Under the Bridge (13 page)

“Let's get it!” Tim replied.

Ernestine, Erna to her friends, then turned her car around and drove
back to the schoolhouse and the picket fence. “As bizarre as it may seem,” she recalls, “the jacket was gone.”

Staring at the fence, Tim and Erna turned amateur detectives. “There was that woman jogging by,” Tim said. “I bet she took it.”

“You think so?” Erna said, recalling the trim blonde jogger.

“Go, get her, Erna! Go!”

In pursuit now, Erna drove over the bridge while Tim looked out through her window, searching for the jogger. “There she is; she's on the trail.” Erna parked the car hastily, and she and Tim went running down the hill to the jogging trail by the Gorge. Sure enough, the blonde jogger had the Adidas jacket tucked under her arm.

“I believe that jacket belongs to a friend of mine!” Erna said. Tim glared at the woman in her velour tracksuit.

Confronted by the two, the woman did not put up a fight. She merely hurled the jacket onto the wet ground, declared, “I was going to give it to the Salvation Army anyway,” and then she continued to jog briskly.

Erna placed the jacket in the backseat of the car, and as she did so she noticed no blood. Erna and Tim had a good laugh about the jogger lady. (“I was going to give it to the Salvation Army!” Tim mimicked. “Yeah,
right!”)
Neither Erna nor Tim knew of the earlier route of the coveted coat. They did not know it belonged once to a boy named Jack Batley, who slept in the child's playhouse on the back lawn of his mother's home near the Tillicum Mall. They could not have known the jacket never belonged to Robby, but to this boy—described as “rat faced”—but nonetheless loved so fiercely by Dusty and Reena. The jacket itself was common and unexceptional, and yet Dusty, seeing it on Reena last night, had punched harder, punched so hard she'd bruised her knuckles. The jacket reminded her of the brief love she'd known and lost so suddenly, as if Jack's love could be stolen like Josephine's notebook, stolen rather than merely never felt or true. Erna knew none of this, knew only that she had seized the jacket back from that jogger lady, and she and Tim drove with their new possession away from the schoolhouse.

At Robbin's Donuts, Erna purchased coffee, and she waited in line in front of two police officers, but she did not hear their conversation. “Quiet night, last night,” Basanti remarked, and Hodginson thought it was unusual as well, because usually on a Friday night, in this part of
town, they received what they called “youth complaints” up until around 2:00
A.M.
Yes, the quiet night was unusual, Hodginson thought, and perhaps he remembered two pretty young girls who smiled at him as they headed away from the dense and vivid green field. “Have a safe night,” he'd said to the two young girls. They'd smiled at him then, eyes shining, as if enlivened by the shimmering spectacle of a starship falling to their part of the world, or perhaps, just merely, as Syreeta said, naive and carefree.

Erna forgot about the coat in the backseat of her car, and she went about her day, selling Wonder Bread and eggs and frozen steaks. In the evening, she cooked herself a meal of pork chops and green beans and settled down to watch the nightly news.

The television news reported neither the fight under the bridge nor a diary thrown into the water. Erna only remembered her discovery, suddenly, and thought, “Robby will be so happy to have his coat returned.” She went out to the car to get it, looking up at the sky, but of course, the strange lights the paper described (“a blaze of red and gold trailing through the sky”) were no longer on display. The jacket was still very damp. Erna thought this was strange, for it had been in her car all day and was waterproof, so why was it still damp as she lifted it from the backseat in her car?

When she was in the laundry room, as she lifted the coat toward the machine, she saw blood. There was blood on the inside of the sleeves. There was blood on the white stripes. There was blood on the back of the coat. There was blood everywhere on the coat she had found hanging on the white picket fence by the old antique white schoolhouse.

“Whoever stole Robby's jacket must have got in some fisticuffs!”

She shook her head and washed the coat in cold water with a teaspoon of bleach. She washed away all the blood and then hung the jacket on a brown wood rack, where she would find it in the morning, clean and dry.

T
HE GIRL WAS
too excitable. That was one reason he didn't believe her.

She wore a small gold stud in her nose. He'd never met her before.

Alan, a Filipino boy, was walking away from the house where he lived with his grandmother. He was at the bus stop when this girl came out of nowhere, this girl he'd never met before.

She's kind of cute, he thought, with that gold stud in her nose and her brown hair and brown eyes. He wasn't all that confident, being only fifteen and shy, but since this girl, whom he didn't even know, just stopped him right on the corner of Eltham Road and Adderly Place, he thought he would try his luck. “I was trying to hit on her,” he would later recall.

The girl's hair was damp, and the day's rain was on her shoulders as well. He didn't really notice the rain as he watched her mouth and her lips and the way she talked so fast as all girls talked—really fast—and yet she talked faster than any other girl he had talked to before. It was as if she wanted not only to talk, but to somehow be listened to so suddenly and immediately, as if the listener might soon be invisible, leaving her there with a story unheard. He caught phrases. Seriously. Something about being part Spanish. Or part Native. Something about her brother. He was trying to think of how to hit on her on that Saturday, but she just talked so fast. The stud in her nostril was gold and reminded him of a girl at his school who wore a ring in her nose, like a bull.

Her run-on sentence went like this:

“I got in a fight with a girl and I beat up a girl and she was beat up so bad she didn't even know who she was anymore. She was beat up some more. We beat her up some more. I offered to walk her home. She was beat up more. She was beat up really bad. And now she's dead.”

“I'm sure whoever you beat up is not dead,” Alan said.

Another fast sentence, so fast:

“No, she is dead because her head was under the water and all this red
stuff floated up and it was bubbly and it came from her and it was around both of us like it was around me this red stuff and then she floated to the top. I saw her float. I saw it but there were other people there too, it wasn't just me, other people helped kill her.”

A lot of lies, he thought. It was all a lot of lies. He caught the phrases.
Floated to the top. No, she is dead. I saw her float. Other people helped kill her.
But he couldn't really believe that. How could you believe it was true? “It just didn't seem real,” Alan would say later, adding that he thought the girl's story of killing was just “some kind of fantasy.”

So little attention had he given to her that he didn't even listen to her name. “Kelly, Jennifer, don't ask me. Something. Ah. Sarah. I don't know. I didn't pay attention to her. I thought she was lying,” he would later unhelpfully volunteer when telling the police about the brown-haired girl. “I don't remember that much about her, and I don't remember her name.”

There was a little gold stud in the brown-haired girl's nose. She walked away from him down toward the long concrete valley of the Tillicum Mall. A lot of lies. All that stuff she'd said so quick, like rat-a-tat-tat, her rapid-fire biography: I'm part Spanish, she said. No, I'm part Native. I have a brother and he drives a really nice Monte Carlo.

•   •   •

Dusty and Josephine took the bus downtown, where they were less likely to be recognized. No one paid attention to them as they moved into an alley downtown, for they seemed possessed of neither beauty nor menace. Their actions were completely unobserved.

Nevertheless, they still moved furtively. In the slim and secret alley, they stood now near a rusted green Dumpster. Dusty kept watch while Josephine removed the black platform shoes from her Guess bag. She gripped the shoes, and her hands were so delicate and pale, and Reena's shoes were clumsy and heavy and dark. She clenched the shoes and then tossed them upward, one and then the other. The shoes fell into the Dumpster, covered in ashes, leaves, and debris.

W
ARREN HEARD
the sound of falling water.

He stood outside the door. Syreeta poked her head out of the shower, and he gazed up at her clean skin and the still hidden shape of her naked body. Her long hair draped across her bare shoulders, and her shoulders shone from the water.

“I heard you kicked a girl in the head last night,” she said, reproachfully.

He stared at the tiles, and she stepped out of the shower, ignoring him. She wrapped herself in a towel.

“Who told you that?”

“Tara.”

“Tara should keep her mouth shut,” he said.

“Well, why'd you do it?”

“I shouldn't have done it,” he said, still looking at the floor.

From the room downstairs, she could hear the low rumble of the television and Marissa's familiar giggle.

“So why did you do it then?”

“I don't know,” he said, and he looked very ashamed, but she still was angry, and turned her back to him, and walked away, into her bedroom.

She took a long time dressing. She wasn't quite sure why. She tried on her jeans, and then changed into her khaki pants, which were flared slightly. She parted her hair in the middle, pulled it into a ponytail.

When she went downstairs, she moved toward Marissa, who lay on the pale blue couch. Dimitri was sitting near the screen, cross-legged, enraptured by the American superstars throwing around a basketball.

“Are you feeling better?” Warren asked her, but she ignored him still, and looked toward Marissa. She was not sure why she did this, only that she did look at Marissa then, and she noticed how Marissa's face seemed so impossibly tiny, like a little treasure you would want to hold on to forever.

Several minutes went by before Warren dared to speak to her again, and when he spoke, it was only with a request for her to do some laundry.

He did not tell her that he was afraid to ask Grace to do his laundry. He had not yet found a place to live, but he knew he must leave by December, and he wanted to be a good guest and not bother her with chores. He did not tell Syreeta he had no money for the washing machines. Though his father said money was on the way, he had not yet received an envelope from California. It was pretty embarrassing to tell your girlfriend you didn't even have twelve quarters to your name, like he was a scrub, or a grub, or whatever, a guy with no money.

Though he did not tell her this, she knew instinctively the reasons behind his request, and so without asking for reasons, she lifted his laundry bag and headed downstairs to the washing machine. His Mossimo sweater was inside, along with his white jeans. He'd once asked her to bleach the sweater, weeks before. He did not like the cream color, he'd said, and she knew he liked white, and the sweater was not white. It was cream or beige or ivory.

Syreeta did not know how to use the washing machine, and her mother was not home.

She went back upstairs to ask Marissa for help, but Dimitri leaped off the couch, and he loped across the floor, swinging his left arm, as if in imitation of the rangy and determined basketball players. “I'll show you how,” he said confidently.

In the basement, Dimitri turned the dials, and Syreeta dumped out the clothes. She felt sad for Warren suddenly. He only had these three pairs of white pants. He had neither mother nor father to provide him with new clothes, to clean his clothes, to just take care of him.

Because she was half-blind, she did not see the blood right away.

She was holding his pants in her hands, while Dimitri turned the dials and unscrewed the top of the bleach, and she saw suddenly the blood. Two drops of blood observed to be “the size of a quarter.” She pushed the clean hair from her face and remembered the phone call the night before. What had he said? Something about a fight. He'd said something about how he was walking with Kelly Ellard and some Native guy yelled at Kelly, and he'd gotten in a fight with the guy. She remembered this, and just then, Dimitri dumped the bleach into the washing machine, and she let the pants fall into the water that was rising
up to her hands. She looked down, for a brief second, and saw everything before her, in the pure, clean water, turning about so rapidly.

•   •   •

On Saturday, Reena's uncle Raj rose, took a long bath, and hoped his legs would be steady as he climbed over the porcelain border. He planned to take Reena shopping because she'd said yesterday that she wanted to buy a Winnie the Pooh teddy bear as a gift for a little girl she babysat.

“Reena never came home last night,” Suman said, when he arrived at Reena's home.

Suman seemed more frightened than angry, and she held on to a notebook she'd found in Reena's bedroom. The notebook belonged to Josephine and was full of phone numbers. Suman thought she would try to call some of the people in the notebook and see if they knew where Reena was. “I'm worried,” Suman said. “She called here around 10:30 and spoke to Aman. She was just at the Mac's and she said she was on her way home.”

“The Mac's by the bridge?”

Suman nodded. Raj knew of Reena's wanderings, and yet she
always
called him. He was the one she called. When she was at Kiwanis, she called him for a ride. When she had to meet her counselor, she called him, and he thought it strange she had not called to tell him she wouldn't be shopping after all. This wasn't like her.