A Thousand Bridges

by Michael McKinney

  I counted them down and told him to turn the bag over and shake it. My voice sounded a little rough and unsteady, but I don't think he noticed. He whimpered as he shook the empty bag.

  "Now," I said, "get out of my house."

  He took off like a runner out of the blocks and hit the screen door so hard it bounced off the outside wall and caught him in the shoulder as he plunged into the dark yard. I stood in the arch and watched as someone flung open the rear door of the car. He leapt inside.

  A couple of excited voices asked questions as the car shot from the curb, then I heard a loud and obscene bubbling sound from inside. The car swerved onto my neighbor's well-kept lawn. Loud curses came from it as the car bounced back onto the road, clipped a mailbox farther down the street and barely made the turn at the corner.

  "My car!" a male voice screeched in falsetto. "God damn it! My car!"

  I sat on the front step and let the pistol dangle between my knees. The bad thing was, these guys probably hade nothing to do with Bob Birk. More than likely, they were just some concerned citizens - young guys listening to their parents and bosses gripe about people like me screwing up a good town, something that wouldn't have happened in the "Old Days."

  The good side was that nobody egged my house again.

  TEN

  When Mark Thornton filed the suit against Bob Birk the press ignored it. That is, until Birk called a press conference on the marble steps of his office building. He stood between two giant American flags, with the Florida state flag behind him, and spoke to a crowd of media that included a handful of national reporters and two network teams.

  He gave an eloquent speech using someone else's words. He said he'd been defamed by scum who'd been paid off by the Radical-Liberal Left. Birk said he welcomed the lawsuit, that he would turn it around and, with the help of "Patriots and God" use it to show the corruption of ideals that threatened to destroy America.

  I watched it on TV and waited for the days of egging and window breaking to start up again, but it didn't happen. Going to town was still no fun, and I had yet to hear from a single contact. I knew Mel Shiver would be very careful, but I still expected to have had some word from him. I was feeling pretty lonesome, and I drove around town, found a comfortable pay phone, and called Katherine. We talked for a long time about nothing and I hung up, believing there was a solution to this case. There had to be.

  On the way home around midnight I drove to the marina and stopped my car. I sidled to the railing, and after glancing around, I got on my hands and knees. I poked my head through the rusted railing and reached into a piece of broken concrete on the underside of the seawall, expecting nothing but finding a thin envelope.

  It had been doubled over and wedged into the crack, and there was only one person who would have done it. The last on my list of people I thought would still be there, willing to help. A man with a lot to lose.

  I tucked the envelope into my shirt and stood, wiping my mouth as though I'd thrown up, just in case. I leaned on the rail for at least twenty minutes before I returned to my car and drove home.

  I sat in my familiar chair and turned on the lamp. Willis Traxler's letters were always a challenge to read, not because he was stupid but because he was illiterate. Raised on the edge of Palmetto Bay in one of the isolated pulpwood communities, Willis had had his priorities in line early, tattooed there by the rise and fall of the river, and its impact on his family.

  Everyone worked six days a week. The men spent their days in the woods working from "can to can't," as they say. "We can get one more load before dark."

  They filled dilapidated trucks with pulpwood and huge, grotesquely formed roots of Southern pine called 'fat-lighter,' because they are unbelievably heavy, and thick with turpentine. Just one sliver can kindle a fire. The women raised the children until they could work alongside the adults, and they cleaned the houses of wealthy people in Palmetto Bay.

  On Sundays, they would go to church as a family, then come home and work on the trucks and chainsaws until bedtime. They stopped in the early afternoon for a big meal that was then covered with sheets as the men returned to their business. When they could no longer work, they returned to the table for a smaller meal before sleep. It had been this way for generations, and wasn't likely to change.

  Like many small Southern towns, Palmetto Bay hired its locals for the low-end jobs and brought in management from the North and the Mid-West. Faulkner's Snopes family, great as they were for literature, left a taint on the good people who quit school to work and always smelled of diesel fuel and turpentine. Willis said "laigs" instead of legs and "aigs" instead of eggs and was called a redneck by the people he worked for. He was a non-entity, and the more compassionate cluck-clucked about the victims of this "archaic" system.

  My favorite quote came one day from a well-dressed, middle-aged couple from Chicago who confided in me that, "We didn't know how bad the education system was down here until we come down and seen it."

  Willis was so glad to have a real job that he ignored the daily insults, and even though promotions were seldom seen, he now had almost eighteen years in as a sheriff's deputy. He took me under his wing a long time ago and taught me how to fish for largemouth bass, how to entice a giant from the black water with an artificial lure and make him rip open the surface and dance.

  There are some people in the world who simply like each other from the start, and we were like that. I didn't see him much anymore, but we were still friends.

  "To Mack," the note, paper-clipped to three folded sheets of white paper, said, "I herd them say a girl was rapped on June 12" - that was the date given by Mark Thornton in the lawsuit - "I fond these and I copyed them. Maybe you will use them. Willis."

  I pulled the sheets from the note and unfolded them. One was a photocopy of an old Sheriff's Department log, authorizing five deputies and their cars to escort local dignitaries to Omni Property for something special at the Limestone Creek Men's Club. The date of the event was June the twelfth, five years back. The second sheet was another old log entry sending eight deputies to the Sunset Hotel for security later that same night.

  The third sheet was a bad copy of a hospital report. It showed emergency room treatment of two teenage girls for multiple bruises. One girl had a broken wrist. The date on the report was June the twelfth. The report had been rubber-stamped 'PAID.'

  Willis didn't just find these reports. He had to have searched for them in the files, hours or perhaps days of looking over his shoulder as he dug through the records warehouse. If found there, he would've been fired on the spot. Now, thanks to him, I had three potentially powerful pieces of information after weeks of nothing. I owed him a big favor.

  I was excited again, and I began to pace the house. My mind turned cartwheels trying to assimilate this new information, and I wanted more. What happened at the Men's Club that could turn community leaders into cowboys at the end of a cattle drive? The enigmatic pairing of the first two bits of information with the hospital report created large playgrounds for my imagination and became puzzles to be solved.

  The next two days went by unnoticed as I pulled the bag of facts from the garbage and laid them out again with my three new pieces. I tried to find out if the girls who'd been treated at the hospital that night were still in the area. I called people with the same last names but got nowhere. It was possible Candace had been close to them sometime that evening and, under the circumstances, they might remember her.

  I was sitting on the floor eating boiled peanuts and shuffling the facts around when Mark called. Before I could say hello he shouted, "Channel five, now!" and hung up.

  I brushed a mound of peanut shells off my lap and crawled to the TV, turned it on and changed the channel. There, in a fan of microphones, was a pretty, young woman with dark-blond hair and no makeup. Her eyes were large, and they darted back and forth as people shouted questions at her. I knew how that felt.

  "No, no," she said. "There were a lot of reasons not to
talk about it. There still are." Another woman stepped up beside her and looked equally nervous. A local lawyer named Bobby Stearns stood behind them. The second woman took her turn.

  "We've lived with this a long time," she said. Her hair was jet black and it made her pale skin look like milk. A microphone whistled. "And, there are other women out there who've been afraid this day would come."

  She looked over at the other woman. "But, to tell the truth, I'm glad it's here. I worked for Tommy Lovett for over a year, and my parents never knew about the Sunset Hotel." She dropped her eyes to the podium, and I dropped my heart into my stomach.

  I don't remember taking a breath for at least five minutes. It took that long for the woman to tell of the abuse and debauchery of Lovett and company, the pay-for-sex business with young girls from his pool hall and, like music to my hears, the revelation that Bob Birk was one of Lovett's regular customers.

  The special report switched back to the newsroom, where anchorman Todd Franklin, tie loose and white sleeves rolled up to show the timeliness of the event, looked at a small monitor. "Glen?" he said, and there was a crackling pause before the on-scene reporter turned his attention back to the camera. "Glen, what have you heard from the Birk headquarters?"

  "Well, Todd," the young, painfully thin reporter was brought onto a now-split screen, "Bill Norris, Mr. Birk's campaign manager, told me just now that his people are trying to find out who is behind this - well, he called it the latest smear campaign. He said they'd be issuing a statement by news time this afternoon."

  I sat in front of the television and watched two game shows, ate an entire bag of peanuts, and waited for the local news. The lead story was about Wanda Dinkins and Linda White, and their confessions of sex and perversion at the Sunset Hotel, but this time their lawyer did most of the talking, and his words, though sensational, were carefully chosen.

  I was breathless. The case of Candace Furay versus the world was taking on new life, one that reminded me that Candy was only one of the victims, and that others had suffered, too. I wondered if more would come forward, and, though Birk's damage-control team was incredible, they managed only to douse the flames. It didn't take much effort to see where the fire still smoldered.

  His people painted Bob Birk as the only victim, a man at the mercy of a vengeful Left-Wing Liberal attempt to bring down the one man with the vision and power to stop the downfall of America. They colored the women's reputations, implied collusion with a conspiracy to ruin Bob Birk. They suggested a payoff had been made and that the people of the Panhandle wouldn't put up with it.

  By the time the ten o'clock news came on, two more women had come forward with horror stories of Tommy Lovett and the Sunset Hotel. One said she'd been with Bob Birk several times and she remembered the night Candy Furay was raped. Mark Thornton came over with pizza and beer, and later we drove to a pay phone and called Katherine. She wanted to collect Candace and fly down to join the ranks, but Mark cautioned her to stay where she was. He told me later he suspected his bosses, Barret, Barret and Finch, of informing Birk about

  Katherine's visit to Tallahassee.

  The next day three women came separately to the press to support the others, and Palmetto Bay divided itself into two camps. One side held a religious rally and all-night gospel sing, handing out glassy bumper stickers that announced 'Bob Birk's Enemies are America's Enemies!'

  A front-page photo in the Friday paper showed a room full of Birk supporters wearing the stickers across the fronts of their white t-shirts. Friday afternoon, I found out just how good Birk's team was.

  Just before news time, one of the women who had come alone to the press the day before shouted tearfully that, yes, she had been paid by some lawyers from south Florida to say what she had said - all of it lies - and, yes, she was sure the other women had been paid, too. She said the lawyers told her that if Bob Birk dropped out of the race for governor, she would get a thousand-dollar bonus.

  Community reaction was instant outrage, and the denials of the other women went unheard in the uproar. The woman who had confessed to taking the money to ruin Birk quickly disappeared, and the once-bitten press made no attempt to find her. Patriotic rallies were held Saturday, not only in the Panhandle but all the way to the Florida Keys. Birk showed up at a massive rally held by the Cuban community of Miami. Red, white and blue banners lined the route of his motorcade, and NBC Nightly News ran a feature on his campaign.

  The other six women held their ground with their lawyers and a terrified Mark Thornton. Two of them were beaten by a group of angry women in the courthouse parking lot after their meeting with the grand jury.

  On the live, Sunday morning broadcast from the First Baptist Church of Palmetto Bay, Bob Birk received a standing ovation from the congregation as the youth choir sang, "God Bless America."

  I drove to the convenience store and called Katherine, then held the phone for a long time as she cried. I really wanted to ask her to call the whole thing off, to keep Candy in therapy until she could accept the deaths of her friends and to forget this goddamned town.

  I leaned on the blue bubble that housed the pay phone and looked at the pompous headline of Sunday's paper, boasting Birk's virtue in patriotically colored inks. I watched Bob Birk bumper stickers go by on everything from police cars to skateboards. I felt hopeless and lost.

  We said good-bye and I hung up. A horn blew, and I watched a man flip me the finger as he drove past. The cashier ignored me for a long time, but finally took my money and I walked out with milk and a package of bear claws. I had hoped to soften up Bob Birk, to weaken him with the rape charge. He should have been on the defensive, punch drunk and prone to mistakes but, instead, he was stronger.

  On Wednesday morning the grand jury allowed the Reverend Bo Treadwell of the First Baptist Church to speak to them behind closed doors, and just after noon the same day, they threw out Candace Furay's case against Bob Birk. The foreman of the grand jury said there wasn't enough evidence to warrant a trial.

  Reverend Treadwell explained to the press that he felt it necessary to let the grand jury know that Mr. Birk was a good, Christian man with decent values and that his contributions to the community and to the church should be considered.

  I felt something begin to uncoil in the darkest part of my soul, something I hadn't known for five years. It slipped into the warmth of my blood and wound around my heart. I saw the frightened and bitter faces of the women betrayed by justice, and I could see them as they were before, that day so long ago when I interviewed them with their parents. Frightened children who had trembled in the presence of their angry fathers and bewildered mothers as I looked down on them from my lofty perch.

  I thought of the years this shame lay uneasy, touching their lives in everything they'd done, and I knew what it had taken for them to come forward, what it cost them in the eyes of their town.

  I remembered their young faces that day five years before when I took their statements, and I realized, too late, how arrogant I'd been, how little consideration I had given their pain.

  Suddenly, time turned upside down and I was standing inside the front door of my house again, excited by the fact that we had finally wrapped up the case against Tommy Lovett and were on our way to success. I was in my best suit and tie, and I loosened the knot, unbuttoned the collar button, and called out to Sheevers. She didn't answer, and I walked past an aquarium filled with brightly colored fish to the kitchen, then into the hall, where I opened the door and found her mutilated body in such an ordinary room.

  I'm not a complicated man. I never lay in Sheevers' arms and wondered what I was missing, what another woman might do for me. I was booked solid through eternity, and we spent our nights planning a future that would never happen.

  Since her death I had dodged any responsibility for tomorrow and turned a blind eye to the problems of the world. Watching Brother Bo, as he was affectionately called, charm the TV screen that Wednesday afternoon did something of biblical proportions
to me. His voice was Joshua's trumpet at Jericho, and my walls came tumblin' down.

  I have a friend who believes that space is cluttered with inert comets, great balls of ice that not only replenish the earth's water supply but are filled with mischief. He says some are full of viruses and nasty gases that push the world to the brink of madness and death, and some are pocketed with spores of knowledge and evolutionary transistors that suck us in one side and shoot us out the other in a snakes-and-ladders game of survival of the fittest. He told me the mysterious sonic booms heard here and there around the world are just the sounds of us colliding with another ball of ice - maybe good, maybe bad.

  A game of chance.

  When I came out of my fog that Wednesday afternoon with the drone of Channel Five's weatherman in the background, I thought I heard a sonic boom. I drove to the phone booth and called Katherine at work, left a message, and waited there for her to call me back. When she did, she sounded distant and detached.

  "Mac," she said, "I've been thinking about it, and I believe it's time to stop. Candace is a basket case and my life's in pieces right now. Somewhere in my mind I convinced myself that I could save Candy."

  She hesitated. "Save you and me, too, I guess. Save the world..." She choked on the words.

  "Fuck," she said. She sniffed and cleared her throat. "Let's forget it, Mac. It isn't worth it."

  "It's strange, Katherine," I said. "I was going to say the same thing to you yesterday. But, now that I've thought it over, there's no way I'm going to quit. If I don't stop these bastards the world won't be worth living in, and all of a sudden I want to live a little longer.

  "I think you have saved me," I said. "I think I finally figured out why living is better than dying, and I don't want to forget it. You just hold on, keep it together out there, and I'll see if I can't make a little noise."