Free Falling Read Online Free PDF Page B

happen,” she said, feeling the girth on Dan to see if it was tight enough.
    They trotted down the one-lane country road lined with rhododendron, Scotch broom and hazel. They rode without seeing another soul.
    “How long do you think we’ll be stuck here?” Sarah said.  
    “I don’t know,” David said, clicking to his horse. “Maybe a few months. Maybe longer.”
    “You think we’ll be home by Christmas?”
    “I have no idea,” he said. “I hope so.” He trotted his horse away from her to catch up to John.
    Sarah watched them both on the road ahead of her. Her spine stiffened, which slowed her horse. Not be home before Christmas? Was that possible? Her mind raced to remember all the appointments in the next few months back home that would have to be rescheduled, all the bills that would go unpaid. Would they lose the house? Was the house still there? Instead of relaxing, as it seemed David (who had actually begun to hum ) was beginning to do, Sarah felt the worry and anguish overcome her. Within minutes, her thoughts turned to the specific, incapacitating anxiety that hovered just beneath the surface of her every waking moment: what had happened back home? Were her parents still alive? As her son and husband rode ahead of her, oblivious, Sarah began to sob silently into the one hand that wasn’t clutching her horse’s mane for dear life.
     
     
    Mack Finn sat in a plastic lawn chair outside the broken down caravan, a small pile of cigarette butts at his feet. His hands rested on his knees as he stared out across the scrubby Irish landscape.  How strange that the world could look so totally different, he marveled, from one day to the next. Just yesterday, his bastard old uncle had physically thrown him into that bush just beyond his favorite pissing spot, and now the old sot was lying there himself, nearly but not quite buried beneath a quarter foot of muck and mud and weeds.
    And wasn’t it Mack Finn, himself, who had put the old tosser there?
    He heard the soft sound of crunching gravel just over his left shoulder as someone approached from the rear. He waited.
    “Oy, Mack.” The young boy stood near the end of the trailer, as if afraid to directly confront Finn.
    Finn lazily beckoned to him to approach. He didn’t take his eyes off the brown and grey landscape of the Irish autumn. He didn’t look at the faltering, approaching boy.
    “Dee-Dee says to ask ya what we’re to eat,” the boy mumbled, rubbing his dirty hands up in down his jeans in a nervous tic.
    Finn could smell the boy’s fear and he smiled to himself.  With Uncle Liam gone, he thought with satisfaction, they’ll all be afraid of him now.
    The eldest of five children in a poor gypsy family that once numbered in the hundreds, Finn felt the rank of protector and guardian of the flock which had finally, belatedly, come to him. Proud of the fact that he had left school at eleven— been forced to when he was caught trying to root that daft scanger in the class behind his —Finn grew up rough and he grew up ready. No one had given him a break. No one had given him a hand. Now, at twenty-two, he’d already spent seven years in an English prison learning more than school could ever teach him.
    Finn leaned back into the chair and listened for the songbirds in the trees surrounding the old trailer. They sounded particularly sweet this morning, he decided. As if they knew that a better new world was coming. A world that was uninterested in rules or laws or should or musts. A world that belonged to the strong and the fearless. Finn smiled to himself, enjoying the sun on his face and the birdsongs.
    Life may have come apart at the seams for everyone else. But for Mack Finn, it had just come together.
     
     

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
    An hour into the ride, Sarah knew that the horses were docile and well mannered. Even though David and John had much less riding experience than she did, they both had found their seats and rode as if they had