Kevin Barry - City of Bohane

‘ As loooong as dat black river flow …’

But even such a girl was poor distraction for the jowly merchants in the banquette booths. Those old boys quivered, almost – they could barely lift the tankards to their lips. Their eyes were drawn to a pair of men seated on high stools at the far end of the Supper Room’s bar. One was broad and densely packed, the other tall and slender.

Double-take:

It was Logan Hartnett and the Gant Broderick.

A tight huddle they had settled to, and they were whispering there. And in a hoarse whisper also the girl’s song came through.

‘ As long as dem stars still shiiine / As long as our twined love grow …’

Tommie the Keep occupied himself with chipping ice from a ten-pound block into splinters for the cooler buckets. Almost lost a pair of fingers to the chisel, Tommie, as his scared glance shot along the counter to the men. Hartnett with a raised hand signalled now for another bottle of moscato, and Tommie fetched one and brought it. The men paused in their talk as he nestled the bottle among the ice chips in their cooler. Each wistfully smiled for him.

‘Mr Hartnett,’ said Tommie. ‘Mr Broderick.’

Tommie was not brave enough to linger and he scuttled again down the length of the bar. The girl singer finger-clicked still as her drummer whittled a high thin beat on the snare. In the booths, the heavy lads nervously swayed. Temperatures were yet in the thirties, even after midnight, and the city’s mood was edgy.

Logan Hartnett and the Gant Broderick both rested their forearms on the bar counter, and they both stared straight ahead, and they both rotated their glasses slowly with the tips of their fingers – each unconsciously mimicked the other.

The Gant lifted his glass then and sipped at his moscato.

‘Fuckin’ breakfast wine,’ he said.

‘Have a Jameson so.’

‘Swore off the whiskey over.’

Like a kid, Logan thought, like a surly little kid.

‘Wasn’t agreeing with you, G?’

The Gant shrugged, drained off the glass, and poured another. Held the bottle for Logan, raised an eyebrow; Logan demurely placed a hand to cover his glass. Like an old bint, the Gant thought.

‘Like an ol’ bint,’ he said.

‘Don’t be bitter, Martin,’ Logan said.

The girl singer held a slow note to its fade; it brought up the blue veins of her slender neck, and she let the note die, and she stepped from the stage then for an interval break, pinching carefully at the thighs of the silver dress so as not to trip.

Barely a scatter of applause came for the room was preoccupied: Dominick Gleeson, the fat newsman, slithered an oyster into his gob from the half-shell but barely registered the shiver of its sea tang as he worried about the Hartnett–Broderick clinch. Big Dom scowled tubbily in puzzlement, and it was a puzzlement shared, two booths over, by Edmund ‘The Gypo’ Lenihan, the old-school S’town hoor-master. Ed sipped sourly at a measure of moscato and laid a hand on his belly, the wine interfering lately with his ulcers. At a booth adjacent was a gentleman of the Bohane Authority, poured into a thin flannel suit and licking the salt off a pretzel, and he tried as best as he could to secrete himself in the Supper Room’s shadows.

All watched the two men at the bar.

A great rip of trembling took hold of the Gant just then – he was laughing ? – and Logan placed a brotherly hand on his back, as though to steady him.

Shudders in the booths, and nervous tabs were lit in a rolling relay around the room – the sparking of one inclined the sparking of the next.

Logan Hartnett took a handkerchief from an inside pocket to wipe away a morbid, a dream-sent tear.

‘That day in August,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t sure I’d know you right off.’

‘You’re actually weepin’?’ the Gant said.

‘Something in my eye,’ he said. ‘Twenty-five years, you know…’

‘You’re one strange animal, Hartnett.’

‘As people never seem to tire of telling me.’

Again they mimicked without knowing it each the other’s posture – each of them was a little slumped now, and they sat bluesily, sad-eyed; it was past midnite at Tommie’s.

‘If you were askin’ me to place a bet,’ the Gant said, ‘I’d say she’ll come back to you.’

‘If she doesn’t, I’m done for.’

‘I wouldn’t worry too much. A nice berth you made for her atop the hill, ain’t it? And she always was a shallow bitch.’

‘Did you really think she’d choose you, Gant?’

On a morning in August, in the grey dim of a deserted bar room, in the village of Ten Light, in the foothills of the Nothin’ massif, they had sat with each other. The rendezvous was discreet and polite. Logan carefully laid out his terms. To test Macu’s loyalty, and to test the Fancy’s – this was the Gant’s role, and in return for playing it, he was allowed safe passage again to Bohane, to his home and to his lost-time. He could return and he could stay – it was what he had pleaded for in the letters that he had sent to Logan. They spat and shook on it in the grey room. Even to shake hands had caused a wince of pain in the Gant – he’d returned with a last wound from the world beyond; his shoulder reefed in Whitechapel.

‘When you told her about the arrangement,’ Logan said, admiringly, at the barside in Tommie’s, ‘I thought, that’s sly… to turn it back at me like so. Put me in an evil light in my own house, didn’t it? Of course it did for your chances an’ all.’

‘Didn’t want her,’ the Gant said. ‘Soon’s as I saw her close up, y’check?’

‘Tell yourself that often enough, Martin, and you might start to believe it.’

Maybe there was a want in the Gant to hurt him yet but was he capable of it? Brave as the dream he each night blew, Logan believed not – the Gant was sold to the past; the Gant was done for. But if the dream-smoke brought courage, it brought a harsh truth, also: Logan knew that he may not himself be far behind.

The girl singer downed a fast whiskey and returned to the stage, and she finger-snapped a double-quick beat, and she swung out her hips, she tried to get things moving at a jauntier pace, she tried to lift the tension, but the hot old boys in the booths shifted uncomfortably and dropped their piggy little eyes, and she sighed, and she let it slow again to ballad pace, began to croon one, and the merchants again sulkily swayed.

Logan and the Gant sat for a time in the selfsame brood; both rejected, it was an odd bond they shared, and sweetly painful.

‘S’pose you done for the galoot lad?’

‘Poor Fucker,’ Logan sighed.

‘Couldn’t have let him go the High Boreen, nah? A boy o’ what, fifteen?’

‘He was seventeen.’

‘Didn’t look it.’

Anxiety spun a web across the room. Those who had passed word and information to the Gant Broderick over the winter and springtime feared now the consequences. They knew they had been tested.

‘You’re all shoulders, ain’t you, Gant?’ Logan smiled as he turned on his stool, a half-swivel, and took a slow reck of his old acquaintance. ‘A big ham-faced lunk off the bog plain. Of course even as a kid you were a fucking unit. Even when you were in off the rez first, Martin Broderick, eight years of age, and putting the fear of the SB into grown men. Of course a brain would have been useful also.’

‘A brain not so hot if it got maggots wrigglin’ about it.’

‘Ah what did she ever see in you?’

Logan sipped delicately at his moscato. Made a face – the wine had warmed in the night’s humidity. Snapped fingers and pointed, simultaneously, at the optics, and Tommie the Keep scuttled for the John Jameson. One measure was brought, a second offered, but the Gant again refused it.