Chapter Seven
Seven
Trey bikes over to Cal’s on Saturday, just like she promised she would.
She scribbles down something or other about Yeats, and they make a start on Con McHugh’s wife’s nursing chair—the baby is due at the beginning of January, so the chair needs to be ready for Christmas.
They’ve never made one before, so they’ve been reading up and sketching for a while, working out their design based on the rocking chair Cal made for Lena a few years back.
They’re starting with the seat: tracing the pattern onto a thick slab of cherrywood chosen for its pretty grain, carefully cutting around it with the jigsaw, scooping out its hollow with curved draw knives.
Its shape feels good in the hands. Curls of wood shavings fall to the dusty floor, and in the corner the radio plays quietly, some woman with a sweet undemanding voice singing about nothing much.
Trey is quiet. She looks tired; there are purple smudges under her eyes.
Cal, expert at reading her various silences, can’t tell what’s under this one, whether she was just up late or whether she’s drudging through the afternoon till she can take off into her real life.
Go on, he wants to tell her. You go run with your buddies, do dumb stuff you shouldn’t, laugh your asses off.
It’s OK; I’ll take care of this. He knows he can’t do that.
Trey needs the money; her mama has nothing spare to give her.
Cal would give her an allowance in a heartbeat, but she wouldn’t take it.
He talks into her silences, about what to make for dinner and what poetry he liked back in English class and whether they should think about buying a bandsaw.
If he keeps his mouth shut too long, he starts getting edgy: about Trey and school, Trey and Kate, about what she’ll do for money if Mart was wrong and Tommy Moynihan sics his Revenue friend on their woodworking.
Cal has never been much of a worrier, not over things that aren’t right in front of his face.
He wonders if this is what a midlife crisis looks like.
The kid sticks around to make chicken parmigiana and green beans, and to eat them, but as soon as they’ve washed the dishes she slings her schoolbag on her back and heads for her mama’s place.
Cal takes Rip for his evening walk, among the squelching leaves and the whiffs of turf smoke, and then doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Nothing on Netflix looks good. He thinks of calling Lena, but he doesn’t want to mess with their routine two nights running; it feels like a surrender, an admission that things are shifting and there’s nothing he can do but let them all be dragged along.
The house is cold, a sullen cold that pushes up through the floor faster than the heating can drive it out. In the end he goes to bed early.
He’s restless enough that he’s half awake when, sometime after one in the morning, his phone beeps. It’s Trey.
Can you come over
Cal sits up and looks at the phone. Trey has never called him in her life—according to her, only old people use phones for making phone calls—but this has every indicator of something that requires an actual conversation. He calls her.
It takes her a few rings to pick up. “Yeah,” she says, warily, like she’s doing something weird and suspect. “So can you come over?”
“What for? Everyone OK?”
That gets a beat of silence. “ ’Cause,” Trey says eventually. “We got Donie McGrath here.”
In the background Cal hears an excited murmur of other voices, tightly kept down. “Where? Who’s we?”
“My house,” Trey says. “I told you.”
“Kid,” Cal says. “What the hell?”
Trey blows out air impatiently. “Can you just come? We’re out the back of the house. In those trees up against the mountain. Can you not let my mam see you?”
“OK,” Cal says. He can’t think of any way this makes sense, and definitely not a single way it could be good.
Donie McGrath is the town lowlife; he has the temperament and the vocation for serious scuzzbaggery but not the brains, so he spends his time hanging around the fringes of anything squirrelly he can find, doing the real guys’ grunt work and making his mama’s house shake with gangster rap.
There’s no good reason why Donie and Trey should intersect.
“I’m on my way. Just hang tight and don’t do anything dumb. We clear?”
“Yeah,” Trey says. “Can you bring a torch? Mine got broke.”
“Sure,” Cal says. He’s already pulling his pants on. “See you there.”
He sticks to running lights and low speed till he’s passed Mart’s place. Then he turns on his high beams and floors it.
Sheila Reddy and her kids live in an old gray cottage a few miles away, tucked in under the mountain.
Cal pulls over a couple of bends before the gate and leaves his car on the shoulder.
The cloud has thinned just enough that the moon is a white haze, and he can see to make his way up the road towards the Reddy place, every window dark at this hour.
He climbs over the wall and skirts the edges of the yard, keeping his flashlight off but ready, dodging Sheila’s flower beds and heading for the grove behind the house.
In among the trees is a light, faint but steady.
“You were ages,” a voice says in an undertone, from the shadow of a big oak. Cal has his feet braced and the flashlight raised before he realizes it’s Trey.
“What’s going on?” he says.
“Over this way,” Trey says, and heads into the trees. Cal follows her, his feet sinking into layers of soggy leaves. The dark is thicker in here. He turns on his flashlight, cupping it with his hand to let out only a trickle of light so he won’t trip over fallen branches.
They do in fact have Donie McGrath, very thoroughly.
He’s face down on the ground, with Aidan sitting on his back, Kate sitting on his thighs, Ciara sitting on his ankles, and Ross standing at his head with a phone flashlight pointed at him and a thick branch at the ready.
Even in the dark and under three teenagers, Donie is recognizable.
He’s a fat little no-neck fuck—flabby couch-potato fat, not farmer fat—wearing the kind of tracksuit that Cal associates with multiple low-level felonies.
“Can he breathe?” Cal asks.
“Who gives a shite?” Trey says.
“Gonna be a lot more paperwork if he can’t,” Cal says. Trey tilts her head, acknowledging this.
As they get closer, Donie comes to life and tries to wriggle himself free. “Gonna kill ye all,” he informs the kids.
That gets snorts of laughter out of them. “Not if we kill you first,” Aidan points out.
“He’s gonna stink us to death,” Kate says. “You should shower more often, d’you know that?”
“Bitch,” Donie says. “Gonna kill you.”
“Well, look at that,” Cal says. “He can breathe.” He goes around to Donie’s head and squats down, outside spitting range. It’s been a few years since the two of them last met, but Donie didn’t enjoy the experience, and Cal is pretty sure he remembers it vividly.
“Well hey there, Donie,” he says. Donie has grown out his hair into a mullet that ought to be illegal, but he still has the stringy little bangs, held in place by so much gel that the night’s events haven’t budged them. “I like the new hairdo.”
“Fucking prick,” Donie says, predictably.
“Language,” Cal says. “There’s young ’uns present.”
“Get them off me.”
“What’s your rush?” Cal says. “It’s a beautiful night; it’s not even raining. You just enjoy the fresh air awhile. Are his hands free?”
“Course not,” Trey says, affronted. “We brought that garden wire stuff my mam has for the roses.”
“Great,” Cal says. He straightens up. “Can you four keep an eye on him while Trey brings me up to speed?”
“No problemo,” Aidan says cheerfully. He bounces on Donie’s spine. Donie lets out a whoof like a deflating air mattress.
Cal jerks his head at Trey to follow him, and heads deeper into the trees. Once they’re far enough away for privacy, he stops.
“Kid,” he says. “I’m gonna ask you again: what the hell?”
“Little shitebag’s been hanging around our house at night,” Trey says.
“For weeks. Threw stones at our windows, poured pig shite all down the front door. Smashed up my mam’s flower beds.
Left a fox with the head taken off it on our step.
Don’t know where he got a fox; that little scut couldn’t catch a fuckin’ slug. Prob’ly roadkill.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Didn’t need to. ’M not a kid. I knew I could sort it myself. Or with the lads, anyhow.” Trey flicks her head backwards at her buddies. Cal swings the flashlight over to check on the situation. Aidan, still sitting firmly on Donie’s back, waves. Ross is tickling Donie’s nose with a long twig.
“We looked around during the day,” Trey says, “till we found a buncha cigarette butts and a coupla empty cans over there, in the trees. So we knew that was where he was watching from. Then we just hid out here at nights waiting, and when he showed up tonight, we jumped him. We didn’t know it was Donie, so we were thinking it’d be a fight, but it was like fighting a fuckin’ marshmallow.
Me and Kate coulda taken him on our own, no need for the rest.”
“For Chrissakes,” Cal says. He looks at her, standing there with her hair messy and a scratch down her cheek from wrestling around in undergrowth with that asshole, and feels a rush of warmth so strong it almost overwhelms him.
No wonder the kid has been tired, no wonder she’s been leaving Banjo to look after her family, and no wonder she wanted to spend most of her nights here.
He has an urge to grab her and give her a bear hug, or a noogie, or something.
“You goddamn dumbass. He could’ve had a knife. ”
“He did,” Trey says promptly. “It was in his pocket, but. We figured it would be. Why would he be waving it about, all on his own out here?” She fishes a sizable flick knife out of her jacket to show Cal.
“Jesus,” Cal says. “Gimme that.” He takes the knife away.