“What?”
We all said it at once, and the wind blew even harder.
“What’d you say, Clay?”
He looked cold in the warmth of the field. His short dark hair was flat on his head, and that fire inside him was lit; he said it, quietly, again.
A firm and final “No.”
And we knew.
We would leave things exactly like this. We’d let the thing die its own death here—or at least that’s what we believed—for how could we ever foresee it?
That Clay would come back and he’d lie here.
He’d squeeze the peg till it bit through his hand.
The first time was the night before State, once we’d sat for a while in the kitchen; him and me. He laid the truth down in between us:
He’d win State, then go for Achilles.
He had the two hundred dollars—probably his whole life savings.
He didn’t even wait for an answer.
What he did do was go out the front, run a light run through the racing quarter, feed a few of our carrots to the mule—and end up back on the roof.
Then, later, much later, while the rest of us slept, he got out of bed and wandered there; he picked out a brand-new peg. He climbed up onto the fence, then walked the width of the laneway. It was dark and there wasn’t a moon out, but he found his way easily through.
He wandered and climbed over onto it.
The bed lay down in the gloom.
He curled himself up like a boy.
He lay down in the dark and he dreamed there, and cared nothing for winning or State. No, he spoke only to another boy, from a small country town, and a woman who’d crossed the oceans.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to both of them, “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” The peg was clenched tight in his hand, and he addressed them, lastly, again. “I promise, I’ll tell you the story,” he said, “how I brought you both home Achilles.”
That mule was never for Tommy.
Once, in the tide of Dunbar past, there was a girl who knew a Dunbar boy, and what a girl she was.
She had auburn hair and good-green eyes.
She had a puzzle of blood-colored freckles.
She was famous for winning a Group One race, and dying the very next day—and Clay was the one to blame.
He lived and breathed and became it.
He eventually told them everything.
In the beginning, though, and quite fittingly, when Carey first had seen him, she’d seen him up on the roof.
* * *
—