Dead I Well May Be (12 page)

He’s a tough guy, I said.

Not against three, she said.

No.

We sat there and didn’t say anything for a while. I looked at her.

It doesn’t help, but I hope he gets better, I said.

Why did Scotchy have to shoot him? He would have paid. He always pays, she said.

She thought Scotchy had done the whole thing. That I was just help. Well, I didn’t enlighten her.

Scotchy thinks he beat up big Andy, cold-clocked him, really gave him a hiding, I said, letting Scotchy take the guilt.

He didn’t do that, she said sadly.

Yeah, I know, I said.

There was a bruise turning blue on the side of her face where Scotchy had pistol-whipped her. Her hair was short and blond and it
suited her, and it made me wonder why she’d had the wig on yesterday. The wig didn’t become her at all. The thought became word.

Are you Jewish? I asked her.

No, why?

You were wearing a wig.

His idea, she said and jerked a finger behind her towards the ward.

Shovel’s? I asked stupidly.

She nodded, then shook her head.

I cut my hair short and he hated it, and he said he would make me wear that thing until it grew, she explained.

I wasn’t sure if she was serious or not. It was certainly an odd occasion for levity. She was younger than Shovel by a good ten years. She seemed to come from a more elevated social sphere. It made me wonder how they’d met, how they’d got together. It seemed an unlikely pairing now, big boozy Shovel and his demure, soft-spoken wife, but then again, love’s a wild card.

Why a brunette wig? I asked.

She laughed. Ask him, she said.

He went out and bought it? I asked.

I don’t know, she said and laughed again.

Jesus, he’s a bit of a bloody nutter, that Shovel. You look so much better without it.

You think so?

Without a doubt.

She bit her lip and sighed.

I’m surprised at you and Fergal, following that monster Scotchy. He’s a mental case. You two must be born stupid.

I hadn’t thought that she knew us that well. Certainly I don’t recall speaking to her before. But probably she’d seen us in the Four P. or somewhere. I said nothing, and we sat there for a minute or two.

Let’s get out of here, she said.

That’s what I was trying to do. It’s bloody impossible. I’ve been here since this morning, and I only came to get a prescription, I said.

She gave me a thin smile.

Get me a cab, she said.

She stood, and I got up with her. She led me to the exit.

So I hear he’s not going to be out until Christmas? I said.

Who said that?

What I heard.

Be out in a couple of weeks. He’s a strong motherfucker.

Aye.

We waited on the street for a while, and she pulled out a gold-covered pack of cigarettes. She offered me one.

I’m trying to quit, I said.

How long? she asked, conversationally.

Since last night, I muttered.

That’s when I started, she said.

I saw a cab and hailed it. She got in.

See me home? she said.

I go downtown, I said.

See me home, she insisted.

And that was that. We rode up together, and I paid the cabbie since I was flush.

She walked me up the stairs of yesterday. You hear stories of female Provos who lure Brits into their houses where they or an Active Service Unit kills them. Classic honey trap. And all that time it wasn’t completely out of the back of my mind that at some point a pistol was going to be shoved in my face, followed by furious yelling and recrimination and then a muzzle flash, and that would be the end of it. Even as she took off my T-shirt and jeans and took off her blouse and pants and led me into a pink bedroom and a big bed, I wasn’t entirely sure that everything was as I thought it was.

You’re beautiful, she said.

I asked her her name but she wouldn’t tell me. She put her finger over my lips, she didn’t want to say anything now. Words were dangerous, they were reminders and could ruin everything.

I held her and touched her. Her breasts were small and her body was thin and supple and that hardness I’d seen in her yesterday was a reaction to us and was not reflected in her kisses and her touch and her warmth. She was so pale, and where Bridget was passionate and businesslike and pretty, she was all need. That was everything about her, and it was almost overwhelming. She was hungry for a body. No, not just a body, I could see that: it was me. It was me, and it almost hurt to be with her.

And this was me punishing Bridget for being with Darkey. Punishing Darkey for loving Bridget.

She could see that I was afraid that she was broken, fragile, but she showed me. She was tender and composed and urgent. She was all need. I kissed her bruises and her eyes and her mouth, and she kissed me and we spent the night giving and being given unto, and sleeping into the new day.

4: ACROSS 110TH STREET

V

ignettes: shopping in C-Town; crazy men yelling in the two-dollar cinema; drinks in the Four Provinces; evening collections with Scotchy; Fergal dinging a gypsy cab and having a go at the cabbie; a black girl’s body in Marcus Garvey Park; two lads going at it with a knife on 191st Street; Bridget leaning over and kissing me for the first time as we changed the kegs; an empty lot bursting with trees and life on MLK Boulevard, and opposite, a hurt guy on a bike splayed in front of the Manhattanville post office; rows of fresh fruit in West Side Market; flattened rats; pepper trees; whole plazas of urine; me and the boys extorting some guy in Fordham into giving us a ton a week for doing precisely nothing; the bakery on Lenox; soul food at M&G; delivering a sofa set for Darkey to some cousin in Yonkers, up two flights and past a goddamn corner; the Nation of Islam screaming at me at the A train stop on 125th; the doe-eyed girl with her boyfriend in the hall; Sunday service all along the hot street in the morning, Christ’s children in a merry wee conspiracy of happiness; choirs; the tiny, forgotten synagogue on 126th; the Ethiopian lady wandering half-naked in the lobby; Ratko’s Santa laugh as another bottle opens; rice and beans on 112th; KFC; McDonald’s; rice and beans at Floridita; M&G again; the Four P.; Bridget; Bridget again …

The whole summer’s events compressed into a single point. Eight weeks in one second. The colors, smells, humidity, tastes, all of it condensed into a moment, folded and pushed together like an old-fashioned brass collapsing telescope.

An instant. Held. So much brighter than Belfast. Faster and richer, too, and not in the sense of money.

Life flashed, and I was momentarily stunned. I got down.

Hit the deck.

Hit the deck.

Yelled.

Holy fuck.

Noise.

Breathed.

Breathing …

I was breathing hard, sweating, and then, to my horror, I realized that I’d been shot in the left hand, a ricochet. A chunk of flesh had been ripped away behind the knuckles, leaving an angry gash that was just figuring out that with this level of injury it really should be starting to bleed.

They must’ve got me when I’d stuck my hands up over my face and it had taken me and the hand some time to realize what was happening. What was happening, of course, was a cock-up of tremendous proportions, a cock-up perhaps just as big and scary as the multifarious and diverse fifteen-year-old-boy cock-ups I’d gotten myself into in North Belfast and Rathcoole. It didn’t, however, necessarily have to be a fatal cock-up, because we were all very close to the door and Dermot had blown the gaff by not having a man cover behind us to cut off an exit.

It was five days after the Shovel incident, and I was in a shoot-out at the long-postponed meeting at Dermot’s place. When I came on board, Scotchy had promised that there would be the occasional shoot-out. The way he said it was the way kids would tell you about a game of Cowboys and Indians. Scotchy said he’d been in Bandit Country and I’d been in North Belfast, so neither of us should be strangers to gunplay, but in America there was a glamour that attached to things. He and Fergal could talk up a storm about some shindig they’d gotten into in Inwood Park a year or two back: bullets whizzing, Fergal taking one in the foot, two black guys running for the hills by the end of it. The details were vague and unconvincing and informed, seemingly, by years of TV and the movies.

But this, unfortunately, was the real deal. Eight months working for Darkey, and the worst I’d seen was Scotchy and Andy giving some boy a powerful, coma-inducing hiding. No, be honest. The worse I’d seen was actually me and Shovel. I mean, I’d hit a couple of recalcitrant types myself, but mostly our actions could be implied with menaces. But now in the space of a few days I’d delivered Old World violence into a New World setting, and now I was in a real honest-to-Jesus firefight, one that conceivably I might get killed in. It was some kind of apotheosis, some kind of tear in the fabric of things, and if I was of a suspicious nature I might have been suspicious.

I was behind the bar with Sunshine, and on the other side in a more exposed position were Fergal and Scotchy. Andy, of course, was out in the car, and if he’d any sense at all in that thick head of his, that’s where he’d stay. Andy was only out of hospital that morning, and Scotchy, instead of letting him rest, had brought him down with us to a potentially hazardous assignment.

I really should have known to stay in bed, because today already had been atypical. The trains had all come promptly, the weather had taken a cooler turn, and although not a big believer in omens, I’d won twenty bucks on a scratch card in the fake bodega on 123rd. Unpleasantness was sure to follow.

Our original plan was to have Andy’s coming-off-the-sick party all day today but Sunshine had put flies in that ointment with his patience suddenly collapsing in the face of Dermot’s singular insistence that he was fucking “quits with you, Sunshine, and if you and Darkey know what’s good for you, you’ll be keeping out of my fucking way.”

Now Dermot’s men were shooting at us with automatic weapons, big ones, too, and they were carving up the bar above us and making a hell of a lot of noise, enough noise to grab the attention of the neighborhood and lure it away from the Yankees game. Sunshine was shaking like a Jell-O-molded pudding that has somehow attained sentience and is being shot at with machine guns. He was staring at me in abject terror. I was breathing.

What the fuck are you doing? Sunshine asked.

I was in no mood to give him an answer. Sunshine’s fabled brilliance with intelligence had let us all down here. There were at least two
shooters and Dermot himself and maybe a bloody barman, and Sunshine had failed to warn us about any of this.

I’m centering my
chi
, I said.

What?

Centering my
chi
.

You’re centering your fucking
chi?
Sunshine asked, frightened.

Aye.

How long will that take?

Not too long. My life was flashing before my eyes earlier, I said, a little less angry with him now and hoping to calm his nerves.

It was?

Yeah.

And now you’re centering your
chi
?

Aye.

The big Kalashnikovs, or whatever they were, were shooting at us from semidarkness in the lounge bar a good fifty feet away from our position. What Dermot’s plan had been was none too clear, because it didn’t seem to be the ideal place at all for an ambush. More than likely Dermot had told his boys to let us come completely into the pub and then open up on us from oblique angles; but the boys must have been inexperienced or jumpy or cracked up because they’d started as soon as we’d walked in. Sunshine and I had dived for the bar. Fergal and Scotchy had ended up near the tables. About a minute and a half had gone by, and I’d spent all of it flashing my recent life before my eyes and lying on the floor with Sunshine trying to figure what was going to happen next. It seemed to boil down to three possibilities: they’d get us, we’d get them, or maybe we’d all get nicked.

I mean, although shooting was not uncommon after dark in this part of town, even if it was just guys firing off .9mm clips into the air, it would really be expecting too much for the average lazy, frightened copper to ignore this palaver. Although this was Washington Heights, it was midmorning and these were machine guns. The nonincarceration window of opportunity couldn’t be more than about five to ten minutes.

Scotchy was signaling at me from across the room. The shooters almost had a sight line onto him and Fergal, and he was making some
kind of gesture for me to stand up behind the bar and let them have it to draw their fire, enabling the two of them to get in a better position, maybe scramble over to us.

I had a .22 revolver, and there was no way I was standing up anywhere and firing at anyone with that. The .22 was there to intimidate a little bit and wasn’t really a gun you’d shoot. Not that I’d have a semiautomatic anyway, because the only time you’d ever need it, the thing would be sure to jam on you. Your revolver, your serious Yankee revolver, a .38, will shoot clean, dirty, waterlogged, and arse-deep in a blanket. Sunshine had a .38, and I suppose it was conceivable that I could have carried out Scotchy’s dubious plan with Sunshine’s gun, but really the smarter play was to pretend not to understand what Scotchy was talking about and just to nod and do nothing.

I did this and Scotchy started miming again, more furiously. I looked at Sunshine, but he had his eyes closed and was muttering what I took to be the Rosary. It surprised me. He’d always seemed the scientific, agnostic type, but I suppose atheists, foxholes, all that.

I could see through the door that there were people outside now, the usual eejits who show up and get killed by a stray bullet, but I knew that at least none of them were calling the authorities. It was a mental couple of blocks, but it knew when to keep its mouth shut. Malcolm X had been assassinated just around the corner, and there had been a six-person homicide just last month, so we weren’t Halley’s comet or anything, but if things went on like this for much longer, you knew that an annoyed new mother trying to kip would call it in, and some wanker would eventually turn up to lecture us through loudspeakers and then teargas us out and lift us. It was all fucking inevitable—well, unless Dermot’s boys got their shit together and killed us first. Either prospect was less than pleasant, and I knew that perhaps I really would have to do something. What, exactly, I wasn’t sure, but something, a withdrawal by sections or a mad dash for the door or a truce, something. Sunshine’s mutterings got louder, and Dermot’s boys stopped shooting and shifted a wee bit and started getting an even better angle on Scotchy behind the overturned table, churning up the floor with huge slugs that sent burning splinters all the way over here. I thought for a moment or two, and cleared my throat.