The Whore-Mother (21 page)

“Good night, Mrs. Burke,” he said, and did not take his pajamas from under his pillow and lay on his own side of the bed with his eyes closed, waiting in the dark, insanely ready.

Then wildfire and lust under the velutinous night. “More, I want more, my darling darling child,” she said with her lips cropping his and her tongue darting. “The morning's coming.”

As if the clear light of day and clear sight were robbers of the things most precious and most real.

A
ROUND
and beyond the Irish customs post two men, Cullen the Garage and Heavey the Grocer, met Pat Powers and drove him to Stranorlar. The walk over the Border had cleansed Powers' mind of Mary Connors, the dirty connivin wee hoore.

He sat in the back seat of the car, harboring a fresh resentment.

Executions were secret things. Who knew who did them? Only the men who ordered them and the men who carried out the orders. That was meant to lower the risk of revenge killings by the dead man's friends, or his relatives. Before McManus got his, all Ireland was goin to know who done him. Powers would be passed on by the Stranorlar men to the Donegal town men, to the Sligo men—and wherever he caught up with McManus it would be known by a great crowd behind him that he done him.

And how many would he have to watch out for, from then on and forever after?

A better thought came, and there was space for only one at a time. McManus had no friends. Students, maybe, and Protestants. But nobody who mattered. T'hell w'that sort. He was tired and relieved by the thought of a friendless McManus. He relaxed and slumped.

“Don't give McManus another thought till you've had a good sleep and a good feed,” Heavey the Grocer said. “We'll put you right beside him in the mornin.”

That was good enough. His bed was in the house of Cullen the Garage, behind the big church, down by the bridge over the Finn to Ballybofey. He went to sleep with an empty mind.

He came down to his good feed in the morning rested and spilling over with noisy geniality. “Jasus, missus, you're tremenjous,” he told Cullen's wife, and ladeled away bacon and eggs and fried bread and Cullen watched him nervously, hoping Heavey and the rest of them would get here before the man was full. Heavey was the talker and with this big fellow he would have to talk well.

“We got the word you're to wait,” Heavey told Powers when he came. It didn't seem to Heavey that it would make much difference to this bull how he heard it, rough or smooth. “There's one comin over the Border from the Bogside. He's goin with you.”

“Who?”

“Name of Kiernan. Sean Kiernan.”

“D'you know him?”

“He's from here once.”

“What's he comin for?”

He'd have to say it sooner or later; he might as well say it now. “To take charge.” He was supposed to get this over and done before Kiernan got here. It was done now, but not over.

Powers felt the shock down to his heels. His silence was not restraint; it was stupefaction. He looked at them sitting round the table, their hands folded, or looped round their plates, or in their pockets, and their faces were full of cunning and deceit and unfriendliness. He could smell it.

He had no clear thoughts but he knew things. He knew without thought that Clune thought this one up. Jasus, Clune was a sleakid wee cunt. A vicious wee cunt. He can't do without me, by Jasus, but he can't keep his fuckin nails outa me. Spite. Jealousy. The wee bastard knows I should be in his job. Don't open your mouth. Get outside and wait. The table tilted with the violence of his rising and the men around it blocked sliding dishes and spilling milk and tea.

Powers rolled out of the house like a boiler past danger point.

He didn't think; his head and heart and belly boiled together like stew in a caldron. He walked, blind, over the bridge into Ballybofey, weaving in and out among the streets, back over the bridge into Stranorlar, in and out among the streets and over the bridge again, not because he meant to but because he came to it. Back and back again. And out of the two towns into the country; boiling, inchoate. He glared without seeing, out over the rolling country. “Fuckin country,” he said, and for a moment saw Heavey clearly in his head. “Fuckin shopkeeper,” and started like a pointer for his shop. Why was his shop so far away? Conspiracy, that was why; it wasn't a thought but knowledge in the guts, born whole. His rage whinnied in his throat and he stormed towards Heavey's, heel and toe, arms pumping, a shade short of a run.

Heavey was serving an old woman a tin of Fray Bentos bully beef. He gave her all his attention. Powers pushed her aside.

“Houl on,” she protested.

“What's up, Heavey? Who done that t'me?”

“Done what?” The face was blank with careful innocence.

“Don't make funa me! By Jasus, don't make funa me.” Powers wheeled and leapt for the street, his head boiling with destruction.

The old woman followed him to the door, laughed in her throat, and spat into the street. “Holy Jasus, Mr. Heavey ... thons a one,” she said, and came back for her bully beef.

The pubs were opening. Tired by fury, Powers went into one. “Porter,” he said.

“Pint or a half?”

Even the fuckin glass-washers were tryin to push him. “Gimme a fuckin pint.”

Kiernan, the man from the Bogside, got off the bus at noon and wanted to hear nothing about McManus till he had eaten. “I'm always afearda starvin when I'm away from home,” he said with a room-warming smile. “I get these terrible sore heads whenma stomach's empty.”

He was very small, very spare, his jacket loose on him, his little legs making no impression on his trousers. They flapped around his shanks and when he sat and the trousers settled on his thighs, there seemed to be only the thigh bone under them. But his little face was full of impish and endearing charm. “I know y'won't begrudge a skinny wee crature a bita grub, Mr. Powers.” He smiled into Powers' surly face and appeared to be unaware of strain. The Stranorlar men watched it without sign of their malicious pleasure and expectation. Smiler Kiernan was a bloody wee marvel. “Taro, Taro,” said Heavey inside his head, and kept his own smile in there, not to spoil the thing.

Powers was not drunk, only distant with porter and faintly aerial. When their session began he attacked. “You don't even know McManus. How're y'gonta kill'm?”

“That's a good point, Mr. Powers,” Kiernan admitted, “and you're right as well. I'm only here for company to make up for that Callaghan that was took. What good would I be without you?”

“Right y'are,” Powers said. This poor wee shit had more sense than them that sent him. His assurance returned, entire. He took over. “All right, Heavey. Put me beside the bastard.”

“He's away in the West,” the shopkeeper said.

“Details.” That's the way the Big Fellow always worked. Attention to details. No loose bloody talk.

“Well, when the word was out on him, we put the eyes to work and ....”

“Where is he, for Christ's sake?”

Kiernan said, sweetly helpful. “There's details to be told, is that it, Mr. Heavey?”

“That's it, Seaneen,” Heavey said, for he kept a shop, and Kiernan, when he lived here, only worked on the roads and ditches for the county council; so Heavey was Mr. Heavey, but Kiernan was only little Sean. “You see, he was spotted at the hotel here, pack, painty clothes, and all that. You see? He slept all day and left at night. You see it? Sleep by day and walk by night. That's it?”

“That's it.”

“Well, that's not it.”

“Somethin else?” Kiernan encouraged.

“For Christ's sake.” Powers protested the back-chat.

“Then there's no sign at all of a man with a pack and painty clothes gain through Donegal town, and them watchin for him. So we ask the drivers on the Letterkenny-Sligo run. He got on a bus on the other side of the Gap and went to Sligo.”

“He's in Sligo?” Powers said, ready to go.

“He is not.”

“For fuck's sake!”

“Somethin happened in Sligo?” Kiernan asked with understanding, being a talker himself.

“The Sligo men worked the pubs. Every damned one. That's
work
. He went to the Great Southern. No painty clothes now. Tweeds, by Jasus. New. He's askin about coach tours with Americans on them and one of the barmen fixes him up w'a man by the name of Charley Murphy, drivin for Fianna Tours. This barman fiddles a wee bit up the lega the oul cashier and she says there's a phone call on his bill, t'Belfast. Up in his room he's coughin and wailin and girnin about his sister that's dead but he's not goin home for the funeral. What d'you thinka that?”

“Aye.” Kiernan gave it omnibus significance.

They're gettin at me, Powers thought with the certainty of guilty knowledge. “Where the fuck is he?” he bellowed.

“Coughin his guts out,” Heavey said. “This Charley Murphy remembers the whole lot. He never speaks. Won't talk. Skulkin like a sick dog in the back seat. This wee American girl by the name of Brendine Healy is as horny as a cat and showin off her knickers, but he won't bite. Then they make a stop on Clew Bay and Murphy finds them fuckin away on the shore. When they get to Bantry McManus takes off, walkin west up the Bay, and she buys herself some gear and comes back and says to Murphy, can you hire bikes here? and quits the tour and takes off on the bike.

“And where is he?”
Powers shouted.

“He walked west from Bantry, coughin and sweatin and shiverin ... and another thing I near missed. Growing whiskers on his chin.”

“Meetin up with the wee girl somewhere?” Kiernan said.

Heavey smiled. “Takin the cure?”

“That's it.”

“We're lookin for him and a girl west of Bantry. That's the best y'can do?” Powers had expected more after so long a wait.

“That saved you a week's work,” Heavey said impatiently.

“Away on,” Powers said to Kiernan, and got up.

“One wee minute and I'm away, Mr. Powers,” Kiernan said. “A wee recapitulation.”

“A wee what?”

“Another wee ask,” Kiernan explained, and to Heavey: “West of Bantry, yes? Sick, yes? Meetin an American girl on a bike, yes? Disguised, yes? The whiskers?”

“That's it.”

“That's it.” And for Powers, with a smiling flourish, “I'm in your hands, Mr. Powers.”

Cullen the Garage said, “There's a car at the door. Y'can have it for a week.”

Kiernan drove, peering out over the wheel like a tall midget, smiling. “Lovely country, Mr. Powers,” he said.

Useless bloody wee smiler. Smiling bloody wee spy. Peepin for Clune the Cunt. Powers didn't reply.

The Stranorlar men watched them go. “That Kiernan,” Cullen said, smiling, “would smile the balls off an ape.”

“He's got one with him,” Heavey said, smiling. There were a lot of amusing things in the world. They did not think of McManus. They had not seen McManus and what they had to do about him had now been done. McManus was as good as dead, though they didn't think specifically about that either. What for would they think about it? If they had seen him? That would have been a different pigpen. He did not, they heard tell, think their thoughts their way. They would have had to hate him if they had met him. Freed from this burden of knowledge, they were free to forget him. Right men don't cumber their memories with things they don't hate.

Kiernan talked a lot, mostly about the wife and the wains. “How's the missus, Mr. Powers? The wains well?” He didn't always wait for answers. “It's hard on youse ones in Belfast, not sleepin at home. I live in the No-Go in the Bogside. No bother at all. No army, no polis. Sleep at home. How many wains have you, Mr. Powers?”

He's gettin at me again, Powers thought, and said shortly, “Not married.”

“By Jasus, boyo, y'don't know what you're missin. Y'know what's great? Y'know what makes you feel better'n the king?”

“What?”

“Makin your oul woman pregnant.” He glowed with honest pride. “I mean, look at me. No, take a look. Go on. I'm a wee skitter. Aye? Five-foot-two in m'stockin feet. She's five-foot-seven and twice the weighta me. Six wains, Mr. Powers. Six!” He shouted it like a winning score.

“Right y'are. Y'like fuckin. Who doesn't?”

“Fuckin?” Kiernan's astonishment was real. “I'm talkin about my oul woman. Y'don't fuck your oul woman.” He waved a shocked, dismissive hand, not smiling. “Y'make love. I mean—you
mean
it.” He chewed his lower lip for a while and drove faster, like an angry man. “I don't hold w'fuckin,” he said emphatically. “I'm a Catholic.” He was good-natured. Cooling. He slowed the pace a little. “You make wains.” Safely round a series of tight bends he recovered his enthusiasm. “That's what makes y'feel great. Like a king. Look at me, for Christ's sake. Me? I make people! Y'ever thinka that?”

“Aye.” Powers was thinking of it. He wasn't grateful to Kiernan for bringing Mary Connors back like a persistent infection.

“There's a right waya doin things,” Kiernan said pontifically. “I mean, y'don't stand in fronta your oul woman and open your spare like some wee bugger up an entry. I mean, I want this job over quick so I can get home. We're gonta start the seventh, y'see?” His smiling warmth was back as he thought about it. It was a real smile—full, warm, devoted. “I'll say t'her, ‘Right y'are, love, are y'ready to start number seven?' Then we'll do it maybe twice a night for a week t'make sure she takes, like.” He entered a caveat for the uncertain times. “That's if I get home every night, o'course.” He might have been a flyweight explaining his training schedule to a sporting priest.

Powers glowered morosely at the flying hedges. Christ!