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.

The Two-Face Boogie

By Jim Kelly

Like they said, he was pretty badly beat up. Beat up, worn down, hiding out. Still, he was not likely to change his ways. Not him. Not in a million years. It’s just who he was. How he was made. A two face. Always had been, always would be. It took half an hour or more to find him. He was in the tall grass on the shore of that little lake. “Mind the bull” the guidebook said, “and be sure to shut the gate behind you.”

We were touring Ireland that summer with our two young sons, stopping for ruins. Stone Age, Roman, medieval, older the better. Fallen down abbeys and castles. Sacked, busted up monasteries. Ring forts, all grown over and big as football fields. Standing stones clustered in meadows, some with mysterious alphabets gouged in. Beehive tombs that looked like gigantic igloos, only built out of massive stone slabs instead of ice blocks.

Mostly they were free. No admission. No tickets. No trinket shops. Just pull over, follow the directions in the guidebook, then look your fill. Look, climb, picnic and goof. Often we were greeted by cows. Cows wandering through vaulted, stone arch doorways, munching tufts of grass, of wildflowers that sprouted out of the rubble. There were thick growing, wind seeded clumps of this and that, no two the same, up and down those ancient crumbling walls.

“The Janus figure” the guidebook told us “is down at the shore of the lake, just to the left of the big oak tree.” We saw no angry bull that day but did, as we were directed, dutifully close the gate behind us when we entered the overgrown little hillside just above the lake. After hunting a bit in thistles and tall grass we found the little neolithic two face. For a standing stone he wasn’t much. A skinny, pocked, gray stone post, at most two and a half feet tall, with a head the size of a middling cabbage. The only carved parts were the two faces. They were identical, except for wear, and stared off in opposite directions.

The eyes were round hollows, like enormous egg cups. The noses, what was left of them, were two worn down lumps. The mouths were strange and fierce. Big and round, deep and dark, they had no lips or teeth. Just an unsettling emptiness. Were they howling out some soundless grudge from the beginning of time? A scalding gripe that just wouldn’t let them be? The guidebook didn’t say.

At more than five thousand years old, that little stone two face in the west of Ireland is probably one of the oldest sculptures in the world. Why, in the dangerous times when he was carved, was set upright, even bother? Survival was surely a daily battle. Wild beasts, the elements, marauding tribes to look out for. Why not just hunt, gather and move on? Maybe, the trait has pissed us off from the get go: lying, saying one thing to your face, saying something else completely behind your back.

Was he a warning maybe? Image of some jumped up little stone age demagogue?Neolithic bully to look out for? Beginning of time two face made grand, made powerful by all those who bought his line of shit, cave to grotto, grotto to glen? Bought it, hook, line and sinker? Bought it and never thought twice?