I was lost for words, none of them containing any hint of thanks, said,
“I’m lost for words.”
He was delighted, urged,
“Put it on.”
I figured he’d lost any vague semblance of sanity, tenuous as it was in the best of clerical years. I asked,
“You mean, like now?”
He did.
I didn’t put it on then or ever.
But was he finished. Was he fuck?
He reached into his priest suit (ash-sprinkled collar — at least I’d prefer to think ash rather than dandruff), took out a flashy decorated box and, I kid you not, with a freaking bow, said,
“’Tis to mark our bond.”
I admit to once seeing an episode of Friends, where Joey is wearing a godawful chunky bracelet and gives Chandler an identical one, saying cheerfully,
“We’re bracelet buddies.”
And Chandler ruefully concedes in horror with,
“And that’s what they’ll call us.”
I said,
“Can I open it later?”
Bitter disappointment flooded his face, so I said,
“I’ll open it.”
Did, to find a heavy hummingbird on a silver chain. He said,
“That bird marks the moment between life and the transition to eternal life.”
I said,
“Wow.”
Thinking,
Won’t eternal life for a suicide, especially a priest suicide, mean eternal roasting in hellfire?
I said,
“You’re full of surprises.”
He put a hand to my shoulder, said,
“This week is my birthday.”
The Ellison Epiphany (No. 5)
I was in my apartment reading The Weight by Andrew Vachss, an author who never ceases to amaze me. He is a
Stone warrior.
A granite poet.
Champion of the marginalized.
Never-ending pursuer of pedophiles.
He was that rare event, a writer I admired as much for his art as for his crusades for justice.
A gentle knock on my door. I almost didn’t hear it. Anyone comes to my door, they come banging and walloping. I opened the door to a waif, a pixie, a dote in miniature.
Ceola.
Keefer’s girlfriend. I had met her only once, when she hugged me at the farm and whispered she was so glad I was there. I’d felt then that something was seriously amiss but Keefer had run me off.
Now here she was.
Her face was tired, distressed. She was dressed in mid-Goth/grunge style: short battered black leather jacket, jeans with more holes than WikiLeaks, Doc Marten worn-to-bits boots, a T-shirt with a faded Brian Jones picture and the logo/question:
“Who murder-dah Brian?”
I thought it was simply a misspelling but learned later, after Ceola’s death, that it was patois.
I urged,
“Come in.”
She did.
She looked around, and I saw it briefly as she might, a basically bare space with a bookcase, books of course, my Garda coat on the one hook, large TV, boxed sets close by. She said,
“Pretty Zen.”
I said,
“Pretty poor, is what.”
She smiled, though her heart wasn’t much in there. I offered,
“Drink?”
She lit up, near gasped,
“Gosh, yes.”
Sounded like,
Golly gosh!
Her accent was mid-Atlantic with a tiny hint of newly acquired Irish lilt. I got us healthy drinks — in that I mean large pour, no ice. She took a fine dollop of hers, asked,
“Mind if I roll up?”
She meant actual tobacco and rolled a cig with fast practiced moves, then lit up with practiced ease. I waited until she was ready, then she said,
“Thank you for letting me in, for the drink, for...”
Paused.
“For not being a bollix.”
I smiled, asked,
“What’s on your mind?”
She finished the drink and cig, seemed to chill, then said,
“My real name is Ellison Riley. My mother is Romanian, my dad is Scottish.”
She continued,
“I was almost a professional violinist but dope got in the way.”
Then she smiled, added,
“Dopes too.”
I liked her sense of humor. She’d fucking need it.
I poured her another Jay and she knocked that back too. I didn’t advise caution. I mean, seriously, me? I asked again,
“What’s up?”
Sounding like a lame ejit, but I felt we were drifting off point.
She went very quiet then.
“Keefer has become besotted by Sara. He is convinced she is the daughter he never had and the sly bitch plays him like, if you’ll excuse the awful pun, a fiddle. She hates me, and I know because she told me so, said she would get rid of me ASAP. I can’t tell Keefer as he already thinks I’m jealous of her, which maybe I am. I had a Siamese cat named Concerto — do forgive all the musical references. Concerto was a gift from my old music tutor. I loved her like a baby.”
She stopped, then regrouped, said,
“You can guess the next bit.”
Alas, I could, said with a heavy heart,
“She killed the cat.”
A sob escaped her. She said,
“That knife with the serrated blade, she gutted her, then last night I woke to find her holding that blade to my throat. She whispered to me in Romanian. She is fluent in many tongues, none of them civil. She said,
“Leave tomorrow, cunt.”
Phew-oh.
I asked,
“What are you going to do now?”
She sighed deeply, said,
“I’m going to take a few days to pull myself together, then I’ll go back there, face the bitch down. I can’t leave Keefer with her. Eventually she’ll take him out. It seems to be her gig.”
I said,
“You could run.”
Sounded good to me.
No.
She wouldn’t do that, said,
“Romany blood doesn’t run.”
Then she looked directly at me, asked what I dreaded she would ask. She asked,
“Will you come with me?”
Ah, fuckit.
Less out of courage but more to not appear weak in her eyes, I said,
“I will.”
She threw her arms round me and near shouted,
“Thank you, Jack, thank you so.”
Everybody was hugging me these days, which made a change from them shooting at me though in some ways I was more comfortable with beatings.
Recently, I’d reread Donato Carrisi’s The Whisperer.
Those lines hit me like truth,
“You have to be careful with illusionists. Sometimes evil deceives us by assuming the simplest form of things.” I thought of Sara and her Guatemalan blue light trick.
Sara posing as a child. What could be simpler?
Carrisi had added,
“The details, the nuances, the shadow surrendering things, the dark halo in which evil hides”
“The dark halo” described the aura of Sara to a chilling degree.
A Stained White Radiance.
James Lee Burke.
The above title suggested so many things, but mainly innocence corrupted and, for some oblique reason, it spelled out Malachy in all his misguided actions.
The very echo of those words reduced me to a state of lost despair.
Malachy’s birthday was fast approaching, and I had to kill him?
Kill a priest, even if that’s what he wanted?
I was forever damned in troubled faith, as the poet Ciannath De Brun had written. And damned in every spiritual fashion under a judgmental sky.
Why I drank.
Ceola had gone to chill in Oughterard, a tranquil place of cozy pubs and friendly locals. When she returned we’d head to Keefer’s... and kill Sara?