In the seedy bars on the waterfront, the Delgatos soon became known as “The Typhoon Cousins.” Jorge enjoyed leaning down to a negligent business associate in a bar and whispering in his ear, “The last word you’re gonna see tonight is typhoon.” A philosophy had emerged. If you leave a Smith & Wesson gun in a bar, you will be out some money and possibly even your freedom. But who registers an Easton Typhoon? And then, should they get caught again for robbery or assault, they didn’t know of anyone in Portland who had done extra time for packing a baseball bat.
Jorge checked the sales tag to see if bats had gone up in the past year. Only $49.99 before tax. Where could you get a loaded gun for that amount of money?
“Think they’ve ever seen a Typhoon up in Waddamash?” Jorge asked. As he warmed up, he imagined the watermelon of Billy Thunder’s head exploding on contact.
“Mattagash,” said Raul. “You swing pretty good for a heavy man.”
“Grab a ball and pitch to me,” Jorge said. He gripped the cushioned handle of the Typhoon as he rocked back and forth on his feet, finding that perfect stance. Smiling, Raul selected a new softball from off the shelf, a Diamond Flyer, sun yellow with red stitching. He paced thirty feet up the aisle before he turned. As he began his windup, Jorge peered up into the rafters at Walmart and pointed to an invisible center field, as Babe Ruth had supposedly called a 1932 hit into the bleachers at Wrigley Field. Raul brought his elbows back, lifted his right leg, and threw the yellow ball down the aisle at a leisurely speed. The crack of cork against aluminum startled him. It seemed to startle Jorge too, as if he hadn’t known his own strength. The cousins watched as the Flyer flew like a small yellow sun over home appliances and Barbie dolls, over towels and indoor furniture, tableware and linens, until it disappeared from their sight.
“Fuck, dude,” said Raul, as the sound of shattering glass echoed through the aisles. A woman’s scream rose up from lighting fixtures. “I thought you were going to bunt.”
***
Harry dreamed of his father again, a man who had come home in a coffin from a place called Bloody Ridge, a man he hardly remembered. But there he was, still young and boyish. He seemed more like a son now than a father. “I have something for you,” Leonard Plunkett whispered. “I brought something back from Korea.” When he opened his hand, Harry saw that it clutched the Purple Heart. Leonard Plunkett had to die for the medal that his son lived to receive, a posthumous gift from the military. The country wasn’t proud of Harry’s war. But he had paid the price for it anyway, along with his fellow soldiers and the innocent Vietnamese women and children, and men so old they had no teeth and no heart left to fight. “Take it, son,” said his father. And that’s when Harry tried to stop his own hand, tried to tell his unconscious mind that it was a trick. Don’t take it! But his hand reached out anyway and touched the ribbon. This was when it always happened, when his fingers touched the medal itself, that his father’s hand changed into the hand of a skeleton, just bone, the skin rotted away. As always, Harry struggled to wake up, but there was the fleshless face, the eye sockets black as coals. It was him, reaching again for the pant leg of those Army-issued fatigues. It was the first man he’d ever killed, a nameless gook intent on never letting Harry forget him. The others, the ones that followed, they no longer bothered him. But this one, this first one, was slow to die. Over the years, and as he’d done that day in the jungle when Harry stood over him, ready to fire the bullet that would finish him off, his eyes had pleaded with the American soldier who was about to kill him. He reached out and grabbed the back of Harry’s pant leg as the gun exploded. All these years later, and through the vehicle of dreams, Harry knew what the eyes were trying to tell him. I am a man, like you. I have a woman I love. I have children in my future. My family will mourn me. Can we stop this, you and me? But he would have killed Harry too, had it been the other way around.
Harry recoiled from the dream skeleton. He fought the blankets on top of him but knew he was still asleep. He knew the pattern well by now. He was still asleep because she hadn’t come yet to stop the nightmare. And sure enough, there she was. Emily. Her smile was what he would remember on his deathbed, when his time came. Emily’s smile was the most gentle thing, not taking up any more space than was needed. It’s all right, Harry, that’s what her smile said. I know now what you went through. Go back to sleep.
Harry opened his eyes. He heard wind rocking the chair on his back porch. Tears ran freely down his face. It’s an amazing thing in a man’s life when he comes to a realization, when he recognizes that the places which breed horror can also breed love. Otherwise, how could Emily arrive each time, just behind the black eye sockets and the bony fingers? We are what we dream, Harry told himself.
7
FRIDAY MORNING
Wind rocked the hanging sign that said Blanche’s Café, swinging it back and forth on silver chains. Around the front steps, dead leaves had pooled into orange and yellow piles, with a few red maples here and there for effect. Blanche’s cat sat licking its front paws as if maybe it had eaten something good from the autumn fields. Harry liked the sound of the bell when he first opened the door at Blanche’s. It was an old-fashioned sound you didn’t hear much anymore. It was good to know there were still places where a bell rang when a person stepped inside, a bell like a pleasant voice, saying, Well, look who’s here. What can I do for you?
He was the first customer, as usual, and right on time for the first order of eggs, the first pancakes, and the first strips of bacon from the griddle. He took off his denim jacket and hung it on the deer antlers by the front door. He pulled out one of the four stools at the little service bar.
“Where were you yesterday?” Blanche asked as she poured him the first cup of coffee. “I saved a meatloaf special for you until I finally had to sell it. You’re not going to Watertown to eat behind my back, are you?”
“Yesterday was the first day of the rest of my life,” Harry said. “So I took the day off.” Blanche gave him that appreciative frown she always did when Harry said something witty.
“Even Orville didn’t know where you were,” she said. “You missed out on a day to torment him and now it’s Friday, his last day.”
“I don’t need to be present to torment Orville,” said Harry. “My moose does it for me.”
“Tell me something,” said Blanche. “I mean, we all know Orville thinks the Lord didn’t rest on the seventh day. He used it to create mailmen instead. But other than that, why him?”
“He’s like that mountain,” said Harry. “He’s there.”
Blanche went to the refrigerator and opened it. She took out a carton of eggs. Harry watched as she bent to grab a roll of paper towels from a bottom shelf. Her long brown hair was pulled back again in a ponytail. Her jeans weren’t too tight, the way some women in town wore them. Instead, they looked comfortable. And that was the operative word for Blanche too, and how most people felt around her. Comfortable. She still had a nice body, but then Blanche was a runner. She put in six miles every day, either in the early hours as dawn crept over the town, or at night, under the shine of moon and stars. Harry often saw her running, absorbed in her own thoughts, her legs thinking for themselves as they ate up the road in front of her. In the summer she wore tank tops and shorts. In the winter, she’d be in sweats and a jacket. Sometimes, if it was night and the road dark, Harry would follow slowly behind in his truck as she ran, his two headlights lighting the way for her. He figured that owning a business couldn’t be easy on Blanche. She and her husband had been divorced for so many years now that he had another grown family somewhere downstate. She was a decade or so behind Harry in years, so he estimated her age to be a year or two over fifty. He didn’t remember her from school. He was a senior in those days and she was lost somewhere down in the lower, anonymous grades of grammar school. She would have been a young girl in 1966, the year he shipped out to Fort Lewis, Washington, that halfway house for th
e insane asylum that had once been a little country called Vietnam. By the time Harry returned and he and Emily got married, Blanche was already living downstate. It had been a year earlier that something in the air called her home, and now Blanche’s Café was a favorite gathering place.
Blanche slid a plate of eggs and bacon in front of Harry. She reached for silverware and a napkin.
“Were you staring at my butt again?” she asked.
Harry didn’t know how to respond to Blanche most of the time. She was as outspoken and confident as Emily had been soft-spoken and shy. But that she had a nice butt had been the hushed topic of many male comments at the café.
Harry cut into the first egg with his fork.
“Is there a charge for staring?” he asked.
“Guess what? I missed you yesterday,” said Blanche. “Maybe it’s time you made your move. We’re not getting any younger. Especially you.”
The bell over the door rang and Harry looked up to see Tommy Gifford and Bobby Fennelson. They pulled out stools next to Harry’s and reached for menus. They sat staring at the words as if maybe the writing had changed over the past year and some new dish was about to jump out and surprise them. Blanche put an empty cup in front of Bobby and poured him a coffee.
“Coke,” said Tommy. “No ice. Eggs and bacon.”
Bobby put down his menu.
“How the fuck can you drink a Coke for breakfast?” he asked. “This early in the day, that’s like drinking motor oil.”
“My mouth, my taste buds, my breakfast,” said Tommy.
“Girls, please,” said Harry. “Do we have to listen to this every morning?”
The red wall phone rang and Blanche answered it.
“Yes, Ray, salmon loaf and mashed potatoes,” she said. “Yes, it’s chocolate pudding. Sure, I’ll save a plate for you.” Blanche hung up the phone.
“Some kids broke a few beer bottles at the town dump,” she said. “The sheriff’s been doing extra duty out there, hoping to catch whoever it was.”
“Those were probably my beer bottles,” said Bobby.
“No town in America has a safer dump,” said Tommy.
Blanche went back to the kitchen, and Harry heard the sound of eggs cracking. He was still trying to sort out his thoughts. She had said it, and he had heard her very well. I missed you yesterday. He had no idea she felt that way about him. Had he grown blind, living alone as he did?
“Hey, Harry, tell us a war story,” said Bobby.
“Yeah, Harry, how many of them slant-eyed bastards did you kill?”
Harry grinned. It was always his first response when anyone asked him about Vietnam, as if the grin gave him time to think. He threw a ten-dollar bill onto the counter next to his plate.
“Apparently not enough of them,” Harry said.
***
Orville was disappointed that Billy Thunder and his swearing Winston weren’t waiting for him at the end of the bridge. He had in his hand the very brown box that the young man had been so anxious about, a package with those four smug words, Elizabeth Miller, Portland, Maine, as its entire return address. Orville had planned a cat-and-mouse game with Billy, pretending there was no package before finding it in the backseat just as the boy was about to hyperventilate. He looked down at the flimsy camper in its clutch of birch trees on the flat, but the roofless Mustang was gone. How much more agony could Billy Thunder endure? And with snow predicted any day now, what was he going to do? He’d need a shovel, not just for the road down from the bridge to the camper, but to shovel snow off the Mustang’s seats. Orville put the brown parcel into the mailbox. He had fifty-two more houses to go, and then he would be a regular citizen of the town.
At Blanche’s Café, Orville glanced over and counted five cars in the yard. The place would be almost empty by the time he got done, around three, depending on whether the populace detained him. He wouldn’t mind a last flirt with his divorcees, since a peek at cleavage was out of the question, it being the season of sweaters and jackets. And he wouldn’t mind that sad, come-hither smile from his widows. It was the Sal Giffords, with their junkyard-dog personalities, that Orville dreaded. But so far, it had been smooth sailing, with a few of his clients even leaving him a note of retirement congratulations in their mailboxes. He was now more certain than ever that a retirement party was in the works. But at which house? These high-tech times were difficult to read. Some days, as he delivered the mail—Orville refused to let Meg refer to it as snail mail—he could almost hear the Internet messages flying over his head like carrier pigeons.
As Orville arrived at the house with the panoramic view of the river, he saw Harry Plunkett waiting by his mailbox. Orville slowed the car, letting his right hand reach out to touch the newspaper that lay on the seat beside him. Patience. That’s what he’d been telling himself for three years.
Harry was smiling as Orville pulled up to the box.
“Last day, Orville?” he asked.
Orville said nothing as he pulled out the packet that held Harry’s bills, along with a few flyers. In a matter of minutes, he’d be at the last mailbox on his route, Buck Fennelson’s house. When he turned around and drove back, he’d no longer be the official mail carrier.
“Did I see you talking to my moose yesterday?” Harry asked. “He’s from Quebec. He doesn’t understand English.”
Orville unclamped the rear-end door and stuffed the letters inside. He pushed the hinged door back up and heard it snap shut. He said nothing as he steered the car back onto the road. He drove toward the trailer park with its nine silver boxes waiting like a purple martin birdhouse, minus the droppings. Then, it was straight on to Buck’s house at the end of the road and Orville Craft’s last stamp, last envelope, last red flag, last mailbox. But it was also the beginning of all-out war with Harry Plunkett, one he knew might last forever. And like those haggard soldiers of wars past, Orville Craft would stay in this one for the duration.
***
By noon, Billy and Buck had finished splitting all of Amy Joy Lawler’s firewood. By one o’clock, they had stacked the wood neatly in even tiers by her back door. All morning long as Billy chopped and stacked, he had tried to think of other beverages that could quench the human thirst better than a cold beer, even during frigid weather. Billy did have that case of Jack Daniels at the camper. But while Jack might warm a person up, he doesn’t take away the kind of thirst that comes with a hard day’s work. What made all this thinking troublesome was that Blanche didn’t sell beer, Mattagash being a dry town.
While Billy had been inwardly philosophizing as he worked, Buck had been outwardly whistling. As soon as he finished one song, he’d quickly start another, none of them songs Billy had ever heard. When each new song began, he had to resist asking Buck to shut up. It was as if the two of them were on a chain gang, singing Negro work songs and picking cotton. But at least Buck’s stomach wasn’t singing, so Billy let him be. When they finished the job, Billy accepted the hundred and twenty dollars Amy Joy gave them—not bad for four hours of work.
“I can get Mona a birthday present now,” said Buck.
“What are you buying her?” Billy asked as he handed Buck sixty dollars.
“A box of white wine,” said Buck.
Billy opened the door to the Mustang and heard it creak. At least there was no sign of snow, as there had been the past few days. The sky was now bright blue and the sun carried enough yellow in it to look believable. The day before, Billy had stopped by Kenny Barker’s camp on the banks of the Mattagash River. Kenny had a computer and so he helped Billy search around on the Internet until they found not just a classic car site, but a classic Mustang site. Billy made Kenny a deal. If Kenny would use his Visa card to pay for the hydraulic mechanism Harry Plunkett needed to fix the Mustang’s top, he’d not only get his money back, but he’d also get a hell of a discount on the next shipment Billy got from Po
rtland. So Kenny had smelled a reefer burning and clicked Order Now on some website out in Arizona.
“Wanna ride to St. Leonard with me?” Billy asked. “I’m dying for a beer.”
“Well, ah,” Buck said. He stared at the roofless Mustang, thinking.
“It’s your fault Mona has the pickup again,” said Billy. “Come on, get in.”
Buck did so reluctantly, his rubber work boots squeaking and his nylon ski jacket swishing as he swung his arms. He pulled the car door shut and pushed himself down in the passenger seat. Finally, he lay with his head pressed against Billy’s leg.
“Now don’t do anything wild while you’re down there,” Billy warned. “I happen to prefer women. Unless, of course, you’re good at it.”
“Damn you, Billy,” said Buck, his face flushing.
Billy put on his earmuffs and gloves and turned the key. The engine purred.
“Pilot to copilot,” said Billy. “We got ignition.”
Eight miles later, they were pulling into the grocery store in St. Leonard. Billy parked the Mustang next to the gas pump that said Regular. Buck sat up in the front seat and looked all around, as if he had no idea where the car had landed, the Sea of Tranquility, maybe. Billy got out and shook his arms to put some warmth back in them. He slapped both hands against his frozen cheeks, hoping to stir the blood there, get it circulating. He reached for the gas cap and unscrewed it. It was the original cap, with the raised and galloping mustang in its center, but the threads were corroded from usage. He would order a vintage one once he got his financial life back in order. He put the nozzle into the tank and started the pump. Buck got out of the car and stood watching the numbers flicking, indicating gallons and dollars. His face was red with cold.
The One-Way Bridge Page 10