The hunter, p.19
The Hunter, page 19
“That’s not what he said. He just never said it is here. It might be. Here’s as good as anywhere.”
It strikes Trey with a new clarity that she hates trying to have conversations with her father. She says, “And your man’s not rich.”
Her dad makes himself laugh again. “Ah, now, depends what you mean by rich. He’s no billionaire, but he’s got more than I’ve ever had.”
“What’s his name?”
Johnny comes closer to her. “Listen to me,” he says, keeping his voice down. “I owe that lad money.”
“He lent you money?” Trey says. She doesn’t bother to conceal the disbelief. Rushborough isn’t thick enough to lend her dad money.
“Ah, no. I was doing a bitta driving for him, here and there. Only then I was driving something up to Leeds, and I got robbed. ’Twasn’t my fault, someone musta set me up, but he doesn’t care.” Johnny is still moving, his feet shifting in the gravel of the drive, making little crunching noises. Trey wants to punch him to make him stop. “I had no cash to pay him back. I was in big trouble, d’you get how much trouble I was in?”
Trey shrugs.
“Big trouble. D’you get what I mean? Big trouble.”
“Yeah.”
“Only I’d this idea. I’d had it in the back of my mind for years, bouncing it around, like—I had it all mapped out in my head where the gold oughta be, I knew whose land it hadta be on, I’d a wee ring with a nugget in that I picked up in an antique shop for proof…I’d to beg himself to give it a go. He didn’t want me coming over here alone, he said he’d never see hide nor hair of me again. So I said he could come with me if he wanted, be the other fella.” Johnny shoots a glance over his shoulder at the cottage. “I never thought he’d do it. Him stuck in a tip like this, for weeks, no nightlife, no women? But he likes something new. He gets bored awful easy. And he likes keeping people on their toes, the way you never know what he’d do next. I’d say ’twas that.”
Trey thinks of Rushborough, or whatever his name is, sitting at their kitchen table, smiling at Maeve, asking her about Taylor Swift. She knew then he was all wrong. She feels like a fool for not having seen the rest.
“I wouldn’ta chosen it,” Johnny says, with an injured note like she accused him. “Having him around you and your mammy, and the wee ones. But I had no choice. I couldn’t tell him no, could I?”
Cal would have, Trey knows. Cal wouldn’t have got himself into this in the first place.
“It’ll be grand,” Johnny assures her. “It’s all going great guns. You just do your wee bit, so the lads know there’s gold out there for the taking. Next thing, after himself finds the stuff in the river, he’s going to give them a choice: they can have a grand each to let him take samples on their land, or they can invest a few grand in his mining company and be in for a share of everything he finds. He’s got other people back in London looking to be investors, we’ll say, but he wants to give first shot to the boys from the auld sod. Only they have to decide quick, ’cause the London lads are at him. Keep things moving, bish bosh boom, keep them excited, keep the pressure on, d’you see? If all of them go for the investment, I’m paid off. Free and clear. If we can get more people on board after that, it’s all profit.”
“They’re not gonna give him money,” Trey says. “Not just ’cause they hear I found that thing.”
“They’ve already thrown in a few hundred, sure. That’s what they’ll be thinking of. Why not go that one extra step and be in for the big prize?”
“ ’Cause they’re not thick,” Trey says. “And they don’t trust you.” The way the evening has gone gives her a freedom that takes her by surprise. She doesn’t need to lick up to her dad any more.
Johnny doesn’t argue with that. He smiles a little, looking out over the dark fields. “I forget you’re only a child,” he says. “You haveta understand men. These lads around here, they’ve been hardworking men all their lives. Everything they’ve got, they earned. A man’s supposed to be proud of that, but the truth is, he can get awful weary of it. He gets to craving something he didn’t have to earn; something that fell into his hands, for no reason at all. That’s why people play the lottery. ’Tisn’t the money they want, even if they think it is; ’tis that moment when they’d feel like they’re one of God’s own handpicked winners. These lads want to feel lucky, for once. They want to feel like God and the land are on their side. They might not give five grand for the chance of fifty, but they’ll give it for the chance to feel lucky.”
Trey doesn’t know what he’s on about and doesn’t care. She says, “Leave Cal outa it.”
“I never wanted him in it to start with,” Johnny says, offended. “I wouldn’t take a penny off a man that’s been good to you. I turned him down flat. D’you know what that fella did? He threatened to go to the Guards if I didn’t let him in. That’s what you get for hanging off a Yank. Would any man from around here do that?”
Trey says, “Leave him outa it or I’ll throw this yoke in a bog.”
“You’ll do what you’re told,” Johnny says. He sounds like everything about him has worn thin. “Or I’ll beat the living shite outa you.”
Trey shrugs.
Johnny rubs a hand down his face. “Right,” he says. “I’ll do what I can. Just get your bit right. For Jesus’ sake.”
Trey heads off down the road. “Where d’you think you’re going?” Johnny calls after her. “There’s no vet open at this hour.”
Trey ignores him.
“Are you headed to your man Hooper’s?”
Trey wants to speed up, but she has to wait for Banjo. He isn’t whimpering any more, but he’s limping heavily, favoring the hurt paw.
“Ah, come back here,” Johnny calls. She hears the car door open. “I’ll give the pair of ye a lift.”
“Get fucked,” Trey calls back to him, without turning her head.
* * *
—
Trey cuts across fields till she’s sure her dad can’t have followed her. Then she finds a moonlit spot, near enough a wall that she won’t stand out too clearly, and squats down to examine Banjo’s paw. Her heart is still going hard.
The paw is swollen. When Trey tries to feel for lumps or breaks, Banjo whimpers, moans urgently, and finally growls, although he follows that up with a frenzy of licking to apologize. Trey sits back and rubs his neck the way he likes best. She isn’t going to push him till he snaps at her. It would break his heart.
“ ’S OK,” she says. “You’re grand.” She wishes she had kneed Rushborough in the goolies.
Rushborough and everything he’s brought with him are so alien to her that she can’t translate the evening into any terms she can comprehend. It feels like something that didn’t happen. She sits, trying to spread it out in her mind till she can see it straight. On the other side of the wall, cows chew in a steady, dreamy rhythm.
As far as Trey can see, she has two choices. She can stick to her original goal, which was to scupper her dad’s plan and set him running. That would be easy. She could take the scrap of gold to Cal, or to any of the men, and tell them where she got it. They’re suspicious of her dad already, by reflex. They’d have him and his Englishman run out of town within a day. Rushborough may be hard, but he’s outnumbered and off his patch: he’d be gone.
Against this is the fact that Trey would cut off her own hand sooner than do any of those men a favor. What she wants to do with them is splay open their rib cages and pull out their hearts. She wants to break her teeth on their bones.
This urge has never troubled her, morally speaking. She’s accepted it as something she can never act on, even if she somehow learned exactly where it should be directed, but she’s clear that she would have every right to act. What’s stopped her, too adamantly for the slightest questioning, is Cal. They made a deal: Cal found out for her what had happened to Brendan, as near as he could, and in exchange she gave him her word to do nothing about it, ever. But her dad’s doings have no connection to Brendan. She can do whatever she wants with them.
She could do what her dad and his Englishman need from her. Against that is the fact that she has no desire to do them any favors, either: her dad can fuck himself, and after what Rushborough did to Banjo, he can fuck himself a million times over. But their plan, if she helps them, could hit half of Ardnakelty. Somewhere in there, it’s bound to hit the people who did that to Brendan.
And her dad will be gone soon enough that way, too. Even if the plan goes perfectly, sooner or later it’ll run up against the fact that there’s no gold. He and Rushborough will grab as much cash as they can, and go.
It surfaces in Trey’s mind only gradually that her dad never had any intention of staying around. It seems like an obvious thing, something she knew all along, if she had bothered looking. She could have just fucked off to Lena’s and waited him out, without ever thinking twice about the shite he’s brought with him.
She would have done that, if she’d realized. She’s glad she didn’t. She sits in the field a little longer, running Banjo’s soft ears between her fingers and weighing up her different revenges in her mind.
“Come on,” she says to Banjo, in the end. She hoists him up in her arms and gets him draped over her shoulder, like a huge baby. Banjo is delighted with this. He snuffles at her ear and gets drool in her hair. “You weigh a fuckin’ ton,” Trey tells him. “I’m gonna put you on a diet.”
The warm, smelly weight of him is welcome. Trey feels, all of a sudden, savagely lonesome. What she wants to do is bring all this to Cal, dump it at his feet, and ask him what to do with it, but she’s not going to. Whatever Cal is at, he’s made it plain that he doesn’t want her in it.
“Salad,” she tells Banjo, as she starts down the road. “That’s all you’re getting.” He licks her face.
Trey was worried Lena would have gone to bed, but her windows are still lit. When she opens the door, music comes out from behind her, a woman with a throaty voice singing something restless and melancholy in a language Trey doesn’t recognize. “Jesus,” Lena says, raising her eyebrows. “What happened to you?”
Trey had forgotten her lip. “Tripped over Banjo,” she says. “He went under my feet. I stood on his paw. Will you have a look at it?”
Lena’s eyebrows stay up, but she doesn’t comment. “No problem,” she says, pointing Trey to the kitchen. “Bring him in here.”
At the sight of Nellie and Daisy, Banjo starts wriggling to get down, but when his paw touches the floor he lets out a pitiful yelp. “Ah, yeah,” Lena says. “That’s at him, all right. Out,” she says to Nellie and Daisy, opening the back door. “They’ll only distract him. Now. Sit, fella.”
She turns off the music. In the sudden silence, the kitchen feels very still and restful. Trey has an urge to sit down on the cool stone floor and stay there.
Lena kneels in front of Banjo and makes a fuss of him, rubbing his jowls while he tries to lick her face. “You get behind him,” she says. “Stand over him and hold up his jaw, in case he snaps. If he cuts up rough we can muzzle him with a bitta bandage, but I’d rather not.”
“He won’t,” Trey says.
“He’s hurt. Even the best dog in the world changes when it’s hurt. But we’ll try it this way first. Come here, fella.”
She takes up Banjo’s paw, very gently, and feels her way around it. Banjo squirms against Trey’s hand, goes through his full repertoire of whines and moans and yelps, and finally brings out his deepest, most impressive bark. “Shh,” Trey says softly, into his ear. “You big aul’ baby. You’re grand.” Lena, running her fingers over his other paw for comparison, doesn’t look up.
“I wouldn’t say anything’s broken,” she says in the end, sitting back on her heels. “Bruised, only. Don’t let him do much, the next few days.”
Trey releases Banjo, who goes in circles trying to lick them both at once, to show he forgives them. “Thanks,” she says.
“He oughta stay here for the night,” Lena says. “He shouldn’t walk all the way up that mountain.”
“I’ll carry him,” Trey says.
Lena gives her a look. “In the dark?”
“Yeah.”
“And if you trip once, the pair of ye’ll be in worse shape than you already are. Leave him where he is. Anyhow, if it’s worse in the morning, we’ll have to bring him to a vet for X-rays. You can stay too. The bed’s still made up from last time.”
Trey thinks of the wide cool bed, and of her dad waiting at home to fidget and nudge at her. She asks abruptly, “Do you know who done that on my brother?”
They’ve never talked about this before. Lena doesn’t show any surprise, or pretend not to understand her. “No,” she says. “No one was about to tell, and I wasn’t about to ask.”
“You could guess.”
“I could, yeah. But I might be wrong.”
“Who d’you guess?”
Lena shakes her head. “Nah. Guessing games are for who’s messing with your scarecrow, or who done a shite on the Cunniffes’ front step. Not this.”
“I already hate all of ’em round here,” Trey points out. “ ’Cept you and Cal.”
“There’s that,” Lena acknowledges. “If you knew who done what, would you hate the rest of ’em any less?”
Trey considers that. “Nah,” she says.
“Well then.”
“I’d know what ones to hate more.”
Lena tilts her chin, conceding the justice of this. “If I knew for definite,” she says, “I’d probably tell you. It might be a bad idea, but there you go. But I don’t.”
“Reckon that was Donie McGrath,” Trey says. “The Cunniffes’ step, not the scarecrow. ’Cause Mrs. Cunniffe gave out about him playing his music loud.”
“Sounds about right,” Lena says. “That’s different, but. You’re on solid ground there. There’s not a lot of people around here that would leave shite on a doorstep, and most of them’d use cow shite; Donie’s an exception. But there’s plenty of people here that’d hide things away if they go wrong, no matter how bad. I’d only be guessing blind.”
“Yeah,” Trey says. She wants to say that the real difference is that they have no right or need to know about the Cunniffes’ step, while she has both a right and a need to know about Brendan, but fatigue has suddenly hit her like a rock to the head. She loves Lena’s kitchen, which is worn and the right kind of messy and full of warm colors. She wants to lie down on the floor and go to sleep.
She has a third choice. She could walk away from all of this. Go up the mountain, and stay there till this all blows over: live in her abandoned cottage, or go to one of the mountainy men. They’re not talkers; they wouldn’t ask questions, and they wouldn’t rat her out, no matter who came looking. They’re not scared of the likes of Rushborough.
Lena is looking at her steadily. “What brought this on?” she inquires.
Trey looks blank.
“How come you’re asking me tonight, two years on?”
Trey didn’t expect this. Lena is the least nosy person she knows, which is among the reasons Trey likes her. “Dunno,” she says.
“Feckin’ teenagers,” Lena says. She gets up from the floor and goes to let the dogs in. They skid over to check out Banjo and sniff his paw. “Did that fella have his dinner yet?”
“Nah,” Trey says.
Lena finds an extra bowl and takes a bag of dog food from a cupboard. All three dogs forget about Banjo’s paw and close in on her, writhing around her legs and giving her the full blast of desperate beagle starvation.
“When I was sixteen,” she says, “one of my mates got pregnant. She didn’t want her parents knowing. So d’you know what I did? I kept my mouth shut.”
Trey nods in agreement.
“I was a feckin’ eejit,” Lena says. She nudges dogs out of the way with her knee so she can pour out their food. “Your woman needed a doctor keeping an eye on her; there coulda been something wrong. But all I thought was, adults would make a big fuss about it, make it all complicated. Simpler to leave them outa it, and handle it ourselves.”
“What happened?”
“One of our other mates had better sense. She told her mam. Your woman got to see a doctor, she had the baby, everything was grand. But she coulda ended up having it in a field and the pair of them dying. All because we reckoned adults were more hassle than they were worth.”
Trey knows what Lena is getting at, but it seems to her that, like with the Cunniffes’ step, Lena is overlooking differences that matter. She feels lonelier than ever. She almost wishes she hadn’t come to Lena’s, seeing as Banjo is grand anyway. “Who was it?” she asks.
“Feck’s sake,” Lena says. “That’s not the point.”
Trey picks herself up off the floor. “Can you keep him tonight?” she says. “I’ll come get him in the morning.”
Lena puts the dog food bag back in its cupboard. “Listen to me, you,” she says. “Me and Cal, we’d do anything for you. You know that, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, acutely embarrassed, staring at the dogs eating. “Thanks.” The idea does give her a kind of comfort, but a confusing, messy kind. It would be more solid if she could find something that she wanted them to do.
“Then remember it. And you need to wash your face and put something over that T-shirt, unless you want people asking what kinda wars you’ve been in.”
* * *
—
The mountain is busier on the way home, a busyness that keeps itself on the edge of perception, crowded with movements and rustles that might or might not be there. Its night activities are in full swing. Trey feels bare, without Banjo at her heel.
She’s not worried for Lena. If her dad tries convincing Lena to put money into Rushborough’s imaginary gold mine, he’ll be wasting his time. What Trey is worried about is Cal. He’s doing something, she can’t tell what, and he doesn’t know what Rushborough is. Cal has sustained enough damage through getting mixed up with her and hers. The whole of her mind balks at the thought of him taking any more. The fact that she’s pissed off with him only intensifies this: right now, in particular, she has no wish to be deeper in his debt than she already is.
