A Thousand Bridges

by Michael McKinney

  "No way!" Lieutenant Patrick almost shouted. "We wouldn't stand for it!"

  Mel looked at him over the back of the television and smiled sympathetically. "Do you remember PATCO, Lieutenant? The air traffic controllers Reagan replaced early in his administration?"

  Patrick nodded and looked uneasy. "With the pool of unemployed men in the state," Mel went on calmly, "how long do you think it would take to replace you? No offense intended."

  "Just imagine," Torrea said, "the media blitz that would go along with it. They could say they were giving those policemen and judges who are soft on crime a chance to retire and save face. They wouldn't be missed, because they'd be replaced by tough new cops who weren't so squeamish."

  "And, then," Patrick's eyes were cold and hard, "Bob Birk and others like him would form companies that would be licensed to sell drugs legally across the state. That would be one hell of a lucrative business, wouldn't it?" He said it to no one in particular, and we sat for a moment in silence.

  "And, tomorrow," I said, "the world. Holy cow."

  Mel made copies and we drank coffee. The ten o'clock news carried a small story about a brush fire at Limestone Creek. They said it started in a shed filled with illegal fireworks, but the fire department and the Division of Forestry got it under control within an hour.

  After the news, Lonnie Patrick hung around conspicuously until, finally, he spoke up. "Mr. Shiver," he said. "Clay? I need copies of those tapes. This thing's bigger than you can handle, and it involves me, too. I know some people in Tallahassee who carry a lot of weight."

  He looked at each of us, and I glanced at Mel as the Lieutenant said, "Please?"

  "Okay," I said. "E pluribus unum and all that."

  Mel shrugged and bound two copies together with masking tape. He handed the bundle to Patrick, and Torrea took his free hand in both of hers.

  "There are a lot of good people in Florida," she said. "I hope you can find some help. We're going to need it."

  I watched the Lieutenant drive away and went back inside. Torrea stepped out of a side room with an armload of sheets and pillows, and I followed her down the hall to a small bedroom. We made the double bed, and she opened the window, then checked the latch on the screen. "When do you think they'll get here?" she asked quietly, and I said I didn't know.

  I was too nervous to stay in one place, so I wandered up and down the hall, watched Mel as he worked at his desk, then stepped out of the house and wandered out into the yard. It was pitch black and at least ten degrees cooler outside. The dogs slipped up and touched their noses to my palm, then, satisfied, drifted away.

  The whippoorwill still searched in the night for a mate. I walked to the gate and stared down the empty road. The air was still and smelled like dust, and I looked up at a spectacular, starry sky. High above, the tiny red lights of a commercial airliner blinked silently across heaven, and I wondered if Katherine was inside.

  When I walked back to the house Mel and Torrea were sitting together on the porch swing, the dogs at their feet.

  "Mac," Mel said, "why don't you go ahead and park your car in the barn?" I looked at him.

  "You'll be staying with us, of course," Torrea said, her arm laced in Mel's, her hand on his cast.

  I thought it over and realized I had nowhere else to go, so I spared them the 'golly-shucks-I'll-just-be-in-the-way' stuff and said, "Thank you."

  I pulled my car into the weathered cypress barn and carried a handful of my clothes into the house, not wanting to look like I was moving in. I joined them on the porch and we sat in silence for a long time before Torrea went inside and left Mel and me to mend our fences.

  We stumbled over recent events and slowly, painfully, reached back to talk about the past. When he began, reluctantly, to talk to me about Patty and the trip he and Torrea had made to her funeral, there were tears in his eyes. Torrea brought out a bottle of dry red wine and three glasses, and we drank to the past and the future.

  Katherine didn't show up the next day, and by the time it got too dark to work, I had repaired almost every broken thing on Mel's farm. We ate supper late, and I sat up listening to the radio new shows for any scrap of information. It was as though nothing was going on. Nothing at all.

  I was up before sunrise, my belt filled with tools and my pockets full of nails, and by nine o'clock in the morning I was filthy and soaked in sweat as Mel and I battled his ancient Allis-Chalmers tractor, muscling a hydraulic unit off in a strange dance of life that resembled Kirk Douglas fighting the giant squid in an old Disney classic.

  I crawled out from under the tractor when the dogs started barking, and brushed dirt from my arms. A sleek blue BMW rolled though the gate and came to a stop in front of the house. Mel caught up with me when I stopped at the trough to splash cold water in my eyes. I pulled the tail of my smeared t-shirt up and wiped a clean spot into my greasy face. The dogs stood warily at the car doors until Mel shooed them away and Katherine stepped out of the passenger side, a lavender dress swirling around her long legs.

  A beautiful young woman in jeans and white shirt eased herself from the cool interior of the back seat, drawing back as she felt the sticky heat. A tall, handsome man in a lightweight suit got out of the driver's seat, leaned against the door and ignored the dogs.

  "Mac!" Katherine took my hand and laughed at me when I tried to brush off the dirt from the other hand onto my pants leg. "This is Candace, My daughter."

  The young woman with the chipmunk cheeks looked at me, and I thought she was going to dive back into the car. I nodded, and Katherine turned me toward the driver. "This is James," she said. "James Lucas."

  There was a tag on the front bumper of the sedan that read, "LUCAS-VEGAS BMW." I started to shake hands, looked down at my filthy fingers, and changed my mind. I waved foolishly, and he nodded his head about an eighth of an inch.

  James left just before noon the next day, and in the time between, even the minutes were like weeks. After supper that first day, just as the sun dropped behind the thick wall of trees down along the river, he and Katherine went outside and sat on the porch swing. Later, in the darkness, I heard the doors of the BMW open and close. Torrea had driven Mel somewhere to talk to a man about cutting his hay, and Candace stayed in the bedroom and cried.

  The house felt smaller than a postage stamp, and I sat in a wooden chair beside the radio, listening as the deejay played every sad song ever written. I woke up on the floor with sunlight in my eyes, and I sat up, listening to voices in the yard. When I stepped onto the porch, Mel and Torrea were standing just inside the screen door as James said his good-byes to Katherine and Candace. He saw me and called my name, so I walked to the car.

  "I want Katherine to live through this," he said. "And Candy."

  "So do I," I said. I felt like a kid called to the front of the class to write something a thousand times on the blackboard. That one thing said, he dismissed me and turned to Candy. She ran to him, hugging him as she cried. He pushed her away slowly, nodded at Katherine, then climbed into his car and drove out. His car was soon hidden from sight by a row of giant azaleas. Candace darted back into the house and Katherine stared silently at the gate. I went back to work, but was too clumsy to finish a single project.

  Katherine was moody the rest of the day and kept to herself. We said a few things to each other, but they seemed contrived and empty, as though we'd hire poor actors to play our parts and read our lines.

  Mel and Torrea left again and were gone the rest of the day. When they returned, Mel was fractious and grumbled about friends not being what they used to be. Somehow, that day ended as well. Clouds gathered in the afternoon and the humidity built to near one hundred percent, but it didn't rain. Far away, blue and yellow lightning crawled along the treetops and thunder rumbled. The air was so heavy that the fireflies stayed at home with their lights off.

  The rain came early the next morning, and stayed until noon. We sat at the kitchen table, rumpled and haggard and beaten, eyes on our coffee c
ups. We had the look of front-line veterans in a long war. Torrea nudged us our of our slump by suggesting we think about the other side. "We can't be sure they haven't stopped looking for you," she said. We got even more solemn.

  "Mel asked if I'd made contact with Mark Thornton yet, and I said no. I wanted to be sure Katherine had nothing new to offer first, and she said they hadn't heard anything since word of Dr. Kuyatt's death.

  I took Mel's truck down to a small crossroad community some thirty miles from Red Oak and called Mark.

  "My God!" he said. "Where are you?"

  I told him I was calling from a phone booth and that I needed to see him. I suggested a shopping center just off the interstate two exits down and said I'd meet him there at three. I told him I had my proof, and he sounded excited.

  We sat on the hood o the truck, and when I told him about the Men's Club I thought he was going to faint. I handed him copies of the video cassettes and gave him a summary of the contents. He slipped off the truck and walked halfway across the parking lot before he spun around and came back. His lawyer skin actually had sweat on it, and his shirt was soaked.

  I told him about Lieutenant Patrick, and his eyes became cartoon circles. "How the hell do you know you can trust him?" he shouted at me as a woman hurried past with her grocery cart.

  "Jesus God, Mac," he said. "Where is your head? I'm trying to get your ass out of a crack and you're confessing to every stranger on the street?"

  "He's not a stranger," I said quietly. "Not to me."

  "Do you even realize you broke a lot of serious laws the other night? And now you've voluntarily told a cop about it?" He slammed a soft fist into the truck fender.

  "Mac," he breathed out the words, "when this is over, I don't want anything more to do with you. At least, not legally."

  "Okay," I said. Mark was strung tightly, and I apologized. He took the bundle I gave him and I filled him in on Katherine and the doctor. He wrote down Mel's phone number but promised he would never call him from his office.

  He raced away in his Mercedes and I wheeled the Trooper toward the plaza exit, then shut the engine off and closed my eyes. The headache came out of nowhere and ripped through my head like a freight train. I put a hand over my eyes and squeezed my temples. A feeling of resentment toward Katherine surprised me even as it appeared, and before I knew it, I was mad at Sheevers, too. She had left me so permanently and so full of guilt, then Katherine came along and pulled me out of my comfortable seclusion just to bounce me around again. I slapped the dashboard and shouted a profanity at the world.

  Why in the hell couldn't they have just left me alone? Why did they both feel the need to involve me in their damned tangled lives, when all I wanted to do was to skate along into oblivion? When I dropped my hand from my eyes I found myself staring into the rearview mirror. The look of self-pity on my face made me sick.

  Here I was, feeling sorry for myself while Katherine huddled with her daughter in a stranger's house, watching her world fall apart. I felt shame. I was like the whining husband who says, "It's her fault, not mine. I had to slap her to get her to shut up.

  By the time I pulled through the gate to Mel's farm, I had managed to extract my head from my ass. I'd stopped by the grocery store in the little shopping center, and when I carried a bag filled with frosted half-gallons of ice cream into the house, I heard the end of the first tape being played.

  Everyone glanced at me, then turned back to the television. I walked into the familiar kitchen, counted out enough bowls for everyone, filled them and passed around the ice cream. Even Candace took one. When the second tape ended, Mel hit the rewind button.

  "Mac," Katherine patted the cushion on the couch, and I sat beside her. "Torrea and Mel told us what happened. Are you out of your mind?"

  "Boy, what a stupid question," I said. I ate a few spoonfuls of ice cream, then leaned back on the soft couch and breathed in, held it for a moment then let it go. I looked around the cluttered room. "May I say something?"

  "Go ahead," Mel mumbled around a glob of chocolate.

  "I almost gave up today," I said. "To tell the truth, I started feeling sorry for myself and I kept thinking, 'Why me?'"

  I hated this kind of confession. "But it's not me, or even us." I made a circle over their heads with my index finger. "It's going to be everyone if we don't stop them now. These people are evil. I'd like to think they're just misguided, but that's not the truth. They're evil, and we can't let them win. This isn't something that will go away."

  "Mel said Lieutenant Patrick was with you," Katherine said. I told her about him, and said Mark Thornton was worried about my letting Patrick know everything, including where we were.

  "That's ridiculous," Katherine said. "I trust him."

  The telephone rang and Torrea rose to answer it as Mel ejected the tape. Torrea called him to the phone, and he came back into the living room slapping his hand against the dirty cast. "That was my friend," he said. "Peter Kinsall. I have to get the tractor ready today or he won't be able to get to my fields for another week or two."

  "I'll get ready," I said. "We should have the new unit on by supper."

  I was a little optimistic, but it was ready to run by eight o'clock that night and we'd nailed new two-by-six guides on the trailer by nine. Katherine and Candace had spent the day with Torrea going over all the details of our case.

  I took a shower and muttered goodnight to everyone. The long days of worry and our work on the tractor left me tired, and I suppose I was trying to avoid any more discussion. I didn't even want to think about it.

  THIRTEEN

  I felt something on my face and I woke with a start. Katherine was sitting on the edge of the bed in a light, sleeveless dress. Her fingers traced my jaw. She smiled. "Let's go for a ride," she said.

  I blinked at her and tried to get my senses about me. I looked at my watch. It was twelve thirty, and the quarter moon in my window was the color of cream. She left the room, and as I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed I heard her open the front door and step outside. I dressed, and when I stood and reached for my keys, a handful of nails punched my leg through the pocket of my jeans.

  The night was damp and warmer than it had been. A light fog veiled the moon. I took Katherine's hand and we walked to the barn. She got in my car on the passenger side and I slid in behind the wheel, cranked the car and backed into the yard. The dogs stood quietly at the gate and moved aside as I drove through. We didn't talk.

  I tried to remember the road. County maintained, it had wide ditches on either side all the way to the bend, where the Choctawhatchee River cut a dogleg curve around a piece of high farmland and then shot west again. There, on that bend, was a local swimming hole, and a sandy strip of land ran between a massive oak tree and the river. In the summer, kids parked their trucks in the shade of the oak while they swam.

  I looked through the thickening fog for the oak. When I came to the first part of the curve I could see its limbs spreading out of the night, though most of its height was lost in the mist. I pulled onto the sandy strip and coasted to a stop. Sounds of the river floated in through the open windows.

  I turned off the engine and looked at Katherine. She came toward me and her hands wrapped my head in a tender web. Her lips attacked mine. She pulled my right hand from the wheel and snaked it around her, easing herself around on the seat until she was lying across my chest. Everywhere we touched was warm. Her hands slipped down my neck to my collar, and the kiss turned serious. I broke free. She raised herself up from my pocket of nails and rubbed her side.

  "Katherine," I was already out of breath. "I'm not sure..."

  "I am." There was anger in her voice. "Now, shut up."

  Her fingers worked at the buttons of my shirt and her lips left to wander along the side of my face. I felt alarms going off all over, and I began to share her urgency. Suddenly, I became aware of the smell of her hair, the scent of delicate perfume in the soft hollows of her throat, felt the pre
ssure of her breasts as she held us together.

  Katherine almost ripped my shirt getting it out of my pants, then she slid it off my chest, hooked her fingers in my belt, and said, "Come this way."

  She tugged, and I squirmed to the middle of the bench seat. I had almost taken a decent drink of air when she kissed me again, this time slowly and passionately. She fumbled with my belt buckle, then unsnapped my jeans, getting the zipper stuck in the process. I pushed her hands away, kicked out of my shoes, and managed to get my pants off, whacking my head only once on the dash and twice on the shifter.

  She climbed across me, and her white dress floated like a cloud. Her long, cool legs rested against the outsides of mine, and she cupped my neck with one hand, curling forward to kiss me as she reached under the dress with the other and held me, guided me to her. Katherine eased down until she was sitting in my lap and, in total control, she rolled against me in an easy rhythm like a train on a track. I slipped my hands under the light cotton dress and held her waist, and as the gentle force of her lips drew me out, as we explored each other for the right flow, I could have devoured her, breathed her in like a fragrance.

  She bit my lip, and when I said, "Ouch," she threw back her head and laughed a husky laugh. It's not that I'd been celibate for five years, but it took that moment for me to realize what a powerful chemical 'need' is to the act of making love; the feeling that you want the other person to be glad to be with you. I felt sensations that made me think, 'Oh, yeah....now I remember why people go through hell for this.'