The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

  Gwen took aim and let fly.

  On the nursery wall, the Faery Queen’s left cheek came to vibrant life. A twin slash quickly adorned the right. Gwen worked fast and loose, showing amazing skill and alacrity in the most random of motions. She dabbed here, stroked there; a layer of cool green sprouted across the breadth of the mural in no time.

  “Yes…yes, yes…” Gwen said. David Byrne’s “Rei Momo” jangled from the speakers of her spattered studio boom box. Gwen grabbed up a brushful of magenta and peppered the shadows around the figure with hot color. “This is a good look for you,” she winked.

  The nursery was spectacular, a magical blend of innocence and mystery. Stuffed animals hung from a hammock in the corner, shower booty awaiting tiny hands to bring them to life; an antique oak crib lovingly refinished by Gary consumed one whole corner of the room, tempo rarily hiding under a protective drop cloth. A mobile floated lazily above it, bobbing on an almost imperceptible breeze. It was a room full of dreams, waiting to come true.

  Gwen could hardly wait for Spike to see it.

  She dropped the brush, picked up a finer one to lay in some highlights of yellow. Then she scooped up a raggedy bit of sponge that she’d custom-plucked for maximum texture and began patting the surface of the fresh paint, adding a stippled coral effect.

  It was a technique that would have appalled her art school painting instructors, but fuck ‘em. Gwen was a firm believer in the right misuse of technology.

  After all, she reasoned, necessity isn’t the true mother of invention.

  Weirdness is.

  Gwen was nothing if not original. Her instructors had hated her style, which was quirky and unschooled but bristling with energy, charming in its imagination and sheer enthusiasm. They told young Gwen Kessler that as an artist she’d make a great hairdresser. One told her he now understood why previous generations preferred their women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen; another even suggested in front of the entire class that she’d be better off enrolling in the art school that advertised on matchbooks. Draw Binky, Make Big $$$$.

  So when she finally got fed up with getting shat upon by the hierarchical cliques of snotty conceptual types at the Atlanta College of Modern Art, she fought back by declaring herself a postmodern neoprimitive guerrilla cartoonist and staging her own one-woman protest show outside the main entrance of the school, which was also the Peachtree Road entrance for the prestigious and oh-so-stuffy Atlanta Museum of Modern Art. She spray-painted the title of her show cum manifesto on the windowless concrete walls of the building.

  BLACKTOP SAVANT.

  Fifty sofa-sized black velvet portraits of great historical figures lined the street, all painted like big sad-eyed kids. There were big sad-eyed Jesuses on neon-bright crosses, with big sad-eyed Elvises strumming guitars and crooning at Their feet; there were big sad-eyed George Washingtons crossing bubbly frothing Delawares in boats filled with big sad-eyed soldiers, and big sad-eyed babes with enormous boobs and nipples that looked like big sad eyes, too…

  Gwen shaved off her hair and chained herself to one of the big concrete pillars along the facade, wearing only a pair of sunglasses and a pair of bumper stickers that read HONK-IF-U--ART.

  Peachtree Road was a main artery leading downtown. The traffic jam was spectacular. Her instructors were horrified. A crowd formed, hooting and cheering. The chains were thick, festooned with cookware and as long as Marley’s ghost’s. Her boom box was chained into it, blasting David Bowie’s “Fame.”

  It took the police and museum security over an hour to cut her loose.

  And Gwen left school a legend in her own time.

  Channel Two sent a crew out to cover it. One of the team was a brash young cameraman who had never seen anyone quite like the ingenue with attitude being blowtorched out of her Houdini-housewife rig. He ended up shooting way more tape than was necessary or even airable; at one point he got too close, and she kicked at him. The camera caught it all.

  The police hauled her off, her bare butt poking out from the jacket they wrapped her in.

  The camera caught it all. And loved it.

  That night, Channel Two ran a filler bit on the crazy woman artist who used a different kind of talent to get her point across. It was smarmy and titillating and played wholly for yocks, and it utterly missed the point.

  The cameraman got her contact info from the rap sheet, stewed over her for a day, and finally called her up. He apologized. She did not accept. He asked her out.

  She told him, very sweetly, to go fuck himself.

  He proceeded to find out the date of her arraignment. When she showed up, he was there. She had become a minor celebrity by that point, albeit an embarrassed one: Channel Two followed up on her case periodically, invariably running the same smarmy clip of her thrashing, bare-butted arrest.

  He asked her out again. She recognized him from the news crew and told him to please leave her alone.

  He was back again at her court date. She got six months’ probation. He handed her a rose and a present wrapped in a brown paper bag. She opened it up in the cab on the way home.

  Inside the envelope was a note with his phone number. The note read:

  Everybody deserves a second chance.

  She unwrapped the package. Inside were a couple of three-quarter-inch videotapes. The masters and the dubs. All of it.

  Channel Two didn’t run any coverage that night, or ever again.

  The next day Gwen called the cameraman and thanked him. He said it was his pleasure and apologized yet again, and didn’t even ask her out.

  Three days later, she called him again. This time she invited him to lunch, her treat. He said yes. Everybody deserves a second chance.

  The cameraman’s name was Gary Taylor.

  And the rest, as they say, was history…

  Gwen blushed with the memory. It was a long way from Atlanta to here; sometimes she could scarcely believe that she was the same person at all. She and Gary had bopped around a lot, going from Atlanta to Chicago to the Big Apple, always following Gary’s gigs. Some places she liked better than others; all of them were ripe for learning and growing.

  But none of them felt like home.

  It was a simple need, if an all-consuming one. Home began to call to them from the pages of magazines, from the gushings of friends who lived upstate, riding a clear whiff of breeze in the stale summer air of their too-small Chelsea apartment.

  That one simple need had gotten to them both, after a while: New York was too expensive, too dirty, and too crowded to grow old or raise kids in. Gary had no real hometown to speak of; that pretty much narrowed it down.

  Exodus.

  She’d been happier, in all: a lot less angry, a lot less stressed. The house was wonderful, and she loved fixing it up. She hiked and went to the farmer’s market, and lived an altogether kinder and gentler existence. With the coming of the Spikester, her world seemed to be nearing completion. What more could anyone truly want?

  But still, sometimes it chafed. She felt so…so normal here. She didn’t trust it. It was clean here, yes, with an immeasurably lower crime rate and a cost of living cheaper by half…what LifeStyle magazine called a real “quality of life” area. But there was no art scene to speak of, a lame nightlife, a meager handful of restaurants worth eating in. She felt torn between the two Gwens inside her: the wildass and the earth mother, the hellion and the homebody.

  And now a third, on top of it. The Gwen/not Gwen nesting in her belly. The one that was so much a part of her and Gary, yet so ultimately other. The one that was so much more than the sum of its parts.

  The one that would call her mommy.

  She worried if that were such a good thing, like she worried about routine and responsibility and all the trappings of adult life. She worried that the day-to-day of it all would siphon off her imagination, steal her weirdness by degrees. Leave her cut off from the essence of the Mystery.

  Inside, she knew differently. Her inner voice told her
so. Mystery is more than a fashion or a lifestyle, it said, Mystery is a state of mind.

  Gwen wanted to trust her inner voice. She always had. But lately she’d been wondering; there was something about coming back here that blew through her like a bad wind every once in a while. Saying being here is the kiss of death, it’ll suck the life right out of you, it’ll steal your sense of the Mystery…

  Gwen shuddered. “Stop it,” she told herself. “You’re being stupid.”

  On the wall, the Faery Queen smiled knowingly, becoming more real with every stroke. Gwen was ninety-nine percent finished with the mural, and was determined to lay down the hundredth stroke before Micki hit town. Or Spike.

  Whichever came first.

  Gwen genuinely loved her work, which was a rarity by anybody’s standard. Over the years she had persevered, parlaying her penchant for weird vision into a somewhat successful illustration career, doing fantasy and sf and the occasional horror paperback, but most notably covers for Micki Bridges’s Bob-Ramtha! series. Micki’s contracts always had a rider that specified Gwen Taylor covers, and with over eight million copies in print her publishers were perfectly willing to humor her. Thus did a lifelong friendship get the added perk of professional fruition.

  Plus we get to write off our lunches together, Micki always reminded her. Gwen smiled and swirled mottled streaks of jet black and neon green into the fabric of the cape.

  The Faery Queen was one of the archetypal figures detailed in Micki’s books, which was a big reason why Gwen had decided to put her on the nursery wall. No Smurfs for the Spikester, Gary and Gwen had agreed long ago. They wanted their child to grow up comfortable in the lap of the Mystery.

  Part animal, part insect, part fish, part fowl, the Faery Queen was a regal being who embodied the Spirit of the Living Earth. Her robes were a lush drapery of green living plants, her hair a cascade of feathery plumage. Her features were arthropodal, elegantly humanoid but rendered in chitinous exoskeleton. Her body was wasp-waisted and segmented, the thorax swelling into fully human breasts. Her feet were softly cloven, doe’s feet; her fingers were long and delicate.

  In her left hand she held a white candle. In her right glowed a tiny star. A rainbow of sleek scales covered her throat and neck; a precious amulet hung there, glistening on a fine golden chain.

  In other illustrations she looked fierce, imperious, sometimes even cruel; here, Gwen deliberately softened the effect, giving her a wise smile and warm blue eyes and surrounding her with birds and rabbits and all manner of gentle creatures, making her a benign sort of otherworldly Übermother.

  But with cheekbones, Gwen added as an afterthought. Great cheekbones.

  Gwen stepped back and surveyed her work, her brow knitted fretfully. This was the biggest project she’d undertaken during the pregnancy. She wanted it to be perfect.

  “Something’s off,” she said; and the moment she said it, the answer came clear. “A-HA!”

  She took a fine brush, dabbed it in the paint, and added a carefully placed dot of white to the blue of the Faery Queen’s eyes.

  Adding the spark of life.

  “There you go,” Gwen said, satisfied for now. She checked her watch. “Oh, shit, how’s that for timing,” she said to her work. “We’ve got to get a move on.”

  She scooped up her brushes and headed for the sink.

  While on the wall, the Faery Queen watched her go.

  Meanwhile, Gary crouched in the garage, practicing his own gentle art of motorcycle maintenance.

  His scoot was an ‘88 Harley-Davidson custom softtail, and it was his pride and joy. He’d personally torn it down in the winter of ‘89, putting in a ninety-six-inch S&S stroker kit, transforming it. Gary had an innate sense about tools and technology. Mechanical, electrical, digital; if it got up and ran, Gary Taylor could figure out what made it tick.

  He was bench engineer for WPAL. Mostly, he did equipment repairs, transformer maintenance, a monthly checkup of the broadcast tower and the microwave uplink, but he was pretty much qualified to handle any broadcast situation.

  It was a good gig, as gigs go. But it was still just a job.

  Gary worked to live, and not vice versa.

  He’d grown up on farms, the son of migrant workers, which was a romantic way to say he’d grown up hard. A lot of drifting, a lot of backbreaking, monotonous scrabbling in the dirt, with very little return to speak of. On more than one occasion he’d had to lend a hand in birthing cattle and then drown a batch of kittens in the very same day. He’d known hunger—not the what’s for supper not hamburger again kind but the real thing, the bottomless dull-knife gnawing in your belly that’s the last thing you feel at night and the first thing that greets you in the morning. He’d known hardship and hopelessness and despair, and by his own bootstraps he’d hauled himself out of all of it.

  The experience had, if nothing else, given him a useful perspective. When life deals you shit, make fertilizer. If the nukes hit tomorrow, and they survived, he’d raise mutant cows with Gwen and be just as happy.

  Gary reached under the block and freed the crankcase bolt, nudging the catch pan under the engine block with his knee. On the outside the softtail looked bone-stock, but he’d tweaked and cranked it until it was two-hundred and forty horses of flat-out drag bike, street legal but just barely. It could do a buck and a half without even breaking a sweat, though Gary’d never really cranked it past one-twenty, and not much over ninety since Gwen put the bun in the oven.

  Oh well…, he thought. Must be gettin’ conservative in my old age.

  Little Feat was on the radio. Let It Roll. The garage door was open, and bright streamers of light filtered in. The day had turned Indian summer-warm, and Gary was looking forward to one last ride before the cold: burning down some back roads, heading nowhere and loving every minute of it.

  “Hey, Dad,” Gwen said, appearing behind him, a steaming mug already in her hands. “Want some coffee?”

  “Thanks, Mom.” Gary stood and turned toward her, accepting the java and a kiss.

  “Ick, you’re all slimy,” she said, pulling away.

  “Thought you liked slimy,” he said, nuzzling her.

  “Not like that,” she said, pushing away and moseying over to the door. “Better get cleaned up, babe. We gotta be at the airport by eleven…”

  “Blech!” Gary cut in. He made a sour face and stared at his cup. “What’s with this coffee?”

  “I just made it,” Gwen said, perplexed. “What’s wrong?”

  “It tastes like shit. That’s all.” He held out the cup to Gwen; she sniffed it. There was an ugly, bitter taint.

  Gwen shrugged, hurt. “I don’t know; I got it at a little shop at the Galleria. It’s expensive enough.”

  “Yeah, well,” Gary said. “It tastes like they got it from the wrong Valdez.” He hoisted the steaming mug sarcastically. “Coffee by Exxon, the richest kind of coffee.”

  She didn’t laugh. He sniffed the coffee again. “Yech,” he said, recoiling. The milk had curdled into a mottled curlicue shape like a question mark, spinning slowly in the center of the cup. “Fuck it,” he muttered, pouring the remainder into the waste-oil pan. Then he held the empty cup up to Gwen. “Thanks anyway, babe.”

  She took it and shrugged. “Make it yourself next time.”

  “Shit, babe, I didn’t mean nothing by it,” he said, but she had already turned away.

  “Better get ready,” she called over her shoulder, and shut the door just a little too hard.

  Gary winced. “I’M SOR-REEE…!” he wailed.

  The thud of cupboard doors slammed in response. “Shit,” Gary sighed, scooping up a glob of GoJo from the can at the utility sink to wash up. “You can’t win.”

  Pregnant women go off on the weirdest things, he thought miserably. Fucking hormones; it seemed like every time he turned around he was stepping on another emotional punji stick. In the shithouse for insulting her stupid special-occasion fifteen-dollar-a-pound yuppie coffee, for chr
ist sakes. God I’ll be glad when this is over.

  In the meantime, there was not much to do but practice his eggshell softshoe and hope nothing else went wrong.

  The phone rang.

  “Oh, no,” he gasped, eyeing the Cobra cordless on the workbench. There was only one reason why the phone would ring this early on a Sunday, and it wasn’t to wish him a nice day off. He rinsed his hands, wiped them off on his pants, and finger-combed his hair, giving the caller time to give up.

  It was no use. He picked up on the fourth ring.

  “What is it, Bob…” he sighed.

  “How’d you know it was me?” Bob Dobberman asked, genuinely incredulous.

  “Experience,” Gary said. “Cut to the chase, Bob.”

  Bob “The Knob” Dobberman was Gary’s boss, a rotund and genial technogeek, right down to his pocket protector and basementful of ham radios. He was ‘PAL’s head engineer, and he did live for his job: Sigma Delta Theta, Society of Broadcast Engineers, the works. “We got a little emergency down at the station,” he said. “Something screwy with the news department’s edit deck. Can you do it?”

  “Bob,” Gary groaned, drawing his name out into two exasperated syllables: Bah-ahb. “Jeezus. I just worked two shifts, back to back, and I’ve got to pick up Gwen’s friend at the airport in less than an hour.

  “What about Brian?” Gary offered. “He ought to be able to fix a fucking jammed deck.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Bob scoffed. “Brian couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a map.”

  “How ‘bout you?”

  “I would if I could,” Bob said. “But Penny’s sick, and who’s gonna take care of the kids? They can’t finish editing without it. They won’t be able to do the news.…” He laid it on with a trowel, delivering the last bit with an air of genuine dread.

  Gary smiled despite himself; God knows, where would we be without the eleven o’clock news.

  “Alright,” he conceded. “But that’s it! Fix the deck and I’m gone. No bullshit.”