The Pig Did It (13 page)

Meanwhile the pig man would tell him where to direct his aim, and he would follow the instruction. More pints were ordered, more pints were drunk. The end of the game approached.

By this time, because the underdogs were coming from so far behind and with a fatalistic advance usually reserved for a Beethoven symphony, the group of spectators had grown to a small crowd. Enough of the throng had left their pints behind so that applause was possible during these final moments. “His name's McCloud,” was heard whispered more than once. “Aaron, they say,” was heard as well as “Aaron McCloud, the nephew.” He was also identified as “the one with the pig.”

It was Aaron's turn. With no points remaining—with the required zero now mathematically possible, the pig man gave his instructions: a single 20, a triple 18, a double 18. Aaron took a moment simply to stare at the board. Surfacing from some clouded region deep in his brain was a different strategy that would be all his own: a treble 20, leaving 50 left. He would go out with a double bull.

No sounds were heard. Aaron toed the line, aimed and made the toss. The treble 20. A few gasps, then silence. A double bull and the world was his. Aaron took a deep breath. No one else seemed to breathe at all. He took aim, holding off until the board came completely into focus. Now he could see it clearly as if some final correction had been made not in his sight but in the board itself. He made the toss. Through the direct intervention of a power as yet unrevealed, the double bull was given.

Shouts, exclamations, oaths. Aaron was rushed to the bar, swept along by his admirers. His back was slapped and his buttocks too; his arms were squeezed, his hands clasped, his hair tousled, his cheeks patted—all the abuse that was his due was duly given. When he turned toward the room and raised his pint in salute to his newly won enthusiasts, he saw Lolly heading toward the door, alone. He noticed next that her friend was among those thronged around him, cheerful, celebrating his own defeat with sure delight and an upraised glass. Aaron tried to push through the crowd, but his effort was interpreted as an attempt to mingle humbly with his admirers. The back slaps and arm squeezes were repeated with increased aggression, and the girl in the pink T-shirt pulled his ear. Lolly was out the door. Aaron made one more push against the crowd, but to even less avail. This time a pint was thrust against his chest, the spilled stout pouring against his shirt, the cloth sticking to his skin. Now he smelled like sour coffee. The merriment that greeted the accident inspired the man in the yellow suspenders to pour an entire glass over Aaron's head. Another glass followed, then a third, all amid cheers and shouts of joy.

Through the falling stout that near-blinded his eyes, Aaron looked for the pig man to rescue him, but he was nowhere to be found, not in the crowd, not at the bar, not in the room.

Off to his right, Lolly's escort in the dark suit was staring down into his pint, a sly half smile on his face. Aaron saw as well the thin tie, dark, knotted loosely beneath the Adam's apple. He couldn't avoid noting the long strong fingers, nor could he ignore the heavy unshined shoes. Aaron looked at the face, the well-formed nose, straight but nicely rounded at the tip, the ample lips even more tumescent than his own, the cheeks taut over the high bones, the forehead made low by locks of hair loosened from the original slick. In his confused and drunken state, Aaron told himself the man was Declan Tovey. Acquainted as Aaron was with the skeleton, he had no difficulty putting flesh to the familiar bones. The suit, all the more dignified for being casually worn, was no longer hanging lank on the skeletal frame. The head held a full crop of hair and the shoes firmly touched the floor, weighted there by the reconstituted corpse, the blood hotly coursing, the arms and legs no longer scrawny but muscled hard underneath the solid, potent flesh.

Now Aaron knew why the man was smiling. He was smiling because he had effected this return. He was smiling because he knew that his destiny and the destiny of Lolly McKeever had been joined for all time to come. No relationship could be more intimate than theirs: the murdered to the murderer. No passion could equal the heated moments that had climaxed their alliance; no love could match the intensity of their final exchange. This softly smiling man, this Declan Tovey, would, by the deed done, by the murder, possess Lolly forever. No one could take his place; no one could aspire to his eminence. No one could wipe the sly smile from his face.

Aaron set his glass on the bar, shoved aside the girl in the T-shirt, lurched at the smiling man, and punched him in the nose. A second blow, intended to achieve a knockout, missed its mark when the man ducked. Aaron had smacked the man wearing the suspenders. Others intervened. A melee followed. Aaron had provided yet another pretext for being mauled, and those assembled took full advantage of the gift. The exchange of blows, however, was hardly limited to Aaron's person alone. The suspendered man was being kicked by the T-shirted girl, a gaunt man with close-cropped hair was pummeling a participant in a green sweater who, in turn, was swinging his arms wildly, hitting a matronly woman who banged her glass against the side of the gaunt man's head.

Francis—now out from behind the bar—was flailing his way to the center of the trouble. Aaron had pulled back to the bar, the better to observe. Declan, if indeed it was he, had moved closer to a booth and was, like Aaron, giving the brawl his disinterested attention. Aaron's eyes and the eyes of Declan met. They nodded courteously to each other, raised their respective glasses in mutual salute, and drank generously to each other's continuing good health.

The girl in the T-shirt was taken into the arms of the gaunt man, the suspendered man was sent back to a booth, the man in the green sweater was directed toward the Men's and the rest urged by Francis to step up to the bar for a pint on the house. Everyone did as he or she had been told. Aaron turned again to face Declan. The man was not where he'd been. Nor was he in one of the booths, nor at one of the tables or among those at the bar. Declan Tovey was gone.

Aaron considered making inquiries under the pretense that he wanted to apologize for the unprovoked attack. He would search the man out; there would be another meeting, words exchanged, the obvious made obvious: The man would prove not to be Declan. For the simple reason that he couldn't possibly be Declan. That Aaron had been destabilized by downing uncounted pints was not an acceptable explanation of the confusions.

A second thought that followed hard upon the first was that he must not make inquiries. He should not search out the man; he should not require enlightenments. Some things were better left unknown. Ignorance, however uneasy, was often a preferred condition. Through whatever power that holds sway over such matters, the man had gone. And this, Aaron suspected, was not a power over which he had much influence. Fairly certain was he that, like most forces lately introduced into his life, this one was inscrutable, beyond logic, given to the coincidental, fulfilling purposes of its own, satisfying needs known perhaps not even to itself, and totally indifferent to requests for explanation, knowledge, or understanding. As Great-Aunt Molly had said, “We move from one mystery to the next, and from this comes wisdom.” For the first time in his life, he was beginning to believe that the good woman was right, and he must be Irish enough to accept it.

Aaron would have one more drink and head home. It was late. He was soaked and smelly—and not for the first time that day. The walk home would do him good. He would see the stars and feel the winds come down from the hills, the breezes wafting in from the sea. There would, of course, be scents and sights. There would, of course, be a moon. He would lift his soul to the sky and be transformed. It had not been an easy day, but it was over now, and he could surrender himself to the cosmic embrace the drink had prepared for him.

He raised his glass. He would empty it, then order the last

Guinness of the day. With the pint at his lips, the stout slurping into his mouth—with a little to spare for the front of his shirt—he saw, over the rim of his glass, the door to the bar inch open. It would be Declan, returned. It would be Lolly, come to make amends for her show of indifference. It could even be his aunt, summoned back from London to see him safely home. The door opened wider. Aaron took the pint from his lips. The pig entered, its snout high in the air as if sniffing out the presence it had come to seek.

It was as though the porcine man had gone to the nearest phone booth, shed his outer garment, and returned in his true form. The pig had been there all evening; it had instructed him in the game of darts and guided him to victory. It had decreed the postponement of his sorrows. It had shown him a good time and won him many worshippers. It had returned now to take him home.

Without hesitation the pig clattered across the wooden floor, its hooves tapping like the high heels of a pair of party girls stepping out for a dance. It stopped in the middle of the room and brushed its snout along a crack in the planks. Before any other thought could enter Aaron's mind, he became worried about splinters. He should call to the pig. But he knew it would be useless. The pig was nameless and not known for its acquiescence. Aaron knew what he must do. There was no alternative, no other possibility. He put his glass on the bar and, without looking either to his left or to his right, without paying tribute to the camaraderie he'd been awarded, he headed straight for the still-open door. From behind he heard the approaching clatter of cloven hoofs. He stepped outside and started down the road. The clatter continued, the
tippity-tap-tap,
an accompaniment that imposed a steadying rhythm on his walk.

He did not turn around. There was no need. Nothing now could induce abandonment; nothing could create the sought-for solitude. The stars were of no use; the moon a simple convenience to light his way, the winds with their melodic waitings unable to compete with the determined metronomic clopping of the high heels pursuing yet guiding him, pressing him forward, despite his lurchings, toward a fate yet to be revealed, irresistible and beyond all refusal.

Resigned, Aaron raised his head, his heart, his voice in song, the melody borrowed from “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow”:

We let the pigs in the parlor,

We let the pigs in the parlor,

We let the pigs in the parloooorr—

And they are Irish, too!

Stumble as he might, fall as he did, Aaron made a fairly straight path toward what awaited him, the
tippity-tap-tap,
the
clack
and the
clop
following faithfully after.

6

T
he following morning Aaron considered taking to the hills, to the low mountains rising to the east just above the town, where the moon's pull would not impose tidal restrictions on his time and force an ending, all too soon, to the day's sufferings. From the summit he could view the great world spread out before him, the parceled pastures sloping down to the fields that reached the headlands.

But there was a drawback. The hills had distractions of their own. It was his great-aunt Molly, who'd taken him time and time again to the summit, where they would move among the sheep, regarding the wool's growth, its texture, and its promise of plenty. The hills belonged to Aunt Molly. Not even Phila would be a match for her persisting presence. Just the idea that morning—before even getting out of bed, before thoughts of Phila, before confusions about Declan Tovey—just the thought of climbing the pastures up past the heather, through the furze and the rocks and the muddied paths to the waiting heights, had given him again the sight of his great-aunt, tall, indomitable, astride the summit, gesturing with an arm grand enough in its sweep to include all the lands below and speak to him the words that had struck into his soul and made him Irish forever, no matter what other allegiances he might claim.

“It was surely at this height,” Aunt Molly had said, “it was at this height and at this place that the devil brought the proud powers of England and, speaking, said to them: ‘All this will I
give
you' ”—and here the gesture came—“‘all this will I
give
you if you will but bow down and worship me.' And no sooner had the devil spoken these words than their knees, their English knees, buckled under them—and who would blame the poor hoors, such a height and such a wonder as was laid out before them? And so we fight not only to free ourselves but to free them too, don't forget. To get them up off their knees at last so they can stand and walk upright in the lovely land, free of the tempter's thrall. It's for them, for the kneeling English too, that we fight, poor hoors. And so it goes and goes and goes until we've freed them for good.” But then she would laugh a great laugh and add: “Or for evil. For with them, you never know.” Then she would sigh a heavy sigh and repeat, by way of an amen, “Poor hoors.”

Not all that eager to renew his Irish credentials—not from infidelity or indifference but from a need to indulge emotions not quite so grand—Aaron chose the sea. Some other time he would give Aunt Molly her due.

Aunt Kitty had returned in the night. She was there, in the kitchen, working away at her computer while he fixed himself a full breakfast: two more hot dogs, a banana, and three cups of coffee that, in their black simplicity, were the perfect antidote for the sour Guinness of the night before. He felt, as it happened, quite fit. Kitty, for her part, concentrated on her writing, the man in the priest's room ignored completely. Each morning his aunt worked and nothing—nor life nor death—could persuade her away from her gleeful remediations. She had, for the moment, at the suggestion of her London publisher, abandoned Trollope's
Can You For-

give Her?
(she couldn't) and was concentrating on her correction of
Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
where the Tess character, now named Tiffany, kills not her first seducer—here named Kyle—who had provided for her and for her family but the husband who had rejected her when she revealed her past sins. This, Kitty had pointed out, was the rightful ending.
He,
the husband, was the one to be killed. She even kept the name of Clair, so it was Clair who would get run through with the sword, not someone of a substitute name. Ever since reading the book as a sixteen-year-old, Kitty had wanted Clair to get his just deserts, and she took particular pleasure in being on such intimate terms with the event that when it finally came about she was, as writer, not only present, but saw to it that the craven Clair was given his moment of unredeeming amazement when, with a conveniently provided sword, Tess/Tiffany nailed him to the headboard.