Cat In A Zebra Zoot Suit

26

The Minstrel Boy

Max’s heart was pounding. He felt he’d been making a pilgrimage commemorating the Stations of the Cross over all of Ireland, south and north, with Kathleen. The fourteen harsh images often hung on Catholic church walls, memorializing Jesus’s suffering, crucifixion, and death…and, sometimes a last image, a happy ending, the resurrection.

Sometimes Max thought the Church fixated on darkness. Yet now, so did Max. This journey, he hoped, would end at the grave of the best man he’d ever known, but first he must deal with the unsuspected living. He hoped he was on the brink of witnessing a rising from the dead.

Kathleen, practicing the controlling cruelty that had dominated her childhood, had told Max nothing, nothing about his cousin. Only that Sean was alive. That Sean was alive and now they were here, in County Tyrone of Northern Ireland, where he and Sean had gone astray on a quest for their roots and “adventure” tourism.

He stood with Kathleen before a quaint white-washed cottage. Ireland was breathtakingly picturesque, but traditionally the land and people were poor, with a harsh and tragic history. The only thing the modern Emerald Isle had to sell was charm until the “Celtic Tiger” awakened in the ’80s with a burst of high-tech businesses. Then a second Irish “famine” came with the global recession.

Max took in every feature of the simple building—the gravel driveway with a green iron gate. The house, clad in white stone, was shaped like an arc or a simple church, a long main floor with an A-shaped second story. The windows weren’t in even rows. Simple narrow wood frames painted bright green dappled the white stone canvas here and there. Green window boxes on shallow stone sills spilled over with fuchsia, purple and white petunias, blooming as madly as any second-story pub window box in the British Isles.

This modest traditional home could be a whited sepulcher, hiding a blasted life behind its green-framed Irish charm.

Sean Kelly, Wisconsin boy by birth. Mourned and missed for almost twenty years. Max thought his thoughts sounded like an obituary. But, unless Kathleen had played the sadist again, Sean was somewhere behind that bright green-painted wooden door, breathing the same clean, earthy Irish air that had Max close to hyperventilating. He hoped Sean wasn’t under a gravestone in the back garden. He wouldn’t put it past Kathleen to “mirror” his past to match the tragedy of hers.

Max’s training as a magician had made him seem eternally cool and collected and had served well onstage and under cover. And now…now he was a bipolar boy again, one moment agonizingly unsure and an instant later filled with a cocky conviction he would soon be master of his own life and druthers, he would know the truth fully and master his fears and guilt.

Maybe, Max thought, this was his moment for finally growing up.

Kathleen sighed, ruefully. “Ah, so green it is, so white the stone, so black the hearts. So charming the accents, so savage the hypocrisy.”

“You’re regaining your lost native Irish lilt,” Max told her.

“I spoke mostly Spanish when I worked South America for the Cause. Sure, and I can sound as Irish as the cleaning lady when I want to. That encouraged Irish-Americans to donate to the IRA.”

“You have a gift for languages, then.”

“Gift? Perhaps. Why would you be interested in my ‘gifts’?”

“No reason.” He studied the house again. “The architecture is so pure and simple, timeless. You don’t realize at first how big and well-situated the structure is. The roof has some skylights. That’s not authentic ‘Irish cottage’.”

“So we’re doing a review for Architectural Digest?” Kathleen’s tart tone was at least an improvement on downright angry.

Max gazed out over a bright green rolling quilt of landscape, seamed by darker green hedgerows and brown stone walls. “Peaceful too,” he added.

“Things may seem so long-distance lovely,” Kathleen said, “but there’s always dirt beneath the grass and shamrocks, soil beneath the soul.”

Max eyed the worn stone sill underlining the aggressively green front door.

“Is he…are they, even home?” he asked, walking to the gate to view a parked car on the paved area behind the house and inhale the drift of roses from the charming garden.

Charm. That word again. Lucky charm. Max had always cultivated both luck and charm, but he had a feeling they had run out on him now.

Kathleen would never bring him to a picture-postcard ending. He again inhaled the scent of dozens of roses, amused by the intricate white wrought-iron garden table and chairs glaring against the everlasting green, and speculated about the owner of the parked Opel Zafira car.

He circled back to Kathleen. Her jade-green pantsuit and plain black pumps blended with the scenery. A designer scarf swathed her throat and shoulders, as vividly floral as the flower boxes and distracted attention from her facial scars. She had white skin, like the stone-clad cottage, black hair, like the dark and bloody history of the land beneath it, and…something very wrong about the eyes. He’d been avoiding direct glances, partly to quell his accelerating emotions as he neared a reunion with Sean. Hope. Fear. Guilt. Anger.

It took him a second to figure out what was wrong…different. She wasn’t wearing her exotic aquamarine-tinted contact lenses. He was seeing the clear blue eyes of young Kathleen O’Connor, twenty-three and the prettiest girl in Northern Ireland, at least to two teenage American boys from Racine, Wisconsin.

Max knew then there was no way to escape this time machine, or the revelations and shock Kitty the Cutter was about to inflict on her two long-ago admirers.