Bridge of Clay(38)

February 4: Car registration due.

March 19: Maria M.—Birthday.

May 27: Dinner with Walt.

Whoever owned the calendar had dinner with Walt on the last Friday of every month.



* * *



—

Now a small note about Adelle Dunbar, the red-rimmed receptionist: She was a practical woman.

When Michael showed her the box of Lego and the calendar, she frowned and tilted her glasses. “Is that calendar…used?”

“Yep.” Suddenly there was a kind of pleasure in it. “Can I keep it?”

“But it’s last year’s—here, give us a look.” She flipped through the pages. She didn’t overreact. It may have crossed her mind to march down to the woman responsible for sending this charity shitbox, but she didn’t. She swallowed the glint of anger. She packed it into her prim-and-proper voice and, like her son, moved on. “You think there’s a calendar of women who changed the world?”

    The boy was at a loss. “I don’t know.”

“Well, do you think there should be?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, isn’t there?” But she softened. “Tell you what. You really want this thing?”

Now that there was a chance he might lose it, he wanted it more than anything. He nodded on fresh batteries.

“Okay.” Here came the rules. “How about you come up with twenty-four women who changed the world as well? Tell me who they are and what they did. Then you can keep it.”

“Twenty-four?” The boy was outraged.

“There’s a problem?”

“Here it’s only twelve!”

“Twenty-four women.” Adelle was really enjoying herself now. “Have you finished blowing up, or should we make it thirty-six?” She readjusted her glasses, and got straight back to work, and Michael returned to the waiting room. After all, there were some abacus beads to shove in a corner, and the Mad magazines to defend. The women would have to wait.

After a minute, he wandered back over, to a good solid round for Adelle, at the typewriter.

“Mum?”

“Yes, son?”

“Can I put Elizabeth Montgomery on the list?”

“Elizabeth who?”

It was his favorite repeated TV show, every afternoon. “You know—Bewitched,” and Adelle couldn’t help herself. She laughed and finished things off with a powerhouse full stop.

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

In the middle of the small exchange, Michael was too preoccupied to notice Abbey Hanley return, sore-armed and teary, from the doctor’s infamous chopping block.

    If he had noticed, he’d have thought: Well, one thing’s for sure, I’m not putting you on the list.

It was a moment a bit like a piano, or a school car park, if you know what I mean—for it was strange to think, but he’d marry that girl one day.





Now he approached the river and it was cut and dry, carved out. It turned through the landscape like a wound.

At the edge, as he made his way down, he noticed a few stray beams of wood, tangled in the earth. They were like oversized splinters, angled and bruised, delivered like that by the river—and he felt another change.

Not more than five minutes earlier he’d told himself he wasn’t a son or brother, but here, in the last scraps of light, in what felt now like a giant’s mouth, all ambitions of selfhood had vanished. For how do you walk toward your father without being a son? How do you leave home without realizing where you’re from? The questions climbed beside him, up the other side of the bank.

Would our father hear him coming?

Would he walk to the stranger by his riverbed?

When he made it up, he tried not to think about it; he shivered. The sports bag was heavy across his back and the suitcase shook in what was suddenly just a boy’s boyish hand.

Michael Dunbar—the Murderer.

Name, and nickname.

Clay saw him, standing in a darkened field, in front of the house.

He saw him, as we do, from far away.





You had to give it to the young Michael Dunbar.

He had a healthy sense of resolve.

He got his calendar of great men, but only after enlisting his mother to help him find the requisite twenty-four women—including Adelle herself, who he said was the world’s greatest typist.

It had taken a few days, and a pile of encyclopedias, but they found the world-changing women easily: Marie Curie, Mother Teresa.

The Bront? sisters.

(“Does that count as three?”)

Ella Fitzgerald.

Mary Magdalene!

The list was endless.

Then again, he was eight, and sexist as any young boy could be; only the men made it to his bedroom. Only the men were hung on the wall.



* * *



—

But still, I have to admit it.

It was nice, in a strange kind of way—a boy living a real life to a sweaty town’s ticking clock, but also having another time frame, where the closest thing he had to a father was a paper trail of some of the greatest figures in history. If nothing else, those men, over the years, would make him curious.