Кен Бруен - Galway Girl

I thought,

“Oh, how I love to be instructed .”

Especially by some half-arsed hippie drug casualty.

And then I said, unreasonably,

“Fucking nerve of him to take my falcon.”

My mind responded.

“Not your bird,”

I think.

I sat down, opened a bottle of Jay, thought about Jericho.

Emerald, my former nemesis, had been a ruthless psychopath but something,

Some weird, bizarre, fucked-up mind thing, still lingered in that

I liked her.

A lot.

Now Jericho was just a poor man’s Emerald. She never shone.

I had recently read New Yorker profiles of famous people:

Writers

Movie folk

Celebrities

By John Lahr.

The piece on Roseanne Barr described Jericho perfectly:

... her face and her presence have no luster.

Without makeup her definition is muted and vague, her face has little mobility.

Despite her intelligence and authority, there is something cadaverous about Roseanne,

A deadness that only rage and combat can banish.

Combat seems to make her more alive.

Something has been murdered in her; this is palpable in

The flatness of her voice, the slouch of her body,

The quicksilver shifts of mood from bombast to gloom,

The timidity and detachment behind her eyes.

She has none of the charm of Gretchen by Chelsea Cain,

Or the appeal of Lisbeth in the Dragon Tattoo novels.

Jericho is a dead thing.

And, soon, she’d be dead in a way that would spark in the utter darkness from whence she came.

By Christ, I swore on that.

Then I rolled out the parchment, wrote to Jericho.

Finished, I propped it against the skull she’d left for me.

I took a small envelope, put Deoch an Doras inside that, then opened my fridge, propped it against a bottle of Galway Hooker beer, closed the fridge gently, thought,

My parting gift deserves to be chilled/chilling;

On ice, as it were.

I was waiting outside my apartment, a battered holdall, a crate of hooch by my Docs, the wax coat cutting the strong, bitter wind off the bay.

I missed my all-weather coat, the Garda one.

Gone with my nun.

A vintage Land Rover pulled up, the driver got out, followed by a German shepherd; the man and dog had the same vibe:

... don’t fuck with me.

We’d take that under advisement.

The man said,

“Taylor!”

I nodded, he held out a large callused hand, covered in scars and recent bites, the falcon I figured. He said,

“Keefer.”

He was a cross between Robert Shaw, as he was in Jaws, and Keith Richards, after he fell out of that tree.

Wore a Willie Nelson bandanna, biker boots over combat trousers.

He had plenty of gray-white hair, a face so lined you could see craters in it, eyes behind aviator shades, and a lean muscled body, none of it going to fat.

He growled,

“What’s in the crate?”

I said,

“A selection of Jameson, bourbon, scotch, and Bushmills.

The Bush in case you are a black Protestant.”

He nearly smiled, said,

“Let’s get you stored away, dude.”

We did.

His voice, I would learn, was a blend of

Hipster (the sixties type)

Scottish

Surfer

Biker.

If he’d been literary, he could have played Hemingway or James Crumley.

I sat in the shotgun seat. He put the jeep in gear and eased into traffic, hit the music band, and the Stones’

“Sweet Virginia”

Flowed.

He asked,

“You speak American?”

I sure did, said,

“Like a good ole boy.”

He went down-home South Carolina, drawled,

“I sure done check you out, boy.”

That might get a little bit irritating, but I asked,

“What did you find?”

He reached into the glove department, drew out a spliff, asked,

“Do us the honor.”

I did, took a hit, and passed it to him, trying to ignore the gun butt I’d spotted in the glove compartment. He drew deep, said,

“You read like a mean son of a bitch.”

The dog leaned from the backseat, nuzzled my ear. Keefer said,

“You just done passed the crucial test.”

I knew he meant if the dog didn’t like me, my arse was gone.

The joint seemed to ease the grim line of his jaw and he expertly navigated the son of a bitch roundabout on the Headford road. He said,

“Here’s the deal.”

Looked at me.

I said,

“I cannot bear the excitement.”

He snarled,

“I just added a new rule to the series.”

A line of spittle on his mouth as he warned,

“Don’t be goddamn snarky. I hate that shit, and Jagger was always running that gig.”

A low rumbling from the dog.

Keefer pulled into a lay-by, said,

“I need a piss.”

He and the dog disappeared into some brush.

Was it some sort of bizarre test?

It crossed my mind to fuck the hell off. He’d left the key in the ignition and, just as I thought I’d do that, a new track flowed from the speaker,

“Strange Boat”

      By

The Waterboys.

The name of the foundation that began and maintained the Circle of Life Garden was Strange Boat, in honor of a young man who worked as a sound tech for the Waterboys.

Ah, the Waterboys, like the Saw Doctors, one of the great bands to come out of Galway in the eighties.

The lead singer / lyricist, Mike Scott, looked like what a rock singer should look like. Many of us believed they should have been the band that emerged globally, not U2.

If you come to Galway, get thee to the Roisin Dubh and maybe catch Mike doing the awesome “Fisherman’s Blues” — almost like “Waltzing Matilda” on ludes.

(Note to millennials, if you can spare a moment from the goddamn phone: ludes were quaaludes, the chill-out drug of choice for mellow times.)

Keefer and the dog were back, got in, he burned rubber out of there. He handed me a flask, said,

“Chill, bro.”

I took a slug. Wow, hard-core. Near spluttered, asked,

“The fuck’s that?”

He cackled, said,

“Maker’s Mark with sipping sour mash.”

I drew a breath, my eyes watering, choked,

“The rules?”

He growled them

Like this:

1. Don’t ask for Rolling Stones anecdotes.

2. Ten hours in the field.

3. Stay away from the armory.

4. Keefer’s word is the word.

I lit a Red, blew out a near perfect ring that the dog tried to snatch, and said,

“I don’t do rules.”

He laughed, loud and lethal, the dog gave me a quick nuzzle. I asked,

“What’s his name?”

You could see his face soften when the dog was the topic. He said,

“Jones.”

Dilemma, was this a Stones anecdote?

Fuckit.

I asked,

“For Brian Jones?”

He sneered,

“That loser. No, I had me a heroin jones, real bad, and just as I went biblically cold turkey the dog found me, in the woods, the barrel of my gun in my mouth.”

We rounded the bend where you come to Cong, bypassed the lake, pulled up on the edge of the woods. He said,

“Home.”

A log cabin, frontier style, sat back in a clearing, smoke rising from a chimney, piles of neatly cut wood stacked on the side, a corral with two horses, then to the back, a small cottage, neatly white and solid. He said,