Gossamer Axe (25 page)

The highway to Sheridan was trimmed with ribbons of blowing snow and hazy with flakes that swarmed down from an overcast sky. It took Kevin past Cheyenne, but he avoided looking at the Missile Road turnoff. A single Solstice, a single Imbolc, could not undo a lifetime.

The dark clouds were growing darker, and the wind from the north had taken on a bitter edge when Kevin knocked on the door of Danny’s apartment. Waiting for an answer, his stomach clenching and unclenching, he tried to think of something he could say to his brother. Twenty years, and Danny dying. What could he say? What could anyone say?

He wished again that Christa were with him. She had, unwillingly, remained in Denver, almost overwhelmed by a full schedule of performances. But had she come to Sheridan with him, she would doubtless have given him the same advice she had already.

“Tell him that you love him,” she had said.

“Then what?”

“Say it again. And again. And again. Until he understands.”

Sleepless, her makeup smudged with the exertions of five hours of rock and roll, she had seen him off in the early morning; and just before he had climbed into his car, she had pulled one of the
failge
off her wrist and put it on his. “For luck. For you.”

He touched the bracelet as he waited. The twisted gold was smooth and warm. He covered it with his hand as though embracing her.

Benji opened the door. He was a short, well-muscled man with brown eyes and a smile that was almost winsome; but his eyes were tired, and his smile did not conceal a sadness that was at once profound and incurable. “Kevin?”

Kevin stuck his hand out. “That’s me, Benji.”

Benji led him into a sparsely furnished living room. Even after so many years, Kevin knew that Danny had chosen the décor. Always the monk. But on the white walls there were no religious pictures, sun bleached and faded with years of contrition; just a few prints by Picasso, one by Van Gogh, and an incongruously comic serigrah by Michael Bedard.

“How is he, Benji?”

“Sleeping right now, I think.” Benji shook the snow from Kevin’s jacket and hung it in the front closet. “This last couple of weeks, he’s been at a plateau. We’ve got something of a routine going. A friend who isn’t so badly off yet comes by while I’m at work and cleans him up if he needs it. A couple times…”He looked away, passed a hand over his face. “A couple times we’ve found him on the floor. He doesn’t want to be a problem and keeps trying to make it to the toilet by himself.”

“How long… how long does he have?”

“It’s hard to say. A month, maybe. Maybe two.”

Softly, as though filtered through distances or years, a voice drifted in from another room. “Benji?”

“It’s your brother, Danny,” Benji replied. He gestured at a short hallway, and Kevin nodded.

Benji showed him to the bedroom and quietly retreated while Kevin hesitated with his hand on the knob. Christa knew what to do, and she could do it. But she was a harper. He played guitar. Not the same thing at all. Not even close.

When Kevin entered, Danny was sitting up in bed, his back propped on a pile of pillows. Kevin was almost shocked: Danny’s age was strange enough to him, but added to the accumulated years was the wasting effect of the disease. Danny seemed old: hollow cheeks, sharp nose, sunken eyes. His hair was thinning, and some of it had gone prematurely gray. He had the look of a damaged angel.

“Kevin.”

Kevin forced his lips to move. “Hey, Danny.”

“You’ve gotten big.” Danny groped for a glass of water on the table by the bed. Kevin picked it up and put it in his hands.

Danny’s skin was dry, cool, like that of an old woman. There was a tremor in his fingers as they closed about the glass. Kevin was afraid to look at his eyes.

“It’s okay, Kevin,” Danny whispered between sips. “Thanks for coming.” His voice was listless. “Have you seen ma and da?”

“I was up there for Christmas. Well… for part of it.” Kevin shrugged. “I pulled one of my famous scenes. I’m… not welcome there anymore.”

“I’m not either.” Danny seemed resigned. Like a painting in a museum, he seemed caught under glass, frozen in time, hollow cheeks forever sunken in El Greco asceticism, eyes mirroring…

Kevin finally looked. Eyes mirroring nothing. If they were bright, it was no more than a hectic side effect of the AIDS, a daub of silver added by a cynical artist to suggest life where there was none.

The insight frightened Kevin. He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Danny, talk to me. What’s going on?”

Danny shrugged. “Why should anything be going on, Kevin? I’m dying.” He laughed softly. “Set myself up real good, too. Lynch would love it.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, Danny.”

“You don’t know me.”

Danny’s words were all too pat, as though he had rehearsed them for the benefit of a straight brother who came with prepackaged bourgeois solace for the queer. “Dammit,” said Kevin, “we’re brothers.”

Danny shook his head. Resignation. “Kev, you went your way, I went mine. Don’t think that you know me, because you haven’t had a chance to. That was what the problem was all along: everyone thought Danny was a pious little nitwit, ripe for the priesthood. They were wrong. I’m not letting that happen again. I don’t have time: I’m dying.” He grimaced. “It’s fucked: I have to apologize for it.”

“Okay. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t know you. So tell me. What happened?”

Danny shrugged offhandedly. “Got AIDS.”

“No, really.”
Brigit, Chris: What the hell do I do
? “Tell me. I care.”

Danny’s eyes flickered as if to say
yeah, sure
. “Not much to tell, really.” He stared at his thin hands, flexed the fingers as though amazed that they still obeyed his commands. “I don’t think I ever really thought about what ma and da had planned for me. I just did what I was told, paddled after them to church, and always figured I’d be a priest. But when I got to the seminary, it just didn’t seem right; and on top of everything else, I started to realize I was gay. I wound up in bed with a few of the novices who were willing, and I started asking questions about what I was doing at the school; but I never got decent answers from anyone. Even Father Paul had too much invested in his religion.” He smiled wryly. “It probably hurt him when I left. I sent him a card to let him know about what happened. Maybe he’ll pray for me.”

“He did better. He turned me on to where you were.”

“Is that how you found me? Christ… maybe he really cared.”

The news seemed to make Danny think, and so made Kevin hope. But Danny resumed his tale ploddingly: “Ma and da flipped out when I told them, and I finally wormed the whole story of my birth out of them. They figure they’re going to hell now. Or maybe since I’m dying, they figure that I’m the one going to hell and it’ll be all right for them. I don’t know.” He stared at the blank wall for a moment. “I tried once more: when I found out about the AIDS. They won’t even talk to me. No one will.” The derision was thick in his voice. “Real nice family. You don’t act like a sweet little Catholic boy, and they want you dead.”

Kevin finally understood: Danny had not left his family in Cheyenne. Instead, they were all clustered here in this small bedroom that smelled of antiseptic and stale urine: mothers and fathers and grandparents and ancestors crowding shoulder to shoulder, bending over Danny’s bed, cursing the apostate, condemning the fallen priest.

What did Kevin have that might stand against so many? what could he say to Danny that might counter the anger of generations?

Take me. Take my people. Take my heritage
… my
Gods
…

Christa had offered him the chalice that was herself, and he had taken it; and with it had come something that now bolstered him, that planted its feet between Danny and the multitude, folded its arms, and defied the condemnation. The old ways and the old Gods had been felled, but in Christa they lived still, and in Kevin they had taken root once again, lifted leaves to the sun, blossomed and endured even in the middle of a winter night.

Kevin lifted his head. “What do you mean, no one?” he said. “What about Father Paul?”

Danny did not respond.

“What about Benji?”

“He’s probably got this too.”

“What does he say?”

“He says he still loves me.” Danny moistened his sore lips with more water. “He says that I gave him a lot of love, and he wants to give me as much of it back as he can.”

“Isn’t that something?”

“Hey, queers have to stick together.”

“Would you say that to him?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I do, Danny.” Kevin kissed Danny’s hand. “And what about me? I’m here. And I’m not here because I feel guilty, or because I’m trying to put some trip on you. It’s been twenty years, and there’s been a lot of bullshit gone down, but… I…” He struggled with words, struggled with the knowledge that, as the divine had spoken through Christa, now it had to speak through him.

But it was simple, really. Christa had already told him what to say, had, in fact, said the same thing to him, over and over again in a hundred different ways, finally speaking with her body when he refused to understand words.

“I love you, Danny.”

Danny bent his head. Kevin felt the ice melting. Or maybe he was only hoping. Which was it? Which did he want it to be?

“I’ve heard that before.” Danny was almost suspicious, as though unbelieving that anything at once so profound and so unconditional could be offered him. “You mean it? You know what it means to say that?”

“Yeah, I mean it. And what it means is that there’s two of us now.”

Danny shuddered for a moment and held himself stiffly until the seizure passed. AIDS was painful. “I’d like to believe that.”

The
fail
on Kevin’s wrist gleamed softly. “Remember when we were growing up?” he said. “Ma and da had those stupid parties where everyone would get drunk and talk about Ireland? They told us never to forget that we were Irish. But when they started putting strings on love, they missed the whole point.” He lifted Danny’s hand, still clasped in his own. “This is what it means to be Irish. This is what it’s always meant.”

Guilt was killing Danny as surely as was the disease, and Kevin could do little about that, for there were too many pointing fingers, too many words that could never be unsaid. But he could stand between Danny and those who pointed; and if he could not cure, he could at least comfort. There was still time for that.

He folded his dying brother in his arms.

Though the loss of her students left Christa free to throw herself further into the world of rock and roll, she did so silently, without comment, her reticence masking both the pain of her loss and her hope for the future. But if she still concealed from her bandmates her reason for playing heavy metal, the overall mask she wore was thinner these days, the Gaeidil closer to the surface.

Truly, she realized, it could not be otherwise, for as she had led Devi into adulthood and Kevin into rebirth, so had she transformed herself. She had channeled divinity through her very being, and by doing so she had achieved the most profound goal of the
Cruitreacha
. A step had been taken, a door had been passed, and she who had once been a child, and then a woman, was now something that was a little of both, and yet neither.

Kevin’s harp understood and recognized the change in her status, and while she worked to restore the old instrument—cleaning brass and repairing cracks and scraping away rot—she felt the trust that radiated from it: the instinctive response of a creature of art to a consummate artist.

Master.

Mortal instruments did not speak, but they had spirits, and the title the harp gave Christa was a sense of fullness near her heart and a glow in the wood beneath her hands that could not have been uncovered by sandpaper and steel wool, but only given freely by a harp to a master harper.

“Do you have a name, old one?” she whispered softly as she worked. But the harp made no response. It had been asleep for a long time. If it had ever had a name, it had forgotten what it was.

Toward afternoon, she heard her front door open. “Kevin?”

“Yeah… it’s me.”

“I’m in the workroom.” Shoving a strand of hair out of her face with the back of a hand, she blinked at the window. Cold gray weather, snow hissing against the glass. How long had she been working? Without a constant stream of students to break up her day, the time slid by unnoticed.

She heard Kevin rattle through the kitchen as he poured himself a cup of coffee. He entered the workroom a minute later. “How’s it going?”

“Progress… that’s about all I can say right now.”

He shuffled to the workbench, peered at the harp. “Do you think you can…”He pressed his lips together as if thinking of something else. “Can you save it?”

“I can.” She watched him nod slowly. He was as dear to her as a child or a lover, for he had been both. “You’re upset.”

“Benji called me this morning at the school. Danny’s getting worse.”

“He won’t come to Denver?”

“He says he wants to stay with Benji. He wants to die at home. I can’t blame him: they were happy together in that apartment.” He stared at the steam rising from his coffee. “I couldn’t do anything except hold him.”

“That in itself is a great deal.”

“Yeah, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to pull him out of there, make him well, make him happy. But I couldn’t. I think that in some weird way he figures that what’s happening to him is just. He’s wrong… he’s just wrong.”

“But he knows he’s loved now.”

“Yeah.” The snow that had caught in Kevin’s hair was melting now, dripping down his face, hiding his tears. “Someday, though, I want to be able to help somebody. I want to be like you, Chris.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t have helped him either. Some things can be done, others can’t.”

“Then I want to know the difference.”

“I think you do already.”

He did not speak for some time. Finally: “Yeah. I know.”