The Whore-Mother (10 page)

“I suppose not. God bless you, anyway. I know He'll forgive you.”

Mrs. Beddoes kissed him quickly. “God guide you better now than He did before,” she said heretically. “You dear poor boy.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

McManus closed the rear doors and walked across to the gate of the house behind the Parker's. He did not think again of the Salvation Army Major and his wife. He thought only that now he was alive and in two minutes he could be dead. Or crippled and dying. He was shivering now. He sweated, then he shivered. It would pass. They trained him for this, to hit and elude policemen and soldiers, and he was alive and not crippled. Now he would see. He was not confident. Neither was he terrified. All he felt was a sort of stony fatalism. It was a matter now of good luck or bad luck. The Americans would have said, “The breaks.”

He did not know that instead of driving on down the street the Major backed his van into Stranmillis and turned the corner into the Malone Road. McManus stepped onto the grass. There were people in the house; lights were blazing; there were three cars in the drive. Guests. Noise. He passed the house and hoisted himself onto the stone wall dividing this yard from the Parker's.

When he dropped to the grass on the other side of the wall, his nerves struck. The car was there, beside the house. The back door of the house opened. Maureen was there. Oh, no, God no. He didn't need any emotional strain. He walked to her and she took him in her arms.

“They're still there. Mr. Parker says he'll hide you, Johnny. Come into the house.”

He held her hard. “You'd have to drive out in that case,” he said, not wanting his mind on anything but what it was set to do. “You can't drive well enough. They'd riddle you before you were turned into the road. Go back into the house and don't watch.”

“Dad loaded the gun,” she said, knowing him. She had tried. “Will we hear from you?”

“After a while. Maybe a long while. Go on in now.”

“God curse Ireland,” she said. “Kiss me for Mummy and Dad.”

He kissed her and the door closed behind her. He walked to the car. It was now. He was no longer shivering. He was trembling. He stood, taming his nerves. He opened the door and got in. The floppy hat was on the seat. He put it on. The gun was in the pocket with the ammunition. He checked it, started the engine, and tried the gun in his hand, tried his hand on the wheel with the gun in it, adjusted it to make it more comfortable, took off the safety, and settled himself. The tank was full. The engine sounded as if it had been tuned. It was now. He slipped down the driveway almost to the open gates, very slowly. If some pedestrian or a passing car crossed in front of the drive in the next second or two, the deaths would not be political. He put down the front windows, sank low in the seat, and put his foot down. It was now.

He did not hear the bleating horn of Major Beddoes' van as the car leaped at the street and spun, skidding, into the road. The rear end spun left and, as his foot dug, spun right, swinging the car across the road and back. Then it shot forward.

He sank lower in the seat, peering through the wheel. He heard the sputtering shots and the roaring of engines and the screeching of tires as his back window and windshield shattered. Glass flew about him, fell in his lap, struck his back and head. A car swung out from the curb to block his road. He waited, whipped his car right, felt the sideswipe through his spine, rode up the sidewalk and, hauling desperately at the wheel, back into the road.

He was clear. His rear-view mirror was whole. The Salvation Army van was side-on across the street, a car backing away from it, with a bashed bonnet. Another car with its bonnet sprung open was backing off the sidewalk away from a lamp post. A man got out and rushed to struggle with the open bonnet. A police siren sounded; off to his left, he thought. A plump, uniformed man climbed out of the van and handed a woman graciously down. Major Beddoes and his wife had done what they could. It had been enough. He gave his mind to the street and the traffic. His hands were wet and slipping on the wheel, his face was pouring sweat, his neck was bleeding behind from a smarting cut. He swung on two wheels into Elmwood and down the Lisburn Road; left into Dublin Avenue. There was nobody close to him behind. They were probably running now from the police siren. He wove through the little, empty streets, heading for the Antrim Road, and unaware of any irony, turned down the lane past his father's house and the golf course and came out to the Shore Road.

He was clear, and cautious till he passed through Carrickfergus. Then he opened up. Lame. The empty Antrim Coast Road. Flat out. Free. Away.

The air off the sea poured through his shattered windshield as sweet as a fresh clutch at a not very old but a damaged and vulnerable life.

He sucked the air in like a man with a dry thirst and laughed; but from hysteria winding down much more than from mirth.

In Carnlough he stopped at a phone booth and called the Parkers'.

“Mr. Parker? I'm away, sir.”

“The shooting on the street, Johnny? They didn't touch you?”

“Just a bit of glass. Will you tell them I'm away, sir? And thank you.”

“Thank some fat wee Salvation Army man that completely buggered them up. We saw it.”

“I know.” He had said all there was to say.

“You're away now?”

“I'm away, sir.”

“Away on, boy—like the hammers of bloody hell.”

“I'm away now. You'll tell them?”

“I'll tell them. Away on.” The big moments are hard to talk about.

The moon was high and the sky clear when he turned up the narrow approach lane to Corrymeela. The camp sat on the top of the cliff, its whitewashed hutments like shining apparitions in the moon's light.

He parked the car at the rear of the main building, behind the kitchens. There were cars parked against the east wall, by the side entrance. Not one of those, he thought, and put his father's gun and shells in his pocket. Everything he had asked for was in the trunk, expertly packed in his rucksack with the pup tent tied on top. His sister had remembered even his walking stick. There were sandwiches and cheese in the side pockets of the sack. His walking boots were loose in the trunk with a pair of heavy walking socks stuffed inside them. He changed into his walking boots and tied his shoes to the pack.

It was half-past one. He felt marvelously safe in the northeastern night. What he must do now was reach the border, and reach it long before daylight. It was not possible on foot. A stolen car had its dangerous risks, but there was no way to avoid them. It was forbidden now to park cars in towns of any size and roadblocks on the outskirts sifted traffic through them. He didn't want to pass through towns, but that was where the cars were to be found. He walked to the road and down the hill towards Ballycastle. He would take the risks that had to be taken.

At the foot of the hill three roads joined. One turned right into Ballycastle, another hard left up over the hills. He was on the third. The roadblock was at the junction of the three.

He climbed the stile in the wall of the old churchyard where Sorley Boy Mac Donnell is buried and walked through it to the golf course. There was no point in getting himself caught trying to sneak into the town. Even if he managed it, he couldn't sneak out again with a car. It was wiser to cross the golf course, walk around the town, and steal what he saw outside some house or country shop on the road beyond.

But things were going well tonight. The clubhouse was not in total darkness. There were five cars in the car park. Drinking hours were long past, but there were many ways to sustain a serious pastime so long as they didn't involve drinking in the bar. The only question was how much farther into the night they would drink and talk.

He rejected the Mercedes. How could a young man cumbered with camping gear explain a Mercedes? The four-cylinder Vauxhall was more like the thing. He lifted the bonnet and started the engine. The night was quiet, only the sound of the sea came across the links. The car was well tuned and no louder than the sound of the sea. He drove it across the links, through a wall gate onto the high road, and let the little car out.

Main roads were no good to him. Secondary roads were not much better. Tertiary roads were often rough riding. But it wasn't his car. It was his life. He took the rough roads and went west with his foot down.

How long do drinking men drink at their golf clubs when they stay until the small hours for serious business? He was around and beyond Garvagh when the question began to worry him. There were hundreds of four-cylinder Vauxhalls on the road, but not at this time of night. By now—two hours on the third-class roads—the car had been reported missing. It hadn't passed through any roadblocks going in any direction. For that reason the army and the police would be keeping an eye open for it. Why would a car avoid roadblocks in the middle of the night? A stolen car? The army would be keeping more than one eye open.

He saw nothing to ease his anxiety on these roads until he reached Sixmilecross, where he exchanged the car for an Austin parked outside a crossroads shop and came at Clady through a complex of narrow lanes. In a field against the Border and close to a small farmhouse he left the Austin. It was snug behind a high hedge.

It was almost five. The sky was lightening and in an hour it would be broad daylight. He took off his suit, cleared the pockets, packed the clothes into a water ditch, and put on the old clothes from his sack. They were paint-stained and baggy—right for a man of the roads.

This was raiding country. The IRA sneaked over here to murder a Northern Senator and burn his house to the ground, and again to kill a policeman and leap back across the border into Donegal. They had helpers in the towns and farmhouses on the Ulster side.

McManus had once been moved to admiring excitement by the misty ease with which acts of violence were committed and men dissolved into the faithful and covering Catholic crowd. His first disenchantment came with his first sight of how this universal loyalty was achieved. He had seen pregnant Mrs. Nolan beaten on the belly, and her husband's shop wrecked, because he refused to pay the imposed weekly levy for Ireland One Nation. The whole street understood the word when it went out: Don't buy from Nolan. So Nolan went bankrupt, and because he was self-employed he couldn't draw the dole and had to go on relief. It was a lesson often repeated, and executed by little men who now ran a protection racket where formerly they had been despised petty thieves in the districts. The small-time criminals had become the enforcers of patriotic unity. Even here in the western Border backwoods, small Catholic farmers with cattle to be poisoned or children to be maimed, kept check on the movements of Protestant neighbors to be shot or burned out.

So McManus went cautiously through the copse against the Border at the end of the field, out of the North and into the Republic, into the safe haven and lair of his former friends and present enemies. He went haunted, by eyes he could not see and that might not be there, but Mrs. Beddoes and the nuns of Port Elizabeth were in his mind. In Ireland friends and enemies had a way of looking alike.

It was broad daylight when he took the road along the Finn to Stranorlar and Ballybofey. His boots were wet with the heavy dew, the smell of burning peat was rich on the hills, and the soft morning air had a sweet taste. He was well away.

He strode into Stranorlar at ten in the morning on the strength of two long lifts, swinging his stick in time with his striding confidence. What was he, after all? Anybody could see by his clothes. He was a man of the roads. They thought so at Kee's Hotel and with some reasonable reluctance gave him a room, to be paid in advance. He had been up all night, walked most of the morning, and he would sleep away what was left of the day and walk through the night. From then, it was the tent in the day, and sleep, and the road after dark, till he got where he was going.

I'm away, he thought as he waited for sleep in a good bed and wished he dared send a wire to his sister. But who would read it in the post office, here in Stranorlar or in Belfast? God, what a land of mistrust and skulking suspicion Ireland was. Who in Christ's name could you trust? Not the ones you could see—not the ones you couldn't see. For the first time in his life he thought he hated the place. The place? No, never that. But the people, some of the people? That was a damn sight easier.

They'd be watching his sister. A telegram boy at the house would tell them he was clear. What Mavis McGonigal got would be only the beginning of what his sister got, if they thought she knew where he was. They would think she knew where he was. They had to hunt him. They would hunt him with the terrible Irish appetite for revenge. He remembered reading about “Pa” Murray who died in 1968 and once was sent to New York to execute an informer who escaped there. New York Irish policemen found the man for him. Murray killed him, for an offense committed in 1922.

His last conscious thought before sleep was that they wouldn't find him. No wire, he decided, and the odd thought drifted into his peripheral consciousness that almost all Irishmen loved Ireland and despised the Irish.

Then merciful sleep took him over.

P
OWERS'
confidence declined and his rage mounted.

Was he goin to spend the rest of his fuckin life standin in front of some bloody kitchen table in the Falls listenin to that Holy Trinity of flappin bacon-mouths, Clune, McCann, and McCandless?

They were on about Mavis McGonigal again, about losin Kelly the useless wee bastard that never held a job in his life and never looked for one; and about the Chemicals and McManus. And Clune was sittin there with an eye patch over his left eye, tryin to look like that Jew-soldier from Israel! He tried to make a bomb last night, for Christ's sake, and it blew up on him and only made a wee poop that burned one of his eyes—singed his eyebrow, very likely, but he wants that patch for the telly—the wounded fuckin hero— “We wanted McManus found dead in there,” Clune was goin on “. . . middle-class Catholic joinin the Catholic workers in their fight for a free Ireland . . . all Catholics united in the Historic Struggle . . .
you
lost him. . . .”