The Dead Yard

4: TROJAN HORSE

On the sand at Salisbury Beach, in the far north of Massachusetts, a Greek and a Trojan battling it out over the upturned hulks of the Greek ships.

It was warm and the sea breeze was only enough to ripple the hair on my arms and make a slight sound on the clandestine greenness of the waves. We skirmished, sweated, and our swords caught the light from the last of the dog-day sun setting slowly over the blurred headlands of Maine and New Hampshire.

Everything in silhouette.

The dome of Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, the crowd of onlookers, the children screaming as the whirligigs of the amusements tossed them in the air and turned them to the wide expanse of sky and brought them down again.

We hardly noticed as we moved over the upturned gunwales, a mainmast, and the tattered remains of an anchor chain, following a motion of rehearsed delirium. Bronze clanging off bronze and the sand becoming wet with the turning of the tide. Lunges, ducks, parries-an exotic play of shape and form in the living grease of the sea air and the sun.

The sky aquamarine and the Atlantic heavy and distant in the violent beginnings of the summer dusk.

My opponent seemed to have the advantage, using his shield to force me into defensive postures. He was playing Achilles and he was bigger than me. I suffered under his pushing and shoving for a while and then, in a moment of drama, I leapt over the carved prow of the boat and made a run for it across the sand.

The crowd booed.

I turned and ducked as a javelin came screaming at me.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said under my breath.

I stood my ground and Achilles drew his short sword, spat.

Lights appeared on the Ferris wheel. Faces. They might be watching us, but the view was so good up there you could see the Isles of Shoals and Cape Ann and if you were really lucky, Mount Washington, way up in the White Mountains. Achilles caught his breath and approached, lifting his sword for the killing stroke. He was an English guy called Simon. He’d been in the RADA briefly and had also done summer stock. If he’d stayed in acting rather than joining MI6, this, he said, would definitely have been the low point of his career. You could tell he was pissed off. That bloody javelin had nearly killed me.

I’d known him for eight days and we both worked for Salisbury Beach’s Department of Tourism. As a tourist town, Salisbury Beach was down on its luck. Everything had an old-fashioned, seedy, worn-out feel to it-think Blackpool, England, or, I guess, Coney Island, New York, on a bad day in 1977. If Martha’s Vineyard and Provincetown are your archetypes for the Massachusetts seaside, you should probably avoid Salisbury Beach. And the people who came here weren’t exactly flying in from the Riviera; a condescending wanker would say they were fat, Kmart-clad white trash who smoked cheap cigarettes, drank Old Milwaukee, and lived in trailers.

In this part of Massachusetts, it wasn’t Congregationalists, East Anglians, old money, and Puritans. Here it was Portuguese, Italians, bog Irish, and Greeks. The latter particularly relevant for us, since as part of their sponsorship of the Salisbury Beach Summer Pageant, the Greek community put on the Trojan War, specifically the death of Hector, every day at six o’clock. Except that after eight repetitions of this shite, today I didn’t feel like cooperating.

I lunged at Simon and seemed to slip a little on the sand. Simon seized the moment and raised his sword to plunge it into my back. The crowd oohed. It was a second before Simon realized that it had been a ruse. I came up underneath him, hooking his parried sword and swinging it harmlessly through the air. I hit him on the back between the folds of his leather armor, and Achilles, son of Peleus, went down into the sand cursing while I applied the coup de grace and took applause from the dour Massachusetts crowd. I helped Simon up.

“One in the eye for the invading Greek dogs,” I said.

“You’ll get in trouble for this,” Simon said.

“Who from?”

“Cleo, for one,” Simon said.

“Who’s that? That hatchet-faced woman on the Chamber of Commerce?” I asked.

“The muse of history, you ignorant Paddy,” Simon said.

We walked back across the sand.

The crowd took some photographs and drifted away from the performance, moving back towards the fair, where they bought Cokes and cotton candy and the more adventurous sampled the local delights of dulse and saltwater taffy. I helped Simon with his gear.

“You’ll be sorry when they hear about your little stunt. The Greeks see Hector as a Turk, they won’t stand for this, they’ll do you, mate,” Simon said.

“They won’t fire me, no one else would take this gig. By the way, every day you’re closer with that bloody javelin.”

“Sorry about that. Come on, we’ll go to the pub, check out the talent,” Simon said.

“If there’s gonna be girls, shouldn’t we shower first?”

“Nah, the lure of show business will impress the babes. You wanna hit the pub or not?”

Of course I wanted to hit the pub. It was Friday night. My second Friday night here. Last Friday, Kit, Gerry, and the whole Sons of Cuchulainn had singularly failed to show up at the End of the State Bar for the fireworks show, despite the fact that Samantha Caudwell had assured me that they came each and every Friday. Bloody British Intelligence. Going to be the death of-

“Quite the display there, macho man.”

I looked over. A girl in the crowd: pretty, Daisy Dukes, high-tops, a pink shirt showing her shoulder tattoo and the dark outline of her nipples. My heart danced a jig. Kit. Simon nudged me in the ribs.

“I think you have a classical mythology groupie over there, mate,” he said.

Kit came over and shook me civilly by the hand. She seemed older or more tired than a little over a week ago, when I’d seen her last. What fresh nightmares were Touched and Gerry cooking up that were disturbing her sleep?

“I’ve been looking for you for a while. I thought that was a line you told me about Salisbury. It’s good to see you again,”

she said.

“Good to see you, too,” I said and I meant it.

“But Sean, what the hell are you wearing?” Kit asked, suddenly taking me in.

“You like my summer wear? I’m setting the fashion. Seriously, Trojans are in for ’97,” I said.

“In America that’s a brand of condoms,” Kit said soberly.

“You think I didn’t know that,” I said, over the top and saucy.

Kit laughed.

“Are you going to introduce me?” Simon asked.

“Aye. Simon, this is Kit; Kit, this is Simon.”

The two of them shook hands.

“How do you know Sean?” Simon asked Kit.

“Sean and I go way back,” Kit said with a beautiful, sweet smile.

“Yeah, we do,” I agreed. “We backpacked around Africa together. Boy, we had some times. Remember Clarence from Australia? Eaten by a lion.”

“It was shocking,” Kit agreed. “It only left the head.”

“No way,” Simon said, pretending to believe us.

“Way,” Kit assured him.

Simon looked at the pair of us. Kit could barely contain her giggles.

“You’re having me on,” he said.

Kit burst out laughing. Slapped Simon on the back.

“Got ya,” she said.

By this time we were up off the beach, walking along the seafront in the direction of the End of the State Bar.

The town sprawled in a long line all the way from the Mer-rimack River to the New Hampshire border. But the beach strip was the worst. A desperate air hanging over everything. A grim, worn sadness that coated the half-drunken people in their shapeless T-shirts and denims. I tried to ignore it all as we walked toward a fish-and-chip stand.

“Are you hungry?” Simon asked Kit.

Kit nodded, which was a relief because Simon and I were famished. In the mornings we did beach clearance, picking up rubbish and the occasional dead thing, and in the evenings we performed the pageant for the Greek Fair. It was hard work for shit pay and we hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. We stopped at the fish-and-chip stand and I bought her a cod.

“Our first meal,” she said coyly. She ate and the food perked her up. Now she looked healthy, happy, pleased to see me.

“You mentioned that you were looking for me,” I said between mouthfuls.

“I was. You told me you were working up here, you didn’t tell me what you were doing.”

“Would you?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said, looking at my outfit.

“What are you doing up here?” I asked, and she explained to me that her dad and her stepmum, Sonia, were at the End of the State Bar. She’d come with them, but it was karaoke at the moment, so she had decided to go for a walk and accidentally caught our act on the beach. Not, of course, knowing that I was Hector until I took my helmet off.

Simon asked her about the nuances of our performance. Kit, being polite, told him it was a terrific show.

“You know, when Sean got the job of Hector he knew next to nothing about sword fighting; there’s a technique to the stage fight, choreography, much more difficult than you would think. I taught him everything he knows,” Simon said.

“It’s true,” I admitted.

“Well, it was very impressive, I liked the javelin bit,” she said. “It seemed to get very close.”

“Oh, that was improvised,” Simon said proudly.

“Yeah, you nearly improvised me into the emergency room,” I said and winked at him, nodded at Kit, and somehow made clear that now was the time for Simon to make himself scarce.

“Oh yeah, well, Sean, I must be heading along, see ya in the pub,” he said and scarpered with a look of ironic jealousy playing across his face.

I binned the rest of my dinner and walked with Kit a little farther along the strand. The End of the State Bar was a good mile up the beach and we had to thread our way through the amusement arcades, go-cart tracks, taffy stands, fortunetellers, cotton candy sellers, and a plastic-duck shooting range. A lot going on but Kit wasn’t talking, there was something on her mind. I tried a few conversational openings and got monosyllabic answers.

“Ok, go on, just say what’s cooking in that brain of yours. You’re plotting something,” I finally demanded.

She stopped, looked at me, and nodded.

“Sean. I’ve been thinking about you. And, like, this is the deal. I think you should meet Dad,” she said.

“So I can ask his permission for your hand?”

“Jesus, Sean, be serious for a minute,” Kit demanded, blushing in a way that Winona Ryder would have killed to be capable of.

“I am being serious,” I said with increasing gravity the more I looked at her. Her blush deepened and Winona, to extrapolate the analogy, would have been well on her way to the electric chair.

“No, I want you to meet my dad. It’s for your own good. But you can’t go like that. You’re going to have to change into your regular clothes. He and Sonia won’t mind, but Jackie and Touched are going to be with him and they’d take the piss out of you,” Kit said without any levity at all. I smiled at her. Her lips narrowed.

“Good news and bad news. The good news is that I’d love to meet your dad. The bad news is these are my regular clothes. The costume was the gear I had on in Revere. I dress like this all the-”

“Sean, stop fucking around, I’m not kidding,” she interrupted, starting to get exasperated. I leaned back on my heels and smirked at her. She was fuming a little and her face had transformed into a delicious pout.

“So you’ve been looking for me and thinking about me. Can’t get me out of your head, huh?” I declared.

“Don’t get ideas. I wasn’t thinking about you in that way. I just want you to do well in America. My dad could really help you out. If you want to make a good impression you’re going to have to change your outfit. Look at the state of you.”

“And now you can’t keep your eyes off me.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I’ll stop saying it but I won’t stop noticing it.”

“Come on, Sean, they’re going to be waiting at the End of the State, you won’t get an opportunity like this again,” she pleaded.

“Ok, fine. I’ll change. No big deal. Why don’t you come back to my flat; I’ll shower, get dressed, you can look through my CD collection and make snotty remarks about it,” I said.

“Sounds like fun,” Kit replied.

“Everything we’ll do together is going to be fun,” I said, and if that wasn’t the lie of the year I don’t know what was.

In the time it had taken me to shower, a thunderstorm had rolled down the Merrimack River valley. A common occurrence in the week I’d been here. Hot during the day, thunderstorms at night. Sometimes Simon and I would go on the roof, drink Sam Adams, watch lightning hit the dome of the nuclear power station and half hope for some kind of atomic emergency to relieve the tedium.

I toweled off, changed into a shirt and jeans. Kit was looking at my bookshelves. She ignored the books, barely pretending to skim through them, but she couldn’t conceal how much she coveted my CDs, which were cool English music, a year or two ahead of similar American trends. The covers she found to be fascinating objects. I stared at her for a minute and she caught me looking. I pretended to be checking out the weather behind her head.

“It’s raining,” I said.

Kit hadn’t noticed. She peered out the window, nodded absently.

The apartment was small. Two tiny bedrooms, a living room that connected to a minute kitchen. A sofa, a couple of deck chairs. No air-con but a bit of a breeze from the Atlantic out the window.

“What are these like?” she asked finally, holding up a handful of the CDs.

“They’re good,” I said.

“What type of music?”

“It’s a thing called Britpop, somewhere between pop and rock, I don’t think there’s really an American equivalent. I suppose REM would be the closest thing,” I said.

“I like REM,” she said, her big eyes shadowed black, blinking slowly, seductively, without meaning to be seductive.

The blue of cornflowers in a black orchid bouquet, you could say, if you were so inclined. And I wasn’t. It wouldn’t do to get carried away.

“Who else do you like?” I asked, to break the silence.

“Nirvana, Pearl Jam, that kind of thing,” she said.

“You might like Oasis,” I said. “Take the CD with you. You can borrow it.”

“Is that your favorite?” she asked.

“Nah, Radiohead is what’s happening at the moment,” I said.

“Can I listen?” she asked.

I put on OK Computer, which had just been released that week. After only a few tracks I could tell that Kit loved it. I was pleased. She’d already called me an old geezer once and I wanted her to think I wasn’t completely unhip. I brought a couple of Sams from the fridge. We drank, listened to a bit of the record, and watched the rain. Kit found herself edging towards me on the rattan sofa, realized what she was doing, stopped herself, shifted away. She made an obvious play of looking at her watch.

“Oh, we better head up to the bar,” she said.

I pulled on a pair of socks and grabbed my Stanley boots. After Samantha’s foot stab, I found that I felt safer in shoes with steel toe caps even despite the god-awful heat. Kit watched me pull the boot on over my plastic left foot.

“What happened to your foot?” she asked. “I noticed when you were wearing that skirt that you have a pro, pro, what’s it called?”

“Prosthesis,” I said unself-consciously. I was used to it by now. I didn’t even think about it anymore.

“Prosthesis. That’s a good word. What happened to you?” she asked, her face radiating concern and curiosity.

I smiled at her.

“Motorcycle accident when I was nineteen. I was going way too fast, I fell off, the bike came down on top of me, my left foot went into one of the wheels. It was my fault, I was speeding, the road was slick, and no one else was involved,” I said.

A nice wee invention with just a little bit of gore and not one-tenth as bad as the real story, of horror piled upon horror down in the gothic badlands south of the border.

“Does it hurt?” Kit asked.

“Now, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“No, it doesn’t hurt.”

“You moved pretty good down there on the beach, with your sword and all, I wouldn’t have known otherwise.”

“I can run on it too; I can pretty much do everything except swimming. I can’t get the hang of swimming.”

“You could just use your arms,” Kit said helpfully.

“I know. It’s not that, it’s just, well, I don’t know what it is.”

“I’ll take you swimming with me, you can use the surfboard to keep you afloat. It’ll be easy.”

“You surf?”

“Of course. You?”

“No.”

“You can learn. I’ll teach you. We’ll get you over this swimming thing and I’ll teach you to surf. Your foot might make it a little harder but I’m a good teacher and the break on Plum Island is pretty easy.”

I wanted to change the subject because I didn’t want the focus to be on me and my bloody handicaps.

“You look nice,” I said. “You did something to your hair.”

She blushed again. She wasn’t used to compliments. The atmosphere of the Sons of Cuchulainn was probably one of matey blokishness, and that pleased me too. It would give me an angle.

“Yeah, got it cut, less of a bob, more of a pageboy,” she explained.

“I don’t know what that means, but it looks good,” I said.

“I got rid of the hairspray, too. It was too 80s, too glam, too New Wave.”

I nodded to show that I got her pop culture references.

“Too much of a fire hazard as well. One loose cigarette and you would have been up like Michael Jackson.”

She looked puzzled.

“What do you mean?

“Michael Jackson set his hair on fire during a Pepsi commercial. Remember?”

“That must have been before my time,” she said, again making me feel like an old git. I was too ticked off to think of a response.

“Anyway, Sean, I’m glad you’ve changed out of your centurion uniform, you look much better,” she said.

“Thanks. But tell me again why precisely I have to dress up for your father?” I asked.

“Because, Sean, my father is, like, a very wealthy man who runs a construction company and can get you a job which would not involve you having to wear a ridiculous costume and fight some English dude for a pittance.”

“How do you know it’s a pittance? And how do you know that I would want to work for your da?”

“Simon said you were getting like six dollars an hour,” she said.

“How much your da pay?”

“Twelve skilled, nine nonskilled. Really, like, twelve if you’re Irish, nine if you’re Mexican or Portuguese,” she said.

I looked at her to see if she was joking or being sarcastic, but apparently not. Her dad was an institutionalized racist and she wasn’t that concerned about it.

“And it wouldn’t look good if I was to say, ‘Dad, here’s this Irish guy you might want to hire,’ and you come in looking like Julius Caesar,” she said.

I stroked my chin, nodded.

“Kit. Why do you want to help me?” I asked.

“’Cos you tried to save my life, ’cos you’re Irish, ’cos you look like a total idiot in that Roman getup. I wouldn’t wish your job on my worst enemy,” she said.

“Not Romans, Greeks and Trojans,” I said.

“What?”

“We were supposed to be Greeks and Trojans. You know, hence the bronze sword, rather than iron; they really paid attention to detail.”

Kit looked at me skeptically. Biting into her lip in a way that was completely captivating. She had no idea what it was doing to me. I had no idea what she was doing to me and since she was doing it so effectively I hadn’t even put up any defenses until it was too late. She was across the moat and over the wall and I had left the keep doors open for her too.

“Well,” she whispered huffily, “I didn’t know you were, like, so enthusiastic about it. If this is what you want to do all summer, I won’t try to help.”

“No, no, I’ll meet your da,” I said, smiling as if I were making a concession.

“Good,” she said, pleased with herself.

It was completely dark outside now and the rain was ending. Kit stood. She looked at me with a little impatience.

“We should head up. Jackie will be wondering where I am. You don’t mind meeting everyone, do you?”

“No, who’s everyone?”

“Touched, Sonia, Jackie.”

“Touched is?”

“My dad’s old friend from Ireland.”

“I take it that’s a nickname, right?”

“Yeah, supposedly because he’s crazy, but he seems ok to me.”

“Sonia is your stepmom, right?”

“Yeah. My mom’s dead. Well, technically she was my adopted mom but you know what I mean,” Kit said.

“Yeah, you told me that. You said that your real mom is still alive somewhere?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you ever-”

She put her hand up to cut me off.

I stopped speaking.

She closed her eyes and when she opened them she looked pissed off.

“Sean. There’s one ground rule with me. You can ask me anything, talk about anything, but just don’t ask if I ever want to meet my real mom or dad someday. Everybody always asks that and it’s really irritating. My dad is my dad and he’s a great man and as you saw yourself a brave man, too. And my mom was my mom, too. And that’s it. I don’t know who my real mother or father were and I don’t care. My real dad is Gerry. End of story.”

Kit looked flustered. She’d said all this to stop me digging a potential hole for myself and, if truth be told, I probably would have asked her if she’d ever considered looking for her “real” mom or dad someday. Clearly, many people had made that gaffe in the past and she didn’t want me to be one of them.

“He’d probably be a jerk anyway,” Kit continued. “I always think of him as one of those idiots who tries to do kung fu on the lions at the zoo or falls into a vat of molten chocolate or dies from urinating on the third rail,” she said with a laugh.

I laughed, but I found her examples of stupidity disturbing, not amusing. There was a hardness in Kit that she got from her adoptive da.

“Ok, so who else is going to be there tonight?” I asked.

“Just Jackie. You know about him. He’s my boyfriend,” she said, playing it straight.

“He’s still your boyfriend?” I asked innocently.

“Yeah.”

“I thought I told you he wasn’t good enough for you.”

“You’re wrong. Jackie is really nice and you’ll like him.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound disappointed but not obsessively disappointed so she didn’t think I was a perv already in love with her or something. Hard to convey all that meaning in one syllable, but I did my best.

“He’s a bit like you,” Kit said almost defensively.

“Handsome, smart, funny, and brilliant, you mean?”

“No, he’s Irish, real Irish like my dad. He came over to South Boston about five or six years ago.”

“South Boston. Yes, I’ve heard about that place. North of the river is Cambridge, racially tolerant, attractive, full of geniuses, and South Boston’s the counterweight.”

“Who told you that?”

“What I heard.”

“It’s not true. I have a lot of friends from South Boston and they’re smart and they’re not bigots. At least not all of them.”

“I stand corrected. Where’s he from in Ireland?”

“I think he said Sligo.”

“Oh dear, well that I do know about, they’re all cow fuckers over there.”

Kit punched me on the shoulder.

“Ok, that’s enough,” she said, laughing.

I sat back on the sofa, edged my arm towards her, rubbed my lip. Considered a move right here and now.

“Come on, dude, tie your shoes up,” she said, interrupting my schemes.

“Ok. Well, look, one more track, the next one’s ‘Karma Police,’ you’ll really like it,” I said.

“Karma Police” came on. Kit really liked it. She made me play it again. Not that surprising. Many magazines would vote it the best track on the best album of the year. I was starting to get nervous so I finished the Sam Adams and popped the last one in the six-pack, chilled, listened to the track, and sat with Kit. These were the moments you lived for. A beautiful girl, good music, good beer. As she watched the sun set, I studied her until I feared she would catch me at it again, so I looked out the window too. The sun completely gone now and the sky amber and gold all the way west into the Berkshires and Vermont. Oystercatchers and gulls on the bay. Kites down at the headland and higher up a light plane skating along the coast, a white single-engined craft with a trailer on the back of it that read “NH Fireworks Shack-Sail Sail Sail This Sunday.” A bad speller but a good pilot. He did a final spectacular dip over the beach and banked the plane lazily towards the New Hampshire border.

We watched the plane until it was a mere speck in the opaque sky, lost in the pattern of cirrus clouds and the regular plough lines of the high jet vapor trails. Its engines long gone in the soporific drone of the fairground generators and the light booming of the water against the seawall.

The music faded. Silence. I turned off the stereo. We looked at each other. We both knew what was going to happen, but I had to ask.

“Why mention the boyfriend?” I asked.

“Just, like, so you know,” she said.

“Is it serious?” I asked.

“As serious as you can get at my age,” she said, grinning, and leaned over and kissed me on the cheek to let me know that that was all it would ever be. Another thank-you for Boston. She had her boy and I wasn’t him and she was just happy to see me.

But she wasn’t going to get away with that.

I took her face in my hands and kissed those soft pillowy lips and pulled her down beside me. I ran my fingers down her back. Her skin was smooth and electric. She was gorgeous.

She put her arms around me and held me tight. I wanted her to touch me, I wanted her to hold me. And I wanted to possess her.

We kissed and when she was out of breath and her mouth was opening and she caught herself pushing her crotch onto my leg she froze, opened her eyes, and pulled on the hand brake. Stopped herself. Moved back.

“I’m serious, I have a boyfriend,” she whispered, like a mantra.

I didn’t say anything.

For once I was utterly speechless.

Kit stood.

“Come on, we really should go.”

I nodded.

“We’ll go.”

She must have remembered about my foot because it drew the mothering instinct out of her and she gave me her hand and pulled me up from the sofa. She let go immediately I was up.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

And I looked at her. Drew in every essence of her. And oh my God. She was beautiful and charming, and I knew, god-damnit, that because of her the mission was going to be much harder, much more complicated, and ultimately much more dangerous.