A Thousand Bridges

by Michael McKinney

  "But, you still have to deal with the Crazies at any level." Katherine found her footing and loosened up. She smiled that smile at me again. "The funny thing is the whole operation is backward. The casino is on the up-and-up and the executives are conservative and straight, but the preachers and the school teachers come in and go nuts at the tables. They keep doing 'white paper' reports on the news about organized crime, but as we say upstairs, 'we're just glad it's organized.'

  She seemed to have taken a trip there while she talked, and she drifted back to me. "James has given both of us stability and a home. Lately, that hasn't been easy."

  She sounded uncomfortable, and I was close to punching a hole in my palm with the car key. She brushed a hand across her forehead.

  "Well, listen," she said. "There's another flight at nine tonight. I know you're calling the shots on this, but I'm so used to making my own decisions. I guess this was a bad one."

  "No, not really," I said. "It'll make it a lot easier on me to have you do the talking. Did I tell you Mel doesn't like me?"

  She nodded, so I went on. "If we can get him interested he may be able to plug into a pretty high level of contacts. Without him, I don't think we can pull this off.

  "I'll have you back in time to catch that plane," I said.

  FIVE

  Katherine used the ride to get reacquainted with the lush jungle that is Northwest Florida. Low, black ponds guarded by prehistoric cypress were all that separated miles of slash pines, all in neat rows that chopped the sun into a dizzying strobe of light. Huge spider webs stretched between trees and reflected the sun's brilliant colors. Open, rolling pastures dotted with mossy oaks and thick, healthy cattle were broken here and there by low, clapboard houses with rusted tin roofs, their yards filled with farm machinery and old cars, mostly hidden behind tall green dog fennel and stacks of used tires.

  She bristled at the billboards that proclaimed Bob Birk as the fighter for the Little Guy. Now that he had formally declared his candidacy for the gubernatorial race, his campaign had gone into overdrive.

  Birk had risen fast during the Eighties and didn't even stumble as he crossed into the next decade. A friend of presidents and a leader of men, the billboards said. He made the noises of a Populist, positioning himself always as the patriot and as the friend of 'good people' all over Florida. The man who struggled against 'big government' and the tax-and-spend Liberals in Washington.

  The old stories of his questionable fortunes were weeded out by clever public relations agencies, and by time. Birk was becoming a local hero - champion of every blood drive, the guy with a temperature of 102, who gets out of bed at three in the morning to deliver a check for just enough money to push the total over the top and save the telethon. The man I was preparing to challenge to a duel.

  They say that in the Panhandle you can stand in mud up to your neck and dust will blow in your face, and when we turned off the pitted highway to Mel's house the truth in the axiom was evident. Even after a night of rain the clay was powdery and hung thick and red in the air. An approaching car created a dust storm.

  I pulled through the gate to Mel's property and blew the horn, pointing as his two huge German Shepherds crawled from under the porch and ran barking across the yard. The house was a low, wood frame structure that had spread haphazardly from its original three rooms to become a testament to Mel's whimsy. The dogs were tall enough to look straight into the windows of the car. I rolled mine down a little and said, "Hey, Sack-o!"

  The dog's quizzical, intelligent eyes shifted and his tail began to sway.

  "Who's this?" Katherine had shrunk from the window as she pointed out her side.

  "Van Zeti, of course," I said and she laughed. "Hello, Van."

  His bark dropped to the woof level by the time we rolled to a stop under a large pecan tree, its new leaves thick and shiny. The house had probably once been white, but now was pretty much the same color as the clay road. As I climbed out and scratched Sack-o under the collar, a menacing voice from the shadows of the screen porch growled, "What do you want?"

  "It's me, Mel," I said. "McDonald Clay."

  "I know," his familiar voice crackled. "That's why I want to know what you want."

  "Damn," I said. This wasn't going to be easy. Van Zeti raced around the car and leapt on me. I rubbed his side as he licked my neck. I ignored Mel, swam through the dogs and helped Katherine to her feet. The dogs sniffed her, and she touched them cautiously.

  "I need your help, Mel," I said.

  "Don't give me your crap, Clay." I knew he could be volatile, and I'd given him reasons to be over the years. He had loved Sheevers and, before she died, we would sit for hours on his porch watching cardinals wink by in flashes of red while his cats looked up and tried to compute wind speed and the birds' forward velocity.

  Gardenias and camellias protected the sides of his house, and giant azaleas, now brilliant in pink and red, lavender and white, stood sentinel along the rangy fence and were a cool home to a couple of large black snakes. In the deep part of Summer, when a cloud couldn't be bought with gold, Mel kept us in gallons of iced tea in giant, sweating glasses.

  He had yelled at me when Sheevers and I drove up to tell him about the state attorney's offer to hire me to bust Tommy Lovett. He called me a fool. We were so swelled with pride in our newfound respectability that we didn't take him seriously. Mel had slapped each word out of the way in a staccato outburst. "You're going to regret doing this, you fuzzy-headed son of a bitch! I never took you for a fool!"

  Now, like parents whose only child died in a senseless accident, we were bonded forever in an angry union. Mel Shiver had never mentioned Sheevers to me again after her death, but our sparring had taken on a bitter edge that his wife, Torrea Levi-Shiver, would not tolerate.

  "Get out of my way, old man!" I could hear her scolding Mel from the porch as Katherine listened in silence. The screen door screeched open and slammed against the wall, and Torrea came through the opening like a cannonball. Three cats on the steps ran into each other trying to get out of her way. Her arms were open and her face was an advertiser's dream. In her middle sixties, Torrea had snow-white hair and red cheeks like little apples, bifocal glasses propped on a pixie nose, and a mind and personality like Molly Yard. I was in awe of her, and she not only knew it, she loved it.

  "McDonald!" She smiled at me and winked at Katherine. She wrapped her arms around my waist and crushed me. "I have missed you!" Each word she spoke was measured and important.

  "And who are you?" she turned her attention to Katherine, leaving me wheezing and overjoyed by her presence. She would know everything about Katherine by the time they came in from the yard, so I turned my attention to her husband, still lurking in the shadows.

  "Mel?" I knew that there would be no banter, that something was wrong. I got no answer, and when I stepped up into the porch, he wasn't there. I walked through the open door and into his house, each familiar room a treacherous mountain range of books and magazines, teetering high above the modest furnishings. A bank of televisions flashed without sound in the corner beside his giant, computer-filled desk and, from the radio, Red Flannery was lecturing a caller on the virtues and dangers of investing in the stock market. Mel sat at the dining room table with his back to me.

  "Listening to Flannery? Mel, I'm a bit surprised." I tried to float it in like a paper airplane.

  "Red's an old friend of mine," Mel said with an angry rhythm. "I've known him a hell of a lot longer than I've known you."

  That really did surprise me, as did Mel's lingering animosity. That was usually slow to develop, even in our most spirited exchanges. I walked around a stack of milk crates filled with computer paper and saw a cane propped against the yellow Formica table, its gnarled brown wood reflecting in the table's chrome rim.

  Mel was silent, but the enormous cast that had swallowed his left leg spoke volumes. Even close to seventy years old, he was a physical man and very proud. He explained the virtual armory of w
eapons in his house to me once by saying only that he was a Rural Liberal.

  "What's that?" I'd asked. I knew he loved to hunt on his one-hundred acre spread.

  "A Rural Liberal," he'd said, "Is a Liberal with a gun."

  I walked slowly into the dining room and stood beside the table. "Sorry, Mel."

  "Sorry?" he said. "What the hell are you sorry for?"

  "Melvin!" The sharp bark of his name from behind me startled both of us, and Torrea walked in, arm in arm with a smiling Katherine. She seated the younger woman at the opposite end of the table from Mel and waved me over. "McDonald, please have a seat. I'm the host until Melvin's manners heal."

  Torrea called his name again, gentle this time, almost a whisper. "This is Katherine Furay. She was a friend of Patricia."

  Her soft words to her husband brought his head around to Katherine, and I watched his face come to life. He looked pale and weak, and I realized then that his age was as much a factor as the cast on his leg. I held my tongue and sat down.

  "Hello, Katherine," he said, his voice full and rich. "Please forgive me. I'm suffering from the very first broken bone I've ever had, and it seems to affected my civility. I'm so used to dealing with this bonehead that I didn't notice he was bringing real company."

  Mel was still calling me names, but his approach with her was gentle and I hoped the tension had passed. Katherine smiled at him, and I could see him loosen up. I already knew the healing power of that smile, and I began to believe we might convince Mel after all. Torrea had never been one to waste time with small talk, and she spun us directly into our business.

  "Melvin," she said to her husband, "they have something very important to tell us. I think you should listen closely." Torrea possessed a powerful calm, and when she spoke there was an aura about her that compelled others to pay attention.

  "Katherine needs our help, and I believe that all we have here may finally be put to use." Mel raised an eyebrow and leaned toward his wife. "She's only told me a little, Melvin, and it scares me."

  I think it was hearing her, the one person in my universe that I thought of as a solid rock, talk of being afraid that made me really grasp the scope of our undertaking. I thought I knew what we were up against, but I'd been so busy concentrating on boring my little holes into the case that I never stopped to think of the true size of my opponent. I lost a lot of inertia there at the table.

  Torrea touched Katherine's hand. "Would you like some tea?" she asked, and I told her I'd get it. I almost fell out of the chair in my hurry for something cold to drink, my mouth suddenly so dry it was as if it had been swabbed with cotton. I stumbled into the kitchen to the old, round refrigerator, and as I wrapped my hands around a gallon jar filled with chilled, reddish brown tea, the color of clear, deep river, I heard Torrea say to Katherine, "It's all right dear, you just start anywhere."

  I cracked enough ice from a white plastic bucket of cubes in the freezer to fill four glasses, found a tray and poured the glasses to the brim. When I returned to the table Katherine was explaining the events that led up to the murders. I quietly spread the glasses around and took my seat. She stopped to drink and I stared at her. She closed her eyes and one hand went to her throat. I glanced at Mel, and he was captivated. She finished the glass of tea before she stopped, and I slid mine to her. When she began telling them about the murders at Limestone Creek, Katherine slipped her hand into mine.

  I watched her closely, the emotion so close to the surface, and I realized this wasn't an old story. This was new to her, too, and she was still in shock, still confused.

  She told it with no interruptions. Mel, a large man with a thick chest and arms like small trees, sat quietly with his elbows on the table, chin on his thumbs as his index fingers bridged his lips closed. He stared at Katherine, and occasionally his black eyes would flick to me before returning to her. When she finished, Katherine closed her eyes again and let her head fall back, shaking her thick hair. I watched her flex like a cat, slowly stretching from her neck to her feet before she opened her eyes and glanced at me. A milky cloud seemed to spread under her olive skin.

  "Are you okay?" I said. She nodded. Mel stood carefully and pushed his chair back. He swung the plaster-covered leg before him and grasped his cane angrily, half leaning on it and half choking it as he step-shuffle-stepped to a tall, narrow window. He leaned against the stout frame and stared into the yard. Clouds covered the setting sun and his face went gray. Torrea slipped silently into the kitchen and I could hear the smooth gurgle of tea over ice. She came back with refills and dealt them around the table.

  "That is the most frightening thing I have ever heard," Mel's voice was the sound of age with the bass turned all the way up. "God damn them! God damn the lot of them!"

  Red Flannery mumbled from the other room as a tinny, telephone voice asked him questions. "I knew they were training the bastards here," Mel said, "but I couldn't prove it. I couldn't get anybody to talk, and I couldn't find anybody who cared if they were bringing them here." He sounded more bitter than I'd ever imagined possible.

  "It may be something else," I said. "You know, Cuban mercenaries, or some right-wing religious stuff."

  "Don't be stupid!" He spit the words at me and turned too fast, tilting dangerously for a second. "You bring me this, put Miss Furay through it, and then you say something as asinine as that? What the hell do you think you're doing, Mac?"

  "Looking at all the angles?" I suggested. He glared at me, and for the moment there were just the two of us in the room. The moment dragged on. He propelled himself back to the table.

  "Why did she come to you?" Mel said.

  "Why don't you ask Katherine?" I wondered if he'd forgotten we used to like each other.

  "This one isn't for you, Mac," he said. "Let her take the doctor's advice and go to the government. Let Congress fight it out."

  "I don't believe you're saying this, Mel," I said. "You don't believe I can do it, do you?"

  "No." His answer was flat and automatic. It landed on me like a hot coal.

  "Then again," I tried to stay level, "you didn't think I could do it five years ago, either."

  "You didn't," he said. "All you did..." He paused and looked away.

  "Go ahead, Mel," I said. "Remind me what happened the last time I started a crusade." He looked back at me and the rage was gone, but the cold words didn't stop.

  "I don't need to remind you," he said. "Just make sure this woman is safe before you unfurl your banner."

  "Nobody's safe, Mel," I said. "You should know that."

  I lifted the tea and drank while my stomach jumped back and forth over all the little organs in its neighborhood. Mel's attitude was like a battering ram to my new confidence and I desperately wanted to hide that from Katherine, but it was her faith in me that came to the rescue. She rose from the chair and stepped behind me.

  "Please stop," she said. "I came to Mac because he was the only one I wanted for this. To be honest, I don't think there's any way we can beat them, but my daughter deserves a chance and I'm going to try."

  "Me too, Mel," I said. "And I plan to win, with you or without you."

  The gathering darkness hid a rolling fog that erased the world beyond each window, and I felt Katherine's hands on my arm as I stood up, still locked in to Mel's gaze. Torrea appeared beside him and rubbed his stomach.

  "Mel fell off the barn two weeks ago," she said as thought we had just walked in the door and were saying howdy-do's. "And even though he landed on his leg, I suspect it was his brain that took the beating. Please don't go yet."

  We were all standing now, wooden and stiff, until Mel sat with a thump that made the dishes rattle in the cupboard. "Give me a week and I should have enough to start you off on the right path," he said. "It'll take longer for anything substantial, but I'll put all my effort into it." It was as close to an apology as I would ever get, and I accepted it.

  "Thanks," I said. We all dawdled, clumsy and embarrassed, as night fell. The tal
k was stilted and forced, but we worked out the skeleton of a plan. A place to start. It was over an hour later when we finally made our way to the porch, and as we stepped into the yard the fog pushed us together. It was so thick in the halo of Mel's porch light that when the dogs led the way to my car, it eddied around them like smoke.

  Torrea crushed me again and took Katherine's hands as I offered mine to Mel. His eyes dodged mine as he grasped the hand and squeezed. He coughed and said goodbye to Katherine. Four cats were curled together on my hood and they stared at me in disbelief as I cranked the car, refusing to budge until I put it in gear and drove off, scrunched over the wheel in that idiotic stance you get into when driving in fog. The one in which your mind tells you that if you get closer to the windshield you can see farther.

  Speed was out of the question, but I was in no hurry. I told myself Mel's age and broken leg had to be taken into account, but the truth was I expected everyone else to come to life simply because I had and it wasn't going to be that easy. I had fallen a long way in five years, and there was no express elevator back. The night was oppressive and damp, and we crept down the road listening to my car rattle on clay that was ridged like a washboard. A rabbit darted in front of me and ran zigzag across the beams of light before leaping over a black ditch.

  I eased the car through the fog and reached the airport with an hour to spare. I found a parking place and turned off the engine. The trip had been made in silence as we both retreated into our thoughts. The more we fleshed out the battle plans at Mel's, the more subdued we became until I felt the start of a depression rolling in, not poetically like Sandburg's fog, but heavy, like a manhole cover. A glance at Katherine told me I wasn't alone in trying to dodge it. She turned to me and moved across the seat until we touched. I slipped my hand along her cheek and cupped her head gently.

  "I'm driving away this time," I said. "So you'd better really get on that plane."