Trey shrugs. “ ’F you don’t want it,” she says, jerking her chin at the bag on the table, “I’ll have it back.”
“And why not,” Johnny says, catching up the bag and pressing it into her hand. “No one’ll grudge you that. You’ve earned it. Amn’t I right?”
“Go on,” Dessie says, still giggling, flapping a hand at her. “Plenty more where that came from.”
“Whatever,” Trey says, pocketing the bag. “Thought you might wanta see it, is all.”
“Ah, sweetheart,” Johnny says remorsefully, catching her arm. Cal is starting to wonder if the guy even remembers her name. “You done great. Daddy’s only delighted with you, and so are all these other nice lads. OK? You go along home now and tell your mammy to put that somewhere safe, and we’ll have it made into a lovely necklace for you to wear.”
Trey shrugs, detaches her arm from his hand, and leaves. Her eyes skid right over Cal.
“Well, God almighty, lads,” Johnny says, running his hands through his hair and gazing after her with a mixture of fondness and bemusement. “Doesn’t that beat Banagher? I didn’t know whether to give her a hug or a skelp. That child’ll be the death of me.”
“She’s got good timing, anyway,” Mart says amiably. “Isn’t that a great talent to have?”
“Where was it she went digging?” Senan asks.
“Fuck’s sake, man,” Johnny says, giving him a disbelieving stare. “Are you serious? I’m handing nothing over for free. And even if I did, ’twouldn’t do ye a blind bitta good: like I told you before, there’s no use in heading out digging with no license. No: we’ll do this right.”
“Foot of the mountain, she said,” Sonny says to Con. “That’ll be our land.”
“Hang on,” Johnny says, turning to Cal, holding up a hand to silence the rest. “Mr. Hooper had a question for me, before my Theresa came in and interrupted him. Mostly I’d apologize for her, only this time I reckon what she had to say was worth hearing, amn’t I right?”
“Jesus fuck,” Sonny says, from the heart, agreeing.
Johnny sits there smiling at Cal, waiting.
“Nope,” Cal says. “Nothing.”
“Ah, there was. Something awful serious, going by the face on you. You put the heart crossways in me there, man; I was afraid maybe I’d run over your dog and never noticed.”
“Not that I know of,” Cal says. “Can’t’ve been that serious; it’s gone right outa my head. It’ll come back, though. I’ll be sure and let you know when it does.”
“You do that,” Johnny says, giving him an approving nod. “Meanwhile, lads, I think we all deserve another shot of the good stuff, amn’t I right? This one’s on me. We’ll have a toast to that mad young one of mine.”
“Count me out,” Cal says. “I’m gonna head home.”
“Ah, now,” Johnny says reproachfully. “You can’t stay for just the two; that’s not the way we do things around here. Sit where you are a while longer and then I’ll see you safe home, if you’re worried about overdoing it. I reckon we could do with a chat anyway.”
“Nah,” Cal says. He drains his pint and stands up. “I’ll see you round.” As he leaves, he hears Johnny say something that gets a big old laugh.
—
The moon is almost full. It turns the mountain road white and treacherously narrow, a trickle of safety wavering upwards between the thick dark scribbles of heathery bog and the formless looming of trees. A fidgety breeze roams among the high branches, but it takes none of the heat out of the air. Cal keeps climbing, sweating through his shirt, till the road splits and he strikes off down the fork that leads to the Reddy place. It leaves him a little closer to the Reddys’ than he’d like, but he doesn’t need someone irrelevant passing by at the wrong time. He finds a boulder in the shadow of a low, gnarled tree, with a clear view of the path below him, and sits down to wait.
He’s thinking of Trey, standing in the entrance of the alcove with her eyes on Johnny and her jaw set, close enough to touch and unreachable. He wonders where she is now, and what she’s thinking, and what happened to her mouth. It aches right through him that he failed her: he didn’t find a way to make her able to come to him with this.
He understands that it’s not surprising. When Johnny first came home, she had no use for him, but the more Cal sees of Johnny, the more he figures there are ways Trey’s brother Brendan took after his daddy. Trey idolized Brendan. If she saw in Johnny flashes of things she had thought were lost to her, she might find it hard to turn away.
Cal knows, not that it makes any difference, that Johnny isn’t deliberately trying to put the kid in harm’s way. He doubts that the extent of the possible harm has even crossed Captain Chucklefuck’s mind. Johnny has a plan, and everything is going to plan, so in his head, everything is hunky-dory. He has no conception of the dangers of being the one with a plan, when your targets have no such thing and are willing instead to do whatever the situation demands.
The undergrowth ticks and twitches as things follow their accustomed trails among it; a weasel or a stoat streaks neatly across the path, fine as a brushstroke, and vanishes into the other side. The moon moves, shifting the shadows. Cal wishes, with a surge of something that feels like vast dawning grief, that Johnny had waited even one more year, till Cal had had just a little more time to shore up the kid’s cracked places, before he came prancing into town breaking things.
He hears Johnny coming before he sees him. The dumb fuck is sauntering up the mountain singing to himself, softly and happily: “But I’m tired of all this pleasure, so I’m off to take my leisure, and the next thing that you’ll hear from me is a letter from New York…”
Cal stands up quietly, in the shadow of the tree. He lets Johnny get within ten feet before he steps out onto the path.
Johnny leaps and shies sideways like a spooked horse. Then he recognizes Cal and recovers himself. “Fuck, man, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” he says, hand to his chest, managing to pull out a laugh. “You’d want to watch yourself, doing that. Another man woulda given you a clatter, if you took him by surprise like that. What are you doing out here, anyhow? I thought you were headed home to the bed.”
Cal says, “You said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Jesus, man, cool the jets. ’Tisn’t life-or-death. It can wait—I’ve been celebrating here, I’m in no state to be having delicate conversations. And neither are you, if you’re out here getting brambles stuck in your arse at this hour; you musta got a touch of the sun on that river. Go on home. I’ll buy you a straightener tomorrow, and we’ll have a nice civilized chat then.”
Cal says, “I been waiting here two hours to hear whatever you’ve got to say. Go ahead and say it.”
He watches Johnny eye him and the escape routes. Johnny isn’t drunk, but he’s considerably closer to it than Cal is, and the terrain has too many surprises to favor a quarry with no head start.
Johnny sighs, running a hand over his hair. “All right,” he says, marshaling his resources to humor the pushy Yank. “Here’s the story. No offense, now, and don’t be shooting the messenger, yeah?”
“Takes a lot to offend me,” Cal says.
Johnny grins automatically. “That’s a great thing, man. Listen: I hate to say it, but my friend Mr. Rushborough, he’s after taking against you. No reason that he’s given me; he just doesn’t like the cut of you. You make him nervous, he says. I’d say ’tis just that you don’t fit the idea of the place that he’s got into his head, d’you know what I mean? Them hairy aul’ farm fellas that smell of sheep shite and tin whistles and forty shades of green, they’re what he came looking for. A street-smart Chicago cop like yourself…” He turns up his palms. “That doesn’t fit the image at all, at all. ’Tisn’t your fault, but you’re upsetting the dream. And men get awful edgy if you upset their dreams.”