The Searcher

by Tana French

Meanwhile, he doesn’t mind the aches. They satisfy him. Along with the blisters and thickening calluses, they’re solid, earned proof of what his life is now.

The sky, dappled in subtle gradations of gray, goes on forever; so do the fields, coded in shades of green by their different uses, divided up by sprawling hedges, dry-stone walls and the odd narrow back road.

Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.

Cal doesn’t fully have the hang of the local accent. He likes it—rich as the air, with a needle-fine point that makes him think of cold river water or mountain wind—but chunks of the conversation go right over his head, and he gets distracted listening to the rhythms and misses more.

All Cal gets off him is urgency, so concentrated that it shimmers the air around him like heat coming off a road.

The kid struck him as a wild creature, even more than most, and wild creatures often need some time to percolate an unexpected encounter before they decide on their next step.

It rains day and night, mildly but uncompromisingly, so Cal takes the desk inside and goes back to his wallpaper. He enjoys this rain. It has no aggression to it; its steady rhythm and the scents it brings in through the windows gentle the house’s shabbiness, giving it a homey feel. He’s learned to see the landscape changing under it, greens turning richer and wildflowers rising. It feels like an ally, rather than the annoyance it is in the city.

“Because you’re American. Ye’re all mental with the guns, over there. Shooting them off at the drop of a hat. Blowing some fella away because he bought the last packet of Twinkies in the shop. The rest of us wouldn’t be safe.”

These guys remind him of his grandpa and his porch buddies, who enjoyed each other’s company in the same way, by giving each other shit; or of the squad room, before a quicksand layer of real viciousness seeped in under the pretend stuff, or maybe just before he started noticing it.

The mountains on the horizon look like someone took a pocketknife and sliced neat curves out of the star-thick sky, leaving empty blackness. Here and there, spread out, are the yellow rectangles of windows, tiny and valiant.

Here, he has the soothing knowledge that the things happening in the night aren’t his problem. Most of them are self-contained: small wild hunts and battles and matings that require nothing from human beings except that they stay away.

It’s occurred to him that he might have an undiscovered talent for letting things be.

When Cal hangs up he has the same empty feeling he always gets after talking to Alyssa these days, a sense that somehow, in spite of having been on the phone for all that time, they haven’t had a conversation at all; the whole thing was made of air and tumbleweed, nothing solid there. When she was a little kid she would trot along holding his hand and tell him everything, good and bad, it all poured straight from her heart to her mouth. He can’t remember when that changed.

“Black people got mad about being treated like crap. Bad cops got mad ’cause they were getting called on their shit all of a sudden. Good cops got mad ’cause they were the bad guys when they hadn’t done anything.”

Cal likes the angle of her next to him: not tilted towards him like a woman who wants him or wants him to want her, off balance as if he might have to catch her any minute, but planted solid on her feet and shoulder-to-shoulder with him, like a partner.

“Church,” Mart tells him, pulling his tobacco pouch out of a jacket pocket and finding an undersized rollie, “is for women. The spinsters, mostly; they do like to get themselves in a tizzy over whose turn it is to do the second reading, or the altar flowers. And the mammies bringing in the childer so they won’t grow up heathens, and the aul’ ones showing off that they’re not dead yet. If a young lad starts going to mass, it’s a bad sign. Something’s not sitting right, in his life or in his head.”

“There’s what’s against the law, and then there’s what’s against the church. Sometimes they do be the same, and sometimes they don’t.

Yesterday’s restlessness has built itself into outright worry, the sharp buzzing kind he can’t pin down, let alone crush.

He sometimes gets the feeling that Donna has methodically erased all their good times from her memory, so that she can move on into her shiny new life without ripping herself up. If he doesn’t keep them in his, they’ll be gone like they never happened.

He can remember clear as day how Donna felt when he hugged her, her skin hotter than normal like some engine was firing on new cylinders, the stunning gravitational pull of her and the mystery inside her.

Trey says, with absolute bedrock certainty, “He wouldn’t do that.” Cal reached the point a long time ago where those words make him tired for all of humanity. All the innocents say that, and believe it to the bone, right up until the moment when they can’t any more.

Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.

an intense awareness of the spread of the dark countryside all around his house; a sense of being surrounded by a vast invisible web, where one wrong touch could shake things so far distant he hasn’t even spotted them.

It’s the sweet warm wave of astonishment that, just for once and out of the blue, the world is feeling generous to you today.

“There’s always reasons to worry.”

He’s come across plenty of people like Sheila, both in his childhood and on the job. Whether they started out that way or got brought to it somehow, their focus isn’t much broader than a prey animal’s. They’re all used up by scrabbling to keep their footing; they don’t have room to aim for anything bigger or farther than staying one jump ahead of bad things and snatching the occasional treat along the way.

Her belief is built purely out of hope, piled on top of nothing, solid as smoke. Her worry, on the other hand, is dense and sharp-cornered as a lump of rock.

She said Cal was addicted to fixing things, like a guy jabbing on and on at a slot machine, unable to leave it alone until the lights flashed and the prize came pouring out.

Cal could never muster up much fondness for his duty Glock, with its thuggish lines, the insolent swagger with which it wore the fact that it existed to be pointed at human beings. It carried nothing but aggression; it had no dignity. The Henry is, to him, what a gun should be.

Cal has always liked mornings. He draws a distinction between this and being a morning person, which he isn’t: it takes time, daylight and coffee to connect up his brain cells. He appreciates mornings not for their effect on him, but for themselves.

Here, the first light spreads across the fields like something holy is happening, striking sparks off a million dewdrops and turning the spiderwebs on the hedge to rainbows; mist curls off the grass, and the first calls of birds and sheep seem to arc effortless miles.

It comes to him with the clarity of a sound, a neat small chink like metal hitting stone.

He never liked rubbing dumb people’s dumbness in their faces. It feels too much like playground picking on the weak kid,

He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don’t have their feet on the ground. They’re turning loose from their families and they haven’t found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They’re unknowns, to the people who used to know them inside out and to themselves.

Nineteen is the right age for a lot of things that can start misfiring inside someone’s mind.

He never spent much time weighing up the intricacies of whether the people concerned and the wider society and the forces of good would be best served by him taking on the investigation; partly because he was going to do it anyway, but mainly because he believed that it was in fact the right thing to do in a general sense, if not necessarily in every particular instance.

I’ve only myself to please. There’s great freedom in that.

One of the reasons he picked Ireland was so he wouldn’t have to learn a new language, but sometimes he feels like the joke is on him.

He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges. They did the same thing to people: people on drugs stopped being what you knew them to be. They looked you right in the face and saw things that had nothing to do with you.

His private opinion about a lot of the baby thugs and delinquents he encountered on the job was that what they really yearned after, whether they knew it or not, was a rifle and a horse and a herd of cattle to drive through dangerous terrain. Given those, plenty of them—not all, but plenty—would have turned out fine.

There’s a burst of laughter. Cal can’t get the flavor of it. There’s mockery in it, but around here mockery is like rain: most of the time it’s either present or incipient, and there are at least a dozen variants, ranging from nurturing to savage, and so subtly distinguished that it would take years to get the hang of them all.

The reel beats in the air like a pulse.

He feels no urge to understand the stars better; he’s contented with them as they are.

Cal is clear that last night he got warned. The warning, however, was done with such subtlety that—whether by design or not—he’s unsure what, exactly, he was being warned off.

People can forgive a man for being a little bit unrealistic, as long as he’s reliable.”

Evening has its own smell here, dense and cool, with a heady tinge of plants and flowers that play no part in the daytime.

“Men with no children get to feeling unsafe, when they get older. The world’s changing and they’ve no young people to show them it’s grand, so they feel like they’re being attacked. Like they need to be ready for a fight the whole time.”

If you’ve kids, you’re always looking out into the world to see if anything needs fighting, because that’s where they’re headed; you’re not barricading yourself indoors and listening for the Indians to attack. It’s not good for a place, having too many aul’ bachelors out on their land with no one to talk to, feeling like they need to defend their territory, even though they’re not sure from what.

One of the pups is scrabbling at the edge of the box. She scoops it into her lap. “I like them this age,” she says. “I can come and have a cuddle whenever I fancy one, and then put them back when I’ve had enough. Another week or two and they won’t stay put for it; they’ll be getting under my feet instead.”

“What I went looking for was peace and quiet. I’m taking what came my way. Same as you are.”