The Road to McCarthy (43 page)

Look at them. They’re like vultures, keeping their distance, waiting for the car to collapse on me so they can come across, pick me clean and toss what’s left over the fence to Lucifer and Satan, who are barking even more ferociously now they can smell my fear. I’m working as fast as I can, knocking chunks out of my fingers and elbows in my hurry to get out of here. Cropskull just went across and got some sort of ominous-looking power tool out of a huge battered old car, like the ones in the movies that are always parked outside the hillbilly homestead where three generations of the same family have spent their lives making lampshades and tambourines out of skin they’ve flayed from the corpses of strangers. Right. Done it. The spare’s on. It’s not much bigger than a doughnut, but it’ll have to do for now. There will be no garages open tonight, because there are no garages. I give them a cheery wave as I drive off, and they just stand there, impassive. Maybe they’ve already got themselves a stranger who they haven’t finished with yet, and they didn’t want to give the game away.

Perhaps he’s under the concrete blocks.

A couple of minutes, and I’ve reached mile marker 68. And here’s the sign, just less than a half a mile farther on, exactly as promised. mccarthy’s—beara west. I can see a low wooden house facing the mountains at the end of an unpaved track. I drive up and park. Dogs are barking inside, but they don’t sound like they mean it. A man is walking down the steps.

“Hi. I’m Larry McCarthy.”

Whether a clan is a real or a bogus thing remains a topic of heated genealogical debate, but as far as I’m concerned it’s extremely heartwarming to turn up in a remote place, covered in dust and with bits missing from your digits, and be treated as kin by people you’ve never met before. Some people find visiting strangers more relaxing than being with family, because no one can see the gulf between what you’re saying and what they know you’re really like from years of unpleasant experience.

It’s been a long day, and I’m more desperate for a drink than Thomas
Francis Meagher after a fortnight’s gallop through an Arizona duststorm with a hangover and a canteen full of sand. Our close genetic bond enables Larry to sense this, and an Alaskan amber ale is slapped into my palm before I’ve had time to try and straighten up from the question-mark stoop into which my back has fused after so long in the Dinky car. The beer’s good, cold but full of dark flavor, a sign of the brewing revolution that’s taken place in this country in recent years. At last there’s an alternative to the loathsome liquid burp produced by the big brand-name brewers. God how I hated those “Wassup!” commercials. “Your beer’s shite, pal, that’s wassup!” I would scream, which used to upset some of the other parents waiting at the school gates.

Larry isn’t drinking because of his recent illness, but he has no qualms about getting me another when he notices I’ve finished the first one before he’s had a chance to close the fridge door. Moments later I’m sitting facing the biggest steak I’ve eaten since—well, since this morning at M & M, I suppose. I don’t think eating steak twice in one day can be very good for you, especially if you’ve only had a banana in between. Doesn’t it lead to those meat-impacted bowel disorders where you wind up on the wrong end of forced high-pressure colonic irrigation from a butch nurse in a rubber dress on the floor of a white-tiled room? Mind you, it’s a very good steak. Local, according to Larry. Reared on all that grass I’ve been driving past today, I suppose, rather than ground-up processed bits of its relatives, as is traditional elsewhere. I’ve eaten half of it now, and soon I should be able to see the plate.

I first became aware of Larry when I stumbled onto the scandal of the McCarthy Mór and discovered the existence of the North American Clan McCarthy Association, which had distributed Terence’s writings and other Celtic-based literature throughout the world, as well as playing a key role in his fundraising and ceremonial operations. John McCarthy—the banker who once drove from New York to Montana to buy a dog—told me that night in the pub opposite Madison Square Garden that Larry was the man I should see if I wanted to know more about the Mór. I know that he’s a paid-up member of the Niadh Nask, the Gaelic chivalric order that Terence either revived or made up, depending on whom you believe; and that he’s
taken part with Terence in various ceremonial McCarthy bashes, in both Ireland and America. Does Larry think Terence is a fraud; or is he still a loyal subject? And how am I going to find out? There’s Celtic harp music on the stereo, a model of the Rock of Cashel on the bookcase, the snowcapped mountains of the North American Rockies are outside the window and the casbah of Tangier seems like a distant dream. Suddenly I realize what I have to do, and it doesn’t involve interrogating Larry so that I can pin down the truth, which will always be a movable feast. I’ll just stick to what I’ve been doing all year: keep following the connections, and see where they lead me.

For some reason I’d imagined Larry lived up here on his own, but there are four of us at the table. To my left is his wife, and across from me his mother, who is ninety-three years old. She’s been telling me about growing up in Butte, how her father came out from Beara and married an Irish girl he met in America, part of the generation who settled the West when it was wild. Wilder. We’re laughing and talking about Father Sarsfield’s Indian-Irish dancing story, and I’m not prepared for what she tells me when I ask about her childhood.

“I had an older sister who I never met. She was eighteen months old. My mother was somewhere out on the edge of Butte, talking to a neighbor, my sister standing clinging to her skirts, when the ground opened up in front of her, and the little child disappeared into a hole in the ground, 150 feet down an abandoned mineshaft.”

I’m stunned, overwhelmed by sadness for something that happened nearly a hundred years ago. How do you recover from something like that?

“I don’t think Mother ever did.”

It’s almost dark when I finish the steak and Larry brings up the subject of Terence. “A lot of people over here,” he says, “are very angry with him.”

Including you, I imagine, as head of the American clan?

“Well, I’ll tell you something. I had a wonderful time with Terence. Everything he said he’d do, he did, and he did it all with wonderful grace and generosity. He brought people together—like we are tonight—McCarthys from all over who otherwise had no connection. That was a good thing to do.”

I agree that it was, and decline the ice cream.

“I’ve never met Conor, but I don’t see how he can carry this forward now. It’s been discredited. Who’s gonna want to put energy, or money, into it? No one. People’s questions remain unanswered, and as long as they do, they’ll stay mad. This was Terence’s thing, and my guess is it’ll end with him. He had charisma.”

But are you angry?

“I could never get mad with Terence. Is he happy in Morocco? I hope he’s happy. He’s a great historian and scholar, he writes real well, and he brought a knowledge of Irish and Gaelic history to people who otherwise would have had none. Part of a clan chief’s job is making people aware of the history they share, bring them together, make things happen. If you judge it like that, Terence was a big success. And if he wasn’t who he said he was? Well, I’ll be honest with you. I’d be disappointed, but I’d still like the guy. All the contact I had with him, I had a wonderful time. Whatever it cost me, I’d happily spend again, but I know other people don’t feel that way. But I had my money’s worth.

“Some people say they’ve seen evidence, but I never have. And you know something? I don’t think I want to either. Just more things to argue about and divide us. Terence brought us together. You could say that whether he was who he says he was is irrelevant. I mean, who knows what really went on in Irish history?”

Next morning
I manage the eighty miles to Missoula airport on three wheels and a doughnut without any further mishap. Two soldiers in camouflage fatigues are on duty at the hand-luggage X-ray machine. I don’t understand the logic in wearing camouflage if you’re not in the jungle or forest. It just makes you easier to spot. There’s no doubt that flying in the United States is a more unsettling business these days. If we admit it, we’re all nervous. A gangling twenty-five-year-old who looks as if he might still be growing rummages through my bag and takes out the least suspicious item he can find. He stares belligerently at the colorless liquid. “This water?”

I confirm that it is. He assumes a look of triumph, as if he just got the prime suspect to betray his guilt on tape.

“Okay,” he says, resisting the temptation to add “wise guy.” “Then drink some for me.”

This is an intriguing security tactic I haven’t previously encountered, and naturally I comply with his request. When I fail to explode or spontaneously combust, he reluctantly lets me through. In the departures lounge an anesthetist in tennis clothing is on the payphone talking loudly to a patient about upping her dose of steroids and injecting morphine directly into her spine, which isn’t what I want to hear before going up to 30,000 feet with a bunch of strangers whose water may not have been checked properly.

The in-flight meal is peanut and caramel-coated popcorn, served with a fizzy drink. It comes with a little slip of paper that says “I will praise God’s name in song and glorify Him with thanksgiving” by way of explanation.

At Seattle airport the clampdown on drinks continues unabated. I’m stopped going through security by a middle-aged Chinese man in a blazer. He ignores the potentially lethal water, and instead removes the bottle of duty-free Jameson’s I bought at Heathrow.

“What’s this?”

“Whiskey.”

“Scotch whisky?”

“Irish.”

“No Irish whisky. Whisky Scotch, eh? From Scotland!”

“No. It’s from Ireland. Look. It says so on the bottle.”

He removes the bottle from its bag, unscrews the top, gives it a sniff and looks to me for an opinion.

“Cheaper than Scotch?”

“About the same.”

An Indian guy in a different blazer has come over now. He smiles and says, “You share that? We have party now?”

“Ireland, eh?” asks the Chinese guy.

“Yes.”

“My mother, all my family, in Toulouse.”

“Toulouse? I see.”

“Yes. Every year, I go to Toulouse. Next time, I remember.” There’s a long pause, but eventually I can’t bear it anymore. “Remember what?”

“Jameson’s. Irish Scotch. Very good. Have a nice flight.”

He screws the top back on and I go through the X-ray machine, secure in the knowledge that the war on terrorism is doing whatever it takes to make the skies a safer place, particularly in the area of hazardous beverages.

In five hours’ time I will be in Alaska; and tomorrow morning I will be on the road to McCarthy.

A geeky youth
with a too-thin head and disturbing grin is staring at me across the desk. He appears to be looking at someone behind me and slightly to one side, but I just turned round and checked and there’s nobody there, so I’ll have to add cross-eyed to his list of attributes.

“So, whaddya got ta show me, Peete?”

I like American informality, but this kid’s behaving like he’s been mixing red wine with his Mogadon, drawling words in a menacing sing-song and stretching out my name like it’s some kind of joke. I decide to go terribly British on him, see how he likes that. Usually, they don’t.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you mean. What do you want? A credit card?”

“Right first time, Peete!”

I give him a green American Express card instead of a slap. He gazes at it as if I’ve just put the Ark of the Covenant on the counter.

“Wow! Weird design. Far out. Where’d ya get this, Peete? England? No kidding. I guess you got some pretty strange stuff over there?”

Not as strange as Alaska, judging by the evidence so far, which is you.

“There you go. Room 3226. You enjoy your stay now, Peete!”

I walk the few yards to the lift and wait for it to arrive. Pinhead stands watching me waiting for it to arrive. It arrives. I’m just about to get in when I decide it might be a good idea to check the obvious.

“Third floor?”

“Nope. Second floor, third building.”

“Third building?”

He nods and grins and points to a depressing parking lot full of dirty half-melted snow.

“Didn’t I say that? Out there, second door. Sorry, Peete!”

I pick my way across the slush to the third building. Strangely, there is no sign of the second building. In the lobby a big, tough woman with processed hair is punching a Coca-Cola machine. It may have failed to dispense her beverage of choice, but it seems more likely she’s just come down from her room because she needed something to punch. I unpack and head out to look for a bar. It’s almost ten and still light, but from what I can see it doesn’t look a promising situation. I’m in a mid-budget chain hotel ten minutes from Anchorage airport, on the main road into town. I can see a gas station, a convenience store, a pizza delivery place, three more chain hotels and some traffic lights, but nothing that resembles a bar. Directly across the four-lane road is a building that looks like the engineering department of a 1970s community college in East Germany. restaurant, claims the sign, then, more hopefully, cocktails. I cross the road and find myself in a wood veneer and plastic banquette fast-food joint that is completely empty. If you’d just taken an overdose and needed to wash it down with a drink, you wouldn’t have it here because it might depress you.

“Can I get you a table, sir?” asks a dispirited waitress, who seems to be the only other soul on the premises. I mutter some random sounds that don’t include any proper words, then look round inquisitively as if I’m checking to see whether my buddies are here, which they’re not. For good measure I decide to imply unpunctuality and look at my wrist, where there is still no watch. By now she’s looking the other way, so I take the opportunity
to slip through the door and escape across the road. Back in the lobby of Building One I ask Pinhead if the hotel has a bar.