“Yeah?”
And looking back, I love the way he called that now—how he stood, and was ready to go to her, to carry her or die for her if he had to; like the Greeks when called to arms.
And the rest of us sat, we were statue-like.
We were stilled, and remained alert.
God, that kitchen and its heat, and the dishes all looking nervous; and the voice came stumbling forward. It was on the board between us:
“Check his shirt….” We felt her smiling. “Left pocket,” and I had to let him. I let him reach over and in.
“I should give you a fucking nipple cripple while I’m at it, you bastard.”
But soon, he’d managed to find it.
His hand reached in, he produced the iron, and he shook his head and kissed it; tough lips on silver token.
Then he took it and stood in the doorway, and he was Rory and just young and untough for a moment, the metal gone soft in an instant. He smiled, and shouted his innocence, his voice gone up to the ceiling.
“Matthew’s bloody cheating again, Penny!” and the house all around us was shaking, and Rory was shaking with it—but soon he came back to the table, and placed the iron on top of my railway, then gave me a look that fell at me, then at Tommy and Henry and Clay.
He was the boy with the scrap-metal eyes.
He cared nothing, at all, for anything.
But that look, so afraid, so despairing, and the words, like a boy in pieces:
“What’ll we do without her, Matthew? What the hell are we s’posed to do?”
We did it in early December.
We all just got in my car.
Clay could say what he wanted, about waiting until he was finished. All of us, we’d all had enough of it, and I took out my tools and work gear; we reached in and righted the seats. Rosy came with us, too. Tommy tried also for Hector, but we said to him don’t push your luck—and God, how we drove and thought of him.
Those reams of empty space.
We drove but hardly spoke.
* * *
—
In the meantime, the clouds were gathering, which meant one of two possibilities.
The storms would pass by, rainless; and they’d wait to be tested for years. Or the flood would come to them early, while they desperately worked to the finish.
Probably the greatest moment came when they took the molds out—the falsework—for the arches to stand alone. They were men of other terms then—of bridging as opposed to dying—and so they spoke of the strength of the spandrels, and the hopes they had for each keystone.
But then simplicity got the better of them, or of Michael, at least, in the riverbed:
“Let’s hope the bastards hold.”
It was like fins out in the ocean—you were sure they were only dolphins, but really, did you really know? Not till you saw them up close.
They knew in their hearts they’d done everything.
They’d done everything to make it perfect.