Free We Were Kings by Thomas O'Malley Page B

Cal noticed the drawn look to his face, the tightness in the skin about his eyes.
    Cal waited in the hall as the man flushed. When he was done, he walked past Cal.
    “You’re an asshole,” the man muttered. “And I know what room you’re in.”
    “That’s okay, sunshine. I know what room you’re in too.”
    Freshly bathed and back in his room, Cal stood in his pants and undershirt before the ironing board and moved the steaming iron slowly and methodically across his shirt. His skin was tight from his morning shave, stinging slightly from aftershave. Coffee steamed from the decanter on the double-burner hot plate. This was part of his daily ritual: he rose just after first light and performed the rosary, kneeling at the side of his bed, then he put the coffee on and let it brew, tuned the radio to the morning news, and showered and shaved and dressed.
    At the center of his thoughts, like a prayer itself, was the memory, the word: Lynne. Sometimes he spoke to her, imagined her with him, and other times, it was more difficult to draw her essence—the sense of her—and though she felt farther away from him than he liked to imagine, he knew she was there regardless, listening, and so he talked to her as he went about his day. He made sure he rose from the bed and dressed like a man should to start his day of work, to be one of the living, as only she would have expected of him. He knew it was the memory of her, the need to respect that memory, to not allow it to become something cheap, tarnished, or diminished, that kept him rising, climbing from his bed, one day after the other, until days joined days and became weeks and months and then years. And in this illusory way, he created the structures and rhythms of a life.
    This morning as he stared through his open window and sipped his coffee, there was no sense of her, only the still water of the channel glimmering silver with sunlight and oil-belching fish trucks passing over the Northern Ave and Congress Street Bridges and the haze already lifting from the tar rooftops of the derelict textile buildings across the channel and the sweat trickling down his spine. His undershirt stuck to his back. “It’s gonna be a hot one, Lynne,” he said to the emptiness. “Too damn hot.”

11
    _________________________
    Galway, Ireland
    IN THE KITCHEN of a stone cottage overlooking the slate-blue waters of the bay, Sean Mullen stood before a large butcher-block table, an apron spotted with blood tied tightly around his waist. In one hand he held a large carving knife and in the other a whetstone. He moved the blade across the stone as if tuning some long-lost instrument, and only once did he look across the kitchen to the man sitting in a chair beside the window.
    The man watched Sean, sometimes called the General, pull a large salmon from a wicker basket, the silver of its scales shimmering and speckled with black.
    Sean Mullen was a short, stocky man with the build of an ironworker or a boxer; he’d been both in his life, among many other things. What hair he had left was raked over his scalp. His skin was dark and weathered but not deeply wrinkled, and his face was clean-shaven but already filling in with a coarse stubble. His hands were thick, roped with veins, and while his fingers appeared stubby and callused, they could maneuver with the dexterity of a well-trained embroiderer’s. Nearing sixty, he had a boyish twinkle in his eyes that betrayed others into believing he was a pleasant man. He could be, from time to time, especially around his sons and daughters and a few select friends whom he trusted.
    Low clouds passed above the cottage, and the midday light staggered from shadow back to the sun again. Wind pressed against the window, making the screen clatter in its frame.
    The man in the chair coughed into his hand and watched as Mullen sliced into the fish, running the blade smoothly along its belly, cutting up to the backbone, turning the fish over, and removing its