by Gray Barker
I assumed the Professor had no children, and had never married, for he wore no rings of any kind. As I was speculating on this matter, Joey breaking his silence, asked the question I had civilly withheld.
“Do you have lots of kids like my dad has (he is one of a very large family)?”
“Seven chaps, seven chaps (he tended to repeat key phrases), but they’re all older than you. One’s a doctor, one’s in the space program, and the others, all girls—well, they all got married.
“Interesting bird, this Sandhill crane,” he switched the conversation.
“The cry of this bird is a veritable voice of nature, untamed and unterrified. Its uncanny quality is like that of the loon, but is more pronounced because of the much greater volume of the crane’s voice. Its resonance is remarkable and its carrying power is increased by a distinct tremulo effect.”
We listened, open-mouthed to his croaking voice, which suddenly seemed appropriate to his description of a creature which he evidently admired greatly for its beauty and courage. I closed my eyes and pictured myself in a lonely, wooded area, lighted only by a summer moon, listening to the great bird as it cried from the empty distances.
“Often for several minutes after the bird has vanished, the unearthly sound drifts back to the listener—like a taunting trumpet from another world.”
CHAPTER 18
THE EMPTY BED
It had been on the Saturday night following the first Mothman sightings that Ida Wentworth had moved out, bag and baggage, taking the dog along, but leaving her husband, Frank behind.
Beyond initial puzzlement and dismay, Frank reasoned that her exit would, after all, be a great relief. Although Ida was a good cook and housekeeper, they had never got along well, and she had constantly nagged and shrieked at him. Practically nothing he ever did pleased her.
He did experience a great relief the first three days of living alone. He didn’t make inquiries about her whereabouts. This would only serve to aggravate the neighborhood gossip, and he was quite certain that she had gone across the river to Middletown, and was living there at his son-in-law’s. He could telephone her, but that would give her too much satisfaction. They had been in a particularly bad argument the night she left, and he felt she would return, once her anger wore off and she got tired of living away from home.
After a week, however, he began to re-examine the situation. She had not yet returned, and despite Ida’s shortcomings, he felt that he definitely missed her.
There had been the times when she was in a good mood, mainly on Sundays, when they came home from church, or when relatives or friends were visiting them. And he was tired of eating out and fixing his own meals.
He did have the comfort of believing that her leaving was certainly not his fault. Her constant criticisms had little basis in fact. For instance, she had often lectured him about “getting ahead”. He had what most people of the Point Pleasant community considered a good job: he drew about $150.00 per week, after deductions, and usually added overtime to that. He had held the same job for twenty years and made reasonable advancement, though his position wasn’t of executive nature, and he had progressed about as high as he could expect to go with the company. He considered himself a good provider. They owned a nice house and farm in adjoining Jackson County, though they preferred to live near Point Pleasant, he close to his work, and Ida near her friends in the city. He was able to provide a modern and pleasant apartment, part of a four-unit structure, shared with two other tenants and the landlady, who listened to all of Ida’s complaints about him and tended to side with her most of the time.
Finally a month, and then six weeks passed, without Ida’s returning, and Frank adjusted himself to the notion that she probably never would come back. After a year of living alone, he had almost given up the idea altogether.
After work, December 16, 1967, he decided to stop in town and have a few beers with some of his buddies before driving home. He felt satisfaction in being able to do this without worrying about being home at a given time. He would have some soup and a sandwich and thus avoid the task of fixing supper for himself.
He parked his ’65 Fairlane across the street, put in a nickel which would keep the meter going until 6:00, and entered the bar.
His crony, Jerry West, one of the few customers in the establishment, beckoned for him to join him at a table where he was slowly consuming a bottle of Black Label.
“Good to see you, Jerry! How’s the old man?”
Frank referred to the skipper of the river boat on which his friend worked. This was usually good for a conversation, for Jerry always liked to commiserate with him about the evil man who was his immediate boss. The skipper couldn’t possibly be all that bad, Frank knew. After all, Jerry had admitted he had many opportunities to change boats, but preferred to stick on this one—though to hear him tell it, his superior would make the fictional captain Bligh appear almost humane. Frank never considered himself a good talker, usually preferred to sit and listen. He knew Jerry would launch his usual tirade against the captain, and he would be asked if he thought Ida would ever return, or to speculate where she might be living.
“That bastard’s gettin’ as crazy as a loon!” Jerry exploded requiring only Frank’s brief question to trigger his recriminative monologue.
“You know what he did today? He had one of these magazines and he read about these flying saucers in it. He kept saying that too many people were seeing these things, for them not to be real. Then he told how he had seen one, a weird light that jumped up and down.
“Well, so far, that’s not too bad, but knowing him, you’d have to realize that most anything he’d say, except for running the boat, would be wrong. You see, he next got onto this Mothman tale. He said he believed the people around here had really seen the thing, and that me and the mechanic had better stop drinking and ‘whorin’ around’, as he put it, and that this Mothman was an angel of God out to scare us into doin’ better.
“Now, Frank, let me ask you. You know I drink beer and sometimes I get a jug of moonshine from those river people down in Cabell County. But you’ve never seen me when it’s got the better of me, have you?”
Jerry didn’t wait for an answer.
“And as for women, you know I keep myself moral. I’m not going to let myself be blackguarded by any half-crazy riverboat captain who believes in flying saucers and the devil’s angels, particularly when he accuses me of something I don’t do…”
Frank’s mind wandered. Again, he realized he felt so comfortable around Jerry because once his friend had started his tirade, he need make no conversational responses, and only half-listen. It was something like talking to Ida.
He sincerely doubted if the captain were as bad as he was made out to be. Jerry had never changed jobs because, as he put it, “I wouldn’t want to subject any other good man to such an unreasonable skipper.”
The captain came up constantly in any conversation one had with Jerry. He probably secretly enjoyed the real or imagined mental anguish he suffered on the boat, and he suspected that his friend, whose father had died while he was a small boy, was reacting to the captain much like a boy often reacts to his father. Jerry was in some ways a strange one: he had never married, was apparently afraid of women, was particular and fastidious, sometimes acting almost like a woman, especially when he spoke out against his boss.
Unencumbered with much responsibility in the conversation, Frank’s mind went back to Ida, a subject which had been on his mind most of the day.
Compared to Jerry’s likely imagined persecutions, his had been more real. In reality, he mused, he had been a truly henpecked man.
When they married, Ida had been only a fair-looking girl, rather raw-boned and plain. Her sharp nose, which he hadn’t greatly noticed then, had, in later years, seemed to grow, and to suggest a kind of beak. He had often looked at her and mentally transfigured her into an old hen, pecking at him in great frenzy.
But he had put up with her faults,
and, he supposed, he was really sorry when she left him. Maybe his relationship with Ida had been something like Jerry and the captain; perhaps he had actually enjoyed the naggings, her constant criticisms, and her general failure as a wife.
Frank remembered he had really entered the bar with the idea of having several beers and deliberately getting “high”, something he rarely did. Once he had finished half of the first bottle, however the thought of getting drunk suddenly became repulsive to him. He said goodbye to Jerry, with the excuse he had to see a friend at the service station, circled the block and drove to the corner. He really only wanted to pick up a can of lighter fluid and go home.
He recognized a young man, checking the oil in his Chevy, as the Scarberry boy, one of the four people who had first reported seeing the so-called “Mothman” creature. He remembered the captain’s remarks, and was about to approach Scarberry and ask him about the matter, but then he remembered hearing that the boy had told people he no longer wanted to talk about it.
He had known Scarberry when he had been employed briefly last summer, on a part-time basis, for the firm he worked for. He had been a good worker, whom his boss had described as “truthful and reliable”. He had laid him off with great reluctance when the seasonal work ended.
He was ready to bring up some other conversational topic with the boy when he heard a loud rumble from behind. He turned and looked toward the bridge, as Scarberry remarked. “Hey, that sounds like a real fender bender!”
Occasionally rush-hour traffic would pile up on the bridge and the trailer truck would lose its brakes on the steep incline descending from the middle of the span, smashing up several cars ahead.
But the rumbling grew louder, as suddenly as it had begun. He saw two people, who were just driving up onto the bridge, abandon their cars and run down off the incline.
Then, the entire towering structure, which had risen above Point Pleasant in a tower of rusty steel, slumped and during an unbelievable second or two, crumbled and disappeared!
The rumbling stopped, and a momentary silence ensued. As yet, Frank didn’t realize, or didn’t quite believe, what had occurred.
“The bridge! It went down!” the station attendant yelled.
Frank ran with the small group of people, who happened to be in that section of town, toward the river. He followed them up the approach, still standing, like an abandoned ski-launch platform.
He envisioned the terrible scene he would regard when he looked over into the river, but apparently, as it was with the others, a perverse curiosity commanded him to look.
The scene that awaited him was little like he or the others expected.
A great silence.
The two great bridge abutments stood like mute giants in the middle of the river as the muddy waters whirled around them. He spotted one trailer truck floating downstream a man standing on top, waving and obviously shouting for help. On the distant Ohio side, murky and now beginning to be shrouded by evening haze, he could see a great deal of activity, with people apparently trying to extract victims trapped in the twisted steel of that part of the span which had fallen on the river bank.
But across the great muddy expanse of the river itself there was—nothing. The enormous superstructure, as well as the vehicles and people who had been on it, had vanished, without a trace, into the deep waters below. It was almost as if nothing had happened, and the same scene which would confront spectators for months to come, as they stood on the river banks and stared at the empty vastness.
Frank turned, ran from the bridge and forced his way through the crowd that seemed to have appeared from nowhere, pressing toward the scene of the tragedy.
For an overpowering idea had come over him, and he fought and pushed his way through the people, hoping that the one thought which obsessed him wasn’t true.
He knew that Ida had selected this very hour to return, and that one of her relatives in Middleport had been driving her home. What if she had been on the bridge? Would she be dead now? Would she be desperately trying to claw her way out of a sunken automobile, deep in the blackness?
“Oh God!” he shouted. “Don’t let her die! Oh God! Oh God!”
He ran to Ball’s restaurant and into the telephone booth. He would call the apartment. If Ida answered—oh, if she only would!
He listened for the dial tone after dropping the coin. The phone was dead. He hung up, dropped it again, and waited. It occurred to him that the bridge collapse had broken some of the lines, or that perhaps everybody, just as he, was trying to call and had overloaded the circuits.
He jumped into the car and slowly made his way through the confusion of traffic and pedestrians. An ambulance careened around the corner, and almost hit him. He turned onto Route 2 South, meeting a line of stalled traffic, delayed by an accident. Some person had been struck and a tall aged man with a strange stick with a ball on top of it waved the object wildly and gesticulated with his other hand.
At Henderson the traffic thinned. Temporarily regaining his senses, he considered how illogical his actions were. She had been gone for more than a year, and obviously had no intentions of returning. Even if she did anticipate returning, there would be only one chance in several million that she would have been on the bridge when it went down. The odds against it were fantastic.
Yet the mental fixation remained. Again he was certain she had returned, whether or not she had crashed with the bridge. He couldn’t explain his strong emotion, for surely his love for her, if there had ever been such a thing, had diminished until he had been glad to get rid of her. But somehow, despite all this, he knew she was home or trying to get there, and the prospect filled him with a blind emotion which, try as he might, he could neither explain nor control.
He swung the car into the driveway, where his garage was blocked by a taxi with Ohio plates. He was right! She had come back! He ran around the walk to his side of the building, and surely enough, his door was ajar.
“Ida! Ida! You don’t know what happened! The bridge went down. But you’re safe! You’re here!”
The door opened into the living room. It was just as he had left it that morning, without any sign of Ida’s belongings. Perhaps her luggage was still in the taxi. But there had been no driver in it. Perhaps they had just arrived and the driver was here somewhere in the apartment, helping her with the luggage.
But the appartment was deathly silent, just as silent as the empty scene of the muddy river which had swallowed up all the people.
They must have taken the things into the bedroom. Surely enough, looking through the narrow hallway, he noted the door was open. Perhaps he shouldn’t appear to be eager to see her, for after all, it would mean his forgiving her constant naggings, and all the unpleasant years that had spanned their marriage.
As he gently pushed the bedroom door fully open, he was temporarily puzzled, for somebody, apparently Ida, was in the bed, though of somewhat larger bulk than she. A maddening thought crossed his mind, as he remembered the taxi. Both Ida and the driver were in bed together! He would jerk off the covers and expose them! His anger grew. He would kill the man! He advanced slowly toward the bed, and when he saw an oscillating movement beneath the covers he knew his suspicions were correct.
Before he could reach the bed, the covers flew back and a huge grayish form rose from it. His anger and jealousy turned to fear as he backed, toward the door, and vainly searched for the light switch while his eyes remained riveted, hypnotically, on the thing before him.
Red flashing eyes burned into his. Then with seeming confusion, and a flapping and gurgling sound, the thing tumbled sidewise to the floor, flapped again, upset a lamp, and then righted itself unsteadily. He retreated to the living room, tripped on the edge of the rug, and fell. As he was getting up, hoping to run and escape from the incomprehensible horror in the bedroom, it waddled through the door. He noted another facial feature besides the eyes: It had a long sharp beak which slanted downward, almost corresponding to a nose. It fell again
, as it had in the bedroom, again flailing its wings, this time hitting the TV and knocking it off the stand. The set crashed into the book case with a loud noise as the picture tube imploded.
The great bird—that was as close as he could describe it to himself—again righted itself, leaped toward the large picture window, and with a crashing and splintering of glass, disappeared.
“Oh Lord Jesus!” he cried. “Deliver me! The world is coming to an end!” He kneeled, covered his face and sobbed loudly.
There was a banging on the wall and shrieking from next door.
It was the landlady, and that was what she always did when there had been loud arguments in his apartment. This had usually halted their altercations, for Ida deeply respected the other women.
Suddenly she appeared at the door.
“Shame! Shame! You’re no good! It’s no wonder Ida could never put up with you! Look what you’ve done to your color TV! My God, you’ve broken the window! That just shows you, Frank Wentworth, what drinking can do to a man!”
He continued to hold his head in his hands and sob.
“My Lord, you’ve busted the plumbing too!” and she ran past him into the bathroom.
The latter remark shocked him to his senses, and he then noticed the trail of muddy water, intermingled with bits of dirt which crossed the floor to the broken window. He ran into the bedroom where the floor showed the same signs. The bed was a mess. Filthy with mud, it looked as if gallons of water had been poured over it.
AFTERWORD
Summer had come to Point Pleasant. Mrs. Ralph Thomas took the two-year-old child by the hand and walked her into the vegetable garden. Lately Mrs. Bennett had brought Betty to visit fairly often, and Mrs. Thomas was grateful.
“Look, honey, how bright and green is the sweet corn.”
“Green!” the child cried, then babbled something unintelligible. She pointed to the sunflowers, which were just beginning to bloom at the side of the garden.
