Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
All the next day, Cal finds reasons to be out on his land or at his front windows, which needed cleaning anyway.
All he sees is Mart, trundling around on his patched-up tractor or stumping across the fields, head bent against the drizzle, to examine a limping sheep that Kojak cuts neatly out of the herd. The odd car goes past, without slowing.
By nighttime, he’s not watching for an emissary any more. Tommy has no intention of negotiating, let alone surrendering. Cal is watching for the counterattack.
He doesn’t know where he ought to be. The expanse outside his windows hums with danger, on every side; he has no way to tell where it’ll condense itself.
He wants to grab Trey and Lena and gather them in under his roof, but neither of them would come.
He has to stop himself from driving around in circles on the muddy roads like a crazy guy, rifle on the passenger seat, trying to keep an eye on everyone at once.
Mart is the most likely target, so Cal makes himself stay home and keep an eye on Mart’s place, and try to trust that Trey or Lena will call him if they need him.
He texts Lena—Everything OK? Love you—and watches the check marks turn blue when she reads it, and then stands in his kitchen looking at his phone for a long time until she goes offline.
He sits up most of the night in his living room, with the lights out, listening to the fitful rain against the windows and watching the blank darkness outside.
Running underneath everything he does, he misses Lena.
Their relationship, which neither of them planned on, has always been a serene thing, holding no surprises except for its existence.
Cal put that down to them being middle-aged, having too much experience to either expect or want the flashy stuff, the fireworks and transformations and revelations that his younger self considered essential to romance; what they looked for was a steady mutual happiness, a warming and brightening of both their lives.
He loved the thought of the two of them continuing this way, graying and unwavering, into old age.
Now—assuming they’re still together, which is unclear—things have shifted; the steadiness he loved, once cracked, might be mended somehow but can never be taken for granted again.
He feels, with a combination of deep grief and outrage, that somehow both of them are being robbed; and, at the same time, that Lena isn’t doing her share to prevent the despoiling.
On Saturday morning his patience runs out and he heads over to Mart’s, to see if he can get some sense of what the fuck is going on.
He finds Mart in his sheep shed, bending over a ewe he’s got trapped in an undignified sitting position between his knees.
Even near-empty, the shed has a placid, comforting smell of wool, straw, and sheep shit.
A thin grayish light filters through the high roof windows, catching on specks of dust that hang motionless in the air.
“ ’Tis yourself,” Mart says, looking up from the ewe. He waggles her hoof at Cal, like she’s waving. “Have a look at this, now. D’you know what that is?”
Cal steps over Kojak, who’s lying across the entrance to the pen waiting to be needed, and bends to inspect the hoof.
Mart watches him with the encouraging smile of a teacher supervising crayon ABCs.
Between the toes, the hoof is moist and reddened, oozing white.
The ewe stares blankly past Cal’s ear, apparently unaware of his existence.
“Scald?” Cal says.
“We’ll make a sheep farmer of you yet,” Mart says. “That’s scald, all right. I’ve been waiting for it, with the fields wet as bog for months, and here it is. She’s the third one this week. Pass me that bottle there.”
Cal hands over the hoof gel, and Mart deftly pinches the ewe’s toes apart and squirts it between them. The ewe gives a convulsive start and then, when Mart grips her tighter between his knees, relapses into her trance.
“How’s the squirrel doing?” Cal asks.
“Pacing,” Mart informs him, rubbing the gel into crevices with a thumb. “All night long, up and down my roof. I’ve got the measure of that fucker. He wants me to know he’s not giving up. He’s working out his next move.”
“I dunno if squirrels pace,” Cal says. “Maybe your house is haunted.”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” Mart says. “A poltergeist’d be a bitta company, and when I got bored of his antics, I’d sell the telly rights for millions and live out my old age in me lavish on a beach in the Bahamas.
No: ’tis Raffles, all right. I know that fella’s style.
But I won’t be bested by a fuckin’ rodent.
If he finds another way in, I’ll be waiting for him.
” He hands Cal the bottle, pulls a roll of green tape out of a pocket, and starts winding it between the ewe’s toes. “Didja come here to ask after Raffles?”
Cal catches the ewe’s other front hoof and squirts gel between the toes. “Nope,” he says. “I came to ask if there’s been any movement, after the other night.”
“Movement,” Mart says, his face creasing up in a smile.
“That’s a lovely way of putting it; very elegant altogether.
You could say there’s been movement, all right.
Long John’s car went on fire last night; ’tis only by the grace a God and the rain it didn’t spread to the house.
Someone’s after spray-painting ‘TRAITORS OUT’ on Tommy Moynihan’s wall.
Izzy O’Connor minds Pauline McGinty’s little fellas while Pauline works at the plant, only Izzy said the plant should have a walkout and Pauline told her she oughta be ashamed of herself, so now Izzy won’t mind the childer any more, and Pauline’s going mental trying to find someone else.
Cara Deery was walking back from Noreen’s with her shopping, and Mouth McHugh went by in the tractor and swerved straight at her; she hadta jump into the ditch, shopping and all.
” He rips off the tape and pats the end into place on the ewe’s ankle.
“I mighta missed something—the grapevine’s suffering from a bitta network overload—but that’s the guts of it.
Give or take the odd gate left open, like, or the odd man that’s not welcome at his card game any more.
Is that enough movement for you, Jean-Claude? ”
Cal thinks about the pretty country road he walked to get here, all flanked by soft fields, the whole picture delicately framed by a horizon of lacy trees.
It seems to him that the dogs should have been hurling themselves against doors and howling to the gray sky, cows kicking down walls to run for the mountains before the lid blows off the whole place and everything underneath rises up, merciless.
“How many people are on Tommy’s side?” he asks.
“ ’Tisn’t even that they’re on his side, half a them,” Mart corrects him.
“ ’Tisn’t that they want the land taken over.
They just don’t believe that’s on the cards, ’cause if they believe it, they’ll haveta change their way of thinking, and maybe even stand up to the big man.
’Tis easier to just not believe a word. Like I told you: ‘Tommy wouldn’t do that, are you mad, Mart Lavin’s losing the plot in his old age, he’s gone paranoid, he’ll be saying the CIA has his phone tapped next…
’ ” He takes the second hoof from Cal and starts taping it up.
“What were you expecting, Sunny Jim? We went looking to stir up trouble, and we got it.”
“Except it’s the wrong kinda trouble,” Cal says.
He moves on to the ewe’s rear hooves; she doesn’t appear to notice.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere. People aren’t turning against the Moynihans; they’re getting more and more pissed off at each other, is all.
This keeps up, someone’s gonna get killed.
” It hits him that he’s hoping Mart will say all of this is exactly what he expected, it was in the plan and will inevitably lead, in some way that a blow-in like Cal can’t see, to Tommy getting his comeuppance. He’s come here looking for reassurance.
“I toldja before, boyo,” Mart says. “We need momentum. ’Tisn’t easy for people round here to go up against Tommy.
’Tis one thing for the likes of you, but we’ve been bowing and scraping to the Moynihans all our lives.
People need to rev the engines a while before they can break outa that habit.
Once the blood’s up, then we’ll give people something useful to do with it. ”
He bends, with a grunt as his joints snag, to catch a rear hoof for taping. “ ’Tisn’t the bitta trouble I mind,” he says. “Will I tell you what’s worrying me about all this?”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” Cal says.
“The scale,” Mart says. “Whatever else about Tommy, and there’s plenty else, the man has scale.
What’s happening around here is all wee bitsa nonsense; the likes of what you’d get in an argument over someone moving a boundary stone, or a dog worrying someone’s sheep.
Small-time carry-on, that’s what it is. Where’s Tommy? ”
“Tommy doesn’t like getting his hands dirty,” Cal says. He caps up the hoof gel.
“True enough,” Mart agrees. “Tommy was always one for leaving the wet work to the minions; if I caught him sticking his own neck out, I’d know his back was well against the wall.
But mostly, Sunny Jim, Tommy’d be the ideas man.
He’d come up with the plan, he’d issue the orders, and then the minions would go out and do what they’re told.
This foostering about burning cars and swerving tractors, those don’t smell like Tommy’s ideas to me. D’you see what I’m getting at?”
“So maybe he’s holding his fire,” Cal says. “Hoping we’ll all be so busy spray-painting shit on each other’s walls, we’ll forget about him.”