Ghost Dance by Mark T. Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page A

as he tried to read the pile of research on the Catholic process of canonization his partner, Jerry Matthews, had shoved into his hands before he left Manhattan. The image of Potter goaded Gallagher as he made the bed upstairs and organized his fly box. It taunted him as he tried to cook an official welcome-to-middle-age birthday dinner of store-bought trout.
    Why Potter and not me? Gallagher asked himself as the butter melted in the pan. What matrix of forces had aligned themselves to say that this day was his last while my life goes on? And then Gallagher asked the question he had been avoiding all day—what matrix of forces had caused his wife to leave, for him to be forty and alone?
    He went through the motions of preparing and eating the trout, but took no joy in the taste. For want of something to do, he looked at the etchings of the Indian standing above the cave entrance and of the albino medium Caleb Danby slumped in his trance. There was something about his slouching posture that reminded Gallagher of his father.
    Seamus Gallagher was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of an alcoholic stonecutter and devout Catholic who spent his life carving religious statuary for churches across the Northeast. For reasons Gallagher never fully understood, by the time his father was a teenager, he had rejected God and his father’s stonecutting trade. Seamus attended City College of New York at night. He got his law degree from Fordham at twenty-seven. By thirty he was a vocal labor attorney and a stalwart of the ACLU and the American Communist Party.
    Gallagher’s father was a stocky man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard, a slick bald head and intense eyes that peered out from behind black polymer glasses.
    He met Gallagher’s mother, Agnes Flanagan, in 1958 at a party for The Progressive Magazine. Agnes was one of the staff’s best writers, a thin, severe woman with a pinched face who chain-smoked Kents and wrote elegant, acerbic essays attacking the capitalist establishment. In her, Gallagher believed his father found the personification of the mainstays of his life—leftist ideals and booze.
    On their first date, they went to Coney Island, flew a kite and got shit-faced on the beach. Gallagher was born some nine months later. ‘A mistake of too much sun and too much vodka,’ as his father would describe Gallagher when he was in one of his black moods, which became more frequent the older Gallagher got.
    Seamus was rarely home at night, more often at a rally or a meeting of some committee he chaired, followed by a long sojourn at the local pub. He was most vocal as an atheist, and when Gallagher was eight his father was chief litigator and spokesman for a group that successfully sued the New York school system to outlaw prayer in the classroom.
    The day after the suit was won, Gallagher was coming down the slide in the school playground when he was surrounded by a group of kids who taunted, ‘You pinko fuck! You God-hating son of a bitch!’
    Gallagher never saw the stone that struck him upside the head.
    He woke up with no memory of the three days he had passed in a coma. When Seamus came to see him in the hospital, the first thing Gallagher asked him about was God.
    ‘He doesn’t exist, Patrick,’ Seamus said coldly. He removed his glasses to rub them on his shirtsleeve. As usual, there was the faint odor of liquor on his breath.
    ‘How do you know?’ Gallagher asked.
    ‘It’s something you feel or you don’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel, therefore I don’t believe. Neither should you.’
    ‘Then what happens after we die?’
    ‘Nothing,’ his father replied. ‘It’s just the end of it.’
    ‘There’s nothing else?’ Gallagher had demanded. ‘We don’t go somewhere, like heaven?’
    ‘Heaven,’ he snorted. ‘We blip out of the darkness. We blip back into the darkness.’
    Gallagher grew up in a Brooklyn brownstone, a place where there was never quite enough light coming through the windows or