The Searcher(124)
“Yep,” Cal says. He wonders who was watching him and Trey on that mountain path.
“They found a big loada Sudafed, as well, and a big loada batteries. No surprise there. They took all that away with them, too, for good measure. If you have a cold this winter, Sunny Jim, or if your alarm clock gives up on you, you just let me know and I’ll sort you out.”
Cal learned a long time back to know when there’s nothing he needs to say. He warms his hands on his mug, drinks his tea and listens.
“Mind you,” Mart says, pointing with his rollie, “I wasn’t taking Donie’s word for anything. For all we knew, he robbed that anhydrous himself, then his deal went arseways and he thought he’d take the opportunity to drop Brendan in a bitta shite. But I know a lad whose place looks out over the road to that aul’ cottage; he kept an eye out. And sure enough, not long after the Guards came calling, didn’t Brendan Reddy go rushing up that road in a terrible hurry altogether. So then we knew for certain.”
He clicks his lighter and takes a leisurely, pleasurable drag on the cigarette, turning his head to blow the smoke away from Cal. “Brendan laid low for a few days after that,” he says. “Considering his options, I’d say. But we had an eye on him. Sure, he couldn’t stay indoors forever; his pals from Dublin were bound to want a word with him. Myself and the lads had no problem with that, but we wanted to get our word in first, so young Brendan’d know where he stood. We were trying to do him a favor; we didn’t want him making any foolish commitments to the Dublin boyos. Next time he headed up to that cottage, we were there to meet him.”
Cal thinks of how Trey said Brendan went bouncing out the door, chirpy as a cricket, on his way to give Austin the cash to replace what Mart’s boys had annexed, get all his plans patched up and back on track. He says, “He wasn’t expecting that.”
“That he wasn’t,” Mart says, momentarily diverted from his story to consider this point. “The face on him: like he’d walked into a room fulla hippopotamuses. A lad as sharp as that, you’d think he woulda seen it coming, would you not? But then, you’d think he’d be a step ahead of a thick like Donie, too. If he’d been a little less sharp when it came to the aul’ chemistry and a little sharper when it came to human beings, he’d be alive today.”
Cal finds himself with no feelings and no thoughts. He’s moved into a place that he knows well from the job: a circle where even the air doesn’t move, nothing exists but the story he’s hearing and the person telling it, and he himself has dissolved away to nothing but watching and listening and readiness. Even his aches and pains seem like distant things.
“We were intending to explain the situation to him, was all,” Mart says. He nods at Cal’s beat-up face. “You know the way yourself, sure. Just a bitta clarification. Only this lad didn’t want anything clarified. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but he was a cheeky little fecker, d’you know that? Telling us we didn’t know what we were dealing with, if we had any brains we’d fuck off back to our farms and not be sticking our noses into things we didn’t understand. I know that fella was dragged up, not brought up, but my mammy would’ve wore out her wooden spoon on me if I ever talked that way to men old enough to be my grandfather.” He reaches for an old jam jar that’s become an ashtray and unscrews the lid to tap ash. “We went to put manners on him, but didn’t he get rambunctious and try to fight back, and matters got a wee bit outa hand. The blood was up all round, like. The lad landed a few punches, someone lost his temper and caught him a great clatter to the jaw, and he went flying over backwards and hit his head on the edge of one of his own propane tanks.”
Mart takes a long drag on his rollie and tilts his head back to blow the smoke at the ceiling. “I thought at first he was only knocked out,” he says. “When I looked closer, but, I knew he was bad. I don’t know what done it, was it the punch or the fall, but whatever way it happened, his head was twisted round and his eyes were rolling up. He made a bit of a snoring noise and he done a few twitches of his legs, and then he was gone. Quick as that.”
In the window behind his head, the fields are a green so soft and deep you could sink into them. Wind blows a whisper of rain against the glass. The washing machine trudges on.
“I seen a man die quick once before,” Mart says, “when I was fifteen. The hay baler wasn’t clearing right, and he went to see what was wrong, only he left the power running. His hand got caught and the baler pulled him in. By the time I got it turned off, his arm and his head were gone. It shredded him like you’d shred a bitta wet kitchen roll.”
He watches his smoke trickle and spread through the air of the kitchen. “My granddad was after dying the month before that, of a stroke. That took him four days. Life seems like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it’s gone in a few seconds, it looks awful small all of a sudden. We don’t like to face up to that, but the animals know it. They’ve no notions about their dying. It’s a little thing, only; you’d get it done in no time. All it takes is one nip from a fox. Or a hay baler, or a propane tank.”
Cal says, “What’d you do with the body?”
Mart’s eyebrows twitch up. “Sure, we didn’t get the chance to do much of anything with it at all; not then, anyway. ’Twas a bit of an action-packed day all round. Before we’d properly got the hang of what was after happening, we got the call from the lad on the lookout, to say that the Dublin boyos were on their way. We put your man on an aul’ bedsheet that was in the back room and carried him up the hillside behind the cottage, as far into the trees as we’d time for. When we heard their car—big bull of a black Hummer, they had, I don’t know how they got it round the bends in them roads—we laid him down among the bushes and crouched down next to him.”