STAY FLUSH Brian Doyle In December of 1961 I was a bartender at a golf club in Palm Beach. One day a guy comes in and orders a whiskey. This was at noon. He was an older guy, maybe seventy. His tee time was at four but he said he was having a bad day and wanted to settle his nerves before he went out on the course.     Don't feel well, sir? I ask.     Afflicted by memory, he says, sipping.     Yes, sir.     Burdened is perhaps the better word, he says.     Can I be of assistance, sir?     No, thank you, he says. Another whiskey, please.     I get another whiskey for him and he stares out at the course for a while and then says, You know what, son, maybe you can help me. This will sound odd, but it would help me a great deal if you would accompany me outside and just sit on the veranda and listen to me for a while. I have something to say. A cathartic impulse, as it were. A peculiar urge of the aged. A shriving, one might say. Do I need to talk to your manager or something? I am the guest of a member here and I might characterize this as an unusual guest service. I would be happy to make it worth your while and recompense the club suitably also. I am a man of some means. I know this sounds odd, but I would be very grateful for a willing ear. What's your name?     Jack, sir.     Jack, he says, blinking. Jack. Well, Jack, to whom do I speak in order to request the pleasure of your company on the veranda?     My manager is Mr. Dineen, sir. In the restaurant.     The guy goes to the restaurant and I top off the rest of the drinkers at the bar. He and Mr. Dineen come back in a minute and Mr. Dineen says it's okay with him if I accompany our guest to the veranda for a conversation on cabbages and kings, whereas our policy here at the club is that the guest of a member is essentially himself a member in good standing for the duration of his visit, and he, Mr. Dineen, cannot imagine that I will not welcome a brief respite from my labors as a purveyor of spirits, and he, Mr. Dineen, sees no clear reason why I cannot spend time in our guest's company up to and until such time as our guest's foursome is ready to commence defeating the course, which is playing beautifully today, sir, very little wind, the greens a touch fast, and I remind you that the tees on eleven have been moved back a tad as a sign of respect for the increasing musculature of American manhood, long may we wave.	"The facts are only bones."
	The guy thanks Mr. Dineen and they have a cash handshake and he and I step out on the veranda.     Let us savor the brilliant and miraculous light, such a gift in winter, he says, and we take a table in the sun and he stretches out his legs and starts talking.     I am seventy-three years old, Jack, he says. I am a man of some means. I have been blessed by nine children and have suffered the loss of three, leaving me six, many of whom have risen to prominence in the affairs of state and nation. I have committed sins, several of which I regret. I have served my nation and my family with all the energy and diligence I could muster. I feel that my time is coming to a close and I wish to be clear about some things before I go. I am choosing you as witness, Jack. Finné, in the Irish, he who hears what is spoken from the heart. An old Irish custom, to choose a stranger and to him issue a final testament. Honesty being easier to inflict on a stranger. With those we love we must be more circumspect, eh? In the old days this would be done on a holy mountain. But here we are on the veranda of a golf course. How very American. Are you Irish?     My grandparents were from Mayo, sir.     Mayo, God help us, he says. My people were from Wexford. They fled the famine. As did my wife's people. They were from Limerick. Very poor people they were, too, God rest them.     Yes, sir.     So we are observing the tradition of millennia here, Jack. I am the teller of tales and you are witness to their telling. I hand over my stories and you receive them. There is a grave moral responsibility here, Jack.     Yes, sir.     For which I will recompense you handsomely, this being America.     Yes, sir.     So then. The facts are only bones. I was born in 1888. I was born in Boston. I was nominally educated at Harvard. I wanted to make money so badly I can still taste the tang of ambition in my mouth. I did whatever I could. I regret nothing in that arena. We lie and cheat and call it commerce. I ran banks, theaters, films, liquor, the buying and selling of influence. I was induced to enter the government, having become wealthy enough to attract the attention of the master thieves who have long manipulated the civic apparatus. I served as this and that. I was for a time the national agent of American interests in the heart of the very empire that had enslaved and starved our ancestors for centuries on end. The irony remains delicious. Yet my dream even when young was for my sons to surpass me. Also very Irish, no? You want to create a world in which your sons flourish. The final duty of the taoiseach, the chieftain. Daughters married, sons admired. And this has come to pass. One son on the very top rung, the other two much respected, my beautiful and vibrant daughters married.     Nine children, you say, sir?     Originally, he says, sipping.     I'm sorry, sir. How many are alive?     Six, he says. One son dead in a plane. One daughter dead in a plane. Another daughter dead to the world.     Sir?     She vanished. Her mind went. Her mind was taken. I allowed it to be taken. I did not tell my wife. I spoke of it to no one. She was flawed. She was not herself. I said yes to the operation. I gave my blessing. They said it would work. It didn't work. Not at all. Ruination. Despair. But she is safe now. A hospital, a nunnery, people wear white. I went there once. It's very quiet. Restful. A kind of limbo. She didn't know me. We do not speak of her. We do not use her name. I allowed her to be taken. We do not speak of her. Another whiskey, please.     I got him another whiskey.     Also I have not been a good husband, he says when I return to the table. It is what it is. I admire and respect my wife. She is a remarkable woman. I love her very much. Yet I have not been a good husband. It is what it is. I regret having caused her pain. I regret that very much. We do not speak of it.     Yes, sir.     So many other stories I could tell, Jack, he says, sipping. So very many. Shadows and illusions, gambles and adventures, drama and melodrama. I have sailed long in the world and studied people closely. Yet a man is measured really by his children, don't you think? Maybe that too is an Irish belief. But I don't think so. At the last, the end of the suffering road, in every culture, you are your children. They carry you inside them into the future. It is the nature of things. Your energy goes into theirs. It is how it is. The cycle of life. In a sense the child consumes the parent. You die so that they might live. The very essence of the Catholic idea, of course. The Eucharist, the miraculous food. So the death of a child before a father or mother is unnatural, a hole in the fabric, a savage wound. You never recover from the death of your child. You readjust your mask, you proceed onward, but your wound cannot heal. Your heart is pierced. The stigmata.     Yes, sir.     I will speak then of three wounds, Jack. I say them aloud as penance. My daughter who is dead to the world, my daughter who fell from the sky, my son who vanished over the ocean.     Yes, sir.     Of my daughters I can hardly speak. We do not speak of them. The one in white now, lost. The other falling from the sky over England when her plane hit a mountain. I had to identify her body. She was so peaceful. I wept for weeks. We did not speak of it.     And your son, sir?     Well, Jack, there's the story. He was the child of my heart, firstborn, riveting, marked for greatness. He was the chosen one. Not only by me. Also by God. I know this to be true. God chose that boy to be among the elect, to be a king. But there was a war. In the conduct of the war he died. Without the war he would be alive. Wars are human constructs, Jack. I worked against the war. I saw it for what it was, thievery on the grandest scale. There are always ways around wars. Outwit the thieves. But it burst out like a disease and took my son. He was the one, Jack. I know this to be true.     Yes, sir.     He was a Navy pilot, Jack. His plane exploded. The plane was crammed with explosives. He was to aim the plane at a Nazi rocket base in France and then bail out. The target village was Mimoyecques. I cannot forget the name. He was twenty-nine years old. He and his friend Bud took off at 5.55 in the afternoon and vanished at 6.20. His last words were Navy code: stay flush, he said into his radio set, and pulled the safety pin on the bomb load, and prepared to eject, and then the plane exploded with such force that only shards and splinters of it were ever found. The pilot in a companion plane nearby said he never saw such an explosion before or since. No bodies were ever found. Not a tooth, not a button. I had people comb the area for months for pieces of my son. Professional searchers. I am a man of means. They searched the village, hills, woods, beach. Divers searched the ocean. They found nothing. Not a hair, not a shred.     I'm very sorry, sir.     Thank you, Jack.     God rest him, sir.     Yes.     Another whiskey, sir?     No, thank you, Jack.     A terrible blow, sir.     We received a telegram from the Navy the next morning. Regret to inform you. My poor wife sobbing. It is what it is. The children sobbing. I went to my study. A brilliant morning like this one. I locked the door. I was in there for several days. I did not eat. They knocked, they wept in the hallway, they remonstrated with me, begged, slid notes under the door. Their notes curled and yellowed in the August heat. I still hear them sobbing in the hall sometimes. I played music to drown their cries. Stay flush, he said into his radio set. I have pored over those words, Jack. Stay flush. A koan, as the pagans say. Lost. He was the first. Then my two daughters lost. Each one torn from me as you would tear off a limb. So I am no longer a man. I am reduced and shriveled, legless, one arm left to shake my fist at the Lord. My time is ending. It is what it is. I know this to be true. I have called you to witness, Jack, and I have said the final words. Finis, finné. Three wounds were inflicted upon me and they will not heal. I accept them. I pay for my sins with the lives of my children. I cannot bear that burden any longer. I still hear them talking sometimes. I drown their cries with music. My first son, my first daughter, my second daughter. I killed them. I did not protect them and so I must die. It is what it is.     He sat silently for a few more minutes, looking out at the course, and I couldn't think of anything sensible or courteous to say.     After a while he stood up and smiled and shook my hand and said he was very grateful indeed for my courtesy to him and he would leave a little something for me with Mr. Dineen for my troubles. I said thank you and he said he really had better be getting to the locker room to meet his friends because when you were older it took longer to gird for battle, so to speak, and I said yes sir and we shook hands again and that was the last I saw of him.     Probably you know the rest of the story, that he was on the eleventh fairway after a good drive from the new tee placement when he had a huge stroke and had to be carried off the course, paralyzed. He spent the next eight years in his study in a wheelchair, unable to move or speak except for two words, no and shit. During those years two more of his sons were shot to death so he ended up with one son and four daughters alive from the original nine children.     The daughter in the nunnery died a year ago at age eighty-six, I saw in the paper. She liked to sing and write letters to her family. Sometimes she would write letters all day and night in a kind of frenzy. She sent letters to all her sisters and brothers whether they were alive or not. The family kept telling her that the one sister and eventually three of the brothers were dead so she shouldn't write letters to them anymore, but she kept right on writing her letters to her family whether they were alive or not. The one person that she stopped writing to when he died was her dad. No one knows how many letters she wrote him over the years, or if he ever wrote her back, because he had all his correspondence destroyed after his stroke, and the nunnery burns letters to deceased patients as a matter of policy, but I like to think that maybe he did write her back, you know? If only for the two of them to try to figure out what her brother meant when he said stay flush into his radio set in the last seconds before he vanished into the air over the endless hungry sea.