Driving Blind

THE HIGHEST BRANCH ON THE TREE

A often remember his name, Harry Hands, a most unfortunate name for a fourteen-year-old boy in ninth grade in junior high in 1934, or in any other year, come to think of it. We all spelled it 'Hairy' and pronounced it with similar emphasis. Harry Hands pretended not to notice and became more arrogant and smart-ass, looking down his nose at us dumb peasants, as he called us. We didn't see at the time that it was our harassment that made him pretend at arrogance and display wits that he probably only half had. So it went with Hands and his incredible moniker Hairy.

The second memory is often of his pants up a tree. That has stayed with me for a lifetime. I have never for a month forgotten. I can't very well say I recalled his pants up a tree every day, that would not be true. But at least twelve times a year I would see Harry in full flight and us ninth graders after him, myself in the lead, and his pants in the air flung up to the highest branch and everyone laughing there on the school grounds and a teacher leaning out a window and ordering one of us, why not me, to climb and bring those pants down.

“Don't bother,” Harry Hands said, blushing there, revealed in his boxer BVD underwear. “They're mine. I'll get 'em.”

And Harry Hands climbed up, almost fell, and reached his pants but did not put them on, just clutched to the bole of the tree and when we all gathered below the tree, knocking each other's elbows and pointing up and laughing, simply looked down at us with the strangest grin and ...

Peed.

That's right.

Took aim and peed.

There was a mob flight of indignant teenagers, off away, but no one came back to climb up and drag him down, for when we started to come back, wiping our faces and shoulders with handkerchiefs, Harry yelled down:

“I had three glasses of orange juice for lunch!”

So we knew he was still loaded and we all stood thirty feet back from the tree yelling euphemisms instead of epithets, the way our folks had taught us. After all, it was another time, another age, and the rules were observed.

Harry Hands did not put on his pants up there nor did he come down even though the principal came out and ordered him to leave and we backed off and heard the principal shouting up at Harry that the way was clear now and he could come down. But Harry Hands shook his head: no way. And the principal stood under the tree and we yelled to him to watch out, Harry Hands was armed and dangerous and hearing this the principal backed off, hastily.

Well, the long and short of it was, Harry Hands never came down, that is, we didn't see him do it, and we all got bored and went home.

Someone later said he came down at sunset or midnight, with no one around to see.

The next day, the tree was empty and Harry Hands was gone forever.

He never came back. He didn't even come back to protest to the principal, nor did his parents come or write a letter to lodge a complaint. We didn't know where Harry Hands lived, and the school wouldn't tell us, so we couldn't go find him, perhaps with the faintest notion that maybe we should apologize and ask him back. We knew he wouldn't come, anyway. What we had done was so horrendous, it could never be forgiven. As the days passed and Harry Hands didn't show, most of us lay in bed at night and wondered how we would feel if someone had “pantsed” us and threw our pants to the highest branch of some tree in front of God and everyone. It caused a lot of unexpected bed tossing and pillow punching, I don't mind saying. And most of us didn't look up at that tree for more than a few seconds before turning away.

Did any of us ever sweat over the dire consequences? Did we perspire on the obvious that perhaps he might have fallen just at midnight, to be harvested as broken bones at dawn? Or did we imagine he might have lurched himself out in a high-jump of doom, with the same shattered consequence? Did we think his father might lose his job or his mother take to drink? We wrestled none of these or if we did, shut our traps to preserve our silent guilt. Thunder, as you know, occurs when lightning sucks back up its track and lets two handsful of white-hot air applaud. Harry Hands, whose parents were never seen, withdrew to a bang of thunder that only we ninth-grade second-rate criminals heard while waiting for sleep, which never came, to arrive.

It was a bad end to a good year and we all went off to high school and a few years later, going by the schoolyard, I saw that the tree had got some sort of disease and had been cut down, which was a relief. I didn't want some future generation to be surprised at the ghost shape of a pair of pants up there, hurled by a mob of apes.

But I run ahead of my story.

Why, you ask, why did we do that to Harry Hands? Was he some sort of super-villain who deserved our Christian persecution, a dumb sort of semi-crucifixion to appall the neighbors and ruin school history so that in the annals of time people would say, “1934, wasn't that the year that—” And fill in the blanks with Look, ma, no pants, no Hands.

What, in sum, was H.H.'s crime sublime?

It's a familiar case. Happens every year, every school, everywhere at one time or another. Except our case was more spectacular.

Harry Hands was smarter than anyone else in the whole school.

That was the first crime.

His second crime, worse than the first, was he didn't do a better job of hiding it.

It reminds me of an actor friend who a few years ago drove up to the front of my house in a brand-new super-powered XKE twelve-cylinder Jaguar and yelled at me, “Eat your heart out!”

Well, Harry Hands, in effect, had arrived at our school from somewhere back East—hadn't we all?—and flaunted his IQ from the first hour of day one. Through every class from just after breakfast to just before lunch to last afternoon bell his arm was permanently up, you could have raised a flag on it, and his voice was demanding to be heard and damn if he wasn't right when the teacher gave him the nod. A lot of collective bile was manufactured that day under all our tongues. The miracle was we didn't rip his clothes off on that first day. We delayed because it was reported that in gym he had put on the boxing gloves and bloodied three or four noses before our coach told everyone to run out and do six laps around the block to lance our boils.

And, Jesus off the cross and running rings around us, wouldn't you know as we made the fifth lap, panting, tasting blood, here came Harry Hands, fresh as a potted daisy, jogging along, nice and easy, passing us and adding another lap to prove he was tireless.

By the end of the second day he had no friends. No one even tried to be one. It was hinted that if anyone took up with this Hands guy, we would beat the tar out of them next time we did laps and were out of sight of our coach.

So Harry Hands came and went alone, with a look of the insufferable book reader and, worse, book rememberer, he forgot nothing and would offer data if someone paused, stuttered, or broke wind.

Did Harry Hands see his crucifixion coming? If he did, he smiled at the prospect. He was always smiling and laughing and being a good chum, although no one smiled or laughed back. We took our homework home. He did it in class in the last five minutes of the hour and then sat there, mightily pleased with his intellectual strengths, moistening his vocal chords for the next recitation.

Fade out. Fade in.

We all went away to life.

After about forty years it got so I only thought about Harry Hands once every two years instead of once every two months. It was in the middle of a sidewalk in downtown Chicago where I walked when I had two hours between trains, on my way to New York, that I met this stranger coming toward me, unrecognizable, and he had almost passed when he froze in midstride and half turned to me and said:

“Spaulding?” he said. “Douglas Spaulding?”

It was my turn to freeze and I mean I turned cold, for I had this ungodly feeling I was confronted by a ghost. A whole flock of geese ran over my grave. I cocked my head and eyed the stranger. He was dressed in a beautifully tailored blue-black suit with a silk shirt and a reticent tie. His hair was dark and moderately gray at the temples and he smelled of a mild cologne. He held out a well-manicured hand.

“Harry Hinds,” he said.

“I don't think … ” I said.

“You are Douglas Spaulding, aren't you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Berendo Junior High School, class of summer 1935, though I never graduated.”

“Harry,” I said and stopped, his last name a stone in my mouth.

“Use to be Hands. Harry Hands. Changed it to Hinds, late spring 1935—”

Jut after you climbed down, I thought.

The wind blew around one of those Chicago corners.

I smelled pee.

I glanced to left and right. No horses in sight. No dogs.

Only Harry Hinds, aka Harry Hands waiting for me to open up.

I took his fingers as if they contained electric shocks, shook them quickly, pulled back.

“My goodness,” he said. “Am I still poison?”

“No, but—”

“You look well,” he said quickly. “Look as if you've had a good life. That's nice.”

“You, too,” I said, trying not to look at his expensively manicured nails and brightly polished shoes.

“I can't complain,” he said, easily. “Where are you headed?”

“The Art Institute. I'm between trains. I have almost two hours' layover and always go to the museum to look at that big Seurat.”

“It is big, isn't it, and beautiful. Mind if I come partway?”

“No, no. Please, join up.”

We walked and he said, “It's on the way to my office, anyway, so we'll have to talk fast. Give me your resume, for old times' sake?”

We walked and I told. Not much for there wasn't much to detail. Fair life as a writer, nicely established, no international fame but a few fans across country and enough income to raise a family. “That's it,” I said. “In a nutshell. End of resume.”

“Congratulations,” he said and seemed to mean it, nodding. “Well done.”

“What about you?” I said.

“Well,” he said, reluctantly. It was the only time in all the years, then and now, I ever saw him hesitate. He was looking sidewise at a building facade which seemed to make him nervous. I glanced over and saw:

 

HARRY HINDS AND ASSOCIATES

FIFTH AND SIXTH FLOORS

 

Harry caught my gaze and coughed. “It's nothing. I didn't mean to bring you here. Just passing—”

“My God,” I said. "That's quite a building. Do you own the whole thing?'

“Own it, built it,” he admitted, brightening somewhat, leaning toward the old young Harry of forty years back. “Not bad, eh?”

“Not bad at all,” I said, gasping.

“Well, I'd better let you get on to the Seurat,” he said, and shook my hand. “But hold on. Why not? Duck inside for just sixty seconds. Then I'll let you run. Yes?”

“Why not,” I said, and he took my elbow and steered me, opening the door ahead of me and bowing a nod and leading me out into the center of a spacious marble lobby, an area some sixty feet high and eighty or ninety feet across, in the center of which was an arboretum with dense jungle foliage below and a buckshot scattering of exotic birds, but with only one singular dramatic piece in the middle.

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 or three inches per minute? Then beyond, Leary's pasture in which his own cows have the devil's time grazing quick enough to survive the unsteady turf and live on the road. Would that not be a good thing to know for the rest of our lives so we can shun it and move to more substantial grounds?”

“My God,” said all in admiration. “It would!”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Doone ran to the door. “Finish your drinks and mount your bikes. Do we live in ignorance or at last play in the fields, as it 'twere, of the Lord?”

“The fields!” The men drank.

“Of the Lord!” they finished, plummeting Doone out the door.

“Time!” cried Finn, since the pub was empty. “Time!”

 

No sooner on the road, with coattails flying as if heaven lay ahead and Lucifer behind, than Doone pointed now here, now there with his surveyor's nose:

“There's Flaherty's. Terrible quick. You're out of sight, a foot a minute and no one the wiser if they look the other way.”

“Why, Christ himself,” said someone in the sweating biking mob, “might not make it across!”

“He'd be the first and last and no one between!” Finn admitted, catching up with the team.

“Where are you taking us, Doone?” gasped Nolan.

“You'll see soon enough!” Doone churned his sprockets.

“And when we get there,” asked Riordan, suddenly struck with the notion, “in the penultimate or final sinkage tests who will be the woman?”

“True!” gasped all, as Doone veered the path and sparked his wheels, “there's only us.”

“Never fear!” said Doone. “One of us will pretend to be the poor put-upon maid, maiden, courtesan—”

“Hoor of Babylon?” volunteered Finn.

“And who would that be?”

“You're looking at his backside!” cried Doone, all elusive speed. “Me!”

“You!”

That almost swerved them into multiple collisions. But Doone, fearing this, cried, “And more surprises, if all goes well. Now, by God, on with the brakes. We're here!”

It had been raining, but since it rained all the while, no one had noticed. Now the rain cleared away like a theater curtain, to reveal:

Brannagan's off-the-road-and-into-the-woods pasture, which started in mist, to be lost in fog. “Brannagan's!” Everyone braked to a stillness. “Does it not have an air of the mysterious?” whispered Doone.

“It does,” someone murmured. “Do you dare me to be brave?”

“Do that,” was the vote. “But are you serious, Doone?”

“Jesus,” said Doone. “It'll be no test for judgments and sinkage tests if someone for starters doesn't do more than jog about the territory like mindless bulls. There must be two people making tracks, beyond. Me, playing the woman for sure. And some volunteer amongst you.”

The men inched back on their bike-seats. “Ah, you and your scientific logic will be the death of brewing and the burial of gin,” said Finn.

“But Doone, your verisimilitude, if there is such a word. It'll be hard for us to conjure you up as a female.”

“Why not,” offered Riordan, “go fetch a real lass here? A gal from the nunnery—”

“Nunnery!” cried all, shocked.

“Or one of the wives?” said Doone.

“Wives?” cried all, in worse shock.

And they would have driven him like a spike into the earth, had they not realized he was yanking their legs to steer them crooked.

“Enough!” Finn interjected. “Do we have pencils and paper at hand to align the sums and recall the burial sinks, plot on plot?”

The men muttered.

No one had thought to bring pencil and paper.

“Ah, hell,” groused Riordan. “We'll recall the numerals, back at the pub. Out with you, Doone. In time, a volunteer, playing the male counterpart, will follow.”

“Out it is!” Doone threw down his bike, doused his throat with gargle, and trotted, elbows in a grand rhythm, over the endlessly waiting and terribly damp boneyard of sexual beasts.

“This is the silliest damn thing we ever tried,” said Nolan, tears in his eyes for fear of never seeing Doone again.

“But what a hero!” reasoned Finn. “For would we dare come here with a real crazed female if we did not know the logistics of tug and pull, devastation or survival, love-at-last as against another night of being strangled by our underwear?”

“Aw, put a sock in it!” shouted Doone, far out now, beyond rescue. “Here I go!”

“Further out, Doone!” suggested Nolan.

“Gripes!” cried Doone. “First you say it's a silly damn thing we do, then you instruct me to the land mines! I'm furthering by fits and starts.”

Then suddenly Doone shrieked. “It's an elevator I'm in! I'm going down!”

He gesticulated wildly for balance.

“Off with your coat!” Finn yelled.

“What?”

“Eliminate the handicaps, man!”

“What?”

“Tear off your cap!”

“My cap? Nitwit! What good would that do?”

“Your pants then! Your shoes! You must pretend to get ready for the Grand Affair, with or without rain.”

Doone kept his cap on but yanked his shoes and belabored his coat.

“The test, Doone!” Nolan shouted. “If you do not writhe to remove your shoelaces and untie your tie, we will not know just how fast a maid in the undressing or a man at his mating dance will slide from view. Now we must find is there or is there not time for a consummation devoutly to be wished?”

“Consummation—devoutly—damn!” cried Doone.

And grousing epithets and firing nouns to smoke the air, Doone danced about, flinging off his coat and then his shirt and tie and was on his way to a dropping of the pants and the rising of the moon when a thunderous voice from Heaven or an echo from the mount banged the air like a great anvil somehow fallen to earth.

“What goes on there?” the voice thundered.

They froze, a riot iced by sin.

Doone froze, an art statue on its way to potato deeps.

All time froze and again the pile-driver voice was lifted and plunged to crack their ears. The moon fled behind a fog.

“Just what in hell is going on here?” thundered the voice of Kingdom Come and the Last Judgment.

A dozen heads spun on a dozen necks.

For Father O'Malley stood on a rise in the road, his bike clenched in his vengeful fists, so it looked like his skinny sister, straddled and lost.

For a third time, Father O'Malley tossed the bolt and split the air. “You and you and you! What are you up to?”

“It's not so much up as down to my smalls,” piped Doone in a wee piccolo voice, and added, meekly, “Father—”

“Out, out!” shouted the priest, waving one arm like a scythe. “Away!” he blathered. “Go, go, go. Damn, damn, damn.”

And he harvested the men with maniac gesticulations and eruptions of lava enough to lay a village and bury a blight.

“Out of my sight. Away, the mangy lot of you! Go search your souls, and get your asses to confession six Sundays running and ten years beyond. It's lucky 'twas me came on this calamity and not the Bishop, me and not the sweet morsel nuns from just beyond Meynooth, me and not the child innocents from yonder school. Doone, pull up your socks!”

“They're pulled!” said Doone.

“For one last time, out!” And the men might have scattered but they held to their bikes in deliriums of terror and could only listen.

“Will you tell me now,” intoned the priest, one eye shut to take aim, the other wide to fix the target, “what, what in hell are you up to?”

“Drowning, your lordship, your honor, your reverence.”

And this Doone almost did.

Until the monsignor was gone, that is.

When he heard the holy bike ricket away over the hill, Doone still stood like a chopfallen Lazarus to survey his possible ruination.

But at last he called across the boggy field with a strange frail but growing-more-triumphant-by-the-minute voice:

“Is he gone?”

“He is, Doone,” said Finn.

“Then look upon me,” said Doone.

All looked, then stared, then gaped their mouths.

“You are not sinking,” gasped Nolan. “You have not sunk,” added Riordan.

“I have not!” Doone stomped his foot as if to test, then, secure, he lowered his voice for fear that the priest, though gone, might catch the echo.

“And why not?” he asked the heavens.

“Why, Doone?” was the chorus.

“Because I distilled the rumors and cadged the notions that once on a time, a hundred years back, on this very spot once stood—”

He paused for the drama, then finished the act:

“A church!”

“A church?”

“Good Roman rock on uncertain Irish soil! The beauty of it distilled faith. But the weight of it sank its cornerstone. The priests fled and left the structure, altar and all, so it's on that firm foundation that Doone, your sprinter, holds still. I stand above ground!”

“It's a revelation you've made!” Finn exclaimed.

“I have! And it is here we shall conjugate our verbs and revive our faith in women in all futures, near and far,” announced Doone, way out there on the rainy moss. “But just in case … ”

“In case?”

Doone waved over beyond them.

The men, straddling their bikes, turned.

And on a rise, unseen heretofore, but now half revealed to the sight, some hundred feet away, there appeared two women, not transfigured rose gardens, no, but their homely glances somehow turned fine by night and circumstance.

Short women they were. Not Irish-short but circus-short, carnival-size.

“Midgets!” exclaimed Finn.

“From the vaudeville in Dublin last week!” admitted Doone, out in the bog. “And both weighing half again less than me, should the church roof below suddenly lose its architectural roots and douse the bunch!”

Doone whistled and waved. The tiny maids, the little women, came on the run.

When they reached Doone and did not vanish, Doone called to the mob, “Will you give up your bikes and join the dance?”

There was a mass movement.

“Hold it!” cried Doone. “One at a time. We don't want to meet back at the pub at midnight—”

“And find someone missing?” asked Finn.