Scott's trying to find a reason for it, so talks to Brendan as they're by the pool behind the house...
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"You're friends for years," Scott said, "then one day you get taken to a party and it becomes--hope you don't mind if we tie you to a board, torture you and kill you, for fun. Then you're never seen, again. I don't get it. How can you do that to somebody you know? Known most of your life?"
I said nothing. Just thought of Da going out to tell his stories and sing his songs and get paralytic, as usual. Full intent to come home to a row with Ma. Instead, joined with some men who offered him more of the devil's brew, but really saw him as nothing but a toy to be torn apart. That they swore they hadn't mean for it to go that far was a lie. They'd dumped his body and run off to hide, hoping they wouldn't be caught out.
But they were. And they'd wept and cried and moaned, over and over, things just got carried away. As pure a lie as ever was told, yet still accepted by those in power.
It was the same on Bloody Sunday. So many had doubted the Paras had run up aiming to kill anyone, really, but they had. They were loaded with real bullets. Fourteen dead for no cause, no matter what that lying Widgery Report claimed. He hadn't seen the faces of the paras as they gunned people down. Hadn't witnessed the joyful gleam in their eyes as a bullet tore apart a fellow human being who was running from them. Once they'd begun their slaughter, they dove into it. And at that point, it was just bad luck to be in the way of a bullet a soldier was firing because he could. The reasons...the excuses, those could come later.
For everyone had their excuses, and they'd be different for every person who flips from friend to foe. Protector to killer. It assumes they actually put thought into their course of action instead of just rolling along with it all. Not knowing where it will end until it's ended.
What did strike me was the arbitrariness of it. The men who killed my Da could have taken any of a dozen others, but he's the one they stumbled upon. And on Bloody Sunday, standing five feet to the left or right might have saved your life, for nothing else would have. If that para aiming for me had fired a moment later, I'd not be here, myself. It was all just luck of the draw.
Like with that bomb. If I'd kept Joanna at the back of her Da's shop fr two more minutes, she might have survived. If I'd stayed there to wait for her, she might still have been caught by the blast but I wouldn't have, and I might have been able to get in and save her. It was just the arbitrariness of everything that most affected me.
If Father Jack had been our priest instead of Father Devil, would Danny have taken the mantle instead of growing cold and angry, over the years? If it hadn't been Father Devil there to-to-to use him in ways I still was unsure about, would he have--Jesus, would he still have joined with the IRA? Been willing to set that bomb? I could work myself in circles thinking about the what-ifs.
The one good thing about that madness was how it cut away my fears that part of the reason they targeted that shop was for me being with Joanna. That I was the link in the final decision to hit them. That they found out I was heading over to see her, one last time, and they feared I was passing along information so set out to stop it. That they decided to protect themselves in a way most hideous. I could finally see that was nonsense.
Her father was high in the UVF, so he could have been a target at any time. Any Protestant like him would have been slated for destruction, thanks what their groups had done to Catholics. To my own father. So I could finally accept it wasn't me who lit the fuse that killed her. It had nothing to do with me. It was just chance. Only circumstance for it to happen at that particular moment. Just rotten luck of the draw. Mine and hers.
Ours.
Like those lads now dead. All for no real reason.
I finally had to tell Scott, "You ask for explanations when there aren't any. Things happen, and all you can do is hope they don't happen to you."
"No, there has to be a reason," Scott snapped. "For them to suddenly start taking friends and others they knew to their deaths. Kids younger than me. Brothers. Families destroyed."
"It may be nothing more than a pair of selfish bastards out for a bit of money."
"C'mon, Bren, people ain't that greedy. Shit. I bet it was the idea of having the control of life or death over somebody else. A way of showing who owns who, and nobody owns me. It's not like they had that much of a future in store for 'em."
Oh, God, that bloody crap, again. That would never happen in River Oaks. He was going to worry this like a dog with a bone. Like Angus and his rawhide toy. Keep at it till there was nothing left and he needed something to replace it.
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