slouched under its old men’s thatch. No. Stone walls to left. Stone walls to right. No. Yet …
I glanced over at Heber Finn. We could have switched off our lights and driven by the steady piercing beams of his forward-directed eyes snatching at the dark, flicking away the rain.
Wife, I thought to myself, children, forgive me for what I do this night, terrible as it might be, for this is Ireland in the rain of an ungodly time and way out in Galway where the dead must go to die.
The brakes were hit. We slid a good ninety feet, my nose mashed on the windscreen. Heber Finn was out of the car.
‘We’re here.’ He sounded like a man drowning deep in the rain.
I looked left. Stone walls. I looked right. Stone walls.
‘Where is it?’ I shouted.
‘Where, indeed.’ He pointed, mysteriously. ‘There.’
I saw a hole in the wall, a tiny gate flung wide.
The director and I followed at a plunge. We saw other cars in the dark now, and many bikes. But not a light anywhere. A secret, I thought, oh, it must be wild to be this secret. What am I doing here? I yanked my cap lower. Rain crawled down my neck.
Through the hole in the wall we stumbled, Heber Finn clenching our elbows. ‘Here,’ he husked, ‘stand here. It’ll be a moment. Swig on this to keep your blood high.’
I felt a flask knock my fingers. I got the fire into my boilers and let the steam up the flues.
‘It’s a lovely rain,’ I said.
‘The man’s mad,’ said Heber Finn, and drank after the director, a shadow among shadows in the dark.
I squinted about. I had an impression of a midnight sea upon which men like little boats passed on the murmurous tides. Heads down, muttering, in twos and threes, a hundred men stirred out beyond.
It has an unholy air – Good God, what’s it all about? I asked myself, incredibly curious now.
‘Heber Finn—?’ said the director.
‘Wait,’ whispered Heber Finn. ‘This is it!’
What did I expect? Perhaps some scene like those old movies where innocent sailing ships suddenly flap down cabin walls and guns appear like magic to fire on the foe. Or a farmhouse falls apart like a cereal box, Long Tom rears up to blast a projectile five hundred miles to target Paris.
So here, maybe, I thought, the stones will spill away each from the others, the walls of that house will curtain back, rosy lights will flash forth, and from a monstrous cannon six, a dozen, ten dozen pink pearly women, not dwarf-Irish but willowy-French, will be shot out over the heads and down into the waving arms of the grateful multitude. Benison indeed! What’s more – manna!
The lights came on. I blinked.
For I saw the entire unholy thing. There it was, laid out for me under the drizzling rain.
The lights came on. The men quickened, turned, gathered, us with them.
A mechanical rabbit popped out of a little box at the far end of the stony yard and ran. Eight dogs, let free from gates, yelping, ran after in a great circle. There was not one shout or murmur from the crowd of men. Their heads turned slowly, watching.
The rain rained down on the illuminated scene. The rain fell upon tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and thin noses. The rain beat on hunched shoulders. I stared. The rabbit ran. The dogs ran. At the finish, the rabbit popped into its electric hatch. The dogs collided into each other, barking. The lights went out.
In the dark, I turned to stare at the director as I knew he must be turning to stare at me.
I was thankful for the dark, the rain, so Heber Finn could not see our faces.
‘Come on, now,’ he shouted, ‘place your bets!’
We were back in Galway, speeding, at ten o’clock. The rain was still raining, the wind was still blowing. The highway was a river working to erase the stone beneath as we drew up in a great tidal spray before my hotel.
‘Well, now,’ said Heber Finn, not looking at us, but at the windscreen wiper beating, palpitating there. ‘Well.’
The director and I had bet on five races and had lost between us two or three pounds. It worried Heber Finn.
‘I won a great deal,’ he said, ‘and some of it I put down in your names. That last race, I swear to God, I bet and won for all of us. Let me pay you.’
‘No, Heber Finn, thanks,’ I said, my numb lips moving.
He took my hand and pressed two shillings into it. I didn’t fight him. ‘That’s better,’ he said.
Wringing out his cap in the hotel lobby my director looked at me and said, ‘It was a wild Irish night, wasn’t it?’
‘A wild night,’ I said. He left.
I hated to go up to my room. So I sat for another hour in the reading lounge of the damp hotel and took the traveler’s privilege, a glass and a bottle provided by the dazed hall porter.
I sat alone, listening to the rain and the rain on the cold hotel roof, thinking of Ahab’s coffin-bed waiting for me up there under the drumbeat weather.
I thought of the only warm thing in the hotel, in the town, in all the land of Eire this night, the script in my typewriter this moment, with its sun of Mexico, its hot winds blowing from the Pacific, its mellow papayas, its yellow lemons, its fiery sand, and its women with dark charcoal-burning eyes.
And I thought of the darkness beyond the town, the light flashing on, the electric rabbit running, the dogs running, and the rabbit gone, and the light going out, and the rain falling down on the dank shoulders and the soaked caps, and trickling off the noses and seeping through the tweeds.
Going upstairs I glanced through a streaming window. There, riding by under a streetlight, was a man on a bicycle. He was terribly drunk, for the bike weaved back and forth across the road. He kept pumping on unsteadily, blearily. I watched him ride off into the raining dark.
Then I went on up to die in my room.
The phone rang at five-thirty that evening. It was December, and long since dark as Thompson picked up the phone.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello, Herb?’
‘Oh, it’s you, Allin.’
‘Is your wife home, Herb?’
‘Sure. Why?’
‘Damn it.’
Herb Thompson
