Cal has been drinking too fast, aiming to be mannerly and show his appreciation. Regardless of the hamburger, the booze is starting to reach him. He feels suddenly and vividly, as he’s no doubt intended to, the lonesomeness of his position. He’s got Nealon side-eyeing him because he thinks Cal is a local, and the locals side-eyeing him because they think he’s a cop, while the truth is that he’s neither one and has neither to take refuge in. No matter which set of wagons is circling, he’s outside, in the darkness with the pacing predators. He’s not frightened by this—Cal has always been practical about fear, saving it for when the danger is solid and close at hand—but the lonesomeness sits as deep as fear. He knows the country outside the window is small and busy with men and their doings, but today something in the hot sunset light hitting the stained glass implies a vast, featureless emptiness, as though he could go out the door and walk himself to death without seeing a human face, or a place to give him shelter.
“I got no idea,” he says. “I don’t read minds. If anyone said Nealon’s got a witness, ask them.”
“There’s a terrible loada possibilities,” Mart says with a sigh, “when you’re dealing with the likes of Paddy Englishman. Even dead, you couldn’t watch the fucker. The man struck me as being that many shades of dodgy, you wouldn’t know which one to keep your eye on.” He glances sideways at Cal. “Tell us, Sunny Jim: what did your Theresa think of him? Sure, she saw more of him than any of us, what with him being a friend of her daddy’s. Did she say he was dodgy?”
“Course she didn’t,” Malachy tells him. “If she was uneasy around him, this fella wouldn’ta let the man near her. Wouldja?”
Cal feels danger rise in the air like heat-shimmer off a road. “I didn’t need any kid to tell me that guy was squirrelly,” he says. “I got that far all by myself.”
“You did,” Mart concedes. “You said to me, right up at that bar, you didn’t like the cut of him.”
“I’ve a pain in my hole with Rushborough,” P.J. declares suddenly and with force. “I’d had enough of him even before this, and ’tis only after getting worse. I’ve my hands full, with this drought. I’m feeding out winter rations; I’ll have to sell stock if this keeps up. I can’t afford to be thinking about anything else. He came in here distracting me, getting my hopes up. He’s dead now, and he’s still distracting me. I want the fella gone.”
P.J. mostly doesn’t get listened to, but this draws a ripple of nods and low noises of agreement. “You and all the rest of us,” Senan says, raising his glass. “We shoulda run the fucker outa town the day he walked in.”
“Young Con McHugh’s only devastated,” P.J. tells Cal, his long face creased with concern, “so he is. With the weather the way it is, he says, it’d take a miracle for him to come outa this year OK. He thought your man Rushborough was the miracle, like.”
“More fool him,” Senan says, knocking back the last of his pint.
“We all thought it,” Bobby says quietly. “You can’t be blaming Con.”
“Then more fool all of us.”
“Con’s grand,” Francie says. “He’ll have a kiss and a cuddle with the missus and he’ll get over it. ’Tis Sonny who’s not great. Sonny talks big, but he gets the moods something fierce.”
“That’s why he’s not here to congratulate you,” P.J. explains to Cal. “He woulda been, only he hadn’t the heart.”
“Sonny wishes he’da been the one that kilt Rushborough,” Francie says. “He never touched him, but he wishes he’d taken his shotgun and blown your man clean away.”
“We all do,” Senan says. “Your man came swanning in here, making believe he was our salvation. All the while he was fucking us right up the arse.”
Mart, who’s been watching in silence from his corner, moves. “Paddy Englishman was nothing,” he says. “Forget about him. He was no more than vermin that wandered onto our land and got itself shot, and good riddance.”
“He was no cousin of mine,” Bobby says, simply and a little sorrowfully. “I shoulda known. I did know, underneath; I just didn’t wanta. Like when I asked Lena to marry me. All the things that disappoint me worst, I knew them all along.”
“He was no cousin or neighbor or nothing to any of us,” Mart says. “There was no reason he shouldn’t try to con us outa our money, the same as he woulda conned anyone else he ran across. That’s what vermin does: scavenges what it finds. Johnny Reddy’s a different matter.”
“Wee Johnny sold out his own people,” Francie says. His deep, slow voice feels like a dark tremor running in the floor, up through the banquettes and the table. “That’s dirty. A dirty thing to do.”
“Sold us to an Englishman, no less,” Malachy says. The men stir at the word. Cal feels something old in the air, stories too long ago to tell, but built into these men’s bones. “Rounded us up and handed us over to him like livestock.”
