The One-Way Bridge

by Cathie Pelletier

  “You got any big regrets, Orville?” Harry asked. It was the question Blanche had asked of him.

  “I wish I hadn’t retired,” said Orville. “What about you?”

  And that’s when Harry Plunkett found himself talking to Orville Craft in the way he could never talk to Emily before she died, saying the things he might one day say to Blanche if the time was ever right.

  “There was this kid in Vietnam,” said Harry. “He was the best soldier in my platoon. Smart as hell. Always thinking on his feet. I was his sergeant, the man he respected most in that hellhole. So one night he tried to talk to me. He tried to tell me that he wasn’t who I thought he was. He wanted to clear his conscience. He told me he was never going to marry that pretty girl he had waiting back in Philadelphia because she didn’t exist. There was a soldier he met in basic, and this guy helped him understand who he was.”

  “You mean he was like Ray Ray,” said Orville.

  “He wanted to share his heart with me that night,” Harry said. “He wanted to die with the truth if his time was up. But I didn’t let him. We were ambushed just before dawn. I lost two men in my platoon. I’d have lost three more, including myself, if it hadn’t been for Wally McGee.”

  Orville had been listening to the melodic sound of Harry’s words. He said nothing for he had no language to give back, no words to express what he was feeling. This was a bigger war than the one he’d fought for three years over a mailbox. He had watched the real war on television, from a safe distance, with Walter Cronkite talking to America in that fatherly voice, deep and comforting.

  “Tell me something,” said Orville. “Where did you go that night of your welcome home party? I heard all kinds of rumors. Is it true you gave your Purple Heart to a hooker in Bangor?”

  Harry looked over at Orville. And that’s when he felt it again, that rush going through his body, as it had the second Wally died. He felt the rush of years, years wasted and years used wisely. He felt time moving through him, as if it were a ghost, a thing that can haunt a man’s days and nights.

  “I went to Craft Pond,” said Harry. “Just me, a couple beers, and a sleeping bag.” They were selling the medals of war on eBay now, collectors buying them from relatives and friends who no longer had use for them or needed money more. Harry had put his father’s medal in his mother’s hands before they closed her casket. At least that was one Purple Heart that wouldn’t end up on the Internet for dollars. His own was another.

  Orville was slowly getting it, running facts and rumors around in his thoughts until he knew.

  “You threw your Purple Heart into my pond,” he said. “That’s why you go up there. It’s got nothing to do with my trout.”

  Harry could never explain to anyone how safe he felt, those nights he camped on the banks of Craft Pond. When the stars twinkled overhead, when the owls hooted from the deep woods, when the crickets and night creatures came alive beneath the trees, skunks and raccoons, fox and porcupines, it was a world he knew and understood, a world he fit into. It was a world The Little People would never find. Some nights, it was as if he could hear that Purple Heart beating, up through the waters of the pond.

  “I’m honored that you chose my pond,” said Orville. “This will be our secret.”

  Harry nodded. He was grateful that Orville understood. Let the town think a hooker in Bangor had a Purple Heart tacked to the wall over her bed.

  “You got an extra set of keys in here somewhere?” Harry asked. He was ready to get off the bridge. Some things weren’t worth dying for. He was ready to find Blanche warm in her bed, hold her to his chest, feel the safety in her body.

  “Of course I got an extra set,” said Orville. “Don’t you?”

  “Yup,” said Harry. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a set of keys. When Orville heard them jangle, he reached into his glove compartment and found his own extra set.

  “I’m gonna back up,” said Harry. He opened his door and light flooded the car.

  “No you’re not,” said Orville. “I am.”

  ***

  Unable to sleep, Edna Plunkett thumbed through the pages of her art book, looking at all the interesting paintings. There was that crazy Russian again, Marc Chagall, with things flying all over his canvases, even people and hens. Wasn’t there such a thing as gravity in Russia? But there was one she saw that she liked. It was called The Flying Lovers, and the couple seemed to be sharing such a tender moment as they floated in the air. Unaware that it was snowing, Edna closed the book and snapped off her light. She snuggled close to Roderick for the first time in a week. And when she slept, she dreamed of a man flying like a bird in the dark sky. He wasn’t in a glider, as Ward Hooper might have been. Edna couldn’t see his face and then realized that he didn’t have a face. There was a blank white oval where a face should be. I need to learn how to paint faces is what her dream mind was thinking. And that’s when the man’s face began to take form, as if an artist were putting strokes of paint on a canvas. Now she could see the nose and the mouth, the eyes. It was the face of her husband, Roderick Plunkett, flying high overhead. Edna knew he was peering down on all the pinpricks of light, the yellow sparks that mark the lives of those people who live in Mattagash. Would he know her light? Could he find their house in a snowstorm? If the flakes were so thick and white, would he fly away, certain that in the town of Mattagash all the lights were out and no one was home? “I’m right here, Roderick,” Edna whispered, still asleep. “I’m here, sweetheart, so fly down and get me.”

  And that’s when Edna realized that she was also flying, she and Roderick together, two lovers floating across the sky.

  ***

  The dog, Bullet, raised his head and whined, as if sensing something nearby in the darkness. Billy opened his eyes. He had had another dream of strolling into Murray’s Restaurant & Bar and there was Phoebe, in her pink uniform and showing everyone a new diamond ring. She was planning to marry someone and it wasn’t William Thunder. Awake now, Billy smiled, thinking it a foolish dream. Phoebe Perkins would wait for him forever. He’d call her in the morning to tell her the money was on its way and ask if she liked dogs.

  “It’s okay, Bullet,” said Billy. He had let Tommy Gifford name the dog. I got a bullet with this dog’s name on it. Billy reached for the small light near his bed and snapped it on. He didn’t notice the white flakes that were hitting the tiny windows of the camper. With all the excitement in town, he was behind in his reading. He flicked his Playboy open to Miss October. She was a brunette named Jordan Monroe, with great legs and a pretty little mouth, lips that pouted out to kiss every man who opened the magazine. From Denison, Iowa, but attends the University of Nebraska, majoring in consumer sciences. She had a great set of knockers. If he was freezing in the camper, what must she feel like, nothing on but a Hugh Hefner smile? Something about her eyes and her nose reminded him of Phoebe. But Phoebe would never take her pink uniform off and pose naked for anyone but Billy. He was so sure of this that he returned to studying the consumer scientist in the centerfold.

  ***

  Cuddled close to Meg, who was already snoring by the time he had arrived home cold and tired, as if he had been away at war, Orville Craft didn’t see the snow filtering down beneath his yard light, turning his lawn white. Instead, he dreamed of his father. “I’m proud of you, son. You’re a fine mailman.” And Simon Craft would know a fine mailman when he saw one. He had died on the job, soldier to the end, sitting next to Amy Joy Lawler’s mailbox, his heart ticking like a wound-down clock. Then, Simon gave his only son some advice. “Don’t retire until they put you out to pasture, Orville. Don’t hang up your spurs.” Orville would think of that word for many years to come. Spurs. It made him dream then that he was a Pony Express rider on that dangerous trail from St. Joseph to Sacramento, his saddle bag full of important letters. He dreamed he was galloping across prairies, galloping through snow-covered
canyons and icy mountain passes, galloping through heat and locusts, along muddy wagon ruts and through fields of swaying grass, through thunderstorms and hailstorms and snowstorms. Orville dreamed he was galloping.

  ***

  Still cold from his hours on the bridge, Harry had kissed Blanche good night and then fallen asleep next to her. The dream this time was of flares being dropped from an AC-47 gunship, which was also firing thousands of rounds at the mountain below it. It was a mountain they could see from their camp. Magnesium flares, falling like sparklers attached to parachutes, igniting twenty seconds after the gunner pulled the safety pin and tossed them out the cargo door. It was the Air Force’s way of letting American ground troops know the enemy’s position in the jungle. “If Charlie so much as lights a cigarette, we’ll find him,” Harry was telling Wally McGee, as he had that night before Wally died. “There are heat sensors all over that mountain.” Harry watched as bursts of light from the flares drifted down, soundless, painting the world below them a dazzling white. And that’s when he realized they weren’t flares at all but hundreds and hundreds of twinkling stars, maybe thousands. They were all the stars that the sky over Mattagash had held, ever since the first settlers came there to build the notion of a town. Millions of stars twinkling in unison. Then, so easily and gently it seemed to happen in an instant, the stars turned into white snowflakes. And that’s when Sergeant Harold Plunkett knew that he had finally come home from the war.

  17

  MIDNIGHT

  A fox slid from the shadows of the trees and onto the main road near Tommy Gifford’s house. Upriver, the eastern sky had turned gray with snowflakes, hiding the stars that were flickering above it. The fox had already been to the dump and found nothing of food on that night. Seeing a light pop on in the darkness, the animal held its nose high, sniffing. The wind was bringing with it the smell of a human. Humans meant food or danger. The fox turned away, a reddish-black shadow moving toward the bridge.

  At the first house above Tommy’s, the porch light was on and Florence Walker was standing near the leafless lilac bush on her front lawn. It was still a couple minutes until midnight. She knew that in two hours the first logging trucks would come whooshing up from Watertown and St. Leonard, all men who worked in the Mattagash woods for the P. J. Irvine Company. They would use their Jake brakes just before the bridge and then fly across it, past Dump Road and then Florence’s house. The trucks would appear as yellow headlights and disappear into red taillights, as if those headlights and taillights marked the years of a man’s life. And for many men, they did.

  Florence was wearing a coat over her nightgown, her boots with the fake fur around the tops, a knitted cap, and a scarf wrapped tightly about her throat. In her hands was the white poster board with the Word for the Week written in large black letters. Monday was always the toughest day, the day of the jokes. “Who will ever use a word like heinous?” But by Friday, lots of folks would be finding all sorts of things hay-nous, and Florence would once again be vindicated. Teaching is not an easy task. One must use whatever tools one has at hand. Harry Plunkett had offered to build for her the type of sign that had a plastic shield over it. That way, she could slide the poster inside and it would be protected from the rain and snow. But Florence didn’t like the idea of plastic. Instead, when it rained, she came out with her blue umbrella and unpinned the poster from the sandwich board sign. She took it inside until the storm passed. But when it snowed, she let the fresh flakes enjoy the word too. She didn’t mind making a new sign. Words, in her opinion, should be toiled for, respected. Human beings have fought wars over words. Florence’s own father had been in the Argonne Forest in World War I, the war to “Make the World Safe for Democracy.”

  Florence Walker pinned the new word to her sign, and then stood back to admire it:

  Denouement (day-knew-ma): the outcome of a complex sequence of events.

  ***

  The fox had made its circling, cautious way toward the upper end of the bridge, its red coat now flecked with snow. It had found half a donut lying frozen in the grass and grabbed it quickly into its small mouth. That’s when the fox noticed the dot of light, saw that it burned like a yellow fire on the flat by the river. It gazed down at Billy Thunder’s camper, waiting to see if this was some kind of trouble. It didn’t fear the humans as much as it feared the coyote. Sensing no danger, the fox searched the grass for the other smells. A piece of ham sandwich. A bite of cake. A potato chip. The Mattagash night, after all, belonged to the fox. With pupils that are vertically slit, with cells that reflect light back out, it saw what it needed and wanted of the night. Food gone, the thin body of the fox moved off, back toward the woods, safe at least for now. In its wake, and as if on cue, Billy Thunder said good night to Miss October and turned out his light. The dog waited in the darkness, its head tilted, its senses alert. Then, satisfied the fox was gone, it moved closer to Billy and slept.

  ***

  On that night in October, a week after the harvest moon, no one could know what the new word would be on Florence Walker’s sign. Or that satellite images had picked up the first big snowfall of the year, an early snow that came gusting in from the Canadian plains. They still did not know the sequence of events that lay ahead.

  They didn’t know that, in four months, Florence Walker would die of a stroke and all vocabulary lessons in town would cease. But first she would live from E, epitome, to P, paradox, giving the populace sixteen more precious words.

  No one knew that once the bitter winter was over, Dorrie Mullins would form a group called Rename the Mattagash Bridge. Six women would gather in Dorrie’s kitchen to discuss strategy and eat pizza. “The William Leonard Fitzgerald Bridge would be my choice,” Lydia Fitzgerald Hatch would say. “After all, the first Lace Curtain Irish name to settle here was Great-Grandad Fitzgerald.” And Dorrie, being the group’s organizer, would reply, “But the name would be longer than the bridge.” And that’s when Lydia, grandmother to the only genius in town, would grab Owl’s hand and take him home. “Wow, that wasn’t the day-knew-mah I had hoped for,” Dorrie would say, as she reached for a second piece of pizza.

  Buck Fennelson didn’t know that he would fail his paternity test with flying colors and be free of Mona. But that he would mourn her right up until the New Year’s Eve party at Bert’s Lounge in Watertown, when he would get a glimpse of Patty Ann, a simple and loving girl who would bear their children and cook them sensible New England meals like Chinese Pie and American Chop Suey.

  No one in town knew yet that Mama Sal’s daughter, Bertina, would marry an older man named Paul Bateman, her former boss from Tampa, and that she would move herself and her daughters back to Florida. Mama Sal didn’t know yet that she would say, “Well, I guess the fourth time tells the story. Always a bride, never a bridesmaid. Let’s hope she gets it right, now that there’s money behind it and the groom is a regular Anglo-Saxon.”

  But Mama Sal also didn’t know that the very next summer, while she was inspecting Edna’s cucumber beds, a garter snake would slither across the top of her foot, prompting her to run for safety in front of Edna and the twins, leaving behind her aluminum walker and her alleged disability, if not the monthly disability check.

  Tommy Gifford didn’t know that he would never reconcile with his wife and daughters, that he would start driving a tractor-trailer out across the vast and exotic United States of America. Or that, one rainy night, he would fall asleep at the wheel, having done too many hours on the road for too little money. He would fall asleep and die in a fiery crash on the interstate north of Atlanta, Georgia.

  No one knew that Edna Plunkett would paint her house a rose color the next spring. Or that the twins, Roddy and Ricky, would do very well in counseling, learning to control their identical anger before they became men and the anger turned to rage. “They need to find a balance between being exactly the same as another person and yet having their own identity as well,” t
he counselor would tell their parents. And Edna would nod and say, “It can be daunting, can’t it?”

  Billy Thunder didn’t know that the river would freeze over in December, sealing inside its belly the body of George Delgato until the ice ran free in the spring. That’s when an excited Buck Fennelson would call Blanche’s and ask to talk to Billy. “Are you sitting down?” Buck would ask, and Billy would say, “Well, yes, Buck, since I’m at Blanche’s eating lunch. But I can lie down on the floor if it’s necessary.” And Buck would say, “They found the body of that man, Bill, the one you told me about. That George guy. And he’s got a police record as long as my dick.” And Billy would smile, thinking, Ah, Bucko, I hope you’re right on this one. But all he would say to Buck would be, “Well, FuckYouBuckFuckYouVeryMuch.” And Buck would collapse in laughter so Billy could hang up the phone.

  That night in October, a week after the full harvest moon, the moon farmers used to gather their crops late into the night, Harry Plunkett did not know that he would buy the white Mustang from Tommy Gifford for two thousand dollars and give the car back to Billy Thunder. Or that he would offer Billy a job and a chance to pay off the loan. He didn’t know that on Blanche Taylor’s birthday, he would lean down to kiss her mouth and ask, “Will you marry me, sweetheart?”

  Orville Craft didn’t know that the very next week he would take back his job as mailman and would deliver letters for another five years before retiring for good. He also didn’t know that he and Meg would soon begin a ritual, a social hour they would spend together, just the two of them at his cabin. They would each drink a martini and play rummy while they listened to classic songs on the oldies station, the one that never plays Faith Hill since she’s still too young. Or that every blue moon, with no help at all from Pfizer and all the help in the world from nature, he and his wife would make love. Orville didn’t know that twelve years after the incident on the bridge, and like his father Simon Craft, he would die of a heart attack as he chopped kindling. His hand would come up to his chest and his first thoughts would be, strangely, of the sun bouncing silver off his trout at Craft Pond. And there, through the clear water, he would see something shiny lying on the bottom, something with a purple ribbon. Then, his mind being a time machine, it would carry Orville Craft in his last seconds back to the island in the Mattagash River, the one you can see so well from the bridge, where the current takes trash thrown down by tourists, that island where there exists a laughter put in place one day when his father took him fishing and a crayfish bit his toe.