Chapter 8 (p.7)
He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeney's lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place. A small green Nissan pulled up, and a harassed middle-aged man with sandy hair and a sandy moustache got out, walked over. He touched the corpse's neck. He kicks the corpse, thought Shadow, and if it doesn't kick him back…
“He's dead,” said the medical examiner. “Any ID?”
“He's a John Doe,” said the cop.
The medical examiner looked at Shadow. “You working for Jacquel and Ibis?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
“Tell Jacquel to get dentals and prints for ID and identity photos. We don't need a post. He should just draw blood for toxicology. Got that? Do you want me to write it down for you?”
“No,” said Shadow. “It's fine. I can remember.”
The man scowled fleetingly, then pulled a business card from his wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to Shadow, saying, “Give this to Jacquel.” Then the medical examiner said “Merry Christmas” to everyone, and was on his way. The cops kept the empty bottle.
Shadow signed for the John Doe and put it on the gurney. The body was pretty stiff, and Shadow couldn't get it out of a sitting position. He fiddled with the gurney, and found out that he could prop up one end. He strapped John Doe, sitting, to the gurney and put him in the back of the hearse, facing forward. Might as well give him a good ride. He closed the rear curtains. Then he drove back to the funeral home.
The hearse was stopped at a traffic light—the same lights he'd fishtailed at, several nights earlier—when Shadow heard a voice croak, “And it's a fine wake I'll be wanting, with the best of everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days.”
“You're dead, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. “You take what you're given when you're dead.”
“Aye, that I shall,” sighed the dead man sitting in the back of the hearse. The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency.
The light turned green and Shadow put his foot gently down on the gas.
“But give me a wake tonight, nonetheless,” said Mad Sweeney. “Set me a place at table, and give me a stinking drunk wake tonight. You killed me, Shadow, you owe me that much.”
“I never killed you, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. It's twenty dollars, he thought, for a ticket out of here. “It was the drink and the cold killed you, not me.”
There was no reply, and there was silence in the car for the rest of the journey. After he parked at the back, Shadow wheeled the gurney out of the hearse and into the mortuary. He manhandled Mad Sweeney onto the embalming table as if he were hauling a side of beef.
He covered the John Doe with a sheet and left him there, with the paperwork beside him. As he went up the back stairs he thought he heard a voice, quiet and muted, like a radio playing in a distant room, which said, “And what would drink or cold be doing killing me, a leprechaun of the blood? No, it was you losing the little golden sun killed me, Shadow, killed me dead as sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.”
Shadow wanted to point out to Mad Sweeney that that was a kind of bitter philosophy, but he suspected it was the being dead that made you bitter.
He went upstairs to the main house, where a number of middle-aged women were putting Saran wrap on casserole dishes, popping the Tupperware tops onto plastic pots of cooling fried potatoes and macaroni and cheese.
Mr. Goodchild, the husband of the deceased, had Mr. Ibis against a wall, and was telling him how he knew none of his children would come out to pay their respects to their mother. The apple don't fall far from the tree, he told anyone who would listen to him. The apple don't fall far from the tree.
That evening Shadow laid an extra place at the table. He put a glass at each place, and a new bottle of Jameson Gold in the middle of the table. It was the most expensive Irish whiskey they sold at the liquor store. After they ate (a large platter of leftovers left for them by the middle-aged women) Shadow poured a generous tot into each glass—his, Ibis's, Jacquel's and Mad Sweeney's.
“So what if he's sitting on a gurney in the cellar,” said Shadow, as he poured, “on his way to a pauper's grave? Tonight we'll toast him, and give him the wake he wanted.”
Shadow raised his glass to the empty place at the table. “I only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive,” he said. “The first time I thought he was a world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin trick I don't remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney.” He sipped the whiskey, letting the smoky taste evaporate in his mouth. The other two drank, toasting the empty chair along with him.
Mr. Ibis reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a notebook, which he flipped through until he found the appropriate page, and he read out a summarized version of Mad Sweeney's life.
According to Mr. Ibis, Mad Sweeney had started his life as the guardian of a sacred rock in a small Irish glade, over three thousand years ago. Mr. Ibis told them of Mad Sweeney's love affairs, his enmities, the madness that gave him his power (“a later version of the tale is still told, although the sacred nature, and the antiquity, of much of the verse has long been forgotten”), the worship and adoration in his own land that slowly transmuted into a guarded respect and then, finally, into amusement; he told them the story of the girl from Bantry who came to the New World, and who brought her belief in Mad Sweeney the leprechaun with her, for hadn't she seen him of a night, down by the pool, and hadn't he smiled at her and called her by her own true name? She had become a refugee, in the hold of a ship of people who had watched their potatoes turn to black sludge in the ground, who had watched friends and lovers die of hunger, who dreamed of a land of full stomachs. The girl from Bantry Bay dreamed, specifically, of a city where a girl would be able to earn enough to bring her family over to the New World. Many of the Irish coming in to America thought of themselves as Catholics, even if they knew nothing of the catechism, even if all they knew of religion was the Bean Sidhe, the banshee, who came to wail at the walls of a house where death soon would be, and Saint Bride, who was once Bridget of the two sisters (each of the three was a Brigid, each was the same woman), and tales of Finn, of Oisín, of Conan the Bald—even of the leprechauns, the little people (and was that not the biggest joke of the Irish, for the leprechauns in their day were the tallest of the mound folk)…
All this and more Mr. Ibis told them in the kitchen that night. His shadow on the wall was stretched and bird-like, and as the whiskey flowed Shadow imagined it the head of a huge waterfowl, beak long and curved, and it was somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibis's narrative (“…such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it'll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper…”) and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead king without so much as a by-your-leave…
Mr. Ibis polished his gold-rimmed spectacles and explained—enunciating even more clearly and precisely than usual, so Shadow knew he was drunk (his words and the sweat that beaded on his forehead in that chilly house were the only indications of this)—with forefinger wagging, explained that he was an artist and that his tales should not be seen as literal constructs but as imaginative re-creations, truer than the truth, and Mad Sweeney said, “I'll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters,” and Mr. Jacquel bared his teeth and growled at Sweeney, the growl of a huge dog who's not looking for a fight but can always finish one by ripping out your throat, and Sweeney took the message and sat down and poured himself another glass of whiskey.
“Have you remembered how I do my little coin trick?” he asked Shadow with a grin.
“I have not.”
“If you can guess how I did it,” said Mad Sweeney, his lips purple, his blue eyes beclouded, “I'll tell you if you get warm.”
“It's not a palm is it?” asked Shadow.
“It is not.”
“Is it a gadget of some kind? Something up your sleeve or elsewhere that shoots the coins up for you to catch? Or a coin on a wire that swings in front of and behind your hand?”
“It is not that neither. More whiskey, anybody?”
“I read in a book about a way of doing the Miser's Dream with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the coins to hide behind.”
“This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch.”
“Well, that's pretty much it for ideas,” said Shadow. “I expect you just take them out of nowhere.” It was meant to be sarcasm, but then he saw the expression on Sweeney's face. “You do,” he said. “You do take them from nowhere.”
“Well, not exactly nowhere,” said Mad Sweeney. “But now you're getting the idea. You take them from the hoard.”
“The hoard,” said Shadow, starting to remember. “Yes.”
“You just have to hold it in your mind, and it's yours to take from. The sun's treasure. It's there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. It's there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm.”
And he showed Shadow how to do the thing.
This time Shadow got it.
