Dead I Well May Be Read online

  There she is. Tell me, Michael, tell me isn’t she amazing. Jesus, look at her, Michael, come on, look.

  I took a look and I thought he was pulling my leg, but he was serious. Aside from the fact that she was a working girl and coked out of her mind, she was four inches taller than him and with the heels it was nearly a foot. She was dancing at a side booth, not even the main show, and added to that she was skin and bones, she hadn’t eaten or seen sunlight in a good few moons, and the hair was a wig. Fergal is six foot two, so there was at least a possibility that the girl was in fact an emaciated, coked-out bloke.

  I see what you’re saying, Fergal. She might be the one for you, right enough. Fair skin, red hair—man, you’re made, and you a big-time player and all.

  You really think so? Really, Mike? Mike, I’m dead serious. I just looked at her and I had this feeling come over me. No, not what you think. It’s like this feeling of love or something, you know. Love at first sight. I mean, you can’t help it. It just happens. Jesus, out of the blue. You could be riding the bus and see somebody and they’d be gone forever. Could be anybody….

  During this neat dissection of love, which wasn’t exactly Ovid, I was scanning the ill-lit club for a sign of the others. I didn’t see any of them and assumed that they’d either left us or retired to a private room somewhere. Either way, it was a sly move to leave me with love-drunk Fergal, and I thought I was supposed to be the man of the hour.

  Bastards.

  What?

  Not you, Fergal. I was wondering where the others were.

  I don’t know, Mike. Have you been listening to what I’ve been saying?

  Of course, Fergal, your words are pearls.

  Well, look, what do you think I should do? I have this warm feeling in my stomach.

  I have that too, Darkey’s so-called single malt, I think—

  Michael, for fucksake, be serious. What do you think I should do? I mean, she’s a dancer, maybe even a—he lowered his voice—hoor or something. Jesus, that would be bad. And anyway, I mean, do you think it would be right if I went over, and if I did go over, what would I say?

  I beckoned him close.

  Listen, Fergal, she seems like a perfectly charming girl. She might, for all you know, be a divinity student who dances to pay off her school fees. You simply go over to her and say politely: Madam, I wonder if it might be possible to see you sometime when you finish working in this establishment, not for any untoward purpose but rather merely to have a coffee or something similar, a meeting of minds, ideas and cultures, that would, I believe, be mutually rewarding.

  You think that would work?

  Undoubtedly, Fergal, my son of the sod, with your native wit and good looks she will be bowled over.

  Fergal finished his Dutch and did go over. I slapped him on the back and watched him begin his little speech. He didn’t get terribly far into it before she said something to him. He immediately clammed up and came back broken and reasonably distraught. You wouldn’t have thought he was the same boy shooting people earlier.

  She says they can’t go out with customers. It’s a rule.

  I took Fergal by the scruff of the neck and pulled him over beside me.

  Fergal, do you love this woman? Do you want her? Do you?

  He nodded.

  Then tell her that you are a Celt of noble race and you care nothing for rules, that if she will be yours, you will remove her from this place and give her a pad of her own and pay her divinity school fees and library fines and you will work tooth and nail twenty hours a day if necessary to keep her in the lap of luxury, anything to see her happy. Now, go. Say as I have told you and do not come back until victory lights your drunken Paddy cheeks.

  I shoved him and he went over, and I closed my eyes again and leaned back in the chair. Sleep came like a welcome assassin and kept me away from all the crap for a while.

  I was back in the gorse and heather for a brief but delightful moment. Slemish at my left and it was all fields and white flowers, bog grass and the loughs over the water to the low hills on Galloway. All of the highlands before me, blue and mysterious, and it must have been dawn or dusk or some other part of the Golden Hour because I could see lighthouses and counted six of them before being summoned back to the more prosaic world.

  The next time it was Scotchy who woke me, kicking the chair leg from under me and laughing as I sprawled onto the dubiously stained floor. Darkey, Big Bob, and Marley were all laughing too, everyone in fact except Sunshine, who nearly always contained his emotions splendidly.

  Ahh, you idle wee fucker, missed out, so you did, lap dances for all of us, Scotchy was saying.

  Aye, there was this Thai girl, gorgeous she was, and I says, Where are you from? and she says, I’m Thai, and I says, I’ll tie you with this, love, Big Bob declared. I could see that he was attempting to be funny, but not feeling particularly generous at this moment, I said that I doubted that she would find anything but fat in the ample area of Bob’s lap.

  Bob was too drunk to get it, but he knew it was an insult and called me a wetback bastard.

  I was about to get into a long thing about his ancestry, but Scotchy shook his head at me.

  Where’s Fergal? Sunshine asked.

  And true enough, Fergal had vanished.

  He went off with some ginger tart, I said.

  For a quickie or the night? Darkey asked.

  I think the night, I said.

  Well, in that case, we’ve lost a man, because we, my friend, are moving on to pastures new, Darkey said and helped pull me up off the floor.

  You should have seen your face, Scotchy said as we walked back out to the car.

  Aye, you’re lucky you can still see yours, Scotchy, I said.

  Is that supposed to be a threat? Scotchy mocked.

  It is a threat, I said, getting angry now.

  Aye, you talk the talk, big man, but I don’t see you doing anything about it, Scotchy said with a toty wee bit more than his usual sneer.

  I stopped. I measured the distance from his head. I clenched my right fist and socked him one in the face. It was a good one too, an uppercut catching him square on the nose and staggering him back into a streetlight.

  You wee fuck, Scotchy spat and came at me like a box of wild cats, clawing, biting, and spitting so furiously that I had to drop-kick him and even then when both of us were on the ground he was on me, pulling out my hair in big chunks and sinking his skanky teeth into my hand.

  You vile bastard, I screamed and attempted to nut him in the face but before further damage could be done we were separated by the others. Both of us were bleeding and I was furious.

  Darkey was yelling at the pair of us, but I couldn’t hear him and even when my ears stopped ringing I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Sunshine was holding out my hand and Darkey was holding out Scotchy’s and I could see that we were supposed to shake. I shook my head and backed away.

  That wee shite can keep his handshake, Sunshine. He’s a no-good wee turd, from a skitter family full of them, and he’s the fucking runt, I said.

  I heard that, Bruce, you bastard, Scotchy yelled at me.

  Aye, there’s more where that came from, I shouted.

  Aye, well bring it on, cuntface, Scotchy screamed, almost hoarse now.

  That’s enough, the pair of you, Darkey said.

  Darkey was holding back Scotchy, Big Bob was holding me. All this, somewhere near to Madison Square Garden, though not on a game night, so not too many prying eyes or peelers.

  Sunshine grabbed me by the shoulders.

  Listen, Michael, you will shake Scotchy’s hand. You’ll be sorry about all this tomorrow and you’ll call me up and apologize and say that you couldn’t believe that anyone could have acted in such an infantile manner and if anyone could take a joke it was you. Everyone knew it.

  Not touching him, I muttered, pride rather than the booze backing me up.

  Sunshine, though, knew he had to end it right here if he wasn’t to s
tart losing face. He smiled and spoke calmly, but loud enough for all to hear.

  If I have to put a gun to your head, Michael, you will shake his hand, Sunshine said.

  I looked at him. Sunshine, five foot eight, skinny, that insane comb-over hairdo and mustache, almost no eyebrows. Really, he looked a bit like an egghead from a 1950s science-fiction movie. You could very easily see him explaining to Steve McQueen that the Blob was coming. The thought of this made me lighten up. I grinned at him.

  Is that an order? I asked.

  He nodded and his eyes tightened in what for him wasn’t a cold expression but rather one of empathy.

  I relaxed. Sunshine had given me a way out. It was usual for him. You could trust him. Sunshine looked out for us, and lived not in the moment but in the tomorrow and in the next week too. I went over to Scotchy and stuck out my hand. To my surprise, Scotchy pulled me in and hugged me.

  You really are a fucking cunt, he whispered in my ear, his voice cracking with emotion. I thought he was going to cry actually, so I grinned at him and pushed him off.

  Jesus, now he wants to fuck me, I said to the audience and Scotchy took a swipe at and managed to connect with the top of my head. But we were old pals now and inseparable until two bottles of Dewar’s later Scotchy collapsed in the outside bog of the Mat Bar, an old speakeasy in the West Village that still had sawdust on the floor and pictures of famous prewar writers and several bar dogs to slurp your beer.

  Leaving Scotchy off was now a priority, so we had to make a long detour up to the Bronx, and as we were going past 123rd I mentioned that it was getting late and might I also be excused, but Darkey was having none of it.

  We stopped outside Scotchy’s place and Bob and myself lugged the wee shite up the stairs. We threw him on his bed, and while Bob helped himself to stuff from the fridge, I adjusted Scotchy into the recovery position so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit. We left him and drove back to the Village, this time the East Village, where Darkey knew a good place for a stout. The bar, unfortunately, was closed, as it was late, and so we made do with somewhere close in Alphabet City, a trendy place that was loud and full of pretty girls going to NYU.

  On my shout, I met at the bar an amazingly cute Israeli girl, with the cropped black hair, beautiful dark eyes, and large gravity-defying breasts wonderfully typical of the type. I’m not a bad-looking chap myself and I figured the gloominess of the surroundings would no doubt conceal the sleep rings around my eyes and any residual trace of the earlier murderous violence in my countenance.

  I told her she looked Irish and asked if there was any Irish in her and when she said no, I said, all ironic and postmodern, Well would you like some? What worked for Bono worked for me, and she said, The chutzpah of you, and I said, Bless you. I spun her some yarn about being an exchange student from Queen’s University, Belfast, up at Columbia for a year. I was studying tensile loss in large mechanical apparatae (which I guessed was the plural of apparatus). It turned out to be an unfortunate choice of major because she, apparently, was a sapper in the Israeli Defense Forces and knew quite a bit about such things. She said she was a lieutenant, and I was disinclined to believe her and told her so, but she convinced me by her officerlike offer to get me a drink. I sent back my round to the lads via the barkeep and retired to a shady corner with Lieutenant Rachel Narkiss. I was not keen to mention my own undistinguished army career, which had lasted less than a year and ended up ignominiously in the brig on Saint Helena.

  Lieutenant Narkiss had grown up on a kibbutz near the Lebanon and had had a wry old time of it up there dodging Katyushas and running through the mountains of northern Galilee. She was studying history at NYU and aside from Hebrew, she spoke English, Arabic, Yiddish, and French and a smattering of other tongues. She was clever and she was funny and for some reason my drunken Paddy chatter wasn’t wearing thin.

  We talked about the pictures and travel and she pretended to be absurdly fascinated by a holiday I’d taken in Spain once. A riot had started between British and German football hooligans on the Canary Island of Tenerife. I’d been kept out of it by older friends, but in this new version of the story I got swept up in the trouble, and it ended with me saving the life of a lost shepherd boy and getting a minor bravery award from the Spanish government. She bought not a word of it, but she was curious about the landscape (being a photography buff), wondering if it was at all similar to the Negev. I said I’d no idea, although I did mention that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was filmed around there, so all she had to do was to rent the flick.

  So you see, the bank at El Paso wasn’t really at El Paso, I added helpfully. She said that the bank at El Paso was in a different film completely. For a Few Dollars More, she thought.

  That killed that subject, but there were many more and we talked about Belfast and Jerusalem and the kibbutz, where she had worked in the machine shop. Of course, we also drew parallels between the situation in Israel and Northern Ireland, and by dint of common sense and hasty maps drawn on the back of a drip mat, we solved both problems to the satisfaction of all parties. She wasn’t a name-dropper, but she did let slip that her brother worked for Rabin. I wasn’t a name-dropper either, and most of the names I could drop, although famous in Ireland, were a little less savory: Johnny “Mad Dog” McDuff, “Chopper” Clonfert, “Bloody Boy” Halrahan. I sensibly chose to leave them undropped and instead waxed eloquent on the delights of university life. She asked me about the Columbia Core Curriculum, and I had no idea what it was but said that I wondered about its relevance in these changing times, which seemed to work well.

  We chatted for a long time and finally she asked if I’d like to come back to her room at NYU. It wasn’t a dorm, and so we wouldn’t have to sneak in, but apart from that, it would still be quite fun. She had just bought a brand-new device for making tea. It was a little wire-mesh ball into which the tea leaves were put, mesh small enough to keep the leaves in but big enough to allow water to pass through, hence allowing for improved infusion. … I’d stopped listening to the tea explanation and was lost completely in her eyes, which, as I’ve previously said, were dark and bewitching.

  Do you have a picture of yourself in your army fatigues? I thought, but realized, to my horror, had also said.

  She said that she did not. Oh, wait. She had a small one on her ID. She laughed and brought it out and this clinched the whole deal. I would go back to her place and experience with her the miracle of the tea-infusion ball. It was then that I did something extremely stupid. Something so stupid that it would ultimately lead to the death of our poor driver David Marley with a screwdriver in the throat on that snowy Westchester Christmas Eve. It would also unfortunately mean the end of everyone else sitting at Marley’s table. What I did was this: I said to her, I just better go tell Sunshine that I’m away.

  If I hadn’t done that, things sure would have turned out differently. I would have spent the night with her. What happened the next morning wouldn’t have happened. There would have been no Mexico, there would have been no death. There would have been just me and this beautiful girl and a different narrative, a better one.

  Ok, she said, not knowing that she’d sealed my fate.

  I went over to Sunshine.

  Listen, mate. Met this girl, have to go, if you know what I mean.

  You can’t, Sunshine said. Darkey wants to take you to this restaurant in Brooklyn, treat you, a big meal. We’re going when he gets back from the bathroom. You know, because we’re impressed with ya. Vendetta. You did well, teaching Shovel a lesson. It’s easy doing your enemies. But it’s hard doing your friends. You showed real moral courage.

  Listen, Sunshine, if it’s all the same to you, I’ve met this girl and Jesus, she is absolutely the cat’s pajamas, I kid you not, my old china, she is the business and—

  End of conversation, Michael. We’re going to Brooklyn, Darkey’s wish. Wants to treat you and he will, Sunshine said firmly.

  Christ, it must be near four in the morning. Wi
ll it even be open at—

  Michael, come on, I won’t tell you again. Get the girl’s number and call her tomorrow.

  I could see that there was to be no discussion, so, shamefaced, I went back to her.

  Listen, what’s your first name again? It is burned in my heart but temporarily my memory is failing to reach my pulmonary system.

  Rachel.

  Listen, Rachel, my boss, uh, my supervisor, university supervisor, is over there and he’s taken it into his head to take us out to dinner and I have to go. But please, please, give me your number and I’ll call you tomorrow. Ok?

  She looked disappointed, but she gave me the number. She bit her lip. It was too much. I leaned over and kissed her. She kissed me back, wet and delicious, for a half a minute.

  You really can’t come tonight? she asked.

  It’s agonizing, but I really can’t.

  Well, I’m going to Miami for ten days the day after tomorrow, so you will have to call soon, she said.

  Are you kidding me? I’ll definitely call.

  No, really.

  I will. Listen, I’m really awfully sorry about the tea. I will call. I promise.

  I kissed her on the cheek and put the number in my jacket pocket.

  Are you ok for getting home? I asked.

  Yes. It’s just across the street.

  She went off, leaving me tealess and heartbroken. Needless to say, I didn’t call the next day. The next day a different girl came back into my life. And the next day Rachel was gone (though I did phone up to check just in case) and when she came back I wasn’t in the country anymore, and then when I came back, finally, I didn’t want her to see what had become of me.

  The restaurant in Brooklyn turned out to be some awful Italian shithole with a night view over stinking mudflats and an abandoned container dock. I don’t know Brooklyn well, but it was in the neighborhood of Williamsburg and the L train. The food was bad, but at least I didn’t get the fate of Big Bob, who ordered lobster in some kind of white sauce and for his many sins was puking most of the next day. But that was in the rosy future, for now he was sitting next to me bullshitting his way through a biography that even Scotchy wouldn’t have had the cheek to make up. I was in a foul temper, mainly over the girl, but I suppose also a combination of factors. It hadn’t been the most successful of days for my self-image as a lovable Artful Dodger type. First, I had to shoot poor old Shovel; then they woke me up after no sleep and dragged me downtown; then Scotchy and I went at it hell’s bells; and then they deprived me of Lieutenant Narkiss—a woman deadly out of, and I’m sure in, the sack.