Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  I walked past all of this and I walked out of the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center.

  And I walked into a party.

  It was in one of those old, Victorian style houses by the University of Minnesota. The exterior was made of a stucco that was turning almost pirate treasure map brown from neglect. I believe that a few wiry branches clung to one side of the house in the shape of four, long, bony witch fingers.

  The first thing that you saw when you stepped inside was a small living room. A worn couch, loveseat, and soft chair surrounded a long table with a glass insert flanked by a couple of similar, smaller tables. At the head of the room was a large, tube television, a VCR, and a component stereo system.

  There were people sitting on the furniture. They looked like they had sunk nearly to the floor. It was going to take the Jaws of Life to get them out of those fabric pits. It’s a good thing that they were college students and probably had at least some core strength.

  Behind all of the furniture were stairs that led upstairs. Those stairs were somewhat blocked off by an old, dark, heavy, tall armoire.

  The keg was in the kitchen. I had paid the price of admission like presumably almost everyone else. It was five dollars. It was all you could drink. The beer was cheap and tasted like day old bread muddled with just a hint of bitters.

  It was awful.

  Still, the kitchen was a popular place. It was the place for serious drinkers. So naturally there was a circle of men gathered in the kitchen, stalking the keg as if it might try to run away. The kegs never ran away of course, but something just as bad (to the serious drinker) could happen. You never knew how many kegs this house party bought. It might be as many as ten, but it could be as few as three. This party could’ve literally run out of beer at any time. You knew that if you were a serious drinker. You’d maybe even been burned once before.

  Not to mention, the cops could always come at any time. And five dollars was a lot of money to a college student back then.

  So imagine a kitchen with beautiful hardwood floors darkened by an occasional heel mark or unidentifiable mess or mishap. An old white stove, white cupboards, and a rounded white refrigerator the likes of which I had only seen in my best friend from my elementary school’s grandparents’ cabin formed a perimeter, an imperfect ring, like a rectangular snake, behind the keg in the center of what was clearly supposed to be the dining area.

  There was no kitchen table. There were no kitchen chairs. And I wasn’t one hundred percent certain that they had just been moved. I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the way that kitchen pretty much always looked.

  The kitchen also led to the door downstairs. That was where almost everyone had gravitated.

  The stairs down were just bare, untreated wooden planks. That being said, they were in surprisingly good repair.

  The basement will be familiar to anyone who has ever been to a house party in Minneapolis. The floor itself was uneven. It rolled and dipped in smooth concrete hills and valleys. At one end of it was a heater that looked like Dr. Octopus. It looked like there was a fifty-fifty chance that if it became sentient it would either strangle eight people or perform a myriad of household chores simultaneously. The music was loud. It was the usual at that time: Beck, Nine Inch Nails. It bounced off of the crumbling concrete block walls.

  Of course it was wall to wall people. My friends and I had to shimmy, duck, dodge, and shake our way through bodies almost pressed one against the other. It was like a can of sardines where the other sardines were drunk and unpredictable.

  We eventually found a little niche over by the Dr. Octopus heater. We began to talk.

  Things progressed the way that they do when you’re in college and you’re at a party. You and your friends separate and you all go off and have your own private, little adventures.

  I went upstairs to get another beer, and a guy invited me to play a drinking game with him.

  It’s not like I was attracted to this guy or anything, but the game that he suggested sounded fun. It was a drinking game based on the board game Scrabble.

  The rules were that it was just like Scrabble with two exceptions. The first exception was that the only words you could spell out were words related to partying like the names of mixed drinks, alcohol manufacturers, other party drugs, etc. The second exception was that whenever someone made a word off of one of your words you had to take one drink, unless they landed on double or triple word score, in which case, you guessed it, you had to take two drinks for a double and three for a triple.

  I loved Scrabble back then, and I was really good at it. So my plan was to make him and the other two boys that I was playing with drink.

  But now I wonder if they didn’t have some darker motive. I wonder if they weren’t all a craven team, like a pack of wolves.

  I got so into the game that I kind of forgot the whole rule of always keep your hand on your drink.

  I had set my drink down on a table to my right. Fortunately, I turned to look at it at just the right moment. Or was it the wrong moment?

  A man had dropped something into my drink!

  In a kind of fugue state, hyperaware of everything, I watched him walk away.

  He was enormous. He had to be at least six foot two. He had muscles on top of his muscles. He had muscles to the point where it was sickening and tough to look at. He had the look of a bodybuilder. It looked like he had American footballs for biceps. His shoulders looked like someone had snuck two bowling balls under his shirt.

  I never could have fended off a guy like that.

  My heart raced. My breathing became shallow. I felt dizzy. I felt like I was going to pass out.

  Then I pulled it together because I knew that was exactly what he wanted.

  He sneaked off…poorly. I could see him in the kitchen by the keg. He was trying to act casual, but he could still see me in the living room. He could still see what I was doing.

  I panicked. What should I do? I thought about just walking out the door, but what if he followed me? As long as I didn’t pass out, I was probably safe here at this party, with all these people around. No, I couldn’t leave alone. But if I got all my friends, then I could leave.

  So I just got up in the middle of our Scrabble based drinking game without saying anything. I hated that I had to walk by the muscle bound rapist to find my friends but I did. As I did, I could hear the people I was playing a kind of Scrabble with protest.

  I found all of my friends, but all of them were having a good time and wanted to stay. Somehow, I couldn’t tell them that a guy was trying to rape me.

  Plus, all of them were with guys and wanted me to go the hell away.

  As I was talking to my friends, I noticed that this muscle bound rapist had joined me downstairs. He was just close enough to see if I began to falter. He was just close enough to offer that hand of support. He was just close enough to be the first to carry me off to his pit like a caveman dragging a woman by her hair.

  Fortunately, I found some people that I kind of knew. They had been in my French class the first semester that I had been in school. We had done a group project together in that class. The three of them were all friends. They had agreed to accept me into their group back then and they did the same thing again.

  They were two women with pale skin, dark hair, and dark eyes who looked remarkably similar to each other except that one was like five inches taller than the other one, and the shorter one almost always wore a knit, purple beret. The other one was a man which pleased me even more. Not that Gunther would’ve lasted long against my muscle bound rapists. Gunther was a tall thin guy from Berlin who always dressed in a really natty way. He was the only guy wearing business casual to French class. Frankly, he was just about the only guy in French class.

  The other thing about Gunther is that he actually helped me complete another assignment in another class. In my intro to sociology class I had to interview someone from a different culture. So I interviewed Gunther. It was inter
esting. Mainly because I found out that I was a more European style thinker than I knew. Provided that Gunther’s comments about Europeans were accurate.

  So we got in our group and we decided to see if we could speak in only French to each other. We did okay. Obviously my mind was elsewhere.

  I tried to suggest that we should go grab a bite to eat, like now. They were all having fun and wanted to stay.

  This whole time I could see the muscle bound rapist. He was pacing. He was muttering to himself.

  I saw him huff and violently move his arms! My heart was beating so fast that I thought that I was going to take flight, like a hummingbird. I began to seriously wonder if I was going to have a heart attack and die. I was sure this was it. The roofie hadn’t worked so now it was time to resort to plain, old fashioned brute force.

  He began to violently push people away from him. I was paralyzed.

  But he made his way away from me…upstairs.

  The next thing that everyone at the party knew, the music was shut off, and we could hear screaming and banging noises upstairs. Everyone tried to run upstairs except me and my group. I tried to stay strong and speak French.

  The upstairs was much smaller than the basement so only a fraction of the people downstairs actually made it upstairs to witness the drama. There was a line on the stairs that led down to a puddle of drunkards who weren’t even (lucky?) enough to get a spot on the stairs.

  One of my friends that I came to the party with had witnessed the drama. For some reason she came and found me right away. She told me what had happened.

  She told me that this muscle bound freak had just run upstairs and run amok! He smashed the armoire that blocked the stairs in splinters. He broke the glass inserts in the coffee tables and then broke the wooden frames. He smashed the loveseat and the chair. He was working on smashing the couch when one of the guys who rented the house had tried to tackle him. The tackle failed, and the guy had just ended up on the hulking man’s back like something between a piggy back ride and a bull ride. Three other guys from the house had to come help the other guy out. Finally, they ended up getting the behemoth down. With one guy on each leg and one guy on each arm, they literally threw out my berserk attempted rapist and locked the door behind him. He got up and tried to open the door. He swore and pounded on the door when he realized that it was locked. That didn’t last long though. According to my friend, the muscle bound predator had left.

  I wasn’t so sure of that. I was still afraid that he was lurking in the bushes, around the corner, or behind a tree waiting for me.

  I looked around wildly every few minutes as my friends and I made the short walk back to the dorm. None of them noticed.

  I never saw that man again. I later found out that he wasn’t even a student at the University of Minnesota. He knew someone who knew someone who was friends with one of the guys at that house in high school. I was also told that the reason that he had muscles on top of muscles was because he had started using steroids. They blamed his bizarre behavior on ‘roid rage.

  That was little comfort to me though. I stopped going to parties for a while. I became suspicious of everyone and everything. I startled easily and was on edge.

  I went to campus counseling…eventually. That helped. But in a fundamental way I was never the same after that. I couldn’t ever just completely relax and party.

  And now I had just come to at the edge of the Third Avenue Bridge with no memory of having walked there and no recollection of where I had come from…until I thought.

  I was at the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center. What just happened? Did I see that man who meant to rape me out of the corner of my eye talking to a visitor just a couple of stalls down? Do I need to see someone again? Was I crazy?

  The answer all of those questions might have been yes.

  8

  I shook myself off like a Springer Spaniel. I shivered.

  Then I decided that I might as well cross the Third Avenue Bridge since I was there. So I began to make the relatively dull crossing to the flattened buildings on the northeast edge of downtown and beyond.

  I studied the bridge as I walked. I wanted to keep my mind engaged. I was a little worried about where it might drift to.

  So I looked at the bridge with an inspector’s eye.

  I immediately noticed something potentially problematic. The Saturday night before that Sunday was supposed to have been the first snowfall in the Twin Cities.

  Twin Cities’ meteorologists try to translate snow into things that are more practical than inches. So plowable is officially a word in the Twin Cities lexicon.

  That last Saturday night was forecast to be plowable.

  That was saying something. The pavement, especially in Minneapolis, still had to be at least in the forties. So a lot of snow would melt.

  That meant that if the weather had looked the same in January we would’ve probably been looking at something like at least eight inches of snow.

  As it was, we had been expecting two to three inches of slushy accumulation.

  MNDOT goes into overdrive with that kind of forecast. Roads are typically pretreated with a solution that contains salt and several other ingredients. That salt does a great job of eating through snow and ice. The problem is that salt does a great job of eating through just about everything.

  That salt is not that big of a deal if there is snow and ice on the roads. Even the winter roads that you probably think of as completely clear of snow usually have at least a thin filmy coating that’s a mixture of the road treatment and snow and ice.

  And you want to have that little bit of film on the roads. If you think that there are a lot of potholes now…

  So MNDOT had pretreated the major roads and bridges. Then we only got a dusting.

  The last thing that I had done before I went to bed that Saturday night was look outside at an onyx sky spitting out fat, white, little snowflakes that fluttered around the city lights like a small number of moths.

  So that Sunday we had salt on the roads and no snow. Even worse, we had salt on the bridge decks and no snow.

  So I looked at each little divot and fissure in the bridge deck as I walked along. I had walked almost all the way across the bridge, but I eventually found it. I saw a rut that had eaten clean through the bridge deck, right by the last joint over water, not far from the shore.

  It was close enough to me that I could reach over a concrete barrier with a guardrail and touch it. When I touched it, I felt the surface crumble beneath the weight of even my lone pointer finger.

  I knew.

  Sure enough, my phone had several frantic messages on it when I returned home. My boss was freaking out. I’m supposed to reply to emergency calls within an hour. Unfortunately, she had first called just after I had left for jail.

  It had taken me twenty minutes to walk to the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center. Of course I hadn’t brought my cell phone because they told me not to. My visit with Mark had taken the allotted half an hour.

  And apparently as I walked, unaware in my fugue state, I walked slowly. Because there was a missing half hour that I can’t account for.

  Plus it took me another ten minutes to get home.

  I didn’t know what to say to my boss. Then I realized that I could just tell her the truth…approximately. I could tell her that I thought that the condition of the Third Avenue Bridge might be so dangerous, and I was so close, that I decided that I would go out immediately and give it a quick inspection.

  I told her that. I don’t think that she believed me until she heard me describe the exact place at which the bridge deck had eroded away.

  I assured her that I’d be there for an immediate full inspection first thing in the morning. She agreed to handle the logistics of getting me a cherry picker for the inspection. I thanked her and hung up.

  It dawned on me that I was actually doing it! For the first time since the semi-suicide, I was inspecting the very bridge that said semi-suicide h
appened on.

  Sure, I’d probably just be inspecting that small portion of the bridge. And sure it would not be the portion that poor Faith fell off of. But it was that bridge!

  Was it wrong to be happy about that?

  That next morning was bone chilling for November. The snow had failed to materialize, but the weather people were right about the cold. It was in the teens at eight in the morning when I promptly showed up to do an emergency inspection of the Third Avenue Bridge.

  My happiness from the night before had vanished. I was cold, cranky, and even a cold press with enough caffeine to dissolve a nail left in it overnight hadn’t helped that. I just wanted that damn inspection to be over with.

  Especially because you never find anything in these inspections. I’ve done eight emergency inspections in my time as a bridge inspector. I’ve never found anything that needed more than a shovel and some road patch.

  But what made me angrier than anything else was that my damned cherry picker wasn’t there. Doesn’t MNDOT fucking understand when MNDOT starts work, I wondered. This was critical. I didn’t have a lot of daylight to burn if something actually needed to be done.

  I took a deep breath so that I didn’t call my boss a lying psychopath. Then I called her.

  She told me that MNDOT forgot to tell her that MNDOT had decided to outsource the hauling of offseason cherry pickers to an outside vendor until this morning. And she had been about to call me. That was because this new vendor didn’t start until eight in the morning. Then they would still have to load up the cherry picker, drive to the shore by the Third Avenue Bridge, and take it off. Best case scenario, they’d be there at nine.

  I was fuming as I stalked across the Third Avenue Bridge, barely noticing how otherworldly the towers of the city looked in the remnants of a clouded, pastel daybreak. I walked at a gallop to Dunn Brothers.

  I had skipped breakfast so I ate this sandwich. It was egg and sausage inside of Belgium waffle “bread” that was studded with maple sugar. I’m sure it’s terrible for you. But it was really good.