“How old are you again?”
“Fourteen.”
The woman laughed and sniffed.
* * *
—
Sometimes she heard them talking at night, in the confines of the kitchen.
Ted and Catherine.
Catherine the Great and Belligerent.
“Look,” said Ted. “If she’s going to do it, Ennis is the best. He’ll look after her. He doesn’t even let ’em live in the stables—they have to have proper homes.”
“What a guy.”
“Hey—be careful.”
“Okay,” but she was hardly softening. “You know it’s not him, it’s the game.”
Carey stood in the hallway.
Pajamas of shorts and singlet.
Warm and sticky feet.
Her toes in the streak of light.
“Oh, you and the bloody game,” said Ted. He got up and walked to the sink. “The game gave me everything.”
“Yeah.” Sincere damnation. “Ulcers, collapsing. How many broken bones?”
“Don’t forget the athlete’s foot.”
He was trying to lighten the mood.
It didn’t work.
She went on, the damnation went on, it darkened the girl in the hall. “That’s our daughter in there, and I want her to live—not go through the hell that you did, or what the boys will….”
Sometimes they rumble through me, those words, and they’re hot, like the hooves of Thoroughbreds:
I want her to live.
I want her to live.
Carey had told Clay that once; she’d told him one night at The Surrounds.
And Catherine the Great was right.
She was right about all of everything.
We found him upstream where the river gums start.
What could we possibly say?