The One-Way Bridge

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Wow, dude,” said Raul. He tapped his finger at a place on the map. “There’s Bangor, and it’s not even halfway up the fucking state. I never been as far north as Bangor. Have you?”

  “Who would go to Bangor?” asked Jorge. “Stephen King maybe, that’s it.”

  “So why are we going?” Raul started the journey from Bangor to Mattagash with his finger moving north on I-95, passing Millinocket and coming to a halt at Houlton, where the interstate ended. From then on, it was scraggly Route One.

  “We’re not going to Bangor,” said Jorge. “We’re going to Waddamash.”

  “Mattagash,” said Raul. He was the one who had addressed all those boxes from a nonexistent woman named Elizabeth Miller. He even knew the zip code by heart. “It doesn’t even look like there are places to eat.”

  “We’ll bring cigarettes and booze in the trunk,” said Jorge. “And candy bars, in case we get in a blizzard.”

  Raul found the word Caribou, a couple hours south of Mattagash. He’d seen a documentary on caribou once. Even the females grow antlers.

  “No fucking way,” said Raul.

  ***

  After thirty minutes of steady and intense lovemaking, Orville and Meg Craft were still lying in their bed, heads on individual pillows, staring up at the light fixture on the ceiling.

  “I see cobwebs,” said Meg. “I need to dust that fixture.”

  Orville said nothing.

  “And I think the fixture itself is crooked,” Meg added. “I’ll straighten it tomorrow.”

  Orville moved the toes on his right foot and felt the sheet above them avalanche into small furrows.

  “I can’t for the life of me remember when I bought that fixture,” said Meg. “I should replace it. I’m getting sick of the flowers on it.”

  Through the bedroom window, Orville saw the top branches of his white birch bending in the wind. A blue jay lifted its wings and rose on the current. Now he couldn’t help it. He cast his eyes down the length of his body and saw the stiff cairn holding up the sheet above it, like the supporting pole in a tent. It was plain good luck that Meg hadn’t got out her electric blanket yet for the winter months ahead. Orville didn’t want to think of third degree burns, not to mention a possible electrocution.

  “I think my mother might have bought that light fixture for my birthday,” Meg said now. “Back in the 1970s.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Meg,” said Orville. “Will you stop the nervous chattering? That’s not going to make it go away.”

  Meg lifted herself on an elbow and stared down at the sheeted hump that was still announcing itself proudly.

  “Then what will?” she asked. “And please don’t look at me. I’ve done my duty and then some.”

  “I don’t know,” said Orville, and it was the truth. He hadn’t felt this kind of vigor and duration since the days when he sat on the edge of his boyhood bed with a girlie magazine in his free left hand. Not even in the earliest years of his marriage could he go full-throttle for almost an hour without a bead of sweat for his efforts. And if Meg had been agreeable, he’d be going for round three about now, that’s how ready he still felt. But she hadn’t been agreeable. “I vowed to support my husband until death do us part,” Meg had said, when their second session was finally over. “But I didn’t know it would be death from this.”

  “I wish you’d go ahead and admit it,” Meg was saying now. “You know darn well you took one of them pills, Orville. You’ve had that brochure up at your cabin for months.”

  “On my mother’s soul, I never took a pill,” Orville said. Why couldn’t she give him due credit? This was the Real McCoy talking to them from beneath the sheet.

  The blue jay returned to the top of the birch, a sunflower seed in its beak. Orville watched as the bird held the seed in its claws and quickly cracked it with its beak. Afternoon sun touched on its feathers, turning them blue as sky. Blue as blueberries.

  Blueberry pie.

  That’s when the film of his brief stop at Blanche’s replayed, winding backward first, then playing forward. Billy Thunder was two stools away from him. So how did he put a pill in Orville’s pie?

  Meg sat up and slid her legs out of bed.

  “Well, I can’t lay around all afternoon staring at it,” she said. “I got work to do.”

  “I didn’t take a pill,” said Orville. “But someone gave me one.” He had taken a bite of the blueberry pie and stopped to put milk in his tea. Then the film played far enough ahead that Orville had his answer. Wow, did Harry Plunkett just hit your mail car? You need eyeglasses, Thunder.

  “Why, you underhanded, no-good, scheming fool,” said Orville, looking down now at the peak beneath the top sheet, pointed like a dunce cap. “I ought to wring your neck.”

  “Heavenly god,” Meg said. “Now he’s talking to it.”

  Orville sat up on his side of the bed and found that the movement was painful. It was like being given a pitchfork and having no hay to pitch, much less a barn to hang the thing in when the workday was done.

  “It was Billy Thunder did it,” he said. He had a good mind to fill a small box with a steaming pile of dog poop, write Elizabeth Miller, Portland, ME, at the top left corner, and mail it to Billy Thunder. Let him stick his fingers in that. But then a thought rushed through Orville’s mind. Should you punish the man who has given you the best hard-on of your life or reward him? “He put one of them pills in my blueberry pie.”

  Meg had pulled on her slacks.

  “Of all the nerve,” she said. “There should be a law. People should get the death sentence for doing that.” She reached for her bra, slid her arms over the two large cups and past the straps. She quickly and expertly did the clasp. She turned to look at Orville.

  “How long will it last?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice now wistful. He had believed, if only for a short time, that even as a retired mailman he was still one hell of a man.

  “Well, what does the brochure say?” Meg was getting that impatient tone to her voice.

  “I never read the last page,” Orville admitted. “I figured if you wouldn’t let me buy any, I didn’t need to know about after-effects.”

  Meg pulled on her sweatshirt that said World’s Sexiest Grandma, the one Debby’s kids had given her for her birthday. She slid her feet into her loafers.

  “I’ll have to get on the computer and find out,” she said. Orville felt his heart sink if nothing else. Had she forgotten so quickly how good it had been?

  “You’re gonna ask the penguin?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Meg. “I’m gonna Google it.”

  “No you’re not!” said Orville. He didn’t know what that meant, only that it sounded painful. Meg gave him that look again, the one that made the muscles around her mouth pinch up.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t retire,” Meg said.

  Five minutes later, Orville was standing behind Meg’s shoulder, wearing the corduroy robe that Debby’s kids had bought for his birthday—World’s Sexiest Grandpa—and doing his best to keep the front of it closed as Meg surfed the web. In no time, with a few clicks and clacks, she had the answer.

  “For most men,” Meg read, her glasses on the tip of her nose so that she could see the words, “a minimum dose of 50 milligrams will ensure and maintain a firm and lasting erection for up to four hours.”

  For the second time that day, Meg’s mouse hand flew up to cover her mouth. Orville coughed softly.

  “Knowing Thunder,” he said, “he probably gave me a bigger dose. You know, for the joke in it.”

  Silence rocked the house. Wind sliced into the pewter chimes on the front porch and they tinkled like leaves on a quaking aspen. Those were the trees Orville liked to listen to best, those days when he sat alone at his cabin and read the first sexy page of his brochure. Why VIAGRA? B
ecause the children are gone and it’s time to fall in love all over again. Because that special look on your loved one’s face is meant only for you.

  Meg turned and looked at Orville. On her face was a desperation the likes of which he hadn’t seen since their first date, that day at the 1962 Maine State Fair, when Orville finally convinced her to step inside the tent for a close-up glimpse at Lobster Boy.

  ***

  Edna stared at the finished painting, her first work of art. The driver of the white pickup truck now had his left elbow resting out his window, relaxed, his right hand on the steering wheel. Roderick believed in driving with two hands. “It’s dangerous to drive single-handed like that,” he’d tell Edna whenever she used a free hand to dig in her purse or open a stick of chewing gum. “What if a tire blew and you had to stop fast?” Edna had allowed the man in her painting to drive with one hand. She had made his light blue shirt a darker blue, and she had taken away the baseball cap. She wanted him to feel comfortable as he drove, free. What had started out as a single man with those first strokes of the brush and hours at the canvas was now two people, a couple, driving away from their creator, maybe leaving town for good. The female companion sat in the passenger seat, the back of her head turned as if she were gazing out her window at the autumn leaves. Her hair was short and brown. The blouse she wore, what could be seen of it above the seat of the pickup, was rose colored. In the bed of the truck itself, Edna had painted a brown suitcase, so plump it must be stuffed with enough clothing to last a long time. A lifetime, maybe. So, had the woman packed in a hurry? Had the man come to rescue her? Was the couple in a rush? Edna didn’t know yet what elements to use that might imply speed to the onlooker. If she had let them leave in a boat, the way people in southern Maine might leave a seaside town, she could have painted small white wakes breaking behind, seagulls rising up in surprise, wind whipping at their hair and clothing. Tension, that’s what the art book said this element was called. But how do you show speed in a lumber town at the end of a two-lane road? Maybe she could paint a trace of panic on each of the faces. But all that could be seen of the couple were the backs of their heads since Edna didn’t know how to paint faces yet. She decided, being their creator, that they were leaving on their own terms. They were two people headed down the tarred road before the snows came. There must have been just future ahead of them, since neither bothered to turn and look back.

  Roddy came down the stairs from his bedroom and stood behind his mother’s shoulder as he stared at the painting.

  “Where are you going, Mama?” Roddy asked, and it caught Edna off-guard. “You taking a vacation?”

  Edna was glad he was standing behind her, unable to see her face. Was she so transparent that a twelve-year-old boy could read her symbolism, even if her husband couldn’t?

  “Why aren’t you in your room?” she asked. “Your punishment isn’t up yet.”

  Now Ricky appeared and stood gawking at the painting. He was eating a raw hot dog.

  “Is that you in the pickup, Mama?” Ricky asked. “Who’s that man driving? That ain’t Daddy.”

  “So, what do I have here?” Edna said. She dropped her paintbrush into the bottle of turpentine beneath her chair. “Two identical art critics?”

  “Ricky’s eating a cow dick,” said Roddy.

  “Roddy is a cow dick,” Ricky said back. In response, Roddy slapped his brother’s hand. Edna watched as the hotdog landed on the pages of her new art book that lay opened on the floor. Easy Steps to Basic Painting.

  “Get back to your bedroom right now!” she shouted. But the boys had already scampered toward the stairs, Ricky in hot pursuit of Roddy. “And if I get one more peeping call, you’re both going to reform school!”

  Edna heard the bedroom door slam. A loud crash was followed by a stream of swearwords. She looked back at the painting. Until she learned how to create the element of speed, perhaps she should let that short, brown hair grow a bit longer, and maybe turn it blond. And she should make that signature rose-colored blouse disappear into a sensible green.

  ***

  When Harry saw that it was eight o’clock, he turned off the television and reached for his jacket. He was sick of watching TV news in the evenings. It had become a different box since the days when Walter Cronkite’s face peered out at America in black and white while his mouth told of important things that were taking place in the country and around the world. Nowadays, celebrities and athletes and puffed-up pundits ruled the airways. History had been Harold Plunkett’s favorite subject in school, but he hadn’t watched the TV news much before he enlisted in the military. He was too busy watching Emily Mason, how graceful she was when she walked, the pretty smile, the dark shine of her hair. He knew when he first saw her, at a craft fair in St. Leonard, that he was going to marry her. Emily promised to wait for him so Harry volunteered before he would be drafted anyway, thinking the United States Army was a way to see the world while he helped stop the spread of Communism to American shores. He wasn’t in the war zone long before he and other soldiers saw firsthand what was happening. It was a corporate war, shiny as hell, but Sgt. Harold Plunkett fought it anyway. In 1968, he had come home alive, a proud owner of the Purple Heart. For a lot of years, before she finally stopped asking, Emily wondered what he had done with that prestigious medal. But Harry never told her. He had believed, once upon a time, that Vietnam had been worth something, had taught everyone a lesson not easily forgotten. Otherwise, his fellow soldiers, young men like Corporal Wallace McGee, had died in vain. But now the country was plunged into yet another war, this one in Iraq and Afghanistan, a war even more corporate and shiny than Vietnam.

  Harry had driven past Sal Gifford’s house when he saw her. She was in sweats and a jacket, a bonnet on her head. He slowed the pickup to a crawl as he came within twenty feet of her. He dimmed the lights and saw Blanche wave a gloved hand, indicating that she knew he was there. He followed along behind as she ran, lighting the way, although she had told him she knew the road so well after months of running on it that she never worried about falling. “Once you know about the pothole in front of Sal Gifford’s house and the frost heave past the old school, the rest is smooth sailing,” Blanche had said the first night he found himself following her as she ran.

  The sky was loaded with bright stars. Free of the light pollution over heavily populated areas, it always sparkled on those nights of moon and stars and planets. It reminded Harry of a planetarium he had once visited with Angie, as if it were something built by man and not part of the natural universe. Below the stars, down on Earth, colored leaves lay splattered along the roadsides like blotches of paint. Harry saw them scatter in the wake as Blanche’s running shoes passed over them. Sometimes, driving on a tranquil night like this, Harry Plunkett was reminded of how mortal he was. In Vietnam, he didn’t need to be reminded. Mortality slept with him in those months as he waited for his tour to end. It woke with him each morning, ate with him, fought at his side. Mortality was just another foot soldier praying to go home.

  They passed the sign that said DUMP, at the mouth of the road that led to it. They passed Florence Walker’s sign with its same word, cantankerous, until Monday morning when a word beginning with D would replace it. Then Tommy Gifford’s house, where the chained dog barked loudly. From there it was a straight run toward the bridge. Blanche didn’t bother to look down at the camper on the flat where Billy Thunder’s small, yellow light burned against the night, but Harry noticed it and smiled. He liked Billy Thunder. When the ordered parts came for the Mustang, he’d do a good job of fixing the roof. Maybe Billy would freeze all winter as he drove his convertible around Mattagash, but it was unlikely he’d freeze to death.

  On the straight road across the bridge, Blanche opened her stride, almost gliding. Harry still followed at a respectable distance. At the lower end of the bridge, on the right, was Hair Today, where Verna Craft had opened a hair and nails salon. T
he Protestant church sat on the left, next to the graveyard. That’s where Emily was now buried, along with both of Harry’s parents. On his father’s grave was the bronze veteran’s plaque that told of his death in Korea, with the 9th Infantry. His father’s war was the first major clash of good versus evil for an America that was still listening to its news on radios. It was the Free World standing up to Communism, as the Cold War turned into a sizzling hot potato. War is all in the words, Harry knew now. In late August of 1951, the Republic of Korea’s 7th Division captured Bloody Ridge, those three interlocking hills southwest of the Punchbowl. Their triumph was short-lived, for the next day the North Koreans took the ridge back in a violent counterattack. And that’s when the 9th Infantry was ordered to scale it. A molehill, really. It was a battle that lasted ten days, until, finally, the North Koreans abandoned the place. Of the many killed on both sides during the intense and bloody combat, Sgt. Leonard Plunkett was one, a few days shy of his twenty-ninth birthday. He would come home in a box, but “the conflict” would wage on for another two years. Now, wedged between the sheer magnitude of World War II and the nightmare that was to follow in Vietnam, Korea had become the forgotten stepchild. So what had the loss of his father’s life been about in the end? The Demilitarized Zone was still there, with a crazed dictator peering out at the world from behind a treasure trove of missiles and bombs.

  When his mother died, Harry placed his father’s Purple Heart inside the coffin with her.

  ***

  The last thing Edna should have done that night was drive to Bertina’s trailer. But when you’re an artist and you’ve just finished your first work of art, what good is it if you have no one to share the excitement? She couldn’t show Mama Sal, who would only criticize her for wasting valuable time, not to mention paint. And Roderick would ask a hundred details about her white pickup truck. He wouldn’t ask important questions like, “Is that your lover behind the wheel, Edna?” Instead, he’d be asking things like if the pickup truck came from Walt’s Chevy Sales in Watertown. How many miles to the gallon? And he’d be sure to sign off with how people shouldn’t drive with one hand on the wheel.