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.
An overabundance of cologne.
A boy with burning arms.
His shirt was too big in a country that was too big, and they stood on a front path all swarmed with weeds. The rest of the family ate No Frills ice cream inside, and the tin roof loomed, leaning at him as he searched for words, and wit. Words he found. Wit he didn’t.
To her shins, he said, “My dog died today.”
“I was wondering why you were alone.” She smiled, just short of haughtily. “Am I the replacement?”
She was giving him a hiding!
He fought on.
“She was bitten.” He paused. “A snake.”
And that pause, somehow, changed it all.
While Michael turned to look at the deepening dark, the girl crossed from cocksure to stoic in a few short seconds; she stepped closer, and now she was next to him, facing the same way. Near enough so their arms touched.
“I’d rip a snake apart before I let it get to you as well.”
* * *
—
After that, they were inseparable.
They watched those much-repeated sitcoms of previous years—his Bewitched and her I Dream of Jeannie. They crouched at the river or walked the highway out of town, watching the world grow seemingly bigger. They cleaned the surgery and listened to each other’s heartbeats with Weinrauch’s stethoscope. They checked each other’s blood pressure till their arms were ready to explode. In the back shed, he sketched her hands, her ankles, her feet. He balked when it came to her face.
“Oh, come on, Michael…” She laughed and plunged her hand down into his chest. “Can’t you get me right?”
And he could.
He could find the smoke in her eyes.
Her mocking, dauntless smile.
Even on paper she looked ready to speak. “Let’s see how good you are—paint with your other hand.”
At the highway farmhouse one afternoon, she took him in. She put a box of schoolbooks against her bedroom door, and held his hand and helped him with everything: the buttons, the clips, the descent to the floor. “Come here,” she said, and there was the carpet and heat of shoulders and backs and tailbones. There was sun at the window, and books, and half-written essays everywhere. There was breath—her breath—and falling, just like that. And embarrassment. A head turned sideways, and brought back.
“Look at me. Michael, look at me.”
And he looked.
This girl, her hair and smoke.
She said, “You know—” The sweat between each breast. “I never even said I was sorry.”
Michael looked over.
His arm had gone dead, beneath her.
“For what?”
She smiled. “About the dog, and”—she was almost crying—“for crushing that spaceship thing in the waiting room that morning.”
And Michael Dunbar could have left his arm down there forever; he was stunned and stilled, astounded. “You remember that?”
“Of course,” she said, and now she spoke upwards, at the ceiling. “Don’t you see?” Half of her in shadow, but the sun was on her legs. “I loved you already then.”
Just past the dry riverbed, Clay shook hands with Michael Dunbar in the dark, and their hearts were in their ears. The country was cooling down. For a moment he imagined the river, erupting, just for some noise, a distraction. Something to talk about.
Where was the Goddamn water?!
Earlier, when they’d seen each other, their faces searched, then down. Only when they were meters apart did they look for more than a second.
The ground felt alive.
Final darkness, and still no sound.
“Can I help with your bags?”