Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl
quarry.
The paramedics must have shot everything they had in the ambulance into Dad before they gave up trying to revive him. They left behind scores of plastic hypodermic needle sheaths, scattered on the lawn like confetti. They did not, however, leave Dad behind. Obvious as it was, he had to be hauled to the hospital so a physician could pronounce him dead. He was later autopsied and then cremated. I never saw him again.
The police showed up a little while later and asked me questions about how, where, and when I found my father. Then they snooped around in the garage for a while. I started to feel sick, so I went into the house and sat down at the kitchen table. The police were still there when my mother got home. She had on her work uniform, a pink cotton dress that had her first name embroidered on the front and “Piggly Wiggly” in big letters on the back.
Two cops escorted her into the kitchen, a short one in a uniform and a tall one in a trench coat. One of my parents had turned the heat off for the unseasonably warm day, and it was getting chilly in the kitchen. It was also dark, because two of the three lightbulbs in the fixture over the table were burned out.
The cop in the trench coat, who introduced himself as Detective Adams, did all the talking. He had a deep, raspy voice, and when he wasn’t talking he made little saliva bubbles between his lips.
“You just get off work, Mrs. Bruckner?”
“No, officer. I get off at three. So I can be here for my two sons when they get home from school. What’s the problem?”
“Please sit down, Mrs. Bruckner.”
“What’s all that junk on the lawn?” She looked around, her eyes settling on me. “Jonathan, what’s the matter? Where’s Jamie?”
I shrugged. I figured I could tell her where Jamie was after the cops left. She didn’t ask where Dad was.
She looked at the detective. “Did something happen to my son? Where is my son?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. Please have a seat.”
My mother sat down and the detective broke the news to her. She did not cry or become hysterical; she just stared blankly and clicked her fingernails. Every so often she looked at me with a sad expression in her eyes.
“You say you get off work at three?”
“Yes.”
“You work at the Piggly Wiggly?”
A regular Sherlock Holmes, this guy.
“Yes.”
“What time did you leave the house again?”
“I haven’t been home since this morning. I went to my sister’s house after work.”
My aunt Melanie lived two blocks away. She was two years older than my mother. Her husband, my Uncle Stan, was disabled in World War II and used a wheelchair. My mother rarely went over there straight from work.
“Mrs. Bruckner, does your husband have any serious health problems?”
Click, click. “He had a kidney removed awhile back. He’s allergic to pollen. He hasn’t exactly been robust for years.” Click. It seemed to me my mother was volunteering a lot of irrelevant information.
“Has he been depressed lately?”
“Oh, yes. Definitely.”
“Anything in particular making him depressed?”
“Yes.” She proceeded to tell the detective the whole story of my father’s colossal blunder, saying he had suffered “severe financial reverses,” like he was some sort of distressed capitalist. She said, “David incurred a large debt as part of a business transaction at Falls Dieworks,” which had “resulted in litigation and the termination of his position with the company.” I could not understand why she was putting on airs. Surely the detective could look around and see that we were of extremely modest means, and had been for a long time.
“David has been attempting to start up a new enterprise, but his ventures have not met with any success,” she said.
It boggled my mind to hear her describe it that way. After my father got fired, he looked for a job for a few weeks and then he seemed to give up. He started drinking more heavily and spent a lot of time puttering at his desk in the basement, ostensibly working on inventions or ideas for new businesses. I snuck down to spy on him a few times and more often than not caught him playing solitaire. Our neighbor Mr. Atkins also fancied himself an inventor, and sometimes he would come over and the two of them would get drunk in the basement and talk about their ideas. My mother derided this activity in the harshest possible terms, saying my dad and Tom Atkins were down there “baking pie in the sky,” “living in fools’ paradise,” or “looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow of crap.”
Now she described it to the detective as “attempting to start up a new enterprise.” La-de-dah.
“I would say he has been despondent lately.”
“Has he been drinking alcoholic beverages?”
“Yes. Quite a bit.”
“To excess?”
“Sometimes.”
The short cop in the uniform was taking it all down. When he wasn’t writing he was clicking the push button on his ballpoint pen. Between that and my mother’s fingernails, the kitchen sounded like a typing pool.
My father was dead, beyond helping or hurting. I didn’t know why it bothered me so much to see them making a record of his weaknesses, but it did. It revolted me.
“Is there any history of mental illness?”
“What?” Her eyes darted around, over to the door, up to the ceiling. It occurred to me she was looking for Jamie. “Oh, you mean David? No.”
“How about his parents? Siblings?”
Click, click, click, click. A look came into her eyes like she had just had an epiphany of some sort. “Yes,” she said, relief in her voice. “I think he once told me his grandfather died in a sanitarium.”
“Uh-huh. Well, thank you for your cooperation, Mrs. Bruckner. I’m sorry for your loss.”
After the police left, my mother poured herself a drink, lit a cigarette, and sat down in the living room. Jamie came in through the back door about five minutes later and headed straight for the stairs.
My mother questioned him. “Where have you been?”
I thought it was obvious. His clothes were covered with quarry dust.
“Out.”
“Where, out?”
He goggled his eyes. “Far out. It’s none of your business.”
She raised her voice. “Jamie. Tell me where you went.”
“Forget it.” He bolted up the stairs two at a time.
I thought we would talk about what had happened that night, but we didn’t. I had told Lori I would call her that night, but I didn’t. Instead, I went straight to bed and lay awake all night, sweating, staring at the crack in the ceiling, and replaying the evening in my mind. My heart raced, my mouth was incredibly dry, and I felt nauseated. Around half-past four, I heard my mother step on the squeaky tread as she came upstairs. She came into my bedroom two hours later and sat at the foot of my bed.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Jonathan, I want you to keep an eye on Jamie for me. I don’t know how he’s going to handle this.”
“Okay. How about you, Mom? How are you doing?”
“Don’t worry about me.” She paused and put her hand on mine, a rare gesture. “Jonathan, I know you haven’t ever seen me cry very much.”
That