Bridge of Clay(143)

He went to university, and no, he isn’t a vet.

He’s a social worker instead.

    He takes a dog called O to work with him (you should know by now what it stands for), and he’s twenty-four years old. He works with tough, hard kids, but the lot of them love the dog. His pets all lived forever, of course, or forever until they were gone. First went the goldfish, Agamemnon, then T, the marching pigeon, then Hector, and lastly, Rosy.

Rosy was sixteen years old when finally she couldn’t walk anymore, and all of us carried her off. At the vet it was Rory, believe it or not, who said, “I think she was holding out—waiting, you know?” He looked at the wall and swallowed. She was named for the sky and Penelope, that dog. “I think she was waiting for Clay.”

It’s only Achilles, in Silver, still alive now.

That mule is likely unkillable.

Tommy lives near the museum.



* * *



—

Then Henry.

Well, what would you guess for Henry? I wonder.

What to expect from brother number three?

He was the first of us to be married, and would always come up smiling. He went, of course, into real estate, but not before making a packet—on betting and all he’d collected.

During one of his Epic Books and Music Sales, a girl walked her dog up Archer Street. Her name was Cleo Fitzpatrick. For some people life just sails like that, and Henry is one such case.

“Oi!” he’d called, and first she ignored him, in cutoff shorts and a shirt. “Oi, girl with the Corgi-cross-shih tzu, or whatever it is!”

She put in a fresh piece of gum.

“It’s a kelpie, dickhead—” but I was there, it was easy to see. It appeared in her black earthy eyes. Fittingly, she bought a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and came back the following week. They were married the following year.



* * *



—

As for Rory, strange as it seems, he’s the one closest to our father again, and goes out quite a lot to the bridge. He’s still as rough as guts—or rough as bags, as people like Mrs. Chilman would say—and the years have taken the edge off, and I know how he always missed Clay.

    It wasn’t long after old Mrs. Chilman died, actually, that he moved to a suburb close by: Somerville, ten minutes north. He likes to come back and sit here, though, drinking beer, and laughing away. He likes Claudia, too, and talks to her, but mostly it’s him and me. We talk about Clay, we talk about Penny, and the story is passed between us: “So they gave her six months—a hundred-and-eighty-odd days. Did they have any fucking clue who they were dealing with?”

Like the rest of them, he knows what happened now, in the backyard that bright-lit morning; how our father couldn’t do it, but Clay was somehow able. He knows what happened beyond it, with Carey and The Surrounds; yet, inevitably, we always come back to it—when she told us, in here, in the kitchen.

“What’d Clay say about that night?” he asks, and he waits a few beats for the answer.

“He said that you roared the fire in his eyes.”

And Rory will smile, every time. “I pulled him from out of that chair you’re in.”

“I know,” I say, “I remember.”



* * *



—

And me?

Well, I did it.

It only took me several months, but I’d been reading Penelope’s books—her immigrant Everests—and opening Waldek’s letter; I’d memorized Claudia’s number.

Then, a Tuesday, I didn’t call the number at all, but walked straight into the school. She was there in the same room, marking essays, and when I knocked, she caught sight of the doorway.

She smiled a great smile of the living.

“Matthew Dunbar,” she said, looking up at me. She stood at the desk and said, “Finally.”



* * *



—

    As Clay had asked, I did go out to Silver.

I went there many times, often with Claudia Kirkby.

Tentatively at first, my father and I traded stories—about Clay as both son and brother. And I told him what Clay had asked me to, about the last time he saw Penelope—as the girl she once had been. Our father was mostly astonished.

At one point I nearly told him; I nearly said it but kept myself back: I know now why you left.

But like so many other things, we can know it but leave it unsaid.



* * *



—

When they tore down the Bernborough Park grandstand, and replaced the old red rubber track, we somehow got the date wrong, and missed the inglorious moment.

“All those beautiful memories,” said Henry, when we went there to see the pieces. “All those gorgeous bets!” Those nicknames and boys at the fence line—the smell of never quite men.

I recalled the times Clay and I spent there, and then Rory and stopping him and punishment.

But of course, it’s Clay and Carey there.

It’s them I imagine best.

They’re crouched together, near the finish line.

It was one more sacred site of his, left hollow without him in it.



* * *



—

On the topic of sacred sites, The Surrounds, however, remains.