Bridge of Clay(116)

Either way, when he told them, he made sure not to look where she’d sat that day, when they’d listened to the race down south—when the big bay horse had failed. His tea was cold and untouched.

He told them what Saturday night meant.

The mattress, the plastic sheet.

He told them of Matador in the fifth.

He said he loved her from the very first time she’d talked to him, and it was his fault, it was all his fault. Clay cracked, but didn’t break, because he deserved no tears or sympathy. “The night before she fell,” he said, “we met there, we were naked there, and—”

He stopped because Catherine Novac—in a shift of ginger-blondness—had stood and she’d walked toward him. She lifted him gently out of his chair and hugged him hard, so hard, and she patted his short flat hair, and it was so damn nice it hurt.

    She said, “You came to us, you came.”

See, for Ted and Catherine Novac, there was no incrimination, at least not for this poor boy.

It was they who brought her to the city.

It was they who knew the risk.



* * *



—

Then there was McAndrew.

Picture frames with horses.

Picture frames with jockeys.

The light inside was orange.

“I know you,” he said, and the man himself looked smaller now, like a broken twig in a lounge chair. In the very next chapter you’ll see it back there—what Ennis McAndrew once explained. “You’re the dead wood I told her to cut out.” His hair was yellow-white. He wore glasses. A pen in his pocket. The eyes gleamed, but not very happily. “I guess you’ve come to blame me, have you?”

Clay sat on the lounge chair opposite.

He watched him, stiffly straight.

“No, sir, I came to tell you you were right,” and McAndrew was caught by surprise.

He looked keenly across, and said, “What?”

“Sir, I—”

“Call me Ennis, for Christ’s sake, and speak up.”

“Okay, well…”

“I said speak up.”

Clay swallowed. “It wasn’t your fault, it was mine.”

He didn’t tell him what he told the Novacs, but made sure McAndrew saw. “She never could quite get rid of me, you know, and that was how it happened. She must have been overtired, or couldn’t concentrate—”

McAndrew slowly nodded. “She lost herself, in the saddle.”

    “Yes. I think she did.”

“You were out with her the previous night.”

“Yes,” Clay said, and he left.

He left, but at the bottom of the steps, both Ennis and his wife came out, and the old man shouted down to him.

“Hey! Clay Dunbar!”

Clay turned.

“You have no idea what I’ve seen jockeys get up to over the years, and they did it”—he was suddenly so empathetic—“for things worth much less than you.” He even came down the steps; he met him at the gate. He said, “Listen to me, son.” For the first time, Clay noticed a silver tooth in McAndrew’s mouth, deep and leaning on the right. “I can’t imagine what it took to come and tell me that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Come back in, won’t you?”

“I’d better get home.”

“Okay, but if there’s ever anything—anything—I can do for you, let me know.”

“Mr. McAndrew?”

Now the old man stopped, and the paper was under his arm. He raised his head just a touch.

Clay nearly asked just how good Carey was, or might have been, but knew that neither of them could bear it—so he tried for something else. “Could you carry on training?” he asked. “It wouldn’t be right if you didn’t. It wasn’t your—”

And Ennis McAndrew propped, readjusted the paper, and walked back up the path. He said to himself, “Clay Dunbar,” but I wish he’d been more obvious.

He should have said something of Phar Lap.

(In waters so soon to come.)



* * *



—

At Ted and Catherine Novac’s house, the last could only be finding them: The lighter, the box and Clay’s letter.

    They didn’t know because they hadn’t touched her bed yet, and it lay on the floor, beneath.

Matador in the fifth.

Carey Novac in the eighth.

Kingston Town can’t win.

Ted touched the words.

For Clay, though, what puzzled him most, and ultimately gave him something, was the second of two more items now that lay inside the box. The first was the photo his father had sent, of the boy on top of the bridge—but the second he’d never given her; it was something she’d actually stolen, and he would never know exactly when.

It was pale but green and elongated.

She’d been here, 18 Archer Street.

She’d stolen a Goddamn peg.





For Ted and Catherine Novac, the choice would make itself. If she wasn’t apprenticed to McAndrew, it would only be someone else; it might as well be the best.

When they told her, there was kitchen and coffee cups.

The clock ticked loudly behind them.