The Searcher

ELEVEN

When Cal sets out for the pub, the darkness has a sawtooth edge of cold. Smoke is rising from Dumbo Gannon’s chimney, and as Cal passes his house he catches the scent of it, rich and earthy: the turf that people round here cut from peat bogs up in the mountains, dry out, and burn. The fields and hedges seem filled with sharp, restless movement; all the animals are feeling the countdown to winter.

The door of Seán Óg’s opens on brightness and a warm fug, leaping with loud voices and music and curling with smoke. Mart, at his alcove table surrounded by his buddies, lets out a welcoming roar when he sees Cal step in. “The man himself! Come here to me now, Sunny Jim, and take a seat. I’ve something for you.”

Mart’s alcove is crowded: Senan is there, and Bobby, and a bunch of other guys whose names Cal isn’t sure of. All of them have a high-colored, glittery-eyed look, like they’re a lot drunker than Cal would expect at this hour. “Evening,” he says, nodding to them.

Mart moves along the banquette to make room for him. “Barty!” he calls up to the bar. “A pint of Smithwick’s. You know this shower of reprobates, amn’t I right?”

“We’re mostly acquainted,” Cal says, taking off his jacket and settling himself on the banquette. Mart has never invited him into his corner before, except when they need a fourth for cards. Tonight the musical corner has a fiddle and a guitar as well as a tin whistle, and they’re singing some song that involves roaring out “No! Nay! Never!” and hitting the table. Deirdre is singing along, half a beat behind, almost smiling and more animated than Cal has ever seen her. “What’s going on?”

“There’s a gentleman here I’d like you to meet,” Mart says, gesturing with a flourish to a slight, thin-faced guy tucked into a corner. “This is Mr. Malachy Dwyer. Malachy, this is my new neighbor, Mr. Calvin Hooper.”

“Pleasure,” Cal says, shaking hands across Mart and starting to get a clearer sense of what tonight is all about. Malachy has messy brown hair and a dreamy, sensitive look that doesn’t match the wild renegade he was picturing. “I’ve heard plenty about you.”

“Mal, meet Cal,” says Bobby, getting the giggles. “Cal, meet Mal.”

“The state of you,” Senan says in disgust.

“I’m grand,” Bobby says, miffed.

“Mr. Dwyer,” Mart tells Cal, “is the finest distiller in three counties. A master craftsman, so he is.” Malachy smiles modestly. “Every now and then, when Malachy has a particularly fine product on his hands, he’s gracious enough to bring some of it in here to share with us. As a service to the community, you might say. I thought you deserved an opportunity to sample his wares.”

“I’m honored,” Cal says. “Although I feel like if I had any sense I’d be scared, too.”

“Ah, no,” Malachy says soothingly. “It’s a lovely batch.” He produces, from under the table, a shot glass and a two-liter Lucozade bottle half-full of clear liquid. He pours Cal a shot, careful not to spill a drop, and hands it over. “Now,” he says.

The rest of the men watch, grinning in a way that Cal doesn’t find reassuring. The liquor smells suspiciously innocuous. “For Jaysus’ sake, don’t be savoring the bloody bouquet,” Mart orders him. “Knock that back.”

Cal knocks it back. He’s expecting it to go down like kerosene, but it tastes of almost nothing, and the burn doesn’t have enough harshness even to make him grimace. “That’s good stuff,” he says.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Mart says. “Smooth as cream. This fella’s an artist.”

Right then the poteen hits Cal; the banquette turns insubstantial beneath him and the room circles in slow jerks. “Whoo!” he says, shaking his head.

The alcove roars with laughter, which comes to Cal as a pulsing jumble of sound some distance away. “That’s some serious firepower you got there,” he says.

“Sure, that was only to give you the flavor of it,” Malachy explains. “Wait till you get started.”

“Last year,” Senan tells Cal, jerking a thumb at Bobby, “this fella here, after a few goes of that stuff—”

“Ah, now,” Bobby protests. People are grinning.

“—he got up out of that seat and started shouting at the lot of us to bring him to a priest. Wanted to make his confession. At two o’clock in the morning.”

“What’d you done?” Cal asks Bobby.

He’s not sure whether Bobby will hear him, since he’s finding it hard to gauge exactly how far apart they are, but it works out fine. “Porn,” Bobby says with a sigh, leaning his chin on his fist. The drink has given him an air of dreamy melancholy. “On the internet. Nothing shocking, like; just people having a bit of a rattle. It didn’t even download right. But whatever was in that batch of Malachy’s, it gave me palpitations, and I got it in my head I was having a heart attack. I thought I oughta confess my sins, in case I died, like.”

Everyone is laughing. “That wasn’t my stuff giving you them palpitations,” Malachy tells him. “That was your guilty conscience coming out.” Bobby tilts his head, acknowledging the possible justice of this.

“Did you take him to a priest?” Cal asks.

“We did not,” says Senan. “We put him in the back room to sleep it off. Told him we’d say the rosary over him till he woke up.”

“They didn’t do it,” Bobby says, aggrieved. “They forgot I was there at all. I woke up the next morning and thought I was dead.”

That gets another wave of laughter, and Cal is swept along, rocking helplessly with it. “He was still half cut,” Senan says. “Rang me asking was he dead, and what should he do about it.”

“At least,” Bobby says with dignity, raising his voice to be heard, “I never broke my nose trying to jump a wall I hadn’t leaped since I was eighteen—”

“Damn near made it,” Mart says, lifting his pint and winking at the rest.

“—or took a dare and knocked on aul’ Mrs. Scanlan’s window buck naked and got cold water thrown on me.”

A guy on the far edge of the group gets a collective whoop of approval and a couple of back-slaps, and shakes his head, grinning. Cal likes seeing them all this way, the wild boys shining through the solid farmers. For a moment he wonders which one of them was Brendan back in the day, the restless one on the hunt for hustles and escape routes, and how he ended up.

“Have another one there,” Mart says, eyes alight with mischief, reaching for the bottle. “You’ve some catching up to do.”

Cal is surface drunk but not deep-down drunk, and he reckons he ought to keep it that way. Booze has never bothered him the way drugs do—it doesn’t hollow out reality, and people, in the same way—but the air of this room has a high giddy spin, like under the right circumstances things could get out of control with free-fall speed, and this situation has a flavor of initiation rite that could well turn out to be the right circumstances. “Sounds to me like I should take it slow,” he says. “So I don’t wind up buck naked outside Miz Scanlan’s window.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Mart assures him. “Sure, it could happen to a bishop.”

“You boys were weaned on this stuff,” Cal points out. “If I try to keep up with you, I’m gonna end up going blind.”

“Not on mine, you won’t,” Malachy says, his professional pride touched.

“Ah, stop your fussing and foostering, man,” Mart orders Cal. “You’re not some tourist that comes in for a pint of Guinness with the quaint natives and then heads back to his hotel. You’re a local man now; you’ll do as we do. Don’t be telling me you never done anything mad on the gargle before.”

“Mostly just crashed parties,” Cal says. “Made friends with some strangers, sang some songs. Stole the occasional street sign. Nothing fancy like you guys get up to.”

“Well,” Mart says, putting the glass back into Cal’s hand, “we’ve no street signs and no strangers handy, and you’re already at the only party around, so let’s get you singing.”

“Are you going to carry him home?” Barty demands, from behind the bar. “The size of him.”

“Sure, isn’t that my point exactly,” Mart says. “It’ll take more than the one to do the job on a fella his size. More than the two, but we’ll start there and see where we get.”

What makes up Cal’s mind isn’t the fact that quitting now would earn him an ineradicable reputation as a pussy and a tourist, or at least not primarily. What does it is the effortless rhythms of the talk snapping back and forth across the table. Cal has been missing the company of men he’s known a long time. His four best buddies were among the reasons he left Chicago; the depth and detail with which they knew him had come to feel unsafe, something to be kept at as much distance as possible. By that point he couldn’t be sure what there might be, inside him, that they would spot before he did. All the same, somewhere in the back of his head, his hunger for an evening in the bar with them has grown, so gradually that he’s only just noticing its magnitude. He may not know these men, but they know each other, and there’s comfort in being around that.

He resigns himself to the likelihood of waking up in a ditch with his pants missing and a goat tied to his leg. “Here’s mud in your eye,” he says, and throws back the shot, which is considerably larger than the first one. There’s a burst of half-mocking cheers.

This one smooths everything over. The room starts moving again and the banquette turns even mistier, but this feels only natural and right. Cal is glad he did this. He almost laughs at how close he came to chickening out.

In the other corner, the song builds to a crescendo, ends on a whoop, and dissolves in a round of applause. “Isn’t that great timing,” Mart says. “What’s your song, boyo?”

Cal’s song, at parties that went this way, was always “Pancho and Lefty.” He opens his mouth and starts to sing. Cal is no opera singer, but he can carry a tune, and he has a deep rambling voice that holds a room and suits a song about open spaces. The last of the applause trickles off, and people lean back in their seats to listen. The man with the guitar picks up the shape of the song and sends a loose, pensive river of notes drifting alongside it.

When Cal finishes there’s a moment of silence, before the burst of clapping. Hands reach out to slap him on the back, and someone shouts to Barty to get him another pint. Cal grins, pleased and all of a sudden a little bit startled at himself. “Well done,” Mart says in his ear. “That’s a fine pair of lungs you’ve got on you.”

“Thanks,” Cal says, reaching for his beer. He finds himself a bit sheepish, not about the singing itself but at the unfeigned approval around the table and the depth of the pleasure he takes in it. “I enjoyed that.”

“Sure, we all did. ’Tis great to have someone who can spice up the aul’ singsong. We’ve all been listening to each other all our lives; we need the new blood.”

The guy who showed up buck naked at Mrs. Scanlan’s window starts singing, in a clear tenor: “Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by . . .” The musicians take up the tune, and a few people hum along in a deep soft underscore. Mart tilts his head back to listen, his eyes half closed.

“When I was a young lad,” he says, after a while, “you’d never have a night out without a bit of a singsong. Do the young people still sing at all, except when they’re trying to get themselves on the telly?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Cal says. He wonders if Alyssa and her friends sing at parties. You need someone with a guitar, mostly, to start things off. Ben is the type of guy who would consider learning an instrument to be frivolous. “Been a while since I was young.”

“Come here to me, Sunny Jim,” Mart says. “You’re sure you want someone to rewire that kitchen, are you?”

“Huh?” Cal says, blinking at him.

“I’m not putting my reputation on the line,” Mart explains, “getting one of these lads to take time out of his busy schedule, and then have you change your mind on us. Do you want the job done?”

“Sure,” Cal says. “Course I do.”

“Then it’s as good as done,” Mart says, clapping him on the shoulder and breaking into a grin. “Locky! Mr. Hooper needs his kitchen rewired, and he needs a dacent washer that won’t cost the earth. Can you look after that for him?”

“I can, o’ course,” says a stocky guy with little eyes and a drinker’s nose. Locky doesn’t look all that reliable to Cal, but he doesn’t feel he’s in a position to express any doubts, even if he were sober enough to frame them delicately, which he isn’t. “Give me a few days and I’ll be down to you.”

“Good man,” Mart says happily, beckoning for the Lucozade bottle, which has worked its way around the pub and back again. “Now, mister: there’ll be no more need for you to go chasing uppity young lads all over the townland, getting yourself all worked up and frustrated. Locky’ll have you sorted inside the fortnight.”

“Well, thank you,” Cal says. “I appreciate that.”

Mart fills Cal’s shot glass and raises his own. “No bother. We have to look after each other around here. No one else is going to do it, amn’t I right?”

They clink glasses and drink. Cal comes unmoored from the room again, but this time he’s expecting it and finds himself able to enjoy the ride. The buck-naked window guy finishes his song and nods gravely at the round of applause, and the far corner strikes up something smart and snappy that starts “Whatever you say, say nothing.”

“Now that I have you loosened up,” Mart says, louder, pointing his glass at Cal. “How’re you getting on with the lovely Lena?”

That gets a scattering of whoops and laughter from the other men. “She’s a nice lady,” Cal says.

“She is. And since I was good friends with her daddy, God rest him, I think I should ask you: what’s your intentions there?”

“Well,” Cal says, taking it slowly and carefully, “I might intend to take one of her pups. But I haven’t made my mind up yet.”

Mart is shaking his head vigorously and waving a finger at Cal. “Ah no no no. That won’t do at all. You can’t be leading on a fine woman like Lena Dunne and then letting her down.”

“I only met her twice,” Cal points out.

“We’ve got the bloody village matchmaker here,” someone says.

“Even if I was,” Mart tells him, “there’s nothing I could do for the likes of you. I like to see people settled and happy, is all. This fella needs a woman.”

“No point in him courting Lena,” a deep voice says from the corner of the alcove, “if he’ll be heading back off to Yankeestania before the winter’s out.”

There’s a splinter of a pause. Across the pub, the tin whistle lets out an ear-piercing trill.

“He’s going nowhere,” Mart says, a little bit louder, glancing around the table to make sure everyone hears him. “This man’s a fine neighbor, and I’m planning to hang on to him.” He adds, with a grin to Cal, “Sure, none of this shower would be arsed getting me them biscuits.”

“If Lena won’t have him,” someone else says, “we’ll sort him out with Belinda.”

There’s a burst of laughter. Cal can’t get the flavor of it. There’s mockery in it, but around here mockery is like rain: most of the time it’s either present or incipient, and there are at least a dozen variants, ranging from nurturing to savage, and so subtly distinguished that it would take years to get the hang of them all.

“Who’s Belinda?” he asks.

“A blow-in, like yourself,” Senan says, grinning. “D’you fancy the redheads?”

“I wouldn’t say the carpet matches the curtains there,” someone else says.

“What would you know? You haven’t been next nor near a woman since Elvis was number one.”

“That’s not what your sister says.”

“Go on outa that. My sister’d roll the likes of you into a ball and use you to polish her floors.”

“Belinda’s an English one,” Mart tells Cal, taking pity on him. “She has a wee cottage up by Knockfarraney, been there near twenty year. Mad as a brush, so she is. Covered in great big purple shawls and jewelry with Celtic yokes on. She came here because she thought she’d have the best chance at meeting the Little People round this way.”

“Did she?” Cal asks. “Meet them?” The room is still realigning its angles every time he blinks, but less dramatically.

“She says she gets glimpses of them at the full moon,” Mart says, grinning. “Out in the fields, like, or in the woods. She does paint pictures of them and sell them in the tourist shops in Galway.”

“I seen her paintings,” someone says. “They’ve some fine sets of knockers on them, the Little People. I’ll have to start spending more time in them fields at night myself.”

“Off you go. You might be lucky and meet Belinda.”

“Dancing round a fairy ring in the nip.”

“Tell her you’re the king of the fairies.”

“Belinda’s grand,” Mart says. “She may be a Sassenach and she may be gone in the head, but there’s no harm in her. She’s not like your man Lord Muck.”

They all laugh. The mockery is right up front this time, loud and ferocious, an aggression.

“Who’s Lord Muck?” Cal asks.

“No need to worry your head about him,” Senan says, reaching for his pint, still grinning. “He’s gone.”

“Another blow-in,” Mart says. “Englishman. He was here for a bit of peace, so he could write a great novel. About a genius who rides the arse off a load of young ones because his wife doesn’t appreciate his poems.”

“I’d read that book,” someone says.

“You never read a book in your life,” someone else tells him.

“How would you know?”

“What’ve you read? Bitta Shakespeare, is it?”

“I’d read that one.”

“If it was a picture book.”

Mart ignores this. He says, “About eight year ago, it was, Lord Muck moved here.”

“All ready to civilize us savages,” Senan says.

“Ah, no,” Mart says fairly. “He started out grand. Lovely manners on him: always Excuse me, Mr. Lavin, and Might I trouble you, Mr. Lavin.” Senan snorts. “Don’t be jeering, you. A few more manners would do you no harm.”

“D’you want me to call you Mr. Lavin, is it?”

“Why not? Bring a bit of elegance to this aul’ place. You can bow to me off your tractor, when you go past.”

“I will in me arse.”

“Where it all went off the rails,” Mart tells Cal, settling to his story, “is when Lord Muck found out about the badger-baiting. D’you know what that is?”

“Not exactly,” Cal says. The first violent flare of the poteen is dying down, but it still feels smarter to stick to short sentences.

“It’s against the law,” Mart says, “but the cattlemen don’t like the badgers. They spread TB to the cattle, d’you see? The government does cull them, but some of the men, they prefer to take matters into their own hands. They’ll send a coupla terriers into a sett to find the badger, and then the men’ll dig it out. They might shoot it or they might let the dogs finish it, depending what kind of men they are.”

“A few of the lads were making plans one night, in here,” Senan says. “And didn’t Lord Muck overhear them.”

“He didn’t approve of that carry-on, at all,” someone else says. “Outrageous, it was.”

“Persecuting the helpless creatures.”

“Disgraceful.”

“Barbaric.”

The men laugh again. This time there’s a low rumble to it, a dark layer running underneath.

“The English are pure mad,” Mart tells Cal. “They’ve more compassion for animals than they have for any human being. There’s childer going hungry in that fella’s own country, his army does bomb the living shite outa civilians all round the Middle East, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid, but the thought of that badger had him almost in tears. And him only on his second pint.”

“Fuckin’ sap,” says Senan.

“I don’t like the badger-baiting myself,” Mart says. “I done it once, when I was a young lad, and I never done it again. But I don’t have cattle. If a man’s afraid the badgers’ll ruin his livelihood, it’s not my place to tell him to sit back and hope for the best. And if it’s not my place, then it’s not the place of some blow-in that was never on a farm in his life except to write a poem about it.”

“A pity Lord Muck didn’t see it that way,” Senan says.

“He did not,” Mart says. “Lord Muck showed up at that sett on the night, with a big torch in one hand and a video camera in the other.”

“Screaming and yelling out of him,” someone else says, “about how he was going to take his footage to the Gardaí and the television.”

“He’d have the whole townland thrown in jail. Get the bloody rotten operation shut down.”

“He never got that footage to the Gardaí and the media,” Malachy says, “the poor creature. Somehow or another, his video camera didn’t survive the night.”

“Ah, he smashed it himself,” someone says. “Throwing himself about like a lunatic, he was.”

“Trying to batter people away from the sett with that torch.”

“Gave himself a bloody nose with it.”

“Coupla black eyes, and all.”

“One of the dogs went for him, and didn’t the little fucker up and kick it in the ribs. Some animal-lover, hah?”

“He shot John Joe in the arm,” Bobby says impressively.

“What are you on about?” Senan demands. “What the hell would he shoot John Joe with?”

“A gun. What the hell do people usually—”

“How would he hold a gun? He’d the torch in one hand, the video camera in the other—”

“How would I know how he held it?”

“—he wasn’t a fuckin’ octopus—”

“Maybe he’d the torch in his teeth.”

“Then how did he shout at them?”

Bobby says stubbornly, “All I know is, John Joe showed me the bullet wound.”

“Your man caught John Joe a clatter with his torch, is all he ever done. If John Joe showed you a bullet wound, he done it to himself; that fella wouldn’t know one end of a rifle from . . .”

An impassioned all-parties argument gets under way, and Cal is left looking at Mart, who is smiling back at him.

“Don’t be listening to them eejits,” Mart tells him, “about Belinda. She’d have your head melted. She’d want you out dancing round fairy rings at the full moon, and you haven’t the build for it. You stick to Lena.”

Cal’s sense of distance is still screwy; Mart’s face seems very close, and slightly watery around the edges. “So,” Cal says, “Lord Muck doesn’t live round here any more.”

“I’d say he went back to England,” Mart says, considering the possibilities. “He’d be happier there. I wonder if he ever got that novel written.”

Cal says, “What you guys do to badgers is none of my business.”

“I don’t do anything to badgers,” Mart reminds him. “Sure, I said that already. I don’t believe in harming any creature unless there’s a need.”

Cal would like his head to be a lot clearer. He takes a swig of his beer, in the hope that it might dilute the poteen in his blood.

“D’you know what you did that was great,” Mart says, aiming a knobbly finger at Cal, “when you first moved in? You asked for advice. Always asking me what was the best builders’ providers, and what to do about the septic tank. I thought well of you for that. It takes a wise man to spot when he needs the bitta advice from someone that knows his way around. This fella won’t end up like Lord Muck, I thought to myself; this fella’ll do grand.” He peers reproachfully at Cal, through the haze of smoke that has thickened in the air. “And then you stopped altogether. What happened there, boyo? Did I lead you astray some way, and you never told me?”

“Not that I know of,” Cal says. “Did you?”

“I did not. So why are you not asking my advice any more? Do you not think you need it, hah? You’ve got the measure of this place now, you’re grand on your own?”

“OK,” Cal says. “Gimme some advice.”

“Now,” Mart says approvingly. “That’s better.”

He settles himself deeper into the banquette and gazes up at the damp-stains on the ceiling. The music has slowed to something old and haunting, the tin whistle spinning a tune whose shapes are strange to Cal, the fiddle a long low drone underneath.

“After the brother died,” Mart says, “I was at a bit of a loose end. All on my ownio in them dark winter evenings, no one to chat to. I wasn’t myself, like; my mind wouldn’t settle. ’Twasn’t healthy. So I’ll tell you what I did. I went into a bookshop in Galway, and I got them to order me a load of books on the aul’ geology. I read them books from cover to cover. I can tell you everything there is to know about the geology round here.”

He points at the little window, coated thickly with darkness. “D’you know those mountains out there,” he says, “where you went for your wee bit of a saunter the other day? Those are red sandstone. Four hundred million years ago, those were laid down, when the land was right down by the equator. ’Twasn’t green then; it was nothing but red desert, hardly a living thing on it. But it got the rain then, too, torrents of it. If you go up in those mountains and you dig about a bit, you’ll find layers of pebbles and sand and muck, and that tells you there were flash floods out in that desert. A few million years after that, a coupla continents smashed into each other, and they crumpled up those mountains like bits of paper; that’s why some of those rocks do be standing up vertical. A volcano shot rocks into the air and sent lava flowing down the mountainside.”

He reaches for his pint, smiling at Cal. “When you went for your wee wander,” he says, “that’s what you were wandering over. It’s a great comfort to me, knowing that. The things we do up those mountains, your walk and Malachy’s still and all the rest of it, they don’t make a blind bit of difference. No more than the midges.”

He raises his pint to Cal and takes a long swallow. “That’s what I did,” he says, wiping foam off his lip, “when I caught my mind getting restless.”

Cal says, “I don’t know if geology’s my style.”

“Doesn’t have to be the geology,” Mart reassures him. “Whatever you fancy yourself. Astronomy, maybe—sure, haven’t you the whole sky at your disposal, now you’re away from the city lights? Get yourself an aul’ telescope and a few charts, and away you go. Or a bitta Latin might suit you. You strike me as a man who never got all the education he could handle. We’ve a great tradition here of going out and getting our own education, if no one offers it to us on a plate. Seeing as you’re here now, it’s only right you should join in.”

“Is this like buying Bobby a harmonica?” Cal asks. “Keep me busy, so I don’t start doing crazy shit?”

“I’m looking out for you, is all,” Mart says. The twist of mockery is, for once, gone from his voice; his eyes are steady on Cal’s. “You’re a dacent man, and I’d like to see you happy here. You deserve that.”

He claps Cal on the shoulder, his face breaking into a grin. “And if you go alien-mad like Bobby, I’m the one that’ll have to listen to you. Get yourself a telescope. And go on up there and get me a pint, in exchange for all that good advice.”

By the time Cal returns, walking very carefully, with Mart’s pint and his own, the conversation is clearly over: Mart is deep in an argument with a couple of the guys about the relative merits of two TV game shows Cal has never heard of, and breaks off only long enough to throw Cal a wink as he takes his glass.

The night goes on. The argument about TV shows gets heated enough that Cal keeps a hand on the table in case someone tries to turn it over, and then somehow dissipates in a burst of insults and laughter. Deirdre sings “Crazy” in a mournful contralto, her head thrown back and her eyes closed. The Lucozade bottle empties, and Malachy produces another one from under the table. The musical corner takes off into a wild reel that has people stamping and slapping tables to the beat.

“D’you know what we thought when you first came?” Bobby shouts over the music, louder than necessary, to Cal. His hair is straggling out of its neat combover and he’s having trouble focusing on Cal’s face. “We thought you were one of them American preachers, and you’d be standing in the road shouting about Judgment Day.”

“I didn’t,” Senan says. “I thought you were one of them hipster shites and you’d be asking Noreen for avocados.”

“It was the beard that done it,” Mart explains to Cal. “We don’t see many like that around here. It needed accounting for.”

“This fella thought you were on the run,” someone else says, nudging his neighbor.

“Just lazy,” Cal says. “I let the shaving slide for a while, and next thing you know, this happened.”

“We’ll give you a hand with that,” the deep-voiced guy in the corner says.

“I’ve got used to it,” Cal says. “I think I’ll hang on to it a while longer.”

“Lena’s got a right to see what’s under there, before she gets herself into anything.”

“You’ll be only gorgeous.”

“Noreen’s got razors.”

“Barty! Give us the shop key there!”

They’re all grinning at Cal, leaning forwards, glasses going down. The reel beats in the air like a pulse.

Cal has been sizing them up all evening, just in case. The deep-voiced guy in the corner is his top priority. He and Senan are going to be trouble, and probably Malachy; if Cal can take care of them, the rest are likely to back down. He readies himself, as best he can.

“Get outa that,” Mart tells them, throwing an arm around Cal’s shoulders. “I told ye all from the start, this fella was sound as a pound. And wasn’t I right? If he wants a big Chewbacca head on him, he can have one.”

For a moment the alcove is still, balanced on the edge and ready to tip either way. Then Senan roars with laughter and the rest join in, like they were just kidding all along. “The face on him,” someone says, “thought he was about to be fuckin’ sheared like a sheep,” and someone else shouts, “Look at him there, ready to take on the lot of us! Get up, ya boy ya!”

They settle back into their seats, still laughing, with their eyes still on Cal, and someone shouts to Barty to bring this madman another pint. Cal stares right back at them and laughs as long and loud as the rest. He wonders which of these men is the most likely to spend his nights in a field with a sheep and a sharp knife.

Senan sings something in what must be Irish, long melancholy phrases with a quaver at the end, his head back and his eyes closed. The deep-voiced guy, whose name turns out to be Francie, slides over to introduce himself to Cal; this somehow spirals into a full account of how Francie’s true love left him because he had to look after his mother through her twelve-year decline, a story heartrending enough that Cal is moved to buy Francie a pint and they both need another shot of poteen. At some point Deirdre is gone, and so is the buck-naked window guy. Someone sets off the rubber fish behind the bar when Barty isn’t looking, and they all sing “I Will Survive” along with it, at the top of their lungs.

By the time people start to leave, Cal is drunk enough to accept a ride home from Mart, mainly out of a confused feeling that it would be uncivil to refuse, given that he owes Mart his beard. Mart sings all the way, in a cracked tenor with surprising volume, jaunty songs about girls who are all the prettiest in town, with some of the words missing. Cold air streams through the open windows, and the clouds are breaking up so that stars and darkness whisk dizzyingly across the windshield. At every pothole the car soars. Cal figures either they’ll get home or they won’t, and joins in on the choruses.

“Now,” Mart says, pulling up with a jolt outside Cal’s gate. “How’s the aul’ stomach holding up?”

“Pretty good,” Cal says, fumbling for his seat-belt clip. His phone buzzes in his pocket. It takes him a moment to work out what on earth that might be. Then it comes to him that it must be Alyssa, WhatsApping him: Sorry I missed you, catch you later! He leaves the phone where it is.

“It is, of course. No better man.” Mart’s wispy gray hair is sticking straight out on one side of his head. He looks beatifically happy.

“Barty looked pretty glad to get rid of us,” Cal says. The last time he looked at his watch, it was three in the morning.

“Barty,” Mart says with magnificent scorn. “Sure, that pub’s not even rightly his. He only got his hands on it because Seán Óg’s son fancied himself sitting in an aul’ office, the big jessie. He can put up with us having a wee carouse every now and again.”

“Should I have given Malachy a coupla bucks?” Cal asks. “For the”—he can’t come up with the right word—“the ’shine?”

“Sure, I looked after all that,” Mart tells him. “You can sort me out some other time. You’ll have plenty of oppornoon—opteroon—” He waves a hand at Cal and gives up.

“Whoops,” Cal says, as he clambers out of the car. He regains his footing. “Thanks for the ride. And the invitation.”

“That was some night, bucko,” Mart says, leaning over a little too far to talk through the passenger window. “You’ll remember that one, hah?”

“Not sure I’ll remember a damn thing,” Cal says, which makes Mart laugh.

“Arrah, you’ll be grand. Get a good sleep, that’s all you need.”

“I intend to,” Cal says. “You too.”

“I will,” Mart says. His face crunches into a grin. “Here I was planning on taking over guard duty from P.J. halfway through the night, d’you remember? I shoulda known better. That was never on the cards. But I’ve been an optimist all my life.” He waves to Cal and revs off up the road, taillights weaving.

Cal decides not to bother getting as far as the house just yet. Instead he lies down on his grass and looks up at the stars, which are thick and wild as dandelions right across the sky. He thinks about that telescope Mart suggested, and decides it wouldn’t suit him. He feels no urge to understand the stars better; he’s contented with them as they are. It’s always been a trait of his, whether for better or for worse, to prefer setting his mind to things he can do something about.

After a while, he sobers up enough to feel the rocks poking at his back and the cold seeping into him. It also occurs to him, gradually, that it might not be smart to lie out here with something or someone on the loose that takes the throats out of sheep.

When he picks himself up his head spins, and he has to lean over with his hands on his thighs for a little bit till it stops. Then he trudges across the lawn, which feels very wide and bare, towards his house. There’s no movement in the fields, and no sound in the hedges or the branches; the night has come to its deepest point, the deserted pre-dawn borderland. His clump of woods is a dense smudge against the stars, silent and still. Mart’s house is dark.