I was pretending not to have heard the story. “He’s forgotten something?” I asked innocently.
“His focking dog!” Gerry could not resist interfering with Liam’s story. “He’s forgotten his focking dog!”
“Who’s telling this focking tale?” Liam’s indignation overcame his timidity.
“Keep your focking hair on!”
“Dog?” I asked.
“Aye!” Liam looked back to me. “The wee fella’s got a dog, see, and the dog focking worships the wee fella, and the dog sees this bomb sailing away toward the focking Brits and the dog thinks, that’s a stick, so it is! He thinks it’s a game of fetch, see? So the dog runs after the bomb, because he thinks it’s a game. But it isn’t! It’s a focking bomb! And the fuse is smoking and even the focking Brits are laughing by now! And the crowd screams at the focking dog, leave it alone, fock away off, but the dog’s got the bomb in its teeth now, see, and it’s carrying the bomb back to its wee master, and the crowd is all running away, so they are, and the dog’s wee tail is wagging like mad, and the wee boy is running like fock, and his ma is screaming at him to get a focking move on before he’s blown to focking bits, and the harder the wee boy runs the quicker the dog runs after him.” Liam paused to cuff tears of laughter from his eyes. He was laughing so much he could hardly articulate the punch line. “And then the focking bomb goes bang!”
“Oh, Mother of God, but did it fock!” Gerry put in.
“There was focking dog-scraps everywhere!” Liam was still half helpless with laughter. “There was bits of dog on the focking roofs! There was dogmeat everywhere!”
“Oh Christ, but did we laugh!” Gerry slapped the saloon table in applause for his friend’s story.
“No one was hurt,” Liam said.
“Except the dog,” Gerry said, and started laughing again.
“The wee fella forgot about his dog, you see?” Liam wanted to make sure I had understood all the tale’s nuances. Above us the wind sighed in Corsaire’s rigging and stirred the ketch’s long white-painted hull and slapped a halyard in mournful clangor against the aluminium mast. The companionway hatch was open, giving me a view of the high stars and a single wisp of elongated, moonlit cloud.
Gerry took a long drink of whiskey, then poured himself another mugful. “It’s funny you being an American,” he said at last.
“Is it?”
“Aye, it is,” he said truculently. “I mean you going to live in Ireland and all that. Jasus, if I had the chance I wouldn’t leave America, not to go to Belfast! No way! I’d stay in America. Get a job, make some money, eh?” He seemed to realize that he had already destroyed any hopes he might ever have possessed of making a normal existence; hopes of a job, a wife, children, of the small happinesses that make the world go round.
“I had a cousin that moved to America.” Liam, emboldened by the success of his last story, spoke in the expectant tone of a man telling a joke. “Landed at the New York Airport, so he did, and his uncle met him off the plane, and they was walking out of the airport door and there was this hundred-dollar bill lying on the pavement. Just lying there, so it was! ‘Well, pick it up!’ his uncle says. ‘Go on, lad, pick it up!’ And my cousin looks him straight in the eye and he says, ‘I’ve only just got here and you expect me to start work already?’” Liam waited for me to laugh, then grinned proudly when I did.
Gerry flickered a dutiful smile, but the thought of America and all its bright hopes that were beyond his reach had depressed him. “We used to make a lot of money off the Yanks,” he said wistfully. “We used to sell them rubber bullets! They’d pay a lot of money for a rubber bullet to put on their mantelpiece.” The black bullets, thick phallic missiles designed to incapacitate rather than to kill, were fired by British troops on riot control duty and had become a prized souvenir of the Troubles. I remembered a canny man in Derry who had set up a useful garden-shed business carving fake rubber bullets from old truck tires. He claimed to have sold a couple of hundred of the counterfeits before the Provisionals, realizing they were losing market share, had threatened to put real bullets in his kneecaps if he did not stop his trade. “And there was a game we used to play with the Yanks,” Gerry said after a while.
“A game?” I asked.
“You know, mister, with the Yanks who used to visit Belfast to see a bit of the Troubles. I mean they were good fellas, so they were! They gave us money, but of course they wanted to see a bit of the action, didn’t they? There was no focking point in flying all the way to Northern Ireland not to see a wee bit of aggravation.”
“So what was the game?” I knew the answer, but they were enjoying their moment of telling me tales and it would have been churlish to deny them the pleasure.
Liam, the more articulate of the two, took up the story. “We used to meet them in a bar, right, and ask if they wanted to meet the IRA. They didn’t know we were the IRA, did they? How could they? I mean, if you told every stray Yank that you was in the movement then you might as well tell the focking Brits. So of course the Yanks would always say yes, I mean why else were they there? They’d come all the way from Boston or Chicago to give us a wee bit of support, to pat us on the back, like, and slip us a dollar or two, so of course they wanted to meet the Provisional IRA soldiers. So we used to tell them, go to such-and-such a house at ten o’clock next morning. We’d give them the address, it was always an abandoned house, one of those that had been half burned out like, and we’d say that some of the boys were meeting there before going off to plant a bomb or shoot a soldier.”
“You could tell a Yank anything,” Gerry put in. “They’d believe you!”
“They wanted to believe, you see,” Liam, who did not want me to feel slighted, explained helpfully.
“So what happened?” I asked, as if Seamus Geoghegan had not told me this exact same story ten years before.
“Well, they’d go, of course,” Liam said, “and sometimes their wives with them, because the women are just the same. They’d be all excited like! I mean they were going to meet the real IRA! They were going to meet the heroes! But what they didn’t know was that we’d phoned the focking Brits on the security line, you know what the security line is?”
“Of course he focking knows!” Gerry put in. The security line was a telephone number that anyone could call to lay anonymous information against the terrorists. A machine answered the call and no names were asked, which meant that more than a few personal scores were settled courtesy of the security forces.
Liam grinned. “So we’d phone the focking Brits and we’d say that some Provos were meeting at such-and-such a house at quarter past ten the next morning, and then we’d ring off. Well, you can imagine what happened!”
“Tell me.”
“The Yanks would turn up”—Liam was grinning at the sheer cleverness of the ploy—“and they’d wait there, and the next thing they’d know there was a focking patrol of focking Brits, all scared out of their focking wits because they thought it might be a focking ambush, and the focking Brits would hammer into the house like it was D-Day and all they’d find was the Yanks there! But the Brits wouldn’t know they were Yanks, not straight away! They thought they were our lads! So they’d knock them about a bit, you know, give them a focking good kicking!” Liam laughed and shook his head. “It always worked! The Brits fell for it every focking time, and of course the Yanks would go home and say how focking brutal the focking Brits was, and they’d never know it was the IRA that aranged the kicking for them! And when they got home they’d send us even more money! Especially if one of their womenfolk got a hammering! Jasus! It was like stealing sweets off a baby.” He chuckled, then looked wistful. “They were good times. The best.”