taking these gents to the damnedest evening ever! Little do they know what waits for them beyond!”
He opened the door. The wind threw half a ton of ice water on him. Taking this as a spur to rhetoric, Heeber added in a roar, “Out with you! On!”
“Do you think we should?” I wondered.
“What do you mean?” cried Mike. “Would you freeze in your room? Rewrite the dead Whale?”
“Well …,” I said, and slung on my cap.
Then, like Ahab, I thought on my bed, a damp box with its pale cool winding sheets and the window dripping next to it like a conscience all night through. I groaned. I opened the door of Mike’s car, took my legs apart to get in, and in no time we shot down the town like a ball in a bowling alley.
Finn at the wheel talked fierce, half hilarity, half sobering King Lear.
“A wild night? Ahead! You’d never guess, would you, to walk through Ireland, so much could go on under the skin?”
“I knew there must be an outlet somewhere,” I yelled.
The speedometer was up to one hundred kilometers. Stone walls raced by on the right, stone walls raced by on the left. It was raining the entire dark sky down on the entire dark land.
“Outlet indeed!” said Finn. “If the Church only knew, or maybe it figures: The poor buggers! and lets us be!”
“Where?”
“There!” cried Finn.
The speedometer read 110. My stomach was stone like the stone walls rushing left and right. Up over a hill, down into a valley. “Can’t we go a bit faster?” I asked, hoping for the opposite.
“Done!” said Finn, and made it 120.
“That will do it nicely,” I said, in a faint voice, wondering what lay ahead. Behind all the slate-stone weeping walls of Ireland, what happened? Somewhere in this drizzling land were there hearth-fleshed peach-fuzz Renoir women bright as lamps you could hold your hands out to and warm your palms? Beneath the rain-drenched sod, the flinty rock, at the numbed core of living, was there one small seed of fire which, fanned, might break volcanoes free and boil the rains to steam? Was there then somewhere a Baghdad harem, nests awriggle and aslither with silk and tassel, the absolute perfect tint of women unadorned? We passed a church. No. We passed a convent. No. We passed a village slouched under its old-men’s thatch. No. Yet …
I glanced over at Heeber Finn. We could have switched off the 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 may 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 windshield. Heeber Finn was out of the car.
“We’re here!” He sounded like a man drowned deep in rain.
I saw a hole in the wall, a tiny gate flung wide.
Mike and I followed at a plunge. I saw other cars in the dark and many bikes. But not a light. Oh, it must be wild to be this secret, I thought. I yanked my cap tight, as rain crawled down my neck.
Through the hole in the wall we stumbled, Heeber clenching our elbows. “Here!” he husked. “Hold on. Swig on this to keep your blood high!”
I felt a flask knock my fingers. I poured its contents into my boilers to let the steam up my flues.
“It’s a lovely rain,” I said.
“The man’s mad.” Finn drank after Mike, a shadow among shadows.
I squinted about. I had an impression of midnight sea upon which men like little boats passed on the murmurous tides, heads down, muttering, in twos and threes.
Good God, what’s it all mean? I asked myself, incredibly curious now.
“Wait!” whispered Heeber. “This is it!”
What did I expect? Perhaps some scene like those old movies where innocent sailing ships suddenly flap down their 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 crack Paris. So here, I thought, will these stones spill away, that house open wide, rosy lights flash on, so that from a monstrous cannon ten dozen pink women, not dwarf Irish but willowy French, will be shot out and down into the waving arms of this grateful multitude?
The lights came on.
I blinked.
For there was the entire unholy thing, laid out for me in the drizzle.
The lights flickered. The men quickened.
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 yell or a murmur from the crowd of men. Their heads turned slowly, watching. The rain rained down on the half-lit scene. The rain fell on tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and sharp noses. The rain hammered hunched shoulders. The rabbit ran. The dogs loped. The rabbit popped into its electric kennel. The dogs collided, yiping. The lights went out.
In the dark I turned to stare at Heeber Finn, stunned.
“Now!” he shouted. “Place your bets!”
We were back in Kilcock, speeding, at ten o’clock.
The rain was still raining, like an ocean smashing the road with titanic fists, as we drew up in a great tidal spray before the pub.
“Well, now!” said Heeber Finn, looking not at us but at the windshield wiper palpitating before us. “Well!”
Mike and I had bet on five races and had lost, between us, two or three pounds.
“I won,” Finn said, “and some of it I put down in your names, both of you. That last race, I swear to God, won for all of us. Let me pay!”
“It’s all right, Heeber,” I said, my numb lips moving.
Finn pressed two shillings into my hand. I didn’t fight him. “That’s better!” he said. “Now, one last drink on me!”
Mike drove me back to Dublin.
Wringing out his cap in the hotel lobby he looked at me and said, “It was a wild Irish night for sure!”
“A wild night,” I said.
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 with its sun of the South Pacific, its hot winds blowing the Pequod toward its doom, but along the way fiery sands and its women with dark charcoal-burning eyes.
And I thought of the darkness beyond the city, the lights flashing, the electric rabbit running, the dogs yiping, the rabbit gone, the lights out, and the rain flailing the dank shoulders and soaked caps and ice-watering the noses and seeping through the sheep-smelling tweeds.
Going upstairs, I glanced out a streaming window. There, on the street, riding by under a lamp, was a man on a bike. He was terribly drunk. The bike weaved back and forth across the bricks, as the man vomited. He did not stop the bike to do this. He kept pumping unsteadily, blearily, as he threw up. I watched him go off in the dark rain.
Then I groped up to find and die in my room.