Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning Read online

  “Alright, Aunt Bridie.”

  ~oOo~

  Mo pulled up at the curb before the high school, and Maggie eased the headscarf from her hair. She folded it up and put it away in the glove box, then wrenched the rear-view mirror to her side so she could apply the bright-red lipstick that would have sent Aunt Bridie to her knees with a rosary in her hand.

  There was a boy watching, leaning on the low brick wall near the door. Wearing pegged jeans and black sneakers, a white t-shirt under a plaid shirt, he looked like a typical Oklahoma teenager, but his shaggy hair suggested there was some rebel in him. Except on the college campus, Oklahoma teenagers still looked as they had in all the years Mo had lived here—buttoned down and pressed flat, like Eisenhower was still president.

  “Is that him?” Mo asked as Maggie put the cap back on her gold Max Factor tube.

  “Is who him?” Maggie looked toward the school, and Mo saw the happy flush color her neck and cheeks. The boy saw her see him and stood up.

  “The boy you stuffed your wee bra for. You know, Mags, there’s no good stuffing your cups for a boy you like. If he likes you back, soon enough he’ll know that you did. Better to be yourself.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re built like Ann-Margret. All the boys fall face-first at your feet.”

  And all they wanted was to cop a feel. Mo had been on plenty of dates but had yet to have a boyfriend, because she hadn’t found a boy yet who’d asked her out for any reason other than thinking she was fast.

  She’d stopped going on dates at all by her senior year, when Maggie had joined her at the high school, and reported that Mo had a ‘reputation.’

  The reason boys were always so handsy with her and girls didn’t like her was because the first boys she’d dated and rebuffed had told tales about her, and their ‘success’ with her, which she hadn’t known until her cousin had been there to hear the tales. She’d been dumb enough to think her lack of friends and surfeit of dates had to do with her Irishness, that these Okie hicks thought she was strange or exotic.

  Thus enlightened to the humiliating truth, she’d stopped dating entirely.

  “That’s not so easy, either, Mags,” she said now.

  Maggie’s flush became a sheepish blush. “Right. I’m sorry.”

  Since she’d started college, Mo had tried to change her outlook about boys and dating, deciding to be just as nonchalant as they. She didn’t try to cultivate an image or meet an expectation. She wasn’t a ‘good girl.’ She wasn’t ‘fast,’ either. She was just Mo. She’d decided she would go on a date when she thought a boy was cute and interesting, and if she still liked him on the date, she would do as much with him as she wanted to do. But after a few attempts, she’d realized that boys were boys everywhere, and college hadn’t changed their outlook at all.

  Mo smiled at her cousin. “Don’t be in such a rush. There’s a lot more in the world than boys.”

  The girl rolled her fifteen-year-old eyes, but the conversation was cut off by the arrival of the boy Maggie was currently in such a rush for. He opened the door.

  “Hiya, Maggie.” He offered Mo a cordial nod, “Ma’am.”

  Ma’am. What a laugh. Mo squinted at him, trying to tell him with her eyes that she’d slice his pretty face if he hurt her kin. It must have come across, because his grin bobbled, and he shifted his eyes away.

  Without bothering to introduce him, Maggie slithered out of Mo’s convertible Bel Air. “Thanks for the ride. Sorry I made you miss your class.”

  “I’ll see you this afternoon.” They both worked at the family drugstore.

  Mo stayed where she was and watched her cousin walk to the front of the high school. She swung her hips with such enthusiasm that she actually overbalanced a little and had to do a sidestep to keep her feet. The boy caught her hand to steady her, then kept hold.

  Hoping that boy was better than most, Mo reset the rearview mirror, took a second to check her own look, put the Chevy in gear, pulled away from the curb, and headed finally to the University of Oklahoma.

  ~oOo~

  Mo had come to Oklahoma at the age of twelve, just two weeks after her parents had died together in a car wreck. Her father and Uncle Dave had had a row before she was born, before Dave had emigrated to America—they’d fought because he’d meant to emigrate to America. Mo had never met him or her Aunt Bridie, or her cousins, until she’d come to live with them. They hadn’t come back to Ireland for the funeral. But Uncle Dave was her father’s next of kin, Mo had been too young to be on her own, and there was no other family who’d take her.

  She’d seen them for the very first time at the gate at the Tulsa airport, when she’d stood there with a piece of paper pinned to her jumper, holding the hand of a stewardess who was shorter than she.

  Her life with her parents had never been smooth, but that summer it had rocked hard, from stem to stern—her parents gone, her life gone, her friends left behind, she’d been dropped into this new world so totally alien to anything she’d known. Even the American movies and television she’d seen had been wrong. The people in Oklahoma talked differently, acted differently, thought differently, to anything she’d imagined.

  Her first two years in the States had been a horror. Mo had felt constantly disoriented, a perpetual mental seasickness that had made her bitter and blue. She’d been Maggie’s age before she finally begun to feel like she belonged in this house. And she’d never yet felt like she belonged in Oklahoma.

  Even now, after seven years, the fit wasn’t right. For one thing, her accent remained broad enough to turn heads—of course, Uncle Dave and Aunt Bridie still sounded like they’d just come up from the pub, too, so much so that their very American children had a touch of Norn Iron in their speech.

  But Mo had been unable—and, admittedly, unwilling—to shake the obstreperous roots of Belfast from her ankles. Her father had been IRA. Her mother as well. It was the cause of the family fracture, possibly the cause of her orphaning, and it was the clay from which Mo had been shaped. Staid Oklahoma was a snug fit for a girl born to raise hell.

  But seven years in Uncle Dave and Aunt Bridie’s care had smoothed her edges somewhat, by the constant rasp of their expectations and disappointments, and the adolescent pressures of life and body. She’d been acclimated enough to her small-town American fate that the culture shock of college, just ten miles from her uncle and aunt’s home, was almost as tumultuous as her entry into Americanness had been. It was nothing like Belfast, nothing like Shayton, nothing like anything she’d known before. Here at the end of her second semester, Mo still hadn’t gotten her feet steady beneath her.

  But she loved it. By 1968, even the University of Oklahoma had discovered the power of protest, and Mo had found a place to raise hell.

  Or heck, anyway. Sooner students weren’t much like those in California or New York, causing chaos and getting their voices heard. Still, there were organizations devoted to resisting the ‘establishment,’ promoting free speech, women’s rights, civil rights, and peace. There was even a chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, a national group Uncle Dave ranted about in the same ways he ranted about the IRA.

  As far as Mo had seen, SDS weren’t terrorists. They simply wanted a better world for everyone, and were angry at the power-hungry men at the controls, who only wanted a better world for themselves. All the groups gave soapbox speeches in the quad, passed out flyers, and held protests. For the most part, they were ignored, but they didn’t give up.

  Mo hadn’t told her family about these groups on campus, or about the meetings she’d attended, or the signs she’d carried. Uncle Dave had embraced his adopted country with both burly arms. He was an American, and would not hear a word against it. More to the point, he’d be more than disappointed to learn that Mo had engaged in any protest or civil disobedience. He’d be terrified. For her.

  For all their strictness and disapprobation, her aunt and uncle loved her dearly, and let her know it. They wanted her to stay i
nside the lines, where it was safe, was all. They were both afraid that she’d turn out like her parents, and have an end like they had.

  They never said it so starkly. As far as Mo officially knew, her parents had been on their way home drunk from a party, and crashed on a lonely road in the countryside. But Mo had been old enough to begin to understand about unionism and nationalism, about the resistance in Northern Ireland to English rule, and the way her parents were involved. She knew enough to know that people fought hard and angrily, and that families and friendships broke badly over the fight.

  As she’d grown older in her uncle and aunt’s care, and seen the way they watched her sidelong, or flinched when she made a critical remark about politics or society, Mo had come to believe her parents had been murdered, and to understand Uncle Dave and Aunt Bridies’ fear for her.

  So she said nothing. She didn’t even argue with Uncle Dave anymore while they watched the news after dinner. And she explained her frequent extracurricular visits to campus as study sessions or nights with friends.

  Today, because she was missing Econ, Mo started her day with a trip to the Student Alliance for Peace—it had been too late when the organizers realized they’d be known forever as the SAPs.

  Registered student organizations got an office in the student union. The most esteemed organizations had lovely offices with views of the quad and the grounds. SAP was in the basement, in a tiny, windowless room Mo was fairly certain had once been part of the boiler room, which was next door. It was always at least eighty-eight degrees, even in the late spring, and in the winter, when the boiler was working hard, it topped a hundred.

  The office was too small and hot for more than two or three people to do any work there at the same time, so when Mo opened the door and saw three women already busy, she drew up short.

  “Hi, Mo!” said the girl at the nearest desk. She was typing on an ancient cast-iron typewriter. Her blonde hair was tied up in a scarf like Rosie the Riveter.

  “Hi, Doris,” Mo replied. She waved at the other girls, one filing and another making signs on an old letterpress machine. They waved back.

  “Don’t you have class on Friday mornings?” Doris asked.

  “I do, yeah, but the Fates conspired against me this morning.”

  Doris grinned and set a dreamy chin on her hand. “I love the way you talk. Like the Lucky Charms leprechaun!”

  “Doris, lass,” Mo said, leaning on the rickety desk. “I don’t enjoy being compared to that cartoon fool. I know you meant it as a compliment, but it certainly isn’t one. A lesser woman might give you a punch for it.”

  The daft blonde blinked. “I—I’m—oh.”

  A low chuckle rumbled behind Mo, and she felt a hand on her waist—a bit too low on her waist, frankly. Steve Best, the SAP president, and the fool who’d missed the terrible acronym, came up to Mo’s side. “No need to scare poor, sweet Doris, Mo. And come on, you do sound a wee bit like Lucky, doesn’t she, lasses?” He’d put on a fake Irish accent, and Mo decided if anybody got punched today, it would be Steve.

  She lifted his hand from her, curling her nails in and letting them get a grip. Steve winced, and she dropped his hand away. “I’m here because I have some free time and thought I’d put up some flyers. Barbie, are there any ready?”

  At the letterpress, Barbie nodded to a stack of green paper to her left. “These are dry and ready, I think. They’re for the lecture next week.”

  Giving Steve’s chest a sharp little push to get him out of her way, Mo worked her way through the cramped space and picked up a stack of flyers. “Ta, love.”

  “Hey, Mo,” Barbie said. “Are you free tonight? We’re all meeting at Buster’s. Ladies drink free from six to eight!”

  At the OU Women’s Political and Cultural Collective, they talked about the essential exploitation of ‘ladies’ nights.’ Just like fraternity parties. The whole point of giving women free booze was to lower their inhibitions so men could get their jollies on them.

  Honestly, men were the worst. “I can’t, and you shouldn’t. They don’t give free drinks out of the kindness of their hearts, Barbie.”

  Barbie shrugged vaguely. Mo was fairly certain Barbie was only in SAP because she had a crush on her TA—the very same Steve who was currently rubbing his wrist. Some women thought ‘prey’ was a biological imperative of the female sex.

  She made her way back to the door, fully aware that all eyes were on her, and turned back to face them. Putting on her tongue all the Belfast she still had, she said, “Have a magically delicious weekend, ya buck eejits.”

  ~oOo~

  Mo had two more classes on Friday mornings: Intro to English Literature and Fundamentals of Speech and Debate. Her father would have come to campus and boxed her English professor’s ears for teaching James Joyce as ‘English’ literature, but ‘The Dead’ was on the syllabus nonetheless—in a unit with Robert Burns, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats. Scots and Irishmen in English Literature. Even her American syllabus was unionist.

  As Dr. Dewey intoned about the main theme of the story being the ‘suffocating pressure of the ordinary,’ Mo couldn’t stand it anymore and raised her hand. He ignored her, as usual.

  “Excuse me, Professor,” she finally called, speaking over him as he read from the story.

  He stopped and peered over his tortoiseshell glasses at her. “Miss Quinn. If you need to use the lavatory, you may go. We’re adults here; you needn’t ask permission.”

  Fecking stook. He knew she didn’t need the lav, but he got sick pleasure from taking the piss. He had some kind of shiny ivory-tower degree and thought the Okies here were beneath him and the presence of women in his classroom was an abomination. There were only two other women in this class, and they both shrank into their desks as the men around them all chuckled.

  “I don’t need a piss. I’ve somethin’ to say about Joyce.” The chuckles got louder and more awkward. “I had my hand up, but you were ignorin’ me, and I thought I should call out before I lost all feelin’ in my fingers.”

  He sighed and closed the book, using his fat sausage finger to mark his place. “What is it you have to say, Miss Quinn?”

  “You keep talking about routine and the mundane, saying that’s what the story’s about.”

  “Because that is what the story is about.”

  “Don’t you think it’s interesting, though, how right up early in the story, Miss Ivors calls Gabriel out for writing for the unionist paper?” She found the passage in her copy and read out, “‘I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ she says. She calls him a ‘West Briton,’ a patsy for the English, and he makes a hash of the answer.”

  “I suppose it’s interesting, but it’s not important.”

  “Not important? It pokes at him all through the rest of the party! All this talk of bein’ trapped in routine, bein’ numb, bein’ paralyzed by society—couldn’t that be Joyce talkin’ about the English? Couldn’t they be The Dead?”

  “No. Miss Quinn, that’s enough. You’re trying to turn Joyce’s story into a political treatise, to force it to fit your own agenda, and you’re wasting your classmates’ time to learn.”

  Mo looked around the room and saw every eye on her yet again. She sagged back in her seat and slammed her book closed.

  ~oOo~

  She finished with her classes, had lunch in the student union alone, spent an hour or so in the library doing research for a paper, and got to Quinn Drug & Sundry by three o’clock. By then, she’d stopped fantasizing about ways to murder her English professor.

  Closing the drugstore was not her favorite way to spend a Friday night, but on this particular Friday she’d decided all men could get tied to one of NASA’s rockets and shot into space, so she wouldn’t have had any other plans anyway, except possibly finding a NASA rocket.

  Uncle Dave was behind the pharmacy counter, stuffed into his white smock. Dave was built like her father had been, tall and br
oad as a brick wall, with thick dark hair on his head and body, and eyes dark as coal nuggets. One look at him and you’d expect him to be a circus strongman, or a stevedore, if they’d lived anywhere near a port. But he was the friendly neighborhood pharmacist here in wee Shayton, Oklahoma. The route he and Aunt Bridie had taken from Belfast to Oklahoma was a twisty one, but they’d sunk their roots deep here.

  “Hi, Uncle Dave!” She called while the bell over the door still clattered. “I’m here, I’m here!” They were short-staffed all this week, because the one store employee not named Quinn, Ruby, had gotten married and was in Las Vegas for her honeymoon. Uncle Dave had been alone since noon, when Aunt Bridie left to tend to the traditional business of wife and mother.

  “No rush, love,” he called. “We’ve been quiet as church today. But we did get a ship in, so why don’t you start there. Magazines and comics, and the new display your aunt ordered.

  “The Maybelline?” They’d had a salesman in the week before. Maybelline had a new line of cosmetics, and they came with a fancy display rack, included in the order. All the Quinn women, Mo included, were excited about that.

  “The Maybelline. Mags wanted to set it up, but I hear she owes you one. Did you have trouble from missing school this morning?”

  Mo grinned. “You’re a good egg, Unca. And no, I haven’t missed that class all semester, so missing today won’t hurt me. I’ll ask a mate for the notes. But let’s not let on to Mags. Let her think she’s wounded me a bit longer.”

  Uncle Dave mimed zipping his lip. “I’ll push the boxes up front, then I gotta take a mo for myself, love.”

  He needed to use the bathroom, he meant. Mo had a moment’s flash to her embarrassment in English class, but shook it off. No stupid professor was going to keep her down, not even one who thought to equate her opinions with bodily waste.