The Visitors (11 page)

The
STOP
was fully erased. Outside my window were two rows of trailers. The ground around them was bare. Two skinny dogs slept in a wire cage very close to the road. Flies circled their heads. Cars and pickups were parked haphazardly. Most of the trailers had antennas that looked like trash can lids turned upside down. I hung the left.

—Left two miles up. Second turn, he said.

—No trouble, I said.

This road was narrow and potholed. Walls of corn growing on both sides.

—Got one kid, he said.

—You do, how sweet, Zoë said.

—Up in Boston? I said.

—Never once been up that way, he said.

—Not even once, I said.

—Not once, man, he said.

—But surely once, man, I said.

—Never, man, he said.

—Never took the bus up there, man, I said. —Drove a semi. Rode up there on a fucking horse, man.

—Like I said, man, never, he said.

—Stop it, James! You’re acting crazy and rude!

She pinched my arm.

—Bad manners, sorry, man, I said.

—You should apologize, Zoë said.

She sighed and stared out her window.

—You’re kind, he said.

Zoë turned to him.

—Thank you, Walter, she said.

I turned the music up a little. The walls of corn sailed past.

—Here, I said ten minutes later.

—Grateful. House on the right, third one down, he said.

I took the left onto a graveled road.

—You’re sure you’ll remember all of this, my dear? I asked.

—I won’t forget any of it, my dear.

Dust swirled at the windshield. It stuck to my lips and eyes. We rolled our windows up. We passed two small houses before we topped a small hill. Cornfields lined the horizon. The road vanished into them. At the bottom of the hill, on the right, was a white Cape house, with vinyl siding and a dark brown roof. It was about thirty feet back from the roadside.

—That one, he said.

—None of it was that hard, I said.

—A pleasure, Zoë said.

I stopped before the house. There were three windows. A narrow stained-glass door between two wide windows and a smaller one. The curtains were drawn. Three wooden steps led up to a small covered porch. Hosta in pots on each step. The grass was cut. The unpaved driveway was empty. Cornfields bordered the yard.

—Sorry for being an arsehole back there, I said.

I didn’t look in the mirror or turn. I rolled my window down. Zoë rolled hers.

—All right, man, he said.

Zoë got out. She lifted the seat. He got out. Zoë sat back in. She shut the door.

—What a cute little house your aunt lives in, Zoë said.

—Grateful, Zoë, he said.

—When should we come back and pick you up, man? I said.

—Hour and a half. Two. Grateful, he said.

He had carefully laid the flowers and the backpack on the yard.

—We’ll just drive around and chat. That’s what we’ll do, I said.

He backed a few steps into the yard, looked right, and pointed at a line of trees that grew out of the cornfields.

—River where the trees are. Nice river. Right side of the road, he said.

—I have sandwiches and water, my dear, Zoë looked at me and said.

—I never thought of that, my dear.

—I guessed you wouldn’t, my dear.

Zoë took the sunglasses off and dragged her fingers through her hair. Her fringe fell over her face. She dug into the tote bag and pulled out the corner of a sweater and wiped the dust from her sunglasses. I turned from them and stared into the still corn and wiped the dust from my eyes and lips with the back of my hand then turned back to him slapping the cap twice against his thigh. He stuck it back on, fixed the peak, picked up the flowers and the backpack, and headed across the yard. I drove away slowly. The shirt crammed Zoë’s mirror for a second. I asked her for water. She passed the bottle. I took a long swig.

—You okay, my dear?

—I’m fine, my dear.

—You’re not, my dear. You looked baffled and you acted very strange back there—

—Rows and rows of corn, heat and dust, the homeless, sorry again for being rude—

—So what exactly is the deal with this Walter character, James—

—You have a lovely way with the homeless, my dear, who would have thought it—

—A skill one learns growing up in Connecticut, my dear, but what’s going on—

—He knows this place so well, Zoë. The signs, the river, and I understood that he has never been out this way before. I guessed he was a downright liar, and I’m fully convinced the old lady on the street is a lie—

—You should be more cautious about inviting strangers into your apartment—

—I was a little stoned. They say it makes us kinder, my dear.

—But he does not really seem like a bad guy, my dear—

—I agree, my dear—

—Now tell me what’s going on. And then we find this river. I brought a blanket.

—But what if I don’t want to tell you, my dear?

—You said before we left you would, my dear.

—I said might, my dear.

—Might. Whatever. Just tell me, James.

I stopped the car, pulled up the handbrake, and looked at Zoë.

—Walter knows someone I once knew, or sort-of knew. Walter works for this someone—

—What exactly does he do for him, my dear—

—I didn’t really ask. All I know is he has to deal with a troublesome bird—

—I’m confused, my dear—

—A whippoorwill, Zoë, but this someone wants me to visit him. I don’t even know what part of the country he lives in, but he sent Walter with the message. Someone would think he was being funny. A hilarious caper. But I told Walter I was not going. Someone is the last person in the world I want to see.

—You’re kidding me, James, right, Zoë said.

—I’m not kidding, my dear—

—And this someone is?

Zoë took off her sunglasses. I fingered a cigarette from my shirt pocket. She pressed in the cigarette lighter. She held it up to the tip of my cigarette. I took a drag.

—I grew up very close to this someone. He is the oldest son of my father’s best friend, but his father is even more dust than mine is. He arrived in Boston a while before I did, and I’m not sure where to start—

—Just tell me three things about this someone, my dear—

—I smell a nice river, my dear.

—Only three, James.

—If I tell you, my dear, can we please stop talking about him—

—Yes, I promise I’ll stop.

I turned from her and stared into the cornfield.

—When he was a teenager, he pushed my older sister into a river. He was the first person to show me a condom. I didn’t know what it was, because they were banned. He was a complete prick to me in high school. And the second time I saw him in Boston years back he was with a woman who was not the one he married a few weeks later.

I turned back to Zoë.

—I’ve told you more than three things, my dear.

—And I get why you might not be excited to see him, my dear, but let’s find this nice river.

The first time I saw Kevin Lyons in Boston was at the benefit for Eamon, which was held on a Sunday afternoon in the bar on Central Square. This was the second or third week of September. Eamon was in a Dublin hospital. Shortly after the accident, a medical team flew in from Dublin and took him home. Money was raised there and here. The couple who owned the house in Concord gave money. I forget how much, but no one complained. Eamon was illegal. So was his friend. In Boston most of the Irish and those I met from other countries were.

Nights after his fall, I’d wake up sweating like a pig and I’d fling the sleeping bag aside, stumble into the toilet, piss for a long time, wipe my face and neck with a damp cloth, then head out to the deck and sit in the armchair that Brendan and I had picked up from the street. Four or five Salvadoran men of different ages lived on the second floor of the house next door. The parties on that deck started after two in the morning, which was when those men clocked out of restaurant kitchens. In a glow of flashing lighters they’d shout and wave.

—Venido, amigo! Venido, Diego!

I went over every time. Big, boxy American cars pulled up onto the footpath. Ecstatic voices and quick footsteps rising on the narrow stairs. The deck rocked, like we were on a boat at sea. Candles shivered along the rails. And the loud music, the sweet weed, the laughter when empty bottles crashed onto the pavement below, and then candles quenched, music switched off, and back down those stairs, whose steps were crammed with soggy boots and soiled clothes that reeked of
dirty dishwater and rotting food in Harvard Square alleyway trash cans.

But on nights when the deck next door was dark and silent, I’d sit in the armchair and see my father lagging along the blue corridor, his walking stick tapping the walls like the keys of a typewriter, and I’d see Hannah leaning over the sink, my mother’s worn tea towel draped over her right shoulder, and I’d see Una the way she was in that doorway on Drumcondra Road, and I’d fall into the strangest sleep, where the traffic on Highland, my small flat on Botanic Avenue, with the records playing, the rank smell from the Royal Canal when I walked its south bank to Binns Bridge after dark, the dammed Children of Lir glimpsed from the top deck of a 16 bus, Tess’s voice on the answering machine, saying if she wasn’t so afraid to get on a plane she’d be over to see me, and my mother’s neglected flower garden all became tangled up, and I’d jolt awake to glaring sunlight, flies buzzing around my ears, honking traffic, and unfamiliar voices rising from the street. I would have to be at Porter Square in less than an hour. The other painter and I had jobs to finish.

The bar was packed for Eamon’s benefit. When I opened the door, someone was reading out a phone message from Eamon’s mother and father:
Thank you all very much for your generosity toward our son. He misses you very much. On a day like today Eamon would want you all to enjoy yourselves.

We bowed our heads and were quiet while an American priest said a short prayer.

Someone gave me his seat at the bar. I waved to Brendan and the Corkman at the other end. They were chatting with two women I often saw in there. Beautiful American women who thought Irishmen were cute. People kept coming over to say how sorry they were that I had to witness that. I said I wished there was something I could have done, but it happened in a flash. They all said the same thing—nothing to be done, that was life.

The other painter was sitting at a table behind me. He wore a gray suit. His eyes were red. His friends sat around him, rows of pints lined up on the table and the ashtrays brimming. His girlfriend sat next to him. She wore a short denim jacket with wide lapels. She minded the two children of a wealthy couple and did their housework. She drank and smoked too much. But that’s what most of us did.

The other painter and Eamon grew up on the same street in Malahide. They went to the same schools. It was Eamon’s idea to come to Boston and start a painting company. They had saved money at home. Their families helped. But the other painter said he and his girlfriend were going back. Never should have left Malahide in the first place. Should have stuck it out. Waited till the day when things improved. That afternoon, I told him he should stay. But he said it wouldn’t be the same. Eamon got the jobs. He could talk to Americans.

On my way to the toilet I ran into Allison. She was a Catholic from Derry, and was studying American literature at University College Dublin. She wore t-shirts with images of Lou Reed, Dylan, Sinéad O’Connor, Che Guevara—people like that. We used to talk about books, the Troubles, apartheid, and The Smiths. I often slept on the single mattress on the floor of her tiny apartment at the top of a tall house on Inman Square, where I pressed the tiny dark freckles that dotted her belly and thighs. Pressed each one like a doorbell. She was in the States for the summer only, and she’d just come back from Texas, where she’d gone to rodeos and met real cowboys. She was telling me about the cowboys when she grabbed my hand and led me into the women’s toilet. In a stall we kissed and did something else. Then she fingered a joint from her jeans pocket. Thirty or forty minutes later we were back in the bar. She waved at someone. We kissed and agreed to meet up later. I watched until her black hair disappeared in the crowd. Musicians were tuning up in the corner: an acoustic guitar player with a hungry beard, a beautiful-looking American woman with a fiddle, and a heavyset gray-haired American woman with a mandolin, whose
t-shirt said Ronald Reagan was a war criminal and an asshole. The Corkman stood next to them. He was ready to sing. People egged him on. His voice was lovely and lonesome.

Our story’s so old, again has been told

On the past let’s close the door

When the song ended I got the urge to escape, and so I nudged my way through the crowd. Laughing people swayed into me and asked where the fuck did I think I was off to. I laughed and swayed and said I was heading outside for a breath of fresh air. I’d be back in in a few minutes. No worries.

The bar door shut behind me. Sounds faded like when you sink underwater. I raised my face and squinted in the hot bright sunlight. Loud laughter exploded from inside an Indian restaurant a few doors down. People and lovers went by. Shorts and t-shirts and sandals and backpacks and Red Sox caps and sunglasses went by. Cameras dangling from necks. People holding the hands of their tanned children.

Behind me the bar door opened. Laughter, smoke, and music leaked out.

Of all the stars that ever shone

Not one does twinkle like your pale blue eyes

I turned to find Tina. She looked younger out of that postal uniform. The tight knots in her hair made me see the thorns on the barbed wire behind the house I grew up in. Tina smiled when she said it was getting to be too much for her in there. I said I knew what she meant, and I bent and kissed her damp forehead and thanked her for coming. She reached her arms around my neck and kissed my sunburned cheek and said she needed to get on home. Kids needing dinner. Husband working the graveyard shift. I said Eamon used to look forward to seeing her walk up that driveway every morning.

—A neat guy. We gotta go on, she said.

—Nothing else to do, I said.

—You gonna be all right? she asked.

—Fine, Tina. Thanks, I said.

We were holding hands. She lowered her head and dropped my hand then turned and headed up toward Harvard Square. I knew I’d never again see Tina, and I watched until she vanished among all the other people. Next I was sitting on an empty bus stop seat a few doors up from the Indian restaurant. I was mesmerized by the ads and the huge smiling faces plastered on the sides of passing buses. I was beautifully stoned and the hot sun felt so comforting and I thought those faces were it. Students were sitting outside a café two doors up from the Indian restaurant. Newspapers, books, notebooks, cups, and sunglasses atop round iron tables. From the restaurant the consoling smell of cooking rice and Indian bread. I folded my arms, stretched my legs, and shut my eyes. Moments later I opened them because someone was sitting too close. I moved and looked in the other direction. The sky behind the vain and delicate downtown skyscrapers was a painful blue.

—Jimmy.

Someone touched my arm. I turned.

—Kevin, I said.

We shook hands.

—I’ve been in there a good while, he said. —I played hurling with Eamon in Dorchester a few times. I saw you in there earlier and wanted to say hello, but people were talking to you. Then I was asking around and someone said you’d gone outside—

—I don’t remember you ever playing hurling at home, I said.

—I stopped after the father passed. Eamon is a nice fella, he said.

—He is. He gave me a job, I said.

—People were very fond of him, Kevin said.

—They say he’ll spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair, I said.

—Never walk or talk again, Kevin said. —I heard you saw it. How are you?

—I’m okay, fine, and you?

—Fine, he said. —My mother ran into Hannah in Tipp town not so long ago. Hannah said they hadn’t heard from you in a while. She gave your phone number and your address to the mother, so I have them now.

—How are they? I asked.

—You know how they are, he said.

—You’re out here a while now, I said.

—Nearly two years, he said.

—You’re liking it, I said.

—I’m a new man. It’s like everything that happened before this never happened. You know what I mean, Jimmy? he said.

—I think I do, I said.

There was that glint in the eyes, the same as in Una’s—their father’s eyes.

He wore a blue button-down shirt, polished loafers, and a creased pair of khakis. The hair was thick like the father’s. If he kept his mouth shut you’d think Boston was always his home.

He said he had good news for me.

—Good news is good on a day like this, I said.

—I’m getting married, he said. —She’s a lawyer. Born and raised not far from here. Blonde. And not from a bottle. The green card. The works.

He laughed then slapped his right thigh.

—Good luck to you. Happy to hear it, I said.

We shook hands again.

•   •   •

I remembered him in the creamery yard. I was standing with my father and another farmer in the doorway of the store. The men were waiting to pick up bags of fertilizer and talking about how awful it was that those men in Mitchelstown were closing down the creamery but how could you stop men like that from doing whatever it was they took a whim to do.

Kevin whipped his shirt around his head and made loud yelps. The bike had been taken apart and rebuilt. It had no mudguards, no brakes, and the back wheel was smaller than the front. The frame was painted a bright red. It would have been the bike his mother once cycled. Tall, sturdy, the frame thick like a shovel handle. Bikes long ago abandoned to dairy houses. Covered in the dusty heavy topcoats that dead grandfathers once wore.

He cycled very fast, in perfect circles, each circle wider, each yelp louder, and the farmer said to my father that young Lyons had been caught robbing more than one shop in Tipperary town that past week, and but for the priest and Nora going in to beg the shop owners not to prosecute, the young fellow would have been in massive trouble.

—No one can control him. Come to no good, that lad will, the farmer said.

The farmer lit a cigarette then held the pack out to my father. He took one and said nothing. We kept staring. My father must have been thinking about his best friend, who was buried not so long ago.

•   •   •

—You have to come to the wedding, he said. —We’ll have it on the harbor. Great food, great band. Una and the husband, the mother, the twins will all be there. You’ll be there, you will.

—How could I miss it, I said.

—So no job for you now, he said.

—I’ll find something, I said.

—I heard in there Eamon’s friend is going back—

—After we finish the last of these jobs—

—I have work for you, he said. —I have a few properties. The fiancée invested in them. I fix them up into nice flats with a crew of lads, all from home, all illegal and mad for work. They’re great gas, and we could do with another painter—

—After these jobs are done I’m never again getting on a fucking ladder, I said.

—Work in the office then, he said. —You look like you might be good with figures.

—Never, I said. —But Brendan is heading to some town in Michigan. He got a printing job near Detroit. The money’s too good for him to turn down. He asked if I’d go with him. I’m thinking I might—

—Why the fuck travel out there? Stay here. I have a job for you.

—I want to see what it’s like. I want to visit Chicago. You get tired of this, I said.

—You don’t know a soul out there. You know me. I’ll pay you well—

—I have to think about it—

—What exactly is there to think about, young Jimmy—

—I need to go back in there, Kevin. There’s someone expecting me—

—Listen to me, Jimmy. I’ll look after you. Will you give me a ring this week—

He opened his wallet and handed me a card. I slipped it into my shirt pocket and said I would give him a ring. Then we stood.

—I’m only trying to help you out, young Jimmy, he said, and he smiled.

—I know you are, Kevin, I said.

He rubbed his hands along the seat of his pants then glanced at his glinting heavy watch.

—I have to go, young Jimmy. An early start. And a few phone calls to make this evening. I’ll be looking out for your ring. And I’ll put the wedding invitation in the post. You look after yourself, won’t you—

—I’ll do my best, I said.

He hurried along the sidewalk. That strut he’d learned in the vocational schoolyard. He looked back when he was opening the door of a new car. Then I was staring through the bar window. They were all singing, arms around each other, window vibrating. Some people moved. Allison stood with her back to the bar. Her right foot tapped the rail. She was touching the forehead of a tall man who was laughing
and fingering the hem of her Dylan t-shirt. I’d never laid eyes on the man before. But Allison and I owed each other nothing. Whatever it was we had was only there and then.