Charles Wilson - A Bridge of Years

Tom said, “When I was twelve years old I used to pray for nuclear war. Not so that millions of people would die. So that I wouldn’t have to go to school in the morning.”

“Exactly! Everything would be rubble. Life would be transformed.”

“Life would be easier.”

“More fun! Yes.”

“Sure. But would it? I’m thirty years old, Doug. I don’t pray for war anymore.”

Archer met his gaze. “I’m thirty-two and I still pray for magic.”

“Is that what we’re talking about here?”

“Something extraordinary, anyhow. Unless you are crazy.”

“It’s a possibility,” Tom said. “Crazy people see things sometimes. I had an aunt Emily who used to talk to Jesus. Jesus lived in the attic. Once in a while he’d move over to the bedroom and they’d have a chat while she combed her hair. Everybody in the family thought this was terrifically funny. Then one day Aunt Emily sliced open her wrists in a warm bath. Her landlord found her a week later. She left a note saying Jesus told her to do it.”

Archer reflected on this a moment. “You’re saying there are serious things at stake.”

“Either way, it seems to me. My sanity. Or sanity in general.”

“Screw sanity in general.”

“My own in particular, then.”

“You want me to take this seriously,” Archer said. “Okay. Fine. But I don’t know you. You’re somebody I sold a house to. Somebody who was a year behind me at Sea View Elementary. You seem like a fairly reasonable guy. But let’s be clear, Tom. You called me because you want credentials for your sanity. I want more than that.”

Tom leaned back in his chair, considering this. Obviously time had not much tamed Douglas Archer. Maybe it was important to remember you could pull a jail sentence and a stiff fine for throwing stones at Buicks, especially if you were old enough to know better. Tom had no love for Belltower, but neither did he especially want to see morning glories tying up traffic down by the car lots (though it would piss Tony off no end).

Still, there was something seductive about Archer’s attitude, especially after a night of nervous hysteria. He said, “You know some of the old trails up through here?”

Archer nodded.

“Let’s scout the territory behind the house.” Tom stood up. “Then we’ll talk about what to do.”

They followed an old, nearly overgrown foot trail into the dense woods behind the back yard.

Tom had forgotten what it was like to walk through these big Pacific Northwest pinewoods, this density of moss and fern and dripping water. He followed the broad back of Archer’s checkerboard shirt along the trail, bending under branches or stepping over small, glossy freshets of rainwater. The sound of cars passing on the Post Road faded as they climbed a gentle slope westward. All this talk of magic—his own and Archer’s—seemed much more plausible here.

Archer said, “There were Indians living in through here a hundred years ago. Used to be an old totem pole in among the cedars, but they dragged that off to the town museum.”

“Who uses this trail?”

“The Hopfner kids down the road, but they moved away a long time ago. Hikers sometimes. There are trails all the way up from the housing development along Poplar. It’s mostly overgrown down by your place—I don’t suppose anybody goes through that way these days.”

He paused behind Archer where the trail banked away through an open meadow full of thistles and fireweed, past an old tin shack overgrown with ivy: someone’s long-abandoned store of firewood, Tom guessed, the structure obscured and sagging moss-thick to the ground. Archer pushed ahead into the deeper forest and Tom followed until the tree shadows closed around him again.

They hiked for more than an hour, uphill through pine forest until they reached a rocky knoll. Archer clambered up the pinnacle, turned back and extended a hand to Tom. “We’ve come up a good height,” he said, and Tom turned back and was surprised by a sweeping view not just to the Post Road but all the way to the coast—the town of Belltower clustered around the bay, the pulp mill lofting a gray plume of smoke.

“This is why people come up here,” Archer said. “It’s not a well-known trail. If we’d followed the other branch we would have ended up in some serious swamp. Up this way, it gets nice.”

“Is there a name for this place?”

“Somebody must call it something. Everything’s got a name, I guess.”

“You come here a lot?”

“Once in a while. I come for the perspective. From here— on a nice day—everything looks good. The fucking parking lots look good.”

“You hate this town,” Tom said.

Archer shrugged. “If I hated it, I’d leave. Though from what I’ve seen I doubt I could find anything significantly better. Hate is a strong word. But I dislike it a whole lot— sometimes.” He paused and looked sidelong at Tom, shading his face against the sun. “I do admit to wondering what brought you back here.”

“You never asked.”

“It’s not polite. Specially when someone obviously doesn’t want to talk about it.” He turned back to the view. The sunlight was intense. “So are we still being polite?”

“My wife left me,” Tom said. “I lost my job. I was drinking for therapy.”

Archer scrutinized him more closely now.

Tom said, “You’re wondering whether an alcoholic can be trusted when he sees strange things at night. Fair enough. But it’s been more than a month since I touched any kind of liquor. As an explanation, a good case of DTs would be almost comforting.”

“How long were you drinking?”

“Seriously? Since the job fell through. Maybe three months.”

Archer said, “I can think of a couple of tough questions.”

“Such as?”

“Lots of people lose their jobs. Lots of people go through divorce. They don’t all jump down a bottle.”

There were lots of ways to answer that. The most succinct would be, It’s none of your business. But maybe he had made it Archer’s business; he had raised the issue of his own stability. It wasn’t a hostile question.

He could say, I was married for ten years to a bright, thoughtful woman whom I loved intensely, and whose mistrust grew until it was. like a knife between us.

He could explain about Barbara’s political activism, her conviction that the world was teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe. He could explain that his engineering work at Aerotech had divided them, tell Archer that she’d come to see him as a living example of the technological juggernaut: all his schooling and all his ingenuity plugged into a military-industrial machine so hydra-headed in its aspects and so single-minded in its goals that the earth itself was being strip-mined and forested into a global desert.

He could replay, perhaps, one of their arguments. He could reiterate his endless, patient assertion that the engines he designed were fuel-efficient; that his work, while not exactly a pursuit of the ecological Grail, might help clear the air around major cities. Band-Aid thinking, Barbara called this, a piddling solution to an overwhelming problem. A better combustion engine wouldn’t restore the rain forests to Brazil or the redwoods to California. To which Tom would reply that it was a damn sight more productive than chaining himself to the gate of a paper mill or sneaking off with some long-haired anarchists to spike trees in the Cascades. At which point— more often in their last year—the conversation would decline into insult. Barbara would begin on his “complacent hick family,” particularly Tony; and Tom, if he was drunk or angry enough, would explore the possible reasons for her recent loss of sexual appetite. (“It’s not too complicated,” she once told him. “Take a look in the mirror sometime.”)