The Searcher

TEN

On his way home Cal stops by Mart’s place, to check if Mart made it through his night watch. Mart answers the door with a paper towel tucked in the neck of his sweater and Kojak, snorting threateningly, at his knee. The house smells of old turf smoke, cooking meat and a baffling mix of spices.

“Just checking that the aliens didn’t abduct you,” Cal says.

Mart giggles. “Sure, what would they want with the likes of me? You’re the one who should be watching yourself, great big fella like you. Plenty there to probe.”

“I better make myself a tinfoil suit,” Cal says, cupping his hand for Kojak to sniff.

“Ask Bobby Feeney for a lend of his. I’d say he has one hanging in his wardrobe, to wear when he’s out hunting the little green men.”

“You see anything last night?” Cal asks.

“Nothing that’d do what we saw. I protected your property from a big bruiser of a hedgehog, but that’s as dangerous as it got.” Mart grins at Cal. “Were you afraid I was lying out in them woods with bits cut off me?”

“Just wanted to know if I could cross those cookies off my shopping list,” Cal says.

“Don’t be holding your breath, boyo. Whatever done that, it’d better bring its friends and relations if it wants to take me on.” Mart holds the door wider. “Come in, now, and have a bit of spaghetti and a cup of tea.”

Cal was about to say no, but the spaghetti catches his curiosity. He had Mart down as a meat-and-potatoes guy. “You sure you’ve got some to spare?” he asks.

“Sure, I’ve enough there to feed half the townland. I do make a big pot of whatever I fancy, and then see how long it lasts me. Go on.” He motions Cal in.

Mart’s house isn’t dirty, exactly, but it has an air of having been low priority for a long time. It has sludge-green walls and a lot of linoleum and Formica, and most surfaces have been worn down till they’re speckled. In the kitchen, Kylie Minogue is singing the Locomotion from a big wooden transistor radio.

“Sit down there,” Mart says, pointing at the table, where his meal is laid out on an old red-checked oilcloth. It looks like spaghetti Bolognese, barely started. Cal takes a seat, and Kojak flops down by the fireplace and stretches out with a pleasurable groan.

“Here I thought you’d have your place painted every color of the rainbow,” Cal says. “After all the shit you gave me about plain white.”

“I didn’t paint this place at all,” Mart informs him, with the air of a man scoring a point. He pulls another plate and another mug out of a cupboard and starts scooping spaghetti out of a big pot on the cooker. “My mammy, God rest her, she did it up this way. When I do get around to painting it, you can bet your life it won’t be any plain white.”

“Yeah, but you won’t get around to it,” Cal tells him. He figures it’s past his turn to yank Mart’s chain a little bit. “You can tell yourself whatever you want, but if you haven’t done it by now, it’s because deep down, you like it this way.”

“I do not. It’s the color that’d come out of the arse of a sick sheep. I’m thinking bright blue in here, and yella out in the hall.”

“Won’t happen,” Cal says. “Bet you ten bucks: this time next year, every wall you own is still gonna be sheep-shit green.”

“I’m not putting any deadlines on myself,” Mart says with dignity, setting a heaped plate in front of Cal. “Not to suit you or anyone else. Now: get your laughing-tackle round that.”

The spaghetti needs plenty of chewing and the Bolognese sauce is heavily seasoned with mint, coriander and something that tastes like aniseed. It kind of works, as long as Cal takes it on its own terms.

“It’s good,” he says.

“I like it,” Mart says, pouring Cal tea from a teapot shaped like a Dalek. “And I’ve only myself to please. There’s great freedom in that. As long as the mammy was alive, nothing but good aul’ meat and potatoes came in this house. She’d boil them till you couldn’t tell one from the other if you’d your eyes closed, and no seasoning: she said the spices were half the reason foreign places had the divorce and the gays and all. The spices got in their blood and addled their brains.” He pushes a carton of milk and a bag of sugar across the table to Cal. “Once she was gone, I went a bit experimental for myself. I went into Galway, to one of them fancy yuppie shops, and I bought every spice they had. The brother didn’t like it, but sure, he’d burn water, so he had to lump it. Dig in there, before it goes cold on you.”

He pulls up his chair and settles back to his food. Cal has apparently stumbled on the one circumstance where Mart doesn’t believe in conversation: he eats with a hard worker’s single-minded dedication, and Cal follows his lead. The kitchen is warm from the cooking; outside the window, the hills are soft with mist. Kylie has wrapped it up and another woman starts singing, pure and sweet, with practiced soulfulness: no frontiers . . . In his sleep Kojak makes little huffing noises and twitches his paws, chasing something.

“The rain’ll hold off,” Mart says eventually, pushing his plate away and squinting out the window, “but that cloud’s going nowhere for a while yet. No matter: anything I don’t see, I’ll hear.”

“You gonna be out there again tonight?”

“I will, later on,” Mart says, “but I’m off duty this evening. I might see if P.J. fancies taking the odd shift, if you’ve no objection. I can’t be missing my beauty sleep forever.” In fact he looks surprisingly bright-eyed. The only sign that he spent the night sitting out under a tree is an extra hitch to his movements, like his joints are troubling him more than usual, but he says nothing about it.

“P.J.’s welcome to hang out in my woods,” Cal says. He knows P.J. a little bit: a long-legged, hollow-cheeked guy who nods to Cal over walls without starting conversations, and who sometimes sings as he goes about his evening rounds, melancholy old ballads in a surprisingly poignant tenor. “How long are you gonna give this?”

“Wouldn’t I love to know that myself,” Mart says, topping up his tea. “Whatever this creature is, it’s got to get hungry sooner or later. Or get bored, maybe.”

“Lotta sheep around here,” Cal says. “You got any particular reason to think it’s gonna come after P.J.’s?”

“Well, sure,” Mart says, glancing up from the sugar with his face crinkling into a grin, “I can’t watch every sheep in Ardnakelty. P.J.’s are convenient.”

“Right,” Cal says. He has a strong impression that Mart is keeping something back.

“Besides,” Mart points out, “don’t we know the creature likes this area? And a lot of the other farms around here are cattle, and they mightn’t be any good to it: it mightn’t be big enough to take down a cow. If I was this yokeymajig, P.J.’s is where I’d be heading next.” He taps his temple. “The aul’ psychology,” he explains.

“Never hurts,” Cal says. “Has it been just those two sheep, yours and Bobby Feeney’s? Or has this been going on awhile?”

“There was one other, beginning of the summer. Francie Gannon’s, beside the village.” Mart grins and points his mug at Cal. “Don’t you be going all Columbo on me, now, asking questions. This is under control.”

So the sheep-killing started not long after Brendan went missing. Cal thinks of that tumbledown cottage again, or a cave in the mountainside. There were wild men out his granddaddy’s way, or at least rumors of them. Cal and his buddies never saw them, but they saw campfire sites and snare wires, coolers hidden in underbrush, animal skins pegged to branches to dry, deep in the woods where no one should have been spending any amount of time. One time Cal’s buddy Billy almost fell into an expertly hidden pit trap. Whoever dug it, probably he started out as a restless teenager prowling the perimeter of his life for an escape route.

“Now,” Mart says, scraping back his chair, “I know what you need, to finish off with.” He bends over with a painful grunt, pokes around in a cupboard and comes up holding a packet of cookies. “There you go,” he says, putting it triumphantly on the table. “Time you found out what all the fuss is about.”

He’s so delighted with his inspiration that it would be unmannerly for Cal to refuse. The cookie tastes exactly like it looks: sugar and foam rubber, in a variety of consistencies. “Well,” Cal says. “We don’t get these back home.”

“Have another one there, go on.”

“I’ll leave ’em to you. Not really my style.”

“You can’t be coming over here insulting the Mikados,” Mart says, miffed. “Every child in Ireland is weaned on these.”

“No disrespect intended,” Cal says, grinning. “I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.”

“D’you know what that is?” Mart demands, struck by a thought. “That’s them American hormones. They’re after wrecking your taste buds. The way, when a woman’s pregnant, she’ll eat fruitcake with sardines. Come back to me in a year and try those again, once we’ve got you recalibrated back to normal, and we’ll see what you think of them then.”

“Will do,” Cal says, still grinning. “Cross my heart.”

“Come here to me, Columbo, while I have you,” Mart says, dipping a cookie into his mug. “Tell me you don’t suspect that little scutter Eugene Moynihan of getting at my sheep.”

“Huh?” Cal says.

Mart throws Cal one bright-eyed glance. “I heard you were having a great aul’ chat with him this morning. Were you interrogating him? I’d say he’d crack in minutes, that fella. One stern look offa you and he’d be bawling for his mammy. Was he?”

“Not that I noticed,” Cal says. “But I didn’t give him anything to bawl about.”

“Eugene didn’t touch my ewe,” Mart says. “Nor did Fergal O’Connor.”

“Never thought they did,” Cal says, truthfully.

“So what were you at with them?”

“All I want,” Cal says, with mounting irritation, “is someone who’ll help me rewire my kitchen so I can put in a washing machine and wash my damn underpants in my own home, instead of hauling them to town every week. Only I keep getting the runaround. One guy says I need this guy, so I go looking and nah, he’s not around, I need this other guy. Track him down and he doesn’t know a cable from his ass, I need this other guy. Track him down”—Mart has started giggling—“and he acts like I asked him to unclog my toilet with his bare hands. I’m trying to give work to local folk here, outa plain good manners, but I’m about ready to give up on that bullshit and hire a professional, just so I have that washer before I get too old to work it.”

Mart is wheezing with laughter. “God almighty,” he says, wiping his eyes, “cool your jets there, buckaroo, or you’ll give yourself a heart attack. I’ll find you someone local who’ll put in a washing machine for you. Get you one at a good price too.”

“Well,” Cal says, settling himself down but still a little bit ruffled. “I’d appreciate that. Thanks.”

“And sure, how would Eugene Moynihan be any use to you, anyway? He wouldn’t lower himself to get his hands dirty wiring anything,” Mart points out, with vast scorn. “Who was it told you he would?”

“Well,” Cal says, scratching his beard thoughtfully, “I’m not rightly sure. It was some guy in the pub. He pointed me towards a coupla people who might be able to help me out, but I can’t seem to remember his name—I’d had a few beers when I was talking to him, and I gotta admit, I haven’t got everybody straight yet. Old guy, seems like. Short hair. Few inches taller’n you, maybe, but I could have that wrong. Got a cap.”

“Spanner McHugh? Dessie Mullen?”

Cal shakes his head. “All I know is, he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.”

“Not Dessie, so,” Mart says with finality.

Cal grins. “Well, he didn’t exactly turn out to be on the right track. Mighta been Dessie after all.”

“I’ll ask him. He can’t be sending strangers on wild-goose chases like that. He’ll give us a bad name.” Mart finds his tobacco packet and tilts it at Cal.

“Appreciate the offer, but I better get moving,” Cal says, pushing back his chair and picking up his plate. “Much obliged for the meal.”

Mart cocks an eyebrow. “Where’s the rush? Got a big date?”

“Date with YouTube,” Cal says, putting his plate in the sink. “Seeing as no one else around here is gonna help me rewire my kitchen.”

“Don’t be messing about with that YouTube; you’ll have the place burned to the ground. I told you I’ll get that washer sorted for you.” Mart points his cigarette at Cal. “And come here to me: if you don’t have a date, let you come down to Seán Óg’s tonight.”

“What’s going on?” Cal asks. “It your birthday?”

Mart laughs. “Holy God, no. I gave up them yokes years ago. Just come on down, and you’ll see what you’ll see.” He blows a thin stream of smoke between his teeth and gives Cal an extravagant wink.

Cal leaves him there, tilting his chair back and humming along to Dusty Springfield, and lets himself out. Kojak thumps his tail and rolls one eye at him as he passes. Cal walks home wondering what it was, somewhere around P.J. and his sheep and the killings, that Mart decided not to tell him.

In the end, Trey doesn’t show up till late afternoon. “Hadta do the messages,” he says by way of explanation, knocking mud off his sneakers against the doorstep.

“Well, that’s good,” Cal says. “You gotta help your mama out.” After some bewilderment at the start, he worked out that around here “the messages” is the grocery shopping. One of the reasons he picked Ireland was so he wouldn’t have to learn a new language, but sometimes he feels like the joke is on him.

Trey is wired tight today; Cal can see it, in the jut of his chin and the shift of his feet on the step. He takes a quick glance behind him, like someone might be watching, before he comes inside and shuts the door.

“I was just tidying up this thicket of mine,” Cal says, sweeping beard clippings off the table into the cardboard box he uses as a wastebasket. His beard was getting pretty unruly, and it occurred to him that if he’s going to go round asking nosy questions, it wouldn’t hurt to look respectable. “Whaddaya think?”

Trey shrugs. He fishes a packet out of his parka and hands it to Cal. Cal recognizes the wax-paper packaging: half a dozen sausages, out of Noreen’s fridge. It hits him, all of a sudden, why Trey keeps bringing him things. This is payment.

“Kid,” he says. “You don’t have to bring me stuff.”

Trey ignores this. “Fergal and Eugene,” he says. “What’d they say?”

“Were you following me?” Cal demands.

“Nah.”

“Then how’d you know I already talked to them?”

“Heard Eugene’s mam saying to Noreen, when I was getting the messages.”

“Jesus,” Cal says, heading for the fridge to put the sausages away. “A guy can’t pick his nose around here without the whole townland telling him to wash his hands.” He wonders how much longer he can keep this thing under wraps, and what the townland will think when it comes out. He finds that he has no idea, either of the answer or even of what factors might influence it. “What’d Eugene’s mama say?”

Trey follows him. “Just that you were asking for someone to do wiring. Face on her like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle. What’d they say?”

“How come? She doesn’t like the look of me?”

“ ’Cause Eugene’s too good for that. And ’cause you thought he’d need the bitta extra cash.”

“Well, I’m just a big dumb stranger that doesn’t know his way around,” Cal says. “What’d Noreen say to that?”

“Said there’s no harm in honest work, and a job would do Eugene good. She doesn’t like Mrs. Moynihan. What’d they say?”

The kid is standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, feet planted apart, blocking Cal’s way. Cal can feel him practically vibrating with tension.

“They haven’t heard from your brother since he went, neither one of them. They both think he’s alive, though.” Cal doesn’t miss the slackening of relief in Trey’s spine. Regardless of how sure the kid claims to be about Brendan’s state of mind, he came in here scared that Brendan’s buddies knew different. “And I’ve gotta tell you, kid, they don’t think anyone took him. They think he went of his own accord.”

“They coulda been lying.”

“I was a cop for twenty-five years. I’ve been lied to by the best in the business. You think a big goof like Fergal O’Connor can bullshit me?”

Trey acknowledges that. “Fergal’s thick, but. Just ’cause he thinks something, that doesn’t mean he’s right.”

“I wouldn’t pick him to build me a rocket ship, but he knows your brother. If he thinks Brendan went off . . .”

Trey says, looking Cal straight in the eyes, “Do you think he’s alive?”

Cal knows better than to leave even the smallest pause there. Luckily he also knows what to say, having said it a few hundred times over the years. “I don’t think anything, kid,” he says. “Right now I’m just collecting information. I’ll do my thinking later on, once I’ve got a lot more of that. All I can tell you is, I don’t have one single piece of information that points to him being dead.” All of which is true, and Sheila Reddy’s face as she looked up at the mountains isn’t information. The words still leave a bad taste in Cal’s mouth. It comes to him, more powerfully than ever, that he has got himself into territory he doesn’t understand.

Trey holds that straight stare for another moment, checking for cracks; then he nods, accepting that, and lets his breath out. He heads over to the desk and starts poking at it, seeing what’s left to do.

Cal leans back against the kitchen counter and watches him. “What kinda drugs do you get round here?” he asks.

Trey flashes him a fast, unexpected grin, over his shoulder. “You looking?”

“Funny guy,” Cal says. “I’ll pass, thanks. But say I was. What’s on offer?”

“Lotta hash, lotta benzos,” Trey says promptly. “E, off and on, like. Special K. Coke, sometimes. Acid, sometimes. Shrooms.”

“Huh,” Cal says. He wasn’t expecting a full menu, although maybe he should have been. Lord knows back home the smallest towns, where the kids had nothing else to keep them occupied, were the ones where you could get your hands on any drug you’d heard of and a few you hadn’t. “Crack?”

“Nah. Not that I ever heard.”

“Meth?”

“Not a lot. Few times I heard someone had some.”

“Heroin?”

“Nah. Anyone who gets on that, they leave. Go to Galway, or Athlone. Round here, you wouldn’t know what’d be around when. Junkies haveta know they can get it anytime.”

“The dealers around here,” Cal says. “You know where they get their stuff? Is there some local guy in charge of distribution?”

“Nah. Buncha lads bring it down from Dublin.”

“Did Brendan know these guys? The ones from Dublin?”

“Bren isn’t a dealer,” Trey says, instantly and hard.

“I never said he was,” Cal says. “But you think bad people took him. I need to know what kind of bad people he could’ve run into around here.”

Trey examines the desk, running a fingernail along cracks. “Them Dublin fellas are bad news, all right,” he says in the end. “You’d hear them, sometimes: they come down in them big Hummers, race them across the fields at night, when there’s a moon. Or in the daytime, even. They know the Guards won’t come in time to catch ’em.”

“I’ve heard ’em,” Cal says. He’s thinking about that huddle of guys in the back of the pub, every now and then, guys too young and dressed wrong for Seán Óg’s and eyefucking him for just a second too long.

“Kilt a coupla sheep that way, one time. And they bet up a fella from up near Boyle because he didn’t pay them. Bet him up bad, like. He lost an eye.”

“I know the kind,” Cal says. “They start out dangerous, and they get a whole lot worse if someone pisses them off.”

Trey looks up at that. “Bren couldn’t have pissed them off. He doesn’t even know them.”

“You sure about that, kid? Certain sure?”

“They wouldn’t sell direct to the likes of him, that only does the odd bit here and there. Bren just bought from the local lads, when he wanted something. He wouldn’t be around them fellas.”

Cal asks, “Then who took him? These are the only bad guys anyone’s mentioned around here. You tell me, kid: if not them, then who?”

“They could’ve got it wrong. Got him mixed up with someone else.” Trey scrapes at paint residue with a thumbnail and watches Cal to check what he thinks of this theory.

“Maybe,” Cal says. He can’t imagine any likely way this could have played out, but if Trey needs it, he can keep it, at least for now. “That type mostly aren’t geniuses, I’ll give you that. If Brendan didn’t hang with these guys, who does? Any of his buddies?”

Trey blows out a dismissive puff of air. “Nah. You saw Fergal, and Eugene. You think they’re on the gear?”

“Nah,” Cal says. “Never mind.” He’s thought of one person who knows plenty about the Dublin guys. Donie McGrath has been at the edge of that huddle in the pub, most times.

Trey glances sideways at him, with a glimmer of that grin creeping back. “You ever do any drugs? Before you were a cop, like?”

For a second Cal isn’t sure what to say to this. When Alyssa asked him this same question, the thought of her on drugs kicked him in the stomach so hard that all he could do was tell her stories of things he’d seen and beg her never to go near anything stronger than weed. She hasn’t, as far as he knows, but then she probably wouldn’t have anyway. Here, the right answer could matter.

In the end he goes with the truth. “I tried a few things, back in my wild days. Didn’t like any of ’em one little bit, so I quit trying.”

“What’d you try?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cal says. “I wouldn’t’ve liked anything else any better.” The fact is, everything he tried repelled him with an intensity that startled him and that he was unwilling to admit even to Donna, who back in those days accepted the odd drag or snort with cheerful ease. He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be. They looked you right in the face and saw things that had nothing to do with you. One of the happy side effects of having Alyssa and leaving his wild days behind was not having to hang out with people who were on drugs.

He asks casually, his eyes on the desk, “How ’bout you? You ever try any of that stuff?”

“Nah,” Trey says flatly.

“You sure?”

“No way. Makes you stupid. Anyone could get you.”

“True enough,” Cal says. He’s thrown by the strength of the relief. “I guess if you’re not the trusting type, drugs probably aren’t for you.”

“I’m not.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that. Me neither.”

Trey looks at him. He seems thinner in the face this week, and paler, like this is taking something out of him. He says, “Now what’re you gonna do?”

Cal is still turning that over in his mind; not what to do, exactly, so much as how to go about it. What he does know right now is that the kid needs something good to happen today. He says, “I’m gonna teach you how to use that rifle.”

The kid’s mouth opens and he lights up like Cal just handed him that birthday bike. “Easy, tiger,” Cal says. “You’re not gonna just pick it up and be a sharpshooter. Mostly what you’re gonna do today is learn how not to shoot your foot off, and miss a few beer cans. If we have time, maybe you can miss a few rabbits.”

Trey tries to give him an eye-roll, but he can’t wipe the grin off his face. Cal can’t help grinning back.

“But,” Trey says, his face suddenly falling. “That’s not finished.” He indicates the desk.

“So it’ll get finished some other day,” Cal says, straightening up off the counter. “Come on.”

The gun safe looks out of place on Cal’s bare bedroom floorboards. The only other things in the room are the mattress and sleeping bag, the suitcase where Cal keeps clean clothes and the garbage bag where he keeps dirty ones, and the four damp-mottled indigo walls; amid those, the tall dark metal box has an air of sleek, alien menace. “This is a gun safe,” Cal says, giving the side of it a slap. “My gun stays in here until I’m planning on shooting it, because it’s not a toy and this isn’t a game; this thing was built for killing, and if I ever catch you disregarding that, you’ll never lay a finger on it again. We clear?”

Trey nods, like he’s scared to talk in case Cal changes his mind.

“This,” Cal says, lifting it out, “is a Henry twenty-two lever-action rifle. One of the finest guns ever made.”

“Ah, man,” Trey says, on a reverent rush of breath. “My dad’s gun wasn’t like that.”

“Probably not,” Cal says. Next to the Henry, he finds most other guns seem either runty or bad-tempered. “They used this rifle in the Wild West, on the frontier. If you ever watch old cowboy movies, this is the gun those boys use.”

Trey inhales the scent of gun oil and runs a finger down the rich walnut of the stock. “Beauty,” he says.

“First thing, before you do anything else with it,” Cal says, “you gotta check that it’s unloaded. Magazine comes out like this, lever goes down like this, make sure there’s no round in the chamber.” He slides the magazine tube back into place and holds out the gun to Trey. “Now let’s see you do it.”

The kid’s face when he takes the gun in his hands makes Cal glad he decided to do this. His private opinion about a lot of the baby thugs and delinquents he encountered on the job was that what they really yearned after, whether they knew it or not, was a rifle and a horse and a herd of cattle to drive through dangerous terrain. Given those, plenty of them—not all, but plenty—would have turned out fine. Failing that, they got as close as they could, with results ranging from bad to disastrous.

Trey checks the gun with the same neat-handed, intent care he puts into the desk. “Good,” Cal says. “Now see this here? This is the hammer. You pull it back all the way, it’s cocked, ready to fire. But you bring it back just a little bit, like this, so you hear it click? That means it’s safe. You can pull the trigger all you want, nothing’ll happen. To go from cocked to safe, you ease the trigger back, just a little bit, then click the hammer forwards. Like this.”

Trey does it. His hands on the rifle look little and delicate, but Cal knows he has more than enough strength to handle it. “There you go,” he says. “Now it’s safe. But remember: safe or not, loaded or not, you don’t ever point it at any creature unless you’re prepared to kill it. You got that?”

“I got it,” Trey says. Cal likes the way he says it, with a level unblinking gaze across the gun in his hands. The kid is feeling the weight of this, and he needs that.

“OK,” he says. “Let’s go give it a try.”

He gets the plastic bag where he keeps empty beer cans and gives it to Trey to carry. He puts the rifle on his shoulder, and they go out into air that’s soft and heavy with mist and rich with wet-earth smells. The first of the evening is just starting to seep in; off to the west, where the clouds thin here and there, their edges are gold.

“We need to pick ourselves a good spot,” Cal says. “Somewhere we’re not gonna hit anything we don’t intend to.”

“Will we shoot them?” Trey asks, flicking his chin at the rooks, who are arguing over something in the grass.

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“I like having ’em around,” Cal says. “They’re smart. Besides, I don’t know if they’re good eating, and I don’t kill creatures for kicks. We get something, we’re gonna skin it, gut it, cook it and eat it. You OK with all that?”

Trey nods.

“Good,” Cal says. “How ’bout we set up here?”

The low dry-stone wall of Cal’s back field has clear views of open grass all around; no one can walk into their firing line unexpectedly. It’s also on the side of the land overlooked by silent, incurious P.J., rather than the side overlooked by Mart, although right now even P.J. is nowhere to be seen. They balance beer cans on the rough stones, stacked there who knows how long ago by what ancestors of Mart’s and P.J.’s and Trey’s, and retreat across the field. Their feet swish in the damp grass.

Cal shows Trey how to pull out the magazine tube, drop the bullets into its slot and slide it back into place. They’ve picked a good day: the cloud keeps the low-angled light from dazzling them or throwing shadows, and the breeze is just an easy brush along one cheek. The beer cans are silhouetted sharply against the green fields, like tiny standing stones. The brown mountains rise behind them.

“OK,” Cal says. “You can shoot standing, kneeling, or flat on your belly, but we’re gonna start with kneeling. One leg under you, one knee up. Like this.”

Trey imitates him carefully.

“The stock goes in the hollow of your shoulder, right here. Good and tight against you, so it won’t kick too hard.” The balance of the rifle is perfect; Cal feels like he could kneel there all day long without his muscles getting tired. “See that bead on the end of the barrel? That’s the front sight. This half-moon here, that’s your rear sight. You line up the two of ’em right on your target. I’m aiming for the third can from the left, so I’ve got those sights lined up on it. I’m gonna take a breath and then let it out again, nice and easy, and when all that breath is gone I’m gonna squeeze the trigger. Not hard; this isn’t a gun you need to haul at. It’ll work with you. You just breathe out through your mouth, and then out through the gun. Got it?”

Trey nods.

“Good,” Cal says. “Now let’s see if I still got it.”

Somehow, after all these years, Cal’s eye with a rifle is still there. He knocks the can clean off the wall with a triumphal ring of metal on metal that echoes across the fields, over the gun’s sharp report.

“Ah yeah,” Trey says, awed.

“Well, look at that,” Cal says. He inhales the smell of gunpowder and finds himself smiling. “Your turn.”

The kid holds the rifle well, settling it into his shoulder like it belongs there. “Elbows in. Let your cheek fall against the stock, nice and easy,” Cal says. “Take your time.”

Trey squints down the barrel, carefully picking his can and lining up the sights. “It’s gonna go bang,” Cal says, “and it’s gonna kick into your shoulder a little bit. Don’t get startled.”

Trey is too focused to bother with the eye-roll. Cal hears his long slow breath in and out. He doesn’t wobble in anticipation of the kick, and he doesn’t flinch when it comes. He misses, but not by too much.

“Not bad,” Cal says. “All you need is some practice. Pick up your shell casing; you gotta leave a place the same way you found it.”

They take turns till the magazine is empty. Cal bags himself five beer cans. The kid gets one, which lights him up so vividly that Cal grins and trudges across the field to retrieve the holed can for him. “Here,” he says, passing it over. “You can hang on to that. Your first kill.”

Trey grins back, but then he shakes his head. “My mam’d want to know where I got it.”

“She go through your stuff?”

“Didn’t useta. Only since Brendan went.”

“She’s worried, kid,” Cal says. “She just wants to know that you’re not thinking of going anywhere.”

Trey shrugs, tossing the can into the plastic bag. The light has gone out of his face. “OK,” Cal says. “Now that you’ve got the idea, let’s get ourselves some dinner.”

That pulls the kid back; his head snaps up again. “Where?”

“That piece of woodland over there,” Cal says, nodding towards it. “Rabbits got a bunch of burrows at the edge of that. I see them up feeding most evenings, around this time. Come on.”

They collect the beer cans and set themselves up far enough from the little wood not to spook the rabbits, but close enough that the kid stands a chance. Then they wait. The gold in the west has shifted to pink and the light is starting to fade, turning the fields gray-green and insubstantial. Off in Cal’s garden, the rooks are having their bedtime powwow; distance gentles their racket to a comfortable babble, running under the high scattered chitchat of the smaller birds.

Trey has the rifle resting carefully on his knee, ready to raise. He says, “You said your granddaddy taught you to shoot.”

“That’s right.”

“How come not your dad?”

“Like I told you. He wasn’t around a lot.”

“You said not steady.”

“That’s right.”

Trey thinks this over. “How come your mam didn’t teach you? Was she not steady either?”

“No,” Cal says, “my mama was steady as they come. She worked two jobs to pay our way. Thing is, that meant she wasn’t home enough to watch me. So she sent me to stay with my granddaddy and my grandma, most of the time, till I got big enough to watch myself. And that’s why he’s the one that taught me to shoot.”

Trey absorbs this, watching the edge of the wood. “What jobs?”

“Care assistant in an old folks’ home. And waitressing in a diner, in her time off.”

“My mam used to work in the petrol station up the main road,” Trey says. “When Emer went off, but, there was no one to mind the little ones while we were in school. My granddads and grannies’re all dead.”

“Well,” Cal says, “there you go. People do their best with what they’ve got.”

“What about your brother and sisters? Did they go with you?”

“Well, they’ve got different mamas,” Cal explains. “I’m not sure what-all they did.”

“Your dad was a hoormaster,” Trey says, light dawning.

It takes Cal a second to figure that one out; when he does, he lets out a crack of laughter that he has to stifle. “Yeah,” he says, still laughing. “That about covers it.”

“Shht,” Trey says suddenly, nodding upwards at the wood. “Rabbit.”

Sure enough, at the edge of the wood there’s movement in the long grass. Half a dozen rabbits have come up for their evening feed. They’re at their ease, trying out leaps and lollops just to stretch their legs, pausing now and again to nibble some delicacy.

Cal looks down at Trey, who is nestling the rifle into his shoulder, his whole body alert and eager. His buzzed hair looks like the baby fur on Lena’s puppy. Cal feels an impulse to lay his hand on the top of the kid’s head.

“OK,” he says. “See if you can get us some dinner.”

The bullet zips over the rabbits’ heads, and they leap for the undergrowth and are gone. Trey looks up at Cal, dismayed.

“ ’S OK,” Cal says. “They’ll be back. You got close enough that it’ll take ’em a while, though, and it’s time we were both heading home.” The dusk is coming down thicker; soon enough, Mart or P.J. will be heading for the wood to keep watch.

“Aah! Five more minutes. I almost had that one.”

The kid looks bereft. “So you’ll get one next time,” Cal says. “No rush; they’re not going anywhere. Now lemme show you how to unload.”

They unload the gun and start back across the field towards the house. Trey is whistling to himself, something Cal hasn’t known him to do before, a jaunty little tune that sounds like something that might come out of the tin whistle in Seán Óg’s; like it might be about setting out on a spring morning to see a pretty girl. The rooks are settling down and the first of the night creatures are out: a bat dips over the tree line, and something small scuttles in the long grass at their approach.

“Nice one,” Trey says, glancing up sideways at Cal. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Cal says. “You got a good eye. You’ll learn fine.”

Trey nods and, with nothing left to say, slopes off towards the cover of the hedge. Cal tries to watch after him, but long before he reaches the road he’s invisible, vanished into the dusk.

Cal finds himself curious about what’s going down at Seán Óg’s tonight. He makes a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner and then takes a bath, to spruce himself up for whatever it might be. It’s Saturday, so he phones Alyssa, but she doesn’t pick up.