‘The fox is flying it,’ he says to the bushes, to the hawthorn and across to the house that he has already targeted. He is merely waiting for the man or the woman to come out, to walk up the road, to open a gate and let the cows make their own way on down to the milking parlour. He has watched them do it each morning, either one of them going up to open the gate and the other going down to the milking parlour to get the machines ready, and Kitty the daughter asleep. She is a redhead too but not golden like the woman, raw, foxy. He bursts out laughing at the thought of her scream.
At the sound of something breaking Kitty sits up startled and thinks Jesus, the dishes, I didn’t stack them right in the press, my mother will eat me. Her younger sister Deirdre and her grandmother in the far wing of the house and her parents gone milking, same as always, then not the same.
The door is kicked in and she screams, she screams at a face masked with black nylon tights, shouting at her to get up, fast. Behind the gauze of the nylon she recognises O’Kane, his eyes like coal, spittle along his lips and every other word fuck, fuck. To save her grandmother a heart attack she gets out of bed and says pluckily, ‘There’s nothing for you in this house, O’Kane.’
There are splinters of glass all over the kitchen floor where he has broken a panel and she has to pick her steps to get the car keys that he has asked for out of the drawer.
‘Take them,’ she says and flings them across a worktop.
‘You’re coming too, Ginger,’ he says.
‘I’ve an exam today . . . it’s a very important day for me,’ she says, that little bit less insolent.
‘It’ll happen without you.’
‘At least let me get some clothes on,’ she says, pulling the lapels of her pyjamas across her front.
‘Get the fuck out the door and stop messing.’
He sits beside her, the gun across his sprawled legs and a couple of minutes beyond the^ gateway she sees her own mother seeing her and flinging her hands up aghast. He has already mapped a route in his mind.
‘Go left.
‘Go right.
‘Go along the pier.
‘Go up to the ash tree.
‘Go to Dick’s Cross.’
‘You think my mother didn’t know you . . . you think that mask disguises you . . . well, it doesn’t,’ she tells him.
‘You’re a fecking useless driver . . .’
‘You were only a class ahead of me at school . . . such a shy little lad . . . you wouldn’t come in the playground . . . waiting for your mother . . . and look at you now . . . having the country at gunpoint.’
‘Stop the fecking car,’ he orders her and as he gets out she thinks she will have a few seconds to bolt, but he has already anticipated that and levelling the muzzle on her forehead, he backs out, opens the back door and lobs the gun above her head as he settles into the back seat and pulls the tights off. He allows the legs to dangle on his shoulder and gives them a little mocking toss from time to time. He nuzzles them and she thinks I know who they belong to. He looks less of an ogre without the tights and she tries talking to him, as if she is not afraid.
‘You’ve made a bit of an impression, haven’t you?’ ‘Is that what they’re saying?’
‘You’re wanted . . . your picture in the papers . . . where did you sleep last night?’
‘In a hole.’
‘And why did you come to us?’
‘That fecking chopper.’
‘Everyone is asking about the missing people.’ ‘What missing people?’
‘A woman and a child and a priest.’
‘I know nothing about a priest.’
‘So you do know about the woman and the child.’ ‘She gave me a lift a week back ... I got out at a shop . . . that’s all I know.’
‘That’s not what people are saying.’
Suddenly he is shouting at her to go left, go left and she is on a dust road, pouches of it splashing the windscreen as if it had not been trodden in centuries.
‘People must have lived here once,’ she says, pointing to gable walls of fallen cottages, mere attempts at normality.
‘It’s my area now.’
‘And that’s why we’re here?’
‘I want to get to France.’
‘What the hell happened to you to turn you into such a raving lunatic?’
‘They put acid into my brain. They doped me first with sleeping pills and poured melted plastic over my feet so as I couldn’t move.’
‘You better have that head of yours seen to.’
‘I don’t want to. I’m in with the top man now.’ ‘Who’s he when he’s at home!’
‘Man with the horns. He’d suck your titties any night . . . or that sister of yours or your old dopey granny.’
‘You’ve seen too many horror movies, O’Kane.’
‘My arse is bleeding. I cut it going into your place.’ ‘That’s because you hadn’t the manners to knock.’ ‘You’re funny. How are you feeling anyhow?’ and he nudges her in the back.
‘Freezing. Could I have my jacket?’ she says and as he passes it to her, her hand comes off the wheel and in that instant the car swerves to one side and slides into loamy ground, the wheels slurping, then sinking down into a swamp.
‘You done it on purpose, you bitch.’
‘If I done it on purpose ... I would have done it on the main road.’
‘Reverse.’
‘I can’t reverse. It’s stuck’ and they get out to push it and he tries raising it onto a ridge of stones, all to no avail and finally he gets newspaper out of the boot, rolls it furiously into twists and as he opens the nozzle to dip them in the petrol she lets out a cry. ‘Don’t. My father loves his little car ... his little Minny.’
‘He’ll get another little Minny,’ he says and as they walk away from it she can see by the haltingness of the flames, the way they hesitate, that Minny will not catch fire. She will stay put and be a clue when her parents and the guards come on their trail.
Nothing, only emptiness, no cattle, a round rusted empty cattle feeder in the middle of nowhere and they walking over boggy ground, the stones and the thorns cutting her bare feet. There are telegraph poles to one side of the bog, the wires sagging down, wires onto which birds fly and perch for a few moments and her whispering to them, ‘Tell them, tell them where I am.’ ‘My fucking feet,’ he said.
‘My fucking feet,’ she said back. She tried to stop but he pushes her on and way way down below they come to a view of lake water rippling and glinting.
‘You can see the Shannon,’ he said.
‘I don’t need to see the Shannon ... I live beside it ... how long more do you intend to keep me?’
‘For as long as I want.’
‘If you’re thinking of killing me, you better know that I’m not ready to die.’
‘Are you afraid?’
‘Everyone’s afraid of death, sonny boy . . . even you . . . acting the big fella with Jeremiah Keogh’s gun.’ ‘Who told you about Jeremiah Keogh’s gun?’
‘His sister did. He’s too chicken to go to the guards.’ ‘What else are they saying about me?’
‘They’re saying you’d be as well off to give yourself up.’
‘Never . . . I’ll never do time again.’
‘The priest’s car was found burnt out on the pier . . . people saw it for miles . . . they knew it was your work . . .’
‘They’ll never get my dabs on it,’ he says with triumph. She stops and grips his arm to hold up one of her feet to show him how it is bleeding. He goes berserk, telling her to wash it wash it or the fecking dogs will smell them out.
‘I can’t wash it ... there’s no water . . . anywhere . . . we might as well be on the moon,’ she says.
‘You’re a cheeky bitch.’
‘You’re not going to kill me, Michen, are you?’ she says almost comradely.
‘If I have to I will . . . it’ll be a fast end . . . you won’t feel any pain.’
‘Jesus. Them that love m
e will feel pain . . . anyhow if you kill me you’ll have no cover . . . I’m your cover.’
‘Bitch.’
They walk and walk. Bronze bracken, tough tawny grasses and furze bushes cutting her feet. Bouts of talk and bouts of silence. All of a sudden he stops, thinks, a storm going on inside his head and decides that they will turn back, they will take a different route. She realises that he is starting to panic.
‘Look . . . we’re going around in circles.’
‘Shut up.’
‘You won’t get away with it, you won’t.’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
He starts to shake his head then, shakes it violently, cursing at some sudden apparition, and then he staggers, like he is drunk or blind as he blunders towards her.
‘I can’t see you ... I can’t see you,’ he is shouting.
‘What’s wrong with you.’
‘I’ve gone blind.’
‘I’m here.’
‘Lead the way,’ he says gripping her arm and she thinks as she leads him along in that wasteland, what a deceptive picture, what a tableau, pilgrims, tired, footsore, making their way to the Inn.
‘There’s a rain barrel here ... I want to drink,’ she says, stroppy.
‘Where . . . where.’
‘Put your hand out’ and she guides him towards it and he plunges his head into it and drinks at the same time, like a caveman, then tells her to wash her fucking feet and keep them sniffer dogs away. She cups the dirty water in her hands and drinks it. It tastes of iron. Then she pours some over her feet. His sight restored, he watches her, grinning.
The sound of the helicopter, abrupt and thundery, comes from beyond, scoring the sky, a giant bird, the engine roaring, the rotor scissoring the air and her eyes drinking it in, following it as it comes up from the rim of the horizon, coasts over Cloosh Wood and veers across the range of bracken ground towards them. Unable to suppress her joy she waves a white sleeved arm and hollers, ‘Here, here.’
‘Get the fuck down.’
‘I won’t get the fuck down’ and he pushes her down with a violence and strikes her across the cheek and they lie in the wet hammocky ground, O’Kane slouches over her, believing his green jacket to be a camouflage, their hearts, their warring hearts like the hearts of lovers, beating violently. It dances above them coming down, closer, closer so that the crew are within calling distance and she is thinking They’ll pick us up ... they’ll pick up our heat and it hovers and dips, undulates and all of a sudden it roars away happy with itself. In the wake of its passing the most awful silence, only the shivery vibrations of the telegraph wires.
‘Thank fuck,’ he shouts.
She closes her eyes not wanting him to see that she is in tears. Finally he eases his chest away from hers and she staggers up, disconsolate.
They go on down, limping, no longer arguing, the sun beating down, the odd house in the distance, ponies in a field sparring over sops of hay, life as it should be. He needs a car. Fast.
‘You’ll have the drive of your life,’ he tells her.
Coming to a two storey house he warns about not doing or saying anything stupid. She sees his finger in the trigger, sees the roof of a hay shed, him kicking open the double wooden doors and dogs barking from inside. The dogs are chained. In the courtyard next to a tub of flowers is a big new Jeep with a sheen to it, a readiness, a yen to go. He shouts for the keys to be handed out. Above the baying dogs comes the voice of a man whom they cannot see, ordering them to get off his property. His accent is foreign.
‘Throw out the keys,’ O’Kane shouts up.
‘I do not have the keys.’
‘Throw out your fucking keys’ and now they swear obscenities at one another, the self same words sounding different in either tongue and then the barrel of a gun juts through the upstairs window and as shots are fired, two orange cartridge shells land on the gravel near her and the dogs go berserk. O’Kane grasps her, his anger unabatable now and holds her as a shield as they back away towards the gate which is swinging open and shut.
‘Tell him we will be back for him and his wife and his kids.’
‘We will be back for you and your wife and your kids,’ she says, her voice high pitched. She is like a puppet, no, a robot, she is witnessing everything as if it is not happening, as if it is outside of her, their going down the drive, him making her jump over barbed wire, his eyes now bulged and rolling.
The birds are busy, flocks of them darting in and out of the hedges, foraging, one with a very yellow beak carrying a worm back into a nest, to its young, birdsong so gay, so spry, soon to be silenced in the ensuing pandemonium, a fleet of patrol cars coming up the road, an older man emerging from a small cottage, refixing his cap as if it is just another morning and he going a few miles to fodder his cattle and she thinks Oh, you poor man, you are for it in a matter of a minute and you don’t even know. They crawl under more wire, down a steep slope onto a cattle grid. Everything is eerily clear, the older man getting into his car and reversing, blue string with an assortment of white carrier bags to keep animals out and underneath the grid a pool of rainwater with cress growing in it, a fleet of cars coming up the road and guards jumping out, more than thirty armed guards on the road, on the wall, calling in loud, brisk, but still reasonable voices, ‘Let the girl go, let the little girl go’ and O’Kane answering that if they come an inch closer he will blow her fucking head off. ‘I’ve seen your face on television . . . you’re wanted,’ the older man says from his car, dazed, disbelieving.
She is pushed into the back of the car, O’Kane lurched over her as the guards yell, ‘Throw out your keys, Pat.’
‘I can’t . . . you see, I can’t,’ Pat answers, helpless.
They drive over the grid and away from the convoy of cars and men, O’Kane, Kitty and the driver all shouting, mad tossing shapes beyond the window and then a crunch as the car veers towards a drain, comes to a halt and Pat exclaiming, ‘We’ve been shot at ... we’ve been shot at.’
The back door is opened and a body thrusts itself over them, a multiple scream as the gun explodes inside the car and she opens her eyes to see Pat grasping the raised barrel, clinging to it, the cloth roof dropping down in shreds and a smell of gunsmoke. ‘We have him ... we have him.’ The guards’ shouts go up as though from one throat, passing through their ranks, in glory and disbelief and he is pulled out of the car, his wild scoriated face, his wild unspent voice, shouting in a brief and fading burst - ‘I know nothing about the woman and the child.’
He moves with a staggering and undefeated bravado, this, for him, just an interim until he is loose again, a free man, them hunting him down, this never ending chase of them and him, hunted and hunters, the victory he had dreamed and re-enacted down the butchered years.
As he is put to the ground and his pockets searched, other guards rush on him exultant; anger and frustration wiped out now in this melee of jubilation, vindication; in triumph, in pride, in honour, his cursing, kicking frame there on the ground, being reined in, his rampaging at an end. But where are the missing people. Where are the missing people. Where . . . are . . . the . . . missing . . . people. They ask from different heights, different vantage points, different degrees of desperation, each thinking he will be the one to worm it out of the bastard. Guard Garvey is already a hero, being punched and congratulated for having had the presence of mind to jump forward from behind that wall and immobilise the back wheel of the car and bring the chase to a close.
‘Good work, Michael.’
‘Pure luck,’ Garvey says, his face scalding with pride.
‘Where are the missing people?’
She comes, the mercy woman, from some hidden dwelling, loose grey hair, in night gown and wellingtons, cuts her way through the swathe of men and kneels by him, placing her hand along his forehead, motherkind.
‘Where are they, son?’
‘I can’t tell you . . . with these fuckers around.’
‘That child is in nappies ... his bo
ttom will be sore ... his poor mother at her wits’ end . . . you can tell me . . . I’m your friend ... I knew your people.’
‘They’ll be left outside the shop tomorrow night.’
‘Are they safe?’
‘They have food for two more days.’
‘Are they alive?’
‘They’re in a house . . . they have television.’
‘They’re safe . . . they’re safe,’ she says, her hands clasped in gratitude.
‘Listen, my dear woman ... I have to ask you to move out of here,’ a detective tells her.
‘Don’t take him . . . give me a few more minutes . . . he wants to tell me ... he needs to tell me,’ she says and as they move him forward her voice goes on begging, like the long sighing sound of the banshee, up there on a road where nothing had ever happened, just the seasons, branches choking each other in summer and reaching out wanly in the wet winters.
He is cuffed to two detectives and in a lather of curses is led away, the bunched arm muscles with the crazed and supple fury of a python and even as they hold him they fear that he will in some way elude them still, some phenomenal ingredient will transport him back to the empty woods and his murdering haunts.
He jerked fiercely on the cuffs and stood above Kitty who was sitting on a wall with a blanket around her.
‘The fox is finished,’ he said, his last utterance to the landscape he had violated.
Reckoning
Superintendent McBride stirs the white stomach medicine in the beaker, keeps stirring it in order to delay drinking it because the taste disgusts him. He is a big man with a bit of flab, his hair grey before its time, but his eyebrows thick and sleek and black where he puts a lick of boot polish on them, something his favourite daughter Sile jeers at. He can scarcely believe what has hit him. Five days of searching, five days of pillory and criticism from press and public and finally O’Kane captured in the early hours on a mountain roadway, with not a drop of blood shed. The heroism and euphoria of the capture are short-lived because now all eyes are on him and his team to find the three missing people, before they die of exposure or starvation. Rumours abound. Tip-offs abound. They are near the lake, they are in the woods, they are in the midlands, they have been seen driving around together, the woman, the child and the priest. He has thirty-six hours to find them, thirty-six hours with the eyes of the world beamed in on him, thirty-six hours of scalding pain in his gut and probably no sleep. He is lucky to have got O’Grady and Wilson, whiz-kids at their job, the two most experienced interrogators in the land, famous for their strategy, their softly softly and then wham-bam.
Edna O'Brien Page 16
