The Searcher, стр. 12
A parallel group of guys is sitting at the bar, arguing. A third group is in another corner, listening to one play the tin whistle, a fast spiraling tune that makes the others tap their hands on their knees. A woman called Deirdre is sitting on a banquette on her own, holding a small glass in both hands and staring into space. Cal is unsure what exactly Deirdre’s deal is, although he gets the general gist. She’s somewhere in her forties, a dumpy woman with depressing dresses and an unsettlingly vague stare in her large droopy eyes. Occasionally one or another of the old guys will buy her a double whiskey, they’ll sit side by side and drink without saying a word to each other, and then they’ll leave together, still in silence. Cal has no intention of inquiring about any of this.
He sits at the bar, orders a pint of Smithwick’s from Barty and listens to the music for a while. He doesn’t have the names in here straight yet, although he has most of the faces, and the gist of the personalities and relationships. This is excusable, given that Seán Óg’s clientele is a shifting bunch of clean-shaven white guys over forty, all wearing more or less the same hardy trousers and padded vests and ancient sweaters, and most of them looking like cousins; but the truth is that, after twenty-five years of maintaining an intricate mental database of everyone he met on the job, Cal enjoys the lackadaisical feeling of not bothering to remember whether Sonny is the one with the big laugh or the one with the cauliflower ear. He has a good handle on who he should avoid or seek out, depending on whether he’s in the mood for talk and what kind, and he figures that’s plenty to keep him going.
Tonight he plans to listen to the music. Cal had never encountered a tin whistle till he moved here. He is unconvinced that he would enjoy the sound at, say, a school concert or a police bar in downtown Chicago, but here it seems fitting: it sits right with the warm, uncompromising raggedness of the pub, and makes him keenly aware of the quiet expanse spreading in every direction outside these four walls. When the grasshopper-skinny old musician brings it out, a few times a month, Cal sits a couple of stools away from the talkers and listens.
This means he’s halfway through his second pint before he tunes in to the argument going on down the bar. It catches his ear because it sounds unusual. Mostly the arguments in here are the well-worn kind that can be made to stretch for years or decades, resurfacing periodically when there’s nothing fresh to discuss. They involve farming methods, the relative uselessness of various local and national politicians, whether the wall on the western side of the Strokestown road should be replaced by fencing, and whether Tommy Moynihan’s fancy conservatory is a nice touch of modern glamour or an example of jumped-up notions. Everyone already knows everyone else’s stance on the issues—except Mart’s, since he tends to switch sides regularly to keep things interesting—and is eager for Cal’s input to mix the conversation up a little.
This argument has a different ring to it, louder and messier, like it’s one they haven’t practiced. “There’s no dog could do that,” the guy at the end of the bar is saying stubbornly. He’s little and round, with a little round head perched on top, and he tends to wind up on the wrong end of jokes; generally he seems OK with this, but this time he’s turning red in the face with vehemence and outrage. “Did you even look at them cuts? It wasn’t teeth that done that.”
“Then what d’you think done it?” demands the big bald slab of a guy nearest to Cal. “The fairies?”
“Feck off. I’m only saying, it was no animal.”
“Not them fecking aliens again,” says the third guy, raising his eyes from his pint. He’s a long gloomy streak with his cap pulled down close over his face. Cal has heard him say a total of about five sentences.
“Don’t mock,” the little guy orders him. “You’re saying that because you’re uninformed. If you ever paid any notice to what’s going on right above your thick head—”
“A crow would shite in my eye.”
“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