The Hunter

Two

The next day is the same as the last, dew burning off quickly under a blue empty sky. Cal checks in with Lena, who reports that Trey is grand and eating everything in the house bar the dog food, and then spends the morning up in his back field, where he has a vegetable patch. Last year the vegetables more or less grew themselves; about all Cal had to do was keep the rooks, the slugs, and the rabbits off them, which he did with a combination of beer traps, chicken wire, Rip, and a scarecrow. The scarecrow went through various phases. Cal and Trey originally made it out of an old shirt and jeans of Cal’s. Then Lena dug out a bunch of old scarves to give it some extra flutter, but then Mart, Cal’s nearest neighbor, objected that it looked like it was doing the dance of the seven veils and it would distract all the old bachelors around, leading to crop failures and neglected sheep. He averted disaster by coming up with what looked like a genuine priest robe, which he put on the scarecrow. A couple of weeks later Cal got home from the store to find that someone, still unidentified, had given the priest inflatable armbands and a My Little Pony swim ring with a pink unicorn head. Regardless of costume changes, by the end of summer the rooks had cottoned on to the scarecrow, and made this clear by using it as a combined play structure and toilet. This spring, when the early lettuce started coming up, Cal and Trey got creative and rebuilt the scarecrow using a plastic zombie that Cal found online. It’s motion-activated; whenever anything comes close, its eyes flash red, its teeth chatter, and it waves its arms and makes growling noises. So far it scares the shit out of the rooks. Cal expects them to take a well-constructed and elaborate revenge when they finally figure it out.

This year the growing is different, with the heat. The plants need endless watering and a considerable amount more weeding, which is what Cal is doing this morning. The earth is different from last summer, too, less rich and restful; it pours between his fingers instead of sticking to them, and it has a harsher, almost feverish smell. Cal knows from the internet that this weather is going to mess with the flavor of his parsnips, but the tomatoes are thriving on it. Some of them are the size of cooking apples, and reddening already.

Rip, who has been snuffling along rabbit trails, suddenly lets out a bark that belongs on a St. Bernard. Rip has never come to terms with his size. In his mind, he’s something that chases down escaped prisoners and eats them whole.

“Whatcha got?” Cal asks, turning.

He’s expecting a fledgling or a field mouse, but Rip’s head is up. He’s pointing and quivering at a man strolling across the field.

“Stay,” Cal says. He straightens up and waits while the man comes towards them. The sun is overhead; his shadow is a small black thing puddling and flickering around his feet. The heat blurs his edges.

“That’s a beauty of a dog you’ve got there,” the man says, when he gets close enough.

“He’s a good dog,” Cal says. He knows this guy has to be around his own age, touching fifty, but he looks younger. He has a wistful, fine-boned face that makes him seem like something more than a hardscrabble guy from the back end of Ireland. In a movie, he’d be the wronged gentleman who deserves his title back and the prettiest girl to marry. Cal is startlingly, savagely glad that he looks nothing like Trey.

“Johnny Reddy,” the man says, offering Cal his hand.

Cal holds up his own palms, which are thick with dirt. “Cal Hooper,” he says.

Johnny grins. “I know, sure. You’re the biggest news in Ardnakelty since P.J. Fallon’s ewe dropped the lamb with two heads. How’s the place treating you?”

“Got no complaints,” Cal says.

“Ireland of the welcomes,” Johnny says, giving him a boyish smile. Cal doesn’t trust grown men with boyish smiles. “I hear I’ve to thank you. The missus says you’ve been awful good to our Theresa.”

“No thanks needed,” Cal says. “I wouldn’t’ve got this place fixed up half as quick without her help.”

“Ah, that’s great to hear. I wouldn’t want her being a nuisance to you.”

“She’s no trouble,” Cal says. “She’s turning into a pretty handy carpenter.”

“I saw that coffee table the two of ye made for the missus. Lovely delicate legs on it. I wouldn’t mind seeing legs that good on a young one.” Johnny’s grin widens.

“All the kid’s work,” Cal says. “I didn’t lay a finger on it.”

“I don’t know where she gets it from, at all,” Johnny says, switching tack nimbly when he doesn’t get the man-to-man guffaw he was angling for. “If I tried, I’d land myself in hospital. The last time I did any woodworking was back in school. All I got outa that was ten stitches.” He holds up a thumb to show Cal the scar. “And a slap across the head off the teacher, for bleeding on school property.”

“Well,” Cal says. “We can’t all have the same gifts.” Johnny gives him the urge to pat him down and ask him where he’s headed. There are guys like that, who flunk the sniff test just going to the store; it’s a good cop’s job to work out whether they’re actually doing something hinky, or whether it’s just that they will be sooner or later, probably sooner. Cal reminds himself, which he hasn’t needed to do in a long time, that hinkiness, imminent or otherwise, is no longer his problem. He motions to release Rip, who’s twitching to investigate. Rip circles Johnny at a distance, deciding whether he needs destroying.

“And now here’s Theresa making coffee tables,” Johnny says, offering Rip a hand to smell. He shakes his head, marveling. “When I was a young fella, people woulda broke their hearts laughing at that. They’d have said you were wasting your time teaching a girl, when she oughta be learning to cook a roast dinner.”

“That so?” Cal inquires politely. Rip, who is a creature of sense, has taken one sniff of Johnny and decided that nibbling his own ass for fleas is a better use of his time.

“Ah, yeah, man. Do the lads not slag you for it, down the pub?”

“Not that I know of,” Cal says. “Mostly they just like getting their furniture fixed.”

“We’ve come a long way,” Johnny says, promptly switching tack again. Cal knows what he’s doing: testing, aiming to get a handle on what kind of man Cal is. Cal has done it himself, plenty of times. He doesn’t feel any need to do it now; he’s learning plenty about Johnny as it is. “It’s great for Theresa, having the opportunity. There’s always room for a good carpenter; she can go anywhere in the world with that. Is that what you did yourself, before you came here?”

There is not a chance in hell that Johnny doesn’t know what Cal used to do. “Nope,” Cal says. “I was a police officer.”

Johnny raises his eyebrows, impressed. “Fair play to you. That’s a job that takes guts.”

“It’s a job that pays the mortgage,” Cal says.

“A policeman’s a great thing to have handy, in an outa-the-way place like this. Sure, if you’d an emergency, you’d be waiting hours for them eejits up in town to get to you—and that’s if they bothered getting up off their arses at all, for anything less than murder. There was a fella I knew one time—naming no names—he took a bit too much of a bad batch of poteen and went mental altogether. He got lost on the way home, ended up on the wrong farm. He was roaring at the woman of the house, wanting to know what she’d done with his missus and his sofa. Smashing all round him.”

Cal does his part and laughs along. It’s easier than it should be. Johnny tells a story well, with the air of a man with a pint in his hand and a night of good company ahead.

“In the end he hid under the kitchen table. He was waving the saltshaker at her, yelling that if she or any other demon came near him, he’d sprinkle them all to death. She locked herself in the jacks and rang the Guards. Three o’clock in the morning, that was. It was afternoon before they were arsed sending anyone out. By that time the fella had slept it off on her kitchen floor, and he was busy begging the poor woman to forgive him.”

“Did she?” Cal asks.

“Ah, she did, o’ course. Sure, she’d known him since they were babas. But she never forgave the Guards up in town. I’d say the townland’s over the moon to have you.”

Neither is there a chance in hell that Johnny believes Ardnakelty was over the moon about a cop moving in. Like most nowhere places, Ardnakelty is opposed to cops on general principle, regardless of whether anyone is currently doing anything that a cop might take an interest in. It allows Cal, but that’s in spite of his job, not because of it. “I’m not much good to them in that department,” Cal says. “I’m retired.”

“Ah, now,” Johnny says, smiling roguishly. “Once a policeman, always a policeman.”

“So I’ve been told,” Cal says. “Myself, I don’t police unless I’m getting paid for it. You hiring?”

Johnny laughs plenty at that. When Cal doesn’t join in this time, he settles down and turns serious. “Well,” he says, “I suppose that’s good news for me. I’d rather Theresa got a taste for carpentry than for policing. No harm to the job, I’ve a great respect for anyone who does it, but it’s got its risks—sure, who am I telling? I wouldn’t want her putting herself in harm’s way.”

Cal knows he needs to make nice with Johnny, but this plan is undermined somewhat by his urge to kick the guy’s ass. He’s not going to do it, obviously, but just allowing himself to picture it gives him some satisfaction. Cal is six foot four and built to match, and after spending the last two years fixing up his place and helping out on various neighbors’ farms, he’s in better shape than he’s been since he was twenty, even if he still has a certain amount of belly going on. Johnny, meanwhile, is a weedy little runt who looks like his main fighting skill is convincing other people to do it for him. Cal reckons if he got a running start and angled his toe just right, he could punt this little shit straight over the tomato patch.

“I’ll try and make sure she doesn’t saw off a thumb,” he says. “No guarantees, though.”

“Ah, I know,” Johnny says, ducking his head a little sheepishly. “I’m feeling a wee bit protective, is all. Trying to make up for being away so long, I suppose. Have you children of your own?”

“One,” Cal says. “She’s grown. Lives back in the States, but she comes over to visit me every Christmas.” He doesn’t like talking about Alyssa to this guy, but he wants Johnny to know that she hasn’t cut him off or anything. The main thing he needs to get across, in this conversation, is harmlessness.

“It’s a fine place to visit,” Johnny says. “Most people’d find it a bit quiet-like to live in. Do you not find that?”

“Nope,” Cal says. “I’ll take all the peace and quiet I can get.”

There’s a shout from across Cal’s back field. Mart Lavin is stumping towards them, leaning on his crook. Mart is little, wiry, and gap-toothed, with a fluff of gray hair. He was sixty when Cal arrived, and he hasn’t aged a day since. Cal has come to suspect that he’s one of those guys who looked sixty at forty, and will still look sixty at eighty. Rip shoots off to exchange smells with Kojak, Mart’s black-and-white sheepdog.

“Holy God,” Johnny says, squinting. “Is that Mart Lavin?”

“Looks like,” Cal says. At the start, Mart used to stop by Cal’s place every time he got bored, but he doesn’t come around as much any more. Cal knows what brought him today, when he’s supposed to be worming the lambs. He caught sight of Johnny Reddy and dropped everything.

“I shoulda known he’d still be around,” Johnny says, pleased. “You couldn’t kill that aul’ divil with a Sherman tank.” He waves an arm, and Mart waves back.

Mart has acquired a new hat from somewhere. His favorite summer headgear, a bucket hat in orange and khaki camouflage, disappeared from the pub a few weeks ago. Mart’s suspicions fell on Senan Maguire, who had been the loudest about saying that the hat looked like a rotting pumpkin, brought shame on the whole village, and belonged on a bonfire. Mart put this down to jealousy. He believes adamantly that Senan succumbed to temptation, took the hat, and is sneaking around his farm in it. The pub arguments have been ongoing and passionate ever since, occasionally coming close to getting physical, so Cal hopes the new hat will defuse the situation a little bit. It’s a broad-brimmed straw thing that, to Cal, looks like it should have holes in it for a donkey’s ears.

“Well, God almighty,” Mart says, as he reaches them. “Look what the fairies left on the doorstep.”

“Mart Lavin,” Johnny says, breaking into a grin and holding out a hand. “The man himself. How’s the form?”

“Fine as frog hair,” Mart says, shaking hands. “You’re looking in great nick yourself, but you always were a dapper fella. Put the rest of us to shame.”

“Ah, will you stop. I couldn’t compete with that Easter bonnet.”

“This yoke’s only a decoy,” Mart informs him. “Senan Maguire robbed my old one on me. I want him thinking I’ve moved on, so he’ll drop his guard. You couldn’t watch that fella. How long are you gone now?”

“Too long, man,” Johnny says, shaking his head. “Too long. Four years, near enough.”

“I heard you were over the water,” Mart says. “Did them Brits not appreciate you well enough over there?”

Johnny laughs. “Ah, they did, all right. London’s great, man; the finest city in the world. You’d see more in an afternoon there than you would in a lifetime in this place. You should take a wee jaunt there yourself, someday.”

“I should, o’ course,” Mart agrees. “The sheep can look after themselves, sure. Then what brought a cosmopolitan fella like yourself back from the finest city in the world to the arse end of nowhere?”

Johnny sighs. “This place, man,” he says, tilting his head back becomingly to look out over the fields at the long tawny hunch of the mountains. “There’s no place like it. Doesn’t matter how great the big city is; in the end, a man gets a fierce longing on him for home.”

“That’s what the songs say,” Mart agrees. Cal knows Mart has despised Johnny Reddy for most of his life, but he’s watching him with lively appreciation just the same. Mart’s personal boogeyman is boredom. As he’s explained to Cal at length, he considers it to be a farmer’s greatest danger, well ahead of the likes of tractors and slurry pits. Boredom makes a man’s mind restless, and then he tries to cure the restlessness by doing foolish shite. Whatever Mart may think of Johnny Reddy, his return is likely to relieve boredom.

“There’s truth in the old songs,” Johnny says, still gazing. “You don’t see it till you’re gone.” He adds, as an afterthought, “And I’d left the family on their own long enough.” Cal finds himself disliking Johnny Reddy more by the minute. He reminds himself that he was primed to do that, no matter what the man turned out to be like.

“C’mere till I tell you who died while you were off gallivanting,” Mart says. “D’you remember Dumbo Gannon? The little fella with the big ears?”

“I do, o’ course,” Johnny says, coming back from the wide open spaces to give this the full attention it deserves. “Are you telling me he’s gone?”

“Took a heart attack,” Mart says. “Massive one. He was sat on the sofa, having a bit of a rest and a smoke after his Sunday dinner. His missus only went out to get the washing off the line, and when she came back in, he was sitting there stone dead. The aul’ Marlboro still burning away in his hand. If she’d been a bit longer with that washing, he coulda taken the whole house with him.”

“Ah, that’s sad news,” Johnny says. “God rest his soul. He was a fine man.” He has his face composed in the appropriate mixture of gravity and sympathy. If he had a hat, he’d be holding it to his chest.

“Dumbo ran you off his land once,” Mart says, fixing Johnny with a reminiscent gaze. “Bellowing and roaring out of him, so he was. What was the story there, bucko? Did you ride his missus, or what did you do at all?”

“Ah, now,” Johnny says, winking at Mart. “Don’t be giving me a bad name. This fella here might believe you.”

“He will if he’s wise,” Mart says, with dignity.

They’re both looking at Cal, for the first time in a while. “Too wise to fall for your guff,” Johnny says. This time he winks at Cal. Cal keeps gazing at him with mild interest till he blinks.

“Mr. Hooper always takes me at my word,” Mart says. “Don’t you, Sunny Jim?”

“I’m just a trusting kinda guy,” Cal says, which gets a grin out of Mart at least.

“There’s a few of the lads coming up to my place tomorrow night,” Johnny says casually, to Mart and not Cal. “I’ve a coupla bottles in.”

Mart watches him, bright-eyed. “That’ll be nice,” he says. “A lovely homecoming party.”

“Ah, just an aul’ chat and a catch-up. I’ve a bit of an idea going.”

Mart’s eyebrows jump. “Have you, now?”

“I have. Something that could do this place a bitta good.”

“Ah, that’s great,” Mart says, smiling at him. “That’s what this townland needs: a few ideas brought in. We were getting stuck in the mud altogether, till you came back to rescue us.”

“Ah, now, I wouldn’t go that far,” Johnny says, smiling back. “But a good idea never hurts. Let you come up to my place tomorrow, and you’ll hear all about it.”

“D’you know what you oughta do?” Mart asks, struck by a thought.

“What’s that?”

Mart points his crook at the mountains. “D’you see that aul’ lump of rock there? I’m fed up to the back teeth driving them roads every time I wanta get over that mountain. The potholes’d rattle the eyeballs right outa your head. What we need is one of them underground pneumatic railways. London had one right back in aul’ Victoria’s time, sure. A tunnel with a train carriage in it, just like the Tube, only they’d a big fan at each end. One would blow and the other would suck, and that carriage’d fly straight through the tunnel like a pea out of a peashooter. Twenty-five mile an hour, it went. Sure, you’d be through that mountain and out the other side in no time at all. You put your mind to it and get us one of those. If the Brits can do it, so can we.”

Johnny is laughing. “Mart Lavin,” he says, shaking his head affectionately. “You’re the same as ever.”

“Theirs went wrong in the end, though,” Mart informs him. “One day they shut it down, just like that; sealed off the tunnel, no word of an explanation. Fifty or a hundred years later, an explorer found the tunnel again, deep down under London. The carriage was still sealed up inside. A dozen men and women still sitting in their seats, in their top hats and hoop skirts and pocket watches, every one of them nothing but bones.” He smiles at Johnny. “But, sure, yours wouldn’t go wrong. We’ve all the finest technology these days. Yours’d be only great. You get onto that, now.”

After a moment Johnny laughs again. “You oughta be the ideas man, not me,” he says. “Come on up to my place and you’ll hear it all. See you tomorrow night.” To Cal, he says, “Good to meet you.”

“You too,” Cal says. “See you round.” He has no desire to be invited over to drink to Johnny’s return, under a roof he fixed himself, but he does have an ingrained dislike for rudeness.

Johnny nods to him, touches his temple to Mart, and heads off towards the road. He walks like a city boy, picking his way around anything that might dirty his shoes.

“Worthless little fecker,” Mart says. “The best part of that fella ran down his mammy’s leg. What did he want from you?”

“Check out the guy who’s hanging out with his kid, I guess,” Cal says. “Don’t blame him.”

Mart snorts. “If he gave a damn about that child, he wouldn’ta run off on her. That fella never did anything in his life unless he was after a few bob or a ride, and you’re not his type. If he dragged his lazy arse down here, he wanted something.”

“He didn’t ask for anything,” Cal says. “Yet, anyway. You going to his place tomorrow night, get in on his big idea?”

“I wouldn’t have one of Johnny Reddy’s ideas if it was wrapped in solid gold and delivered by Claudia Schiffer in the nip,” Mart says. “I only came down here to let him know not to be trying to get his hooks into you. If he wants to mooch, he can mooch offa someone else.”

“He can try all he wants,” Cal says. He doesn’t want any favors from Mart. “Did he hook up with Mrs. Dumbo?”

“He did his best. That lad’d get up on a cracked plate. Don’t you be letting him around your Lena.”

Cal lets that go. Mart finds his tobacco pouch, pulls out a skimpy rollie, and lights it. “I might go on up to his place tomorrow night,” he says reflectively, picking a shred of tobacco off his tongue. “Whatever he’s at, there’s some eejits around here that’d fall for it. I might as well have a good view of the action.”

“Bring your popcorn,” Cal says.

“I’ll bring a bottle of Jameson, is what I’ll bring. I wouldn’t trust him to have anything dacent in, and if I’ve to listen to that gobshite, I’d want to be well marinated.”

“I figure I’ll stick with ignoring him,” Cal says. “Save myself the booze money.”

Mart giggles. “Ah, now. Where’s the entertainment in that?”

“You and me got different ideas of entertainment,” Cal says.

Mart draws on his rollie. His face, creased against the sun, is suddenly grim. “I’m always in favor of paying heed to the sly fuckers,” he says. “Even when it’s an inconvenience. You never know when there might be something you can’t afford to miss.”

He nudges one of Cal’s tomatoes with the point of his crook. “Them tomatoes is coming along great,” he says. “If you have a few going spare, you know where to find me.” Then he whistles for Kojak and starts off back towards his own land. When he crosses Johnny Reddy’s trail, he spits on it.

Ignoring Johnny turns out to be harder than Cal expected. That evening, when Lena has sent Trey home and come over to his place, he can’t settle. Mostly his and Lena’s evenings are long, calm ones. They sit on his back porch drinking bourbon and listening to music and talking, or playing cards, or they lie on the grass and watch the expanse of stars turn dizzyingly above them. When the weather is being too Irish, they sit on his sofa and do most of the same things, with rain padding peacefully and endlessly on the roof, and the fire making the room smell of turf smoke. Cal is aware that this puts them firmly in boring-old-fart territory, but he has no problem with that. This is one of the many areas where he and Mart don’t see eye to eye: being boring is among Cal’s main goals. For most of his life, one or more elements always insisted on being interesting, to the point where dullness took on an unattainable end-of-the-rainbow glow. Ever since he finally got his hands on it, he’s savored every second.

Johnny Reddy is, just like Mart spotted from all the way over on his own land, a threat to the boringness. Cal knows there’s nothing he can do about the guy, who has more right to be in Ardnakelty than he has, but he wants to do it anyway, and quick, before Johnny starts in fucking things up. Lena is drinking her bourbon and ginger ale, comfortable in the back-porch rocking chair that Cal made for her birthday, but Cal can’t sit. He’s throwing a stick for Rip and Nellie, who are surprised by this departure from routine but not about to turn down the opportunity. Daisy, Rip’s mama, who doesn’t have a sociable nature, has ignored the stick and gone to sleep beside Lena’s chair. The fields have sunk into darkness, although the sky still has a flush of turquoise above the treeline in the west. The evening is still, with no breeze to take away the day’s leftover heat.

“You fed her dinner, right?” he asks for the second time.

“Enough to fill a grown man,” Lena says. “And if she needs more, I’d say Sheila might have the odd bitta food lying around the house. D’you reckon?”

“And she knows she can come back to your place if she needs to.”

“She does, yeah. And she can find her way in the dark. Or in a snowstorm, if one comes up.”

“Maybe you should go home tonight,” Cal says. “In case she comes back and you’re not there.”

“Then she’ll know where to look for me,” Lena points out. Lena spends maybe two nights a week at Cal’s place, which naturally the entire village has known since the day it began and probably before. At the start he suggested tentatively that she might walk, or he could walk to hers, to avoid people seeing her car and making her a target of gossip, but Lena just laughed at him.

Rip and Nellie are having a ferocious tug-of-war with the stick. Rip wins and gallops triumphantly over to drop it at Cal’s feet. Cal hurls it back into the darkness of the yard, and they disappear again.

“He was nice to me,” Cal says. “What was he nice to me for?”

“Johnny is nice,” Lena says. “He’s got plenty of faults, but no one could say he’s not nice.”

“If Alyssa was hanging around some middle-aged guy when she was that age, I wouldn’t’ve been nice to him. I’da punched his lights out.”

“Did you want Johnny to punch your lights out?” Lena inquires. “Because I could ask him for you, but it’s not really his style.”

“He used to hit them,” Cal says. “Not often, from what the kid’s said, and not too bad. But he hit them.”

“And if he tried it now, she’d have somewhere else to go. But he won’t. Johnny’s in great form. He’s the talk of the town, he’s buying the whole pub drinks and telling them all the adventures he had over in London, and he’s loving it. When the world’s being good to Johnny, he’s good to everyone.”

This fits with Cal’s assessment of Johnny. Except on the most immediate level, he isn’t reassured.

“He told Angela Maguire he was at a party with Kate Winslet,” Lena says, “and someone spilt a drink down the back of her dress, so he gave her his jacket to cover up the stain, and she gave him her scarf in exchange. He’s showing the scarf all around town. I wouldn’t say Kate Winslet would go near that yoke for love nor money, but it makes a good story either way.”

“He told Mart he had an idea,” Cal says, also for the second time. “What kind of idea does a guy like that come up with?”

“You’ll know day after tomorrow,” Lena says. “Mart Lavin’ll be straight down here to spill the beans. That fella loves being first with a bitta gossip.”

“Something that’d be good for this place, he said. What the hell would that guy reckon would be good for a place? A casino? An escort agency? A monorail?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lena says. Daisy whimpers and twitches in her dream, and Lena reaches down to stroke her head till she settles. “Whatever it is, it won’t get far.”

“I don’t want the kid around a guy like that,” Cal says, knowing he sounds absurd. He’s aware that gradually, over the past two years, he’s come to think of Trey as his. Not his in the same way as Alyssa, of course, but his in a specific, singular way that has no relation to anything else. He sees it in the same terms as the drystone walls that define the fields around here: they were handmade rock by rock as the need arose, they look haphazard and they have gaps you could stick a fist through, but somehow they have the cohesion to stand solid through weather and time. He hasn’t seen this as a bad thing; it’s done no one any harm. He can’t tell whether he would have done anything differently if he had expected Johnny to come home, bringing with him the fact that Trey is not, in reality, Cal’s in any way that carries any weight at all.

“That child’s no fool,” Lena says. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders. Whatever Johnny’s at, she won’t go getting sucked into it.”

“She’s a good kid,” Cal says. “It’s not that.” He can’t find a way to express, even to himself, what it is. Trey is a good kid, a great kid, on track to make herself a good life. But all of that seems so vastly against the odds that to Cal it has an aura of terrifying fragility, something incredible that shouldn’t be disturbed until the glue has set hard. Trey is still too little for anything to have set hard.

Lena drinks her bourbon and watches him hurl the stick with all his force. Normally Cal has the innate calm of a big man or a big dog, who can afford to let things alone for a while and see how they play out. Regardless of the situation, a part of her welcomes seeing this different side of him. It lets her know him better.

She could settle his mind, temporarily at least, by bringing him to bed, but she decided right from the beginning that she wasn’t going to make Cal’s moods her responsibility—not that he has many, but Sean, her husband, was a moody man, and she made the mistake of believing that was her problem to fix. The fact that Cal never expects her to do that is one of the many things she values in him. She has no intention of wrecking it.

“Mart says all Johnny’s ever looking for is women and cash,” Cal says. “I could give him cash.”

“To leave, like?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Lena says.

“I know,” Cal says. There are far too many ways Johnny Reddy could misread that, or make use of it, or both.

“He wouldn’t take it, anyway,” Lena says. “It’s not the money Johnny’s after, or not only. He’s after a story where he got the money by being the big hero. Or the dashing bandit, at least.”

“And for that,” Cal says, “he’s got his big idea. Whatever it is.” Rip makes his way back up the garden, hauling the stick by one end, with Nellie dragging off the other. Cal detaches it from the pair of them, throws it, and watches them vanish into the dark again. The last of the light is ebbing out of the sky, and the stars are starting to show.

Lena is trying to decide whether to tell him the thought she had, the day before, as she watched Johnny saunter away. She’d like to have Cal’s views on it—not only because, having been a detective, he has a wider knowledge of trouble and its many forms, but also because of the way he considers things, without hurry or strain. Before he even says a word, that makes the thing seem more manageable, susceptible to being held still and examined at leisure.

His restlessness is stopping her. She has only a guess, based on nothing but a scruffy haircut and old memories. Unsettled as Cal is, it would be unfair to put that on him, just for her own convenience. Lena herself is wary and watchful, but she’s not unsettled. She isn’t by nature a peaceful woman; her calm is hard-won, and Johnny doesn’t have enough force in him to shake it. She’s not altogether convinced that he has enough force to bring any trouble bigger than a debt-collection notice in his wake, but Cal, knowing less of Johnny and more of trouble, might see it differently. Then, too, she knows the stakes here aren’t the same for Cal as they are for her.

She adds the tightness in Cal’s face, and the fact that she finds herself shielding him, to the list of reasons she despises Johnny Reddy. The man hasn’t been in town long enough to muddy the shine on those pretty shoes or that pretty smile, and already, without even aiming to, he’s making problems where there were none.

“Come on,” Cal says suddenly, turning to her and holding out a hand. Lena thinks he wants to go inside, but when she takes his hand and lets him pull her out of the rocking chair, he leads her down the porch steps, onto the grass.

“I figure I oughta mind my own beeswax for a while,” he says. “When was the last time we took a nighttime walk?”

Lena tucks her hand through his elbow and smiles. Rip and Nellie follow them, Rip taking big bounds over the long grass just for the fun of it, as they head for the road that twists away between the fields, faint and pale in the starlight. The night flowers have the rich, honeyed scent of some old cordial. Daisy opens one rolling eye to watch them on their way, and then goes back to sleep.

Even though Cal tries not to say it, Trey knows he doesn’t like her being out on the mountain in the dark. When she’s at his place for dinner, he keeps one eye on the sky and orders her home as soon as the west starts to glow gold. He worries about her falling into a ditch and injuring herself, or straying off the path and getting sucked down in a bog, or running into one of the scattering of people who live high on the mountain and who have the reputation of being half wild. None of these things worry Trey. She’s been on the mountain her whole life, which means her body knows it better than her mind does; the slightest unexpected shift in the consistency of the earth under her feet, or the slope of it, is enough to warn her if she’s going wrong. The mountainy men have known her since she was a baby, and sometimes give her a few quid to do their messages at Noreen’s shop, or to bring a few eggs or a bottle of poteen to a neighbor a mile or two up the road. She’s considering being one of them when she’s grown up.

She’s spent the last few hours on the mountainside, waiting to be fairly sure her dad will be either in bed or down the village at Seán Óg’s pub. Trey is good at waiting. She sits with her back against a drystone wall, in its shadow, rubbing Banjo’s ears. She has a pocket torch, but she likes both the invisibility and the feeling of power that she gets from not using it. It’s a bright enough night, anyway—the sky is crowded with stars, and there’s a big, close half-moon; Trey can see down the ragged slopes of heather and sedge to the fields, bleached by the moonlight and misshapen by the shadows of their walls and trees. Up here the air has a thin fitful breeze, but Lena lent her a hoodie, which is too big and smells of the same washing powder as Lena’s sheets. Now and then there’s a sharp, furtive rustle out on the bog or up among the trees, but those don’t bother Trey either. She stays still and watches for the hare or fox to show itself, but whatever creatures are out there, they smell Banjo and stay clear. A few times, before she had Banjo, she saw hares dancing.

When the lights in the farmhouses below start to blink out, she heads home. The front of the house is dark, but there’s a haze of yellow light spilling out behind it: someone is still awake. As Trey pushes open the gate, Banjo stiffens and lets out a low warning bark. Trey stops, ready to run.

“Call off the dogs,” says a voice not far away, light and amused. “I’m harmless.”

A shadow peels itself off a tree trunk and comes towards her at a leisurely saunter. “Wouldja look at this night,” her dad says. “Isn’t it only gorgeous?”

“Mam knows where I was,” Trey says.

“I know, sure. She said you were down at Lena Dunne’s, polishing up an aul’ bed. You’re great to give her a hand.” Johnny takes a deep breath, smiling a little up at the stars. “Smell that air. My God, there’s nothing in all of London that’d compare to that smell.”

“Yeah,” says Trey, to whom the air smells much the same as usual. She heads for the house.

“Ah, come here,” her dad calls after her. “Don’t be wasting a night like this. We’ll stay out here a bit. Alanna won’t go asleep—overexcited, like. We’ll let your mammy settle her in peace.” He beckons with his head to Trey and arranges himself comfortably, leaning his arms on the barred metal gate. Trey’s dad likes being comfortable, and he’s good at it; he can make anywhere look like he belongs there.

Trey remembers what Cal said about not pissing him off. She thinks it’s stupid and knows he’s right, both at the same time. She goes over and stands by the gate, an arm’s length from her dad, with her hands in the hoodie pockets.

“I’ve missed your mammy,” Johnny says. “She’s still a beautiful woman—you’re too young to see that, maybe, but it’s the truth. I’m lucky to have her. Lucky she waited for me all this time, and didn’t run off with some fancy man that came knocking at the door selling notions.”

Trey can’t picture her mam having the energy to run off with anyone, and anyway no one ever comes knocking at their door. She had forgotten his smell, cigarettes and soap and an aftershave with some rich spice in it. Banjo is sniffing it too, and glancing up at her for clues on how to classify it. “Sit,” she says.

“I can’t get over the size of you,” her dad says, smiling at her. “Just a little biteen of a thing that’d run from her own shadow, you were, when I saw you last. And now look at you: near grown up, working away, in and outa houses all over this townland. I’d say you know half the people round here better than I would. D’you get on with them all right?”

“Lena’s sound,” Trey says. She can feel him wanting something from her, but she doesn’t know what.

“Ah, yeah. Lena’s grand. And I called in to your friend Cal Hooper. I reckoned if you’re going down there on the regular, I oughta get to know him a bit. Make sure he’s all right.”

Trey goes cold straight through with outrage. He said it like he was doing her a favor. He had no right anywhere near Cal. She feels like he stuck his hand in her mouth.

“He seems like a dacent-enough fella. For a policeman.” Johnny laughs. “Jaysus, a child of mine hanging around a Guard. Did you ever hear the like?”

Trey says nothing. Her dad grins at her. “Is he a nosy bollox, yeah? Always asking questions? Where were you on the night of the fifteenth?”

“Nah,” Trey says.

“I’d say he has the whole place afraid to put a toe outa line. If he caught the lads drinking poteen, heaven help us, he’d have them hauled up to the Guards in town before they’d know what hit them.”

“Cal drinks poteen,” Trey says. “Sometimes.” She thinks about punching her dad in the face, or running away and sleeping in an abandoned cottage somewhere on the mountainside. A couple of years back she would probably have done both. Instead she just stands there, with her fists in the pockets of Lena’s hoodie. Her anger is too dense and tangled to find a way out of her.

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” her dad says, amused. “He can’t be too bad if he can handle Malachy Dwyer’s stuff. I’ll have to bring some down to him one day, and we can make a night of it.”

Trey says nothing. If he does that, she’ll get Cal’s rifle and blow his fucking foot off, and see can he make his way down the mountain to Cal’s after that.

Johnny rubs a hand over his head. “Are you not speaking to me?” he asks ruefully.

“Got nothing to say,” Trey says.

Johnny laughs. “You always were quiet,” he says. “I thought it was only that you couldn’t get a word in edgewise, with Brendan about.”

Brendan has been gone more than two years. His name still feels like a jab to Trey’s throat.

“If you’re annoyed with me for going away, you can go on and say it. I won’t get angry with you.”

Trey shrugs.

Johnny sighs. “I went because I wanted to do better for you,” he says. “All of ye, and your mammy. You might not believe that, and I wouldn’t blame you, but at least have a think about it before you decide it’s only rubbish. There was nothing I could do for you here. You know yourself: this shower of gombeens act like the Reddys are nothing but shite on their shoes. Am I wrong?”

Trey shrugs again. She doesn’t feel like agreeing with him, but he’s right, or near enough. People are nicer to her and her family, the last couple of years, but the note underneath hasn’t changed, and she wouldn’t want their niceness even if it was real.

“There wasn’t one of them would give me a chance. Everyone knows my daddy was a waster, and his daddy before him, and that’s all they want to know. There’s a hundred jobs I’d be able for around here, but I was lucky to get a day shoveling shite. I’d go up for a factory job I could do in my sleep, and be turned away before I could open my mouth—and the job’d go to some feckin’ eejit that could barely tie his own shoelaces, but his daddy drank with the manager. And there was no point in trying Galway, or Dublin. This bloody country’s too small. Someone woulda known someone whose mam was from Ardnakelty, and they’da scuppered my chances just like that.” He snaps his fingers.

Trey knows the dark edge to his voice. It used to mean he was going to slam out and come home drunk, or not at all. It’s fainter now, just an echo, but her calf muscles still twitch, ready to run if she needs to.

“That wears a man down. It wears him till he loses sight of himself. I was turning bitter, taking it out on your mammy—I never usedta have a cruel bone in my body, but I was cruel to her, those last coupla years. She didn’t deserve that. If I’da stayed, I’da only got worse. London was the nearest I could be and still have a chance to get somewhere.”

He looks at her. His face is pulled into the taut lines she remembers from those same nights, but those are fainter too. “You know I’m telling the truth, am I right?”

“Yeah,” Trey says, to make him leave it. She doesn’t give a shite why her dad went. Once he was gone, Brendan was the man of the family. He felt like it was his job to look after the rest of them. If their dad had stayed, Brendan might still be there.

“Don’t be holding it against me, if you can help it. I done my best.”

“We’ve done grand,” Trey says.

“You have, of course,” Johnny agrees warmly. “Your mammy says you’ve been a great help to her. We’re proud of you, the pair of us.”

Trey doesn’t respond. “It musta been hard on you,” her dad says sympathetically, switching tone. She can feel him circling her, looking for ways in. “I’d say it didn’t help that Brendan went. The two of ye were always fierce close.”

Trey says, keeping her voice flat, “Yeah.” Brendan was six years older than her. Up until Cal and Lena, he was the only person who ever appeared to think about Trey by choice, rather than because he had to, and the only person who regularly made her laugh. Six months before Trey met Cal, Brendan walked out of the house one afternoon and never came back. Trey doesn’t think about those six months, but they’re layered into her like a burn ring inside a tree.

“Your mammy said he went looking for me. Is that what he said to you?”

“He said nothing to me,” Trey says. “I heard he went to Scotland, maybe.” This is true.

“He never found me, anyway,” her dad says, shaking his head. “I never thought he’d take it that hard, me leaving. Do you ever hear anything from him?”

The wind fingers restlessly through the trees behind them. Trey says, “Nah.”

“He’ll be in touch,” her dad says confidently. “Don’t you worry. He’s only off sowing his wild oats.” He grins, out to the slopes of dark heather. “And praying for a crop failure.”

Brendan is buried somewhere in these mountains, Trey doesn’t know where. When she’s out there she keeps watch for any sign—a rectangle of mounded earth, a space where the brush hasn’t had time to grow tall again, a tatter of cloth brought to the surface by weather—but there’s more of the mountains than she could look at in a lifetime. There are people in the townland who know where he is, because they put him there. She doesn’t know who they are. She watches for signs in people’s faces, too, but she doesn’t expect to find them. People in Ardnakelty are good at keeping things hidden.

She gave Cal her word that she’d say nothing and do nothing about it. Trey, seeing as she doesn’t have much else, puts a fiercely high value on her word.

“I came back,” Johnny points out cheerfully. “See? Brendan’ll do the same.”

Trey asks, “Are you gonna stay?”

It’s a plain question—she wants to know what she’s dealing with—but her dad takes it as a plea. “Ah, sweetheart,” he says, giving her a soft-eyed smile. “I am, of course. I’m going nowhere. Daddy’s home now.”

Trey nods. She’s no wiser. She can tell he believes it, but he always does; it’s one of his gifts, taking every word out of his own mouth as gospel. She had forgotten what it’s like talking to him, how misty and muddy.

Johnny leans in a little closer, his smile widening. “I’ve no need to go anywhere, sure,” he says confidentially. “Will I tell you something?”

Trey shrugs.

“I’ve a plan,” Johnny says. “When I’m through, the only place we’ll be going is a lovely new house with a big bedroom for each one of ye. And you won’t have to be walking around with holes in your jeans, neither.”

He waits for her to ask. When she doesn’t, he settles his arms better on the gate, preparing to tell the story anyway. “There’s a fella I met,” he says, “over in London. I was in an Irish pub, having a pint with a few mates and minding my own business, when this lad came over to me. English fella. I was wondering what he was at in a place like that—the pub’s a bit rough, now, and he was the type you’d expect to see drinking brandy at a fancy hotel. The coat on him, and the shoes: you could tell they cost more than I’d see in a month. He said he’d been asking around for an Ardnakelty man, and I was pointed out to him.”

Johnny rolls his eyes whimsically. “Course I reckoned this was bad news, one way or another. I’m no pessimist, but Ardnakelty never worked in my favor before. I was about to tell him to fuck off for himself—which woulda been the worst mistake of my life—only he offered to get me a pint, and I was a bit short of a few bob that day. And then didn’t it turn out his granny was from Ardnakelty. One of the Feeneys, she was. She went over to London before the war, doing the nursing, and married a big-shot doctor. She usedta tell this fella stories about the place, how beautiful it was, how she’d run wild on the mountains—same as you do, sure.” He smiles at Trey. “And she told him something else, as well. You know there’s gold somewhere at the bottom of these mountains, don’t you?”

“Teacher said that,” Trey says. “In Geography.”

He points a finger at her. “Fair play to you, paying attention in school. You’ll go far. Teacher was right. The men that lived here thousands of years ago, they knew where to look for it. There’s more ancient gold pieces found in this country than anywhere in the whole of Europe, did Teacher tell you that? Bracelets as wide as your hand, collars bigger than dinner plates, round bits like coins that they sewed onto their clothes. Your great-great-granddads and great-great-grannies woulda been dripping with it, at feasts. They’da been out on this mountain, round their fires, shining so bright you could hardly look at them. They were digging it up by the handful, musta been, big nuggets of it, as easy as we’d cut turf.”

He mimes grabbing a fistful and holding it high. His voice has caught alight, rising. His excitement tugs at Trey, but she doesn’t like it. It doesn’t fit in the still night. She feels like he’s drawing notice, in ways that aren’t safe.

“Only then the Brits came,” Johnny says, “and that land was taken away from our people, and they emigrated, or they starved—and, bit by bit, the knowledge got lost. Except…” He leans in closer. His eyes are bright. “It wasn’t lost altogether. There were still a few families that passed it down, all those hundreds of years. This fella in the pub—Cillian Rushborough, his name is—his granny’s granddad told her where to look. And she told Cillian.”

He cocks his head at her, teasing, waiting for her to ask more. In the moonlight, with his eyes shining and a half-smile on his face, he looks barely older than Brendan.

Trey says, cutting to the end, “And your man Cillian told you, and now you’re gonna dig up the gold.” That’s all he came home for: money. The realization is a sweep of relief. She’s not stuck with him forever. If he finds nothing, and his novelty value in the village wears off, he’ll be gone.

Johnny laughs. “Ah, God, no. Only a fool would hand over a treasure map to a man he doesn’t know from Adam, and Cillian’s no fool. But he needed a man from Ardnakelty. The directions his granny gave him, they’re all Greek to him: ‘In the old riverbed that’s dried up now, just by the northwest corner of that field the Dolans bought offa Pa Lavin…’ He needs someone that knows his way around the place. And if he blew in here on his own, there’s not a man that would let him go digging on their land. But with me on board…”

He leans in closer. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he says, “that I’ve learned along the way. The best thing you can have in life is a bit of a shine on you. A bitta possibility; a bitta magic. A shine. People can’t stay away from that. Once you’ve got it, it doesn’t matter a tap whether they like you, or whether they respect you. They’ll convince themselves they do. And then they’ll do whatever you want from them. D’you know where I was last night?”

Trey shrugs. Only a few points of yellow light are left among the dark fields below them, and the chill of the breeze is sharpening.

“I was down at Seán Óg’s, having the crack with half this townland. Four years ago, if I was on fire, there’s not a one of them lads woulda pissed on me to put me out. But when I walk in there wearing this”—he flicks the lapel of his leather jacket—“and buying the drink and telling them about the life in London, they’re all crowded round me, laughing at my jokes and patting me on the back for being a great fella altogether. Because I’ve got the shine of a bitta cash and a bitta adventure on me. And that’s nothing. Wait till they see what I’ve got up my sleeve.”

Trey hasn’t been around anyone who talked this much since Brendan went. Brendan’s stream of chat and messing made her want to be part of it, even when all she could think of to do was grin at him. Her dad’s talk bombards her. It makes her feel more silent than ever.

“The one and only Mr. Cillian Rushborough arrives from London in a few days’ time, as soon as he’s wrapped up some important business affairs, and then…” Johnny nudges Trey’s arm with his elbow. “Then, hah? We’ll be on the pig’s back. You’ll have dresses outa Giorgio Armani, or VIP tickets to meet Harry Styles; take your pick. This fella here can have a diamond collar. Where d’you fancy going on holiday?”

Trey can feel him wanting her to put all her hope on him. She can’t remember when she first knew that he’s too puny to take that weight. She thinks of Brendan, before he went out the door for the last time, promising her a new bike for her birthday, and meaning it.

“What if he doesn’t find gold?” she asks.

Johnny grins. “He’ll find it,” he says.

Away among the trees, up the mountainside, there’s a rattle of wings in branches and a bird’s harsh alarm call. Trey wants, suddenly and sharply, to be inside.

“Gonna go in,” she says.

Her dad looks at her for a second, but then he nods. “Go on,” he says. “Tell your mammy I’ll be in soon.” When Trey glances back at him as she rounds the house, he’s still leaning on the gate, with his face tilted up to the moon.

Sheila is wiping down the kitchen counters. She nods when Trey comes in, but she doesn’t look up. Trey finds a slice of bread, butters it, rolls it up and leans against the fridge to eat it. Banjo slumps heavily against her leg and lets out an extravagant sigh. He wants to go to bed.

“He’s outside,” Trey says. “He says he’ll be in soon.”

Her mam says, “Where’d you get that hoodie?”

“Lena.”

Sheila nods. Trey says, “Are you gonna let him stay?”

Sheila keeps wiping. She says, “He lives here.”

Trey pinches off a bit of her bread for Banjo and watches her. Sheila is a tall woman, rangy and rawboned, with thick red-brown hair starting to gray and pulled back in a ponytail. Her face is like old wood, worn shiny in some places and rough in others, and immobile. Trey is looking for the beauty her dad talked about, but she’s seen her mother’s face too many times; she doesn’t know how to interpret it in those terms.

Trey says, “Didja tell him Bren went off looking for him?”

It’s been almost two years since they said Brendan’s name to each other. Sheila knows what Trey knows, give or take. Trey hears her breath hiss through her nose.

She says, “I did.”

“How come?”

Sheila swipes crumbs off the table into her hand. “I know your daddy well. That’s how come.”

Trey waits.

“And I told him the whole lot of ye missed him something fierce. Cried your eyes out every night, and wouldn’t go to school because ye were ashamed of not having a daddy. And ashamed that I couldn’t afford dacent clothes.”

“I didn’t give a shite that he went,” Trey says. “Or about the clothes.”

“I know that.”

The kitchen smells of bacon and cabbage. Her mam moves slowly and steadily, like she’s making her energy last.

“If he gets to feeling bad enough in himself,” she says, dusting the crumbs off her hand into the bin, “he’ll run from it.”

Sheila wants him gone, too. Trey isn’t surprised, but the knowledge doesn’t offer her much comfort. If Sheila had enough force to move Johnny, she’d have done it already.

A sleepy wail comes from down the hall: “Mammy!”

Ever since their dad left, Alanna has slept in with their mam, but her cry comes from Liam’s room. Sheila wipes her hands on the dish towel. “Finish that table,” she says, and she goes out.

Trey stuffs the last of her bread in her mouth and scrubs down the table. She listens to Alanna’s fretful murmuring, and to the restless stirring of the trees. When she hears footsteps crunching out front, she snaps her fingers for Banjo and heads for bed.