The Bridge

by D Keith Mano

  Abruptly the boy pushed up with both arms. He sat astride the cable. Hands prayed over his chest; dry blood was encapsulated beneath each fingernail. Priest became concerned. He mouthed, “Get down. Get down.” Wind seized its opportunity, but the boy’s reflexes were good. He slipped upsetting gusts, right shoulder shrugged against his ear. He saw beyond Priest; hands dropped to shelter his groin. Priest motioned him forward. The boy tilted left: he did not advance. Once, then, he shook his head, but it was a larger negative, not intended for Priest alone. The mouth closed; the eyes closed. Lazily he toppled left, over the cable’s edge, legs still astraddle. Priest lunged foolhardily. His fingers rapped the side of one instep as it left the sheathing. In fetal position, tumbling, the boy plunged down. At once he was annihilated by distance, a mote dissolving through colorless backgrounds. And, in obedience, he fell without sound. Priest snapped his head back. He howled, affording a human voice to death.

  ***

  Priest lay on his back below the New Jersey tower. It had been full night for two hours. Even a light breeze stung his flayed inner thighs. Glossy chaps of dried blood had formed there; rubber fabric was grafted to it. He could not walk normally. Priest’s eyes were open. Through the uncontaminated atmosphere he saw random seedings of nebulae, more clustered as they were farther from the earth. Water below him rebounded from the half-submerged roadway island, and its rushing, and the stars, and his extremities made remote by lassitude, these were all interpenerable things. He might have been any of them. Priest sat up, disturbed. Mosquitoes started away, then resettled on his face. The insect mask had cracked in half during his descent from cable to roadway. Rain had not doused the fires. Across the river he could see wide glows that expanded and contracted noiselessly, lungs of the city. He stood, wrenching up on girderwork. He stepped forward with his heels wide, stiff at shoulders and hips and knees. Cicadas whirred: their sound was hot, a good conductor. Priest staggered; he needed a place to sleep. Over high foreheads of blasted rock, a full moon rose. He could see fairly well. The tollbooths in their plaza, roofless, plastic-sided, had served as greenhouses. They were congested with vegetation. Priest stumbled west on Route 4. Dandelions had won there and milkweed and fireweed; the Canada thistles chafed thorny leaves through his spread crotch. His right ankle had swollen frighteningly; liquids sloshed in it. The boot would have to be cut off.

  The left lane of Route 4 had eroded; it was a ravine several feet deep. Now modest rillets moved in it, supporting a new ecosystem: there were frogs, crayfish, a stand of water willow. Its sewers had become strangled and, in spring thaws, water, extravasating, rivered toward Overpeck Creek along the highway bed. Moonlight was preservative: Priest accepted the roadside civilization of thirty years before. The motels, the filling stations, the drive-ins had not been bulldozed. They looked whole, clean. The creeper had not been sowed in New Jersey. Priest blew upward, lower lip protrusive, chasing mosquitoes and no-see-ums from his eyes. By fierce rote he reiterated the chant of eight hours, though now it was irrelevant and confusing. One-two, three. Onetwo, three. Up on elbows, slide vine ahead, kick. He hurt at ankle and thigh and shoulder. This did not dishearten him. Priest had great capacity for pain; it was his best talent. He stayed on the right verge on Route 4. A three-story motel appeared pristine, attractive, but he knew that most buildings had been securely boarded up. And some, on the highways, had been booby-trapped by fanatics just after the Decree.

  Priest saw the shell. This same emblem had turned easily, obverse and reverse identical, one rotation every five seconds, above Sebastian Priest’s filling station. Young Priest had once imagined the station and the farm and his own body to be parts of some dioramic mechanical toy, the sign its key, winding down. He walked into the front plaza. Squat, anthropomorphic gas pumps had toppled; they lay side by side, faces down, as though dormitoried. There was a cliff of reddish stone, black now against the clear sky, two hundred feet behind the main building. Priest tried the door but it was warped shut; wood dust of termites showered on him from the eaves. He shuffled away. An air pump, hose still looped around its bracket, had been riveted to the building’s comer. The hose cracked into half circles when Priest touched it. The machine’s handle would not turn. He remembered the games he had played with Sebastian Priest’s hose: bubbling in the tire tank, a submarine periscope; air under the shorts of a friend momentarily puffed out cloth buttocks. He kicked pieces of rubber on the asphalt. A hand touched his shoulder.

  Priest pivoted around, insucking breath, fists prepared. His ankle gave; he knelt unwillingly. A spry, thin man stood in shadows of the building wall. His beard was braided; several dozen clinking medals had been knotted into it. He backed two fingers against his forehead, a V, the accepted sign of peace. Priest shrugged irritably. The man stepped forward. He was nude, his skin ghastly in the moonlight. Priest ignored the peace sign. The man grinned. He inclined slightly to cup one hand over Priest’s genitals: the sensitivity greeting. It had evolved from encounter-group psychology in the 1980s; established by Decree at the century’s end. It was meant to show trust; put your most vulnerable parts at the mercy of strangers. In reluctance, for Priest loathed this intimacy, he flicked fingertips across the man’s penis. It was half erect.

  The man laughed without sound. His legs were curved severely at the shin: big toes pigeoned tip to tip. He might otherwise have been tall as Priest. He took Priest’s arm tactfully, began to converse inside it. Priest said no, then gestured at his mouth. It was too dim there for lip reading. The man hesitated. He started to draw Priest toward him, pointing behind the garage. Priest disengaged his arm; he was suspicious. The man mimed “Please,” hands in a cup under his chin. Priest did not want involvement, but he needed new insect-suit pants, a new mask. The man disappeared into the darkness toward the cliff; a fragile tinkling was shaken from his beard. Priest followed, legs wide, soles scraping: as when, a five-year-old child, he had played daddy in Sebastian Priest’s over-large, broken workshoes.

  They crossed a marshy field. Water swarmed into their deep footprints. Priest closed hands over his face. Skin of cheeks and lips was tumid with insect poisons. Between spread fingers he saw the man bend. He had found a discarded insect suit and from one thigh pouch he removed a death capsule. He pretended to swallow it, then offered Priest the capsule. Priest refused. The man approached.

  His hips ground, insect suit rubbed across bare teats; the effeminate motions, carried through crooked calves, were grotesque. He touched Priest’s thigh. Priest frowned: perfunctorily he slugged the man beneath one shoulder. His fist, withdrawn, was wet with insect corpses. The man backed; he rubbed his arm. He smiled nonetheless, pointed. Priest saw a roomy grave. There were two dead men in it. One knelt, inclined forward on arms and cheek, nude buttocks upraised. The second man clothed him, stomach and groin over back and hips. His lips were open; Priest read noises of pleasure on them.

  The man raked one hand through his beard. He sat on the grave’s rim; let his feet dangle. He winked at Priest, beckoned. Priest smiled: he was tolerant, but shook his head. The man hassocked heels comfortably on a set of buttocks below him. Priest picked up the insect suit, acted out giving. The man agreed. An insect mask was attached to the hood. Priest popped it off and snapped the mask onto his own hood. It smelled of perfumes. The man watched him, thoughtfully milking his penis. Priest backed away. The man slid into his grave, toes wide as if testing cold water. North of the Shell station, behind it, a hill had been incarcerated. It was two hundred feet in diameter, sixty feet high. Frames of a tall fence fanned inward. Priest stepped onto the springy wirework. In moonlight, surfaces glistened. The hill was metal, a charnel avalanche of tractor-trailer cabs. They had been piled without dignity on forehead and jaw, upended on cranium pates. Soil had been spread over the hill, but rain and wind had skinned it off. Near the base one cab lay upright, just slightly nodded at its hinging, some elephant about to perform a headstand. Roof and hood were buckled by the tires of another cab stacked atop. Prie
st stripped turf sideburns from the driver’s window. Then, using a corroded jack handle, he knocked out two jagged glass fangs. Priest slithered through the window.

  The seat’s flesh had rotted out. Soil sifted through its open skeleton of springs. The sleeping compartment above/behind him was crushed down. Priest’s head ached. He hung his new insect suit around the window frame. In both elbows an involuntary mechanism took control of his hands, opened and closed them. He wrung fingers, slapped his palms against the roof. With one glass fang Priest cut his insect-suit pants off. Scabs cracked when he peeled the crusty rubber free. Blood seeped again. He was panting crazily: bent double in the seat, his diaphragm had panicked. He took the left boot off, then slashed his right boot along its Achilles tendon. There was no pain in the ankle; sensation, when he touched the sole, was perhaps in his finger, perhaps in his foot. He did not investigate further. Naked, Priest leaned back. After a few seconds he began to shake convulsively. In darkness, without reference, the truck cab had contracted long, nauseating undulations from the cable. Priest tore aside the insect-suit curtain, saw fragments of moonlight, and steadied his perspective on them. He was stiff with tension; he could not sleep. Priest closed uncertain palms on the steering wheel.

  Instinctively then, he pinched a sparse forelock of his hair. Priest recognized the gesture. It was his father's salute, his father’s hair: eaving over it, the brim of an antique baseball cap, blue sun-bleached white, six metal grommets exhaling around the crown. Priest turned the wheel. It moved generously, no longer attached to the steering works below. He groped for the accelerator. It was under dirt; he excavated it with his left foot. Priest’s fingers turned, pushed, switched across the dashboard. He produced an experimental sound, mmmm. The sound of a child seated on his father’s lap thirty-five years before, in youth that was, as well, a different age of man’s time, the old robin’s-egg-blue wrecker rushing ahead, though caught in Sebastian Priest’s garage. For several minutes he drove through another dimension. He began to sob and was astonished and ashamed and pleased, for Priest could not recall crying since he had become a man. Then he was no longer astonished: in his nape all the taut cables of that day broke—he heard a distinct noise at his mastoids—and whipped out fiercely, exploded by their tension. Priest slept with one cheek on the round horn button.

  Chapter 5

  He couldn’t work the boot on. Liquid traveled under his right instep, bleaching skin from purple to white where it moved. Tires came through the broken windshield. With his glass knife Priest carved off a five-inch piece of tread. Patiently, though it was now well past dawn, he bored eyeholes in the rubber with a nail, strung bootlaces through, then between his fattened toes; constructed a rudimentary sandal. It was humid in the cab. Outside, the crane flies swarmed. The air above him jiggled as if shot through with heat waves. They seemed to cartwheel backward, lanky, bumpkin mosquitoes, regulated by some nebular logic. They flurried onto him. Priest found a five-foot length of aluminum tubing, a cane. He swathed his bare ankle with the elastic bandage, then limped toward the highway. It was perhaps seven miles, he thought, to the junction of Routes 4 and 17. Priest hoped to reach Paramus by nightfall.

  There was occasional traffic. Pairs of guardsmen patrolled on jittery bicycles. In Indian file the anonymous faces of a lesbian commune passed him, walking south. He mastered the cane’s rhythm: hit earth with metal tip as right ankle accepts weight; push off with right arm; hurdle cane ahead. Most highway overpasses had collapsed; he was forced to make expensive detours. The sun came out. Priest left his mask ajar to dissipate condensation. In the parking lot of a gutted furniture store three dozen people waited with jugs and bottles near a public fountain. Priest was hungry, but he meant to walk another full day before eating. Chafed areas on his thighs had begun to suppurate; the new insect-suit pants were constrictive. Yet he felt exuberant. On the cable he had bluffed old fears. He remembered the doctor in Yankee Prison and laughed, blowing cheeks out, muting sound in their skin. He rehearsed his account of yesterday for Mary. She knew his fear and would be amazed.

  Route 4 crossed broad swamplands near the Hackensack River. Priest walked into a twilight of insects; the sun had collapsed, was shrunken. Pigeons and crows in flocks, solitary jays, had gorged themselves flightless. The roadbed was gray/white, oily with their excrement. Under the reeds, cats, perhaps several hundred of them, dashed into quick feather explosions, wolfed down bird flesh. The air reported small deaths by violence. Staring upward. Priest imagined himself on a seabed, fathoms below the turbulent surface. Life registered in blurs, only the darning needles and a few hummingbirds attained the great speed of inertia. Every ten steps Priest scraped his breathing mask clear. Mosquitoes stung through his suit, indifferent to the repellent greases impregnated in it. Priest ground his teeth: he abhorred the sound. He wanted to answer it. And there were bees.

  He could not see to avoid them. Their clumped weight bore down burdock and thistle heads. Telephone poles, cheesy with wood rot, oozed beards of them. The bumblebees swung below their small wings. Yellow jackets stared into his mask. They could easily sting through his rubber. Priest owed his child to bees. A year before, he had been stung in the testicles. Priest had become habituated to pain, but this was the worst. Had he dared touch his hardened scrotum, Priest would gladly have torn it from his groin. For two weeks he had been paralyzed below the hips, afflicted by strange convulsions. He supposed it had made him impotent, but Mary was patient, used to Priest’s fierce, suicidal urges. She had gently coaxed his member, ignoring it, surprising it. They had decided not to have children: Mary had suffered two dangerous miscarriages; it was not a world that understood children. But Priest’s manhood had resumed unexpectedly; they had made love without contraception. The time of the miscarriages had come, had passed. Before he was taken away. Priest had felt life in her.

  Route 4 was barricaded. Locusts washed across it, moving southeast with the wind. Their gray, triangular bodies repaved the highway bed. Swarms would flutter out of the mass, striped underbellies showed beneath wings, reams of newsprint riffled. A guards platoon waved Priest left, across country: he would have crushed too many locusts. Vegetation had been denuded in a mile-wide swathe to the northwest; Priest walked from summer through the last days of autumn. His detour squandered an hour. It was two o’clock: he had travled more than five miles since morning. Priest returned to Route 4 by a forested suburban avenue. He was tired. Sharp edges of the aluminum tube cored his glove palm. There had been a treetop fire of great intensity. Candelabra branches were charred, leafy with ash, though undergrowth and trunks had not been harmed. House roofs were black and showed rafters. The siding was curled out. Yet the interiors, though warped by melting, had not caught fire. Priest sat to rest in the yard of a low ranch house.

  A woman with one small child crossed toward the house. The child was a girl, perhaps five years old. She had outgrown her insect suit. They were no longer manufactured; it was impossible to find children’s sizes. The band of flesh at her waist was purulent with insect bites. Mosquitoes circled there. She had no mask, but held a cloth between bare hands over her face. The woman was blond: unkempt, dirty strands appeared at the join of hood and mask. She was tall. Priest assumed she was at least his age. Scoop seat of pelvis ridged assertively through her tight insect suit. She noticed Priest, paused. Then she walked toward him. The girl child did not follow at once. Irritably, with thumb and forefinger, the woman vised her daughter’s nape. The child stumbled forward. The woman snapped open her mask. Priest hiked up on the cane. He undid his mask: it was a courtesy of the times. She smiled; she had once been handsome. The child squatted, watched them between fingers. The woman took three overlong strides toward Priest. In her fine hips there were downward rotations, an ambulating contrapposto. She had large breasts: Priest stared at them; mammary development was rare since the E-diet. She halted, but her torso did not respond fully, seemed to overshoot the pedestal of her hips. She smiled. She might have been his sister: s
loped cheekbones, eyes slanted to a squint. Her mouth was broad and never closed. She had sharp canines, but the lower jaw appeared slack. Wrinkles worked out from her mouth comers, from her eyes. Matted hair, caught in fringes of the hood, put muttonchops on her cheeks. She performed the sensitivity greeting; she elaborated it, judging Priest’s size with her fingers. He was embarrassed and angry. Priest reciprocated; he squeezed her left breast. The woman laughed, pushed eagerly into his grip. She tapped under Priest’s forearm, but he shook his head. She translated the movement of his lips; her own lips imitated simultaneously, a young child first reading. Her breath smelled honeyish; her skin had yellowed. Priest knew that she was heavily drugged. The woman mouthed,

  “You can’t talk with fingers? Are you too stupid?”

  “Yes,” Priest mouthed. “I’m too stupid.” He limped away. The woman pulled at his elbow.

  “Don’t go. I like stupid men.” She smiled. “I like stupid men with good bodies. Your legs are straight. You have something between them.” She pointed toward the ranch house. “My home is there. I want to get laid. I’m tired of playing with myself. Yes? You’re not too stupid to understand that?”

  “I understand. No.”

  “Queer?”

  “No.”

  “Don t be so angry. You grit your teeth. Your teeth are terrible. Come inside with me. I’m going to die now.” She extracted a capsule from her thigh pouch. “I don’t want to face the night again. I’m too alone in the night.”