Paul Levine - Night vision

She clawed at the grating as her slide began, and she called my name. "Jake!"

I'm here, Pam."

"Jake, I can't hold on."

Still clinging to the grating with my left hand, I reached out with my right and caught her by a wrist. I pulled her up next to me, her feet dangling helplessly. I inched my hand up her arm, then slid it around her back, gripping the back of her head, pulling her face next to mine. Blood seeped from two gashes in her forehead, smeared her hair, and ran down her face. The back of her neck was clammy with cold sweat.

"Help me, Jake," she whimpered. The color had drained from her cheeks. Her face was a ghostly pallor streaked with red. "Kiss me quick…"

Stunned, I didn't move. Clinging to me, she hoisted herself up and kissed me, at first softly, with parted lips, and then harder, our teeth scraping. I tasted the warm sweetness of her blood…before I die."

"Hush, now. I've got you. You're not going to-"

"Take me away, Jake. Don't let them-"

"I'm going to get you help. The best doctors, the best hospital, the best-"

Suddenly the span shuddered again and, with a clatter of meshing gears, began a slow, balky descent. She pulled away, digging her feet into the grating. She climbed out of my grasp, dragging herself up again. "I've seen the best, Jake. It doesn't work. I am what I am."

I caught her by an ankle, but she jerked it away. She clambered up, hand over hand.

"Pam, there's nowhere to go."

Still, she climbed toward the sky, and I followed, overtaking her a few feet from the top of the span. Hanging on again with one hand, I grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her to me. As Pam turned she clenched her right hand into a claw and raked my face with her nails, now ripped by the steel. She drew four tracks of blood from my forehead to beneath each eye. Instinctively, I let go of her hair, my hand shooting to my face. My forearm collided with her shoulder, knocking her off balance, and I heard her gasp. She had lost her grip. I reached for her as she skidded by me and our hands touched, but only for an instant. I grabbed for her, but my timing was off, and she slid past me, her head glancing off the grating. Farther she fell, trying vainly to hold on, slowing down, but only for a moment. An instant later, she disappeared into the blackness between the raised span and the bridge.

I waited for the splash, but there was none.

There was no scream, no plea.

There was just the heavy, deadweight thumpety-thump of body on metal. I pressed my forehead into the hot steel and looked through the grating. In the milky reflection of the moon off the water below, I looked into the guts of the motor. She was pinned in the gear housing, feet first. Her face was twisted into a grotesque mask of fear. She extended an arm upward, toward me or toward heaven, I couldn't tell which. Slowly, the span descended, the gears churning, and her body disappeared into a mammoth, oily black-toothed wheel that groaned and creaked as it dragged her into an unseen crevice.

I heard her scream.

A piercing wail of pain.

And then silence except for the sound of the bridge itself.

I waited an eternity for the wheel to emerge from its turn. When it did, the crusted blackness ran wet with crimson. The wheel chinked and chawed and then clunked to a stop, spitting out shards of linen, obscenely red. It came to a stop and, with a final jangle, expelled the bony stump of an arm and a clenched fist.

I closed my eyes, said a silent prayer, and wondered if one without a conscience could have a soul. When I opened my eyes, the bridge had lumbered into place, and the gates lifted. I scrambled to the catwalk, cars zooming by, one nearly clipping me.

The old bridge tender was jabbering frantically into his phone. Nick Fox leaned on the railing, mouth agape. "Jesus H. Christ," he said. "As bad as anything I saw in 'Nam." He took off his suit coat and ran a hand through his hair. "You're a little pale. You okay, Jake?"

I was not okay.

Charlie Riggs inserted the serrated knife at the base of the tail and sliced forward with a steady hand. He took care to avoid the razor-sharp bone at the outer edge of the gills. He cut off the gill plate and removed the stomach cavity. Then he slid what was left of the snook into the chicken-wire drawer of his homemade smoker, a six-foot-tall contraption with a brick floor, tarpaper roof, and cypress sides covered with wooden shim shingles. Charlie wore his hiking boots, old gray socks, a canvas hat, and khaki shorts with six pockets. He looked like a sixty-five-year-old Boy Scout.

I was wearing gray sweat pants, sneakers without socks, an old practice jersey, and an AFC Champions ball cap. I looked like an over-the-hill ex-jock. My job was to gather the wood and stay the hell out of the way. Get buttonwood or mangrove, Charlie commanded. Not hickory. If I had known this would be so much trouble, I would have chosen the veal porcini at Cafe Baci in the Gables. But Charlie wasn't much for cream sauces with mushrooms and wine, and besides, he knew that making me work for my dinner was a form of therapy.

The trick with the fire is to keep it burning, but not too hot. The idea is to smoke the fish, not dry it out. When the fire was going just right, we sat there in Charlie's battered lawn chairs, watching the tangy smoke seep out of the roof. He was waiting for me to start, but I couldn't find the words. So finally he asked me, and I told him of a sweltering Sunday night on the bridge.

"I killed her," I told him finally. "She was reaching to me for help, and I tried to save her, but I killed her."

He thought it over before speaking. A great blue heron circled low overhead in the drifting smoke, its long legs swept back. "She didn't want to be saved, Jake. She probably didn't even want to live, given the choices available to her. As Pliny wrote, Natura vero nihil hominibus brevitate vitae praestitit melius. "

"Something about the brevity of life," I said, taking a stab at it.

"'Nature has granted mankind no better gift than the shortness of life.' Pamela Maxson knew there was no cure for her. She knew better than anyone else what her remaining years would be like. Stop blaming yourself. You tried to save her."

The heron dropped its legs like the landing gear on a jumbo jet and drifted to the ground near the smoker. The big bird would settle for some fish innards in the scrap pile.

"No, Charlie, you don't understand. I really killed her. I've replayed the moment a thousand times. Trying to read my mind. It's harder than reading someone else's, but this is what I've come up with. I wanted her dead. In my mind I tried her and convicted her and sentenced her. And then I executed her. I just didn't know it at the time."

Storm clouds gathered in the west, and the wind was picking up. The temperature was falling in advance of a squall line. "The mind plays tricks on us all," Charlie said. "You don't know what you intended, Jake, trust me."

In the distance a thunderclap. "So much has happened," I said. "So much blood."

He let it hang there, and I rattled them off in my mind. Mary Rosedahl and Priscilla Fox dead at the hands of the insanely jealous ex-jockey. Marsha Diamond, Bobbie Blinderman, and Alejandro Rodriguez dead, too, killed by Pamela Maxson. And what about Pam, psychotic lady psychiatrist, a woman who moved me to-to what? I didn't know what. She was smart and beautiful…and homicidal. Deceptio visas, Charlie would say, and he was right. A deceptive vision, and I had only seen the illusion, not the truth.

"What about Nick Fox?" Charlie asked. "What will happen to him?"

Two laughing gulls circled overhead, guffawing at us, and I told him all about Nick Fox.

Police sirens were wailing from both sides of the causeway, Miami cops from the east, Beach cops from the west.