Between the Bridge and the River

by Craig Ferguson

  He gave them coolness by proxy.

  Leon got his bag from under his seat (he had taken to carrying his schoolbooks in an old sailor’s tote, which gave him the air of his father in Anchors Aweigh—”Nu Yawk Nu Yawk id’s a wunnafil down”), and walked down the aisle of the bus. Saul waddled behind him as usual.

  As Leon got off the bus, Deborah began her showy Wuthering Heights run across the yard toward him. She did this every morning for two reasons: First, she knew it made her breasts bounce up and down and everyone wanted to look at that, and second, she loved the feeling of being breathless just as she grabbed Leon and kissed his lips. It made her feel romantic.

  Leon looked and saw Deborah running just as the lysergic acid that had been prepared by the kid who would become the greatest pharmacologist in the world kicked in.

  For the first time in his life, Leon felt real terror. He saw Deborah in a very different light. She was still Deborah but she was no longer the wildly desirable teenage princess. Her eyes had changed. Her irises, instead of being cobalt blue, were now yellowy white, the color of the urine stains on Saul’s underwear. Her pupils were not black, they were red. Her perfect teeth were fangs and her skin like that of an albino turtle. She looked like a vampire squid in a summer dress, blue veins coursing black blood beneath the surface. Her breasts were moaning as they bounced in slow motion. They sang, in an exact impersonation of the New Zealand soprano Dame Kiri Ti Kanawa, “We Will, We Will Meet You” to the tune of the rock band Queen’s “We Will Rock You.”

  Leon screamed and ran away from her as fast as he could, his heart thundering in his chest, the sound of a screaming waterfall in his ears.

  The other kids laughed, as did Deborah, thinking Leon was pulling a joke. Playing a game. But Saul, the real Player of Games, knew what was going on and he felt a different rush.

  The rush of directing the show.

  Power.

  Real power, the kind unseen by everyone but God.

  The bell rang and the kids left for their classrooms. Everyone expected Leon to show up in a minute or two, but Leon was as gone to that high school as Jean Luc DuCan was to the city of Paris, and Saul was going with him.

  Acid, even wild extra-weird acid prepared by Benny Alderton, wears off but it takes a while. As anyone who has taken acid knows, the trip always lasts much longer than you want it to, even if it’s a good one. You can get really sick and tired of ecstasy. Many acid trippers have found themselves asking out loud at six A.M., “Oh, when will this fucking hilarity end?” Only to be taken again into another agonizing and exhausting wave of pleasure. It’s torture, and that’s if you’re lucky, which Leon, on this occasion, was not.

  Leon heard screaming bats as he ran. The purple pansies planted at the side of the school gate screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” at him as he tore by them into the woods at the back of the school. He stumbled over a vine and tumbled, then fell and rolled down a steep embankment to an aboveground oil pipeline that ran alongside a railroad track at the bottom of a little valley. The dewy morning grass ripped blunt and dirty razors across his skin but he could not bleed because his blood had turned to hard rubber. His jaw and face had disappeared to him, he was neither in nor out of his body. He was in hell. Truly in hell. In a deep level reserved usually only for the schizophrenic, the bipolar, or the delirium tremens alcoholic.

  Saul struggled down the embankment after him. He found him crouched under the pipeline trying to immerse himself in the small stones, broken glass, and dry white dogshit that was scattered around. He was clutching at his jaw and twitching and sobbing uncontrollably.

  “Saul, fuck—are there ducks in these woods?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Saul.

  Leon had noticed that Saul kept turning into Billy Idol, a popular-music singer in the 1980s.

  “Stop fucking doing that, man, it’s freaking me out.”

  “Sorry, I can’t help it,” guessed Saul.

  “Okay, okay, what the fuck are we going to do about the ducks? They’ll fucking kill us if they find us.”

  “I can handle it. I’m not afraid of the ducks.”

  “They’re killers, Saul.”

  “Fuck them. Don’t you worry about it,” said Saul, feeling like Bruce Willis, a movie actor who pretended to be very tough in his films. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Leon wept with gratitude and crawled further beneath the oil pipe for safety.

  Saul had been sitting sentinel for about an hour but luckily no killer ducks had descended on them. Leon was whimpering incoherently, crouched in the fetal position beneath the pipe. (Actually he was muttering the word “please” over and over again.)

  Off in the distance, a horn sounded. Leon looked at Saul in panic.

  “Don’t worry. It’s a train. It’s come to rescue us from the ducks.”

  “Oh, thank you God, thank you God,” intoned Leon as he rocked back and forth.

  The train, one of the mile-long, slow-moving freighters that crisscross Georgia and the South, rumbled toward them at an agonizing twenty miles an hour. As the noise of the nearing train built, Saul kept softly telling Leon that it was all right, everything was fine, that the train was good and it was the ducks that were evil. Leon hyper-ventilated but didn’t leave his crouch.

  As the train was about to pass by them, it stopped, as they periodically do, waiting for a signal to proceed from further down the line.

  Saul knew this was a decisive moment in his life.

  “Shit!” he yelled. “Ducks, fucking ducks, Leon—run!”

  Leon sprang up and ran in little circles like a mad whippet. Saul grabbed him, turned him to face the train.

  “Quick, jump on. It’s our only hope.”

  Leon bolted for the train, his brother struggling to keep up. They clambered aboard a giant rusting metal car that was laden with twenty tons of coal. Saul panted up the ladder behind Leon and collapsed next to him on the coal heap just as the train ground back into motion.

  Saul laughed. “Fuck, we made it!”

  Leon started laughing too, delighted to escape. “Thank you God, thank you Allah, thank you Buddha, thank you whoever you are!” he screamed, covering his options.

  He lay back on the dirty black carbon and looked at the white-blue space of sky and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  He was still laughing eight hours later after Saul had fallen asleep and the train passed over the state line into northern Florida.

  The truth is that Leon, like a lot of those—maybe everyone—who trips on acid, never really came back. He recovered but he was never the same guy again. He had lost something—innocence of hell. Acid presses a little button in your mind that should never be pressed.

  The coal train was stopped in some rural yard when Saul woke from his nap. Leon was gazing out into the sunset, which had turned the sky to the north an eerie pale green.

  Saul looked at the back of Leon’s head. He waited until his brother spoke first.

  “Well . . . that happened.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” said Leon, sounding like himself again. “Man, that was fucking weird.”

  Saul was a little scared, he didn’t know how to read this. “You remember everything?”

  “Sort of. I think someone must have spiked me acid or something, some prick jealous I was boning Deborah.”

  “You wanna go back?” asked Saul.

  “No fucking way. I’d be scared to even have a cup of coffee or a soda. Next time it might be rat poison or something. Mom isn’t the only crazy person in the world, obviously.”

  “What’ll we do?”

  “Keep moving. I never liked it there anyway. It’s best when it’s just you and me. Blood is thicker than water.”

  Leon turned and looked at his brother with tears in his eyes.

  “You’re the only one I can trust,” he said.

  Saul smiled through his own tears and hugged the brother he loved more than anything in the world. He loved him
even more now that he had broken him.

  Leon eventually cried himself to sleep in Saul’s arms and Saul held him until sunrise.

  The boys felt that it was too risky to stay on the train. There were always rumors of mad psycho guards who would beat you to death for hitching a free ride, although in reality these bogeymen had disappeared in the 1930s. The boys didn’t know that and what you don’t know can hurt you. Beat you to death for dodging a fare.

  They headed off into the woods with no idea of where they were going but with a certain faith that they would be provided for. A faith less to do with God and more to do with the fact that they were two white boys who grew up in the South. They knew, sooner or later, someone with old-time Dixie manners would offer them food or a bed or both.

  Leon was still very jumpy and fragile from his trip and he almost fainted when a raccoon ran across their path, but Saul was there to soothe him and he listened to his fat brother coo in his ear as they both stumbled over bracken and roots on the forest floor.

  They were in fact walking through the outskirts of the small town of Crawford’s Creek, treading on a forgotten battle site from the Civil War. In a minor skirmish there toward the end of the conflict, after Sherman had burned Atlanta and was mopping up the South, a party of twenty-eight Union soldiers were ambushed by a gang of renegade Confederate troops who had been hiding out with the locals. All twenty-eight were killed (hence the forgotten battle—no survivors from the eventual winning side) and their heads were put on spikes in a giant circle in the forest.

  The locals lit a bonfire in the center of the circle and everyone got drunk and danced, making believe that the South did indeed rise. The charred circle inside the severed heads became the clearing where the snake handlers eventually built their place of worship.

  Critters and some starving, quiet, guilty rednecks from the town of Crawford’s Creek stripped the burnt flesh from the bodies, and the bones sunk into the earth over time.

  The Civil War was the bloodiest war in history, they say. Usually Americans say that but we have already examined the reliability of American popular history, although it cannot be denied that the American Civil War was a particularly gory and unpleasant affair. Brother against brother, and everyone knows how vicious that can be.

  The woods got thicker and greener, the dense canopy of leaves allowing only shafts of light to stream to the ground. The boys walked on slowly and carefully. They looked like Grimm children in an El Greco.

  And lo it was that they walked from the darkness into the light. The Christian Reformed Fellowship of Born Again Snake Handling Pentecostal Baptists has their place of worship in the heart of the woods, almost a mile from Crawford’s Creek proper. A white wooden one-room structure by the side of a shiny bubbly stream. There is a little graveyard off to the side of the church where the faithful bury the finished.

  Little bunches of purple pansies decorate the small whitewashed carved boulders that serve as headstones to mark the recent and the Confederate dead.

  A fairytale church, but aren’t they all.

  MIAMI VICE

  HOTEL ROOMS HAVE AN APHRODISIAC QUALITY. It doesn’t matter how expensive the room is, it’s just the fact that you are renting a room for a short period of time means you can do what you want. It suggests a lack of accountability, it promotes the desire for wantonness and abandon. No one would ever know—well, maybe the hotel staff, but they are sworn to secrecy in an occult brotherhood as dark and tight as a mulatto ladyboy. Hotel staff are pilot fish, cleaning the crap and crumbs from orifices of the sharks in their charge. A cheap hotel room gives the seedy, sleazy vibe that many, especially rich, deviants enjoy but Fraser personally preferred expensive hotels. To Fraser an expensive hotel room was a clean plate. A chance to start again, and God knows he wanted that more than anything.

  When Fraser stepped into Room 113 of the Four Seasons Miami, he felt that little rush of adrenaline, he knew fun was on the way. He quickly dispensed with the porter, Steve, a worryingly tanned and shiny plastic queen, handing him twenty dollars in order to avoid listening to a lengthy and desperate, illiterate pitch about the benefits of the trouser press. There is just something thrilling about the full mini-bar and the military-style bed-making and the little soaps wrapped in cellophane and the jar of macadamia nuts. The only time in life Fraser ever ate macadamia nuts was when he was in a hotel. He wouldn’t even know where to get macadamia nuts in the real world.

  He opened his leather case and hung up his black Boss suit, a miracle of German efficiency—it would free itself of all wrinkles if hung properly on a hanger for an hour or two. He took off his trousers and threw them over the chair next to the bed, selected a small bottle of Stolichnaya vodka from the minibar, mixed it with fresh guava juice, opened the jar of macadamia nuts, and turned on the TV to CNN.

  The Cable News Network promised up-to-the-minute news reports twenty-four hours a day but, of course, there isn’t always news to report. So, in order to fill the airtime with something that felt like news, the Cable News people like to put on interview shows; after all, there are only so many human-interest “news” reports you can use to pad things out. Once you’ve seen one parrot that can ride a miniature bicycle, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

  The interview show that was airing when Fraser turned on the television was hosted by a gentleman named Larry King, a pompous narcissist who thought he was a tough intellectual because he wore suspenders and had a voice that sounded like an aged camel in sexual ecstasy.

  Larry was interviewing O.J. Simpson, who was complaining to Larry that people still were mean to him in airports and hotel lobbies, even though he had been cleared of the murder. Larry asked him if that was perhaps because they thought he was guilty. (Larry did, but he talked to politicians all the time, so dealing with self-justifying murderers came easy to him.) O.J. said that no, it was because they were jealous of his celebrity, and actually, in this case, O.J. was telling the truth, albeit unintentionally.

  Most Americans are disappointed because they are not in show business. They’re depressed because they are not famous. This is why “reality shows,” i.e., shows where “real” people are the stars (the definition of real here is people who are ugly or poor or not famous), became so popular on American (and, of course, Britain is included in this, as it is now little more than an annexed colony) television.

  Viewers want to believe that the fifteen minutes promised them in the famous sound bite by Mr. Warhol is just around the corner. The glorious day when they can Marry a Millionaire/Ordinary Guy/Beauty Queen/Midget and get front-row seats at the Golden Globes. Fraser watched Larry and O.J. blah for a few moments and became bored.

  Fraser thought he should absorb some of the local culture and switched off the television. He reached across the bed and opened the nightstand. Inside was a Miami Yellow Pages, a telephone directory, which was a throwback to the days before the Internet. He looked up E for Escorts.

  There is a language—perhaps not a language but a code—that goes with American prostitution. For example, in an advertisement for her services, an escort may offer a GFE, a Girl Friend Experience: This means the girl promises to kiss the client on the lips as well as the usual hooker stuff. You could also have a PSE, a Porn Star Experience: This means the girl will not kiss the client but she will have undergone an inexpensive and brutal-looking breast augmentation and she will allow him to ejaculate on her face.

  Fraser noted with some mirth that no one ever promised a WE, a Wife Experience, presumably because most men who sought the services of prostitutes were already married and were already paying much more for their WE elsewhere. (Although Fraser had never been married, he had picked up a bitterness and cynicism about the whole thing from his angry drinking buddies in the Press Bar, many of whom had been divorced by their wives because they spent too much time drinking in the Press Bar with divorced guys.)

  Even the term escort is important. Escort lets the prospective client know that he can expe
ct intercourse, or Full Service, if he is willing to pay the requisite price. Hookers who advertise “Sensual Massage” will not allow clients to penetrate them but will perform hand jobs or fellatio.

  Fraser was familiar with all this parlay, he was an old hand. He selected a full-page advertisement, a bad drawing of two women standing next to a stretched-out limousine with a private jet parked behind them. A giant champagne glass was also parked next to the jet, and at the top of the page, the name of the agency—Miami Platinum. (It is a common belief among workers in the sex industry that customers will pay more for sex if the word platinum is involved. This is not necessarily true but if you are in the sex trade you are already desperate, so what harm can it do to look a little foolish.)

  For some reason he felt a little guilty, a little adrenal, which was unusual. He had done this many times before in hotels all over the U.K. Whenever he was away on business, in fact. He contemplated not dialing the number. Maybe just have a bath and watch TV.

  “What’s this about?” he said out loud to himself.

  Thousands of miles away in Paris, even though it was getting very late, Claudette and George were still in conversation at Les Deux Magots. The mysterious intoxicating mist of human attraction had rolled in on them, causing them to stop and take stock of each other.

  They were doing favorite authors. George said he’d read only one book by a Frenchman. Camus’s L’Étranger. He’d had to study it at school. Didn’t really get it.

  Claudette said she thought it was a hateful piece of nihilism and that Camus wasn’t even French, he was Algerian.

  “A Frenchman would have written a nicer book?” asked George.

  “Of course,” smiled Claudette.

  Fraser dialed the digits at the door of his undoing.

  A woman answered. “Agency.”

  “Is this Miami Platinum?”

  “Yes, sir. How may I help you this evening?”

  “I’d like a girl to visit my room.”

  “Sure, honey.”

  Fraser put his hand down his Marks & Spencer’s underpants. He was already a little turned on. By this time he had completely forgotten the deal he had made with God when his airplane was going through turbulence.