A retired travelling salesman, Jim Kelly has been writing for over forty years. His work has been in War, Literature & the Arts, Harvard Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Switchback, The Coachella Review, and now Harvard Review Online. He won the 2017 George Garrett Fiction Prize from Texas Review Press for his story collection, Pitchman’s Blues.
A Family Likeness
By Jim Kelly
Best start off with a bird’s eye view. Show you, at a glance, what caused all the trouble. Better than words anyway. Let you see for yourself why all those people got suddenly furious. Honking horns, shouting and cursing. Jumping out of cars and vans. Out of busses. Shaking fists. Looking to fight. Looking to punch whoever was holding them all up. Keeping them dead stopped.
Look off to the west. Miles out to sea. I know it’s getting dark, but see those three islands, their outlines anyway? Those are the Aran Islands. That’s where we’d been all day, all us tourists, walking around looking at fallen down monasteries, stone walls and neolithic ring forts in the rain. Cold, soak you through rain all day long. See the crazy big waves, breaking this way and that, all the way from the islands to the coast? See the whitecaps everywhere? No place you’d want to be in a small, smacked around ferry boat jammed in, elbow to elbow, with too many people.
There’s the ferry now, lashed, finally, to that stone pier. All the cars and vans, the busses, their lights on for the dark, are lined up and waiting in the little field next to the pier. They need to make it through a tiny one street town to get out to the big roads. Roads going east to Dublin, south to Limerick or north to Galway City. Roads taking them off to the comforts of home, hotel or B & B.
Now the town. Twelve, maybe fifteen buildings facing one another across the narrow main street. Some are two story, most one. Cars are parked all down one side of the street. There’s only room enough for a single vehicle to drive the length of the town in either direction. Stopped, engine turned off, at the east end of the street, just in from where the big roads start, is a small, dark blue car. Nose to nose with it, a van. My van. Behind my van, lined up and honking, are all the angry tourists crazy to be off and gone.
A word about our end of day ferry crossing back to the mainland. We were crowded in close, out of the rain, protected from wave spray, but with little room to move. To turn around in. Two stinks started things off, hot diesel fumes and thick wet clothes. Then the smacking started. The pitch and roll. Dip and shudder. Skid and stall. Certainty, in the stomach, that we were tipping over, going under. Here and there people start getting sick. Stinks blending, inspiring others. Back on shore, nobody wanted to stick around.
The town, I should explain, is famous for traditional fiddle music. Four pubs, two on one side of the street, two on the other, are hosting a contest. The winner represents the area in a national competition. Much singing and dancing. Laughing and clapping. Families cheering their own, their own and anyone else who can get them up on their feet or raising their voices in a sing along.
The man in the small, dark blue car has just rolled up his window, crossed his arms on his chest and begun staring straight ahead. Hardened, head to toe, for the long haul. “I prefer to go first” he told me before rolling up his window. Nothing more. No back and forth allowed. He wasn’t listening. It was his way or nothing at all. Soon enough his car is surrounded. Threats made. Shouts, pleading, exasperation. Nothing.
Angry noises from the street burst into the four pubs. Highjack the happy moods. People crowd out to see what’s what. See who it is with the bad manners to be intruding on their celebrations. Four big guys, after a brief chat, bend down on either side of the won’t budge car. At the shout of “now” they hoist it up, carry it a few feet up onto the sidewalk and set it down. Inside, arms still crossed on his chest, the hard man continues staring straight ahead, unblinking. Cheers all around. Seconds later, much revving of engines and squealing of tires. The field by the pier is emptied out in maybe ten minutes, certainly no more than twelve. The lovers of fiddle music return to their revels.
Epilogue
Nothing about the man’s face was familiar, but the stance, that’s where I saw the family likeness. That bone deep embrace of pointless refusal. It was, when I was a kid, a constant. My Old Man, a drinker, would take stands, often about next to nothing, begin shouting, and we’d all run for cover.
One hot summer afternoon when I was ten or eleven I found him on the cold cement floor of our basement, burning up with a fever, teeth chattering, sweated through and talking nonsense. I asked if he needed help. Rousing, he blinked me into focus then shouted “leave me the fuck alone, I’ll be fine.” I called an ambulance.
He’d drunk a hole through his stomach. Acid was pumping out into places where it shouldn’t be going. He had eight hours of emergency surgery. “He would have died” the surgeon told us, “if you hand’t brought him in when you did.”
The next day we visited him in the hospital. He was flat on his back in a bed with tubes going everywhere. Tubes dripping things in and tubes draining things out. He
couldn’t shout for the pain so he waved me over. “Little Man” he rasped “don’t you ever disobey me again. You do like I say and don’t ask the reason why.” I was, once again, on notice.
The Galway Review 