The Searcher(83)
Cal finds himself afraid. He feels the fear first, and understands it only gradually. It has to do with the kid, and the way people around here treat him and his family like shit, and the way his brother leaving threw him into a savage, desperate tailspin. It has to do with the matter-of-fact, unflinching neatness—which seemed like a good quality at the time—with which he killed and butchered that rabbit. He couldn’t handle causing suffering, but then the sheep didn’t suffer, or only for a second or two.
Cal thinks, That’s a good kid. He wouldn’t do that. But he knows that no one has ever made it clear to Trey what, exactly, good and bad mean, or the importance of finding the line between them and staying on the right side.
After a while, a lone flashlight beam makes its way up the fields from P.J.’s place to Mart’s. A while after that P.J.’s lights go out, and finally Mart’s do too. The countryside is dark.
Cal heads for home. On his way up the garden he shines his flashlight over at the stump. Something has taken away the remains of the rabbit, clean as a whistle, not a scrap left behind.
When Cal gets to the meeting point, at three-twenty and by a long rambling route, Trey isn’t there. The mountainside is so deserted that he feels like an intruder. Along the way grazing sheep turned their heads to stare at him, and he passed fragments of lichen-mottled field walls; but up here the only signs of human existence are the dirt track he’s been following, with weeds growing tall along the middle, and the occasional dark scar in the heather where someone was cutting turf sometime.
Last night’s unease builds higher. The only way the kid would miss this is if he was hurt too badly to come.
Cal turns in a circle, scanning the mountain. The wind combs the heather and gorse with a low ceaseless rustle. Its smell has a sweetness almost too cold to catch. The sky is a fine-grained gray, and from somewhere in its heights a bird sends down a pure wild whistling.
When he turns back, the kid has materialized on the road above him, like he was there all along.
“You’re late,” Cal says.
“Doing my homework,” Trey says, with the edge of a sassy grin.
“Sure you were,” Cal says. He can’t see any bruises or gashes. “You get home OK last night?”
Trey gives him a suspicious look, like this is a weird question. “Yeah.”
“I heard noises, later on. Like an animal got hurt, maybe.”
The kid shrugs, implying that this is both possible and not his problem, and turns to head up the road. Cal watches him walk. His long, springy lope is the same as ever; he’s not favoring anything, or holding himself like anything hurts.
Some of the worry goes out of Cal, but a residue stays. He’s more or less satisfied that the kid isn’t the one hurting sheep, but this no longer seems like the central point, or at least not the only one. It’s been brought home to him that he’s not clear, or anything like clear, on what Trey is and isn’t capable of.
Beyond the bend Trey strikes off the path, upwards into the heather. “Mind yourself,” he says over his shoulder. “Boggy bits.”
Cal watches where Trey puts his feet and tries to match him, feeling the ground sink under him here and there. The kid knows this terrain better, and suits it better, than Cal does. “Shit,” he says, as the bog sucks at his boot.
“You haveta go faster,” Trey says, over his shoulder. “Don’t give it a chance to get holda you.”
“This is as fast as I go. Not all of us are built like jackrabbits.”
“Moose, more like.”
“You remember what I told you about manners?” Cal demands. Trey snorts and keeps moving.
They pass between gorse bushes, around old turf-cutting scars, under a sheer cliffside where tufts of grass sprout in the cracks between boulders. Cal keeps an eye out for watchers, but nothing moves on the mountainside, except heather stirring in the wind. This isn’t a place anyone would stumble across by accident. Whatever Brendan was doing up here, he wanted to do it undisturbed.
Trey takes them up a slope steep enough to use up Cal’s breath, and plunges into a thick plantation of spruces. The trees are tall and neatly spaced, and the ground is padded with years’ worth of needles. The wind doesn’t reach them here, but it rakes the treetops with an unceasing restless mutter. Cal doesn’t like the stark contrasts in this terrain. They have the same feel as the weather, of an unpredictability deliberately calculated to keep you one step behind.
“There,” Trey says, pointing, as they step out of the trees.
Brendan’s hideout is below them, sheltered from the worst of the winds in a slight dip, with its back up against the mountainside. It isn’t what Cal expected. He was picturing one of those clusters of raggedy stone-wall scraps with maybe a piece of roof here and there, left to nature’s slow devices for generations. This is a squat white cottage no older than his own, and in much the same shape as his own was when he arrived. Its door and window frames even have most of their red paint left.
Cal finds this more unsettling than his original image. A derelict two-hundred-year-old house fits into the ways of nature: things have their time and then fall apart. For a relatively new and usable house to be abandoned seems to imply some unnatural event, sharp-edged and final as a guillotine. The place has a look he doesn’t like.
“Wait,” he says, putting out a hand to block Trey as he starts towards it.