardy in the extreme, for surely he needed all his wits about him. But this is, in fact, what he did—and in what might be considered reasonable quantities, to boot. His subsequent rationalization of his actions involved such thoughts as, “Sure I need to eat something” and “It can’t get any worse!”

This perhaps explains why, despite the gravity of recent events—he had after all witnessed a fatal shootout which had left a normally tranquil country road literally stuffed with corpses, not to mention absconding with a briefcase filled with money which did not belong to him—he now willingly gave himself to hopeless chortling which, it would seem, to the
independent observer at least, to possess a sort of willful abandonment, which might be expected from a three-or perhaps four-year-old.

However, as Pat was amusing himself deep in the sanctuary of Mackie’s Wood beneath the cool shade of that expansive elm, what he did not know was that some considerable few miles away, in an establishment called Mary’s, a certain gendeman whose name was, in fact, Mary, had just received some information which was not having the effect of making him feel that all was well with the world in any respect whatsoever. As the person on the other end of the telephone had known for quite some time now. Mary was a large man of about eighteen stone in weight. He wore an orange shirt festooned with bending purple palm trees. His head was fat and, inside it, his eyes were stony and dead.

“This is a very good joke,” he said. “This is so good a joke I’ve wet my pants. Will I hold the phone down to my pants so you can see how wet they are? Hey, how are you, Ben? How the hell in the futhermugging sugar-shaking world are you fugging doing, huh?”

Suddenly Mary hit the table a kick.

“What?” he snapped. “Now, Ben, I don’t like you doing this! I don’t like it when you do this to me! What did you say?”

He lifted a pink pool ball from the green baize surface where it rested placidly. It thudded against the padded leather of the secret door set into the wall.

“Well, then get the futhermugger! You hear me? Get the mother-shakin’ thing! Get it!”

Mary waved an index finger—very tremulously indeed, and drew his breath.

“Because if you don’t,” he continued, “if you don’t—”

He broke off.

“Ben,” he barked down the receiver, “take off your socks.”

There followed a pause, in which Mary appeared to lose his mind.

“I said—take off your socks!” he roared.

A static-filled reply satisfied him.

“That’s better.”

Mary coughed politely. He seemed to be considering the reflection of his hair parting in the burnished, stainless steel of a paper knife.

“Now,” he went on, “how many toes do you see?”

The reply was indistinct. But seemingly satisfactory.

“That’s right,” said Mary, soothingly, “and you know what it is about them toes? You already owe me one.”

The sound of the receiver being slammed down was shattering in the silence. Not unlike a large bear in a cave, Mary paced the office for some moments, considering various objects, assaulting others, before eventually deciding upon a course of action and squeezing the reception buzzer with his thumb.

“Hi, Mary!”

“Tell Celia Mary wants him!” he barked.

“Sure thing, Mary! You got it,” came the receptionist’s reply.

A thin employee in a silk suit inadvertently caught his employer’s gaze then looked sharply away. A pool ball thudded dully into the wall behind him, narrowly missing his ear.

“What in the hellin’s name you lookin’ at? You hear me? Get outa here!”

It was some hours later when the studded leather secret door swung open and through it entered a pair of snakeskin winklepicker boots. Followed by some pink trousers and a leopardskin shirt which belonged to Celia, a six-foot black man now grinning from ear to ear beneath his wide-brimmed floppy hat. He liked jewelry, Celia. Gold, especially. He had lots of rings on either hand. “As black as the riding boots of the Earl of Hell” might have been an apposite way of describing him. Mary smiled as he turned from the window. His eyes met Celia’s.

“I think we got a problem,” were the words he uttered.

The family pet had been introduced as Pongo. Celia smiled as he considered anew the tiny shivering terrier. Its fur was literally standing on end as it cowered in a corner behind the washing machine. Babbie Connolly was a quiet woman who had done nothing in her life except collect the pension and mind her own business. Now, inexplicably, she found herself being slammed up against the wall and shouted at for something she hadn’t done, something she couldn’t have done and knew nothing in the world about. But that wasn’t good enough for Celia. He put his muscular arm around her slim neck once more and said, “Now let’s run through this one more time, lady. And this time you’d better get it right because you are puttin’ red pepper on my ass,
and if you don’t, I am gonna shove what’s left of you down that fugga-mutha’s barking throat, you hear?”

Pongo shivered behind a jumper as Babbie Connolly, sweetshop owner (and one of the most popular figures in Gullytown), nodded. Her suede ankle boots hovered two inches from the floor.

“Please! Whatever you do, don’t hurt him!”

“Then tell me what you know—and be quick about it!”

While he was waiting, Celia produced from his pocket a small rectangular cellophane packet which contained white powder, some of which he proceeded to remove and lick from the ends of his fingers.

As she hobbled away, Babbie Connolly thanked God that her mother wasn’t alive.

“Please, mister,” she pleaded shakily, “all I know is that that was the man I saw through the window. And there was some kind of argument. I don’t know what it was about—I think it was over money. They were—”

“Go on!” snapped Celia, interjecting and sniffing some “snow.”

“No! Don’t hurt me! They were arguing and shouting. And then—one of them pulled a gun!”

“And—?”

“Then all I remember—I heard shooting. And when I looked again—they were all dead. That was when the other man appeared.”