That afternoon I trudged the same path from the parking lot to the lake that I’d marched on the morning of Katie’s death. Starting from the canoe racks, I made a hard half circle around the lake through heavy, frosted weeds to the hunched willow that once ensnared my favorite lure. Of course it was unlikely that anyone would have noticed the lure or taken the time to retrieve it, but on finding it perched in such a remarkably observant and lifelike pose I burst into astonished laughter, ignoring the fact of its inherent artificiality in order to marvel at the sight of a frog that had not only adapted to the winter freeze, but also taught itself to climb trees. Despite my bulky boots and gloves, I mounted the willow’s icy spine just as I had the first time, undis tracted now as I worked my way from one bare branch to the next, noticing the places where eight months before I’d snapped off a sprig or two in order to more easily reach my target. This time I did reach it, and carefully plucked the barbs loose with both hands in order to prevent myself from dropping it onto the frozen lake below. I didn’t leave right away, but instead lay like a snoozing cat across the trunk, admiring my lure—its leopard spots, cool white belly, and phosphorescent eyes—every once in a while looking up to peer dreamily over the snow-covered lake. I didn’t climb back down until I’d come to a clear decision about what I had to do.
Forty-three
A week later I found myself bundled up in as many flexible layers as possible, already waiting at the curb at five a.m. when Frank picked me up to head to the fairgrounds in East Des Moines. He was pumped about the big contract, already singing along to Ste vie Wonder and grinning ear to ear, popping open the glove compartment to retrieve a photo book of the restoration models on display at the Historical Society downtown. On the whole, he and a dozen other contractors were embarking on a $30 million initiative aimed at restoring the original fairgrounds of 1842. This mission involved the complicated task of reviving the original ecosystem, including all the underground water channels that once served the Grand Basin, the original symbol of the fair. Frank’s enthusiasm had a way of spreading and soon I was grinning alongside him while paging through original photos of ancient Ferris wheels, young girls in bonnets smiling out of covered wagons, a group of roughnecks posing next to a snarling cougar in an iron cage. Even our small contribution to the project was massive: we were to dig up seventy acres of frozen ground, much of which had been employed as a landfill from the fifties to the seventies. I didn’t see how it was possible to complete the restoration before the fair kicked off in August, but I never mentioned my doubts, knowing Frank wouldn’t have heard them anyway.
“Wait till you see the equipment you’re gonna to be working with,” he told me as we started over the river. “The state’s providing most of the heavy artillery, including skid loaders with ripper buckets that’ll tear us right through to China. After we haul out the lot, we’re gonna thaw the ground beneath it with a Thawzall system they use up in Minnesota and Canada. We’ll thaw a foot a day until the weather warms up.”
It was strange driving onto the fairgrounds in the middle of winter. First thing I changed into padded overalls and a Carhartt work jacket Frank gave me. Most of the crew members were already waiting in their trucks with the windows cracked, smoking and exchanging hearty laughs about how fat they’d gotten collecting welfare over the previous two months. But they were eager to work and it didn’t take long before we were all moving fast and talking fast and downing enough coffee to motor ourselves clear through the afternoon the following Friday.
The first task on the list was to rip up a parking lot that another company was rebuilding on the other side of the park. We’d all seen the blueprints, but before we went to work busting up the concrete Frank gave an inspirational speech to help us better picture the whole gorgeous plan. This involved him strolling back and forth along the edge of the woods, twirling an imaginary umbrella and swinging his hips side to side to let us feel the romance of the arching footbridge over the basin, just like it was back in 1842 when the grounds were crawling with homesteaders twenty years ahead of the western migration. By the heroic fury in his voice I had a feeling that within a few weeks he’d be adding to the effect of his handlebar mustache by greasing his hair back and parting it down the middle like the pioneers in the original fairground photos. “These was the wild days!” he shouted, seeming to snatch the cold right out of the air. “We’re gonna be digging up the graves of pistol-whip frontiersmen and their horse-jumpin’ girlies! Now mount them steel bulls, boys! We’re making history here!”
We laughed and tightened our bootstraps and went to work, still hooting and hollering when that first rockwheel went spinning into the pavement. That first day was about as brutal and bitterly cold as anyone could have imagined, especially for those few of us out in the naked wind, jackhammering old cracked-up sidewalks in all the wooded areas too tight for the skid loaders. When it was finally over I couldn’t have felt more healthfully exhausted, though that wasn’t my only reward for a hard day’s work. Minutes after Frank dropped me off I received a radio transmission from Emily informing me that she’d booked a room at the West Des Moines Days Inn (a particularly welcome gift considering the previous week’s semipublic sexual mishaps while parked between eighteen-wheelers in the overnight lot near the airport). Thus began a weekly routine, soon moved to Fridays, which was Emily’s day off from rehearsals for her upcoming production.
“It’s called
Tinker
,” she later explained, while dabbing the sweat from her chest with a hotel hand towel. She pulled a T-shirt over her head and kicked her legs onto the desk. “We’ve got a month of hard-core rehearsal, then it’s three weeks of shows at the Garage Theater, which in my opinion puts the Playhouse to shame. The script is pretty wacky, but Tony’s really going for it. He’s definitely going for something. It could be great.”
I laid a bath towel under the door while Emily packed a glass pipe. When she lit it and sucked in, her eyes constricted and her lips sealed tight. There was a slow jazzy movement in the smoke. I held my first hit in as long as I could and when I stepped up to the window to exhale, barely any smoke escaped and I was already high. In the parking lot below, the stores were all closing, the cars clearing out. Judging by the largely unlit windows at the Holiday Inn (sulking curbside along University like a forlorn bully), I guessed they were still struggling to overcome the negative publicity that for the last two and a half years they’d yet to live down.
“I checked my e-mail down in the lobby,” Emily said, coughing out the last words. “Looks like Schell’s Shirtworks is going national, so my dad’s in Arizona. He sent me a pretty deep letter, telling me what a rock I’ve been over the last year, how glad he was that I was back living at home, even if he still didn’t recognize me from a distance. It was nice and everything, but still,
e-mail
from your dad? It’s so quick and easy.
I love you
and boom, express delivered.”
Emily handed me the pipe. I leaned down to kiss her shoulder. She reached for her cigarettes and turned to the blank TV, clearly occupied by other thoughts.
“Who taught him how to use e-mail anyway? I sure didn’t. Only a few months ago he was spending half his weekends sitting in front of the DVD player, pressing every button on all five remote controls, hoping to luck out on the right sequence to get the stupid thing going.”
“At least he’s trying,” I said. “Not too many parents out there riding the electronic wave.”
“Hummm,” Emily said, lighting up.
I took another hit, then paged through a misfolded newspaper on the desk. Emily had no doubt read every article, including the censur ing op-ed column on the rising belligerence of the city’s youth. The piece included a photo of Hogback Bridge as it appeared on the cover of
The Bridges of Madison County
, juxtaposed against a charred and skeletal after-photo. “What do you think about those kids on trial?” I asked.
“The pyros from Waukee?”
“Yeah. It says their friends ratted them out for the reward.”
“Some friends,” she said, exhaling. “If I was those guys, I’d beg for a long stint in the pokey. Pretty soon people are gonna find out where they live, and they’re gonna get lynched by every man, woman, and child in Madison County.”
“It sounds like it might’ve been an accident,” I said, moving on to the sports pages. Emily grabbed the op-ed section, looking over it again and chuckling to herself.
“How do you accidentally burn a bridge to ashes? Of course they said it was an accident. They just meant to singe a few names off the panels and accidentally torched the whole turkey. Never mind that they were drunk and it was two in the morning.”
I shrugged and sprawled out on the bed, wondering what my chauvinistic Civil War professor (who in our first class had insisted that Iowegians had saved the country from irreversible ruin at least a dozen times) would view as proper punishment for such a crime.
“You know, George,” Emily said, quickly rapping the heating vent as though reviving a thought she’d nearly lost. She slid her legs off the desk and leaned forward. “After I read that article I got this really great idea for a short film. Something to send out to all the Hollywood casting agencies. You know, as a résumé film for potential agents.”
“Is that how it works?” I asked, distracted by the sight of her legs crossing at the knees. (I remind you that she was wearing no underwear, if this point wasn’t well enough implied.)
“I think that’s one of the ways. Anyhow, the idea involves starting a few more fires down in Madison County. The movie would begin with a damsel-in-distress situation, like a bunch of gangsters interrogating a girl about a big drug shipment that they think’s gonna wipe out their business. When she refuses to talk they pour gas all around her, then leave her in the middle of the bridge as they continue pouring gas and block both sides. Of course they offer her one last chance, but she just gives them the finger, real scared, but real cool, you know? So the gangsters on both sides of the bridge count down from ten, matches in hand. Only problem is that when one of them strikes his match, immediately the fumes alight and he ends up running around in a ball of fire. But the trail of gas still ends up catching, so none of this really helps our damsel, who’s now got flames zooming at her from both sides. At that point we cut to the only exterior shot of the film as she takes a leap from the bridge down into the creek. And that’s it. For the rest of the film we just watch the bridge blazing and crackling and falling apart.
The end.
”
“How does she jump into the crick from a covered bridge?”
“The what? Did you say
crick
?”
“Whatever. Creek.”
“Haven’t figured that out yet,” she said, taking a puff from the cigarette she’d left burning in the ashtray. When she couldn’t get any smoke from it, she opened her pack and lit another one.
“Does the girl die or what? How deep is the water?”
“It’s deep enough that she’s completely submerged, but the audience doesn’t know if she survives or not. Maybe there should be one more shot where the leftover gangster stares down into the creek, wondering.”
“So she
doesn’t
die.”
“Probably not,” she said, shining me a big smile and rocking one leg over the other. “Better to keep her alive for the sequel.”
“Onto the next covered bridge, huh?”
“Pretty crazy, huh?” she said, then started whistling the chorus to “Light My Fire.” I sat up and leaned against the headboard, looking at the time and sighing. Emily eventually quit whistling. She uncrossed her legs and shook her head at the ceiling before waving forth my criticism.
“I used to imagine having sex with you on those bridges,” I said. “One right after the other. And as I was driving to pick you up on the night of the premiere, all I could think about was how I’d get you to go skinny-dipping with me in the crick below Hogback.”
“The
creek
?” she asked, making a face that involved halving the height of her forehead and allowing one side of her mouth to stretch open as though being reeled in by a fisherman standing directly behind her.
6
“Okay, the creek,” I said, shoving off the headboard and onto my back to close my eyes. According to the auditory cues that followed, Emily shoved her chair against the wall, dragged her feet to the bathroom, turned a squeaking knob, dipped her head under the faucet, turned the knob back, then slapped the toilet seat down and plopped herself on top of it. Then she stood up again and stopped dragging her feet and for several minutes I lost track of her. By the time I marked her again, she was already standing over me with her hands on her hips at the edge of the bed, staring inverted into my eyes.
“I want to know the truth, George. Do you have a
plan
for us?”
“A
plan
? What kind of plan?”
“A
plan
. A
map
. A
design
for the future.”
“What’s
your
plan?” I asked.
“My plan is obvious. Breast surgery, as soon as I save enough money. Then maybe a few ski bunny movies. But we’re talking about
your
plan, George. I’m having a hard time seeing
your
plan and I’m starting to get the feeling that you’d go along with just about any idea I presented you, as long as it didn’t involve starting any fires. Tell me the truth, if I said I was going to get breast implants and then move to Canada to make direct-to-video movies, would you follow me?”
“I’m just not a fan of torching the bridges for a bunch of short films. That’s all I was saying.”
“Or maybe you
do
have a plan, and you’re just waiting for the right moment to spring it on me. Maybe I’ve got a future waiting for me in a small town in the Ukraine, which you probably consider part of
your Russia
, and any small town as
your
small town.”