Bridge of Sighs

by Richard Russo

  But that wish, he’d realize later, had been the first sign of wakefulness, and as soon as he opened his eyes the dream began to recede, dull reality assuming its place. He knew that when he fully awoke it would be Saturday, and that afternoon he’d play his final football game of the season. Football! What could be more foolish? Panicking, he tried desperately to fall back asleep. The idea that he might never find the cathedral again—he never would—was in that moment unthinkable. The dream’s orgasmic intensity still seized him, even half awake, though he already was thinking of it as a dream, not a real place. He’d glimpsed the miraculous and then, just that quickly, it was gone. He wanted to weep and never quit. In a matter of a few actual minutes, all that remained was the dream’s aura, the tingling sense that something marvelous had happened and now was gone forever.

  Even at sixty, Noonan could feel his fingertips tingling at the memory, probably because no painting had come from the dream. That first one had come too soon, before he had any idea of what use he would put it to. Each subsequent dream would be a gift, again filling him with wonder and gratitude, though each would also be less intense than the last. That made a kind of sense, he supposed. As he matured as an artist, his power increasingly derived from discipline, from skills honed by habit, and he had less need of inspiration, if that’s what the dreams were. The paint gods were frugal. They gave you only what you needed. Last night’s had been a pitiful thing, the faintest echo of his cathedral dream, but it was all he’d needed. He’d awakened feeling like he was twenty again and could work forty-eight hours straight if he needed to.

  It also occurred to Noonan that last night’s just might be his final dream. That possibility he put out of his mind.

  THAT FALL Thomaston had suffered through a mediocre season marred by almost pathological inconsistency. The town’s gamblers, Dec Lynch foremost among them, found that particularly frustrating. Against his better judgment he’d bet on Thomaston the first game of the season, only to have Mohawk’s speedy Puerto Ricans, the very ones Dec had feared, get loose in the home team’s porous secondary. Still, the Tanners had made a game of it in the second half, and with time running out had been driving toward a tying touchdown when Noonan, who’d been sure-handed to that point, coughed up the ball and that was that.

  “What was I thinking?” Dec Lynch said the next morning when Noonan stopped by Ikey’s.

  “Sorry, Dec,” Noonan said as if he wasn’t particularly. “Next week bet on Utica.”

  But Dec wasn’t finished with this week yet. “You know you’re allowed to run around guys, right? If there’s just you and a single defender, there’s no law says you gotta go over the top of him. And if you go around him you won’t drop the ball on impact, because—and here’s the real beauty of the thing—there is no impact. And the other beauty would be that I’d still have money in my wallet, whereas…” He took out his billfold then to demonstrate the consequence of trying to go through defenders.

  “Bet Utica next week,” Noonan repeated. Because Utica was, by all reports, bigger, faster and tougher than Mohawk, and it was an away game to boot.

  “Don’t worry,” Dec told him. “I intend to.”

  Except that the following Saturday the whole team played well. On the first play from scrimmage, Perry Kozlowski planted Utica’s star running back in the turf, and the boy went off the field wobbly, never to return. Noonan ran the ball effectively, though he lacked the speed to be spectacular, and late in the fourth quarter he found himself in the same situation as the previous week, a single safety between him and the goal line, and this time he took Dec’s advice. Lowering his head as if he meant to steamroll the Utica defender, he spun at the last second and left the kid with an armful of air and Dec with an empty wallet for the second Saturday in a row.

  It had gone that way pretty much all season, the team zigging when Dec zagged. When he tried to change things up, figuring the Tanners were incapable of having either two good or two bad games in a row, they disproved him then, too.

  “Normally I like to go on vacation right after football season,” he told Noonan the night before their last game.

  He and Lucy and Sarah had congregated at Ikey’s, to wait for Nan Beverly to pick them up. Nan, who’d failed her driver’s exam twice, had passed on the third try, and they were celebrating by going out for pizza in her father’s Caddy.

  “But not this year,” Dec continued. “This year it’ll be Easter before I make back all the money I lost on you nitwits this season. The only bright spot is you’re all going to graduate and stop tormenting me.”

  “I may get held back, actually,” Noonan said, mock-serious. “Honors English may do me in.” In truth it was his best class, and he was still, for some reason, Mr. Berg’s favorite.

  “Sweet thing,” Dec said to Sarah, who was killing time by playing a game of crazy eights with Lucy. “Tell your father that if he flunks this kid, I may have to shoot myself.”

  “That might make him even more determined,” she answered, always happy to take the opposite side of any argument that involved Dec.

  “There she goes being mean to me again,” he said, now trying to make an ally of Noonan. “She does look especially sexy tonight, though, doesn’t she? What I’ll never understand is why she hangs around with mere boys when there are eligible, single men around, men with good looks and experience both.”

  “Lou-Lou isn’t single,” Sarah said, causing Big Lou, at his usual post by the register, to beam.

  “I’m talking about me,” Dec said. “You must’ve missed the good-looking part.”

  “I just heard the part about you being broke, I guess. Last card,” she told Lucy, who commenced drawing, hearts suddenly a rarity. Noonan met Sarah’s eye, and when she grinned, he guessed the truth, that the card she held was a wild eight, that Lucy could draw all night and it wouldn’t matter, his fate already sealed.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Dec went on. “This football team is all that stands between me and solvency and true love.”

  “What stands between Dec Lynch and a better life is Dec Lynch,” Lucy’s mother told him. The two of them were busy tearing down the meat case, stretching sheets of plastic wrap over the tubs of ground beef and ferrying the salads into the walk-in. “I’m guessing a plate of macaroni salad wouldn’t completely ruin your appetite,” Tessa said, handing Noonan one. Since football season had begun, there was never a time when he wasn’t ravenous, and he accepted the plate gratefully.

  “Instead of feeding this kid we should be starving him,” Dec said. “If he was too weak to play I’d know how to bet.”

  Finally Lucy found a heart and laid it down. “Why’d you let me draw all those cards?” he said when Sarah put her eight on top of the heart, giving him a kiss on the forehead and her best, throaty laugh. Noonan could almost feel that kiss on his own brow and touched the spot where it would’ve landed.

  Finishing the macaroni salad, he looked up and saw that Tessa had been observing him with her most knowing expression. She wouldn’t have drawn for that heart like her son just did. She’d have seen her defeat coming and known there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

  Outside, a horn tooted, and Nan pulled up to the curb.

  “This week I’d bet on us, if I were you,” Noonan told Dec on the way out.

  “Thanks for the tip,” he said. “I’d have to be a complete idiot to take it, but I always feel better knowing your opinion.”

  BY THE TIME Noonan and his teammates trotted onto the field the next day, he’d all but forgotten his cathedral dream. He’d remembered it a couple of times that morning, feeling just a faint tingle of residual wonder. By afternoon he was able to laugh at the memory, especially since the dream had seemed so urgently important. Tell everyone. Tell them what? That somewhere there’s a church as big as the world, with more chambers than you could count and ceilings as high as the sky? Good God. He’d been dreaming architecture. What next, biology?

  Yet something fel
t different, brighter, as if some of that golden light had leaked into the real world. On Thomaston’s first possession, Noonan took the handoff and ran between the tackles, a play designed to pick up, if all went well, a tough four or five yards. But a gaping hole miraculously opened, and in a heartbeat he was through it and rumbling untouched into the end zone.

  And it wasn’t just on the field. Even the bleachers seemed brighter, clearer, and when he saw Nan and Lucy and Sarah sitting about halfway up, they looked almost close enough to reach out and touch. Nan seldom paid attention at games. She liked the idea that her boyfriend was the team’s star running back, but when time ran out she seldom knew whether he’d had a good game or a bad one, whether he’d fumbled or held on to the ball, scored three touchdowns or been held in check, so she stood and cheered when other people did. “Oh, look!” she was telling Lucy now, pointing at the scoreboard. “We’re ahead. Didn’t the game just start?” Was it possible he was seeing all that? Had he read her lips, or was he just guessing what she’d said? But when Sarah replied, Noonan could read her words as well. “Bobby just ran for a touchdown.”

  Everywhere he looked, his heightened powers of observation offered up privileged glimpses into private behavior. In the crowd that ringed one end zone he saw Sarah’s father in furtive conversation with a tall, emaciated black man named Jackson—first name or last, Noonan didn’t know—and then his teacher slipped him something that quickly disappeared into his pants pocket. A moment later Jackson pivoted, as if to depart, and with his other hand deposited something into Mr. Berg’s outside coat pocket. Noonan knew this man from Murdick’s, where he tended bar on Sunday nights, and knew that he dealt marijuana and who knew what else. Mr. Englander, who owned Murdick’s, had been blunt about Jackson. “I don’t give a damn what he does as long as he does it in the alley with the door closed. You see him transacting business inside, you have my permission to toss his black ass onto the pavement. Just be careful of that blade he carries.”

  Noonan spotted his mother sitting, for some reason, over on the visitors’ side with his raucous feral brothers, all of them a bane to their teachers but loving to her. They surrounded her now, as if they feared that contact with the world outside their Borough home might overstimulate her. Not much danger of that, Noonan felt sure. Her usual smile was even more serene today, which suggested she’d fortified herself with an additional little pill before leaving the house. He doubted that by tomorrow she’d be any too sure exactly what sort of sporting event she’d attended. She might even wake up and think she’d dreamed her day out. Still, every time he glanced up where she sat, her gaze was fixed on him, his teammates apparently beside the point, and each time he got tackled, she clamped her hand to her mouth. After every play, his brothers had to reassure her. “It’s okay, Mom. See? He’s up. He’s not hurt.”

  And so it had gone all afternoon. Things normally shrouded in the fog of combat were brightly lit, things happening singly instead of all at once, a slow-motion miracle. When the game was over, Coach Halliday addressed his rowdy, ecstatic team in the locker room for the last time. With the possible exception of Dec Lynch, nobody had been more exasperated by the Tanners’ inconsistency than their coach, and today he seemed even more dispirited by their lopsided victory than he’d been by many of their losses. “You see what I been telling you?” he said. He had bad knees from his own days in the semipro leagues, and he needed to be helped up onto the bench so he could address his troops. “You see?”

  Noonan, for one, did not, and it didn’t look like anyone else did either.

  “Marconi,” Coach said, barely containing his exasperation. “What have I been telling you guys all season?”

  Noonan tried to guess what he might be getting at. He’d told them a lot of things, more than they could absorb at any given moment. Now he seemed to want Noonan to distill all of those things, including the ones they’d forgotten, into a single lesson, after an exhausting game. He took a stab. “Fundamentals?”

  Coach Halliday rubbed his forehead vigorously, then turned to Perry Kozlowski. “Koz,” he said. “What have I been saying since August?”

  Perry was visited by a sudden inspiration. “How good we could be if we all worked together?”

  “Thank you,” Coach said, as if he really was grateful and might well have borrowed the track coach’s starter pistol and shot himself in the head if Perry, too, had disappointed him. “Four months I’ve been telling you that. It’s good to know I wasn’t wasting my breath. Today, you were a team. You understand? Life is teamwork, men. That’s all it is. When you think about this game, that’s what I want you to remember—how good you were today and how good you could’ve been all season long if you’d paid attention back in September.”

  It was a good speech, Noonan thought, and he was moved by it, despite not believing a single word of it. He didn’t doubt that Halliday truly thought that life was teamwork, and he supposed he was grateful for his high opinion of their abilities. And of course he was sorry they’d disappointed him by underachieving. But he doubted they’d been any more of a team today than previously. Rather, they’d just played better than usual, probably because this was their last game. Kids who normally missed blocks made them, receivers who usually dropped balls managed to hang on. They’d scored first and benefited from a couple of lucky bounces. Their victory, the way Noonan saw it, was a combination of luck and fate and momentum and who knew what else, but he doubted it could be chalked up to teamwork. More to the point, though Noonan wouldn’t have said so to Coach Halliday, he was delighted to see the end of the season, which, far from teaching him that life was nothing but teamwork, had convinced him to eschew all team sports in the future. He’d enjoyed the competition and the physicality, and he understood the necessity of discipline, but the camaraderie that seemed so important to Coach and Perry was left out of him.

  When Halliday was done talking, it took two linemen and an assistant coach to help him down and lead him out of the locker room. Then Perry, the team captain, clad only in a jockstrap, leapt up onto the same bench and announced that from that moment forward, everyone on this team was his brother. Noonan had to look away because Perry’s entire back was a moonscape of angry purple pimples, bigger and angrier looking than those on his ravaged face. “I’d lay down my life for you guys,” Perry proclaimed, his eyes brimming with tears. “Even you, Marconi,” he added, getting a laugh.

  Their old animosity had gradually leaked away over the course of the term. Perry attributed this to the fact they were teammates, Noonan to Mr. Berg’s class. Though Perry still embraced the role of class contrarian and general knucklehead, no one had profited more from the readings and discussions of honors English. Ironically, Noonan thought, that class had become more of a team effort than the Tanners, though Mr. Berg would have scoffed at the idea.

  “And I know something else,” Perry continued, hitching up his jockstrap. “I know you’d do the same for me.”

  This, thankfully, seemed to be addressed to the whole team, which absolved him of making a similar declaration that would’ve been insincere in the extreme. But when Perry hopped down from the bench, he clasped Noonan on the back of the neck with one big paw and drew him forward until their foreheads touched. “I meant what I said up there,” he told him.

  “I know you did,” Noonan said.

  “Back in September I wanted to kill you, man,” he admitted, and unless Noonan was mistaken, the memory was still fresh enough for some of that old desire to flare again, the grip on the back of his neck tightening. Then it relaxed, one emotion trumping an equally bogus one. “But now we’re brothers. Forever.”

  “Okay, then,” Noonan said, trying to pull away, although it was apparently too soon for that.

  “You know what we should all do tomorrow? We should go down and enlist. Keep the team together.”

  “Sort of like a suicide pact,” Noonan said.

  “We could kick some ass over there, this team,” Perry said.

&
nbsp; “Or,” Noonan said, “we could just plan to meet right here every year for homecoming.”

  Perry, considering this less lethal option, seemed to think it needed some punching up. “Sort of like, no matter where we are, no matter what we’re doing, no matter how much it costs, we drop everything and somehow get back here. Prove to Coach we’re still a team. That we remember this day.”

  “I like it,” Noonan said, and he did. He particularly liked the fact that it would give them all a full year to forget this day, this pledge and the emotion that inspired it.

  Out in the parking lot, after he’d showered and dressed, Noonan saw a man leaning against his motorcycle. For safety Noonan had parked it between two school buses. Dec inspected the bike at least once a week for scratches and dents. He seemed happy enough that somebody was getting some use out of it, but that raised the possibility of damage. “You know this fucking thing’s a classic, right?” Dec kept reminding him. “They don’t even make Indians anymore. The company’s gone out of business.” So he always parked out of harm’s way, and he didn’t allow people to lean on the bike either, like this guy was doing. That Noonan didn’t immediately recognize him as his father suggested his sensory apparatus had returned to normal. Either that or it didn’t work on his father.