Authors: Thomas Fleming

Hours of Gladness (33 page)

BOOK: Hours of Gladness

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O'Toole threw the Uzi to Mick. He threw his Colt .38 to him. O'Toole broke it and made sure there was only one bullet in the chamber. Mick and the other man crouched, their M16s leveled. O'Toole spun the chamber and put the gun to his temple. He pulled the trigger.

Click.

“Looks good, Uncle Bill. Two more to go.”

He spun the chamber and put the gun to his temple again.

Click.

“I always knew you were a lucky son of a bitch, Uncle Bill. One more.”

One more and then what? More days and weeks and months and years with this thick, disgusting body? Probably some of those years in jail and the rest listening to his wife tell him what a fool he was?

Smoke thickened the air around them. The fire was a moving wall of flame, almost a quarter of a mile away, now. More planes were bombing it. Out on the main road fire trucks were wailing. One more for what?

“Bastard!” Bill O'Toole screamed. He threw the gun at Mick and ran toward the fire. Across the burned ground,
across the bodies, he ran to catch up to the purifying flames. He knew he could not get through them. He knew and he did not care. Finally all he wanted to do was die the way his son had died. He wanted to be with Jimmy, with that red hair and those laughing eyes for a few seconds. He wanted to walk through purifying fire and somehow convince God that he should be with Jimmy for eternity.

Toward the end of the day, when they got the fire out, they found Bill O'Toole on his knees, embracing the blackened trunk of one of the tallest pines.

“Oh, Mick,” Trai said. “That was so cruel.”

“Yeah,” Mick said, watching his uncle disappear into the wall of fire.

There was no love in him. He was all warrior justice now. He ordered Joe to guard the cocaine and Phac's body. He gestured Suong and Trai to the car. “I want to go get Pop's body,” he said. He cleared the jammed round from Phac's M16 and threw it in the backseat beside Suong.

They drove down the sand roads, skirting the fire, and stopped near the mobsters' cars. Mick approached them through the woods, his M16 ready. They were empty. The gunmen were all dead or wandering, disoriented and terrified, in the pines.

In a half hour they were in the clearing. It was utterly still beneath the gray sky. An empty limousine sat with its doors open, like a looted tomb. Mick left Suong and Trai in his car and walked toward the house, his M16 ready. He checked the car and glanced in the open door of the house, then slung his rifle and went behind the house. He emerged with the old man's body in his arms. Death and war were all Trai saw on his face. Death and war and grief.

Out of the woods behind the house stepped a man with a once handsome face, burned raw by the sun. His teeth
were bared in a grimace of diabolical rage. He had a pistol in his hand. He shot Mick in the back with it. The gun did not make a sound. It was like a gun in a nightmare. But the bullet tore through Mick's body. Trai saw the blood spurt on his chest, above his heart. It was a mortal wound.

Mick whirled and saw him, saw Dick O'Gorman. He saw his doom, hurtling toward him from four hundred tormented years of Ireland's history. Like a true warrior, Mick lunged at it, ready to grapple death itself with his bare hands, to fight the irresistible, the way Cuchulain in the ancient saga assaulted the waves of the sea.

Mick abandoned the burden of his American grandfather to grapple with this Irish death that had stalked him across two oceans. O'Gorman fired two more bullets into his chest from the Chinese Type 64 silenced and still Mick came at him. He seized O'Gorman by the throat and they both went down. The .64 clicked once more. This time the muzzle was pressed against Mick's heart. With a long, bitter sigh, Mick fell back, slain.

Slowly, calmly, O'Gorman stood up and reloaded the Type 64 silenced. Trai realized that he planned to kill her and Suong. “The gun,” she said to Suong. “Give me Phac's gun.”

“It doesn't work,” Suong said.

“It will work for me,” she said.

He slid the rifle over the seatback to her and she released the safety catch, as Mick had showed her last night. The evil wave had broken. They would have to learn to swim in its dark flood.

In a distant corner of his soul, Dick O'Gorman grieved. He had just destroyed a part of Ireland that he should have cherished, one of the sons of the diaspora whose body and soul spoke of ancient greatness. He had desecrated Mick's body and polluted his own soul in the name of the future, not the past, a future described by a bearded German Jew
who had transformed economics into a philosophy of hatred and hope in a London tenement a century ago.

Whether it was true or false no longer mattered now. Only the blood mattered, the blood and torn flesh and shattered bone, the deaths on shell-pocked battlefields and greasy side streets and on gallows, deaths in ships beneath the sea and planes spilling more death from the sky. Only the darkness mattered; Mick's blond hair, his fair skin, were already obliterated by it, he was already vanishing in the onrushing wave.

Only The O'Gorman and a rare few like him could walk on these waters, could command death with a cold eye and pass by unafraid. A poet of death, he walked toward the woman and the boy in the car, ready to write the last stanza on this pasquinade. Like terrified deer trapped in the headlights of an oncoming automobile, they would sit there and await him.

Suddenly the woman sprang from the car and knelt on one knee beside it, aiming a rifle with a short stock and an ammunition clip beside the trigger. An M16, first cousin of the ArmaLite, the gun that the IRA had used to kill so many British soldiers.

For an astonishing moment, O'Gorman gazed down the barrel of the rifle into her eyes. They were blank. They were the staring eyes of the Virgin in a Byzantine painting. The eyes of Jesus the Terrific Judge in the dome of Santa Sophia in Constantinople.

Don't be an idiot, he told himself. Those are the ordinary eyes of a Vietnamese woman. The size of the eyes in the small face gave an impression of blankness, of false serenity, when she had the same gullible soul of any woman anywhere. There was a good chance that she would miss him with that formidable gun. Another ten steps and he would be close enough to finish her off with the Chinese silenced.

“Wait a moment,” O'Gorman called, giving her his infallibly charming smile. “Don't shoot. I'm an officer of the law.”

Trai pulled the trigger and dozens of bullets hammered into O'Gorman's chest. He reeled back, whirling in the blast of fire, trying to run. Instead he fell headfirst into the front seat of the limousine. It had looked empty to Trai and Suong, but it was actually a hearse. Tommy Giordano's squat body lay in the backseat.

Bullets shattered the rear window of the car as O'Gorman pulled himself erect behind the wheel. He tried to turn the key, the key to the kingdom of heaven, to escape to a hospital where lovely nurses would soothe his tormented body with kisses and caresses.

But the key would not turn. There was no life in his fumbling fingers. More bullets shattered the window beside his head. He slumped against the seat and watched the woman walk toward the car through the gathering darkness. She stood at the window and gazed at him. Through the shattered glass she acquired a terrific splendor. She was a being a thousand centuries old, surrounded by the aureole of sainthood. The boy stood beside her, his Asian face also partaking of eternity. They seemed immensely sad, immensely grave, these creatures from beyond time.

The car began to move. It hurtled through the blazing woods and caught fire. Looking over his shoulder, O'Gorman saw Giordano sitting up in the backseat, burning like a Roman candle. Flames poured out of every body orifice, his mouth was wide in a wild scream of pain. As he burned, he became more and more translucent and suddenly he was gone. His peasant soul was not worthy of damnation. Annihilation was his fate.

Over Paradise Beach the limousine soared to plunge into the deepest part of the sea. The flames vanished and O'Gorman felt the cold begin. Down, down he spiraled toward a frigidity that only the mind can conceive. Finally, beyond the uttermost depths of the deep, at the end of all dimension, he heard a voice, laughing.

A thousand welcomes, whispered Captain Arthur Littlejohn.

A CYNIC'S TEARS

C
ynics are not ordinarily weepers. But Alex Oxenford wept the day Suong drove Mick's car back to Paradise Beach and asked him to help bring Mick home. Suong and Trai were afraid they might be accused of some of the crimes that had been committed in the war in the Pines. To calm their fears, Oxenford asked the night police sergeant, Tom Brannigan, to come with them.

They found Trai sitting on the mossy ground with Mick's head in her lap. Nearby O'Gorman and Giordano lay dead in the bullet-ravaged limousine. Pop Oxenford's body lay a few feet away. Alex Oxenford was struck by the extraordinary peace on his father's faceâand Mick's face. It helped him to maintain a few shreds of self-control.

For the living, there was no peace. Alex Oxenford undertook the task of telling Barbara Monahan O'Day what had happened. Her grief was so terrible, he almost forgot his own sorrow. “It's my fault,” she said. “It's my fault from start to finish.”

“No, it isn't,” Oxenford said. “Remember what my father said about things happening to grown men? What happened to Mick was beyond your controlâor mine.”

“No,” she said, “No. I let that Irish bastard lie to me. I believed another lying bastard like you. I'm hopeless.”

“No, you're not. A man in pursuit of a beautiful woman will always be tempted to tell lies. But some of them regret it.”

“Regret,” she snarled. “I'm supposed to believe that, now?”

“Yes, now!” Oxenford shouted. “Jesus God, don't you believe I loved Mick too? Loved him as muchâmaybe more than you?”

He blundered out of the Monahan house and almost got killed by a car on Ocean Avenue. For the rest of the day he walked the empty beach remembering Mick as a towhead of five, his chunky body already aglow with energy. Mick at twelve with the cloud of unease in his hazel eyes as he tried to comprehend his fatherless world. At seventeen, in his prime, the football and basketball star, the lifeguard emanating maleness, the year when the world belonged to him.

Oxenford brooded on his dreams for Mickâand himself, the artful invisible father. Mick was going to star for Notre Dame and then for the Jets or the Giants. Marry money and let the Professor help him manage it.

Then the war, Trai's dark wave, rolled toward them. History rearranged everyone's dreams. Oxenford remembered his numbing disappointment when Mick came home from boot camp in his dark green marine uniform and announced one night in the Golden Shamrock that he liked the Corps so much he was going to make it his career. For the first time Oxenford glimpsed the warrior who had been waiting beneath the swaggering boy. For the first time he realized Mick had escaped him.

The memories grew darker. He remembered the hours he had spent trying to rescue Mick from the tragedy in Binh Nghai. The struggle to plant some seeds of ambition
in his wounded soul. To somehow obliterate the memory that haunted him. Oxenford found himself loathing his own boozy barroom lectures, his attempts to explain why this huge, voracious country has always been inept at fighting minor wars, why Americans worship patriotism and disown patriots. Trying to set a historical backfire to fight the blaze that was consuming Mick.

Remembering how many times he was tempted to assert his fatherhood and never finding the courage.

Remembering and weeping for his American-Irish son, betrayed by his parents, by his psuedoparents, by both his countries.

Eventually, the sun sank and Oxenford stared at the twilit sea and wondered if it held the answer to what to do with the rest of his miserable life. It would be simple to walk into the surf and let the Atlantic claim the last of the Oxenfords. It would prove his regret to Barbara Monahan O'Day.

“Alex.”

It was a woman's voice. A voice he had never expected to hear again. Barbara was standing about a dozen feet away from him, speaking the words into the sea wind. “There'll be a wake tonight for Mickâand your father. I'd like you to come and sit beside me.”

HAIL AND FAREWELL

T
hese days, Paradise Beach is a prosperous, peaceful town. Yours truly Alex Oxenford is the mayor. Thanks to Police Chief Tom Brannigan, we have been able to resist the moral and political muck that oozes our way from Atlantic City with all the elan and not a little of the skulduggery that Bill O'Toole employed.

With a nice combination of public relations and legal maneuvers we were able to portray the Monahan clan as victims of Mafia pressure. We handed over the cocaine to the FBI, who were delighted to convict several of the survivors of Mick's conflagration for trying to smuggle it into the country. The demoralized Giordano mob were forced to surrender their mortgages and abandon their plans to take over Paradise Beach. Bill O'Toole and Leo McBride and Melody Faithorne emerged from our spin machine as heroes on a par with Pop Oxenfordâall resisting the vicious scheme to sully our town with a tidal
wave of dope. Black Dick O'Gorman and Billy Kilroy went unmentioned into the darkness.

I have been married to Barbara O'Day for thirteen years now. If we have not achieved happiness, I don't know what to call it. Out of the ashes of sorrow and loss has risen a veritable phoenix of our first love.

Not long after we married, we adopted Suong. Without the slightest prompting from us, he announced a determination to pursue a military career. A decade ago, he graduated from Annapolis. He is now a major in the Marine Corps, on his way to becoming our first Asian general. No one knows he is determined to review Mick's court-martial as soon as he achieves sufficient rank and power. I have no doubt whatsoever that he will restore Mick's good name.

Trai is no longer among us. She has joined a convent of contemplative Carmelites in Connecticut. They devote their days to meditation and prayer for the rest of mankind, who continue to demonstrate an egregious need for all the divine assistance they can get. Privately I believe she is waiting impatiently for the moment when her soul will join with Mick's for eternity.

Have I, the ultimate cynic, heir of twenty generations of indifference to law and morality, become a believer? At times I wake in the night beside Barbara and sense a hovering spirit in the room. Humming through the screens, the wind off the ocean almost becomes a human voice, crooning bittersweet words.

Oh the days of the Kerry dancers!
Oh the ring of the piper's tune!
Oh for one of those hours of gladness
Gone! alas, like our youth, too soon.

Oh to think of it!

Oh to dream of it!

Fills my heart with tears â¦

BOOK: Hours of Gladness

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