Bridge of Clay(40)

He left.



* * *



—

At sixteen, his body grew, his hair changed shape.

He was no longer the boy who’d struggled to lift the typewriter, but an aqua-eyed, good-looking kid with dark wavy hair and a fast-looking physique. Now he showed promise at football, or anything else deemed important, which is pretty much just to say, sport.

    Michael Dunbar, however, wasn’t interested in sport.

He went onto the school football team, of course, he played fullback, he did well. He stopped people. He’d usually check to see if the kid was okay, and he could also make a break; he could set someone up to score, or score himself.

Off the sports field there was a kindness that set him apart, and also a strange single-mindedness. He would suffer before he’d belong, unable to show himself easily; a preference for greater hope—to find someone who would know him completely.

As was tradition (in the sporting stakes, at least), girls followed, and they were predictable, in their skirts and shoes and matching booze. They chewed gum. They drank drinks.

“Hey, Mikey.”

“Oh—hi.”

“Hey, Mikey, a couple of us are goin’ up to the Astor tonight.”

Mikey wasn’t interested—for if Michelangelo was the one man he truly loved, he also had his hands full with three girls: First, the great typist—the counterpuncher in the waiting room.

Then there was the old red cattle dog who sat on the couch with him, watching repeats of Bewitched and Get Smart, and who lay asleep, chest heaving, as he cleaned the surgery, three nights a week.

And lastly, there was the one who sat in the front right corner of his English class, hunched and lovely, bony as a calf. (And it was she he was hoping might notice.) These days she had smoky grey eyes and wore a green checkered uniform, and hair that fell to her tailbone: The waiting room spaceship-crusher had also changed.



* * *



—

In the evenings, he walked the town with the red cattle dog called Moon; named for the full moon camped above the house when his mother brought her home.

    Moon was ash and ginger, and she slept on the floor of the back shed, while the boy drew at his father’s workbench, or painted at the easel—his sixteenth birthday gift from Adelle. She rolled on her back and smiled at the sky when he rubbed her stomach on the lawn. “Come on, girl,” and she came. She jogged next to him contently as he walked through months of longing and sketches, longing and portraits, longing and landscapes; the artwork and Abbey Hanley.

Always, in a town that turned slowly toward the dark—he could feel it coming for miles—he saw her up ahead. Her body was a brushstroke. Her long black hair was a trail.

No matter which streets he took through town, boy and dog made it out to the highway. They stood at the strings of a fence line.

Moon waited.

She panted and licked her lips.

Michael placed his fingers down, on the knots of barbed wire fence; he leaned forward, eyeing the corrugated roof, set deep on a distant property.

Only a few of the lights were on.

The TV flashed bright and blue.

Each night, before leaving, Michael stood still, with his hand on the head of the dog. “Come on, girl,” and she came.

It wasn’t till Moon died that he finally traversed the fence.



* * *



—

Poor Moon.

It was a normal afternoon, after school:

The town was slathered in sun.

She was laid out near the back step with a king brown snake, also dead, in her lap.

For Michael there was “Oh, Jesus” and quickened footsteps. He’d come round the back and heard the scratch of fallen schoolbag, as he kneeled on the ground, beside her. He would never forget the hot concrete, the warm dog-smell, and his head in her ginger fur. “Oh, Jesus, Moonie, no…”

He begged her to pant.

    She didn’t.

He pleaded with her to roll over and smile, or trot toward her bowl. Or dance, foot to foot, waiting for a deluge of dry food.

She didn’t.

There was nothing now but body and jaws, open-eyed death, and he kneeled in the backyard sunshine. The boy, the dog and the snake.

Later, not long before Adelle came home, he carried Moon past the clothesline and buried her next to a banksia.

He made a pair of decisions.

First, he dug a separate hole—a few feet to the right—and in it he placed the snake; friend and foe, side by side. Second, he would cross the fence at Abbey Hanley’s that night. He’d walk to the tired front door, and the TV’s blue-blinking light.



* * *



—

In the evening, on the highway, there was the town behind him and the flies, and the pain of the loss of the dog—that naked, pantless air. The emptiness by his side. But then there was the other feeling. That sweet sickness of making something happen: the newness. And Abbey. The everything-equals-her.

All the way he’d lectured himself not to stand at the barbed wire fence, but now he couldn’t resist. His life was reduced to minutes, till he swallowed and walked to the door—and Abbey Hanley opened it.



* * *



—

“You,” she said, and the sky was bulging with stars.