Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told

by Phelan, Tom;

  “But you told me to come over with the bike tonight,” the child said. He bit his trembling bottom lip and lowered his head.

  “But, Jesus, you shouldn’t have sneaked in on me that way.”

  “But I knocked. And then I stood there and said hello, Kevin. I thought you heard me, and I thought you were playing with me.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Lalor sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you. Jesus! I suppose I frightened you too when I jumped up.”

  “You did so. You frightened the life out of me, so you did.” Mikey put his gun back into its holster on his hip, and from the cast of the child’s face, Lalor saw that the thrill of showing off the new toy had turned to ashes.

  The Civil Servant put his tangle of wires and gadgets on the kitchen table. “Where did you get the gun?” he asked.

  Mikey drew the six-shooter out of the holster with a flourish. He pointed it at Lalor. “I swapped the spyglass for it.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did so.”

  “Who swapped with you?” Lalor took the double-wicked paraffin-oil lamp off the wall. He removed the tall glass globe and shook the oil well.

  “Dumpy Dolan from Tile Town,” Mikey answered, using the nickname for Saint Martin’s Terrace in Gohen, where all the houses were roofed with red Spanish tile. Everyone who didn’t live there believed that the desperate, the depraved and the hungry dwelt in Tile Town. Occasionally, at nighttime, entire families living there disappeared into England leaving behind their debts to grocers and drapers and rent collectors. It was the hunger and the desperation of its inhabitants that made outsiders afraid or suspicious of them.

  Shapeless shadows danced on the white walls as Lalor dragged the safety match along the sandpaper strip on the box of Friendly Matches. When he touched the match to the lamp, Mikey watched the flames creeping across the wicks.

  “Where did Dumpy Dolan get a gun like that?” Lalor asked, and he hung the lamp back on its nail in the wall.

  “His uncle brought it home from England.”

  “Give me a look.” The Civil Servant held out his hand.

  “It has ivory handles,” Mikey said, as he gave over the weapon.

  In Lalor’s big hand the gun was small. It was light and cheap, made not to last very long. The ivory handles were painted tin and the paint had already begun to peel off the barrel. The Townies had fooled Mikey again. The gun was a cheap toy; the spyglass would have withstood the salt of the seven seas forever.

  When he handed the gun back, Lalor saw the red scrape on Mikey’s right cheek.

  “Watch this, Kevin.”

  Lalor watched as the boy awkwardly and self-consciously spun the gun around his finger in the trigger guard. Mikey missed the holster when he tried to slam the gun in. It fell on the floor with a clatter. “Gene Autry never misses,” he said, as he picked up the gun, “and he doesn’t even look at the holster when he does it.”

  “What happened to your face?” Kevin asked.

  The boy bent his head as he stuck the gun into the holster. “Dumpy Dolan wants the gun back,” he mumbled, as matter-of-factly as he could.

  “And you don’t want to give it?”

  Mikey still fumbled unnecessarily with the gun. He didn’t look up. “It’s mine. It was a fair swap.”

  Lalor bent down to the turf basket and put some fresh sods on the fire. “When did you do the swapping?” he asked.

  “Last week.”

  “What day last week?” Lalor used a cured turkey wing to sweep up the fallen turf crumbs between the basket and the grate.

  “Monday.”

  “That’s nearly two weeks ago. And when did Dumpy Dolan say he wanted his gun back?”

  “On Tuesday.”

  “This week or last week?”

  “Last week, the day after the swap.”

  “And why didn’t you give it to him?”

  “I hadn’t it with me. I left it in the knife-and-fork drawer because I knew he’d want me to give it back. Everyone in the school said I got the good swap and he got the bad one because they’re always playing Cowboys and Indians in Tile Town and now he has no gun.”

  “Did he beat you up every day since last Tuesday week?”

  “One day he wasn’t in school, but Elbows Kelly got me for him that day.”

  Kevin Lalor finished attending to the fire. He straightened up and looked at Mikey. “Show me your wrists,” he said.

  Mikey put his hands in his pockets. He looked at his unpolished and scuffed leather boots. “My wrists are all right,” he mumbled.

  “If you don’t show them, I won’t mend your bike.”

  Mikey held up his hands and stretched his arms out of their sleeves. The wrists were marked with red blotches where bony fingers had grasped them like two wrenches. The Indian torture was inflicted when the two wrenches were twisted against each other. “Dumpy Dolan told me today if I don’t bring in the gun on Monday, his uncle is going to paralyze me.”

  Kevin Lalor unhooked his crystal set from its aerial where it came in through a hole in the wooden window casing. “They’ve beaten you up for nine days in a row,” he said, “and you still wouldn’t give the gun back! You’re as stubborn as a mule, Mikey.”

  “It was a fair swap. Can I sit in the armchair?”

  “Yes, but mind your boots.”

  Mikey sat into the cushioned chair, adjusted the gun on his hip to make himself comfortable.

  Lalor asked, “What do your father and mother say about getting beaten up every day?” He untangled the wire of the earphones from the components of the crystal set.

  “They don’t know.”

  “They don’t know you’re getting half-killed every day! How did you explain that scrape on your face?”

  “I said I ran into Dumpy Dolan’s head when we were playing stag.”

  Lalor folded the earphones into their polished case. “Do they know you made the swap?”

  “They do. Daddy’s cross because he was watching Mattie Mulhall thatching the Coughlins’ house. He told me he won’t let me go to the pictures anymore till I swap back. Can I listen to your crystal set?”

  “There’s nothing on besides the Dublin Cattle Market.”

  “Doul Yank told Daddy the Coughlins are thatching their roof because their brother’s coming home from India.”

  Lalor’s hands hesitated on the brass latch of the crystal set case. “Mister Gorman to you, Mikey! So that’s why they’re thatching! I was wondering about that. The next thing they’ll do is whitewash the house.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s what everyone does when someone important is coming to visit.” The Civil Servant put the lacquered black box on top of the dresser. Since Mikey had toddled up the road for the first time with his pants sagging between his legs and he as ripe as a dungheap, the top of the dresser had become the place to keep things out of his reach.

  “A brother isn’t that important.”

  “If you haven’t seen him for a long time, he becomes important.”

  “What’s he doing in India, the brother?”

  “He’s a teacher, a missionary, a priest.”

  “We just finished India in school. They have funny names for things. The rivers are the Godavari, the Narmada, the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej, and the Juma.” Mikey rattled off the names as if he was reciting the two-times-two multiplication table.

  “How about the cities?” Lalor asked, always amazed at Mikey’s intelligence and his lack of common sense. He enjoyed playing these classroom games with the boy who didn’t know how bright he was.

  “Bombay, Calcutta, Karachi, Madras are port cities. Ahmadabad, Cawnpore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Lucknow—”

  “Mountains?”

  “Eastern Ghats, Western Ghats, Himalayas, Karakoram, Nanga, Rahaposhi—”

  “States?”

  “Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Andrah Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Sikkim—”

  “Natural resources?”
/>   “Asbestos, coal, copper, gold—”

  “Agriculture?”

  “Camels, cattle, goats, rice, sheep, sugar, tea—”

  “Industry?”

  “Chemicals, iron, steel, textiles—”

  “Size?”

  “One and a quarter million square miles.”

  “How many Irelands would fit in India?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “Seas?”

  “Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal.”

  “Who used to rule India?”

  “The English.”

  “What were the English called in India?”

  “The Raj.”

  “Get the bike.”

  “Was I good?”

  “Full marks.”

  “Let me read your composition out loud before we do the bike, Kevin.”

  “You’ve read it a hundred times.”

  “I’ll read it quick.”

  “No, not tonight, Mikey.”

  “What did you do with the five pounds you won for it?”

  “Mikey Lamb. How many times do you want me to tell you?”

  “But I like hearing it.”

  Lalor took on the tone of a bored child reciting a poem. “I went to the post office. I bought a postal order. It cost two pounds seven-and-sixpence. I put it in an envelope with the order form. I sent it away to Rugby in England. Two weeks later the postman, who is my father, gave me the parcel from Rugby. When I opened it, there was the crystal set.”

  “I bet you couldn’t wait, Kevin. Do you remember the time I sent the flaps of the cigarette boxes to Capstan for the pack of cards and it took months. I waited for the postman every day for ages. Did you show . . . ?”

  “Mikey Lamb! Go out and get your bike, and there better be no dung or muck on the wheels.”

  “I made sure to miss the dung and the lane is dusty.”

  The boy left the kitchen door open, and Lalor heard the bike bouncing off the ground as Mikey knocked the dried muck out of the mudguards. Then he was back with the bike, a wheel scraping against something with every full circle it made.

  “For God’s sake, Mikey,” Lalor said, when he saw the broken rear mudguard and the crooked front wheel. “What the hell happened to the wheel?”

  “The Tilers knocked me off, and Dumpy Dolan jumped on the wheel when the bike fell.”

  “What happened to the mudguard?”

  “Elbows Kelly kicked it.”

  Lalor grabbed the bike by the frame and turned it upside down. He went to the dresser, reached up and felt around near the stamp albums. He touched the cloth bag of his tool kit. “That wheel will never be right again no matter how hard we try to straighten it,” he said.

  Mikey kept the bike steady on its saddle and handlebars. Lalor, with his hands eighteen inches apart, grasped the front wheel and pushed one against the other. He spun the wheel, and sat on his hunkers trying to detect the wobble still hitting the fork. After more straining and sitting, he spun the wheel, and it finally sang silently on its ball bearings.

  As Lalor went to the back of the bike to inspect the mudguard, Mikey asked, “Do you want to hear a riddle?”

  “Is it a good one?” the Civil Servant asked.

  “It’s a great one. Supposing, supposing three men were frozen; one died, how many were left?”

  Lalor said, “Get out of the way while I turn this back on its wheels.” He picked up the bike and twisted it in the air. As the tires bounced on the kitchen floor, he said, “Well, I suppose the answer isn’t two. Tell me the answer.”

  “None, because it was only supposing,” Mikey said gleefully.

  “That’s a stupid riddle,” Lalor said.

  “That’s what you always say when you don’t know the answer.”

  “Well, that’s the stupidest one you ever told me. I don’t think this mudguard can be fixed. Will your father mind if I break it off?”

  “Daddy says you’re the mechanic.”

  “Be jakers! Is that what he said?” Lalor bent the piece of mudguard up and down. “I’m the mechanic!” When the metal broke, he said, “Well, this mechanic says that the owner of this bike should give the six-shooter back because this mechanic is getting tired of fixing what Dumpy Dolan breaks. And as well as that, this mechanic knows the six-shooter is going to break soon and then there will be no way of getting back that sailor’s spyglass.”

  “A sailor’s?”

  “Probably a pirate’s.”

  “You’re codding me, Kevin.”

  “Well, it’s such a good one it could have been stolen by a pirate. Here, take your bike and go home.”

  “Let me stay for a while!”

  “No. I have a good book to read, and I’m going to finish it tonight no matter what.”

  “Let me look at your stamps.”

  “Mikey Lamb! Take your bike and leave me in peace.” Lalor went to the kitchen door and opened it wide. “Hurry up and don’t let all the heat out of the house.”

  When the bike was half in and half out, the boy stopped and asked, “Does it pain you much when you’re getting paralyzed?”

  “It’s terrible, and for the rest of your life you can’t move a muscle. You just lie there in a bed wetting yourself and dirtying the sheets, and some big, cross nurse with a red face and fat arms feeds you nothing but lumpy porridge with no sugar or milk on it. Go on, go home.”

  With mouth open, Mikey wheeled his bike out into the failing light. Kevin Lalor closed the door and smiled to himself as he went to the kitchen windowsill and picked up The Good Companions.

  13

  The Trap

  1951

  In which the Civil Servant assists Mikey to plot the entrapment of a Tiler into friendship.

  WITH THE BUTTONS UNDONE, the flaps of Kevin Lalor’s short coat were floating on the breeze created by the speed of his bike. The muck of the Lower Road had dried during the past rainless two weeks and his bike’s fat tires were leaving a low trail of dust in their wake. The dismalness of a wet spring had suddenly changed into the glory of high summer. There was warmth in the air from a sun that had been shining for eight consecutive days. The clear-sky sunshine was affecting the brains of the populace as powerfully as the moon lifting forty-foot tides into the Bay of Fundy. Even the cattle, lately released from the long winter housing, showed their appreciation of the sun by mindlessly breaking into sudden gallops, throwing their back legs into the blue sky and splitting the air with crackling farts.

  The fields had responded to the weather with a profusion of growth. Almost overnight the vibrant green grass of the countryside was littered with white-petaled daisies and yellow dandelions, golden buttercups and custardy cowslips, lilac cuckoo flowers and yellow-flowered trefoils, red clover and white cow parsley and bright-blue bluebells.

  The birds had gone mad entirely, peeping and cawing and whistling and singing and shouting and pecking and hopping and swooping and flying, just for the sake of flying. Soaring swallows traced black lines across the blue sky, twisting and twirling and testing the far-out limits of aerodynamics.

  Kevin Lalor’s bike was a magic carpet, and his body was not registering the passage of dried-up potholes beneath his fat wheels. Something unusual was going on in Lalor’s body. A hot emanation, intensified by the generosity of the sun, was centered in the area of his diaphragm. It was a sensation he had experienced only once before—when a Norwegian soprano had sung an aria on the stage of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. She had sung to him alone in a voice purer than gold refined a hundred times. The beefy, ponderously-breasted, yellow-wigged, Viking-helmeted soprano in makeup applied with a trowel was the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld.

  And now, ten years later, his diaphragm revisited by an identical feeling, Lalor knew he had been smitten through both ventricles by a love-shaft as thick and as blunt as the handle of a dungfork. However, he was mature enough to recognize that Cupid’s darts connect the heart to the testes in such a way as to knock a man’s equ
ilibrium off its axis.

  Ever since he had heard Deirdre Hyland speaking three weeks ago, the Civil Servant had been keeping a tight lid on the explosive mixture of emotional and sexual giddiness which he knew could change his life in an instant of indiscretion. What his giddiness was driving him to whisper in Miss Hyland’s ear was, “I’m insane with the love of you. I want our beings to meld into each other like two pieces of baker’s dough kneaded into one loaf. I’m totally mad with the want to be naked with you. I want to put my mouth on your mouth, on your breasts at the same time in soft green grass in a sunny field. I want to be inside you forever. I want to be so much inside you that I will be able to see the world out through your eyes.” But Lalor, having inherited the same iron will that had allowed his father to finish with his bayonet what a German machine gun’s bullets had begun, had held in check the feelings in which he was so painfully laocoöned.

  Deirdre Hyland was twenty-eight, and she had passed the Civil Service examination nine years ago. While waiting for a position to present itself in the Courthouse in Gohen, she had worked in the back office in Humphrey Smiley’s Hardware and Farm Supply Company. There, to the monthly annoyance of farmers in debt, she had established a reputation for steely efficiency in the management of accounts payable. When the farmers complained to each other about Deirdre Hyland in their nasty testosteronic way, they associated the monthly reminders of their indebtedness with the premenstrual symptoms of their tormentor.

  However, for another reason completely unrelated to her business efficiency, every man who came in contact with Deirdre Hyland felt threatened, whether or not he was a farmer. The men gave vent to their imagined emasculation by declaring loudly to each other, “The way she talks! Who the hell does that bitch think she is?”

  Deirdre Hyland said meat when everyone else said “mate”; for her, “bate” was beet, “sate” was seat, “buhher” was butter, “waher” was water, “munny” was money, “cowshite” was farmyard manure and “ferninst” was not a word at all. “‘Opposite’ is the word,” she had told one ancient bachelor farmer who enragedly gaped at her as if eyeing the bastard cattle jobber who had just pulled a fast one on him in the buying of a bullock.