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“I’m known in all of them.” Left unsaid was that Van frequently made a spectacle of himself, and, in the places he patronized, it didn’t matter. He engaged the protesting gears.
Several minutes later Van ushered Irish through the tufted red vinyl door of a lounge located on the seedy outskirts of downtown. “Are we going to get rolled in here?” Irish asked.
“They check you for weapons as you go in.”
“And if you don’t have one, they issue you one,” Irish said, picking up the tired joke.
The atmosphere was murky. The booth they slid into was secluded and dark. The midmorning customers were as morose as the tinsel that had been strung from the dim, overhead lights several Christmases ago. Spiders had made permanent residences of it. A naked señorita smiled beguilingly from the field of black velvet on which she had been painted. In stark contrast to the dismal ambience, lively mariachi music blared from the jukebox.
Van called for a bottle of scotch. “I really should eat something,” Irish mumbled without much conviction.
When the bartender unceremoniously set down the bottle and two glasses, Van ordered Irish some food. “You didn’t have to,” Irish objected.
The video photographer shrugged as he filled both glasses. “His old lady’ll cook if you ask her to.”
“You eat here often?”
“Sometimes,” Van replied with another laconic shrug.
The food arrived, but after taking only a few bites, Irish decided he wasn’t hungry after all. He pushed aside the chipped plate and reached for his glass of whiskey. The first swallow played like a flamethrower in his stomach. Tears filled his eyes. He sucked in a wheezing breath.
But with the expertise of a professional drinker, he recovered quickly and took another swig. The tears, however, remained in his eyes. “I’m going to miss her like hell.” Idly, he twirled his glass on the greasy tabletop.
“Yeah, me, too. She could be a pain in the ass, but not nearly as much as most.”
The brassy song currently playing on the jukebox ended. No one made another selection, which came as a relief to Irish. The music intruded on his bereavement.
“She was like my own kid, you know?” he asked rhetorically. Van continued smoking, lighting another cigarette from the tip of the last. “I remember the day she was born. I was there at the hospital, sweating it out with her father. Waiting. Pacing. Now I’ll have to remember the day she died.”
He slammed back a shot of whiskey and refilled his glass. “You know, it never occurred to me that it was her plane that went down. I was only thinking about the story, the goddamn news story. It was such a piss-ant story that I didn’t even send a photographer along. She was going to borrow one from a station in Dallas.”
“Hey, man, don’t blame yourself for doing your job. You couldn’t have known.”
Irish stared into the amber contents of his glass. “Ever had to identify a body, Van?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “They had them all lined up, like…” He released an unsteady sigh. “Hell, I don’t know. I never had to go to war, but it must have been like that.
“She was zipped up in a black plastic bag. She didn’t have any hair left,” he said, his voice cracking. “It was all burned off. And her skin… oh, Jesus.” He covered his eyes with his stubby fingers. Tears leaked through them. “If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have been on that plane.”
“Hey, man.” Those two words exhausted Van’s repertoire of commiserating phrases. He refreshed Irish’s drink, lit another cigarette, and silently passed it to the grieving man. For himself, he switched to marijuana.
Irish drew on his cigarette. “Thank God her mother didn’t have to see her like that. If she hadn’t been clutching her locket in her hand, I wouldn’t even have known the corpse was Avery.” His stomach almost rebelled when he recalled what the crash had done to her.
“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad Rosemary Daniels isn’t alive. A mother should never have to see her child in that condition.”
Irish nursed his drink for several minutes before lifting his tearful eyes to his companion. “I loved her—Rosemary, I mean. Avery’s mother. Hell, I couldn’t help it. Cliff, her father, was gone nearly all the time, away in some remote hellhole of the world. Every time he left he asked me to keep an eye on them. He was my best friend, but more than once I wanted to kill him for that.”
He sipped his drink. “Rosemary knew, I’m sure, but there was never a word about it spoken between us. She loved Cliff. I knew that.”
Irish had been a surrogate parent to Avery since her seventeenth year. Cliff Daniels, a renowned photojournalist, had been killed in a battle over an insignificant, unpronounceable village in Central America. With very little fuss, Rosemary had ended her own life only a few weeks after her husband’s death, leaving Avery bereft and without anyone to turn to except Irish, a steadfast family friend.
“I’m as much Avery’s daddy as Cliff was. Maybe more. When her folks died, it was me she turned to. I was the one she came running to last year after she got herself in that mess up in D.C.”
“She might have fucked up real bad that one time, but she was still a good reporter,” Van commented through a cloud of sweet, pungent smoke.
“It’s just so tragic that she died with that screwup on her conscience.” He drank from his glass. “See, Avery had this hang-up about failing. That’s what she feared most. Cliff wasn’t around much when she was a kid, so she was still trying to win his approval, live up to his legacy.
“We never discussed it,” he continued morosely. “I just know. That’s why that snafu in D.C. was so devastating to her.
She wanted to make up for it, win back her credibility and self-esteem. Time ran out before she got a chance. Goddammit, she died thinking of herself as a failure.”
