The Incident on the Bridge (6 page)

S
hiva lives on Mount Kailash. He has a thousand names and a thousand faces. He is woven into all that the eye can see: the urban forest, the body of the girl, the bag once used to carry sails.

Frank opened the bag in the acacias, where a sign helpfully said
NO TRESPASSING
. He settled Julia's head and body first, then her feet in their white socks, dirty now, a hole in one toe. The gun was a terrible thing in the short term but Julia was just sleeping, a heavy sleep, the weight of her body as he pulled her to the trees surprising. If she awakened too soon, she might overturn the dinghy and drown, so he wrapped pieces of an old T-shirt, torn into strips for this purpose, around her ankles and slim wrists. No one passed on the jogging path as he wrapped tape over the ribbons of shirt, once around, twice around. No one but Shiva was watching him in the urban forest. There was a man near the skateboard park sitting on the hood of his cab to have a smoke, but he was too far away. Other side of the bridge. Only Shiva could see Frank and Julia, and Shiva understood.

But Julia's boots. They were too big. No place for them in the bag with Julia. One hand for the boots, one hand to pull the sail bag to the dinghy.

The black man who was smoking on his taxi, what if he could he see the boats from the parking lot and thus would see Frank lifting the bag that held Julia? Frank walked out of the acacias to the chain-link fence, under the bridge, and out to the beach, just a sailor with empty hands, every right to be there, to observe the dark water, inspect the sky. It was normal to turn and face the park, the general direction, normal to see if the man who had sat with his knees raised, skinny as a monk, sat there still.

Nothing, no one, pavement, light.

The time was now. Sweat covered his entire chest, slicked his arms. He carried the sail bag until he reached the sand, then dragged it. The strap tore right off. No good. He needed both hands for the last thirty yards. He laid the pink boots over the bag and hurried: twenty-five yards, twenty yards, fifteen, ten. Achieved. He turned the boat right-side up as he always did. Removed the oars as he always did. Dragged it to the water because the extra weight would be impossible unless the boat was already afloat. Thinking! Always thinking. He was too impatient, though. He thought he could lift the sail bag and balance the boots, but the boots slid off,
kerplunk kerplunk.
One floated and one filled as he arranged the foot end of the sail bag in the dinghy, his eyes dry and over-open, his back tight with panic, the silver light on the white dinghy inhumanly bright, as if disgusted. He felt in the water for the boots, both submerged now. It was high tide. Headlights raked the bay, skimmed the bushes, streaked his hands. He needed to climb in the boat now, look normal, begin to row. Somebody's car turned in the parking lot, toward, then away.

Go. He'd just go. Come back for the boots if he had to.

Row, row, row your boat.

It was simple now. It was a matter of rowing, water, and balance.

Whoever had been in the parking lot was not there now. No one stood on the beach. No one stood on the sidewalk. The
Sayonara
was moored on the far end of the first row, the outer edge, and four of the five nearest boats never had a soul on them, not even on weekends, just parked, collecting slime. Nobody was home as he passed, not even the Parrot Lady, who was out cruising again, probably sailing around in the dark with no lights on, the way she liked to do.

There were flashing lights up on the bridge, something happening up there, a jumper, maybe.

One more stroke, and he was home. All he had to do was carry Julia aboard.

F
en Harris was tired but he couldn't sleep. The highway still seemed to be going under him the way it did when you'd been on your skateboard for a long time. You moved, but the bed didn't go anywhere and you couldn't slow your mind down. Again and again he saw the girl on the bridge wave him on, her hair like a flag in the bleaching light, and the poles of the streetlights ticked past uncounted.

“Alea iacta est,”
his father used to say when they moved to a new town or he bought a new car or signed a check. He even said it when he and Fen did something silly but irreversible, like ascend the first hill of a roller-coaster ride.
Alea iacta est.
“The die is cast.”

Moving to a new town was like getting to cast the die again, in Fen's opinion. No matter how disappointing the last town had been, and Las Vegas had been bad even before his father got depressed, Fen had always felt that this time when the die stopped, the number he wanted would be right there on top.

It was easy to feel this, because he was lucky. The second time he'd broken his arm, his dad asked for a description of what Fen had been doing at the skate park, and when Fen gave him a slightly modified version of the truth, his dad said, “You know what, Fen? You don't weigh the risks. That's your problem. You do what you want, and you think it'll be fine, you'll always be lucky.”

“I'm an optimist,” Fen said. “Why do you hate that so much?”

“I don't.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Whether I like it or not doesn't matter. It'll end on its own.”

“What will?”

“Optimism. It's a thing that ends with experience. Experience does not breed optimism.”

Fen felt sick inside, the way he always did when his dad talked like this.

His dad said, “What, you think it's not true?”

“I don't want it to be true.”

“I'm not trying to depress you, Fen. I'm trying to prepare you for real life.”

Fen would have preferred his father to say goofy, cheerful stuff like
The world is your clam,
the way his uncle Carl in Coronado did.
Carpe diem,
maybe, if he had to use high-horse Latin. That would have prepared Fen better for things like his father dying by the side of the road. Wasn't it bad enough that his father had been mistaken at first, or so they presumed, for a homeless man under an overpass, car after car driving on while Alan Harris, fighter pilot and father of one, lay gasping in the cold shade until one driver thought,
Why is that guy wearing new shoes and nice shorts?
But by then all hope of reviving him had passed.

Alea iacta est.

Experience does not breed optimism.

He could not find other words to think.

The day after the funeral, Fen had taken a die from the Yahtzee game he and his mother used to play, driven to the bare, sandy edge of Woodlawn Cemetery, walked to his father's grave, which he found easily because of how disturbingly fresh the dirt was, and shaken the die in cupped hands.

“Six,” he said out loud. It was hot in the cemetery. There was not a single dark color in the atmosphere, as if everything living had been faded by the sun, even the grass and the tall palm trees. The die was deep red plastic, a beautiful ruby cube with soft edges and white painted dots, and it felt like a caramel in his hands. He visualized the six, the two rows together like buttons on a coat, and he willed the die to give him a sign that his father was wrong. Fen squatted down, shook it a few more times, and let it fall on the powdery dirt. It tumbled toward the grass and stopped. Four white dots. Fen felt disturbed but not defeated. He came back the next day, and the next, and the next, until all the dice from all the games in the house had been used up: Yahtzee, Farkle, Risk, Payday, backgammon, Clue. Sometimes the dice lay where they'd fallen out of his hand until the next time, and sometimes they'd been picked up and set somewhere else, as happened the day that the flat marble tombstone that said 
ALAN GREGORY HARRIS, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER, NOW FLYING JETS IN HEAVEN
lay newly installed, flush with the ground. The headstone installer or whoever it was had set all the dice in a straight line above his father's name, the same way someone had arranged toy cars on the nearby stone of a boy who had died at five years, six months, and thirteen days.

Yesterday, before he drove to Coronado, Fen had taken a die from a friend's Monopoly game and stood by the grave until he was sweating from his scalp and his armpits and the backs of his knees. The dice on the headstone were different shades of white and red and they were all different sizes. The numbers facing the sky were random, not in any order.

“Alea
NOT
iacta est,”
Fen said to his father's stone, then visualized a six and tossed the last die. He felt almost psychic as it tumbled over the dirt, as if he could not only see the outcome but control it: James Fenimore Harris the Magician. But no. He got a three.

Normally he walked away at that point, but this time he reached down and turned the die over so the six was on top. He turned the others, too, all twenty-one of them, so that he had a colossal set of sixes, and he raised his hands in mock victory before glancing sheepishly around to check if someone had seen. But it was blazing hot. Baking. No other mourners stood at the edges of the green, shadowless, mown-over graves. He wished all the headstones were sticking up instead of lying flat, so the people's souls or whatever could see out, like invalids propped up on pillows. Then he thought what a stupid, childish idea that was.

“Bye, Dad,” he said. “I'm moving to Coronado now.”

The thing about visiting people in the cemetery and thinking them back to life was that you left them all alone afterward. You turned your back on them and walked away into the world, free and heartless.

“There won't be anybody here, not for a while, anyway, not
right
here….I'm sorry.”

Fen had almost reached out to roll all the dice again and leave them in a more random state, the way the world left things, but he hadn't, and now he was awake in his uncle's house, searching the drawers of his cousin's old desk, pushing aside paper clips, roach clips, pushpins, tarnished pennies, a torn book of matches, broken mechanical pencils, and tangled headphones until he found, at the very back of the bottom drawer, a red- and-white wooden die, which made him feel vaguely hopeful as soon as he cradled it in his palm. “I'm an optimist,” he said, but he didn't roll the die to prove it. He set the die—which was chipped and dented, as if someone had idly bitten down on it with pointed teeth—inside the top drawer, deliberately choosing the snake eye instead of the six, and then he lay back in the borrowed bed and wondered if he should have gotten out of his truck to help the girl on the bridge.