~ Making Tracks ~

by

Trisha FitzGerald-Petri

Mick Flannery had been up since the break of dawn. He hated Mondays. For him, every day was a working day, but Mondays were the absolute pits. He flicked on the battered transistor radio he’d attached to the frame of the tractor cab with a piece of wire. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hear much above the wheezings and fartings of the old engine, but every now and then Mick would get snippets of news or the latest hurling results.

He was in a filthy humour. Lismanor had flogged the livin’ daylights out of Kilgrange at the home match the day before and, as one of their most avid supporters, Mick was still suffering the agonies of bitter defeat. He pulled deeply on the cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth. Those feckers! He couldn’t remember seeing that much foul play in one match since Roscregg swindled their way to victory over Mountquin in the last season. Needless to say, Mountquin had done its own fair share of knacker-bashing and eye-elbowing, but for Mick that was merely bending the rules a tick, not breaking them. Mick cackled to himself. One consolation anyhow, that sheep-shagger, Tony Flynn, would be nursing his balls today, that’s for sure!

He glanced at his watch. Better get a move on if I want to be home for dinner, he thought bleakly, remembering that he had yet to repair the hose leading across the Flaggy Meadow to the trough, check that none of the cows had wandered into the boggy ditch overnight, and stack the pile of used tires at the back of the silage pit. He didn’t want his farm to end up looking like P.J. Lally’s, with the carcasses of gutted vehicles in the corner of every field and empty fertiliser bags floating around in the slurry.

He took another suck on the cigarette, not noticing that he was well into the filter. I hope those new age itinerants--or whatever you call them--haven’t put soap in the cattle trough, he reflected. I’ll set their horse-drawn whoring-nests alight, if they have!

On Friday afternoon he’d been confident Kilgrange would beat the hell out of Lismanor and was in a sanguine frame of mind when the tinker with the German accent had asked if they could park their caravans in his field for a night or two. After the unmitigated cock-up made of the match on Sunday, he’d immediately regretted his philanthropic gesture, and was pretty damn certain he would find a rubbish dump where the Flaggy Meadow used to be.

The tractor puttered past the old water pump on its way to the field, belching in protest whenever Mick tipped the accelerator. He had tuned into an oldies program and every time he slowed at a curve, snatches of Joe Dolan and the Drifters could be heard crackling out over the airways. Straining to see over the hedge as he approached, Mick relaxed somewhat when, through a gap in the hazel bushes, he saw that they had, indeed, left the day before, as promised. I’ll have the Garda up here in a flash, if I find as much as a paper hanky hanging in the bushes, he thought, his neck stretched like a turkey’s in order to get a better look. He steered the tractor in through the small opening to the meadow.

He was almost disappointed to find they’d left the place spick-and-span. The bonfire place had been carefully covered with loose earth and, to his astonishment, the horse droppings removed. He zigzagged across the small field. Not a matchstick, not a chewing gum paper, not even the telltale Kleenex peeping out from under a stone--nothing! Pity, he badly needed something to gripe about. He was just heaving himself up into the tractor cab when he spotted the rusty old Mazda half hidden between the hedge of hazel bushes and a scramble of hawthorn. What the hell...? He couldn’t remember any of them having a car. He got down again and glanced around, half expecting to see someone squatting in the briars, the call of nature having caught them on the hop. In the tangle of greenery surrounding the meadow only the odd chaffinch voiced its presence--there was no one to be seen. After one last pull, Mick spat the cigarette butt into the bushes and stalked over to the abandoned vehicle. Hardly midday, heat was already rippling up from the dull metal surface; the air was unusually still. He tugged at the door handle before peering through the window, but saw nothing which might give him a clue as to who the owner was. Straightening up, Mick lifted his hat and scratched his head. A crow squawked overhead causing the farmer’s heart to skitter. Disgruntled, he cautiously circled the car, shaking his head at the damage and rust. He was just turning to leave when he noticed the smell of burnt rubber. Automatically he looked over at the old tractor, the stink being all too familiar, but then realised it was coming from the Mazda.

“Bloody hippies!” Mick exclaimed to the heavens. Someone had gone and dumped their broken down heap of scrap in his meadow. There was no way he was going to let them get away with that. There was going to be hell to pay!

“And bloody stupid hippies to boot!” he guffawed suddenly, taking out the pencil stub he kept in his shirt pocket for emergencies. With the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration, he carefully jotted down the registration number on the back of a receipt from Christy’s hardware shop.

“I have ye now!” He kicked the back wheel derisively, sending a glob of cow dung flying off the toe of his Wellington boot. He rubbed his hands together, hardly able to contain his excitement at the thought of ringing up the Garda barracks and really stirring up the shit. He swung up onto the tractor. The hose, the cows and the pile of used tires were forgotten.

Not bothering to drive all the way back to the farmhouse, Mick pulled the tractor up outside the pay phone at the crossroads and fished around for some coins. He knew the lads down at the station--only last week they’d been complaining about how the County Council were on their backs about the “Keep Our County Clean” campaign. They were to put the pressure on polluters. Well, good old Mick Flannery was going to hand them one on a plate. At that moment the oil was probably trickling out of the Mazda and down into the ground water.

Garda Duggan picked up the phone.

“Kilgrange Garda Station, good morning.”

“John, is it yerself? Mick Flannery here.”

“Mick! How’s it goin’, chief? I heard our lads took a real clobbering up in Lismanor yesterday.”

“Jaysus, will ya not be reminding me! They made a right dog’s dinner of it all right. Listen... have ya got a minute?”

“Depends... What’s the problem? If you’re goin’ to complain about P.J. Lally’s donkey again, forget it. I told ya, unless it takes a chunk out of yer arse, there’s nothin’ I can do. I can’t have the beast put down for nibbling at the seat of yer trousers!”

“No, no, this is somethin’ else.” Mick got right to the point. “Some shagger has gone and dumped his wrecked car in my field. I wouldn’t mind if it was at the side of the road, but it’s hidden nicely in the hawthorn. It doesn’t look as if anyone will be back to pick it up.”

He could hear Garda Duggan clicking his biro at the other end of the line.

“Hmm... sounds a bit odd all right--where exactly did ya say it was?”

“In the Flaggy Meadow, down past the old water pump--are ya comin’ over?”

“Well, I can’t do much straight away... Maybe it’s been stolen--what kind of a car is it anyway?”

“An old Mazda, blue, no front bumper--sure don’t I have the registration number an’ all.”

“Yer coddin’!” He paused for a moment. “I hope there hasn’t been any foul play.”

“What d’ya mean ‘foul play’--are we talkin’ about the hurling match or what?”

“No, ya gobshite--I mean, what’s the car doin’ down that lane in the first place. It isn’t exactly the Naas dual carriageway--as far as I know, it ends in P.J. Lally’s back yard.”

Mick sensed the Sherlock Holmes in Garda Duggan working its way up to the surface. He jumped at the chance.

“You have a point there. Look, this could be somethin’ serious. Why don’t you come over straight away? Nora will put the kettle on for a cup of tea.”

“Well, let me see... It just might be better to have a look before I ring up the registration office. The Flaggy Meadow, you say?”

“There’ll be warm scones straight out of the oven and fresh raspberry jam waiting on the kitchen table.”

“I’ll be over in twenty minutes.”

“Right y’are!”

Mick quickly hung up and leapt onto the tractor, hoping to get over to the shop at Kearney’s corner in time to buy some brown scones and throw them onto the range before Duggan arrived. He revved the engine and hurtled off.

~ * ~

An hour later Mick and Garda Duggan were standing beside the Mazda hypothesising deeply as to the whereabouts of the driver. They had dropped to their knees to investigate the underside and established that the locals wouldn’t be forced to drink nothing but Guinness and milk as a result of groundwater contamination.

“More’s the pity,” Mick had mumbled under his breath.

Duggan patted his stomach and suppressed a belch. You couldn’t beat fresh, homemade brown scones.

“Well, as I suspected, there’s nothin’ I can do. I’ll get back to the patrol car and give Galway a call. We’ll find the owner and get it towed away. I’ll let you know if...”

He was gazing blankly into the car as he spoke when suddenly his eyes focused sharply on one or two items he found disturbing. He stopped mid-sentence. One was a nail file lying in the compartment between the two front seats. The other was a lipstick on the dashboard. A woman’s car. That shed a whole new light on the matter. Not that a woman would be much less likely to dump a car than a man, but the abandoned car of a lady driver with the lipstick still lying on the dashboard made Garda Duggan uneasy. His wife had had her own wee car for the last five years, so he knew exactly what he’d find in the glove compartment if he broke the Mazda open: scrunched up chocolate bar wrappers and a couple of emergency Tampax. He also knew that every time his wife took the car in for repairs, she made a big song and dance about clearing out her personal things. “Lookin’ into my car is like lookin’ into my handbag, and I wouldn’t like strangers lookin’ into my handbag!”

Foul play.

He walked around the car once more, this time keeping his eyes peeled for anything which seemed out of place: signs of a struggle, flattened grass caused by something heavy being dragged away, broken twigs on the hawthorn bushes. The hawthorn bushes. Mother of God! Could there be something hidden in there? Something he couldn’t bear to see and certainly not on a stomach full of fresh doughy brown scones and raspberry jam.

Garda Duggan sniffed the air. “How long has the car been here?”

Mick ruffled his eyebrows. “No idea. Come to think of it, I haven’t been down here since Friday. Let me see, there was the mart on Saturday, I was up in Athenry yesterday. I suppose it could have been dumped anytime after Friday afternoon.” Then, after a moment’s detective brainwork, “It can’t be much longer than that, you can still smell the rubber.”

The Garda sniffed again, his nose twitching like a squirrel’s. Burnt rubber was all he could smell at the moment, thanks be to God! No, he decided, if there’s a stiff in the undergrowth, I wouldn’t be allowed to touch it anyway. That’s a job for the state forensic pathologist and Detective Inspector Maloney. If the truth be known, Duggan wasn’t terribly sure he’d keep the scones down if he did stumble across something nasty. He’d never hear the last of it if Mick Flannery, who’d dealt with hundred of dead and rotting animal carcasses in his life, caught him succumbing to a violent attack of projectile vomiting. No, I’ll check with Galway first.

Mick was standing behind the car smoking a cigarette, holding it pointing into the palm of his hand with the tip of his index finger and thumb. The callused fingers were stained with nicotine.

“What’s that?” He nodded towards the rear bumper.

“What’s what?” Garda Duggan had been peering into the briars, lost in thought.

Mick bent forward to get a better look. “There’s something stuck in the bumper. Will I--?”

“Don’t touch it!” Duggan barked, making Mick jump out of his skin. “Leave it to me!”

The baffled farmer backed off, surprised by the change in the Garda’s voice. He watched as Duggan took a biro out of his shirt pocket and poked around at the back of the car, trying to detach something which had got caught up between the boot and the loose rear bumper. He stood up and raised the pen for Mick to see.

“And what does that look like to you, Mr. Watson?”

“Unless I’m greatly mistaken, I would say it looked like a plastic Bank of Ireland biro with a key ring and a couple of keys hangin’ from it.”

“Car keys, to be exact! And that there, is a plastic photo holder--complete with photographs.” He jutted his chin at the trophy. “Not the kind of thing you leave behind when you dump your car.”

Still holding the key ring in front of his nose, he stepped back and studied the rear of the vehicle. He looked up to the roof, down to the bumper and then back up again. He began to nod his head slowly, like someone listening to a lecture--someone who doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the speaker is talking about.

“Hmm... It looks as if the keys slid off the roof of the car. Whoever it was, they left in a hurry, or were very confused--or both.”

He swivelled the pen around in order to get a better look at the photograph holder. On one side, a man in his early forties--about the same age as himself. This man’s hair, however, contrary to the few greying strands combed strategically across his own bald patch, was thick and dark. Good-looking bloke. On the other side a young girl scowled out at him--about thirteen, fourteen--maybe more. You could never tell these days. She had a pale complexion and wavy, chestnut-coloured hair, tinged with auburn. Pretty girl, he thought, pity she wouldn’t smile for the camera. Probably wearing a brace. Husband and daughter? Are they wondering at this moment where wife and mother is?