The Bus to Galway

The bus bounced up and down on the country road, each bump causing my stomach to retch. I took a deep breath to calm it down. It drew the attention of the other four people on the bus and the old man, possibly in his late 70s/early 80s  in the seat across from me, offered an antacid. 

“No, thank you,” I said, staring past him out the window at the beautiful green outside. 

The tour guide was talking about donkeys or something when the bus started to slow down. Confused murmurs filled the small space and I turned my attention to the tour guide. 

“All ok?” I asked.

“Grand,” he said in a deadpanned voice, stopping the bus completely in the middle of a deserted road. 

“Why are we stopping?” the redheaded couple with the toddler asked in unison. 

“You’ll see,” the tour guide responded. 

My heart leapt up in my throat as he pulled his large frame out of his seat. He was a short, stout man with brown hair and a shaggy beard, peppered with white and gray and gray eyes. His lilt had been a bit hypnotizing when I had originally boarded the bus, but after the first hour, I was able to tune out everything. I just wanted to go to Galway and see where my father was born. He was a good man who had fallen in love with my mother and moved to America to be with her. It was the perfect love story until it wasn’t… until she found her “true love”, a younger man named Joey. Dad never dealt with it and slowly drank himself to death. I wanted to see where my dad last had hope to get some of my own. Things had been hard, I realized as I twisted my engagement ring several times when booking this trip. Telling my fiance I was going to Ireland just a month before would’ve driven most men away, but he encouraged it. He wanted me to feel better because he loved me. Looking at the tour guide, I had to wonder if I’d see Erik again. The man stared at all of us. 

“What’s your biggest sin?” His Irish accent had gone, replaced by a familiar Midwest accent. I couldn’t stop myself from getting sick as I took the plastic bag out of my travel bag and barely opened it before everything came out. 

“Is yours bad enough to make you sick, Jessie Boo?” 

He knew my family nickname, the one they’d teased me with since I was a kid and would go around trying to scare people. 

“What do you want?!” the old man demanded as he started to use his cane to stand. 

“The truth,” he gritted the answer through his teeth. 

Everyone stared at him, the woman in the couple was now sobbing. Her cries filled the air and her son followed suit while her husband comforted both of them.

“The truth about what?” I asked, afraid to know the answer. But we had to.

What could we have done to this man? Was this why it was so cheap? I looked around at the circle of seemingly random people, noticing for the first time that we were all American. My stomach and nerves had been so bad since pickup that I never noticed that no one was local or from another country. In fact, the old man definitely looked familiar and the man in the family looked like Trent Kind, a man who had been in the news for the accusations of sexual harassment being levied against him by a few female employees of his. He was an upper management type who had apparently told women that sleeping with him would earn them a raise. If they said anything, he would blackball or demote them, but never fire them. Other upper management apparently backed them, saying the females just misunderstood his “jokes”.

“Are you Trent Kind?” I asked him. He nodded, resolute. 

“So your sins are clear,” the old man said, coughing into his hand. 

“They’re accusations,” his wife’s voice was now clear as she defended Trent, her son was still screaming but she was now shushing him with a stern voice. 

“Accusations?!” the tour guide screamed.

“False accusations,” Trent now spoke up, glaring at the tour guide.

“Fine, we know his and hers. What’s mine? What has an old man done to you?”

“Does the name Mickey O’Connor mean anything to you, old man? Or should I address you as your true title? Peter Flannigan,head of the Flannigan family?” 

I looked at the old man, barely able to walk with a cane and tried to reconcile him as head of the most notorious mob in the Midwest. He stared back at me, not saying anything. 

“What’s her sin?” the old man asked, pointing the end of his cane at me. 

“My father was Mickey O’Connor and my sister was Jenna O’Connor,” I looked pointedly at both Peter and Trent. “But Peter didn’t do anything to my father, he drank himself to death.”

“Did he now?” Peter laughed, “See, I did nothing to Mickey.” 

“You and I both know that’s not true, the man was a notorious drunk, but he wasn’t the one who poured so much alcohol down his throat that he aspirated on his back” 

“What?” I managed to choke out, now sobbing. My father hadn’t killed himself with his drinking. His death was a mob hit? I just wanted to curl up and keep crying. “Why am I here? What does my family being victimized by these people have anything to do with me? Oh, god, do you want me to hurt them?”

He smiled, “You have it right.”

“I can’t do that, that’s messed up. Especially with their kid watching. I’m not a monster.”

“Oh, but you have your own sin, don’t you? Your fiance thinks you’re coming home to find Daddy’s hometown, but you’re on vacation with your lover.” 

I blushed, Jimmy was in the hotel bed waiting on me to come back. I left him nude, satisfied, and looking at me with absolute lust to get on the tour bus for a day in Galway. He was the reason I came to Dublin, having met him one summer and been infatuated since then. It wasn’t easy to betray the man who loves me for an obvious womanizer, but I kept it to myself or so I thought. 

“How do you know all this?” Trent inquired, “you know about Jenna. She quit ages ago and as far as I know, she’s still in prison for drug dealing.” 

He looked to me for confirmation and I nodded,  glaring at him. 

“I’m a keen observer who feels justice needs to be done. I was obsessed with the connection as soon as I put together the news stories.”

“What’s your name? It’s Tom, right?” Trent’s wife inquired. 

The tour guide laughed and merely shook his head. I was handed a gun suddenly by the tour guide and my hand started to shake. I put the other one over it to stop it. 

“I won’t kill anyone or myself,” I told the tour guide. 

He laughed again, a big bellow deep from his belly. 

I pointed the gun at him and shot, the gun merely clicked so I sprung up and attacked him with it, hitting his skull over and over again. 

No one stopped me even after the man’s spasms stopped and it was clear he was dead. 

We buried the man who called himself Tom in a field. It was too easy in my opinion, but I was grateful that by burying the man, we buried our secrets. At least as much as we could with Peter and Trent being in the news. 

Trent told me that Jenna was just a one night stand, she meant nothing and he had been faithful to his wife since then. I chuckled and told him no judgment, but in reality, I would have buried him and Peter too if I thought his wife wouldn’t snitch.

Then again, she’d be easy to dispose of too.

The boy would be the only issue, but he was young enough to forget. 

I grabbed the keys and had everyone sit down, told them we had another stop to make on the way to Galway.