The Hunter

Thirteen

That night the house is still: everyone is hard asleep, after last night’s disturbances. Trey doesn’t want to be in bed. Her life has stopped feeling normal; it’s crowded with too many people and too many wants, till she doesn’t feel safe taking her eye off it, even to sleep. Instead she stays on the sofa, being hot and watching worn-out late-night telly by the dirty yellow light of the standing lamp. Some smarmy tosser is trying to make an unhappy-looking couple build an extension shaped like a box even though they hate it. Trey is in no humor for the likes of him. She hopes the couple give him a kick up the hole and build whatever they want.

When light powerful as day ignites outside and floods in around the curtains, she doesn’t move. Her mind is a blank; there’s nothing in it to answer this. For a wild lurch of a second she thinks Bobby Feeney’s UFOs are real and have landed, even though she doesn’t believe in that shite. For another lurch she thinks she must have fallen asleep and it’s morning, but on the telly the same tosser is still quacking away. Trey switches him off. In the sudden silence she hears engines revving, loud and deep.

She stands in the middle of the sitting room, listening. There’s no movement from the rest of the house. Banjo, tucked away in his corner by the sofa, is snoring peacefully. In the blue-white glare the room looks like something in a nightmare, familiar objects suddenly incandescent and humming with menace. Outside, the engines pulse on.

Trey moves, very quietly, down the corridor towards her bedroom. She’s thinking of the window, but before she even reaches the door she can see the same blue-white light spilling out through the opening. In the glow from the window Maeve’s sleeping face is luminous and unnatural, like she’s deep underwater, unreachable.

“Mam,” Trey says, not loud enough to be heard. She has no idea whether she wants her mam to wake up. She has no idea what she expects her mam to do.

Maeve turns sharply on the bed and makes a protesting sound. Trey doesn’t want to deal with Maeve awake and demanding explanations. “Mam,” she says, louder.

In her parents’ room there’s a stir and a murmur, and then quick footsteps. Sheila opens the door in a flowered nightie, hair messy on her shoulders. Behind her, Johnny, in boxers and a T-shirt, is pulling on trousers.

“There’s something outside,” Trey says.

“Shhh,” Sheila says. Her eyes flick around the corridor. Maeve is sitting up, open-mouthed; Liam is calling.

Johnny pushes past Sheila and Trey and heads down the corridor, towards the front door. He stands still, his ear cocked to the door, listening. The rest of them gather behind him.

“Daddy,” Maeve says. “What is it?”

Johnny ignores her. “Come here,” he says to Alanna, straightening up, but she backs away with a high muffled whimper. “You, then,” he says, catching Liam’s arm. “Don’t be whinging, for fuck’s sake; no one’s going to hurt you. Come on.” He pushes Liam in front of him, opens the door, and stands in the doorway.

The light hits them full in the face from all directions. It turns the night air to a white haze. The rev of the engines is louder, a full deep snarl. On every side amid the haze, too blinding to look at straight, are circles of condensed light, paired like eyes. It takes Trey a minute to understand: high beams.

“What’s the story, lads?” Johnny calls cheerily, raising his arm to shield his eyes. The note of his voice jars crazily against the scene. “Is there a party on and no one told me?”

Silence; just the growl of the engines and a strange flapping sound, like wind-whipped washing on the line. Trey, craning past her dad’s shoulder, sees flames. In the middle of the bare front yard is a galvanized metal barrel. Inside it is fire. The flames surge avidly, feet high, a tall ragged column swaying in the restless breeze.

“Ah, here, lads,” Johnny calls, shifting his voice to a mix of tolerance and exasperation. “I’ve children trying to sleep. Go home to your beds. If ye’ve something to say to me, come up tomorrow and we’ll have a chat like dacent men.”

Nothing. The breeze catches a flaming scrap from the barrel and scuds it away till it blinks out, high against the sky. Trey squints, trying to see the men or even the cars, but the lights are too bright; everything behind them is erased into darkness. The air is fever-hot.

“Shut that door,” Sheila says sharply. “Whether you’re in or you’re out.”

Johnny doesn’t look around at her.

“I said shut it.”

“Fuck’s sake, lads,” Johnny calls reproachfully. “Cop yourselves on. Go on outa that and sober up. We’ll talk tomorrow.” He pulls Liam back inside and closes the door.

They stand in the cramped corridor, barefoot and ragtag in the odds and ends they wear for sleeping. No one wants to move. Around them, every doorway is alive with the blue-white glow.

“Who’s out there?” Alanna whispers. She looks like she might cry.

“Lads messing,” Johnny says. His eyes are moving, assessing options. His bruises look like holes in his flesh.

“Why’s there a fire?”

“They mean they’ll burn us out,” Sheila says. She says it to Johnny.

“What’s burn us out?”

Johnny laughs, throwing his head back. “Christ almighty, would you ever listen to yourself,” he says to Sheila. “The drama outa you, holy God. No one’s burning anyone out.” He squats down to put a hand on Alanna’s shoulder and the other on Liam’s, grinning into their blank faces. “Your mammy’s only messing, sweethearts, and so are those lads out there. They’ve had a few too many pints, is what happened, and they reckoned it’d be funny to play a wee joke on us. Aren’t they silly aul’ fellas, acting the maggot at this hour?”

He smiles at Liam and Alanna. When neither of them responds, he says, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Will we play a joke back on them?”

“Shoot ’em with my air gun,” Liam says.

Johnny laughs again, clapping him on the shoulder, but he shakes his head regretfully. “Ah, no. I’d only love to, but we might give them a fright, and we wouldn’t wanta do that, sure we wouldn’t? No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do: we’ll go back to bed and take no notice of them at all, at all. They’ll feel like a right bunch of eejits then, won’t they? Coming all the way up here for nothing?”

They look at him.

“Go to bed,” Sheila says. “The lot of ye.”

For a few seconds the four of them don’t move. Alanna’s mouth is open; Maeve looks like she wants to argue but can’t find an argument.

“Come on,” Trey says. She gives Alanna and Liam a shove towards their room and gets Maeve by the arm. Maeve pulls away, but after a glance at Johnny and Sheila, she shrugs extravagantly and follows Trey.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Maeve says, in their bedroom. Out in the corridor, their parents aren’t talking.

Trey gets into bed fully dressed and turns her back on Maeve, pulling the sheet over her head to block out the light from the window. For a while she can feel Maeve standing still, watching her. Finally Maeve gives up, lets out a huffy sigh, and thumps into bed. The rev of the engines runs on outside.

After a long time, when Maeve’s breathing has finally slowed into sleep, the light slides off the window and the room goes dark. Trey turns in bed and watches the corridor dim as, one by one, the other windows are released from their beams. She listens to the engines moving away, slowly, down the mountain.

“What happened in the night?” Alanna asks Sheila, at breakfast. Their dad is still in bed.

“Nothing happened,” Sheila says. She sets down a cup of milk in front of each of them.

“Who was outside?”

Liam is watching Sheila too, pulling the crusts off his toast.

“No one was outside,” Sheila says. “Eat your breakfast.”

Sheila says the house needs cleaning and none of them can go out till it’s done. “I don’t have to,” Liam says, looking up at Johnny for approval. “Boys don’t have to clean.” Johnny—just surfaced, rumpled and smelling of sweat—laughs and ruffles Liam’s hair, but he says, “You help your mammy.”

Sheila sets Maeve to tidy the sitting room and Trey and Alanna to clean the bathroom, while she and Liam do the kitchen. Maeve turns up the telly too loud, some idiot talk show with lots of whooping and laughing, as revenge for not being allowed to go meet her friends.

“Here,” Trey says, spraying cleaner around the sink. “Wipe that down.”

Alanna takes the sponge. “There were people outside,” she says, looking up sideways at Trey to check her response.

“Yeah,” Trey says. She expects more questions, but Alanna just nods and starts wiping the sink.

Johnny mostly stays in the bedroom. Some of the time he’s on the phone; Trey can hear him pacing as he talks, fast and low, with the occasional flare of urgency quickly tamped down. He’s talking to Rushborough, and Rushborough isn’t happy. She tries listening in, for clues to how raging he is and what Johnny’s telling him to calm him, but every time she reaches the bedroom door, Sheila comes out of the kitchen and sends her back to her work.

Johnny comes into the bathroom as Trey is scrubbing the walls. The walls looked OK to her anyway, but if she says she’s finished here, Sheila will only find her something else to do. Alanna has got bored and is sitting in the bathtub singing to herself, a made-up chant with no beginning or end.

“How’re ye getting on?” their dad asks, leaning in the doorway and smiling at them.

“Grand,” Trey says. She doesn’t want to talk to him. Somehow or other, he fucked up. Between him and her and Rushborough, they had all of Ardnakelty hooked and ready to be reeled in, and somehow he managed to blow the whole thing.

“ ’That’s looking great,” Johnny says, scanning the bathroom approvingly. “God almighty, we won’t know this place when ye’re done. We’ll think we’re living in a luxury hotel.”

Trey keeps scrubbing. “C’mere to me,” Johnny says. “You’re the brains of this outfit, so you are; if anyone knows, it’s you. Who was out there last night?”

“Dunno,” Trey says. Alanna is still singing, but Trey is pretty sure she’s listening. “Couldn’t see.”

“How many of ’em d’you reckon?”

Trey shrugs. “Eight, maybe. Maybe less.”

“Eight,” Johnny repeats, tapping his fingers thoughtfully on the door frame, like she said something deeply meaningful. “That’s not too bad, sure it’s not? That leaves an awful lotta people who wanted nothing to do with it. D’you know, now”—his voice lifts, brightening, and he points a finger at Trey—“this mightn’t be a bad thing for us, when all’s said and done. They’re a contrary lot, around here. If there’s a few grumpy aul’ fellas banging on about what a terrible idea this is altogether, there’s plenty of ’em that’ll put it down to begrudgery and dig their heels in deeper.”

The way he says it, it sounds more than possible; it sounds obvious. Trey wants to believe him, and is furious with herself for it.

“All we need to do,” Johnny says, “is find out which ones are which. Tomorrow you’ll go down to the village, see what you can pick up. Hang around Noreen’s, keep an eye on who’s friendly and who’s a bit off with you. Stop in to Lena Dunne. Talk to your Yank, see if he’s heard anything.”

Trey sprays more cleaner on the wall. “Not today, but,” her dad says, with a grin in his voice. “Let the hare sit. Do ’em good to stew for a bit, amn’t I right?”

“Yeah,” Trey says, without looking at him.

“Missed a bit up the top there,” her dad says, pointing. “You’re doing a great job. Keep it up. Perseverance is a virtue, hah?”

After lunch, Sheila and Trey and Maeve go out front to deal with the remains of the fire. They have the mop bucket and the stewpot, both full of water. The yard is noisy with grasshoppers, and the sun hits them like a solid blow. Sheila tells the little ones to stay inside, but they stray out onto the step and hang off the door, watching. Alanna is sucking on a biscuit.

The galvanized barrel was stuffed with rags and newspapers, now black and fragile, edges crumbling in on themselves. Wisps of smoke still curl from the heap. When Trey touches the side of the barrel, it’s hot.

“Move,” Sheila says. She hefts her bucket with a hard grunt of effort, braces its lip on the barrel, and pours. The barrel lets out a vicious hiss and a puff of rising steam.

“More,” Sheila says. Trey pours in the water from the stewpot. The residue in the barrel is sinking into a sodden mess.

“Get the rake,” Sheila says. “And the spade. Whatever’s got a long handle.”

“Why?” Maeve demands. “It’s out.”

“One spark and we’ll have the whole mountain on fire. Get the things.”

The shed, at the far edge of the yard, holds tools from a time before they were born, when Sheila tried to turn the yard into a garden. Trey and Maeve scuff their way through scattered scraps of black that disintegrate under their feet. “I hate them lads,” Maeve says. “They’re a shower of fuckin’ pricks.”

“They don’t give a shite if you hate them,” Trey says. She and Maeve have never liked each other much, not since they got old enough to tell the difference, and today neither of them likes anyone much.

They heave aside a cobwebbed stepladder and a rust-ridden wheelbarrow to dig out a rake, a hoe, and a spade. “It’s not Daddy’s fault,” Maeve says defiantly, as they get back to the barrel. Neither of them answers her.

They dig the handles of the tools into the barrel and stir, extinguishing any hidden smolders. It gives off a thick, acrid reek. “Stinks,” Maeve says, wrinkling her nose.

“Fuck up, you,” Trey says.

“You fuck up.”

Sheila swings round and catches each of them a slap across the face, in one move so neither of them has time to jump back. “Now ye’ll both fuck up,” she says, and turns back to the barrel.

The mess resists them, clogging and tangling the handles. In the end Sheila pulls the rake free and stands back, breathing hard. “Get rid of that,” she says, nodding at the barrel. “And come straight home, or I’ll malavogue the pair of ye.” She picks up the bucket and the stewpot and heads back to the house.

Trey and Maeve take one side of the barrel each and drag it around the back of the house and up the mountainside. There’s a ravine where they dump unwanted large things, broken bikes and Alanna’s outgrown cot. The barrel is awkward to grip and heavy, scraping across the yard with a loud relentless grating, leaving a wide swathe of raw dirt and a leaking trail of black liquid in its wake. When they get in among the underbrush, they have to stop every minute to heave it over roots and brambles.

“You think you’re so great,” Maeve says. She sounds like she’s on the verge of tears. “Now look what you done.”

“You haven’t got a clue,” Trey says. Her arms ache from hauling the barrel; flies are whirling noisily at the sweat on her face, but she doesn’t have a hand free to swat them away. “You thick cow.”

The ravine drops out of the mountainside with lethal suddenness. Its sides are steep and rocky, blurred in patches by muscular, tenacious bushes and tangles of tall weeds. At the bottom, among the undergrowth in the dried-up streambed, Trey can see the flash of sun on something else discarded.

“You fucked it up on purpose,” Maeve says. “You never wanted him back.”

They swing the barrel together, over the edge of the ravine. It bounces down to the streambed in great zigzagging arcs, letting out a deep ominous boom each time it hits the ground.

“I’m going out,” Trey says, as they clear the table after dinner. Sheila had nothing in, so dinner was a dispiriting stew of potatoes, carrots, and stock cubes. Johnny made a big production of praising the flavor and talking about fancy restaurants where traditional Irish cooking is all the rage. No one except Liam was hungry.

“You’re going nowhere,” Sheila says.

“Going for a walk.”

“No. Wash them up.”

“I’ll do it later.” Trey can’t stick looking at their faces another second. The air feels like it’s clamping in all round her. She needs to move.

“You’ll do it now.”

“Sure, you can’t go out anyway,” Johnny says, in a peacemaking voice. “I’m off for a wee saunter myself, in a bit; you need to stay here and help your mammy while I’m gone.”

“I don’t want you to go,” Maeve tells him, pouting. “Stay.” She nuzzles up against Johnny’s side. He smiles and smooths her hair.

“Quit acting like a baby,” Trey says.

“I’m not!” Maeve snaps, her lip trembling. “I want Daddy!”

“You’re fuckin’ eleven.”

“I’m scared!”

“You make me wanta puke.”

Maeve kicks out and gets Trey in the shin. Trey shoves her hard enough that she staggers back against the counter. Maeve screeches and goes for her, raking at Trey’s face with her nails, but Trey catches Maeve’s wrist and punches her right in the gut. Maeve wheezes for breath and grabs for Trey’s hair, but it’s too short. Somewhere Liam is laughing too loud, like it’s fake but he can’t stop.

Their dad gets between them. He’s laughing his arse off too. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, cool the jets there,” he says, holding them apart with a hand on each one’s shoulder. “Holy God almighty, wouldja look at the pair of spitfires we’ve got here? None a that, now. Leave that stuff to the big rufty-tufty lads. Ye’re both too gorgeous to go ruining those faces. Are you all right, Maeveen love?”

Maeve bursts into tears. Trey shakes her dad’s hand off her shoulder and goes to the sink to wash up. She feels like she’s drowning, deeper in bog every second, the mountain sucking her down.

On his way out, Johnny pokes his head into Trey’s room, where she’s shut herself to get away from the rest. Maeve is in the shower and has been for a while. Trey would bet money that she’s using up all the hot water on purpose.

“There’s my wee wild woman,” her dad says. He’s all dolled up, with a fresh shirt on and his hair arranged in an appealing swoop; Trey can smell his aftershave. He looks like he’s going on a date. “Now, you do what your mammy says while I’m out, and look after the little ones. And don’t be bickering with Maeve. She’s a bit nervy, just. ’Tisn’t her fault she’s not as big and brave as you.”

Trey shrugs. She’s brushing Banjo. Normally he basks in the attention, twisting to make sure she gets the best spots, but tonight he’s too hot to do anything but lie there like he’s melted. She thought about leaving the shed fur in Maeve’s bed, but that kind of babyish shite doesn’t fit in the place where they’ve found themselves.

“And don’t you go worrying your head, now,” her dad says, waving a finger at her. “No one’ll do anything on anyone tonight. They’ve all gone for a nice sleep, after their shenanigans last night. You do the same.”

“Why can’t I go out, so?”

“Ah, now,” Johnny says reprovingly. “I know you’re missing your pals, but a bitta responsibility won’t do you any harm. ’Tis only for one night; you’ll be out and about tomorrow.”

Trey doesn’t answer. Johnny switches tone. “Ah, sweetheart. ’Tis awful hard being the oldest, isn’t it? It’ll be only great when Brendan gets the rambling outa his system and comes home. You can be one of the little ones again, and have the poor lad’s head wrecked.”

Trey doesn’t want to think about Brendan. She keeps her eyes on Banjo.

“Meanwhile,” Johnny says, “you just keep telling the rest everything’s grand. ’Cause it will be. I’ll do my bit tonight, and you’ll do your bit tomorrow, and we’ll have the show back on the road in no time.”

“What’s your bit?” Trey asks.

“Ah,” Johnny says, tapping the side of his nose, “that’d be telling. This and that, and a bit of t’other. You just get some rest; you’ve a busy day ahead.” He gives Trey a wink and a thumbs-up, and he’s gone.

Trey doesn’t want to sleep, but after last night and the night before, she can’t stop herself. She moves in and out of a sweaty doze, jerking alert to things that could be real or dreams—a door closing, a strange voice snapping Wait in her ear, a flash of light, a sheep’s insistent call—and getting dragged back down into the doze when they fade. Maeve tosses and mutters wretchedly.

When she half-wakes for the dozenth time and sees dawn light around the curtains, Trey forces herself to sit up. The house is silent. She doesn’t want to be around for everyone getting up, her dad putting his arm around her and giving her instructions, Maeve pouting and whining for his attention. She carries her shoes out to the kitchen, feeds Banjo, and butters a few slices of bread while he eats. She’ll find somewhere in the shade to eat them and wait for Ardnakelty to get underway, so she can start assessing the damage.

She still holds a thread of hope that her dad will actually get his plan back on track. Like she told Cal, making up stories and getting people to believe them is what Johnny is good at, and he’s got desperation to spur him; he might pull it off. The thread is a thin one, and it frays every time she remembers the column of flame in the yard, but it’s what she’s got, so she keeps hold of it.

The bleating she heard in the night was real: a few black-faced sheep, each with a splotch of red spray paint on its right hip, are straggling around the yard, eating what they can. Malachy Dwyer’s herd have found or made a gap in their paddock wall again. At Banjo’s delighted howl, they startle and bound off into the trees. Trey revises her plans. She likes Malachy, who always gave her messages to do when she was a kid and who has the mountainy men’s rule of asking no questions. Instead of shiteing around till people are awake, she’ll go up the mountain and tell Malachy his sheep are out. By the time she’s helped him round them up, it’ll be late enough to head down to Noreen’s.

Before she’s out the gate, she’s sweating. The sun is barely up, but today even the mountain breeze has been tamped down to a twitch, and the air is so heavy Trey can feel it pressing at her eardrums. What they need is a thunderstorm, but the sky is the same mindless blank it’s been for weeks.

As they near the fork where their road merges with the one twisting from higher up the mountain, Banjo stiffens and stretches his nose forward. Then he gallops off ahead, around the bend and gone.

Trey hears his siren howl, the one that means he’s found something, rise through the trees and the webs of sun. She whistles for him, in case he’s run into more of Malachy’s sheep, but he doesn’t come back. When she rounds the bend, there’s a dead man lying across her way.