Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles Read online

  Everyone scattered in different directions as I let out one of my famous Ronan Boyle shrieks. A few turns later, I ran dead-end into a gate, which, after a furtive panic, I realized could only be raised from above—by Pat Finch, up in the crow’s nest, with a set of block-and-tackle pulleys like you might see on an old ship.

  “Rhyme time, ya dirty eejit!” Finch shouted at me from above.

  Next to the gate was a bowl filled with cards. I pulled one out and read it. The question written on it was: “How can I marry Margaret—you know she’s made of concrete and marzipan?”

  I could hear the friendly pigs just a few turns behind me. The upbeat snorting and thumping of hooves was intense. Up above, Pat Finch fired off a starter pistol—not to symbolize the start of anything, just to add to the chaos.

  I had already forgotten the question. I had to reread it, wasting precious seconds. Three of the pigs rounded the corner straight toward me. They were so close, I could feel their hot breath. The largest, cutest one of them got a bite of a belt apple and pulled me down. Their friendliness was overwhelming. I pounded on the gate.

  “Finch, please!” I cried.

  But Pat Finch was now tuning up his bagpipes. If you don’t love bagpipes, you really won’t love the sound of them being tuned up. Between the blaring pipes, the pig snorts, and my adrenaline pumping, the Pig Maze was now an absolute disaster on all fronts.

  Without thinking, I blurted out the best rhyme I could come up with to match the question on the card: “Come on, let’s play some darts, quick. I’m going to use my bare feet if I can.”

  Up in the nest, Pat Finch rang a bell, which meant that my rhyme was sufficient. He pulled a lever, and the gate popped open. I dove through to the other side. The gate snapped down behind me, and I could hear the wonderful pigs bumping against it and then doubling back to hunt me down again. I remembered something somebody once said about always going left in a maze to find your way out. I can’t say if this is true or not, as after six or so left turns I was still very stuck. I finally encountered Log and Dermot running toward me, the full complement of cheerful pigs right behind them.

  At this point I wondered: Where was Tim the Medium-Sized Bear? He hardly ever showed up for classes, and in the maze he could have been a real asset.

  It was a hundred meters to the next gate. Up above, Pat Finch was attempting to play “Sweet Child o’ Mine” on the bagpipes, and it sounded like a cat being declawed inside a set of bagpipes. We reached the gate, and Log grabbed a card, studying it for a long time.

  “What does it say? Hurry, Log! Please!” I yelled. “Whatever you’ve got!”

  “Sorry, lads, I forgot that I can’t read human. No wonder I never pass these classes,” said Log, shrugging and handing me the card.

  I read it aloud. It was an obscure question that surely has never been uttered by a real person in English. It read: “When is the rent due for your pied-à-terre?”

  Above us, Pat Finch fired off a few more shots from the starter pistol and then bagpiped like someone who had not made a deal with the devil. The pigs closed in on Dermot Lally, knocking him down and swarming him with their affection. They licked his face and devoured every last one of his belt apples.

  Glancing at the card, I yelped out, “Let’s glue some tin cans to Fred’s derrière!”

  Derrière means bottom.5 It was a tacky rhyme, obviously, and I’m not proud of it, but Dermot was about to be snuggled to death, so I took a chance. Finch considered the rhyme for longer than seemed fair, then rang the bell and pulled the lever.

  I pushed Log out the gate and yanked Dermot through behind me. We had made it out the other side of the maze. Dan the Troll slammed the bolt to the wooden gate, sealing off the ever-so-friendly pigs.

  Dermot and I tumbled to the ground, laughing, and I felt for certain that he and I would now be mates. He hoisted me up and tossed me in the air like a baby, which was odd and, honestly, somewhat fun. I thoroughly enjoyed the moment, right up until he clapped me on the back and said, “Thanks, Little Rick—you’re a champ.”

  Again, I have no idea why he thinks my name is Little Rick, other than the letter R having a leading role in both.

  Wise Young Jim, our Practices of Irish and Faerie Law teacher, started each of his classes with the Recruit’s Pledge, which was too vague to remember but has something to do with not being afraid of six types of rain, and then you have to do a burp at the end of it.

  “When I was your age, a millennium and a half ago, nobody just handed us careers like they do now,” said Young Jim to us in his seemingly endless first lecture, which was mostly his own life story. “I could have been an actor in Tir Na Nog, but that racket is all about who you know. Not talent. ‘Kiss up to the big shots, Young Jim,’ ‘Make sure you mingle with the casting agents, Young Jim,’ ‘Send out solstice presents with your new headshots on them, Young Jim.’ Nowadays you can just film yerself doing jumping jacks in yer knickers on a mobile phone, and next day you’re a household name! Fie!!!”

  Wise Young Jim’s lecture was so epically dull that, fortyish minutes in, even he fell asleep, quietly face-planting into the wheelbarrow that transports his beard. Log quietly piled up some extra beard around him, like tucking a baby bird into a nest, motioning for us to sneak out after her.

  As Collins House turned back into a picnic table, Log led us south through the forest toward the Upper Lake. Tim the Medium-Sized Bear was accompanying us, or perhaps he was just following us. It’s hard to tell with him sometimes.

  “Who wants to play hide-and-seek?” asked Log in a low chuckle. For some reason Log can make a sentence this innocent sound mischievous.

  “Sure,” I replied, unaware that Log only plays the leprechaun version of hide-and-seek, which is epic.

  Dermot Lally was declared “it,” and Log grabbed my hand and ran with me while Dermot counted to thirty-four-hundred (leprechaun rules). I thought for sure we were about to be busted, as Sergeant O’Brien trotted toward us in the form of a fox, but it turned out to be an actual fox. Log consulted with her in the language of the animals, then led us up a stream to cover our scent. We must have run for three kilometers. Then Log painstakingly crafted two life-sized dummies of us out of sticks and hay. She then marked the dummies with a small jar of fox urine she had purchased from the fox to further confuse anyone seeking us. At the bank of a stream, she showed me how to become invisible just using mud and leaves. We slopped the mud all over us until nothing but our eyes were visible. Then we rolled in the leaves, closed our eyes, and crouched in the embankment.

  Twelve hours passed.

  Neither Dermot nor Tim the Medium-Sized Bear ever found us. Log laughed hard, as this meant that we had won! Sure. We had won?

  I had a nose blocked with mud and could not feel either of my legs. Back at Collins House that morning, even the huevos rancheros in the astonishingly bad cafeteria tasted good to me.

  Tin Whistle for Beginners is by far the hardest class at Collins House. The instructor is recognizable as one of the Clancy Brothers, or maybe he is a dead ringer for one of the Clancy Brothers. Or possibly Spider Stacy from the Pogues. He definitely has an interesting hat, and I’m certain I know his face from somewhere. Unfortunately, I had taken a bad fall on the Butter Wall and was out with a sprained neck on the first day of class and never caught his name. Any questions in his class must be posed using the tin whistle, so I was never able to ask his name, as that would be a very advanced question for a beginner. Now it’s ages later and feels inappropriate to ask his name—it would just be so embarrassing for both of us. In the halls of Collins House, I simply say, “Hello, guy” whenever I see him, and he points and says, “There’s a fellow,” and this vague repartee seems to suffice for us. He can certainly play a tin whistle like a madman, whoever he is. It may come to me in a moment.

  * * *

  1 Elevator.

  2 Noobster is the slang term for new recruits.

  3 The Special Unit has more stringent smelling t
ests than vision tests—oftentimes even a hawk can’t see the wee folk, as they are so quick, but you can almost always smell them.

  4 Hello. Finbar Dowd, Deputy Commissioner here in the footnotes. This is one of my rare appearances in Ronan Boyle’s diaries, which is surprising, as I am a major figure in the Special Unit and well-liked at Collins House.

  5 Bottom means butt.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EXAMS

  Week twelve of the training program is exams and happened to fall right before the Faerie New Year.1

  In Tin Whistle for Beginners, we were required to play questions or statements that we pulled at random from the interesting hat of the instructor whose name escapes me. The one I had to play was “Let me go; I have other humans who will come looking for me if I don’t report in on the hour.” This is a massive sentence to play, especially if, like Ronan Boyle, you have not been practicing. It felt particularly unfair, as some trainees, like the all-around teacher’s pet and dreamboat Dermot Lally, were lucky enough to get “Good morning!” which is just three notes.

  The idea of having to use this sentence in the Undernog made me a bit uneasy. What on earth is happening down there? According to my test results, I actually played the statement: “Hold on to my foot; I’m going to frighten the mayor.” I received a D-minus, which is the lowest passing grade, and that was only because my tone was “decent.”

  Yogi Hansra’s exam never came, which was the most surprising thing she could do, and a perfect example of her method. When anyone asked when we were to be tested, her response was “When you least expect it.”

  Tim the Medium-Sized Bear was absent for the entire week of exams. When I asked about it, everyone just shrugged, which is part of my theory that Tim the Medium-Sized Bear was never a trainee at all—just a regular bear that wandered into Collins House and settled into one of the cots. Neither Sergeant O’Brien nor Captain de Valera seemed to even be aware of any bear trainee, which also supports this “random bear” theory. I asked Log about it, because she and Tim seemed close, but she just giggled, because she is slightly insane.

  Graduation day is a twenty-four-hour event at the house called Torture Tuesday. The trainees do not sleep and are given grueling final tests by Sergeant O’Brien. Luckily for me, she was in the form of a goat for my finals, which happens to be her most pleasant manifestation. Other than her chewing on my jumpsuit a bit, I did well and got out of the Pig Maze and up the Butter Wall in record time.

  Shockingly, Log passed all of her exams on this, her fifth attempt. When she heard the news that she’d made cadet, she threw her arms around me and wept. It was a rare tender moment from the otherwise tough-as-nails Log MacDougal.

  “I wish me wee little mum and tiny da could see me now,” said Log with tears rolling down the broken zigzag of her nose and off the side of her face, which is the direction her nose points.

  “Well, I’m here, and I’m proud of you, Log,” I said as I held her and rocked her gently until I started to see stars, then blacked out completely. Log has the strength of a chimpanzee, and she had accidentally hugged me into a brief coma. This happens sometimes.

  We were sent to collect our new uniforms in the Supply and Weapons Department from pale Gary and Dan the Troll. Dan the Troll was leaving, as he had served his time and been paroled.2

  The cadet uniform is an olive houndstooth tweed and Kevlar jacket with black knee-length pants and whack guards that run from the shoe up to the knee. The jacket has a thick leather patch to protect the shoulder when flipping your shillelagh on and off and a belt with extra slots for the poetry notebook and the three weaponized whiskeys that cadets must carry. There is also an optional beret that I happen to like very much. With the accessory belt, the whole thing costs 280 euros, but it also comes with terrible complimentary socks that refuse to stay up. The new outfit was fun to wear and looked especially good on Dermot Lally, as his white eye patch can pull whole ensembles together. Somehow Dermot’s version of the outfit included a scarf—which is neither allowed nor available in the S&W Department. This was puzzling and maddening.

  That night was the graduation céilí, which is held outdoors with all ranks of the Special Unit and is a fine time indeed. Log looked striking in her cadet uniform, her massive biceps almost popping through the tweed. Many toasts were made, and a brief tribute was held for the late, hilarious Brian Bean, the trainee who had perished on Frolic Day and whose ghost had been seen haunting Collins House on three separate occasions, still doing voices and impressions. The living Brian Bean had been a riot, but when I later encountered his ghost in the library doing an impression of the singer Nicki Minaj, it was a vision so horrifying that I knew I could never unsee it.

  “Boy toy named Troy used to live in Detroit,” Brian’s ghost rapped at me, in the absolutely perfect voice of Nicki Minaj.

  “Oh. Hey, Brian,” I said politely, but really wishing he’d let me get back to my book. “Great seeing you, mate. I wish we could hang out and I didn’t have all this recreational reading looming over me.” I rubbed my temples with a pretend headache.

  “Oh, sure. Cheers, Ronan,” said Brian’s ghost as he twerked away.

  The following day was a faerie folk holiday recognized by the Special Unit called Queensday. Queensday is a touchy subject at Collins House, as it celebrates the famous Leprechaun Queen called Moira with the World’s Most Interesting Forehead. Queen Moira herself was one foot, two inches tall, and her forehead was famous for being not all that interesting. She had a firm stance that the wee folk should make all humans into sausages and annex Ireland as a suburb of Tir Na Nog. Obviously, this is a hot-button issue, as Queen Moira’s politics are not very popular with the human crowd, but she is a superstar in leprechaun history. At some point, everyone decided to let the wee folk have their day to celebrate her and not make a thing out of it. Either way, the Special Unit has the day off.

  I took the train into Cork and then changed on to Dublin to visit my folks at the Joy. I brought Mum and Da falafel sandwiches from the Cafe Oasis, not too far from the prison, and after they were smashed, inspected, taken apart, and then put back together at the security checkpoint, we sat and ate them, catching up.3

  I showed off my new uniform to Mum and Da, twirling an imaginary shillelagh, since mine was being held at the guard’s desk.

  I told my folks of my recruitment to the Special Unit, and they oohed and hmmmmed with great interest.

  “The Garda of Tir Na Nog! Brilliant! Who ever knew of such a thing?” said Mum.

  “I always thought the wee folk were made up. The folks that put candy in your shoes?” said Da.

  “I used to think that, too.” I nodded. “But far from it. I’m not some Galway Garda intern anymore. Maybe my position could even help me find the Bog Man.”

  “Oh, bless you, Ronan. You look like a superhero!” said Mum, squeezing me.

  “You think, Fiona?” asked Da, his eyes locked on the complimentary socks that never stay up. “I mean . . . of course he does, such a strapping lad. And the beret almost works!”

  Nobody who’s ever met me would call me “strapping,” but compared to my da, I actually am. And there’s nothing he or anybody could say to make me doubt the beret. I love it.

  We sat at a metal table under the lights that make everyone look seasick, and I told them about the remarkable last twelve weeks of my life. About Collins House and how it’s sometimes a picnic table. About my classes and about Log, Dermot, and Tim the Medium-Sized Bear, while their eyes cycled through various phases of shock and disbelief.

  “He sounds like a pretty big bear,” said Da.

  “No, trust me,” I said. “He’s very much medium-sized.”

  When we had finished our falafels, I laid out my progress in their legal troubles.

  “Good news—I’ve written to the judge, who has assured me that the case will not be reopened unless there is a major new piece of evidence,” I told them with excitement.

  “But that’s terrib
le news, Ronan,” said Mum.

  “I don’t think we’re likely to find much new evidence,” added Da.

  “Oh, I think we will—or rather, I will,” I said with a sly smile. “Because I’ve got a plan. A plan that goes in motion this very night.”

  “Oh, bless you!” said Mum, tears welling up in her eyes. “I’d tell you to be careful and not to meddle in all of this, but honestly, two years here in the Joy has taken a real toll on your father and me. We need to tell him, Brendan.”

  Their faces got quite serious as they took each other’s hands.

  “We didn’t know when to tell you this, so I’ll just say it: Your mother and I have had to join two different gangs,” said Da.

  “It’s just for protection purposes, but I’m in the Hutch Gang, and your father is in the Kinahans,” said Mum.

  “Mum and I are fine—in fact, as much in love as ever. But the gangs are mortal enemies. Kinahans run the prison with an iron fist. We take no guff, especially from the dimwit planks in the Hutch Gang,” said Da.

  “Actually, Ronan, Hutch Gang is number one. Kinahans are a bunch of cabbages who better watch their mouths, or else,” said my mum, a former museum curator and one of the most polite people I’ve ever met, pulling her finger across her neck in a threatening manner.

  “Again, it’s mostly for protection, Ronan,” said Da.

  “But there’s a social aspect. The camaraderie and all. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was a wee bit of fun, knowing I’m in the top gang in the Joy,” giggled Mum.

  “Now, now, Fiona. Hutch Gang is a bunch of knobs who are gonna get their clocks cleaned if they don’t mind their step,” said Da, forming his fingers into a letter K, which was clearly the gang sign for the Kinahan Gang.