A Bridge of Years (7 page)

He
could say, /
was
married for ten years to a bright, thoughtful woman whom I loved
intensely, and whose mistrust grew until it was. like a knife between
us.

He
could explain about Barbara's political activism, her conviction that
the world was teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe.
He could explain that his engineering work at Aerotech had divided
them, tell Archer that she'd come to see him as a living example of
the technological juggernaut: all his schooling and all his ingenuity
plugged into a military-industrial machine so hydra-headed in its
aspects and so single-minded in its goals that the earth itself was
being strip-mined and forested into a global desert.

He
could replay, perhaps, one of their arguments. He could reiterate his
endless, patient assertion that the engines he designed were
fuel-efficient; that his work, while not exactly a pursuit of
the ecological Grail, might help clear the air around major cities.
Band-Aid thinking, Barbara called this, a piddling solution to an
overwhelming problem. A better combustion engine wouldn't
restore the rain forests to Brazil or the redwoods to California. To
which Tom would reply that it was a damn sight more productive than
chaining himself to the gate of a paper mill or sneaking off with
some long-haired anarchists to spike trees in the Cascades. At which
point— more often in their last year—the conversation would
decline into insult. Barbara would begin on his "complacent hick
family," particularly Tony; and Tom, if he was drunk or angry
enough, would explore the possible reasons for her recent loss of
sexual appetite. ("It's not too complicated," she once told
him. "Take a look in the mirror sometime.")

But
there was no way to explain any of this. No way to explain his
nagging suspicion that she was, after all, right; no way to explain
the fundamental upwelling of love he still felt, even after their
battles, when she was kneeling in the garden or brushing her hair
before bed. He loved her with a loyalty that was animal in its mute
persistence. He loved her even when he opened his mouth and called
her frigid.

He
blinked against the fierce blue sky, the curve of the distant bay.

He
said, "I loved my wife a lot. I hated it when she left."

"So
why'd she leave?" Archer added, "You're allowed to tell me
to fuck off at this point."

"It
was a political disagreement. I was doing engineering for a little R
and D company out of Seattle. Barbara was into the peace movement,
among other things. She came home one day and told me the company was
about to be handed a big federal grant for weapons research,
something connected with SDI. I told her there was no truth to the
rumor. The people I worked for were scrupulous, small-scale,
community-minded—I
knew
these
guys. I checked out the possibility, asked a few questions, came
up totally blank. Stood my ground. Really, it was just one more
argument. There'd been more than a few. But it turned out this was
the last one. She couldn't bear the idea of being married to a
war-economy engineer. As far as Barbara was concerned it was dirty
money."

"That's
what broke you up?"

"That
and the fact that she was seeing somebody else." "Somebody
in the movement," Archer guessed. "Somebody who was feeding
her a line about government grants." Tom nodded.

"Pretty
fucking raw deal. So you started drinking—that's how you lost your
job?"

"I
started drinking later. I lost my job because the rumor turned out to
be true. The company had been asked to bid on a satellite contract—a
little bit of congressional pork for the Pacific Northwest. There was
a lot of secrecy, a lot of paranoia about corporate espionage.
It was all those questions I asked when I wanted to reassure Barbara.
They figured I was a security risk."

Tom
stood up and brushed the dirt off his jeans.

"Offhand,"
Archer said, "I would guess you're as sane as the next guy. A
little bit bruised, maybe. Aside from what we've talked about, you
hear voices?"

"Nope."

"Are
you suicidal?"

"Three
a.m
.
on a bad night—maybe. Otherwise no."

"Well,
I'm no shrink. But it sounds like you're a long way < from crazy.
I think we ought to check out what's been happening in that
house you bought."

"Good,"
Tom said.

He
shook hands with Archer and smiled at him, but a new and unwelcome
thought had formed at the back of his mind:
If
I'm not insane, then maybe I ought to be scared.

The
next morning, Sunday morning, Tom recalled that he hadn't told Archer
about the holes in the foundation of the house.

Maybe
it was a mistake to withhold this, the only physical evidence that
what he'd experienced wasn't an illusion.

But
he had held back on purpose, salvaging some fragment of the
experience as his own. It was an odd idea: that he should feel
possessive about a haunting (or whatever was happening here). But
hadn't Archer been possessive, in his own way? All that talk about
magic, as if this were his own personal miracle.

But
it wasn't Archer who had been called by name in a dream. It wasn't
Archer who had stood at the window and watched the shadows of the
pines and heard a voice among their sighing voices.
Tom
Winter,
the
voice had said; and it seemed to him now, after a sounder sleep, that
there had been another message, less obvious then but clarified
somehow by memory:

Help
us,
the
voices had said.

Help
us, Tom Winter. Please help us.

Archer
arrived that afternoon with a VCR, a Sony video camera, and a
tripod packed into the trunk of his car.

Tom
helped him unload and erect all this paraphernalia in the living
room, where it loomed like a selection of props from a science
fiction movie. He said so to Archer, who shrugged. "That's what
we're playing at, isn't it?"

"I
don't think of this as playing. I
live
here."

"You
live here. I'm playing."

"This
is not a Huck Finn adventure, Doug. In case you haven't noticed, I'm
not enjoying it."

"Something
happen during the night, or are you just in a bad mood?"

"No,
nothing happened." The question made him uncomfortable.
"What's all this for?"

"Surveillance.
The unsleeping eye. Take a look."

Tom
peered into the eyepiece of the video camera. It was aimed into the
kitchen and captured a fairly wide angle of the room, including the
stainless steel sink and the tile counter-top. A digital clock in the
corner of the display read out the date, the hour, the minute, and
the second.

Archer
said, "The camera's hooked into the VCR and I just set the timer
for midnight. At the slowest speed, we've got approximately eight
hours of tape. You leave everything alone, you sleep soundly, and in
the morning you see what we've got."

Tom
shook his head. "They won't stand for this." Archer
regarded him curiously.

Tom
pulled back from the eyepiece. "So what do we do in the
meantime?" "I think the logical thing would be to mess up
the kitchen."

Archer
had brought more than electronics. From the back seat of his car he
produced two six-packs of beer, a bag of potato chips and a quart of
sour cream and avocado dip his girlfriend had made.

"You
eat like an undergraduate," Tom said.

"Is
there any other way?" Archer opened the six-pack and popped the
tab on a can. "We can order a pizza for dinner." He handed
a can to Tom, then looked suddenly dubious. "Oh, hey, are you AA
or anything like that? I don't want to make life difficult."

"I
was a hobby drinker," Tom said, "not a professional."
But he left the beer alone.

The
afternoon droned on. It was a sunny, warm day and Tom opened the
front and back doors to let a breeze sweep through the house. The air
smelled of hot, tarry pine.

Archer
kicked back and put his Reeboks on the kitchen table. "You went
to Sea View Elementary. Then the high school over on Jackson, I
guess, just like everybody else. Shit-awful schools, both of them,"
and then they were off on a round of skewed nostalgia—what Barbara
had once called "the hideous past, relived at leisure." It
turned out that the trouble Archer had gotten into in high school had
been more serious and more personal than preadolescent rock throwing.
He had waged a war of attrition against his high school principal
and his father—two staunch disciplinarians who happened to be
poker buddies. Archer had spent plenty of nights listening to them
vent their hatred of children over pretzels and a well-shuffled pack
of Bicycle playing cards. His father was an appliance repairman who
hated kids, Archer explained, out of some fundamental quirk of
personality; the principal, Mr. Mayhew, had professional reasons and
was deemed to be an expert on the matter. Jackson Archer,
belt-whipping his only son, liked to explain that Mr. Mayhew did this
for a living and could probably do a better job of it. In fact Mr.
Mayhew confined himself to the use of a ruler on the back of the
hand, which was painful without incurring the kind of visible
injuries that brought mothers howling down to the school—maybe this
was what made him an expert. Archer had a theory that they took
out their poker losses on him; he learned to avoid whoever had lost
money on Sunday night.

"Didn't
stop you from getting in trouble," Tom observed.

"Didn't
stop me from drinking, smoking, and riding in fast cars. Nope. But I
never figured they really
wanted
to
stop me. They were having too much fun."

"Does
this story have a punch line?"

"When
I was sixteen I drove my father's Pontiac into a

tree.
Totaled it. I wasn't hurt, but I was driving without a

license.
They sent me to a so-called military school upstate,

with
the happy consent of the Juvenile Court. What it was,

of
course, was a concentration camp for adolescent psychotics.

"What
did you do
there?"

Archer
ceased smiling. "I ate shit, like every other inmate. These
institutions live up to their rep, Tom. They can turn a sullen,
rebellious teenager into a sullen, submissive one—like
that.
I
ate shit for a couple of semesters and came back when my dad died. My
mother said, 'I couldn't leave you in that place.' I thanked her
politely, and when she marched me past the casket—in full parade
dress, for Christ's sake—I looked down and said, 'Screw you and
your poker game and your cardiac arrest too.'"

The
silence rang out in the kitchen for a few awkward moments. Tom said,
"You never forgave him?"

"He
was a lonely, hostile man who never forgave me for being born and
complicating his fife. Maybe I'll be more generous than that.
One of these days." He took a long pull from his beer. "So
how about you? Another casualty of childhood?"

"I
had a reasonably happy childhood. Nobody sent me to military school,
anyway."

"That's
not the only way to suffer."

"I
can't say I
did
suffer.
Not substantially. Dad wouldn't have stood for it."

"Ah—wait
a minute. Winter?
Doctor
Winter?
Used to have a practice over on Poplar Street?" 1 hat s us.

"Shit,
I knew Doc Winter! I went there with a ruptured appendix when I was
ten years old. My father said, The kid's complaining about a
bellyache.' Of course, I had a raging fever, my abdomen was hard as a
rock, I was convulsing from the pain. Your dad took a look at me and
phoned the hospital for an ambulance. When he put down the phone he
turned to my old man and said, 'You nearly killed your child by
waiting this long. If there was a license for fatherhood, I would
have yours revoked.' Sick as I was, I remembered that. It felt good.
My God, Doc Winter's son! But didn't he—?"