“Leave her alone.” Joe pulled himself from the bed. “She’s American. Doesn’t know shit about what’s going on here.”
“I’m bringing you both in.”
My hands shook and my chin quivered. The officers’ arrival had me torn between relief and fear. Their accents sounded imperial and brutish after a week of the melodious Irish. Joe pulled a second sweater from his bag and put it on. I picked up my wool coat, but it was soaking wet and covered in fine pieces of glass. I threw it on the floor and grabbed a sweater from my opened suitcase. The three policemen and the landlord led us down the hall, down the damp stairs, and out onto the crowded street.
All eyes and fingers pointed to us, people pushed and shoved us, shouted obscenities as we drove away. My brain, cleared of the naiveté of the simpering new wife, replayed, almost at a mental distance, what had gone on that night — the insistence and negotiation for the ferry ride during a gale, the meeting on the deck, the suddenly appearing slicker, the hurry to the waiting car, intense drive, hotel instead of the house, his return from the corner, covering his head, the sickness, fear... that metal case. That was where my mind stopped. No matter how I urged it on, how I tried to think beyond, how much I tried to see a clear path to a solution, every thought became muddled within what had just happened, where I was, how I got there. We sat in silence as we sped through the countryside, a Nazi-esque siren screaming loudly. I felt like a war criminal in some old movie.
Joe took my hand. “I didn’t do it.”
I pulled away. Joe looked larger to me, more straggly, his sweater hand-knitted and worn. I couldn’t remember when he had changed from shoes to black boots, from trousers to jeans. How could he look like a computer specialist one hour and a terrorist the next?
We entered the station together. It smelled like the Grays Harbor Police Station. They registered us, took our fingerprints. As they did, Joe hollered, “Better watch your steps, mates. She’s an American, and she’s my wife.”
An older cop in plain clothes came into the station. “Ah, one of the Donnelly’s. Joe, right?” He became serious. “How long you two been married?”
With a chuckle, Joe answered, “About a day.”
“You Donnelly’s get the best alibis. Your brother is still about, I see, even though we got him locked up. How’s our lovely Bridget? Still in the explosives business?”
“I had nothing to do with this. I don’t know about my fookin’ brother.”
Muddled... I had to think back to our first night. Surely he had told me his brother was dead. The rebel’s grave and all.
“That’s what they always say, Joseph Patrick Donnelly, and always, always, a Donnelly is where it happens.”
“Lookit, man, I’m really sick. I need to lie down. I don’t do explosives. I’m here for that factory in Kildare and you know it.”
This was the nightmare that had been waiting for me since childhood — defenseless, surrounded by lies, explosions, strangers, imprisoned in damp, dark rooms.
“Just think, Colleen,” Joe shouted as they dragged him toward a cell. “God came looking for you and he found me. Funny how that happens with people who...”
I never heard the rest.
Mark Mayer
The Clown
from American Short Fiction
The clown counted his murders as he drove the new couple to the house on Rocking Horse Lane. Not few. The Lexus needed air again, according to the little orange light, the man in his passenger seat was offering original commentary on the Clintons, and behind the clown’s left eye a toothache and an earache were collaborating. Not few at all, and some of the murders had been admirably painful, admirably patient. Outside the Lexus it was seventy-two degrees in October, and inside the Lexus, according to a different screen, it was also seventy-two degrees, the car’s climate system blowing hard even so. The clown hated the Lexus and was wearing a blazer he’d bought to match it. In the backseat, the woman, very pregnant, was picking her teeth with the aid of her phone. The clown’s mouth — thirsty — tasted like waffle fries and crispy chicken sandwich, and so did all the rest of him. Salt, grease, a synthetic drive-thru savor — he was likely composed of it by now. No matter how many times he sucked the straw the soda was still out.
“We hate to leave the downtown,” the man, Seamus, was saying again. “Our apartment is five minutes from Pinche Taco, five minutes from Cerebral Brewing, like two minutes from Über Dog, but how fast I got her pregnant, we’re going to need rooms.”
“Congratulations,” said the clown, shaking his ice. Any kind of knife murder, some hooks, some rod-and-fire stuff. One dehydration. He tried to recognize himself, his life and effort, in the résumé, but it was like he’d consigned his life effort to a secret man. What was left ate waffle fries, sold houses, awaited the secret man’s return.
But he had a good feeling about this couple. Early thirties, Apple Watches, fecund. He wanted to kill them. That was something. The woman, Eliza, was very quiet. All she had said since the place on Ridgeway Row was “Hi, Daddy” when they passed a trim tort lawyer’s billboard. Seamus was lavishly freckled, in an overlaundered polo probably assigned to lazy weekend wear, curling collar leaning toward the postnuptial paunch.
The houses on Vinci Park and Ridgeway Row, where the air still smelled of other people’s lentil soup, had been staged disappointments, unmowed drabnesses after which 404 Rocking Horse would gleam like a mirror. It was the perfect place for Eliza and Seamus; Eliza and Seamus were the perfect pair for it. The clown had been preparing this for a while.
“We’re thinking high fours, maybe low fives,” Seamus was lowballing already. “They’re reviewing me for associate sooner than anyone in my cohort, so it’s not that. I’m just not ready for the house yet, you know?”
The clown did know. The man wanted granite counters, sectional couches, a pop-up soccer goal. There was time yet for Japanese fountains. He wanted the yard the kid could mow for iTunes money, not the one that needed a koi specialist. Happiness was not so hard to engineer for the typical, but it did no good to say it. The house on Rocking Horse would speak for him, a three-bedroom with a power study and a crafts room with a guest loft. You had to let the clients spin twice in a living room and recognize themselves. Not just themselves — the selves they knew and also latent selves they just suspected. Only then, when they saw their books in the cases and their mugs in the cabinet, could the murderer emerge from the basement, where he’d been waiting all along.
“Downtown, it’s fun and all, but it’s not safe for Eliza or the kid. All the money the city has now, you think they’d clean that shit out. Our alleyway, every morning someone’s given them all hot coffee and doughnuts. These bums are glamping.”
The clown, forty-eight, amicably divorced, amicably depressed, real-estate licensed, was aware that he was a type too. Apart from murder, his interests were no less predictable than Seamus’s. He’d offered lunch after the Ridgeway place — he often took clients out — but now he was thinking about Tums — he loved Tums — about gin, about juice cleanses, about smothering Seamus’s face with the wet side of Seamus’s scalp. He rarely spoke his mind. He let his thoughts imbue his smile.
He’d set about it in earnest ten years ago, full sails with research and planning, whiteface and greasepaint, professional grade, learned to accentuate a menace, if there was one, already present in his face. The wig had cost a fortune, real hair, bruised strawberry, but it had lasted. The teeth too, cutlery porcelain, filed, stained. Ought to be tax deductible. The nails he made himself with molded tin. It took most of an hour to put it all on, but people did react — more so than they would to rubber stuff, he hoped. “That tall building over there would be your closest hospital, if anything happens,” he said. “Terrific obstetrics center, though I’m sure you’ve already made plans. There’s the Whole Foods coming up and here’s a mosque, should you be needing one of those. I believe it would be your polling place were you to move before the election.”