Dead I Well May Be (36 page)

I opened the screen door again and went around the side of the house until I was in the backyard. More garbage, tires, a cement mixer. I tried the back door. It, too, was locked, but there was a top window open in the kitchen. I peered through and checked inside. All seemed to be ok. I put my hand through the top window, flipped the handle on the big side window, and pulled it open all the way. The kitchen door was closed, but under it you could see the flickering light coming from the TV in the front room. I climbed through the window and onto the sink. I was about to go into the living room when I heard Bob get up. I pulled out the Colt and waited there, but he was only swishing the curtains over, and I heard him sit down again. I chambered a round, opened the kitchen door, and went straight into the adjoining living room. The light was on and I adjusted for a moment. Bob’s back was to me, and the local news was on the telly.

Bob, I said.

He dropped his beer can and started to get up.

Hands on your head, Bob, it’s fucking Banquo, I said.

He puts his hands up, but I think the reference probably eluded him.

Holy fuck, Bob said, and when he turned round to face me, he was white with terror. His hands fell into a pleading gesture.

Hands on your head, Bob, or I’ll shoot you.

He put his hands back up, and I motioned for him to sit down in the chair. I turned it around so that he was completely facing me. I sat in a wicker chair opposite. He was smiling weakly at me. Even for Bob, it was stomach-churning.

Christ, Michael, am I glad to see you. Sunshine finally got you boys out, he said he would. But why the gun? Jesus, you don’t think I stooled you boys or anything? Ask Darkey. Jesus. Mike. I mean, come on. You know me.

He’d confirmed everything I suspected in one big slabber. The stupid fuck. I nodded.

Listen, Bob, it’s important that I know when Sunshine told you about the plan, I asked him quietly, calmly.

What plan?

Bob, just tell me, was it organized a long time, like weeks in advance or was it something that took place in that last couple of days?

No, man, you’ve got it all wrong. I didn’t fuck you guys over. It was a straightforward deal. It just went wrong. You know that. Just fucked up, Bob said, dripping with sweat.

Bob, listen to me. I know nearly everything. Look, have yourself a beer and throw me one. No, roll me one, I said, and we both laughed a little.

Bob picked up a beer and rolled it over, opening a fresh one for himself. I opened mine with my left hand, the right pointing the barrel of the .45 at Bob’s chest. The can was Budweiser, but it was so cold you couldn’t taste it, so it was ok. Bob was more relaxed now and leaned back in the chair.

Bob was just over six foot and about two hundred and fifty pounds. I’ve seen heavier men carry it better and I felt bad for him, for a moment.

Ok, Bob, now listen to me. Please don’t waste my time denying the fact that Sunshine had you set us up. It’s only going to irritate me, and it’s a really foolish move to irritate a man who’s pointing a .45 at you. Don’t you think?

Yes.

Ok, now all I have is a few questions. When did Sunshine tell you about Mexico?

Uhhh, uhh.

Come on, Bob. I’ll fucking shoot you right now.

Ok, I was against it. Totally against it. I said so. It was that week, I was as surprised as you guys. I didn’t know about it. It may have been in the pipe for longer, but it was sprung on me that week.

I nodded. It was that week. So maybe Bridget’s trip to me had been the final straw, or the missing piece of evidence. I wondered why Darkey hadn’t just had me shot and dumped me. It puzzled me and I thought for a moment. It was unnecessarily torturing Bob, but the big guy could handle it. The only thing I could come up with was that Darkey did it for the sake of Bridget’s feelings. I mean, she’s smart. She doesn’t look it, but she is. If I just disappeared she’d twig, she’d know he’d murdered me, and Darkey was probably right to think that that might sully the romantic atmosphere. Whereas all of us, all of us, remember, disappear in bloody Mexico, rot there, it seems like an accident. Bridget thinks, Well, gee, Darkey wouldn’t sacrifice his whole fucking crew just to kill Michael. No. He wouldn’t do that. That’s fucking insanity.

I smiled. Aye, sadly, that was it. Sunshine’s plan, no doubt. The whole crew would disappear, and she’d be distraught over me. But she’d forget me in time, and maybe she’d just have enough of a wee suspicion of ill will to be more careful with Darkey’s affections in the future. Yeah, that was it. I saw it all. The whole thing.

It had been a cascade of events. A horrible escalating fucking disaster. Andy gets the crap beaten out of him, possibly by Shovel. Scotchy thinks it is Shovel, so we get rounded up and I do a Belfast six-pack on him. I’m so shook up, I tell Bridget I need to see her the next day. She comes down and doesn’t check her fucking arse. Boris Karloff is on her tail. The evidence gets passed on, it’s all confirmed, it’s all fucking true, and Sunshine starts organizing things. In the meantime, unfortunately for Sunshine’s filthy conscience, I save his bacon at Dermot’s, but that doesn’t change Darkey’s mind. He’s cold like that. You make your bed, you lie in it.

The sequence was perfect. The events projected and fixed in reels, and I had no choice about the next act.

How much did you give the Mexicans? What did it cost to get rid of us?

Michael, listen, you’ve got it all wrong, I—

How much, Bob? I insisted.

He wiped his brow, looked at me.

There was a hundred thousand dollars. I was to take twenty—he began, but he couldn’t finish.

Christ, I was worth that much? I ought to be flattered.

Bob’s room was bright. He had ferns. I liked ferns. They followed the Fibonacci series, they were orderly. I got up and grabbed the cushion from underneath the wicker seat. I rolled the cushion as tight as I could with one hand. Bob was leaning forward in his seat, a curious but not frightened expression on his face, as if he was watching me attempt origami or something. Things are going a wee toty bit better now, he was probably thinking.

What did Sunshine say had happened to us? I asked him.

He took a sip of his beer.

He didn’t say anything, he said to forget about youse, Bob said.

Jesus, weren’t you curious? I mean, for fucksake, Bob.

Look, man, you don’t ask too many questions, you don’t want to know, you know?

I know, I said.

I pushed the cushion against the muzzle of the .45. Bob looked even more confused.

Hey, Michael, you’re not doing wha—

I shot him in the chest, and then I got up and moved close and shot him in the head. The first shot had killed him, but it was an old lesson. The noise had been awful, even with the cushion, but probably outside in the street they’d assume it was a car backfiring or a firecracker. Did they celebrate the Fifth of November in this country? Guy Fawkes Night. I wasn’t sure.

I went outside, bold as brass, and walked casually back to the Cadillac. The street was deserted, and as far as I could tell, there was no one staring at me from behind net curtains.

Heading out of town, I noticed that the fuel gauge was on empty, so I had to stop for petrol. I pulled in and got five bucks’ worth and headed in the direction of the highway.

On the way home I got lost on three separate occasions trying to get back into Manhattan, but finally sometime after four, I made it to the
building on 181st. I drove the car ten blocks north and dumped it where I knew someone would take it. I walked to where I could get a clear shot at the water and threw the .45 into the Hudson. I’d ask Ramón to get me a new piece tomorrow.

T

I have now killed a man. Killed him as well as can be killed. I look at the swell and the water and try to see if something is pricked. I contain my feelings and dissolve from the world and think. Am I aware of what I did, how does this affect me? I think, cool my brain. Repose. No, on due reflection, it affects me not a whit. I believe not in hell or afterlives. I cannot see how lower forms, bacteria, insects, can be excluded—were we not as they once, long ago? How did we evolve a heaven? No, there is no eternal retribution and I will not haunt myself.

But can I leave? Can I mitch myself away? Yeah. I could. The Hudson is the escape route. I’ll go down to the marina at Riverside and steal a boat and head it north. North up into those ice kingdoms. I’m not sure how far I can go. I know there’s a canal at Albany, going west. I’ll just keep going up until I hit the Saint Lawrence and then I’ll make my break for the ocean. Winter, maybe where the Vikings wintered, and then by dead reckoning and short hops, Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Hebrides, and then on to Rathlin and down the Antrim coast to Belfast Lough. I’ll have the Northern Lights and the Pole Star and the sinking moon and I’ll make good time on the Gulf Stream. It’ll be old and familiar as I cruise up the gray waters of the lough. The great Stalinist power station at Kilroot, the harbor at Bangor, the castle
at Carrickfergus. Belfast, brown and flat under the brooding hills. Harland and Wolff, whose cranes will welcome me. The Lagan, the Farset, the Blackwater.
Agua negra
. No.

I turn from the river and walk back to the apartment on 181st. I nod to the super and go up the five flights. The lift works here, but I need the walk. I go to the big living room and sit.

And stare. Still the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge. Dust on the window ledge and on the hardwood floor. Pigeons and assorted flocks following the garbage barge.

The windows are up, and everything is in silence.

I sit there cross-legged on the futon. My mind is emptied of thoughts, and I breathe and exist. Time flows on and around me, pouring people over the bridge into stores and offices. They come over in the early morning and the lights are on in their cars and they leave in the evening and the lights are on again. Time flows, and I sit and breathe and exist without it for an age.

I remember a conversation I had with Scotchy long ago about the ethics of murder. Scotchy was a guy who talked big, and he claimed to have killed a man in South Armagh. The way he bragged about it to Andy and Fergal, I began after a time to believe that he’d really done it. It was a shoot-out, he claimed with shiftiness, but I knew it was something else. Cold-blooded: a capture or an assassination. He’d been part of a cell, maybe not the shooter, but part of it. That night after we left Dermot’s, neither of us felt troubled, it was them or us, that was not a problem. That wasn’t where the difficulty came from.

Scotchy was not a great reflectivist, but at night when he’d had a few sometimes in the Four P., he set himself to thinking. His argument at the time was existentialist. In the absence of a Supreme Being to set a moral tone and without a future world of punishments, it was up to the individual to seek out his own moral code. Such was his position, though not, it must be stressed, in those precise sentences.

But Scotchy, I said, if you think that the moral center comes only from you, surely that means that other people will be means to your moral ends and not ends in themselves, which is dangerous. This I said, but again not in those words.

Scotchy was ready for me. Ok then, fuckwit, what’s the fucking
alternative? he asked, and I thought about it, and I didn’t have one. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Neither of us had successful relationships with organized religion. We were both troubled. It had become a disturbing conversation, so Scotchy, as he was wont to do, changed the subject to girls and chocolate, much to the relief of both of us.

I sat there and I thought about him and I felt nothing for Bob. Scotchy had me and Fergal swear, and there on the razor wire outside the prison again he had extracted a promise from me. Not in words. He didn’t need words. He had made me promise and that bond trumped all other moral sentiments. It wasn’t that ethics weren’t worthy of thought, but the argument was loaded from the beginning. Bob was dead, and there was one down and two to go and woe to those who would get in the way of sanctioned vengeance.

I stayed in the apartment the next day and ordered up fried eggs over plantains, rice and beans from the Caridad on 180th. It was foggy and dense and rain came and changed the landscape to a better one, erasing the gray Hudson and New Jersey and all but the closest towers of the suspension bridge. With the fog and the ghost bridge, you could be anywhere: Washington Heights bleeding in grays and blues into the moss of deserted places. Lamps from caravans bobbing down the river’s edge, the swaying faces of herds of buffalo, recognizable only from their bells, a fort on the far shore, invisible, and down along the ghats pilgrims coming to pay homage to a disappeared sun and bathe themselves and purge their being of present sin. Sadhus washing and children up to their waist and swimming and throwing water and pieces of the moon. And farther down, sandalwood fires casting up smoke and the science of incarnation, the crackling gold of daisies as the funeral pyres and their inky skeletons cloud the sky still more. The burning ghats of the Hudson giving off an aura of incense and tobacco.

On the third day, Cuba came to see me. He came in the morning with coffee and Dominican cakes. He’d also brought real food with him in a pot covered with tinfoil. It was a hot stew his aunt had made up with sausage and ground beef, potatoes, carrots, onion, chilies, and peppers. We heated up the stew and ate it with tortillas. We drank the coffee and ate the cakes.

I asked him how he was, and he said that he was just fine if somewhat disillusioned still by the life of a lower-echelon drug gangbanger. Things were dull and too exciting at the same time. The Dominicans were crazy, and he said again prophetically that for all his smarts Ramón’s time on this earth was limited to months or years but not decades, and he feared that he would be brought down with him.