Read Online Creatures of the Earth by John McGahern - Free Book Online Page B

them.’
    â€˜I don’t want.’
    â€˜Have it your own way, so,’ he said, and as he took the rule to measure Lavin I left and waited outside. He soon followed.
    â€˜Why did you do it?’ I attacked immediately.
    â€˜Oh, I like to take a hand at old John every now and then and get him all worked up,’ he said casually.
    â€˜Why did you let him fool around with you?’
    â€˜What does it matter? It gets him all worked up.’
    â€˜It’s disgusting,’ I said, disturbed by feelings that had never touched me so fiercely before.
    â€˜Oh, what does it matter? He’ll soon be in the poorhouse. Why don’t we go for a swim?’
    I walked in sullen silence by his side across the bridge. I wanted to swim with him but I wanted to reject him, and in my heart I hated him. I calmed as we walked. At the boathouse I helped him lift someone’s night line. It had no fish though the hooks had been cleaned of bait. We started to talk again as we went to where the high whitethorns shielded the river from the road. We stripped on the bank and swam and afterwards lay on the warm moss watching the bream shoal out beyond the reeds, their black fins moving sluggishly above the calm surface, white gleam of the bellies as they slowly rolled, until harness bells sounded on the road behind the whitethorns.
    At the iron gate, where the whitethorns ended, two gypsy caravans and a spring cart came into our view. The little round curtained window in the back glittered in the sun, and two dogs roped to the axle trotted, heads low, mechanically, between thered wheels. Now and then a whip cracked above the horses’ heads into the jingling of the harness bells.
    â€˜Do you think Lavin did what he was supposed to do to the gypsy girl?’ I asked.
    â€˜He’d hardly have to pay with the farm if he didn’t,’ Casey answered with quiet logic. The image of the monstrous penis being driven deep into the struggling gypsy girl made me shiver with excitement.
    â€˜It’d be good if we had two caravans, you and me, like the caravans gone past. You and me would live in one caravan. We’d keep four women in the other. We’d ride around Ireland. We’d make them do anything we’d want to.’ If Casey had been more forward with Lavin early on, I was leading now.
    â€˜It’d be great,’ he answered.
    â€˜They’d strip the minute we said strip. If they didn’t we’d whip them. We’d whip them with those whips that have bits of metal on the ends. We’d whip them until the blood came and they’d to put arms round our knees for mercy.’
    â€˜Yes, we’d make them get down on their hands and knees, naked, and do them from behind the way the bull does,’ Casey said, and dived sideways to seize a frog in the grass. He took a dried stem of reed and began to insert it in the frog. ‘That’s what’ll tickle him, I’m telling you.’
    â€˜Why couldn’t we do it together?’ I tentatively asked, stiff with excitement. He understood at once.
    â€˜I’ll do it to you first,’ he said, the dead reed sticking out of the frog in his hand, ‘and then you’ll do it to me.’
    â€˜Why don’t you let me do it to you first, and then you can have as long as you like on me?’
    â€˜No.’
    The fear was unspoken: whoever took his pleasure first would have the other in his power and then might not surrender his own body. We avoided each other’s eyes. I watched the dead reed being moved in and out of the frog.
    â€˜They say it hurts,’ I said. There was relief now of not having to go through with it.
    â€˜It’d probably hurt too much.’ Charley Casey was eager to agree. ‘It’d be better to get two women and hurt them. They say a frog can live only so long under water.’
    â€˜Why don’t we see?’
    I found a stone along the bank and we tied one of the