Page 38

“This is a terrible date,” he said.

“What?” she asked, so surprised that she laughed. “Excuse me?”

“Not you. My god. Me. This wasn’t a good idea. The racetrack. I didn’t research the horses. I’m usually pretty good at picking, to tell you the truth. Not that I come here often, I honestly don’t have much interest. I know a bit about horses, don’t know if I told you that. I don’t mean racing them, just—” Mac sighed. “Can we do it again? Except different?”

“That would be okay,” she said. “Sure we can. Next weekend.”

“Sooner,” Mac said, turning in his seat so he was facing her. She was so lovely with her short pants and her slim ankles. She was quick to smile and carried herself lightly, as if she was made of air. Sometimes he could tell she was thinking things that she wasn’t saying and he wanted to know her well enough to know what those thoughts were. He needed to wipe the slate clean. “Wednesday. Would Wednesday be all right?” Nino was leaving for vacation on Wednesday morning, so Mac could lock up early. He told her he’d pick her up at seven sharp and he’d take her to dinner. He’d take her over to Arthur Avenue for a change of scenery.

“All right,” Lillie said, smiling.

And now it was finally Wednesday, almost closing time, and he had his chance to make it up to her. The cat usually skulked around outside but that day she’d come right in like she had an appointment and lay under the window AC. But he’d have to turn it off when he left and the room would heat up fast. Mac considered tossing her outside, but he could smell a storm coming and where would she shelter? She’d tuck herself up against the tire of a car and risk getting run over. He got up slowly, sorry to leave the cool floor behind, and went out to the narrow alley where they parked the van. He checked the club on the steering wheel, the boot on the tire. He considered the cat again and finally pulled a chair up against the file cabinet that sat under the window. He cracked the window a few inches, enough for her to squeeze out if she wanted to. He filled a bowl of water and left it on the floor. She’d be okay. He’d just begun to slide the dead bolts of the front door when the phone rang.

It was Nino. Calling to make sure he was still there.

“Yeah,” Mac said, listening as Nino reminded him to do all the things he’d already done. “Yeah, got it.”

When they hung up, Mac asked himself what in the world he was doing. He was every bit as good a smith as Nino and he was far better on the days when they shod horses. He was a certified farrier, listed by the association and a dues-paying member of the journeymen’s organization, but Nino owned the shop and Mac didn’t. He was thirty years old now, and it was pressing on him heavily that he’d better get going with a few key areas of life. A wife, a place to live that did not include a selection of his brothers, children, maybe. From the moment he arrived in New York he knew the decision to join his brothers was the right one. He felt it as soon as he walked into the apartment—furnished with mismatched chairs and a long couch that looked leather but was plastic and pinched the skin of anyone who sat on it in bare legs—and saw the effort they’d made. For Mac’s arrival, one of them had gotten a box of Irish cookies and placed it in the middle of the table, as if Mac were an important guest.

Being together after being apart for so long also made him feel it was more likely they’d find Rian. It didn’t make sense in any logical way, but it was something he felt sure of. When he explained his thoughts to Martin right before leaving Larkspur, he thought Martin would try to talk him out of going but instead he said he understood. In Mac’s position, he’d do the same.

When Mac first arrived in the Bronx, all he wanted to talk about was Rian: what he’d been up to before he disappeared, how he filled his days, what thing or person or event had been the catalyst for him leaving? The others indulged him at first, told him stories, but it was old news for them. Rian was Rian, how to explain him? Still, Mac wanted to picture what he’d been like at eleven, twelve, thirteen, and if he got a clear picture, then maybe he’d know where he went. Finally Barry said there’d been no big event that prompted him to leave—he’d likely just seen an opportunity and taken it.

“He doesn’t seem to be on your minds at all,” Mac said.

“You don’t know what’s in another person’s mind, Macdara,” Barry said, insulted, and next to him Fearghal nodded. “I’m worried, of course I am. We all are. I hope he’s all right. But I have to worry about the problems right in front of me too. We need to make rent. We need to eat and buy subway tokens. And it would be very nice if we saved a little or else why are we here?”

That seemed cold to Mac at first, but then he started to see the sense of it. Rian was alive. He didn’t have proof, but he knew. Mac hadn’t walked the fields like the others had. He hadn’t climbed up to the booley or searched the watery cuts. He hadn’t been there to witness whatever arguments had led up to Rian’s going. He hadn’t listened to Cathal shouting at the gardaí that everyone who worked the ferry to Holyhead must be questioned. He hadn’t been there to see the main garda look at his partner as if to say get a load of this one. All that for a rural Gaeltacht boy who’d run away of his own accord? Unlikely. Among the villagers, they knew there was room in the back of the van that left the Cuan on the day Rian was last seen. They knew a boy of Rian’s size could have hidden there and kept very, very still.

They were all hoping, wondering, keeping ears open to any rumor of a boy on his own in the Irish neighborhoods of London, Manchester, Liverpool. Being in New York with so many other Irish who had connections there made it feel likely they’d hear something, eventually. And they did, here and there. Any Irish person Mac met in New York went through a battery of people until they found someone they had in common, and then they shared news of that person. Everyone knew the Joyces were hoping for news of their brother, and if there was the tiniest slip of a rumor, it traveled to them.

After a few years went by, Mac realized Rian was no longer a boy. Somewhere out there he was a full-grown man. Sometimes Mac lay on his bed in the room he shared with Sean and between the radios blasting on stoops and windowsills, the revving of engines, the sigh of the city buses that stopped on the corner, the sirens, dogs barking, and babies crying, the lush health of Larkspur compared to the little patches of grass in the Bronx, cigarettes strewn everywhere, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. Sean left damp towels on the floor and had a habit of leaving mugs half full of tea on his dresser, on the windowsill, on the floor next to his bed.

When Mac first got to New York, Sean tried to help him get on with the sandhogs as he’d helped Barry and Fearghal, but although he got days here and there, he couldn’t get a book. He tried scaffolding for a while. He got a six-month temporary replacement job as janitor of a Catholic high school, which he kind of enjoyed, but that came to an end when the real janitor returned. He bartended here and there but he was bad at small talk and he hated having to listen to drunk people go on. For eight hilarious-to-his-brothers weeks he’d driven a taxi, even though his entire experience driving a car was on the wide open roads of Montana. The only thing he knew about the geography of the city at that time was if the Hudson was to his right, he was facing downtown.

“Rivington and Essex,” a man said as he jumped into the back of the cab on Mac’s very first day.

Shit, Mac thought, gripping the wheel.

Driving the taxi was the worst of these jobs and felt worse still because he’d had so much hope for it. He wasn’t drawn to the city like his brothers were, but he’d seen the New York skyline in movies and photographs and now he, Macdara Joyce, was in it. But people somehow knew he’d fall for a story. “I forgot my wallet,” one heavily pregnant woman said when it came time to pay the fare. She began to cry so he told her not to worry about it. An elderly man told him his son had stolen all his money for drugs. What was he supposed to do? Lock them in until they produced cash? The owner of the taxi medallion made him pay for the fares but kept him on until Mac sideswiped a concrete pillar near Lincoln Center because he miscalculated a tight angle. His last check was withheld to contribute toward the damage to the taxi.

Mac knew he needed real work. He needed something that was more than a temporary fix. And just as he started berating himself for ever leaving Montana he noticed the ad for a blacksmith at the back of the Echo. The box of text included a sketch of a horse but he knew as soon as he got to the address that horses were not the main thing. In the window were wrought-iron decorative fence pieces, heads of posts, trivets, a huge variety of tools, a selection of iron pedestals, hinges, and knobs so big they must have been meant for doors twelve feet tall. Nino did industrial work, too, on machinery. His business nameplate was screwed onto at least five hundred Manhattan chimneys, most near-crumbling with age. Every four weeks or so they took the van over to the riding academy stables on West Eighty-Ninth. These were Mac’s favorite days and once, when they were finishing up, Nino paid him a rare compliment, said most smiths only claimed to know horses but Mac really did.

But now he’d stayed at Nino’s too long and was in a rut at the worst possible time. He itched to go out on his own. He’d heard of stables in Rockland County and farther north. There were stables in Westchester and Connecticut. Who was to say if he could manage to get his own van, and his own kit, he couldn’t make a good living going around to those stables like he used to do with Ivor in Montana? What was so different? He read the Farriers Journal when it came in the mail once a month and noticed that other people made a living on their own. Why not him? The city was broke, according to the newspaper and Ed Koch, who was running for mayor, and the anchors of the evening news and the laborers who filed into Dunleavy’s around four o’clock each afternoon to drink one slow, cold pint before scattering home to face hot apartments and exhausted wives. It didn’t seem like the right time to make a risky leap. Maybe it would make more sense to go back to Montana or try somewhere else—Australia or New Zealand or Peru.

And then Mac saw Lillie at a hurling match in Gaelic Park. She was there with a mix of people but he couldn’t tell if she was partnered with any of the guys. Every time a play turned violent, she squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears. He’d been in New York for almost ten years and never once had a girl caught his eye as immediately as she did. She had thick dark hair, and he noticed the people in her group all seemed glad to be with her. She smiled like she was up to something. He recognized two of her friends, so he went over to say hello. Eventually, they were introduced. Someone said Lillie was also from Galway, so she turned to him and named the village she was from, a stone’s throw from Galway City.

“I know it,” he said. “I’m from Cuan an Mhíl Mhóir.”

“Ah. The ‘real Ireland,’ ” she said, quoting a campaign that was intended to get more tourists to Connemara. “I knew you were a pocaide the minute you walked over.”

She meant nothing by it, teasing with what seemed like affection despite not knowing him. But a pocaide was a he-goat, a local nickname specifically for men from his village. A pocaide was a fighter, a native speaker, a country person. She’d learned her Irish in school, but she knew that much. It was interesting. In a minute they’d named all the mutual people they knew. And then he asked for her phone number. She lived on 204th Street with her sister and another girl from home. One had gotten the other two into the data entry pool at an advertising agency in Midtown, very good jobs. Lillie said she could type ninety words a minute. He’d never typed anything in his life and he didn’t know if that was fast or not, but Mac made a sound like he was impressed.

BY 1977, THERE WERE SIX Joyces in New York City: Sean, Mac, Barry, Fearghal, Noel, and most recently, Thomas the Red, who was now twenty. It was like the old system with the baby room and the loft. When one of them married or moved out of the apartment for any reason, then one of the younger brothers would come to America and take his spot. Sean and Marie had gotten their own apartment on Mosholu Parkway when they married. In addition to working in the tunnels, Barry had gotten a job as a superintendent of a building on York and Ninety-First Street, and the job included a free apartment on the first floor. Recently married, he lived there now with his wife, Regina. So Mac shared a bedroom with Thomas, and Fearghal shared with Noel. Their mother used to have a habit of hanging damp dishrags on the latch of the window to dry in the sun and Mac noticed that he and Sean, Barry, Fearghal, and Noel did the same, probably without even thinking about it. Thomas did not. Mac realized he must not remember.

Dunleavy’s was a well-known construction hangout, catty-corner to Roosevelt Hospital, where Marie had given birth, and just a few blocks north of Nino’s shop. Mac figured he’d walk up, stay for one pint, and then head to the Bronx to get ready for his date. The rest of them planned to go across the street to the hospital to meet the baby before visiting hours ended. But when Mac arrived a little after four, expecting to be the last to arrive, they weren’t even there yet. Barry walked in while he was looking around. There weren’t usually any women except for Hilda, the stout German who’d married Dunleavy and tended bar. Hilda loved Barry just as all women did—he was the most handsome of the brothers—and winked at him as she slid their pints across the bar. Mac and Barry chatted with the other men while they waited for their brothers to show. When the clock showed four thirty Mac drummed his fingers along the rim of his glass and kept glancing at the door. Noel and Fearghal walked in at four forty-five—they were linemen for Con Edison and often got placed on the same job. Thomas, who’d probably just woken up, rolled in just after five, looking disheveled and slightly confused. Noel bartended at a place called the Selkie on Saturday nights and had gotten Thomas a bar-backing job to hold him over until he found more work, so he rarely got home before dawn. The five of them waited for Sean and in the meantime told the rest of the men Sean’s news. A new baby. A second girl. It had all gone well, thank god.

“Is he working?” one man asked. “I know him a little. He was in the tunnels, wasn’t he?”