The Searcher(60)

“Mal, meet Cal,” says Bobby, getting the giggles. “Cal, meet Mal.”

“The state of you,” Senan says in disgust.

“I’m grand,” Bobby says, miffed.

“Mr. Dwyer,” Mart tells Cal, “is the finest distiller in three counties. A master craftsman, so he is.” Malachy smiles modestly. “Every now and then, when Malachy has a particularly fine product on his hands, he’s gracious enough to bring some of it in here to share with us. As a service to the community, you might say. I thought you deserved an opportunity to sample his wares.”

“I’m honored,” Cal says. “Although I feel like if I had any sense I’d be scared, too.”

“Ah, no,” Malachy says soothingly. “It’s a lovely batch.” He produces, from under the table, a shot glass and a two-liter Lucozade bottle half-full of clear liquid. He pours Cal a shot, careful not to spill a drop, and hands it over. “Now,” he says.

The rest of the men watch, grinning in a way that Cal doesn’t find reassuring. The liquor smells suspiciously innocuous. “For Jaysus’ sake, don’t be savoring the bloody bouquet,” Mart orders him. “Knock that back.”

Cal knocks it back. He’s expecting it to go down like kerosene, but it tastes of almost nothing, and the burn doesn’t have enough harshness even to make him grimace. “That’s good stuff,” he says.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Mart says. “Smooth as cream. This fella’s an artist.”

Right then the poteen hits Cal; the banquette turns insubstantial beneath him and the room circles in slow jerks. “Whoo!” he says, shaking his head.

The alcove roars with laughter, which comes to Cal as a pulsing jumble of sound some distance away. “That’s some serious firepower you got there,” he says.

“Sure, that was only to give you the flavor of it,” Malachy explains. “Wait till you get started.”

“Last year,” Senan tells Cal, jerking a thumb at Bobby, “this fella here, after a few goes of that stuff—”

“Ah, now,” Bobby protests. People are grinning.

“—he got up out of that seat and started shouting at the lot of us to bring him to a priest. Wanted to make his confession. At two o’clock in the morning.”

“What’d you done?” Cal asks Bobby.

He’s not sure whether Bobby will hear him, since he’s finding it hard to gauge exactly how far apart they are, but it works out fine. “Porn,” Bobby says with a sigh, leaning his chin on his fist. The drink has given him an air of dreamy melancholy. “On the internet. Nothing shocking, like; just people having a bit of a rattle. It didn’t even download right. But whatever was in that batch of Malachy’s, it gave me palpitations, and I got it in my head I was having a heart attack. I thought I oughta confess my sins, in case I died, like.”

Everyone is laughing. “That wasn’t my stuff giving you them palpitations,” Malachy tells him. “That was your guilty conscience coming out.” Bobby tilts his head, acknowledging the possible justice of this.

“Did you take him to a priest?” Cal asks.

“We did not,” says Senan. “We put him in the back room to sleep it off. Told him we’d say the rosary over him till he woke up.”

“They didn’t do it,” Bobby says, aggrieved. “They forgot I was there at all. I woke up the next morning and thought I was dead.”

That gets another wave of laughter, and Cal is swept along, rocking helplessly with it. “He was still half cut,” Senan says. “Rang me asking was he dead, and what should he do about it.”

“At least,” Bobby says with dignity, raising his voice to be heard, “I never broke my nose trying to jump a wall I hadn’t leaped since I was eighteen—”

“Damn near made it,” Mart says, lifting his pint and winking at the rest.

“—or took a dare and knocked on aul’ Mrs. Scanlan’s window buck naked and got cold water thrown on me.”

A guy on the far edge of the group gets a collective whoop of approval and a couple of back-slaps, and shakes his head, grinning. Cal likes seeing them all this way, the wild boys shining through the solid farmers. For a moment he wonders which one of them was Brendan back in the day, the restless one on the hunt for hustles and escape routes, and how he ended up.

“Have another one there,” Mart says, eyes alight with mischief, reaching for the bottle. “You’ve some catching up to do.”

Cal is surface drunk but not deep-down drunk, and he reckons he ought to keep it that way. Booze has never bothered him the way drugs do—it doesn’t hollow out reality, and people, in the same way—but the air of this room has a high giddy spin, like under the right circumstances things could get out of control with free-fall speed, and this situation has a flavor of initiation rite that could well turn out to be the right circumstances. “Sounds to me like I should take it slow,” he says. “So I don’t wind up buck naked outside Miz Scanlan’s window.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Mart assures him. “Sure, it could happen to a bishop.”

“You boys were weaned on this stuff,” Cal points out. “If I try to keep up with you, I’m gonna end up going blind.”