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.
CHAPTER 5
Several weeks had passed since the ancient Elders arrived at their church’s sprawling Boston manor.
This has always been a comfortable place, Elder Joseph thought, even when restless soldiers lined every inch of these stone floors. He was almost certain he could remember the corner where he’d slept the night before the battle that had changed his life and the lives of so many brothers. The Elder looked entirely appropriate in the great hall, sitting tall in an austere, high-backed chair at a long, thin table, reading from an enormous cloth-bound book. Heavy tapestries depicting holy soldiers from various campaigns and black drapery covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, hiding a view to the property’s endless gardens.
All morning pleasant classical music was piped through hidden speakers, one concerto after another. It wasn’t until a mournful soliloquy infected the room that Elder Joseph looked up from his studies. Out of respect for the singer, he shifted his bones against the soft cushion, determined to let the long-dead Scottish girl’s song affect him the same way it had centuries before—the only other time he’d heard it. She had performed live at a wake. No instruments accompanied her words that day, as she sang over her only son’s grave on the day she finally let them bury him:
“Tis fine this day without you;
the sun is high and you’ll be gone till dark.
Tired I’d say,
but your feet sound lightly on the stair.
In you bound
past your supper
around and around...”
As Elder Joseph’s grief crystallized, the mother’s sadness gently pulled his wrinkled fingers down his forehead, across his eyes and down his cheeks. He let his hands fall from his chin and land over his heart.
“All is well if sadness and joy are two hands upon your soul.” His voice was weak, a whisper meant only for her to hear.
At the sound of a door opening, Elder Joseph dabbed solemnly at the tears on his cheeks with the white sleeve of his robe. He didn’t look up until the footfalls had stopped before him.
“Holiness,” said the powerful-looking lay apostolate, “I am sorry to interrupt you.” Elder Joseph said nothing, and instead waited for the tower of snow-white skin and thick blonde hair to continue. “You asked to know when Elder Fortunato returned. She comes now.”
Elder Joseph betrayed his nonchalance with the deepening wrinkles on his forehead. “She did not telephone earlier?”
“No, Your Holiness. We’ve had no communication from her since she left earlier in the week. And as you know, she refused to have an escort or communicate with the local parish. If she made it to the desert she made it there alone, and has since operated there alone.” When the man finished speaking, he looked stiffer than when he’d entered.
“Thank you, William,” said Elder Joseph, turning his attention back