by Shaun Herron
“But the oul postmaster’s a cripple and won’t let you use the phone after three?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Then how’se you goin t’phone the wife?”
“I don’t know.” He knew nothing now.
Kiernan handed him an open packet of cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette for fifteen years. “I never seen you with a cigarette, Mr. Sorahan.”
He lit it from Kiernan’s match. “I do, sometimes,” he said.
They stopped a short way up the road on a bend from which they could see The Hill. McManus was in reach. The end of the road was in sight, for McManus; for Powers.
Kiernan said to Powers, “Are’y ready?”
“Fuckin right, I’m ready.” He had been quiet, under restraint. His time had come. He could taste McManus. It gave him great pleasure.
Kiernan took binoculars from the dashboard pocket. “We’ll take a look from up that rock.”
They climbed The Hill and waded among the ferns and gorse and lay down on the crown. The little house lay white and quiet inside its fringe of fuchsia, like a cotton blouse. The white stone barn was at an angle to the gable of the house, on their left. It’s one glassless window gaped out like a blind eye.
Sorahan saw the place with dismay. It was a peaceful sight. It was a killing ground. What the grocer said about Thomas Burke’s widow didn’t matter much to him. Once, he had thought of Thomas Burke as a prophet; now he was no more than a dead novelist still in print in paperback. The wives of living novelists mean nothing to anybody but the novelists; their widows mean nothing to anybody. Sorahan lived eighteen miles from this one, and wife or widow, he’d never known she breathed.
The grocer would know some of what he pretended to know. For the rest, gossip was the fleshing out of lean lives. Malice salted talk. Sometime or other the woman in that house had cut Deasy. His sly winking twinkle as he slid his knife in was the decoration on a cultural cake—the stage business in a living live theater. The grocer would know who the woman was. He would know who came and went about the place and how many beds were in the house. Who slept where in it or with whom, he would decide by what he would like to do in McManus’s place. Maybe he’d tried for her himself and she’s laughed at his years? Whatever it was, he would draw from it malice and humor—and drama. Life on the fringes of the island fringe of Europe was personal, drama in the mind. Missing lines improvised on the spot.
Sorahan didn’t need to think about this. It was there, whole, in the mind. He was one of them.
His thoughts were of himself and his predicament. He had swung half-circle from his delight in the loved illusion of the native Irish genius for conspiracy and intrigue to alarm and despondency at his half-thought fecklessness. Conspiracy in the mind. It was part of the drama in the mind. Most literate Irishmen called it imagination. That’s what Sorahan called it the other day. Today on this rock hill he called it fantasy. What in the name of God made him think he could find a phone easily in this landscape where he knew phones were five miles apart? What made him think he could call the Garda down on these men? Wasn’t he, like more than half the nation, their passive but supporting bystander? What made him think he could inform? The gut instinct of the nation was against it. Fantasy. Wouldn’t little Barney have a catatonic seizure if he tried to lift the phone? Drama in the mind it was. Irishmen young and middle-aged and old glancing forever off the shoulder of reality, never meeting it head-on. Myths; the masturbating emotions of myths; saints made out of schoolmastering windbags; martyrs made out of psychotic killers ... heroic virtue pouring out of the barrel of a gun ... we’re a nation of political masturbators, he thought, and buried his sweating face in the ferns. That white quiet place down there is a killing ground and I’ve been playing with my political genitals like a thirteen-year-old but the real fuckers are here, beside me in this place, and when I see them open their political flies I’m sick at my stomach.
“What’s eatin’ you, Mr. Sorahan?” Kiernan asked him.
“I’m tired.” I’m an Irish fantasist, he wanted to say, and I’ve walked into a brick wall with my face stuck out in front of me.
“Aye.” It sounded contemptuous. “Not long now. It’ll be over after it’s dark and then y’can go away on home.” It was open disdain. Kiernan rolled on his back and looked into the sky. “Nice quiet place this.”
Powers was watching the house through the glasses. “I seen the woman,” he said. “She’s in the room w’the big window, lyin on the bed.” He raised his head, grinning. “In her skin.”
“Any sign of McManus?”
“Not yet. Why’s she lyin naked?”
“Y’can ask her when it’s dark.”
“The oul fella in the shop’s right. He’s been fuckin her.”
Barney lay apart like a staying retriever. Dirty jokes among his peers were funny and didn’t mean anything. Dirty talk from older men made him feel dirty. He shut off hearing and felt lost and thought about his mother and father and wanted to be at home with them. There was a man in there gain to be killed. Murdered, he tried to say in his head and his mind wouldn’t accept the word. He’s not much older than me, he said. Jasus, it was great lyin in the hills in the warm sun and the bees singin, thinkin about dyin for Ireland but, piteous Jasus, it never crossed your mind that that meant killin for Ireland. Softly, he moved farther away, as if that made him safer, less part of the event. He loved Mr. Sarah an surely and he’d let nothin happen Barney couldn’t face ... but what could Mr. Sorahan do? He was only a schoolmaster.
“You won’t be fuckin her,” Kiernan said distantly, with the sky in his eyes.
“What d’ye mean ... ?” Powers was up on one elbow.
“Get your stupid head down....”
“You said somethin, Kiernan. By God, you’d better explain it.” The man was gettin at him again. It was Maureen McManus he was talkin about. He’d forgotten Maureen McManus. What did Kiernan know? His mind darted fruitlessly. He didn’t understand this little weasel of a man....
“Explain what?” Waspishly, as if he wanted to explain it.
“About me not fu ...” But it was hard to say. Maureen McManus was in his throat, in his eyes, and if Kiernan knew ... the word shut off in his mouth. If it wasn’t said, it wouldn’t stay in Kiernan’s mind. Powers didn’t know what was in Kiernan’s mind. It was hard, not to know. Not knowing started a peculiar trembling in the gut.
Kiernan turned on his side to face Powers. “Were you thinkin of fuckin her, Mr. Powers?”
The way he said “Mr. Powers.” Mockin me. “I was not,” Powers said.
“Good,” Kiernan said meanly, and rolled on his back again. “When the light goes, go on down and scout the place. Then come back and we’ll see.”
“I know how to do it.”
“You’re great. You’re great.” Kiernan’s smiles were gone. Sorahan hadn’t seen one of them for twelve hours or more. Kiernan’s own moment was closer; he was sickening for it. He turned his head and looked at Powers. It was a covetous look. “Give Mr. Sorahan the glasses,” he said. He knew the mind. He smiled at Sorahan when he had them and said, “You watch and keep us posted.” Sorahan wished he hadn’t seen the smile for another twelve hours.
The light died to twilight. “She’s up,” Sorahan said.
“What’s she doin?”
“Putting on a dressing gown.”
“That all? No clothes?”
“No.”
“Any sign of McManus?”
“No.”
“Keep lookin.”
There wasn’t much to look at. He could see the woman as a shape, through the kitchen window. She was working at the counter beside the sink. What she was doing he couldn’t tell. Getting a meal?
He moved the glasses across the house to the right. Just beyond it a rock ridge rose about a hundred and fifty feet high. It must, he thought, overlook the front yard of the house, giving a line of sight over the fuchsia hedge. He searched the ridge idly as a welc
ome alternative to watching Mrs. Burke and saw the movement between two rocks. It was a man. He saw him shift a rifle from his left side to his right, and slide behind one of the rocks.
The glasses moved back to the kitchen window to think about the man on the ridge. A Garda? Had Dr. Sullivan reported their visit, knowing where McManus was? Was McManus there at all? Why was Mrs. Burke in sight and never McManus? Was he walking with these two men and little Barney into a police trap? What should he tell Kiernan? Nothing, he decided. Nothing. Not yet.
“What’s she doin?”
“Making food, I think.” There was no more sight of the man on the far ridge. The light died. The lights in the house went on. The yard light went on. The back door opened and Mrs. Burke came out, in her dressing gown, carrying a back pack and a jerry can.
She crossed the lawn slowly, her head down. “Gimme the glasses.” Kiernan fixed them on her. “That’ll be McManus’s pack,” he said. “Maybe he’s in the barn.” She went through the barn door.
“All them barns is the same,” Powers said greedily. “I can get him in there.”
“The way to do it,” Kiernan said coldly, “if he’s in there, is to get to the woman and make her call him out.”
Powers said doggedly, “I can get him in there.”
“And get shot.” Kiernan had an execution of his own. He was not to be robbed of it. “Go on down and scout the place.” He put down the glasses. “Go down this hill the way we come up it and circle the whole place—see, go round behind thon hump to the right of the house and check the place from the front. Then come back here.” He said firmly, “Powers. Do nothin till I tell you. All I want to know is—is McManus in thon house.”
“Aye.” It had an angry guttural sound.
Sorahan still said nothing about the man on “thon hump,” and Powers scrambled down the back of the hill.
The woman was a long time in the barn. When she came out she still had the pack, but it hung thinly from her hand. “He’s in there,” Kiernan said. “She took him somethin. Grub maybe.” She did not have the jerry can. “There was water in it. He’s in the barn.”
She went into the house and closed the door. The front yard light went on.
“I hope Powers isn’t buck stupid enough to walk into that light,” Kiernan said like a man afraid of being cheated.
Mrs. Burke walked into the light in her bedroom and dropped the dressing gown to the floor. Naked she lay down again on the bed. Like a vigil, Sorahan thought; like a nude virgin on the altar at a black mass. She lay on her back, her legs straight down, her hands folded on her belly, like a Pharaoh’s widow on a sarcophagus: nothing common, nothing mean; drama in the mind. McManus was in the barn. She took him food and water. He had been sick in there, raving and writhing in the hay. Dr. Sullivan had tended him there, in the hay. The poor woman had stayed his fever, cooled his brow. All this time he had been the hunted, his refuge among whatever dumb animals the woman had in there, with no soul to talk to but the woman ... and yes, the three men the grocer mentioned, who had seen him and spoken to him. No, they had gone, the grocer said, they had no connection with the man on the ridge. The police were hidden around, the man on the ridge was one of them: Powers and Kiernan and himself had gone to see the doctor, looking for transient patients, “calling himself McManus, or something else, beard, pack, a girl with him maybe ...” and the doctor knew the one they wanted, down there in his sister-in-law’s barn. He told the police. Good. Sorahan no longer needed to. Absolution. It was done, by a doctor. A humane act. And Powers was walking into a police trap. Good. Soon he and Barney could drift away in the darkness. The thing was all over bar the shouting.... Drama in the mind. He had it all worked out, comfortably.
Powers went far to the right from the bottom of the hill, then struck towards the sea. It was the wrong way to approach the house. He ought to have gone round the left side and come at the house under cover of the blind gable of the bam, because Kiernan told him to come at it from the right, round than hump. He got bad orders from the stupid jealous wee cunt, so he’d improve on them. He went down all the way to the sea and then came left over the rocks above the shore. The nesting gulls on the rock faces cried warning and anger, took flight from their ledges, settled on the sea, scolding like coarse-throated shrews. He came up from the shore, hurrying now, climbing through the pockets of soil among the rocks, through stabbing gorse and thistles, and the sheep coughed and sneezed and rose and ba-a-a-d and moved stupidly ahead of him in single file, along the crowns of the rock ridges, announcing him to the night. There was one ridge more, thon hump. He climbed down to the grassy hollow that passed it and let into the lane that ran to the gate in the front fuchsia hedge.
That hedge was almost the end of the road. Beyond it, McManus, the cause of every trouble. There’d be no mistakes here. His heartbeat was faster, not from the climbing. There was sound in his head, high sound, pleasant sound, and a kind of sweet pleasure ran through his frame and into his groin. His mind was on killing. The pleasure deepened, swelling him. The sweetness was intense behind the eyes, like an itch. He rubbed his eyes and the pleasure was rich. He muttered obscenities, greedy, hungry obscenities, and eagerness roared in his chest and his head and delight sang in his throat.
The black mass of thon hump was on his left. He walked faster tight against its base, his step almost silenced by the sheep-cropped grass, and when the side of the ridge no longer sheltered him, made a crouching run over the hundred feet to the hedge. Not the gate. Gates have unoiled hinges. Through the hedge, slowly, gently. The hunter. He stood in the hedge, holding fuchsia bushes apart and saw her through the small front window, lying naked on the bed.
Holy fuckin. Jasus! She’s a l-o-n-g one.
His eyes lapped her body from her feet to her head.
Christ, lyin there naked in her glasses.
The steel-rimmed glasses touched something. He had to get closer. He moved along the circle of the hedge to the left gable of the house and slid along the wall to the little window.
He was open, in the little lake of red-ringed light.
The woman’s eyes were closed. Sleepin. Them fuckin curtains on the big window were open. Kiernan would have the glasses on her, feedin his face. Jasus, she’s a one. He could feel her thighs round his rump. Them glasses. They made him drunk. He could hear the delight in his throat.
When he was done w’McManus ... McManus ... it was a struggle to move from the window. He passed the door and slid across the little window of Thomas Burke’s study. The light from the kitchen gave him all he needed. McManus was not there. The kitchen? He reached left-handed for the latch and knew it would be locked ... the kitchen window at the back ... his hand fell from the latch as he turned and heard the shot after the bullet spun him and came through the fleshy rump of his left shoulder and tore a hole in the door. He fell rolling, not hurting, his arm hanging numb from a thump, and heard three? four? more shots as be rolled at the hedge and felt bis foot jerk from another violent thump. Then he was through the hedge and out of the lake of light and scrambling low, one good arm keeping him from falling on his face, the other arm dangling and warm-wet. He was among the rocks and ridges again, trying to see a course in his mind, from memory, back to the car. But he was going in the wrong direction and the arm was alive and hurting more with every unbalanced stride, the pain mounting up into his neck. It was a jolting run, shattering his head. His foot was not hurting, but the heel of his boot was gone and small stones and spiked vegetation pierced the thin leather skin under his heel. He broke into the lane beside the grocer’s shop and knew where he was and made a limping run for the car. The arm was agony, burning hot, screaming in his head with every jarring stride, then he was in the car, fumbling, missing, ripping gears and away, half-blind with pain and nausea and bleeding. He whinnied in his nostrils, stifling screams.
“I told him not to,” Kiernan said with the first shot. “I told him not to!” He thumped the ferns with his little fists. “I told him ..
.” and four more quick shots rolled in the hollows and over the enclosed bay. “It was a rifle!” Then a sixth shot. Then the silence, and the after-shock of sea birds’ complaints and sheeps’ pitiful protests.
“It was a rifle,” Kiernan said in a tiny voice. “There was no talk of McManus havin a rifle.”
Little Barney slid farther down the back side of The Hill, dry in the mouth and weak in the legs.
Sorahan said nothing. He had been waiting for a voice, a challenge in the night. He had already fixed “Hands up” in his mind, a voice shouting, and it rhymed there. The shots stunned him.
“He got Powers,” Kiernan said. “Holy Christ Jasus.” He lay limp and still, robbed and puzzled. “He got Powers. That last one was a finisher.” He rose to his knees and crouched in the ferns. “But where is he?” he said, bewildered, peering down at the house. “Where is he?” The little man was frightened. He lay down again and hugged the ground. “We’ll wait and see,” he said prudently.
Sorahan took the glasses from his hand and parted the ferns. Mrs. Burke was off the bed. Her movements were unhurried. She put on the dressing gown. He watched her appear in the kitchen and disappear. The back door opened. The birds were settled, the sheep were settled, the night rustled, and Mrs. Burke walked across the lawn slowly, in eerie undisturbed composure. She went into the barn and came out immediately, carrying the jerry can she had earlier carried in. She took from her dressing-gown pocket something that looked like a long cloth, a shirt sleeve, a towel, and stuffed it into the mouth of the can. Then she carried the can back into the barn, was inside for a little while, and came out, closing the door behind her.
“It’s a fire-bomb, for Christ’s sake,” Kiernan said, and stood up. “She’s gonta burn the place.” The bullet fired from the blind eye of the barn took him in the chest. Mrs. Burke walked quickly into her house and closed the door.
The fire-bomb woofed like a howitzer.
They could hear the screaming hens as the barn door flew open and burning balls of bird were blown out and scattered like little scurrying campfires on the grass.