“They trouble?”

“Ah, no. Wasters, just. A few domestics, but himself went off to England a coupla years back, and that put a stop to that. I know them because the childer won’t go to school. The teacher doesn’t want to be calling in child protection, so she rings me. I go out there and have a word with the mammy, put the fear of God into the childer about juvenile homes. They shape up for a month or two, and then we’re back where we began.”

“Know the type,” Cal says. He doesn’t need to ask why the teacher won’t call child protective services for anything short of broken bones, or why O’Malley doesn’t do it himself. Some things are the same out here as they were in his childhood backwoods. No one wants the government sending down city boys in suits to make things worse. Business gets handled as close to home as possible. “Their mama can’t make them go, or she won’t?”

O’Malley shrugs. “She’s a bit . . . you know. Not mental or anything, like. Just not up to much.”

“Huh,” Cal says. “So you reckon Brendan’s not missing?”

O’Malley snorts. “God, no. He’s a young fella. He’s got sick of living up the hills with his mammy, gone off to kip on some pal’s floor in Galway or Athlone, where he can go to the discos and meet the young ones. Natural enough, sure. Who said he was missing?”

“Well,” Cal says, scratching the back of his neck meditatively, “some guy in the pub was saying he was gone. I musta got the wrong end of the stick. Guess I spent too many years in Missing Persons, now I’m seeing ’em everywhere.”

“Not here,” O’Malley says cheerfully. “Brendan’ll be back when he gets tired of doing his own washing. Unless he finds himself a young one who’ll do it for him.”

“We could all do with one of those,” Cal says, grinning. “Well, I wasn’t aiming to use that rifle for self-defense anyway, but it’s nice to know there won’t be any need around here.”

“Ah, God, no. Hang on a minute there,” O’Malley says, extracting himself bit by bit from his chair, “and I’ll have a look on the system for that license. What gun are you getting?”

“Got a deposit down on a nice Henry twenty-two. I like ’em old-fashioned.”

“That’s a beauty,” O’Malley says. “I’ve a Winchester myself. I’m not great with it, now, but I took down an aul’ rat in my garden the other week. Big fella, looking at me bold as brass. Felt like Rambo, so I did. You wait there, now.”

He ambles off into the back room. Cal looks around the warm little foyer, reads the raggedy posters on the walls—SEAT BELTS SAVE LIVES, WALK FOR SUICIDE PREVENTION, TEN FARM SAFETY TIPS—and listens to O’Malley singing along to a bread-ad jingle on the radio. The place smells of tea and potato chips.

“Now,” O’Malley says triumphantly, coming back out front. “That’s marked in the system as approved—and sure, why wouldn’t it be. You should have your letter any day now. You can take it into the post office and pay the fee there.”

“Much appreciated,” Cal says. “And nice to meet you.”

“Likewise. Call in another day when we’re closing up, sure; we’ll bring you for a pint, welcome you to the Wild West.”

“I’d be honored,” Cal says. The rain is still coming down hard. He pulls up his hood and heads out into it, before O’Malley thinks of inviting him to stick around for a cup of tea.

While he waits for his laundry, Cal finds a pub and gets himself a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich and a pint of Smithwick’s. This pub is an entirely different species from Seán Óg’s: big and bright, smelling of hot savory food, with a shine on the wooden furniture and a wide selection of taps at the bar. A bunch of women in their thirties are having lunch and a laugh in one corner.

The sandwich is good and so is the beer, but Cal doesn’t enjoy them the way he ought to. His chat with O’Malley, which should have settled his mind, has only stirred it up worse. Not that he believes for a minute that Brendan Reddy has been kidnapped by persons unknown. If anything, O’Malley confirmed what Cal thought from the start: Brendan had every reason to take off, and not many reasons to stick around.

What’s bothering him is the fact that Trey was right about one thing: the Guards are, for his purposes anyway, fucking useless. Once O’Malley heard the name Reddy, he was done. So is everyone else. Cal thinks of those rain-blurred hills, and a mother who’s not up to much. A kid that age shouldn’t be left with nowhere to turn.

The restlessness is still biting. Cal finishes his pint faster than he meant to, and heads back out into the rain.

He picks up an oil heater and a new can of primer in the hardware store, and a bunch of supplies including a new toothbrush at the supermarket. He doesn’t bother with milk. He’s pretty sure the kid won’t be coming back.

SIX

The next morning is all soft mist, dreamy and innocent, pretending yesterday never happened. As soon as he finishes his breakfast, Cal packs up his fishing gear and heads for the river, two miles away. On the slim chance that Trey does come back, he’ll take the empty house as an extra kick in the teeth, but Cal figures this is a good thing. Better let the kid be upset now than let him build up another head of false hope.

This is only the second time Cal has fished this river. He’s regularly gone to bed intending on fishing the next day, but the house always had more of a welcome pull on him: this needed getting under way, he wanted to see how that turned out, the fish could wait. Today that pull just feels like nagging. He wants the house far away, with his back turned on it.

At first the river feels like what he needs. It’s narrow enough that the massive old trees touch across it, rocky enough to make the water swirl and whiten; the banks are speckled orange-gold with fallen leaves. Cal finds himself a clear stretch and a big mossy beech tree, and takes his time picking a lure. Birds flip and sass each other between branches, paying no attention to him, and the smell of the water is so strong and sweet he can feel it against his skin.

After a couple of hours, though, the romance is wearing off. Last time Cal was out here, he caught himself a perch dinner in half an hour flat. This time, he can see the fish right there, picking bugs neatly off the surface, but not one of them has worked up the interest even to nibble at his lure. And he’s starting to discover what Mart meant about the sneaky cold: what seemed like a nice cool day has seeped right up through his ass to chill him from the bones out. He digs a few worms out of the rich mulch under the layers of wet leaves beside him. The fish ignore those too.

The day he planned on teaching Alyssa to fish turned out like this. She was maybe nine; they were on a log-cabin vacation in some place Donna found whose name escapes him now. The two of them sat by a lake for three hours with nothing biting but midges, but Alyssa had promised her mama she would bring home dinner, and she wasn’t leaving without it. In the end Cal looked at her red, miserable, stubborn little face and told her he had a plan. They swung by the store and bought a bag of frozen fish sticks, hooked it onto Alyssa’s rod, and came in the cabin door yelling, “We got a big one!” Donna took one look and told them that fish was still alive and she was going to keep it for a pet. All three of them were giggling like idiots. When Donna dumped the bag in a bowl of water and named it Bert, Alyssa laughed so hard she fell over.