Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  “Using petrol on a man isn’t nothing.”

  “I was barely a teenager. Not even that old, I don’t think. I didn’t start a fire.”

  Thirty seconds passed.

  Very lightly: “But why would you try?”

  “If I really tried, Bren, I would’ve done it.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Let it go.”

  She was quiet for another minute. Then she turned and propped herself up on her elbow. “But Crawl knows.”

  “Crawl lived with me for years. In less time than that, you’ll know a lot more about me than Crawl. You already do.” He found her shoulder and pressed her back down, this time with her head resting on his pillow, very near.

  Another thirty seconds passed.

  “Tell me something new about yourself,” she said. “Something I don’t know.”

  “Secrets?”

  “No.” She thought about it, then added, “Well, secrets if you want. I just meant, something I don’t know.”

  “Do you have secrets?” Kieran asked quietly.

  “Of course I do, I guess. Nothing huge. But you go away with yours, you know? I talk with you, but sometimes you’re not even there.” She placed her hand over his heart. “I don’t mind that you have secrets. I just wish they didn’t hang on to you so. I just don’t like to see you sad.”

  She traced circles on his chest with her fingernails, slowly.

  Nearly five minutes passed in the dark.

  “I have my name in forty-seven different places,” Kieran whispered. “All within three kilometers of Newtownberry.”

  Brenna stirred. “What?”

  “Where nobody can take them off.”

  “I must have just slid back to sleep. I just now dreamed you said something about your name being written all over Newtownberry. Tell me I was dreaming.”

  He chuckled. “You wanted to know a secret about me. It’s true. And nobody can take them off.”

  She laughed brightly and softly. Her fingernails began to trace the same slow circles on his chest. “Tell me.”

  “I like building fences. I told you that.”

  “Yeah.” She propped herself up again on her elbow.

  Kieran propped himself up too. His left hand circled her waist. “Well, I realized something, with the fences. All those jobs I’ve been in and out of for the past few years, everything I did disappeared like smoke. I never realized that before. Hell, I never worked before, how could I know that kind of thing?”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “I told you I worked in a warehouse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Everything I stocked disappeared in two weeks. Same with stocking and cutting in the lumberyard. Think about it. Everything I did went away. Bam, bam, people buy it, it’s gone. Cutting grass for the city, they called me a landscape technician, I told you that. You ever hear of a landscape technician?”

  “And you cut grass, and it grows again.”

  “So there was never a trace left to say I did anything. Anywhere.”

  “I have that at the beauty salon. I do their hair, I do their nails. . .”

  “And it all comes undone.”

  “God, that’s depressing.” She suddenly laughed. “That’s right, though.”

  “I did that conditioning coaching for Devlon-South’s soccer team? One day they all walk off the field and it’s gone.”

  “But fences are different,” Brenna said. “I like that.”

  “There’s something physical out there now that says I was there, you know? The whole idea of fences is, they last. Like monuments. Fences stay like monuments stay. I put up a good fence—those people have all kinds of money—good wood, nice-looking fence, a trellis on some, fancy post tops. . .”

  Brenna ran her hand along his cheek. “God, love,” she said, laughing again, “don’t tell me you’re writing your name on people’s backyard fences?”

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head in the dark. He started to laugh. “But those tops are all decorator tops. They’re monuments themselves. So I write, with a big felt pen. . .”

  Brenna rolled away, then back again, laughing so hard she shook the bed.

  “I do.” He began laughing too, not so much about the fences, but at how hard Brenna was laughing. “All the way across the base of the post tops before I seal them in place, I write a big K-I-E-R-A-N.”

  “Oh, God, I love it,” Brenna said.

  “You like that?”

  She laughed again, then leaned to kiss him on the cheek. “I love it,” she said. “I love you.” Then she sank back down to the pillow.

  He settled down too.

  Her arm rested across his waist.

  “See,” she said, “secrets are fun. Or, they can be. Oh, I liked that.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  They were silent again. But this time, the silence lasted only a few seconds.

  “We have to be careful which ones we share, though,” Kieran said.

  She turned her face toward his. “What do you mean?”

  “Some secrets don’t bring you together, like names on fence tops.”

  Again, “What do you mean?”

  Kieran took the time to choose his words carefully. “I know secrets about Crawl, for example. And he knows things about me. You tell some secrets to get things out of yourself, thinking it’ll help. But once they’re out, that kind of secret, you find it didn’t help at all. It just drove you apart.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When I went to see Crawl after they blew up his leg, we had a few drinks. A lot of drinks. And we talked. And the first thing you know, there they were, these secrets, right out in the open where they shouldn’t have been. Something about him nobody else should have known.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  He ran his hand through his hair. He didn’t answer. “I can carry it with you,” she whispered. “Would you trust me with it?”

  He still didn’t answer.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “No,” he said, rising from the pillow. “That’s just it. It’s not bad at all, that’s the whole thing with it. I mean, it turned out bad, but it wasn’t like he did anything on purpose.”

  It was Brenna’s turn to be silent.

  He sank back down to the pillow. “It was just kid stuff. All hell breaking loose everywhere, but he was just a kid.”

  “Please. Let me carry at least one thing with you. Especially if it wasn’t bad.”

  It was another thirty seconds before Kieran said, speaking quietly, “It was when he was eleven years old. His father took him on a robbery when he was eleven, and it was a big job. Serious crime. UVF stuff. No place for him at all.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Michael was supposed to be there, on watch for them, but he’d broken his thumb, so Crawl’s dad had him fill in. Told him to watch for the police or any nationalists while him and some others in the Force broke into the place. . . . He fell asleep, Bren. He was eleven years old. It was the middle of the night, he fell asleep.”

  “And they came when he was asleep?”

  “They took his dad and the others. They almost got him, too, but he was small enough to hide.”

  “What happened to his father?”

  “Somebody killed him. Stabbed him a month later, in Maze Prison.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “There were different stories, but the big one was, Crawl’s dad got them all caught because he was stupid enough to put his kid out there like that, so there was a fight and one of them killed him.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “So that’s Crawl: the man who got his dad killed. And now I know it, because he told me about it that night. So now, there’s a part of Crawl that hates me. I know what he doesn’t want anybody else to know. I know what he doesn’t even want to know himself.”

  Brenna touched his face, softly. “I’m so sorry, Kiero.”

  “There are just some things other people can’t know about
you, Bren. Not because they’ll hate you for it, but you’ll start to hate them for knowing it.”

  She whispered, “I understand. I really do.”

  “Some things, you just can’t make them right by talking about them.”

  “I’d never hate you, Kiero,” she said.

  He took a deep breath and pulled her closer. “I wouldn’t like that,” he said, barely above a whisper.

  She said, “I’ll never hate you.”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  Her lips brushed his cheek. “I could never hate you, Kiero.”

  Kieran was breathing deeply. Steady breaths in the dark.

  Slowly, very gently, so she wouldn’t wake him up, Brenna traced her fingertips through his hair, close beside her on the pillow. She remembered the day she told him that his hair was so black his grandparents must have been crows. She remembered it because it was the day they first met.

  She had just left work at the salon on Colson Street. She saw him walking toward her in a lightly falling snow in front of the Cantonese restaurant with a neon sampan in the window. He stopped and smiled and said, “Excuse me.” So she stopped, too. But he didn’t say anything else, as if it were her turn.

  Smiling at him so he would know she was willing to play, she asked, “And why do you say that? What have you done that I’d want to excuse you for?” But he still didn’t answer, so she said, “Or are you just thinking about doing something that you might want me to excuse you for later on?”

  It was in the Oriental restaurant, where they spent an hour and a half getting to know each other, that she said to him, “Your hair is so black, your grandparents must have been crows.” Looking far away and serious, he said, “I wish they were.”

  She wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but she hesitated. He might have said he wanted to be able to fly away from everything, and she didn’t want to hear that. Maybe everything meant everybody, including her. She changed the subject, but she still went back and forth about it in her own mind, wanting to ask him if he wished he could fly away, but not wanting to push it. Back and forth, the whole time they talked about other things.

  She didn’t like see-sawing inside herself, and had, in fact, worked hard to overcome it: part of her was the little girl wanting to run with scissors in her hand, just as Kieran had said, the other part was afraid she would put her eye out. That second part had never quite been able to escape something that her mother told her when she was very young. She said, “Brenna, God’s told the world to find a way to break your heart. And the world has to do what God tells it.”

  What the hell kind of thing was that to tell a little girl?

  She turned to lie on her back, resting her palms one on top of the other over her midsection.

  Fifty thousand pounds, for God’s sake. If that wasn’t worth running with scissors, what was?

  The money didn’t mean big spending on rings or new cars, either. Crawl didn’t have a clue what she was all about. If she had a price, it was about finally getting a chance to secure roots so deep nobody would be able to throw her away, throw her out into the street or something, as if she were junk.

  She realized that her heart was racing.

  She twisted again, settling on her left side, facing Kieran. Her hand reached into the dark and settled on his shoulder. Kieran, bad boy turned her boy. But still wanting, she suspected, at least during those moody times of his, to be able to fly away from them all.

  Kieran said it right out loud, and so abruptly that it startled her: “He was older than me.”

  “Who was?” she replied, blinking in the dark.

  “Willie Doyle. The guy I set on fire.”

  He turned toward her.

  She said, “Oh.” And then, “Have you been awake the whole time?”

  “On and off maybe.” He found her hand by his side and grasped it. “He was thirty-five, at least,” he said. “He hurt my sister.”

  “How’d he hurt her?”

  “He just hurt her. I was ten, eleven, somewhere in there; she was older. He worked pumping petrol over on Lynchway, by the bridge. I knocked him down from behind with a pipe and sprayed him with his own pump. Then I chased him with a lit cigarette lighter.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I guess I did set fire to him, Bren. Isn’t that somethin’?”

  “Oh, God, Kiero.”

  “Me, not even a teenager.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He didn’t die or anything. I threw the lighter at him and his arm caught fire, then his whole jacket. It scared me more than it scared him, I think. I could have just as easy lit myself up.”

  “But what happened to him? What happened to you?”

  “He got his jacket off and people rolled him around on the ground. I was runnin’. I didn’t see it. He got burns on his face and hands, his arms. I don’t know. That’s what I heard later. They chased me, some of the guys that hung around the station did, but I got back home.”

  “What did he do to you after that? What did the police do?”

  “Michael had too many friends for any of that. No police. No visitors in the night. Michael was deep into the Volunteer Force, and his friends were hard people. He had a lot of them, and everybody knew it. He told Willy he’d light him up himself, he ever sent anybody to mess with me. Crawl told me about that. Crawl thinks Michael is God. Willy ended up leavin’ the city, as far as I knew. That’s what they told me.”

  He released her hand.

  “But I did torch him,” he said. “And it scared me more than him; I really believe that. Only it wasn’t just that I could have been lit up, too. I just said that. But seeing what you’re capable of, seeing what you’re willin’ to do, how everything can just turn around, just from one minute to the next. . . My God, that can be a fearsome thing, Bren.”

  She eased closer.

  “I wasn’t scared about his being dead, though,” he said, now whispering. “I hated him. I guess I still do. But I’m glad I didn’t have that to carry around all these years on top of everything else. Not torching a man to death.”

  Brenna gave him another full minute, just making sure that he didn’t have more he wanted to say, not wanting the closeness to end. Then she kissed him twice very lightly, once under his collarbone, once on his shoulder, and then, settling her head on his outstretched arm, she closed her eyes.

  Several minutes later, in the deep dark, she whispered, “Thank you.”

  “Michael?” Crawl said it furtively, cupping his hand over the phone, wanting Michael to pick up on the fact that something was wrong.

  “Crawl. What’s goin’ on?”

  “I’ve got somethin’ comin’ down on me, Michael. I need your help.”

  There was a long pause. He pictured Michael moving with his phone to another part of his house, giving himself some privacy.

  He heard a shuffling, then Michael again. “Tell me.”

  “I need you to help me find out about a man. He’s talking about handing somebody my head in a box if certain things don’t happen, and I think you’re the only one who can tell me who he is. I have to know that before I see him again.”

  “What do you owe him? And why would I know him?”

  “I don’t owe him. He made me and Kieran an offer to do a job. There’s a lot of money involved. But the thing is, he knows things about us, about the truck yard and H-block, the UVF, all kinds of personal things nobody knows except you and me. And I never mention inside stuff to anybody, you know that. The job at the trucking company, are you kidding?”

  A long pause. “So you think I’d be talking about those kinds of thing to people? What the hell is this, Crawl?”

  “I’m not saying on purpose.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I’m just telling you—no, I’m not drunk—there’s a powerful man who’s threatened me with decapitation, for God’s sake, and who’s serious about it, and he knows secret things about us. About Kieran. It’s stuff he can
’t know. No one knows this stuff except us. He got the information from one of us because no one alive, Michael, knows these things except you and me.”

  “And Kieran.”

  “Kieran’s not talking about it, for God’s sake. He’s got locks on things as big as China. And you know I’m not out there telling anybody anything.”

  “So he got it from me?”

  “Not on purpose, I said. But I have to know who this guy is. If you did slip some time and talk to somebody, about Maze or Kieran’s sister or Willy Doyle or anything that so few people know about, I’m not mad. It’s a one-time slip, I know that. But I’m counting on it being you, and on you remembering, because that way you might be able to tell me who he is. Maybe it wasn’t to him directly, but if you can figure out who got the information, then maybe you can find out who it was passed on to. This is serious, Michael. Please. I need you to remember.”

  Crawl waited, but Michael was silent. “Michael?”

  “About the night with the trucking company?”

  “He knows.”

  Another long pause. “About Kieran and Willy, too?”

  Crawl, speaking softly: “You know who it was, don’t you, Michael?”

  Again, a long wait.

  Crawl said, “Tell me you know.”

  “No, I don’t,” Michael said, sounding like a man deep in thought. “But maybe I can stare at it awhile. See what happens.”

  “I haven’t got much time. I’m willing to send you money if you need that to track somebody down.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Not only my head, but Kieran’s, too.”

  “What’s the job you said you’re into?”

  “I can’t talk about that yet. Trust me. Find the guy and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  Michael sighed a long sigh. “I’ll stare at it.”

  “That’s all I’m askin’.”

  After Michael hung up, he stood staring at the phone for several minutes, not moving a muscle. He could hear the TV from the family room. His mind tuned in to it in bits and pieces. He heard announcers’ voices bobbing up like beach balls in water, but he kept pushing them back down, letting his mind fly past possibilities like a scanner radio. Irishmen talking, sometimes in whispers. Where and when? Could he have been drunk, not thinking right, talking about even the dark things to people who had no business knowing?