The One-Way Bridge

by Cathie Pelletier

  “I’m still gonna ask Roderick for a divorce,” said Edna. She stepped two feet back, the comb in one hand, the curler she was about to put in Mama Sal’s hair in the other. Mama Sal turned and looked at her, and Edna wanted to giggle at the sight. With those five curlers across the top of her head, she looked like a Mohawk Indian. But then Mama Sal surprised her.

  “It’s hurting my heart,” she said. “Tommy is my only boy.”

  Edna knew by the tone of the words that this sadness was real. Tommy had been Mama Sal’s pride, her golden boy. Edna came and put a hand on her mother’s shoulder. They said nothing for some time as they listened to autumn wind in the porch chimes and watched cars going up and down the road. Florence Walker in her little brown Chevy. Sheriff Ray Monihan in his black sheriff car with the light on top. Dorrie Mullins in her purple Bronco. Meg Craft in her little gray Mazda. Henry Plunkett in his maroon pickup truck.

  “Lives going back and forth, back and forth, every day,” said Mama Sal. “And all we’re doing is getting closer to our last ride.”

  It was almost a mother-daughter moment until Tommy’s enormous black pickup went flying by, the huge tires turning like Ferris wheels under the cab, the engine so loud that the porch chimes seemed to pick up the noise and echo it back. And Edna could sense that the mother-daughter moment, maybe the first one ever, was officially over.

  ***

  Harry Plunkett finished replacing the broken starter cord on Tommy Gifford’s snowmobile, a Polaris 550 Supersport. It was a known fact that Tommy was hard on machines and women, and in that order. He had apparently developed a philosophy in kindergarten that he stuck to over the years. If it ain’t broke, break it. Harry reached for the cup of coffee he’d put on the windowsill. It was in this garage that he’d opened his business two summers ago. Many of the jobs he got didn’t take the greatest skill, just patience. But as Harry saw it, he was providing the town with a good service. Almost everyone owned a lawn mower or a snowmobile or a four-wheeler, and many folks had all of the above. Harry didn’t charge city prices, but Plunkett’s Small Engine Repair, as the sign on the garage door announced, helped supplement the monthly check he got from the Veteran’s Administration.

  Harry went inside the house to answer the telephone, thinking it might be his daughter, Angie. But it turned out to be another one of those anonymous, far-off voices wanting to send him a credit card. He’d hung up on the voice and was about to pour a fresh cup of coffee when he heard the sound of blaring music. He saw Billy Thunder cut the white Mustang into the yard, right next to Harry’s pickup, and get out. Harry opened the front door.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” he said.

  Billy nodded. He took off his earmuffs and gloves, which he tossed onto the seat of the Mustang. He lit a cigarette. That was the biggest drawback of the convertible. You couldn’t smoke as you drove, and it was the number-two reason Billy wanted the top fixed. Number one was that he was slowly freezing to death. He walked past Harry’s pickup and stood below the garage, shielded from the wind as he smoked. That’s when he noticed a few cars parked behind the building, some spotted with rust, others fender-less. Billy walked over to a 1974 Cutlass and kicked the block of hardwood that held up the right front wheel axle. He figured Harry must use the old cars for spare parts. Harry appeared behind him, pulling on his denim jacket. The T-shirt that disappeared beneath asked Which Part of E=MC2 Don’t You Understand? Billy looked at the older man and smiled his downstate smile.

  “I guess the biggest wear and tear on these tires is done by woodpeckers,” Billy said. “How many cords do you get to the gallon?”

  “See these boots?” Harry asked. He lifted one burgundy boot so Billy could better see the steel-enforced yellow toe. They were the same as Buck’s boots, the kind lumberjacks wear to protect their feet from mishaps, yellow-tipped for visibility. “I get three good ass-kickings per pair and I’ve only used up two. Now, do you want me to look at that piece of shit you’re driving or not?”

  Billy seemed satisfied with that answer about mileage. He took his foot off the block of wood and followed Harry over to the Mustang. As they crossed the lawn again, Billy saw a sign hanging inside the garage door: AL GORE IS REALLY PRESIDENT.

  “You sure like signs, don’t you?” asked Billy. “T-shirts and hats. Don’t you have anybody to talk to, Harry?”

  Harry was about to say something sarcastic. “Even with the top up, a convertible isn’t a thinking man’s car.” That’s what he intended to say. Instead, an image of the old Vietnamese man flashed quickly into his mind, the Papa-san, bloody stumps where his arms and legs should have been, his eyes glazed with pain. He was lying in a sampan that the enemy had floated out from the riverbank, an attempt to trick the Americans, lure them into the open. Of all the many things Harry hated about Vietnam and being trapped there, it was the sampan searches he dreaded most. Hundreds of those small boats ran the Mekong Delta on a daily basis. It was how the locals made their living on the river, their sampans carrying a cargo of vegetables, fruits, and rice. But it was common knowledge that sampans sometimes carried other things. Sometimes, VC were lying flat on their bellies, packed like sardines beneath tarps and baskets of rice. And even the daylight hours weren’t safe. If an American soldier moved that basket of dragon fruit, so pretty and oval-shaped with their pink and green spikes, would a barrage of bullets tear him apart? But for those sampans that floated the river by night, especially in hostile areas, the MO was simple: don’t ask questions. Sampan at night. Just fire. “Shit, I think he’s trying to talk to us, Sarge,” Wally McGee had shouted, a second before Harry’s men filled the boat full of bullets. Maybe it had been a blessing in the end. Maybe he would have begged them to kill him anyway. What old man, what Papa-san, wants to live like that? That’s what Harry and the others told themselves for days, each of them grieving over the sight, over the frozen memory they would carry back to the United States of God Bless America on that air-conditioned plane, back into the peaceful towns and the shiny cities. Back to the faces in high school and college yearbooks of the boys they once were. Back to the families who welcomed them home but could never understand the men who had returned to them.

  He’s trying to talk to us, Sarge.

  Don’t you have anybody to talk to, Harry?

  “When I push the switch under the dash, to send power to the pump, there’s nothing but quiet,” Billy was saying. “And now even the canvas is stuck. I’m afraid I’ll rip it if I try to put it up manually. It’s the original roof.”

  Harry walked around the car, giving it a close look and saying nothing. He was still trying to undo that picture of the bloody stumps, the pained eyes, the lips trying to work again, to share those last precious words. He’d almost forgotten about the Papa-san.

  Billy watched, waiting. Harry said nothing.

  “The trouble started when the thing that raises and lowers the top got a leak,” Billy said. “So I took it to an expert in Boston. He replaced the left cylinder and it worked good for a while. But then the left side started going down slower than the right. Then it quit working altogether.”

  Harry Plunkett was only half listening. He could hear the sound of a northern raven from the trees along the riverbank, near where he kept his canoe tied up. He knew he had work to do and that he had a customer standing in front of him. He knew he was in Mattagash, Maine. He knew the man he had become, a widower about to turn sixty-three, father of one child and grandfather to two. But the sound of the Mattagash River, and of the raven, reminded him of another river, the sound of another bird, the silhouette of different trees, a different boat than a canoe. It reminded him of a different man. The river was any one of the dirty rivers and murky canals of the Mekong Delta on any given day or night. The patrol boat was a PBR. The bird was a Huey, a UH-1B helicopter gunship. The job on the river and in the air was to stop the flow of enemy troops, supplies, and arms into South Vietnam. And the ma
n was Army Sergeant Harold Plunkett, still twenty-four years old until November. If he lived to see November. He was a man of few words in those days. Some nights, when silence fell like rain over the jungle, a menacing stillness that meant something bad was about to happen, he knew only two words: Emily and home.

  “And with all due respect,” said Billy, seemingly ready to run if Harry lifted one of his boots, “this car is not a piece of shit. She’s an American classic, and I’ve taken good care of her. I’m getting a little tired of the hicks in this backwoods town thinking she’s just an old car.”

  Harry peered across the roofless car at Billy, as if remembering he had a customer. His mind and thoughts were back again. As he had done on all those black nights on the delta, nights when a leaf dropping in the jungle would make his heart race, he had taken himself away from a time and place. Over there, he had done this to save himself from the future. Nowadays, he did it to save himself from the past.

  Harry Plunkett walked to the front of the Mustang. He released the latch to open the hood, then looked over at Billy.

  “What’s the wheelbase? A hundred and eight inches, right?”

  “Shit, I don’t know,” said Billy. Harry lifted the hood.

  “Nice,” he said. “Detailed engine compartment and the valve covers and air cleaner are Ford Blue, just as they should be.”

  “Really?” said Billy. He glanced down at his car, as if seeing it for the first time.

  Harry closed the hood and looked at Billy Thunder.

  “The hydraulic mechanism, or what you call the thing, is what lowers and raises the top,” he said. “It must have had a leak in it. Your expert down in Boston should’ve never replaced just one cylinder, or ram, but both of them. If I were you, I’d go back to zero and replace both cylinders. But, of course, I’m not a specialist. I’m an old hick from a backwoods town.”

  Billy thought fast. This was an upstaging, no doubt about it, and while he was fifty percent Mattagash, thanks to his mother, the part that wasn’t Mattagash told him to take the scolding he had coming to him and keep his mouth shut.

  “Where will I find cylinders for a 1966 Mustang up here?” Billy asked.

  “Same place you’d find ’em for an Edsel or a Model-T,” said Harry.

  “Nowhere?”

  “Nowhere,” said Harry. “Find someone with a computer and enough brains to use it and get them to order you some. I’ll put ’em in for you.”

  ***

  After Billy disappeared down the road in his Mustang, Harry had come inside the house and stood in the middle of the room. He didn’t know what was happening, only that a wound had opened inside him and he knew it wasn’t the physical one that had brought him home from Vietnam two months early. He looked around his kitchen, at the mug on the counter that the grandkids had given him for his birthday. World’s Greatest Grandpa. The poster on his fridge had been taped there by his granddaughter during her last visit. He liked that little girl a lot. She reminded him of Emily in so many ways, the soft voice, the shiny dark hair, the sweet temperament. Grandpa, today is the first day of the rest of your life. Harry read the words again. The plaque over the fridge was one that Angie had sent last Christmas. Why God Made Fathers. She was only eleven when Emily died, and now she was almost thirty-seven. Her life was rooted in Portland, with a family of her own. Harry hadn’t seen Angie or his grandkids in over a year. Mattagash wasn’t their idea of a vacation hot spot. After his daughter left home, it had been just Harry Plunkett in the small house, trying to keep up family appearances.

  His eyes moved slowly around the room, but Harry’s mind was moving too, remembering the T-shirts and hats he had piled in his closet. A Hangover Is The Wrath Of Grapes. Shut Up And Paddle. Procrastinate Now. And his favorite fishing hat: When In Doubt, Trust The Trout. He could have answered Billy Thunder’s question. After all, here was a young man who had driven a broken car north to Mattagash and put his finger on a broken spot in Harry’s soul, a place no one else in town had thought to look. Harry could have said, “Listen, it’s not that I don’t have somebody to talk to; it’s that the somebody I want to talk to is no longer here.” It had taken him twelve long years of thrashing the blankets off at night, of waking up and shouting, “Who’s there?” to the shadows of an armchair in the corner, with Emily waking to talk him back to sleep. Twelve years before he felt he could tell the woman he loved about the horrors of Vietnam, about the men he had lost, about Wally McGee, his best soldier. And when that moment finally came, it came too late. She’d been to a doctor. Soft, little Emily. When you’re a man known for his bravery as Harry was—hell, the goddamn military had given him a Purple Heart—that would be the time to act, to save your wife. But Harry soon discovered that he couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t grab an M60 and start mowing down every shadow that moved. He couldn’t plan an ambush. He couldn’t even hide. Emily had died before he could speak to her of the faces and voices who were waking him at night, haunting him. And now, Emily was among them.

  Harold Plunkett stood alone in his small house on the banks of the Mattagash River, a house in which every window looked out upon water and trees and road, a house that could see the enemy coming from a long way off, a house he had built when he came home from Vietnam and married Emily Mason. And that’s when all the words on all the hats, the T-shirts, the signs, the posters, and the mugs, all the words flew out of drawers and bounced off walls and closet shelves. Sixty Is Not Old If You’re A Tree. Rehab Is For Quitters. If All The World’s A Stage…I Want Better Lighting. If You Shoot Me, City Slicker…You Better Kill Me.

  Harry stood alone in the middle of his kitchen and said no words at all. Why should he, when there was no one there to hear him? He stood and thought about the ocean of words he’d been sailing upon for years, an ocean in which he was now drowning. So many words, and yet now, with the afternoon sun beginning to touch the river, making it shimmer, he could think of only one small word. So he said it aloud.

  “Emily,” he whispered.

  6

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON

  AND EVENING

  A pale sun rode in and out of cloud patches as Orville hit the bridge. He always felt airborne at times like that—nothing above him but sky, nothing below but river. In the sky over the mountain to the north, he noticed a string of Canada geese cutting a wide V in the sky, some of the last stragglers to head south. Orville had been hearing their distant honkings late at night when he let the dog out before bedtime. The geese knew what was coming, that’s why they had a plan. Orville saw Sheriff Ray Monihan approaching the opposite end of the bridge in his black sheriff’s car. But Orville had the right-of-way, given the First Come–First Served philosophy of one-way bridges, and that also applied to lawmen unless it was an emergency. Ray pulled to the side and waited. Orville nodded hello as he came off the bridge and slid the mail car up close to Billy Plunkett’s box. No Billy in visible sight, and that was a good thing since Orville was already late in his deliveries.

  By the time he slowed for Blanche’s mailbox, he noticed that she had a nice crowd of cars in her yard and it was not yet two o’clock. But some of the women in town liked to gather at Blanche’s in the afternoon. Orville often saw Meg’s gray Mazda in among the herd, a fact he did not like or approve of but had no control over. Meg did what Meg saw fit. And on top of this, everywhere he looked, he saw cars made by Japanese and Germans, the country’s two biggest enemies during World War II. Somehow, that seemed discrepant to Orville Craft. Discrepant: not compatible with facts. He also noticed on this day that among the female-driven cars at Blanche’s was the topless white Mustang. This was not a surprise, considering that Billy Thunder’s lifestyle bordered on the kind led by matrons and English royalty.

  Orville had put Blanche’s mail inside her box and clamped the door shut when he heard a thump on his trunk. He looked into his rearview mirror to see Billy Thunder on his way up to Orville’s windo
w.

  “Hey, Mr. Mailman,” said Billy. “Did you happen to have a little box for me today?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Orville, “I did deliver a small box. You’d better get home, Thunder, before someone steals it.”

  Before Orville could say anything else—even if he had intended to, and he didn’t—Billy Thunder made a dash for the Mustang. As Orville watched, Billy shifted the car into first gear and then gunned it. The tires caught tar, and the Mustang screamed out of the yard and up onto the main road. Billy hadn’t even bothered to put on his earmuffs.

  ***

  There was no sign of Harry. The moose was alone. Orville was actually disappointed. He put the car in park and pretended to flick through some advertisements that lay beside him on the seat. He had two more times to deliver mail to #77, and he wanted to let Harry know something was up. Make him nervous. Harry’s pickup was parked near the garage. Orville didn’t think Harry was the type of man to take an afternoon nap. Where was he? Now Orville was the nervous one. He had lived all his life in the same town as Harry Plunkett and yet knew little about him. Harry had come home wounded from Vietnam and decorated to the hilt. That was back when the whole country was going to hell in a hand basket. College students were taking drugs instead of tests. Professors were running around with hair down to their shoulders, tripping over their bell-bottoms, higher than kites. Orville remembered that the Watertown Weekly had run a story about Harry’s unit being ambushed and how two of his soldiers had died. The town of Mattagash had thrown a welcome home party for their hero. The only person not to show up was Sergeant Harold Plunkett. There were those who said he went fishing. Others said he was home, both doors locked and a gun at his side. Wherever he was, the party had been a huge success.