The Hunter

“Maybe you should go home tonight,” Cal says. “In case she comes back and you’re not there.”

“Then she’ll know where to look for me,” Lena points out. Lena spends maybe two nights a week at Cal’s place, which naturally the entire village has known since the day it began and probably before. At the start he suggested tentatively that she might walk, or he could walk to hers, to avoid people seeing her car and making her a target of gossip, but Lena just laughed at him.

Rip and Nellie are having a ferocious tug-of-war with the stick. Rip wins and gallops triumphantly over to drop it at Cal’s feet. Cal hurls it back into the darkness of the yard, and they disappear again.

“He was nice to me,” Cal says. “What was he nice to me for?”

“Johnny is nice,” Lena says. “He’s got plenty of faults, but no one could say he’s not nice.”

“If Alyssa was hanging around some middle-aged guy when she was that age, I wouldn’t’ve been nice to him. I’da punched his lights out.”

“Did you want Johnny to punch your lights out?” Lena inquires. “Because I could ask him for you, but it’s not really his style.”

“He used to hit them,” Cal says. “Not often, from what the kid’s said, and not too bad. But he hit them.”

“And if he tried it now, she’d have somewhere else to go. But he won’t. Johnny’s in great form. He’s the talk of the town, he’s buying the whole pub drinks and telling them all the adventures he had over in London, and he’s loving it. When the world’s being good to Johnny, he’s good to everyone.”

This fits with Cal’s assessment of Johnny. Except on the most immediate level, he isn’t reassured.

“He told Angela Maguire he was at a party with Kate Winslet,” Lena says, “and someone spilt a drink down the back of her dress, so he gave her his jacket to cover up the stain, and she gave him her scarf in exchange. He’s showing the scarf all around town. I wouldn’t say Kate Winslet would go near that yoke for love nor money, but it makes a good story either way.”

“He told Mart he had an idea,” Cal says, also for the second time. “What kind of idea does a guy like that come up with?”

“You’ll know day after tomorrow,” Lena says. “Mart Lavin’ll be straight down here to spill the beans. That fella loves being first with a bitta gossip.”

“Something that’d be good for this place, he said. What the hell would that guy reckon would be good for a place? A casino? An escort agency? A monorail?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lena says. Daisy whimpers and twitches in her dream, and Lena reaches down to stroke her head till she settles. “Whatever it is, it won’t get far.”

“I don’t want the kid around a guy like that,” Cal says, knowing he sounds absurd. He’s aware that gradually, over the past two years, he’s come to think of Trey as his. Not his in the same way as Alyssa, of course, but his in a specific, singular way that has no relation to anything else. He sees it in the same terms as the drystone walls that define the fields around here: they were handmade rock by rock as the need arose, they look haphazard and they have gaps you could stick a fist through, but somehow they have the cohesion to stand solid through weather and time. He hasn’t seen this as a bad thing; it’s done no one any harm. He can’t tell whether he would have done anything differently if he had expected Johnny to come home, bringing with him the fact that Trey is not, in reality, Cal’s in any way that carries any weight at all.

“That child’s no fool,” Lena says. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders. Whatever Johnny’s at, she won’t go getting sucked into it.”

“She’s a good kid,” Cal says. “It’s not that.” He can’t find a way to express, even to himself, what it is. Trey is a good kid, a great kid, on track to make herself a good life. But all of that seems so vastly against the odds that to Cal it has an aura of terrifying fragility, something incredible that shouldn’t be disturbed until the glue has set hard. Trey is still too little for anything to have set hard.

Lena drinks her bourbon and watches him hurl the stick with all his force. Normally Cal has the innate calm of a big man or a big dog, who can afford to let things alone for a while and see how they play out. Regardless of the situation, a part of her welcomes seeing this different side of him. It lets her know him better.

She could settle his mind, temporarily at least, by bringing him to bed, but she decided right from the beginning that she wasn’t going to make Cal’s moods her responsibility—not that he has many, but Sean, her husband, was a moody man, and she made the mistake of believing that was her problem to fix. The fact that Cal never expects her to do that is one of the many things she values in him. She has no intention of wrecking it.

“Mart says all Johnny’s ever looking for is women and cash,” Cal says. “I could give him cash.”

“To leave, like?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Lena says.

“I know,” Cal says. There are far too many ways Johnny Reddy could misread that, or make use of it, or both.