creep over the bar at what passed in the Mediterranean for a high tide. My pilot book told me that this dying port had once sheltered the feared Barbary pirates, but Liam and Gerry only cared to know whether or not the village under the deserted castle battlements might shelter a pub. “Probably not,” I said.
“No focking booze?” Liam, recovered from his seasickness by being safely anchored in port, asked in a horrified voice.
“Not a drop.”
“So how long are we going to be here?”
“Till the gold arrives,” I explained.
“Have you really got fock all to drink on board?” Gerry wheedled.
“Not a drop,” I lied. In fact I had hidden two bottles of Jameson Whiskey that I was saving for Christmas Day. I had hoped we would spend the day at sea, but Christmas came and the gold had still not arrived and so we just stayed at anchor in the deserted harbor.
Our Christmas dinner was Spam fritters, tinned peas and French fries. Afterward I brought out the surprise Jameson’s and the three of us sat in
“You know Seamus?” Liam asked incredulously.
“Sure. Very well.” I saw my reputation soar in their eyes. Liam and Gerry were already wary of me, for I was a very strange creature in their starved eyes. I was foreign, bearded, tall, competent and taciturn, but now that they had discovered I knew Seamus, I became almost as godlike as Seamus himself.
“You really know him?” Gerry asked.
I crossed two fingers. “Like that.”
“Jesus.” He half smiled at me, then frowned, and I wondered if he was contemplating the difficulty of eventually killing me. Killing a stranger is easy compared to killing a man you know, and neither Gerry nor Liam, for all their bombast, struck me as men who would find a cold-blooded killing easy. But perhaps their job was merely to escort me to Miami where my death, if it was indeed ordained, would come from the hands of others.
As Christmas night wore on the stories of Gerry and Liam’s prowess were replaced by better and funnier tales. Liam told the night’s best story, that of the young boy who threw the nail bomb. “He was only a wee thing”—Liam stubbed his cigarette into the mess of gravy, butt ends and cold peas on his plate—“he can’t have been more than ten or eleven. It happened up in Turf Lodge, so it did. There was a riot one evening, nothing special, just something to pass the time like, but the focking Brits had sent a focking patrol up there to break a few heads, so the lads took the wee boy aside and asked him did he want to throw a nail bomb?” Liam paused to light another cigarette. “He said yes, of course he did, because all the wee boys are just waiting for the chance to do their bit, like. You know what a nail bomb is, mister?”
“Of course he focking knows!” Gerry said. “He lived in Belfast, didn’t he?”
“I know what it is,” I assured Liam. A nail bomb was a length of metal pipe crammed with explosives and plugged at either end with four-inch nails. It was thrown like a stick grenade and, when it exploded, it scattered a lethal shower of nails among the enemy.
“So they take the wee fella behind a house, right, and he’s shown the bomb, and he’s told that if he throws it properly then he’ll be given other jobs, like more responsible jobs, know what I mean?” Liam was enjoying telling the tale. “So they give the wee boy the bomb, light the focking fuse for him, and tell him to run like fock. Go, boy, they tell him, go! So the wee kid, he runs like fock, so he does, and he throws the focking bomb at the focking Brits, then he turns and focking sprints away like the devil himself is up his arse. But he’s just forgotten one thing, so he has.” Liam paused to increase the suspense of the tale’s telling.
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
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
