“And make sure I have a few shots of poteen first,” Cal says. “To shorten my odds.”
Mart laughs and claps him on the shoulder, and turns to nod to a stout guy leaning on the bar. “How’s she cuttin’?”
“Not a bother,” says the guy. “Your man’s having a grand aul’ night, anyhow.” He nods at Rushborough.
“Sure, who wouldn’t, in a fine establishment like this,” Mart says. “ ’Tis a while since I saw you in here yourself.”
“Ah, I’d be in every now and again,” the guy says. He takes his pint from Barty. “I’ve been thinking of selling a few acres,” he mentions. “That field down near the river.”
“I’m not in the market,” Mart says. “You could try Mr. Hooper here. He could do with something to keep him occupied.”
“I’m not offering. I’m only saying. If there was gold on it, or even if your man went looking for gold on it, I could triple the price.”
“Out you go with a spade, then,” Mart says, smiling at him, “and start digging.”
The guy’s jowls set mulishly. “Maybe your man’s granny said there was gold on your land, but she never said there was none anywhere else. Johnny Reddy can’t be keeping this to himself and his pals.”
“I’m no pal of Johnny Reddy’s, bucko,” Mart says. “But I’ll say this for the man: he’s wise to start small. Let you bide your time, and see what way the wind blows.”
The guy grunts, still dissatisfied. His eyes are on the alcove, where Dessie is putting plenty of bawdy winks into a song about a guy coming home drunk and finding various unexpected items in his house, and Rushborough is laughing. “See you again,” he says, picking up his glass and giving Mart a brief nod. “I’ll be back in soon enough.”
“D’you know what Johnny Reddy’s real failing is?” Mart asks, considering the guy’s back as he wades through the crowd towards his table. “He doesn’t think things through. It wouldn’t take a psychic to predict that fella, and plenty of others like him, but I’d put money on it that he never once occurred to Johnny.”
“That guy doesn’t look like a happy camper,” Cal says.
“I did consider sending him in to have the chats with Mr. Rushborough,” Mart says, “just to watch what wee Johnny made of that. But that fella has no subtlety about him. He’d go putting a sour taste in Paddy Englishman’s mouth, and then where would we be at all?”
“Do people know?” Cal asks. And, when Mart cocks his head inquiringly: “That Johnny’s aiming to salt the river.”
Mart shrugs. “There’s no telling who’d know what, around here. I’d say there’s a dozen different stories going around this same pub, and a few dozen different ways that people wanta get in on the action. We’re in for an interesting wee while. Now come on back, before that chancer robs our seats on us.”
The night proceeds. Gradually the singing runs out of momentum; Con puts his guitar back in the corner, and Rushborough buys him and everyone else in the alcove a double whiskey. The pub has started to run out of momentum, too. The non-locals have reached the maximum level of drunkenness at which they still consider it reasonable to drive home on unfamiliar roads. The old people are getting tired and heading for their beds, and the young ones are getting bored and taking bags of cans back to each other’s houses, where they’ll have more scope. The girl in pink leaves with the potato-faced fucker’s arm around her waist.
By midnight, all that’s left in the pub is a dense fug of sweat and beer breath, Barty wiping down tables with a rag, and the men in the alcove. The ashtrays have come out. Rushborough smokes Gitanes, which lowers him further in Cal’s esteem: Cal feels that, while people are entitled to their vices, anyone who isn’t a dick finds a way to pursue those vices without giving everyone in the room a sore throat.
“I’m proud,” Rushborough informs them all, throwing an arm around Bobby’s shoulders, “I’m proud to claim this man as my cousin. And all of you, of course all of you, I’m sure we’re all cousins of some degree. Aren’t we?” He looks about half drunk. His hair is ruffled out of its sleek sweep, and he’s tilting a little bit, not drastically, off center. Cal can’t get a good enough look at his eyes to decide whether it’s real.
“ ’Twould be a miracle if we weren’t,” Dessie agrees. “All this townland’s related, one way or another.”
“I’m this fella’s uncle,” Sonny informs Rushborough, pointing his cigarette at Senan. “A few times removed. Not far enough for me.”
“You owe me fifty years’ worth of birthday presents, so,” Senan tells him. “And a few quid in communion money. I don’t take checks.”
“And you owe me a bitta respect. Go on up there and get your uncle Sonny a pint.”
“I will in me arse.”
“Look,” Rushborough says, with sudden decision. “Look. I want to show you all something.”
He lays his right hand, palm down, in the middle of the table, among the pint glasses and the beer mats and the flecks of ash. On the ring finger is a silver band. Rushborough turns it around, so that the bezel is visible. Set into it is a pitted fragment of something gold.
“My grandmother gave me this,” Rushborough says, with a wondering reverence in his voice. “She and a friend found it, when they were children digging in the friend’s garden. About nine years old, she says they were. Michael Duggan was the friend’s name. They found two of these, and kept one each.”
“My great-uncle was Michael Duggan,” Dessie says, awed enough to talk quietly for once. “He musta lost his.”
The men lean in, bending low over Rushborough’s hand. Cal leans with them. The nugget is about the size of a shirt button, polished by time on the high surfaces, ragged in the crevices, studded with small chunks of white. In the yellowish light of the wall lamps, it shines with a worn, serene glow.
“Here,” Rushborough says. “Take it. Have a look at it.” He pulls the ring off his finger, with a reckless little laugh like he’s doing something wild, and passes it to Dessie. “I don’t really take it off, but…God knows, it could have been any of yours as easily as mine. I’m sure your grandparents were digging away in the same gardens. Side by side with mine.”
Dessie holds up the ring and peers at it, tilting it this way and that. “Holy God,” he breathes. He lays one fingertip on the nugget. “Wouldja look at that.”
“ ’Tis beautiful,” Con says. Nobody makes fun of him.
Dessie passes the ring, held over a cupped hand, to Francie. Francie, giving it a long stare, nods slowly and unconsciously.
“That’ll be quartz,” Mart informs them all. “The white stuff.”
“Exactly,” Rushborough says, turning eagerly towards him. “Somewhere in that mountain, there’s a vein of quartz, shot through with gold. And over thousands of years, much of it was washed down out of the mountain. Onto Michael Duggan’s land, and all of yours.”
The ring passes from hand to hand. Cal takes his turn, but he barely sees it. He’s feeling the change in the alcove. The air is drawing in, magnetized, around the shining fragment and the men who surround it. Till this moment, the gold was a cloud of words and daydreams. Now it’s a solid thing between their fingers.
“The thing is,” Rushborough says, “the important thing is, you see, my grandmother didn’t just discover this by chance. The one thing that frightens me, the one thing that’s been giving me pause about this whole project, is the possibility that her directions are no good. That they’ve been passed down over so many generations, they got warped along the way, to the point where they’re not accurate enough to lead us to the right spots. But you see, when she and her friend Michael found this”—he points to the ring, cupped like a butterfly in Con’s big rough hand—“they weren’t digging at random. They picked the spot because her grandfather had told her his father said there was gold there.”
“And he was right,” Bobby says, starry-eyed.
“He was right,” Rushborough says, “and he didn’t even know it. That’s one of the marvelous aspects: her grandfather didn’t actually believe in the gold. As far as he was concerned, the whole thing was a tall tale—something invented by some ancestor to impress a girl, or to distract a sick child. Even when my grandmother found this, he thought it was just a pretty pebble. But he passed the story on, all the same. Because, true or false, it belonged to our family, and he couldn’t let it disappear.”
Cal takes a glance at Johnny Reddy. Johnny hasn’t said a word to him all evening. Even his eyes have stayed carefully occupied, far from Cal. Now, he and Cal are the only people who aren’t gazing at the scrap of gold. While Cal is watching Johnny, Johnny is watching the other men. His face is as intent and consumed as theirs. If this ring is what Johnny was keeping up his sleeve, it’s having all the impact he could have hoped for.
“The gold is out there,” Rushborough says, gesturing at the dark window and the hot night outside, thrumming with insects and their hunters. “Our ancestors, yours and mine, they were digging it up thousands of years before we were born. Our grandparents were playing with it in those fields, just as they’d play with pretty pebbles. I want us to find it together.”
The men are still. Their land is changing from a thing they know inside out to a mystery, a message to them in a code that’s gone unsuspected all their lives. Out in the darkness, the paths they walk every day are humming and shimmering with signals.
Cal feels like he’s not in the room with them, or like he shouldn’t be. Whatever’s on his land, it’s not the same thing.
“I feel incredibly lucky,” Rushborough says quietly. “To be the one who, after all these generations, is in a position to salvage this story and turn it into a reality. It’s an honor. And I mean to live up to it.”
“And no one but this load of gobshites to give you a hand,” Senan says, after a moment of silence. “God help you.”
The alcove explodes with a roar of laughter, huge and uncontrolled. It goes on and on. There are tears rolling down Sonny’s face; Dessie is rocking back and forth, barely able to breathe. Johnny, laughing too, reaches over to clap Senan on the shoulder, and Senan doesn’t shrug him off.
“Oh, come on,” Rushborough protests, slipping his ring back onto his finger, but he’s laughing too. “I can’t imagine better company.”
“I can,” Sonny says. “Your woman Jennifer Aniston—”
“She’d be no good with a shovel,” Francie tells him.
“She wouldn’t need to be. She could just stand at the other end of the field, and I’d dig my way over to her like the fuckin’ clappers.”
“Here, you,” Bobby says, digging a finger into Senan’s solid arm, “you’re forever giving me shite about why aliens would want to come to the back-arse of Ireland. Does this answer that for you, does it?”
“Ah, whisht up, wouldja,” Senan says, but his mind isn’t on it. He’s watching Rushborough’s hand, the turn and pulse of light as he gestures.
“Aliens need gold now, do they?” Mart inquires, taking up Senan’s slack.
“They need something,” Bobby says. “Or otherwise why would they be here? I knew there hadta be something out there that they were after. I reckoned it was plutonium, maybe, but—”
“Fuckin’ plutonium?” Senan bursts out, goaded out of his thoughts by this level of idiocy. “You reckoned the whole mountain was about to blow up in a big mushroom cloud—”
“Your trouble is you don’t fuckin’ listen. I never said that. I only said they’re bound to need fuel, if they’re coming all this—”
“And they’re using gold for fuel now, is it? Or are they trading it for diesel on the intergalactic black market—”
Cal leaves them to it and goes back up to the bar. Mart joins him again, in case Cal should forget by whose favor he’s here tonight.
“Hey,” Cal says, motioning to Barty to make it two pints.
Mart leans on the bar and works a knee that’s stiff from sitting. He has an eye on the alcove, over Cal’s shoulder. “Didja ever hear the story of the three wells?” he asks.
“Well, well, well,” Cal says. He’s not in the right frame of mind to humor Mart.
“That’s the one,” Mart says. “Well, well, well.”
He’s watching, not Rushborough, but Johnny. Johnny has his head bent sideways over a lighter, flicking it hard. In that unguarded second his face is slack, almost helpless, with some emotion. Cal thinks it might be relief.
“Like I told you,” Mart says. “We’re in for an interesting wee while.”
Cal says, “What’ll you do if it all goes wrong?”
Mart’s forehead crinkles. “What d’you mean, like?”
“If Rushborough starts smelling a rat.”
“ ’Tisn’t my place to do anything, Sunny Jim,” Mart says gently. “This is Johnny Reddy’s wee enterprise. I’m only here for the view. The same as yourself. Remember?”
“Right,” Cal says, after a second.
“Don’t worry,” Mart reassures him. He pulls out his tobacco pouch and starts rolling a cigarette on the bar, with leisurely, expert fingers. “If you forget, I’ll remind you.”
Barty swears bitterly at a rip in one of his new bar stools. In the alcove, someone whistles, high and shrill, cutting through the laughter and the voices like an alarm.
Over breakfast, Cal does some hangover-related calculations. He wants a talk with Johnny Reddy, as early as possible, to prevent Johnny from claiming he’s too late; but that requires Johnny to be awake, and he was still going strong when Cal left the pub at midnight. He doesn’t want Rushborough there, and while Cal figures Johnny won’t want to leave Rushborough unsupervised, Rushborough looked a lot drunker than Johnny did, so he’s likely to take longer to surface. Cal also doesn’t want to encounter Trey, but she has football training on Tuesday mornings and mostly hangs out with her friends afterwards, so she should be out of his way at least until she gets hungry.
In the end he reckons ten-thirty should find Trey gone, Johnny conscious, and Rushborough not yet functional. At a quarter to ten he gets three hundred euros out of his emergency-cash envelope, puts it in his pocket, and starts off towards the mountain. He leaves Rip at home. As far as Cal is concerned, Rip made his opinion of Johnny plain on their first meeting, and shouldn’t be subjected to a second one.
The mountain is sly. From far off, its low, rounded curves look almost harmless, and even as you go up the trail, every step seems gentle enough, until all of a sudden you realize your leg muscles are juddering. The same goes for straying: the path is clear, until you look down after a minute’s distraction and find yourself with one foot slowly pressing deeper into watery bog. It’s a place whose dangers only come into focus when you’re already engaged with them.