The Hunter

Eight

Until Trey shows up at his door on Wednesday afternoon, Cal doesn’t realize how much of him has been fretting that Johnny would keep her away. He feels bad for not having more faith in her, when he has personal experience of how hard it is to keep Trey away from anything she wants; but then again, he would have to be a serious dumbass to assume that he knows what Trey wants right now, when she might not even know that herself. Cal’s own daddy bounced in and out of his life a bunch of times, when he was growing up. He was funnier and a lot less dapper than Johnny Reddy, and he made more of an effort when he was around, but he gave the same impression that his actions had surprised him as much as anyone, and that it would be both uncouth and unfair for anyone to rake them up. By the fifth or sixth go-round, Cal and his mama would have had every right to tell the guy to get fucked, but somehow it was never that simple. He had enough bad habits that Cal presumes he’s dead by now.

They’ve finished cleaning the fixer-upper chair, which under all the layers of dirt and grease turns out to be a muted, autumny golden-brown. They dismantle it carefully, taking photos on Cal’s phone as they go, and measure up the broken pieces for replacements. Cal leaves plenty of silences where Trey could bring up her dad and Rushborough and the gold, but she doesn’t.

Cal tells himself this is normal. She’s fifteen, right around the age when Alyssa stopped telling him stuff. Trey has very little in common with Alyssa, a gold-hearted girl who sees potential good in the most unlikely people and has solid, methodical plans for letting them see it too, but in some ways fifteen is always fifteen. When Alyssa stopped talking to him, Cal reckoned at least she was talking to her mama, and let it be. He’s no longer sure that was the right call, but even if it was, he has no such easy out when it comes to Trey.

Nothing, of course, says he can’t bring up the subject himself and just tell her straight out that he knows the story—which presumably the kid has already guessed, Mart’s mouth being what it is—and that he’s bought in on the gold; but that has the feel of a bad idea. Trey is unlikely to believe that Cal feels any urge to scam money out of some random Brit, and he’s nowhere near convinced that she’ll appreciate the thought of him getting involved in order to look out for her. And if she’s ashamed of the stunt Johnny is pulling, or if she just wants to keep her time with Cal separate from his shenanigans, she won’t welcome Cal prying the topic open. Trey has various levels of silence. The last thing Cal wants to do is nudge her into a deeper one.

“That’ll do for today,” he says, when they’ve cut and planed pieces of the oak sleeper to roughly the right sizes, ready for turning. “Spaghetti Bolognese sound good?”

“Yeah,” Trey says, dusting her hands on her jeans. “Can I borrow your camera?”

Not long after Cal moved to Ireland, he splashed out on a high-end camera, so he could send Alyssa photos and videos. His phone would have done the job just fine, but he wanted better than fine: he wanted to offer her every shade and detail, the full fine range of subtleties that make up the place’s beauty, so he could maybe tempt her to come see it for herself. Trey used the camera for some school project on local wildlife, last year. “Sure,” Cal says. “What for?”

“Just for a coupla days,” Trey says. “I’ll look after it.”

Cal has no desire to push her till she comes up with a lie. He goes into his bedroom and finds the camera, on one of the neat array of shelves they built into the closet.

“Here,” he says, coming back out to the living room. “You remember how to use it?”

“Sorta.”

“OK,” Cal says. “Let’s find you something good to practice on. We’ve got a while, unless you’re about to starve to death.”

Trey turns out to have definite ideas about what she wants to photograph. It needs to be outdoors, and at a distance of about fifty yards, and she needs video, and she needs to know how to adjust the camera for low light. Cal can’t provide the low light—at past five o’clock, the air is still swollen with sun—but they head out to his back field and use the scarecrow for a model. Someone has been bringing out its hidden potential again. It’s been out hunting: it has a water pistol in one hand and a big teddy bear dangling upside down from the other.

“Mart,” Trey says.

“Nah,” Cal says. He starts to count off fifty paces from the scarecrow, which, activated by their approach, is growling at them and brandishing the teddy bear menacingly. “Mart would’ve told me. He likes to take credit.”

“Not P.J.”

“Hell no. Senan, maybe, or his kids.”

“We could get a security camera. The Holohans have one they can watch off their phones. Lena said Noreen said one time Celine Holohan stayed home from mass ’cause she said she felt sick, and halfway through the homily Mrs. Holohan looked at her phone and saw Celine in the garden shifting her fella. Let such a squawk outa her that the priest lost his place.”

Cal laughs. “Nah,” he says. “I don’t wanna scare off whoever it is. I’d rather see what they come up with next. How ’bout here? This far enough?”

The dogs, with a rawhide bone each to keep them from getting restless, gnaw and mumble contentedly in the grass. While he shows Trey how to move her autofocus point and how to switch between stills and video, Cal tries to figure out what Johnny could want her to photograph. The best theory he can come up with is that Johnny wants footage of the guys planting the gold in the river, in case at some point he needs to do a little arm-twisting to keep them on board. Cal doubts he’ll even stir his scrawny ass to take his own footage; it looks like that’s going to be Trey’s responsibility, specially since he doubts her personal moral code would allow for putting his camera in Johnny’s hands. And of course Johnny wouldn’t bother to consider what might happen to her, if she should get caught.

Come dawn, Cal is going to be at that river. If he wants the men to keep him abreast of any developments, he can’t sit back like Johnny and let other people do the dirty work. He has to be right in there beside them, the whole way.

If Trey shows up and sees him standing there, up to his knees in water and gold dust and intrigue, she’ll feel like he’s been lying to her. He revises his ideas. At some point this evening, he needs to bring up the subject.

“Need to zoom closer,” Trey says. “He’s not clear enough.”

“It’s got face detect,” Cal says. “Not sure it works on zombies, but if you’ve got people in the frame, it’ll automatically focus in on their faces.”

Trey doesn’t respond to that. She fiddles with dials, tries another shot, and examines the display critically. The scarecrow gapes out at them, in such precise detail that they can see the drips of fake blood on its teeth. Trey nods, satisfied.

“The buttons can light up,” Cal says, “if it’s dark. So you can see what you’re doing. You gonna want that?”

Trey shrugs. “Dunno yet.”

“It’s this key here,” Cal says. “You oughta try it out in the dark somewhere, before you actually go out shooting. Just in case the buttons light up brighter’n you might want them to be.”

Trey turns to look at him, a sharp questioning look. For a second Cal thinks she’s going to say something, but then she nods and turns back to the camera.

“ ’S heavy,” she says.

“Yeah. You need to make sure you’re settled somewhere you can keep your hand good and steady.”

Trey tests out different ways of bracing her elbow on her knee. “Might need a wall,” she says. “Or a rock or something.”

“Listen,” Cal says. “You remember when we talked about what if someone tries to make you do stuff you don’t want to do?”

“Go for the nads,” Trey says, squinting through the viewfinder. “Or the eyes.”

“No,” Cal says. “I mean, yeah, sure, if you need to. Or the throat. But I mean if people try to get you to do drugs or booze. Or dumb shit like, I dunno, breaking into old buildings.”

“I’m not gonna do drugs,” Trey says flatly. “And I’m not gonna get drunk.”

“I know that,” Cal says. He notices automatically that Trey didn’t say she’s not planning to drink, or for that matter break into abandoned buildings, but those can wait. “But remember we talked about what if people try to pressure you?”

“They don’t,” Trey reassures him. “They don’t give a shite. More for them. And my mates don’t do drugs anyway, only hash sometimes, ’cause they’re not fuckin’ thick.”

“Right,” Cal says. “Good.” Somehow this conversation seemed a lot simpler the last time they had it, a year or so ago, fishing in the river. Now, with Johnny Reddy all over everything, it feels like rocky and complicated territory. “But if anyone ever does. You could handle that, right?”

“I’d tell ’em to fuck off,” Trey says. “Look at this.”

Cal looks at the photo. “Looks good,” he says. “If you want the trees in the background clearer, you can play around with this a little bit. What I’m saying about pressure is, you can do the same thing with adults. If an adult ever tries to rope you into something you don’t like the looks of, you’ve got every right to tell him to fuck off. Or her. Whoever.”

“Thought you wanted me to be mannerly,” Trey says, grinning.

“Right,” Cal says. “You can tell them to kindly fuck off.”

“I never like the looks of my Irish homework,” Trey points out. “Can I tell the teacher—”

“Nice try,” Cal says. “People fought and died so you could learn your own language. I don’t know the ins and outs, but that’s what Francie tells me. So you do your Irish.”

“I’ve loads of Irish,” Trey says. “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas.”

“That better not be Irish for ‘kindly fuck off.’ ”

“Find out. Say it to Francie next time.”

“I bet it doesn’t mean anything,” Cal says. He’s slightly reassured by the fact that Trey is in a good mood, but only slightly. Trey’s sensors for danger are miscalibrated, or not hooked up right, or something: she can identify a dangerous situation without necessarily recognizing any need to back away from it. “You just made it up.”

“Did not. It means ‘can I go to the toilet.’ ”

“Damn,” Cal says. “That sounds fancier’n it has any right to. You could tell someone to kindly fuck off in Irish, and they’d probably take it as a compliment.”

Rip lets out a bark that has a growl mixed in. Cal turns fast. He feels Trey tense beside him.

Johnny Reddy is walking out of the late sun towards them. His long shadow across the stubbled field makes him look like a tall man, moving closer at a slow glide.

Cal and Trey get to their feet. Cal says, before he knows he’s going to, “You don’t have to go with him. You can stay here.”

Rip lets out another bark. Cal puts a hand on his head. “Nah,” Trey says. “Thanks.”

“OK,” Cal says. His throat hurts on the words. “Just so you know.”

“Yeah.”

Johnny lifts his arm in a wave. Neither of them waves back.

“Well, fancy meeting you here,” Johnny says happily, when he gets close enough. “I’m after bringing Mr. Rushborough to see Mossie O’Halloran’s fairy hill. God almighty, the excitement; he was like a child at its first panto, I’m not joking you. He’d a bottle of cream with him, and a wee bowl to put it in, and he was fussing about like an aul’ one with her doilies, trying to pick the perfect spot for it. He wanted to know what side of the hill would be traditional.” Johnny gives an extravagant, humorous shrug and eye-roll. “Sure, I hadn’t a notion. But Mossie said the east side, so the east side it was. Mr. Rushborough was all for staying out there till it was dark and hoping we’d get a sound-and-light show, but I want my dinner. I told him we’d be better off coming back another day, so we can see did the fairies take the cream.”

“Foxes’ll eat it,” Trey says. “Or Mossie’s dog.”

“Shhh,” Johnny says, waving a finger at her reproachfully. “Don’t be saying that around Mr. Rushborough. ’Tis a terrible thing to crush a man’s dreams. And you never know: the fairies might get to it before the foxes do.”

Trey shrugs. “Have you been down there yourself?” Johnny asks Cal.

“Nope,” Cal says.

“Ah, you oughta go. Regardless of what you think about the fairies, ’tis a beautiful spot. Tell Mossie I said you were to get the full tour.” He winks at Cal. Cal suppresses the urge to ask him what the fuck he’s winking about.

“So I’m after dropping Mr. Rushborough home,” Johnny says. “He’s had enough excitement for one day. I saw the two of ye out and about, and I thought, since I’ve the car”—he waves an arm at Sheila’s beat-up Hyundai, whose silver roof shows over the roadside wall—“I’d save my wee girl the walk home. Make sure you’re in time for whatever feast your mammy’s cooked up tonight.”

Trey says nothing. She switches the camera off.

“Here,” Cal says, handing Trey the camera case. “Remember to charge it.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “Thanks.”

“What’s this, now?” Johnny inquires, cocking his head at the camera.

“Taking a lend of it,” Trey says, fitting the camera carefully into the case. “Summer homework. We’ve to photograph five kindsa wildlife and write about their habitat.”

“Sure, you can use my phone for that. No need to be risking Mr. Hooper’s lovely camera.”

“I’m gonna do birds,” Trey says. “The focus isn’t good enough on a phone.”

“Holy God, you don’t make life easy for yourself, do you?” Johnny says, smiling down at her. “Would you not do bugs? You could find yourself five different bugs in ten minutes, just out the back of the house. Job done.”

“Nah,” Trey says. She loops the camera strap across her body. “Everyone’s gonna do bugs.”

“That’s my girl,” Johnny says affectionately, ruffling her hair. “Don’t follow the herd; do things your own way. Say thank you to Mr. Hooper for the lend.”

“Just did.”

Cal discards his earlier ideas. Whatever Trey is planning to do with that camera, she doesn’t want her father knowing about it. He has no idea what the kid is up to, and he doesn’t like that one bit.

At least there’s no longer any urgency about explaining to Trey how he’s mixed up in all this, if she’s not going to be at the river to see him. Cal’s instinct, in terrain as misty and boggy as this, is to take as few steps as possible. He might still need to have that conversation at some point, but he’s considerably happier leaving it till he can pick up some sense of where Trey stands.

“It might be a while before you get that back, now,” Johnny warns Cal. “Theresa won’t have as much time for the aul’ carpentry, the next while. She’s going to be giving me a hand with a few bits and bobs. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

“Yeah,” Trey says.

“I’m in no hurry,” Cal says. “I can wait as long as it takes.”

Trey whistles for Banjo, who comes lolloping over with his head cocked at a goofy angle to manage his bone. “Seeya,” she says to Cal.

“Yup,” Cal says. To Johnny he says, “See you round.”

“Ah, you will,” Johnny assures him. “Sure, in a place this size, you can’t escape anyone. Are you ready, missus?”

Cal watches them head across the field towards the car. Johnny is yakking away, tilting his face to Trey, gesturing at things. Trey is watching her sneakers kick through the grass. Cal can’t tell whether she’s answering.

In the dark before dawn, the men don’t look like men. They’re only snatches of disturbance at the edges of Trey’s senses: smudges of thicker shadow shifting on the riverbank, flickers of muttering through the rush and gabble of the water, which is raucous in the silence. The stars are faint enough that the surface of the river barely shimmers; the moon is a bare cold spot, low on the horizon, giving no light. The tiny orange glow of a cigarette butt arcs out over the water and vanishes. One man laughs.

Dawn comes early in July. Trey, who has the knack of waking when she wants, was dressed and out her window before four, waiting in the trees beside the road for her father to pass her by. He was harder to follow than she expected. She was thinking of him as a city blow-in who would crash through undergrowth, trip over rocks, and take half an hour to pick his way half a mile. It had slipped her mind that he has more years on this mountain than she does. He went down it like a fox, nimble and silent, shortcutting over walls and through groves. A few times Trey, hanging back for safety, lost him; but he has a small torch that he switched on for a second whenever he needed to get his bearings, and she watched for that.

He brought her to a bend in the river, not far from where she and Cal sometimes fish. Trey is in among the beech trees on the bank’s elbow, crouched low behind a fallen trunk that will both mask her and steady the camera. The ground beneath her has a warm, living smell. Below the bend, where the river widens and shallows, the men have gathered.

Slowly the darkness thins. The men take shape, at first not human, just tall standing stones spaced irregularly at the water’s edge. As the sky blooms deep blue they come alive. Trey recognizes Mart Lavin first, the hunch of his back over his crook. She spots her dad by his quick restlessness, shifting and turning, and P.J. by his walk when he takes a few paces forward to peer into the river—P.J. gives the impression of having a limp, till you realize that he drags both feet, not just one; his legs are too gangly for him to keep them supervised all the way to the ends. She thinks the biggest man there, a little apart from the rest, must be Senan Maguire, until he turns to glance up at the coming dawn, and by the movement of his shoulders she knows him for Cal.

Trey goes stiller among the underbrush. It doesn’t enter her mind for a moment that Cal might be there to con Rushborough. She takes for granted that he, like her, has reasons for what he’s doing, and that they’re likely to be solid ones.

She’s angered, and stung hard, regardless. Cal knows she can keep her mouth shut. He knows, or ought to know, that she’s not a child to be shielded from the big people’s doings. Whatever he’s at, he should have told her.

She slides the camera up her hoodie to muffle the chirp when she turns it on. Then she finds it a stable spot on the fallen trunk and starts adjusting her settings, the way Cal taught her. The sky is lightening. Sonny McHugh and Francie Gannon, the two most dedicated fishermen, are pulling on thigh-high waders and rolling up their shirtsleeves.

Trey, down on one knee squinting over the tree trunk, imagines that the viewfinder of the camera is the sight on Cal’s big Henry rifle. She imagines picking off the men one by one, Mart crumpling forward over his crook, Dessie Duggan bouncing on his fat belly like a kid’s ball, until the only two left are Cal, standing motionless amid it all, and her dad, running like a rabbit while she lines up the sights on his back.

The morning is coming to life. On the opposite bank, a colony of small birds in a massive oak tree are waking up and yammering all at once, and the rush of the river has settled in among the rising morning sounds. The light has brightened enough for filming. Trey presses Record.

Mart takes something from inside his jacket, a big Ziploc bag. The men close in around him, swiftly, to peer at it. Trey hears Con McHugh laugh, a quick crow of incredulous delight like a boy’s. Bobby Feeney reaches to touch the bag, but Mart slaps his hand away. Mart is talking, jabbing a finger at the bag and explaining something. Trey tries to keep Cal out of her picture, but he’s mixed in among the rest and she can’t avoid him.

Mart gives the Ziploc to Francie, and he and Sonny wade into the river. It’s low; they have to stretch to step down from the bank, and the water swirls and eddies around them only knee-deep. Sonny has a long stick that he uses to prod all around him, testing depths. They bend and feel under the water. Then they take handfuls from the bag. Their closed fists go deep into the water, and come up empty.

Mart gestures to them with his crook, giving instructions. Johnny talks, swiveling his head among the other men; sometimes they laugh, the sound coming up to Trey as a rough murmur rising above the noise of the river. Trey keeps the camera steady. Once she sees Cal’s head lift and turn, scanning. She freezes. For half a second she thinks his eyes catch hers, but then they slide on.

When Francie and Sonny straighten up and turn to wade out of the river, Trey fits the camera into its case and starts inching carefully backwards through the undergrowth. As soon as she’s out of view, she runs, holding the camera against her body with one hand to stop it jolting. On her way back up the mountain she takes a load of photos of every bird she can spot, just in case.

By the time she gets home, Alanna and Liam are out in the yard, trying to teach Banjo to walk on his hind legs, which Banjo has no intention of doing. Trey goes in through the front door, so she can hide the camera before anyone sees it. Then she goes looking for breakfast.

Sheila is in the kitchen, ironing Johnny’s shirts. “There’s no bread left,” she says, without looking up, when Trey comes in.

The room is already hot; the sun comes full through the window, singling out Sheila’s rough hands moving across the blue of the shirt. Steam from the iron rises up through its beam.

Trey finds cornflakes and a bowl. “Where’s my dad?” she asks.

“Out. I thought you were with him.”

“Nah. Just out.”

“Emer rang,” Sheila says. “I told her.”

Emer is the oldest. She went off to Dublin a few years ago, to work in a shop. She comes home for Christmas. Trey doesn’t think about her much in between. “Told her what?” she asks.

“That your daddy came back. And about the English fella.”

“Is she gonna come home?”

“Why would she?”

Trey shrugs one shoulder, acknowledging the justice of this.

“I thought you were going to stay awhile at Lena Dunne’s,” Sheila says.

“Changed my mind,” Trey says. She leans against the counter to eat her cornflakes.

“Go to Lena’s,” Sheila says. “I’ll give you a lift down in the car, the way you won’t have to carry your clothes.”

Trey says, “Why?”

Sheila says, “I don’t like this English fella.”

“He’s not staying here.”

“I know that.”

Trey says, “I’m not scared of him.”

“Then you oughta be.”

“If he tried to do anything to me,” Trey says, “I’d kill him.”

Sheila shakes her head, one brief twitch. Trey stays silent. What she said sounds stupid, now it’s out of her mouth. The iron hisses.

Trey says, “What’s my dad doing today?”

“Something with the English fella. Seeing the sights.”

“How about tonight?”

“Francie Gannon has a card game.”

Trey refills her bowl and thinks about this. She considers it unlikely that Rushborough will be invited to Francie’s game. Unless he goes down to Seán Óg’s for a pint, he’ll be home, on his own.

Sheila arranges the shirt on a hanger and hooks it onto the back of a chair. She says, “I shoulda picked ye a better father.”

“Then we wouldn’t exist,” Trey points out.

Sheila’s mouth twists in amusement. “No woman believes that,” she says. “No mother, anyhow. We don’t say it to the men, so as not to hurt their feelings—they’re awful sensitive. But you’d be the same no matter who I got to sire you. Different hair, maybe, or different eyes, if I’da went with a dark fella. Wee little things like that. But you’d be the same.”

She shakes out another shirt and examines it, tugging creases straight. “There was other lads that wanted me,” she says. “I shoulda got ye any one of them.”

Trey thinks this over and rejects it. Most of the men in the townland appear to an outside eye to be better bargains than her father, but she wants nothing to do with any of them. “Why’d you pick him, so?” she asks.

“I can’t remember that far back. I thought I’d reasons. Maybe I just wanted him.”

Trey says, “You coulda told him to fuck off. When he came home.”

Sheila presses the tip of the iron along the shirt collar. She says, “He said you’re giving him a hand.”

“Yeah.”

“What way?”

Trey shrugs.

“Whatever he’s promised you, you won’t get it.”

“I know. I don’t want anything offa him.”

“You know nothing. D’you know where he is? He’s out hiding gold in the river for that English fella to find. Did you know that?”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “I was there when he said it to the others.”

For the first time since Trey came in, Sheila lifts her head to look full at her. The sunbeam shrinks her pupils so that her eyes look one hot, clean blue.

“Go to Lena’s,” she says. “Pretend Cal Hooper’s your daddy. Forget this fella was ever here. I’ll come down and get you when you can come back.”

Trey says, “I wanta stay here.”

“Pack your things. I’ll bring you now.”

“I’ve to go,” Trey says. “Me and Cal have that chair to do.” She goes to the sink and rinses her bowl under the tap.

Sheila watches her. “Go on, so,” she says. She bends over the iron again. “Learn your carpentering. And remember, your daddy has nothing to give you that’s worth half as much. Nothing.”