We Were Kings (7 page)

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Dublin, Ireland

WITH THE IRISH
Sea below him, Bobby Myles said farewell to Dublin. He wouldn't be back again. Not even for his mother's funeral, which he knew deep in his gut would happen sooner rather than later.

The doctor had said a year, if she was lucky. Bobby thought a month, maybe two at best. Yesterday afternoon, he had sat with his mother at a restaurant on Essex Street. The lights were dimmed and wisps of a dissipating fog smoked against the windows, and even with it so dark, he could see how sick she had gotten. The shadows seemed to seek her out and gather in the shallows of her face, the bags under her eyes, and the concave cheeks, the skin so brittle it might have been old parchment paper. In the blueness of her veins that wormed their way along her hands, he could see that even inside her, there was a darkness taking over.

The food had arrived silently, and she pretended to enjoy a meal of lamb, roasted potatoes, and spring vegetables—cutting something, moving it across the plate, but rarely ever putting anything in her mouth. She kept clearing her throat before she talked, as though she needed to startle and force out the words she wanted to say. Clearly, she had spotted his lie about spending a week in London on business. She knew he wasn't coming back. Yet she asked questions about the trip, and he did his best, giving her brief answers to make it seem authentic yet insubstantial, nothing to worry about. “That's nice,” she'd said. “It's good to keep busy. Onwards and upwards.”

He paid the bill and told her he had to go home and pack. He didn't tell her that in London he would meet three other soldiers, Kinsella, Egan, and the Ox—Fitzgerald. And he didn't tell her there would be a journey across the Atlantic to New York, followed by an airplane to Boston. And then from Boston, whenever the job was finished, as far out west as he could get. “I trust you'll be okay,” he said to her. “The nurses at the home, they'll take good care of you.” He had stood and kissed his mother on the top of her head. His nostrils filled with the strong scent of her lilac shampoo and something deeper, the sourness of death that came with living too long. He gently pressed down on her hand, felt the coldness of her skin and the fragile bones beneath, and told her that he loved her and would be back to spend Christmas with her.

“Don't forget that you'll always be from here, Robert. This was my country, not your father's,” she said, trying to come across with humor. She was referring to her side, the Galway side, and not his father's Liverpool and Merseyside roots.

“How could I ever forget that, Mum?” He laughed, giving her a pained, crooked smile.

With her fork, she speared a stem of asparagus and moved it from one end of the plate to the other, and then her lips turned up in a sickly grin, yellowed teeth bared and exposing her discolored and receding gums. Even though she was smiling, her eyes remained lowered, as though heavy with the weight of oncoming tears. Where had her beauty gone? Where was that woman he had once feared? In the lobby of the restaurant, he grabbed his sports coat and hat and made his way to the exit. Outside on Essex, he walked along the sidewalk and stole a final glimpse through the restaurant window. His mother sat there, no more significant than a mannequin propped behind the dusty window of a tailor's storefront. Fighting the urge to go back and tell her the truth, he kept on walking and didn't look back to watch the tears roll along his mother's cheeks, cutting pale, gummy lines through the rouge she wore so thickly.

Now, in the fixed-wing, dual-engine airplane, Bobby Myles lowered the brim of his hat so it rested at his brow. Sunlight broke through the clouds and reflected off the wing of the Douglas DC-3. The light up this high was different, less tainted. It flared up under his hat and warmed his face—a pleasant sensation, but in his chest there was a leaden weight, and from that came an anxiety that made him feel as though he were a mere bag of bones in a floating vessel constructed of aluminum, gears, gasoline, all of it bound together by a lonesome prayer that the heavens wouldn't let it buckle and come crashing down.

The aircraft could seat twenty-five comfortably. On this trip, it was half full. One man in the front was saying prayers in Irish, occasionally clearing his throat with a poorly veiled curse. Behind him, a mother and son sat quietly, as if they were still inside a crowded pew at Sunday Mass. A woman across the aisle softly chewed on sweets that she plucked from a cellophane bag between her legs. Her attention was focused on a paperback novel she held up with one hand, her thumb pressing hard in the center. Bobby could tell it was an American book by the lurid cover showing a bosomy brunette in the arms of a square-jawed cowboy; the cowboy was apparently about to either smack the woman in the face or tear off her blouse and ravage her breasts.
The irony of it all,
he thought. America: the lustful frontier mapped by greed, avarice, skin, and sin. He amused himself with images of how the Americans saw their own country (America the Beautiful, the Land of Opportunity, the Great Melting Pot), and then he imagined it as he'd always wished and hoped it would be—a great wide expanse of sky and land, a sanctuary of deserts, mountains, forests, and lakes where one answered to nature only, lived with what one had, and didn't rely on handouts from others.

A sanctuary—he liked the way that sounded.

Sanctuary.

A safe, sacred place.

The plane hit turbulence and it felt as if the aircraft were moving against a tempestuous sea. He had a flask in his chest pocket, and he took it out, unscrewed its thimble-like cap, and filled his mouth with brandy. Instantly it softened the panic.

He forced himself to listen to the buzzing of the engines, hoping they'd lull him into a peaceful state. The attendant moved through the aisle as silently as a ghost, and when she spoke, it startled him so much that he quickly pushed the hat up from his brow. Her fingers gently touched his shoulder, and she smiled apologetically. “I didn't mean to give you a start. We'll be landing in an hour. Would you like a pillow for your neck?” He said no, thank you, and watched her move down the aisle, stiff-hipped and without much grace, an Irish country girl who seemed to have just started out on the job; perhaps this was her first time leaving the island and she was already missing home.

The Douglas DC-3 hit more turbulence. Another taste of brandy, but instead of calming his busy mind, it filled it with the reality of the situation ahead, his real reason for going to the States.

Was he really going to abandon the outfit and call America his own? Informer, traitor, fugitive—what would they say of him once they found out he wasn't coming back? What guilt would they shame him with?

He couldn't count the number of hours he had spent going through scenarios, times when he'd lain idle but with his mind working frantically as he imagined all manner of miscues, hiccups, and errors and tried to find a way out of each mishap without one wrinkle, one wasted second. In the end, no matter how hard he tried to cement the plan, he realized that only being there in the moment would show him the way out, that right moment to flee.

And maybe, just maybe, the farther away from Ireland he got, the less he'd see her. No more nightmares, no more moments where her porcelain face and coal-black eyes exploded into his consciousness, obliterating every other thought, almost everything else in the world.

That terrible day in Belfast—God bless her poor young soul.

He always saw the road first.

Through the windshield speckled with rain, he saw mist rise up off the wet tarmac like steam, and above, the clouds rolling dark and heavy as if hidden behind them some great behemoth powered a dangerous, unspeakable machine. Pedestrians scattered along the walkways, and as Bobby drove by them, they appeared to him like faceless mourners trudging through the misery of another day. Even though it was only two in the afternoon, it felt as if night were already pressing down on Belfast.

Bobby was wired tightly, his knuckles pale as he gripped the steering wheel with both hands. He watched out for the potholes that threatened the threadbare, mismatched tires of the Hillman Minx he carefully drove north toward Old Falls Road.

In the Austin Saloon in front of him, Gedrick was driving in a messy way. He was drawing unnecessary attention, making sloppy turns on narrow cobblestoned roads and, earlier, an abrupt, skidding stop at an intersection that had been clear of traffic; the RUC officer standing on the corner had eyed the vehicle warily but in the end didn't raise a hand to pull him over.

In the passenger seat next to Gedrick was Marcus Coyne, no more than twenty years old, all high-and-mighty Dubliner—the type who thought he could change the times with his fists, a pugilist who lacked all restraint and nuance and who in public stood out like a leper at a high-collared English tea party. Bobby didn't like him, but he thought at this moment that he should be the one driving the lead car.

“Geddy, you ripe bastard, slow and easy,” Bobby said. “Don't make a fool now. Steady, steady.”

The car ahead of Bobby swerved over the center, then quickly straightened out and slowed down. Black smoke twisted out from the tailpipe. A stretch of terraced houses leaned into the street, dark wood and gray paint. In that moment, Bobby sensed that something was amiss.

Earlier this morning, he had sat with Gedrick at an empty lot south of the city in Dunmurry and watched him drink straight from a green-hued bottle that bore no label. It wasn't to calm his nerves but to keep a monthlong drunk from falling apart. Gedrick had been in a bad way since his wife had left him and gone south back to her childhood home in Waterford. Ever since then, he'd scuttered and drunk without end, a right mess pushing his luck to the brink. But it was in that moment this morning before they squared up and set the bomb in the trunk of the car that Bobby noticed a look of determination and clarity in his friend's eyes, a look that held true to the past when he was a soldier through and through—once the best bomb maker in all of Europe, a magician in the way he mixed the nitrobenzene and fertilizer or nitrosamine and ethylene glycol to duplicate the British PE-4.

Bobby wished he hadn't noticed that look. If he hadn't seen it, he would have forced Coyne to drive the lead car instead of Gedrick.

Even last week, Bobby had put in a call to the General and said that Gedrick was in a bad way, not right in the head. He'd suggested that he be taken off the Belfast factory job and that if they couldn't get somebody else, two men could do it instead of three. The General gave him a whole line of staying true, that Gedrick could handle it, that he was the best they had.

Manpower's thin,
the General had said,
and Gedrick is a right fucking master at making the goods. He could wire one in his sleep, for Christ's sake. About the drinking, now, c'mon, who hasn't had their fair share of misery? Every so often, it comes when you're not looking and you grin and bear it and you take it as your own. That's life; that's what happens to us all.

The General had ended the call with
Just keep an eye out. Use your magic. You
see things before they happen, and that's why we trust you, Bobby.

Ahead, the Austin Saloon was pushing forty miles per hour.

Bobby checked the rearview to make sure they weren't being tailed. They weren't.

And in that second where his eyes flashed from the rearview back to the road ahead, the Austin swerved around a large pothole and caught the edge; the hubcap popped off, the tire burst, and the car began to skid out, spinning into the opposite lane. Instead of letting up on the gas, Gedrick hit the brakes.

Bobby would always remember that the world had gone mute and time slowed down so that he could see the car careening and flipping over, sparks flaring out as the metal scraped against the asphalt. The vehicle turned over, once, twice, and then a white blast of fire tore through its frame.

Bobby pulled the car over and left the keys in the ignition, the engine idling. He had been holding his breath, and he forced himself to take in air, shouldered the door open, and ran out. The flames consumed the wreck, and a mushroom of smoke billowed up into the sky. He felt his lungs constrict and he fought to breathe evenly, the burning petrol stinging his eyes and making everything around him indistinct and blurred.

Other sounds filtered back into reality. Car doors slammed behind him. Brakes squealed and tires screeched along the road as more cars stopped to see what had happened. And then he heard it: the sounds of a man miraculously still alive, his body pinched and punctured by metal, the flames eating through his skin and flesh and cooking the marrow and the bone. There was nothing Bobby could do except listen to Gedrick scream and ask God for forgiveness and to stop the pain.

Step away from the fire
.
You don't know these men. You don't know anything about them. You just saw it all happen and you did your good deed by checking to see
if anybody could be helped. That's all.

He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. When he opened them, he noticed movement at the curbside. Underneath a tree that had caught fire, most of its branches sheared off from the shrapnel and the impact of the explosion, there were shapes strewn about on the walkway. Human shapes. The smoke was burning his eyes, the heat of the flames blistering, but he moved in closer, noticed that one of these shapes was still moving.

A woman wormed her way off the curb and into the street like some half-crushed insect. He couldn't tell which were the tattered threads of her red sweater and which were the tattered and torn shreds of her own flesh. In shock, she tried to turn over but with one of her arms completely torn off at the biceps, she floundered and then went still.

Beside a storefront window shattered from the blast, a man sat against a wall. The shrapnel had shaved off his face, leaving nothing but pulp and bone. And lying next to the man was another shape; Bobby couldn't tell if it was a dog or a small child.