Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (16 page)

Back to my seat. Redhorse had gone.

“Where’s the cop?” I asked John.

“They moved him to the smoking section,” John said.

“And Jesus said unto the nonbelievers, ye must be born again, it’s not enough to just keep the commandments,” the missionary said.

I sat down. The ketch had calmed me. Didn’t matter now, let them convert John, arrest me, didn’t bloody matter.

Three in the morning when we got into Denver. David Redhorse came back and wished us a pleasant trip. I said good luck in catching killers. Without further ado, he said goodbye. So his appearance here had been coincidence after all. He hadn’t been watching the train for a couple of runaways or, if he had, he figured we didn’t seem the murdering type. And for a peeler he wasn’t a bad sort. I just hoped he wouldn’t put two and two together. Most cops can be pretty stupid, but Redhorse clearly wasn’t. I was relieved to see him go and bloody shocked when he got back on twenty minutes later.

Oh, shit, he has put it together, he’s come to arrest us, I thought, and grabbed John’s shoulder and tried to pull him up. We could run down the train, exit the next car, get back out into Denver. Probably Redhorse wouldn’t have had time to seal off the station.

“John, we have to get up,” I said.

I pulled him to his feet, but it was too late. David Redhorse walked over to us.

I took a deep breath and got ready for fight or flight. Take this wee shite easy.

“Guys, I just thought I’d come back and tell you, because I know you don’t have a sleeper, the train is going to be stuck here all night, there’s a big derailment up ahead on the line. Track’s blocked. Nobody hurt, but if I know Amtrak, no one’s going to tell you anything about it until the morning and the train isn’t going to get going till tomorrow afternoon, if then.”

“Shit,” I said.

“You boys need the name of a hotel?” Redhorse asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“The Holburn on Sherman, always got rooms, even this time of night,” he said.

“Thanks, we’ll check it out,” I said.

“Ok, well, nice meeting you,” he said.

I shook his hand and he headed off back down the track. Now I really believed that he had decided we were harmless.

“What are we going to do, Alex?” John asked.

“We’re getting off this train, that’s for damn sure,” I whispered.

Later…

It’s four a.m.

A dead time in a dead town. The prostitutes are gone from Colfax Avenue, the patrons home from the LoDo bars. Magpies, crows debate the labyrinth of alleys and deserted cul-de-sacs. The lights are on at Coors Field, but the game is long since done.

Fuck the Holburn. No way am I going there. So instead we go back to our old place, but the bastard there wants us to pay for another week, cash in advance, which is suspicious and makes me think that he thinks we’re in some kind of trouble. I don’t like it, and breezily refuse.

I explain it to John, and reading
Lonely Planet
he suggests the youth hostel on Seventeenth Street. On the way there, they’re delivering
The Denver Post
. I pay a quarter, find the story on page three.

A man fell to his death from the fourth floor of the Mountain View apartment complex on Cheesman Park today. Eyewitnesses spoke of a struggle with an assailant. “The building has been burglarized twice in the last month,” said Jean Simmons, a neighbor. Police are looking for two men said to be light-skinned Hispanic males in their twenties or early thirties. A DPD officer is believed to have shot and seriously wounded one of the assailants.

I stop reading, put the paper down. The first thing I have to do is reassure John:

“John, you can relax, a dozen eyewitnesses, three of them cops, and they have us pegged as wetbacks. Jesus Christ. That little crack in Spanish to the dude in the army T-shirt worked.”

He grins at me. “Aye. Typical. You see what you want to see. Bloody racists. Xenophobes. All burglars are fucking Latinos,” he says.

I nod. It doesn’t let us off the hook, but it helps. Maybe that was why Redhorse had changed his mind about us. Of course, I don’t tell John that sometimes the cops are tricky about what information they release. In any case, he looks visibly relieved.

An exhausting walk. The youth hostel. Overhead fans. Insomniac Swedish boys flirting with German girls. Clean, nice, inviting. John collapses into a chair, I go to the desk.

The receptionist, bald guy, sweating in a white wife-beater shirt and thinking he’s part of the Christmas story: “There’s no room at the inn, we’re full.”

“Look, we’re desperate,” I say.

“Plenty of motels out on Colfax near the airport,” he suggests.

“How far?”

“Three, four miles, I don’t know,” he says.

“Isn’t there anywhere closer?” I plead.

The man looks at me for a minute.

“Where you from? What’s that accent?” he says a little unexpectedly.

“We’re from Ireland,” I say, too exhausted to lie anymore.

“I thought so,” he says, “I thought so. Sean Dillon, ex–Denver Fire Department,” he says, sticking out his hand.

I shake it wearily.

“Alex Flaherty,” I say.

“I golfed the ring of Kerry once,” Sean says.

“Is that so?”

“Rained every day. Miserable. Yeah, look, about the room. How picky are you?”

“We want anywhere, we’re desperate.”

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be a hotel, right? Just a room, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me see your passports.”

We take out our passports, show the man, they’re British passports but they’re registered and stamped in Belfast. He doesn’t notice I gave him a fake name, seems satisfied.

“Yeah, look. If Pat lets you, there’s a building, a few blocks east on Colfax. Noisy out there, but Pat’ll let you stay for, I don’t know, ten bucks a night.”

“That’s fine, anything,” I say.

“Finder’s fee, give me twenty bucks, see what I can do,” Sean says.

I give him twenty bucks.

“Ok, it’s late. I’ll call Patrick and see if it’s ok,” he says, picks up the phone, dials a number.

“Sorry, Pat, I knew you’d be up. Yeah, I know, me too, but at least I’m paid for it. Couple of possibles for you. I told them you’d charge ten bucks for that room. Irish kids…. No, from Ireland, for real…. They seem ok, one looks like Big Foot on a bad hair day, the other, I don’t know, Val Kilmer’s skinny brother.”

He puts down the phone.

“Pat says you can come over. You’re very lucky, you can have one of the furnished rooms for a while. It’s on the fifth floor. He’ll meet you in the lobby.”

We walk all the way from the youth hostel to the building. Not just a few blocks. Twenty bloody blocks. The front door is open. We go in. No sign of Pat. The elevator is busted, too, so we hike up to the fifth floor. On one apartment there’s a note and a key taped to the door. It says, “For the two Irish boys, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

A studio apartment. Foldout bed. Tiny bedroom–box room off to one side, kitchenette. Damp on the walls, crumbling ceiling, plastic–fake wood tiles on all the floors. Small bathroom, a great view over Colfax and the mountains to the west.

“It’ll do,” John says.

“I want the bed in the wee room,” I tell him.

John is too exhausted to argue. I slouch into the little room and close the door, John bursts into tears and weeps for I don’t know how long, since within ten minutes I’m out for the bloody count.

7: STORM BRINGER

J
ohn woke first. He’d had trouble resting on the pullout bed. There were no sheets and it was far too hot to kip in his sleeping bag. I’d had a good night since I’d brought a sheet bag and a sleeping bag to America. We checked out the apartment, small but surprisingly tidy. We learned later that Pat cleaned it when he was healthy. We climbed out onto the fire escape to examine the view. We were only about a mile east of our hotel on Broadway, but Colfax Avenue was a different animal. This was the original way into the city for travelers heading west and you could still see the traces of the old frontier town under the facades. No tall buildings, and if you evacuated the cars, the concrete road, the fast-food restaurants and tattoo parlors, it could have stood in for Hadleyville in
High Noon
. And it seemed hotter here, a seething heat that mingled with the vehicular pollution.

It also appeared to be one of Denver’s few black neighborhoods, or if not black, certainly poorer. East Colfax was the opposite of everything that Boulder stood for. Down at heel, black, grungy, dirty, honest, and a little bit scary. I liked it.

John, however, was horrified. Where I saw character in the odd derelict building or empty lot, he saw Berlin, June 1945, or—

“Bloody West Belfast on a bad day,” he said. “Not the way I imagined America at all.”

Before I could reply, a knock at the door. We climbed in off the fire escape, opened the door.

Patrick. Six feet tall, a hundred pounds, pale as a banshee, red eyes, cold sores, coughing, in fact, full-blown AIDS. Patrick O’Leary was thirty-three, about a year ago he’d been a two-hundred-pound, ripped, good-looking firefighter. Clearly going down fast. He introduced himself, claimed we were in the second-nicest apartment in the building, showed us how the appliances worked, made us coffee, told us his whole story. When we heard about the AIDS, neither John nor I drank the coffee. He was from Fort Morgan, Colorado, and had been a nine-year veteran paramedic with the Denver Fire Department; unfortunately the DFD had fired him as soon as they had found out that he was HIV positive. The union could see the fire department’s point of view, claiming he put at risk not only patients but also his fellow coworkers. He had lied about his condition too, so the union denied him benefits. He was in the middle of a lawsuit with the union and the fire department, but that, he admitted, would be settled long after he was dead.

Pat, though, had a friend in the DFD who owned a few buildings in Denver and who had let him stay rent-free in this place. All Pat had to do was keep the building as full as possible of tenants but it was harder than it looked, only four apartments were properly furnished, it had erratic plumbing, worse heating, it occupied a dangerous part of town, it had no super and no one to do maintenance. Also Denver was undergoing a building boom, they had closed the old air force base at Lowry Campus and thousands of much nicer lots were becoming available. The suburbs were opening up to the east around Aurora, to the west at Lakewood, and in the south around Littleton. Rich people heading out where they thought it would be safer for their kids. And in 1995 Denver the last place anyone wanted to live was the seedy strip around Colfax Avenue, liquor stores, porn stores, prostitutes, and junkies and everything grown worse since it had become a feeder road for the new airport.

Pat told us that in the other furnished apartments were a retired schoolteacher in his seventies, a nurse in her fifties, and an Ethiopian family of six on the first floor.

Pat was the de facto landlord, took a minimal rent, listened to no complaints, carried a gun. We told him that we were in Denver for only a couple of days until we could change our ticket and fly back to Ireland. He said we should stay longer, that the neighborhood wasn’t as bad as it looked and they had finally dealt with the roach and rat problem with a sonic vermin device. Comforting to know, but our minds were made up.

Pat had a phone in his apartment. We could use it.

I called British Airways. To change our departure flight would cost only a hundred dollars. I changed the tickets. I hung up. That was that. Our American adventure was done. Ending in shambles and disaster. Finito. We were all set to go and we would have gone, flying Denver to London, London to Belfast, and Victoria’s murderer would never have been found and I would have been assassinated by a secret cadre inside the RUC within twenty-four hours of landing on Irish soil, had not Patrick, at that precise moment, said:

“Boys, listen, make any call you like, I get ten cents a minute to Ireland.”

“Any call?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I could call up my dad and let him know we’re coming back,” I said after a pause.

“Go ahead,” Pat said.

I dialed the number for home. Dad picked up after a minute.

“Noel, is that you?” he said.

“No, Dad, it’s me.”

“Alex,” he said, “it’s good to hear from you. I thought it was Noel with the new flyers. The Green Party in Dublin gave me a hundred pounds and—”

“Dad, I’m coming home,” I said, ignoring him.

“Did you find anything out?”

“Yeah, the man who sent the note is just a local nut, nothing to do with anything. But as a matter of fact, I think the police have arrested the wrong man. I’m pretty sure they’ll release him soon. He’s got a good lawyer and I think I’ve helped him a bit. They’ll be opening the case again, it’s the cops’ job now, nothing more I can do. Coming home.”

“There’s nothing else you can do?” Dad asked, sounding disappointed.

“No. Will you tell Mr. Patawasti? I’ll be home in a couple of days, see him myself, but I’d like you to fill him in, if you can.”

“I’m very busy, but I’ll make a point of going to see him. Actually, I want to talk to him, I think he might want to come on the campaign trail with me, take his mind off things,” Dad said.

“Dad, for God’s sake, don’t ask him to campaign with you, give the man some peace, just tell him I found the guy who sent the note and it was unimportant, ok?”

“I will.”

“Ok, look, this is someone else’s phone, I better hang—” I began.

“Oh, Alex, wait a minute, your friend Ivan called three times yesterday, he was looking for you. I got him on the third call.”

“Facey called you up?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want?”

“He said that it was urgent that he speak to you. I told him you were still in America and he said that it was good that you were away. I thought that was a bit odd.”

“That is odd.”

“He said, wherever you are, you should call him, reverse the charges, if necessary, he said it was very, very important.”

“Shit.”

“I know, he didn’t sound like himself at all.”

“What did he sound like?”

“He sounded, I don’t know, worried, frightened. You’re not in any trouble, are you?”

“No. Did he leave a number?”

“He did, let me see, six-seven-oh-nine-three, got that?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, Alex.”

“Ok, Dad, tell Mr. Patawasti, ok?”

“Ok.”

I hung up, called Facey, he wasn’t home.

Pat brought me some milk.

“Alex, do you want milk in your coffee? I take mine black, but I always forget how other people like theirs.”

“No, thanks. Look, uh, can I use your phone later? I’ve an important call to make.”

Pat looked at John and myself wistfully. He cleared his throat, wiped his skinny hand over his forehead. He had something to say:

“Of course, use the phone anytime, and listen, um, the building gets quite lonely, no one wants to visit me, they’re prejudiced against coming out here, even though we’re only a few blocks from East High School, which is a lovely building, uh, anyway. Look, so I was thinking, you boys can stay as long as you like. Rent-free until you get jobs. How does that sound? You don’t get an offer like that every day.”

“Uh, no. Thanks for the offer but, sorry, we, we have to go back home. I’ve already changed our flight to Sunday,” I said.

Pat’s face fell.

“Ok. Well, it’s nice to have you even for a few days,” he said cheerfully, “and if you want to reconsider, there’s no bugs anymore and no rent.”

I thanked him and went back to the apartment. I took a shower, and when I came out, John was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. He was going out.

“Where the hell you think you’re going?” I asked.

“I’ve got to get out of here, I’m going nuts, just a walk up and down the street.”

“John, are you fucking out of your mind? Half the cops in Denver are looking for us, you think a haircut and a beard cut are going to fool them forever?”

“Listen, I can’t be cooped up in here, it’s too damn hot, I want out, I want to go to the cinema or something. I’ll wear my baseball cap, change my shirt, you said yourself they’re searching for Spanish guys.”

I looked at John, he did seem a bit jittery, but I was insistent.

“First of all, that baseball cap goes in the garbage. Second of all, not today, not today at least, maybe tomorrow when the heat’s cooled down, but for today, we are staying put, ok?”

“Ok,” John said reluctantly.

About an hour later, Pat saw that we weren’t leaving and came by with martinis. For someone in the throes of a major life-threatening health crisis, after a few drinks, Pat became quite the chatterbox. When he got a wind, he became an entertaining, angry son of a bitch, and we both found ourselves liking him. He particularly had it in for Colorado’s white Christian population, whom he blamed for the infamous antigay referendum that had changed the state’s constitution, allowing organizations such as the Denver Fire Department to fire gay people because of their lifestyle, never mind their HIV status. Odd, though, for with Pat’s red hair and ghostly complexion, he was the whitest person I’d ever seen and, technically, he was a Christian.

“Yeah, boys, they fucked the constitution. It’s going to the Supreme Court next year. Hope I live to see it overturned. Wipe the smile off their fat white faces. This is the only state in the country that did that. Colorado. The hate state. White, bourgeois scum,” Pat said bitterly while we sipped his martinis on the fire escape.

“And no blacks voted for it?” John asked mischievously, sucking on his olive and giving me a wink. I was glad to see that he was making himself forget about yesterday in a haze of alcohol.

“I’m sure some did, but it’s the goddamn Anglos. They’re all Fundamentalist Christian out here. Hate gays, hate non-Christians. They hate Catholics, Latins. Don’t believe me? Drive out on Federal sometime, ask those Mexican guys how they’re treated. While you’re at it, look at the cars, Jesus fish all over them or, occasionally, a Jesus fish eating a fish that says ‘Darwin,’ I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said ‘Warning. This car will become driverless in the event of the Rapture.’”

Neither John nor I got what he was talking about, so Pat explained that Fundamentalist Christians believe they will all be spirited up to heaven during the Rapture, an event that will precede the Apocalypse and the Second Coming.

Pat told us about the corruption of the Denver Fire and Police Departments, for which he blamed the white Masonic lodges. He then went off on John Elway and his series of car dealerships. He blamed the drought on the Coors people, and he even had it in for the Denver Zoo for reasons neither John nor I could fully understand. Paranoid and mad, but entertaining for a while. But we could see Pat wilt before us, he had limited energy, good enough for a few serious rants, but not a whole afternoon of it. Soon he had to lie down.

“What do you make of that Pat guy?” John asked later in the apartment.

“He’s all right,” I said.

“What do you think his deal is?”

“The they’re-out-to-get-me thing?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, they
are
out to get him. They bloody fired him. He feels betrayed, and I think he’s gone a bit stir out here in a black neighborhood.”

John nodded. The paper got delivered and the later edition of
The Denver Post
had the dismaying news that the Denver Police Department was watching bus terminals, the train station, and DIA in the hope of capturing the two assailants in yesterday’s apartment murder. Jack Wegener, a congressman from Colorado’s eighth congressional district, was quoted in the paper as saying that maybe now people would take seriously Pat Buchanan’s idea of building an electric fence on the Mexican border.

We tried to nap for a bit, and later, when we heard Pat singing to himself, we went down the hall to pay him another visit and maybe use his phone.

Pat made us two additional martinis and told us more about his favorite subjects; he hated the suburbs, SUVs, and Starbucks coffee. He said if he ever got money, he was going to open a chain of tea shops called Queequegs.

“Pat, uh, about the phone …” I said.

“Oh, yes, go ahead, take it in my bedroom for privacy.”

Pat’s bedroom. Spartan, to say the least. A futon on the floor, one sheet, one pillow.

The sun setting behind Lookout Mountain.

The phone call that’ll change everything….

I dial Ireland.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Facey,” I say.

“Shit, Alex, is that you?” Facey says in a whisper.

“It is.”

“Alex, Jesus Christ, where are you? Still in America?”

“I’m—” I begin.

“No, don’t tell me,” Facey interrupts.

“Ok,” I say, worried now.

“Alex, listen to me very carefully, ok? Pay attention. I’ve been trying to reach you. I’m only a messenger. I’m only a messenger, don’t take it out on me. Ok?” he says, sounding scared.

“Ok, Facey, just tell me,” I say.

“Alex, I wrote it down, let me get the piece of paper, I’m going to destroy the paper once I tell you, can you believe it?”

“Facey, just fucking tell me,” I yell at him, getting impatient now.

“Alex, from channels, way above me, not me, I’ve been instructed to tell you, that if you come back to Northern Ireland, you will be, I don’t know how to say this, Alex, I’ll just say it, they say they’ll see to it that you’re killed. They say if you come back, they’ll kill you. They’ll kill you.”