Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  In deserted tunnels beneath a city of angels a Checker Cab’s headlights probe ahead like searchlights unshrouding the ocean floor.

  Somewhere out there in the turning world lost people who will meet are strangers yet. Somewhere crowded strangers meet. Somewhere consequential people fall in love. A woman dies and maroons the man who loves her on the crowded globe alone. Somewhere in history strong hands clasp and hold. Somewhere myth demands a terrible release. A penitent soul will not let go. Plucked guitar strings conjure tears. Vapor ghosts from liquid bubbling on a heated spoon. A lyre chord resounds while riots burn a city down. Siren song a singalong for old dogs’ howls. In rank apartments needles carve cuneiform on blueveined roadmap flesh, a plunger pushed to summon dreams in sepia. Somewhere cold along the Mission District a cancer riddled ragman stops and grabs his chest with sudden vivid memory, some lost love’s perfume. His callused fingers numbed by blues he played for her for thirty years in crappy underpaying bars where groping drinking paying people talked above his naked pain. Somewhere east of downtown there’s a blind man and his halfblind dog waiting for a train that never comes. In Hollywood dark deals are clinched inside a restaurant closed for many years that caters to a private clientele. In a bar where gazes never meet a jukebox gulps a coin and blank eyes become ghosted by a generation’s past as everyone and no one hears a steel guitar begin to sob. In a drawer in a desk in a secret room lie sixteen yellowed stapled pages and a signature in blood.

  Alone in a house on the continent’s edge a brokenhearted father sobs and sinks beneath the burden of his grief.

  In a silent house in the Hollywood Hills a body on a bed grows cool.

  Somewhere on a windswept frozen plain a resolute musician falls.

  XV.

  COME ON IN MY KITCHEN

  NIKO BLINKED AT his brother in the late morning sunshine. Van didn’t say a thing, not hello, not even surprise, but his expression clearly said Jesus Niko you look like hell. Niko silently opened the door wider and turned his back on his brother and drew his ratty bathrobe tighter as he went back into the apartment.

  Van followed him inside and stood dumbfounded and turning about in the still and musty living room. Knotted bedsheets curtained the windows to perpetual twilight. A faded Navajo blanket rumpled at the foot of the threadbare couch. On the other end two stained bedpillows without cases. On the coffee table within easy reach lay empty Nehi bottles, chip bags, In-N-Out sacks, paper plates, tv dinner trays, a pizza box. Cigarette butts and crumpled wrappers everywhere. The coffee table scarred around the edge closest to the couch where butts had been left burning. The possibly tan shag carpet matted and sprinkled with detritus. Cottage cheese ceiling waterstained and earthquake cracked. The silent old tv tuned to General Hospital and bathing the room in some awful light. An unplugged lamp sideways on the stand beside it, next to a kilnstretched Pepsi bottle.

  From where he stood Van could see into the kitchen where foodcaked dishes swam in gray water. The toilet droned in the bathroom, needing only a jiggle to shut it up.

  Niko flopped onto the couch and began searching for his cigarettes as he stared at the mimetic soap opera.

  Van wrinkled his nose and breathed out and said Jesus. “Wrong apartment. He’s a couple doors down. Tell him you’re a Jehovah’s Witness.” He snorted.

  “Don’t you have a bed?”

  “Yeah. It’s in the bedroom.” Niko found his Kools under the pizza box and tamped the pack. “You want something to eat?”

  “This may be the first time I’ve been glad I ate on the plane.” Niko lit a smoke. “Haw haw, that’s a good one bro.”

  “Where’s your girlfriend? What’s her name?”

  Niko smiled a private sleepy smile. “Rumor has it she’s just hunkydory.” He looked down at himself exposed by the bathrobe when he flopped onto the couch but didn’t bother adjusting anything.

  Van looked at the floor and sighed. He left the room and a moment later came hollow metallic jiggling. In the living room again he said, “Your bathroom is disgusting.”

  Niko tapped ash into the pizza box. “I piss in it, man, I don’t eat off the floor.”

  Van glanced at a poster of a mouse giving the finger to a diving eagle, THE LAST GREAT ACT OF DEFIANCE.

  The sobbing toilet quieted.

  Van found the Trimline phone under a stack of unread newspapers. He clicked it several times but got no dial tone. “You disconnected your phone?”

  “Ma Bell did it for me.”

  “Niko.” Van stood over Niko now. “Dad’s been trying to get hold of you for three weeks.”

  “You make a better wall than window, Van.”

  “What?”

  Niko made a brushing gesture for Van to get out of the way of the tv. Van stared at him a moment longer and then turned around and banged the tv off. “Look, you want to crawl into a bottle and sit there in your own crap, that’s your business. You’re thirtysix hundred miles away from us and we all know what a grownup you are now.”

  “You came all the way to Califor-ny-ay just to tell me I can do what I want with my life? That’s a real shot in the arm, bud.” He laughed. “Speaking of which.” He glanced around the coffee table and then started to get up.

  “Niko, Mom’s sick.”

  Without replying Niko went into the kitchen and opened Jemma’s Cookie Monster cookie jar.

  Van followed him. “Did you hear me? I said Mom’s—”

  “I heard you.” He reached into the cookie jar and pulled out a baggie.

  “I didn’t come out here because she’s got the flu, Niko. Dad thinks it’d be good for her if you—” Van stared as Niko removed his rig from the baggie. Teaspoon and syringe and cottonballs and a tiny cellophane packet of china white. Cut with baby laxative but hey. Beggars can’t be choosers. Also a length of surgical tubing but Niko no longer bothered with it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making breakfast.” Niko measured a fingernail sized pinch of whitish powder into the spoon and added water from the dripping tap. He grabbed a matchbox from the foodcaked O’Keefe & Merritt stove. “Most important meal of the day you know.” He scraped a match alight and held the flame beneath the spoon and watched the powder liquefy and quickly bubble. “All your recommended daily vitamins and minerals.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Van’s tone was curiously empty. “Well I’ll tell you, brother mine.” Niko stirred the spoon with the hypodermic needle and pressed a cottonball into the liquid. He pushed the needle into the cottonball and slowly drew the plunger. “I’m cooking my heroin because snorting it just don’t float the boat no more.” He held the filled syringe up to the light and turned it to look for cotton filaments. Instead of pulling up the sleeve of his robe he unbelted it and dropped it just to piss Van off even more. Sickly thin and bareass naked in the filthy kitchen he held the syringe away from himself and glanced at the crook of his elbow. Three square meals a day for the last six months had not collapsed his veins and Niko took a certain pride that he still shot in the ditch. Not between his fingers or his toes and not under his tongue or behind his balls or in his neck or stomach like some fuckedup junky. Sure these regular meals had gotten steadily larger but hey, that’s what appetites are for. An eighth a day, big woop. A real junky’d call that a fucking tease. And hell, look at this arm. Pinpricks sure, but nothing like some of the road atlases he’s seen. His last abscess was a fading purplish memory. Good healthy veins. The better to—

  That was when Van hit him. Van was taller than Niko but much lighter and he’d never been much of a fighter. The blow was more haymaker slap than punch but Niko wasn’t expecting it and the hypo sailed out of his hand and onto the baggie which promptly turned over and emptied every last expensive necessary grain of china white into the filmy gray dishwater.

  Niko gaped. For a second he seriously wondered if he could shoot up the dishwater.

  Van looked as surprised as Niko, as if he had just been operated by remote control.

/>   “You asshole.” Niko made to go around Van but Van was ahead of him and rounded the counter and saw the syringe on the carpet and stomped it. Then he whirled around with his fists up but Niko only stared in total disbelief at the ruined syringe and the wet stain on the shag carpet like some backwoods king whose tiny kingdom has just vanished out from under him.

  “You dick. What the fuck do I do now?”

  “I guess you’ll have to do without like the rest of us.”

  Niko lunged. He got Van by the collar and pushed him back into the kitchen and bent him back over the counter and put his face inches from his brother’s. “I got a special bulletin for you, Father Vangelis.” Flecking his brother’s face with spittle. “That wasn’t yours. Who told you you could show up here uninvited and fuck with my shit?”

  Van tried to push back but Niko pushed him first and then turned away. “Fuck. I got no dough for more smack and my connection might as well be in Antfuckingarctica till tomorrow. Jesus in a fucking sandbox, man.” Suddenly he turned toward Van with narrowed eyes. “You came here with money didn’t you? Sure you did. Our father who art in Florida wouldn’t send his baby boy out west without a little pin money.”

  “I’m not going to give you money to buy drugs.”

  Niko clasped his hands and looked piously skyward. “And somewhere an angel gets its wings.”

  Van watched perplexed as Niko stomped out of the kitchen and came back with a wrinkled Cheech Wizard shirt and a wrinkled pair of pants drawn from a laundry pile.

  “Look Niko, whatever we need to do I’m sure we can both—”

  Niko tossed a set of keys and Van caught them. “You broke it,” said Niko, pulling on the pants he’d grown too thin for. “You can help fix it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Trolling.” Niko slid his feet into a pair of rubber thongs.

  THE INTERIOR OF Niko’s white Ford wagon looked a lot like the inside of Niko’s apartment. A for sale sign taped to one window, useless because the phone number on it was disconnected now. On the rear windshield some wag had written Test Dirt—Do Not Remove! The engine’s idle sounded like an offbalance washing machine on spincycle. Niko slumped in the passenger seat and yawned at the roof. He sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of his hand as Van backed out of the driveway and onto Las Palmas.

  Niko gave Van directions to a payphone on Highland and scrounged up change from the seat cushions. He was out of the car before it stopped moving. Van watched him run into the booth and slam the door and drop the change and dial and light up a Kool and try to pace the eighteen inch length of the booth. Niko’s face brightened when someone answered. He got out maybe five words and then frowned. He said hello a few times and then batted the receiver into the phone and left it hanging. He got back in the car and slammed the door and sat there scowling at a torn flyer for some band at Gazzarri’s.

  “Niko—”

  “Shut up man, I’m trying to think.” His face was covered in sweat. “I’m not going to help you get any more of that shit.”

  Niko looked at Van as if he’d told a bad joke. A thin clear trickle of snot ran onto his upper lip.

  “I mean it. I won’t have anything to do with it.”

  Niko pursed his lips. Finally he nodded. He sniffed loudly and held out his hand. “Okay. Give me the keys.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You’re gonna take a cab back to the airport and tell Mom and Dad whatever the hell you want. If I can’t get hold of my guy I’m gonna drive to Watts.”

  Van pulled the keys out of the ignition and held onto them. “Are you crazy?”

  “The brothers don’t care who they sell to.”

  “You’re not going to Watts and I’m sure as hell not driving you there.”

  Niko waved at his brother as if batting away flies. He yawned hugely and spat out the window. “Spare me the party line, little buddy. I don’t really give half a shit if you approve. I’m facing the day without my usual rosy smile and it’s all your fault. So this is your chance to make it right.”

  “I’m not going to help you buy drugs.”

  Niko wiped sweat from his forehead. “If I was a kid and you broke my toy you couldn’t just say So what, kid, I don’t like your toy. Right?”

  Van stared at him as traffic went by on Highland. “That’s some seriously messed up logic.”

  Niko shook his head. “No it’s not. You break my toy, you owe me a new—”

  “It’s not a goddamned toy.” Van slammed the steering wheel. His eyes were tearing. Frustration, anger, pity, some combination. “Jesus look at you. What the hell have you done to yourself out here? Mom’s got cancer, do you understand me? She’s going in for radiation treatments and Dad thought it’d be good if you were home. I’ve been running interference for you for a month. I told him you’re a musician, you keep weird hours, maybe you fell on bad times and your phone got cut off, maybe you had to move, it’s a tough life, flying by the seat of your pants, blah blah blah. And then I show up and—” He waved at his brother as if he could dispel him like smoke. “What a fool,” he said and Niko knew Van meant himself. Somehow that was worse than him calling Niko a fool. Because something in Van’s tone said, I should have known better. You’re a screwup and I should have known better.

  Van clamped his eyes shut and turned away from him. Niko looked at the cigarette burned nearly to the filter in his fingers. He chewed his lower lip and scrunched his face up like a gambler figuring odds. Then he ground out the butt in the overflowing ashtray and set a hand on his brother’s shoulder. For the first time since he showed up on his doorstep Niko realized his little brother was still just a kid. He’d just gotten out of, what, his first year at UF? Only two years separated them, but Van was just a kid.

  “Van. Van. I’ll go with you. Okay man? I’ll go home.”

  Van turned toward him but his guard was still up. “Just like that huh?”

  “Almost. You gotta cut me some slack man. It’s like six hours to Florida. I’ll be a mess.”

  “Poor baby.”

  Niko was dying for another cigarette but he wasn’t about to relinquish his brother’s attention now that he had it. “It’s like medicine, Van. If I don’t take it I’ll get sick. I just want to be sure I’ll be okay until we’re home, that’s all. I need to score. Just a little bit. Just enough to get me through the flight okay. And then we’ll be home and it’ll be fine. I’ll see Mom and you guys will help me through this.”

  Van looked at Niko’s hand still on his shoulder. His mouth scrunched up and he looked worried. It was the expression Niko’d learned to seek every time he wanted to talk Van into something. Letting him borrow a dollar from the uncirculated coin set their grandmother had given them, loaning him money in Monopoly so he wouldn’t have to quit, letting him ride his brand new birthday bike. Of course somehow it always worked out that those mint coins never got replaced even with regular old coins, or he came back strong in Monopoly and trounced everybody and wouldn’t offer to bail his brother out, or he clipped a curb with the bike and laid it down hard enough to bend a pedal inward till it scraped the metal trouser guard every time Van rode it from then on.

  Niko saw that look and saw that Van wanted to believe him so he pushed a little more. “I just need a little. Enough to get me home. I won’t buy any more than that, I swear.”

  Van looked at his lap. “And you’ll come back with me?”

  “I’ll eat the peanuts and stare at the stewardess’s butt.”

  Van shook his head. “Why do I let you do this to me?”

  “Cause you’re my brother.” Niko grinned and sniffled and shook Van’s shoulder. “That’s what brothers do, man. You know I’d do the same for you.”

  Van started up the car. “No I don’t. Because I’d never ask you to.”

  THEY DIDN’T GET a hundred yards from the Gulf station five blocks away from Niko’s apartment.

  At the station Van gave Niko some money to fill up the car
and buy more cigarettes and then sat there shaking his head and getting madder in the early summer heat. Niko went in and in a moment the pump activated. Van shoved the nozzle in and squeezed the handle. Niko came out of the station and went to a door and found it locked. He shook his head and walked quickly back into the station and came out and waved a restroom key at Van. Van frowned. Was Niko going to the bathroom to shoot up? How could he? He was clearly out of heroin.

  The nozzle cut off and Van reinserted it and squeezed the handle again.

  He kept trying to feel sorry for Niko but what he mostly felt was anger, and something that couldn’t be called betrayal because it was not entirely unexpected. Niko was the hell bent for leather one, the one without a brake pedal, the one who went too far. He had always stuck up for Van in fights with other kids and had always been fun to tag along with because he was restless and mischievous and always coming up with new diversions. But it seemed you always ended up standing beside him hanging your head and apologizing to someone for breaking their window, talking their son into jumping off a roof and spraining his ankle, getting into the birthday cake before it was served. Something in Niko didn’t know how to stop.

  When Niko entered high school and Van was still in junior high they began to drift apart. Niko took up guitar and joined a band and discovered girls in earnest. Van stuck with the schoolbooks. He knew Niko was drinking and probably worse and it made Van a little cool toward his brother and a little sad. After Niko left for California seeking fame and fortune as a rock star, like every other American male of his generation who could even get his hand around the neck of a guitar it seemed, not only did Niko have no brake pedal, his wheels came off. In California you could do anything and no one seemed to care.

  Van shook his head. Go west, young man. So you can fall off the goddamned map.

  Niko came back from the restroom already lighting up a Kool and looking fidgety and happy the same time, a jester desperate to keep the king entertained and avoid losing his head. His wrinkled T-shirt was soaked with sweat. He kept rubbing the back of his head and scratching his arms. His nose would not stop running and he kept sneezing and spitting and swallowing.