No doubt his old man was in the pub drinking with his loser friends. Probably bragging about how he’d given his boy a good backhand. With any luck, Travis thought, the stupid prick would ditch his truck and snap his motherfucking neck.
Evil thoughts. For sure he was going to Hell.
The old house ticked and creaked around him. Something scuttled under the floorboards and something other chittered behind the walls. It was the house that did it, made you think evil thoughts. Jesus. How many people were murdered in this place? Six or seven? Ghosts lurking in the dryrot walls, floating in the rafters.
A stab of light flashed in the window, blinding him. The headlights arced through the room and then cut out. The thump of the door closing. Travis felt a sudden itch to run. He couldn’t remember why he’d come here in the first place.
The door flung open. Corrigan clomped into the house, breathing heavy as if he’d just run the whole way. He froze when he spotted Travis. Neither moved, two statues in the house.
Corrigan teetered, his mouth souring. “What do you want?”
Travis smelled the tang of booze roll across the room. He should have run when he had the chance. His shoulders jumped to his ears. “Needed to get away. So I came here.”
“Get out.”
“I didn’t touch nothing.” Travis felt his cheeks puff up. “Just had to go somewhere.”
Corrigan teetered but said nothing. His face was marred by raw marks down his cheeks. Angry red lines. “Did you get cut?” Travis asked.
“If you’ve come to cry on someone’s teat, you got the wrong house, boy.” Corrigan crossed the room right towards him. As if to wring his neck. Travis crabbed backwards but the man strode past him.
Mr. Corrigan rummaged a can from the fridge and popped it. Wiped his mouth and looked at the boy standing in the doorway, watching him with little bird eyes. The boy nodded at the iron contraption on the workbench. “What is that stuff?”
Corrigan flung the can at him. Travis ducked and the missile hit the wall, spraying him with foam. The man’s face twisted into something demonic. “Fucking little snoop.”
“I wasn’t.” Travis stuttered, tripping on the consonants. Making him look the liar.
“You filthy little spy. That’s why you keep coming round, isn’t it? Who put you up to it? Your old man?”
Travis denied it. Unconvincing even to himself.
“I thought you were a friend.” He was quick, bunching the boy’s collar and pushing him into the wall. “You’re no better than the rest. You’ve betrayed me. Sold me out.”
“I didn’t!”
Travis felt himself lifted off the ground, shoes scuffing the floor and Corrigan’s knuckles digging into his collarbone. He screamed at him to let go.
“Get out!” He flung the boy away, bowling him across the floor. Kicked his arse when he didn’t get up fast enough. “Get out of my house!”
Bolting for the door, feet tripping on the sill. Travis went ass over tea kettle down the porch steps. The crazy drunk chasing him across the yard. “Go back to your worthless father! You’re all the fucking same, you! Bastards and liars!”
Travis rabbitted over the crabgrass, fell and ran on. South into the dark of the fields, away from the road. He wanted the darkness, the nothingness of pitch black and no stars. To slip into a void and vanish.
How do fix a whopper of a mistake like beating your own child? You don’t, and right enough.
Jim wheeled aimlessly through town, drifting up Bleeker Street, down Chestnut. Nowhere to go except home but not wanting to go. Unwilling to face his sins. He turned back onto Galway and drifted to the curb, killed the engine. Leaned back against the bench seat and watched the dark street.
He still couldn’t shake the look on his son’s face at being smacked. The image stung like a wasp trapped inside his ribcage, lashing out with its nettle.
Travis would never forget it, of that he was sure. Just as he had never forgotten the lashings and the fists doled out by his own father. It was a legacy, a birthrigh from his father, now given to his son. A vicious little gene passed down the bloodline like haemophilia. A reverse philosopher’s stone, taking something golden and turning it to shit.
The blow kept playing itself out in a never ending loop in his head. His hand against the boy’s face. Unable to shut it down, he forced his brain to focus on something else, anything, to cut the endless replay. Running numbers in his head, he calculated acres to yield for corn, then soy. No effect. He thought about sex. Emma peeling off her clothes before bed. Fucking in the grass one afternoon when Travis was at school. The way Emma looked on top of him, back straight and hips grinding. The saltiness of her neck.
It worked and then it didn’t. His erection withered when the reverie was broken by the flash image of another blow. A memory so old he had convinced himself it had never happened. He had hit Emma once too. Ages ago.
Drunk, fighting like cats over God knows what. He’d swung back and broke the flat of his hand across her mouth. She hit the floor like a dead weight and the fight was over. Tears and apologies. Jim vowing on his mother’s grave that he’d never do it again. After that night, they had never spoken of it.
Jim stared through the rain spackled windshield at the dark sky. That enormous abyss looked back at him, whispering things he didn’t want to hear.
The neon sign in the pub window was still on. Puddycombe pushing last call. He swung out of the pickup and hopped over a puddle to the pub door. It was a bad night for peeling back unwanted truths. Drink it deep.
Joe Keefe knew smoke.
He had been with the Pennyluck Volunteer Fire Department for eleven years, the last four as Deputy Chief. His days were spent on job sites or in the cramped office of his construction company but his nights belonged to fire. There wasn’t a lot to do but when the alarm went and they bolted into gear, it was unlike anything else. Going to war, squaring up battle lines against the monster, the crew working together. Orders hollered out and shouted back, each man roasting inside the heavy gear.
Keefe stepped out of the pub and crossed Galway to where his truck was parked. The smell of the Dublin came out with him and it took a moment to discern the acrid tang of smoke in the air from the deep-fryer smell on his clothes.
A fire, real and alive.
Smoke had different tastes. A campfire of cord wood smelled different from a field of corn torched in a controlled burn. House fires were a noxious spew straight out of the pits of Hell. Shingles and plastics, resins and paint, all of it throwing up a poisonous cloud worse than mustard gas. It clung to your hair and hid inside your pores, taking days to scour off. The devil’s own stink. Joe Keefe stood sniffing the air, the smell of smoke sobering him quickly.
Foul and true, it was a fire. Close too.
He scanned up and down Galway for a trail of it or a light in a window but he couldn’t see it. No coiling vapour or orange twinkle in a shop window but the smell was getting stronger.
That meant the fire, wherever it was, was deep inside one of the buildings. Burning hot enough to stink but not show itself from the street. Bad business.
Keefe started running, digging through a pocket for his phone. Already calling it in when he spotted it. A flickering light inside a window, all Halloween orange.
The fire was inside the old town hall.
26
THE RAIN HAD stopped but the thunderclouds lingered, blocking out the stars. Emma took the flashlight, umbrella and started down the Roman Line. Stepping around the puddles, the bunchgrass soaking her shins. Heels squeaking inside her wet sneakers.
