The pain jerks me up from the dark, spills bright red across my memory, shakes me in time to the artillery shells exploding around us.
##
Voices, mumbling medical jargon, the hum, and clicking of some electronics, antiseptic smell. Bright, bright too bright, I close my eyes tight.
##
My arm. They amputated my left arm below the elbow. Shit. I reach across my body and touch my new left forearm and hand. A prosthetic, but it feels, feels flesh like, like dead meat.
In the chaos following the nightclub bombing the story of Ruby’s disappearance never travelled beyond her immediate community. Ruby had been the daughter of one of the ill paid native porters at the American hotel and during the year in which she turned sixteen two local men had begun fighting over her. One happened to be the chief of police while the other was the chief’s former friend and associate, the organiser of an illegal lottery. This pair had vied in their ambition to have Ruby as a mistress. Ruby’s father, insignificant as he was, did his best to fob them off by spinning some yarn about his daughter’s betrothal to her cousin, the son of the headman back in his home village on the slopes of the volcano. He did this not so much to spare Ruby the policeman or the lottery owner—they weren’t such terrible fellows—but to leverage his daughter’s position. In response the lottery fellow threatened to have the head of the son of the village headman separated from his body and the policemen threated to have the next volcanic incineration of the man’s village brought considerably forward. Ruby’s father sensed they weren’t joking. Certainly not the policeman. So the bombing came as a welcome diversion. But once Ruby’s father had seen off the airport minibuses evacuating the expats and returned to the snarl of shanties at the rear of the now deserted hotel he discovered Ruby had vamoosed. When she hadn’t returned by the next day he guessed either the policeman or the lottery owner had taken advantage of the chaos to make off with their prize.
Estaban deTullis may not have been the most beloved man on the small island of Azure De Ponce De Leon, 57 miles south of Caracas, but that was only because of the sometimes venomous feelings harbored toward him by his often-times put upon wife and busy-body mother-in-law.
Joy’s eyes were stinging from the stench of urine. She was hoping it was from her mother’s three tiny dogs, but suspected the mutts weren’t the only ones who’d been incontinent.
Oracle Park has one tree. It’s a little non-fruiting cherry that seems nervous because cherry trees usually grow in numbers. They typically line parkways and chatter amongst themselves like a backstage gaggle of pink-clad chorus girls. By itself, however, a cherry tree seems fretful. Now, a lone wolf oak is expected—for it has a greedy nature that sucks up the best of the soil and hastens the death of the grass around it. But not the cherry; they are used to sharing resources as though they are swapping garters and smoking off the same cigarette. One suspects that without intervention the little cherry in Oracle Park may die of anxiety, or from overdosing on too much sunshine and minerals. If this one survives, it will most likely grow to cast an uneasy shadow.
“I don’t have a lot of friends,” I reminded myself. The cold and warm fronts were colliding in the sky which was colored with moving clouds, yellows, grays, and shades of purple. Darkness was falling as I was driving.
“Hey babe, what tie should I wear with this shirt?” I asked, draping a solid pink tie and then a diagonal-striped black and blue one from the collar of my black dress shirt.
Having spent the previous day stripping layers of old paint off the shop front the last thing she wanted to do today was begin on the interior. But needs must. Her body complained as she dragged it out of bed, Al still snoring contentedly beside her. He was a lazy bastard but to be fair to the boy he’d worked hard the previous day. He’d climbed ladders and brewed up and carried stuff and taken increasingly fraught instructions as she slowly reached the end of her tether. He moved an arm and an eye shot open then closed again, his head being buried further down into the pillow.
“. . . ?”
How can you help? Hmm, how can you—
“. . . ?”
My mother? . . . Okay, we can start there. . . . My mother—my mother came from a large family, a very large Irish Catholic family. Do they make them any more? I think not. . . . At any rate, as a boy, a young boy, no more than eight or nine, I would employ the template of the Baltimore Catechism to sort them out and keep them straight—the Faheys I mean . . .The catechism’s set formula, y’see, helped me convey the essential and fundamental content of the Fahey family. Beginning—
I pinned the latest of my twin brother’s postcards on the corkboard above the desk our father never used. This one showed the famous bridge that I’d seen in books and on TV. Finally made it. Wayne used the same blotchy pen to scribble Mom and Dad’s address. It was my address too, but I rarely got mail.
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