“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 veer
ed 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.