The Hunter

“Well, whatever you decide,” Cal says, “work like this is gonna give you all the options you could ask for. We gotta celebrate. You want to go catch some fish, fry ’em up?” Ordinarily he would take the kid out for pizza—Trey, after going almost fourteen years without encountering pizza, discovered an overwhelming passion for it when Cal introduced her to the concept, and would eat it every day given the chance. No place delivers to Ardnakelty, but on special occasions they make the trip into town. Now, all of a sudden, he’s wary. Ardnakelty in general approves of their relationship as the thing that likely prevented Trey from turning into a troubled youth who would break their windows and hot-wire their motorbikes, but Johnny Reddy is a different matter. Cal doesn’t have a handle on Johnny yet, or on what he wants. He feels the need to examine little things, ordinary things like a trip to town for pizza, for what they might look like from outside and how they could be used, and he resents this. Apart from anything else, Cal has a low tolerance for indulging in self-examination at the best of times, and he doesn’t appreciate it being forced on him by some twinkly-eyed little twerp.

“Pizza,” Trey says promptly.

“Not today,” Cal says. “Another time.”

Trey just nods and goes back to rubbing down the chair, without pushing or questioning, which pisses Cal off even more. He’s put a lot of work into teaching the kid how to have expectations.

“Tell you what,” he says. “We’ll make our own pizza. I’ve been meaning to show you how to do that.”

The kid looks dubious. “Easy as pie,” Cal says. “We even got a pizza stone: we can use those tiles left over from the kitchen floor. We’ll invite Miss Lena, make it a party. You go down to Noreen’s and pick up ham, peppers, whatever you want on there, and we’ll get started on the dough.”

For a minute he thinks she’s going to turn it down, but then she grins. “Not getting you pineapple,” she says. “ ’S disgusting.”

“You’ll get whatever I say,” Cal says, disproportionately relieved. “Make it two cans, just for that. Now git, before you smell of vinegar so bad that Noreen won’t let your stinky self in her store.”

—

Trey goes all out on the toppings, which relieves Cal’s mind a little bit: a kid who comes home with pepperoni, sausage, and two kinds of ham, as well as peppers, tomatoes, onions, and his pineapple, can’t have restrained her expectations too thoroughly. She loads stuff onto her pizza like she hasn’t eaten in weeks. The dough appears to have turned out OK, although their stretching game is weak and the pizzas aren’t shaped like anything Cal’s ever seen.

Lena is curled on the sofa at her ease, reading Trey’s report card, with the four dogs dozing and twitching in a pile on the floor beside her. Lena doesn’t do much cooking. She’ll bake bread and make jam, because she likes those made her way, but she says she cooked a good meal from scratch every night of her marriage, and now if she wants to live mainly off toasted sandwiches and ready meals, she has the right. Cal takes pleasure in making her the best he can come up with, for variety. He wasn’t in the habit of doing much cooking himself, when he first got here, but he can’t feed the kid nothing but bacon and eggs.

“ ‘Meticulous,’ ” Lena says. “That’s what you are, according to this Wood Technology fella. Fair play to you. And to him. That’s a great word; it doesn’t get out enough.”

“What is it?” Trey asks, considering her pizza and adding more pepperoni.

“Means you do things right,” Lena says. Trey acknowledges the justice of this with a nod.

“What’ll you have?” Cal asks Lena.

“Peppers and a bitta that sausage. And tomatoes.”

“Read what the Science teacher said,” Cal tells her. “ ‘An intelligent inquirer with all the necessary determination and method to find answers to her inquiries.’ ”

“Well, we knew that already,” Lena says. “God help us all. Well done; that’s great stuff.”

“ ’S just Miss O’Dowd,” Trey says. “She’s nice to everyone. Long as they don’t set anything on fire.”

“You want some pizza on that pepperoni?” Cal asks her.

“Not of yours. Pineapple all over it. Dripping.”

“I’m gonna put chili flakes on it, too. Right on top of the pineapple. You wanna bite?” Trey makes a face like she’s gagging.

“Jesus,” Lena says. “Mr. Campbell’s still there? I thought he’d be dead by now. Is he still fluthered half the time?”

“Here I’m trying to teach the kid to respect her elders,” Cal says.

“With all due respect,” Lena says to Trey, “is he mostly fluthered?”

“Probably,” Trey says. “Sometimes he falls asleep. He doesn’t know any of our names ’cause he says we depress him.”

“He told us we were making his hair fall out,” Lena says.

“You did. He’s bald now.”

“Ha,” Lena says. “I’ll have to text Alison Maguire. She’ll take that as a personal victory. She hated him ’cause he said her voice gave him migraines.”

“Head on him like a golf ball,” Trey says. “A depressed golf ball.”