Lafferty, with little to lose, pushed at his luck. “Can you put down the gun?”
“I can, of course,” the skinny man said, “but I won’t. Mrs. Dunleavy didn’t raise a fool.”
“Good job,” said the fat man. “Why don’t you give him your bloody address too?”
“And why would I do that?”
“You just give him your bloody name.”
“He wouldn’t have known it was my fucking name if you hadn’t just fucking said so.”
“And who was your bloody Mrs. Dunleavy then? Your bloody nanny?”
The skinny man shrugged. “For fuck’s sake, let’s just get on with it.”
They looked down again at Lafferty sitting on the sofa, daffodils over his oul hoo-ha. “One L of a sofa,” the fat man said. “Good one.” He wasn’t smiling. “One more time then. Where’s the woman?”
One more time then Lafferty told them. All he knew was she was in her bed when he went in for his tub. “What are you doing here in the first fucking place?” the skinny man wanted to know. “How do you bloody well know her at all?” asked the fat man. “How much do you know about her fucking business?” the skinny man said, and the fat man said, “How bloody long have you been dipping your toe in her tub?” Lafferty talked till his mouth was dry. His missus, he told them, contemplating throwing him out of her house for no good reason at all, had bullied him into marriage counseling in the person of Katherine Flanagan, LPC, IACP, a newcomer to the area, chosen because the missus, noticing the spanking new sign by the road every day on her way to work—a nurse over at St. Christopher’s she was—judged it to be of the finest professional quality. And hadn’t Lafferty merely chanced upon Katherine Flanagan at Connor’s News Agent, just across the street from his turf accountant Mickey G’s, and hadn’t one thing led to another. In his desire to come clean, to make a clean breast of it, to throw himself on the mercy of the court as it were, didn’t the words come gushing out of Lafferty in a rush. How he attributed his extraordinary compatibility with members of the opposite gender not to the dimple in his chin, nor to the playful unruliness of his light brown hair—though those qualities certainly couldn’t hurt—but rather to his innate ability to detect the tiniest, most subtle signal, such as when Katherine Flanagan, immersed in a session with himself and Mrs. Lafferty, had slowly drawn her eyes away from his and laid her bright red fingernail on the tip of her lip. So not at all surprised was he then, when following their chance encounter he merely wondered if she might be willing to show him what he was doing wrong in his marriage, and she proceeded to do so, in a manner quite eager.
“Let me get this straight,” the fat man said. “You’re shagging your bloody marriage counselor.”
Lafferty shrugged. “Not habitually.”
The skinny man jabbed his pistol toward Lafferty. “I like this fucking guy.”
The fat man’s thick lips curled into a reasonable facsimile of a grin. “Me too. But then again, some of my best friends are stone-cold liars.”
“What do you mean by that?” the skinny man said.
“What’s your name?” said the fat man.
“Lafferty. Terrance Lafferty.”
“You sound like a Dub,” the skinny man said. “Any relative to Denis Lafferty from Summerhill?”
Lafferty seized the moment. He lied. “He’s my brother.”
“Small world,” said the skinny man.
“Small indeed,” said the fat.
“Do you know him well?” Lafferty said.
“Do we know him well says he,” said the fat man.
The skinny one’s black eyes finally settled, latching on to Lafferty’s. “Well enough to know he’s one of the grandest fucking liars ever to breathe Dublin air.”
“A trait known to run in the family,” the fat man said. “Tell us where the woman is. Tell us now. My manners are wearing thin.”
“Did you look under the bed?” Lafferty said, his mouth as dry as a camel’s arse.
“Did we look under the bed says he,” said the fat man. The skinny man didn’t answer. The fat man looked at him. “Did we look under the bloody bed?”
“Did you look under the bed?”
“How am I to look under the bed with my bloody knees? You didn’t look under the bed?”
“For fuck’s sake,” said the skinny man, sulking toward the bedroom door.
The fat man never budged, the tips of his ears turning red. Hovering over your man, staring down at him, he drew his pistol out from beneath his stained brown jacket two sizes too tight. Lafferty, his stomach in full riot, puckered up his arse, fearful of soiling the sofa. The flowers over his oul hoo-ha wilted and trembled from the heat and shaking of his hand, and his heart clambering in his chest like a hamster in a heated cage. He wished he was anyplace else. He felt the color fleeing his face like rats from a sinking ship. He wished he’d never been there.
Never there. Wasn’t that the reason he was here in the first place. The first words out of Peggy’s mouth at the first session the first time he ever laid his eyes on Katherine Flanagan, LPC, IACP: “He’s never been there for me. Even when he’s there, he isn’t really there.”
Through the wide window behind his wife that afternoon, Lafferty saw the broad sweep of fields dotted with sheep grazing among the hedgerows and stone fences leading down to the village tucked in the hillside. He saw the steeple of the church in the mist, the blue façade of the Commodore Hotel, and in his mind he calculated just where the Pig and Whistle would be, down the street, beyond the green. How he wished he was there with his fistful of jar. Of course it wasn’t the first time he’d heard the words out of Peggy, not at all, but he’d realized, seated in upholstered splendor in the office out front, gazing down at Kilduff, that he’d grown immune to them. Hearing them again, Lafferty disagreed, and disagreed emphatically. He never thought of himself as never there. Wasn’t he someplace all of the time?
The time they’d been evicted from their Dublin flat, hadn’t he been at the Curragh, trying to win back the price of the rent. The time of the miscarriage, lamentable, tragic to be sure, but hadn’t he been at the Pig and Whistle celebrating his impending paternity, and him with no earthly way of knowing. Any number of other times she’d complained he was never there, hadn’t the cause of it been that she’d told him to get the hell out of her sight. Though Peggy’s ears were deaf to his persuasions—her brown eyes indeed feigning pain and disbelief as they stared at him across the broad and pricey teak tabletop—Lafferty thought he detected a glimmer of understanding in the eyes of Katherine Flanagan, LPC, IACP.
Didn’t it run in the family after all. Lafferty’s oul man had never been there either.
And at the end of the day, didn’t absence make the heart grow fonder. Hadn’t Lafferty himself witnessed as a youth the grand reunions, his oul man and his oul wain on any number of occasions, him waltzing her across the narrow kitchen floor between the table and the stove, and her with her head back to let out the laugh. Hadn’t he seen with his own eyes the pair of them, arm in arm, making their way up Drumcondra Road in a zigzag stagger, half blind with the song and the drink and the joy.
Didn’t never being there have its sweet side as well.
No sooner did the skinny man walk into the bedroom till a ruckus of noises broke out. The fat man over Lafferty bounced back a step, raising the gun toward the door of the bedroom. Lafferty, shrinking on the sofa, hunkered over his daffodils. There was a shout, a thump or two or three, the sound of a scuffle, another shout and a gasp and a curse, the fat man starting for the bedroom door just before the explosion, the bang of the gun.
Then the silence holding nothing.
“Eamon!” called the fat man. “Eamon!”
More of the quiet. The ears of the fat man the color of raw beef.
Katie-bar-the-door. Standing there suddenly, the gun in her hands in front of her face, looking down the length of her arms over the pistol pointing straight at the fat man, like a right proper soldier, if not
for the hot-pink housecoat hanging down, gaping open. “Drop it!”
The fat man in the same proper stance, feet wide, staring down both his arms over the pistol pointing at Katie, the sleeves of his brown jacket up to his elbows. “You drop it!”
Lafferty, slippery with sweat, caught a sweet scent of daffodil.
That was how they stood, squirming closer, squinting down their barrels. It seemed a long time passing. Lafferty off to the side, out of the line of fire, out of the line of vision, out of the picture altogether, might as well have never been there. A chill caught the sweat, and his back ached at how he was hunkered over and he sat up a bit, fearful of making himself too big. But nobody noticed.
“Drop it!” Katie said.
“You drop it!” said the fat man.
Katie creeping closer, her housecoat peeping open another inch, Lafferty staring at the glimpse of her nakedness, the shadows of the woman’s body, the navel, the hair down below it, astounded at how it left him cold, at how utterly irrelevant was the clothing and the nakedness and the flesh at the end of the day. Invisible, didn’t he keep growing bigger. The daffodils spread out flat and dead over his oul hoo-ha, the one part of him getting smaller.
“Drop it!” said Katie. “Drop it now!”
“You drop it! Now!”
It occurred to your man he could rise slow and easy and creep away, leaving them to their own devices, to settle it however they might, leaving them pointing their pistols at one another ad infinitum, or at least till tomorrow morning when Katie’s first clients arrived to find the pair still standing there pointing their pistols yelling drop it. The skinny man he supposed was dead or mortally wounded, and he wondered where this warrior woman called Katherine the Great had come from, though he wanted nothing at all to do with it, whatever it was that it was. He wanted only to never be there. What he wanted, the only thing, was to be someplace else altogether where he could shake himself like a dog climbing out of the water and make it all fly away. He wasn’t quite ready yet to stand up naked and tiptoe off, not yet, but the idea having planted itself in his mind was rooting around, searching for purchase, and was this close to finding it when the guns went off, bang, bang, one after the other within the span of the blink of an eye. The sound like a wind that boxed his ears, blowing his hair back, causing the sweat on his back to chill and dry in the instant.
Lafferty looked up blinking. Katie and the fat man were gone.
The scent of gunpowder bitter in his nose, the wind of the blast had sucked away all sound, leaving nothing but pure silence in which Lafferty sat for a while. When finally he heard a gurgle and a distant chirp of bird, he stood. Wobbly he was, his muscles like pudding. He dropped the flowers to the table. Katie and the fat man both lay on their backs, the fat man just off the L of the sofa, Katie’s head in the doorway of the bedroom. The fat man, his stained brown jacket up past his elbows and squeezing the tips of his shoulders, was lying with his arms and legs flung out, looking at the ceiling with wide-open eyes, a patch of blood in the middle of the untidy white mound of shirt on his belly. Lafferty like a ghost in the quiet. Katie was lying the same, staring up at the top of the doorway, hot-pink housecoat spread open across the carpet, her naked body splayed, the scar, her emergency smile, smiling out from her bottom rib, the hole between her breasts still oozing. In the bedroom lay the skinny man humped up on his stomach, the eye on the side of his face wide open as well, staring under the bed.
Does nobody ever die with their eyes closed anymore?
In the bathroom, he put on his clothes. Without an ounce of consideration, with no premeditation at all, as though it were instinct, he took a small bath towel from the polished brass rail and wiped down the tub and the faucet, then all about the toilet. Taking the towel with him to the bedroom, he wiped off the doorknobs, the nightstand, the headboard, the shade of the lamp he’d admired. Then, in the lounge, the coffee table where he’d braced himself standing up. The back of the chair he’d grasped passing by. Any place he might have touched. Then he folded the bath towel, hanging it back proper on its polished brass rail.
Outside it was nearly dark, air clean and sweet. Lafferty shook his face into it, washing off the scent of the gunpowder, the smell of the blood, the odor of fear. Making it all fly away. He made his way down the road toward Kilduff, scarcely aware of his legs as they marched, nor his arms as they swung, exchanging nods with the odd sheep at the side of the road. Into Kilduff he walked, past the green where the Kilduff Cross stood, its once intricate Celtic design having been washed away by decades of Kilduff rain. It had been erected in loving memory of someone, but the inscription had long since vanished, and no one remembered the identity of the dearly departed, a sad anonymity. Lafferty strolled into the dark and friendly confines of the Pig and Whistle.
There sat Pat Gallagher in the heat of battle, the complexion of him like that of a boiled lobster, arguing with Francie Byrnes, a bald and bitter barber, and a clutch of others. Pint in hand, arse on stool, Lafferty entered the fray. His opinion was as strong as the next man’s when it came to how realistic the mechanical contraption that portrayed the great shark in the film Jaws had been, and when the argument escalated to the question of whether or not Elvis had ever been in the employ of the CIA, and then on to the British conspiracy responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, Lafferty was able to hold his own there as well. They argued well into the night.
He was there next morning with Peggy in the kitchen, her roof yet over his head, a fine splash of sun coming in through the green of the curtain. Wasn’t he there. Her hands were shaking. He made her tea, rattling the spoon in the cup. Listened to her tall tale. She bit into her muffin, and he watched the buttery crumb on the edge of her lip in a mesmerizing state of flux as the words flowed out of her. She was still excited, still in shock, still incredulous over the goings-on at St. Christopher’s.
We sat there, in the same room with her, Terrance, you and me.
Sure, the IACP never heard of the woman. It was all a bloody hoax.
Nobody knows who she is. They’re saying all kinds of things. They’re saying she was a supergrass and the IRA clipped her. They’re saying she was IRA and it was MI-5 took her out. They’re saying she was Colombian cartel and it was a Mexican hit squad done her in.
There’s no record of her at all. Nothing, nowhere.
Can you imagine if we’d been there? Can you just imagine?
MICHAEL NOLL
The Tank Yard
FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
THE WOMAN WHO could have been the love of my life lived in a duplex with a black metal railing held to cement steps by loose bolts. I was nineteen years old and out of my league with a tall blonde who’d already graduated from community college. I wanted to hold the door and let her walk down the steps first the way a gentleman is supposed to do—or that’s what I’d heard, what I knew about dating—but she came outside too fast, purse in hand, on the move, and if I wanted to be polite, it would have meant leaning against the rail to make room for her, and how would it look to fall into a bush before you’d even sat down to dinner? So I cut ahead of her and kept moving all the way to my truck so that I could at least hold that door open. She had on black pants and a sparkly shirt of sequins all sewn together, like she’d been dancing on a stage somewhere and then walked behind the curtain and straight into our town. I tried to sweep the seat clean. All it did was send a dust cloud in the air.
“Well,” she said, “my mom always said not to shoot for the moon.”
Then she said, “I’m kidding.” The maple trees were red and vast over the street. She could have painted every breath I took. “So, what’s the plan?”
I’d given this some thought, which meant I’d asked Rob where to go, and he’d explained that there was only one place in town worthy of a date. “You’ve got those glass lamps and sparkly cups.” Which was true. And also the photos of old people in Italy.
“Pizza Hut,” I said, which made he
r laugh, and so I laughed too, until she stopped.
“No, really.”
I stopped the truck right in the middle of the street. “Hey,” she said, but I hit the gas and took the next corner too sharp. “Did you, um”—she edged toward the door and gripped the handle—“forget something?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My brain.”
I didn’t want her to jump out and I didn’t trust that I could explain myself, so I sped up. At Walmart, I got out of the truck and threw the keys at her. “You stay here,” I said. “I’m just going to run in and—” I almost said, “get some things,” but part of me knew that if I said that, she’d drive away and leave me there, so I just came out with it. “I’m going to buy a charcoal grill and some charcoal and lighter fluid, and I’m going to buy two steaks and some peppers and onions and a loaf of some kind of bread and some spreadable butter and a bottle of some kind of wine, and then I’m going to come back and we’re going to drive—” I almost said, “to City Lake,” but I was slowing down, listening to my own thoughts and how I’d sound like a rapist, so instead I said, “to the courthouse and we’ll park on the street and put the grill in the back and I’ll cook up that food and then we’ll eat on the tailgate while looking at downtown. Because one thing we’ve got here, if you haven’t noticed, is a pretty nice-looking downtown. Does that sound okay to you?”
We ended up going into the store together. Afterward, we parked on the post office side of the courthouse because the kids don’t drive back there when they’re cruising, which means the cops wouldn’t find our grill, and we cooked everything up and sat on the tailgate in the dark and watched the shadows of the trees and buildings grow long in the dark. You could see the outline of the town clock against the sky.
Nobody was using the word steady anymore, not even me. I don’t even know where it came from. Sure, I was nervous. I’d been going on dates with Marissa and hanging out with her for a month. We were sitting in her backyard, drinking beer because it turned out neither of us knew what to do with wine.