Mortality Bridge (52 page)

The mason jar is gone. How could it not be here, considering what it held? Could Jemma not have made the crossing? Leached into the world, and everything for nothing?

He clenches his fists and glares at the sky. The sun bright, the cloudless sky blue enough to break his heart.

He looks away. He has awakened by the side of a paved road that cuts straight and long across a bright and featureless plain that looks like lower desert.

There is no wreckage. No sign of Nikodemus. No creek no gorge no mountain road. No mountain.

In the distance straight ahead something else lies by the road. Niko hoods his eyes and peers. No. It’s much too large to be a jar.

He turns to see what lies behind him and he staggers backward as if struck. Behind him is nothing. Utter Nothing.

Niko spins back around and clamps his hands against his head and shuts his eyes. After ten deep measured breaths he opens them again. Okay. All right.

He begins to walk toward the only feature on this sundrenched plain. The Nothingness keeps pace behind him. His progress destroys what he leaves behind. There is no going back.

HALF AN HOUR later Niko hears tremendous roaring in the sky. He looks up to see a vintage Old American 260 steam locomotive plunge chuffing from a Magritte cloud and hurtle overhead, pulling half a dozen passenger cars. It looks like the tourist train Niko and Van rode around Stone Mountain Georgia when he was seven years old. Confederate flags and rubber tomahawks. A hokey staged train robbery that had terrified the two boys nonetheless.

The blast of horn cuts off abruptly as the locomotive rushes into sudden Nothing, followed by the passenger cars and the caboose. Then the train is gone and leaves behind an echo of its whistle on the plain, a line of black smoke, a faint smell of hot iron and grease, the fleeting image of a darkhaired boy in the caboose. Waving something that might have been a tomahawk.

Again the plain is silent still. Niko waits a while but nothing else happens so he resumes his walk.

Eventually the thing in the distance begins to look like someone in a hammock. Though what the hammock is lashed to is still too far away to tell. Behind it a small square structure.

He stops again at a familiar sound. He’s still trying to place it when a mile away across the plain a boy in cutoffs and a broad-striped shirt comes pedaling a red and white Spyder bike with a banana seat and a high sissy bar. Apehanger handlebars, no gears, pedal brake. The boy leans forward into the wind his moving makes. A white bathtowel safety-pinned around his neck flaps behind him.

Niko stares. The boy bikes by and waves and grins as only boys in summer can.

Niko finds his voice and calls out Van? Van?

The pedals turn to make a rhythmic sound that he remembers well because it’s he who banged the bike into a curb and bent the pedal down into the trouserguard.

The darkhaired boy does not slow down as he speeds by. The sound cuts off as the bike rides off the edge of existence. Coming out of memory and passing into memory. Niko’s gaze turns to follow it but he closes his eyes because the alien Nothing interferes with something in his brain.

Now the distant barking of a dog. Soon a Rottweiler runs toward him across the plain, trailing gleaming drool and flapping a long pink tongue.

“Rufus?” The name escapes his lips as the memory blossoms. “Hey Rufus boy.” Niko squats and calls to the dog and claps his hands. Remembering how Rufus would put his paws on your shoulders and press you down until he stood on top of you licking your face. The day one of his elementary school teachers drove by and saw this and became hysterical and pulled over and got out of her car screaming Get off him, get off him, thinking Niko was being attacked. Dad had thought it was the funniest damned thing.

Rufus had been hit by a car while mating in the middle of the street with a collie from the neighborhood. Dad and Niko had bundled his broken gasping body in a blanket they would later throw away, and driven him to the vet to be put to sleep.

Rufus runs past Niko happy as a dog can be. His bark cuts off as he follows the boy and the bicycle into Nothing, leaving behind only a faint and fading echo in the air to indicate he was ever there at all. Niko’s heart breaks just a little more.

Gone.

THE PERSON IN the hammock is reading a book. Whether the person is a man or a woman is still too far to tell.

AHEAD OF NIKO now a cheery carhorn toots. He leaps out of the way as a white Ford Fairlane races by. Greenlettered Florida plates, a man and a woman in the front seat, two boys in the back. The man dark and bearded and smoking. Niko knows they’re Lucky Strikes. The woman thin and pretty in a bright floral print sundress. The car gives a saucy wiggle and the woman raises a hand to wave as the car sounds off its cheerful toot

and gone.

Alone again upon the desert floor. Dad had bought that Fairlane new on credit. He had finally gotten promoted to supervisor at the bottling plant and he surprised his family with the car by just driving up in it one day and taking them for a ride all over St. Petersburg. Mom asking Can we afford this? Niko and Van used to pretend to drive it in the carport and Dad would get pissed when he started it up and the wipers came on and the turn signals blinked and the radio screamed static.

So that’s the way it’s going to be.

Niko squints and shifts the mason jar to his other hand to hood his eyes and peer at the reclining figure reading in the hammock in the distance. He resumes his walk. He doesn’t get four paces before he stops.

He just shifted the—

He raises it and sunlight glints from glass contours. It slickens with his sudden sweat as he turns it in his trembling hands. There is no hairline crack. No missing triangle of glass. The lid is tight, the glass clean, the blacktipped feather floats. He knows if he could set it in the shade the jar would glow cool green.

Niko presses the jar against his face. He breathes in deeply but smells nothing. It’s sealed tight. Its beehive energy against his cheek. He shuts his eyes.

THE STRAT HAD cut a groove across his thigh and the headphones round his neck were choking him. Graying dawn outside the little bedroom studio. The track still didn’t feel right and he knew he was going to try again rather than sleep and lose the impetus that drove him here.

At his knee the tube Marshall hummed like a contented cat.

Niko set down the Strat and rewound the Akai and cracked his knuckles and then picked up the guitar once more to try and figure out the thing it wanted from him, the feeling within that wanted out.

But before he plunged back into that uncharted wood he glanced up. Across from him she curled asleep and covered by a faded threadbare blanket with a thunderbird design. And she was not beautiful asleep. Her expression slack and not angelic. The very ordinariness of it so beautiful he felt a yearning to be something more than he was or could be. And as good a player as he was, he knew as he turned on the reel to reel and hugged the Fender once again that nothing he composed would ever be as beautiful as her ordinary sleep.

Watching her he played the music of her sleeping. And by surrendering made something beautiful.

NIKO LOWERS THE jar and opens his eyes. He sniffs and looks around. “Okay,” he tells the desolate plain. “All right.” He lowers the jar to the road to wipe his palms against his jeans then wipes his cheeks. Get it together bud.

When he feels as ready as he’s ever going to be he bends to pick up the mason jar that has been returned to him. Beside it now is a milky plastic bubble. A container from a bubblegum machine. He holds it up against the sun and joggles it and sees that it contains a little rubber monster. Niko remembers pestering his grandmother on a visit to the A&P, Can I have a quarter for the machine, just a quarter, I’ll get a monster. She’d rolled her eyes and acted exasperated but Niko knew she was delighted to give him a quarter. And out of the milky bubble had come this little rubber monster with googly eyes and a silly grin and long ropy quivering tentacles. Niko remembers it clearly. Remembers imagining the voice he thought the monster would have if it could speak.

He glances from the little rubber monster in its milky plastic bubble to the feather floating in its mason jar and back again. And feels a sudden stab of hope.

Hello Nikodemus, Niko whispers.

TALISMANS IN HAND. The road ahead his unmapped future. Unraveling history and rewriting myth with every step. We are ready for the coda now.

THERE IS NO hammock.

WHEN NIKO IS ten yards away the reclining stranger dogears a page in the book and stands. The hammock stands with him quivers a moment as if shrugging itself and then unfolds. Tattered feathers ruffle in the light hot breeze.

“Howdy,” says the angel. The accent broad, the vowels flattened. Niko guesses East Texas. The angel is tall and lean with long straight thin blond hair and a long and fine planed face. The voice is pleasant, a whiskey-rough tenor. His eyes are Parrish blue. He seems to be male though he is more pretty than handsome. Though he is beautiful his wings are frayed and patchy, mottled and kind of beatup looking. They vibrate behind him like tense muscles.

The structure behind the angel is a rundown greasy spoon truckstop currently untenanted but with badly lettered neon sign. PETE’S.

“Afternoon,” says Niko.

Niko and the angel regard one another as the wind scatters memories across the landscape of his life.

“Good book?” Niko nods at the paperback in the angel’s alabaster hand. Long and slim like the rest of him, that hand would be at home on a Rodin sculpture, a concert pianist, an angel.

The angel looks at the book as if just remembering it. His sudden blush is startling. “Louis L’Amour. Got a weakness for em.”

Niko nods. “Well I don’t want to keep you from your reading.” He makes as if to continue walking but the angel blocks his path.

“Ah ah. Fraid not, old son. Not while I’m standin here.”

Niko looks thoughtful. He ought to be sweating in the sun but he isn’t. “That’s the way it is?”

Worn feathers rustle: the angel shrugs. “Folks familiar with the Good Book tend to be a mite less surprised than them that aint.”

“I’ve read it.” Niko smiles. “Except the begats. I’ll say hi to Jacob for you when I get where I’m going.”

Parrish blue meets placid brown and the angel smiles back. “Tough hombre, old Jake. Good reverse sitout on him. Lot biggern you too.”

Niko shrugs. All these gestures movements of a dance.

The angel’s having himself a good old time. “Well sir, we can flap our jaws all day long but I just dont see the point, do you?”

“I suppose not.”

The angel nods. “Guess that aint corn mash youre totin in that jelly jar.”

Niko turns the mason jar in his hands. “Guess not,” he says, liking the angel very much.

The angel looks wistful. “Aint had me no mash in—well that dont matter neither does it?” He brushes his pale ivory palms.

“Youll be wantin to put that and your personals down somewheres out the way. Things are liable to get kinda—” he cracks bony knuckles and leers like a hyena “—broke.”

“Okay.” Niko bends to set down the jar and the gum machine bubble.

“Off the road, son. We get all kinda traffic here.”

Niko looks around the desolate plain. Looks back to the waiting angel. “Where exactly is here, if you don’t mind my asking.”

Another rustling shrug. “Depends. Word like here dont really figure. Not the way you mean. Could be somewhere not a place at all but a bunch a stuff stands for something else.” His sidelong grin is sly. “Could be all this is happenin in your head in a hunk a metal at the bottom of a ditch while your poor old bodys callin closing time.”

“Could be,” Niko says, “I’m nodding off in my living room with an empty needle on the floor beside me and none of this is real at all. Never has been.”

“Ive studied that notion too.” Now the angel’s grin shows yellowed smoker’s teeth. “But you get a piece a me, son, you aint gonna wonder whats real and what aint. These battered wings still kick up dust.” The mass of feathers rushes from behind the angel to clap in front. A dust devil whirls before him and evaporates.

Niko gently sets the jar and the gum machine bubble a safe distance from the road and from the angel. He gives both a final lingering touch and asks them for whatever blessing they can give and then reluctantly he turns away. He cracks his knuckles and touches his toes and works his head from side to side to loosen up his neck. As he stretches he figures that even in his prime, uninjured and in tiptop shape, he’d have his work cut out for him with this good old boy watching him with patent amusement.

“You bout ready there champ?” the angel calls.

Niko nods. Determined and bemused at how he’s come to be once more in this position. He heads toward the angel and tries to ignore the jackhammering of his heart. He surprises himself by saying, “Can I ask you something?”

The angel straightens from his fighting stance. “You sure dont look like the kind that stalls. But fire away, son.”

“This may be more a favor than a question.”

“Cant make you no promises, but lets hear er.”

Niko takes a deep and only slightly shaky breath. “In my wallet there’s a driver’s license. Taped to the back of it is an obolus. An old Greek coin.”

The angel’s brow furrows. “You wanna aim for the bullseye there, amigo?”

Niko glances back at the distant jar gleaming in the pleasant afternoon sun. “It’s for you. I mean if you. If I don’t.” He looks back again at the angel, surprised how hard this is to say. “It’s a tradition,” he tries again, “that you pay the ferryman when you. When.”

The angel stands up straight and brightens as he understands what Niko’s asking. “Oh hey, dont you worry bout a thing there. Thats all took care of. You did your job just fine and dandy. Tell the truth I won a good bet offa you.”

Niko purses his lips. Again he looks at the jar and the milky bubble beside it. “They’re okay?”

The angel grins. “Heck yeah, theyre fine. The both of em.” And at last the burden shifts.