Читать книгу Little Red War Gods - Patrick PhD Marcus - Страница 8

“Archer! You’re an identical twin for real then, are’n ya? Begob, there to be two of you and me not even crediting the first one,” said the Irishman to the tall, slim American sitting on the pub stool next to his own. Though they’d just met a few hours earlier, they shared an almost instantaneous connection that gave the two men the look of old friends. If they’d both had less to drink, they might have noticed the beautiful woman several stools down, laughing to herself as she listened to their conversation. The white robes she’d worn in the Arizona desert had been replaced by a simple, periwinkle silk dress that held her tightly on its way past her knees; the outfit was quintessentially alluring.

“You won’t believe it when I tell you his story,” said Archer, leaning toward Alvin confidentially. “His name is Keane—”

“Like a knife blade?” interrupted Alvin.

“That he is. Like a knife blade, Al.”

Alvin made a stabbing motion with his hand, Archer acting out a death-blow.

“You’ve struck onto something, Al. I don’t know how he’s done it, but my dad tells me Keane’s transformed into an Indian. Of all the fucking things, my identical twin brother’s become a Navajo Indian. Can you believe that?”

By his late twenties, Alvin had achieved veteran status in local pubs around Dublin, where he was affectionately known as “Alvo the Great.” During any stint at a variety of oak-paneled bars, Alvo would happily report that he was the best damned lorry driver in all of Dublin, and as far as he knew, the world. And if someone went so far as to buy Alvo a pint, they might hear his carefully crafted philosophy of professional driving: how the right man with the right hands could push the massive power of a lorry in and out of the long, hard streets, as a man might master the sweet curves of the female form. It was the kind of story the locals loved him for, and the tourists remembered long after returning home.

His friends teased Alvin whenever he embarked on an overly sentimental rant. “If all of Ireland is your home,” they would say, “it’s no wonder there’s nary a bit to eat in my fridge.” And his really good friends – those he saw almost every night at the Boar’s Head for sausages and pints – would tease: “Save your hugs for the girls on holiday, Alvo. We love you, but you’re ugly as a pig licking piss off a nettle.” Then they laughed. Alvin laughed with them.

Alvin was the kind of person who felt actual love for the place he lived. He loved the cobbled streets slick with bus oil and the simple address numbers on doors. He loved the way Irish girls walked home at four in the morning, sweetly sideways, or the way Dublin’s air made a pint of Guinness taste warm and smooth.

He loved Dublin in spite of the fact she’d yet to grant his wish and produce a great love for him. Only French Normandy, the town of Rouen, had come close. It was there that Alvin had met, and fallen deeply in love with, Tatiana. Tatiana was a Korean girl who’d been raised in Russia, and whose skin reminded most people of porcelain.

A year ago, Tatiana and Alvin had spent just a weekend together, but Alvin still thought of her every day. “She’s my wife,” he would tell himself, “in my heart, she is,” tears leaping from his narrow eyes. “I’m the dumb shite to be losing her cellular number. She’d be wanting for nothing with me...”

Somehow, Alvin’s phone, his only means to contact Tatiana, was lost on his train trip home to Ireland. He spent days trying to track her down on the internet, but found nothing. There seemed to be no record of her anywhere. He even returned to Rouen and retraced their steps, blubbering to himself as he walked.

Sometimes, when he was really smashed, Alvin would think of how he and Tatiana had cried before the cross honoring Joan of Arc, how they’d made love, how she’d accepted him. And he would cry again, his tears a fifty-fifty solution of joy and pain.

Archer didn’t see Alvin’s face during the split second that it went totally blank, or notice the ghostly pallor that suddenly left the ruddy-cheeked Irishman pale. “Good Christ, what did you say?”

“I said my twins an Indian, Al.”

Alvin got to his feet and stretched his arms to the raftered ceiling, his huge gut almost on Archer’s lap, then sat back down. “Is it the Indians of the Western World you do be meaning? For I don’t know who the Neevoowho are.” His tone was calmer, but still intense.

“They’re a tribe from out west, Arizona.” Archer could see Alvin wasn’t understanding him. “A tribe is like you and your mates. They share common ancestry and common goals, like getting pissed.” Archer laughed even though Alvin seemed to lack appreciation for his quip.

Alvin got to his feet again. He thrust his fat fingers into his pockets, searching around.

“I doubt you’ll find anything in there,” snickered Archer. “At least nothing that’s worth more than a copper penny.”

“Ohone, and me to be stony till coronation day,” said Alvin. “You’ll have to get another round, and make it the wine of the country this time, by Jesus.” He clapped his hand on Archer’s back. “Will you do that, mate?”

Archer motioned to the bartender. “Two Jamesons. To the brim if you please, there’s a good man.” He turned to Alvin. “Sit. You’ve no reason to be upset that I can see.”

Alvin sat back down.

Facing his whiskey, Alvin offered a toast.

Archer lifted his glass.

“Here’s to a friend that will listen to what my heart has to say.”

“Well said.” They clinked their glasses together, Alvin finishing his with one mighty tug, Archer nursing his down in gulps. They both opened their mouths and bellowed loud “Ahhhs.” They laughed uproariously until Alvin burst into drunken tears.

“It’s bloody awful,” he hollered. “They come to murder me every night.”

“Who, Alvin? Who?”

“The Indians.”

Alvin cried uncontrollably on Archer’s shoulder until Archer could safely relocate his friend’s head to the bar. Before Archer could decide just how strange a coincidence it was that he, too, had been dreaming of murderous Indians, he was rudely interrupted.

“Rough break-up?” said a muscular college kid in a University of Miami t-shirt.

“Fuck you,” said Archer disdainfully.

“Shit like that gets your ass kicked,” said the kid, stepping within striking distance.

Archer felt a swoosh of air as Alvin’s well-aimed fist passed over his shoulder square into the face of the shitty American marauder. The kid’s nose exploded like a blood-filled water balloon. His body sat down hard on the tiled floor, followed quickly by his torso and the back of his head, which was saved from shattering by a size-fifteen sneakered foot.

Archer, still staring at the wreckage of the kid’s face, wasn’t surprised to feel a bear’s grip on his neck guiding him roughly to the exit. Alvin’s big body hurled along at Archer’s elbow at the whim of the monster bouncer who treated them with the skill of an accomplished cattle hand. Archer wasn’t as impressed with his body’s flight into the gutter, but as Alvin’s laughter echoed up the alley walls he couldn’t help but join in, his wounded ribs infusing their jolliness with intermittent whimpers and gasps.

“That was brilliant,” said Archer, getting to his hands and knees. “I’ve never seen anyone go down so hard.”

“Sure he had it coming to him. He deserved it,” said Alvin, shakily getting to his feet and pulling Archer after him. “Let’s find another pub. There’s a damn sight more than one in Dublin, and with the shite has been troubling me these weeks, it’s going to take a load of booze afore I’ll be able to get any sleep.”

The Fat Crow was as good as any place to get away from the tourists; it was known for a dark brew so thick, Alvin claimed “you could stand it up from a glass and it wouldn’t crumble and you blinking and blinking.”

Halfway into their first Fat Crow pint, Alvin took a breath so deep, he took thirty seconds to exhale. “You said your twin brother’s an Indian?”

“Yes.” Archer could tell he was supposed to listen, only listen.

“I’ve had the black demons.” Alvin swirled his tongue on the inside of his cheeks. “And I can’t explain why. At first, I thought it was grief over my girl, but it’s a year since I saw her and I manage that pain as well as I manage my weight. With the fair measure of a blind person.” He chuckled with Archer, pointing vigorously at his impressive stomach. “Don’t say it’s touched I am when I tell you this. You swear?” Alvin looked genuinely concerned that Archer might reject him.

Archer nodded.

“It’s two weeks now I’m having dreams about your Indians.”

Archer recalled what Alvin had said at the last pub: the Indians were murdering him. The comment sent chills down his spine.

“Sure it’s bad enough to be hatcheted to death every bleeding night in your sleep, but the depression that comes with does be even worse. I used to be happy as Larry. They’ve got me thinking I’m off my head. I can’t sleep. I can’t feel. My love for my Tatiana is changing, slipping from my fingers like it never was, and she all I ever had.”

A short, golden-skinned beauty walked past them on her way to the bathroom, her short blue dress swishing cat-like around her legs.

“I think…if you’re crazy, I’m crazy, too,” said Archer, still trying to piece Alvin’s disjointed story together in his mind. “I’ve been dreaming of Indians, too.” Though the nature of their conversation had the awesome ramifications of two men sharing similar nightmares, Archer found his tone cautious, a voice used to feel out its listener’s intentions.

“What?” said Alvin, alarmed. He focused every scrap of sober attention on Archer. “I don’t twig. Tell me what you mean. How can you be dreaming of Indians and me to be dreaming of Indians? There’s no rhyme nor reason to it.”

Archer was feeling drunk enough that it was hard to respond in the face of Alvin’s raw emotions. His brain buzzing, Archer managed to find answers for Alvin that he hadn’t wanted to find for himself. He liked how they made so much sense coming out of his mouth. “At first I wanted to blame the cowboy and Indian movies we watched on American movie night at Trinity. But the truth is, I haven’t seen him in five years, since we graduated from high school and he moved to the reservation. He got fucking married and I didn’t go. What kind of brother am I?”

“So you’re dreaming about your brother’s wedding bells and me to be getting my head scalped.” Alvin looked fully prepared to justify the unique validity of his pain.

“Alvin. The Indians kill me, too. Every time they strike I can’t do anything but watch their blades enter my body. I can barely sleep.” Alvin was the first person Archer had confided in. It was obvious by the imploring look on Archer’s face that he wanted Alvin to believe him, and that he felt a degree of relief just getting the truth of it out.

Alvin grasped Archer’s shoulders. “I am sorry, friend.” Alvin looked on the verge of tears again.

“Don’t you cry on me, Alvin. Dublin’s not big enough to get kicked out of two pubs a night.”

“Aye.” He relaxed his arms and managed a modest grin.

“Drink up.”

“Forgive me, Archer. I’ve one last question.” Alvin clasped all ten of his fingers around the remaining pint. “Is it depressed you are then, too?” Alvin looked silly as drunken people do when trying to be inquisitive. One eyebrow cocked itself dramatically, like the arm of a pitcher.

Archer considered Alvin for a second. “It’s a queer depression I have. Queer for its suddenness. But I have an excuse for that, too—at least, I thought I did.” He rubbed his hands together, trying to organize the words in his head. “I’ve been blaming it on college graduation more than the Indians. I’ll be going home to the States in a few days, after final exams. I’ll be leaving Ireland and Susan, and I’ll have to start living in the real world, cook up a resume, find a job. Seems like explanation enough for feeling a little down.”

“With me already having a great drop taken, I’d be likely to agree to anything. But I can’t help feeling we’ve a relationship to each other, something I wouldn’t have expected…” Alvin’s train of thought was interrupted when he was distracted by the exotic woman passing on her way back to her table.

Archer wondered if he could stand long enough to make it into a cab. He guessed there was a better than average chance he would have a hangover from hell tomorrow. Training on his bicycle the next morning might be out of the question if he didn’t retire soon.

Too drunk to remember exactly what they’d been talking about, Alvin fell back into ranting about his favorite football team and how bad the keeper was. Hardly able to hold his head up, Archer managed to put a ten-pound note on the bar.

“Is that for the mouse’s tab or is it leaving you are?” asked Alvin.

“It’s late. I promise I won’t forget you since you’ve been a good friend to me tonight, but I need my sleep for tomorrow and another drink might kill me.” They both laughed.

“Well and if you must go, then get you gone. I would besiege you further, but far be it from me to keep a man from a passing mark,” said Alvin. “Now get you gone again. Just promise you’ll see me back at my favorite pub before you do be returning to the States.”

“I promise. Good night. Better tomorrows. You’ll find your love for her again you know. I’m sure of it.”

“Aye, you’re right there, friend. Good night to you.”

The next day didn’t start well for Alvin.

His mood was so horrible he’d gone so far as to declare himself “no longer Irish.” Nonetheless, he dutifully went to work, leaving every light in the house turned on as they’d been all night. He grabbed a bag of Mel-O-Cream Donuts and shakily filled a large silver flask with a funky fig brandy from Portugal before he left.

Though it was a beautiful day, the sunshine only served to make a disaffected Alvin look more out of place as he jerked awkwardly across Dublin’s poignant aesthetic. His protruding waistline, replete with blossoming stretch marks pulled across puffy white clouds of fat, took second fiddle to the look of pain on his face. All morning customers asked Alvin what was wrong, but he couldn’t speak about it.

It didn’t help matters that the many pints and whiskeys Alvin had consumed with his new American friend, Archer, were still winding their way through his pores. He hadn’t slept a wink, either, and in fact, he’d been too busy trying not to sleep to worry about being drowsy once morning came. During the long night, as he listened to his mind replay the conversation with Archer about their shared depression and dreams of murderous Indians, it became clear to Alvin that his nightmares were part of some sinister plot. He hoped the man holding the strings was just trying to sell him sleeping pills.

As Alvin drove his truck to the next delivery, images from his dreams rode with him: fierce Indians, noisy like nature, stepped from doors and vanities and slithered from under his bed. He’d known who they were immediately from having watched so many American movies; he still toasted John Wayne any time an American girl talked to him at the Boar’s Head. The Indians circled around his bed, horrifyingly real, their painted faces and smoky breath a shock to his senses. They pulled Alvin from his bed, his head ricocheting off the hard floor as they dragged him from his one-room flat. On the verge of slicing him apart with dull-looking blades, a smallish, pitch-black man shouted for the Indians to stop. The man, his skin a reptilian obsidian, took Alvin’s face in his impossibly large hands and squeezed until Alvin burst from his sleep, dry-mouthed, cold, and with a scream on his lips that left him unable to sleep for the rest of the night.

Exhausted, Alvin stopped at Peet’s for a second cup of scalding black coffee. “It’s like I’ve got déjà vu, and me seeing you twice in the one morning, you bloody old cod,” the clerk said, but Alvin only nodded sadly. Alvin kept delivering office supplies until the need to nap overtook him like a pack of young greyhounds. He’d barely guided his truck to his favorite shade tree – the one with the five-fingered leaves – before he was out, a split second devoted to a prayer that the Indians would leave him in peace to dream of Tatiana.

Naps weren’t uncommon for Alvin. In fact, he took one every day on the job. He said they focused him. And besides, Alvin’s naps could be counted on to last exactly 45 minutes, a short respite in the scheme of things. He would park around one ‘o clock in the afternoon, and minute by minute, his head would loll forward until his apnea-strained breathing would catch so hard he would jolt awake. Wiping his chin and gathering himself, Alvin would head back to Dublin’s streets to finish his deliveries.

Deep in sleep, Alvin was unaware that the brilliant white cab of his truck perfectly reflected the sweat-beaded forehead, black eyes, and cave-black skin of an unusual-looking man walking with an unusually fluid gait. The man, sharp featured, short, and precisely dressed, was the darkest man in the world. His skin was pure black, like some lost bit of space captured in human form. As the man passed the hand-polished truck, he smiled politely at its sleeping inhabitant, ironically, since he knew he was unseen.

Looking at his scratched watch, Alvin was shocked to see it was as late as 4:00 p.m.

Wiping his face, Alvin cranked the keys still hanging from the ignition. He felt the smooth surface of the picture of Tatiana he’d laminated and hole-punched on the key ring. Every time he looked at the picture, he wished it were bigger. He wished it were her skin he was feeling. He wished he knew where she was. How would he ever find a Korean girl, raised in Russia, whom he’d met only by chance on her journey through France?

The truck’s engine fired to life. Alvin’s foot rocking on the pedal gave it a throaty sound like a Harley Davidson, or so Alvin imagined. He wished he were anywhere else. Alvin stopped revving the engine, his eyes fixed on the quiet street reflected in the truck’s large rear-view mirror. Any other day he would have slipped the column’s gear shift into first and sprung onto the streets; now he just sat there. Picking up his cell phone, he pushed at the power button until the home screen popped up. No messages. Alvin let the phone fall from his fingers like a tear.

He looked into the side mirror and pulled it toward him until he could see his face. He tried to repair the distorted reflection with a smile or cough out a laugh. Nothing changed. The look of sorrow on his face seemed permanent, frustration etched deeply like a tribal tattoo.

Alvin was ready to break.

Losing Tatiana was bad, but manageable with the help of a little brew.

But losing his ability to sleep because he was repeatedly murdered by ferocious Indians from some faraway country? That was too much.

The black man strolled around the corner, sniffing at the air. He could not resist a casual backwards glance at the rumbling white truck and Alvin’s fluttering blue eyes.

“I have chosen as well as I could,” he thought. “He will do his job and be back with his kind before he misses a meal. And I will be just in time to clear another field of disbelievers so another ministry can grow.”

While his fingers absently fingered the smooth dashboard, Alvin’s body shook with frustration. As his concentration broke and his hands slipped quietly, restfully, to his sides, the last image of his happy self disappeared. Alvin abruptly slammed the truck into gear and ignored the cough and grind it made in complaint. He resolved to finish his route if it killed him – or someone else.

Alvin looked into his side mirror again, easing brilliantly into the lane despite cars tight on all sides. He shook his head like a wet dog might, desperate to rid himself of the plague of weariness. “Just a wee drop more and maybe I can get some real sleep,” he thought, eyes drooping even as he accelerated his lorry down the narrowest of Dublin’s lanes. A kind of hypnotic recklessness possessed what good sense he had left.

His eyes closed completely. For a fraction of a second, Alvin was asleep at the wheel. That was all the time it took to let the nightmare in.

He woke just as quickly, screaming, stabbing with his fist at the fearsome red face pressing against him. His heart thundered as he swerved to avoid another car.

“Fuck you!” he yelled, his body a quivering spectacle. He slowed the truck almost to a stop. Car horns sounding behind him pushed him through the next stop sign.

“Sleep shouldn’t be a bloody battle, and me only having an hour last night and with nightmares the like of which an Irishman shouldn’t have. And now tha’ bleeding Indians do be haunting me in my own truck.” Tears streamed down his face, his frustration all-pervasive. “It’s not my fault,” he muttered over and over again.

Alvin’s lorry ground through a corner onto O’Connell Street, coming impossibly close to the parked cars lining the curb. Exhausted, Alvin’s head tilted forward as his eyes fluttered open and closed, the edge of his white truck moving still closer and closer to the empty cars. Several pedestrians stepped backward onto the curb, angered by the reckless lorry. Crack! A rear-view mirror from a red Peugeot exploded against the cab. The sound brought Alvin’s foot to the brake as his head whipped around and his heart rate quickened.

Alvin fed the gas and the lorry lurching violently forward, struggling to start in third gear.

“Serves you right, you shite!” Alvin screamed out the window, his fist pumping at no one in particular. Already Alvin was feeling better about what had just happened. Well enough, in fact, that when the traffic signal half a block ahead turned from green to flashing orange, he floored the accelerator.

“Pearse Street or be damned!” Alvin whooped, his left hand on the wheel and his right hand at his mouth, mimicking the war-whooping Indians from his dreams.

The light turned red just as Alvin’s lorry stormed into the start of the large and busy intersection. Two bright red double-decker buses, having just come up Grafton onto College Street, started to roll forward.

Alvin pushed harder, honking his horn not in warning but as a threat, his big gut now steering the wheel frantically as his left hand shifted into a higher gear and his right hand beat vigorously against his coarse lips, the war-whoop still signaling that the fight was on.

Suddenly, a young man on a bicycle wearing a bright racer’s kit bolted from Trinity College onto the street just in front of the buses, directly in Alvo’s path. Cursing like mad, Alvin rammed on the lorry’s breaks so hard that the truck’s heavy back end jacked around as the entire vehicle jerked spasmodically. The buses, too, were forced to break heavily as Alvo now blocked their way. Both bus drivers gestured impolitely at Alvin, whose face had turned into a mask of shame and uncontrollable anger. His body was bursting with murderous rage from every cell.

“I’ll be blamed if I let that faggot in spandex nip round me like that,” Alvin barked at the bus drivers in lieu of an apology, his truck pushing off through the red light in pursuit of the cyclist who’d already gained more than a block’s lead. In only a few moments he’d be pressing hard down Pearse, turning onto the N11 at nearly 30 miles per hour.

For ten minutes, Alvin could gain no headway on the cyclist. Try as he might, streetlights and cars and the acceleration limitations of his lorry kept the pursuit in check. It wasn’t until several miles after the N11 had become Stillorgan Street and the traffic began to thin that the bright colored dot on the horizon looked human again. Alvin looked at his odometer: 50 miles an hour, nearly 100 kilometers. The gap was closing quickly and the cyclist had slowed to languish in Stillorgan’s gentle curves.

Kill him! shouted an unfamiliar synapse from the back of Alvin’s mind. Several cars were now all that separated the lorry from its prey. A stoplight turned red. The cyclist slowed as if to stop, then accelerated through the intersection. Alvin pounded his fists against the sweaty steering wheel as his target turned out of view. Had he turned on Cranford? Though he couldn’t be sure, Alvin throttled up hard the moment the light changed, sending the driver in front of him fearfully to the side and out of the way at last.

BOOM. The engine sounded as Alvin accelerated wildly.

BOOM, like an animal skin drum.

BOOM, the beat shattering the clear day.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.