Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
Cal finds Mart up his attic ladder, with only his legs visible, banging something metal and singing “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” into the attic at the top of his lungs.
Kojak, determinedly staying put at the foot of the ladder in case he’s needed, gives Cal an imploring eyeroll.
Cal has to shout three times before Mart hears him.
“Ah,” Mart says, when he’s reversed his way down the ladder till he can twist his head around to see Cal, a maneuver complicated by the fact that he has a frying pan in each hand. “ ’Tis yourself. That fucker’s back.”
“Squirrel?” Cal says. Mart’s battle with the squirrel is an annual event, as reliable a part of the calendar as the National Ploughing Championships or the little old ladies’ springtime novena at the village grotto.
The squirrel, when the weather turns cold, feels that Mart’s attic is an ideal place to spend the winter; Mart disagrees.
According to him, the war has been going on for fifteen years and counting.
Cal has pointed out that squirrels only live a few years and this is presumably a hereditary feud, but Mart is having none of that. In his view, this is personal.
“Raffles himself,” Mart says. He drops the frying pans, which thud onto the congealed brown hall carpet, and comes down the ladder after them.
His fleece has a fresh layer of dust and cobwebs, over its usual decorations of mud and tractor grease.
“D’you know what that fucker’s after doing?
Yesterday, while myself and Kojak were out on the farm doing a dacent day’s work, he strolled into our kitchen, as bold as brass.
Et the food right outa Kojak’s bowl and done a shite on the table. That’s a declaration of war.”
“You sure it’s not a rat?” Cal asks. He picks up the frying pans, to spare Mart’s joints, and hands them over.
Mart snorts. “Rat, me arse. I know this fella’s work when I see it.
What I oughta do, if I was a man of leisure, is lie in wait for the bastard.
Spend the day sitting in my kitchen with my rifle, and when he shows his face”—he mimes firing the frying pans—“go ahead, punk, make my day. D’you fancy taking over the farmwork for tomorrow, Jean-Claude? ”
“You’re turning into Yosemite Sam here, man,” Cal says.
“That rabbit was a fuckin’ amateur,” Mart says darkly, picking a cobweb out of his eyebrow. “This fella’s the real thing. A stone-cold professional.”
“You’re gonna end up burning the house down or something,” Cal says. Things have never escalated to flamethrower levels yet, but it appears to be a matter of time.
“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” Mart says.
“One year I tried rat bait, and d’you know what he done?
Took it outside and dropped it around the yard.
That cute hoor tried to poison my dog. I can’t let that slide.
” He shoots the ladder back into place and slams the attic trapdoor closed.
“All that noise oughta have scared him out for now, but he’ll be back.
We’ll go have a look for where he’s getting in.
” He hands Cal one of the frying pans. “If you catch sight of the fella, give him a skelp with that. See can you get him over the wall.”
They circle the house, their boots sticking in the gravelly mud, Kojak trudging behind them with a long-suffering air.
The day is cold and windless. The rams have been turned out with the ewes, for spring lambing; their deep calls carry faintly, muffled by the low mist hanging over the fields.
Every half-minute Mart whips around to scan the trees that edge the yard.
Now that he’s here, Cal finds himself putting it off a little longer, like he could just do this: help Mart fix his lintel or his vent or whatever, maybe even agree to do some farmwork tomorrow while Mart hides in the kitchen playing Caddyshack, and then go home, taking his grenade with him.
Once he pulls the pin, he has no idea what the blast radius is going to be.
“Hey,” he says, pointing his frying pan up at the eaves. “That a hole, right under there?”
Mart squints at the tiny dark patch in the soffit. “By George,” he says, “I think he’s got it. Isn’t it a great thing to be young and have good eyesight?”
“You want me to go up there, take a look?”
Mart shakes a finger vigorously at Cal. “Ah, no, no, no. This is between Raffles and myself. If I go bringing in backup, he’ll take it as a sign of weakness. If you’re in a helpful humor, but,” he adds, “are you any good at the aul’ auto repairs?”
“Not my department,” Cal says. “That rustbucket finally give up on you?”
“That classic vehicle,” Mart informs him with dignity, “will be riding the range long after yourself and myself are dead and gone. No: someone took a crowbar to Senan’s car.
Bet the living shite outa it. That yoke wasn’t going to win any prizes to start with, but the state of it now: if ’twas a horse you’d shoot it.
Senan’s bulling. And he can’t go through the insurance without making a police report, so he’s stuck paying for the whole thing outa pocket. ”
Cal doesn’t need an explanation. Senan will leave the police out of this, both by reflex and because he doesn’t want them keeping an eye on what might come next. He says, “Long John?”
“Who knows, Sunny Jim,” Mart says. “Who knows. Long John’d be the obvious suspect, all right, but it never pays to go after the obvious around here.
There’s plenty of other people besides Long John that have strong opinions, these days.
” He narrows his eyes at the eaves, scratching his jaw.
“While we’re on the subject,” he says. “Did you ever find any of that clarity you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “About that.”
Mart turns to look at him.
“Word is,” Cal says, “that factory over towards Kilhone is gonna want more land than they thought. If Tommy buys up enough parcels here and there and sells them to the factory, and if he gets Eugene onto the county council, the factory can get compulsory purchase orders on everything in between.”
There’s a silence. Mart says, “Where’d you get this?”
“Lena got it from Mrs. Duggan,” Cal says. Mart’s voice, its complete lack of any expression at all, chills him.
Mart nods a few times. “That means ’tis likely true,” he says. “I’ll say this for Dymphna: her prices are high, but she delivers the goods.”
He stands still, thinking, his eyes on nothing. Back on the job, that particular stillness would have had Cal reaching for his gun.
“It’d work out, all right,” Mart says. “Tommy already has a few of the council in his pocket, one way or t’other. If he gets Eugene in there to run the show, they’ll do anything he tells them.”
“Why would anyone want that much land?” Cal asks. It’s the one thing that’s been making him doubt this story. “How big is this factory gonna be?”
Mart smiles, a small grim smile out to the fields.
“That’s the beauty of it, Sunny Jim,” he says.
“Once the land is theirs, ’tis theirs. Whoever’s behind that factory can have a change of heart any time they like.
Maybe it’ll dawn on them that they don’t need all that land for the factory after all, but they can get the council to rezone it, not a bother on them, and they’ve developer pals who think a housing estate’d go lovely right there.
Or a tourist village, maybe, or a data center.
Or they can sell the whole lot to one a them megafarms. The world’s their oyster, or anyhow this townland is. ”
Cal says, “They don’t have to sell it back to you guys if they change their minds?”
Mart’s smile widens. “Ah, God, no. A few years back, there was people trying to get that rule brought in, but your woman that was Minister said we didn’t need it; sure, she said, that’d never happen.
Whenever a politician starts promising that something’ll never happen, boyo, that’s when I start the countdown. ”
He’s still looking out at the fields. P.J. is out on his land, poking at something with the toe of one boot, a big yellow bucket hanging from his hand. Behind him, the mist blurs trees to huddled ghosts; stone walls hang unmoored. The fields eddy like water.
“Everything in between,” Mart says.
“Bobby,” Cal says. “Rory Dunne. Lena.” He recalls Tommy, way back in Noreen’s shop with Rachel Holohan outside the window, nudging to find out whether Lena would be moving to his place.
Mart nods. “Flapper Deery. The McHugh lads. Ciaran Maloney.”
The names fall like a list read over a tolling bell. “Not this side,” Cal says. “Not you and me and P.J.”
“Not yet,” Mart says. “But it will be. I’d say it’ll be one a them megafarms; all investors behind it, not a farming man or woman among them—and we all know who one of the big investors’ll be.
And that’ll be the young fellas around here scuppered.
If I decide to sell up tomorrow and spend the rest of my days cruising the Caribbean—which I’m considering, if ’tis the only way to escape that Raffles fucker—then some young lad whose father hasn’t enough to share between all the brothers could buy my land.
But once one a them megafarms comes in, land prices’ll shoot up till no one else can afford to buy. ”
He smiles that small grim smile again. “ ‘I own this town,’ the Boss Moynihan usedta say. Tommy’s after taking that awful literally.”