by John Klima
“Gone?” asked Dale.
“Gone.”
“Christ.”
McGovern blessed himself.
Beside him, Bartley tapped his pipe upside-down against his hand. “Every one of your stories starts like that, Gerry. Every one.”
McGovern sneered. “Won’t be long now,” he said to the American.
“Hopefully,” said Dale, who had been waiting ten days for the parish priest. “I should have called ahead, but . . . I wasn’t sure.”
“Bad luck, truly,” Bartley said. He cut thin strips of tobacco from a block with his penknife and rolled the tar curls between filthy palms until the nest was finely shredded. “Though you could hardly blame the Father,” he said. “Tis the first holiday that man has taken since God-knows-when.”
“Well his timing’s incredible,” Dale said, “just incredible.” He followed the thread of his borrowed line down into the water and watched a tiny ripple stir around it. It was a fine morning on the coast of Ireland, cool beneath a naked sun. Dale felt like he’d been sitting there since he first trundled through the airport, catching nothing and talking about airplanes or weather. Every day he ate his breakfast in the B&B and every night he drank at a small bar in the centre of the village. He had yet to go into the gray stone hills which loomed above the crooked, multicoloured houses. There was just something about them, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“I wonder,” Bartley said, “D’you think they’d ever have one of our lads up there?” He plucked a pebble from the ground and placed it in the bowl of his pipe. “They’re fierce small, you know, because of our planes. They’d fit them tin cans of yours awful easy.”
Dale laughed. “Height really isn’t . . . ” He looked around. “It doesn’t matter. The program’s shut down.”
“Aye,” Bartley said, serious all of a sudden. “Because of the crash?”
“It wasn’t a crash.”
“The accident then?” He held a match towards his face and cupped both hands above the pipe.
“Yeah,” Dale said. “Because of the accident.” He drank from the plastic bottle beside him and stared out across the water. As we set sail on this new ocean, he thought . . .
“Terrible thing,” Bartley was saying. “Terrible altogether. Did you know any of them boys, you did?”
“I knew them all,” Dale said. “Davis, O’Neil, Rodriguez . . . ” He took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. It was two years later and the president’s speech still rang in his ears: “Aquarius is lost. There are no survivors.”
*
Ireland. The slide-rule rigidity of Houston had not prepared him for it. Dale was used to clean lines and order, but this little village was a bow-tie of crooked streets knotted where their paths crisscrossed with those of history and want. The first time Dale saw it he had thought it was a theme park. Even after fourteen days on the ground, its true arrangement continued to elude him. One wrong turn, what he thought might make a sensible shortcut, and Dale would find himself on the shoulder of the potted two-lane to another parish, would suddenly be in the company of dirty hens by a half-finished house on the edge of the arid countryside.
He had taken a room in the centre of the village, on what passed for the main drag. It was a rambling nook-and-cranny job, an anarchic spider-web of low doors and high ceilings rebuilt and renovated many times. Thomas and Catherine, the elderly couple who owned it, had gleefully explained the building’s history to him; how it had consumed outhouse after outhouse, how it had gone from farmhouse to townhouse, from boarding house to B&B, and Dale was sure his room had once been among the rafters of a forge or stable. Standing in the guesthouse doorway, one could go only left or right— to the pub or the sea— and still Dale always managed to get lost.
“The streets all move around at night,” Catherine told him one morning.
“Nice try,” Dale said.
“It’s true,” Thomas added, cocking his head towards the window. “The village used be up there, in the hills.”
Dale looked over his shoulder. It was as much limestone as he had ever seen. “I don’t think so,” he said at last.
“Oh yeah,” Thomas winked at his wife. “Twas a deal made with the devil, you know? Sealed with a hoof. And pretty soon the whole lot of us are to be sucked right down the Blue Pool, like one of them black spots of yers.”
Dale thought for a moment. “A black hole?”
“Aye, a black hole.”
The American laughed. At least the food was always good. “I appreciate the effort,” he said, “but I’m not buying it.”
“Then tell me this so,” Thomas hunched over his plate, “did ye really go up there? To the Moon, like?”
“Thomas,” Dale said, “I’ll let you know.” He excused himself as he always did, climbing the bare staircase back to his room where a copy of the county paper lay yellowing in the sun. “Spaceman Dale” had made page five, and he had cringed when he saw it, his life unspooled as lies and inexplicable exaggeration, the gross embellishment of an undistinguished record. To read it one would think him a Borman or a Conrad, if not the equal of Armstrong himself. Dale had not looked at it since Thomas first produced it one morning over breakfast.
“I didn’t know you gave an interview” the old man had teased at the time.
“I didn’t,” Dale had said, staring at the picture they had printed alongside the article, a publicity snap of him at the initial rollout of Aquarius, his arm around Rodriguez’s shoulder and both men grinning. He supposed it was easily sourced.
“Twas a slow week,” Thomas said.
“Excuse me?”
“Slow enough now,” the old man went on. “Though Maggie Kelleher’s ewe drowned down by the shore last evening. That’s two now.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Two,” he said. “Careless, that woman. Not like her husband, God bless him.”
“God bless him,” repeated Catherine, drifting through the room with a plate piled high with toasty strips of bacon.
Dale had watched this all with amusement. After breakfast he had asked Thomas for the paper though he didn’t know why. Vanity, probably, though when he went back to his room he refused to open it again, merely threw it on the dresser beside the tin flask he had brought across the ocean. It irked him, the usurpation of his life. He had never even met this reporter and yet her fanciful invention now defined him to everyone he met.
Catherine told him not to worry. Every morning after breakfast she would meet him at the bottom of the stairs, he with a satchel to see him through his fishing; she with a little foil package of sandwiches, moist, crustless feasts of dark bread and thick-cut meats painted heavily in relish. It was a peculiar, motherly gesture with which she earned Dale’s gratitude forever.
“Sure, we have to keep you fed,” she said.
Somewhere Thomas coughed violently. Dale smiled, and let himself out.
Down by the Blue Pool, the American explained his theory about his room having once been a forge, but McGovern only smirked.
“What?”
“Ah now,” McGovern said, turning to Bartley.
Puffing his pipe, his cheeks an artful bellows, Bartley shook his head. “Didn’t they tell you, Dale?” he asked. “Sure everybody knows, that part of Tom’s used be the undertakers.”
*
For years he had heard Rodriguez talk of coming here, of green hills and red-headed girls. It was a fantasy, colourful and wild, and by definition it bore scant resemblance to what met Dale as he rolled his battered hardside off the plane. Not a fertile field or a dancing lass in sight, instead a murky tonnage of dull cloud which weighted on the whole country like a fat palm pressed upon a chest. At customs, a sneering, gray-haired policeman stamped his passport without a word. At the car hire desk, a woman with food stains on her blouse went on and on about the foulness of the weather, about the worst summer in a generation and how the crops were rotting in the ground.
“Twas far from
the ground the likes of her were raised,” Bartley said when Dale recounted him the story. Hell of an introduction, the American thought later. It was the first time they had met, the old man seemingly oblivious to the fact that it had indeed been raining steadily since Dale’s arrival, weather which had confined them all inside the gloomy local.
“It was late,” Dale said. “I’m sure she was just tired.”
“No excuse for that kind of behaviour, and you a guest of this great little nation.” Bartley daubed at the beige moustache left by his pint and leaned into his new acquaintance. “What was it you said you did again?”
Dale cleared his throat. “Aeronautics,” he said warily.
“No,” Bartley said, squinting. “No, that’s not it . . . Too much bearing, too . . . clean cut.” A ripple of laughter passed through the bar.
“I’m sorry?” Dale said. He hadn’t realized anyone was listening.
“Not that you should have to be,” the old man said, “but I appreciate it.”
Dale looked around, though no one met his eyes. He turned back to Bartley. “And what’s your line?”
“When you’re ready, Pat,” Bartley said, grinning at the barman and sinking a bony finger deep into his empty glass.
“You’ll not get an answer out of him,” the barman told Dale.
“Yeah, I’m starting to see that.”
Beside him, Bartley cleared his throat. “So,” he said, “is it a pilot or an engineer you are?” he asked.
“First one,” Dale said, “and then the other.” He was getting the hang of Bartley.
“Test pilot?” the old man said, narrowing his eyes. He was sharp.
Dale shook his head, sipped his drink and allowed himself a tiny smile.
“He’s toying with me,” Bartley announced.
The barman said nothing.
“You really want to know?” Dale asked at last.
“I do,” Bartley said.
“He does,” the barman echoed, elbows on the counter.
Dale sighed. “All right.” He tapped the little silver pin on his lapel. “Astronaut Corps.,” he said.
“Well now,” Bartley said.
The barman whistled quietly.
Dale sipped his drink. “It’s a job like any other.”
“A job like any other, he says.” Bartley cocked his thumb in Dale’s direction. “Bring him another whiskey, will you, Pat?”
The American shifted his weight on the barstool. “Hospitality?”
“Generosity of spirit,” Bartley said, a gleam in his eye. He began on the fresh pint before him with a kind of practiced reverence.
“Well then,” Dale said, raising his own glass, “I believe I’m supposed to say sláinte.”
“Aye,” said Bartley, “you’ve got it, sláinte indeed,” and so their conversation drifted into trivialities, the price of stout and the state of county games, things which were the heartbeat of the local. Dale left when the bar was almost empty and the barman started to look restless. He had no better grasp on who Bartley was, the old man foxing him at every turn. He walked back to the B&B beneath a loaned umbrella, shaking the rain off out on the step.
“Gallivanting, was it?” Thomas asked, stirring from the shadows in the hallway.
“Only as far as the bar”.
“How’d you find it?”
“Your directions were perfect.”
The old man smiled patiently. His teeth were crooked and yellow. “I mean,” he said softly, “how was it?”
“Ah . . . It was good. I enjoyed it. Met a man named Bartley, I’m sure you know him.”
“Oh, Bartley’s a cute one all right. Wiley, like.”
Dale rubbed the side of his head. “I gathered that.”
“Fierce interested in you now, I’d say.”
“He was. Though less forthcoming about himself. I wonder, what is it he does exactly?”
“His brother killed three Tans in that business with the British.”
“Right. But Bartley?”
Thomas laughed as he began up the stairs, slapping Dale on the back. “Sure, isn’t he his brother’s keeper, Dale? His brother’s keeper.”
When the downpours finally ended the little village came into its own. Stone walls caught the new light and turned it back upon the darkest corners of the place. The streets began to glow, and, on their outskirts, brave flowers sprung from a frugal soil. Everywhere became warm and the sky assumed a welcome, almost Texan hue.
“This is our summer now,” Bartley announced in the bar that afternoon, wiping his hands on his thighs and standing up. His crooked frame drew nods of approval from the other patrons. It seemed an event of some importance.
“You going somewhere?” Dale asked. The half-full glass in front of Bartley was conspicuous.
“The Blue Pool,” the old man said, “Come on, if you like and we’ll stand you the line.”
That was how it started.
“You seem awful content,” Bartley said at the end of that first week’s fishing.
“Must be the company.”
“All the same,” McGovern said, cocking his head towards the gray hills, “would you not see The Burren?”
“I’ve no interest.”
“Tis a place of beauty.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“You’re a strange man, Dale.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
Their lines hung heavy in the water. Nothing was biting.
“I heard once,” Bartley said, “that spaceships were tiled, and that ’twas Irish students working over there that glued them on.”
Dale smiled. “Sure, on the outside. Ceramics to survive re-entry, but I don’t know who glued them on.”
“Pity,” Bartley said. “Pity now.”
Beside him, McGovern shrugged.
“Twould be nice,” Bartley went on, “to think of the contribution, like.”
“Twould a’course,” said McGovern.
Dale looked at the two of them, this grizzled pair, then shook his head and smiled. He closed his eyes and raised his head towards the sun. So unremarkable, he thought, and still so great. Turning away, he opened his eyes and caught the ghost-face of the Moon in daylight peeking through the afternoon. He allowed himself a look of happiness.
“What’s that now?” Bartley asked. He never took his eyes off his line.
“I remember he was on the radio,” Dale said. “Loud and clear. His first words out of the lander were Man, that’s beautiful.”
“Who was that, then?”
“A friend of mine,” Dale said. “Rodriguez. One of the men who died.”
Bartley nodded.
Beside him, McGovern asked what it was like. He too was looking at the Moon now, the withered veins on his unshaven neck coaxed back to elasticity by the tilt of his blunt chin.
“Rock,” said Dale. “He went on and on about the rock, the mountains and the boulders and the dust.”
“Rock?” McGovern said. “Mountains and dust?”
“Sure you could see that here,” said Bartley.
Dale grinned. “Could you see the colors in the gray? The red and orange and the yellow tints from the sun?” He laughed. “God, he wouldn’t shut up about that. We could hardly get him to carry out his orders.”
The two old Irishmen exchanged a look. Dale couldn’t read it.
“You’d get the most of it here anyway,” Bartley said. “The sun on the stone and all that. No knowing what you’d see.”
“Sure isn’t it all they go on about above in them hills?” McGovern added. “And they don’t need any of them helmets or big white suits to see it in.”
“They’re lucky,” Dale said.
“Terrible lucky,” Bartley nodded.
Dale smiled. “But can they see the Earth rising over the horizon the way the moon does here? That’s what Rodriguez saw. He said he was standing there, looking up at planet Earth, this great, blue oasis in the black velvet sky, and he said it was just too beautifu
l to have happened by accident . . . ”
They were listening to him now, he saw, Bartley and McGovern with their gray heads cocked, though Dale didn’t know what else to tell them. Technical particulars and numbers and dry facts would only spoil it, and Rodriguez only shared so much that anyone would call poetic.
Instead, Dale reeled in his line and watched ripples echo all across the surface as his bait broke through from underneath. Earth, he mused, was covered mostly of water. A blue pool in the night of space. Its name was suddenly inadequate, powerless to convey its sheer, inexplicable abundance. Staring into the water, he found himself speaking without realizing.
“Rodriguez was talking to us afterwards,” he said, “when he was back aboard Aquarius, and he told me he’d seen the whole world, all of it, all at once. Imagine that, every human being in existence, everything we are, all of it a size that if he reached out he could have plucked it from the sky. I’ll never forget that,” he said. “It was almost as good as being there.”
“Almost?”
“Almost.” Dale laughed again. He wasn’t sure which one of them had said it, but it didn’t matter. “We’re explorers,” he said. “Or at least we were; we should be. And no explorer ever knows exactly what he’s going to find when he gets to where he’s going, but every time we fly we add to what’s known. Rodriguez, he helped me to learn something, you understand? About the grand scheme of things. Perspective, that’s what I learned from him.”
“Aye,” McGovern said, licking his lips, “but what have you learned from us, I wonder?”
“I’ve learnt,” Dale said slowly, “that there aren’t any fish in this pond, are there?” He looked from McGovern to Bartley and back again, but the two old men had already started laughing.
*
Blue skies and bright light. It was outdoors that Dale felt most at home in. All Irish people seemed to regard the world through doors and windows, he had noticed. Their view was blinkered, like the draw-horses in the etchings which hung on the walls of Catherine’s dining room. When people here spoke of the land they did not mean the country or the state, they meant the field, some small enclosure within which they were snared by circumstance or greed. Whole lives here were bounded by the whitewashed sovereignties of dated bungalows or played out in discontent behind the cobweb-covered lens of guilty window panes.
