Screwed: A Novel (Daniel McEvoy 2)

“I’m okay, Mike,” I say evenly. “I been in deeper holes with worse people.”

Mike gathers himself, digging deep for some real anger.

“You came to my house,” he says finally. “To my goddamn house.”

“I was in a hole, Mike. You put me there.”

“You crossed the line, McEvoy.”

This must be the code phrase, because Mike’s goons are up and drawing flashy weapons. It’s difficult to believe that these Wild West types still exist in a first-world country.

I feel a familiar buzzing shroud settle on my brain, muffling the circuit breakers in there. Long-term consequences evaluators are now unavailable.

“That’s me, Mike. Always crossing your precious lines.”

“First I lose my mother, then I gotta see you lurking in my garden, putting my daughter’s life in danger. We may be on the wrong side of the law, McEvoy, but there’s a code.”

“Like your dear departed mother taught you,” I suggest.

Mike jumps on this, delighted that I have handed him a segue right into the next section of his speech. His fat potato face glows with the joy of a happy coincidence.

“Yes, exactly, laddie. Where I come from a man looks after his family and does what his mammy tells him.”

“Whatever she tells him?”

Mike kisses a finger and smears the photograph pinned to his lapel.

“To the letter. My mam had a wisdom about her. I sometimes thought she had a touch of the fairy magic.”

Two of Mike’s boys begin humming My Heart’s Across the Sea in Ireland so low that it’s possible I’m imagining it.

“My mammy raised eight of us on three shillings a month. Eight!”

Feck me. JFK didn’t get treated to this level of post mortem rose-tinted spectacle-ness.

I lay on the Irish. “Ah, sure, she was only a saint.”

“She was.” Mike sniffles. “And I didn’t even see her off.”

He switches tack in a heartbeat. Mercurial, that’s our Mike.

“But I can see you off.” He grins with the tears still on his cheeks, following the wrinkles. His face reminds me of the irrigation channels in a rice paddy. “You threatened my family.”

I can see where he’s going. It’s classic self-justification. Mike doesn’t see himself as a monster, so he’s gotta spell out his reasoning in case God is watching.

“Mike, before you wrap me in plastic, I got something to show you.”

“Really? You ain’t gonna dick about, laddie? I am not in the mood. It’s gone noon and I ain’t busted a nut today.”

I pull out my phone, slowly. “Mike, you need to see this. Your mam would want you to see it.”

Mike plucks the phone from my hand with pudgy fingers. “A cell phone? Mam never even had a cell phone.”

“Not the phone,” I say. “There’s a video message on it, all keyed up. Just touch the screen.”

Mike’s scowl intimates that someone of his importance should not have to be bothered with touching a screen, and in case the scowl might be misinterpreted, Mike vocalizes too: “Fucking little phones. I cannot be arsed, honest to Jaysus. A load of bluetoothing wankocity.”

Wankocity? I am reluctantly impressed.

Calvin returns from shooing Mona into the dressing room just in time to offer his services as audio-visual guy.

“Mr. Madden,” he says. “I can cue that up on the big screen, no problemo.”

Mike tosses him the phone. “Do it, laddie. I have a pain in my face with these gizmos. I stopped paying attention after VHS.”

While Calvin is e-mailing the video file to his MacBook I smile pleasantly at the man whose heart is about to be ripped out of his chest and dragged along the asphalt by the HD ghost of his own mother.

Is this cruelest thing I have ever done?

Possibly.

But in fairness I have suffered severe provocation. Occasionally I do stuff that doesn’t make much of an impact at the time but loops around to haunt me for years. Until this moment the number-one act of cruelty ever perpetrated by Daniel McEvoy on another human was the summer evening in the Curragh army training camp in County Kildare when I got peer grouped into the hazing of a Donegal grunt for bringing down the squad’s time on the assault course. Guy’s jaw got busted and it was my kick that busted it. I felt the bone flex and crack under my boot. Never owned up to it. Let the blame get spread across the group. The Donegal guy washed out so maybe I saved his life, that’s what I tell myself.

You’re not a spineless bully. You saved his life.

Bullshit. I chose myself. I walked the soft road.

I am not so bad. No, no, no.

I think that guy’s name was Mike too.

Is that an omen? Should I let Irish Mike off the hook?

I look into the wannabe godfather’s deep-set eyes and it strikes me that he would probably drop the hammer on Sofia himself.

Screw mercy. I gotta get myself out from under this guy.

“Where the hell is that video, Calvin?” says Mike, pouting. “I got stuff on, you know.”

Power makes children of grown men. My dad was the same. His trick was to build up a head of steam then invent a flimsy reason for it. He couldn’t just throw a tantrum because he was an evil bastard. No, there had to be justification and God help whoever challenged his reasons. I remember him coming home from the track with a thundercloud on his shoulders, having thrown a bundle at a nag that ran into the first fence and broke her own neck. He accused my mother of flirting with the milkman and gave her a ferocious slap, or a cross-court backhand as he often referred to the blow when he had a few whiskeys warming his gut.

The milkman on our street was eighty seven, with an honest-to-God wooden leg. For ten years I thought the guy was a retired pirate. You don’t see wooden legs anymore. Everything is carbon fiber these days.

Maybe it’s thinking of my father that does it, but I am suddenly in a quiet rage.

“Hey, Mike,” I say. “Before we look at this video, I want you to know that either way, I am done with your shit.”

Mike isn’t sure how to react. He wants to laugh it off but I think he hears the wire in my voice.

“Really, laddie? Done with my shit, are you? That’s possible. That is entirely possible.”

I don’t say anything but I get ready to come out of the chair because there is an excellent chance that Mike will lose it once this movie starts rolling.

“Here we go, Mr. Madden,” says Calvin, unaware that he could soon be the shot messenger of legend. “See, what I did was add the video to a mail then send it from the phone to my computer. Seeing as you have Wi-Fi in here it was literally no problem. What took so long was the size of the video, I didn’t want to compress it and sacrifice quality as we’re putting it up on the screen.”

Mike looks so bored by this explanation that his head might roll off his shoulders.

“Kids,” I say and Mike’s eyes reply, Tell me about it.

It’s nice that we’re connecting. This will definitely be our last chance.

“Here we go, boss,” says Calvin, pressing the space bar with the same gravitas as the president launching a nuclear attack with the football.

Shit. I’m nervous. Giddy. I feel like giggling. Also I’m embarrassed for Mike, you know ’cause he’s a human being after all. And no son wants to look at what Mike’s about to see. Except maybe that Greek guy Oedipus.

A video box appears on the screen.

“Ta dah,” says Calvin, stepping back from the screen, trying to ramp up the importance of playing a video to compensate for his earlier faux pas. He is almost certainly going to regret that.

The film is excellent quality. Amazing what you can do with a phone these days.

As a techno-fool, Mike’s default setting during any sort of computer activity is boredom. If someone were to ask Mike Madden whether he was a Mac or a PC he would probably say that he had some cousins in Waterford who were McDonalds. In spite of this

I am not surprised when something on the screen slices through his ennui.

“Hang on,” he says brightly. “That’s mammy’s room.”

On-screen we see a bedroom that could have been lifted from an Irish Mammy’s Room catalogue, complete with patchwork quilt on the four poster and enough throw pillows to choke a whale. There is an embroidered platitude hanging behind the wrought-iron headboard.

It is his mammy’s room. I know because I have watched this clip and the big soft grin Mike’s sporting is about to get wiped clean off his mug.

The camera swivels a little, bringing an elderly lady into the shot.

“Mammy had her hair done,” Mike breathes. “And she has teeth.”

Mrs. Madden coughs delicately then stares down the eye of the camera.

“This is a message for my son, Michael,” she says, and she is Irish Mother incarnate to be ignored at one’s peril.