It was a single tree of some forty or fifty feet in height, but it was hard to tell what kind of tree it was, maple, oak, chestnut, what? because there were no leaves on the tree. It was not even an autumn tree with the proper yellow and red and orange leaves. It was a barren winter tree that reached for a stark sky with empty twigs and branches.
“Ain’t she a beaut?” said Harry Hinds, staring up.
“Well,” I said.
“Remember when old Cap Trotter, our gym coach, used to make us go out and run around the block six or seven times to teach us manners—”
“I don’t recall—”
“Yes, you do,” said Harry Hinds, easily, looking at the interior sky. “Well, do you know what I used to do?”
“Beat us. Pull ahead and make the six laps. Win and not breathe hard. I remember now.”
“No, you don’t.” Harry studied the glass roof seventy feet above. “I never ran the laps. After the first two I hid behind a parked car, waited for the last lap to come around, then jumped out and beat the hell out of all of you.”
“So that’s how you did it?” I said.
“The secret of my success,” he said. “I’ve been jumping from behind cars on the last lap for years.”
“God damn,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said, and studied the cornices of the interior court.
We stood there for a long moment, like the pilgrims at Lourdes waiting for the daily miracle. If it happened, I was not aware. But Harry Hinds was. He pointed with his nose and eyebrows up, up along that huge tree and said, “See anything up there?”
I looked and shook my head. “Nope.”
“You sure?” said Harry.
I looked again and shook my head.
“The highest branch on the tree?” said Harry.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Funny.” Harry Hinds snorted faintly. “How come I see it clearly?”
I did not ask what it was he was seeing.
I looked up at the bare tree in the middle of an arboretum in the center of the lobby of the Harold Hinds Foresight Corporation.
Did I expect to see the phantom outlines of a pair of pants way up there on the highest branch?
I did.
But there was nothing there. Only a high branch and no clothing.
Harry Hinds watched me looking at the tree and read my thought.
“Thanks,” he said, quietly.
“What?” I said.
“Thanks to you, to all of you, for what you did,” he said.
“What’d we do?” I lied.
“You know,” he said, quietly. “And thanks. Come on.”
And before I could protest, he led the way to the men’s and raised his brows, nodding, did I need to go? I did.
Standing at the porcelains, unzipped, Harry looked down as he watered the daisies.
“You know,” he smiled, “there isn’t a day in my life, when I do this, that I don’t remember that day forty years ago and me up the tree and you down below and me peeing on all of you. Not a day passes I don’t remember. You, them, and peeing.”
Standing there, I froze and did nothing.
Harry finished, zipped up, and stood remembering.
“Happiest day of my life,” he said.
A Woman Is Fast-moving Picnic
The subject was women, by the singles and in the mobs.
The place was Heeber Finn’s not-always-open but always-talking pub in the town of Kilcock, if you’ll forgive the implication, in the county of Kildare, out along the River Liffey somewhat north and certainly beyond the reach of Dublin.
And in the pub, if only half full of men but bursting with talk, the subject was indeed women. They had exhausted all other subjects, hounds, horses, foxes, beers as against the hard stuff, lunatic mother-in-laws out of the bin and into your lives, and now the chat had arrived back to women in the pure state: unavailable. Or if available, fully dressed.
Each man echoed the other and the next agreed with the first.
“The dreadful fact is,” said Finn, to keep the converse aroar, “there is no single plot of land in all Ireland which is firm or dry enough to lie down with purpose and arise with joy.”
“You’ve touched the bull’s-eye and pierced the target,” said Timulty, the local postmaster, in for a quick one, there being only ten people waiting at the post-office. “There’s no acre off the road, out of sight of the priest or out of mind of the wife, where physical education can be pursued without critical attention.”
“The land is all bog,” Nolan nailed it, “and no relief.”
“There’s no place to cavort,” said Riordan, simply.
“Ah, that’s been said a thousand times this night,” protested Finn. “The thing is, what do we do about it?”
“If someone would only stop the rain and fire the priests,” suggested Nolan.
“That’ll be the day,” cried all, and emptied their drinks.
“It reminds me of that Hoolihan tragedy,” said Finn, refilling each glass. “Is that remembered?”
“Say it, Finn.”
“Well, Hoolihan wandered this woman who was no Madonna, but neither was she last year’s potatoes, and they passed a likely turf which seemed more flatland than swamp and Hoolihan said, Trot on out on that bog. If it holds, I’ll follow. Well, she trotted out and turns around and—sinks! Never laid a hand on her. Before he could shout: No! she was gone!”
“The truth is,” Nolan obtruded, “Hoolihan threw her a rope. But she slung it round her neck instead of her waist and all but strangled in the pulling out. But I like your version best, Finn. Anyways, they made a song of it!”
And here Nolan began, but everyone put in to finish the verse:
“The sinking of Molly in old Kelly’s bog
Is writ in the Lord Mayor’s roll call and a log
Poor Molly went there with the Hoolihan boy
And sank out of sight with one last shriek of joy.
He took her out there for what do you suppose?
And was busy at ridding the lass of her clothes,
But no sooner deprived of each last seam and stitch
Than she wallowed and sank and was lost in the ditch.
The ducks they all gaggled and even the hog
Wept Christian salt-tears for Moll sunk in the bog—”
“It goes on from there,” said Nolan. “Needless to say the Hoolihan boy was distraught. When you’re thinking one thing and another occurs, it fair turns the mind. He’s feared to cross a brick road since without testing for quicksand. Shall I go on?”
“No use,” cried Doone, suddenly, no more than four foot ten inches high but terrible fast plummeting out of theaters ahead of the national anthem, the local Anthem Sprinter, as everyone knows.
Now, on tiptoe, he boxed the air around the pub and voiced his protest. “What’s the use of all this palaver the last thousand nights when it’s time to act? Even if there was a sudden flood of femininity in the provinces with no lint on them and their seams straight, what would we do with them?”
“True,” admitted Finn. “God in Ireland just tempts man but to disown him.”
“God’s griefs and torments,” added Riordan. “I haven’t even wrestled Adam’s old friend Eve late nights in the last row of the Gayety Cinema!”
“The Gayety Cinema?” cried Nolan in dread remorse. “Gah! I crept through the dark there once and found me a lass who seemed a salmon frolicking upstream. When the lights came on, I saw I had taken communion with a troll from the Liffey bridge. I ran to commit suicide with drink. To hell with the Gayety and all men who prowl there with dreams and slink forth with nightmare!”
“Which leaves only the bogs for criminal relief and drowned in the bargain. Doone,” said Finn, “do you have a plan, you with that big mouth in the tiny body?”
“I have!” said Doone, not standing still, sketching the air with his fists and fingers as he danced to his own tune. “You must admit that the various bogs are the one place the Church puts no dainty toe. But also a place where a girl, representing the needy, and out of her mind, might test her will to defy the sinkage. For it’s true, one grand plunge if you’re not careful and no place to put her tombstone. Now hear this!”
Doone stopped so all might lean at him, eyes wide, and ears acock.
“What we need is a military strategist, a genius for scientific research, in order to recreate the Universe and undo the maid. One word says it all. Me!”
“You!” cried all, as if struck in a collective stomach.
“I have the hammer,” said Doone. “Will you hand me the nails?”
“Hang the picture,” said Finn, “and fix it straight.”
“I came here tonight with Victory in mind,” said Doone, having slept late till noon and gone back to bed at three to adjust the sights and rearrange our future. “Now, as we waste our tongues and ruin our nervous complexions, the moon is about to rise and the empty lands and hungry bogs await.
Outside this pub, in boneyards of handlebars and spokes, lie our bikes. In a grand inquest, should we not bike on out to peg and string the bogs for once and all, full of brave blood and booze, to make a permanent chart, map the hostile and innocent-looking flats, test the sinkages, and come back with the sure knowledge that behind Dooley’s farm is a field in which if you do not move fast, you sink at the rate of two
