But then either the women or the pig would dig him up again. The only solution was the gardaí. When Aaron lifted the phone in the kitchen, however, he was reminded that the authorities might not subscribe to his theory of the murder, that Sweeney, for all his preferred guilt, might be innocent and the accusing finger pointed at someone whose protector he now was. He put down the phone. Declan Tovey could enjoy his rest. Aaron would eat the hot dogs his aunt had left in the refrigerator and, possibly, heat up the canned tomato soup she’d pointed to on the pantry shelf. He would feed the pig the pellets from a fifty-pound sack Lolly had donated from the back of her truck. He would shower and clothe himself in the studied casualness best suited to his particular brand of pretension. He would then go down the road to Dockery’s and leave behind the distractions that had lured him so far from his set purpose of flaying himself with thoughts of Phila Rambeaux. All the livelong day Phila had been given only scraps and leavings, moments of attention that never managed to lengthen sufficiently to allow for actual suffering. What the beach had not achieved, the bar would surely provide. Here in the crowd he could be all the more solitary—even if the room wasn’t all that crowded. He would stand here, at the end of the bar, unnoted, unremarked. He would look at nothing but the mounting bottles and into the few spaces of mirror unblocked by the sacred display.
Since he wanted a long drawn-out descent into the depths, he would drink with measured sips as befits someone pondering his loss, a man who has given himself over to numbering like rosary beads the sorrowful mysteries of his recent life, thoughts that would sustain his sense of injury and nourish his belief that he was beyond all possible succor.
Trapped somewhere in the thin membrane between the conscious and subconscious there was a knowledge that he, Aaron, was obsessed by Phila rather than in love with her. He had chosen her to love him—which, in turn, would save him the trouble of having to love her. And he had been willing to do almost anything he could to achieve her compliance. When she declined the honor—without giving it an even cursory consideration—the rejection provided Aaron with all the elements needed to persuade himself he was in love: jealousy, rage, sorrow, yearning and inconsolable need.
But he wasn’t in love. He had, quite simply, been denied what he had wanted, and now the components of thwarted love had been appropriated to himself in support of the tantrum his efforts had earned him. All this Aaron knew and would not deny if he were to force some confrontation between himself and himself. But for the time being he made the usual excuse: Suffering was suffering, no matter what its source, no matter the worthiness or unworthiness of its cause. His anguish was real, and the egotism of its origin was of no account whatsoever. That Aaron had brought his sufferings upon himself was beside the point. The suffering was there. And fool though he may be, he was still a fool who embodied the tenacity of human longing, the ability peculiar to his species, to yearn and yearn again without repose, even when all hope had died.
“Aaron McCloud,” Francis said. “You’ve come back. And looking brilliant.” They shook hands. Aaron ordered a pint of Guinness.
After the appropriate time of drawing and resting, Francis set the glass in front of him. Aaron took a fair gulp. The taste, of course, was of sour coffee, a taste he’d come to enjoy, but there was, unavoidably, as always with Guinness, the disappointed expectation. The dark brown liquid had the appearance of root beer and Aaron, try as he might, could never get beyond this early preference.
He took a second gulp. His disappointment lessened and he knew that by the time he had emptied the glass, his maturation from root beer to stout would have been accomplished and he could, with full commitment, order a second pint.
“I hear you got yourself a pig,” Francis said.
“Oh. Yeah.” Aaron, who was still wondering how Francis had known his name, was even more astonished to realize that his troublesome acquisition had become common knowledge. And if the pig were a known presence, what about Declan Tovey? How could Tovey’s bones—of far greater consequence—have escaped the notice of whatever omniscience kept its all-seeing eye trained on local events large and small? Aaron considered posing a few leading questions that might encourage Francis to tell what he knew, but decided that at the first dropped hint, the reporter in Francis would be roused and Aaron would be subjected to an inquisition leading to an inevitable confession that would implicate his aunt and deliver into the hands of the gardaí the grinning bones of the felled thatcher. Aaron would keep his mouth shut for a change. And besides, he had come for other purposes than to discuss a renegade pig and the unearthed corpse of a murdered vagabond. He assumed that his self-exile from the other customers would be respected and he could now move on to his assignation with the elusive Phila Rambeaux.
Francis had put both hands on the top of the bar, one on each side of Aaron’s glass.
“Lolly McKeever says it isn’t hers, but I wouldn’t be too quick to believe. An old animal, they say, and Lolly’s ashamed. Still, to disown your own pig.” He shook his head.
“You want it?” Aaron asked. “It’s yours if you say so.”
“No. Not me. I work nights, like this [thish], and it wouldn’t be fair to the pig.”
Aaron decided not to follow the logic of this statement. Instead he took several good gulps of the stout, expecting that Francis, impatient with this suspension of their talk, would move down the bar and converse with those who had no sufferings to indulge, no grievings to enjoy. But as he drank he saw over the rim of his glass, in the mirror behind the bar, the entrance of Lolly McKeever, conjured, it would seem, by the mere mention of her name. A man was with her, taller than Lolly but shorter than Aaron. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt with a thin knit tie, and, if Aaron saw right, heavy-soled shoes in want of a shine. His dark hair, slicked back, gave him a look suggesting an inborn potency, a look to which Aaron had long aspired but had yet to achieve. Aaron’s impression was reinforced by the gesture the man was making toward a table not far from the door, a casual command, a gesture that could be made only by someone never known to displease or to disappoint. Lolly, without pause, slid into the chair next to the wall, leaned forward and put her elbows on the table.
She was wearing a pair of trim tan slacks and a woolen sweater of Aran origin. She seemed to have cut her hair and, in the intermittent light of the room, it had become darker and more severe. She was less attractive than he remembered, but the man’s presence at her side suggested that she was more desirable than he’d thought.
The man chose not the chair next to her but the one opposite. He slouched slightly and put his hands on the table. Lolly was talking. They had been talking when they’d entered, and this seemed a simple continuation, the subject of sufficient interest to sustain itself during the rubric of their arrival and the ordering of their drinks. Now the man leaned forward. Lolly, after a moment, leaned back but without taking her eyes off the man’s hands. She cocked her head to the left, skeptical perhaps but more likely an increase of interest. Now Lolly leaned forward. Aaron waited for the man to lean back, but even after Aaron had downed another drawn-out gulp, the man kept his forward position.
Aaron looked down into his glass. The thought that he himself had taken the trouble to make himself presentable for the evening offered some relief. He hadn’t intended to get all dressed up, but before he’d realized what he’d done, he had dressed in a stiffly woven white shirt, a pair of pressed khaki pants, and the Alfani shoes that had had the mud cleaned off. He’d combed his hair, then tousled it to give himself a more athletic look. Examining himself in the mirror he’d become convinced that he had been, in these two days in Ireland, transformed from a somewhat drab man now past thirty to someone newly arrived at the fullness of his youth, the eagerness of his early years firmed into manly assurance, the sweet smooth flesh now textured with experience, the hesitant eyes made bold, ready for any condescension that might prove necessary, the lips freshly plumped as if they, like his penis, could swell in anti
cipation of uses soon to come. His clothes felt tailored, fashioned expertly to accommodate the broad shoulders, the tapering torso, the hard thighs, to say nothing of the slender hips and the resolute buttocks—long seen as vestigial evidence that he was descended from centaurs. The tousled hair, in its well-crafted chaos, provided not only a proper crown but would reassure the onlooker that here was civilization at a moment of true fulfillment: the snakes of the Medusa not only tamed and domesticated but divinely transformed in their writhings into the curls and locks and errant strands that, while tumbling comfortably into one another, still suggested the presence of the primal, the potential reversion to mythic terrors and uncontrollable consequences.
In other words Aaron felt uncommonly preferred, more than ready to be seen by anyone who, like himself, might chance into Dockery’s bar on this clear and lovely night.
At least a third of Aaron’s pint had yet to be drunk. He took one gulp, then another. Lolly hadn’t moved, nor had the man. Aaron tried to study the froth lines tracing the patterns on the side of his glass, but he soon found himself looking again into the mirror, waiting for the next move to be made, Lolly’s or the man’s, backward or forward, to the left or to the right, with the hands on or off the table, Lolly speaking or Lolly listening.
It annoyed Aaron that he was giving his attention to Lolly McKeever and to the man who was with her. His experience of her earlier that day had certainly been sufficient. Beyond being a potential killer, she was, he told himself, of no interest whatsoever. He should stop looking in the mirror.
After he’d found himself looking two more times, he got up and, with the self-conscious ease of a cowboy who assumes he’s being intently watched, his shoulders shifting from side to side, the set gaze focused straight ahead, Aaron did his best to saunter over to the dartboard. He plucked the three red-feathered darts—not feathers, actually, but a Darwinian mutation of plastic called “hard poly”—he pulled them from the cork and went back past the gray painted line measuring the required distance from the board. Set into the space between the bar and the back wall and sufficiently distant from the booths, the game was isolated in its own niche but still visible from almost anywhere in the room, with the player’s back to the assembled—except when he would return from retrieving the thrown darts for yet another try. With a not unpracticed ease he threw the first dart. A single 20. He tossed a second. It kissed off the wire and bounced out. The third, a treble 7. Careful not to move too eagerly, he collected the darts. The first toss landed in the narrow rim surrounding the bull’s-eye. A single bull. Before he could make his second throw, a man holding his pint came and stood behind him, just to the right. Aaron tried to affect an even greater ease, an indifference he wanted desperately to feel. After a few forward jabs of the held dart he made the toss. A double 9. The man moved closer. Aaron’s third toss landed dead center. A double bull.
While retrieving the darts another man came to stand a few feet behind the drawn line. Aaron considered going back to the bar, but the second man was handing him a full pint. “You’re the first McCloud to make a single and a double bull in one round,” he said. “In all the years, the first.”
“Thank you,” said Aaron. He accepted the pint, sipped, then set it on the end of the bar next to his other glass, still unemptied.
“Do you mind?” asked the man. He was holding three darts, the yellow hard polys.
“Well,” said Aaron, “I haven’t played in a long time. A fluke, the single and the double bull.”
“All you McClouds are known liars and the better for it. Are you for a quick game?”
“Why not?”
The man was short and squat with a huge head, his neck no more than a crease between his chin and his chest. Only a taut string could have penetrated through to the actual neck bone. He was wheezing slightly, a faint sound of flapping mucus marking each inhalation, each exhalation. He was pink. His face was pink, his hands were pink, his bald head was pink. Aaron had the suspicion they’d met before, then realized that he was thinking of the pig. He knew immediately who would win at whatever game they might decide to play.
The man took the first game, reducing his numbers from the designated 301 to zero by doubling out on the double 17. Aaron still had 132 points left, the object of the game being to erase the given 301 to zero with as few throws as possible. In the second game, Aaron fared better: the man zero, Aaron 93.
Each time Aaron went to retrieve his darts he would, as he returned to his station behind the line, observe the various positions being taken by Lolly and her companion. The variants were few, but he sensed a growing intensity in the conversation. Lolly had begun to keep her hand on her glass, the man to put his arms, not just his hands, on the table, his elbows now six inches from the edge. Neither of them seemed aware of the game.
During the third round a woman—young, blond, wearing a pink T-shirt, tight jeans, and overpriced sneakers—came to watch. Between one of Aaron’s throws and the throws of the pig man, she put her initials on the scoreboard—CC—meaning she would like to play the winner. She was holding her own set of darts, the blue polys. The pig man, as pitiless as only one eager for involvement with a beautiful woman can be, played out the game with seven tosses, going out on a double one. Aaron, who would not have minded Lolly seeing him in competition with a young blond, was still stuck with 197.
Justice, however, soon asserted itself. In direct combat with the woman, the pig man was undone. Sweating, twitching, he forgot the needed mathematics, to say nothing of the loss of his well-aimed eye and purposeful toss. The woman went out on a double 3, leaving his opponent, if not in the dust, at least with 199 unerased points.
The pig man, a brave smile in his lips, insisted on buying a round, including a drink for a spectator a little off to the right. The young woman declined the drink and the offer of a match with the spectator. She had to get back to her boyfriend, who was talking to a woman even younger and with hair at least as blond. The spectator accepted the drink, a glass of red wine, which, to Aaron’s chagrin, scandalized no one. After the appropriate salutations, the spectator took up the cause of the blue polys, and a new game was begun—one only—between himself and Aaron.
While waiting his turn, Aaron from the side of his eye thought he could see Lolly looking in his direction. He was tempted to turn and make sure, but his opponent had stirred up some excitement in the pig man by scoring 140—two treble 20 and a single 20. Another round of drinks was ordered. The game was mercifully ended with the man’s double 9.
Just as Aaron was about to offer the red polyed darts to a man at the end of the bar, a fellow distinguished by his yellow suspenders, he saw Lolly’s escort advance in his direction. Aaron hesitated, then made the offer to the suspendered man. The fellow looked down at the darts, puzzled as to what they might be, then accepted, suspicious that he was committing himself to something not quite acceptable in polite society. Aaron stood up to the bar, drained his pint, and nodded to Francis, the equivalent of a spoken request. Francis obliged, whispering, “Nesh time take the yellow. Better balance.”
Before Aaron could acknowledge the advice, Francis, to demonstrate his neutrality and disinterest, moved to the far end of the bar and listened to a teenager lecture him on the impropriety of electing a woman to public office. Master bartender that he was, he listened with no response beyond the occasional blink of an eye, the nod of his head, the lift of his chin.
To his left Aaron could see the darts fly by, some in a straight line, others in a high and graceful arc, some in a slight wobble. The pig man had teamed with the spectator against Lolly’s friend and the fellow in the yellow suspenders. Aaron could make out the colors—red, blue, yellow, green. From behind him came grunts, chuckles, groans, phrases like “Unlucky” and “Good darts,” and silence. Again the darts went past like hummingbirds. He would concentrate on his drink. He would find within himself the waiting grief. He would give Phila her due, a full complement of jealousy and anguish, forcing the
m to their limits and, if possible, beyond. Now was the time to see how much he could bear, how much he could sustain without losing consciousness; he might at least test to see how far he could go without obliterating his sense of decorum, when the bitter tears would drop, diluting his stout, disturbing the surface pattern that now suggested a fleur-de-lys.
He took a hefty gulp. The pattern changed to roiled waters receding from the rocks. After another gulp he saw the palm lines of a woman’s hand, the lifeline long, the love line almost nonexistent. He made a quiet snort through his nose, then gulped again. He put the glass on the bar without checking the pattern and looked instead into the mirror.
Lolly, from her table, was watching the dart game with complete absorption. To see where her escort might be, Aaron shifted first his head, then his feet, to give himself a different angle from which to look into the mirror. There he was, his hair now falling over his forehead, the knot of his tie pulled down, the top button of his shirt unbuttoned. He was aiming a yellow-polyed dart. With a quick flick of the hand he released the dart. His face registered no reaction, no indication of success or failure. Aaron emptied his glass and raised his hand, signaling Francis. When Francis failed to notice, he used the back of the hand to wipe his lips so the gesture wouldn’t be wasted.
He looked down into the emptied glass, stuck his finger into it, wiped it along the sides and put the finger into his mouth. He considered repeating the procedure but, in the mirror, he saw Lolly looking at him—or so it seemed at the distance and in the dim light. She had watched him put his finger in his mouth. To assure her it was an acceptable gesture, he did it again, this time making it seem that he was performing a taste test requiring thought and judgment. He let the finger stay longer in his mouth, lowering his eyes as if ruminating. When he checked the mirror again, Lolly had returned her attention to the game.
The Pig Did It Page 9
