The Tangled Bridge

by Rhodi Hawk

  “A break,” Ferrar said.

  He sat down on the trampled foliage. Patrice paused and then sat next to him. In truth she wanted to press on. Find her mother. Execute whatever transaction she must in order to get Gil and Rosie to safety. Seek vengeance for Trig. Maybe even meet her own death. But she realized she was treating poor Ferrar like a pack mule. He hadn’t rested once since they’d left Bayou Bouillon.

  The moon passed from behind a cloud and the banks seemed to bloom in its pale light. She looked at Ferrar and saw a black trickle running just beyond his brow.

  She gasped and reached for his face but then paused, afraid to touch the wound. “You’re bleeding.”

  He bent his head to the crook of his arm and blotted the blood. From the looks of his shirt, he’d probably been doing that the entire way.

  She said, “I’m sorry. You’re really hurt.”

  He waved a dismissive hand but said, “We have a choice now. We can keep going or stay here until dawn.”

  “Let’s keep going.”

  “Please, listen first. After the last set-in, once we make it to land, we need a way to get to New Orleans.”

  “How do you usually get there?”

  “I wait at the highway crossing. I know someone who drives a truck through there. He goes to the farms at sunrise and then he carries his load to New Orleans. He will take us, but not until midmorning. We will be exposed while we wait for him—no one out there but farmers and the bootleggers and pirates from the Gulf. So we can wait here or wait there. Here it is safe.”

  She listened, thinking very little of safety concerns. Trigger was gone, and she herself was doomed. But it wasn’t fair to put Ferrar in any more danger, and she had to keep herself safe, too, if she was going to get Gil and Rosie out of her mother’s hands.

  “Alright, then. How long do we wait?”

  “We can leave about an hour after sunrise. Then by the time we get to the crossroads where the truck picks us up, we’ll only have to wait by the road a little while.”

  She nodded. Looked around. The moon was already disappearing behind the clouds again and the darkness folded over the beachfront.

  And she thought, No, no, no, no, no. I have to keep moving.

  She scrambled to her feet. Ferrar must have taken this as a sign that she was ready to set up camp because he rose and pulled on the boat. Two good yanks and it was up a fair distance from the water. He slapped his neck where a mosquito must have landed.

  Patrice folded her arms across her chest and tried not to think of the look in Trigger’s eyes when the knife slid into his belly.

  “I have this, at least,” Ferrar said.

  He was pulling a canvas tarp from the boat and unfolding it over the grass. “You lie down there. If you get chilled, fold it over yourself. I’ll be in the woods.”

  “No.”

  He paused. A vanishing silhouette. She couldn’t speak another word for the tightness in her throat. The moon had fully receded behind the clouds and she was glad for it. She didn’t want him to see her. She put her hands to her face and covered her eyes.

  “Patrice?”

  He’d stepped toward her. She was certain he couldn’t see that she was crying but maybe he knew anyway. She stood like that for breath after breath, elbows clamped over her chest and hands to her eyes.

  He said, “I know it hurts.”

  She nodded though he couldn’t see her in the darkness, but she was still unable to make herself speak. Her tears flowed in silence. A minute passed, and then another, and the whole while he just stood there, not saying another single word. She cried and shivered. And then finally, she reached out for him. He opened his arms and let her press her head into his chest. He patted her gently on the shoulder. She kept weeping for Trigger. For Gil and Rosie in that horrible imprisoned state.

  * * *

  HE HADN’T KISSED HER. Hadn’t touched her beyond the comforting way he patted her shoulder. They’d finally settled themselves on the canvas tarp and fallen asleep beneath the dark clouds. He hadn’t even so much as draped an arm over her although, when Patrice awoke to find him lying there with her, she wished he had. She didn’t fall back to sleep.

  When the birds began their predawn restlessness she realized he wasn’t sleeping either.

  And so she said, “You’re awake.”

  “Yes. We should both be sleeping.”

  She was glad he wasn’t.

  “The mosquitoes were bad all night long. We should have at least built a fire for the sake of the smoke.”

  “I’ll build one now if you want.”

  “No.” Patrice reached out and took his hand.

  His breathing paused. She squeezed his fingers. Such a big hand.

  Dawn would come soon.

  She said, “How many times have you made this voyage, between New Orleans and Bayou Bouillon?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a hundred.”

  “It’s a good thing you’ve got a pirogue like that, with the motor.”

  He gave a small laugh, and it was a nice sound. “Not at first. I didn’t get the motor until ’bout a year later. Before that it’s all poling or paddling.”

  “That must have taken forever.”

  “It did. But then when I got the motor, I had to get the boat dollies. It got too heavy to haul the boat overland without them.”

  “You’d been dragging them across without a dolly?”

  “Yeah. First pirogue I had was light as a cloud. Carried her on my head when she wasn’t in the water. Too light to do with a motor, though—she liked to tip. So I got a bigger pirogue that was heavy enough to tote the motor, but then I had to tote the boat.”

  Patrice smiled.

  Ferrar went on, and this time he moved his fingers so that they were tracing Patrice’s. “So I found the dollies and had them dropped on the islands.”

  “You’re not worried someone’ll steal them?”

  “Who’d steal a boat dolly out here? It would take more heartache to steal them than what they worth. I got’m both for free in tradin for the old boat ’cuz they both broken.”

  Patrice had no idea who would steal a boat dolly, but then again she knew nothing about the pirates and bootleggers that came through this part of the Gulf.

  “What’s it like? Runnin hooch?”

  Ferrar was quiet a moment. She could see the outline of his ear now, just enough light forming beyond the beachhead.

  He said, “Lonesome. Hard. Dangerous.”

  “Mm. I s’pose it’s better working on the bridge.”

  “It is. But that’s also lonesome. And hard.”

  “And dangerous?”

  “And dangerous.”

  She thought of the waters that surrounded the landmass where they lay. Waters that had taken Trigger away, waters fed by the very river that moved under Ferrar’s bridge.

  Enough light to see the outline of his face now. The sun would keep following until it broke the horizon and then it would rise, and by nothing but just being there, without even trying, it would turn darkness into daylight.

  She wondered if she was going to die on this day. She would get Gil and Rosie out, and then she would face her mother down. If she failed, she would be folding herself into darkness as her mother’s captive. If she succeeded, she would kill her mother and lay down her soul to eternal damnation. Somewhere in between failure and success was a third possibility: her own death. Any one of these things was about to be. In that little pinch of something between sunup and sundown.

  Even as she lay there touching fingers to Ferrar and listening to the birds, the shadows were receding. How long before those shadows would come back? Fourteen hours?

  She said, “Those people in Bayou Bouillon, they call them ghosts. Does that mean they’re from the dead? Does it mean we are dead?”

  Ferrar shook his head. “I’ve wondered that a long time. No one seems to know. I don’t think the ghosts even know.”

  She turned to her side and kissed Ferrar o
n the mouth. It felt like the most daring thing she’d done in her life. Her heart raced, waiting to know what Ferrar would do now that she’d kissed him.

  He lay very still and did not kiss her back.

  She said, “You don’t love me?”

  He didn’t reply, not for a long moment, and she could hear him breathing. The kind of breathing that sounded like he had something to say but wasn’t saying it, so he just lay there huffing.

  Finally: “I do love you, Patrice. I’ve loved you a long time.”

  She leaned forward to kiss him again but he pushed her back, rising to a sit. She pulled herself up to her knees and smoothed her hair.

  He said, “All these years, I haven’t been able to see you. Not even for a minute. Except for once. Just the once. I came down the boardwalk and you were in the water, with … her.”

  Her. Patrice thought about what he meant. “My ghost?”

  “Yeah. She saw me and just turned her back. You already had your back to me. I knew the best you was off somewhere else, and it was just the pretty you in the water. All I saw was the back of your head. Francois caught me lookin and liked to feed me to the gar.”

  Patrice listened.

  “But that was it. Six years and three months. It’s all I saw of you. But I saw the other you, and I saw the other me. And I guessed by the way they did, that they loved each other. Never saw them hold hands or nothin. I just knew it. Which meant you and I was goin’ to love each other someday. And that’s when I realized I already did love you.”

  She didn’t know what to say to this. It occurred to her that having seen that in him, having recognized that he loved her, she ought to have figured out whether she loved him back before forcing him to speak of it. In this she was lacking gentleness. Her thoughts and emotions had tangled together so much that she could only allow them to lead her to the next step, whatever that may be. Right now she wanted only for him to put his arms around her. She wanted to feel alive. She wanted to be brave enough.

  “If you do love me, Ferrar, kiss me.”

  “Don’t. You’re naïve, Patrice, you don’t understand.”

  “I do.”

  “I will come calling on you and make it proper. After all this.”

  “No sir, you don’t seem to understand. There may not be any ‘after all this.’”

  He fell silent. The water beyond the beachhead was forming silver ripples that winked in and out.

  “I don’t believe that’s true anymore,” he said.

  “That I’m about to die?”

  “That there is such a thing. After these last years in Bayou Bouillon, I see that time don’t work the way I thought it did. It’s a good thing to know. Because then you can always do what’s right with your heart.”

  She was frustrated, weeping again, the tears apparently hadn’t played themselves out yet.

  But then she realized: “You believe you’re going to die today, too.”

  Somehow that changed everything. It snapped her to a different level of attention. He said nothing, and he didn’t even look at her.

  She said, “But that’s pointless. Just get me to the bridge, that’s all I ask. I’ll deal with my mother on my own.”

  But of course he wouldn’t do that. She knew even as she was saying it that once they arrived at the bridge, he would not leave her. Even if she used pigeonry on him—Ferrar, with his constant light, was nearly impossible to pigeon.

  He said, “Something continues on, that’s all I know. I think you and I continue on.”

  “I think that’s true, too. But we’re not going to continue on because of any afterlife. It’ll be because we go over there and get Gil and Rosie back, and we all walk away safe, mind and body.” Patrice heard herself speaking these words as though they were coming from someone else.

  Hadn’t she just determined only three possibilities that waited between sunup and sundown? Lifelong darkness, eternal damnation, or death?

  But for some reason she was thinking differently now. She was not in the briar, didn’t dare approach it in Ferrar’s company, but if she were she wondered if she would see if his strange and beautiful illumination might be spreading from him. Maybe seeping onto her.

  He turned to look at her, and then he reached out and pressed her hand close into his own. She nodded though he hadn’t said anything. She’d found that space inside, somewhere deep within her. She wasn’t thinking from a place of hope or determination. Only understanding. The pain over Trigger was still there, and even the frustration and fear, but there was space around those feelings. They were volatile inside her, and something more solid and permanent was at her core. A subtle difference but one that changed everything.

  Even as she experienced this awareness, he leaned over and kissed her.

  A full, true, powerful feeling. Her heart surged. She dared not move lest he stop. But he did not stop that kiss. He held her so close, so sweetly. It strengthened the sense that things were alright. Even in the worst possible situation things were still somehow alright.

  She held onto him, held onto that kiss, let it fill her heart with its sweetness, his arms so strong around her. She felt like she might blow away with the morning fog were it not for his arms.

  “I would do anything for you,” he said.

  She put her mouth over his to shush him, but he spoke again: “I would die for you. It could go either way, and either way I’m ready.”

  “Hush now.”

  She fit her lips to his. She fit her body against him and marveled at how her skin craved his skin. His lips felt firm and large, just like his hands. She sensed the change happening below his waistband, and the knowledge caused her to heat up inside. So much mystery. Had the last six years been different, she might understand more about what was happening. Girls her age got married. They had mothers and sisters and friends who knew.

  Strangely, the answer was to shush her mind, let her body take over.

  fifty-nine

  BAYOU BOUILLON, NOW

  MADELEINE WASN’T BREATHING. THAT was the first realization that swept over her. Her body convulsed in the effort. Thornflies, too, were there, and a furious Severin who seemed determined to take her right back to the briar. Madeleine sat up in bed, her hands going to her throat.

  And she remembered she could hold her breath for a very, very long time.

  She stopped fighting for air. Her lungs and stomach continued to convulse but she waited until it passed.

  The girl who’d been in the room earlier was there. She was staring at Madeleine with wide eyes. Gaston was at the foot of the bed but had turned his back to her when she’d sat up, probably because the blankets had fallen away and left her exposed. But she was no longer naked. Someone must have dressed her—probably this girl. The garment was a stained white cotton chemise, soaked through with Madeleine’s sweat, and matching bloomers from her hips to her knees. The click beetle necklace was still in place.

  Madeleine climbed out of the bed and strode past both the girl and Gaston, through the door, and outside. She paused as a faint breeze tickled across her skin.

  She had expected to walk out into a hall, not the great outdoors. The room where she’d been convalescing was a floating one-room shack, and she was now standing on a boardwalk that adjoined several such shacks. Entire rows of them stretched like floating neighborhood blocks.

  Madeleine still hadn’t taken a breath and wasn’t really sure what to do, but the moment she saw the water beaming back the afternoon sunlight she stepped off the boardwalk and let herself sink.

  The water felt like heaven. Cool, cleansing, inside and out. She plunged down feet-first and then she swam to the surface.

  The retching started again, and the convulsions in her chest, and she let her body heave. She coughed out what seemed to be both solid and liquid. Spat it all straight into the bayou. Immediate relief of air entering her lungs. Her stomach emptied, too, though it hadn’t held much.

  No pain in her ear. None in her ankle. She r
eached down, feeling for the place where Gaston’s knife had cut her. No hot, weeping gouge. No scab. Nothing.

  She turned around while treading the surface. Gaston was now watching her. She felt fury at the sight of him, remembering how Cheryl had turned the gun on herself.

  He said, “That some kind of primal thing, like a dog wandering off to die?”

  “I’m not dying.”

  “Then do you mind comin on outta there?”

  “I’m going back.”

  He put his hands to his hips and sighed. “Can’t. Not til the moon’s up high, when the tide’s on our side.”

  Madeleine frowned, but she turned around toward the boardwalk.

  He gestured back toward the shack. “Look, I went ahead and talked to her, OK? It’s alright to talk to her, but no one else here. Don’t even let anyone else see you.”

  He knelt on the wood and reached his hand toward her but she ignored it, struggling instead to hoist herself up onto the boardwalk. The result was a fine seam of splinters down her leg.

  “I know you don’t like what happened in that briar patch,” Gaston said.

  “Don’t like it? Gaston, are you the one who pigeoned Cheryl?”

  “Cheryl?”

  “The woman who shot herself!”

  “Honey, she was stained.”

  “I’m stained!”

  “You happen to be one of us. She wasn’t.”

  Madeleine sagged, leaning against the wall of the shack. There were several others like it in a row, but this one was distinctive in that it had a canted tin roof that made it look like the north side of the structure was sinking.

  Madeleine said in as calm a voice as she could muster, “She was the mother of an eight-year-old boy who is deaf and paralyzed.”

  Gaston was quiet for a moment. “I know it’s hard. If you’d just let me help you get the stain out of you it’ll make it so much easier. Now that is the truth.”

  She pushed past him through the door but he blocked her from slamming it behind her. “You hell bent on goin back and you think you’re well enough, then fine. I’ll come back for you when the tide’s high. Meantime, stay inside.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, and he gave a shrug before releasing the door. “Ghosts.”