Читать книгу Seven Mile Bridge - Michael M. Biehl - Страница 14

7

October, 1971

Somebody accidentally left the engine running. That was what I thought as I walked around to the access door on the side of the garage. I had no premonition that I might find anyone in there. Or if I did, I have erased it from my memory.

The access door was locked, which was odd, because we all knew it was pointless. The door was so warped that only about a quarter inch of the latch bolt penetrated the hole in the strikeplate, and a good push popped it open. I held my breath as I found my way through the clouds of exhaust to the button that opened the overhead door. Then I went outside to let the air clear a little before I went back in to turn off the engine.

My father was in the driver’s seat, pitched over on his side. His face was flaccid and cherry-red. The passenger compartment reeked of alcohol and an unpleasant, ethereal odor I had never smelled before but assumed was from some kind of liquor. I remember feeling a clutch of shock in my face and chest, but I don’t remember feeling anything else except the urgent desire to get my dad out of there. I knelt down on the garage floor, got one arm under his knees and the other under his back, and carried him out of the garage in the same position a groom carries a bride over the threshold.

I lowered him to the lawn next to the driveway as gently as I could. An hour later I would feel the pain from the muscle I pulled in my back, but I did not feel it at the time.

His body was limp and his skin was stone cold. I had no training in CPR, but I had once seen it illustrated in a medical pamphlet. Could I remember how it went?

Just do your best.

Tilt head back, listen for breathing. Pinch nose and cover mouth completely with yours. Blow until you see the chest rise. Repeat. If he doesn’t start breathing, do chest compressions. How many? I forget. Try five. No, try ten. Repeat mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions. This time, try fifteen. Continue until help arrives.

Realize you’ve fucked up already, help is not going to arrive because you stupidly started CPR before calling for it. Run to the kitchen, dial the operator (there was no 911 in Sheboygan back then), say you need an ambulance, it’s an emergency. Get to the brink of screaming with frustration at the ambulance dispatcher.

Run back outside. Rip your shirt on the door handle. Continue CPR until you hear a siren on your block, then use your torn shirtsleeve to wipe your tears and snot off of your father’s red, lifeless face, collapse on the lawn and sob like a baby.

Sad to say, that, apparently, was my best. One of the paramedics was nice enough to tell me that, from the looks of things, my delay in calling and poor CPR technique “probably” had not made any difference. That “probably” haunted me for years after, but not nearly as much as the belief that my father might not have perished if I had come home on the athletic bus when I was supposed to, instead of fornicating in the quarry.

The paramedics must have shot everything they had in the ambulance into Dad before they gave up trying to revive him. They left behind scores of plastic hypodermic needle sheaths, scattered on the lawn like confetti. They did not, however, leave Dad behind. Obvious as it was, he had to be hauled to the hospital so a physician could pronounce him dead. He was later autopsied and then cremated. I never saw him again.

The police showed up a little while later and asked me questions about how, where, and when I found my father. Then they snooped around in the garage for a while. I started to feel sick, so I went into the house and sat down at the kitchen table. The police were still there when my mother got home. She had on her work uniform, a pink cotton dress that had her first name embroidered on the front and “Piggly Wiggly” in big letters on the back.

Two cops escorted her into the kitchen, a short one in a uniform and a tall one in a trench coat. One of my parents had turned the heat off for the unseasonably warm day, and it was getting chilly in the kitchen. It was also dark, because two of the three lightbulbs in the fixture over the table were burned out.

The cop in the trench coat, who introduced himself as Detective Adams, did all the talking. He had a deep, raspy voice, and when he wasn’t talking he made little saliva bubbles between his lips.

“You just get off work, Mrs. Bruckner?”

“No, officer. I get off at three. So I can be here for my two sons when they get home from school. What’s the problem?”

“Please sit down, Mrs. Bruckner.”

“What’s all that junk on the lawn?” She looked around, her eyes settling on me. “Jonathan, what’s the matter? Where’s Jamie?”

I shrugged. I figured I could tell her where Jamie was after the cops left. She didn’t ask where Dad was.

She looked at the detective. “Did something happen to my son? Where is my son?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. Please have a seat.”

My mother sat down and the detective broke the news to her. She did not cry or become hysterical; she just stared blankly and clicked her fingernails. Every so often she looked at me with a sad expression in her eyes.

“You say you get off work at three?”

“Yes.”

“You work at the Piggly Wiggly?”

A regular Sherlock Holmes, this guy.

“Yes.”

“What time did you leave the house again?”

“I haven’t been home since this morning. I went to my sister’s house after work.”

My aunt Melanie lived two blocks away. She was two years older than my mother. Her husband, my Uncle Stan, was disabled in World War II and used a wheelchair. My mother rarely went over there straight from work.

“Mrs. Bruckner, does your husband have any serious health problems?”

Click, click. “He had a kidney removed awhile back. He’s allergic to pollen. He hasn’t exactly been robust for years.” Click. It seemed to me my mother was volunteering a lot of irrelevant information.

“Has he been depressed lately?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“Anything in particular making him depressed?”

“Yes.” She proceeded to tell the detective the whole story of my father’s colossal blunder, saying he had suffered “severe financial reverses,” like he was some sort of distressed capitalist. She said, “David incurred a large debt as part of a business transaction at Falls Dieworks,” which had “resulted in litigation and the termination of his position with the company.” I could not understand why she was putting on airs. Surely the detective could look around and see that we were of extremely modest means, and had been for a long time.

“David has been attempting to start up a new enterprise, but his ventures have not met with any success,” she said.

It boggled my mind to hear her describe it that way. After my father got fired, he looked for a job for a few weeks and then he seemed to give up. He started drinking more heavily and spent a lot of time puttering at his desk in the basement, ostensibly working on inventions or ideas for new businesses. I snuck down to spy on him a few times and more often than not caught him playing solitaire. Our neighbor Mr. Atkins also fancied himself an inventor, and sometimes he would come over and the two of them would get drunk in the basement and talk about their ideas. My mother derided this activity in the harshest possible terms, saying my dad and Tom Atkins were down there “baking pie in the sky,” “living in fools’ paradise,” or “looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow of crap.”

Now she described it to the detective as “attempting to start up a new enterprise.” La-de-dah.

“I would say he has been despondent lately.”

“Has he been drinking alcoholic beverages?”

“Yes. Quite a bit.”

“To excess?”

“Sometimes.”

The short cop in the uniform was taking it all down. When he wasn’t writing he was clicking the push button on his ballpoint pen. Between that and my mother’s fingernails, the kitchen sounded like a typing pool.

My father was dead, beyond helping or hurting. I didn’t know why it bothered me so much to see them making a record of his weaknesses, but it did. It revolted me.

“Is there any history of mental illness?”

“What?” Her eyes darted around, over to the door, up to the ceiling. It occurred to me she was looking for Jamie. “Oh, you mean David? No.”

“How about his parents? Siblings?”

Click, click, click, click. A look came into her eyes like she had just had an epiphany of some sort. “Yes,” she said, relief in her voice. “I think he once told me his grandfather died in a sanitarium.”

“Uh-huh. Well, thank you for your cooperation, Mrs. Bruckner. I’m sorry for your loss.”

After the police left, my mother poured herself a drink, lit a cigarette, and sat down in the living room. Jamie came in through the back door about five minutes later and headed straight for the stairs.

My mother questioned him. “Where have you been?”

I thought it was obvious. His clothes were covered with quarry dust.

“Out.”

“Where, out?”

He goggled his eyes. “Far out. It’s none of your business.”

She raised her voice. “Jamie. Tell me where you went.”

“Forget it.” He bolted up the stairs two at a time.

I thought we would talk about what had happened that night, but we didn’t. I had told Lori I would call her that night, but I didn’t. Instead, I went straight to bed and lay awake all night, sweating, staring at the crack in the ceiling, and replaying the evening in my mind. My heart raced, my mouth was incredibly dry, and I felt nauseated. Around half-past four, I heard my mother step on the squeaky tread as she came upstairs. She came into my bedroom two hours later and sat at the foot of my bed.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Jonathan, I want you to keep an eye on Jamie for me. I don’t know how he’s going to handle this.”

“Okay. How about you, Mom? How are you doing?”

“Don’t worry about me.” She paused and put her hand on mine, a rare gesture. “Jonathan, I know you haven’t ever seen me cry very much.”

That was true. Just the once, actually, when we got the letter from the Bank of Wisconsin.

“And I know it probably hasn’t looked lately like I care much for your dad.”

Man was that true.

“But you should try to understand that he was still my husband and the father of my children, and it wasn’t so long ago that I loved him very much. So don’t be upset if you see me crying a lot for the next few weeks.”

But I didn’t. Not even once.

* *

The House, Day Three

The sun streaming through the window in the gable awakens me. Sitting up, my head reminds me that it took more whiskey than usual to put me to sleep, probably because I took that detour down the dark alley off Memory Lane.

Now I am getting earnestly, gut-gnawingly hungry. If I am going to spend even one more day here, I must buy groceries.

The Piggly Wiggly where my mother worked is still on the same corner. It has gotten much bigger and now has a strip mall attached to it. I pick up a frozen pizza, a couple of frozen dinners, a bag of chips, some cans of soup, a sixer of beer and, for the sake of my health, an apple. I put the groceries in the trunk of my Dodge, right next to Mom.

On the way back I swing by Photo-Phast to pick up the prints I had made from the negatives in the envelope labeled “Lake/Audrey,” the pictures of my parents, my brother, and me in front of the lake cottage. The bright sun of the early morning is gone and the sky is now paved over with concrete-gray stratus clouds. A few snowflakes wander restlessly over the potholed street.

The Asian woman behind the counter has her black hair pulled into a sprightly ponytail today. She gives me a friendly smile as she hands me my prints, and I feel desire stirring. Too young, I tell myself, don’t risk making a fool of yourself. Besides, she’s probably just smiling because you look slightly ridiculous in your high school letter jacket. I return a minimal smile and retreat to the Dodge with my pictures.

The snow has picked up and it is starting to accumulate on the windshield and moonroof. I open the Photo-Phast envelope and pull out two four-by-six black and white glossies. The first shows my mom and dad standing on a wooden raft buoyed by oil drums, floating on a large, weedless lake. Behind them in the distance, a tiny motorboat pulling a skier churns a long, white wake.

In the second print, my parents are standing in front of a tidy cabin with window boxes full of geraniums. My mother is holding a baby and my father is holding the hand of a child who looks about two or three years old.

The child is not me. It’s not even a boy.

I look at the baby in my mother’s arms. When I looked at the negative, I thought the baby was my brother. In the print I can tell that he isn’t. I have seen enough family pictures lately to recognize myself as an infant.

There is something familiar about the little girl holding my father by his index finger. The mouth, the jaw, the contours of the forehead. No wonder I mistook her for myself in the negative. There is a resemblance. But I don’t know who she is.

I feel a flutter in my gut and an urgent need to take a drive out to the Kettle Moraine State Forest, to Lake Audrey. The Dodge hesitates before it turns over. Time for a new battery if I intend to hang around Sheboygan much longer. The tank is almost empty, not enough to get me out to the Kettle Moraine and back.

The attendant at the Amoco station is so covered with grease I hesitate to take change from him. He’s heard of Lake Audrey, but doesn’t know how to get there. A map costs me $4.98. They used to be free.

The snow is really coming down by the time I get on Highway 23, heading west. Even so, I can’t seem to hold my speed down. Traction is poor and visibility is worse. But the road is flat and straight, there is no traffic, and the freshly flocked trees fly past me on both sides until I see the sign for the Northern Unit of the Kettle Moraine Forest.

Here, the road starts to rise and fall, and several times I almost slide into the woods on narrow, hairpin curves. Much of eastern Wisconsin is so flat that it looks like God came down on it with a gigantic iron. In school I was taught that the reason for this is that a glacier came through during the last Ice Age and scraped the land smooth. But in some places the retreating glacier left behind humps and ridges of rock, sand and gravel in various characteristic forms. They gave the humps and ridges cute little names like eskers, drumlins, kames, and kettles. At some point they figured out that glacial detritus made for lousy farmland but nice scenery, and the Kettle Moraine units were set aside for tourism and recreation.

I don’t remember anymore what the difference is between an esker and a drumlin. I know it’s a bitch to drive through them with six inches of snow on the road and not enough tread on your tires. But I press on.

The wind is whipping the snow hard across the road, and I almost miss the small, brown wooden sign for Lake Audrey. At the end of a quarter mile of gravel road there is a deserted parking area and a small boat ramp. The lake is frozen and white as a wedding cake.

Wet snow sticks to my face and hands and invades my shoes as I walk out on the lake and look around. The lake is so small I can see the entire shoreline through the blizzard. I turn 360 degrees, wincing against the brutal wind.

So that’s why my father didn’t mention a vacation home on Lake Audrey. There are no homes on Lake Audrey. No log cabins, no cottages. No one would waterski on a lake this small.

A blast of snow accompanies me back into the car. My face and hands are raw, my feet are soaking wet. The yellowed envelope in which I found the negatives is crumpled on the passenger seat.

“Lake/Audrey,” it says. That slash between “Lake” and “Audrey” bothered me, but I’d ignored it. I look again at the picture of my parents with the two children in front of the log cabin, and now I know.

Audrey is not the lake. Audrey is the little girl. Who looks like me.

Who is she? Why is she in this picture with me and my parents, in front of a vacation cabin, grasping my father’s finger as if he were her daddy?