Chapter Fourteen #2
“Here you go, Sunny Jim,” Mart says. He digs in his jacket pocket and hands Cal a black wad that turns out to be a beanie, sliced in three spots to make a balaclava. “To cover up the head on you,” he explains, “so you don’t give anyone a shock, with the state of that beard.”
Anything requiring balaclavas doesn’t meet Cal’s definition of a direct route. He says, “While we do what?”
Senan and P.J. move on the doorstep, shoulders rolling, boots shifting.
“Nothing dramatic,” Mart assures Cal. “Or that’s not the plan, anyhow. Just a bitta explaining, like I told you. If we’re in luck, Tommy’ll be in a direct humor as well: he’ll be on for a nice chat, and we’ll have everything straightened out in time to get a good night’s sleep.”
Senan grunts cynically. Mart smiles at Cal. “I haveta admit,” he says, “I’m not feeling lucky. But either way, Sunny Jim, the message’ll get through loud and clear. And then we’ll see what we’ll see. Wrap up warm; we could be a while.”
“I’ll come,” Trey says. “Got another one a them yokes?” She points to the balaclava.
“No,” Cal says, pulling on his boots. “You’re staying here.” He doesn’t like leaving her alone, on a night that has this in the air. But just because Mart’s not planning on drama, that doesn’t mean no one else is.
Trey’s chin is out. She says, “Tommy fucked with us.”
“If I know anything about you, young one,” Mart tells her, “you’ll get your chance, or make one. This isn’t it. Adults only, tonight is.”
Trey says, “I don’t take orders offa you.”
“You’d get on with my Finbarr,” Senan tells her. “He’s a cheeky little fuck as well.”
“Kid,” Cal says. “Do me a favor. Stay here.”
Trey eyes him for a moment, but in the end she nods. She retires to the far end of the room, taking Rip with her, and rubs behind his ears while she watches Cal tie his bootlaces.
“We oughta ring Bobby again,” P.J. says. He sounds like he’s saying it for the fifth or sixth time.
“Fuck him,” Senan says flatly. The set of his jaw says he’s pissed about something, above and beyond the obvious.
“I s’pose,” P.J. says. He’s fidgeting his feet, troubled. “But he oughta be here.”
“He oughta be,” Mart agrees, “but he’s not. Another phone call won’t change that.”
“Have a guess where that fat little fuck is right now,” Senan says to Cal. “Go on, guess.”
“Róisín’s place?” Cal says, throwing on his jacket.
“That’d be understandable,” Mart says. “I wouldn’t mind that. You can’t keep a bull from the heifer.” P.J. shoots Mart a horrified look and jerks his head at Trey.
“That wee shite,” Senan says, “is at home in his bed. He says he’s got no love for Tommy Moynihan, but he owes Tommy for giving him the cash to meet Whatshername, so he can’t go up against the man. Did you ever hear such a loada—fuckin’ rubbishy—” Words fail him.
“So tonight’s just us four?” Cal asks.
“God, no,” Mart says. “I toldja: momentum.”
“Lock the door,” Cal tells Trey. He stuffs the balaclava in his jacket pocket. “And call me if you need me.”
“Smash his fuckin’ face in,” Trey says.
No one talks as they start, shoulder to shoulder, down the long road towards the village.
The cloud is high tonight, letting through a haze of moonlight here and there so that streaks of fields rise ghostly out of the darkness, and the air has an icy bite that burrows to the bone.
The silence is so powerful it comes at them like an attack.
As they near a side road, there’s movement: crunch of dirt, rustle of jackets. Mart stops at the turning, and they wait while two men take shape out of the dark: Francie and his cousin Skippy. Up ahead, down the road, there are more footsteps.
All the way to the village, men come out of gates, out of side roads, in twos and threes, to join them.
Some of them have brought things with them: tire irons, lump hammers, crowbars.
They go down the main street thirty strong, with the near-soundless, purposeful surge and patter of a wolf pack.
The shops are dark and shuttered tight, Noreen’s, the ladieswear boutique, Seán óg’s.
In the houses, windows are still lit here and there, but no one moves behind them.
The Moynihans’ house is on the edge of the village, just far enough out that the view doesn’t get cluttered up by common people going about their business. The garden is walled in by high concrete blocks. As Cal and the guys come closer, shadows peel off from the walls to meet them.
No one talks. Mart pulls another makeshift balaclava out of his pocket and works it down over his face.
Small movement ripples along the road as other men zip fleeces high, pull down hoods, arrange homemade balaclavas of their own.
In the turns of heads Cal catches flashes of Halloween masks, Frankenstein, Wolverine.
He pulls on his balaclava and feels something shift, his own outline wavering as he blurs into this thing that’s happening.
He can hear the other men’s breath all around him, the hiss of their jackets as they move, the gritty sounds of their feet on the road; he can smell their shared scent, hot and angry like a burner left on too long.
Mart turns his head, faceless, to scan the assembly. Then he nods, and steps through Tommy’s gate.
The security lights snap on, a brazen white glare that floods the yard from every direction at once.
The shadows it throws are stark and strange-angled, so each thing stands out separately, like stickers slapped onto a background: pagoda-shaped water feature, palm trees, glossy trio of cars.
Forty or fifty men follow Mart through the gates and into the glare.
They spread out across the smooth gravel, work boots crunching, and keep on spreading, onto the fake grass and the groomed flower beds, around the fancy conservatory, encircling the house.
Cal recognizes a few, by their jackets or their walks or Dessie Duggan’s snowman build, but most of them could be anyone.
Ardnakelty is made up of related guys with worn clothes and worn bodies; there’s nothing distinguished about any of them.
They wait, silent in the white dazzle, breath smoking in the cold air.
In a front bedroom, a light goes on.
Somewhere a deep voice rises, pitched to carry across fields, or through triple-glazing: “Hands off our land!”
The curtains don’t move. Presumably Tommy doesn’t need to look out the window; he can inspect them all, and record them, from some app on his phone.
Cal turns his blank black face up to the camera above the front door, straight to Tommy Moynihan, and points two-fingered to his own eyes and then to the lens: I see you.
Very few men in this townland are as tall and as broad-built as he is, but he doesn’t care.
Another voice, off behind the house, calls, “Hands off our land!”
Other voices pick it up, ragged and overlapping at first, then condensing into a hard, rhythmic chant.
The sound floods out to fill the vast night silence, ruling the fields, the village street, the invisible mountainside.
Cal doesn’t realize he’s chanting too till he hears his own voice, full-throated, pulled from deep in his belly by the voices rising all around him.
He feels the wild freefall of the fact that this fury isn’t his sole possession, or contained within his bounds; it’s a thing held in common, surging from him and every man with him, from their women and their children and their dead.
The curtains don’t shift, no more lights come on, the front door doesn’t open. Inside the house, Tommy Moynihan is realizing that his cover is blown, and evaluating what to do about it.
A new sound has started, a low dark pulse running beneath Hands off our land. It takes a few beats to rise up into clarity: Out out out out out.
The flare of the security lights means Cal can’t see if there’s movement behind the windows.
He can only sense it, the frantic scurry within the house, the dashes that meet the same faceless anger on every side.
Men are pounding weapons on the ground and stamping in time, the earth shaking with their drumbeat, Out out out.
Cal has stopped existing, dissolved into this.
He’s not cold any more. He understands now why Mart called this the direct route, how the meanings here are different from any he’s known.
Faceless, nameless, he and every man here is charging on Tommy stripped naked, all their trapped and swollen rage laid bare to the night sky.
Cal feels it lifting him, he knows he could keep roaring into this dizzy mix of darkness and white glare all night long, and he wonders who’ll break first, Clodagh or Eugene, or the walls of the house crumbling to dust under this barrage.
Mart was right: Tommy isn’t going to come out.
Cal is hit by a blast of savage exultation at what must be going on in Tommy’s mind right now.
Tommy is slick, Tommy is rich, Tommy has everyone who matters in his pocket and he always gets his way, but none of that is any kind of armor against this.
They could storm this house, smash every window and every stick of furniture, beat Tommy and Eugene to bloody pulp, and torch the place to ashes.
No one could come in time to stop them. No one would have seen a damn thing.
The thought is circling the house, leaping from one man to the next like electricity. Men are shifting their grips on the handles of their tools, getting ready. One guy—young, by his shape and swiftness—picks up a rock from the edging of a flower bed.
Mart, next to him, catches his arm as it rises and holds it down.
For a second it looks like he’s going to pull away, and a surge of motion ripples outwards from him, weapons rising, the circle breaking forward.
The chant is speeding up, building like a great wave ready to smash down, Out out out out.
In the splinter of a pause between beats, a siren whines, far off.