Suzie’s House 63: Brothers in Arms

Joseph sat in a matching recliner.  He was sweating hard.  “You aren’t any worse than me.  You’ll be fine.”

“This isn’t like With Uncle Seamus in Ireland.  We aren’t fugitives hiding in someone’s cellar, afraid to let anyone know we were anywhere near the bomb when it went off, or happened to have be in the same apartment as a dead man.”

“Yes we are.”

“In an apartment with a dead man?”  Sean lifted his head and looked around the cramped little efficiency.

It wasn’t theirs.  Joseph wasn’t entirely sure who was renting the efficiency, only that one of the letters she’d left for the mailman said she’d be going to Thailand for a couple of months to study Batik, and hadn’t been able to find a Sublette.

“I don’t see a dead man.  Unless you mean me,” Sean said with growing alarm.

“No.  Fugitives, I mean.  We ARE fugitives here.”

“Just because some whack job took a shot at us…”

“No.  Because I took a shot at the whack job’s partner.  They’re cops who were trolling for you.”

“What?!”  Sean tried to sit up, flinched, and fell back.

“They are cops.”

“Not that part.”  He waved a hand in the air.

“They were trolling for you.”

“Not that part either.”

“I shot one of them?”

“There you go.  What do you mean you shot one?”

Before he answered, Joseph took up a bottle of vodka and splashed some on the bandage over his hip, then sucked in a lot of air at the burn.   

“Here, sterilize your wound.”  He held it out to Sean.

“No.”  Sean flopped his head back and forth in refusal.  “I need a hospital.  I need an IV, and antibiotics, and pretty nurses.”

“Eat the chicken soup I made for you.”

“I lost a lot of blood, Joe.  Maybe I need a transfusion.”

“Quit whining.”

“At least tell me what you mean you shot someone.”

Joseph switched the vodka for some beer, which he guzzled down.  “Remember nearly a month ago when you decided to make a special appearance in that game you set up online as the Smash Master.”

“You mean the street demolition derby we did around Vilas Park?”

“You were gunning for the taxi driver with the red barrette.”

“Yeah,” Sean’s eyes gleamed in avaricious humor.  “I really wanted to nail his ass.  He was such a challenge.  But he never showed.”

“He’s a cop working under cover.  I heard it from the taxicab company where he supposedly worked.  I caught up with him around the capital square, drove him toward Monona Terrace, and took him out.  Only his partner saw me, and he didn’t die.”

“Oh my God.”  Sean turned so pale Joseph actually started to worry about him.  “You idiot!  The most they would have done to me would’ve been a little jail time.  It isn’t like I’d have killed him, just totaled his taxi.”

“Yeah, well he and his partner live in a house with two women and a teen age boy.  The boy I told you to leave alone.  They probably think you were trying to kidnap the kid, especially after I’d gone to their house and asked a bunch of questions.”

Sean groaned.  “I just wanted to talk to him, maybe give him some driving lessons.  He looked like I felt when I was his age.”

“I doubt that.”  Joseph snorted in disgust.  “At that age you had already set a dozen bombs and stabbed one man in a knife fight.”

The two of them lapsed into silence for several minutes; each thinking about the grand, but terrible time of their lives when every moment could be their last and everything they did was in the name of a cause far greater than themselves.

“Remember the time Clancy McCrae took a knife to the gut and we hid him in some old woman’s back bedroom?”  Sean looked over at Joseph with something like wariness in his eyes.

“Mmm-hmmm.  That I do.”

“I wanted to take him to hospital, but everyone said we couldn’t because he’d finger the rest of us.”

“I remember,” Joseph said grimly.  It was then he learned to value something greater than himself, something more worthy than his own life.

“Clancy died.  He died for nothing.”

“No.  Not for nothing.  He died to protect us, and so Ireland could be free of British rule.”

“But Ireland is still under British rule and there’s no one left fighting, and he didn’t want to die for us.  He kept begging us to take him to hospital.  So it was all for nothing.”

Joseph didn’t say anything.  The collapse of all the resistance in Ireland still struck him a heavy blow.  And the way Clancy died hadn’t been very noble.

“If I really need to go to the hospital, you’ll take me, won’t you?”

Joseph didn’t say anything.  He was still trying to work out the honor in how Clancy had died.  There had to be some honor in it, or all the things he had done in his life had no meaning.  He and Sean had done so much that other people would consider wrong.  Only the higher cause made any of it right.  So there had to be a higher cause.  But if so, what was it?

“You wouldn’t really let me die, would you Joe?”  Sean looked worried.

 The previous was Suzie’s House 62: You Can and I Can’t?

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