The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  It’s the dirtiest, oldest, funkiest set of signal flags she’s ever seen. The kind all connected for running to the top of the mast and down again, flapping on holidays in the summer sun. It almost makes her laugh. It makes her want to say, HUGH! YOU WERE SO RIGHT!

  Other people know the distress signals, more than just her and Ted and her stepdad know them, right? People learned them, didn’t they? I am on fire and have dangerous cargo. This is a code, people!

  She feels the metal edge of the porthole again but still can’t find the handle to unlock it. Either it’s not the kind of porthole that opens, or it’s grimed shut. If she smashed it, someone could hear her better. She could hear if the bird is still calling her Lady Locke.

  A can opener doesn’t work. Too small. Likewise the cutting board, which slips out of her hands when it thunks the glass. But she can get enough velocity with a three-legged chair. The glass cracks and she swings the chair again with all her strength. It crackles and some glass falls out. She uses the can opener to push the pebbled glass out onto the deck, and she touches air. Cold air like fresh watermelon. Sounds are louder now: the clear ring of metal against the mast as the boat rocks. She sets the whole slippery pile of flags on the shelf and pushes one out the gap of the broken porthole. There’s a deep wrinkle in the nylon that makes the flag fold in half and flip up all crooked, and this fills her with despair.

  She remembers how she said to Hugh, “What’s the point of a distress signal that tells people to stay far away from you?”

  Something moves on the deck—is it Frank?—and she retracts her hand. It’s the cat, though, just the cat. It draws closer and sniffs. It paws at the flapping signal flag, plays with the curl of it in the window. She tells the cat with her mind to go away and fall into the sea. It pauses, pats the bent tongue of the flag, sits like a figurine, licks a paw, stares at the universe.

  In time, the cat pulls itself forward, stretches out like a rug and falls asleep. Above the cabin the wind makes a tinging, pinging sound like a child playing the triangle in a school play. She can’t shout, so she goes to the galley and gets a can of Mrs. Dowder’s Major Chowders and throws it over and over again at the locked door.

  The next sound she hears is the scream of the cat. A green bird swoops toward the deck, wings spread out over the cat’s head, and then rises at the last second to miss the cat’s swipe. The cat crouches and stalks out of sight. Now the tinging, pinging sound is punctuated by the rusty hectoring of the bird.

  “So, like, I thought we would look around here,” Ted says to Jerome.

  Jerome waits with the dog called Maddy, the one he calls a softie, though the dog is sharp-eared and Nazi-ish. The three of them are blocking the bike path and Ted has to scoot over while Jerome is showing her what a softie Maddy is by stroking and patting the dog’s head. It being a summer evening, plenty of runners are chugging themselves along, and bikers in neon shirts are going zip zip zip. Ted picked the bike path to begin the search because she thought, Okay, if you didn’t jump, where would you go? You would walk. Would you walk to the city or the island? The city is gnarly. Gangs and all. Homeless. If you were a lone girl, you’d walk to the island, and if you were Thisbe freaking out, you might go to the troll house.

  This is what she has to tell Jerome now while making it seem intelligent. Which is hard because he seemed to think there would be a whole lot of people doing the search, and the police would be in charge.

  “The troll house?” he asks.

  She points. He stares at the weird little shingled shack on the side of the fence where you’re not supposed to go. Built for the bridge workers, maybe, back when there used to be a toll. There’s a tall, tall chimney thing all covered with shingles, and the house/shack is covered with shingles, all homeylike, and there’s one window and one door. “Thisbe had a whole story about it. When we were younger.”

  Jerome doesn’t speak. He’s probably thinking she’s nuts.

  “It was just stories she made up about trolls who live under the bridge.”

  Jerome says, “Won’t people wonder what we’re doing over there?”

  He has a point. They both face the chain-link fence that divides the paved trail from a long gutter and a hillside with trees and bushes and dead leaves and stuff. The foresty part leads to the troll house.

  “Oh, well,” Jerome says, and even though he seems worried about breaking the law, he starts walking to the place where you can go around the little chain-link fence if you totally ignore the NO TRESPASSING sign. Ted’s glad Maddy is one of those scary Nazi dogs, even if she’s a softie at heart, because if they go into that underbrush or perchance yank open the troll door, whatever might be living there will have to face the dog first.

  Superlarge amount of brush around. Huge, thickety mounds that are more like overgrown bushes than trees. Her heart is thudding like when a horror movie is getting bad and she has to turn the sound off.

  No music to turn off here, though: just crackle crackle snap snap. She walks directly behind Jerome’s large, comforting back. The dog’s tail nub and pointy ear tips float in the golden air. The extendo-leash creaks as Maddy gets farther ahead, goes sniffing up the bank.

  Should she call out? Should she say, Thisbe? like she’s calling for a lost pet?

  Maddy sniffs herself into a thicket-place that’s like a cave of dead vines and branchy stuff and might be where a homeless man makes his poos. You can’t see Maddy anymore, just the leash line. If Maddy weren’t a Nazi dog, Ted would be afraid for her.

  The thicket-place explodes with barking, followed by the strangled voice of a man shouting, “NO!” Scared look on Jerome’s face as he jerks on the extendo-leash to reel Maddy back like a fish from the thicket-place and whoever’s in there. Passersby on the bike path are definitely staring. They definitely are. Best to act like you belong in the no-trespassing zone.

  A man pops out of the brush, holding his wrist, where there are definite bite holes, bright red and bruisy blue. “I’m so sorry,” Jerome says, his face blotching red. “She doesn’t normally bite, I swear. She never has.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The man has a blue spot on his lip. White hair in a circle around an elfy bald head. Dirty clothes, so maybe homeless. A gazillion dark brown wrinkles from a gazillion hours in the sun. But what’s he doing here?

  “Do you want to go to the hospital?” Jerome is asking him.

  People on the path slow down as they see what’s happening. They don’t stop completely but they almost stop. They listen and stare.

  The man says no, he has a first aid kit. He talks like he’s in a hurry to go.

  Ted waits to see if he goes back into the thicket. Does he live in there? Do homeless guys have Band-Aids?

  “It’s on my boat,” the man says.

  So he’s a rich guy? “Oh,” Jerome says.

  “I’m fine,” the man says again, though red blood is dripping from one of the bite holes. He wipes it on his not-clean pants.

  “You guys okay?” a runner on the other side of the fence is asking, a middle-aged guy like Hugh, bald and sporty, his shirt dark from a good sweat. “You need anything?”

  “No,” the wrinkled elf-man says. “I’m fine, sir. It’s fine.”

  Instead of going back into the thicket, the elf-man turns toward the bay, and along the gutter that Ted and Jerome followed, he begins to walk really fast with his dog-bite arm not bent in any special protective way, just hanging down almost normal, and it’s kind of like how Ted pretends sometimes when she’s sailing that she isn’t hurt when she is—and it’s weird—it really is—how he isn’t mad at them for the dog bite.

  After Elaine left to go get the boot Carl’s nephew had found, the front desk called Skelly to say a cabdriver wanted to talk to him about a girl he’d picked up on the bridge. African guy, he said he was.

  The very same.

  Awate Mebrahtu has no receipts to prove he picked someone up right after he supposedly saw the girl. No subsequent fare u
ntil one a.m., he says, at McP’s. He has a name that no one is going to spell right, ever, and which will mark him as a foreigner. Skelly is amazed that the guy has come into the office at all, that he is sitting in Skelly’s presence to talk about a missing white girl.

  In what seemed a previous life, on this man’s home continent, R. P. Skelly had been Elder Skelly, aged nineteen. Elder Skelly had been the Jesus Man inside homes, on streets, and in cafés, where all the skin was walnut brown like Awate’s and Skelly was a pale giant from America.

  “You saw this girl?” Skelly asks. “Where did you find her, exactly?”

  “On this bridge.”

  “Like, the middle or the end or what?”

  “Middle.”

  “Was she wearing boots? Pink ones?”

  He nods. So the boots were right, anyway.

  “And where did you take her?”

  “It is the football field.”

  Skelly holds out a map. “Here?” he asks, pointing to the high school stadium.

  The man studies the illustrated map of the island, the red roof of the Hotel Del, the blue grid of streets, the green circles and yellow squares. He turns it clockwise a quarter turn. He points to a green blob shaped like a kidney bean, the outer edge of Tidelands Park.

  That kind of football. “Then what?”

  “Do I sit and have a smoke.”

  “You do or you did?”

  Nodding.

  “So right there”—Skelly points to Glorietta, the street that curved away from the bridge and around the green blob—“you stopped?”

  “No.” Awate touches the map again: a circle near the blue edge of the cartoon bay.

  “You were sitting here, like, on a bench?”

  “No bench. The front skirt of taxi.”

  “Inside or outside.”

  “Outside.”

  “The hood. Then what?”

  “The girl is walking.”

  Skelly nods.

  “Along this path,” Awate says. “Under this bridge.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you see where she went?”

  “Under this bridge.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “Yes. The Boat Man.” Not boatmun. He says it like two words, not one.

  “Who’s the Boat Man?”

  “He live in the water. I see him two times also before. Coming shore, going out.” Awate holds up both elegant hands and mimes rowing.

  “Was the Boat Man rowing when you saw him?”

  “No, he is walking. He is walking the same path.”

  “What’s his boat look like?”

  Awate shrugs and shakes his head.

  “What about the guy?”

  “Guy?”

  “The Boat Man.”

  “He is a white.”

  “Big? Tall? Short? Beard? Bald?” Skelly points to his own thinning hair.

  “He is old.”

  “Then what?”

  “I finish my smoke, I drive.”

  “Did you see the man talk to her or anything?”

  “No.”

  Skelly writes that down. The earth was full of holes that opened up and swallowed things. The hole was there and you could find it, or the hole closed over, smooth as water.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mebrahtu,” Skelly says, unable to feel much hope. A Boat Man by definition had a boat. Boats sailed away. South to Mexico, north to anywhere, surrounded by the erasing, swallowing sea.

  “There is one thing,” Awate says.

  “What’s that?”

  “It is not on her feet then, the boots.”

  “When?”

  “She is walking, she is holding boots. Like this.” He holds his hands out to the sides as if in each one he has a boot.

  “So she’s barefoot.”

  “No. She is socks.”

  “That’s weird.”

  Awate stares at him like he doesn’t know the word or everything is equally weird.

  “It’s good, though.” So the boot Carl’s kid had found didn’t mean a body hitting the water from the bridge, clothes ripping off, boots torn away and floating—which didn’t make sense, anyway—all the way to shore.

  He walks Awate to the door and shakes his hand, and for a second Skelly remembers the Nigerian sky, foreign and yet benign because in that time and place Skelly had been absolutely sure of goodness watched over by a fatherly God. Then the glass door of the police station closes and he can see nothing but his own reflection.

  “That was psycho,” Ted says.

  Jerome nods. He’s still feeling rubbery. He thought that old homeless guy would want to sue him for sure, but first they’d have to go to the hospital and the man would get tested for rabies and need stitches and who knew what else that would cost a fortune. Jerome’s mom would freak. Then maybe Maddy would have to be put down even though she wasn’t vicious at all. It was Jerome’s fault. Totally his fault. He lets the extendo-leash reel out a little and Maddy picks up a stick and stops mournfully in front of him. “I know,” he says, and she looks sadder.

  “What do you think he was doing in there?” Ted asks.

  “Something weird,” Jerome says. He should go back in the bushy cave-place and look around, he thinks, but it might be a toilet, just a disgusting place with tissue left all around. “Hold the leash,” he says.

  He makes himself stick his head in and sees a sleeping bag unrolled. Jars and cans, various types. A bag of what looks like trash. Just a camp for some homeless guy. At the far edge of the circle, where the branches touch down, he sees a white piece of paper. Small like a card. Probably nothing, but maybe not. He steps over the sleeping bag and picks up a business card that says SEER: Reuniting Souls in Transit. That’s a weird one. He decides he has to pick up the sleeping bag and look underneath, though he’s pretty sure the sleeping bag is going to smell, and he doesn’t want to touch it. Maddy is sniffing and whining. He can’t see well in the shade but he picks up the sleeping bag and drags it out of the bushes. He bends over and looks at the mashed grass and dirt underneath. There is something wrinkled and crushed: a piece of newspaper. Edges torn, not cut. He picks it up and thrashes out of the branches, Maddy pulling hard at the leash and poking his thigh to be petted, and then he sees. A part of the local paper, the Eagle, its colors and type font familiar. What has been torn out is a photo of a girl, and the girl is Thisbe. LOCAL GIRL SUBMITS SCHOOL PROJECT TO OCEAN FOUNDATION, it says. Thisbe grins in the photograph and holds up a clear glass jar. Something floats in the jar, but he doesn’t know what it is.

  Maddy breathes her hot tuna-can breath and Ted comes up to see, her face worried.

  “It was under the sleeping bag,” he tells her. “I think we should tell the police.”

  Frank sees it as he pulls the dinghy across the mud. The boot is uncovered. It will be uncovered every day at low tide. Lying there for anyone to see.

  He should pick it up. Who would question digging trash out of the mudflats? But he has a sense of misgiving. He gets into the dinghy and begins to row, and when he turns to look at the beach, a boy is standing there with his skateboard, looking out at the bay. The boy looks directly at Frank, as if he’s watching him to see where he goes.

  Frank’s wrist throbs, and he still doesn’t have the impeller. The wind is light. What if Julia is dead? The dog was a sign of something. Something bad.

  He stops rowing to press on the bite mark.

  What if the boy is still watching?

  He is.

  He should go back and get the boot. He could pull it out of the mud like a tooth.

  He’s passing the mint-green sloop with the fake owl on its stern and the light is fading, the water rising, “All the water will rise and cover us,” that’s what the Seer said. It’s not just the boy with the skateboard watching him. Under the bridge he sees two people not moving, just waiting there close together, and beside them is the hulking shape of the same dog.

  The ivory
cat hears her hitting the door with the heavy can. The sound is nothing, does nothing, brings nothing. Perhaps the parrot? But what can a parrot do! She kicks the door. She screams the raspy, hopeless scream.

  The cat is the only thing listening, and perhaps the parrot is no longer teasing it, because the cat resumes patting the flipped-up flag that is telling people the wrong message: stay far away from me, I might explode.

  Jerome holds the news article so Ted can see the photo of Thisbe. He hands her the business card that says SEER: Reuniting Souls in Transit. The dog looks at them with brown eyes and brown face smoothed and shaped by little black hairs. She has a noble bearing.

  Ted dials and then tells everything fast to the guy who answers at the police department: the nervous man, the newspaper picture of Thisbe in his camp, the path that says NO TRESPASSING. Ted doesn’t care now who sees them on the wrong side of the fence. She wants to see where the weird man went. “Can you tell Elaine?” she asks the police person. “And the giant man?” He says he will, but she isn’t sure it will happen fast enough. Nothing happens fast enough.

  “Wait,” Jerome says when they’re almost out of the bridge’s shadow, and he pulls her back before she can run.

  The man Maddy bit is a shadow. The sun’s down now but everything is still half-yellow, half-black. Ridges in the green mud look like furrows seen from an airplane. Bits of trash spoil the effect here and there. The man is out of his boat, standing on the mud, his hair a black halo.

  “What’s he doing?” Jerome whispers, as if the man might hear them. He’s about fifty yards away. He holds his arm like it hurts.

  A voice yells, “No! Don’t pick that up!” The voice comes from a boy on the sidewalk, some skater, but the man looks in the wrong direction, under the bridge. Ted feels the man see her and Jerome. The man stands perfectly still, like that might make his physical self and Ted’s physical self evaporate. The man stares for one more second, maybe two, then rolls the wheels up on the boat and climbs in. The water rises around the boat. The sky in its yellow-orange glowing is like a half-dead fire.