The Searcher

NINETEEN

Hunger finally rouses Trey, and Cal makes them both peanut butter sandwiches and then locks Trey in again so he can head into town. Even if Donie called Austin straightaway, this is hardly going to be high enough on Austin’s priority list to make him leap into action, but Cal still wants to be back home by dark. As he backs out of his driveway, the house, low and stolid amid his overgrown fields and the brown smudge of mountains on the horizon, looks very far away from anything else.

On the drive, he phones Lena. “Hey,” he says. “How’re the dogs doing?”

“Grand. Nellie destroyed one of my shoes to punish me, but it was an old one.” In the background, men’s voices are calling back and forth. She’s at work. “How’s Trey?”

“OK. Still kinda shaky, but better. How ’bout you? Did the aches and pains wear off yet?”

“You mean,” Lena says, “have I blocked it out enough that I’d be on for doing it all over again.”

“Well,” Cal says, “that too. The kid wants to stay one more night at my place. Would you help me out again? If I get that mattress?”

After a moment Lena makes a sound that could be laughter or exasperation, or both. “You should’ve just taken the pup,” she says. “It would’ve been less hassle.”

“It’s just one more night.” Cal is pretty sure this is true. This isn’t something he can let lie for any length of time. “You could bring Nellie, if you want. Keep the rest of your shoes out of danger.” He doesn’t mention the part where a beagle’s alert ears might come in handy, but he’s pretty sure Lena catches it anyway.

The men’s voices get smaller; Lena is moving away from them. She says, “One more night. If you get that air mattress.”

“Heading there now,” Cal says. “Thank you. If ever you need a favor, you know where to come.”

“Next time one of the pups gets the runs all over the floor, I’m ringing you.”

“I’ll be there. Can I invite you to join us for dinner?”

“No, I’ll make my own and call over to you after. Around eight, say. Can the two of ye protect yourselves till then?”

“We’ll do our best,” Cal says. “While I’m pushing my luck, could you do me one more favor? Can you call Sheila Reddy and tell her Trey’s OK?”

There’s a silence.

“She oughta know,” Cal says. He’s not feeling particularly warm towards Sheila, but it wouldn’t be right to leave her wondering if Trey is helpless or dying somewhere on the mountainside. “Just tell her the kid’s safe, is all.”

“Ah, yeah, right. And when she asks where Trey is, I just say I’ve no clue, is it? Or I say, ‘Ha ha, not telling,’ and hang up on her?”

“Just tell her, I don’t know, tell her the kid doesn’t want to talk to her right now, but she’ll be home tomorrow. Something like that.” Into another silence that has a distinct air of raised eyebrows, he says: “I’d do it myself, except Sheila might get upset if she finds out the kid’s staying at my house. I don’t want her calling the police on me. Or banging on my door.”

“But it’s grand if she does that on me, yeah?”

“She won’t call the cops on you. If she comes to your place, you can show her you don’t have the kid. And if she comes after eight, you won’t be there anyway.”

After a minute Lena says, “I’d be happier if I could figure out how I ended up in the middle of this.”

“Yeah,” Cal says. “Me too. The kid’s got a gift.”

“I’ve to go,” Lena says. “See you later.” And she hangs up. Cal thinks of the array of sound effects Donna would have come up with to convey the iceberg-tip of her feelings about this situation. He actually thinks about phoning her and telling her the whole story, just for the pleasure of hearing them one more time, but he doubts she would appreciate this the way he intends it.

Town has a weekday briskness, old women steaming along with wheeled shopping bags, young ones juggling strollers and shopping and phones, old guys having stick-waving conversations on corners. Cal has some trouble tracking down an inflatable mattress, but eventually the guy in the hardware store disappears into his back room for a long time and comes back with two of them, both coated in dust and sticky cobwebs. Cal takes them both. Even if he welcomed the prospect of a night in his armchair, a lone mattress might give Lena the impression that he has expectations.

In a shop hung with an impressive variety of resigned polyester-based clothing that explains Sheila’s sweater, he finds a wire bin of polyester-based bedding, an extra duvet and a couple of pillows, as well as a set of pajamas, a blue hoodie and a pair of jeans that look to be around Trey’s size. He loads up his supermarket cart with steak, potatoes, vegetables, milk, eggs, the most nourishing stuff he can find. While he’s at it, he picks up a packet of Mart’s cookies. He needs an excuse to go over and let Mart rib him about Lena, before Mart gets impatient enough to try calling round again.

Evening works its way in earlier, these days. By the time Cal leaves town, the light is lowering, throwing great swathes of shadow across the fields. He heads for home faster than he should, on these roads.

He’s still figuring out how to approach Austin. Back on the job, he would have been going in equipped with an elaborate range of sticks and carrots in every shape, size and specification. He watches the slim low moon hanging in a lavender sky and the fields deepening with dusk as they flow past his windows, and feels the wide immensity of his empty-handedness all over again.

Austin isn’t going to talk to an ex-cop, he’s not going to take kindly to a business rival, and he’s not going to give a random civilian the time of day. Cal figures his best bet is to go in as a guy who used to be in the life, retired before his luck could run out, and moved far from home so he wouldn’t get sucked back in or tracked down: tough enough to keep Trey in check and to merit some respect, not active enough to be a threat.

He realizes that he’s thinking like a detective again, but not the kind of detective he ever was. This is undercover thinking. Cal never liked undercover work, or the guys who did it. They moved in an atmosphere of funhouse-mirror fluidity, and had a nimble, flyweight ease with it, that made him edgy down to his bones. He’s starting to feel that they would fit in around these parts a lot better than he does.

By the time he parks in his driveway, his house is two lighted rectangles and a roofline against indigo sky and first stars. Cal gets out of his truck and goes around to the back to get out the air mattresses. When he registers the rush of feet in long grass, he has just time to spin round and see the dark shapes in near-darkness charging towards him, just time to grab at the spot where his Glock should be, before something rough and dusty comes down over his head and he’s yanked backwards off his feet and slammed down flat.

The fall winds him. He heaves for breath, uselessly, like a fish mouthing at air. Then something hard smashes down on his collarbone. He hears the dull clunk of it striking bone and feels himself splinter. He heaves for breath again, pain shears through his collarbone and this time he manages a lungful of dust and grit, mixed with barely enough air.

He twists sideways, wheezing, his mouth clogged with rough fabric, and flails out blind. He grabs an ankle and yanks with all his might, and feels the thud in the ground as the man goes down. A kick in the back makes him let go. The hard thing cracks into his kneecap, the pain whips his breath away again, and a small clear part of his mind realizes that there’s more than one of them and that he is fucked.

A man’s voice says, into his face, “You mind your own business. D’you hear me?”

Cal punches out, connects and hears the man grunt. Before he can get his knees under him, the hard thing slams into his nose and it explodes, pain blooming dazzlingly bright all through his head. He breathes blood, gags on it, retches it up in great helpless hacks. Then the air splits open with a great roar and Cal thinks they’ve hit him again, thinks this is it, and then everything stops.

In the silence a hard clear voice, some way away, shouts out, “Don’t fuckin’ move!”

It takes Cal a moment to make sense of the sound, through the insistent singing fog of blood and stars, and another to identify it as Trey’s voice. In the third moment, he realizes that Trey just shot off the Henry.

Trey shouts, “Where’s Brendan?”

Nothing moves. Cal scrabbles at the cloth covering his head, but his fingers are useless with shaking. A man’s voice shouts, very nearby, “Put that down, you little scut!”

The Henry roars again. There’s a raw yell of pain from behind Cal’s head, then a rising gibber of voices.

“What the hell—”

“Jesus Christ—”

“I told ye don’t move!”

“I’m fuckin’ shot, she fuckin’ shot me—”

“Where’s my brother or I’ll kill the fuckin’ lot of ye!”

Somehow Cal manages to get a grip on the bag and pull it off his head. The world tilts and seethes and he can see only one thing clearly: a lighthouse beam of gold spreading across the grass, and at its apex, silhouetted in the bright rectangle of the doorway, Trey aiming the rifle. Trey has come out of that house like a flamethrower, fueled to the brim with a lifetime’s worth of rage, all ready to burn everything for miles to the ground.

“Kid!” Cal yells, and hears it echo out over the shocked dark fields. “Stop! It’s me!” He claws himself to his feet, swaying and lumbering, one leg dragging, snuffling and spitting blood. “Don’t shoot me!”

“Get outa my fuckin’ way!” Trey shouts back. Her accent has turned rougher and wilder, straight down from the mountains on a saw-toothed wind, but her voice is clear and intent.

Behind Cal someone pants through gritted teeth, “My fuckin’ arm,” and someone else snaps, low, “Shut up.” Then there’s utter stillness, as far as he can hear through the pounding and bubbling in his head. The men watching Trey’s every move know better, now, than to take her lightly.

Cal spreads his arms wide and lurches in front of them. “Kid,” he shouts. “No.” He knows there are words he’s used to talk guns out of people’s hands before, promises, soothing things. They’re all gone.

“Get outa my way or I’ll shoot you too!”

All around Cal things are rocking and rippling, but her silhouette in the doorway is steady as a monument; the heavy rifle at her shoulder doesn’t even shake. If these men refuse her, or if they lie to her, or maybe even if they tell her the truth, she’ll blow them all to kingdom come.

“Kid,” he shouts. His voice comes out frayed by dust and blood. “Kid. Send them away.”

“Where’s Brendan?”

“Please, kid,” Cal shouts. His voice cracks open. “Please. Just send them away. I’m begging you.”

There are three breaths’ worth of pure, cold nighttime silence. Then the Henry goes off again. The rooks explode from their tree in a vast black firework of wings and panic. Cal’s head goes back and he roars like an animal up at the night sky.

When he gasps for air, paralyzed between lunging for the rifle and lurching around to see the damage, he hears Trey’s voice shout, “Now get ta fuck!”

“We’re going!” a man shouts back, behind him.

It takes another second for Cal’s jolted brain to catch up. Trey aimed high, into the treetops.

“Get ta fuck offa this land!”

“I’m bleeding, God almighty, look—”

“Come on, come on, come on—”

Rough panting, jumbled voices that Cal can’t make into sense, feet hurrying through grass. When he turns to get a look at the men, his knee gives out and he collapses, gradually and ungracefully, into a sitting position. The men are already vanishing into the dark, three swift black shapes huddled together with their heads ducked down low.

Cal sits where he is and presses his coat sleeve to his streaming nose. Trey stays in the doorway, with the rifle to her shoulder. The rooks whirl, screaming abuse, and then gradually calm down and settle back into their tree to bitch in comfort.

When the muffled voices have faded up the lane, Trey lowers the gun and comes loping down the beam of light to Cal. He takes his sleeve off his nose long enough to say, “The safety. Put the safety on.”

“I did,” Trey says. She hunkers down to peer at him in the darkness. “How bad are you?”

“I’ll live,” Cal says. He starts trying to reorganize his limbs into some arrangement that will let him stand up. “We need to get inside. Before they come back.”

“They won’t come back,” Trey says with satisfaction. “I got one fella goodo.”

“OK,” Cal says. He can’t articulate the fact that, if they do come back, they’ll come with guns of their own. He manages to get to his feet and stands there, wobbling gently and trying to work out whether his knee will carry him.

“Here,” Trey says. She loops her free arm across his back, taking his weight on one skinny shoulder. “Come on.”

“No,” Cal says. He’s thinking of her injuries, which at the moment he can’t picture exactly but which he recalls as horrifying. Trey ignores him and starts towards the house, and Cal finds himself moving with her. They shamble across the grass, weaving in and out of the light, propping each other up like a pair of drunks. Both of them are panting. Cal can feel every inch of the darkness spread out around them, and every inch of their bodies that would make a perfect target. He tries to limp faster.

By the time he slams the door behind them and double-locks it, every muscle in his body is juddering. The sudden brightness smashes him right in the eyes. “Get me a towel,” he says, dropping into a chair at the table. “And that mirror.”

Trey leaves the Henry on the counter and brings him both, and then a bowl of water and his first-aid kit, and stands there hovering while he presses the towel to his nose. “How bad are you?” she asks again.

The tautness in her voice reaches Cal. He takes a long breath and tries to steady himself. “ ’Bout the same as you were the other night,” he says, through the towel. “Pretty banged up, but I’ve taken worse.”

The kid hovers for another minute, watching him and fingering her lip. Then she heads abruptly to the freezer and starts rummaging. While Cal waits for the bleeding to stop, he pulls up his pants leg and checks out his knee. It’s purple and inflating, with a darker purple line scored right across it, but after some experimenting he’s pretty sure it’s not broken. His collarbone is at least cracked: it shoots out pain whenever he moves his shoulder. When he probes very carefully along it, though, the line is straight. It shouldn’t need setting, which is good. Cal would much prefer not to explain any of this to a doctor.

Trey dumps two plastic bags of ice cubes on the table in front of him. “What else?” she asks.

“I’m gonna need a sling,” Cal says. “That sheet over the bathroom window, that’s long enough that we can cut off a strip at the bottom. Scissors in that drawer there.”

Trey goes into the bathroom and comes back with a length of cloth, which she fashions into a dirty but serviceable sling. Once they have Cal’s coat eased off him and the sling fixed on, she pulls herself up to sit on the countertop, where she can keep an eye out the kitchen window.

Cal’s nose has stopped bleeding. He tests it, trying not to let the kid see him flinching at each touch. It’s swollen to twice its size, but the line of it feels much the same as it ever did. His shaking has ebbed enough that he can clean up his face, give or take, with a corner of the towel dipped in the bowl of water. In the mirror, he looks just about how he expected: his nose is the shape of a tomato and he has two black eyes coming, although his are nowhere near as impressive as the kid’s.

Trey is watching him. “Look at us,” Cal says. His voice sounds just as muffled and blurred as it did through the towel. “Pair of beat-up stray mutts.”

Trey nods. Cal can’t tell how much this has shaken her. Her face still has the hard, intent focus that he heard in her voice across the yard and the gun. It seems wrong on a child. Cal feels like he ought to do something about it, but right this moment he can’t work out what.

He leans back in the chair, settles one ice pack on his knee and the other one on his nose, and concentrates on slowing his body and his mind so they can work right. He goes back over previous beatings he’s taken, in order to put this one into perspective. There were kids in school, a few times. There was the idiot who came after him with a piece of pipe outside a party Cal and Donna were at in their wild days, because he thought Cal had looked funny at his girlfriend—Cal still has a dent in his thigh where the end of that pipe dug in. That guy was aiming to kill him, and so was the guy jacked up on something or other who charged out of a back alley when Cal was on patrol and wouldn’t quit till Cal broke his arm. And yet, somehow, here Cal still is, sitting halfway across the world in a back corner of Ireland, with yet another bloody nose. He finds this strangely comforting.

“We had a beat-up stray mutt one time,” Trey says, from the counter. “Me and Brendan and my dad, we were going to the village, and we found him on the road. All scraped up and bleeding, and a bad leg. My dad said he was dying. He was gonna drown him so he wouldn’t suffer. But Brendan, yeah? He wanted to fix the dog up, and in the end my dad said he could try. We had that dog six more years. He always had a limp, but he was grand. He usedta sleep on Bren’s bed. He died of being old, in the end.”

Cal has never heard her talk this much, especially for no apparent purpose. At first he thinks it’s tension coming out as babble, but then he looks at her looking at him, and realizes what she’s doing. She’s using what she’s learned from him: talking about whatever comes into her head, in order to soothe him down.

“How old were you?” he asks.

“Five. Bren said I could name him. I said Patch, ’cause he had like a black eye patch. Now I’d think of something better, but I was only little.”

“You ever find out where he came from?”

“Nah. Not from round here, or we’da known about him. Someone dumped him out of a car on the main road, probably, and he crawled from there. He wasn’t one of them fancy dogs. Just an aul’ black-and-white mutt.”

“Best kind,” Cal says. “Your brother did good.” He tests out his knee, which is working OK, now that the initial shock has worn off it. “Tell you something, I’m feeling better’n I expected to right now.”

This is pretty much true. He’s throbbing in various places and feels mildly nauseated from swallowing blood, but overall, he could have ended up a lot worse off. He would have done, if Trey and the Henry hadn’t interrupted.

“Thanks, kid,” he says. “For saving my ass.”

Trey nods. She reaches for Cal’s bread and sticks a couple of slices in the toaster. “You figure they woulda kilt you?”

“Who knows,” Cal says. “I’m fine with not finding out.” He doesn’t want to take anything away from the kid, but he doubts he would have wound up dead, unless someone screwed up. He knows the difference; this beating wasn’t intended to kill. Just like he said to Donie, the Dublin boys don’t want the attention that a dead Yank would draw. What they wanted was to get their message across.

Now that Trey’s gone and shot one of them, that might change. It depends on how level-headed this Austin guy is, how persuasive Cal can be, and how strong a hold Austin has on his crew. Cal is in no frame of mind to make that phone call tonight, but it needs to happen tomorrow morning, as soon as Austin can reasonably be expected to be awake.

Trey is alternating between watching the window, watching her toast and watching Cal. “You got that gun loaded up pretty quick,” Cal says.

“I had it ready. Ever since you left.”

“How’d you get it out of the safe?”

“Saw the combination when you opened it that time.”

Cal feels he ought to lecture her about not touching guns unless she has both permission and a license, but in the circumstances that would seem unappreciative. “Right,” he says. “How’d you know you wouldn’t hit me?”

The kid looks like the question is so dumb it barely deserves an answer. “You were on the ground. I aimed higher up.”

“Right,” Cal says again. The thought of her getting one of those men in the head gives him an extra fillip of nausea. “Well then.”

Trey’s toast pops. She leans over to get the cheddar out of the fridge and a knife from its drawer. “You want some?”

“Not right now. Thanks.”

Trey packs slices of cheese between the toast, not bothering with a plate, and pulls off a chunk so she can bypass her split lip. She says, “How come you didn’t let me make them talk?”

Cal takes the ice pack off his nose. “Kid. You had a gun on them. You’d already shot one of them. What did you think they’d say? ‘Uh, yeah, it’s our doing that your brother’s gone, sorry ’bout that’? Nah. They woulda sworn blind they had no idea what happened to him, whether they did or not. And then you woulda had to pick between shooting them all dead and letting them go home. No matter what, you wouldn’t have got your answer. I figured it was a lot smarter to skip straight to sending them home.”

The kid thinks that over, eating hunks of sandwich carefully and swinging one foot. The taut focus has faded out of her. Her eye is blooming in lurid new shades, but she seems revived and energized, back in her body and her mind. Tonight did her good.

She says, “I wanted to shoot them.”

“I know. But you didn’t. That’s a good thing.”

Trey looks about half convinced. “I got the one fella, anyway.”

“Yeah. I think you got him in the arm. He was moving fine, when they left. He’ll be OK.”

“He won’t go to the cops.”

“Nah,” Cal says. “The hospital might call them, if he has to go there. But he’ll say he had an accident cleaning his gun, something like that. They won’t believe him, but there won’t be a lot they can do about it.”

Trey nods. She says, “They sound like Dubs to you?”

“Dunno. I wasn’t paying much attention to that.”

“Sounded local to me.”

“Probably,” Cal says. Austin wouldn’t have had the time, or likely the inclination, to send guys down from Dublin. This would have been a job for a few local foot soldiers. “You recognize any of ’em?”

Trey shakes her head.

“You see what they hit me with?”

“Looked like hurls. Couldn’t see for sure, but.” She glances up from her sandwich. “We haveta be getting close, right? Or they wouldn’t bother coming after us.”

“Maybe,” Cal says. “Maybe not. Could be they’re just fed up of the hassle. Or pissed off with me for beating up Donie.”

“But maybe.”

“Yeah,” Cal says, only partly because she needs that, to make all this worth it. “We could be.”

After a moment Trey says, “Are you raging?”

“I don’t have time for that right now. I need to get things straightened out.”

Trey thinks that over and rips off another piece of her sandwich. Cal can feel her wanting to say something, but he can’t help her with that. He rummages through the first-aid kit till he finds his ibuprofen, and swallows a hefty dose dry.

Trey says, “It’s my fault they done that to you.”

“Kid,” Cal says. “I’m not blaming you.”

“I know. It is, but.”

“You didn’t beat me up.”

“It was me that got you into this.”

Cal looks at her and finds himself floored by both the vast importance and the vast impossibility of saying the right thing, at a moment when he can barely piece together a thought. He wishes Lena were there, until he realizes that she would be no help at all. He wishes Donna were there.

“All’s you can do is your best,” he says. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you intend it to. You just gotta keep doing it anyway.”

Trey starts to ask something, but then her head snaps around. “Hey,” she says sharply, in the same instant that headlights sweep across the kitchen window.

Cal pulls himself to standing, bracing himself on the table. His knee still hurts, but he’s steadier on his feet. “Go in the bedroom,” he says. “Anything happens, get out the window and run like hell.”

“I’m not going to—”

“Yeah you are. Go.”

After a moment she goes, slamming her feet down hard to make her views clear. Cal picks up the Henry and goes to the door. When the car’s lights go off and he hears the engine cut out, he throws the door wide and stands in the doorway, leaving himself clear in the light. He wants whoever it is to see the rifle. He couldn’t aim it even if he wanted to, but he’s hoping the sight of it will be enough.

It’s Lena, getting out of her car with Nellie bounding ahead of her, and lifting a hand to Cal in the door-beam of light down the grass. What with one thing and another, their plans slipped Cal’s mind. He recognizes her just in time to avoid making a fool of himself by shouting the Lord only knows what. Instead he remembers, after a moment, to raise a hand in return.

As she gets close, Lena’s eyebrows shoot up. “What the holy Jaysus,” she says.

Cal had forgotten what he looks like. “I got beat up,” he says. It occurs to him that he’s holding a rifle. He steps back inside and lays it down on the counter.

“I got that part, yeah,” Lena says, following him. “Didja shoot anyone with that yoke?”

“No casualties,” Cal says. “Far as I know.”

Lena takes his chin in her hand and turns his face from side to side. Her hand is warm, rough-skinned and matter-of-fact, like she’s examining a hurt animal. “Are you going to the doctor?”

“Nope,” Cal says. “No real harm done. It’ll heal.”

“I’ve heard that somewhere before,” Lena says, giving his face one more look and releasing it. “The pair of ye are a match made in heaven, d’you know that?”

Trey has emerged from the bedroom and squatted down to make friends with Nellie, who is joyously wriggling and licking. “How’s the war wounds?” Lena asks her.

“Grand,” Trey says. “What’s her name?”

“That’s Nellie. If you give her a bitta food, you’ll have a friend for life.” Trey heads for the fridge and starts rummaging.

“You oughta go home,” Cal says. “They might come back.”

Lena starts unloading the various pockets of her big wax jacket. “You never know your luck. If they do, I might do a better job of dealing with them than ye two have.” The jacket contains an impressive quantity of stuff: a small carton of milk, a hairbrush, a paperback book, two cans of dog food, a clip-on book light, and a toothbrush, which she waves at Cal. “Now. I came prepared this time.”

Cal feels that Lena isn’t taking in the full weight of the situation, but if his face and Trey’s haven’t brought it home to her, he can’t come up with anything that would. “I bought a couple of air mattresses,” he says. “They’re in the car. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye out while I go fetch them.”

One of Lena’s eyebrows arches upwards. “You want me to cover you, is it? With that yoke?” She nods at the rifle.

“You know how to use it?”

“For Jaysus’ sake, man,” Lena says, amused, “I’m not going to crouch under the window playing snipers while you go twenty meters to your car. You’re going nowhere, anyway: with that arm, you can’t carry anything. I’ll go. Where’s your keys?”

Cal doesn’t like that idea one bit, but he can’t get round the fact that she has a point. He works his good arm around to fish his keys out of his pants pocket. “Lock it up once you’re done,” he says, although he’s not sure what this will achieve.

“And you can’t cover me, either,” Lena points out, catching the keys. “That yoke needs two good arms.”

“I’ll do it,” Trey says, from where she’s sitting on the floor feeding ham slices to Nellie.

“No you won’t,” Cal says. He finds himself getting irritated with Lena. He was starting to feel that he had a grip on the situation, until she showed up, and now the whole thing seems to have slipped out of his hands and got itself stranded somewhere between dangerous and ridiculous. “You’ll quit distracting that dog, is what you’ll do, so it can go along with Miss Lena. Put that ham away.”

“Now there’s a stroke of genius,” Lena says approvingly. “Nothing like a beagle to fight off a gang of desperate criminals. She hasn’t had her supper; I’d say she could eat at least three of ’em, depending how much meat they have on them. Were they big ones?”

“If you’re getting those mattresses,” Cal says, “now would be a good time. There’s some groceries in there, while you’re at it.”

“Sure, anyone’d be a narky fucker, after the day you’ve had,” Lena tells him consolingly, and she heads out to the car. Cal follows her to the door to watch after her, regardless of what she thinks about that and of whether he could actually be any help if she needed it. Trey, after a brief pause to assess matters, goes right back to feeding Nellie.

By the time they—Lena and Trey, mainly—have unloaded the groceries, fed the dog, inflated the mattresses, set out one on each side of the fireplace and made up the beds, Trey is yawning and Cal is fighting it. All his good intentions with steak and green beans have gone out the window. Trey’s cheese sandwich will have to get her through the night.

“Bedtime,” he tells her. He throws her the clothes he got in town. “Here. Pajamas, and stuff for tomorrow.”

Trey holds up the clothes like they have cooties, her chin goes out and she starts to say something that Cal knows is going to be about charity. “Don’t give me any shit,” he says. “Your clothes stink of blood. By tomorrow they’re gonna be attracting flies. Throw ’em out here once you’ve changed, and I’ll wash ’em.”

After a moment Trey rolls her eyes to heaven, heads into the bedroom and bangs the door behind her. “You’ve got yourself a teenager,” Lena says, amused.

“She’s had a long couple of days,” Cal says. “She’s not at her best.”

“Neither are you. You look about ready for bed yourself.”

“I could sleep,” Cal says. “If it’s not too early for you.”

“I’ll read for a while.” Lena finds her book and her clip light amid the stuff on the table, kicks off her shoes and makes herself comfortable on one of the mattresses—she has, sensibly, come wearing a soft-looking gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, meaning she has no need to change. Nellie is checking out the new space, snuffling into corners and under the sofa; Lena snaps her fingers, and Nellie lollops over and curls up at her feet. Lena props herself up on her pillow and gets to reading. Cal isn’t in the mood for sleepover chitchat either, but he’s irritated that she made the point before he did.

Trey opens the bedroom door, wearing the pajamas, and skids her dirty sweatshirt and jeans across the floor. Cal realizes that the pajamas are boy-type stuff with some kind of race car on the front. He still has trouble thinking of Trey as an actual girl.

“You want me to sit with you awhile?” he asks.

For a second she looks like she might, but then she shrugs. “Nah. I’m grand. Night.” As she heads back into the bedroom she throws him a lopsided grin over her shoulder. “Call me if you need your arse saving,” she tells him.

“Smartass,” Cal says to the closing door. “Get outa here.”

“Looks like she oughta be the one telling you a bedtime story, tonight,” Lena says, glancing up over her book.

“This isn’t a joke,” Cal says. Lena’s comfy sweat suit is annoying him all over again. He has no intention of asking for her help getting changed, which means he’s going to have to sleep in his blood-covered clothes.

“Seems to me you’re the one that hasn’t been taking it seriously enough,” Lena points out. “Are you done doing stupid things yet?”

“I’d love to be,” Cal says. He’s been trying to work out the least painful way to bend over for Trey’s clothes. He gives up on the whole damn thing and heads for his mattress. “I just can’t see any way around them.” Lena flicks one eyebrow and goes back to her book.

Cal is almost dizzy with fatigue. He turns his back to Lena and keeps his eyes open by poking his sore knee till Lena’s light clicks off, leaving the house dark, and till he hears her breathing slow down. Then, as quietly as he can, he disentangles himself from the bedding, gets up and inches the armchair over to the window. Nellie opens one eye at him, but he whispers, “Good dog,” and she thumps her tail once and goes back to sleep. He lays the Henry along the windowsill and sits in front of it, looking out at the night.

There’s a three-quarter moon, a rustler’s moon, high over the tree line. Under its light the fields are blurred and unearthly, like a mist you could lose yourself in, an endless sweep of it crisscrossed by the sharp black tangles of hedges and walls. Only small things move, flickers among the grass and across the stars, intent on their own business.

Cal thinks of the boys who have left their lives out there on that land: the three drunk boys whose car soared off the road and spun among the stars up beyond Gorteen, the boy across the river with the noose in his hands; maybe, or probably, Brendan Reddy. He wonders, without necessarily believing in ghosts, whether their ghosts wander. It comes to him that even if they do, even if he were to take up his coat now and go walking the back roads and the mountainsides, he wouldn’t meet them. Their lives and their deaths grew out of a land that Cal isn’t made from and hasn’t sown or harvested, and they’ve soaked back into that land. He could walk right through those ghosts and never feel their urgent prickle. He wonders if Trey ever meets them, on her long walks homewards under the dimming sky.

“Go get some sleep,” Lena’s voice says quietly, from her corner. “I’ll watch.”

“I’m fine here,” Cal says. “Can’t get comfortable on that thing. Thanks, though.”

“You need sleep, after the day that’s in it.” He hears a ruffle of movement and a grumble from Nellie, and Lena’s shape rises up off the mattress and pads across the floor to him. “Now,” she says, laying a hand on his good shoulder. “Go on.”

Cal stays put. They look out the window, side by side. “It’s beautiful,” he says.

“It’s small,” Lena says. “Awful small.”

Cal wonders if things would have been any different for all those dead boys if they had had, stretching out beyond their doorsteps, one of those days-long empty highways he was dreaming of a few days back: something else to sing in their ears at night, instead of the drink and the noose. Probably not, for most of them. He’s known plenty of boys who had the highway handy and still picked a needle or a bullet. But he wonders about Brendan Reddy.

“That’s what I came looking for,” he says. “A small place. A small town in a small country. It seemed like that would be easier to make sense of. Guess I might’ve had that wrong.”

Lena lets out a small, wry puff of breath. Her hand is still on his shoulder. Cal wonders what would happen if he were to lay his hand over hers, stand up out of the chair and take her in his arms. Not that he could do it even if he was sure he wanted to, given his various injuries, but still: he wonders whether she would lie down with him, and whether, if she did, he would wake up in the morning knowing, for better or for worse, that he was here for good.

“Go to bed,” Lena says. She gives his shoulder a gentle shove out of the chair.

This time Cal moves with it. “Wake me up if anything happens,” he says. “Even if it seems like nothing.”

“I will, yeah. And just so you know, of course I can use a rifle. So you’re in safe hands.”

“That’s good,” Cal says. He drags his aching self over to the mattress and is asleep before he can pull up the duvet.

A few times during the night he half-wakes, from a burst of pain as he turns or a jerk of adrenaline out of nowhere. Every time, Lena is sitting still in the armchair, her hands resting on the Henry laid across her lap, her profile upturned as she watches the sky.