Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (25 page)

The vulnerability, the fragility, the tongue, the wit, the mind, the body, the face, all seemingly of a piece to make a man, even a strong one, entirely lose his senses. And he
was
lost. He was aware, as an intelligent man will be, of his weaknesses as well as his strengths and knew just what he was able to withstand.

He took her hand, uncertain of whether she would withdraw. He compared it against his own dark, rough ones and marveled at the differences between them, even in small ways. Her skin, in the dying crimson of the sun, was luminous, washed through with shade upon shade of red.

“I apologize if I seemed angry before,” he said.

“It was stupid of us,” she replied, “though it was only out of concern. You frightened Pat. You set him a certain example but expect him to live by different rules than you do. It doesn’t seem entirely fair.”

“There’s not so much that has been fair about my brother’s life,” Casey said, laying her hand gently on the tiled roof. “I need to keep him safe, I promised my Da’ a long time ago that I would an’ I’ll not fail him a second time, especially not because Pat takes a notion that I need rescuin’. It’s fortunate for the both of ye that ye went to Jamie, though for what reason I can’t quite fathom. Still, my brother knows better than to go tell a stranger our business. In the world we live in, such things can get ye killed.”

“Your Daddy left you an awfully big burden,” she said sidestepping the issue of Jamie.

“Pat’s my family, all that’s left, I don’t consider his well-bein’ a burden.”

“Still, you were terribly young.”

Casey leaned back on his elbows, eyes closed, the soft, silted evening breeze ruffling his hair.

“Aye, I was young an’ stupid. Daddy was about two weeks dead when I broke the promise I made him an’ was carted off to prison and left my brother alone. Da’ was always careful of Pat, said he was made of poetry an’ that sort of material didn’t wear well in the world. Pat didn’t talk much as a child, Daddy had him looked at by specialists here an’ in Dublin, ‘cause we weren’t even certain he could talk. But then when he did he could tell stories that’d take ye to another time an’ place. I think sometimes that’s where he belonged, to a gentler time an’ place. I wonder if we don’t have guardian angels an’ they’re not so much more competent that human bein’s an’ maybe times they set ye down when they’re not supposed to.”

“He’s stronger than you give him credit for,” she said fingers brushing the side of his cheek, releasing an errant curl that the wind had tangled in his lashes.

“Aye, I suppose he is,” he smiled, his one dimple slicing and curving like an ivory new moon in the dark of his whiskers. The smile disappeared as quickly as it had come, clapped out like a candle flame.

“Pat says yer off to Scotland for the summer.”

“I am.”

“Ye can run if ye feel the necessity, but this thing between us—it won’t go away, it’ll follow ye there an’ it’ll be here when ye come back.”

He took her chin in gently firm fingers and turned her face toward his own. She could smell the smoke of cigarettes there like a blue-black mist, a more earthy undertone ribboning in and out underneath. It was the smell, the singular scent of it more than anything that made her cry. When, she wondered, had the mere smell of his fingers become so tangled up in all the things she couldn’t sort out enough to understand with any clarity.

“Runnin’ away with him won’t help either,” Casey said softly, “he won’t let ye love him, darlin’, but I think,” he paused, the pressure there in the fingers again, forcing her to meet his eyes, “I think yer beginnin’ to care enough for me to make the pain of that bearable.”

He kissed her, carefully at first, then with more demand. Last night’s kiss had been a promise that he would return safe, that he would keep things on an even keel. Tonight’s kiss asked that she make the same promise.

They watched the stars for a time, those bright enough to pierce the city’s phosphorescent glow and when at last exhaustion and Pamela’s curfew bid them off the roof, she spoke the words she’d given him silently on the roof.

“I will come back.”

Having fasted five days and nights in order to draw closer to the presence of his Lord, Lucien Broughton was in body and soul as white and empty as the scourged innards of a wentletrap shell. He believed he had at last received an answer to the question he’d posed God some days earlier.

With an answer in hand, a man could proceed to action, clearly, brilliantly and expediently. Rising up off his knees and ignoring the blood that began to leak through the scabs, he surveyed himself in a full length mirror. He looked well for his deprivation, incandescent, as though he burned from inside with a pure, scorching light, which indeed he did.

Naked, he took stock. Skin without flaw, a white so unearthly that at certain angles there seemed a silver tint to him. He despised messiness in other people, did not allow it in himself and could not understand why anyone else should. Not a ripple of muscle, a bump of bone, a wavelet of tendon displayed itself through the gilt covering of his skin. It was to his advantage this; it caused people to misread him, to underestimate his power.

This age he lived in was messy, violent and filled with contradiction, all of which displeased him. But things could be changed to suit, shifted to fit, broken in order to achieve alignment. It was only a matter of having a skilled hand upon the rudder and a firm mind behind it. Lucien knew he had these things in abundance. God had intended that it should be so, he had intended that his son, his pale and perfect son, be a man of destiny. God was the mind, Lucien the vessel.

Still naked, he walked to the window, surveying the city around him. Grander cities there were, larger cities, shinier cities even, but this one was his. Of a size and temperament to make the task of seizing hold the reins and guiding it to a better future, so much the easier.

He breathed deeply, taking in the air of evening, the colors as they lay lambent and molten, layer upon lacquered layer in bronze, gold, crimson and purple. July was only around the corner. In Ireland, summer was the season of rage and July its burning epicenter. The Marching Season was upon them in all its slashing orange, drumgutted glory. He himself was to lead a crowd of thousands, to finish on the lawns of Stormont with a ringing oratory no one would ever forget.

There had been rumors, suggested by the foolish, that perhaps it was time to stop the parades. That such aggressive and open hostility only stirred the sectarian pot, adding more poison to the bubbling, heaving, ready to boil over mess that was Northern Ireland. But it was a Protestant statelet with a Protestant government and no Unionist government in their right mind was going to cancel the event that was a two and a half century old reassurance of their superiority. It would be insanity and political suicide all in one move. In times of trouble, people needed reassurance, dressing in their father’s sash and beating the drum gave them this. And there really was no more effective method of polarization to separate the two communities that in other times and seasons had come dangerously close to melding.

Lucien eyed the sun as it sank well into its evening descent. Time to dress. To don the vestments of his calling. He’d a meeting with the B-Sots, as he called them, or ‘Benevolent Sisters of Temperance’ a name, which he thought, had a rather profane popish smack to it and then he was to offer prayer and verse at the Orange Lodge, Chapter 46 later in the evening.

Lucien smiled, a pleasant smile, which brought a glow to his pale blue eyes and made old women sigh. Even for a Man of Destiny things couldn’t be moving any closer to schedule.

He took a last look over the city, raising his eyes to encompass the outlying hills and the smile, well practiced, faded quickly from his face. For on the hill, reflecting all the colors of sunset, refracting and winking like an obscene jewel was the house of James Kirkpatrick.

Perhaps there was, after all, one fly in the ointment.

A week after Pamela’s departure for Scotland Casey was fired from his job. He’d finished his shift that day and was looking forward to a pint with a few fellow workers when he was called over to the shift foreman’s office.

“Kevin said ye wanted to see me,” he said, ducking under the low doorframe.

“Aye,” the man sighed and turned from the blueprints he had rolled out across his desk. He needn’t have said a word. Casey could read what he had to say all too clearly from the discomfort in the man’s face. He’d be damned if he’d spare the bastard the misery of it though.

“It seems, Casey,” the foreman twitched papers and pens about in front of him, “it seems that we will have to let you go,” he cleared his throat nervously and Casey suddenly saw that the man was afraid, “for the present time.”

“I’m fired then,” Casey said mildly.

“Well, not technically, no—” the man was actually sweating.

“Just to clear things a bit,” Casey said slowly as if he were talking to a dimwitted child, “when I get up in the morning I will not be coming here an’ come next Friday there’ll be no pay for me an’ yet somehow I’m not technically,” he drew the word out like sticky toffee, “fired.”

The foreman swallowed nervously once or twice. “It’s a possibility that we’ll need you back in the autumn.”

“Bullshit,” Casey said wearily, seeing the game very clearly for what it was. “Who is it needs a job then, boss’ nephew, his wife’s cousin, his auntie’s bingo partner?”

“This isn’t about nepotism,” the foreman said testily, pen drumming a nervous beat on the table.

“Really? Then what have I done to lose my job? Have I been late, slacked off, taken long breaks?”

“No,” the foreman agreed hastily.

“Then what is it?”

The man took a long, shaky breath and spent several seconds studying the nub of his pen. Casey sat down.

“I’ll not leave until I’ve had an honest answer. There are boys with less seniority out there, so I’d like to know why it’s me specifically that’s bein’ given the sack.”

“There’ve been rumors...” the foreman said eyes still firmly fixed to the desk.

“Rumors about what? Ye knew I had a prison record when ye hired me, I made no bones about that,” Casey said, willing the man to look up and meet his eyes. He did a moment later.

“It’s not the past we’re concerned with, it’s the present company that yer keepin’ that has tongues waggin’. We keep no truck with those sort of dealins’ around here.”

“I see,” Casey said rising stiffly, feeling older and heavier than he had only moments ago. “I wasn’t aware that my weekends an’ evenins’ were of any concern to the company.”

“’Tis when yer activities could get the place blown up.”

“I don’t bring my politics to work.”

“The sort of politics ye practice have a way of followin’ a man wherever he goes.”

“Do they?” Casey asked, moving towards the open door. Knowing that once it was behind his back it was closed for good and all. It was a hard lesson to learn about doors for every one you walked through represented an ending. There would be no job in the autumn, or any other season for that matter.

Outside, his pals, the five token Catholics of the three hundred man-work force, stood together. Desperation as much as comradeship had drawn them to one another.

“Will we still be havin’ that pint then?” asked Kevin Doherty, father of three blue-eyed girls and possessor of a new mortgage away from the neighborhood. A man who wore the tight look of one fleeing from something that cannot be escaped.

“Aye,” Casey smiled, flipping his jacket over his shoulder, “it’s on me lads.”

Not one to be daunted by the prospects of unemployment, Casey, the Monday after his dismissal took to the streets in search of another job. After a week of solid, unequivocal rejection, it seemed that something temporary might be in order. Window washing presented itself as an option that would leave his afternoons open for a variety of activities. However, three days into the endeavor, having yet to wash a window, the only real opportunity for wages that had presented itself came from a lonely widow and had little to do with the state of her windows. He received a similar offer from an older gentleman when he took up house painting, an enterprise that netted him two jobs that were, in the end, just enough to pay for his brushes, paint and ladder.