The Last Bridge (3 page)

“Cat!” Wendy came toward me and hooked her hand in the crook of my elbow.

“This is Willard.” She walked me to him and whispered, “Be nice.”

I put out my hand. He smiled and nodded as if he didn’t understand the gesture. I looked at Wendy.

“He’s hard of hearing. You have to speak up.” She raised her voice to demonstrate. “Not circumcised either,” she whispered in my ear. Willard looked like I was about to punish him. He was painfully bald. The kind that makes you wonder if the guy ever had any hair. His glasses were Coke-bottle thick with frames that covered most of his face. His blank expression evoked the name Dullard.

“Has anyone seen Dad?”

Wendy’s nonchalance caught me off guard. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that Dad would be a subject anyone would bring up around me. The mention of his name and the nearness of Jared and Wendy brought it all back. My body’s memory betrayed me first. The muscles in my thighs gave way, causing me to lose my balance. I grabbed the back of a chair.

“We were focusing on the arrangements for Mom,” Jared said. “Cat identified her and filled out the paperwork. I’m planning the service.”

“I’d like to know where Dad is.”

I went to the pantry and found a copy of last year’s Yellow Pages and handed it to her.

“You don’t even know what hospital he’s in?”

“No. The only person who knew was Mom, and she blew her head off before we could ask. Besides, there are only two hospitals, Mercy and Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Pick one.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.” She rolled her eyes and passed the directory to Willard and shouted, in what I presumed was his good ear, “Look for hospital … HOS-PEE-TALL … H-O-S … here.” She opened her fake Chanel bag and took out a pen and grabbed the lilac stationery off the table. Jared pulled it out of her hands.

“What?”

“That’s Mom’s suicide note,” Jared said.

“Oh … sorry,” she said, as if we had told her she was stepping on a dog’s tail. “Do you have something else?”

“Here,” I said. I ripped a loose piece of wallpaper off the wall and handed it to her.

Wendy and Willard left for the hospital later that afternoon. Wendy had been able to ascertain from the nurse on duty that my father was still in a coma. The nurse said that it didn’t look too promising.

I was relieved. Although he had been dead to me for years, part of me knew he was still alive and haunting the lives of anyone who cared about him. It was a bitter irony that he survived my mother, especially since no one thought he would live as long as he did. He was a heavyset man with a weakness for drinking and smoking. That combination, along with his lethal temper, made many people think he was living on borrowed time. Not me. I believed he would outlive all of us. Monsters always do.

Wendy was Dad’s favorite. He called her his princess and showered her with gifts whenever he went to town. She forgave his outbursts and quickly forgot how afraid she was of him when presented with a new dress or pair of shoes. I suppose Wendy understood Dad in a way the rest of us didn’t. Or perhaps it was Dad who understood that giving to Wendy bought her acceptance.

I wasn’t sure if there was anything Dad could do to turn Wendy
away. Even after he cut off the tip of my mother’s finger, she defended his right to be angry. (I’m guessing the charm bracelet he bought her didn’t hurt either.) The night he did it we lay in bed while she told me I could never understand how hard it had been for someone of Dad’s intelligence to end up on this farm. She said he was like the lion that had the thorn in his paw in the story my mother used to tell us. She said he just needed someone to take it out and he wouldn’t be so angry anymore. I asked her why she didn’t do it. She said it was up to Mom to keep him happy. A lion with a thorn in its paw—he was a lot more than that.

While Wendy and Willard visited my father, Jared went out to make last-minute preparations for the service. He picked up deli platters and beer in case people stopped by afterward. He asked me to go with him, as he was planning on taking a drive around town to see how much it had changed. I told him I needed to rest. I put on my coat, grabbed a pack of cigarettes, and headed down toward the lake.

We called the huge pond on our property “the lake.” I think we did it because it irritated Dad and Wendy so much. “It’s not a lake,” they’d shout. We knew it wasn’t a lake; in fact, it was barely a pond. As far as I could tell nothing ever lived in it. There were no ducks, no fish, no beavers, just algae and cloudy water. During the hot days of summer, Jared and my mother would go in to cool off. I never waded in; I didn’t like the feel of the mud squishing between my toes. I also didn’t know how to swim and was deathly afraid of drowning. I did like to sit at the edge and stare out onto the vast horizon of our property.

Now, looking out, I was struck by how familiar everything felt. Like the house, the yard was an extension of my mother. It was filled with her touches, from the long clothesline that ran the width of the driveway to the carefully pruned rosebushes along the back of the house. This mother, the one who gardened and tended and threw outdoor parties for us when we were kids, was the one I wanted to remember. This was the twenty-six-year-old woman who
wore capri pants with a matching halter top that she copied from a picture she saw in a magazine. “I made this for your party,” she said days before I celebrated my fifth birthday in high Rucker style. “We’ll invite everyone from your class, so no one feels left out,” she said from behind her sewing machine. And we did. When the day arrived, she moved around the yard giving out prizes to all of my friends from school. “This one is for you.” She squatted down to be eye level with my playmates. “Thank you, Mrs. Rucker,” they replied as my mother smiled a beautiful, brilliant, happy-to-be-alive smile that made everyone giggle. She made everything for that party, from the decorations down to the cake we decorated together. We covered it with strawberries and good wishes for me. She even made me a crown so I could be a princess for the day. At the end of the party, we stood together on the front porch holding hands and waving good-bye to everyone. She lifted me into her arms and hugged me. I could feel her warm breath on my neck tickling me. She smelled of coffee and cigarettes and White Shoulders perfume. “I love you,” I whispered in her ear. It was the last time I said it. We laughed as she sang, “You smell like a monkey, and you act like one too,” into my ear. She was my good mother. She was not the woman who closed the bedroom door when my father went roaming. Not the one who let me go and never tried to find me. Not the one lying half-faced and naked on a metal slab.

He isn’t who you think he is …
.

It was getting dark and a cold wind was rolling up the hill. I could see the lights in the house come on and Willard’s car in the drive. I got up and brushed the cold mud from my pants, feeling the chill and desperately craving a drink.

I snuck to my car without getting their attention. I saw Wendy through the kitchen window as I pulled out of the driveway. Her hands were covered in Mom’s Playtex Living gloves as she scrubbed down the windowsill while Willard pulled masking tape off the cupboards. Apparently the cleanup that was done did not meet with her approval.

I headed out Connor’s Road to Walt’s Tavern. I figured it was far enough out of town that I wouldn’t run into anyone I used to know. Just to be safe, though, I took a booth in the back and sat with my back to the door. After several beers I was beginning to feel the numbness I had been longing for all day.

“So … what brings you to these parts?” a ratty-haired fool of a man asked, as he leaned his stinking face into mine.

“Get the fuck away from me,” I said, loudly but slow enough for him to understand.

“Cripes … can’t a guy buy a lady a drink?”

“Get lost.”

The jukebox was playing some sappy half-country half-rock song with lyrics like “I’m gonna love you forever.” Yeah, right. There was a couple snuggling up on the dance floor groping each other as they moved back and forth to some alien rhythm. The girl couldn’t have been more than eighteen while the guy must have been in his forties. In spite of the age difference, they both looked old. In fact, everybody in the bar looked old and tired, including me. The only difference between them and the rest of us was that they looked old and tired and happy. Maybe their happiness had something to do with the fact that she had her hand on his dick.

“That pitcher for sharing?”

I looked up at the man who was blocking my view of the hand-on-dick dancers. The face was familiar but not recognizable until I saw the silver pen in his shirt pocket. I signed my mother’s papers with it. It was Andrew Reilly, County Coroner.

“Hands that touch dead bodies do not come near my beer,” I said.

He smiled a car salesman kind of smile and laughed awkwardly. “You’re joking, right?” he said as he sat down on the bench across from me.

“No,” I responded, looking back at the dancers. The guy’s fly was unzipped and her hand was lost in his pants. He was looking
younger every second. The coroner ordered a beer from the waitress.

“So, uh … Hal tells me you guys went to school together.”

“Yup,” I said, not diverting my attention from the impromptu peep show on the dance floor. He looked over at the dancers and then back at me watching them and smiled.

“That’s some dance move,” he said.

I stared at him and tried to figure out if he was trying to be funny. I decided I needed more beer.

We sat in silence as I watched chunks of frost slide slowly off the handle of his beer mug. I felt his eyes on me. I didn’t remember anything about him except his voice and that pen. I tried to remember what he looked like, not for any other reason than to be able to describe him in detail in case something happened to me. It was a little trick I picked up along the way.

“I don’t think I know your real name,” he said, finally breaking a silence I was prepared to endure for much longer.

Was he joking? He didn’t look like he was. “You didn’t notice my name on any of the paperwork? What about next of kin, what—”

“Is your point?” he interrupted.

“The point is you know my name is Alex … Alex Rucker. So why are you playing this stupid game with me?”

He sat there stunned, shaking his head. “I wasn’t sure if you were Wendy or Alex. It was busy today; I didn’t check the paperwork that closely. I had to process the body.”

I lifted my mug. “Well, here’s to processing.”

He took a reluctant sip while I finished what was left of my beer and poured the last of the pitcher. “People call me Cat.”

“Well, Alex,” he said as he finished his beer, “I’m sorry about your mother. She was a wonderful woman.” He stood up and put on his coat.

“You knew her?” I said.

“Yeah … we used to run into each other at the park after church. She would go there on Sundays to watch her grandson. I would go to read and to get some sun on my face. You know, being in my business …”

“I’m sorry, but did you say her grandson?”

“Yeah …”

“My mother has no grandchildren. You must be thinking of someone else.”

“Oh …” He hesitated and thought for a moment.

I felt dizzy but tried to concentrate.

“On Sundays she watched the kids climb that twisted apple tree with such interest that I assumed—”

“Nope. No grandchildren.” That wasn’t completely true. I didn’t know for sure that Jared or Wendy had no kids. I reached into my pocket and threw a couple of singles on the table and struggled out of the booth. I felt a wave of nausea pass through me and lost my balance. The coroner put his arm out to steady me and out of instinct I flinched.

“Thanks,” I said, more embarrassed at flinching than at almost passing out. He locked his arm under mine and helped me to the door.

“Are you okay getting home?”

I pulled away and grabbed the keys out of my pocket. “I’m fine,” I said, walking toward my car.

“I’ll follow. Just to make sure.”

“That’s not necessary.” I was perfectly prepared to lecture him on my infamous capacity for drinking and driving.

“I’m afraid it is …. I don’t need the business.”

He pulled behind me and waved when I looked in the rearview mirror.

I pushed in the car lighter and for a moment considered smoking two cigarettes at the same time.

T
HE ALARM WENT
off at seven in my old bedroom. Wendy shouted at Willard to turn it off. I was asleep in my father’s La-Z-Boy by the window in my parents’ bedroom. I wasn’t picky about where I slept as long as I’d had enough to drink to pass out.

Jared was rustling in the kitchen. I could hear his sure-to-be-polished dress shoes traversing the floorboards as he put coffee on and prepared for the service. The white winter sun was warm on my face. Dust fairies danced around the orange-and-green afghan at the foot of the bed.

Did she know she was making her bed for the last time?

I pushed the footrest down on the chair and rolled to a stand. My legs, as usual, felt hollow and unsure of whether or not they wanted to carry me for the day. My head soon followed; why stay upright when you could be resting on a pillow? I battled my body on a daily basis. Most days it won, and I crawled back to wherever I came from—the bed, the floor. Today I rallied the troops: I asked the legs to stand, the head to focus, and the heart to stay hidden.

I dressed slowly, putting on an old black cocktail dress I bought a couple of years ago to impress a club owner who could not be impressed. I forgot I had it until Ruth called. The dress was plain and fell above my knee, with a scoop neck and short sleeves. When I last wore it, the fit was snug against my body, showing off my “assets,” as my stripper friends call them. Now the dress was loose in all the
places it should be tight, and communicated “wasting away” more than “come fuck me.”

I hatched my panty hose from their egg-shaped home. Off-black—do the makers of cheap stockings have something against solid black? Even people who buy panty hose at Wal-Mart like real black. A line called “Funeral Black” resting in a plastic coffin would do just fine.