“You performed in Las Vegas and the family never knew?”
“I used a deliberately corny performance name, ‘The Mystifying Max’.”
“Max? Where’d that come from?”
Max pursed his lips in a smile and waited.
“Oh, no! Not those awful middle and confirmation names.”
“Yup. Michael Aloysius Xavier.”
“And I’m Sean Owen Turlough. MAX, huh? Way better than SOT.”
Max started laughing. They’d get going on an absurdity as teens and laugh themselves silly. Some of that back and forth was coming back. “Owen Turlough, really? It sounds like Turdlough. Forgot about that. And who can pronounce Aloysius?”
“Al-low-ish-is. It has ‘Ish’ built in. ‘The mystifying Alo-ee-see-us’ does not have a ring to it, and you sound like a drunk when you say it.”
“On the other hand, SOT is an apt set of initials for an Irishman,” Max said.
“Then let’s have another brew,” Sean said, still laughing.
“What about the women in the other room?”
“Let ’em drink tea.” Sean pried open two more bottles and handed him one.
“I mean, Sean, Kathleen is a loaded pistol. She led me to you only to hurt us both. She may have killed a bunch of people.”
“Deirdre knew how to handle her then, and she can do it even better now. We noticed a strange rental car lurking in the neighborhood a few weeks ago. Now I realize it was her. Is this her way of punishing you for pursuing the terrorists instead of the Black Velvet Band?”
“Yes. You know that song?”
“Every Irishman does.” Sean crinkled his eyes to regard Max. “‘Her eyes they shone like the diamonds…’ Damn, but they did.”
Max heard the next lines in his head. And her hair hung down to her shoulders, tied up with black velvet band.
Sean was still smiling at the memory. “You literally left your home and your family, like the song said, to follow…not the Black Velvet Band, but a course in counterterrorism. In a contrary way, you fulfilled our teenage quest, to contribute to the Irish cause.” He ticked bottles with Max. “Here’s to peace and the only terrorism-resolved country in the world. Our beautiful love, Ireland. And I fulfilled our quest to find Irish roots and love of the Old Country.”
Max nodded, too touched to speak. Sean’s spirit and laughter had made his injuries fade already.
Sean clicked bottles again. “And to those who perished in the good fight to end all fights. “You’ve had quite the James Bond run, Mike. I mean, Max. I’m sorry about your mentor’s death. Who killed him? Was it what’s left of the IRA?”
“I don’t know. Maybe ‘retired’ IRA members with long memories or the so-called ‘Real IRA’, which remains a paramilitary organization and attacks drug dealers and criminal gangs. ‘The Troubles’ of a thousand years of discrimination and oppression to the point of genocide doesn’t end with a clean edge. I should warn you. Kathleen O’Conner found you and told me you were alive. She’s been stalking me and anyone I can vaguely call mine for the last year or two. The IRA winning an age-old battle and the resulting member retirement comes hard for a psychopath.”
“She’s still lethal? Kathleen?” Sean started up from the stool.
“Nothing Deirdre can’t handle, as you said,” Max reassured him. “I made sure of that before I left them together.”
“So. You nailed her that day of the pub bomb, really?”
“Sean, that’s crude.”
“Yes, but it what was we both wanted and you got it.”
“It shouldn’t have happened. She was terminally damaged, from long before we met her.”
“Aren’t we all?” He looked hard at Max, both sides of his face exposed. “You pity her.”
Max lowered his head. Nodded. “Hers is one of the more horrendous stories from the hell that was the Magdalene laundries. Asylums, they called them, and those imprisoned there certainly courted madness. She’s expecting our reunion to savage both our wounds. Can you imagine that kind of…anger and pain?”
“I’ve spent my time in hell asking why me and therefore why not my best friend? It took years to grow up and realize that was unworthy of me, and you, and the God we profess to follow, including in the Way of the Cross. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Humankind is capable both of uplifting and casting down and will suffer for either. Our job is to do better than expected. Let’s disappoint the poor girl. I’m grateful she found me, and that you cared enough to find me. I’m grateful you see the me beneath life’s scars. I’m grateful we’re alive and can quit kicking our own asses for long-ago misconceptions.”
Max got up to clink bottles together. “Nothing like some Irish beer to banish the crud of almost twenty years. To union and reunion.”
Sean’s grin was back, the one that made him look like Huck Finn. “To Deirdre and Ireland. I love it here, Max. I love maintaining the place and the land. The sunsets almost knock your eyes out. I wouldn’t change anything.”
They stood at the same time. Sean looked shocked. “My Gawd, I believe you’ve grown two or three inches since we were last together.”
“Probably. Perhaps it’s the rack Kathleen’s had me on. What are we going to do about her?”
“Go and see if Deirdre has had to hog-tie her.”
“Seriously?”
“We keep some sheep to shear. Sure, a bit of a thing like Kathleen is lighter than any ewe.”
“As kids, we always longed for Ireland long distance, Sean.” Max nodded. “And you’ve got it, in a time of more peace than ever before.”
“In fact, I had a role in some of those discussions, but I’m retired now, and content.”
“I envy you.”
“Retirement?”
“Contentment.” Max slapped his palms on his unlikely jeans, plain and strong, like the life Sean had made for himself.
They returned to the front lounge, where the big American “picture window” of the ’50s made an Old-World barn into a modern HGTV viewing palace.
The landscape as dimming, the distant blue hills almost luminescent. Flowing waves of shades of green were darkening and melding together. A peachy glow edged Ireland’s western land mass that served as the selvage edge of England and Europe. This was the bookend to Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” described in his Odyssey, Max thought, only this was sunset. He felt that his own odyssey was almost coming to an end.
He caught himself glancing at Kathleen, whom he caught in the same act. The scenic beauty was too overpowering not to share. This embodied the “terrible beauty” of Ireland and the Irish cause to be free of England, as the poet Yeats had called it, thinking of the woman he’d loved, Maud Gonne, a patriot so fierce she declined his love.
Deirdre stood, her tall, sturdy, rounded form reminding Max of a mother goddess. “Sean is cooking dinner. I’ll get him started and bring us all a glass of Madeira to toast the sunset. These are the most beautiful in the world.”
In the picture window the white wrought-iron table and chair set glowed with an unearthly light-lavender shade, as white objects did in the black lights of a strip club stage. Kathleen’s pale face shared the halo effect.
Max grinned at his own comparison. Strip club? Wild, Northern Ireland was the antithesis of pop culture sleaze. Everything…the air, the view, the light, the surrounding sea was so clean it could have been etched on the mind and emotions like a laser light, like the famous Waterford Irish crystal.
Deirdre had approached on silent feet over the rug and set delicate glasses on the large square coffee table in front of the modern sectional sofa.
“I’ll be wi’ you in a minum,” she said, backing away like the clouds shrouding the horizon.
Alone together.