One Day the Wind Changed (14 page)

A sign next to the pylon said he'd face a thousand-dollar fine if he drove across the bridge. It was closed now. These days, the way into town lay six miles south of here, on a brand-new bridge near the railroad trestle.

He could get back, but not the way he used to. Or the way he used to
be
.

He recalled how, on weekends, people paddled wooden canoes down this stretch of the river—children, families. People rode horses along the banks.

A metallic ticking rose from the idle engine beneath the rental car's hood. The drive from the El Paso airport (the nearest, though it was more than a hundred miles away) had been arduous. He'd forgotten what it was like, driving in the Lone Star State: the chalky dust, the harsh southern light, the challenge of desert roads, often ill-paved. How did the old joke go?
Crossing Texas ain't a trip. It's a career
.

Griffin squinted against the four o'clock light, across the bridge and the gulch where the river had once coursed with so much careless power toward the Bottoms, the lip of town where the poorest factory workers used to live-probably still did. Griffin didn't know. He'd lost touch with his brother through the years.

“
Professor,
” Earl used to drawl into the phone, back in the days when they still called each other on holidays and birthdays. Ten, fifteen years ago now? After school, Griffin had moved out west to teach in a small liberal arts college on the Oregon coast and to write books on the pastoral tradition in twentieth-century Irish poetry.

“Brother,” Griffin answered Earl, on the phone.

Inevitably, their conversations turned to Griffin's betrayals—a word Earl never used (like many West Texas men, he rarely used words at all, and would have been happy, Griffin thought, as a mute), but it suffused the very timbre of his voice. Griffin had “gone and got educated” (betrayal number one), left Texas (two), and devoted his imagination to some misty, far-off place (case closed).

Like the bridge, he'd been badly engineered.

“Ireland's in our blood,” Griffin tried to argue with his brother. “Our ancestors come from there.”

“Who
all died
hundreds of years ago,” Earl countered. “You're a
Texan
. What the hell does Ireland matter to us?”

Truth be told, Griffin wasn't sure he knew the answer to this question, beyond his passion for Irish rhyme and story, which he'd first heard in high school right here in Eagle Valley, Texas—an eccentric English teacher hated by all the other kids (what had happened to
her?
Evaporated like the river, he supposed; like his mother; like a whole generation in town).

Besides, the Irish, historically oppressed, knew enough not to trust their deepest feelings—a relief to Griffin, for Texas demanded of its children firm allegiance to nation, state, family, church, and place—above all, place.

Never leave. That was the message in public prayers, pledges to the flag, football fight songs. And if you did: betrayal.

“You care more for some old Irish blatherer than you do for Mama, Daddy, and me,” Earl accused him regularly.

“Of course not,” Griffin said. But listen, he wanted to add, listen to a wise old blatherer, your distant countryman, a poet named Seamus Heaney: “the actual soil
/
… doesn't matter; the main thing is
/
An inner restitution.”

What does he mean? Listen: he's treading carefully (like Mama on the bridge),
mistrusting the ground beneath his feet
. The Long-Term is a lie, Big Brother. Nation, State, Glory. The river. The Irish know—the
poets
know—you're damn lucky if you can see the next step ahead of you.

“Yeah, well, just think about it, bro. What is it
I
do?” Earl challenged Griffin one night. Beneath his voice on the line, Griffin heard the hiss of long-distance emptiness. “I make paper so you can have something to scribble your goddamn wisdom on. Where would you be if I hadn't stayed put, huh?”

Brother, where does this bitterness come from? Griffin longed to ask. But he had to own up to the fact that probably he'd already grasped the answer.

There were betrayals, and then there were betrayals. He sat quietly beside his rental car. His first treason wasn't his embrace of poetry and the Emerald Isle. This much was certain. It was a small wooden bench in the Bottoms, near the paper plant. In the shadow of the bridge.

One night, Griffin's junior year in high school, he sat on the bench with Martha Henshaw, who, like Earl, had dropped out of school to work in the factory. Martha had just gotten off shift, and Griffin had skipped supper with his family to meet her.

They didn't speak. Her fingers brushed his lips. He turned soft as smoke inside. Clouds scattered over the river. Her hand opened on his chest. Together, dizzy above the water (water sipping clay, spinning leaves, drumming stone) they lifted like divers off a high board in a gold and sudden flutter.

“Griffin!”

The tug back down.

“Griffin, what the hell are you doing?” His brother's voice. Night. The bridge. The moon going green, behind the factory's processed clouds.

“Leave! Now!” Martha whispered to Griffin. He saw it in her eyes: she wished to rush onto the bridge and leap into the river. Instead, she turned to face Earl—her lover of nearly a year. Griffin, the pesky younger brother who'd never let the couple be, who from the first had quietly flirted with the irl, scrambled down the riverbank.

Leave
. Yes. And so Griffin had, by slow degrees—all the way to an imaginary Ireland. Bitterness? Well. But he and Earl had managed through the years. It's true they'd never trust each other again, not quite. They'd engage in heavy sparring on the phone. But at least they'd stayed in touch. And even when the phone calls stopped, it wasn't the sign of a rupture. Their father had died. Peacefully, in his sleep. Griffin had returned to Eagle Valley, briefly, for the funeral, eaten a meal with Earl and his wife, and after that, for the next ten or fifteen years, there simply wasn't a compelling reason for the two of them to talk. Earl sank into his natural muteness, and Griffin accepted that. No hard feelings, just … no feelings at all.

Martha? Long forgotten. Earl had married someone else and stayed married, apparently happily, for over twenty years. Griffin, who had left for college a year after the night on the bench, didn't even know what had happened to the lovely Miss Henshaw.

Lost water. Under the bridge.

Then last month, the call from Earl's wife, a quiet woman named Lori. The lung cancer, she whispered. An unexpected return. This time it was brutal and swift.

Squinting now in the afternoon light at the green haze beyond the bridge—a
reeking
haze, an odor like a bee sting, if stings left a residue, acrid, sharp, the smell of paper being made—Griffin wondered just how unexpected the illness was, if
this
was the air you breathed.

Even the river couldn't survive it.

He heard a soft slapping of hooves, and turned around: a young woman on a peanut-colored pony, galloping up what used to be the riverbank. She wore a dazzling white shirt. Griffin caught only a glimpse of her before she disappeared over a squat, craggy rise.

A strange music swelled above him in the girders of the bridge: a humming shriek of steel in a burst of wind, a knocking of wood, like an old man cleaning his pipe on a tabletop (one of Griffin's fondest memories was of watching such a man in a Derry pub one night, on his first and only trip to the north of Ireland five years ago. All evening, the man had told him ghost stories of people lost on the moors, in the bogs).

A grand and rolling wail from deep inside the bridge, the nails and bolts, as if the whole structure wanted to rise and slink away, having outlived its usefulness.

The actual soil doesn't matter. The main thing is an inner restitution
.

Shading his eyes, scanning the uppermost reaches of the steel frame, Griffin registered another white flash, this time on the bridge. Was the girl on the horse crossing the gulch? No. He lowered his gaze to pinpoint the movement. Too late. Whatever it was vanished over the bridge's far side.

He swore in just the glimpse he'd had it appeared to be (naked? did that account for the startling whiteness?) a person leaping into the sun-baked river-trace.

Griffin scrambled up a dusty bluff next to the pylon. Gingerly, he placed a foot on the bridge's sloping surface. The girders sang. He clung to the cable railing, the way his mother used to do while his father waited in the car. He made his way to the center of the structure where the figure he thought he had witnessed had jumped. He peered over the side. If a body had plunged into the packed sand below—an arrow piercing flesh, a knife falling from the sky (yes, by God, he knew his Irish poets!)—it would have left a small crater, not to say a rather gruesome corpse.

Nothing. The bridge swayed. Griffin's head spun. He sat against the singing steel, and felt the song in his bones.

All right, he consoled himself. This isn't so strange. Traces of memory, of
false
memories (the leap his mother never made to spite his father; Martha Henshaw's almost-hurtle into the river). The smoke of guilt? Absences. Hauntings. The vast desire for movement,
any
movement here, now that the water was missing.

He stood, steadied himself with the railing. All still, below. Open and empty. Gravel, rocks. Heat-gorged weeds.

In the moaning of wind in the steel, he caught an echo of Lori's voice as he had heard it two days ago on the phone. “I'll box up a few of Earl's things for you,” she had told Griffin, audibly swallowing tears. “You can take them with you after the funeral.”

“No no,” he'd said. “There's nothing I want.”

“I know his stuff ain't worth much—”

“That's not it.”

“—and you ain't got any use, at home, for silly trinkets from Texas—”

“Lori, I just don't want to trouble you, that's all.”

“Griffin. Sometimes some of us
like
to be troubled, you know? In spite of what it looks like.”

It was as though she'd bit his lower lip. Immediately, and ever since, he had swallowed Lori's words, carried them in his body—they had
cost
this quiet woman, he knew, just as the meaning behind them, as far as he could make it out, may have cost his brother, and they served as the final indictment of Griffin's betrayals over the years. A mute howling that would never cease, as lacerating as the wind on Shannon's waves.

Still, what would he do with a box of his brother's things? He looked up. Of course, he thought, shading his eyes against the sun. The white flash, the leaping figure: it wasn't a memory at all, nor a wistful haunting, a guilt-induced fantasy. The sun, burning itself up, made everything clear to him now. An illusion, but.

The future. That's what he'd seen. Surely, that's what the straining was all about in the flexing of the girders. The music he heard was the music of matter wrenching toward its end.

He would take the box and throw it off the bridge, at last freeing his brother from this god-awful place.

In spite of what it looks like
. He envied me, Griffin thought. Did he envy me? The phone calls, not bitterness and hate, but jealousy—and not just Martha, long ago. Nothing as small as that. What was it he'd said? “Where would you be if I hadn't stayed put?” How had Griffin missed the longing in those words? Surely his brother wished to cross the bridge. Why he hadn't done so, Griffin would never know.

It's the least I can give him now, he thought.

Just as he, in some way, kept me
here
.

Griffin glanced at his watch. He still had two hours before motel check-in and the call to Lori. The funeral was tomorrow morning. Tonight, there would be a small supper with Earl's old friends, none of whom Griffin knew. Afterward, maybe, Lori would give him the box. Would he bother to look inside? He figured he wouldn't.

He stepped carefully off the bridge and down the embankment beneath it, past brittle old rattlesnake skins, translucent as fingernails, scattered bird's nests, tiny animal bones whose peaceful arrangement in the sand belied the violence that must have left them there.
The actual doesn't matter
. His eyes prickled with sweat, with the factory's foul air. He walked to the place where the leaper would have landed. Here, according to his vision, the box, his brother's leavings, would land. Griffin stood there in the river's past track, on a small incline that cradled the future. He gazed up at the bridge's faded arms and tried to see the next few hours of his life.

I
t's a mistake when water collects out here. Rain, mist, dew—the instant moisture hits the ground, the land burns it up because water doesn't have a place in the desert's natural march, which is ever and always toward obscurity and filth. I'm not speaking ecologically. I'm talking about the soul.

It's the summer they killed Timothy McVeigh. I have an interest in this because Timothy McVeigh killed three of my friends when he blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. I was living in the city at the time, working as a bank clerk. Shortly after my friends' funerals (in one instance, we buried only an arm and a leg), I quit the job and left town.

The thing is, I used to see these hoodlums—kids fourteen, fifteen—milling around Fifth and Robinson after dusk, once the crowds bearing garlands for the rescue workers had gone. The boys would get as close as they could to the chain-link fence draped with teddy bears and rain-smeared notes to the dead. They'd point at the void where the building once stood and smirk and spit and laugh. Hoodlums? More like little Nazis, with shaved, pointy heads.

Once, I confronted two of them. I used to stroll near the Survivor Tree at night, staring at the absent building, the moonlit emptiness, the glass shards, fine as webbing, seared into the ground. “What the hell are you laughing at?” I asked the boys. It was a Wednesday evening in May, unseasonably chilly. The boys were lean, and they appeared to be frightened. They looked at me, looked at each other, and spat on the sidewalk. Simultaneously. A choreography of adolescent spite. Then one of them punched me in the kidney and they ran. As I doubled over in shock, I felt nothing. I swear, not a thing. A week later, I said good-bye to my remaining friends. I drove to the old cemetery south of town with its inexpensive lots, said “So long” to my parents' graves, and left OK City.