(peeling potatoes), “Pat, do you know what it is, I can’t seem to find my cap—my good Sunday police cap, that is.”
“Your good Sunday cap?” replied Pat.
“Aye,” the sergeant nodded, “my good Sunday cap that I wear on special occasions. Like when the superintendent comes, for example.”
Pat shook his head and scratched his chin.
“God, that’s funny,” he replied, “but wait—let me have a look!”
Within moments he had arrived back, exclaiming, “There! I knew I’d seen it behind the chair.”
The sergeant dusted down his hat of harp-badged blue and settled it on his head, remarking, “Sometimes I think you should be the guard, Pat, not me. Sometimes I don’t seem to know whether I’m coming or going.”
Pat smiled and did his best to reassure his policeman lodger.
“Ah, sure, anyone can forget where they put things, Sergeant. We’re all only human, after all.”
The sergeant, gratified, replied, “We are surely! And I suppose you’re more likely to forget it if someone goes and hides it on you, the way a rascal of a youngster might!”
Pat, swallowing, jerked his head back and smiled, a litde uncomfortably.
“Oh now, Sergeant!” he laughed.
“Sure a fellow’d do the like of that, stuff a man’s cap in behind a cistern—who knows where the hell he’d stop?”
“Aye, Sergeant!” Pat fulsomely agreed. “Who’s to know!”
“A fellow’d do that—sure he’d as quick turn around and kill all belonging to him!”
Pat’s reply seemed more distant now.
“I suppose he would,” he ventured, “I expect so, Sergeant.”
“Oh, he would surely!” insisted the sergeant. “His mother even! Mother, neighbors, strangers! All the same to him! Dispatch them into eternity like they were the shite of fleas! The lowest form of life in the world—a sack of good-for-nothing germs! Lives snuffed out without so much as a by your leave!”
Pat chewed his bottom lip for a moment or two before saying, “Without even so much as a good-bye, even, Sergeant!”
The sergeant smacked his fist into his palm.
“Good-bye? Ha! You’d be waiting! But then, of course—a fella like that—there’d have to be something wrong with him, wouldn’t there? There’d have to be a want in him!”
Pat frowned and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“Something wrong with him?” he said. “A want?”
There was a dryness consuming the back of his throat.
“Aye. A bit of trouble up top. You know? I read a book one time. About a fellow—begod if he didn’t go round the house in his mother’s apron. Now, I don’t know much about these things, Pat. But do you know what it said in the book?”
“What? What did it say?”
Pat unconsciously curled the string of his apron around his index Finger.
“It said he wanted to be his mother! Can you believe the like of that? I mean for the love of God—his own mother! There’s only one thing you could say about a fellow that would do the like of that. And do you know what that is?”
Pat found himself swallowing again.
“What, Sergeant?” he said.
There was no mistaking the sergeant’s buoyant grin.
“He has his trousers on the wrong way round!”
The words seemed to leapfrog from Pat’s lips.
“Shut up! “he cried abruptly.
It was as though the sergeant hadn’t heard a word as he proceeded.
“A fellow’d do the like of that, I know how many years he’d spend cooling his heels in the chokey! And it wouldn’t be just twenty-one either! Twenty-one’d be nothing for that!”
“Shut up!” snapped Pat again, with renewed venom. “What do I care how many years he’d spend in the chokey! I don’t care! What do I care how many years he’d spend in the ch—”
“Forty! Or fifty years maybe!” the sergeant cried, almost triumphantly.
“No!” snapped Pat.
“Not twenty-one!” cried the sergeant. “Not twenty-one! Forty! Or fifty! Sixty at the least!”
“Stop saying that! Stop it!” demanded Pat.
The sergeant placed his large hand on his shoulder and said, “Ah, sure, I’m only joking! I’m not that bad, really! A fellow that wants to be his mammy—what he’d want is pity. It’s no good locking a specimen like him away in chokey. It’s a complete waste of time!”
“Yes,” Pat murmured, awkwardly, “I expect it is.”
“For he wouldn’t be worth it!” cried the sergeant. “Far better off giving him a few wee dolls to play with and letting him get on with it!”
The sergeant sighed and said, “Well—I’d best get back. I have a report to write. There was a break-in down at O’Higgins’s sweetshop this morning. Oh, by the way—”
His large hand disappeared into his jacket pocket. When it reappeared, it was clutching a small,