Fiction: Running Guns by Scott Pomfret

Photo Source: Unsplash

This was the Eighties. Inter-sibling combat over corned beef was a staple at our table, and it wasn’t uncommon for one of my brothers to invite one or more other brothers to step outside before the salad course to resolve some finer point of political debate. But my mild-mannered new best friend Brendan Rafferty surprised me. He quickly learned that merely defending his convictions was the price of entry and boring, so he went on the conversational offensive, launching provocative grenades challenging the Reagan presidency and my family’s other sacred cows, which led to a table-clearing arm-wrestling match during which my brothers questioned Brendan’s cojones and the genuineness of his Irish heritage, which was dismissed as lace-curtain bullshit. But by the time my mother served the traditional green Jell-O with Cool Whip for dessert, Brendan let slip that his grandmother had once run guns for the Irish Republican Army, and my brothers were cuffing him affectionately and dubbing him The Jesuit, which was the highest compliment, since every one of them had graduated from Boston College High School.

My first clues that the Rafferty’s table might be different? Classical music instead of Clancy Brothers. Six crystal glasses on the sideboard paying homage to a Waterford sherry decanter like the wisemen to the newborn Christ in a Christmas creche. A starched cloth napkin in a giraffe-shaped mahogany ring marking my dinner plate, which, Brendan’s mother Mrs. Dr. Rafferty explained, had been fashioned in East Africa by expatriate Irish nuns of the Carmelite Order.

I didn’t know a Discalced Carmelite from a Poor Clare, but I said, “Of course, they were fashioned so, Mrs. Dr. Rafferty. Any fifteen-year-old moron would recognize the blessed nuns’ fine handiwork, sure, they would, and it’s a credit to you, missus.” It was my standard operating procedure with older women of Irish extraction to lay the ass-kissing on thick.

Before the word were out of my mouth, Brendan’s legendary gunrunning grandmother dropped squarely into the chair across from me as if prepared for inquisition. A silver perm crested sun-damaged cheeks and slashing blue eyes, but she was so short and plump that she looked like a little kid at the adults’ table. Her lips moved. Thinking she must be speaking to me, I craned forward, but it turned out she was talking to God. After I made the post-grace sign of the cross a beat too late, Mrs. Dr. Rafferty extended a serving dish as if it contained the head of John the Baptist or my own.

            “Elders first,” I said cheerfully, indicating Mrs. Dr. Rafferty should serve her mother-in-law before me. Based on the legendary grandmother’s downturned pout, I might as well have said, Whores first.

            “You’re the guest,” Mrs. Dr. Rafferty accused.

“Yes, I guess I am. Five of you, one of me.” I scooped a helping of tender meat in a yellow sauce over a pile of small twigs I later learned was long-grain rice.

            “More,” she said.

            I shoveled more onto my plate.

            “More,” she repeated.

            I froze. We stared at one another from point-blank range. Without dropping her gaze, she ever so subtly pushed the serving tray a fraction of a fraction of an inch closer like a dealer trying to get me to take another card.

I knew better. I slipped a chunk of stewed meat back from my plate to the serving tray. “I think that’s enough. Don’t you? Leave some for the faeries, right?”

Mrs. Dr. Rafferty nodded. Brendan’s legendary grandmother stretched her thin lips, indicating either approval or a conviction that I ought to be knee-capped pronto. Mr. Dr. Rafferty eyed me without expression, and Brendan’s little brother Brian regarded me as if he suspected I might burst into song.

Brendan shrugged. He’d warned me his parents were odd ducks. Unlike my mom and dad, fourth generation Southie, the Drs. Rafferty immigrated directly from Dublin. They’d sponsored the expatriate nuns’ East African expeditions, and Mrs. Dr. Rafferty employed a French-Canadian cook (rare and exotic in our Irish enclave) specializing in vegetarian dishes who’d nevertheless learned to make visiting expatriate nuns’ favorite Tanzanian dishes.

In my house, the word vegetarian, if spoken at all, was as filthy as a curse, and vegan hadn’t yet been invented. My mother’s vegetables swam in butter and were boiled to the consistency of baby food. Pork was panfried to shoe leather out of fear of trichinosis. Fish on Fridays was exclusively cod. And God forbid a dish be seasoned with anything other than salt. Blandness was a proof of loyalty to country, God, and the Catholic Church.

Determined to overcome my upbringing, I dug in. “Delicious! Compliments to the chef! What the heck is it?”

Mr. Dr. Rafferty mumbled at one end of the table. Mrs. Dr. Rafferty murmured back. The legendary grandmother, her inflection flat, muttered something further. Brendan responded to all the murmuring in yet another murmur, all completely indecipherable to my ears, which were pitched to my own family’s deafening drumbeat.

I looked to Brendan for translation.

“Curried goat,” he said.

I swallowed hard, as if the goat’s entire carcass had slid down my throat sideways

.

Amused, Brendan’s little brother Brian bleated, “Baaa!”

Mrs. Dr. Rafferty annihilated Brian with a glance. The legendary grandmother nodded vigorously as if she were sealing a deal over contraband Kalishnikovs. By this time, I realized I was dealing with a take-no-prisoners crowd. Sure, my family was tough. But the Rafferty table was another kettle of fish. Or, more specifically, a side dish of firm tofu sprinkled with parsley and swimming in lemon juice quivering at the center of the table and a bioluminescent seaweed salad. Choking down a tofu cube that had the texture of something coughed up from my lungs, I mustered the courage to ask the legendary grandmother about the guns.

“You kill any Brits?” I asked. “Royals?”

The grandmother murmured. The Drs. Rafferty murmured. Brendan murmured back. Brian cackled.

“Tell me you helped take down Mountbatten!” I encouraged. “Swear I won’t tell a soul.”

Murmur to the left of me. Mumble to the right. Sometimes it was difficult to figure out who was talking, except Brian, who spoke in yelps and was upbraided until he, too, reduced his tone to subsonic levels. The Raffertys seemed to understand each other, but I was damned if I could make out a word.

“What’s happening here?” I asked. “You guys talking Gaelic?”

“Um, no,” said Brendan.

“Oh. Then, uh, what’d they say?”

“We don’t talk politics at the dinner table,” Brendan translated.

Flabbergasted, I looked from Brendan to Mrs. Dr. Rafferty to the legendary grandmother to Mr. Dr Rafferty and to Brian and back again to Brendan. “What do you talk about?”

“Mahler,” Mr. Dr. Rafferty mumbled.

“Mahler,” Brendan repeated for my benefit.

“Kindertotenlieder,” Mrs. Dr. Rafferty murmured.

“Songs About the Death of Children,” Brendan translated.

“Deaths of … children?” I asked. Astonished. Bewildered. Then scared.

“Baa,” bleated Brian.

Then each member of the Rafferty family, little Brian included, offered some constructive, sub-audible observation on the composer’s life or works. In order. Never speaking over one another. Or making outrageous unsupportable claims.

When my turn came, I was still a little terrified, but I couldn’t stand the tidiness any longer. “My father says Mahler was a damn Kraut Commie.”

Forks stopped mid-spear. Knives ceased to cut. The legendary grandmother’s eyes twinkled as malevolently as if she were mentally composing lieder about my death.

“I’m kidding,” I said weakly. Turning to Brendan, I begged, “Tell them I’m kidding.”

“He’s kidding,” Brendan said.

The legendary grandmother pressed her starched napkin to her lips, behind which I thought I detected an evil grin. I kept waiting for a Rafferty to break, someone to wink or nudge or kick me under the table, acknowledging at last that this whole silent Mahler-inflected dinner was a drawn-out gag at my expense. Soon they’d be teasing and talking over one another like normal people and recalling the precious expressions on my face and the width of my eyes and my jaw hanging down in astonishment, while they whisked away the goat and tofu and replaced it with a generous helping of cabbage and corned beef.

When none of this happened, my heart filled with puny rage. I was ashamed of my father, my family, our fraternal rivalry, our fisticuffs, our preference for the Clancy Brothers, and I was ashamed of being ashamed.

Trying to be a good sport, I selected a few strings of seaweed with my fork and laid them as gently on my tongue as a communion host. Another mistake. No, call it what it was: a booby trap. My nose filled with brine. My stomach heaved. I coughed the glowing strands out into my palm as if they were green eels.

The legendary grandmother deftly slipped me her starched napkin. “Wouldja look at the child?” she exclaimed, the first time her words were audible. “He’s after choking himself to death!”

She turned on Mrs. Dr Rafferty and delivered dark, scolding, sub-audible murmurs. Mrs. Dr Rafferty fended them off with equally indecipherable murmurs.

“For the love of God, speak up!” I wanted to shout.

At last, the legendary grandma prevailed. Mrs. Dr. Rafferty relieved me of the balled-up napkin, now slimed green with ribbons of seaweed, and asked in an exaggerated lilt, “Would you fancy a cuppa tay?”

What I fancied was to burst into flame. I envied the dead children to whom people sang comforting mournful songs. I yearned for my own dinner table where the extent of the torture ran to what we used to call Indian sunburns, caused by my brothers twisting the skin of my forearm in opposite directions. Despite the superficial similarity of our Irish surnames, my new friend Brendan and I clearly had nothing in common.

Desperate and destroyed, I nodded weakly, somehow grateful, like a Stockholm prisoner, to my captors.

“Sure, tea. Absolutely,” I huffed. Reaching to the near wall, the legendary grandmother mercifully dialed down the chandelier light so I could take shelter in my gloomy shame. It occurred to me that now would be an ideal time to die.

Afterward, in Brendan’s tidy bedroom, I said, “You hate me. Only a person filled with hate could possibly expose me to … you should have warned me.”

“I did warn you. I told you my parents were odd ducks. But that thing about the commie Krauts. And Mountbatten. Mountbatten!”

“What? Mountbatten deserved it.”

Brendan’s expression tightened, oddly hard and unforgiving, a stranger where my friend had been. The hardness in Brendan brought out a rising hardness in me, and when I punched him, and his nose crunched and lip split, it was as if something opened up in me and split at the same time, but it was relief and not blood that spilled out. My rage satisfied and humiliated me, proving beyond doubt I was the Mahler-hating savage the Raffertys thought I was.

Brendan didn’t strike back. Overt violence wasn’t the Rafferty way. No doubt his revenge would be quiet, insidious, and exquisitely painful, a secret all of them would be pleased to keep.

Scott Pomfret is author of Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir; Hot Sauce: A Novel; the Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails, and over fifty short stories published in magazines including Ecotone, Smokelong Quarterly, The Short Story (UK), Post Road, New Orleans Review, Fiction International, and Fourteen Hills. An MFA candidate in creative writing at Emerson College, resident in Provincetown MA, Scott is at work on a comic queer Know-Nothing alternative history novel set in antebellum New Orleans. More at www.scottpomfret.com.