“We’ll ask him,” the big guy says, pointing his thumb at Cal. “Neutral party.”
“Sure, what would he know about it?”
The big guy—Cal is pretty sure his name is Senan, and he mostly gets the last word—ignores this. “Come here,” he says, shifting his bulk around on the bar stool to face Cal. “Listen to this. Night before last, something kilt one of Bobby’s sheep. Took out its throat, its tongue, its eyes and its arse; left the rest.”
“Sliced out,” Bobby says.
Senan ignores this. “What would you say done it, hah?”
“Not my area,” Cal says.
“I’m not asking for an expert scientific opinion. I’m only asking for common sense. What done it?”
“If I was a gambling man,” Cal says, “my money’d be on an animal.”
“What animal?” Bobby demands. “We’ve no coyotes or mountain lions here. A fox won’t touch a grown ewe. A rogue dog would’ve ripped her to bits.”
Cal shrugs. “Maybe a dog took out the throat, then got scared off. Birds did the rest.”
That gets a moment’s pause, and a raised eyebrow from Senan. They had him pegged as a city boy, which is only partly true. They’re re-evaluating.
“There you go,” Senan says to Bobby. “And you making a holy show of us with your aliens. He’ll take that back to America now, and they’ll be left thinking we’re a bunch of muck savages that’d believe anything.”
“They’ve got aliens in America as well,” Bobby says defensively. “They’ve more than anyone, sure.”
“Nowhere has fuckin’ aliens.”
“Half a dozen people seen them lights last spring. What d’you think that was? The fairies?”
“That was Malachy Dwyer’s poteen. A few sups of that and I see lights too. One night walking home from Malachy’s, I seen a white horse wearing a bowler hat cross the road in front of me.”
“Did it kill your sheep?”
“Damn near kilt me. I jumped so high I went arse over tip into the ditch.”
Cal is comfortable on his stool, drinking his beer and appreciating this. These guys remind him of his grandpa and his porch buddies, who enjoyed each other’s company in the same way, by giving each other shit; or of the squad room, before a quicksand layer of real viciousness seeped in under the pretend stuff, or maybe just before he started noticing it.
“My grandpa and three of his buddies saw a UFO one time,” he says, just to feed the conversation a little bit. “They were out hunting, one evening about dusk, and a big black triangle with green lights on the corners came along and hovered over their heads for a while. Didn’t make a sound. My grandpa said they about shit themselves.”
“Ah, holy God,” Senan says in disgust. “Now you’re starting. Is there no one in here with a titter of sense?”
“Now,” Bobby says triumphantly. “D’you hear that? And you getting the vapors about what the Yank might think of us at all.”
“Cop yourself on, would you. He’s only humoring you.”
“My grandpa swore blind,” Cal says, grinning.
“Did your grandpa know any moonshiners, did he?”
“A few.”
“I’d say he knew them well. Think about this,” Senan says, turning back to Bobby and pointing his glass at him. This argument is well on its way to joining the permanent repertoire. “We’ll say there’s aliens out there. We’ll say they’ve put in the time and the technology to come all them light-years from Mars or what-have-you, all the way to Earth. They could find themselves a whole herd of zebras to do their experiments on, or a fine strapping rhinoceros, or head down to Australia and pick up a shower of kangaroos and koalas and mad yokes, for the crack. But instead of that”—he raises his voice over Bobby, who is objecting—“instead of that, hah, they come all this way and settle for one of your ewes. Are they all loopy, up on Mars? Are they soft in the head?”
Bobby is swelling up again. “There’s nothing wrong with my ewes. They’re better than feckin’ koalas. Better than your scrawny, limpy—”
Cal has stopped paying attention. The quality of the talk from Mart’s table has changed. “I bid twenty,” one of the young guys is saying, in a tone that Cal recognizes. It’s the aggrieved tone of a guy who’s going to insist, to the point of making everyone’s evening considerably messier than it needed to be, that he has no idea how that crack pipe got in his pants pocket.
“Get outa that,” one of Mart’s buddies says. “You bid twenty-five.”
“You calling me a cheater?”
The guy is in his mid-twenties, too soft and too pale for a farmer; short, with greasy little dark bangs and something that has ambitions to be a mustache someday. Cal has registered him before, a couple of times, in the back corner with the huddle of other young guys who stare for a second too long. Without ever having spoken to the guy, he would be pretty confident listing a number of facts about him.
“I’m calling you nothing if you put that pot back,” Mart’s buddy says.
“I fucking won it. Fair and square.”
Behind Cal, the argument has stopped; so has the tin whistle. The realization that he’s unarmed hits Cal with a vivid shot of adrenaline. This guy is the type who would carry a Glock to make him feel like a badass gangster, and would have no clue how to handle it. It takes him a moment to remember that this is unlikely to be an issue here.
“You heard me say twenty,” the chubby guy says to his pal. “Go on and tell them.”
The pal is lanky and big-footed, with buckteeth that keep his long jaw hanging and a general air of being the last person to figure out what just happened. “I wasn’t listening right,” he says, blinking. “Sure, it’s only a couple of quid, Donie.”
“Nobody calls me a cheater,” Donie says. He’s getting a bull-eyed stare that Cal doesn’t like.
“I do,” Mart informs him. “You’re a cheater, and d’you know what’s even worse, you’re fecking useless at it. A babby’d do a better job.”
Donie shoves his stool back from the table and spreads his arms, beckoning Mart. “I’ll take you. Come on.”
Deirdre lets out a halfhearted yelp. Cal has no idea what to do, and this fact baffles him further. At home this is the point where he would have stood up, after which Donie would have either settled down or left, one way or another. Here, that doesn’t seem like an option—not because he’s short his gun and his badge, but because he doesn’t know how things are done in these parts, or whether he has a right to do anything at all. That feeling of lightness overtakes him again, like he’s perched on the edge of his stool like a bird. He finds himself wanting Donie to go for Mart, just so he’ll know what to do.