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Kate could have told him that for free. The girl she knew was not the type they were looking for at all. According to
False Apparitions
, the Virgin was a lady in long white robes who never showed her feet and was indescribably beautiful, her conversation all beatitudes. But this girl wore sneakers or stack-heeled boots, you had to assume that she had feet underneath, and she spoke a bare minimum, seemed happier to listen. Hard to know what she was really thinking, but reverence
and fuss made her tense, that was obvious, while stories helped her relax. “Call me Mary,” she said, and seemed happiest when Kate spoke of Elvis.

Sometimes she showed herself to the trippers as they hung over the garden fence, snapping instant photos. It didn’t seem to bother her, she’d only shrug and smile; and the light from her eyes then was blinding. Kate would put up a hand to shield her own sight from its dazzle, and all the trippers would start to scream,
Look at the sun! Oh my God, look at the sun!

Later on, they’d claim to have seen the Amarillo Virgin for themselves, a footless lady in white robes, beautiful beyond words. If Kate could have seen with their eyes, Monsignor Beebe might have left her in peace. But she couldn’t, and she could hardly lie. “The Virgin has no feet, has no feet, has no feet,” the Monsignor kept insisting. “Mary does,” she kept replying. And so she was cast into darkness.

When the Amarillo Report was released, a writer called Steinwood from the
Washington Post
followed close behind, a man who put Kate in mind of a centaur and wanted to know where the money had went. Every dollar that Karl Rhute charged was meant to go towards building a shrine in Buddy Holly Park. Instead of which he now drove a pink Cadillac and owned a poolhall outside Odessa, a cathouse in San Angelo. So Steinwood wrote his story, and the IRS came calling. Katerina was excommunicated, Mary took a vacation, Pompey went to the pound. And Karl Rhute changed names again.

That should have been the end; it wasn’t. For two more years, Charley Root traipsed her round the south-west, working her in shorter and shorter seasons, ten days in Tatum, a weekend in Flagstaff, a matinee in Almagordo, till the string was played out.

The girl didn’t seem to blame her even then; leastways, she never said so. She just visited more rarely, and for shorter
spans. Even when she was present she seemed distracted. Perhaps she was missing Pompey.

Kate was turned fifteen, everything had changed. Trawling Louisiana that fall, they stopped in St. Martinville. There was a child’s swing in the motel yard, strung between two locust trees. She rode it at dusk, and the girl came to her one last time, talked with her a space, then she faded in air, she was gone.

Nothing left of Mary now but cheap souvenirs and trash. Three files filled with junk on a New York roof. A front page from the
Clarion
headlined AMARILLO VIRGIN EXPOSED kept trying to cling to Kate’s dressing gown, only she wouldn’t let it, she hurtled it down into the brazier with all the rest, and set it blazing. Poured out the miniatures of rum that she had found in the Zoo overnight, strange fruit that ficus trees bore in the summer season, and she tossed a half-smoked Camel.

The sudden whoosh of flame, a dragon’s breath, made her stumble backwards, turn her head. The morning’s heat was up now, the city sweltering again. Up and down the block, and all over the neighbourhood, fires were burning on roofs just like hers. It made Kate feel she belonged, that she was a part of the community, and she raised her eyes to the sun, it hung in yellow haze like one more fire. Like a circus hoop for terriers to jump through. Or the cricket ball she’d seen that time with Fred Root in the field behind the brewery.
Bellamy’s Beer, Good For What Ales You
. Sitting in the long grass that smelled of barley wine, drinking sweet milky tea, when the ball rose high, turned into a red-winged bird.

When that ball had swooped again to split her nose like a ripe plum, she hadn’t felt a thing.
Now then
, Fred Root had said, bribing her not to cry with a Space Blaster. It was her favourite candy, a long tube of caramel shaped like a rocket with lemon powder inside, coated with a thin shell of chocolate, and when you bit through that shell, a rush of fizzy
lemon flew out, Fred Root called it sherbert, but it felt more like battery acid. So tart it made her eyes water, and the water mingled with the blood from her burst nose, she was a mess.
Now then, now then
, the old man kept saying helplessly, and she wanted to comfort him.
It was the light
, she said.

It always is
, Fred Root replied.

O
f course there was no shadow of doubt in his mind where his duty lay. Juice Shovlin was his friend, and more than friend, his sponsor. If not for the warmth of his invitation that lunchtime at Tigh Neachtain’s, John Joe might never have travelled to America in his own lifetime. He could easily have rotted his days to death in Scath, and not once strutted the wider stage.

That was the great truth to bear in mind. There were a power of forces in this city to lead any man astray, all classes of seductions, but he had an obligation. After all, it was Juice who’d made him what he was.

When first he was brought to Scath Uncle Frank didn’t care for him to be seen alive, so he was not sent to school. Then the social worker rode her bike into the yard, and the next week he was togged out in blazer and knee-socks, packed off down the road to that grey stone building with the high windows where it was so cold that he couldn’t grip his pen, the purple ink spilled and blotted his tablets, and the teacher called him Gunga Din.

In that season, he was seen fit for monkey nuts only. Stout Mackeson used to bellow like a gorilla when he passed, make his mouth go all bulging like the chimps in the ads for PG Tips and dangle his arms so the knuckles brushed the ground and circle John Joe with his eyes crossed. It was a trial.

And Juice Shovlin had rescued him. He was in the year above, already a star. Not a scholar born, but a great athlete in his own right. Handball, football, hurling, he was a master of all Gaelic games, destined to play for Donegal if injury didn’t ruin him. A laughing loud boy, cock of the walk he was always, and so full of sap you could fill a bucket with his drippings like they did with the rubber trees in tropic lands, he would have made a fresh set of tyres for every bike and tractor in Kilmullen. A terrible temper on him when he was crossed, nobody could deny it. Cuchulain likewise had been no stranger to rage.

For a term he never gave John Joe a look, then on the last day at lunchbreak he walked up without a blink, laughing and sporting with his gang, Peter Tookey, Jocko Conlon, Bar McBride and all, and clapped him on his shoulder, man to man. “What’s it like to be a nigger? Is it dark in there?” he asked.

“At night just,” said John Joe.

“Good man yourself,” said Juice with another clap on the shoulder, and a laugh that would topple a barn, and John Joe was under his protection ever since.

Night and day was the change. Instead of an outcast, he was included in every game and outing.
The Great Maguire
, Juice Shovlin named him, for what cause he couldn’t tell, and at each word John Joe spoke, there was a fresh round of laughs.

He was a mascot then. Another style of monkey on a stick, and this brought its hardships also. When his eye was burned, there was a time that he thought he’d do better alone. But where was the force in holding a grudge?
No use crying over spilt milk
. Juice Shovlin said so himself.

And what were the alternatives besides? Blood pudding for breakfast, his mother’s romances after tea. These years she’d moved on to Maeve Binchy and
Light a Penny Candle, “Johnny was annoyed that he hadn’t been invited to the wedding, but
Elizabeth was cool and firm. It was tempting, very tempting to take him with her. The handsome Johnny Stone would steal the show, he would be proof that little shy Elizabeth White had done well in the world. He would be so charming too
,” John Joe read, while Bernadette worked through another box of Black Magic. “Hector Wall,” she said, popping an orange creme. “The only man I ever loved.”

“What about Da?”

“Hector could be so charming, he drove a Humber Supreme, I danced with him at the Kilburn Palais. The paso doble and the tango, and the Viennese waltz on the night I wore my organdy gown, alice-blue, with a white silk orchid for my corsage. We fit like gloves, little shy Bernadette Maguire and handsome Hector Wall, I thought we’d be partners for ever. Only Hector had a weakness, it broke my heart.”

“What class of weakness?”

“The love that dare not speak its name in public toilets, and the day it all came out in court, your father in his taxi was the darkie who drove me home.”

A few of those orange cremes went a long way on a full stomach, especially after onions. With Juice Shovlin as his mentor, at least he was entitled to have his skull crushed like an eggshell on a football field or later stand loafing against a wall in the Hollywood Ballroom on Saturday nights, watching Ann-Marie Tully’s crackers when she twirled jiving and her skirts flew up. Or Eithne Ward’s were almost as shapely. Though they only giggled when he asked them to dance, it took Juice to persuade them, and even then they’d run away screaming when the All-Stars struck up a smoocher, they wouldn’t slow-dance for the world, not even on a dare. So that afterwards John Joe would need to peddle his Rudge up and over the gap in all weathers to Gilooley’s knocking shop in Killybegs. Else he might have committed a violence.

It was Juice Shovlin’s word as well that brought him his job at Muldoon’s. “Money for old rope,” Juice said, and it was the truth. All he had to do was stand around inside a big metal drum with slick walls like the Wheel of Death at Bundoran, dressed in rubber from head to foot, coveralls and thighboots, long gloves past his elbows, and a shower cap, watching a load of dead fish get translated into fertilizer.

He stood on a platform over the drum’s belly, feeding fish guts and fish bodies into a great rotating screw that pulped them all to paste. After a few weeks he felt so at home he didn’t notice the fish even, just the spiralling screw, expanding and contracting. “The insatiable maw,” Juice called it in his office upstairs with the brass nameplate on his desk and the leatherette swivel chair. “The cunt of creation.”

But it wasn’t cunt that John Joe saw, it was the other, and filthy at that. The stench of fish would never wash off him. Soaping and scouring only muffled the stink, overlaid it with a film of saccharin that quickly faded, leaving him three parts catfood, only one part man.

He thought that Ann-Marie Tully and Eithne Ward would never stop gagging. Then Briege came along, and she savoured him like stout.

She was a research assistant up from Trinity, Dublin, on a grant. Collecting folk myths or some such for
Roinn na neacba neamhbeo agus nithe nach bbfuil ann
, the Department of Unalive Beings and Things Without Existence, and strutting her stuff half-naked at 2001 Odyssey in Ballybofey, she hadn’t as much on her back as would stuff a crutch.

Come the morning after the night before, she had informed Juice Shovlin that she was in the market for local colour. So when John Joe came off his shift, there she was waiting in the road outside Muldoon’s. “
Buachaill buí
. Yellow boy,” she said.

It was his first kiss in daylight. To be fair, it was his first kiss for free at all. In her Civic driving to her room, she put her fat pink tongue in his mouth outside Davenish Memorial Marble. “
An de bheoibh nó de mhairbh thú?
” she asked. “Are you of the living or the dead?”

“I’d say living.”

“So kiss me deadly,” said Briege.

Plump as an otter she was, and slippery too, sliding through his fingers wherever he touched. On his back he learned that she was not a researcher really, she was really a journalist, her first love was TV, what she really wanted to do was make documentaries and go to the States, she really felt she belonged there, it was her spiritual home, and she really loved Marvin Gaye, didn’t he? Well, he would of course. Gulping in great lungfuls of him like a fish-glue elixir at each thrust down, rolling her eyes at each slow drag back. “And James Brown, too,” she said, subsiding on his chest. As she stilled, the gulps shrank to sips. “And Jimi Hendrix, of course,” she said, and slept.

In the night, though, she woke up writhing. “I’m too high-strung. If I don’t do my Yoga I flip,” she said. John Joe brushed away her tears that felt and smelled like cod-liver oil. “Too sensitive,” she said, and jumping still naked from her bed, she did a Starburst on the rug.

Her legs flew up over her shoulders and twined behind her neck, her puppy-fat chin rested on her crotch. Then the whole force of her body was gathered into her anus. Tiny currents began to spread outwards through her buttocks, through her belly and trunk, spreading faster and wider, more intense at each spasm, till it seemed she must fly apart. But she didn’t. At the moment of dissolution the spasms softened, the circles began to close again. Until no other muscle, no nerve of her moved, just that one bud pulsing. “You should try it yourself,”
she said. “Put hair on your chest.” Then she was back to Dublin, safe home.

All of this John Joe took in his stride, he’d read the like in dirty books. Only one question nagged and dismayed him: why would he love Marvin Gaye?

When he asked Juice Shovlin, and Juice explained, he was banjaxed. All his life he had been called nigger, darkie, coon, but he’d never thought that made him black. Not properly. Blacks were people you saw on the TV news rioting in South Africa or starving some other place, or else in shoot-em-ups at the Eureka,
Shaft
and
Superfly
and
Uptown Saturday Night
, living the life of Larry up in Harlem, fancy cars and big hats and girls in tight red dresses, all classes of artillery. In the films they seemed to have great gas altogether, but those men couldn’t be him, he was not of their race whatever.

Or was he? Maybe he had missed the point.
Black
. Maybe there was something here had escaped him.
To be black
. What was the meaning of this?