Hours of Gladness by Thomas Fleming

Nevermore could they roll up the killer majorities that had brought presidents and senators slavering to their doorsteps. But for their children—or some of their children—Paradise came close to living up to its extravagant name.
    I am thinking now of Mick in the glorious summers of his prime. He would come floating into the Golden Shamrock around midnight and tell me about his latest conquest. It was the sixties, 1967 to be exact, and all the girlies were eager to discover the Experience in those BHA (Before Herpes & AIDS) days. I had played some part in freeing Mick from his compulsive Catholicism, enabling him to accept their eager offers.
    My God, what a beautiful creature he was in those days. He sat on that elongated green lifeguard’s chair at Havens Beach, the blond hair cascading to his shoulders, muscles rippling on his golden brown torso. He emitted sexual attraction with the intensity of an atom smasher spitting particles into a centrifuge. Nobody knew they were responding to something elemental, a piece of history emerging from the void with the same inconsistency atoms display to our baffled physicists.
    Mick was a warrior, spawned by His Incomprehensibility in our supposedly modern world for reasons we cannot begin to understand. Maybe by the time I
finish this story we will understand a few of them. But I doubt it.
    One night in 1970 just before Mick went into the Marines, I hypnotized him in the Golden Shamrock when we were all drunk. I regressed him through several irrelevant lives, which included at least two deaths by starvation in Irish famines, back back into the Celtic mists where the Firbolg and the Tuatha da Danaan wandered and chanted and fought. He wailed a song in a language that no one in New Jersey had ever heard before. He crouched by a nonexistent peat fire to warm his hands and backside.
    Then he stripped off his clothes and wound the bartender’s rag around his neck in a remarkable approximation of a Celtic torc. The light of ancient battle fury danced across his face. Both hands gripped the hilt of an invisible sword, and he hacked and thrust and whirled it around his head exactly as his ancestors had wielded the weapon at Arretium in 285 B.C. where they annihilated a Roman legion.
    Think about that while I relapse into the third person and get back into the story.

HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD
    A s usual, the Aer Lingus 747 took the better part of forever to get its hulking immensity into the air. Dick O’Gorman felt sweat gluing his Taiwan-made undershirt to his Oxford Street shirt as he gazed down on Ireland through the inevitable gray drizzle. A line from William Butler Yeats caromed through his brain: What shall I do for pretty girls, now that my old bawd is dead? O’Gorman took a quart of Jameson from his flight bag, filled a paper cup to the brim with the brown whiskey of his native land, and drank it down in one swift swallow.
    O’Gorman filled another cup and handed it to a scrawny, red-haired man in the seat next to him. He had an ugly set of bare patches in his hair, like mange on a cat. Billy Kilroy imitated the older man’s dispatch of the Jameson and held out the cup for another round. O’Gorman filled it reluctantly. But he filled it. “We’re on duty, you know,” he said.
    â€œFook dooty,” Billy said in the nasal whine of the
Belfast proletariat. In the dangerous alleys of the Bogside, Billy was known as the Eye, for his ability to put a bullet through the slit of a Saracen tank with an ArmaLite rifle or in a man’s head with a Zastava pistol.
    It was going to be a desolate two weeks with this sod on his hands, O’Gorman thought gloomily. The IRA’s chief of staff was still at it, making his life miserable.
    The pilot began droning his message of phony reassurance to the passengers, telling them that they were trapped in his infernal machine for the next five and a half hours, during which they would hurtle over