“He can try all he wants,” Cal says. He doesn’t want any favors from Mart. “Did he hook up with Mrs. Dumbo?”
“He did his best. That lad’d get up on a cracked plate. Don’t you be letting him around your Lena.”
Cal lets that go. Mart finds his tobacco pouch, pulls out a skimpy rollie, and lights it. “I might go on up to his place tomorrow night,” he says reflectively, picking a shred of tobacco off his tongue. “Whatever he’s at, there’s some eejits around here that’d fall for it. I might as well have a good view of the action.”
“Bring your popcorn,” Cal says.
“I’ll bring a bottle of Jameson, is what I’ll bring. I wouldn’t trust him to have anything dacent in, and if I’ve to listen to that gobshite, I’d want to be well marinated.”
“I figure I’ll stick with ignoring him,” Cal says. “Save myself the booze money.”
Mart giggles. “Ah, now. Where’s the entertainment in that?”
“You and me got different ideas of entertainment,” Cal says.
Mart draws on his rollie. His face, creased against the sun, is suddenly grim. “I’m always in favor of paying heed to the sly fuckers,” he says. “Even when it’s an inconvenience. You never know when there might be something you can’t afford to miss.”
He nudges one of Cal’s tomatoes with the point of his crook. “Them tomatoes is coming along great,” he says. “If you have a few going spare, you know where to find me.” Then he whistles for Kojak and starts off back towards his own land. When he crosses Johnny Reddy’s trail, he spits on it.
—
Ignoring Johnny turns out to be harder than Cal expected. That evening, when Lena has sent Trey home and come over to his place, he can’t settle. Mostly his and Lena’s evenings are long, calm ones. They sit on his back porch drinking bourbon and listening to music and talking, or playing cards, or they lie on the grass and watch the expanse of stars turn dizzyingly above them. When the weather is being too Irish, they sit on his sofa and do most of the same things, with rain padding peacefully and endlessly on the roof, and the fire making the room smell of turf smoke. Cal is aware that this puts them firmly in boring-old-fart territory, but he has no problem with that. This is one of the many areas where he and Mart don’t see eye to eye: being boring is among Cal’s main goals. For most of his life, one or more elements always insisted on being interesting, to the point where dullness took on an unattainable end-of-the-rainbow glow. Ever since he finally got his hands on it, he’s savored every second.
Johnny Reddy is, just like Mart spotted from all the way over on his own land, a threat to the boringness. Cal knows there’s nothing he can do about the guy, who has more right to be in Ardnakelty than he has, but he wants to do it anyway, and quick, before Johnny starts in fucking things up. Lena is drinking her bourbon and ginger ale, comfortable in the back-porch rocking chair that Cal made for her birthday, but Cal can’t sit. He’s throwing a stick for Rip and Nellie, who are surprised by this departure from routine but not about to turn down the opportunity. Daisy, Rip’s mama, who doesn’t have a sociable nature, has ignored the stick and gone to sleep beside Lena’s chair. The fields have sunk into darkness, although the sky still has a flush of turquoise above the treeline in the west. The evening is still, with no breeze to take away the day’s leftover heat.
“You fed her dinner, right?” he asks for the second time.
“Enough to fill a grown man,” Lena says. “And if she needs more, I’d say Sheila might have the odd bitta food lying around the house. D’you reckon?”
“And she knows she can come back to your place if she needs to.”
“She does, yeah. And she can find her way in the dark. Or in a snowstorm, if one comes up.”
“Maybe you should go home tonight,” Cal says. “In case she comes back and you’re not there.”
“Then she’ll know where to look for me,” Lena points out. Lena spends maybe two nights a week at Cal’s place, which naturally the entire village has known since the day it began and probably before. At the start he suggested tentatively that she might walk, or he could walk to hers, to avoid people seeing her car and making her a target of gossip, but Lena just laughed at him.
Rip and Nellie are having a ferocious tug-of-war with the stick. Rip wins and gallops triumphantly over to drop it at Cal’s feet. Cal hurls it back into the darkness of the yard, and they disappear again.
“He was nice to me,” Cal says. “What was he nice to me for?”
“Johnny is nice,” Lena says. “He’s got plenty of faults, but no one could say he’s not nice.”
“If Alyssa was hanging around some middle-aged guy when she was that age, I wouldn’t’ve been nice to him. I’da punched his lights out.”
“Did you want Johnny to punch your lights out?” Lena inquires. “Because I could ask him for you, but it’s not really his style.”
“He used to hit them,” Cal says. “Not often, from what the kid’s said, and not too bad. But he hit them.”
“And if he tried it now, she’d have somewhere else to go. But he won’t. Johnny’s in great form. He’s the talk of the town, he’s buying the whole pub drinks and telling them all the adventures he had over in London, and he’s loving it. When the world’s being good to Johnny, he’s good to everyone.”
This fits with Cal’s assessment of Johnny. Except on the most immediate level, he isn’t reassured.
“He told Angela Maguire he was at a party with Kate Winslet,” Lena says, “and someone spilt a drink down the back of her dress, so he gave her his jacket to cover up the stain, and she gave him her scarf in exchange. He’s showing the scarf all around town. I wouldn’t say Kate Winslet would go near that yoke for love nor money, but it makes a good story either way.”
“He told Mart he had an idea,” Cal says, also for the second time. “What kind of idea does a guy like that come up with?”
“You’ll know day after tomorrow,” Lena says. “Mart Lavin’ll be straight down here to spill the beans. That fella loves being first with a bitta gossip.”
“Something that’d be good for this place, he said. What the hell would that guy reckon would be good for a place? A casino? An escort agency? A monorail?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lena says. Daisy whimpers and twitches in her dream, and Lena reaches down to stroke her head till she settles. “Whatever it is, it won’t get far.”
“I don’t want the kid around a guy like that,” Cal says, knowing he sounds absurd. He’s aware that gradually, over the past two years, he’s come to think of Trey as his. Not his in the same way as Alyssa, of course, but his in a specific, singular way that has no relation to anything else. He sees it in the same terms as the drystone walls that define the fields around here: they were handmade rock by rock as the need arose, they look haphazard and they have gaps you could stick a fist through, but somehow they have the cohesion to stand solid through weather and time. He hasn’t seen this as a bad thing; it’s done no one any harm. He can’t tell whether he would have done anything differently if he had expected Johnny to come home, bringing with him the fact that Trey is not, in reality, Cal’s in any way that carries any weight at all.
“That child’s no fool,” Lena says. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders. Whatever Johnny’s at, she won’t go getting sucked into it.”
“She’s a good kid,” Cal says. “It’s not that.” He can’t find a way to express, even to himself, what it is. Trey is a good kid, a great kid, on track to make herself a good life. But all of that seems so vastly against the odds that to Cal it has an aura of terrifying fragility, something incredible that shouldn’t be disturbed until the glue has set hard. Trey is still too little for anything to have set hard.