Chapter Nineteen #5
Cal tucks his jacket around Mart’s body, as well as he can.
He takes off his sweatshirt and folds it up.
“I’m gonna stick this under your head,” he says.
“Keep your face out of the dirt.” Probably he shouldn’t do it, spine injuries or whatever, but there’s no one here to do better.
Mart’s face tightens in a grimace when Cal lifts his head, as gently as he can, but he relaxes again when Cal lowers him onto the makeshift pillow.
“That’s lovely,” he says. “Sure, you wouldn’t get better in a fancy hotel.”
Mart’s tractor has always looked like a dinky little thing, but now, shadowing them both, it’s immense, a brutal hunk of metal weight.
It’s as old as Mart is, and has the safety features to match: no cab, no rollover bar.
Cal has called it a death trap before, but Mart just laughed at the city boy and pointed out that he never died yet.
The bale of silage that he was taking to his sheep has tumbled away and lies on the grass. “What happened?” Cal says. “Silage too heavy?”
Mart manages a snort, although it’s a wisp of his normal one.
“Don’t be insulting me. That’s what the investigators’ll put down on their wee notepads: wasn’t he very foolish altogether, driving the tractor on the slope, and the ground this wet and the silage on the front.
But you oughta have better sense than that.
I’ve driven this same path on this same tractor since before you were born. I don’t make fuckin’ mistakes.”
He takes a minute to get his breath back, but when Cal starts to say something, Mart raises a hand to stop him.
“Hold your whisht and listen to me,” he says.
“When you lift this tractor, you’ll find a hole in the ground under that front tire.
I felt it; felt the tire go into it. It’ll be small enough that the investigators won’t get their suspicions up, with the ground all boggy and the rabbits everywhere, but ’twasn’t there when I drove this path yesterday.
That hole was dug. Someone came out here last night and dug it, and laid the sod back down over it so I’d see nothing till ’twas too late. ”
Carrying sthing could be a gun. Trey guessed wrong. Tommy, at bay, brought an older weapon to battle, and worked in dirt and darkness with his bare hands, to the sound of his own hard breathing. Not a gun; a spade.
“It mightn’ta worked,” Mart says. “That’s the part that annoys me. The tractor mightn’ta tipped right over, or I coulda been thrown clear. I don’t appreciate dying just ’cause that fucker got lucky.”
Cal wants to say You’re not gonna die, but Mart wouldn’t thank him for cheap comfort. “Wait for the ambulance,” he says. “Don’t talk too much. You gotta save your strength.”
Mart ignores that. “There’s one silver lining,” he says. He’s turned his head, with some difficulty, so that his watery blue eyes can hold Cal’s. “This could come in fierce useful. Don’t you let it go to waste. I hate waste.”
“I’ll use it,” Cal says. He can’t afford his anger at Tommy right now; he’s keeping it for later. “You got my word on that.”
“You’re the one that’ll haveta get the job done, Jean-Claude,” Mart says.
“The resta them reprobates are grand men in their way, but there’s not a one of them that has a head for strategy.
That’s what Tommy’s banking on: without me, they’ll all be running around like headless chickens. He hasn’t bargained for you.”
“That’s a mistake,” Cal says.
Mart nods, satisfied. “Your Theresa was out on the prowl last night,” he says. “Amn’t I right? She’s a good girl. I’d say she saw something.”
For a reflexive second Cal balks at dragging Trey into this, till he realizes there’s no such thing. Trey lives here now; this is her fight already. “She probably did,” he says. “You ever think you’d be grateful for a Reddy?”
Mart’s laugh is an effortful wheeze that costs him. When it stops, he’s panting.
“I don’t know about you,” he says, “but I need a drink. Go on up to my kitchen. There’s a bottle of whiskey in the press above the kettle.”
“I’m gonna stay here a while,” Cal says.
“Get ta fuck with that. I need a drink to get me through this. That’s not a lot to ask. Get me a fuckin’ drink.”
He’s working himself up. “I’ll call P.J.,” Cal says. “He can bring us something.”
“You will not. By the time you get this explained to P.J., we’ll all be dead. Just fetch the fuckin’ bottle. I’ll still be here when you get back.”
Cal finds himself standing up. The air is cold, biting through his T-shirt like it’s not there. “You want me to call anyone else?” he asks.
“If you ring Father Eamonn,” Mart says, “I’ll come back and haunt you right outa Ardnakelty. I don’t want my sins forgiven, and I’m not having that Jabba the Hutt head be the last thing I ever see.”
“I meant friends,” Cal says. “Relatives, I dunno.” Mart has brothers somewhere, if they’re still alive, and cousins scattered around, but Cal doesn’t know whether he even has their phone numbers, let alone how to get hold of his phone.
“What for? I haven’t time for all that fussing and foostering, and I’m not the famous-last-words type anyhow. Just get that dog over here, before you go. I don’t like the look of him, and I haven’t the volume to do it myself.”
Kojak is crouched a few yards away, ears flat and tail tight between his legs.
Cal coaxes him, and in the end he slinks close enough to sniff Mart’s hand, and then his face and chest, lip drawing back at the wrongness in the scent.
“That’ll do,” Mart says, and Kojak folds to the ground, into the curve of Mart’s body.
“About fuckin’ time,” Mart says. He puts a hand on Kojak’s head. “Get a move on,” he says to Cal.
Once Cal is out of Mart’s line of sight, he runs.
It feels like running in a nightmare, slow motion through an endless landscape of empty fields, under a flat gray sky and a silence thick enough to choke him.
The only sounds are his own panting and the squelch of his boots in the muddy ground. Rip runs by his side, silent.
Mart’s house is dark. The kitchen smells faintly of frying bacon, and breakfast things are still on the table, plate, mug, Mart’s Dalek-shaped teapot. The whiskey is where he said it would be, a bottle of Powers, three-quarters full.
Cal finds Mart’s bedroom after wrong turns into two spare rooms where stripped beds and dark wood furniture lie under a thick film of dust. Mart sleeps in a single bed, below posters so old their colors have faded: The Magnificent Seven, Charlie’s Angels.
Cal rolls up the duvet to fit under his arm.
There’s a worn blue fleece at the end of the bed, and he pulls it on; it’s several sizes too small, but it’ll be enough for the time he needs it.
“Stay,” he says to Rip, on his way out, and shuts the door on him.
He can’t run any more, cumbered by the bottle and the duvet; he crosses the fields in a ludicrous clumsy jog.
When he gets back to the tractor, Mart and Kojak haven’t moved, and Mart is still alive.
“That’s lovely on you,” he says, when he sees Cal wearing his fleece.
His face is whiter. “You can keep it, as a souvenir. Where’s my whiskey? ”
Cal steadies the bottle as Mart drinks. A little bit dribbles down the side of his face, and Cal wipes it away with the cuff of the fleece. Mart’s skin is clammy and too cold. Kojak watches, only his eyes moving.
“That’s the stuff,” Mart says, when he’s had enough. Cal spreads the duvet over him and Kojak both. Mart grins when he sees it, but can’t laugh.
“Have a sup yourself,” he says, nodding to the bottle. “I’d say you need it.”
Cal takes a swig. The whiskey turns his stomach, but when it hits his blood it braces him up.
Mart’s hand, with a shake in it, moves on Kojak’s head. “Bring this fella down to P.J., after,” he says. “I’d let you have him, only he’d never be happy without the sheep.”
“He’s a working dog,” Cal agrees. He figures he’ll end up having to do Kojak a mercy.
“I’ve left the farm to Senan’s young lad,” Mart says. “The second one; Ruairi. That way Senan won’t have to split his land. And I’ve no need to worry that the young fella’ll sell up to the likes of Tommy Moynihan and his pals. Senan’d rip the head off him and shove it up his hole.”
His sentences have more gaps for breath now, and the lines of his face have tightened. “You got any pain?” Cal asks.
“You couldn’t do anything about it if I had,” Mart says, “so don’t be annoying me. Just give us another sup of that.”
Cal steadies the bottle for him again, and wipes his face.
“Ruairi’s a good kid,” he says. He’s talking to stop Mart talking.
“He goes out with Noreen’s girl, right? The oldest one.
Ella. After all your fighting and fussing with Noreen, her grandkids could end up running your farm.
Bet you would’ve got yourself a wife if you thought that was in the cards. ”
He expects that to get a grin, but Mart isn’t paying attention; he’s looking past Cal, out over the fields.
Cal thinks maybe he’s starting to wander, but his eyes are focused.
He’s scanning the land with a farmer’s purpose, with intimate, fine-grained knowledge of each stretch of earth, each wall, each animal, in all their history and their worth and their needs.
“Tell Ruairi about the scald,” he says, after a minute. “He’ll need the footbath.”
“I’ll do that,” Cal says.
“Senan’s raring to give Bobby a few skelps. This’ll make him worse. Don’t let him do it.”
“Bobby’s back on board,” Cal says. “He came over to my place this morning, to tell me he’s had enough of Tommy Moynihan and he’s not gonna stand aside any more.
I was gonna come tell you.” He’d forgotten all about that—it feels like it happened in a different world—but he’s glad Mart reminded him. It’s something Mart should know.
“Better late than fuckin’ never,” Mart says. “Them sheep are still waiting on that silage.”
“Me and P.J.’ll see to it,” Cal says. “Don’t worry.”
Mart nods. His eyes close.
“Mart,” Cal says. He doesn’t get an answer.
Cal works a hand carefully past Kojak and feels at Mart’s throat till he finds a pulse, faint and very fast. “Mart,” he says again, louder. Kojak’s eyebrows twitch. Mart doesn’t move.
Cal sits with his back against the tractor. He has the impulse to say a prayer, but he can’t think of any that would fit. He takes another drink of whiskey.
The sheep, losing interest in a situation beyond their understanding, have started to graze.
In all these fields, nothing moves except animals meandering through their steady patterns; in all this silence, there’s no distant wail of a siren coming.
All he can do is wait there while Mart’s life ends.
After a minute or two, Kojak lets out a wrenching sound between a howl and a whine. When Cal looks, he sees that Mart is dead.