Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction
“Shovel birds in silver tides,” Sammy read aloud from his flippy little notebook.
We were huddled on a bench on the wind protected side of the park. We’d just been kicked out of the library for loitering, where Sammy was scribbling down lines he liked from a little poetry magazine, trying to memorize them. “Because I’m a professional plagiarist,” he told me while he scribbled.
Out in the cold, I wanted to keep moving. But Sammy needed to sit, to come up with a plan— he needed eighty punts to get his girl Sandy out of hospital. So I sat there, cold and hungry, while Sammy came up with a plan. I had nowhere to go, and sitting with Sammy was better than wandering alone.
“Smashed by unsuspecting sneakers,” Sammy said.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got it! We’ll need bus fare. Do you have two punts?”
With numb fingers, I jiggled my pocket for coins. A puff of icy snow sifted down from the clouds.
“So this is what I’m thinking,” Sammy said, staring at a lone pigeon on a phone booth. “We’ll go up there, and blah-de-blah-blah. But you’ll have to come with me.”
I had started staring at the pigeon myself—a beautiful shiny thing—and completely checked out on what Sammy was saying, until I was implicated.
“Who, me?”
“You, sure!”
“But what do you want me to do?”
“The charm! I’ve just told you. Weren’t you listening?”
“Gentlemen,” came a whisper. We turned to see a bent man with a long beard and leaves tangled in his stringy hair. “I ask only that you remember me.”
We both got up and started walking.
“Wow,” Sammy whispered. “What a bum.”
*
The green bus gathered heat in its pockets. We rode through little ditches of civilization—boarded up pubs and shops, smoky little row houses. Red-haired children in peacoats raced up the street banging on the bus, latching the back fender to slide their heels down the muddy street. Houses gave way to rubble-shuttered buildings. Timbers stuck up in the air. The bus dropped us next to a forlorn pub, in a blast of cold wind. We were the last ones off.
“Gone, here, the days of sun.” Sammy pointed up a ruined hill topped by three houses. “There, the Phoenix sleeps.”
“What happened here?”
“What? Here? Nothing. Once, I’ve been assured, it was the loveliest neighborhood in Dublin. But now, so many, so many fried eggs.”
“I still don’t understand why we are here?”
Sammy patted me on the shoulder.
“Just be your charming self, is all you got to do.”
Two mangy dogs trotted up, sniffed us, and trotted away with an air of disappointment. The cold wrapped itself around my bare head like an icicle scarf. My ears stung. My fingers burned. We pushed up the hill. The clouds parted for a moment above a row of mountains, a swirling tomb of silver light.
Three meat-faced boys appeared from behind a wall. Each held a brick in one hand, and a smoking cigarette in the other.
“There they are now,” Sammy said, with a stern voice of authority. He flipped open his notebook. “What do you boys think you’re doing?”
“Nothing, sir.” The biggest dropped his brick.
“You’d better be doing nothing.” Sammy scribbled notes. “We’ve got the wagon at the foot of the hill. Now give me a smoke, you.”
The boy pulled a single, half crumpled cigarette from his pocket.
“And a light.”
The boy pulled a huge box of matches from another pocket, cupped his filthy hands, and lit a match.
“And one for my partner, here.”
This boy nudged that boy.
“But it’s my last one,” he whispered.
We watched the boys march down the hill.
“I don’t see any wagon,” one said.
“Shhh, they’ll hear us,” another said.
“Angel-driven precipitation,” Sammy said, closing the notebook.
We walked straight up to the center house, its big dark windows staring down on us. Sammy banged three times with a huge knocker. We waited. Then we waited.
“I’m not paying you a single punt more than you’re owed,” a little voice whispered through the mail slot.
“Nana, its me, Sammy.”
There was a long shuffling noise, a bolt turned by pained fingers. The big door creaked open, revealing little white head on a long black robe. A tiny arm took Sammy by the coat and pulled him inside. I slipped in just before the door slammed shut, into a swirl of hot dust.
“I thought you were the coal-boy. I won’t pay him a single punt more than he’s owed.” She squinted up at me. “Who’s this then?”
“This is my friend, Nana.”
“Here. Hold this.” She handed me a heavy ceramic bowl, a pumpkin. In the dust and shadows, I felt heat—real house-heat–emanating from the core of the house. I followed them through two hanging blue drapes into a parlor. There were cobwebs everywhere. A huge window stared out at the cluttered rubble. Another swirl of snow was making its way down into the ruins. Dust spun in a lone shaft of dim light slanting into the room.
Nana came at me with a duster, starting first with the ceramic pumpkin, then dusting me. This created still more dust and Sammy, who had seated himself in the middle of the room on a blue couch, started sneezing.
“A hankerchief, a hankerchief,” Nana cried out. “Samuel! Now then,” she said, turning to me. “I’ll take your coat. Patrick’s no longer here to take it. Back to Clare to be with his people, he is. That one. He’s blind, very blind, you know.” Nana held my coat in her two bony hands, looked up at the hook on a coat stand, and dropped it on the floor. “Now, where was I? Patrick, yes. He wasn’t much but he was something. He was from a long line of Bogmen. I’d send him for eggs and he’d be gone all day, he’d take the bus out to Bray and weep at the sea. He could never understand where he was, East from West, City or Country. He was very homesick, you know, and then he went blind. Blind as a bat, he was. Started knocking things over. I had to send him home, after thirty years. But I took very good care of him. I did. I went with him to the station and put him on the train. I called his people to make sure he’d made it. “You’re welcome, you’re welcome,” his niece kept saying to me on the phone, as if it was I thanking her. Funny people, Bogmen. Very gruff, I think. Not suited for merry old Dublin.”
Nana clasped her hands and stared out the window. A broken, bare tree stretched its branches toward her.
My eyes adjusted to walls of shelves filled with antique dolls, at least a hundred of them.
“Where’s the girl,” Nana asked Sammy, who uncrossed his legs, and then re-crossed them.
“She’s in hospital,” he shrugged. “But she’ll be out tomorrow.”
“Serves her right, whatever it is.”
Sammy clapped his hands together.
“Cold enough outside, isn’t it, Nana?”
“I haven’t been outside in weeks. They bring me everything I need, the State. Trying to get me from here for years. They want my house, the State. But I told them I’m the last of the Mohicans. They’ll have to drag me out by my feet.”
Sammy was flipping through his notebook again. “Umbrellas bursting into bloom. The debris cleanses everything.”
“Again with the poetry, are you? Is it even yours? Do you want to be a poet? Can you eat your poems? Can you drive them to work?”
“No, Nana.”
“Stop giving me other people’s quotes, boy. Tell me what you know.”
Sammy closed the notebook “I know how cold it is, Nana. I know that the coldness of the ocean on this side of the ocean grows colder as it floats in its glorious coldness across the frosty ridges of foam blowing, blowing, faster and faster, picking up moisture, blowing colder and wetter and colder and wetter, racing, lapping, until it boofs into the flat black rocks, and fingers its way into the bluffs, pushing trees and hedges and houses and people out of its way, and those people, the dwellers of houses, the smokers, the fire burners, the huddled tea and stout sippers, they know nothing of the cold, but soon they will.”
“A bullshitter is what you are, boy. Like your father. Just like your father.”
“Anyhow, my friend here is a Yank! He’s here on Holiday. Some Holiday we’ve shown him. Tell Nana that story you told me, about your trip to the west. Tell her the story.”
And I did, you know. I told her my bum-luck story. Blah, blah, blah-de-blah. It went on for a bit. Nana, for her part, seemed quite amused, and warmed up as I prattled along. She smiled. Her eyes sparked. Sammy got up and made tea, but found nothing to eat. Blah-blah, blah-blah-blah. And then I asked Nana a million questions—about the dolls, about the house, about Dublin. I asked an awful lot of questions. I think I tired her out.
“Say, friend,” Sammy said. “Nana’s finished. Do you mind meeting me down at the bus stop?”
I gathered my coat. “It’s very nice of you to keep an eye out for the boy here,” Nana said. She shook my hand. “My brother Tommy went off to the States, to Baltimore. Do you know him? Tommy. He’s you’re spitting image but older now. He left many years ago and we’ve never heard back. You will come back soon? Will you remember me? I’ll be right here. Where am I going to go? Promise you’ll come back. Promise you’ll come back.”
At the bus stop I waited and waited, like a cold, hungry bum. This all feels very bummy. I remember thinking. A skeleton in a raincoat popped out of the bar and glared at me, swaying in the wind.
“Hello,” I said.
“Bum,” he spat at me. He stumbled away.
Sammy, fifteen minutes later, came dancing down the rubble street. The last gray streaks of light drained the place. More snow was coming.
“What are you all about?” I asked.
He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket.
“Let’s get soused.”
“You didn’t steal from your grandmother?”
“Steal? No! She gave it to me. I asked her for it. I told her I needed it for Sandy, to get Sandy from the hospital. Which is truth, you know.”
“But why did you bring me along?”
“You? You were the warm-up act. You were the charmer, you were. I couldn’t go it alone, she’s onto me. Like a wooden puppet at last call, beating nature’s drums. Now come along. Let’s get back to town and get soused.”
So, we got back to town and got soused. We burned through that money. In the end, Sammy lost his little notebook, and most of the money he needed to get Sandy out of the hospital. But the next day, bloodshot, he turned on his charm with the nurses, and they finally released her.
“And Sandy claimed I’d forgotten her, after all that. Can you imagine?”
Sammy told me this, shrugging again, waiting in front of the hospital gate for Sandy to come out, as we shared a last cigarette in the rain.
Sandy came out the gate, eyes vacant, pale as death, wrapped in a hospital blanket. Sammy took her bag and patted her slightly on the back. “There, now, girl. Off to the bus.” We parted there.
But as I walked away I heard a burst of sobbing. I turned and saw Sammy clinging to Sandy’s arm at the bus stop. Sandy was staring blankly up, up at the damp clouds whistling out to sea. And Sammy was wailing “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Frank Haberle is the author of two books: Downlanders (Flexible Press, November 2023), following five misfits into a fictional wilderness; and Shufflers (Flexible Press, Minneapolis, September 1 2021), a story of transients moving through minimum-wage jobs in the 1980s. Frank’s short stories have won awards from Pen Parentis, Beautiful Loser Magazine, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Rose Warner Prize for Fiction. They have appeared in more than 30 journals including Deep Wild Journal, the Adirondack Review, the Baltimore Review, Wilderness House Literary Journal, Necessary Fiction, Vagabonds and the Nomadic Review. Professionally, Frank has worked thirty years in nonprofit development, most recently with New Settlement in The Bronx. Voluntarily, he leads an Amherst method-driven writing group with the Creative Center for Health and Healing on the Lower East Side. Frank lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.