The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  “Where is it? The search thing.”

  She wanted it to seem planned out. People followed when you had a plan, but she didn’t know yet. She had to stall. “I’ll let you know, okay?”

  She noticed he was thinking all kinds of things he didn’t say. She could see doubt or resistance in the way he didn’t look at her, in the way he clicked a tiny flashlight on the key in his hand, which flashed red and went out again. His hair was sweaty under his cap. She was glad he didn’t ask her the questions a normal person would ask, because she didn’t know the answers to anything, but she was afraid of him turning away from her. “Near the bridge,” she said. “We’re going to search near the bridge.”

  He looked down at her with his pale green eyes.

  “I mean, where else?”

  “Right,” he said, and she felt balanced again, like when you saved a boat from flipping by leaning your whole body out.

  Fen sat with his uncle in the backyard, moving the dice from Ted’s Monopoly game around in his pocket. He dreaded what his uncle was going to say about the flyers, and the cloudy day made him feel worse. If you took a picture of his uncle’s dead yard right now, you’d think it was a cold day in North Dakota.

  “Grilled cheese?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Peanut butter?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  They sat facing the spiked fence of the navy base, the pink Victorian gazing ball, the dead tomato vines and their withered fruit. He hoped his uncle wouldn’t ask him anything about Thisbe or Ted.

  “So…the flyers,” his uncle said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I understand the impulse.”

  “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay.” His uncle chewed, swallowed, scratched his knee. They sat in the rusty chairs before the pink gazing ball. The two of them in its surface were shortened and obese. Overhead, a navy jet split the sky with sound.

  “Do you think Ted is wrong?” Fen asked. He brought the dice out and rubbed them in one hand.

  “Probably. But it’s past experience with the situation that makes me say that. People don’t believe you when you’re still looking for the body. It’s normal to hold out hope.”

  “Has anyone ever been right? Like they thought someone jumped, and they didn’t?”

  His uncle stared at the pink globe for a while. “I can’t think of a time.”

  Alea iacta est, Fen thought bitterly, but he didn’t say it aloud. It wasn’t really whether the die was cast but whether you could see what you’d rolled. “Would you always die if you jumped?” Fen asked.

  “Yes,” his uncle said, then paused. He shook his head. “No. But the effects are always horrific.”

  Fen remembered lying facedown on the surface of the pool at the Isle of Capri. He breathed through the snorkel and studied the plaster through thick layers of chlorine; the slope, three feet to eight feet; the drain at the very bottom. The plaster was chipped and fragile in places, full of holes like popped blisters that hadn’t healed. His head was underwater, and yet he breathed. “What should I do?” he asked his uncle. “I mean, with Ted?”

  “You don’t have to do anything to change her mind. It’ll change if circumstances change.”

  He decided to ask the question that bothered him the second most. “Will they blame me?”

  “No. They shouldn’t, anyway. If they do, it’s not because you did anything, but because people need someone to blame.”

  This didn’t help at all. He blamed the people who could have stopped to call an ambulance for his father, and he blamed himself now.

  “What should I have done?” he asked. That was the top question, the sharpest needle he used to poke himself.

  “What you did.”

  His uncle clearly meant it, but Fen was unsatisfied.

  “I’ve got to work this afternoon,” Carl said.

  “Okay.”

  “What are you going to do to keep busy?”

  “I don’t know. Watch TV.”

  “You brought your skateboard, right? You should go out. Here’s money for the skate park. Or something to eat later.”

  “Thanks,” Fen said.

  After his uncle went inside to put on his uniform, Fen rolled the dice around in a cupped hand. He decided to throw them out into the garden. Just throw the stupid things away. Why had he come here? He would have been just as bad off in Brazil with his mother. He didn’t know people in Brazil, either, but at least they would have all been foreigners saying stuff in Portuguese. He threw the dice hard at the grass, the way you would if you were skipping stones in water. They skipped, kind of, then were stuck somewhere in the tangled plants that had been vegetables once. He could hardly make himself stand up afterward.

  He’s been waiting outside for half an hour because he thought the bank opened at 8:30, and then when they finally let him in, the nice teller isn’t there. Frank only came into the bank once a month, on the day before his mooring fee was due, to buy a money order, and he timed that for the late afternoon, right before the bank closed. She was a Spanish girl, a lot friendlier than the other people who worked behind the counter, flashing her white teeth and asking if the fish were biting, if he wanted to open a savings account, if he needed anything else. She remembered, every time, that he used to be a commercial fisherman and that he lived on the water, which she seemed to regard as brave and interesting. El Capitán, she called him.

  The only teller behind the counter is the skinny kid who drives a BMW, a tall guy with hair pushed up like mown grass, sipping coffee out of a tall paper cup. Black-framed glasses that look like part of a costume, and hands soft as a girl’s.

  The security guard is watching Frank from his stool beside the door.

  “Good morning,” Frank says to the guy with his hair pushed up. Jay, his name is, according to the sign on the counter.

  “Good morning! What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I’ve lost my wallet. My bank card. I need a new one.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Would it have been stolen?”

  “Maybe. It could have been. I lost it in the park.”

  “Then we should check and make sure there’s been no illicit activity. Let me—one sec. I’m just gonna ask the manager what all the steps are, okay? I’m new.” The manager is a heavyset woman in an orange skirt and a long gold necklace. She gives Frank a glance and says some things he can’t hear. A coffeepot ticks in the corner. He hasn’t had breakfast or coffee.

  Skinny boy comes back. “I’m Jay Thorne, by the way.”

  Frank nods. He can read.

  “What we need to do is check activity on your account. Can you print and then sign your name here?”

  Frank signs carefully, slowly, so as to make an exact replica of the last way he signed his name in a bank, which would have been five years ago, when his cousin Telma said it was time to sell their grandmother’s house and retire, all of them.

  The boy’s shirt is so tight around his waist and chest that he looks like a Christmas package. When Frank hands him the card, Jay studies a screen Frank can’t see while Jay pushes each of the knuckles on his right hand, then each of the knuckles on his left. Whatever’s on the screen takes Jay a long while to read, and it doesn’t change his expression. “Okay. Just one more sec. I see a Frank Le Stang here. Can you just confirm your address?”

  “General delivery, Coronado.”

  “What?”

  “General delivery, post office, Coronado. I move around. I live on my boat.”

  “But I need the address on the account.”

  “Maybe it’s my cousin’s address?”

  “I don’t know. The one you put down as permanent.”

  “Let’s see. It’s my cousin’s. She mails me things that need to be mailed. Telma Cardozo, 314 Stimson Avenue, Pismo Beach.”

  As soon as he says it, the number sounds wrong. “Maybe it’s 413. It’s 413, I think.”

  “That’s right,” Jay says
. “So that’s where we should mail the new card?”

  “Mail it? Can’t you just give it to me?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think so. I’ll check again if you want.”

  “I’m right here. I’d like to just take it with me. It’s my money, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll check with the manager. One sec.”

  The woman is reading something at a desk behind the counter, but she looks up as if she had expected this. They’re tiresome interruptions to her, the boy with the toy glasses and Frank with his lost wallet. After a low conversation, Jay Thorne and the manager approach the counter with an air of defensive diplomacy. They expect him to be unhappy with whatever they’re about to say, but they’re going to pretend they’re giving him excellent service, that they have his best interest at heart.

  “Mr. Le Stang?” the woman says. “I’m Carol Ambrose, the manager. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. We have to mail the cards as a security measure. We’re required to verify your identity by the Patriot Act.”

  “But you just verified my identity.”

  “You could get cash today with a counter check. But to issue a new card, that takes two weeks.”

  “I don’t understand. Where’s the Spanish girl?”

  “What Spanish girl?”

  “The one with dark hair. Works in the afternoons.”

  “Elena?”

  “That’s her. She knows me. I come in every month. I always wait until her line is open.”

  “Elena is on maternity leave.”

  “She could tell you who I am.”

  “Even if Elena could come in, and she can’t, that wouldn’t be enough for the Patriot Act.”

  “This is not right.”

  “I know. It’s frustrating. There’s nothing I can do about it, however. Did you report the wallet stolen to the police department?”

  “No. I dropped it, I think. I don’t know that it’s stolen.”

  “If you dropped it outside, you should assume it was stolen. Where did you say you dropped it? The beach?”

  “The bay. Tidelands.” Saying this makes his flesh warm. He’s blushing. They’ll think he’s done wrong when it’s just that he’s aware people don’t look kindly on canners, though they all say recycling is tip-top. Okay to sort your own trash but not to sort others’. Thoughts of Julia pass through his head so he looks down.

  “Well, it could have been stolen just as quickly at Tidelands. I’m sorry for your trouble, Mr. Le Stang. Do you want to write the counter check now?”

  He has to get money for the impeller and for whatever might go wrong along the way. Two weeks. “It’s my money,” he says. “All of it. I never should have given it to you people.”

  Others have come into the bank now, a middle-aged woman and an old man in a suit, and they give him disapproving looks. The guard is standing now instead of sitting near the door.

  “I understand your frustration, but the card will come, and meanwhile you can write a counter check and withdraw up to your limit, which is two hundred dollars.”

  “What if I need more than that?”

  “Did you also lose credit cards?”

  “I don’t have any of those. It’s a racket.”

  “I admire your stance. A lot of people don’t have that kind of self-control.”

  “Maybe I should just take all my money out of here and put it in another bank. That’s what I ought to do.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to withdraw it all today.”

  “You people are robbers, you know that?”

  The middle-aged woman and the natty man flinch. They exchange glances and little smiles. He knows what those glances mean. Crazy old coot.

  “I have a lot of money in this bank,” he says to the woman in line.

  “I’m sure,” she says, but she isn’t. The security guard takes a step forward, but the manager holds up her hand to the guard as if to say, Stay.

  “You should report the wallet as stolen,” the manager says to Frank. “You know where the police station is? Just down the street a block? Not even a whole block.”

  “I just need what’s mine. The card to get the money that’s mine. All of it. I’m going to take it all out of here.”

  “You can do that through the proper channels if you want, but you’ll need to wait for the clearance anyway.”

  “This is robbery,” he says, and he walks out the door.

  Six. Funny how he didn’t even want a six this time.

  He stared at the dots for a few seconds, picked up his skateboard, and opened the gate. Okay. I’m leaving the house.

  In the yard across the street, two girls sat behind a folding table that held a pitcher of lemonade. They saw him standing on the step, so he had to wave. He started riding away, but they were looking at him, waiting for him, looking all disappointed because they had no customers. It was a long way to the skate park and he wanted to get there before, like, July.

  But he had gotten a six. Alea iacta est. Gotta go with it.

  He handed over a dollar to drink a small Dixie Cup of highly sweetened, possibly germy lemonade. “Mmm,” he said. Beside the pitcher of lemonade and the jar that said Pay Hear was a paper plate holding the three smallest carrots he’d ever seen. Like peeled crayons, except that at the ends they became long threads.

  “Did you grow those?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten cents,” the one with hair like a dandelion said.

  “Each,” her older sister added.

  He set a dime down and ate one whole. “Yum,” he said, though it was like eating old thread. The littler girl smiled her face off but the older one just nodded, like selling produce was a serious business.

  There was a certain feeling, an antigravity state, that he liked to reach when he was riding his board a long way, when the rolling of the wheels and the slight bump and jiggle of the pavement began to flow through his legs and arms and the vibration of rolling onward became more normal than standing still. He felt that way after leaving the little girls. The air was cool on his skin like a layer of ice over metal, and it cleaned him, brightening the late afternoon oranges and greens, the rolling road underfoot, the whole earth moving away from him as he traveled.

  The air thickened and chilled as he neared the water. Cyclists passed him often on either side of the bike path as he rolled toward the bridge: neon-bright racers in clumps, a kid on a tiny bike, staring all around and wobbling, his helmet like an eight ball, followed by a jogger who looked, for a jarring second, like Fen’s dad. It wasn’t him, though. Just some other man.

  Before him, on water the color of lead, two tall sails coasted in silence, and he stopped to watch. The sun was finally coming out and things were starting to have a shimmer. As a kid he would have run ahead to see the rest of the bay and count all the boats with a tight happiness in his stomach that was like pain, it was so intense.

  He didn’t feel that happiness now and he didn’t run, didn’t even care if there were more boats, but he still felt a kind of rightness and calm. A chain-link fence separated the bike path from the rocks that led down to the water and the huge numbered pylons. The two sailboats slid in silence under the bridge, disappearing for a second behind the concrete legs, and he remembered, with a jolt, that Thisbe might or might not be in that water. He shouldn’t have come over here at all. Stupid idea. He stepped back on the board and started rolling again. There was a line waiting to pay at the skate park, and he joined it, kept his eyes on the skaters going up and down the little concrete hills of the course, the helmeted heads and confident bodies, letting his mind go dumb in the clatter of wood and steel.

  His cousin Telma had shown him how to use her computer because he might want to use the free ones at the library. “You could shop for things or look up what other people are doing on their boats.”

  “Why would I care?”

  “You can look up government agencies.”

  “Why would I do that?”

/>   “Remember when your Social Security didn’t come? Things like that. Or you could send me a message,” Telma said.

  “A message about what?”

  She shrugged. “Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Hey, Telma, I’m coming for a visit! Anything, Frank. And you can look up news or mooring prices or weather.”

  This was the cousin who had thought, when he’d tried to explain about Shiva and the reuniting of lost souls, that he’d become a Jew. “Sitting shiva?” she said. “You’re sitting shiva for Julia now?”

  She’d stuck by him more than the others, though. They all got tired of hearing him talk about Julia, all of them. He’d heard Telma’s daughter say, when she didn’t think he was still in the house, that it was creepy how Uncle Frank said that if Julia came back, he would be the exact right age to be her grandfather, and he could raise her the way their dad and mom should have raised them both, and Telma said it was just a symptom of the poor man’s grief. He knew even Telma hoped he wouldn’t accept when she invited him to Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. He was seated farther and farther from the brides at weddings.

  He walks his bike past the police station. No bikes are allowed on the sidewalk, so you have to get off and walk. One block, that’s all it is. A long block.

  Once he’s safely past the station and the giant banyan tree with its strange roots hanging down like hair, he sees that a small crowd is waiting on the walk in front of the library doors. Yet another impediment: the library isn’t open yet. A few people, some of them as old as Frank, stand around by the door with bags in their hands. A young woman in tight clothes is rolling a stroller up and down the front walk while her child, sticky and blond, eats crackers. Frank can smell them: cheese crackers. It galls him again that he couldn’t get the card. He needs something to eat now and that’s how it’ll be for ten days. Less and less money to buy things and more and more times that he’s hungry. Will they even send the card now that he walked out of the bank? He’s not going back. No way. He’ll have to ask Telma to watch for the new one. She’ll ask where the other card went and if he tells her he lost his wallet, she’ll say he’s too old to live on a boat anymore, he should live somewhere in town.