Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

They stood a dozen strong on the high dune and with their braids and feathers and markings they had the look of strange birds indeed.

‘I’ll do the talking, Fucker,’ said Logan.

And so at duskfall on the shortest day Logan Hartnett and Fucker Burke climbed the duneside and the line of pikeys stood and silently watched their approach and an orphan clutch of pine trees sang in the dark haze as hardwind careened off the crested dunes.

Sand-pikeys wore armless jerkins year-round, their hair was braided thickly and dressed with magpie feathers, and their torsos were covered with ash markings – unreadable to all but their own kind. They were martyrs to the sweet herb and as noiseless and wary as the dune hares they had for neighbours and sometimes, in the hard times, for prey.

‘How’re we now?’ cried Logan Hartnett, cheerfully.

Our sand-pikey brethren settled the dunes way back. They had a forge out there in which they made weaponry for their protection and for trade. They built also six-bar gates they sold to the farming fraternity: the Big Nothin’ fermoiri. They drank elderflower gin and married at fourteen years of age and enjoyed the maudlin scrape of a fiddle. They didn’t get mixed up in Feuds too often, but when they did?

Was said there was no sight on the peninsula quite so fearsome as that of a sand-pikey at the business end of a scrap.

Logan and Fucker were close enough to make out the faces now. Creased, typically, a sand-pikey’s features – this was from squinting out for generations into the dusty expanse of the dunes, and the decades of fine sand blown hard at them gave an odd, silvery sheen to the complexion, as though your sand-pikey was born of some distant planet altogether, a place made of different minerals and gases.

No answer was made to Logan’s call but he could see the pikeys looked serene enough.

It was known that the sand-pikeys in the evenings listened intently to the wind’s tune and divined what messages from Big Nothin’ it might contain. If you had e’er a drop of the pikey blood in you at all, it was Big Nothin’ was the spirit-home, was the bog-maternal, check? The sand-pikeys also read messages in the sky at night – Word was delivered to them in the arrangement of the stars. Logan knew that if he was to secure their aid this evening, much would depend on what they were hearing in the wind and reading in the sky. This was the level of it when you were dealing with the sand-pikey kind.

Logan and Fucker stalled a few yards from the pikey line.

‘Smile, Fucker!’

Fucker pasted what he could of a grin across his chops and the hardwind dipped and there was momentarily an awful silence and a grey hare passed along a dune crest down the way and rose on its hind legs and was frozen still as it watched the men and the mystique of the dunes was stored, somehow, in the stillness of its stringy frame.

Your sand-pikey, it so happens, was given also to superstitious thinking about the significance of the grey hare – but that is a bag of sticks we are as well keeping for another, less trying day.

‘That’s not a bad evening at all!’ called Logan Hartnett.

Was there a leader among the sand-pikeys? There was – it was the fattish lad that styled himself Prince Tubby.

He stepped out now from the pikey line and he was a big cuss of a young fella for sure. He was the same width across the shoulders as a dray-horse would be. Was known he kept eight wives, aged fourteen to forty-six, and they were all lookers, one as black-eyed and sharp-boned as the next, and three of ’em sisters, and a head count of twenty-two bairns had thus far been bred off them. Twas as if Prince Tubby was out to explode the sand-pikey population with just the lash of his own member.

He eyeballed Logan and Fucker.

He silently chuckled.

He went blank-faced, vague, mystic.

‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye,’ he said.

Prince Tubby wore his braids waist-length and as thick as the marram and his filthy red velvet lowriders were tucked into leather boots and up top he had his jerkin open across a broad, bare chest on which was tattooed with Indian ink an evil eye.

‘Fuck’s he sayin’, H?’ said Fucker.

‘It’s just their old cant,’ said Logan. ‘Hush, child.’

Prince Tubby came down to Logan and Fucker, side-footing the duneside neatly in the sand-pikey style, and close up he had the look of a full-blown howler.

‘Tis the ’bino I’s talkin’ at, tis?’

‘Logan Hartnett, Prince. And this is my boy Fucker Burke.’

The sand-pikey pulled a slow hand through his braids and the hand he bunched into a fist then and bumped it sardonically with Logan’s.

‘Awrigh’?’ said Fucker.

The Prince smiled at him benignly and Fucker dipped his eyes. Could a pikey tell at a glance, he wondered, if there was pikey blood in you yourself, like? The Prince signalled to his ragged crew behind that they could remain at ease and he gently regarded Logan and he raised his eyes in polite questioning.

‘Maybe a quiet word we’d have?’ said Logan.

‘T’ain’t needed, ’bino.’

‘Oh?’

‘I-and-I’s de Far-Eye.’

‘You were saying.’

‘Far-Eye cop a reck at de Bohane mash-up.’

‘And what are you making of it, Prince?’

Prince Tubby shook his head in sadness.

‘I-and-I gots the feelin’ de ’bino facin’ a manky shake o’ uptown aggravators.’

‘You’re speaking the truth, Prince.’

‘I-and-I don’t need tellin it’s truth he speak,’ Tubby softly corrected. ‘All that come from de I-and-I is truth and Baba-sent. I-and-I’s de Far-Eye.’

Logan placated:

‘My visit to you is no surprise then?’

‘T’aint, ’bino. An’ dere’s a price I can name an’ all, y’check me?’

They trailed down to the pikey camp. Women ’n’ childer scurried forth from the darkness, wide-eyed, to watch: there were strangers on the dunes. Of course, sand-pikey children were an odd breed – they didn’t walk till they were seven years of age but were quick as lizards on the four-hoof crawl, and they came about the Fancy pair, and made hissing noises. Fucker, frankly, was a little shook, and all the more so when he heard a strange rattling, a kind of keening nearby.

‘What’s it, H?’

‘Lurcher cages.’

‘Do they really exis—’

‘Stow it, Fucker!’

They came to the bonfire in the central pit of the sand-pikey camp, and sharp-pointed posts ’bout yea high, maybe ten foot tall, were arranged to a ritual design around the fire, and atop each post a scalp was nailed.

Sand-pikey old-timers looked up from their haunches by the bonna, and passed wee bottles of the Beast around, and there was a heady aroma of bushweed, and some old cove hollered a ballad of the pikey lost-time, and the surging throb of the forge was palpable nearby.

Logan maintained as best he could; Fucker kept his eyes down.

‘Said you’ve a price in mind, Prince T?’

The sand-pikey menfolk all took to crouching by the fire, all went to the haunches, and Logan and Fucker joined them, and Prince Tubby for a while whispered.

Sand-pikeys didn’t come out of camp all that often. Sure, they might head off for a time, after a few palominos, perhaps, or for a rendezvous with some mustachioed diesel seller in Clare or Galway, but they would be back again to the dunes, soon enough, with fresh scars, a good bake on them, and more bleak tales for the telling. And more often than not with new scalps for the posts. They were not to be crossed in business, and the Long Fella knew it, and so he nodded in agreement as Prince Tubby named his price.

It was spat on and shook.

And so it was that less than a half-hour later, the runnings of life on the Bohane streets were set to a different and yet stranger course. For their willingness to help clear the Back Trace of Norrie aggravators, Logan had sworn to the sand-pikeys a third of a share in the Smoketown trade and a role in its daily management.