Saints and Sinners (11 page)

It was the tapping on the window at night that Curly came to dread and he being called out. First it was Seamus the foreman, telling him that he would have to comply, otherwise the McSorleys would punish him. Then it was Ambrose, saying that they knew he had made a statement to the guards, but that he would have to retract it. He could say that he saw nothing and that he heard nothing and that anyhow, he had bad sight. The proof that he had bad sight they had already ascertained, because of the many pairs of glasses Curly had been prescribed down the years. Finally, it was Daragh McSorley himself, just dropping by for a friendly chat, asked who was his favourite pop group, when last had he been to Galway, and how was his granny doing on her lonesome out there in the wilds. Then he said that Curly had nothing to worry about, all he had to do was stand up in the court and say he had made up a story to keep himself company out there on the lonely mountainside. Muldoon, a friendly solicitor, would help, coach him and put him through his paces. If he played ball and the case was quashed, Santa would come and Santa would come to his granny also and to tell her that. Curly looked at Mr. McSorley's big tall frame silhouetted against the shiny chrome of his car, and then into the distance, the church spire tapering up into the sky until it seemed like a long needle. His knees had turned to water.

I am afraid of that man, that man Mr. McSorley,
Curly was saying to himself on the stepladder, stacking floor tiles on a shelf, when in walks Muldoon the crooked solicitor and tells him that the case is called for first Thursday in Michaelmas and to come in next day at his lunch break, so that they can get their act together. In his mind he now stood in the witness box, the judge firing questions at him, tripping him up, a barrister warning him that the case for the prosecution rested on his evidence. He saw himself being asked to stick out his tongue for the signs of a lie and he began to shake uncontrollably and the ladder underneath shook with him. He could do a runner, he could just vanish to some destinationless place, but where and how. He knew that he was being watched.

After work he went straight to Widow Nell's, not to the bar, but to the back room, where he sat at a table, by himself, lads saluting and gassing and he talking back but not knowing a single thing he said. There was a newspaper open on the table and a big article about the price of cattle-feed gone sky high and fears for the decline in agriculture. The money in his granny's shed, his fingerprints on it. He should have used rubber gloves, but he didn't. He should have refused Donie, but he didn't.
I am so far in that I can't get out
was what he kept saying, kept piecing the bits together—if he denied what he saw that would be perjury and he would go to jail, and if he didn't deny that he saw what he saw the McSorleys would get him. Either ways he was sunk. When Curly was a young man, there was a girl two doors down that got a toy at Christmas that could talk. It was clothed in red fur, the mouth wide open and the tongue hanging out. It had two plastic knobs for eyes and an orange fur nose, and every so often it said, "Elmo wants you to know that Elmo loves you." He was Elmo, only it was him saying it to himself
—I am so far in that I can't get out.
It wouldn't stop. Shelagh, the barmaid, an older woman, could see that he was upset and kept bringing him saucers of chips that were free and asking if he was sure he wanted another drink and oughtn't he be heading home for bed.

After he'd downed three pints, two large whiskies, and a Bailey's liqueur, he felt better. All of a sudden he asked himself,
Why should I stay here, why should I loiter?
and got up and went out, pulling up his hood.

He was not drunk but he was not sober as he got on his bicycle and pedaled and pedaled through the drizzly night. Up the high street, past the church, past the monument, and down the back road, where people jogged at all hours and were a menace. Up to the junction that forked to the main road with a sign that said
^d
ublin,
except that it was invisible, cars flying by at one hundred miles an hour. Then pedaling at breakneck speed to get to the far side, and three and a half miles along to the forestry gates. When he entered the forestry he felt safer, tarred avenue with trees on either side and the big lake still and black and glassy. Everything black, save for one little light in the turret window of the ruin of the Castle. He'd never noticed that light before, because he'd never set foot there at night. That little light belonged to his other life, before he fell into the clutches of the McSorleys and before he buried the cursed bag in his granny's shed.

When Curly didn't appear at the beep of the boss's hooter and when it was discovered that his bed wasn't slept in, it was expected he would mooch into work at some point with a cock-and-bull story. But when he was not seen and not heard of for twenty-four hours and had not kept the appointment with Muldoon, the Gardai had to be alerted. A guard drove up to his granny's house and, being as she was an old woman, he didn't want to upset her too much, did not immediately get out his notebook and biro to take down any evidence. He was amazed at the amount of clobber she had accumulated, every single chair and armchair a throne of old newspapers and bags and flattened cardboard boxes. There were bits of crochet, dolls, dolls' prams, and a multitude of small china animals along the mantelpiece, above the unlit stove. Sensing that Curly was in some trouble, she got very flustered and jumped up and took her hat and coat off the hook on the hall stand saying, "What have I got to do now, sir," and he had the greatest trouble in calming her down. He said to leave it to them, that Curly had not boarded bus or train, and that Gardai were following up every lead and had their ears close to the ground.

It was a German woman who found him, or rather traced the sound of a ringing telephone. Eerie it was, up there in that empty wilderness, her two big dogs chasing each other and sniffing the territory where they had never been before. She was new to the neighborhood and had come to look at a portion of bog with a view to renting it, so that they could have a turf fire the year following. Various sections were pegged with names and numbers, but there were still allotments for rent.

The phone was almost buried in a thicket of golden-brown heather, the "auroras of autumn," as she had read in the guidebook. The ringing stopped just as she got to it and, bending in the near dusk to pick the phone up, she was startled by the sight of a sneaker, a man's dirty white sneaker, at the side of a deep black trench. She backed away, not knowing which apparition would be more terrifying at that instant, that of one living or dead. The phone felt alive in her hand, like a viper, a pink viper, and she walked, or rather she ran, holding it and whistling sharply to call her dogs.

The guard who answered the intercom could not hear her very distinctly, but when he saw her walk into the station, he guessed by her expression that she had come with a story.

It was all over the town, how Curly was missing and how sad, how very sad. The divers were not expected until later, since they were dashing all over the country, but the superintendent was promised that they would come, even if it had to be at night. Rumors were rife and ominous. Those who had barely thrown a word to Curly were now picturing him, so harmless, going up the street in his old windcheater, his brown mop of wet hair over his wet rosy cheeks, recalling his little impertinences, going up to people in pubs and saying, Why
can ye not talk to me,
and crashing weddings because he loved, adored, the taste of champagne. Some said that it must have been a rotten footbridge that gave way under him and that most likely the bog hole he fell into was deep or the woman would have seen him. One pundit said that he might not be found for hundreds of years, buried down there like the deer of old. A more sinister theory was that he had been brought there in the black night by those who wished him gone, and an extra twist to the various scenarios was that he had indeed been got rid of, but somewhere else, that the cell phone and the shoe were a decoy and Curly was lost in the vast swells of the Atlantic Ocean.

Only Donie knew, or rather guessed, that Curly, having heard that he was to appear in court, lost the nerve and believed that the judge could read his mind and would trip him up, so that somehow he would have to own up to the stash in his granny's shed. That's why he went at night and salvaged the bag to bury it—it was for her, the love of her. The minute the news broke, Donie drove to the grandmother's to give her some kind of comfort and felt a villain, an out-and-out villain. He saw how the carts in the shed had been overturned and the empty hole with dirty black slashed cobwebs. It was in the bog now, beyond the grasp of mankind. "I wouldn't do any harm to you or to your granny," he had told Curly and he meant it, but he did, he did do harm and he felt rotten. When Phonsie the car dealer asked him to hide the haul, he was promised a bonus and a scooter for Kathleen, so she could hop down to the shops or have her hair done when she felt like it. He did it for graft.

Never before had there been a hearse parked on that isolated road that led to the bog. How grim and inhospitable the place was, not a single bird-note, a universe of black, frozen over and luridly lit by the fitful flares of the torches. The divers brought the body up slowly and laid it on the bank for the sergeant to identify Curly. Then it was placed in the black zipper bag and carried ceremoniously on a stretcher of tarpaulin. It would be taken first to the morgue for forensic examination and then to the chapel where the mourners would foregather.

It was in an annex between the bar and the kitchen, poorly lit, that Shelagh asked the sergeant if she could have a word with him. He had gone in very late for a pint, to try to wind down. He could feel the emotion in her, but he could not see her face very clearly. She wanted to know one thing. What did Curly look like when they brought him out. He thought before answering. He knew that she needed reassurance of some kind and he heard himself say, "He was fairly close to perfect." He saved her the other things, how Curly's clothes were all soggy, his face and hands ash white from being suspended in the freezing water, and that when they pulled him out, the diver had to wipe the frothy fluid around his mouth, the egg white stuff, before putting him in the body bag. He spared her that.

"And the cause of death?" she asked.

"Probably death by misadventure," he said. Picking up the carving knife that was on a sideboard, she drew it in mock execution across her neck and said woefully, "Poor Curly, a lamb to the slaughter."

The tradition still held to lay down the sword for a funeral. Everyone came. Bouquets of flowers lined the entrance hall, Isolde's the most exquisite of all, blue and purple—not like any flowers that might grow in the ditches, but like flowers in a dream. Curly's granny had to be contained, kept from trying to open the sacristy door, believing Curly was in there, even though she had already seen him in the coffin and put one of her china mice in along with him. Donie stood at the back. He was over a barrel, hadn't slept. At moments he thought he was keeling over and had to grasp the baptismal font for balance. He saw the McSorley brothers in their long black coats of finest nap, pillars of neighborliness and loyalty, their wives weeping beneath their mantillas.

Father McDermott spoke fondly of Curly, his innocence, his always offering a helping hand, his love of shooting stars and his love of the small things in life, like being invited into a house for hospitality. He said how poignant that Curly should lose his young life in the very bog where, only the previous June, he had helped a neighbor to foot and stack turf and then, somewhat melodramatically, he said, "Whom the Gods love die young." Gazing out at his parishioners, he asked them not only to grieve for a sensitive youth of one score years, but to open their hearts and examine their consciences, and then he reddened and his voice grew vehement. Greed, he said, was ruining the country, people no longer showed the compassion that they once had, and while he was not pointing a finger at any single individual, he said someone must have known that Curly was in some sort of jinx to go riding off into a bog in the dead of night.

Then Curly's voice, sweet and boyish, filled the chapel as a tape of his party piece was played and the mourners wept openly.

The walking man I am

I've been down on the ground

I swear to God

If ever I see the sun

For any length of time

I can hold it in my mind

I'll never again go underground.

They were filing out now and Donie filed out with them. He would drive straightaway to Phonsie's place. Phonsie was an affable man but a ruthless man and with a cock-up of this magnitude, anything could happen. He might be next, dispatched to the wild blue yonder. Since he was a third cousin, people shook his hand and offered their condolences, but he was not listening, not heeding, he was miles away.

The strength in their hands was mighty.

Thursday