The One-Way Bridge

by Cathie Pelletier

  “What the fuck is that?” he asked. He heard Jorge zipping up his pants.

  “What the fuck is what?” Jorge asked.

  “That long white thing,” said Raul, and pointed up into the mass of thick stars over his head. Jorge looked up too, and for a few chilly seconds, the Delgato cousins pondered the marvel of the Milky Way.

  “It looks like a big ribbon,” said Jorge.

  “Maybe pollution,” said Raul.

  “Global warming,” said Jorge.

  “Like acid rain and shit,” said Raul.

  It was right then, as Jorge started to deliver one of the many jokes he always had for his cousin, that he knew something had gone wrong in his chest. He brought a hand up to his heart and felt the pressure of it beating beneath his coat. Panicked, he reached his other arm toward Raul, beckoning to him, hoping to tell him with a gesture what his mouth could not speak. He would not say what he had planned to say seconds earlier. How the fuck would you know what acid rain is? You got lost in Caribou, Maine. It was true. They had driven around the small so-called “city” of Caribou for an hour, trying to find the one road that led north to Mattagash. Annoyed, and even hungrier, they had finally pulled into Miller’s Restaurant and availed themselves of a couple steaks, a baked potato each, and the endless salad bar. And they had enjoyed the pretty waitresses, flirting with them until closing time and the restaurant doors shut behind them. Raul had wanted to get a motel room and sleep it off. But Jorge, being older and wiser, felt that striking at night would be the best tactic. Visit Billy Thunder when he least expected them. How the fuck would you know what acid rain is? You got lost in Caribou. Jorge was still reaching his hand, gesturing to Raul. Help is all Jorge Delgato wanted to say now.

  Raul saw the outstretched hand. “No fucking way,” he said. “You been drinking all the way up here. It’s almost gone, dude. Let me have another hit first.” Raul turned his back on his cousin. Bacardi bottle in his hand, he again stood looking upward, his eyes trying to trace the Milky Way across the sky to its end. “It’s like a long white scarf,” Raul said. “Like Grandma Delgato used to wear to confession.”

  Raul heard the deadly thump against the side of the car as Jorge’s body struck full force and then pitched backward, two hundred and forty pounds of dead weight. He dropped the bottle in the road and raced around the front of the Cadillac, reaching out both hands, desperate to help his cousin. But Jorge, or George Delgato as his birth certificate stated, was now flat on his back, both eyes open and staring up at the Milky Way, staring into that heaven of stars so big and shiny in Mattagash. Raul dropped to his knees beside his cousin and reached for his wrist. He knew people in movies felt for a pulse, but he didn’t really know what a pulse was supposed to feel like. Fast, like someone knocking on an apartment door, the police maybe? Or slow? Like raindrops dripping from the eaves of your girlfriend’s house, irritating the hell out of you, especially if you’re there to hide from the police. Or is it the heart you listen to first? He leaned closer then and put an ear to Jorge’s chest. Nothing, no rumbling heartbeat, no steady heartbeat, nothing. Raul scrambled back across the gravel road in front of the car, feeling with his hands until he touched the Bacardi bottle. He quickly brought it over to his cousin and put the lip of the bottle to Jorge’s mouth.

  “Drink this, Jorge,” Raul whispered, his voice close to a whimper. He had seen this done in films too, but usually it was because someone was freezing to death in Alaska, after a plane crash. Or they were having a leg amputated in a Civil War film. The rum ran down the sides of Jorge’s cold and unmoving mouth. “You bastard, this better not be a joke.”

  But Raul knew it was no joke. He had heard the thud of the body against the car, the awful grunt when Jorge hit the frozen ground. Raul reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He banged out the numbers, 9-1-1, all three luminous and shining like the stars overhead, glittering and magical in the black of night. But all he heard was the dull tone that told him no reception. He put the phone back in his pocket and leaned close to Jorge’s face, listening for a sign of life. Nothing. He tried again to feel a pulse, fast, slow, medium, any kind of pulse. He stood, letting his cousin’s cold hand drop back to his chest. He hurried around the car and slid again into the driver’s seat. He pushed the switch for the headlights and both beams shot forward into the night. Trees glistened in the gleam, the frost sparkling. Raul jumped out of the car and looked frantically for the light of a house, a trailer, a cabin, a camp, a hut, a tent, a cave, wherever these hicks must live. Only stars stared back at him, and that half-moon, now so white it seemed made of paper and nailed to the sky. Ahead, at the side of the road, a sign stood out in the swatch of light from the headlights. Dead End.

  Raul went back and knelt beside his cousin. This time, he put his face against Jorge’s cheek, felt with his own warm and living skin how quickly the body grows cold once it gives itself up to death. This thought frightened him instantly, causing him to pull back with a gasp, almost a loathing. And then he felt ashamed. This was his cousin. But already a stiffness had come into Jorge’s body, changing it as death claimed the body for its own. He tried lifting Jorge, maybe get him up and into the backseat of the car. But even if Jorge Delgato had been alive and helping, Raul would have difficulty getting his hefty cousin to sit up, much less stand. He felt beads of perspiration forming on his forehead, growing instantly cold. He could drive back the way they’d come until he found a house with a light on, even if that was all the way to Caribou. He could knock on someone’s door and rouse them from sleep. He could tell them, “My cousin had a heart attack. Call an ambulance.” He could do that. Yes, that’s what he would do. He took one of Jorge’s large hands into his own, trying to warm it, even though a part of him was repulsed by the weight of death, its heaviness. He had only touched one dead person, his Grandma Delgato in her casket, that day he put the yellow fly swatter by her side, and even that had been an accident. He would never forget the chalky blue lips, the white of her hands that lay buried in a mound of prayer beads.

  Raul drank again from the bottle as he sat there on the gravel road and did what Jorge had always encouraged him to do. He used his brain.

  “He’s already dead,” Raul said, speaking softly, as if maybe the stars could hear, or the winter animals that had settled deep into the trees and brush for the night. “The police will come with the ambulance. They’ll ask what we’re doing here. They’ll run a check on me. And now I got that fucking Beretta that maybe Jorge registered in his name and maybe he didn’t. Maybe it’s even registered to a Raul Delgato. And what will Billy Thunder tell them?”

  Raul drank more of the rum and when a dog began to bark, a distant yelp that rang along the riverbank, he wondered if it might be a wolf. Or worse yet, a wolf that was now informing an entire pack of wolves that a man from the city was sitting flat on his ass in the middle of a dead-end road that led to a dump. Wolves talk to each other. They would drag him past the dump and into the thick trees. Maybe someone, some mountain man with shaggy hair and yellow teeth, would find his bleached bones in the spring. He leaned over Jorge again, this time forcing his hand to go deep into the shirt pocket. Only cigarettes. In the coat pocket was where Jorge kept his wallet. Everyone who knew Jorge Delgato knew this fact, for Jorge was too fat to sit on a wallet if it was in his hip pocket. Raul pulled the wallet out fast, as if something might bite his hand if it lingered, and slipped it inside his own coat pocket. With no identification on the body, it would give him time to get out of that awful place, get back to the warm lights of Portland where he could think more clearly. Use your brain for once, Raul. That’s why God put one inside your head, even if it’s not a very big one. He could hear Jorge’s voice, his constant nagging. But now he was thinking fast and more like Jorge. He couldn’t stay there and wait for the police to come. Jorge would know that and would understand. Raul looked up into the heaven of blinking stars, distant and cold. He wondered
if Jorge was already up there with God and the Blessed Virgin. True, he walked slow on earth, being a fat man, but surely the soul is weightless, fast as a runner. Surely, Jorge would be putting his make on the Virgin Mary by now. He liked to brag about that, with the others gathered around to listen, admiring him. “First thing I’ll do when I get to heaven is make sure everyone has a good reason to start calling her just Mary.” But maybe, maybe it was Grandma Delgato who met Jorge at the Pearly Gates, and she was beating him all over the head and neck right then with that yellow fly swatter she used on her grandsons every time they got into trouble.

  “Jorge, are you up there?” Raul asked the heavens. “Can you hear me, dude?” Autumn wind beat down the gravel road and the branches of the roadside trees seemed to reach in, wanting to touch him. “I gotta leave you, Cuz,” Raul said. “I got no choice.”

  The only reply was another bark of the distant dog, an answer that came riding on more cold wind, a wind that made Raul shiver in the chill of its bite. Jorge would leave him, no doubt about that, if it were the other way around. Shit, Jorge would leave if Raul were still alive and breathing and hanging onto his cousin’s pant leg, begging him to stay. Jorge would head for a breakfast steak at Miller’s and another glimpse of the pretty Caribou waitresses. Jorge always thought of himself first. He had let Raul take the rap how many times now since they were boys in grammar school? Even when he stole Grandma Delgato’s wedding ring and pawned it in grade seven, he had blamed it on Raul. And Raul had taken the blame, being younger and wanting his cousin’s acceptance. Raul Delgato had felt the yellow fly swatter all one day and into the next over that wedding ring. And what about the three times Raul had spent in jail, the first because it was his checkbook Jorge had taken and written out all those bogus checks. And the second because it was Jorge who dared him to use the Typhoon on the ATM machine outside the Portland bank. “You’re like a scared girl, Raul. Grandma Delgato has bigger balls than you do. Come on, no one is watching you.” How could Raul know that a camera was watching him? And the third time, at the convenience store, the one owned by that old man with bushy, white eyebrows, a man as old as Grandpa Delgato, an old man crying and praying, his hands held high as Raul emptied the cash register—that time, the gun was registered to a Ralph Delgato and not a George Delgato. And then, two days earlier, who had to pay for the broken lamps at Walmart, when it was Jorge who batted the fucking softball toward Lightning Fixtures in the first place? The more Raul sat at his dead cousin’s side, the more he remembered the yellow fly swatter and the angrier he became.

  “Fuck you, dude,” said Raul.

  ***

  Tommy Gifford’s dog was the only living thing that saw the Cadillac arrive, and it was the only living thing that saw it leave, when the red taillights cautiously approached the glistening one-way bridge, crossed slowly, and then disappeared past the moose on the sign, until eventually the sound of its engine died away.

  12

  SUNDAY MORNING

  Edna was awake before Roderick. She lay in bed, feeling the weight and warmth of the cat that was sleeping on top of her feet. Mr. Whiskers. On top of Roderick’s feet was Mrs. Paws. Just as she had her favorite cat and Roderick had his, so the cats had their favorite person. Had the humans decided on a favorite cat first, or was it that the cats had already picked a favorite human? It was this special attention from Mr. Whiskers that always prompted Edna to give him his bowl of food first in the mornings. She heard Roderick pulling himself out of sleep and toward the waking world. It was his morning to sleep in, often staying in bed until eight o’clock. Those were the mornings she’d slip out of bed, put the TV on with the sports news, and then go downstairs to make pancakes and coffee. Then she’d bring breakfast upstairs on a tray. “What did I do to deserve this?” Roderick would ask, pushing the pillow up behind his back, taking the fork she offered, then tearing into the pancakes and syrup.

  There had been good mornings, hadn’t there, in the past? And wasn’t the divorce rate in America high enough already without Edna adding to it? She’d read the statistics in a magazine at her dentist’s office. For first marriages, it’s 41 percent. For second marriages, it’s 60 percent, and for third, it’s 73 percent. No wonder Bertina wasn’t getting any better at matrimony. The percentages were against her. And then, four states don’t even report divorce rates and one was California. Surely, if California threw their numbers into the lot, the percentages would blow up. Hollywood was out there somewhere.

  Edna heard Roderick do that Sunday morning grunt that always woke him up, followed by a peddling with his feet that sent Mrs. Paws into a tizzy. The cat jumped then from the bed, padded across the room and out the door. Roderick turned over to look at Edna, folded his pillow, and tucked it under his head for support.

  “Morning,” he said. “You been awake long?”

  “Not long,” said Edna.

  “What’re you thinking?” He said this almost cautiously, having been told too often and too honestly over the past few days exactly what her thoughts were.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Edna. “Lots of things.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I been thinking,” said Roderick. “That maybe you and me could go on a second honeymoon. We never really had a first one, not with your Aunt Mildred with us. Maybe we could go somewhere down along the ocean.”

  Edna thought about that. The ocean. It was a thing she knew nothing about, unless it was something she read or saw on television. She had always imagined that the ocean was like a big dog, rolling over, licking and lapping. A dog that could turn and bite if you weren’t careful.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Tommy says there are towns down on the ocean where everyone paints their house white and their shutters black. The whole town.” She wondered what color house Ward Hooper lived in. Was it white with black shutters? But then, Bangor was a safe distance from the ocean.

  Roderick let this thought play through his mind.

  “You sure it’s not Russia he’s talking about?” he asked. “Where the communists live?”

  “He says they call it Downeast,” said Edna. “He trucks through there now and then. But maybe he’s pulling my leg.”

  “I’m glad I don’t live on the ocean,” said Roderick. “At least a river lets you do what you want to.”

  Edna smiled. When he said things like that, it helped her remember why it was she had fallen in love with Roderick Plunkett, tall and slim in his army uniform. It was his good heart and his solid way of thinking, even if it wasn’t a fancy way of thinking.

  “I bet seagulls shit on white houses as easy as the colored ones,” Roderick added.

  She wished he had stopped with the river line.

  “I’ll think about a trip,” Edna said. “But I can’t promise anything.”

  “Okay, honey,” said Roderick. He reached out and touched her arm.

  “Want some pancakes in bed?” Edna asked.

  ***

  Harry had been hearing the distant sounds of northern ravens all morning, the grating pruk-pruk-pruk. There seemed to be a whole flock of them, their excited calls rolling in from across the river and down from the hill behind his house. The dawn had come alive with ravens, as if born on their wings. But Harry was still asleep, and this outward sound, this concept from the waking world, reminded him of other birds, another time. That’s when he heard the voice. Not all nightmares happen at night. Harry knew this well. They happen when the conscious mind lets down its guard, lowers the drawbridge over the moat. That’s the place where sorrow lives, deep in that castle of the subconscious. It lives there with guilt and hate and love and the ability to kill another human being as easily as save him.

  He heard it clearly, that young and energized voice, so excited to learn more about the world they were destroying by the second. The Crow Pheasant is a glossy black bird, somewhat clumsy, that inhabits forests where it can stalk and hide. Hey
, Sarge, that sounds like us. We’re clumsy, and we stalk and hide. That was the first time they’d heard the orchestra sound filling the night, echoing through the jungle. “What the hell is that?” Wilson, from St. Louis, had wanted to know. “Holy shit, it sounds like a marching band.” And Wally McGee had gotten out one of his nature books. Man, listen to this. Two birds will often synchronize their call, coop coop coop, and soon the jungle is an orchestra of sounds. That’s what we’re hearing, Wilson. A whole bunch of Crow Pheasants. God, I hope this stuff we’re dumping on the jungle doesn’t kill everything that’s alive.

  So, this morning it was Agent Orange? He never knew what Wally might want to talk about until he arrived in Harry’s dreams. Corporal Wallace McGee was the most outspoken soldier, the one who asked the right questions, even if he never got any answers. What the hell are they dropping, Sarge? Now, almost forty years after he left Vietnam for good, Sergeant Harold Plunkett knew the answers. Because the Ho Chi Minh Trail was nothing more than a tunnel through the jungle, the military came up with an ingenious plan to destroy those canopies of plants and shrubs that enemy troops were hiding beneath. The idea was to wipe out the ground cover, so they could pick off the enemy from the air and reduce the chance of ambush on the ground. And yet, they didn’t know what it was they were dropping on the jungle. Agent Orange was a defoliant, a chemical stored in canisters with orange stripes, thus the name. Planes flying overhead dropped the poison and American soldiers walked blindly into it. Hardest hit were troops on the ground, sometimes being sprayed with the stuff while they were in the field. The U.S. Army even tried to blame the first signs of illness on the people of Vietnam themselves. They must be up to some nasty tricks, those slant-eyed bastards. It killed the jungle all right, but it also killed birds and animals and fish. Back in 1968, Wally McGee had already guessed this would happen. His Philadelphia father was a chemist. The vegetation is dead. Cattle and fish are floating belly-up in the river. This is dioxin, Sarge. But the military gave its assurance, its word. There was no need to worry. Agent Orange wasn’t harmful to humans. So the soldiers drank the water, they walked through the dust, they wore it on their clothes for weeks at a time.