She turned around and called.
“Michael?”
There was no answer, so she walked back out, and the boys were gone, and it was city, red air and Pepper Street.
He was sitting, alone, on his stairs.
* * *
—
Later, much later, when Michael Dunbar slept in the single bed they’d often shared in her apartment, she came back out, in the dark.
She switched on the light.
She turned the knob to a shadowed dimness and sat on the stool at the piano. Slowly, her hands drifted, and gently, she pressed the high-pitched notes. She hit them soft but true and right, where she’d used the paint left over.
She’d played the keys of Y | E | S.
“I can’t believe my eyes. I thought you’d only make a start.”
That’s what Michael Dunbar said about the giant trench that was dug by a single boy in less than a week. He should have known better.
“What the hell did you do, dig all night and day?”
Clay looked down. “I slept sometimes.”
“Next to the shovel?”
Now he looked up, as the Murderer saw his hands.
“Jesus…”
As for Clay, when he told me about that particular little stunt, he spoke more about the aftermath than the exercise itself. He was dying to at least see Archer Street, and The Surrounds, but he couldn’t, of course; two reasons.
First, he was in no condition to face me.
And second, coming back and not facing me felt like cheating.
No, from the cemetery, he’d caught the train back to Silver, then spent a few days recovering. Not a single part of him wasn’t hurting. The blistered hands were the worst, though, and he slept, lay awake, and waited.
* * *
—
When the Murderer came, he’d pulled up on the other side of the river, in the trees.
He walked down and stood, on the floor of the dug-out ditch.
Either side were tidal waves, of rocks and mounds of dirt.
He looked and shook his head, then over, across at the house.
Inside, he sought Clay out, he pulled him apart in the kitchen; he sighed and half slouched, and shook his head once more, between shock and total dismay. He finally had something to say to him:
“I gotta give it to you, kid—you’ve got heart.”
And Clay couldn’t stop it.