Off the Bridge
It seemed like it was the end of the night, but of course it wasn’t, because God can’t even define the vanishing point, and a dead cheerleader doesn’t really end things if you look at the big picture like I do. But we threw her over the railing that night, wrapped in an afghan, because Drunk Stu said that was what she would have wanted, an afghan. I knew since his mother died that he’d be the one to listen to, because at her funeral he’d never cried, and that had meant something to me about how someone can face adversity with such flagrant pragmatism. “Guess I’ll have to make my breakfast tomorrow,” he’d said. But the girl we’d just thrown out, the girl whose body was floating south wrapped in an afghan with a tag reading Made Especially For: Stuart Clybourne, that particular girl would never be gone to Drunk Stu the way his mother was. Ferdie lived with his father the same as Drunk Stu, both ducking into their houses, working their way between fists just to sleep in their own beds. I was different because I had my mother, I would soon be gone to college on scholarship, though it was still very real for me.
She’d showed up at Ferdie’s house around nine, but who knows, because it had been getting dark at five for weeks, so maybe it was earlier. Her car’d gone off the road almost a mile back and she was hurting, only a small scratch, some glass slices in her forehead, but her ribs hurt, and I guess that should have been a sign. We’d been working on emptying the same tank of nitrous Drunk Stu had stolen three weeks earlier from his dentist’s office. When she knocked I let her in, so maybe when it all gets sorted out on Judgement Day, I’ll be standing there stupid and confused in the middle of the blame spiral, all this shit shooting out from an epicenter of ignorance. She took a balloon when Ferdie held it out to her like she’d done it a thousand times, and a lot of people pass out, but after a few minutes when she didn’t get up, I took her pulse and then all this happened. I could say it wasn’t always like this, but it sure as hell seemed like it most of the time.
The worst part of the night wasn’t what happened on the bridge,
though--it was the cold. The wind in Great Falls in February comes off
the plains in an upsweep screaming like the wails of a thousand starving
children. It doesn’t matter if you’re an Ethiope dressed as
thick as the Michelin man, you will feel naked in that kind of cold. Yes,
the worst part of the night was driving in that cold in my car, in my
very identifiable 1966 Ford Fairlane, no heater, windows permanently half-down,
listening to them in the back.
-Drunk Stu, who’d been the one to yank the phone cord out of the
wall when Ferdie picked up the receiver to dial because he’d be damned,
he’d said, if he’d go to jail over a fucking girl what dies
from a nitrous balloon, was in the back of the car saying, “Turn
off the damn lights. Quiet down. Ooh, turn this song up!”
- Ferdie, who’d come a long way since pissing his pants an hour earlier and always said he’d be the one to call if the CIA wanted another hitman, rocked himself back and forth in his arms next to me saying, “Oh, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck, ooh, fuckfuckfuckfuck fuck… Fuck!”
- Drunk Stu, who’d also been the one who’d first said we were
all going to go to hell for this, smoked a cigarette, saying, “She’s
gonna bounce off the ice you dumb fucks, she’s gonna be sitting there
in the morning and some little girl, her sister or some shit is gonna
say ‘Mommy what’s that in the river?’ and that’ll
be that.”
I just kept my mouth shut and drove the speed limit.
She didn’t bounce when she hit the ice, I could hear the crash from
inside the car after Drunk Stu hefted her over and the red-and-white afghan
flashed over the guardrail. Ferdie watched to make sure the body didn’t
resurface while I sat silent in the car, and I imagined I was watching
with him for an instant, and had the sudden fear that her hand would break
through from below and she’d drag herself, undead, on top of the
ice to be found at daybreak.
After he was back inside we drove to Denny’s where my mom worked
nights.
“It’s only midnight,” Drunk Stu said from the backseat.
Ferdie, who sat next to me, said, “I can’t remember her name.
What was her name?”
He was crying, and Drunk Stu was quiet because he didn’t know it either, because she went to a different school, but I knew her name was Thaedra Burnstein because she’d told me earlier that night, but I’d be damned if I’d give them a name to put to her face.
“It’ll be in the paper soon enough,” I’d said. “It’ll all be in the paper.”
“You boys want wheat, white or what?” my mother asked from the foot of our table.
“Ooh, could I get a english muffin?” Ferdie asked.
“An english muffin and that’s an extra fifty cents.”
She didn’t know anything about what we’d done and couldn’t have. I had furry teeth from the beer and cigarettes and the shit in the coffee was clinging to the deposits and my God, all I wanted was a toothbrush and a bed and friends that wouldn’t embarrass me in front of my mother. But that night, seventeen years old in Great Falls, Montana, you didn’t really get to choose these things. As if things are different now.
It was snowing when I got home; I could hear the tick of the flakes on the glass as I fell asleep, shuddering awake again and again when the sensation of a cold, wet hand struck my cheek in dream. It was clear and late on Sunday when I woke, and there were no sheriffs storming into my bedroom flashing badges and teeth. On the phone, Drunk Stu told me we needed to talk, that Ferdie didn’t go home last night.
“Well who dropped him off?” I asked as we drove east toward Ferdie’s grandmother’s trailer.
“It’s just that I think he might be talking to someone,” Drunk Stu said. “That little shit!”
Ferdie was four-nine in his basketball shoes, five-six when he took a jump shot. Drunk Stu was six-three barefoot and had first gotten chest hair at fourteen and could’ve pulled Ferdie’s arms off if he’d said something. But he would never tell, he had nothing to gain. Great Falls is not a place where back-stabbers are heroes--cowboy justice is not yet dead and Ferdie knew it.
Ferdie’s grandma is Blackfoot, half-deaf and blind, so she opened the door and felt our faces to make sure we were who we said we were. Her hands were soft and warm and barely brushed my cheeks before she switched over to Drunk Stu’s face that she’d always said she could recognize even before she touched it by the smell, but today she squeezes his cheeks tightly before nodding us inside.
“He’s in the back,” she whispered. Then more loudly, “You
boys done something, you feel guilty enit? Want to come over her to get
to Ferdie Bird’s good side. I know what you did. You got to drinkin
again. Devils.”
She kept talking to Drunk Stu while I slipped past quietly to the half-opened
door in the back of the trailer. Ferdie crouched in the corner of the
bedroom under some hanging mobile with feathers and Indian shit all over
it. He was definitely not sick, but I could tell from the door that he
was really out of his mind by the way he kept mumbling and rocking back
and forth on the balls of his feet.
“Let’s go for a drive,” I said.
I pulled drunk Stu away from Ferdie’s grandma, and we were in the car headed back into town, which was stupid really, because we’d just have to cross the bridge again, and there’s apartments that look right at it that could’ve seen us last night, but just then was when Drunk Stu remembered the tag on the afghan.
“Holy Fuckin Christ Shit-ass!”
The girl had been underwater for ten-and-a-half hours and we were all getting pretty edgy. We talked about what we could do. The afghan was lashed together with garbage ties, which I had tried to explain earlier wasn’t a good idea cause those things break real easy but right then all we wished was that they would. Ferdie said he had a plan.
“We’ll just scout the river, go out and find the body and cut the afghan off it and no one’ll know the difference.”
“My fucking mom put that tag on it,” Drunk Stu said. “She didn’t even make the fucking thing, she just mail-ordered a bunch of the fucking tags and bought the blanket secondhand.”
“We’ll find it before anyone else does,” Ferdie continued, “and we’ll get the afghan off’n it and push it back under and everything will be okay then I think, it will be better… like new.”
He was crying again and before I could say anything Drunk Stu lashed an open palm against the back of his head and screamed at him for being a sissy, for not having brains enough to realize that three boys hauling a waterlogged body out of a river might draw questions. We decided to search at night, which turned out to be pretty stupid because after about a week, when the girl’s car was found and the search parties were out, they were up all night with floodlights on the banks and down by the dam and there was no way we were going to volunteer because Drunk Stu said that’s just what they’d expect.
“You know how in those cop shows how the murderers is always them guys standing in the crowd tryin to be real real helpful and all that. Well if we’re not in the scene, you know, we ain’t even suspects.”
At school everyone was talking about her. I sat through math class envisioning
Mrs. Dayton holding up a frozen arm asking me if the angle at which it
was frozen was complimentary to the angle I had scrawled on the board
as an answer. I knew even then that it was ridiculous to obsess about
her, that something like kismet, fate, God, or the spirits Ferdie’s
grandmother warned us about, would be the ones to decide our futures.
As it happened, I had the best ACT scores of my senior class, which I
was sure was a mistake, but it came in the mail one day and my mother
wept, saying how proud my father would’ve been if he hadn’t
gotten asbestos poisoning in the mines up toward Libby. I couldn’t
tell Drunk Stu or Ferdie about the test scores, about the offer from Montana
State for a full-ride, the same way I haven’t told them about the
few minutes that I’d spent in the bathroom with the girl that night,
Thaedra, and listened to her worry about her father and cheerleading tryouts
and her sick dog, Herbie, and I never said to them that I had convinced
her, trained her on nitrous balloons, how you can’t take too much
and I didn’t tell them that she’d nodded and said, yes, it sounded
like just the thing to take the edge off before she would call her father
to come pick her up. Drunk Stu and Ferdie eyed me when I came out of the
bathroom, sitting on the couch in the basement smoking cigarettes, and
the balloon was already in Ferdie’s dwarfish little hand. I didn’t
tell them that she probably wouldn’t have done it, that it was me
who’d talked her into sucking on that balloon, and I regret that
in a way.
In May, after a baseball game we’d lost, some rancher south of town reeled in the afghan and recognized the name. It was Drunk Stu’s dad, Drunk Chuck, who answered the phone when the man called. I was in Drunk Stu’s room drinking a warm Coors listening to his demo tape and I could hear enough of the conversation to hear the word ‘blanket’ and ‘Clybourne’ when his father popped his head in.
“Why you throw out that blanket your momma made you?! You ungrateful shit, you know how much that meant to her.”
Drunk Stu made something up about how he’d let someone borrow the afghan one night, and how they’d never given it back, but it was no use, I could smell the bourbon his father was breathing into the room, and I knew how he got over things like this, and all I could do was curl up in the far corner of the bed and listen to him beat the shit out of his eighteen-year-old son with the cordless phone. When it was over, I stood behind Drunk Stu in the bathroom while he sopped up the blood under his nose with toilet paper and said how it was nothing, that it was easy to take his old man’s shit, that it made for good song lyrics.
“I’m sitting there alone… he comes in with the phone… plastic crushing bone…”
Later we star-69’d the other phone, the one that wasn’t broken, and a woman answered. Drunk Stu grabbed the phone from me because all of a sudden everything had become confusing, and I stammered something like ‘hehehehehe…’ before he was holding the phone himself carrying on a conversation.
“…and it washed right up?”
His eyes darted some distrust in my direction.
“Heck, I can come pick that up right now. Nope. OK, down Gallatin road then. White, you said? Yep, ‘cause it’s my ma made that for me godresthersoul and I’d sure appreciate it back here where it belongs.”
How I’d wished for that composure, he was cool incarnate with that phone, countrygentleman and all that, just sweet as could be.
“‘Hehehehehe’--whatn’ the fuck was that, retard? ‘I, I ,I, kk.k.k.k.killed Thelma.’”
“Thaedra,”I said.
We grabbed Ferdie and headed south together, there was a sign to the ranch for me to look for, so I tried to focus on that, but then on the side of the road was an arm on a pole and a tattoo I hadn’t noticed on her arm but we were going too fast for me to read it and then Drunk Stu was yelling at me.
“You dumbass, Circle H ranch! You didn’t see that fuckin’ sign?” he twisted his head to look behind us.
It was a sign; a plywood arm on a pole pointing at the dirt road to the left and the tattoo said “Circle H Ranch 0.2 mi.”
“Once we get this blanket,” Ferdie said, “I’m going down to Arizona to that Pueblo rez ‘cause I seen pictures and those desert Indians got it good.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why’s getting the blanket so important anyway?”
“Cause there’s gotta be her hairs in it an’ shit and I don’t want nothing, not even a hair, left of this,” Drunk Stu said. “Jesus! Why’d it have to be some sweet old woman?”
I stayed in the car with Ferdie while Drunk Stu knocked on the screen door of the white house. We talked about Arizona and I warned him about scorpions and snakes, but he said he knew all about snakes because he’d killed all those rattlers under his grandma’s trailer with a pump-action pellet gun.
“I heard you’re going to Montana State,” he said.
“It’s not for sure, man. Where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“Got eyes and ears all over,” he said, waxing Indian-wise. “Mrs. Dayton told me about the scholarship. Why keep that a secret, not like we’re jealous. College can suck my dick for all I care. Bunch of liberal-ass earthball hippies an’ shit.”
Drunk Stu came backing out of the screen door then, holding the blanket, or half of the blanket, and I could just see the silhouette of the woman holding the door for him and her arm was thin and long and looked cold there against the doorframe. Drunk Stu popped into the car and we were off.
“Even washed it for me,” he said, holding up the afghan.
Half of the blanket was missing and the water had stained it a light brown and almost all of the original color was gone. Looking at the way he was grinning, his chipped teeth all angular, I thought about what would drive a man, who was only fishing, to reel a thing like that out of a river, about what would drive a man to beat his own son with a telephone, but Drunk Stu was so happy, and I looked over where Ferdie was beside me, and he was just staring at the blanket, and he looked old, like an old, old man, and then there was just me looking at them, back and forth, back and forth.
Drew McNaughton lives in Missoula, MT. He can eat a soft taco in one bite. His fiction has been described by Kevin Canty, author of A Stranger in This World, Into the Great Wide Open, Nine Below Zero and Honeymoon, as “I don’t know, toss it out there… see what they say.” He keeps a machete in a chunk of wood outside his cinder block home for no reason, really. There’s deer that come and blink at the long blade of the thing, wondering.
He can be contacted via e-mail at drewcmcnaughton@hotmail.com or you can swing by Bungalow#26 775 Monroe St., Missoula, MT 59802.