Green Shadows, White Whale Read online

I scanned the lot, tried to say wine, but quit.

  “A whiskey, please,” I said.

  “Make mine a Guinness,” said Mike. “Now, introductions all around. That there is Heeber Finn, who owns the pub.”

  Finn handed over the whiskey. “The third and fourth mortgage, that is.”

  Mike moved on, pointing.

  “This is O’Gavin, who has the finest bogs in all Kilcock and cuts peat turf out of it to stoke the hearths of Ireland. Also a fine hunter and fisher, in or out of season!”

  O’Gavin nodded. “I poach game and steal fish.”

  “You’re an honest man, Mr. O’Gavin,” I said.

  “No. As soon as I find a job,” said O’Gavin, “I’ll deny the whole thing.”

  Mike led me along. “This next is Casey, who will fix the hoof of your horse.”

  “Blacksmith,” said Casey.

  “The spokes of your bike.”

  “Velocipede repair,” said Casey.

  “Or the spark plugs on any damn car.”

  “Auto-moe-beel renovation,” said Casey.

  Mike moved again. “Now, this is Kelly, our turf accountant!”

  “Mr. Kelly,” I said, “do you count the turf that Mr. O’Gavin cuts out of his bog?”

  As everyone laughed, Kelly said: “That is a common tourist’s error. I am an expert on the races. I breed a few horses—”

  “He sells Irish Sweepstakes tickets,” said someone.

  “A bookie,” said Finn.

  “But ‘turf accountant’ has a gentler air, does it not?” said Kelly.

  “It does!” I said.

  “And here’s Timulty, our art connoisseur.”

  I shook hands with Timulty. “Art connoisseur?”

  “It’s from looking at the stamps I have the eye for paintings,” Timulty explained. “If it goes at all, I run the post office.”

  “And this is Carmichael, who took over the village telephone exchange last year.”

  Carmichael, who knitted as he spoke, replied: “My wife got the uneasies and she ain’t come right since, God help her. I’m on duty next door.”

  “But now tell us, lad,” said Finn, “what’s your crisis?”

  “A whale. And … ” I paused. “Ireland!”

  “Ireland?!” everyone cried.

  Mike explained. “He’s a writer who’s trapped in Ireland and misunderstands the Irish.”

  After a beat of silence someone said: “Don’t we all!”

  To much laughter, Mr. O’Gavin leaned forward. “What do you misunderstand, specific like?”

  Mike intervened to prevent chaos. “Underestimates is more the word. Confused might be the sum! So I’m taking him on a Grand Tour of the Worst Sights and the Most Dreadful Truths.” He stopped and turned. “Well, that’s the lot, lad.”

  “Mike, there’s one you missed.” I nodded to a partition at the far end of the bar. “You didn’t introduce me to … him.”

  Mike peered and said, “O’Gavin, Timulty, Kelly, do you see someone there?”

  Kelly glanced down the line. “We do not.”

  I pointed. “Why, it’s plain as my nose! A man—”

  Timulty cut in. “Now, Yank, don’t go upsetting the order of the universe. Do you see that partition? It is an irrevocable law that any man seeking a bit of peace and quiet is automatically gone, invisible, null and void when he steps into that cubby.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Or as close as you’ll ever get to one in Ireland. That area, no more than two feet wide by one deep, is more private than the confessional. It’s where a man can duck, in need of feeding his soul without converse or commotion. So for all intents and purposes, that space, until he breaks the spell of silence himself, is uninhabited and no one’s there!”

  Everyone nodded, proud of Timulty.

  “Fine, Timulty, and now—drink your drink, lad, stand alert, be ready, watch!” said Mike.

  I looked at the mist curling through the door. “Alert for what?”

  “Why, there’s always Great Events preparing themselves out in that fog.” Mike became mysterious. “As a student of Ireland, let nothing pass unquestioned.” He peered out at the night. “Anything can happen … and always does.” He inhaled the fog, then froze. “Ssst! Did you hear?”

  Beyond, there was a blind stagger of feet, heavy panting coming near, near, near!

  “What …?” I said.

  Mike shut his eyes. “Sssst! Listen! … Yes!”

  Chapter 4

  Shoes pounded the outside steps, drunkenly. The double wing doors slammed wide. A battered man lunged in, reeling, holding his bloody head with bloody hands. His moan froze every customer at the bar. For a time you heard only the soft foam popping in the lacy mugs, as the customers turned, some faces pale, some pink, some veined and wattle red. Every eyelid down the line gave a blink.

  The stranger swayed in his ruined clothes, eyes wide, lips trembling. The drinkers clenched their fists. Yes! they cried silently. Go on, man! What happened?

  The stranger leaned far out on the air.

  “Collision,” he cried. “Collision on the road.”

  Then, chopped at the knees, he fell.

  “Collision!” A dozen men rushed at the body.

  “Kelly!” Heeber Finn vaulted the bar. “Get to the road! Mind the victim—easy does it! Joe, run for the Doc!”

  “Wait!” said a quiet voice.

  From the private stall at the end of the pub, the cubby where a philosopher might brood, a dark man blinked out at the crowd.

  “Doc!” cried Heeber Finn. “Was you there all the time?”

  “Ah, shut up!” cried the Doc as he and the men hustled out into the night.

  “Collision …” The man on the floor twitched his lips.

  “Softly, boys.” Heeber Finn and two others gentled the victim atop the bar. He looked handsome as death on the fine inlaid wood, with the prismed mirror making him two dread calamities for the price of one.

  Outside on the steps, the crowd halted, shocked as if an ocean had sunk Ireland in the dusk and now bulked all about them. Fog in fifty-foot rollers and breakers put out the moon and stars. Blinking, cursing, the men leaped out, to vanish in the deeps.

  Behind, in the bright doorframe, I stood, dreading to interfere with what seemed village ritual. Since arriving in Ireland, I could not shake the feeling that at all times I was living stage center of the Abbey Theatre. Now, not knowing my lines, I could only stare after the rushing men.

  “But,” I protested weakly, “I didn’t hear any cars on the road.”

  “You did not!” said Mike, almost pride fully. Arthritis limited him to the top step, where he teetered, shouting at the white tides where his friends had submerged. “Try the crossroad, boys! That’s where it most often does!”

  “The crossroad!” Far and near, footsteps rang.

  “Nor,” I said, “did I hear a collision.”

  Mike snorted with contempt. “Ah, we’re not great ones for commotion, or great crashing sounds. But collision you’ll see if you step on out there. Walk, now, don’t run! It’s the devil’s own night. Running blind you might hit into Kelly, beyond, who’s fevered up with pumping just to squash his lungs. Or you might head-on with Feeney, too drunk to find any road, never mind what’s on it! Finn, you got a torch, a flash? Blind you’ll be, lad, but use it. Walk now, you hear?”

  I groped through the fog and, immersed in the night beyond Heeber Finn’s, made direction by the heavy clubbing of shoes and a rally of voices ahead. A hundred yards off in eternity, the men approached, grunting whispers: “Easy now!” “Ah, the shameful blight!” “Hold on, don’t jiggle him!”

  I was flung aside by a steaming lump of men who swept suddenly from the fog, bearing atop themselves a crumpled object. I glimpsed a bloodstained and livid face high up there, then someone cracked my flashlight down.

  By instinct, sensing the far whiskey-colored light of Heeber Finn’s, the catafalque surged on toward that fixed and
familiar harbor.

  Behind came dim shapes and a chilling insect rattle.

  “Who’s that!” I cried.

  “Us, with the vehicles,” someone husked. “You might say we got the collision.”

  The flashlight fixed them. I gasped. A moment later, the battery failed.

  But not before I had seen two village lads jogging along with no trouble at all, easily, lightly, toting under their arms two ancient black bicycles minus front and tail lights.

  “What …?” I said.

  But the lads trotted off, the accident with them. The fog closed in. I stood abandoned on an empty road, my flashlight dead in my hand.

  By the time I opened the door at Heeber Finn’s, both “bodies,” as they called them, had been stretched on the bar.

  And there was the crowd lined up, not for drinks, but blocking the way so the Doc had to shove sidewise from one to another of these relics of blind driving by night on the misty roads.

  “One’s Pat Nolan,” whispered Mike. “Not working at the moment. The other’s Mr. Peevey from Maynooth, in candy and cigarettes mostly.” Raising his voice: “Are they dead, now, Doc?”

  “Ah, be still, won’t you?” The Doc resembled a sculptor troubled at finding some way to finish up two full-length marble statues at once. “Here, let’s put one victim on the floor!”

  “The floor’s a tomb,” said Heeber Finn. “He’ll catch his death down there. Best leave him up where the warm air gathers from our talk.”

  “But,” I said quietly, confused, “I’ve never heard of an accident like this in all my life. Are you sure there were absolutely no cars? Only these two men on their bikes?”

  “Only?” Mike shouted. “Great God, man, a fellow working up a drizzling sweat can pump along at sixty kilometers. With a long downhill glide his bike hits ninety or ninety-five! So here they come, these two, no front or tail lights—”

  “Isn’t there a law against that?”

  “To hell with government interference! So here the two come, no lights, flying home from one town to the next. Thrashing like Sin Himself’s at their behinds! Both going opposite ways but both on the same side of the road. Always ride the wrong side of the road, it’s safer, they say. But look on these lads, fair destroyed by all that official palaver. Why? Don’t you see? One remembered it, but the other didn’t! Better if the officials kept their mouths shut! For here the two be, dying.”

  “Dying?” I stared.

  “Well, think on it, man! What stands between two able-bodied hell-bent fellas jumping along the path from Kilcock to Maynooth? Fog! Fog is all! Only fog to keep their skulls from bashing together. Why, look, when two chaps hit at a cross like that, it’s like a strike in bowling alleys, tenpins flying! Bang! There go your friends, nine feet up, heads together like dear chums met, flailing the air, their bikes clenched like two tomcats. Then they all fall down and just lay there, feeling around for the Dark Angel.”

  “Surely these men won’t …”

  “Oh, won’t they? Why, last year alone in all the Free State no night passed some soul did not meet in fatal collision with another!”

  “You mean to say over three hundred Irish bicyclists die every year, hitting each other?”

  “God’s truth and a pity.”

  “I never ride my bike nights.” Heeber Finn eyed the bodies. “I walk.”

  “But still then the damn bikes run you down!” said Mike. “A wheel or afoot, some idiot’s always panting up doom the other way. They’d sooner split you down the seam than wave hello. Oh, the brave men I’ve seen ruined or half ruined or worse, and headaches their lifetimes after.” Mike trembled his eyelids shut. “You might almost think, mightn’t you, that human beings was not made to handle such delicate instruments of power.”

  “Three hundred dead each year?” I was dazed.

  “And that don’t count the ‘walking wounded’ by the thousands every fortnight who, cursing, throw their bikes in the bog forever and take government pensions to salve their all-but-murdered bodies.”

  “Should we stand here talking?” I gestured helplessly toward the victims. “Is there a hospital?”

  “On a night with no moon,” Heeber Finn continued, “best walk out through the middle of fields, and be damned to the evil roads! That’s how I have survived into this my fifth decade.”

  “Ah …” The men stirred restlessly.

  The Doc, sensing he had withheld information too long, feeling his audience drift away, now snatched their attention back by straightening up briskly and exhaling.

  “Well!”

  The pub quickened into silence.

  “This chap here …” The Doc pointed. “Bruises, lacerations, and agonizing backaches for two weeks running. As for the other lad, however … ” And here the Doc let himself scowl for a long moment at the paler one there, looking rouged, waxed, and ready for final rites. “Concussion.”

  “Concussion!”

  The quiet wind rose and fell in the silence.

  “He’ll survive if we run him quick now to Maynooth Clinic. So whose car will volunteer?”

  The crowd turned as a body toward Timulty. I stared, remembering the front of Heeber Finn’s pub, where seventeen bicycles and one automobile were parked. “Mine!” cried Timulty. “Since it’s the only vehicle!”

  “There! A volunteer! Quick now, hustle this victim—gently!— to Timulty’s wreck!”

  The men reached out to lift the body, but froze when I coughed. I circled my hand to all and tipped my cupped fingers to my lips. All gasped in soft surprise. The gesture was hardly done when drinks foamed down the bar.

  “For the road!”

  And now even the luckier victim, suddenly revived, face like cheese, found a mug gentled to his hand with whispers.

  “Here, lad, here. Tell us …”

  “What happened, eh? Eh?”

  “Send,” gasped the victim. “Send for Father Leary. I need the Extreme Unction!”

  “Father Leary it is!” Nolan jumped and ran.

  “Get my wife,” husked the victim, “to call me three uncles and four nephews and my grandfather and Timothy Doolin, and you’re all invited to my wake!”

  “You was always a good sort, Peevey!”

  “There’s two gold coins put by in my best shoes at home. For me eyelids! There’s a third gold coin; buy me a fine black suit!”

  “It’s good as done!”

  “Be sure there’s plenty of whiskey. I’ll buy it meself!”

  There was a stir at the door.

  “Thank God,” cried Timulty. “It’s you, Father Leary. Father, quickly, you must give the Extremest form of Unction you ever gave!”

  “Don’t tell me my business!” said the priest in the door. “I got the Unctions, you provide the victim! On the double!”

  There was a cheer from the men as the victim was held high and run for the door where the priest directed traffic, then fled.

  With one body gone off the bar, the potential wake was over, the room empty save for myself, the Doc, the revived lad, and two softly cudgeling friends. Outside, you could hear the crowd putting the one serious result of the great collision into Timulty’s car.

  “Finish your drink,” the Doc advised.

  But I stood, looking numbly around at the pub: at the recovered bicyclist, seated, waiting for the crowd to come back and mill about him; seeing the blood-spotted floor, the two bicycles tilted near the door like props from a vaudeville turn, the dark night waiting outside with its improbable fog; listening to the roll and cadence and gentle equilibrium of these voices, balanced each in its own throat and environment.

  “Doctor,” I heard myself say as I placed the money on the bar, “do you often have auto wrecks—collisions between people in cars?”

  “Not in our town!” The Doc nodded scornfully east. “If you like that sort of thing, now, Dublin’s the very place!”

  Crossing the pub, the Doc took my arm as if to impart some secret which would change my fate. Thus stee
red, I found the stout inside me a shifting weight I must accommodate from side to side as the Doc breathed softly in my ear.

  “Look here now, son, admit it, you’ve traveled little in Ireland, right? Then listen! Biking to Maynooth, fog and ail, you’d best take it fast! Raise a din! Why? Scare the other cyclists and cows off the path, both sides! If you pump slow, why, you’ll creep up on and do away with dozens before they know what took them off! And another thing: when a bike approaches, douse your light—that is, if it’s working. Pass each other, lights out, in safety. Them devil’s own lights have put out more eyes and demolished more innocents than all of seeing’s worth. Is it clear now? Two things: speed, and douse your lights when bikes loom up!”

  At the door, I nodded. Behind me I heard the one victim, settled easy in his chair, working the stout around on his tongue, thinking, preparing, beginning his tale:

  “Well, I’m on me way home, blithe as you please, assailing downhill near the cross, when …”

  Outside, the Doc offered final advice.

  “Always wear a cap, lad, if you want to walk nights ever—on the roads, that is. A cap’ll save you the frightful migraines should you meet Kelly or Moran or anyone else hurtling full tilt the other way, full of fiery moss and hard-skulled from birth. Even on foot, these men are dangerous. So you see, there’s rules for pedestrians, too, in Ireland, and wear a cap at night is number one!” He handed me a cap.

  Without thinking, I took the brown tweed cap and put it on. Adjusting it, I looked out at the dark mist boiling across the night. I listened to the empty highway waiting for me ahead, quiet, quiet, quiet, but not quiet somehow. For hundreds of long strange miles up and down all of Ireland, I saw a thousand crossroads covered with a thousand fogs through which one thousand tweed-capped, gray-mufflered phantoms wheeled along in midair, singing, shouting, and smelling of Guiness stout.

  I blinked. The phantoms shadowed off. The road lay empty and dark and waiting.

  Taking a deep breath, I straddled my bike, pulled my cap down over my ears, shut my eyes, and pumped down the wrong side of the road toward some sanity never to be found.

  Chapter 5

  The door swung wide at my knock.