A Thousand Bridges

by Michael McKinney

  Flannery's suggestion to "Just say no" to all pollsters seemed to be having an effect on the political coverage. He'd begun a campaign of his own, saying no matter what your politics or your party, refuse to answer all questions by those who polled continuously through the telephone or door-to-door. He said if everyone refused to answer these questions the politicians would be forced to commit themselves to a platform.

  There were reports that polling accuracy had dropped. Still, Birk seemed to be holding a sizeable lead in popularity among those who did answer. Time seemed suspended.

  I woke up after midnight on primary morning and saw Katherine standing at the window, her arms crossed, head leaning against the frame. "What's on your mind?" I said.

  She didn't move, and after a long while I decided that she didn't want to talk. I lay back and closed my eyes. When she came back to bed, Katherine stretched out beside me and draped an arm across my stomach, her head on my shoulder.

  "I killed someone," she said. "And I can't get it out of my mind - I mean, I know why I did it, and I'd do it again, but, Mac, I killed a man."

  I rubbed her neck softly and kept quiet as she talked. An hour passed as she told me about her family, how her mother had died just months after her father. Her voice was like a slow stream, and the story of her childhood flowed into the birth of Candy and of being a mother at fifteen.

  She talked about taking a bus to Las Vegas, of looking for work and trying to protect her daughter. Somewhere in the conversation she fell asleep, and I lay motionless in the dark feeling her heart tapping against me, and I wanted to be twenty feet tall and mean as hell. I wanted to guarantee her no harm would ever come to her again, and I cursed myself because it was beyond my power. Her breathing was deep and even, and she was relaxed in her sleep.

  "I love you," I said.

  I was sitting in a chair on the front porch when Lonnie Patrick drove up in a battered old Chevrolet. The dogs barked until I stood up and leaned on the railing, then they slipped gratefully back into the cool sand under the house. Even at dawn the heat was like a heavy blanket. A dense fog hung an inch above the water, and black cypress stumps stuck their heads out of the top. Beyond them, a peach-colored line divided the earth from the sky.

  I had been awake early, sharing coffee with Mother Mae as the other Traxler women prepared their day's supplies - jugs of water and slices of pie. They laughed and talked among themselves as I sat with Mae in her kitchen, a place that always smelled like grease, tomatoes and cigarette smoke.

  Katherine and Candace had been working in the fields with them for days, but we'd received word from Lonnie that he had something to tell us and that he would arrive early, so the two of them slept in.

  "We'll be finished with the peas by noon today," Mae spoke around a Pall Mall cigarette, its ash long and unstable. "Sooner than that if the deer got back through the fence again. 'Then we'll start canning tonight. Willis and Addie and the kids are doing just fine over there, so don't you worry about that. The three of you can come over this evening and we'll make a night of it." The ash fell to the bare wooden table top and she brushed it over the side.

  "I'm scared for Willis, Mac," she said, her brow wrinkled and low over her heavy eyes. "He thinks everything is a game."

  "I'll talk to him, but I think he knows what he's doing, Mae," I said as they carried everything to the 'yard truck,' a flatbed truck that may have once had a brand name, a body style. There were no fenders, and they had kept the body hammered into a truck-like shape that left the tires free to turn. It had one headlight and one taillight, and the crumpled tag was over twenty years old. This was the work machine, and it never left Traxler land.

  The women would have its flatbed stacked high with hampers of peas when they returned. They had been in the fields for almost an hour when Lonnie showed up.

  "Hey, hero," he said as he climbed from the old truck.

  "Fuck off." I made my way down the steps.

  "Where is everybody?" he said.

  "Katherine's asleep," I said. "So is Candy. The others are picking peas. What's the story?"

  "Well," he pulled a brown, scuffed briefcase through the open truck window and used the hood for a table, shuffling papers together before he removed them from the case. He waved them at me and smiled. "I've had people working overtime in the archives, you know, the document files in Tallahassee. They found these."

  He handed the paperwork to me, and I looked through it. There were photocopies of contracts between government officials and the board of Omni, signed documents authorizing percentages of profit to Omni members in exchange for a chance to develop a new type of army on the Omni grounds.

  A Top Secret stamp marked the top of each page, but I didn't care how he'd obtained them. Bob Birk's name was at the top of each line of signatures. The date on each page was June the twelfth, the same as the wild party at the Sunset Hotel and the rape of Candace Furay.

  "Holy cow," I said.

  "Wait until you see the ones from the FDLE," Lonnie said as he pulled out a fat, stapled folder with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement letterhead. He'd obviously been getting a lot of help from high places. "They're investigating your Sheriff in connection with the Limestone Creek murders and the death of the black dope pusher."

  "Good morning, handsome," Katherine called from the porch, and we both turned toward the house. She looked at me and wrinkled her face. "Not you, sweetie."

  Candy opened the screen door and peeked out over her mother's shoulder. "Come inside, Mr. Policeman," Katherine said, "and show me what you've got."

  "How could I resist an invitation like that?" Lonnie said, taking the papers from me and stuffing them back into the briefcase. He snapped it closed and straightened up.

  "Out of my way, gimpy," he said, pushing me aside as he headed for the porch. "You can catch up to us later."

  They all went inside but I lingered, sweat trickling under my bandages as I stood beside Lonnie's truck. I thought of the documents, the other paperwork, and the women who were still willing to testify against Birk if we ever made it to trial. For the first time since Katherine knocked on my door, I mulled over the possibility of success. We had a case for murder at Omni.

  A big fish broke the surface of the black water somewhere in the fog, and I heard him swirl quickly before he was gone. Willis and I had fished these backwaters until I knew every inch of them, and I imagined that big bass rolling on the surface, swallowing a spider, a cricket, a hapless minnow. I remembered what I'd said to Lonnie Patrick as I gathered my clothes from the lawn that night, and wondered how the bass would react to a minnow lodged in its throat. It wouldn't just sink and die.

  I walked to the muddy edge of the slough and circled to the right, past the junked timber trucks and the carefully tended bass boats tied to a short dock. I skirted a mountain of burned trash that rose from a deep pit, and sat on the tall, worn tire of an old tractor, my legs dangling over the side. I slapped the injured leg and it hurt, but not much. I tried rolling my shoulder, but it scolded me. It wasn't ready for that.

  I closed my eyes and added my new facts to the mental files. Somewhere, someone knew the soldier who murdered Candy's friends. When the story broke, there was a minor flurry of activity from their parents, but as the facts were twisted around and reburied, the broken families willingly returned to anonymity, back to their sad lives. I wanted them to have their day, to know what really happened to their children. The family of Renaldo Tipped deserved no less.

  I added and deleted, watched a hopeful pattern emerge. I wanted to go even deeper, but I heard the swirl of water again and this time it was no fish. I struggled to free myself of the labyrinth inside my brain, strained to return to the real world, to my normal state of semi-consciousness. I wondered how long I'd been sitting there.

  The noise came again. It was the sound of an oar being drawn carefully through the water. I opened my eyes and shook my head. The sun had risen well over a wall of cypress trees on the fa
r side of the slough, and its blistering heat was cutting holes in the fog.

  I squinted into the brightness and off to my left, coming out of one of the narrow channels that gave access to the Traxler slough, was a long black boat. Sleek and dark, it floated out of the fog like a wraith, its presence evil enough even before I saw the lone man rise from behind the windshield. He was dressed in black and had dark grease paint smeared across his cheeks and forehead.

  He bent down and dropped the oar soundlessly into the boat, and when he came back up there was a hand-held rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder, one of those Stinger-type missiles that our government traded like baseball cards to Third World countries.

  My first thought was a dumb one. I thought he was going to blow up the tractor, but I don't think he even saw me. He turned casually until his little launcher was pointed just to the right of Lonnie's truck, directly in line with the screen door that stood in the middle of the front porch. Before I could crawl down from the big tire I heard a swoosh, and the explosion threw me to the wet ground, the heat singeing the hair on my arms.

  I leapt to my feet and clawed my way around the trash piled, only to stand dumbly watching as the few charred remains of Willis Traxler's home folded in on themselves in a fiery roar. Somewhere inside was what was left of Katherine, Candy and Lonnie Patrick.

  Behind me, the man cranked his engine and it puttered for a few seconds before he opened the throttle and slipped back into the fog.

  "No!" I shouted at him, running to the three boats tied to the rough-cut cypress dock. I looked back over my shoulder, but the remains of the house were just a small stack of burning black timbers. The windows of Lonnie's truck were shattered and, though the fire hadn't spread, the other houses had suffered from the blast.

  My heart was ice cold and my hands were rock steady as I untied the faster of the three boats, squeezed some gas through the line and cranked the engine.

  I don't think he was in a hurry until he heard me start up, but I heard his boat rev up, pictured it in my mind as it cut through the channel. I twisted the throttle and shot from the dock in pursuit, wondering at first why he wasn't outrunning me. In a boat like his, it should have been no contest. Then I realized he wasn't familiar with the series of channels cut in the dense cypress swamp, and he was having to find his way through unseen walls of submerged stumps.

  I listened to him and could tell by his changes in direction and speed where he would end up when he finally hit the river, and I opened the throttle the rest of the way, felt the wet air on my face push hot tears from my eyes. My lips were stretched tightly and pulled away rom my teeth in a snarl, muscles so rigid that i felt the ones in my neck jumping.

  The man's death was all I had to live for, and I put my entire self into the chase. The boat bucked and slapped over familiar waters, and I cut every corner, feeling the thump every time I drifted slightly off course and touched one of the submerged trees.

  Long fingers of mist reached from the slough into the river, and I brought the bow of the boat up like a knife blade, cutting the mist into swirling pieces. I turned the boat down river, toward the winding course the man in the black boat had to have taken, and I saw him slipping the boat's nose into the deep water just as I ripped through the last line of fog and bore down on him.

  I didn't slow down. He raised an automatic rifle with a banana clip and almost got it pointed in my direction before I rammed his boat with mine. The metal hull screeched and shook, and everything in the boat flew into the air. I tried to hold on, but couldn't. The throttle was torn from my grasp and I crashed into just about every part of the boat before it bobbed to a stop, bent but intact.

  I picked myself up, clutching my useless shoulder, and looked around. The black fiberglass boat had virtually exploded, and ragged chunks of things bobbed in the rippled water. The hull of my boat had accordioned, the nose twisted and disfigured, but I saw no leaks, yet.

  The boat bobbed in a circle and I watched for the man, wishing I had a weapon. It turned out I didn't need one.

  Nothing looks more useless and ugly than a dead human being. There's a perversity to what we leave behind: a soft, puffy and pitifully shaped piece of meat. This man was undeniably dead, and I didn't want to touch him. But I had to know who'd sent him.

  I reached down and grabbed his shirt, lost my grip and tried again, gaining new respect for what Candace had gone through to get me out of the river as I dragged the body on board. It seemed impossible that she could have found the strength to pull me up onto that river bank.

  Even thinking of Katherine and the others dead in the inferno of the Traxler home, I couldn't scrape up enough emotion to hate this empty thing. I felt my shield rising around me again, cutting off the new emotions I'd been savoring. I was as hollow a shell as this nameless body, and I began the mechanical process of trying to row the bent boat toward the land with one arm and one oar.

  There was only one public boat landing for miles on this part of the river, and I headed for it. I hoped someone would be there to help me. There was no way I'd be able to swim to shore, and I wanted to survive. I hadn't searched the man's pockets yet, but I knew beyond a doubt that Bob Birk had sent him, whether or not it was endorsed by his handlers. This was personal.

  I didn't know how he'd found us, but I was going to find him. I vowed to myself that it would end before the day was out. Birk would be dead, or I would die trying.

  It took over an hour to row the boat to the secluded landing, and just as I turned into the entry cannel, a couple of boats raced by at full speed. Someone had undoubtedly found the remains of this guy's craft.

  There was a truck and an empty trailer at the landing, but no people were in sight. I shouted a few times, then gave up, forced the boat onto the bank and climbed carefully over the side, waded to shore and tugged it up the grassy bank.

  The truck was locked and there were no houses in sight, so I sat down on the bank and rested. My leg wouldn't last much longer, and the shoulder was already gone. I thought of Katherine again, but already she seemed distant to me. I had room for only one thing in my mind. Bob Birk occupied all the territory. There was nothing else.

  I waited but nobody came, so I limped back to the boat and turned the man over. I searched all his pockets, but there was no wallet and no change. Just a half-eaten roll of Tums and a set of keys. He was already cold, and I removed them quickly. On a hunch, I walked to the truck and tried the keys. One fit the door lock and I opened it, sat down inside and cranked it up, then climbed back out.

  The boat trailer separated easily from the ball, and I pushed it back into the wiry grass. I dug under the seat and found a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver, fully loaded. A Remington thirty-caliber rifle with a scope was cradled in a rack above the seat. The pistol went in my belt.

  There was nothing in this world that could hold my attention. The landscape passed by unnoticed, the wind on my face wasn't soothing, and the life around me was without consequence. They wouldn't stop me from getting to Bob Birk, from taking his worthless life, but knowing that didn't mean anything to me. It was a job to be done.

  When I drove under the interstate it seemed strange that so many hundreds of people had nothing better to do with their time than to drive around aimlessly. Didn't they know there was a war going on?

  NINETEEN

  Glossy red, white and blue rectangles were plastered on everything, and most seemed to have Birk's name on them. We'd heard on the radio that his staff had planned a large victory celebration for him at his business office, a large brick building facing the bay on the front and an enclosed courtyard in the rear. His choice as the party's candidate during this primary was a given.

  Time was no big deal to me anymore, so I stopped by the cemetery first, drove to Sheevers' grave and said goodbye. So much had changed. I cruised around in the dead man's truck while I searched for a plan. I was in no shape to simply run in, guns blazing. The front of the office was alive with well-dressed men and
women stringing colored foil ribbons and passing out literature to people on their way to the polls to vote. New cars were arriving as others puled away, and everyone looked so god damned happy.

  The General and his troops, one of them a man who'd murdered a fifteen year-old girl in cold blood, had gone away, but not for good. Under Birk's command as governor, they would simply bide their time, wait for the right sequence of events, and it would be back on line again.

  I drove past the jubilant crowd, pulled around the block, and examined two buildings on the back side of the block. The taller one was a state office building, filled with administrators and engineers. The other, less well-kept, had once been a hotel, but the Sunset cut its own rates, ran a high-powered advertising campaign. The famous old hotel added a few amenities for a time, and this hotel's owners threw in the towel. A triumphant Sunset Hotel board of directors bought the building and turned it into a supply warehouse.

  I stopped the truck in the alley and snugged it up to the warehouse. I sat there, looking like hell. I didn't need to be out wandering around in my condition. A quick look showed both side doors and, beyond that, a dark alley ended at a tall cinder block wall enclosing Bob Birk's courtyard.

  Once again, the only choice was to act or sit in the truck breathing carbon monoxide until it didn't matter anymore. I glanced around, saw no one, and got out. The double steel doors were locked, but it took only a shove to open them. From the number of gouges around the cheap and battered lock sets, it was apparent that most of the hotel staff found it easier to carry a screwdriver than a key. The doors scraped across the dirty, dark entry and I stepped inside.