A Bridge of Years (2 page)

It
had been empty for years, the real estate agent said, and the
property backed onto a cedar swamp. "Frankly, I don't see a lot
of investment potential here."

Tom
Winter disagreed.

Maybe
it was his mood, but this property appealed at once. Perversely, he
liked it for its bad points: its isolation, lost in this rainy
pinewood—its blunt undesirability, like the frank ugliness of a
bulldog. He wondered whether, if he lived here, he would come to
resemble the house, the way pet owners were said to resemble their
pets. He would be plain. Isolated. Maybe, a little wild.

Which
was not, Tom supposed, how he looked to Doug Archer, the real estate
agent. Archer was wearing his blue Bell Realty jacket, but the neat
faded Levi's and shaggy haircut betrayed his roots. Local
family, working class, maybe some colorful relative still logging out
in the bush. Raised to look with suspicion on creased trousers, which
Tom happened to be wearing. But appearances were deceptive. Tom
paused as they approached the blank pine-slab front door. "Didn't
this used to be the Simmons property?"

Archer
shook his head. "Close, though. That's a little ways up the
hill. Peggy Simmons still lives up there—she's nearly eighty."
He raised an eyebrow. "You know Peggy Simmons?"

"I
used to deliver groceries up the Post Road. Came by here sometimes.
But that was a long while ago."

"No
kidding! Didn't you say—"

"I've
been in Seattle for most of twelve years."

"Any
connection with Tony Winter—up at Arbutus Ford?"

"He's
my brother," Tom said.

"Hey!
Well, hell!
This
changes
things."

In
the city, Tom thought, we learn not to smile so generously.

Archer
slid the key into the door. "We had a man out here when the
property went up for sale. He said it was in fairly nice shape on the
inside, but I'd guess, after it's been closed up for so long—well,
you might take that with a grain of salt."

Translated
from realty-speak, Tom thought, that means it's a hellacious mess.

But
the door eased open on hinges that felt freshly oiled, across a
swatch of neat beige broadloom.

"I'll
be damned," Archer said.

Tom
stepped over the threshold. He flicked the wall switch and a ceiling
light blinked on, but it wasn't really necessary; a high
south-facing window allowed in a good deal of the watery sunshine.
The house had been built with the climate in mind: it would not
succumb to gloom even in the rain.

On
the right, the living room opened into a kitchen. On the left, a
hallway connected the bedrooms and the bath.

A
stairway led down to the basement.

"I'll
be damned," Archer repeated. "Maybe I was wrong about this
place."

The
room they faced was meticulously clean, the furniture old but
spotless. A mechanical mantel clock ticked away (but who had wound
it?) under what looked like a Picasso print. Just slightly kitschy,
Tom thought, the glass-topped coffee table, the low Danish Modern
sofa; very sixties, but immaculately preserved. It might have
popped out of a time capsule.

"Well
maintained," he said.

"You
bet. Considering it wasn't maintained at all, far as I know."

"Who's
the owner?"

"The
property came up for state auction a long time ago. Holding company
in Seattle bought it but never did anything with it. They've been
selling off packets of land all through here for the last year or
so." He shook his head. "To be honest, the house was
entirely derelict. We had a man out to evaluate these properties,
shingles and foundation and so on, but he never said—I mean, we
assumed, all these old frame houses out here—" He put his
hands in his pockets and frowned. "The utilities weren't even
switched on till late last week."

How
many cold winters, hot summers had this room been closed and locked?
Tom paused and slid his finger along a newel post where the stairs
ran down into darkness. His finger came away clean. The wood
looked oiled. "Phantom maid service?"

Archer
didn't laugh. "Jack Shackley's the listed agent on this. Maybe
he was in to tidy up. Somebody did a phenomenal job, anyway. The
listing is house and contents and it looks like you have some nice
pieces here—maybe a little dated. Shall we have a look around?"

"I
think we should."

Tom
circled twice through the house—once with Archer, once "to get
his own impression" while Archer left his business card on
the kitchen counter and stepped outside for a smoke. His impression
was the same both times. The kitchen cupboards opened frictionlessly
to spotless, uniformly vacant interiors. The linen closet was
cedar-lined, fragrant and bare. The bedrooms were empty except for
the largest, which contained a modest bed, a chest of drawers,
and a mirror— dustless. In the basement, high windows peeked out at
the rear lawn; these were covered with white roller blinds, which the
sun had turned brittle yellow.
(Time
passes here after all,
he
thought.)

The
building was sound, functional, and clean.

The
fundamental question was, did it feel like home?

No.
At least, not yet.

But
that might change.

Did
he
want
it
to feel like home?

But
it was a question he couldn't answer to his own satisfaction.
Maybe what he wanted was not so much a house as a cave: a warm, dry
place in which to nurse his wounds until they healed—or at least
until the pain was bearable.

But
the house was genuinely interesting.

He
ran his hand idly along a blank basement wall and was startled to
feel . . . what?

The
hum of machinery, carried up through gypsum board and concrete
block—instantly stilled?

Faint
tingle of electricity?

Or
nothing at all.

"Tight
as a drum."

This
was Archer, back from his sojourn. "You may have found a bargain
here, Tom. We can go back to my office if you want to talk about an
offer." "Why the hell not," Tom Winter said.

The
town of Belltower occupied the inside curve of a pleasant, foggy
Pacific bay on the northwestern coast of the United States.

Its
primary industries were fishing and logging. A massive pulp mill had
been erected south of town during the boom years of the fifties, and
on damp days when the wind came blowing up the coast the town was
enveloped in the sulfurous, bitter stench of the mill. Today there
had been a stiff offshore breeze; the air was clean. Shortly before
sunset, when Tom Winter returned to his room at the Seascape Motel,
the cloud stack rolled away and the sun picked out highlights on the
hills, the town, the curve of the bay.

He
bought himself dinner in the High Tide Dining Room and tipped the
waitress too much because her smile seemed genuine. He bought a
Newsweek
in
the gift shop and headed back to his second-floor room as night fell.

Amazing,
he thought, to be back in this town. Leaving here had been, in Tom's
mind, an act of demolition. He had ridden the bus north to
Seattle pretending that everything behind him had been erased
from the map. Strange to find the town still here, stores still open
for business, boats still anchored at the marina behind the VFW
post.

The
only thing that's been demolished is my life.

But
that was self-pity, and he scolded himself for it. The quintessential
lonely vice. Like masturbation, it was a parody of something best
performed in concert with others.

He
was aware, too, of a vast store of pain waiting to be acknowledged .
. . but not here in this room with the ugly harbor paintings on the
wall, the complimentary postcards in the bureau, pale rings on the
wood veneer where generations had abandoned their vending-machine
Cokes to sweat in the dry heat. Here, it would be too much.

He
padded down the carpeted hallway, bought a Coke so he could add his
own white ring to the furniture.

The
phone was buzzing when he got back. He picked it up and popped the
ring-tab on the soft-drink can.

"Tom,"
his brother said.

"Tony.
Hi, Tony."

"You
all by yourself?"

"Hell,
no," Tom said. "The party's just warming up. Can't you
tell?"

"That's
very funny. Are you drinking something?" "Soda pop, Tony."

"Because
I don't think you should be sitting there all by yourself. I think
that sets a bad pattern. I don't want you getting sauced again."

Sauced,
Tom
thought, amused. His brother was a well-spring of these antique
euphemisms. It was Tony who had once described Brigitte Nielsen as "a
red-hot tamale." Barbara had always relished his brother's
bon mots. She used to call it her "visiting Tony yoga"—making
conversation with one hand ready to spring up and disguise a grin.

"If
I get sauced," Tom said, "you'll be the first to know."

"That's
exactly what I'm afraid of. I called in a lot of favors to get you
this job. Naturally, that leaves my ass somewhat exposed."

"Is
that why you phoned?"

A
pause, a confession: "No. Loreen suggested—well, we both
thought—she's got a chicken ready to come out of the oven and
there's more than enough to go around, so if you haven't eaten—"

"I'm
sorry. I had a big meal down at the coffee shop. But thank you. And
thank Loreen for me."

Tony's
relief was exquisitely obvious. "Sure you don't want to drop
by?" Brief chatter in the background: "Loreen's done up a
blueberry pie."

"Tell
Loreen I'm sorely tempted but I want to make it an early night."

"Well,
whatever. Anyway, I'll call you next week." "Good. Great."

"Night,
Tom." A pause. Tony added, "And welcome back."

Tom
put down the phone and turned to confront his own reflection, gazing
dumbly out of the bureau mirror. Here was a haggard man with a
receding hairline who looked, at this moment, at least a decade older
than his thirty years. He'd put on weight since Barbara left and it
was beginning to show —a bulge of belly and a softness around his
face. But it was the expression that made the image in the mirror
seem so ancient. He had seen it on old men riding buses. A frown that
announces surrender, the willing embrace of defeat. Options for
tonight?

He
could stare out the window, into his past; or into this mirror, the
future.

The
two had intersected here. Here at the crossroads. This rainy old
town.

He
turned to the window.

Welcome
back.

Doug
Archer called in the morning to announce that Tom's offer on the
house—most of his carefully hoarded inheritance, tendered in
cash—had been accepted. "Possession is immediate. We can have
all the paperwork done by the end of the day. A few signatures and
she's all yours."

"Would
it be possible to get the key today?"

"I
don't see any problem with that."

Tom
drove down to the realty office next to the Harbor Mall. Archer
escorted him through paperwork at the in-house Notary Public, then
took him across the street for lunch. The restaurant was called El
Nino—it was new; the location used to be a Kresge's, if Tom
recalled correctly. The decor was nautical but not screamingly
kitschy.

Tom
ordered the salmon salad sandwich. Archer smiled at the waitress.
"Just coffee, Nance."

She
nodded and smiled back.

"You're
not wearing your realty jacket," Tom said.

"Technically,
it's my day off. Plus, you're a solid purchase. And what the hell,
you're a hometown boy, I don't have to impress anybody here." He
settled back in the vinyl booth, lean in his checkerboard shirt, his
long hair a little wilder than he had worn it the day before. He
thanked the waitress when the coffee arrived. "I looked into the
history of the house, by the way. My own curiosity, mainly."