Hairpin Bridge

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  And I remember how she used to dominate at hide-and-seek. Even indoors, she’d somehow remain undiscovered for ages while we searched for her, creeping from room to room like a shadow. When she finally got bored and came to us, she explained it so matter-of-factly: I took off my shoes and walked in my socks so you wouldn’t hear my footsteps.

  Duh, right?

  It’s ironic, though, that the most vivid memory I have of my sister would involve her leaping off a bridge.

  This was summer, years back. Senior year. Ellensburg, the morning after a concert at the Gorge. This was one of the few times we ever joined socially. She was with her friends, including her current boyfriend—Terrible Guy #10 or #11, I think. I can’t remember his name. Only that he was twenty-eight and we were eighteen. Growling voice, shaved head. You’ve probably seen him on an episode of COPS.

  “You have to clench your butt cheeks,” he says.

  There’s a black railroad trestle that spans the Yakima River down by Holmes. The jigsaw wood frame stands thirty feet up, barely a fraction of Hairpin. The river below is deep enough to dive.

  “Clench them,” he repeats. “It’s science.”

  My sister is perched on the bridge’s edge like a tanned rock climber, her hands clasped, her calves taut, her unpainted toenails over blue water far below. “Why?” she asks.

  “It’s something I learned from Boy Scouts. See, you hit the water feetfirst from this high, and it’s like landing directly on a fire hose, which is why you have to clench your butt cheeks.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple.”

  “Can you please elaborate?”

  “It’s science, Cambry.” He’s annoyed now. “I got a merit badge in this, okay? You gotta clench your butt cheeks so all those gallons of pressurized water won’t explode inside your asshole and just fuckin’ obliterate everything up there—”

  “I see.”

  She’s getting bored with him, so she looks over the truss frame at me instead.

  I’m hot and uncomfortable. Chasing a weak buzz with PBR and cheap weed that burned my throat. I’m perched up there on the oily railroad ties with her, Terrible Guy #11, and a few others. I’m not jumping with her. No way. This was Cambry’s idea. For a moment, I’m afraid she’ll make fun of me again. I don’t fit in with her friends. Never have. Never will.

  But she smiles at me. “Think I’ll die?”

  “What?”

  “Think I’ll die, sis?”

  “Not if you clench your butt cheeks,” her boyfriend says.

  But she’s asked me, and now she’s waiting for my answer, and I’m not sure what to say. The black railroad tie is between us like a countertop, bleeding sticky tar, and she’s leaning away to grip the edge by her fingertips and hunched toes. Even in my memory—she’s a living, breathing mystery.

  On the black wood between us, a few different variations of Bob the Dinosaur are marked in chalk between squashed PBR cans.

  She leans back farther. Away from me, over the void.

  As her question lingers in the air: Think I’ll die, sis?

  I decide I can’t answer her. I won’t. I don’t know, I want to say. You’re the one who has to jump off a perfectly good bridge into a mosquito-filled river. We’re all hungover, dehydrated. No one else wants to take a death dive into the water. No one else has a change of clothes, anyway. I don’t even think she does.

  But it’s there, so she needs to jump off it. And not just that, but she’s decided she wants to try to catch a particular trestle beam that juts a few inches out from the framework. Ten feet below us, twenty above the water. Like a trapeze artist. Just because she can, or she’s curious if she can. I remember thinking: I hate her. I hate her impulses. Her reckless curiosities.

  Do you think I’ll die, Lena?

  No. I won’t answer her.

  She rolls her shoulders back. Hanging off the wooden tie by one hand now, by her chewed fingernails. Her other arm free and dangling. She asks me a different question, no less obtuse: “Do you think there’s an afterlife?”

  “Like heaven and hell?”

  “Anything.”

  “Like ghosts?”

  “Anything.”

  I think before answering. “I do.”

  She nods thoughtfully as she hangs over the blue water. Like something down there is calling her. She looks back at me, flicking her bangs from her face to reveal a melancholy smile. “I don’t.”

  It startles me. I’ve seen my sister frown and cry, but I’ve never seen that face before.

  Then she lets go.

  She slides right off the bridge’s edge, her hand swishing away, her body and voice and all her mysteries disappearing in an instant, and I crane my neck down to follow her through the framework of trestle beams as she plunges—

  “Clench your butt cheeks—”

  It feels like she’s airborne for a full second, but I know it’s not possible at thirty feet. Midair, I see her reach for the jutting beam, and her outstretched fingers miss it.

  I hadn’t exactly been rooting for her.

  But her wrist whacks painfully off the wood on her way down. I can still hear the sound it made, almost a tick, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.

  And then she’s gone. She breaks the river’s surface with a violent clap and a geyser of green-white spray hits the bridge’s underside. The speckle of landing droplets. I barely glimpse the spreading ripples through the structure’s wooden bones, only enough to know that she hit the river feetfirst as Terrible Guy #11 instructed, although I would never ask about the status of her butt cheeks.

  As we wait for her head to appear in the water below, I feel truly alone. Her friends have nothing to say to me. I have nothing to say to them. I’m a less-fun copy of Cambry and we’re joined here because the show tickets were a Groupon. I just trace my fingers over Cambry’s chalk drawing of Bob the Dinosaur, accidentally smearing the character’s eyes with my thumb.

  Someone drops a PBR can. It pings off the beam she tried to catch and splashes down.

  Cambry’s ripples are gone now, taken by the current.

  Her boyfriend crawls past me, squinting, bumping aside another beer can. Everyone is crowding closer to the edge now. He’s the first to voice it, but it’s been building in everyone.

  “She’s . . .”

  I reposition, too, slippery fear rising in my chest as I watch the water for movement. For the flow of her dark hair. For an arm, a leg, any sign of life . . .

  “She’s gone.”

  * * *

  MAKE HER GONE, the handwritten note read.

  Marked with spidery blue pen, the college-ruled paper was taped to a deluxe Quadratec CB radio encased in the truck’s dashboard in a custom and costly retrofit. The radio reached ninety-six channels, six of them emergency frequencies, two law enforcement only.

  A second note, taped higher:

  LENA NGUYEN. HAIRPIN BRDG. UNARMED

  Above the radio, atop the dash, a female Colombian red-tailed boa rested in a lake of bright sunlight. She was coiled into a clump the size of a soccer ball, but stretched to her full length, she would measure eleven feet. Her scales ran a vivid fade from pale earth to dried blood, glossed with silver. Her eyes were lidless, unblinking.

  The dashboard was crusted with downward streaks of brown and chalky white, where fast-food napkins had failed to wipe away boa feces. Below the glove compartments, a floor of crumpled burger wrappers and fry cups climbed two feet deep around skyscraper stacks of vintage Playboys and Hustlers.

  Down in the center console, a Golden Rule bottle—Sweet Tea with Real Sugar, None of That Artificial Stuff!—rested in the cup holder, half-drunk, its glass neck alight with sunlight. A smeared print of a man’s lower lip on the bottle’s rim.

  Inches farther, a twenty-count box of Remington Express .30-30 caliber Winchester cartridges—Proven Stopping Power for Medium Game—rested on the driver’s seat by the seat-belt buckle. The box’s cardboard
flaps were open, exposing golden primers in a plastic cradle. Seven were absent.

  Within arm’s reach of this box, in a pocket of shadow, crouched the truck’s single occupant. The man who nested here in this roost of crunchy porn and reptile shit hunched on his knees in the floor space by the truck’s pedals, his right elbow resting on the steering wheel for a firm firing stance. The rifle he held was a Winchester lever-action cowboy carbine, with a blued-steel barrel and a polished walnut stock engraved with the signatures of the entire cast and above-the-line crew of the 1969 John Wayne film True Grit. The firearm was nestled on the corner of the driver’s side window, in the thinnest diagonal crook between glass and frame, so that only the last inch of the barrel protruded outside into daylight.

  The rifle’s notched iron sights aimed at the spine of Lena Nguyen, the one and only Lena Nguyen, whom he’d been summoned to collect like a dogcatcher, standing now beside Corporal Raycevic in the bridge’s northbound lane thirty feet away. She didn’t see the gunman in the truck. Her pistol was in her right hand, trained on Ray. Her attention was on something in her left. Ray’s diversion, whatever it was, seemed to involve his billfold.

  As Lena inspected it, Ray took another furtive step back, creating five feet between himself and her. Enough room to miss. Furtively, he turned to face the truck.

  Shoot, he mouthed.

  The gunman disengaged the rifle’s safety, and in his sights, Lena glanced sharply toward Ray. She couldn’t have heard the click. Maybe she saw his lips move. Or she was noticing he’d moved. Could she know? She glanced back down at the billfold in her hand (what kind of distraction was that, anyway?) and took a timid step backward. The rifle’s front sight followed her, smoothly recentering on her back.

  Red-faced, Ray mouthed again, furiously: Shoot. Shoot.

  The gunman squeezed the trigger.

  But Lena took another step backward. His gunsights followed her another wavering half step, and she dropped Ray’s wallet. It hit the pavement.

  One more step. The front sight bobbed after her.

  Finally, she stopped, her foot raised birdlike in a moment of pause, and the pinpoint of floating death found her spine. He had her. The girl’s head cocked, as if straining to hear a faraway noise. As if, too little, too late, a whisper in her mind warned of the growing danger behind her.

  Still squeezing the trigger, farther, farther . . .

  Shoot now—

  Then the girl spun sharply, whirling in a blur to face the Winchester’s sights—and the eye behind them—directly. Her black pistol spun into view, her second hand clasping around it, raising to aim. The entire maneuver took less than a half second, and by the time he comprehended this, she’d already fired with a smoky flash.

  The driver’s side window spiderwebbed with cracks—a brittle, glassy impact; the snap of displaced air; the shattering thud of lead impacting metal. The gunshot arrived a microsecond later, a tinny pop chasing the sound barrier. By then the man was already ducking on reflex, half crouching, half falling behind the door.

  The Winchester fell to his lap, his hands now clumsy mittens.

  The pistol’s echo thinned. It had happened so fast. On his ass now in crunchy fast-food debris, he looked up, blinking, at the fresh hole punched through his window. A crystalline star shape against white sky. Based on its location in the glass, she’d missed his face by barely an inch or two. Across thirty feet of distance, fired in a split-second quick-draw spin.

  As he shouldered his rifle and rose to return fire, he mouthed astonished words of his own: “Where in the hell did she learn to shoot like that?”

  Chapter 16

  Cambry’s Story

  “Get her. Get her now—”

  Cambry recognizes Corporal Raycevic’s urgent voice in the darkness, nearby but far from her mind, as huge fingers clamp around her windpipe and squeeze. The plastic-shrouded man has already closed the distance with shocking speed.

  She tries to scream, but her throat is already pinched shut. His gloved index finger and thumb clench tight. His plastic is cold against her skin. The fierce pressure crowds the blood up into her brain, making her thoughts swim.

  Voices swirl around her: “You got her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I said I got her, Ray-Ray.” The second voice comes from directly behind Cambry’s right ear, muffled by a mask. The voice is deep, full of warmth and moisture. She smells something fragrantly sweet, like tea. “She just surprised me. You could’ve warned me she was so close—”

  As he says this, he tightens his grip on her airway, wrenching her jaw painfully up and out of alignment. Her sinuses swell behind her face, about to explode. Her eyes well with stinging tears. Her chest balloons with pressure, a frenzied scream trapped inside her ribs.

  “Careful.” Raycevic’s voice rises with alarm. “Careful. You’re going to bruise her skin—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Ray-Ray—”

  “No finger marks. No bruising. No evidence at all. If you crush her windpipe, that’s a dead giveaway. Just steady, indirect pressure. Easy does it. Okay?”

  The Plastic Man’s choke hold doesn’t loosen. But the uncomfortable grip relieves a bit under her jaw. Her elbows are wrenched achingly upward, like bird wings—she can’t even remember how he did this. Whatever this wrestling hold is, he’s done it before. They’ve done this before. This entire night has been one awful calamity after another, but to these bickering men, it’s routine. And this gives way to the ultimate, most visceral disbelief of all: I’m being murdered. Right now.

  By a man dressed like a condom, who talks like the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

  Nightmares do come true, but never in the shape you expect. The man tugs her backward, as if easing her into a recliner. She kicks the ground in blind frenzy, searching for traction to brace against. Just yards of slippery, frustrating plastic. Like the sloped floor of a bathtub.

  This is it, Cambry.

  This is how you end.

  Out here, off a desolate road in Howard County, Montana. Murdered by a crooked cop and a fat trucker. Strangled to death by a man wrapped head to toe in Saran wrap, with his crinkly mummy hands clamped around her throat. She struggles anyway. Her heels scuff plastic. Squealing, squeaking.

  His warm voice returns by her ear. “Hey. You know how a boa constrictor suffocates a rabbit?”

  I don’t fucking care, she’d say if she could.

  But it’s been twenty, thirty seconds now. Her trapped breath burns inside her chest. She can’t hold on to consciousness much longer. The oxygen dwindles in her brain, her thoughts going indistinct. Blood cells withering, going dark and blue.

  “Sorry. I was expecting you to answer for a moment, there.” The Plastic Man sniffles, a deep and snotty huff. “See, a boa constrictor has a whole pink mouthful of curved needle teeth. It grips the rabbit with them, dozens of little fishhooks, while it wraps its coils around and around and around—”

  His hold on her left arm is weaker, she realizes. She squirms, twists, pivots. She can slip her left shoulder against his grip. Slowly, though. One sweaty inch at a time, and she’s running out of it—

  “And those coils tighten, oh so slowly, into a noose. Not a hard squeeze—just gradual constant pressure. Like a firm handshake. The rabbit might even have a full breath left in her chest from before the attack. Maybe she thinks she’ll be okay, and she can just wait it out. Until she exhales.”

  Almost . . .

  Cambry twists harder. But to her terror, there’s a new and powerful darkness around her, rising, lapping at her thoughts, and a putrid taste in her teeth. River water. Green algae.

  “See, the instant she lets that breath out, her chest shrinks a bit, and the boa’s grip tightens, and her lungs won’t ever inflate fully again. Against that gentle, constant squeeze, every breath is a little smaller, a little weaker—”

  She keeps twisting her arm toward freedom, inch by torturous inch, outrunning her own fadin
g thoughts, but she’s already back in the Yakima River under the railroad bridge again, trapped far beneath the water’s glassy surface, her lungs bloating with horror. Thrashing and flailing under a heavy blanket of cold water, with no one coming to help.

  “And after three or four or ten breaths . . . the rabbit’s lungs can’t expand at all.”

  Cambry Nguyen’s muscles turn to jelly. She goes limp.

  His rotten voice in her ear as she slides deeper into the river’s crushing darkness, sinking, sinking: “You aren’t the first. You aren’t the last. You’re nothing special to the boa. You’re just satisfying his need, and he won’t remember you at all when you’re gone.”

  Lena, she thinks as she plunges.

  Lena will remember me.

  She’ll come in after me.

  She’s jumping in right now . . .

  Chapter 17

  Lena

  I hit the water and for a split second it feels as solid and unyielding as asphalt. I swear I’m splattering against it the way an insect streaks against a windshield. The air punches from my chest. My shins and knees instantly bruise.

  I don’t remember deciding to jump in after her.

  I just did.

  But I remember the fall itself, how Terrible Guy #11 and all the others vanished behind me under a turbine-engine roar of racing air. A disorienting tumble as sky, trestle, and water rearranged wildly. Upon landing, I know I did everything wrong and hit the river sideways. I definitely, certainly, one hundred percent did not clench my butt cheeks.

  And now I don’t know which way is up. I’m still whirling, slowing now under icy water clouded by a rush of bubbles. My teeth hurt. There’s a ringing in my ears. I open my eyes but see only a glaucoma of dimness pierced by faraway rays of sunlight. I sweep my sore fingers to my sides, exploring, feeling for my sister in all this darkness. Finding nothing.