Bridge of Clay(2)

Some honeymoon:

Claudia was at work.

The girls were at school.

Part of me still liked that, of course; a lot of me liked it a lot.

I breathed in, and out, and knocked.



* * *



—

    Inside, the house was oven-like.

The furniture all was roasted.

The pictures just out of the toaster.

They had an air conditioner. It was broken.

There was tea and Scotch Fingers, and sun clapped hard at the window. There was ample sweat at the table. It dripped from arm to cloth.

As for the Merchisons, they were honest, hairy people.

They were a blue singlet of a man, with great big sideburns, like fur coat meat cleavers on his cheeks, and a woman named Raelene. She wore pearl earrings, tight curls, and held a handbag. She was perennially going to the shops, but stayed. From the moment I mentioned the backyard and that something might be buried there, she’d had to hang around. When the tea was done and the biscuits reduced to a nub, I faced the sideburns, front-on. He spoke to me fair and squarely: “Guess we should get to work.”



* * *



—

Outside, in the long dry yard, I walked left, toward the clothesline, and a weathered, dying banksia. I looked back for a moment behind me: the small house, the tin roof. The sun was still all over it, but reclining, leaning west. I dug with shovel and hands, and there it was.

“Goddamn!”

The dog.

Again.

“Goddamn!”

The snake.

Both of them nothing but bones.

We combed them close and careful.

We placed them on the lawn.

“Well, I’ll be!”

The man said it three times, but loudest of all when at last I’d found the old Remington, bullet-grey. A weapon in the ground, it was wrapped in three rounds of tough plastic, so clear I could see the keys: first the Q and the W, then the midsection of F and G, H and J.

    For a while I looked at it; I just looked: Those black keys, like monsters’ teeth, but friendly.

Finally, I reached in and hauled it out, with careful, dirty hands; I filled in all three holes. We took it out of the packaging, and watched and crouched, to examine it.

“A hell of a thing,” said Mr. Merchison. The fur coat cleavers were twitching.

“It is,” I agreed, it was glorious.

“I didn’t think this was going to happen when I woke up this morning.” He picked it up, and handed it across.

“You want to stay for dinner, Matthew?”

That was the old lady, still half astonished. Astonishment didn’t trump dinner.

I looked up from my crouching stance. “Thanks, Mrs. Merchison, but I’m hurting from all those biscuits.” Again, I eyed the house. It was parceled up now, in shade. “I should actually get going.” I shook the hand of each of them. “I can’t thank you enough.” I began to walk on, the typewriter safe in my arms.

Mr. Merchison was having none of it.

He called out a forthright “Oi!”

And what else could I do?

There must have been good reason for unearthing the two animals, and I turned from under the clothesline—the tired old Hills Hoist, just like ours—and waited for what he would say; and he said it.

“Aren’t you forgetting something there, mate?”

He nodded to the dog bones and the snake.



* * *



—

And that was how I drove away.

In the back seat of my old station wagon that day were the skeletal remains of a dog, one typewriter, and the wiry boneline of a king brown snake.

About halfway, I pulled over. There was a place I knew—a small detour, with a bed and proper rest—but I decided not to take it. Instead, I lay in the car with the snake there at my neck. As I drifted off, I thought how before-the-beginnings are everywhere—because before and before so many things there was a boy in that old-backyard-of-a-town, and he’d kneeled on the ground when the snake had killed that dog, and the dog had killed that snake…but that’s all still to come.

    No, for now, this is all you need: I made it home the next day.

I made it back to the city, to Archer Street, where everything did begin, and went many and varied ways. The argument about just why in the hell I’d brought back the dog and the snake dissipated hours ago, and those who were to leave have left, and those to stay have stayed. Arguing upon return with Rory about the contents of the car’s back seat was the icing on the cake. Rory, of all the people. He, as much as anyone, knows who and why and what we are: A family of ramshackle tragedy.

A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts.

We were born for relics like these.

In the middle of all the back-and-forth, Henry grinned, Tommy laughed, and both said, “Just like always.” The fourth of us was sleeping, and had slept the whole time I was gone.

As for my two girls, when they came in, they marveled at the bones and said, “Why’d you bring those home, Dad?”

Because he’s an idiot.

I caught Rory thinking it, immediately, but he’d never say it in front of my kids.

As for Claudia Dunbar—the former Claudia Kirkby—she shook her head and took my hand, and she was happy, she was so damn happy I could have broken down again. I’m sure it’s because I was glad.