Bridge of Clay(121)

    “Commiserate?” He grinned. “She won! That, and you’re underage.”

Carey was disgusted. At the first comment, not the second.

“C’mon, Clay, let’s go.”

The barman looked at the girl, though, and then he looked at Clay; both Scotty Bils and the boy were older, and Scott just couldn’t place him; but there was something, he knew, between them.

When finally he did, they were almost out the door.

“Hey,” he called, “it’s you; you’re one of ’em—a fair few years ago—aren’t you?”

It was Carey who first did the talking.

“One of who?”

“Seven beers!” shouted Scotty Bils, and his hair was almost gone, and Clay came back and spoke to him: “She said those beers were good.”



* * *



—

And what have I told you before?

Carey Novac could make you tell her things, although Clay was her hardest case. Outside, when he’d leaned on the Naked Arms tiles, she leaned against them with him. They were close, their arms were touching.

“Seven beers? What was that guy talking about?”

Clay’s hand went into his pocket.

“Why is it,” she asked, “that every time you’re uneasy, you reach for whatever you’ve got there?” She was facing him, applying pressure.

“It’s nothing.”

“No,” she said, “it’s not.”

She shook her head and decided to risk it; she reached down.

“Stop.”

“Oh, come on, Clay!”

She laughed, and her fingers touched the pocket; her other hand went for his ribs—and it’s always something awful and anxious, when a face ignites, then changes; he’d taken her and shoved her away.

“STOP!”

    His shout like a frightened animal.

The girl fell back, she stammered; a single hand kept her up off the ground, but she refused to be helped to her feet. She slumped back against the tiles, her knees curled up at throat-height. He started to speak. “I’m sorry—”

“No—don’t.” She looked fiercely at the boy beside her. “Don’t, Clay.” She was hurt and wanted to hurt him. “What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway? Why are you such a…”

“A what? What?”

Such a Goddamn freak.

The vernacular of young people everywhere.

The words like a wound, between them.



* * *



—

They must have sat there a good hour after that, and Clay wondered how best to fix it; or if it was fixable at all—the swollen taste of conflict.

He took the peg out softly and held it.

He laid it slowly down onto her thigh.

“I’ll tell you everything,” he said, but quietly. “Everything I can but this.” They looked at it, perched amongst them. “The seven beers, all her nicknames…how her dad had Stalin’s mustache. She said it was camped on his mouth.”

She cracked, just slightly; she smiled.

“That’s how she once described it,” and his voice now more like a whisper. “But not about the peg. Not yet.” The only way he could live with himself was knowing he’d tell her at the end—when she’d need to leave him behind.

“Okay, Clay, I’ll wait.” She stood and she pulled him upwards; she forgave by being relentless. “So for now, just tell me the rest of it.” She said it like not many said such things. “Tell me all of everything.”



* * *



—

And that was what he did.

He told her everything I’ve told you so far, and so much more to come—just short of a backyard clothesline—and Carey did what no one could, she saw exactly what somehow he couldn’t.

    The next time they stood at the cemetery, with their fingers each clenched in the fence, she reached over with a small piece of paper.

“I was thinking,” she said, and the sun backed away, “of that woman who left your father…and the book she’d taken with her.”

Her freckles were fifteen coordinates, with a last one down on her neck—because there, on that small crumpled paper, was a name and several numbers, and the name she had written was HANLEY.

“There are six of them,” she said, “in the phone book.”





He woke up.

He was sweating.

He swam up through the sheets.

Since the telling of truth to McAndrew, and Ted and Catherine Novac, he was left with a lasting question.

Did he confess for only himself?

But not even in his darkest moments did he believe that; he did it because he’d had to. They deserved to know how it happened.



* * *



—

Now, many nights later, he woke and felt her upon him: The girl was on his chest.

It’s a dream, I know it’s a dream.

She came at his will of imagining.

There was the smell of horses and death, but also alive and life-like; he knew because she was warm. She was still, but he felt her breath.

“Carey?” he said, and she moved then. She got up sleepily and sat beside him. Her jeans and glowing forearms, like the day she’d first walked over.