Читать книгу The Secret Goldfish - David Means - Страница 10

A small car had blown from the bridge. He heard it in a news report, but when it happened, exactly, he can’t remember—and now it’s like any old news report, nothing but a premonition. A small Toyota compact was swept from the bridge during one of three days of high winds. (This was back when small Japanese-built cars were a novelty, and many in Michigan shrugged and said, “See what buying one of those little tin shit cans will do to you?”)

A fine drift of snow moved over the meeting point of two massive, surging bodies of water; it covered the lurking currents. He imagined the car floating down, making a swan dive into the icy reaches.

Those currents battling each other between two great lakes at the Straits of Mackinac, pounding past St. Ignace, surging along Nine Mile Point. Into this unimaginable fury of currents she falls, angelic with her hair lifting up and her face settled into terror and then grace (it’s five or so seconds before she hits the water) or whatever you want to call it as for the first time, perhaps in years, she becomes completely placid, almost joyous. The car hits the choppy foam and lingers upright until it lists (some might say romantically) to one side like a great ship sinking, the water spilling the rubber seals, cracks, anyplace it can until a bubbling froth no one will ever see rises up and she’s gone. All that in two minutes. There are those who have stopped on the narrow span, one of the longest suspension bridges in the world, braving the wind, to gaze down at the dark water. They wave and point, finding nothing in the surge and snow and night-dark except perhaps what they imagine to be a glint of fender, a fleck of what was but is now completely gone—rising out of the blinding wind and snow.

That day she went down to the Lower Peninsula to visit X, who managed a food market in Traverse City. They went driving, two lovers alone. Now they’re parked in his tan Chevy Nova at the end of Mission Point. See them? Her boyfriend has his pants shackling his ankles and she has her shirt above her shoulders. A beastly, dark night, raging gusts rock the car on its shocks. The words whispered aren’t much different from the radio noise, vows floating over static, meant more to tickle the timpanic membrane than anything else—and gooseflesh on her arms proves to him that his breath in her ear is arousing, and the words she speaks, with her lips against his neck, don’t come anywhere near his ears, but he feels them anyway, a soft, moist flutter of lips and tongue. It is the solitude and joy in this stuffy car in the center of the absolute rage of the elements that amuses, draws us to them, makes us wish there might be some way to pluck her out of the car, to warn her of her pending fate. Twenty yards down the sand, Lake Michigan churns wildly with the same violence that sends supertankers to their grave, and yet they are going at it, finding handholds, testing new courses with their fingers. The external rage of wind that will in a few hours send this girl’s car off the bridge now helps them to feel that the only solace and relief and safety in this world lies in the intermingling of their bodies, while outside the earth breathes hellfire.