“Wait till you see the equipment you’re gonna to be working with,” he told me as we started over the river. “The state’s providing most of the heavy artillery, including skid loaders with ripper buckets that’ll tear us right through to China. After we haul out the lot, we’re gonna thaw the ground beneath it with a Thawzall system they use up in Minnesota and Canada. We’ll thaw a foot a day until the weather warms up.”
It was strange driving onto the fairgrounds in the middle of winter. First thing I changed into padded overalls and a Carhartt work jacket Frank gave me. Most of the crew members were already waiting in their trucks with the windows cracked, smoking and exchanging hearty laughs about how fat they’d gotten collecting welfare over the previous two months. But they were eager to work and it didn’t take long before we were all moving fast and talking fast and downing enough coffee to motor ourselves clear through the afternoon the following Friday.
The first task on the list was to rip up a parking lot that another company was rebuilding on the other side of the park. We’d all seen the blueprints, but before we went to work busting up the concrete Frank gave an inspirational speech to help us better picture the whole gorgeous plan. This involved him strolling back and forth along the edge of the woods, twirling an imaginary umbrella and swinging his hips side to side to let us feel the romance of the arching footbridge over the basin, just like it was back in 1842 when the grounds were crawling with homesteaders twenty years ahead of the western migration. By the heroic fury in his voice I had a feeling that within a few weeks he’d be adding to the effect of his handlebar mustache by greasing his hair back and parting it down the middle like the pioneers in the original fairground photos. “These was the wild days!” he shouted, seeming to snatch the cold right out of the air. “We’re gonna be digging up the graves of pistol-whip frontiersmen and their horse-jumpin’ girlies! Now mount them steel bulls, boys! We’re making history here!”
We laughed and tightened our bootstraps and went to work, still hooting and hollering when that first rockwheel went spinning into the pavement. That first day was about as brutal and bitterly cold as anyone could have imagined, especially for those few of us out in the naked wind, jackhammering old cracked-up sidewalks in all the wooded areas too tight for the skid loaders. When it was finally over I couldn’t have felt more healthfully exhausted, though that wasn’t my only reward for a hard day’s work. Minutes after Frank dropped me off I received a radio transmission from Emily informing me that she’d booked a room at the West Des Moines Days Inn (a particularly welcome gift considering the previous week’s semipublic sexual mishaps while parked between eighteen-wheelers in the overnight lot near the airport). Thus began a weekly routine, soon moved to Fridays, which was Emily’s day off from rehearsals for her upcoming production.
“It’s called Tinker,” she later explained, while dabbing the sweat from her chest with a hotel hand towel. She pulled a T-shirt over her head and kicked her legs onto the desk. “We’ve got a month of hard-core rehearsal, then it’s three weeks of shows at the Garage Theater, which in my opinion puts the Playhouse to shame. The script is pretty wacky, but Tony’s really going for it. He’s definitely going for something. It could be great.”
I laid a bath towel under the door while Emily packed a glass pipe. When she lit it and sucked in, her eyes constricted and her lips sealed tight. There was a slow jazzy movement in the smoke. I held my first hit in as long as I could and when I stepped up to the window to exhale, barely any smoke escaped and I was already high. In the parking lot below, the stores were all closing, the cars clearing out. Judging by the largely unlit windows at the Holiday Inn (sulking curbside along University like a forlorn bully), I guessed they were still struggling to overcome the negative publicity that for the last two and a half years they’d yet to live down.
“I checked my e-mail down in the lobby,” Emily said, coughing out the last words. “Looks like Schell’s Shirtworks is going national, so my dad’s in Arizona. He sent me a pretty deep letter, telling me what a rock I’ve been over the last year, how glad he was that I was back living at home, even if he still didn’t recognize me from a distance. It was nice and everything, but still, e-mail from your dad? It’s so quick and easy. I love you and boom, express delivered.”
Emily handed me the pipe. I leaned down to kiss her shoulder. She reached for her cigarettes and turned to the blank TV, clearly occupied by other thoughts.
“Who taught him how to use e-mail anyway? I sure didn’t. Only a few months ago he was spending half his weekends sitting in front of the DVD player, pressing every button on all five remote controls, hoping to luck out on the right sequence to get the stupid thing going.”
“At least he’s trying,” I said. “Not too many parents out there riding the electronic wave.”
“Hummm,” Emily said, lighting up.
I took another hit, then paged through a misfolded newspaper on the desk. Emily had no doubt read every article, including the censur ing op-ed column on the rising belligerence of the city’s youth. The piece included a photo of Hogback Bridge as it appeared on the cover of The Bridges of Madison County, juxtaposed against a charred and skeletal after-photo. “What do you think about those kids on trial?” I asked.
“The pyros from Waukee?”
“Yeah. It says their friends ratted them out for the reward.”
“Some friends,” she said, exhaling. “If I was those guys, I’d beg for a long stint in the pokey. Pretty soon people are gonna find out where they live, and they’re gonna get lynched by every man, woman, and child in Madison County.”
“It sounds like it might’ve been an accident,” I said, moving on to the sports pages. Emily grabbed the op-ed section, looking over it again and chuckling to herself.
“How do you accidentally burn a bridge to ashes? Of course they said it was an accident. They just meant to singe a few names off the panels and accidentally torched the whole turkey. Never mind that they were drunk and it was two in the morning.”
I shrugged and sprawled out on the bed, wondering what my chauvinistic Civil War professor (who in our first class had insisted that Iowegians had saved the country from irreversible ruin at least a dozen times) would view as proper punishment for such a crime.
“You know, George,” Emily said, quickly rapping the heating vent as though reviving a thought she’d nearly lost. She slid her legs off the desk and leaned forward. “After I read that article I got this really great idea for a short film. Something to send out to all the Hollywood casting agencies. You know, as a résumé film for potential agents.”
“Is that how it works?” I asked, distracted by the sight of her legs crossing at the knees. (I remind you that she was wearing no underwear, if this point wasn’t well enough implied.)
“I think that’s one of the ways. Anyhow, the idea involves starting a few more fires down in Madison County. The movie would begin with a damsel-in-distress situation, like a bunch of gangsters interrogating a girl about a big drug shipment that they think’s gonna wipe out their business. When she refuses to talk they pour gas all around her, then leave her in the middle of the bridge as they continue pouring gas and block both sides. Of course they offer her one last chance, but she just gives them the finger, real scared, but real cool, you know? So the gangsters on both sides of the bridge count down from ten, matches in hand. Only problem is that when one of them strikes his match, immediately the fumes alight and he ends up running around in a ball of fire. But the trail of gas still ends up catching, so none of this really helps our damsel, who’s now got flames zooming at her from both sides. At that point we cut to the only exterior shot of the film as she takes a leap from the bridge down into the creek. And that’s it. For the rest of the film we just watch the bridge blazing and crackling and falling apart. The end.”
“How does she jump into the crick from a covered bridge?”
“The what? Did you say crick?”
“Whatever. Creek.”
>
“Haven’t figured that out yet,” she said, taking a puff from the cigarette she’d left burning in the ashtray. When she couldn’t get any smoke from it, she opened her pack and lit another one.
“Does the girl die or what? How deep is the water?”
“It’s deep enough that she’s completely submerged, but the audience doesn’t know if she survives or not. Maybe there should be one more shot where the leftover gangster stares down into the creek, wondering.”
“So she doesn’t die.”
“Probably not,” she said, shining me a big smile and rocking one leg over the other. “Better to keep her alive for the sequel.”
“Onto the next covered bridge, huh?”
“Pretty crazy, huh?” she said, then started whistling the chorus to “Light My Fire.” I sat up and leaned against the headboard, looking at the time and sighing. Emily eventually quit whistling. She uncrossed her legs and shook her head at the ceiling before waving forth my criticism.
“I used to imagine having sex with you on those bridges,” I said. “One right after the other. And as I was driving to pick you up on the night of the premiere, all I could think about was how I’d get you to go skinny-dipping with me in the crick below Hogback.”
“The creek?” she asked, making a face that involved halving the height of her forehead and allowing one side of her mouth to stretch open as though being reeled in by a fisherman standing directly behind her.6
“Okay, the creek,” I said, shoving off the headboard and onto my back to close my eyes. According to the auditory cues that followed, Emily shoved her chair against the wall, dragged her feet to the bathroom, turned a squeaking knob, dipped her head under the faucet, turned the knob back, then slapped the toilet seat down and plopped herself on top of it. Then she stood up again and stopped dragging her feet and for several minutes I lost track of her. By the time I marked her again, she was already standing over me with her hands on her hips at the edge of the bed, staring inverted into my eyes.
“I want to know the truth, George. Do you have a plan for us?”
“A plan? What kind of plan?”
“A plan. A map. A design for the future.”
“What’s your plan?” I asked.
“My plan is obvious. Breast surgery, as soon as I save enough money. Then maybe a few ski bunny movies. But we’re talking about your plan, George. I’m having a hard time seeing your plan and I’m starting to get the feeling that you’d go along with just about any idea I presented you, as long as it didn’t involve starting any fires. Tell me the truth, if I said I was going to get breast implants and then move to Canada to make direct-to-video movies, would you follow me?”
“I’m just not a fan of torching the bridges for a bunch of short films. That’s all I was saying.”
“Or maybe you do have a plan, and you’re just waiting for the right moment to spring it on me. Maybe I’ve got a future waiting for me in a small town in the Ukraine, which you probably consider part of your Russia, and any small town as your small town.”
“What if I told you I was saving up for a Claddagh ring?”
“I’ve got a Claddagh ring,” she said. “It goes nicely with my dad’s little pistol.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What do you mean, What’s that supposed to mean? His little pistol on the bar downstairs. You haven’t seen it? It really shoots, you know?”
“I doubt that,” I said. “Though it might explain a few things if it did.” (Though I wasn’t exactly sure what I meant by this comment, it was certainly received with every ounce of its incestuous implication, particularly when considering the delicate subject of our original abstinence.)
“I was joking!” she shouted, waving her fists so angrily that I was certain they’d slam against something before coming undone. “You think I’d really get work with a film like that! You don’t recognize a joke when you hear one!”
“I knew you were joking,” I said, still lying on my back, breathing in long, slow breaths, watching the moment play out from some other place.
“Jesus Christ, George.”
Forty-four
A few hours later, after what amounted to a long, touchless nap, I ended up squatting down in the bathtub to absorb myself in a reading assignment on the division of Iowegians who fought on the first day of the battle of Shiloh, nicknamed the Hornet’s Nest for the deafening whiz of bullets through the sapling and peach trees. I imagined the battle from a dozen angles, reliving six hours of onslaught along that sunken Tennessee road, when the Unionists never broke, even when the Confederate artillery lined up sixty-two cannon at point-blank range, the most ever used at that time in a war effort. All but wiped out, the Iowa boys held them off long enough for General Grant’s reinforcements to arrive by steamboat. Under a heavy rain and snowing peach blossoms, surrounded by more than twenty thousand American dead, Grant’s army pushed the Rebels back where they came from and changed the course of the war. The writing was battle ready and emotional. I guess you could say it worked on me because I hopped out of the bathtub full of pride, embracing the attitude that if I left our petty skirmish to brood unattended, it would only spread and threaten to destroy everything we’d so recently regained. But when I marched into the room, prepared to serenade Emily with all the poetic whispers of a quixotic knight-errant, I was immediately derailed by my wake-up call that sounded in four or five rings like furious cowbells that sent Emily’s knees and elbows leaping skyward as though yanked into action by a crude marionette puppeteer. She covered her ears and pinned her face into the mattress, her bloodless right hand soon slapping the empty side of the bed, in rhythm with the rings—a tin drummer rapping out a seismographic beat meant to probe the mattress, and the Days Inn motel, and the earth holding us up for proof of their immeasurable stupidity.
Forty-five
February brought record low temperatures and a sense of frozen time, intensified by such a layering of motion-restrictive clothing and the sudden lack of shame in the sporting of thermal face masks that I hardly recognized my fellow crew members except by the shouts of their profane invitations to the unforeseeable spring. Emily returned to the theater full force, pouring all her energies into the creative invention of a dramatic other, in this case an Irish gypsy who’d never known a moment’s rest from society’s glaring sidewise judgments. (I felt I was doing the same, molding myself to the character of spineless sap with infinite patience for guilt trips and stoned motel room digressions in nihilism, then absurdism; I would have lost her if I didn’t.) As for her parents, her dad continued traveling to meet with potential business partners and scout new store locations, while her mom joined a support group for parents of deceased children, then broke with her doubles partner in exchange for a punishing season of singles in a more competitive and younger division. Under other circumstances these actions might have been considered healthy, but that was never my impression, particularly in the case of Emily, who’d taken to such radical shifts of behavior that I was forced to interpret many of her unwelcomed commentaries as those of a character playing an actor, as opposed to the other way around. (Perhaps this was also the case in earlier moments of effrontery tracing as far back as our junior year on the day she summoned me from class in the spirit of a strict secretary, after presenting a notably less dominant personage when I first met her a few days before.)
At any rate, we continued meeting every Friday at the Days Inn, where one night I arrived key in hand to find her parading about naked while rearranging the furniture to enable more preposterous positions and deeper penetration. While testing such a position—which might have been more easily enjoyed minus the nightstand turned on its side and the desk chair stacked on the love seat—Emily ended up role-playing an enraged and poverty-stricken publisher, designating me the hermetic author of a science-fiction manuscript that for personal reasons I had refused to release.
“I made you!” she screamed. “You recluse! Prick tease! You hack!
”
“You’re a leech! You’re all leeches!”
“Tell me the story!”
“No!”
“Tell me the title!”
“No!”
“Gimme the first page, you flaming, pissant, cocksucking hobbit!”
“On the first page YOU GET FUCKED! ”
And so it went back and forth as I cranked her legs over my shoulders and she pounded the wall. Next she played a mail-order bride with rape fantasies, then a Christian missionary undergoing her own conversion in a Bible-thumping gang bang. Emily was still inventing new characters and asking me to help her prop one end of the bed up on the desk when I complained that I couldn’t keep up with the dialogues, admitting that anyway I’d squirted myself dry. We ended up smoking a bowl on the windowsill, where Emily told me all about the propaganda films she was studying.
“The best thing about them is that they’re all epics. You’ve got to see Pulgasari, which is this absurd Godzilla rip-off they made in North Korea. I mean, everything about it’s ludicrous, including the fact that the director was kidnapped from South Korea after he got fired from his studio. After watching it, I had this amazing dream where I was a cute little Asian girl who was actually a badass spy. Do you ever have dreams like that? Where you end up a character in the movie you just watched?”
Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter Page 26
