They looked up, and Clay said, “Matthew?”
And nothing could ever prepare me, as I made my way down toward them. I was nothing but a shell of what I needed to be, for I wasn’t expecting this—such buoyancy and life in the tilt of his face—or such a wondrous bridge.
And it was me, not him, who fell down first, my knees in the earth of the riverbed.
“It’s Carey,” I said. “She’s dead.”
What if they hadn’t kept the place?
The house at 11 Archer Street.
If only they hadn’t come back.
Why didn’t they just sell it and move on, instead of prudence, collecting the rent?
But no—I can’t go thinking like that.
Once again, I can only tell it.
She arrived at nearly sixteen—to a street of boys and animals, who now included a mule.
* * *
—
In the beginning, it was the night of the day in March, when Clay had run and won State.
It was back at E. S. Marks.
I’d lovingly taped his feet.
The closest kid was a farm boy from Bega.
It took a while to convince Clay to stay.
He didn’t want the dais, or the medal; he only wanted Achilles.
* * *
—
He’d broken the state record by just over a second, which they said, at that level, was ludicrous. Officials had shaken his hand. Clay was thinking of Epsom Road.
As we pulled out of the car park, and joined the late-afternoon traffic, he watched me in the rearview, and I looked, briefly, at him. Fair’s fair, he seemed to be intimating, the gold medal round Goddamn Rosy. She was panting in Tommy’s lap. I glanced back and silently said it:
You’re lucky you’re refusing to wear it—I’d use it to wring your neck.
Back home we dropped Rory and Henry off.
We also dropped off the dog.
As Tommy got out of the car, Clay put a hand on his arm.
“Tommy, you’re coming with us.”
* * *
—
When we got there, in the evening, he was waiting at the fence, and he called and cried at the sky. I remembered the ad from the classifieds: “Doesn’t buck,” I said, “doesn’t bray,” but Clay had flatly ignored me, and Tommy had fallen in love. The fifth of the undangerous bunch.
This time when we’d stood for a while, the caravan shifted and shook, and a man came pouring outwards. He wore tired old pants and a shirt, and a smile of camaraderie. He walked over as fast as he could, like pushing a lorry with a limp, uphill.
“Are you the bastards who’ve been feeding this miserable old bastard?” he asked, but he was grinning the grin of a kid. Was he the groom Penelope had met that first time, over the fence at 18 Archer Street? We’ll never know.
By then the evening was fading.
The man was Malcolm Sweeney.
He had the physique of a dressed-up doughnut.
He’d been a jockey once, then a groom, then a certified stable shit-shoveler. His nose was alcoholic. Despite the boyish outlook, you could swim in the sorrows of his face. He was moving up north, to his sister’s.
“Can we let the kid in, to give him a pat?” I asked, and Malcolm Sweeney was happy to oblige. He reminded me of a character in a book I’d once read, called The Sad Glad Mad Bad Glad Man—full of kindness but also regret.
“You’ve seen the Tribune?” he said. “And the ad?”
Clay and I nodded, and Tommy was already over there; over and patting his head.
Malcolm spoke again.
“His name’s—”
“We don’t need to know the name,” Clay informed him, but he was watching only Tommy.
I smiled at Malcolm Sweeney, as encouragingly as I could, then motioned across to Clay. “He’ll give you two hundred dollars to change it,” and I felt myself almost scowling. “But feel free to charge him three.”
There was a laugh like something-once-had-been.
“Two hundred,” he said, “it is.”
At the fence were Clay and Tommy.
“Achilles?” said one to the other.
“Achilles.”
At last, they thought, at last.
* * *
—
With Achilles we had to think ahead, though, and there was beauty and stupidity, common sense and pure outlandishness; it’s hard to know where to begin.
I looked up council regulations, and there was definitely some sort of bylaw—written in 1946—explaining that livestock could be kept on premises, as long as they were aptly maintained. The said animals, it stated, can in no way infringe upon the health, safety, and well-being of any residents on the property itself, or those bordering the property—which, reading between the lines, meant keeping whatever you wanted, unless someone else complained. Which brought us to Mrs. Chilman: the only real neighbor we had.
When I went over she invited me in, but we stayed on the afternoon porch. She asked if I could open a jam jar, and when I mentioned the mule, she creaked inwards at first; her wrinkles into her cheeks. Then she laughed from deep in her lungs. “You Dunbar boys are terrific.” There were three or four good marvelouses, too, and a thrill to her final statement. “Life was always once like this.”
* * *
—
And then there was Henry and Rory.
Henry we told from the outset, but with Rory we kept it a secret; his reaction was going to be priceless (and likely the reason I agreed to it). He was already in a constant bad mood because of Hector sleeping on his bed, and sometimes even Rosy, or at least she’d just rest her snout there:
“Oi, Tommy,” he’d call across the bedroom, “get this bloody cat off me,” and “Tommy, stop Rosy’s bloody breathing.”
Tommy would try his best. “She’s a dog, Rory, she has to breathe.”
“Not near me she doesn’t!”
And so on.
We waited the rest of the week, so we could bring the mule home on Saturday. We could all be there to supervise that way, in case anything went wrong (which it might).
On Thursday we got the supplies. Malcolm Sweeney no longer had a horse trailer, so we’d have to walk him home. The best, we agreed, was early morning (trackwork hour), on Saturday, at four a.m.
The previous Thursday night, though, it was beautiful, it was four of us there with Sweeney, and Rory most likely out drinking. The sky and the clouds were pink, and Malcolm looked lovingly into it.
Tommy was brushing the mane, while Henry appraised the tools. He carried stirrups and bridles toward us, and held them approvingly up. “This shit,” he said, “we can do something with…but that thing’s bloody useless.”
He’d jerked his head with a grin at the mule.
* * *
—
And so it was—we brought him home.
On a still morning in late March, four Dunbar boys walked the racing quarter, and between us a Greek-named mule.
He’d stop sometimes by a letterbox.
He’d gangle and crap on the grass.
Henry said, “Got any dog bags?”
All of us laughed on the footpath.
What always gets me hardest is the memory of Malcolm Sweeney, crying silently by his fence line, as we walked the mule slowly away. He’d wiped at the yeast of his cheeks, and ran a hand through his frosted hair. He was moist and the color of khaki; a sad old fat man, and beautiful.
And then just simply the sound of it:
The hooves clopping over the streets.
Everything around us was urban—the road, the streetlights, the traffic; the shouts that flew right past us, from revelers out all night—and between it the rhythm of mules’ feet, as we walked him over pedestrian crossings, and crossed the empty Kingsway. We negotiated one long footbridge, and the patches of dark and streetlights: Henry and me on one side.
Tommy and Clay on the other.
And you could set your watch to those hoofbeats, too, and your life to the hand of Tommy—as he led the mule fondly home, to the months and the girl to come.
So this is what happened:
They’d broken the unwritten rules.
There was the feel of her naked legs.
He remembered the laid-down length of her, and the plastic mound beside them; and how she moved and gently bit him. And the way she’d pulled him down.
“Come here, Clay.”
He remembered.
“Use your teeth. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt me.”