The Searcher(14)

“He actually gonna try and burn you down?”

Barty snorts. “Jaysus, no. Donie hasn’t the guts of a louse. And that’d be too much like hard work.”

“You reckon he’s harmless?”

“He’s pure fucking useless,” Barty says with finality. Behind him the tin whistle starts up again, neat and jaunty. He dusts Donie off his hands and heads back into the pub.

Nobody else seems particularly unnerved by the incident, either. Mart and his buddies have reshuffled and started a new round of Fifty-Five; the argument at the bar has shifted to the merits of this year’s hurling team. Barty gives Cal a free pint. Deirdre finishes her drink, casts a long hopeless look around the pub, and drifts out when nobody meets her eye.

All the same, Cal hangs around, making his freebie last, till Mart and his buddies finish up their game and start gathering their things. Mart was the one who called Donie a cheat. When he offers Cal a ride home—which he does every time, purely for the pleasure of ribbing Cal when he turns it down—Cal says yes.

Mart is moderately drunk, enough that he drops his keys in the footwell of the car and has to get out again to fumble around for them. “Don’t be worrying,” he says with a grin, reading Cal’s expression and giving a slap to the side of his car, a decrepit blue Skoda covered in mud splatters and smelling strongly of wet dog. “This yoke knows her way home from the pub, even if I fall asleep at the wheel. She’s done it before.”

“Great,” Cal says, retrieving the keys and handing them over. “I feel better now.”

“What happened to your hand?” Mart inquires, clambering painstakingly back into the car.

Cal’s hand is healing up fine, but he still has that Band-Aid on so no one can see the tooth marks. “Caught myself with a saw,” he says.

“That’s what you get,” Mart says. “Next time you’ll listen to me and go to them websites.” He fires up the car, which coughs, shudders and springs off up the road at an alarming pace. “What was that big lump Senan going on about? Was it Bobby’s ewe?”

“Yeah. Bobby figures it was aliens. Senan doesn’t agree.”

Mart wheezes with laughter. “I’d say you think Bobby’s mad as a brush, do you?”

“Nah. I told him about the time my grandpa saw a UFO.”

“You made him a happy man, so,” Mart says, turning off the main road and shifting gears with a nasty crunching noise. “Bobby’s not mad. All that’s wrong with him is he spends too much time at the farm work. It’s grand work, but unless a man’s pure thick, it can leave his mind restless. Most of us have something to look after that: the family, or the cards, or the drink, or what-have-you. But Bobby’s a bachelor, he’s got no head for the drink, and he’s that bad at cards we won’t have him in our game. When his mind does get restless, he’s got no option but to head up the hills hunting UFOs. The lads want to buy him a harmonica, give him something else to occupy him, but I’d rather listen to him go on about aliens any day.”

Cal considers this. It seems to him that aliens are probably a healthier antidote to restlessness of the mind than some of the others on Mart’s list. The way Mart is driving supports this theory.

“You don’t reckon the aliens got his sheep?” he asks, just to yank Mart’s chain.

“Arrah, fuck off, would you.”

“He says there’s nothing round here that would do it.”

“Bobby doesn’t know everything that’s round here,” Mart says.

Cal waits, but he doesn’t elaborate. The car bumps over potholes. The headlights illuminate a narrow streak of road and waving branches on either side; a pair of luminous eyes flare suddenly, low to the ground, and are gone.

“There you go,” Mart says, slamming to a stop in front of Cal’s gate. “Safe and sound. Just like I told you.”

“You can drop me up at your place,” Cal says. “Just in case you’ve got a welcoming committee.”

Mart stares at him for a second and then laughs so hard he doubles over coughing, slapping the steering wheel. “Well, begod,” he says, when he recovers. “I’ve got my own knight in shining armor to escort me home. Surely to God you’re not worrying about that little scut Donie McGrath? And you from the big bad city.”

“We get guys like him in the city, too,” Cal says. “I don’t like them there either.”

“Donie wouldn’t come next nor near me,” Mart says. The last of the laugh is still creasing his face, but there’s a flat note to his voice that startles Cal. “He knows better.”

“Humor me,” Cal says.

Mart giggles, shaking his head, and starts the car again. “Go on, so,” he says. “As long as you’re not expecting a good-night kiss.”

“In your dreams,” Cal says.

“Save them for Lena,” Mart tells him, and he laughs all the way up the road.

At Mart’s place—a long white cottage with undersized windows, set well back from the road amid neglected grass—the porch light is on and Kojak is there to greet him when he opens the door. Cal lifts a hand and waits while Mart tips his tweed cap in the doorway, and while the inside lights go on. When nothing else happens, he heads for home. Even if Donie McGrath shows an uncharacteristic flash of initiative, Kojak is pretty good backup. But something about the sight of Mart in his doorway, at ease amid the fields and the huge wind-roamed dark, Kojak wagging beside him, has left Cal feeling slightly ridiculous, although not in a bad way.