Blood From A Shadow (2012) Read online

  When we had first landed in Iraq, I started to get a bad feeling when something big was going to happen. It was a swirling cloud of dark energy bursting out of my head, but nobody else could see it except me. It spooked me at the start but I grew to see it as my special armor. In the end, I think that’s what got me through when others didn’t make it. As I shouldered scowling Eddie aside and turned into 34th Street, the angry spasm was frothing into full blossom in my head, like the white Rose of Jericho that resurrects itself under the Shamal winds scorching across the Iraqi desert.

  Madison Square Garden loomed over me, I knew I would kill again soon, I knew I had been kicked in the balls.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Duffin sent me my ticket, a new passport, a cellphone, a credit card in my name, $500 and two grand in European currency. Gallogly was to pick me up at 5pm and take me to JKF, so I left Hoboken before lunchtime, caught the bus to the Port Authority station and was in Grand Central before the prick was out of bed. I hopped the Harlem Line Metro to Woodlawn and then quickened my step as I got closer to McLean Avenue. These were the streets that sheltered me in my youth, but I wasn’t there to reminisce.

  I still had the key to the apartment but didn’t feel free to use it. I rang the bell and waited for Rose to answer. The door popped. I went in and took the stairway. I half expected her to have changed the door, maybe a new color, but no, it was the same flaking brown. It was open, I stepped into the hallway.

  “Rose, it’s me,” I called.

  No answer, but I could hear cupboard doors being thrown closed in the tight kitchen. I went in. Rose stirred a boiling pot with one hand and punched the buttons to start the microwave with the other. She didn’t speak and didn’t look at me.

  “I wasn’t sure you would let me in,” I said.

  “What’s in your bag?” she asked.

  “I’m going on a trip. I just thought I should come and see you and young Con before I left,” I said.

  “I heard, you can get yourself together to go to Ireland for that little shit McErlane, but you’re still too damaged to see your own child?” she said.

  “Is young Con here?” I asked.

  She snatched the holdall out of my hand and dumped it on the table. She ripped the zip roughly and rummaged through the few things I had packed. I was embarrassed.

  “You’re not going there like a tramp,” she said.

  She reached under a table and pulled out a bag I recognised.

  “Here, put your shaving gear in there,” she said.

  She had pressed and packed my best clothes. Fuck Gallogly, he had told her.

  Rose knocked off the microwave and pulled the pot off the stove.

  She was still dark and beautiful. Her father liked the story that said the Spanish landed in Ireland on their way to the New World and had left their Latin blood with his family.

  “Young Con isn’t here, then,” I tried again.

  “Maybe you passed him out on the street, maybe you didn’t recognise your own son,” she said.

  She was dark and beautiful but tired and strained. I did that to her.

  “I don’t want to go, but I have to do it for Mrs McErlane, she has no-one else left,” I said.

  “You’re an asshole, Maknazpy!” she shouted. “You think I don’t fucking know you? You’re so fucking special, aren’t you? You just can’t wait to be the big hero again. Well fuck Sarah McErlane, who does your own son have?”

  She was angry. I did that to her as well.

  “I’m sorry, Rose. I can’t explain it. You and young Con are all I care about, but I just need to be on my own right now. It doesn’t mean I feel any different about you.”

  “And we just sit tight until you decide it suits you to come home?”

  “Just try to understand what I’m going through here” I said. “I’ll work it out, but I just don’t feel ready to come home yet.”

  She grabbed the lid of the boiling pot and threw it at me with all her anger. I dodged it, set it back on the table.

  “I’m busting my balls to keep your 15 year old son out of trouble,” she screamed at me. “You walk out on us but the only thing that matters are your feelings. Like, what will poor Mrs McErlane think about you, is your wife cheating on you, has your son forgotten about you. It’s all you, you, you, isn’t Con? Always has been, always will be. So don’t give me any of that ‘wounded hero getting his life together’ shit, that’s just your excuse today, ok?”

  I was always pathetic against her razor wire voice, so backed off and sought cover in young Con’s room. It hadn’t changed either, except the photograph of me being presented with my Silver Star wasn’t framed on his bedside table. It wasn’t anywhere. I wrote my new cellphone number down and left it by his pillow. “Call me if you need me”, my note said. I hoped that was enough.

  Rose was waiting when I turned back out of the room. She pressed her lovely body against me, her cheek against my chest.

  “You are such an asshole, Maknazpy, just stay home, don’t let them kiss your ass so you get into any more shit.”

  “They’re paying me $10,000 to do this, most of it I’ll bring back to you,” I said.

  She reached up to kiss me, but I froze. I don’t know why I did that, I needed her then more than ever but I just couldn’t show it. She pushed me away before I could think of the right thing to say, slamming the bathroom door behind her.

  “Get out of here before Con gets home, this isn’t the life for you anymore,” she shouted, then chinked the door open, “and stop calling him ‘Young’ Con. He doesn’t like it, he says he is his own man now, he isn’t ‘young’ anybody. How does that make you feel, huh?”

  I turned slowly, trying to lock the scene into my mind’s eye. I breathed in deeply to capture as much of her perfume as I could, then slipped out, relieved at avoiding another farewell to my son.

  * * *

  Belfast International airport wasn’t really what I had expected. Our shadow slanted over a stretch of gray water that I thought was the sea but turned out to be a lake. The fields ringing the airport were small, a skewed knot of twisting shapes and shades. The leached light made them a hash of strained greens and sickly browns, and the dislocated boundaries made this countryside seem transient, as if the plans had been lost. The pilot banked, my spatial orientation scrambled some more.

  The “International” airport was smaller than some bus stations in the United States, but at least it was easy to find my way out. I found a line of taxis. Four drivers ignored me as they chatted, too busy to look my way.

  “Can I get a taxi to Armagh from here,” I said.

  “American? New York?” the most obese said. He was at least 60 pounds overweight, most of it hanging off his thick head and neck.

  “I’m going to Armagh, how much is that?” I asked.

  Fatso looked to his comrades for inspiration. They were stony faced, but I could see the greed in their eyes.

  “That would be PS90 to you, sir,” said Fatso.

  “PS90, that’s the same as Euro, right?” I said, showing my wad of new European notes.

  “Wrong, sir,” he said. “They use Euro in the Republic of Ireland, but you are on British soil now, Northern Ireland, we only use British money.”

  I could hear the other drivers snigger as Fatso’s easy mark turned and walked away.

  Trains don’t run from this airport and the buses don’t go to Armagh, so I jumped on a blue and white Ulsterbus Express to take me the fifteen miles to Belfast City Centre.

  We were about to pull out of the main entrance when the driver spotted another bus coming in the opposite direction, into the airport. The two express buses stopped, windows opened and the drivers launched into a serious dialogue—something about a supervisor who shouldn’t be in the job, didn’t know what he was doing, that sort of thing. Cars backed up in both directions. Like bus drivers everywhere, the two guys didn’t hear the horns or see the headlights flashing at them, they carried on their conversation.


  I was getting restless myself and about to tell him to move it when a motorcycle cop glided to a halt directly opposite our bus. Police Service Northern Ireland, it said on his BMW. Ferdy had told me stories about the cops here. Two of his uncles, his mother’s younger brothers, had been caught and executed by cops on a lonely country road back in the 1980’s or 90’s. Forty slugs in the two guys, one hundred or more bullet holes in their automobile. They were young guys, younger than Ferdy was when he was ambushed.

  The cop couldn’t muster enough swagger himself, so he revved up a growl on the motorcycle. The drivers pretended they had finished anyway, and moved off. Our driver edged slowly past the cop so that he couldn’t fail to see the driver flip the bird. I felt at home already.

  Thirty minutes later, we were in Belfast city. The driver shouted “Dickhead” at a taxi-driver blocking the entrance to the bus station, but smiled “Thank you”, “Enjoy your stay” or “Good luck” to each of his passengers as we got off the bus. He went off to find out about a bus to Armagh for me and came back quickly. There was one in twenty minutes, from right over there.

  I had left Hoboken almost 24 hours ago. I was tired and hungry and that was excuse enough for me to put off the moment I would have to see Ferdy’s mother again. I found a hotel beside the bus station. A guy in livery held the door, I fished out Duffin’s credit card again and five minutes later I was in a fine corner room at the end of a dark corridor. The room had floor to ceiling windows on the two sides that overlooked the city from this 6th floor. Most of the surrounding buildings were only two stories high, the ground floor usually some sort of shop, and the upper floor an office, or even derelict. Like the fields near the airport, it looked as if everything here just happened at random, nothing had worked out the way it had been planned. The streets were limp and drab but there was one spot of sunshine, on a blue hill stacked above the city, maybe three or four miles from my window.

  I had a shave with Hendrix blasting “Hey Joe” on the radio. I turned the shower to cold and sucked up the sweet painful sensation as the large shower head pulsed me back to that waterfall in the Hudson Valley where Gallogly, Ferdy and I goofed one day when Gallogly had stolen an Italian guy’s Audi.

  I unpacked my bag and folded the clothes away in the deep drawers. I didn’t need to, I would be leaving early the next day, but it gave me the excuse to feel the things that Rose had touched, that smelt like her own clothes, that meant she hadn’t completely given up on me, despite everything I had done to her.

  I never contacted Rose when I was at home, but it felt easier here, with the Atlantic ocean as a buffer. I took the escalator back down to the ground floor and found the hotel bar. Did the pretty red head waitress know how to send a text message to New York? Of course, her boyfriend was an intern at Morgan Chase on Park Avenue, in Emerging Markets. Would she follow him?

  “Maybe, I was at Columbia last year,” she said. “But I’ve friends in London, they’re having a great time, I might go there first.”

  She served me a Gin Martini in a Fred Astaire glass and I settled into one of the tight little cubicles that looked over the sidewalk. I sent a text to Rose. “In Ireland, thanks for clothes, don’t worry, things will be better”. It meant more than it said, I thought she would realise that, and maybe Con would understand later.

  My footloose red head was busying herself behind the bar counter and chatting to a silver haired French lady about the terrible rise in prices. I hoped the intern would get himself a good job on Wall St, because I didn’t think she would be here waiting on him. I didn’t know if Rose would wait on me, but at least I knew that she would never move far from Yonkers now, she had stopped being footloose a long time ago, and for that I was both guilty and glad.

  * * *

  I left the hotel and turned left, towards the hill. The streets here weren’t like the New York grid, but I kept in the right direction. I was at the top maybe an hour and thirty minutes after leaving the hotel.

  I pulped through the oil black bog sponge and skirted the caves gaping out of the blue rock before stretching up the barbed cliff that monitors all of Belfast below. Braced at the top, I was surprised by how small the city looked, and how normal. It was more like a decent sized town in the US. Belfast lake opens out to the sea, an old guy told me that the shape hugging the horizon to the north-east was actually Scotland, but it looked too close, maybe he was just jerking around with the Yank. He had the weathered face of a walker and was eager to share his lore with me, but his strong Belfast accent was hard to make out, something about this hill and Napoleon and Gulliver’s Travels, I think. I understood him when he told me the hills to the south marked the border between British Ireland and Irish Ireland, maybe 40 or 50 miles away. That’s where Mrs McErlane was waiting for me.

  I spent some time taking photographs with the cellphone Duffin had sent me. Zoomed in on the shipyard where the Titanic was built 100 years ago, at the zoo down below, at what might have been Scotland. I set the camera to video and did a neat 360 take of the whole scene. I flicked through the images, confirmed how normal this place looked. But I knew all about the trouble that framed these regular urban streets below. Sure, I’d seen it on TV reports and newspapers, but I’d learnt more from the McErlanes and the Irish in Yonkers and the Bronx, so I knew how poisoned it was, from before Columbus discovered America. Maybe there was something I couldn’t see here, was only visible to the Irish themselves.

  Could be some day I’d go back to Iraq and it would look normal like the Belfast streets below me now. Maybe, if I could only do that, I would feel normal again myself. Sometime soon, I hoped.

  There was something about this place, though, the color of the sky, the taste of the moist breeze on my lips, the peat skimmed rocks, the look and sound of the people, they way they spoke and moved. Somehow it was familiar, calmed me. It was a sort of homecoming.

  * * *

  I took a different route back to the hotel and soon came to a junction where the street lights were almost hidden by flags; British flags, “Ulster” flags, a host of flags planted by Loyalist Paramilitary groups. This was British Ireland, very different from the Irish of McLean Avenue, Yonkers and the Bronx.

  The way to the hotel was to the left and downhill, straight ahead was the dangerous attraction of a hostile zone. Why not? I wouldn’t be back here again, so straight ahead. Every city in the world has these mean streets, barcoding the rank and file at inception, karma barely skin deep, always room at the bottom. Like that street in the Bronx I couldn’t avoid sometimes when I was a kid, risking attack from my peers every trip. The young men here answered their call too, hung around street corners, no work, no school. They went silent as I passed, their eyes on me as I snapped the wall pictures of their fallen heroes -“Brigadiers” and “Commanders”, each one “Murdered by the Enemies of Ulster”.

  I was about to turn back when I was slapped with a thunderbolt. This couldn’t be true. I looked around where I was, far from the Irish bars of McLean, and laughed out loud. Across the street was a social club for a British army regiment, the Royal Irish Rangers. There was a banner stretched above the doorway with the battle cry “Faugh a Ballagh” boldly marked in foot high s.

  I don’t know where they got it from, but that’s the battle cry of my regiment, the Fightin” 69th Regiment, New York, our battle cry forged in the crucible of the Civil War, at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Marye’s Heights, Gettysburg and everywhere else the Irish marched proudly into slaughter. This was the last place in the world for those words to be paraded, it was like hanging it in Richmond before Appamattox. I had to go in there. I took a photograph and then asked a passing young guy in a suit to take one of me with the banner visible in the background. I didn’t know how they would take to me in there, but Faugh a Ballagh is the Irish language for “Clear the Way”, that’s what I would do, if they wanted.

  An old boy with a string of medals stood at the doorway. He had been watching me taking photographs. This was a priv
ate member’s club, and visitors had to be “signed in” by a member. He was the sentry, pulling guard on the visitor’s book. He looked at me as I approached, didn’t need to ask if I was a member, he knew them all, and their grand daddies.

  “Faugh a Ballagh,” I called to him, pulling up my sleeve to show the same words tattooed on my right forearm.

  “American?” he said.

  “Yeah, Fightin’ 69th, New York State,” I said.

  He was pleased to see me, until I pulled the sleeve up too far and exposed my only other tattoo, the green, white and orange flag of the Irish Republic, complete with the s “IRA”, with one in each of the coloured segments of the tricolor.

  “Fuck me!” the old boy said. “Lenny, Kyle, get the fuck out here now!” he shouted into the bar area.

  Lenny and Kyle appeared, foot soldiers gone to seed, but still ready for action if needed.

  “Sorry guys,” I explained. “It’s not how it looks. I’m an American soldier on holiday, 69th Regiment. I served with some of your guys in Iraq. Our battle cry is ‘Faugh a Ballagh’, the same as yours.”

  Lenny and Kyle looked to the old boy.

  “He’s an IRA bastard!” he shouted. “Look at his tattoo!”

  I showed my tattoo again. I always knew the IRA one would bring me grief sometime, Ferdy had just laughed.

  “No way, old timer,” I said. “I got drunk with a couple of Irishmen on R&R one time, they had that done when I passed out. It’s just a joke. This is the one that matters,” I pointed to the motto familiar to them.

  Lenny and Kyle were used to taking orders, weren’t ranking material, what should they do now? A hand gripped my shoulder from behind.

  “It’s alright, he’s with me,” the hand’s owner was a young guy, maybe 25 or so, and looked every inch a battle hardened combat soldier.

  “But he’s got an IRA tattoo,” said old boy.

  “I don’t give a fuck what tattoo he has, he’s 69th Regiment, they took Route Irish in Baghdad and held it. He’s with me, ok?” said my new bodyguard.