Page 229 of Bridge of Clay

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The light inside was orange.

“I know you,” he said, and the man himself looked smaller now, like a broken twig in a lounge chair. In the very next chapter you’ll see it back there—what Ennis McAndrew once explained. “You’re the dead wood I told her to cut out.” His hair was yellow-white. He wore glasses. A pen in his pocket. The eyes gleamed, but not very happily. “I guess you’ve come to blame me, have you?”

Clay sat on the lounge chair opposite.

He watched him, stiffly straight.

“No, sir, I came to tell you you were right,” and McAndrew was caught by surprise.

He looked keenly across, and said, “What?”

“Sir, I—”

“Call me Ennis, for Christ’s sake, and speak up.”

“Okay, well…”

“I said speak up.”

Clay swallowed. “It wasn’t your fault, it was mine.”

He didn’t tell him what he told the Novacs, but made sure McAndrew saw. “She never could quite get rid of me, you know, and that was how it happened. She must have been overtired, or couldn’t concentrate—”

McAndrew slowly nodded. “She lost herself, in the saddle.”

“Yes. I think she did.”

“You were out with her the previous night.”

“Yes,” Clay said, and he left.

He left, but at the bottom of the steps, both Ennis and his wife came out, and the old man shouted down to him.

“Hey! Clay Dunbar!”

Clay turned.

“You have no idea what I’ve seen jockeys get up to over the years, and they did it”—he was suddenly so empathetic—“for things worth much less than you.” He even came down the steps; he met him at the gate. He said, “Listen to me, son.” For the first time, Clay noticed a silver tooth in McAndrew’s mouth, deep and leaning on the right. “I can’t imagine what it took to come and tell me that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Come back in, won’t you?”

“I’d better get home.”

“Okay, but if there’s ever anything—anything—I can do for you, let me know.”

“Mr. McAndrew?”

Now the old man stopped, and the paper was under his arm. He raised his head just a touch.

Clay nearly asked just how good Carey was, or might have been, but knew that neither of them could bear it—so he tried for something else. “Could you carry on training?” he asked. “It wouldn’t be right if you didn’t. It wasn’t your—”

And Ennis McAndrew propped, readjusted the paper, and walked back up the path. He said to himself, “Clay Dunbar,” but I wish he’d been more obvious.

He should have said something of Phar Lap.

(In waters so soon to come.)


Tags: Markus Zusak Young Adult