Dead I Well May Be (29 page)

Our boy. Young, short, black jeans, black denim jacket, and a black Stetson. He yelled at us as if we didn’t see him and we went over, me
muttering that half the bloody state of California must have heard the eejit. A van idled nearby and everyone gave the driver money. I didn’t have any cash left now but they let me come along. They were good guys, and most of them were agricultural laborers who did this thing every year. Fruit-picking season was over, but in Las Vegas, building season was just beginning. We drove all night and into the next day and the final stop was an industrial complex just south of Las Vegas itself. Everyone was there to demolish and build hotels and with my experience I knew I could have been on to a good thing, and but for my leg I might have made a fortune. But as it was, no one was ever going to hire me, save to make the coffee, so I thanked the guys for the ride and started hitching again east.

I was on the road an hour and a half when a sheriff’s officer picked me up and told me that hitching here was against the law. I said I wasn’t aware of that and he recognized the accent and asked me what part of Ireland I was from. I said Belfast and Deputy Flinn said that his grandmother on his father’s side was from Belfast. I’m not the biggest fan of peelers or other agents of the law, but Flinn was a big, gingerbapped, pale-skinned, nice bloke who almost wept over my story, which was that I’d come to Vegas to work as a builder but a hoddropping accident had cost me my foot and since I was an illegal I couldn’t very well go to the authorities to get work comp. I was hitching my way back to New York, where I had an address of a distant relative in Brooklyn who might sport me the cash to carry me back broken and dispirited to the Old Country.

Well, Seamus, Flinn began (for I was called Seamus McBride in this little universe), that’s about the worst thing I ever heard, and I want to lend you some cash to get the Greyhound. No, don’t object. I know you guys are full of pride but I absolutely insist.

I did object and explained that I had got myself into this mess and would get myself out of it without having to rely on the well-meaning charity of strangers.

Flinn was not to be daunted and explained that this money was only to be a loan and I would pay him back. Surely it was foolishness not to accept a loan from a friend and wasn’t that what I was going to do in Brooklyn anyway? Since he put it that way, it was hard for me to refuse, so I took his name and address and I did pay the bugger back about a
month or so later, when, incredibly, I was on Ramón’s payroll, wearing a thousand-dollar suit and carrying a bloody Uzi.

He gave me two hundred-dollar bills and left me with handshakes at the bus station in Las Vegas. I bought a ticket to New York and stayed on all the way to Denver, where I had to get out and stretch and get my wits together after a very long and unpleasant over-air-conditioned journey through Utah and the Rockies.

I found a motel, got a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, stripped, and had a shower that lasted about an hour and a half. I watched TV like it was a new invention. A presidential campaign had been taking place all the time I’d been away and it was getting close to its climax. The governor of Arkansas was being tipped to edge out President Bush. It was boring, so instead I watched
Wheel of Fortune
and
Jeopardy
and flipped between endless daytime soaps.

I stayed in the motel for two nights. I spent all my money and cashed in my Greyhound ticket and ordered pizzas and drank beer. I rebandaged my foot and stood, agape, staring at my stump for a while, though fortunately I was pissed senseless at the time, otherwise I might have had a bit of a header. In any case, like I say, in two days I’d spent all my hard-earned cash. It was an idiotic and silly waste of resources, considering how Nyx’s weans had escaped me from the prison and the jungle and given me dough.

But that was it, of course. I wanted to get back, I wanted to see blood on walls and pooling under the bodies of gray men. I wanted to see widows’ tears. To hear screams and pleas for mercy. But I didn’t want to go back for precisely the same reasons.

I tried finding Hibernians organizations in Denver, but there was only one in the phone book. I called up and explained my case, but the guy practically laughed when I said I’d like to borrow some money. After that, I packed my shit and walked down Broadway and tried hitching at the on-ramp to the I-70. No one gave me a lift and coppers waved me off and had no time to listen to the adventures of Seamus McBride. I slept rough that night under a bridge near Cherry Creek. I drank the creek water and washed in it before I started hitching again. I went back up to the I-70 ramp and this time I again got lucky.

An hour later, a man in a camper van was pulling up to the on-ramp
and saw me and our eyes locked for a second and he jerked his thumb back for me to get in.

It was a huge white-and-yellow Winnebago of the very latest fashion. I climbed up. The man was in his fifties, white hair, the sunken gray face of an actuary or undertaker. He told me his name was Peter Jenning, though not like the anchor, he said, because of the
s
(but I had never heard of the anchor and immediately, from all this nautical terminology, assumed that he was ex-navy).

I spun him Seamus’s sad story and he swallowed it, and I asked him about life on the ocean wave.

Well, Seamus, I was never in the armed services. Ear problems. But my son was in the Gulf War, not in the actual fighting, but he was a radar operator behind the lines. Reservist, got his medal, and don’t think it wasn’t dangerous, because it was.

I believe it. They kept firing those things. Those missiles, I said.

Scuds, he said, seething with the memory of it.

Yeah, very risky. I was in the British Army myself then, actually, but I wasn’t sent to the Gulf. Pity, really, I told him. Not mentioning, as I’ve already said, that at that time I was finishing out a minor prison sentence on Saint Helena, and that in itself was a class-A double fuckup too, because after I got back, my regiment was merged with another regiment and a lot of the new recruits were offered semigenerous packages to get out of the army, though not, of course, the fucking dishonorable dischargees.

You seem upset about it, he said.

I nodded absently.

But, son, that war screwed up. Listen to me. The ground war. Gulf War was all based on the Battle of Cannae, you know, flanking maneuver. Cannae was a big victory and so was the ground war, but did Hannibal win the war? Did we beat Saddam? No, we did not. Let me tell you:
Vinse Hannibal, et non seppe
, um,
usar
uh,
poi. Ben la vittoriosa sua ventura
. Read that, memorized it.

I nodded sagely and said, Ah yes, good point, excellent point. He smiled at me, clearly well pleased with himself.

You must have learned Latin in school in Ireland, huh, Seamus? Jesuits, right, thumped it into you, he suggested in a leer that seemed to convey his distaste for popery but approval of the beating.

We did, but, you know, I was never very g—

Hannibal was victorious and knew not how to use victory given him. That’s what that means. See my point? Bush and Powell, none of them used the victory to boot Saddam out of the country. Hannibal didn’t march on Rome, see what I’m saying?

I had no idea what he was saying, actually, but there are certain very strict duties imposed on a hitchhiker and one of those is to agree with whatever the driver says. I agreed and he proceeded to break down other errors in the president’s strategy.

They’re going to have to go in again, you mark my words, son. You remember Cato?

Yeah, he was always attacking Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther mov—

Carthago delenda est
, that’s what Cato proclaimed, Cathage must be destroyed. You’ll see, we’ll go after Iraq again, Mr. Jenning said, and he outlined how we would win the war and further explained how every engagement in every war since 1860 could have been prosecuted more successfully. It didn’t come as much of a surprise when Mr. Jenning told me that he was a bit of a history buff. He had been in sales for forty years and that wasn’t a shock either, considering that he could talk the arse off an octopus. He had ended up, before retirement, as a regional marketing VP with the Kentucky Fried people. I had assumed that all the restaurants were franchises and wondered what they needed a regional marketing VP for, but Mr. Jenning had laughed at my naive appreciation of the ways of the world and further explained his role in the great corporate machine with endless and excruciating detail.

It was, however, my luck that Mr. Jenning was driving all the way to Vermont to see the fall colors, and he said he would swing by New York City and leave me off if I wanted. I did so want, and a few days listening to his yammering seemed a small price to pay. He explained Livy, Clausewitz, and Bismarck and, given encouragement, expanded further upon his theories of the universe. He was a widower but didn’t seem to miss his wife that much, and once in his sleep in the big bunk of the Winnebago he said, Serves you right, you old hag, which elicited a few theories of my own.

He asked a couple of times if I could pay for the gas but I emptied out my pockets and I suppose it convinced him. He didn’t let me do
any of the driving, but I entertained him with made-up stories of Ireland. He especially enjoyed salty tales that involved women of loose virtue, and I had a few of those that weren’t so far from the truth.

When we arrived at the George Washington Bridge, it was raining and cold and night. I thanked him much and he let me off and headed up the Palisades to cross the Hudson at some other point.

I walked over the GWB in the drizzly dark. There’s no toll for pedestrians, thank Christ, for I had only a dollar and fifty-seven cents that I had husbanded carefully, and with that I took the A train to 125th Street. I came out in familiar old Harlem again. It was two
A.M
. and sleeting and such people as there were around gave me the cold shoulder. I walked with my crutch along 125th and turned up the hill on Amsterdam.

I found our building. The front door had been conveniently jemmied again. I walked down into the basement and rang Ratko’s bell. I rang for a long time and eventually there was much swearing in Serbo-Croat and he opened the door holding a lead pipe.

I need a place for a couple of days, I said. Ratko looked at me in astonishment for a second and then helped me through the door.

The basement stair was steep.

Each step down was agonizing but I enjoyed the pain. I had made it, I had fucking made it, and every torture now I engraved in memory, another torment notarized and ultimately to be paid for soon in the currency of fear.

9: THE CORNER OF MALCOLM X AND MARTIN LUTHER KING

T

hose first few days back, it was as if I were an astronaut exploring a city on the planet Mars. The people were not human. They were alien creatures sniffing the cold air and muttering and, in sinister fashion, disappearing down into the earth beneath me to catch clattering, spark-spewing electric cars. Shopping, talking, hauling little versions of themselves to school. I watched from shadows, hoping they wouldn’t see that I was a stranger, a being from another world. And I was afraid at any moment that one of them would cry out the usual words: Uitlander, Teague, Jude, Leper. Or no, it would be something that they would understand and I would not, for now even their language puzzled me. Their manner, not hostility exactly, but indifference. The people moving with their long arms and their straight backs, and fast, since for them the outside was merely a place between work and home. These weren’t all the populace, of course. There were others who lived there in the parks and streets; you could see them all the way from Mount Morris to Morningside and Riverside, shuffling, aware of me, hiding too, rag people. We would pass and exchange signs in secret; they could see that I also was adrift, apart. We conspired in silence and walked between greens and churches from 125th Street all the way up to the Cathedral of Saint John. Most of the time, I kept it together and I walked, came back to Ratko’s, ate and slept.

But some days it was all too much and I expected horrors. I heard weird noises and lights and the trees would be alive; or I’d catch a panorama of wounded birds and jungle animals, or I’d see monsters in
parade coming in from Queens and with them giants and the undead and marching bands, elephants, painted floats, and children dressed as rats and crocodiles. Me alone cognizant. Only I could bear witness. Only I was attuned. The other citizens of Harlem were blissfully ignorant of all this noisy caravan coming over the Triborough Bridge. They couldn’t see it, but then they couldn’t see anything. They were blind, perpetually blind, dazed, like survivors of a great ship intercepted unexpectedly by the shore.

One morning when the sun was out, I took the Queens-bound A train to look at the Atlantic Ocean. Rockaway was cold and the journey by crutch from the subway stop to the beach took me forever. The water was gray and incredible, tangled, bristling. Whitecaps and a howling wind. The sand freezing on my arse. There were half a dozen surfers making attempts on the slow breakers. I watched them for an hour, watched them wait in their black suits for the perfect wave and take it, cutting and gliding and falling in. Maybe I could have done that once, but not now. Fury. I walked farther up the shore where the sea was empty. I sat there and looked and begged the Atlantic to uncover itself. I waited for revelation, for meaning. But the ocean doesn’t give you anything, it doesn’t contribute, it’s a repository, a mirror of yourself, and when I looked I had no reflection at all. I decided to take the train back to Harlem, having learned nothing.

The A train is the airport train and at JFK dozens of people got on, bringing color and difference to the subway car. For them it was the end of a journey; they were tired and relieved. Their talk was excited and loud. It marked them out. And as they got more animated I got less so and dissolved into the plastic of my seat. They were too much, these Homo sapiens, these people. So close, how can they stand to be so bloody close?