The rain is merciless, has been all day. Beside the wall, the earth has become a quagmire that pulls at Christy’s navvy boots with every step he takes, trying to suck him into the bog. And a thousand years from now, they’ll be burning him in the manor fireplace along with the rest of the turf, reflects Christy. But he doesn’t earn a hapenny for sitting by the fire so the rain lashes him to the bone as he chips, chips, chips, shaping stones for his lordship’s fine demesne wall.

            His mood is black as the day. His eldest daughter has been acting out, bringing grief to her mother, threatening to run off down to Dublin, the city. And now, to top it all, the news on the radio when he was having his tea: The King is dead.

            He might have shed a tear, at one or the other, or both. He could have; he’d felt his eyes reaching down to try and pull the sadness out of his heart. But he can’t tell if a tear has actually been shed; his face couldn’t be any wetter if he were diving for oysters. And now to think—and at the thought Christy lays down his mallet to swoop his hand across his chest, an involuntary blur of the sign of the cross—bad things always come in threes. What will be next?

            Through the relentless splashing clatter of the rain, the mournful melody of Heartbreak Hotel haunts his mind, and the bog pulls insistently at his feet.

The missus greets him at the door with the news: “O’Neill’s after calling.”

            Ah, Christy thinks, number three. “What’s he want then?”

            “He says he’ll have a jar with you down at the Six Step.”

            “Tonight,” Christy says, more statement than query.

            “At half six,” she says, trying to read his face. Christy’s eyes go deeper than the sorrow in his heart, the only softness at all on the face of sculpted granite; his jaw is fixed in a permanent flex from fending off flying stone chips down the years.

            “Help me out of the wet things, then.”

            “Your tea is on the table. I’ve a fire started.”

            He eats in the parlor at the card table, before the pleasant gaze of the fire. The pungent sweet smell of the smoldering turf flavors his ham and potatoes. He eats alone, the missus on the sofa, still wearing her apron, rigid with worry. They both stare into the fire as though it were a television.

            “You heard about Elvis then?”

            “No—” is full of concern, as though she has.

            “Found him dead,” says Christy.

            “No! When? How?”

            Christy shrugs the mass of his shoulders. “Yesterday, from what I gather. News was rather vague.”

            “What happened?”

            “Drugs, they suspect. Leastways that’s all they’re saying.”

            The word triggers the same trail in both their minds and Christy is the first to give it voice: “Is she home?”

            “She’s up in her room. I’m after finding these.”  The missus pulls a pack of Players Cigarettes from the pocket of her apron.

            “You’re codding me,” Christy says, putting down his fork. She shakes her head. Beside him, she rests her hand on his shoulder. Christy pushes aside the table, slaps his knee. “Sit here.” She does; Christy engulfs her with his arms, his chin resting in the nest of her hair. “I’ll have to deal with it when I return,” he says. “I may be gone a day or so.”

            The missus squeezes his hand. He can feel the drumming of her heart through the refuge of her ribs. “Put on one of the old records, would you ever?” he says. “Put on ‘Love Me Tender.’”

The Six Step Inn, on the Dundalk-Castleblayney Road near the Inishkeen crossroads, is crowded for a Tuesday evening. From the far end of the carpark, Christy walks to the squat white building through the drizzle. The sky is bland and uncommitted, stretching the twilight on and on. “Still raining is it, Christy?” the publican asks.

            “Only spitting a bit,” Christy says, shaking off his cap and jacket.

            “The usual?”

            “Aye, a pint of plain’s your only man,” Christy says, looking about the room. Cigarette smoke hangs thick as gauze, stinging his eyes and stuffing his lungs; it clouds the center of the room where the bar lights glow, making the shadows beyond even deeper. Christy quickly assesses faces; skimming those too familiar, those too old, too drunk, too fat, too stupid, finally settling on the anonymous face of the man sitting alone in a far corner, the half-pint before him light by only a sip. A mate shouts a greeting down the bar: “Christy!”

            Christy nods as his mate joins him, tripping lightly up among the tipplers.

            The publican says, “Did youse hear about the new Orange calendar? It goes January, February, March, March, March, March, March— “ They laugh, his mate, who is drunk, the hardest.

            “You heard about Elvis?” Christy asks soberly.

            “A tragedy, that,” the publican says. “Drugs, do you think?”

            His mate says, “CIA,” wisely.

            “You’re codding me,” Christy says, “you think the CIA would bump off Elvis?”

            “Fucking right— “ says his mate, whose explanation is interrupted by the publican, “You old fuck, you probably think Humpty Dumpty was pushed.”

            “Of course your man Humpty was pushed,” his mate says. “Fucking murthered.”

            The stranger is at Christy’s elbow. “Have you the time? My watch has stopped.”

            “Mine’s running fast,” Christy says. “I can’t keep up with the bloody thing.”

            Nodding, O’Neill leads him to the snug, the private cubicle at the end of the bar, where they shut the door, alone. Their eyes duel, thrust and parry, each inventing a history for the other, trying to see a future where none might be. Christy does not ask O’Neill his real name; he has no need to know. Instead he touches his glass to that of the stranger with the anonymous face, says “Slainte,” and sips his creamy black brew.

            The stranger nods and sips as well. “You’re needed to cast a ballot,” he says, licking his lip.

*

By dawn, Christy has kissed the sleeping missus on the cheek, dressed, peeked in on his eldest and her sisters and in on the boys as well, made himself a cup of tea and driven to the carpark of McGinty’s pub in Louth where he pulls in beside the wee blue Ford described by O’Neill. When he slipped into bed last night, the missus was still awake, restless with unspoken curiosity. “I’m needed to cast a ballot,” Christy said. “I’m off tomorrow early.” Her back to him, she took his hand and pulled it over her, placing it on her chest, holding it with both of hers. “Cast one for me as well,” she said at last. Breathing the smell of the turf fire from her hair, Christy smiled.

            The man beside him in the Ford is a serious sort, nondescript, as practiced in his anonymity as O’Neill. Perfunctory greetings, and they’re off in silence; Christy does not ask the driver his name. The man drives south toward Ardee, soon leaving the main road for a circuitous journey northwest, an endless succession of cow paths and winding country lanes. Wooded hillocks dot the countryside of the midlands, the lanes leading over humpbacked bridges of crumbling stone and between tall fuchsia hedgerows, claustrophobic as tunnels in the early morning light; the dark green leaves are dappled red with blossoms like droplets of blood.

            Christy fiddles with the radio. “Have you any wains?” he asks the driver.

            “I got a squall of ’em,” the driver says, his voice an echo from the streets of Belfast.

            “They’ll bring you heartache,” Christy says with a shake of his head. When the driver nods sympathetically, Christy tells him a bit about his eldest. He tells him his theory that the source of the corruption of the country’s youth lies in the popular music of today.

            The driver agrees. “All this fucking foreign rock and roll,” he says. “Give me a good old ballad any day.”

            “I love the old ballads,” Christy says. “But Elvis is good. He had some great music too. I sung in a band once upon a time and we done a lot of Elvis.”

            “What do ye make of him keeling over dead like that?” the driver asks.

            Christy shrugs. “Drugs, they’re saying.”

            “I don’t know,” the driver says. “I mean your man was in great physical shape, a black belt in karate and all, it stands to reason he wouldn’t be abusing his body like such.”

            “So what do you suspect?”

            “I suspect we’ll find there was more to it than meets the eye, is all.”

            Christy’s eyes and the driver’s have never met. Beneath his breath, Christy hums Suspicious Minds. He was sure he’d find an Elvis tune or two on the radio, perhaps a tribute of some sort, but the dial refuses to yield any hint of the King. There are ballads galore and the traditional music, rife with uilleann pipes and bodhrans and gaelic words of woe. Christy loves the music but he feels now the need for Elvis and he cruises the dial with growing frustration. All Shook Up, he begins to sing.

            Twice more they change cars at isolated farms. There is no glimpse of the occupants, if any, of the houses. More theories are exchanged on the death of the King and the raising of the kids, but most of the journey is silent; one car is radioless.

            The west begins to emerge on the face of the land as the copses grow fewer and further between, the craggy hills become more barren and the grasses and gorse grow wild on the sweep of the valleys. The ubiquitous stone walls and ruins of tumbled cottages glisten in the sunlight like heaps of bones.

Christy is humming Love Me Tender as they pull behind the derelict farmhouse that looks uninhabited, out of sight of the road. Another car is hidden there. Grazing sheep stare blankly from the hillock above. They are not far from the Bloody Foreland, where God has forsaken poor Donegal.

            Inside the house are two other anonymous men, one a head taller than the other. Black plastic sheets have been tacked on the windows and a lantern burns meekly on a table in the center of the room. The newcomers are given tea and bread smeared with margarine that tastes like gun grease. Several posters have been tacked on the walls, each picturing a black silhouette of a man in a peaked cap with the caption, Faceless Men – British terrorists who rule our country.

            After tea, Christy dons a one-piece jumpsuit and gloves provided by the short man who is the Officer Commanding. He says, “Not some drunken squaddie, this one. He’s SAS, an officer.” The SAS is an elite undercover regiment of British killers, so Christy figures the OC is telling him this for a reason. Christy has no need to know, but the OC goes on: “South Armagh lifted him from the carpark of a pub just outside Crossmaglen. The bastard was inside for two hours first, drinking with the locals, even got up on stage and sung a rebel song with the band— ‘Kevin Barry,’ it was. Musta thought he was fucking bulletproof.”

            “We’ll see,” Christy says.

            “Where his back-up was God only knows,” the tall man says.

            “Never look a gift horse,” the driver says. “How was the interrogation?”

            The OC ignores the question. He nods to the tall man who leaves the room; the OC takes a pistol, a Browning nine millimeter Hi-Power, from a table behind him and hands it to Christy. Christy checks the clip, rams it back home. The tall man returns with the SAS officer who is dressed in soiled civilian clothes and shrouded with a black hood. Legs hobbled, arms bound behind him, the hooded officer stumbles limply.

            The OC addresses the hooded officer. He tells him that he has been found guilty of terrorist offenses and has been sentenced to death under the lawful authority of Oglaigh na hEireann, sentence to be carried out immediately. The SAS officer straightens imperceptibly and his words cause the hood to puff out before his face: “Fuck you, you fucking Paddy pig.”

            “Sparky,” the driver says, “I like that in a Brit.”

            “A bullet,” says the OC, “is what I like in a Brit.”

            Christy takes the hooded man by the elbow and leads him outside, where he pauses to listen, making sure no one is passing on the road below. He removes the man’s hood so he will not stumble on the rock strewn fields. The man shakes his head and takes a deep breath of air, looks up at the sky, then back at Christy. He is a handsome man, but the flicker in his eyes is dying. Christy stares through the eyes and the flesh of the man to the dark holes of the skull, to the heap of bones that is the waste of all mortality, the heap that lies glistening in the sun on every barren hillside.

            By a deep hole in the bog, Christy pulls the hood back over the eyes of the man and puts a bullet in the back of his head. The bog swallows him as effortlessly as the northern air swallows the bitter scent of gunpowder. Christy tucks away the pistol to swoop his hand across his chest, an involuntary blur of the cross. He does not wonder about the man’s family, although he does find himself singing Little Sister as he makes his way back across the unforgiving fields.

Christy waits in the car behind the derelict farmhouse. He removed his jumpsuit, leaving it with the gloves and the pistol on the table for disposal. He carefully scrubbed his hands clean, washing away all forensic hints of firearms. The OC and the driver waited for Christy to leave before continuing the debriefing for HQ Intelligence. Christy has no need to know. He is only a specialist for HQ Special Ops.

            As he waits for the driver, he watches the restless hillside: It is never still. He listens closely through the window: It is never quiet. The greens of the grasses, the yellow of the gorse, the purple of the heather on the surface of the bog are never at ease, always writhing and whispering conspiratorially in the ceaseless breezes. Bright white clouds hurry in from the ocean, racing across the sky as though being chased, as though fretting to be free of this place.

            The driver arrives and they leave. There are no farewells; no words are spoken at all. No sign of the King on the air so Christy rides in silence, thinking about his eldest daughter. In the sunlight on a far hillside he sees a little boreen etched on the face of the earth and abruptly the utter unalterability of that worn and ancient path makes the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. Not until just before their first change of cars, when the countryside has begun to grow weary in the soft evening light, does the driver finally speak.

            He says, “Did ye tell your man to remember you to Elvis?”

            Christy wonders with a fleeting frown if that is a reasonable possibility in God’s grand scheme of things, but decides he has no need to know.

            “Now how the fuck would Elvis know who I am?” Christy says.

– Dennis McFadden