The Incident on the Bridge (12 page)

S
he points her toes to touch the wooden door and tries to stretch the duct tape. She smells disgusting. When did this happen? When he shot her with the gun? She's like a goat penned at the fair. Black diarrhea on its trembling legs.

She calls out, “I half do pee,” and “Leth be outh,” twice, three times. The boat rocks, the gag crushes her cheeks against her teeth. Finally she hears the click of the outer door, his heavy feet, the scrape.

There he is with his turtle skin and his spotted lip.

In his hands he holds a white blouse that's yellowy tan at the collar, a knitted poncho in pink acrylic. Small clothes, like for a child. “Remember these?” he asks her, and his eyes are trying to be soft but they scare her to her very core. The fear that keeps her from nodding or shaking her head is that he used to have sex with Julia. She closes her eyes and holds her bladder tight in the stinking, hot cabin of the crazy man's boat. Seven signs, he says. Sand dollars are one of the seven signs. He puts aside the ancient blouse and the stained poncho so he can hold up a jar of sand dollars packed in sand. “For you,” he says. “I wrote the date on the bottom and the number it is in the collection. They're good luck, you know.”

She has to pee. In an effort to make him listen, she makes what sounds like a goat's grunting. A goat's choking. He takes hold of her legs and pulls her toward the main cabin, which is toward himself. Her feet touch the floor and she feels the grit of sand on polished wood. He says, “If you sit up, I'll take off the gag, Julia,” and somehow she sits up even though pain streaks up her throbbing arm, and he puts his disgusting hands behind her head and she holds her bladder tight like a balloon she's filled for a water fight.

“We're going home now,” the crazy man says. “The Seer says it's the only way.”

“Wheah awh whe?” she says, and suddenly retches. All is feverish, smelly, choking. The sand dollars in jars that ring the hull—all the way around one side and down the other, on a high shelf—are yellow in the bone-gold light, so it's afternoon, maybe. The cushion beside her, speckled black from mildew, torn at the corner and thready, expands and contracts in her blurred vision. She retches against the gag again, her whole body prickling with nausea and fear.

“Let me help,” he says. “Mustn't choke,” and his root-brown fingers come at her. They touch her hair. It's repulsive to have those fingers on her head, to see two inches away the grime on his sweatshirt, white paint, drops of oil, the slick denim of jeans that have been worn forever, it looks like.

“Almost,” he says, struggling with the knot behind her head, pulling out what feels like clumps of her hair, when, like a tooth from a socket, the gag pops out of her mouth. He drops it on the floor and uses a dish towel to wipe her chin. Like she's a baby, he swabs at her lips. Every time she spits she's revoltingly swabbed.

“Wheah awh whe?” she says, her tongue still thick.

“On our way home,” he says.

“I
wath
home!”

“It won't be long.”

“I half do pee.”

“Of course, Julia. Of course that's right. Go to the bathroom. That's right, only fair. Who doesn't help his sister?”

He brings a steak knife and cuts the tape around her wrists. Her arms noodle painfully apart and he cuts through the tape around her ankles. So simple. One swipe.

“Back here,” he says.

She sways and falls to the right when she reaches to pull her sock free of the toe, throws her hand out for support, then does it, makes the sock bloom out and hold all the toes inside it. The smell gets worse as they walk, but boat toilets always stank. They were the worst part about sailing, so she always peed in the yot club bathroom one more time right before they launched. Or she hiked her bare bum over the water in the dark and peed into the bay while Ted pretended she was going to turn on the flashlight.

“I gould pee oudside,” she says, the consonants thick, like she's an alien German or a German alien. She would never actually pee in front of him. She would jump overboard.

“Too dangerous,” he says.

“Why?” she says, hoping he'll say where they are, but he doesn't. They've reached the bathroom now, and the need to pee is the strongest thing in the world, stronger than hunger or fear or shame, a snake biting her deep inside. The man's claw, clamped on her shoulder, lets go of her once she reaches the tiny compartment, and she flings the door shut, yanks at her zipper, gets herself over the metal bowl from which the stink of waste is rising, and feels relief. Tremendous relief.

And then, almost as soon as it comes, the joy goes. Same fouled underwear, same dirty shorts. Same legs. Tissues are not good enough to wipe her legs clean, just falling apart and tearing off.

“Es-cuse be,” she says.

No answer.

“Can I half sub clea panz?”

He doesn't answer right away, and maybe he can't understand her. She hears him rustling, snapping, the slide of wooden doors. He knocks. Sticks his arm through the little gap she makes with the door, as if decency existed, as if she were trying on clothes in a store:
Here you go, miss, the size you wanted
.

In his turtle-ish hand he holds a pair of faded jeans. No underwear, but this is not a store. This is not her room. This is not the day before. When she lets the folded jeans fall open, the smell of mildew plumes, but it's just the scent of towels that have been folded still wet. How she'd hated that smell back when she was stupid! When she could throw a sour towel back into the dirty clothes basket unused.

Thisbe studies a grayish rag balled up and dry in the tiny stall shower. Fossilized there. She picks it up and holds it to the showerhead, creaks the handle. Only a trickle of water spills out.

“What are you doing, Julia?” the man asks.

“Wathing.”

“The shower doesn't work right.”

She can see that. But there's a little water, a shard of old soap. She uses it and puts on the old jeans. It's not good but it's better.

When she leaves the bathroom, he holds the duct tape and strips of cloth. The knife is right beside him on the table.

He says he's sorry to tape her wrists again, but he isn't sorry. The tears she meant not to cry are oozing out of her eyes again. “It will all come back,” he says, “and then we'll be together again, like we used to be,” and she stiffens with the fear that the man used to have sex with Julia. Only when she's lying once again in the aft cabin behind the locked door does she permit herself to move her hands against each other to see if the tape can be stretched this time.

In the silence she hears water. Lapping, flowing, lapping. The water might be moving around the boat or the boat might be moving through the water. If they're sailing, how far have they gone? How many miles a day, and for how many days? An engine starts, then sputters, starts again, and holds. All she can see through the porthole is sky, and the sky is blue-green, a trick of the glass or the time of day, she can't tell, so she rubs her wrists together slowly, the way you might rub the edge of a bandage that has been glued to your skin for too long, the way she used to rub the stickers on the spines of library books that said, in red letters,
14-Day Book,
knowing that eventually the edge of the sticker would dry up and curl away because she couldn't let it alone.

J
erome dropped his tennis bag by the front door, where it basically blocked the whole entrance to the kitchen, as his mother had many times pointed out, and took Maddy out on her leash. The sun on his skin was perfect, dry but not hot, weather his mother said he should learn to appreciate because his dad was emphasizing small liberal arts colleges now, especially DePauw. Friendly coach, full scholarship, midwestern values, his dad's relatives within range for dinner, especially Thanksgiving, because it would be too far to come home, and never mind that it was Division III, which just meant, according to his dad, that Jerome could play every match and win some. Jerome knew the truth was he hadn't panned out. At ten he had seemed headed for the highest high-holy teams, the kind his dad hadn't been able to play on, but the better Jerome got and the higher he climbed in the rankings, the more kids he faced who practiced like he practiced and played like he played, who had also been competing, since six or eight or ten, for the highest high-holy teams, and who maybe had something he didn't.

The text that came through as Maddy sniffed a telephone pole said,
Jerome?

He didn't want to answer it or even show that he was there. He let Maddy go to the end of the extending cord and then tugged her back. He typed,
Who's this?

Thisbes sister Ted.

He allowed part of himself, a small part, to hope that Thisbe's sister, who thought he was a beast, was texting him secret information about Thisbe, who regretted her association with Clay and was in love with Jerome, spent her nights crying about it, actually, and Ted wanted Jerome to know that.

Hi
, he said.

But it wasn't like that. It never was. All Ted said was,
Have you seen Thisbe today or last night?

No
, he said. Of course Thisbe wasn't crying in her room over the stupid choice she'd made. Who wanted Jerome, anyway? Probably not even DePauw. He thought about adding,
Did you check with the stoners because they'd probably know.
He didn't, though. He walked up the steps with Maddy and left the door open so she could sit on the threshold, half in, half out, while he made a sandwich that he ate in four bites because he didn't want to taste it.

W
hat the crazy man is doing she has no idea. They are definitely anchored somewhere. It can't be the open sea because she'd be seasick, wouldn't she? Or is the sea calm right now? She should tell him she gets seasick. She might barf again while she's locked in the cupboard and die.

A splashing sound. Scraping. Through the porthole she sees nothing but sky. The same blue-green color. It's impossible to tell what time it is, or to feel that time will pass.

She lies on her side, knees bent, and thinks. A yellow taxi pulled over in front of her, she remembers that. Yellow with black letters that said
Eritrea
on the trunk. The driver was a black man with bony shoulders who told her to get in. The taxi driver is or is not a part of what is happening now? She got into the taxi, and the backseat had no padding, so you felt the round springs. “My phone died,” she said to him, by way of explanation. The thought came to her, too late, that she was in a taxi without her purse. Like a dream of being at school in your underwear. She asked the man from Eritrea with the long, slender hands to pull over right at the end of the bridge, in Tidelands Park, and she told him she was sorry, so sorry, that she had no purse. She promised to send him the money. He said no. He said it was nothing. She said
please give me your address and I'll send you money
. He wrote it down on a piece of paper he tore from a book. Did he have something to do with Julia? He stayed in the taxi and she walked toward the bay, across the wide lawns of Tidelands Park. The boots were bugging her, slowing her down, so she stopped and took them off. Where was she going? Home. She was planning to walk home under the bridge.

But when she turned the corner at the golf course, where the bike path ran straight like a gray ribbon, a man came out from the bushes. “Julia,” he said. The bristly beard, the tanned skin like the neck of a tortoise, the blue spot on his lip. He wore a beanie and a stained sweatshirt, the look of scary imploring.

“I'm not Julia,” she said, and kept walking, but the man followed her, his feet scraping gravel on the asphalt path.

“Julia,” he said again. “Forgive me.”

If only she'd had money, she could have paid the man from Eritrea to drive her home. She walked faster, but the man followed.

“I saw them all, Julia,” he said. “The seven signs.”

She started to run with her boots clutched hard against her chest, awkward running, sharp stones underfoot. She heard him ask forgiveness one more time before she felt the pain in her arm, a violent shuddering that spread and stiffened in all her bones at once, and before she fell like a dropped puppet, the trees on the golf course grew whiter, taller, almost human with their muscled arms reaching upward in the empty air.