Authors: Thomas Fleming

Hours of Gladness (31 page)

BOOK: Hours of Gladness

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I
n the fire watchtower on top of Apple Pie Hill, FBI agent Aloysius Sweeney paced up and down in the suffocating heat. The April sun made the flat-roofed compartment almost as hot as it would be in August. George Petrie, the gray-haired, laconic ranger who shared the tower with him, seemed unbothered by it. His lined face and lean body looked as dried out as one of the ancient pines below them.

The radio on the table crackled. “This is Sunbeam Two. Any orders?”

“No,” Sweeney said. “Something must have gone wrong. Just stand by.”

Picking up his Zeiss 600 binoculars, Sweeney studied the two rented trucks at the empty boat landing on the Mullica River. McGinty's Ford Escort was still parked beside them. It was almost three o'clock. By this time Sweeney had expected to have the trucks, the Houlihans, O'Gorman, Kilroy, and the Irish-Americans in custody.

Not a single boat had gone up the Mullica for hours.
The river was an empty, shining swath in the brilliant sunshine. In a sixty-mile circuit around Apple Pie Hill, twenty FBI agents who could be doing a lot of other important things were baking in cars along with almost as many state police, covering every road out of the Pine Barrens.

Sweeney paced up and down, sweating. Why didn't those goddamn trucks move? Why didn't McGinty get to a phone and call him in New York, where they would relay the call to him?

Sweeney sighed. McGinty was afraid the Houlihans would start wondering about a double cross and panic. McGinty had his problems, the poor bastard. He had no guts in the first place. These double-agent deals were nightmares for everybody.

“What's the biggest fire you've ever had around here?” Sweeney asked Ranger Petrie.

“Nineteen sixty-three was pretty big. Burned out seventy-five thousand acres. That's the biggest I've seen.”

By now Sweeney had become an expert on fires in the Pine Barrens. It was the only thing Petrie wanted to talk about. He had no interest in sports or politics. Sweeney learned that a forest fire moves in a V, like the wake of a ship. The point of the V is called the head fire, and if it gets up into the tops of the trees, it becomes a crown fire. The sides of the V are called lateral fires, and they have to be fought just as hard as the head fire, because when the laterals reach out far enough, they become new head fires.

“We had two hundred fire trucks from all over New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” Petrie said. “We tried everything. Backfires, bombing it with retardant from the airânothin' worked. Spring is the worse time for fire around here. The vegetation is dried out from the winter. Cured, we call it.”

Sweeney had been amazed to learn that a lot of the four hundred fires each year in the Barrens were the result of arson. The forest glistens with oils and resins; oak leaves are coated with oil that will burn at the touch of a match.
Teenagers drive through the Barrens and fling burning matchbooks out of cars. They are miles away by the time the woods begin to burn.

Some blazes were what Petrie called “grudge fires,” set by Pineys. No one could touch them for the skill with which they created a conflagration. Generally their aim was not to kill, however. They just wanted to burn somebody's house down for insulting them or taking a woman away from them. They were confident that a fellow Piney knew how to survive a fire.

“How do you do that?” Sweeney asked.

“Get onto burned ground. It isn't hard if the head fire's not too deep,” Petrie said.

Sometimes, of course, the head fire can be very deep, and then the runner for burned ground is in a lot of trouble. Pineys could arrange that too in rare instances, when they wanted to kill somebody. Pineys, at least the older ones, had a lot of experience with fire. They used to set fires in the blueberry lowlands because wild blueberry bushes yield more berries after a fire.

The radio crackled again. “This is Sunbeam Three. When do we eat? We're out of everything, including water.”

“Soon,” Sweeney said.

He studied the trucks and the Ford again. Something was wrong. There were no signs of life around the vehicles. Wouldn't McGinty or one of the Houlihans emerge from the trees to squint impatiently down the river? McGinty was not stupid. He should be able to invent an excuse to telephone by now. It would be a logical move, when the operation was twelve hours behind schedule. O'Gorman must have given him a number to call for further instructions.

“Sunbeam One. This is Central. Pick me up. I think we better move in for a closer look.”

In five minutes Sweeney was driving toward the Mullica with agents Larry Pinna and Tom Clancy. “What the hell's going on, Art?” Pinna asked. “I thought guys from New York never made a mistake.”

“Other people do.”

“Yankee fans? I can't believe it.”

Pinna was from Boston. He believed in the Red Sox and not much else. They swung the car onto the sand road that led to the landing on the Mullica. Clancy, at the wheel, cursed as the car slewed in the ruts. They bounced around a curve and Clancy slammed on the brakes so hard they almost wound up in the trees.

A man was on the road ahead of them. He was trying to crawl toward them, but the result was more like the motion of a snake. He was inching himself forward by pulling on the loose sand ahead of him.

All three sprang out of the car and raced to him. Pinna turned him over and Sweeney looked into the agonized face of Hughie McGinty. They had kneecapped him and then shot him in the belly. They wanted him to die slowly and painfully.

“When did it happen? Who did it?” Sweeney said.

McGinty shook his head. He had no time for trivial questions. “Tell Nora,” he gasped. “Tell Nora I died for Ireland.”

RENDEZVOUS

A
s Barbara Monahan O'Day slipped into the front seat of Alex Oxenford's battered blue Volkswagen, thirty-two years unreeled in his mind, twisted in his flesh. It was the first time he had been this close to her since the night of 1952 when he had seduced her in the Pines. The night he had discovered an invisible boundary between seduction and love that even an Oxenford could cross, unaware.

For all those years they had not spoken a word. Thirty-two years of icy glares when he passed her on the boardwalk or the street. Thirty-two years of living on the wrong side of that boundary. Now, surrounded by terror and death, he felt a need, almost a compulsion, to speak.

“It's been a long time,” he said as he shoved the balky clutch into first gear and the old chunk of rust rumbled toward the Pines and her meeting with Mick at his father's cabin.

“Just drive the car,” she said. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“I have some things I'd like to say to you.”

“I made a vowâa long time agoâthat I'd never listen to another word from you.”

“Was what I did so terrible? Part of the way things turned out was your fault. If you'd waited a few more monthsâ”

“Shut up! You ruined my life! I would have had a perfectly happy life if it wasn't for you.”

“Are you sure? When I look at your sisters, I wonder if you would have been happy marrying some Irish lunkhead and having six lunkhead kids.”

“Why do you think what I did instead was better?” She was practically screaming now.

“You had Mick.”

“Mick.”

“I remember seeing you with him when he was four or five on the beach. I ate my heart out, envying you.”

“You never ate your heart out for anyone. You have no heart. What have you done with your life? Chased women and corrupted kids' morals with your crazy ideas.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that I might have been waiting?”

“For what?”

He kept his eyes on the road. He had no hope of being taken seriously. “You.”

“Shit.”

“I talked Mick out of the Catholic Church, true enough. But I was trying to talk you out too. I hoped he might take some of those ideas home.”

“He didâand they only made me despise you all the more.”

“But now, things have changed?”

“Nothing has changedânothing will ever change as far as you're concerned.”

“But as far as you're concernedâyou and the Catholic
Churchâyou seem to have decided to give yourself a dispensation from perpetual chastity.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. Why don't you just shut up and drive the car.”

“I'm talking about you and that Irishman. Mick says you're in love with him. And you're proving it in very direct fashion.”

“That's none of your business. None of Mick's either.”

“I know. But for some improbable reason, it stirred hope in my skeptic's soul.”

“It shouldn't. He's all the things you never have been and never will be. Kind, considerate, honest.”

“I wonder. I just spent ten hours in a small boat with him. He didn't mention you once. He didn't say a word about retreating to California to bask in the sunshine of your love when this mess was cleaned up. He talked mostly about what he was going to do to Mick when he caught himâand what he was going to do to the British when he became the maximum leader of Ireland. He didn't mention you as his royal consort in that role.”

“He wouldn't tell you what we're planning to do. He wouldn't tell anyone.”

“He gave me and Bill O'Toole quite a lecture on the IRA. He said they sent gunmen to the ends of the earth to shoot people who double-crossed them. Will you be happy living with a man who dives under the sofa every time a car backfires?”

“I'd be happy with almost any man in the worldâexcept you.”

“I guess that's definitive.”

They drove in silence the rest of the way. Jouncing into the Pines in the twilight, Oxenford remembered growing up in Chatsworth in the 1940s, prowling these woods with his father, listening to the same stories about their history the old man told Mick. The wind sighed mournfully through the tops of the taller trees.

“Listen,” he said, unable to resist it, thinking in his
exhausted state he was saying something significant. “The air tune.”

“Oh, you bastard, you rotten bastard.” Barbara started to cry.

“I'm sorry.”

“You were never sorry for anything you said or did.”

“Generally that's true. You were the exception.”

“Don't start that again,” she raged.

They lumbered into the clearing before Pop Oxenford's shack. He met them at the door. “Hello, Alex,” he said.

“Hello, Pops. This is Barbara Monahan.”

“Mick's mother? Well, this is an honor. A long-awaited honor. I wish it was a happier occasion, I wish it was.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I wish it was too.”

They sat down at the table. Pop Oxenford stayed on his feet by the sink. “Mick's given me a lot of hours of happiness. Not as many as you've had, watchin' him grow to manhood. But knowin' him, the last fifteen years, has made gettin' old a lot easier. It really has made it a lot easier.”

“I'm â¦ glad,” Barbara said.

“He's turned out pretty good, considering his troubles. He really has. He ain't a henpecked husband or a burglar. Or a barfly like this fellow.”

“Yes,” Barbara said, accepting with relish the last designation.

“Things happen to grown men a parent can't do a thing about. I guess they happen to women too, but I'm more acquainted with men. Did Mick ever tell you I had two sons killed in the war?”

“No.”

“Yeah. The big war. One was killed in the Atlantic and the other in the Pacific. All I got left is this fellow. The permanent bachelor. That's why I've been grateful for Mick, even though he's only partly ours.”

“Yes,” Barbara said, her voice growing smaller. She did
not know that Alex Oxenford had told his father about Mick.

A handful of pebbles rattled against the window. “That'll be Mick. He's too smart to walk in the front door. They could be out there with a dozen machine guns. Nobody followed you, did they?”

Alex Oxenford shook his head.

“I'll give him the high sign.”

Pops lit a lamp and held it up to the window. A moment later, Mick loomed in the doorway. He had an M16 over his shoulder. Joe Turner was with him, also with an M16.

“Hello, Mom. Hello, Prof. Are you coming with us?”

“No,” Barbara said. “I'm here to give you a message from DickâDick O' Gorman. He says he wants to forgive and forget this whole thing, Mick. The ship is gone. The guns are gone. All he wants you to do is give him back the cocaine so he can settle with the Mafia. Pay off our debts and have some money to send back to Ireland. So they won't come after him when we go away together.”

“Is that on the level, Prof? Is the ship gone?”

“I don't know,” Alex Oxenford said.

“It's gone. I heard him make the call to New York, telling them to go back to Cuba,” Barbara said.

“What about Trai and Phac and Suong? Will they be safe?”

“Yes. They can stay here. But I don't think it would be a good idea if you stayed.”

“I don't plan to. There's nothing to hold me here now. Nothing in this whole lousy state or country. I went up to the city to see the old man. Your husband. My father. I asked him if he could help me get rid of the cocaine. He practically went nuts. He said he wasn't my father. You just married him to cover up being pregnant. Who the hell is my father?”

The anguish in Mick's voice was unbearable. Alex Oxenford had to speak. In his father's name and his own name, they had to claim Mick now, when they were in danger of losing him forever.

“I'm your father, Mick. I left your mother pregnant and went off to Korea to fight a war.”

Disbelief at first. Then a smile of comprehension spread over Mick's face. “No wonder you were always trying to change my mind about everything under the sun.”

Alex Oxenford had hoped Mick would remember the days they had spent fishing on the Mullica or in the bay, the trips to New York to see the Yankees. Mick had been one of a group, of course. But Alex had made some feeble gestures at fatherhood.

“Mick,” Barbara whispered, “Mick. I had to do it. The family made me get married. They made me keep quiet all these years.”

“What do you think we ought to do, Prof?”

“Give the stuff back. But keep your guns loaded and be ready to fight. I smell a double cross.”

“So do I,” Mick said.

“That isn't true. Dick promised me. If anything goes wrong, it'll be your fault,” Barbara cried.

“Tell them we'll meet them at the head of Tulpohocken Creek tomorrow at noon. The Prof knows where it is. The stuff is hidden near there. I'll show them where it is. I want five thousand bucks off the top for Joe here. Tell them to bring that along. And twenty for Phac. That's all he needs to buy his boat.”

“You don't have any rightâ” Barbara began.

“The hell I don't,” Mick said. “Tell them. We'll be waiting.”

BOOK: Hours of Gladness

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