The MWL and Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones had known one another since they were children. They had grown up together, gone to school together and stayed in the old neighborhood when almost everyone else they knew moved away. They thought of themselves as more than the closest of friends, not because their feeling for one another was stronger than that of best friends but because they saw one another as central pieces of the reality that made up each other's everyday, natural world.
Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones had been born in Ireland and came here with his father and mother and sisters and brothers when his father got a job driving a Orange bus in Queens. One of the things that had attracted the MWL to Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones was his rich brogue. In the 30 or so years that the MWL had known him, the brogue had deepened and grown thicker and richer like the coat of a forest smart bear.
They had moved in separate directions out of the old neighborhood and they did not see one another frequently, so it was with considerable joy that the MWL looked down one spring day to find Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones standing by the side of his ladder looking a little ragged and a smidgin depressed. When Patrick Timothy opened his mouth his voice came out naked and shorn like a spring sheep, and the MWL had to look again to assure himself it was his friend.
"What happened to you," asked the MWL, "were you beaten up?" It was clear to him that Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones showed no signs of an assault, so that even as it came out of his mouth the MWL knew that it was the wrong question, but he could not think of anything else to describe the damage that appeared to have been inflicted on his friend.
"It's a long story," Patrick Timothy replied.
"You came to tell it," replied the MWL with certainty.
"That I did," came the response and he began.
"I am doing nothing in particular recently, so I have plenty of time to do it in. And yesterday I am wandering my afternoon wander, treating myself to the streets, when on the sidewalk I see this oriental gentleman selling watches. He has this makeshift table spread with a feast of timepieces. Now I have no particular need to be apprised of the time. My stomach strikes the even hours well enough and my throat the odd. But it was a feast for the eyes, all glittering and glowing, and safe enough I think, because I have no money to speak of, unless 47 cents is money to speak of. I was wrong."
The MWL hesitated to interrupt unless he was somehow instructed to do so which he was not.
"Now most of the watches were of your jewelry store variety. They told the time and the date. No bait for the fancy at all and I was ready to move on when I spied this special sort of watch in a box in the back a wonderful, miraculous instrument. It told four sorts of time and chimed odd quarter hours. It told the day, and the date, and the phases of the moon. It had a little window in which pictures conveyed the weather at two places in the world. It could calculate Pi to the 123rd digit and it gave the price of pork bellies in the morning and grits in the afternoon. Desire rose in me like I haven't felt since the lust for Phoebe came over me twenty years ago. It was a sister to that lust that seized me for this watch. It was a wonderful, wondrous watch but wondrous expensive also," he said sadly.
"Now I had no money except the 47 cents. I am despairing at how I can connive this watch and I remember I have my fathers pocket watch with me, the gold one he left me when he went off."
"'How about this gold watch?' I offered. I felt silly offering to trade this 'this' for that 'this' with a stable of 'thises' before me."
"'Have enough watches,'" the oriental gentleman replied, accurately enough.
"'It's genuine gold, not that plated stuff.'" I handed it to him. He opened it and shook it. He was no fool this oriental gentlemen. "'No need more watch, even of gold, especially if broken,'" he said, handing it back. I was fully despaired at that point and not thinking swiftly only the lust was nearly bursting inside of me. It was the lust put the idea in my head. This oriental gentleman in front of me speaks a horrible English. Marks him it does, I thought to myself. So I say, "'for that watch I will swap my brogue.'" It was out of my mouth before I knew what I had said.
"'What's a brogue?'" he asks. It's a hell of a job I have trying to identify which part of me is the way I talk, and I start talking to him with a mind to fixing the idea in his head that my way of sounding when I talk will give him a business advantage on the street."
Now the MWL could contain himself no longer."How could you give it away?"
"I didn't give it away," Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones insisted. "I traded it. I got a watch for it and a wonderful watch to boot. It cost my mother and father plenty, that brogue. The old country was hell sometimes."
"That's hard to believe," said the MWL. "You were always trying to lose he hesitated before the word accent that way of talking."
"You're right," Patrick Timothy replied. "I couldn't shake loose from it and I tried a lot of ways. But in all that time trying to talk American, I never tried to trade it away, and it traded away without a trace, like it had never been."
"Well, what happened?" the MWL asked.
Patrick Timothy continued his tale of woe."I go home with the watch and Phoebe nearly throws me out claiming I'm an imposter. My children treat me like I had a disease, and the neighbors think I'm putting on airs. And what's worse I look in the mirror and everything's O.K. until I open my mouth and then I even look different to myself."
The MWL found it a difficult story to believe. On the other hand here was Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones with no accent to speak of or none more that the MWL had, and he always thought of his own speech as free of encumbrance or enhancement.
"What should I do?" Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones asked.
"Try to get it back," the MWL said definitely. "Try hard to get it back. Do anything to get it back. Winter is coming and you won't last anytime at all without it."
"I just wanted to hear you say it," Patrick Timothy answered. "Just to make sure."
It was a week before the MWL saw Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones again. He showed up waiting on the grass in the shade near the depression that marked the ladder's home in the park. He sat there a long time not saying a word leaving the MWL in doubt as to what his insides sounded like. But when he spoke it was the old Patrick Timothy that was recognizable in the brogue.
"You got it back," gurgled the MWL.
"I got it back," his friend said, blanketed under the fuzzy brogue. "And it cost me. It was a devil of a time finding the oriental gentleman. Straight out he says to me, 'with your brogue business has improved greatly, me boy,' without me askin anything such as would provoke such a response. 'People recognize it as the genuine article,' he adds."
"When I hear him talk it is like hearing an echo and it wrings my heart. And I noticed he was killing the brogue. He can't handle it, I thought to myself. It slips out from under him and turns and twists his wanting to say things. And I look at him and he smiles. 'You like the watch?' he asks. 'Oh, a wondrous watch.' But I couldn't hold myself in and play the wily trader. 'How about taking the watch back in exchange for, lets say, my brogue, I say to him?'"
"'Couldn't do it,' says he. 'Watch is used now. It has lost value.'"
"'So's the brogue,'I say."
"'I've got used to it,'he says."
"I realize the game. 'So I'll make up the difference,' I say. We dicker for a while. 'Only I get the brogue back now and I'll make the difference up slightly at a time,' says I."
"'O.K.,' he says looking in my eyes. 'Why don't you work part of it off,' he suggests. 'It will collapse the debt and give you something to do,' he adds. We make the trade and the brogue leaps back to me smooth and natural and only a little worse for wear in the East."
"So you're selling watches now."
"Sort of," Patrick Timothy Ohara Gerber-Jones says. "It turns out we really only sell one watch."
"The one you bought."
"Yeah," he said slowly. "Occasionally we sell one of the others. But our business is that one watch. It's funny what people will trade for a object of desire," he added. "They always want it back after a while though," but he refused to speak of selling watches any more after that and the rest of the afternoon was spent reminiscing about other things.