Cal takes the three hundred bucks out of his pocket and holds it out.
Johnny glances at it, but doesn’t move to take it. After a moment he says, “That’s nothing to do with me. If you want to do something with it, talk to Mart Lavin.”
Cal more or less expected this. Mart said no one wants to trust Johnny with cash, so they’re buying the gold themselves. Johnny is keeping his hands clean, and making the men think it’s their smart idea.
“I’ll do that,” he says, pocketing the cash. “Good talk.”
“Daddy!” Liam yells, and he starts pointing at the earthworks and calling out some long excited story. “I’ll see you round,” Johnny says to Cal, and he saunters over to Liam and Alanna’s construction, where he squats down and starts pointing at things and asking interested questions. Cal heads off all the way back down the mountain, to find Mart.
—
Pissing Noreen off comes at a price. Lena is the last person in several townlands to hear about Johnny Reddy’s Englishman’s granny’s gold. Contrary to Noreen’s opinion, Lena is not a hermit and in fact has a respectable number of friends, but the close ones are women from the book club she did in town a few years back, or people from work—Lena does the accounts, and whatever else needs doing, at a stable out the other side of Boyle. She can go for days without talking to anyone from Ardnakelty, if she feels like it, which under the circumstances she has. She hasn’t been into the shop, on the grounds that if Noreen starts shoving her down the aisle again, Lena might tell her to fuck off and mind her own business, which would be satisfying but unproductive. She hasn’t been round to Cal’s, either. The easeful rhythm they’ve established, over the past two years, has them meeting a few times a week; and Lena, who has never before felt the need to worry about what Cal might read into her actions, doesn’t want him thinking she’s hovering and fretting over him because Johnny bloody Reddy is back in town. She expected Trey to come back looking to stay the night again, but there’s been no sign of her.
So the first Lena hears of the gold is when she calls round to Cal on Tuesday to give him some mustard. Lena likes finding small gifts for Cal. He’s not a man who wants many or fancy things, so she enjoys the challenge. At the food market in town, on her way back from the morning’s work, she came across a jar of mustard with whiskey and jalapeños, which should both please Cal and give Trey’s face the look of mingled suspicion and determination that he and Lena enjoy.
“Fuck me,” Lena says, when Cal has put her abreast of the situation. They’re on the back porch, eating ham sandwiches for lunch—Cal wanted to try the mustard straightaway. A few of the rooks, who zeroed in on the food before Lena and Cal even sat themselves down, are stalking the grass at a safe distance, turning their heads sideways to keep an eye on the prize. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
“I thought Noreen would’ve told you before now,” Cal says.
“We annoyed each other, the other day. I was giving it some time to wear off. I shoulda known. I miss two days of Noreen, and I miss the biggest news in years.”
“Go tell her you just found out now,” Cal says. “She’ll be so smug, she’ll forgive you anything.” Rip is twitching to go after the rooks. Cal runs a hand down the back of his head, settling him.
Lena is thinking back to Johnny lounging on her gate, telling her about his fortune under construction. “Ha,” she says, struck by a thought. “Here I thought that little fecker was calling round to me trying to get his leg over. And all the time it was my wallet he had his eye on, not my pretty face. That’ll teach me to flatter myself.”
“He’s only looking for cash from people whose land is on this line,” Cal says. “So far, anyway. I reckon what he mostly wanted from you was someone to tell people he’s a great guy and they oughta back him up.”
“He was barking up the wrong tree here,” Lena says, tossing a scrap of bread to the rooks. “I reckon anyone that gets involved with that eejit wants his head examined.”
“That’d be me,” Cal says. “I gave Mart three hundred bucks this morning, for my share of the gold.”
Lena forgets about the rooks and turns to look at him.
“Probably I need my head examined,” Cal says.
Lena says, “Is that fucker getting Trey mixed up in this?”
“He had her in the room while he talked the guys into it,” Cal says. “Had her telling them how her teacher says the gold’s there. Beyond that, I dunno.”
He sounds calm, but Lena doesn’t mistake that for taking it lightly. “So you’re going to keep an eye on him,” she says.
“Not much else I can do, right now,” Cal says. He pulls a chunk of crust off his sandwich, avoiding the mustard, and throws it to the rooks. Two of them get into a tug-of-war over it. “If something does come up, I want to be there to catch it.”
Lena watches him. She says, “Like what?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m just gonna wait and see. That’s all.”
Lena has only ever known Cal to be gentle, but she’s not under the illusion that he has no other side. She doesn’t underestimate his anger. She can almost smell it off him, like heat off metal.
“What’s Johnny think of having you on board?” she asks.
“Doesn’t like it one little bit,” Cal says. “But he’s stuck with me. Specially if he doesn’t want me.”
Even if Lena had any inclination to try and turn him from this, she would get nowhere. “It’ll do him good,” she says. “He’s too fond of getting his own way, that fella.”
“Yeah, well,” Cal says. “Not this time.”
Lena eats her sandwich—the mustard is good and strong—and examines what she’s learned. Her first guess was right, and Noreen’s was wrong. Johnny didn’t just drift home because his girlfriend had dumped him and he couldn’t figure out how to work himself on his own. Johnny needs money, badly. For him to go to this much trouble, it’s not just rent arrears or an unpaid credit card. He owes someone; someone dangerous.
Lena doesn’t give a shite what Johnny personally is facing. What she wants to know is whether the danger is going to stay over in London, waiting trustingly for him to show up with the cash, or whether it’s coming after him. Lena wouldn’t trust Johnny to come back with her cash from down the road, let alone from over the water. If she wanted the money, she’d be going after him.
Cal, not knowing Johnny as she does, is unlikely to have reached the same conclusions yet. Lena considers sharing hers with him, and decides against it for the moment. It’s one thing to refuse responsibility for Cal’s moods; it’s another to deliberately whip up his fears and his anger, when she has nothing to go on but conjecture.
“Next time I see Trey,” she says, “I’ll ask her to come stay with me for a few days.”
Cal throws the rooks another piece of crust and shifts, trying to get the sun to attack a different part of his face. “I don’t like this weather,” he says. “Back on the job, this kind of heat was when we knew things were gonna get messy. People lose their minds, do the type of crazy stuff where you figure they must’ve been high on half a dozen things at once, till the tests come back and nope, stone-cold sober. Just hot. Whenever it stays hot for too long, I’m just waiting for things to get messy.”
Lena, although she doesn’t say this, has been liking the heat wave. She appreciates the change it brings to the townland. It transforms the muted blues and creams and yellows of the village houses, lifting them to an expansive brightness that barely seems real, and it rouses the fields from their usual soft somnolence to a spiky, embattled vividness. It’s like seeing Cal in a new mood: it lets her know the place better.