Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (36 page)

then I bought this big fuck-off car that I couldn't even drive. It was too big to park so I had to abandon it in the middle of the road all the time and then, of course, the Army panics and sends in its bomb-disposal team and they threaten to blow it up because they think it's a car-bomb

The fact that he could not imagine any big Kansas deal of which he would not know made Evans more convinced of the truth of his theory. Anything he didn't know about had to be very good indeed.

`Do you do much business over here?' he asked Chuckie, interrupting that steady flow of plaint.

Chuckie looked confused. `A bit.!

'Oh, yeah?'

'Sold some stuff here. No big deal. Very small-scale. Everything we sell is complete bullshit.'

Evans tried to smile ironically but it was too European for him. `Bullshit?'

'Total.'

Evans smiled in a more American manner this time. `Bullshit sells. We like it. Look at our presidents.'

He laughed his huge laugh again. Chuckie didn't bother to join in this time. The time for politesse had passed. He started to read his magazine, quickly flipping over the pages about Evans.

Evans's good humour was checked by Chuckle's rudeness but his irritation was soon replaced by an expression of recognition, of approval, even. He seemed to think that Chuckie's handling of the situation was admirable. The fat Mick had big balls, for sure, but Evans had never met a man who could outgonad him. He persisted. 'OK, Mr Lurgan. Let's talk straight. I'm interested. Let's do some fucking business.'

For the next half-hour he badgered Chuckie for more information. Chuckie was growing wild with despair. They would land soon and he didn't want to turn up at Max's door without some preparation. Unfortunately, his demonstrably unfeigned lack of interest made Evans wild with plutocratic desire. Eventually, maddened, Chuckie gave him his office number in Belfast and told him he could speak to Luke. He warned him one last time that it would not be worth his while.

The plane had now landed and Chuckle was standing by one of the exits before the airbrakes had been released. The air hostesses were unable to persuade him to return to his seat. He heard Evans puffing and blowing to follow him. He closed his eyes and thought of Ireland.

'I should have guessed she'd end up with someone like you,' the old lady at Max's grandmother's house remarked.

`That's what her mother said.'

`Yeah?'

'I'm glad I meet everybody's expectations like that.'

The old woman's face was expressionless. `Her mother's a tramp. She married two of Bea's sons. Bea hated her both times. Sometimes I think she did it just to annoy the old girl.'

`I met her. It wouldn't be a surprise.!

This produced something close to a smile. Her eyes clouded again quickly. This woman's husband rented Max's land. Max had come round a couple of days before and asked her to fix up the house. She was going to stay a while.

'You're not pretty,' the old lady said implacably.

`I have a good personality,' said Chuckie.

There was a definite smile on her papery face this time. `Max never went much for looks.' Her words were insulting but her tone was distinctly less harsh. Chuckie decided to be happy with that.

It had taken him three hours to get to Max's grandmother's place. He had booked a hotel room in a small town ten miles away and cabbed it out there. He had stood on the gravel of her driveway for some minutes, his fortitude in poor repair. The old lady had come to find out who he was. At first, the bewildered Chuckie thought that she was Max's grandmother but she was just a neighbour. She was the cliched Midwest matriarch and he was almost surprised to find her without a shotgun on her hip. After a couple of minutes of conversation with her, it became clear that this old lady didn't need one.

She told him that Max was not there. That she had gone to LA for a couple of days. The old woman expected her back the next day. She did not invite him in, but neither did she tell him to go away. Max must have told her about him. Chuckie felt that this was a start.

It had taken some minutes to arrive at this insulting but less harsh situation. Chuckie was confident. He decided to try some drama. That might compensate for his lack of beauty.

`I think I love her,' he said.

The old lady was silent. She brushed a fly from her face. `You'd better,' she said firmly, significantly.

'Why?'

The woman peered closely at him. Her expression changed in some way that Chuckie did not understand. He saw real warmth in her eyes. Her stiff backbone gave a little and her shoulders sagged into a less indomitable posture. The fly landed unmolested on her hair. `Jesus, son.You don't know.You really don't know.'

'What? Know what?'

She looked gently right in his eyes.'You better come in: She moved back in her threshold and held open the door for him.

Chuckie didn't move.'What don't I know?'

`Come in, son.'

`Tell me.'

She swatted the fly from her hair.

`She's pregnant,' she said.

They sat for a couple of hours on her wide porch. Chuckie reclined with his dizzy head against the hand-rail. Numbly he stared at the wood. It comforted him strangely. Lacquered, firm, it looked like wealth to him. A plump emblem of prosperity.

He returned to his hotel in a stupor. The cab driver asked him for a hundred and fifty dollars. Chuckie gave him three hundred. It was only six in the evening. He went up to his room and sat on his anonymous bed for four hours staring out of his hazy, unopenable windows.

He watched the winds blowing across the freeway, making the trucks wobble. Somehow he had thought she had left because of the Fountain Street bomb. He watched the cars drive by the little town, which was less a town than an accidental cluster of buildings hanging onto the Interstate.

The people driving past were people he would never meet and who would never meet him. In this America there were scores of millions so. The thought made him lonely no longer. America's massive indifference to him elated Chuckie now.The presentiment that America was unreal had been bothering him since he'd arrived. He'd seen it plenty on television but he had had no real proof that it existed. It could have been a cinematic fiction, a cartographic conceit, a giant trornpe-l'oeil.

But sitting on his hotel bed, watching the freeway, Chuckie began to believe that America was a concrete verity. Ignore him as it might, a part of him was there. Somewhere in the blank abundance of America, his child grew. Chuckie had contributed. Son of the son of the son of planters, Chuckie Lurgan had planted something on his own behalf.

He knew that she had gone to LA but he didn't care. For a while, he had been jealous of the young professor. It had been their only argument. Max had lamented the male obsession with the past, her past. Men always wanted to know everything, she said: size, weight, textures, time and place. Some of them had gone so far back into the past that they met palaeontologists. They had discovered the fossils of old love.

But Chuckie was jealous no longer. Chuckie didn't care about the young professor now. The child made it all right in some complete way he barely understood. He had always found expectant fathers risible. But now that it had happened to him, Chuckie knew that everything had changed.

He knew that he would see her the next day. He felt sure that he would make it fine now The child made it easy. Whether she came back to Belfast or he stayed in America, they would not separate.

Chuckie watched the Interstate until the day grew dark.

Their cries rang out.

`Open your legs and see if we know ya.'

`Get your chubbies out, darlin'.' '

'I'd fuck ye any day o' the week.'

, Yo, yo, yo'

Young Billy, unable to contribute a fresh piece of dialogue, simply howled like a hound.The girl walked past, trim, tidy, her jaw set firm, her eyes scanning the other side of the street. Ronnie Clay shouted some more suggestions to her mute welldressed back. `Ah, c'mon, sweetheart, ya know ya want to.'

There was a brief pause after the woman had passed out of my experience there always was a pause just then.

Ronnie shrugged his shoulders. `Nice tits but she wasn't up to much.'

I watched fat, bald, ugly Ronnie bend to grasp the handles of his wheelbarrow. Perhaps uncomely Clay just never looked in the mirror. That still did not put him in a position from which he could confidently notice a dearth of pulchritude in others.

We had been doing this for the last three hours. We were dumping the debris of a cleared-out ground-floor kitchen into some skips by the side of the hotel. Every time a woman passed by, she received the tribute of a hundred such taunts. Only Rajinder and I declined the opportunity. This was scrupulous sexual politics, Belfast-style.

I suppose I could have tried to stop them, to dilute their expressions of admiration. It would have been pointless. I'd spent large parts of my life around men like that. They didn't listen to polite objections.

Anyway, Ronnie was running the show and he would have been impossible to stop. He was like a new man. He buzzed and fizzed with surplus energy. Even I had to concede that it was fairly impressive for a man in his fifties. He worked at double pace and barked at these unfortunate women with something like real hunger. During the lunch break, someone had asked him what he was on and Ronnie had explained to us all.

He had been suffering from chronic insomnia for some years. He attributed it to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the creeping suspicion that his country would soon be in the hands of the filthy Roman Catholic Church. Never having had a day's illness in his always claimed by fascists, for some had visited his doctor with some reluctance. The doctor had refused to prescribe sleeping pills. He had told Ronnie that there was a new Californian technique, which sounded absurd but worked like a charm. He advised Ronnie to think nice, soothing thoughts in bed to calm him and lull him into sleep. Nothing about sex or work or money. Pleasant green-trees kind of stuff.

Ronnie took the doctor at his word and tried the technique. For weeks it had not worked. No sylvan musings seemed to help Ronnie sleep. Then he decided to personalize the process.

Ronnie began to lie in bed and day-dream idle dreams of pest control, of genocide. He dreamt of ways of ridding the planet of all its dark-skinned humans. He dreamt of starting an underground militia to kill didn't want to know what had happened to all the Catholics. Receiving massive financial aid from South Africa and the southern US states, Ronnie and a group of like-minded colleagues and neo-Nazis armed themselves. Thousands of twenty-man cells walked into black towns and villages with their guns (AK-47s, Uzis, Brownings, mortars and flame-throwers) blazing.

Always having been intrigued by sickle-cell anaemia, he dreamt of inventing a bacterium that wiped out black people. He dreamt of inventing a special global neutron bomb that killed only non-whites. He imagined some controversy about the danger to those whites with deep suntans but Ronnie didn't care. The seeking of a suntan was, for Ronnie, sufficient colour treachery to merit death. He dreamt of becoming an international arms dealer, who sold defective weapons to black nations which fatally exploded when used. He bred a hybrid dog, a vicious superdog, which ate only black people. He dreamt pain-filled dreams of black quietus. He dreamt of telling Teacher on them.

Every night since then, he had fallen perfectly asleep, so relaxed, so happy.

That's what I liked about Ronnie Clay. Absolutely nothing.

We worked on for another few minutes until one of the boys spotted a woman approaching our spot. I paused. There was something in her gait I recognized. I couldn't put my finger on it but I felt a sudden foreboding.

Ronnie and Billy started their business:

`C'mon, big girl.'

'Show us your hairy pie.'

`Do ya wanna climb my pole?'

"Mon over here and I'll put some colour in your cheeks.'

Rajinder looked at me and rolled his eyes. I smiled back. I had finally recognized her and I confidently awaited events.

As the woman passed my workmates, her chin was set grimly. They did not abate their compliments and Ronnie grew enormously excited. The tide of his obscenity did not ebb.'Ach, cone on, honey. Just a quick blowjob. I'm dying for ye. C'mon over here and empty my bollocks for me.'

The woman stopped abruptly and looked Ronnie full in the face. Some of the others cheered. They waited for her feeble objection.They became quiet as she walked up to Ronnie.This had never happened before. One or two briefly thought that Ronnie was going to receive some of the sexual services he had requested.

It was not to be. The woman simply grabbed Ronnie's testicles and started to squeeze. Ronnie crumpled, his knees bent but he did not fall. The woman squeezed harder. Ronnie's face went white. The woman looked in my direction.

`Hello, Aoirghe,' I said.

`Friends of yours, Jackson?' she asked, giving Ronnie another tweak.

I looked around my dumb, terrified workmates. `Not exactly,' I replied.

Some moments passed. I bit my lips. Ronnie had stopped breathing.