He’d stopped her playing and held her hands, and they were whipped and small and warm. He clenched them, but did it softly, in the width of his obelisk fingers.
He’d stopped and eventually told her— And the boy.
Our boy.
This young but story-hardened boy of ours, he stepped forward, and believed in everything.
He stepped forward and kneeled down slowly.
Slowly, he spoke to our dad.
Michael Dunbar didn’t hear him coming, and if he was surprised he didn’t show it—he was numb on the grass, unmoving.
The boy said, “Dad—it’s okay, Dad,” and he slid his arms beneath her, and stood, and took her with him. There was no looking back, our father didn’t react, and her eyes, they didn’t seem yellow that day; they were hers and always would be. Her hair was down her back again, her hands were crisp and clean. She looked nothing like a refugee. He walked with her softly away.
“It’s okay,” he said again, this time to her, “it’s okay,” and he was sure he saw her smile, as he did what only he could, and only in his way: “Ju? wystarczy,” he whispered quietly, then carried her through the translation. “That’s enough, Mistake Maker”—and he stood with her under the clothesline, and it was then she’d closed her eyes, still breathing but ready to die. As he took her toward that note he heard, from the light to the smoke in the doorway, Clay could be totally certain; the last thing Penelope had seen in the world was a length of that wire and its color—the pegs on the clothesline, above them:
As weightless as sparrows, and bright in the light.
For a moment they eclipsed the city.
They took on the sun, and won.
And so it was.
All of it led to the bridge:
It had finally been enough for Penelope, but for Clay it was one more beginning. From the moment he carried her away, it was life as he’d never known it. When he came back out to the clothesline, he reached up for the first of his pegs.
His father wasn’t able to look at him.
They would never be the same again.
What he’d done, and what he became at that moment, would turn so fast to regret.
He never remembered the walk back to school.
Just the lightweight feel of the peg.
He was sitting down, lost in the playground, when Rory and Henry found him, and lifted him up and half carried him.
“They’re driving us all back home,” they said. Their voices like broken birds. “It’s Penny, it’s Penny, she’s—”
But the sentence never had an end.
At home, the police, then the ambulance.
The way it all swam down the street.
It was well into afternoon by then, and our father had lied about everything; and that was always her plan. Michael would help her, then tell them he’d gone out briefly. It was Penny herself, so desperate—
But the boy had come home and he’d ruined it.
He’d come and he’d saved the day.
We would call our father the Murderer.
But the murderous savior was him.
* * *
—
In the end there was always the bridge.
It was built, and now for the flooding.
The storm never comes when it should.
In our case, it happened in winter.
The whole state was soon underwater.
I remember the endless weather, as the city was lashed with rain.
It was nothing compared to the Amahnu.
* * *
—
Clay was still working with me.
He was running the streets of the racing quarter, where her bike, surprisingly, stayed; no one had got out the bolt cutters, or managed to break the code. Or maybe they just didn’t want to.
When the news came through of the weather, the rain started coming much earlier; Clay stood in the first drops of water. He ran to the stables at Hennessey.
He made the lock into all the right numbers, and walked the bike carefully away. He’d even brought down a small bike pump, and put air in the sunken tires. Cootamundra, The Spaniard and Matador. The courage of Kingston Town. He pumped hard with the names inside him.
When he rode out through the racing quarter, he saw a girl on Poseidon Road. It was right up top near the northern part, near the Tri-Colors gym and the barbers. The Racing Quarter Shorter. She was blond against blackening sky.
“Hey!” he called.
“Some weather!” she replied, and Clay jumped off the old bike.
“Do you want this thing to get home?”
“I’d never be as lucky as that.”
“Well, you are today,” he said. “Go on, take it.” He put the stand out and walked away. Even as the sky started storming, he watched as she went and took it. He shouted: “Do you know about Carey Novac?”
“What?” she cried back, then, “Who?”
The pain of shouting her name, but he felt all the better for it. “The lock!” he called, through the water. “It’s thirty-five-twenty-seven!” and he thought for a final moment, and swallowed the pins of rain. “If you forget, just look up The Spaniard!”
“The what?”
But now she was on her own.
He watched her a moment, then gone.
* * *
—
From there, there was only more rain.
It wouldn’t be forty days and nights.
For a while, though, it looked quite likely.
On the first of them, Clay walked out, for the next train to Silver, but the rest of us wouldn’t allow it. All five of us, we piled in my station wagon, and Rosy, of course, in the back.
Mrs. Chilman looked after the rest.
* * *
—
In Silver, we were just in time:
When we drove across the bridge, we looked down.
The water bit hard at the arches.
From the porch, in the rain, Clay thought of them; he remembered upstream, and those tough-looking trees, and the stones and the giant river gums. At this moment they were all being pummeled. Debris was flailing downwards.
Soon the whole world was flooded, it seemed, and the top of the bridge was submerged. For days, the water kept rising. Its violence was something magnetic; it scared the absolute life from you, but it was hard to not watch, to believe it.
Then, one night, the rain stopped.
The river continued to roar, but in time began to recede.
There was no telling yet if the bridge had survived—or if Clay could achieve its true finish: To walk across that water.
All through the days the Amahnu was brown, and churned like the making of chocolate. But at sunrise and sunset there was color and light—the glow, then dying of fire. The dawn was gold, and the water burned, and it bled into dark before night.
* * *
—
For three more days, we waited.
We stood and we watched the river.
We played cards in the kitchen with our father.
We watched Rosy curl up near the oven.
There wasn’t room for all of us, so we laid down the seats in the station wagon, and Rory and I slept out there.
A few times, Clay went out back, to the shed, where Achilles stood guard, and saw more of the artworks in progress. A favorite was a loose-drawn sketch, of a boy in the legs of the eucalypts—until it happened, it came, on Sunday.
* * *
—
As always he woke in the dark.
Not long before dawn, I heard footsteps—they were running, they were splashing—and next I heard the car door open; and I felt the force of his hand.
“Matthew,” he whispered. “Matthew!”
Then, “Rory. Rory!”
And quickly, I came to realize.
It was there in Clay’s voice.
He was shaking.
* * *
—
The lights came on in the house, and Michael came out with a flashlight, and when he’d gone down toward the water, he soon came careering back. As I fought my way out of the car, he staggered but spoke to me clearly, his face shocked and disbelieving.
“Matthew, you have to come.”
Was the bridge gone?
Should we be making attempts to save it?
But before I could take a step further, first light had hit the paddocks. I looked in the distance and saw it.
“Oh, God,” I said, “Je-sus Christ.” Then, “Hey,” I said, “hey, Rory?”
* * *
—