Silence.
Then, irritated,
“Got it?”
“I’m only partially deaf. Is the boy okay?”
A nasty chuckle, then,
“Okay? He’s fucked is what he is.”
Click.
Five long minutes, I counted every damn second, then my doorbell rang. Opened to find the boy unconscious on a sleeping bag, dressed in a white tracksuit, bruising on his face. I called a cab, then his mother, who was hysterical. I said,
“I found Joffrey, am rushing him to the hospital.”
Deep intakes of breath, then she asked,
“Is he alive?”
“Yes, a bit banged up but he’ll be fine.”
Yeah, right.
I clicked off, picked up the boy, blood congealed on the bottom of the boy’s pants. I daren’t think on that, got him to the cab, managed to ignore the driver’s barrage of questions.
The hospital was pandemonium. A hysterical grateful Marion, suspicious Guards, worried doctors. Within a short time the press arrived and the Guards had to extract me from a babble of reporters.
Whisked to Mill Street, the Guards’ headquarters. Shoved, pushed into the office of the new superintendent.
A woman.
In her late forties, with blond hair tied in one of those severe buns that screams: I am not a sexual being. Her face had the requisite hard edges that cautioned,
“Do not even think about fucking with me.”
She said,
“I am Mary Wilson.”
A thug / sergeant was right behind me, breathing curry chips on my neck. I said,
“I didn’t even know you left the Supremes.”
Bang.
From the thug.
It hurt.
I said,
“If this moron hits me again, I will come across the desk and he’ll have to beat me senseless to subdue me. Then how will the press like that the boy’s rescuer had the shit kicked out of him?”
An eye signal to the ape, who moved to my side.
She asked,
“How did you find the boy?”
“Through the very grace of God.”
I managed to move fast to my side to avoid the intended heavy blow to my ribs.
Wilson said,
“Your story reeks. If I find you are connected in any way you are in deep shit. Now get out.”
As they pushed me to the door, I managed,
“Was Diana Ross really a diva?”
The press surrounded me, a gallon of questions until I managed to get into a cab, told the driver,
“McSwiggans.”
As I got out, reached for my wallet, the driver said,
“No charge. You’re a hero.”
Fuck.
Silence
is
the
last
dance
of
the
Disenchanted.
22
Michael Ian Allen.
They called him the Silence.
Meaning, he was usually the last thing you ever heard.
He was the only child of an Irish mother, American father, grew up in Watertown, Boston.
Quiet
Studious
Religious.
A Catholicism verging on fundamentalism instilled in him a fierce passion. He seemed destined for the priesthood but that other organization the Marines claimed him first.
He was a fine soldier, if not outstanding.
Until
Two patrols in Fallujah.
Both patrols were wiped out. He was the sole survivor — if just still breathing counted as life.
His initials had been almost a foreboding.
Some essential part of him had been MIA.
Chess and a warped sense of assisting those who were unable to help themselves lodged in what had been his soul. On leave, he had
2
4
J
Tattooed on his arm.
He wasn’t entirely sure what his mission was until by chance he read an article about a man who tormented his family, received a slap on the wrist from the court.
“Pawns.”
He thought.
Victims who had no recourse to justice.
He’d be their advocate. His sense of definition varied from going after a man who beat his son in a supermarket to a bully who taunted a fat girl on the street. A crash of sounds roared in his head, the explosion of the Humvee.
With that first doomed patrol to the shrieks of the second as a mortar fired on them. Such times he physically shook his head to plead for ease.
A brief visit to the West of Ireland, land of his mother’s people, led to a chance encounter with Pierre Renaud, who had come across Allen curled in a terrorized ball on the shores of Lough Corrib. Renaud had sat with him and gently soothed him down to a quiet green platform and whispered to him,
“Le silence est magnifique.”
A rare confluence of events:
Kindness
The soft words in a soft French
Compassion
Created
A jellying of benevolent quiet in the mind of Michael Allen.
Renaud had gone further... provided a small cottage in the wild of Connemara.
Many weekends the duo spent fishing, hunting, and just finding a solace in each other’s company. One late Sunday evening, the men, tired from a day of hiking along the mountain trails, sat outdoors, sipping pure poteen, a turf fire fresh from the very bog they had traversed, when Allen said,
“You seem troubled, my friend.”
Renaud, prodding the fire into a blaze, said,
“My sons plan to kill me.”
He explained years of rebellion, bad behavior, insufferable attitudes, resulting in the twins’ becoming obsessed with the Menendez brothers. Renaud thought they were just adding another layer of abuse to irk their father.
They had the books, documentaries on the trial and eventual jailing of the two young killers. Mocking their father with comments like
“The difference is we won’t get caught.”
Their mother, a drunk, refused to see or heed anything that was less than one hundred percent proof. He had managed to find a way to live that had him work every hour he could until...
Until.
He was searching the garage for old tax returns when he came across two brand-new shotguns.
Allen had listened with no interruptions.
When Renaud finally wound down, he was weeping softly. Allen asked,
“What do you want to do?”
A sudden wave of anger crossed Renaud’s face. He spat,
“I want them to go away.”
So it was.
All islanders, no matter what their ethnicity,
live with a certain kind of longing.
(John Straley)
23
Harley, the documentary maker, was frustrated.
He was sitting in the Quays, on his second vodka, staring at Raoul, his camera guy. Raoul was, in fact, the whole crew.
The filming had been going well. He’d hired Jimmy Norman Media to get some very fine aerial shots of Galway at night. Norman Media used drones to huge effect.
Harley had been impressed but hid it from Jimmy lest he wanted payment then. Harley had perfected the fine art of never
Ever
Paying anybody.
He’d told Jimmy,
“Soon as the American money hits, you’re first to be paid.”
Jimmy had smiled, used to Galway shenanigans, said,
“No problem. I’ll hold on to the footage until then.”