The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  Should they stop him?

  She wants to stop him.

  “Wait,” Jerome says. “Watch him.”

  Watch him row? Watch him leave? Jerome holds his hand on her arm or she’d run, and she’s not sure what to do. When the man can’t be seen because of the darkness and other boats, Jerome’s grip on her arm loosens and they walk with Maddy until they reach the beached dinghies and the skater who told the guy to stop. “Ted?” he says. It’s Fen, and he looks really freaked out.

  “Why did you tell him no?” Ted says.

  He doesn’t answer her.

  “That was great,” she says, but he doesn’t look glad to hear it.

  “We need to go after him,” she says. She still doesn’t hear any sirens or see any twirly lights. Everything is taking way, way too long.

  She finds a boat that isn’t locked. Not a nice one but it will do. “Help me,” she says to Fen and Jerome.

  Jerome says they should wait for the police and Fen just stands with his hands in his pockets. Far off, the sound of sirens.

  She shoves the boat to the mud and is glad to see the tide has come in so much. She won’t have far to go before she reaches the water. Hands are helping her and the dog is barking. “What are you doing?” Fen asks.

  “You come with me,” she says to Fen. “But can you stay, Jerome? To tell the police what happened?”

  What a slow boat this is. If she had her paddleboard, she’d be better off. She has to row harder or the man will disappear. That’s her sense of it: he is going.

  The sirens are louder. They might be coming this way.

  When she hears footsteps on the deck, she curls up to hide.

  If you close your eyes, others can still see you, Thisbe. Her mother said that to her gently, so long ago, she doesn’t remember why, only that she was under the coffee table and it was the middle of a school day. Something had happened at school, something mean.

  She doesn’t close her eyes. She watches the hatch, but it doesn’t open. She hears thuds and the rake of metal, maybe the sound of a chain.

  I am the devil of reality,

  Seen for a moment standing in the door.

  The sound is the anchor coming up, the links of the chain coiling. He’s trying to take her away, and there’s nothing she can do.

  There’s no time to open the hatch. He’s waited far, far too long, and there are people watching him. He can feel their eyes like the eyes of Shiva. The engine waits in the cold. Worthless.

  Though sometimes when you let it cool, the engine recovered.

  He gives the cord a yank. It starts right up like nothing was wrong, like he didn’t need the impeller after all.

  The boat is moving. They’re going again, going away. She raises both fists and goes to the broken window. “I’m Julia!” she says. She pushes the can of chowder out the window and hears it thud and roll. “Julia wants out,” she tries to scream, but the motor is louder than her ruined voice can ever be.

  Ted won’t let Fen row. He feels that, as the guy, he should row, but she refuses to trade places with him. “Where are we going?” he asks her.

  “We have to find him.”

  Carl had told him not to mention the boot, but maybe he should. She said Jerome’s dog bit a guy who was living in the bushes by the bridge. A homeless guy who was acting weird and had a news clipping about Thisbe in his camp.

  “The police are coming,” he says.

  “I know,” she says. “I called them.”

  “So did I.”

  “Really?”

  They pass the first row of tethered sailboats, and she turns the dinghy to row them down a sort of water street in the dark. The boats they pass are empty and cold, which he didn’t expect. He’d always thought, when he looked down from the bridge, that they would all have families living on them, that everything would be happening there as in a campground, where you made small dinners on a tiny grill and maybe watched old-fashioned TV with your old-fashioned mutt and lay down in a hammock and were very happy. But the boats have a permanent sense of loneliness about them and a cold, mucous-thick smell of brine. Moonlight licks at the metal edges and masts. It scallops the water they cut through like silk. Ted has her back to where they’re going and that strikes him, suddenly, as bad planning in the design of rowboats. Again he says she should let him row and she says they’ll tip over and he remembers, with shame, how badly he sailed.

  At the far end of the water street, a silhouette begins to move, and a wake begins to flow outward, licked by the same moonlight, lifting each moored sailboat and each slime-edged mooring ball. Ted turns to see the dark mass, which is boat-shaped, and she says to Fen, “That could be him!” She rows harder and keeps turning her head.

  “This is too freaking slow!” she says.

  She stops where a string of white Christmas lights has been draped over what he thinks is the cabin-house of a newish boat. Broker, says the name on the side, but he misreads it first as Broken. Plants of some kind are growing in pots and their shape in the dark is like Spanish moss. Ted lunges and grabs hold of the ladder on the boat’s side and Fen feels that he’s stuck in the getaway car of a person who’s just committed a minor crime and may be about to commit major ones.

  “Can you still see that boat?” she asks.

  He hears boot at first. He starts to shake his head, but she says, “Is it still going?” and points, and he sees the light on the boat that’s chugging away from them. “Yeah.”

  Ted climbs the ladder and says, “We have to follow him.”

  “Whose boat is this?” he asks.

  She doesn’t answer him, just calls, “Gretchen? Are you home?”

  No one answers, and when Ted opens the unlocked door to the cabin, birdcages are the first thing they see and smell. In one cage, a white parrot screeches. The other cage is empty and the door is ajar.

  “Where’s Rogaine?” Ted asks the bird. “Or are you Rogaine? Where is Pick Your Boob?”

  That Ted has lost her mind occurs to Fen.

  “Rogaine?” he asks her.

  “They have weird names” is all she says, and then she tells him to call the police again and say the man who was living in the bushes beside the Coronado Bridge is getting away. “I think,” she adds.

  Honestly, this isn’t the clearest message he’s ever been asked to give. She says she can’t do the calling because she has to get them under way—sailor talk, he’s pretty sure, for making a boat move.

  Once she’s up on deck somewhere and he’s alone with the parrot, which starts screeching at him, he calls his uncle instead, because that seems more direct. His uncle will understand that Ted is grieving about her sister and doing crazy stuff. “Quiet,” Fen says to the very agitated, very loud bird. “Shhh.”

  “Pickle stew!” the bird shrieks over and over. Or maybe it’s picker view!

  His uncle doesn’t pick up.

  Holding one finger very hard against his left ear and standing outside the cabin door, which enables him to watch Ted unhitch the boat from its floating, slimy mooring, Fen explains the situation on his uncle’s voice mail, which isn’t easy, the situation being so odd, and after he hangs up he questions the wisdom of ending the message with “I think we’re trying to chase somebody,” but he’s pretty sure his uncle will pick up the message right away and call him back.

  At the harbor patrol office, Carl sits at a desk, hoping Elaine is on her way to find Fen. He’ll go himself as soon as Howard arrives. The boat ride will take twenty minutes. Can’t go fast in the dark.

  “News,” Chrissy says, sticking her head in. “The girl may not have jumped.”

  “Why?” Carl asks.

  “Some taxi driver says he brought her down.”

  “When did this get reported?”

  “Just now.”

  A great blue heron stands on the pier beside the patrol boat, where Carl goes to wait. Night after night, the heron flies to the same spot and takes up his post. Officer Joe, they’ve taken to ca
lling him around the office, but Carl always thinks of God when he sees the giant bird with its pop-eyed expression. It watches Carl board the boat, and it watches, feathers stiff, neck unfurled, as Carl starts the motor, and only when Howard has jumped aboard and they’ve started moving does the moonlit bird extend its great wings and rise up for a few minutes, disappearing with whatever thoughts it thinks, and Carl feels the consciousness of the bird like the consciousness of all the creatures swimming or floating in the black bay, instinctual and mute, wise about things they can never say.

  It was late August. Julia was eight and he was twelve. They were playing pirates, so they tied Julia’s hands and her feet, then put a bandanna in her mouth, not to hurt her but because she said it had to be real. It wasn’t tied very tight. He, Julia, and Ben Crames had already dug the cave. It took all the summer days that had already passed to dig it: day after day, the three of them working. Never was anything more fun than that. Never was the sunlight more beautiful, never was the water fresher when you ran into it with sand-covered hands and knees. For hours at a time they were lost in it, the idea that they were not themselves but other, grown-up people. Julia would be in the cave, tied up, and Ben would be the pirate and Frank would save her with the ransom that was sand dollars. They had the dollars all saved up in buckets. Julia was in charge of that because she was so good at finding them.

  But then they had the idea of getting ice cream. Ben said he had enough for two. Not three. “It won’t take long,” he said. “Just a second.”

  How terrible to see the cave was gone. He thought for a moment they had run too far or not far enough. But up on the cliff was the palm tree by the pink house. There was the same fisherman on the beach with his bucket and pole, and he was staring at the rocks. He said he hoped nobody was under there.

  Julia wasn’t standing on the beach. She wasn’t saying, “Look, I got free!”

  “His sister’s in there!” Ben said, and the fisherman started running. Then they were all pulling at the boulders and rocks, the fisherman, Ben, and Frankie, an absurdly small number of people for a giant pile.

  After the funeral, when his grandmother had to take charge of Frank, the Seer taught him how the dance of destruction is the dance of creation, the rhythm of the dance is the rhythm of a world perpetually forming, dissolving, and re-forming. Serpents coil about Shiva’s limbs and from his right hand flows the promise of release.

  When the letters from the Seer ceased, Frank knew that she was not dead, just as Julia was not dead, only gone to another life-form. That other time he thought he’d found Julia, he was wrong, because as soon as she said, “I forgive you!” he felt cold. He’d been mistaken. Julia wouldn’t forgive him.

  He can hear her nearby. He won’t fail her now; he’ll let her see the lights of the city, the light of the stars, the beautiful water, where Shiva is inextricably woven into all that the eye can see.

  The hatch opens. The air is cold and salty and delicious like that moment when you plug your nose and jump off a boat. The man is still there, but he stands still and lets her pass.

  “I lost my wallet,” the man says. “It took all day. I couldn’t help it. But the motor started. It’s working.”

  “Get away from me,” she says. She holds the knife and she feels like she could bring it down on him, slash slash. The way she holds it makes him back up, so she’s doing it the right way. He lets her come up out of the smelly darkness and stand on the deck in the strobelike air. Never has anything felt better than the salty cold. She keeps the knife aloft.

  “You don’t remember,” he says.

  “I remember,” she says, her lips still cracked and stinging at the edges, her mind dizzy from hunger and fright, so that the parrot sitting on the rail of the boat seems a possible figment of her imagination, a figment that keeps saying crow man. Where the cat has gone, she isn’t sure.

  “I remember,” Thisbe says, knife up. “And I don’t forgive you.”

  “I know,” he says. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”

  “Stop the boat,” she says.

  It never ceases to amaze her, looking back. The unexpected obedience. The turning of the boat when she said to stop it. The power seemed to flow out of the knife that she was only pretending to know how to use. He jumped into the water and then two boats came up. One had her sister on it, and the other was the harbor patrol. The creepy man was still down there in the water, and he was waving a gun. He kept saying, “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot,” shouting it over and over again until a policeman shot him, shot him dead.

  On the day the Sayonara is to be towed to a police storage yard, a dockworker removes thirty-two jars from the cabin. His daughter is always hunting for sand dollars, so he sets two of the biggest jars aside to take home, then imagines her asking where they came from, and what kind of story is that to tell a five-year-old? He stands on the deck at midday and opens the lid of the first jar and watches the sand dollars and their beds of fine, dry sand fall into green water at the edge of the beautiful, summer-bright bay, aware that what he’s doing would be viewed as inefficient if his supervisor were to pass by. It would be faster to throw all the jars, unopened, into the trash bin, but he can’t quite do it, so he unscrews lid after lid and dumps. The sand dollars float briefly, then begin to sink, staring up at him like open eyes until they reach the deeper water and wait for the tide to lift them like ghosts.

  Elsewhere: Telma Cardozo is eating clam chowder and a piece of rye bread when the call comes about her cousin. She’d always expected to hear of Frank’s death from the police or the coroner, a heart attack while he was alone on his boat somewhere, or him drowned, the boat found drifting, and she’d expected to think, Well, he’s finally at rest. She wasn’t prepared for a kidnapping. A girl who said he called her Julia. Resisting arrest, getting himself shot.

  “No,” she says, “we do not have the money for that,” though they do. She simply can’t ask her husband for money to bring the body of a man who could do such a thing all the way from San Diego.

  “Who was that?” her husband asks, eyes on the television.

  “Frank died,” she tells him.

  “Well, he’s finally at peace,” he says, and she doesn’t correct him.

  Elsewhere: A boy stands with a girl on a tennis court. Summer, not yet dark. No one is around, so the court feels like an enormous empty chalkboard. The sky is lilac.

  “I’m not athletic,” she says. “I warn you.”

  “It’s okay if you don’t get it right the first million times.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well, that’s how long it took me.”

  “So we’ll be here awhile.”

  “Whatever it takes,” he says. A million seems like a small number of times to do something with Jerome.

  “Like this,” he says. He throws the tennis ball straight up and then he hits it with stinging precision into the opposing court. It looks possible, like all graceful things. She takes a ball and nods, holds it, then starts to fling it upward.

  “Bounce first,” he says.

  Bouncing and catching it with her left hand is bad enough. “I can’t even do this part!” she says, laughing, but she knows he doesn’t need her to do it well. She bounces it again, badly, then throws it too low and far away from her body, and the clumsy way she reaches for it makes her laugh. “That was terrible,” she says, and he says it truly was, a thing he doesn’t care about in this exact moment.

  Elsewhere: A boy stands on the dock beside a sailboat that a girl is preparing to make him sail. “Here’s your bailer,” she says.

  “I thought that was to pee in.”

  The ludicrous thoughts of nonsailors.

  “What do you say to pump people up in this situation?” he asks.

  “Win or don’t come in,” she says, and then laughs.

  “Perfect,” he says, and in a peculiar way, for that moment, everything is.

  Elsewhere: Clay Moorehead walks through the jardin at
ten minutes to five. The trees have been trimmed with machetes into these giant cube-type things that are very surreal and remind him every second that he’s in Mexico, not at home. As does the smell of burning corn.

  He’s mailing, like, ten things for his mom because he has to work for her now, and forget about going back to Coronado High, because, What? she says, everybody is going to forgive you just like that? No. They’re all going to think you are a criminal!

  Clay is not a criminal. He’s a fighter, man. And Jerome won’t answer his emails or his chats, so Clay picks out a postcard in the mailbox place that shows a superhot woman in a supersmall dress, comic-book sexy but that’s what makes it cool. On the part that says Escribe tu mensaje aquí, he writes:

  JERONIMOOOOO!

  What’s up? I miss you bro! I’m really sorry. I mean seriously. I didn’t mean to make Thisbe feel that bad and I’m really glad she’s okay. Don’t cut me off bro, okay?

  Your besto amigo, Claymo.

  He sticks one of his mom’s American stamps on it and the lady takes it and puts it with all the other mail someone is flying up to Texas to make sure it gets there quick, and when he walks back through the garden of giant cube trees, a zillion black birds are flying into them and disappearing but you could still hear their crazy screams.

  Elsewhere: The boy digging in the sand near the golf course at Stingray Point submits to the sunscreen being rubbed into his shoulders for approximately five seconds before he resumes excavation with the small, rusty shovel his father nearly cut his foot on when he waded into Glorietta Bay. The sharp blade is excellent for moats and canals, so the boy goes deeper than he’s ever gone before, so deep that he’s kneeling down and leaning his head way down into a hole when he hits the hard top of something that looks like a plastic bowl full of cash, or maybe just old salad, but he yells as loud as he can to his mother, lying facedown on a towel, and his father, lying faceup on a towel, taking yet another boring nap: “I found it! I found the treasure!”