That night, I went to a graduation party at a professor’s farmhouse in Bridgefield, Mass. There was a lot of drinking. Late in the evening, a close friend and I went outside to share a goodbye toast in private.
Somehow we’d gotten our hands on an expensive bottle of Glenmalloch single malt scotch. We passed it back and forth, sitting by a stream behind the house, talking and reminiscing. I had never drunk scotch before and had little experience with hard liquor in general. I did not realize how drunk I was getting (not an excuse, just an explanation).
I left the patry—my eyes note the misspelling—alone. Foolishly and regrettably, I got behind the wheel of my car, taking the scotch bottle with me.
As I was driving home—on the “back roads”—I dozed off at the wheel and almost struck the stone wall that borders the Dempsey Bridge. I jammed on the brakes, making a loud squeal, and went into a panic. What if the noise attracted attention? I’d had way too much to drink and was carrying an open container of alcohol. I had to get rid of the bottle.
What I did next was an honest mistake, but the costliest one of my life. I threw the half-full bottle over the bridge. I won’t describe the consequences of my action here, but for those interested in knowing...
Here the note provides a link, presumably to a news article (I see the name bostonglobe embedded in the long URL).
Where I erred, morally speaking, was not so much in making the initial mistake but in failing to own it once I realized what I’d done.
I have regretted my actions every day since, and it’s not an overstatement to say they have ruined my life. I deeply apologize to all those whose lives I have affected. Thanks for reading this.
Until next life,
Finnian Carroll
I feel like I have a blowgun dart in my neck. This note is a flat-out impossibility. Shock waves bombard me and I can’t make sense of my world. I wobble to my feet. If I don’t get some air, I’m going to pass out, right on the floor of Brew Moon.
Chapter 5
I hang an “In Use” tag on the monitor and tell Barista General Django I’ll be back. I punch the door open and stumble out into the chill night air.
I need to walk, process what I’ve just seen. My legs are on auto-pilot. I jam my hands into my pockets and head straight up Washington Street, past the sleepy pubs and closed thrift shops. Without consciously intending it, I’m walking straight toward the bridge over the Merrimac River.
There are so many disturbing elements to the note, I have trouble putting them in order of enormity. Questions tumble in my head like clothes in a dryer. Which one holds the key to the others? Which do I need to answer first? Logic can’t gain traction in my brain.
Okay: first and foremost, there are elements in the note no one could possibly know about. No one on the entire planet but me. No one. Then there are other details only Miles and I would know. At the same time, there are crucial facts that are flat-out wrong or omitted. Why? How? Either someone is lying or doesn’t know the whole story.
Who could be behind this? Who could possibly have learned these private and unknowable truths? And whoever it is, why are they making a move now, after eighteen silent years? And, oh yes—don’t want to forget this trifling little detail—why does someone want me dead because of it?
Of course, the biggest question of all—and the one I know I must answer before this evening is over—is What actually, factually happened after the bottle was thrown that night? My entire adult life has been an exercise in stuffing that jack into its box. But tonight, when I get back to that computer at Brew Moon, the jack will be sprung, baring its grinning teeth. I will learn the facts. At long last. I am both terrified and relieved.
I arrive at the Comeau Bridge and look down at the rushing black Merrimac far below. I reflect that if a certain glass bottle had landed in these waters all those years ago, as intended, the worst crime to have been committed would be littering.
The flowing water has a hypnotic effect. I allow myself to be carried back to a night I spend as little time thinking about as possible.
. . . . .
May 12, 1999. Miles and I did indeed go to a party, at a farmhouse in the rural section of Bridgefield, where a sociology professor we knew co-ran a small organic farm.
The Godwin College graduation had taken place that afternoon, and I was now a certified Bachelor of Arts. Stand back, world. Godwin, a small private college in blue-blooded Bridgefield, Massachusetts, catered largely to upmarket students who didn’t make the Ivy League cut but still wanted to go to a college that looked the part. About two-thirds of its students were out-of-towners who lived in the dorms or in nearby college apartments. A third were local commuters. Townies. Like me. I lived in Wentworth, the neighboring blue-collar city, with my parents, and never could have afforded Godwin if not for a full scholarship.
I drove Miles and his live-in girlfriend Beth to the party that night. They were planning to return the next day to Miles’ home state of Connecticut, there to take up their rightful places in the world of privilege-by-birthright that I knew only from behind a glass wall. This was to be our last night together as college friends.
Jeannie, my unofficial girlfriend, came to the party too but tellingly did not come with me. We were already starting to do the emotional mitosis necessitated by the fact that she had taken a job in Quebec and I was planning to go to grad school at RISD. Jeannie and I were planning to have our grand goodbye the following weekend.
The beer was flowing freely, but I was trying to be cautious. I knew I would be driving later, and I suspected the local constabulary would be out in force on this celebratory night.
May 12th was a gorgeous spring evening, strident with frog song, that seemed to stretch on forever. There was a pass-the-guitar session around a fire pit, and I yowled out a couple of Cohen tunes. There were sloppy toasts and long goodbye hugs and tearful reminiscences.
Toward the waning part of the evening, I managed to get Miles alone for a private goodbye. Miles Sutcliffe was my best friend. We came from different worlds, but we had bonded at a level I’m not sure I understand even today. I was working-class all the way, deeply self-conscious and insecure. Miles was cool and self-assured, from old Connecticut money (though I think the bulk of the family money had taken its show on the road a generation or two earlier, leaving mostly old Connecticut attitude).
Our friendship grew from the fact that we both loved to talk endlessly about topics no one else was remotely interested in—Castaneda, game theory, obscure Monty Python sketches. We tended to drive other people away with the fervor and exclusivity of our conversations. I guess it was natural that we became friends.
Miles was a handsome son of a bitch, with a smile that made estrogen boil. For the first three years of college, he had an endless, overlapping stream of good-looking, brainy, and cool girlfriends. In fact, I can’t remember a single girl (except Jeannie) who ever spurned his advances. It wasn’t till senior year that he became exclusive with Beth, who, oddly enough, was the “plainest”-looking girl he’d ever dated, as well as one of the least philosophical and imaginative. Well, maybe not so odd when you realized how much her dad was worth.
The dudes loved Miles too. Yep, all the preppy boys and girls genuflected at the altar of Miles Sutcliffe. And because I was his friend, and a reasonably funny guy, I got to nibble at some of his social crumbs. But when push came to shove, I think most of his friends regarded me as little more than smart-assed white trash. I was fun to have around in a group setting—a capuchin monkey in a bellhop cap—but wasn’t really invite-on-the-ski-trip material.
Here’s the thing about that fucking bottle of scotch: I bought it for Miles as a gift, and I didn’t take it home with me. …And I was not the one who tossed it.
“Sutcliffe,” I said, holding up two heavy-bottomed whiskey glasses I’d appropriated from the house. “Come with me, I want to give you something.”
“A kiss? You can do that here,” he said. “Everybody knows.” The gals laughed. It was an open joke that certain members of the male student body thought Miles and I were gay because of our constant and enthusiastic companionship.
I wiggled the whiskey glasses like fishing lures and started down the path to the stream that ran behind the farmhouse. Miles followed, grabbing one of the Coleman lanterns stationed around the yard. When we got to the banks of the brook, which was bursting with early spring growth, I surprised him with the bottle I’d hidden there. It was the Glenmalloch, his dad’s favorite single-malt. This was the sixteen-year stuff, and it came in a special, limited edition, decanter bottle, rectangular-shaped and made of heavy glass. It had set me back eighty-something bucks. I was proud of it.
“I want to have a private toast with you,” I said, “and I want to do it with a man’s drink, not something from a red Solo cup.”
I handed Miles the bottle. He responded with an overly hard hug that I took as evidence he was already pretty well lubricated. He uncorked the bottle expertly and poured us each a finger. We clinked our glasses and drank. To my uncultured tongue, the stuff tasted like Listerine. But Miles, as in so many other things, was light years ahead of me, taste-wise. He rolled the nectar around on his tongue, savoring the texture and flavor. “That’s whiskey as God intended it,” he proclaimed. “Blended scotch ought to be used for soaking machine parts.” A ridiculously pompous statement for a twenty-one-year-old but the kind of thing Miles could get away with.
I was soon to learn that Miles, who was always judicious in his consumption of beer and wine, was powerless under the spell of single malt. Over the next hour, as we swapped memories and promises by lantern light, he bogarted the bottle and swigged from it like it was a hiker’s canteen. His speech got progressively sloppier as his tongue got progressively looser.
Miles was typically a guarded guy beneath his cool exterior. I think he always felt he was carrying the weight of his family name and had to keep himself on a tight leash. He liked to have fun but not too much of it. He talked like an anarchist but was careful never to do anything that could get him into real trouble.
Not tonight, though. Tonight he was throwing off the moorings. Sharing his family scandals with me, offering scathing analyses of all our friends. “What’s the over-under on when Timmons gives up the hetero act and starts begging for cock? I give him three months in Manhattan, tops.” Whoa. My window of opportunity for getting Miles home conscious was slipping shut.
“Wait here, brother. I’m gonna go find Beth.”
I took a walk around the property, looking for Beth amongst the lingering partygoers, but she was nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to leave without her. Someone finally told me, “She left with Fitzy and Deb, like an hour ago.” Beth often became impatient with Miles and me as a duo, so it didn’t surprise me that she’d found her own way home.
I packed Miles into the car. I was pretty clearheaded for driving, but still, I did have more than trace quantities of alcohol in my system, so I stuck to the back roads on my way to Miles’ apartment. Miles clung to the Glenmalloch and continued to hit it like it was Dr. Pepper.
We hadn’t driven more than a mile or two when he let out a wounded-animal wail and buried his face in his hands.
I found a place to pull over, a picnic area at the edge of the state park. There, Miles proceeded to have what I can only call a breakdown. Jettisoning his usual self-control, he threw himself on the ground and proceeded to blurt out all the fears and doubts he’d been stuffing inside for years. Fears about his future. Fears about the expectations that had been hung on him by his family and himself. Fears about his upcoming marriage to Beth. “I want what you have with Jeannie. I want to be an artist and a gypsy like you. You’re so fucking lucky. You can live the life you choose. Love whoever you want.”
I think I offered him some thin counsel, but he was too drunk to hear it. Just as well. He finally staggered to his feet, wrung out, and stumbled back to the car.
After driving another mile or so, I spotted a police car parked in the shadows on a wooded section of Carlisle Road. Watching for speeders and drunks. My heart started to rev.
“Shit,” I said to Miles, “The bottle.” Massachusetts law forbade “open containers” of alcohol in moving vehicles.
As I drove out of the woods onto an open stretch of road, I kept my eyes glued to the rear-view mirror, certain the cop would be tailing us any minute. I didn’t notice we were going over a bridge, but Miles evidently did.
Before my brain could register what he was doing, he rolled his window down. I heard him slur the words, “My apology to the river gods,” then his window went back up. My eyes were still riveted to the rear-view mirror, watching for the cop.
Moments later, we were passing an old carved-wood sign with a crucifix on it when I heard—or thought I heard—a faint series of sounds that didn’t make immediate sense to me.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Miles.
“Hear what?” he said, his head wobbling precariously.
I glanced at Miles’ lap and noticed it was empty.
“What did you do with the bottle?” I asked him.
“Tossed it in the Merrimac,” he said. “Ba-bye.”
It was then I noticed headlights following us at a distance.
“Fuck, Miles, that’s the cop behind us. What if he saw you throw it?” I didn’t think the cop could have seen anything; he wasn’t behind us at the time, but still...
“Jeez, I was jus’ try’na help.”
“Shit, man, we’re screwed.”
I drove a little farther, hewing to the speed limit, and the headlights continued to follow us. And then the dreaded thing happened. Blue lights. My heart hammering, I started looking for a place to pull over. That was when I noticed another bridge up ahead of us on Carlisle Road.
My body must have put two and two together before my conscious mind did, because a wave of nausea rose up from my gut. “Oh no, Miles,” I said. “This is the bridge over the Merrimac! This is the bridge over the Merrimac!”
I parked the car as the full weight of the realization sunk in.
If this was the bridge over the Merrimac, that meant only one thing: the previous bridge had been the bridge over route 495.
Oh God. Oh shit. The sounds I’d heard—or thought I’d heard—when we were passing the crucifix now made damning sense. They were the distant sounds of squealing brakes, shattering glass, and smashing metal.
The blue lights loomed larger in my mirror. Life as I knew it was about to end.
But instead of pulling to a stop behind me, the police car turned on its siren, did a quick three-point turn, and sped off in the direction from which it had come.
I should have been massively relieved that the cop was rushing off to deal with an emergency but was only more deeply sickened by the implications. “Miles,” I said, gathering my strength to tell him what I now knew. “You didn’t throw the bottle into the river, you threw it onto the highway.”
But as I turned to look at Miles, he was passed out, stone cold.
Chapter 6
I stare, spellbound, at the rushing black water below. There’s no question what my next move must be, though I long for an excuse to stall.
I drag myself back to Brew Moon, giving Django the Brave a little nod as I
enter. He fails to acknowledge my existence with even the tiniest of facial tics.
Jumping back onto the rented computer, I pull up the file—my “suicide” note—and stare at that hypertext link on it, ripe with odious promise. I click on the link before I can change my mind. The elderly iMac starts to churn.
Moments later, a Boston Globe news article from 1999 is sitting on my rented screen: “Police Investigate Fatal Three-Car Collision in Bridgefield.”
Ah, shit. Ah, no.
No, no, no.
I take a shaky breath and start in on the news story. I want to throw up. I want to run away. I want to drink something infinitely stronger than a Cà Phê Dá.
I can’t believe what I’m reading, yet the words strike home with the fatedness of cancer after a thirty-year smoking binge.
A fatal car accident occurred at 1:21 a.m. Sunday on Route 495 near the Carlisle Road exit in Bridgefield, say police. According to an eyewitness who was peripherally involved in the accident, a 1987 Chevrolet El Camino driven by Edgar Goslin of Wentworth lost control “for no apparent reason” and veered into the passing lane where it collided with a 1998 Ford Aerostar occupied by Paul and Laurice Abelsen and—please no—their two-year-old daughter. The Abelsens’ vehicle veered off the highway, rolled over and struck a tree, where Goslin’s car struck it a second time, crushing both the roof of the Abelsen’s vehicle and the front end of Goslin’s car. All three of the Abelsens were pronounced dead on arrival at Wentworth General Hospital. Goslin is listed in critical condition with multiple undisclosed injuries.
A third vehicle, driven by the eyewitness, Jeremy Halsey of Methuen, reportedly collided with debris from the other two vehicles and was damaged slightly. Halsey was uninjured. Police have not ruled out alcohol as a factor and are continuing to investigate.
Fishermen's Court Page 4