Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl

      Pineapple Press, Inc.

      Sarasota, Florida

      Copyright © 2009 by Michael Biehl

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Inquiries should be addressed to:

      Pineapple Press, Inc.

      P.O. Box 3889

      Sarasota, Florida 34230

      www.pineapplepress.com

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Biehl, Michael M.

      Seven mile bridge / Michael Biehl. -- 1st ed

      p. cm.

      ISBN 978-1-56164-451-3 (alk. paper)

      1. Adult children--Fiction. 2. Parents--Death--Fiction. 3. Family secrets--Fiction. 4. Wisconsin--Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title. II. Title: 7 mile bridge.

      PS3602.I34S48 2009

      813’.6--dc22

      2009023029

      First Edition

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      ISBN 978-1-56164-579-4 (e-book)

      Design by Shé Hicks

      Front jacket photo courtesy of the State Archives of Florida

      Printed in the United States of America

      To my son

      The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn.

      — David Russell

      Section I

The House

1

      The House, Day One

      As I start to clean out the house where my mother spent the last fifty years of her life, it occurs to me that in a half century the woman never got rid of anything.

      Except my father.

      Wandering through the forlorn rooms where I spent most of my childhood, I see that my mother has left the house in such a state of disrepair that the piles of old clothes, stacks of paper, and mind-boggling mass of memorabilia might be all that’s holding the place up. I have never seen a house with so much deferred maintenance. In fact, you couldn’t even call it deferred. It has been denied maintenance.

      The roof has apparently been leaking for years, with the result that the drywall is so rotted with mildew that in places it has acquired the appearance and texture of Roquefort cheese. The Thermopane picture windows all lost their seals so long ago that they are milky white and nearly opaque, while the wooden frames around them are black with mold. All the doors are warped, all the floors squeak, all the faucets drip. The wallpaper is stained and faded, and in some places it has peeled off and curled into scrolls that hang on the walls like sconces. The fuse boxes are plugged with pennies, a hazardous temporary means of restoring power that apparently became a permanent solution for a woman so worn out that she chose to risk a house fire rather than make a trip to the hardware store. The whole house smells musty, with hints of rotted vegetables and urine.

      The condition of the house speaks volumes about how much my mother’s faculties deteriorated in the last few years before her death. It seems to me it also indicates that the neighborhood has changed a lot since I left thirty-four years ago. The neighbors I remember were as nosy as foraging warthogs, and obsessed with property values in their middle-middle-class subdivision. They would have reported anyone to the police who let knee-high weeds flourish in the lawn and had seed-bearing trees growing out of the gutters. Perhaps, as the Glen Oaks subdivision of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, matured, its occupants became more tolerant and easygoing. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn anymore.

      Merely contemplating the Herculean task of clearing out this cataclysmic clutter and getting the dump in any kind of shape to sell wearies me like a long hike up a steep hill. It also frightens me more than a little, and I know why. Lurking in the heaps of junk are undoubtedly countless mementos of the events that led to the death of my father, damaged the rest of the family beyond repair, and ended my youth on the sourest note imaginable. I think of the archaeological dig portrayed at the beginning of the movie The Exorcist and wonder what demonic icons I might unearth in this excavation.

      The inevitability of uncovering buried souvenirs along with buried memories is what has kept my younger brother away and left me to handle the job alone.

      “I, um, I, uh, can’t do it,” Jamie had told me on the phone a week earlier.

      “But there might be some stuff in there you want,” I said.

      “No, uh, not enough to face all that shit. I can’t.”

      I understood. Jamie knows his own limitations better than I do. He was four years younger than me, only thirteen, when it happened. I always thought that was why it had affected him more profoundly. Unlike Jamie, I have never spent time in a psychiatric hospital.

      “You want me to keep anything for you?” I asked.

      “Just