The Incident on the Bridge (34 page)

T
ed won't let Fen row. He feels that, as the guy, he should row, but she refuses to trade places with him. “Where are we going?” he asks her.

“We have to find him.”

Carl had told him not to mention the boot, but maybe he should. She said Jerome's dog bit a guy who was living in the bushes by the bridge. A homeless guy who was acting weird and had a news clipping about Thisbe in his camp.

“The police are coming,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “I called them.”

“So did I.”

“Really?”

They pass the first row of tethered sailboats, and she turns the dinghy to row them down a sort of water street in the dark. The boats they pass are empty and cold, which he didn't expect. He'd always thought, when he looked down from the bridge, that they would all have families living on them, that everything would be happening there as in a campground, where you made small dinners on a tiny grill and maybe watched old-fashioned TV with your old-fashioned mutt and lay down in a hammock and were very happy. But the boats have a permanent sense of loneliness about them and a cold, mucous-thick smell of brine. Moonlight licks at the metal edges and masts. It scallops the water they cut through like silk. Ted has her back to where they're going and that strikes him, suddenly, as bad planning in the design of rowboats. Again he says she should let him row and she says they'll tip over and he remembers, with shame, how badly he sailed.

At the far end of the water street, a silhouette begins to move, and a wake begins to flow outward, licked by the same moonlight, lifting each moored sailboat and each slime-edged mooring ball. Ted turns to see the dark mass, which is boat-shaped, and she says to Fen, “That could be him!” She rows harder and keeps turning her head.

“This is too freaking slow!” she says.

She stops where a string of white Christmas lights has been draped over what he thinks is the cabin-house of a newish boat.
Broker,
says the name on the side, but he misreads it first as
Broken.
Plants of some kind are growing in pots and their shape in the dark is like Spanish moss. Ted lunges and grabs hold of the ladder on the boat's side and Fen feels that he's stuck in the getaway car of a person who's just committed a minor crime and may be about to commit major ones.

“Can you still see that boat?” she asks.

He hears
boot
at first. He starts to shake his head, but she says, “Is it still going?” and points, and he sees the light on the boat that's chugging away from them. “Yeah.”

Ted climbs the ladder and says, “We have to follow him.”

“Whose boat is this?” he asks.

She doesn't answer him, just calls, “Gretchen? Are you home?”

No one answers, and when Ted opens the unlocked door to the cabin, birdcages are the first thing they see and smell. In one cage, a white parrot screeches. The other cage is empty and the door is ajar.

“Where's Rogaine?” Ted asks the bird. “Or are
you
Rogaine? Where is Pick Your Boob?”

That Ted has lost her mind occurs to Fen.

“Rogaine?” he asks her.

“They have weird names” is all she says, and then she tells him to call the police again and say the man who was living in the bushes beside the Coronado Bridge is getting away. “I
think,
” she adds.

Honestly, this isn't the clearest message he's ever been asked to give. She says she can't do the calling because she has to get them under way—sailor talk, he's pretty sure, for making a boat move.

Once she's up on deck somewhere and he's alone with the parrot, which starts screeching at him, he calls his uncle instead, because that seems more direct. His uncle will understand that Ted is grieving about her sister and doing crazy stuff. “Quiet,” Fen says to the very agitated, very loud bird. “Shhh.”

“Pickle stew!” the bird shrieks over and over. Or maybe it's
picker view!

His uncle doesn't pick up.

Holding one finger very hard against his left ear and standing outside the cabin door, which enables him to watch Ted unhitch the boat from its floating, slimy mooring, Fen explains the situation on his uncle's voice mail, which isn't easy, the situation being so odd, and after he hangs up he questions the wisdom of ending the message with “I think we're trying to chase somebody,” but he's pretty sure his uncle will pick up the message right away and call him back.

A
t the harbor patrol office, Carl sits at a desk, hoping Elaine is on her way to find Fen. He'll go himself as soon as Howard arrives. The boat ride will take twenty minutes. Can't go fast in the dark.

“News,” Chrissy says, sticking her head in. “The girl may not have jumped.”

“Why?” Carl asks.

“Some taxi driver says he brought her down.”

“When did this get reported?”

“Just now.”

A great blue heron stands on the pier beside the patrol boat, where Carl goes to wait. Night after night, the heron flies to the same spot and takes up his post. Officer Joe, they've taken to calling him around the office, but Carl always thinks of God when he sees the giant bird with its pop-eyed expression. It watches Carl board the boat, and it watches, feathers stiff, neck unfurled, as Carl starts the motor, and only when Howard has jumped aboard and they've started moving does the moonlit bird extend its great wings and rise up for a few minutes, disappearing with whatever thoughts it thinks, and Carl feels the consciousness of the bird like the consciousness of all the creatures swimming or floating in the black bay, instinctual and mute, wise about things they can never say.

I
t was late August. Julia was eight and he was twelve. They were playing pirates, so they tied Julia's hands and her feet, then put a bandanna in her mouth, not to hurt her but because she said it had to be real. It wasn't tied very tight. He, Julia, and Ben Crames had already dug the cave. It took all the summer days that had already passed to dig it: day after day, the three of them working. Never was anything more fun than that. Never was the sunlight more beautiful, never was the water fresher when you ran into it with sand-covered hands and knees. For hours at a time they were lost in it, the idea that they were not themselves but other, grown-up people. Julia would be in the cave, tied up, and Ben would be the pirate and Frank would save her with the ransom that was sand dollars. They had the dollars all saved up in buckets. Julia was in charge of that because she was so good at finding them.

But then they had the idea of getting ice cream. Ben said he had enough for two. Not three. “It won't take long,” he said. “Just a second.”

How terrible to see the cave was gone. He thought for a moment they had run too far or not far enough. But up on the cliff was the palm tree by the pink house. There was the same fisherman on the beach with his bucket and pole, and he was staring at the rocks. He said he hoped nobody was under there.

Julia wasn't standing on the beach. She wasn't saying, “Look, I got free!”

“His sister's in there!” Ben said, and the fisherman started running. Then they were all pulling at the boulders and rocks, the fisherman, Ben, and Frankie, an absurdly small number of people for a giant pile.

After the funeral, when his grandmother had to take charge of Frank, the Seer taught him how the dance of destruction is the dance of creation, the rhythm of the dance is the rhythm of a world perpetually forming, dissolving, and re-forming. Serpents coil about Shiva's limbs and from his right hand flows the promise of release.

When the letters from the Seer ceased, Frank knew that she was not dead, just as Julia was not dead, only gone to another life-form. That other time he thought he'd found Julia, he was wrong, because as soon as she said, “I forgive you!” he felt cold. He'd been mistaken. Julia wouldn't forgive him.

He can hear her nearby. He won't fail her now; he'll let her see the lights of the city, the light of the stars, the beautiful water, where Shiva is inextricably woven into all that the eye can see.