Touched examines the gun for a moment and then begins to unscrew the silencer. I can tell what he’s thinking. There’s no one for miles. If he has to kill me or Peter, he can do it without fear of being overheard.
When she’s cuffed me, he checks to see that she’s done a good job.
He gives me a wink.
“You know how it is, mate. When this wee task is over and we get the all clear from over the water, it’ll be different. We’ll forget the fuckups. I’ll take you for a big session as an apology. I can tell, Sean, that you are going to be our right-hand man.”
He gives me a friendly dig on the shoulder.
“I hope so.”
Kit leads me out of the room and helps me downstairs.
The “cabin” is even bigger than I’d thought. It’s a huge edifice, with a large central room, almost an interior courtyard, and six or seven bedrooms arranged around the inner space on the second floor. The style is that of a Swiss chalet rather than that of an old Kentucky home. A large stone fireplace made from irregular local rocks, a kitchen, and the big open-plan living area and dining room. You’d need to burn half the surrounding forest to heat this place in winter, but in summer, with the windows open and the breezes off the mountain, it would be quite temperate.
And they’re not living the simple life either.
A big-screen television, a stereo, and a speaker system that would give Aerosmith’s roadies a hard time.
Jackie and Sonia are tucking into breakfast at an enormous pine table. Jackie’s hair is also wet and he’s wearing swim trunks. Maybe they have a pool or there’s a lake nearby.
“Morning, all,” I say.
Jackie nods. “You sleep ok, mate?” he asks, noticing me and trying to ignore the handcuffs on my wrists.
“Slept fine.”
“Did Kit bring you breakfast?” Sonia asks.
“Yeah, it was delicious, thanks,” I tell her.
“The maple syrup is from here,” Sonia adds.
“Yeah, Kit told me, it was fantastic. . . . Where’s the big guy?”
“He’s still sleeping. He sleeps so well up here,” Sonia says and gives me a little grin of domestic bliss.
Keep that smile, love, it’s going to be a happy fucking tapestry when that poor kid, Peter, is screaming for his life.
“Gerry design this place himself?” I ask.
“Oh yes, this has been his labor of love,” Sonia says.
“And do you own part of the forest, too?” I inquire.
“Twelve acres,” she says.
“Must be a big tax bill on that?” I ask.
“I have no idea,” Sonia says.
Kit looks at me.
“Well, do you want to gab away, or do you want me to show you outside?” she asks.
“Don’t get out of sight of the house,” Touched says, putting his 9mm on the table and tucking into the rest of his breakfast.
“I know,” Kit assures him.
I can see that Jackie has only started his food, so it will be ok to ask him.
“Jack, you wanna come along for a wee walk in the woods?”
“Nah, I’ve just started breaky,” he says.
Good.
We walk outside.
The Mercedes, the van, a few outbuildings. The woods beginning thirty feet from the house.
The sky is grayer and it’s a little colder than I’m expecting.
“It’s getting chilly,” I say to Kit.
“Yeah, Sonia heard on the radio that there’s a storm front coming down from Canada.”
“Funny, I was just thinking it would be tricky heating this place in cold weather,” I say.
“Yeah, despite what Sonia said on PI, it could even dip into the forties tonight. Touched said we might have to chop some wood and get the fire going. But don’t worry. It’ll be fun.”
“Will Peter be warm enough?” I ask.
Kit sighs, as if I’ve spoiled a nice conversation by bringing up an awkward subject.
“He’s in the smokehouse, it’s pretty warm there.”
I look at the three single-story log structures scattered around the clearing. They are all inverted V shapes. A steep slope from the ground to the top of the roof. One of these must be the smokehouse.
“Can we see him?”
“See who?”
“Peter.”
Kit shakes her head.
“Touched would definitely not allow that.”
“Ok,” I say, not wanting to make a big deal out of it.
“So, Sean, what do you want to see first? Do you want to go to the back of the cabin or do you want to go on the little trail to the pond?”
“The pond sounds fun.”
“It’s not really in sight of the house, but, like, what exactly are you supposed to do to me with handcuffs on?” she says, laughing.
Oh, I’ll do plenty, love.
“I’ll be helpless,” I agree.
We walk into the trees and follow a lightly worn trail as it curves downhill away from the house.
“It’s so peaceful here. Are there any neighbors nearby?” I ask.
“Nah, the nearest is in the next valley and he’s a German and I don’t think he comes here much,” Kit says.
“And Belfast town is ten miles away?”
“As the crow flies, but it’s a little longer by road.”
“Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes in the car?”
“Yeah. Something like that. But it is so quiet here, such a contrast to Plum Island on a weekend when all the dregs of— Ah, here we are at the pond.”
The trail stops at a small lake about a hundred yards across that is choked with pond scum, leaves, tree branches, probably hundreds of drowned animals, and maybe the odd former associate who got on Touched’s bad side.
“Yeah, I know, it’s not very nice, but Daddy’s going to get it cleaned out and someday we can go swimming or even kayaking,” Kit says.
“I think Jackie already took a dip.”
“Did he? Well, he’s braver than me.”
“Let’s go over here,” I say. I walk to a little rise away from the trail and sit down on a fallen tree. It’s a good spot. That way I can hear and see anyone coming from the house.
“Sit next to me,” I tell her.
There’s only going to be one chance at this and I can’t blow it. She sits, her dress bunching up over her knees. She moistens her full raspberry lips in anticipation of something exciting.
“Kit, I want to tell you something and I didn’t want anyone around to hear,” I explain quietly and take her hand.
“What?” she asks a little too eagerly.
“I think you know what I’m going to say.”
“No?” she says, a touch of fear in her eyes.
“You do,” I insist. “It’s about you; me and you.”
Kit’s smile evaporates. Her eyes narrow. She does know what I’m going to say. Women always do when you’re in this subject area.
“I hope you’re not fucking with me,” she says, even her surfer/stoner accent disappearing in the gravity of the moment.
“I am perfectly serious, Kit. I think there’s something between us. Something important. Something real. I’ve been in love with one person in my life but she was in love with someone else, so that didn’t work out too well. But I know how I felt then and I know how I feel when I’m with you now,” I begin slowly.
I look at her.
I’m trying to keep the conflict out of my face. The confusion of thoughts and emotions.
It’s an odd sensation. I don’t know if I’m playing her or not.
If this is a lie or whether it’s some part of the truth.
But I’ve begun and the only choice is to continue.
“I’m falling in love with you,” I say and pause for a full beat.
“You shouldn’t say that if you don’t mean it,” she whispers.
Her eyes close and she holds me tighter.
“I do mean it. And it’s not that w
e’ve got a lot in common: you surf, I don’t; you’re rich, I’m not; you’re American, I’m Irish. But none of that matters. It wouldn’t matter what you did, or where you were from, or what you were like. I think I’ve loved you from the moment I set eyes on you. In the bar at Revere, when you were waiting tables and wearing your Marine Corps shirt. It was as if the lightbulb flashed above my head and a voice said, she’s the one, Sean, you had one false start, but she’s the one. And it wouldn’t have mattered if you’d hadn’t been nice, and sweet and funny. If you were a bad person or stupid or mean, I still would have fallen for you. But luckily for me, as I got to know to you, I saw that you were perfect. You are perfect.”
She blinks and stares at me in amazement, and when she sees that I’ve finished speaking, she turns away. She’s been robbed of her voice and she may even be tearing up. We sit in silence for two minutes, the only sounds the birds on the water, the breeze in the trees.
I’m waiting for her.
It’s her move.
I’m feeling . . . what exactly?
Yes, that’s it: guilt. Above all, guilt. At the lies within the lies within the lies. And I still don’t know if that speech was part of them too.
“I’m not sure what to say, Sean,” she mutters at last.
“You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to get that off my chest. To let you know how I feel. I don’t even need reciprocation. I don’t need you to say that you love me. I don’t need you to say anything. Now that I’ve told you and you believe me, that’s enough. That’s enough for the present.”
She takes my hand in hers and holds it. And then she kisses it.
“Talk about something else for a while. Let me think,” she says.
“We don’t have to talk.”
“No, I want you to talk, I like to hear your voice,” she insists.
“What about?”
“Anything. You talk and I’ll listen and think. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Ok. Um. Let me see. We’re in Maine. Oh, I know. You probably don’t know this story. But some people think the Irish were here first, in Maine or Nova Scotia or somewhere around here. Did you ever hear that? You ever hear the story of Saint Brendan?”
“No. Tell me.”
“It’s a bit of a fairy story, but the theory is that Saint Brendan and a bunch of monks sailed a coracle from Ireland to America. They sailed right across from Ireland and landed somewhere around these parts. And of course Brendan met the Indians and he proselytized to them and tried to convert them from their heathen ways. And then the monks traveled around and saw great wonders and built a church and had lots of adventures, then they came home again. A mad Englishman sailed a replica of Brendan’s coracle over here sometime in the 1970s.”
“What’s a coracle?” she asks.
“I don’t really know, it’s some kind of leather boat, I think.”
“When was this?”
“A thousand years before Columbus.”
“Do you know the entire story?”
“Bits and pieces,” I say.
“Tell me the whole thing.”
And I do tell her. Everything I know of Saint Brendan and Saint Patrick and Saint Columba and all the Irish missionary navigators, and she listens to me and relaxes and laughs and holds my hand tighter and before I’m done, she turns to face me. She’s nervous. Terrified.
“I want you,” she whispers in a tiny, shy, almost nonexistent voice. And she lets go of my hand, takes off her shoes and her dress, and stands there naked. Her pale body and small breasts, her long legs and dark eyes and hair. She is so beautiful that she robs me of my breath. My pulse pounding in my ears.
She helps me take off my trousers and my boots. And she hooks herself under my outstretched, handcuffed arms, and she pulls me close and kisses me.
We lie on the forest floor and she arcs her torso over mine, my arms round her back and leading her. Touching her spine and buttocks and the back of her hair. Clement and meek, the both of us. Like it’s our first time. She gives herself and I ease her to the leafy ground and grasp her tighter, touching her with my lips. I kiss her on the shoulders and the faint, scared smile on her face. And she rolls me back to the forest floor and stretches out her body on me, kissing me, breathing words that are careful and true.
“I feel the same way, Sean, from that night, from the journey in the car, I couldn’t help it, I can’t help it. . . .”
And she tells me more. “This, this is my first, my first time.”
It shocks me. Incredible, in this day and age, that she has waited, saved herself, for the right moment and the right man.
And it proves that a lot of her character was bravado and an act and it shows me that she thinks she’s found that man at last.
And gently, very gently, I climb on top of her and I can see that this is the way it’s supposed to be. That this is what it’s been like for everyone else. Not hard or frantic or desperate. But like this. Geometries of movement and belonging, a giving of each other for each other. We maneuver our limbs and she puts me inside her and I can feel her pulse, a hasp of beating.
“Sean, I know it’s strange, but I—”
“Ssshhhhh . . .”
I push, and for her it’s an awakening. A revelation. And no less for me, too. And I fall in those blue eyes and the shadows of thoughts on her face. Things that I couldn’t read but now I can.
“Hold me. Hold me tighter,” she says.
“I am.”
“Hold me. Hold me and never let me—”
“I won’t,” I say and hook my handcuffed arms about her back.
We make love under the trees like a human and his elven enchantress. Or is it the other way around, that I am the woodland spirit and she is the lost mortal girl entering the dark part of the fairy tale?
We make love and she cries and I talk to her and hug her. And the moment is beautiful and complete and in the present tense there is no future, there is only her pulsing heart and her skin and the look of completeness on her soft lips and sylvan eyes.
It’s perfect. But I’ve seen this movie before. It’s the scene in the book of Genesis before the storm.
I hold her and we make love again, in the near absolute dark of the forest, without a noise or an interruption. A fragile promise of me and her. The calm before the hurricane.
* * *
The woods were wild and thick and the regions between the trees were pierced by sunlight through the canopy.
The red men had taught them to tap the bark for syrup and showed them berries and the nests of bees. Drunk on sweetness, they forged between huge firs and giant elms and trees of no description yet known to civilized man.
They had seen nothing but forest since coming off the fish-swarmed shore and it was to the forest gods that the local people prayed. Fintan was here and Daana, too, and in the glades they felt the heathen presence of age-old Pan. They came sometimes upon an altar or mound or other pagan edifice, yet they were not afraid, for the knowledge of the One God sustained them.
They crossed a river of leaping salmon. They listened to wolves and spotted eagles and even vultures—a bird no monk but one from Italy had seen before.
They rang the angelus for the first time in the breadth of river valleys and laid a monument to Patrick of humble stone, humbled yet under a huge mountain. Life was so much here. Beautiful and abundant and brimming over. Sprouting forth upon all dimensions and angles. The priest from Alba mentioned the Gnostic heresy and ventured that here the world was untouched by evil or the Fall. But Brendan was quick with him and made him do penance of sacking and chastisement. He knew in his heart that beauty was a corrupter, that the monks were being seduced by the very earth itself. . . .
I woke.
Kit was looking at me. She was fully dressed.
“You were dreaming,” she whispered.
“How could you tell?”
“Rapid eye movement,” she said, smiling.
“What time is it?�
� I asked, wiping the leaves off my back, shivering.
“It’s nearly twelve o’clock, lunchtime.”
“Won’t Touched be going crazy?”
“No. I walked back to where I could see the house and waved to him. And he said: ‘Where the fuck is Sean?’”
“And what did you say?”
“I shouted to him that you had a toilet emergency and were going to the bathroom,” she replied with a wee laugh.
“What did he say to that?”
“He didn’t seem that fussed; Dad and him were having a discussion about something but he told me to hurry you up.”
“Yeah, but even so, Kit, you should have woken me,” I said.
“You never wake a sleeping baby. And besides I had to do what I always do with Touched.”
“And what’s that?”
“Ignore him.”
I rubbed my eyes, sat on the log, and pulled on my boxers and trousers. I fitted my prosthesis and with some difficulty tied my boots while she watched with fascination. If she was still in the business of comparing me with Jackie, this was a mark for him.
I caught her looking at me. She blushed and turned away. But then again maybe the time for comparisons was over. Jackie was an irrelevancy now. Things had progressed from that pissing contest to a matter of life and death.
I brushed the leaves and pine needles off my T-shirt and sat on the fallen tree and stared at her until her smile fixed and she saw that I wanted to say something.
“What?” she asked.
“Kit. I didn’t mean to fall asleep. We don’t have much time.And we might not get another chance to talk. I want you to sit down on the tree next to me and listen to what I have to say. You’ve got to listen to me very carefully,” I said.
“You suddenly got very serious. While I am walking on air,” she said, mocking herself in a silly, preppy accent.
“I’m not joking. Take a seat.”
She frowned, but sat.
“Ok, say your speech,” she demanded.
“They’re going to have to kill Peter tomorrow. The Brits will not cave to Touched’s demands. There is a long-standing policy about negotiating with terrorists. Neither the Brits nor the Americans are allowed to do it. They never give in to kidnappers, ever. It’s a standing order,” I said slowly and carefully.
The Dead Yard Page 26