The Bridge

by D Keith Mano

  “What is it?”

  “Deer. Millions. Millions of them. God—you can’t believe it. They’re coming right at us. Up. Get up. We’ll be tram pled.”

  “I can t.”

  Xavier Paul turned over, as infants will, sliding one elbow under his ribs, an inclined plane, levering with his heels. Priest knelt: it seemed that Xavier Paul’s spine was no longer continuous. A knot had erupted, just over his hips, thrust out through taut rubber. They were head to head, butting stags. Priest plunged fingers into Xavier Paul’s arm pits, heaved up in a double action, draping the old man’s great slackness across his left shoulder. He staggered. Xavier Paul shrieked, then he gasped—from Priest’s height, he had first seen the stampede. Its center flagged; mile-wide bull’s horns pincered, closing. And there was no end: deer still seethed through the distant gap. Priest and Xavier Paul were vulnerable there. The rock face prevented retreat. Priest estimated the herd’s speed. He could make out individual deer now. They were less than a thousand yards away. Priest saw the bear lumber just ahead of its massed prey. Deer headed it, ran alongside, then the bear was enveloped. A raccoon knocked itself unconscious on Priest’s shin. He tottered.

  “My God. Oh, my sweet God. It can’t be.”

  “The stream,” Priest yelled. “The stream will stop them.”

  “Never. Nothing can stop that.”

  “Walk, damn it. I can t carry you like this. We’ve got to reach the trees.”

  “My wine.”

  “Forget the wine. Walk.”

  “No.” And, despite grim pain, Xavier Paul thrashed his dead weight, made it capsize. He fell from Priest’s shoulders.

  “Stupid man. Stupid man. Get up.” Xavier Paul had found the corkscrew.

  “Go. Run, Priest. Go.”

  “Get up. Leave the wine.”

  “Go!”

  Priest hauled him up, fingers wrenched under Xavier Paul’s insect-shirt collar. It stretched. The old man ducked his chin, found Priest’s thumb knuckle, chewed savagely down on it. Priest cursed: he kicked Xavier Paul in the chest. He wanted a bottle of wine, but he had waited too long. Now the churning surf was five hundred yards away. Priest gave up. He ran at it. The grove of pines stood between him and the deer, fifty yards ahead. His hearing obsolesced; he sensed thunder in the hollow chamber of his mouth. His diaphragm trembled sympathy. Footing was deceptive; it met his feet, dipped. They hit the river and exploded it over banks for a quarter mile, crushed water to fine mist. The momentum hesitated, then recovered. Priest could see terrorized muzzles as he ran. Their eyes did not guide, thrown high, blank. Breastbones strutted up; the winter for est of antlers crossed, recrossed its branches back through an infinite perspective. Lead deer misjudged a single stride and were overthrown. The reaching right arm of the tide had al ready embraced, lapped the pines. The semicircle closed on him. Priest was beaten ten yards from the first tree. He pulled out the .45.

  Six shots bucked at his palm. They were soundless in the greater sound. Priest could not miss. The charge was perfectly contiguous: each crowding breast and throat seemed to have a thousand legs beneath/behind. He fired as he ran at right angles to the stampede, traversing aim ahead. The first deer was dead at the apex of a lovely, high bound; it finished the arc gracefully, cannon bones bowed under. Then it came apart, head snapped back and over its shoulder, just five yards from Priest’s feet. Others crumpled, abruptly legless, falling crosswise, a crooked stile of bodies. Deer behind were hobbled by them. They somersaulted, antlers pronging into the soil. A live windrow accumulated, then the ranks adjusted and fallen deer were climbed, some minor elevation in the ground now, blood spurts punched out of flanks and necks. But their impetus had been checked momentarily and Priest was inside the stand of pines.

  They died on the trunks, brained there, limbs shattered, unable to swerve against the irresistible, crowding pressure. The trees strained them; one animal out o£ ten passed through to stand confused, in a sheltered eddy on the grove’s south face. Priest had shinnied up the first narrow bole. Ten feet above, he found the stump of an amputated branch. His instep folded over it. For more than an hour the stampede rushed under him. His tree thrilled with impacts. He heard the shush of their pelts against bark. Pines on the northwest perimeter were axed down: they leaned into the branch tops of trees behind them. But Priest saw nothing. Dust obliterated sky and earth. Particles drifted in his nostrils, shutting them. His tongue shaped clay balls. He spat, spat: he wheezed asthmatically, afraid of fainting. He tore off the hood and clapped it over his mouth. The sound deaf ened him. His ears began to bleed. Then they were gone.

  Priest slithered down. He walked on carcasses: for twenty yards his feet did not touch the soil. Deer lay, tongues eaten in half; hoofs twitched, a nerve memory of the stampede. Flesh aprons, four feet high, six feet high, surrounded the pine grove. North, on the plain, tumuli rose where some obstacle, a fallen trunk, an old fence length, had gathered bodies, as boulders in a swift current will collect flotsam. The brush fire had scalped foothills now: it burned fitfully, cut off from wind and fuel. The river was dammed with corpses. It had begun to fill a broad lake below the Thruway roadbed. Here and there a deer, merely stunned, would right itself in sections, doddery. One large stag waited, half its antlers lopped off, head wrestled down by the unequal weight, as if listening to the earth. It panted: downcast, ashamed. Car rion birds flew apathetically overhead, spoiled by their great good fortune. Priest reloaded his .45.

  The shred of black fabric had adhered to an antler. Priest picked it off. Fuzzy horn tickled his thumb pad, made him shiver involuntarily. Priest walked back in a straight line until he had found Xavier Paul’s body. There were no familiar landmarks; he had passed this place several times al ready. Deer were heaped on the remains. Patiently Priest lugged the corpses off. Xavier Priest’s skull had been driven into four inches of soil, face downward. The occiput was pulverized, flayed of scalp and hair, scooped out by hoofs. The ground was chalked with bone dust. The rib-cage grating had been picked clean: no bone was longer than an inch. It seemed the skeleton of a man long dead.

  Priest knelt, interested, not repelled. There was a minia ture glass bowl, a thick bottom fragment of the wine bottle. It lay within smashed pelvis flanges. Priest examined the bowl. Crimson liquid, nearly clotted, nearly dry, painted the shallow indentation. Priest wet his lips. Then he dabbed one forefinger in the bowl, touched forefinger tip to tongue. Per haps it was blood, perhaps wine: he didn’t know the taste. Priest stood and began walking north again.

  Chapter 9

  He knew the tree. Branches chaliced, set on one foot, an empty snifter. Debris of his tree house floored the branch shoulders. Three rungs, short plank lengths, had been nailed to the trunk, now almost absorbed by its bark. Below, the thin soil intimated roots, toes wriggled in a sock. The pond lay thirty yards beyond; it was fist-shaped with tributary forefinger poking under the bed of Route 206. Priest knelt to drink. Weeping willows dragged its surface. Young frogs darted to the mud, streamlined as pairs of pliers. Priest cleared the green algae, hands swimming apart; often he had cleared a space to drink there thirty-five years before. He sipped, nose and cheeks and forehead under, but his throat was roped with apprehension. He could not swallow. He gagged.

  The sign said ENTERING NEW LOCK—SPEED LIMIT 30 MPH. Priest had been walking three hours, since dawn. It had begun to drizzle. Poison-ivy leaves on the roadside shone as though greased. His insect mask was fastened, a disguise. Clover Knoll bunched on the left; it enforced a bend in the highway. Sebastian Priest’s home—the service station, the house, the barn—lay directly behind it. Parts of the road were de toured with stone rubble. The knollside had collapsed and there was a hollow in it now like that under an upraised arm, fleshy breast of rock below. Priest stripped the haversack off his shoulders. It was almost empty: the Book of Common Prayer, the crimsoned sliver of glass, a few mushrooms. He climbed down, stored it in a cement-lined culvert under the road. He touched the thigh pouch. Priest
had seen no one as yet, and he was afraid.

  The barn had burned. Its silo seemed a lit flare. Hot gases had accumulated there. The hemisphere cap was shredded: in flame shapes it held an image of the explosion. Sebastian Priests house had caught. The roof had been trepanned by fire, then doused by sudden rain; black soot stalactites oozed down the walls. Priest had not entered the house in twenty years. Round upper windows, ocular, were boarded over, XXX, some child’s naive representation of death. Priest crossed the asphalt yard. His father’s pillbox service station, built of cement block during two summers, was unchanged, overhead garage door warped open. The two pumps had vanished. The empty holding tank had collapsed twenty feet underground—pumps, earth, cement island drawn into its vacuum. Priest looked down. The pump heads appeared above murky water, tilted forward, men dog-paddling. His parents had been buried between the house and the service station. Priest had marked the place with a low, unmortared stone wall. The ground was alive with surface water: the two grave blisters appeared to have risen, impetuous. Priest did not walk toward them.

  Of nine window panes in the imitation Dutch door there was one yet intact. Priest saw it when the English ivy moved, underleaves thumbed up by breezes: a reflection there, while the eight other squares were moronic, black. Priest uprooted chunks of asphalt; he pitched them. They missed, bouncing back, somewhat rubbery: one penetrated the service-station office. He stepped nearer: SEBASTIAN PRIEST. PROP. He tossed again, but with gangling follow-through, intentless because the result was certain and he could postpone it. The pane be longed to him: a last functional portion of his inheritance. One piece hit, tinked, cracked, but did not shatter the glass. Priest sensed that his throwing was impersonal, perhaps a coward’s way. He came close. A piece of shale, wedge-shaped like a Stone Age biface tool, lay on the brick planter. Priest handled it, discovered its balance. He opened his mask. Drizzle had glazed the pane, but he saw parts of brow ridge and eye and nose before its glass broke. A single bird, blue/white, afraid, leaped from the eave. It rose in an exact perpendicular, then soared through the mist. Priest walked away.

  Mary’s house, his home, was two hundred yards north, set on a slope well back from Route 206. Priest stopped. He tore off his thigh pouch flap. Then he set the .45 on its muzzle, butt upward. He hurried. He heard the noise of work. A heavy stone clattered against other stones. There were ten women on his long, downslanting front lawn. They were naked. He knew several: members of the New Loch Lesbian Commune. They hoed with fingertips lazily, sifting; movements were overelaborate and sensuous. One hauled rocks low, in a sling of embracing arms, held against the uptilt of her pelvis. Their bodies were reddish, the skin caked with clay to discourage insects. Priest stepped forward. Logs of his front gate came apart when he pushed, stale bread loaves. His hands shook: the women worried him. They didn’t be long here; he knew Mary would not have allowed it. A few watched him, hardly aware. They stared at places where Priest had been long after he had moved ahead, walking up/ toward the house. He counted six whole graves. Four were as yet incomplete.

  The broad front porch had sagged. Its roof seemed to levitate, Corinthian pillars six inches now above the planking. It was a large house, fifteen rooms, but they had closed the up per story. The roof was square, with a false widow’s walk around it. Priest began to stride faster. Curtains in the dining room were parted at an edge. Someone had seen him. A door opened and shut inside. Priest ran, off the path now, to his left, for Mary used the side door near the kitchen. Priest jerked back his hood, patted his face, raking fingertips through clotted forelock. He stopped, arms wide to hug. For some reason he thought the burlap shift, the pail covered with rags, were Mary and the child. It was foolish: an infant could not stand alone, and Mary’s shift hung on a line three feet off the ground. But he had been running, and his eye sight, distorted, had superimposed expectation on reality. His arms dropped. The front door opened. Priest, at the left comer of the porch, swerved around.

  It was Ogilvy; behind him, in the doorway, a junior guardsman named Mason. Ogilvy blurted, with adept fingering, into Mason’s left forearm. They were disconcerted; Priest had surprised them. Green guards uniforms were tattered, moist with earth at the knees. Mason’s arms came out of his elbow pits, and the sleeves dangled behind, vestigial limbs. Priest trotted parallel to the porch railing. Ogilvy halted him, both hands up, at the stoop. Mason unholstered his stun can; he manipulated it at arm’s length, crouching, eye along the cross-hair aimer. Priest opened his palms. He was submissive, cautious. The porch flooring grunted under Ogilvy. His face was pear-shaped, upper lip beaked out: the jowls were blue, heavy as bean bags, their dead saliva glands packed with infected gravel. He was thin: his insect-suit crotch made a deep Y to the points of his pelvis. Yet there were selected fats, toneless, stored by erratic hormones: above the pubis, in the buttocks; big lobes of tissue under his armpits. He grinned at Priest, but backed away from the landing.

  “Where is my wife?” Priest trapped the sound; mouthed. By chance he became a ventriloquist then, and his last word was murmured from the porch cornice, “…wife?”

  “Don’t come any closer. Priest.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Home to die, Priest?” Ogilvy smiled. Mason edged away from the steps. He lapped one leg over the porch rail, stun can alert, flanking Priest.

  “Answer me, please. For God’s sake.”

  “We’re a little surprised. After all, we didn’t expect you home. How did you get out? Escape? Did you kill someone?”

  “They let everybody out. Is she in there? Is she in the house?”

  “Well, no. Mary didn’t expect you either. Can’t blame her.” Ogilvy put thumbs under his puckered armpits. “You’ve been an absentee husband.”

  “Where—tell me where she is.”

  “Mason. Show Priest where his wife is.” Mason started, eyes aghast. “Not alone. You come with me, Ogilvy. I don’t like this guy. He’s an animal.”

  “Sure. I wouldn’t miss it. I want Priest to see his wife and child.”

  “My child?” Priest’s mouth yawned. “My child—” Ogilvy gestured. Priest went back, nodding, amenable. Ogilvy was astonished at the reach of his arms. From drooped shoulder caps they extended below the knee, finger tips touching at left thigh pouch. The man had been defeated: Ogilvy felt an exciting pity; it titillated him. “Ape,” he said. Priest did not answer. The drizzle had snowed itself in white globules on Priest’s greasy hair and beard: he seemed hoary, old. Ogilvy thought, but could not recall Priest’s age. Mason jumped down from the porch rail. He led them at five yards, stun nozzle set on distance. Halfway to the gate they turned right, into the weed shambles. Ma son, light and agile, did not appear to depress the damp, three-foot-tall nap of chess and barnyard grass and thistle when he stepped over it. A few women craned to watch them. One pointed, then forgot her purpose, stared at the pointing forefinger, puzzled by it. Priest’s legs sickled: he was distressed—why would Mary be here, in the grass? Ma son waved the stun can in loops, as if hurling it over his shoulder. Then he leaped. He waited for them. Priest could not see what he had jumped across. He came nearer.

  It was a grave. Mary lay in it, a strange infant clutched high against her shoulder. She had been dead perhaps twelve hours. Her left breast jutted, nipple purplish, between the baby’s triangular heels. One palm rested at the small of its back. Her sharp features were slurred kissing into the child’s side. Brown hair, carded tight by a rusty barrette, spread up the grave wall. Her buttocks lolled in a turgid puddle. Priest saw her feet, and in the sodden clay he saw one clear print—toes, arch, heel—the end of Mary’s spoor. He stared, tongue out. Then Priest began to applaud. He made big clopping sounds in his palms, anguished. He was fully insane. He bellowed. The sound was terrific. Mason winced. Priest anchored both heels in the earth, bellowed again, fists on kneecaps, pupils rolling up. It was a shout of triumph. The women trembled, afraid. They came together in groups, yanking at their fingers, their nipples. Ogilvy kic
ked Priest. He fell, curled, at the grave’s edge. Mason stepped closer; he aimed the stun can at Priest’s head. Ogilvy grinned. Priest began to grunt, Hmmmm-hmm, clearing his throat, ruminative. He dropped into the grave. There was scarcely room for his feet and they soiled her white calves. He knelt. Mary’s breasts were fuller than he could remember. He wet fingers, touched them. The carotid artery in her throat was blue, sclerotic. The finger traced it from collarbone to ear lobe. Priest stripped off his insect-suit shirt. He shrouded her privates and breasts, the baby’s buttocks.

  Its small head would not turn toward him. Priest was gentle, afraid he might snap the neck. Mosquitoes settled over his back. Mason signaled, getting Ogilvy’s attention. He shook the stun can. Ogilvy mouthed. Not yet. He was inter ested. Priest bent close, cheek to cheek with Mary, blowing dirt away. The baby’s sparse hair stirred. A fetid, sour odor rose: Priest frowned; he was embarrassed for his wife. He examined the infant’s eye, its nose; he thumbed the long cheekbone. The skull structure was prominent, threatening its skin. Priest smiled. The child seemed ugly. He heard a ticking. The capsule had landed on Mary’s stomach, on his insect-suit shirt. Priest looked up. Ogilvy’s fingers were out stretched, completing the toss. Mason had relaxed, on his haunches now. Priest’s ankles were hobbled by Mary’s body; he couldn’t leap. As if curious, Priest picked up the capsule. And the fingers of his left hand worked down, along his thigh, to the .45.

  “Swallow it,” Ogilvy mouthed. “She’s dead. Now it’s your turn. Be a good boy and we’ll bury you with her.”