The Searcher

TWO

The busted-up desk, when Cal gets it outside and takes a good look at it, is older than he thought and better quality: dark-stained oak, with delicate curls carved into the rail above the drop front and along the bottoms of the drawers, and a dozen little cubbyholes nested inside the drop. He had it stashed away in the smaller bedroom, since he wasn’t planning on getting to it for a while, but it seems like it might come in useful today. He’s hauled it out to the bottom of the garden, a carefully judged distance from the hedge and the rooks’ tree, along with his table to act as a work surface, and his toolbox. That toolbox is one of the bare handful of things he shipped over here. Most of those tools were his grandpa’s. They’re scuffed, nicked, paint-splattered, but they still work better than the crap you pick up in hardware stores these days.

The main thing wrong with the desk is a big splintered dent in one side, like whoever went over the bathroom with a lump hammer took a swing at this on his way out. Cal is leaving that for last, once he gets his hand back in. He’s planning on starting with the drawer runners. Two of them are plain gone, and the other two are warped and split till the drawer won’t go out or in without a fight. He takes both drawers out, lays the desk on its back and starts drawing pencil outlines around the remaining runners.

The weather is on his side: it’s a mild, sunny day with just a light breeze, little birds in the hedges and bees in the wildflowers, the kind of day where a man might naturally feel like taking some work outside. It’s mid-morning on a school day, but judging by the other incidents, Cal doesn’t reckon this necessarily means he’s wasting his time. Even if nothing happens straightaway, he’s got plenty here to keep him busy till school lets out. He whistles his grandpa’s old folk songs through his teeth, and sings a few of the words when he remembers them.

When he hears the swish of feet in grass, a ways off, he keeps whistling and keeps his head down over the desk. After a minute, though, he hears a messy scramble through the hedge, and a wet nose shoves under his elbow: Kojak, Mart’s raggedy black-and-white sheepdog. Cal straightens his back and gives Mart a wave.

“How’s she cuttin’?” Mart inquires, over the side fence. Kojak lopes off to check out what’s been in Cal’s hedge since he was here last.

“Not too bad,” Cal says. “ ’Bout you?”

“Sound as a pound on the ground,” Mart says. Mart is short, maybe five foot seven, wiry and lined; he has fluffy gray hair, a nose that got broken once or twice along the way, and a wide selection of hats. Today he’s wearing a flat tweed cap that looks like it’s been chewed by some farm animal or other. “What’re you at with that yoke?”

“Gonna fix it up,” Cal says. He’s trying to bump the second runner free, but it’s holding fast; this desk was made right, way back whenever.

“Wasting your time,” Mart tells him. “Have a look on one of them adverts websites. You’ll pick up half a dozen of them for nothing.”

“I only need one,” Cal says. “And I’ve got one.”

Mart clearly considers arguing the point, but he decides to drop it in favor of something more rewarding. “You’re looking well,” he says, eyeing Cal up and down. Mart was predisposed to approve of Cal from the start. He loves conversation, and over his sixty-one years he’s sucked all the juice out of everyone around here. Cal is, from Mart’s point of view, Christmas.

“Thanks,” Cal says. “You too.”

“I’m serious, man. Very slender. That belly’s melting offa you.” And when Cal, patiently rocking the drawer runner back and forth, doesn’t answer: “D’you know what’s doing that?”

“This,” Cal says, nodding backwards at the house. “Instead of sitting on my ass at a desk all day.”

Mart is shaking his head vigorously. “Not at all. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the meat you’re ating. Them sausages and rashers you get off Noreen. They’re local; so fresh they’d hop off the plate and snort at you. They’re doing you a power of good.”

“I like you better than my old doctor,” Cal says.

“Listen, would you. That American meat you were ating back home, that’s chock fulla hormones. They pump those into the cattle to fatten them up. So what d’you think they do to human beings?”

He waits for an answer. “Can’t be good,” Cal says.

“They’ll swell you up like a balloon and put tits on you like Dolly Parton. Mad yokes. The EU has them all banned, over here. That’s what put the weight on you to begin with. Now that you’re ating dacent Irish meat, it’ll fall off you again. We’ll have you looking like Gene Kelly in no time.”

Mart has apparently picked up that Cal has something on his mind today and is determined to talk him out of it, either from a sense of neighborly duty or because he likes the challenge. “You oughta market that,” Cal says. “Mart’s Miracle Diet Bacon. The more you eat, the more you lose.”

Mart chuckles, apparently satisfied. “Saw you heading into town there yesterday,” he mentions, just in passing. He squints across the garden at Kojak, who is getting serious about a clump of bushes, scrabbling hard to jam his whole front end in there.

“Yeah,” Cal says, straightening up. He knows what Mart is after. “Hold on.” He goes inside and comes back out with a pack of cookies. “Don’t eat ’em all at once,” he says.

“You’re a gentleman,” Mart says happily, accepting the cookies over the fence. “Did you try them yet?”

Mart’s cookies are elaborate constructions of pink fluffy marshmallow, jam and coconut that, to Cal, look like something you would use to bribe a five-year-old in a great big hair bow into quitting her tantrum. “Not yet,” he says.

“Dip them, man. In the tay. The marshmallow goes soft and the jam melts on your tongue. Nothing like it.” Mart stashes the cookies in the pocket of his green wax jacket. He doesn’t offer to pay for them. The first time, Mart presented the cookie run as a once-off, a favor that would make a poor old farmer’s day, and Cal wasn’t about to demand a handful of change from his brand-new neighbor. After that Mart treated it as a long-established tradition. The amused slide of his eyes at Cal whenever he takes the cookies says he’s testing.

“I’m a coffee man,” Cal says. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

“Don’t be telling Noreen about these, now,” Mart warns him. “She’d only find something else to take off me. She likes to think she’s got the upper hand.”

“Speaking of Noreen,” Cal says. “If you’re heading that way, can you pick me up some ham? I forgot.”

Mart gives a long whistle. “Are you after getting yourself into Noreen’s bad books? Bad move there, bucko. Look where that landed me. Whatever it is you done, get you down there with a bunch of flowers and make your apologies.”

The fact is, Cal wants to stick around home today. “Nah,” he says. “She keeps trying to set me up with her sister.”

Mart’s eyebrows shoot up. “What sister?”

“Helena, I think she said.”

“God almighty, man, then away you go. I thought there you meant Fionnuala, but Noreen must like the cut of you. Lena’s got a good head on her shoulders. And her husband was tight as a duck’s arse and he’d drink the river dry, God rest him, so she’s not suffering from high standards. She won’t go mad if you bring your muddy boots inside or fart in the bed.”

“Sounds like my kind of woman,” Cal says. “If I was looking.”

“And she’s a fine strapping lass, too, not one of them scrawny young ones that you’d lose if they turned sideways. A woman needs a bit of meat on her. Ah, now”—pointing a finger at Cal, who has started to laugh—“that’s your filthy mind, that is. I’m not talking about the riding. Did I say anything about the riding?”

Cal shakes his head, still laughing.

“I did not. What I’m saying”—Mart settles his forearms on the top bar of the fence, getting comfortable to expand on this—“what I’m saying to you is, if you’re going to have a woman in the house, you want one that fills a bit of space. It’s no good having some skin-and-bones scrap of a girl with a mousy wee voice on her and not a word out of her from one day to the next. You wouldn’t be getting your money’s worth. When you walk into the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she’s there, or what’s the point in having her at all?”

“No point,” Cal says, grinning. “So Lena’s loud, huh?”

“You’d know she was there. Away with you and get your own ham slices, and ask Noreen to set up that date. Give yourself a good wash, shave that wookiee off your face, put on a fancy shirt. Bring her into town, now, to a restaurant; don’t be bringing her down the pub to be stared at by all them reprobates.”

“You should take her out,” Cal says.

Mart snorts. “I’ve never been married.”

“Well, exactly,” Cal says. “Wouldn’t be right for me to take up more than my share of loud women.”

Mart is shaking his head vigorously. “Ah no no no. You’ve it all arseways, so you do. What age are you? Forty-five?”

“Forty-eight.”

“You look well on it. Them meat hormones must keep you young.”

“Thanks.”

“Either way, but. By the time he’s forty, a man’s either in the habit of being married or he’s not. Women have ideas, and I’m not accustomed to anyone’s ideas but my own. You are.” Mart extracted this and other key vital statistics from Cal on their first meeting, with such near-invisible expertise that Cal felt like the amateur.

“You lived with your brother,” Cal points out. Mart is at least reciprocal with information: Cal has heard all about his brother, who preferred custard cream cookies, was an awful gom but a great hand at the lambing, gave Mart that broken nose by hitting him with a spanner in an argument over the TV remote, and died of a stroke four years ago.

“He’d no ideas,” Mart says, with the air of someone scoring a point. “Thick as pig shite. I couldn’t have some wan bringing her ideas into my house. Wanting a chandelier, maybe, or a poodle, or me to do yoga classes.”

“You could find a dumb one,” Cal offers.

Mart dismisses that with a puff of air. “I’d enough of that with the brother. But d’you know Dumbo Gannon? On that farm there?” He points across the fields at a long, low, red-roofed building.

“Yeah,” Cal says, making an educated guess. One of the old guys in the pub is a little runt with a set of jug ears you could pick him up by.

“Dumbo’s on his third missus. You wouldn’t credit it, the head on him and the price of spuds, but I’m telling you. One of the women died and the other one ran off on him, but both times Dumbo had himself a new one inside the year. The same as I’d get a new dog if Kojak died on me, or a new telly if mine went, Dumbo goes out and gets himself a new missus. Because he’s in the habit of someone bringing in ideas. If there’s no woman in it, he doesn’t know what to have for the dinner, or what to watch on the telly. And with no woman in it, you won’t know what colors to paint the chambers in that mansion over there.”

“I’m gonna go for white,” Cal says.

“And what?”

“And white.”

“See what I’m telling you?” Mart says triumphantly. “Only in the heel of the hunt, you won’t. You’re in the habit of having someone bringing in ideas. You’ll go looking.”

“I can get in an interiors guy,” Cal says. “Fancy hipster who’ll paint it chartreuse and puce.”

“Where are you planning on finding one of them around here?”

“I’ll import him from Dublin. He gonna need a work visa?”

“You’ll do the same as Dumbo,” Mart informs him. “Whether you plan on it or not. I’m only trying to make sure you do it right, before some skinny bitta fluff gets her hooks into you and makes your life a misery.”

Cal can’t tell if Mart actually believes any of this or is just spinning it on the fly, hoping for an argument. Mart loves arguing like he loves his cookies. Sometimes Cal goes along with it, in a spirit of neighborliness, but today he has a few specific questions and then he wants Mart to leave the coast clear. “Maybe in a few months,” he says. “I’m not gonna start anything with any woman right now. Not till I get this place fixed up enough that I can let her see it.”

Mart squints over at the house and nods, acknowledging the validity of this. “Don’t be leaving it too long, now. Lena could have her pick, around here.”

“It’s been falling apart for a while,” Cal says. “Gonna take me a while to put it back together. You got any idea how long it’s been empty?”

“Fifteen year, must be. Maybe twenty.”

“Looks like more,” Cal says. “Who was living here?”

“Marie O’Shea,” Mart says. “Now, she never got herself another man after Paudge died, but women do be different. They get in the habit of marrying, same as men, but the women do like a rest in between. Marie was only widowed the year before she died; she hadn’t had a chance to catch her breath. If Paudge had gone ten year earlier—”

“Her kids didn’t want the place?”

“They’re gone, sure. Two in Australia, one in Canada. No harm to your estate, but it’s not the kind that’d bring them running home.”

Kojak has given up on the bushes and trotted over to Cal, tail wagging. Cal rubs behind his ear. “How come they just sold it now? They fight over what to do with it?”

“From what I heard, they hung on to it at first because prices were going up. Good land going to waste, because them fools thought it would make them millionaires. And then”—Mart’s face splits into a grin of unholy glee—“didn’t the crash come, and they were stuck hanging on to it because no one would give them sixpence for it.”

“Huh,” Cal says. That could raise some bad blood, one way or another. “Did anyone want to buy it?”

“My brother did,” Mart says promptly. “The eejit. We’d enough on our plates. He watched too much Dallas, that fella. Fancied himself a cattle baron.”

“Thought you said he had no ideas,” Cal says.

“That wasn’t an idea, that was a notion. I nipped it in the bud. There’s no nipping women’s ideas. Cut them down one place, they grow up another. You wouldn’t know where you’d be.”

Kojak is leaning up against Cal’s leg, eyes half closed in bliss, butting Cal’s hand whenever he forgets to rub. Cal has been planning on getting a dog; he was going to wait till he had the house in better shape, but it looks like sooner might be a good idea. “Any relations of the O’Sheas around here?” he asks. “I found some stuff they might want.”

“If they wanted it,” Mart points out logically, “they had twenty year to take it. What class of stuff?”

“Papers,” Cal says vaguely. “Pictures. Figured I might as well check before I throw it out.”

Mart is grinning. “There’s Paudge’s niece Annie, a few mile up the road beyond Moneyscully. If you fancy taking that stuff to her, I’ll bring you, just to see the look on Annie’s face. Her mammy and Paudge couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”

“Think I’ll pass,” Cal says. “She have any kids who might want mementoes of their great-uncle?”

“They’re all gone off, sure. Dublin or England. Use them papers to light your fire. Or sell them on the internet, to some other Yank that wants a bit of heritage.”

Cal isn’t sure whether this is a jab or not. With Mart, he can’t always tell, which he knows is half the fun of it. “I might do that,” he says. “This isn’t my heritage, anyway. My family’s not Irish, so far as I know.”

“You’ve all got a bit of Irish in ye over there,” Mart says, with supreme confidence. “One way or another.”

“Guess I oughta hang on to that stuff, then,” Cal says, giving Kojak a final pat and turning back to his toolbox. Annie doesn’t sound like she’s sending kids round to scope out the ancestral home. Cal would love a lead on who the kid might be—he thought he had a fair handle on all his near neighbors, but he isn’t aware of any kids—but being a middle-aged male stranger asking questions about the local little boys seems like a good route to a hiding and a couple of bricks through your windows, and he has enough going on as it is. He rummages through the toolbox for his chisel.

“Good luck with that yoke there,” Mart says, straightening up off the fence with a grimace. A lifetime of farm labor has ground Mart’s joints to rubble; he has trouble with his knee, his shoulder, and everything in between. “I’ll take the firewood off your hands when you’re done with it.”

“Ham,” Cal reminds him.

“You’ll have to face Noreen sooner or later. You can’t be hiding away up here hoping she’ll forget. Like I told you, bucko: once a woman gets an idea, it’s going nowhere.”

“You can be my best man,” Cal says, working the chisel under the runner.

“Them ham slices is two euros fifty,” Mart tells him.

“Huh,” Cal says. “So’re those cookies.”

Mart wheezes with laughter and slaps the fence, making it bounce and rattle alarmingly. Then he whistles to Kojak and they head off.

Cal goes back to the desk, shaking his head and grinning. He sometimes suspects that Mart is putting on the gift-of-the-gab yokel act, either for shits and giggles or in order to make Cal more amenable to the cookie run and whatever else he has in mind. Betcha, Donna would’ve said, back when they used to love coming up with stuff to make each other laugh, betcha when you’re not around he wears a tux and talks like the queen of England. That or else he’s in his Yeezys, busting a move to Kanye. Cal doesn’t think about Donna constantly, the way he did at first—it took months of dogged work, blasting music or reciting football lineups out loud like a loon every time she came into his head, but he got there in the end. She still crops up from time to time, though, mostly when he runs across something that would make her smile. He always loved Donna’s smile, quick and complete, sending every line of her face flying upwards.

From having seen his buddies go through this process, he expected that getting drunk would give him the urge to call her, so he stayed away from booze for a while, but it didn’t turn out to work that way. After a few beers Donna feels a million miles away, in some other dimension, like no phone could reach her. When he goes weak is when she takes him by surprise like this, on an innocent fall morning, blooming right across his mind so fresh and vivid that he can almost smell her. He can’t remember why he shouldn’t pull out his phone, Hey, baby, listen to this. Probably he should delete her number, but they might need to talk about Alyssa sometime, and anyway he knows it by heart.

The drawer runner finally comes free, and Cal pulls out the old rusted nails with a pair of pliers. He measures the runner and scribbles the measurements on it. First time he was in the building suppliers he picked up a few bits of lumber, different sizes, because he had that toolbox and because you never know. One long piece of pine is just about the right width for the new runners, too thick but not by much. Cal clamps it to the table and starts planing it down.

Back home his plan would have been to grab the kid again, in a better hold this time, and deliver a fear-of-God speech about trespassing, assault and battery, juvie, and what happens to kids who fuck with cops, maybe finished off with a slap upside the head and a good hard shove off his property. Here, where he’s not a cop and where that feeling of not knowing what he might set in motion is settling in deeper, not one bit of that is an option. Anything he does, he needs to keep it smart and careful, and do it with a light touch.

He gets the wood planed to the right thickness, rules two lines down it and saws along each of them, a quarter-inch deep. A part of him wondered if he would still know what to do with these tools, but his hands remember: the tools fit like they’re still warm from his last grip and move smoothly through the wood. It feels good. He’s whistling again, not bothering with tunes this time, just tossing out amiable little trills and riffs to the birds.

The day warms up till Cal has to stop and take off his sweatshirt. He starts chiseling out the strip of wood between the two sawn lines, taking his time. He’s in no hurry. The kid, whoever he is, wants something. Cal is offering him the opportunity to come and get it.

The first time he hears a sound, off behind the hedge, it’s blurred by his whistling and the slide of the chisel, and he’s not sure. He doesn’t look up. He finds his tape measure and checks the groove he’s making: long enough for one runner. When he moves around the table to get his saw, he hears it again: a sharp rattle of twigs, someone ducking or dodging.

Cal glances up at the hedge as he stoops for the saw. “If you’re gonna watch,” he says, “you might as well get a good view. Come over here and gimme a hand with this.”

The silence from behind the hedge is absolute. Cal can feel it thrumming.

He saws off the runner, blows away the dust and measures it against the old one. Then he tosses it, underhand and easily, towards the hedge, and follows it with a sheet of sandpaper. “Here,” he says to the hedge. “Get that sanded down.”

He picks up his chisel and hammer and goes back to cutting the groove. The silence lasts long enough that he thinks he’s struck out. Then he hears the rustle of someone easing, slowly and warily, through the hedge.

Cal keeps working. In the corner of his eye he sees a flash of red. After a long time he hears the rasp of sanding, clumsy and inexpert, with gaps between the strokes.

“Doesn’t need to be a work of art,” he says. “It’s going inside the desk, no one’s gonna see it. Just get the splinters gone. Go along the grain, not across it.”

A pause. More sanding.

“What we’re making here,” he says, “is drawer runners. You know what those are?”

He glances up. It’s the kid from last night, all right, standing on the grass about a dozen feet away and staring at Cal, with every muscle poised to run if he needs to. Mousy buzz cut, too-big faded red hoodie, ratty jeans. He’s maybe twelve.

He shakes his head, one quick jerk.

“The part that holds the drawer in place. Makes it run in and out nice and smooth. That groove, there’s a piece on the drawer that’ll fit into it.” Cal leans over towards the desk, good and slow, to point. The kid’s eyes follow his every move. “The old ones were falling apart.”

He goes back to his chiseling. “Easiest thing would be to use a router for this, or a table saw,” he says, “but I don’t have those handy. Lucky for me, my grandpa liked carpentry. He showed me how to do this by hand, when I was about your size. You ever done any carpentry?”

He takes another glance. The kid shakes his head again. He’s built wiry, the type who’s as fast as he looks and stronger, both of which Cal already knew from last night. In the face he’s ordinary: a little of the baby softness left, not strong-featured or fine-featured, or good-looking or ugly; the only things that stand out are a stubborn chin and a pair of gray eyes fixed on Cal like they’re running him through some CIA-level computer check.

“Well,” Cal says, “now you have. Drawers nowadays, they’ve got metal runners, but this is an old desk. I can’t tell you how old, exactly; that’s not my area. I’d love to think we’ve got ourselves some Antiques Roadshow material here, but more’n likely it’s just a piece of old crap. I’ve taken a shine to it, though. I want to see if I can get it up and running.”

He’s talking like he would to a stray dog in his yard, steady and even, not bothering much about the actual words. The kid’s sanding is getting faster and more confident, as he gets the hang of it.

Cal measures his groove and saws off the next runner. “That should be done enough by now,” he says. “Lemme see.”

“If it’s for a drawer,” the kid says, “it oughta be real smooth. Or it’ll stick.”

His voice is clear and blunt, not broken yet, and his accent is almost as thick as Mart’s. And he’s not stupid. “True,” Cal says. “Go ahead and take your time.”

He angles himself so he can see the kid out of the corner of his eye while he chisels. The kid is taking this seriously, checking each surface and edge with a careful finger, going back over it again and again till he’s satisfied. Finally he looks up and throws Cal the runner.

Cal catches it. “Good job,” he says, testing with his thumb. “Look.” He fits it over the tenon at the side of the drawer and slides it back and forth. The kid cranes his neck to watch, but he doesn’t move nearer.

“Smooth as butter,” Cal says. “We’ll wax it up later on, just for a little extra slide, but it hardly even needs that. Have another one.”

When he reaches for the second runner, the kid’s eyes go to the Band-Aid on his hand.

“Yeah,” Cal says. He holds up the hand so the kid can get a good look. “This gets infected, I’m gonna be real pissed off with you.”

The kid’s eyes snap wide and his muscles snap tight. He’s on the verge of flight, toes barely touching the grass.

“You’ve been keeping a pretty good eye on me,” Cal says. “Any reason for that?”

After a moment the kid shakes his head. He’s still ready to run, eyes fixed on Cal to catch the first signs of a lunge.

“There something you want to know? Because if you do, now would be a real good time to go ahead and ask straight out like a man.”

The kid shakes his head again.

“Got any problems with me?”

Another head-shake, this one more vehement.

“You planning on robbing me? ’Cause that would be a bad idea. Plus, unless this turns out to be Antiques Roadshow stuff after all, I got nothing worth stealing.”

Hard head-shake.

“Someone send you?”

Incredulous grimace, like Cal just said something bizarre. “Nah.”

“You do this as a regular thing? Watch people?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

After a moment the kid shrugs.

Cal waits, but no further information is forthcoming. “OK,” he says, in the end. “I don’t much care why you were doing it. But that shit stops now. From now on, you get the urge to watch me, you do it like this. Face-to-face. This is the only warning I’m gonna give you. We clear?”

The kid says, “Yeah.”

“Good,” Cal says. “You got a name?”

The kid has relaxed a notch or two, now that he knows he’s not going to need to run. “Trey.”

“Trey,” Cal says. “I’m Cal.” The kid nods, once, like this confirms what he already knew. “You always this chatty?”

The kid shrugs.

“I gotta get some coffee inside me,” Cal says. “And a cookie or something. You want a cookie?”

If the kid’s been trained in stranger danger, this is a bad move, but Cal doesn’t get the sense he’s been trained in much of anything. Sure enough, he nods.

“You’ve earned it,” Cal says. “Back in a minute. You sand this down meanwhile.” He tosses Trey the second runner and heads up the garden without looking back.

Inside, he makes himself a big mug of instant coffee and finds his pack of chocolate chip cookies. Maybe those will get Trey talking, although Cal doubts it. He can’t get a handle on this kid. He might have been lying, in one or more places, or he might not. All Cal gets off him is urgency, so concentrated that it shimmers the air around him like heat coming off a road.

When Cal goes back outside, Kojak is snuffling in the undergrowth at the base of the shed, and Mart is leaning on the fence with a packet of ham slices dangling from one hand. “Well, begod,” he says, inspecting the desk, “it’s still alive. I’ll have to wait for my firewood.”

The half-sanded runner and the sandpaper are lying on the grass. The kid called Trey is gone, like he was never there.