Bridge of Clay(108)

Henry said, “Got any dog bags?”

All of us laughed on the footpath.

What always gets me hardest is the memory of Malcolm Sweeney, crying silently by his fence line, as we walked the mule slowly away. He’d wiped at the yeast of his cheeks, and ran a hand through his frosted hair. He was moist and the color of khaki; a sad old fat man, and beautiful.

    And then just simply the sound of it:

The hooves clopping over the streets.

Everything around us was urban—the road, the streetlights, the traffic; the shouts that flew right past us, from revelers out all night—and between it the rhythm of mules’ feet, as we walked him over pedestrian crossings, and crossed the empty Kingsway. We negotiated one long footbridge, and the patches of dark and streetlights: Henry and me on one side.

Tommy and Clay on the other.

And you could set your watch to those hoofbeats, too, and your life to the hand of Tommy—as he led the mule fondly home, to the months and the girl to come.





So this is what happened:

They’d broken the unwritten rules.

There was the feel of her naked legs.

He remembered the laid-down length of her, and the plastic mound beside them; and how she moved and gently bit him. And the way she’d pulled him down.

“Come here, Clay.”

He remembered.

“Use your teeth. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt me.”

He remembered how at just past three a.m. they left, and at home, Clay lay awake, then headed for Central Station.

Back to the bridge and Silver.

Carey, of course, went to trackwork, where in the dawn, the old stager, War of the Roses, returned from the inside training track—but returned without his rider.

She’d fallen on the back straight.

The sun was cold and pallid.

The sky of the city was quiet.

The girl lay face turned sideways, and everyone started running.



* * *



—

At the Amahnu, in Silver, when I told him, Clay broke wildly away. He ran raggedly up the river.

    God, the light here was so long, and I watched him clear to the tree line, till he vanished into the stones.

My father looked at me numbly; so sad but also lovingly.

When he attempted to follow, I touched him.

I touched and I held his arm.

“No,” I said, “we should trust him.”

The Murderer became the Murdered. “What if—”

“No.”

I didn’t know all I needed to know, but with Clay I was sure of his choices; right now he would choose to suffer.

We agreed we should wait an hour.



* * *



—

In the trees up high in the riverbed, he kneeled against its steepness—his lungs two treasure chests of death.

He wept there, uncontrollably.

That thing he heard outside himself, at last, he could tell, was his voice.

The trees, those stones, the insects: Everything slowed, then stopped.

He thought of McAndrew, and Catherine. Trackwork Ted. He knew he would have to tell them. He’d confess it was all his fault—because girls just didn’t disappear like this, they didn’t fail without someone making them. Carey Novacs didn’t just die, it was boys like him who made them.

He thought of the fifteen freckles.

The shapes and glimpse of sea glass.

A sixteenth one on her neck.

She’d talked to him; she knew him. She’d linked her arm through his. And sometimes she’d called him an idiot…and he remembered that slight smell of sweat, and the itch of her hair on his throat—her taste was still in his mouth. He knew that if he searched himself, down near the bone of his hip, her imprint was bitten, and visible; it remained as a hidden reminder, of someone, and something, outlived.

The clear-eyed Carey was dead.



* * *



—

    As the air grew cool, and Clay felt cold, he prayed for rain and violence.

The drowning of the steep Amahnu.

But the dry and its quietness held him, and he kneeled like just more debris; like a boy washed up, upstream.





You had to give it to the young Carey Novac.

She had a healthy sense of resolve.

Despite her mum and dad resigning themselves to the fact that their sons would be jockeys, they denied the ambition in her. When she talked about it, they only said, “No.” In no uncertain terms.

In spite of this, when she was eleven years old, she started writing letters to a particular horse trainer, in the city, at least two or three times a month. At first she was asking for information, on how best to become a jockey, even if she already knew. How could she start training up early? How could she better prepare? She signed the letters as Kelly from the Country, and waited patiently for answers, using the house of a friend in Carradale (a neighboring town) as the sender.

Soon enough, the phone rang, at Harvey Street, in Calamia.

About halfway through the call, Ted stopped and simply said, “What?” A moment later, he went on. “Yeah, it’s the next town over.” Then, “Really? Kelly from the Country? You’ve gotta be joking. Oh, it’s bloody her all right, I’m sure of it….”