The Bridge Trilogy Part 19

'Man,' he said, impressed, 'who put this on you?'

Chevette stood up and s.h.i.+vered, this tremor running down through her like a live thing, the way those red bracelets had moved.

How she felt, now, was just the way she'd felt that day she'd come back to the trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone. No message there hut a can of ravioli in a pot on the Stove, with the can-opener propped up beside it.

She hadn't eaten that ravioli and she hadn't eaten any since and she knew she never would.

But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn't really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. And she'd moved around in it, whatever it was, from one point to another, 'til she'd wound up behind that wire in Beaverton, in a place so bad it was like a piece of broken gla.s.s to rub against that big empty. And thereby growing aware of the thing that had swallowed the world, though it was only just visible, and then in sidelong glances. Not a feeling so much as a form of gas, something she could almost smell in the back of her throat, lying chill and inert in the rooms of her subsequent pa.s.sage.

'You okay?' Nigel's greasy hair in his eyes, the red ball in his hand, a c.o.c.ktail toothpick with a

spray of amber cellophane stuck in the corner of his mouth.

For a long time she'd wondered if maybe the fever hadn't burned it out, hadn't accidentally fried whatever circuit in her it fed back on. But as she'd gotten used to the bridge, to Skinner, to messing at Allied, it had just come to seem like the emptiness was filled with ordinary things, a whole new world grown up in the socket of the old, one day rolling into the next-whether she danced in Dissidents, or sat up all night talking with her friends, or slept curled in her bag up in Skinner's room, where wind scoured the plywood walls and the cables thrummed down into rock that drifted (Skinner said) like the slowest sea of all.

Now that was broken.

''Vette?'

That jumper she'd seen, a girl, hauled up and over the side of a Zodiac with a pale plastic hook, white and limp, water running from nose and mouth. Every hone broken or dislocated, Skinner said, if you hit just right. Ran through the bar naked and took a header off some tourist's table nearest '55.

the railing, out and over, tangled in Haru's Day-Gb net and imitation j.a.panese fis.h.i.+ng floats. And didn't Sammy Sal drift that way now, maybe already clear of the dead zone that chased the fish off the years of toxic lead fallen there from uncounted coats of paint, out into the current that sailed the bridge's dead, people said, past Mission Rock, to wash up at the feet of the micropored wealthy jogging the concrete coast of China Basin?

Chevette bent over and threw up, managing to get most of it into an open, empty paint can, its lip thickly scabbed with the gray primer that Nigel used to even out his dodgier mends.

'Hey, hey,' Nigel dancing around her, unwilling in his shy bearish way to touch her, his big hands hovering, anxious that she was sick and worried she'd puke over his work, something that might ultimately require the in-depth, never-bef ore-attempted act of cleaning out, rather than up, his narrow nest. 'Water? Want water?' Offering her the old coffee can he kept there to quench hot metal. Oily flux afloat atop it like gas beside a dock, and she nearly heaved again, but sat down instead.

Sammy Sal dead, maybe Skinner, too. Him and that grad student tied up up there with the plastic worms.

'Chev?'

He'd put the coffee can down and was offering her an open can of beer instead. She waved it aside, coughing.

Nigel s.h.i.+fted, foot to foot, then turned and peered through the triangular shard of lucite that served as his one window. It was vibrating with the wind. 'Stormin',' he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic. 'Stormin'

down rain.'

Running from Skinner's and the gun in the killer's hand, from his eyes and the gold in the corners of his smile, bent low for balance over her bound hands and the case that held the a.s.shole's gla.s.ses, Chevette had seen all the others running, too, racing, it must have been, against the breaking calm, the first slap of rain almost warm when it came. Skinner would've r~6 known it was coming; hed have watched the barometer in its corny wooden case like tw wheel of some old boat; he knew his weather, Skinner, pe:ched in his box on the top of the bridge. Maybe the other; knew, too, but it was the style to wait and then race it, biding out for a last sale, another smoke, some bit of business. The hour before a storm was good for that, people naking edgy purchases against what was ordinarily a bearahe uncertainty. Though a few were lost, if the storm was big enough, and not always the unestablished, the newconers lashed with their ragged baggage to whatever freehold they might have managed on the outer structure; sometimes a wiole patchwork section would just let go, if the wind caught it right; she hadn't seen that but there were stories. There was iothing to stop the new people from coming in to the shelter cf the decks, but they seldom did.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took the beer from Nigel. Took a sip. It was warm. She handed it back to him. He took the toothpick from his mouth, started to raise the can for a swallw, thought better of it, put it down beside his welding-torch.

'Somethin's wrong,' he said. 'I can tell.'

She ma.s.saged her wrsts. Twin rings of rash coming up, pink and moist, where t~~e plastic had gripped her. Picked up the ceramic knife and clesed it automatically.

'Yeah,' she said, 'yeah Something's wrong. . .'

'What's wrong, Chevette?' He shook hair out of his eyes like a worried dog, fing~rs running nervously over his tools. His hands were like pali dirty animals, capable in their mute and agile

way of solvingproblems that would have hopelessly baffled the man himself. 'That j.a.p s.h.i.+t delaminated on you,' he decided, 'and you're pssed . .

'No,' she said, not realy hearing him.

'Steel's what you wait for a messenger bike. Weight. Big basket up front. Not cadh.o.a.rd with some crazy aramid s.h.i.+t wrapped around it, weghs about as much as a sandwich.

'57.

What if you hit a b-bus? Bang into the back of it? You got more m-ma.s.s than the b-bike, you flip over and c-crack open crack your.. .' His hands twisting, trying more accurately to frame the physics of the accident he was seeing. Chevette looked up and saw that he was trembling.

'Nigel,' she said, standing up, 'somebody just put that thing on me for a joke, understand?'

'It moved,' he said. 'I saw it.'

'Well, not a funny joke, okay? But I knew where to come. To you, right? And you took it off.'

Nigel shook his hair back into his eyes, shy and pleased. 'You had that knife. Cuts good.' Then he frowned. 'You need a steel knife...'

'I know,' she said. 'I gotta go now ...' Bending to pick up the paint can. 'I'll toss this.

Sorry.'

'It's a storm,' Nigel said. 'Don't go out in a storm.'

'I've got to,' she said. 'I'll be okay.' Thinking how he'd kill Nigel, too, if he found her here.

Hurt him. Scare him.

'I cut them off.' Holding up the red ball.

'Get rid of that,' she said.

'Why?'

'Look at this rash.'

Nigel dropped the bali like it was poison. It bounced out of sight. He wiped his fingers down the filthy front of his t-s.h.i.+rt.

'Nigel, you got a screwdriver you'll give me? A flathead?'

'Mine are all worn down ...' The white animals running over a shoal of tools, happy to be hunting, while Nigel gravely watched them. 'I throw those flathead screws away as soon as I get 'em off.

Hex is how you want to go-'

'I want one that's all worn down.'

The right hand pounced, came up with its prize, blackhandled and slightly bent.

'That's the one,' she said, zipping up Skinner's jacket. Both hands offered it to her, Nigel's eyes hiding behind his hair, watching. 'I. . . like you, Chevette.'

'I know,' she said, standing there with a paint can with vomit in it in one hand, a screwdriver in the other. 'I know you do.'

Baffled by the patchwork of plastic that roofed the upper deck, the rain was following waste-lines and power-cables, emerging overhead at crazy angles, in random cascades, miniature Niagaras rus.h.i.+ng off corrugated iron and plywood. From the entrance to Nigel's workshop, Chevette watched an awning collapse, gallons of silver water splas.h.i.+ng all at once from what had been a taut concavity, a bulging canvas bathtub that gave way with a sharp crack, instantly becoming several yards of flapping, sodden cloth. Nothing here was ever planned, in any overall sense, and problems of drainage were dealt with as they emerged. Or not, more likely.

Half the lights were out, she saw, but that could be because people had shut them down, had pulled as many plugs as possible. But then she caught the edge of that weird pink flash you got when a transformer blew, and she heard it boom. Out toward Treasure. That took care of most of the remaining lights and suddenly she stood in near darkness. There was n.o.body in sight, n.o.body at all. Just a hundred-watt bulb in an orange plastic socket, twirling around in the wind.

She moved out into the center of the deck, trying to watch out for fallen wires. She remembered the can in her hand and flung it sideways, hearing it hit and roll.

She thought of her bike lying there in the rain, its capacitors drained. Somebody was going to take it, for sure, and Sammy Sal's, too. It was the biggest thing, the most valuable thing she'd ever owned, and she'd earned every dollar she'd put down on the counter at City Wheels. She didn't think about it like it was a thing, more the way she figured people thought about horses. There were messengers who named their bikes, but Chevette never would have done that, and somehow because she did think about it like it was something alive.

'59.

Proj, she told herself, they'll get you if you stay here. Her back to San Francisco, she set out toward Treasure.

They who? That one with his gun. He'd come for the gla.s.ses. Came for the gla.s.ses and killed Sammy.

Had those people sent him, the ones who called up Bunny and Wilson the owner? Rentacops. Security guys.

The case in her pocket. Smooth. And that weird cartoon of the city, those towers with their spreading tops. Sunflower.

'Jesus,' she said, 'where? Where'm I going?'

To Treasure, where the wolf-men and the death-cookies hung, the bad crazies chased off the bridge to haunt the woods there? Been a Navy base there, Skinner said, but a plague put paid to that just after the Little Grande, something that turned your eyes to mush, then your teeth fell out.

Treasure Island fever, like maybe something crawled out of a can at that Navy place, after the earthquake. So n.o.body went there now, n.o.body normal. You saw their fires at night, sometimes, and smoke in the daytime, and you walked straight over to the Oakland span, the cantilever, and the people who lived there weren't the same, really, as the people over here in the suspension.

Or should she go back, try to get her bike? An hour's riding and the brakes would be charged again. She saw herself just riding, maybe east, riding forever into whatever country that was, deserts like you saw on television, then flat green farms where big machines came marching along in rows, doing whatever it was they did. But she remembered the road down from Oregon, the trucks groaning past in the night like lost mad animals, and she tried to picture herself riding down that. No, there wasn't any place out on a road like that, nothing human-sized, and hardly ever even a light, in all the fields of dark. Where you could walk and walk forever and never come to anything, not even a place to sit down. A bike wouldn't get her anywhere out there.

Or she could go hack to Skinner's. Co up there and see- No. She shut that down, hard.

i6o The empty rose out of the rain-rattled shadws like a gas, and she held her breath, not to breathe it in.

How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you'd ever had them. Took a mother's leaving for you to know she'd ever been there, because otherwise she was that place, everythin~, like weather. And Skinner and the Coleman stove and the oil she had to drop into the little hole to keep its leather gasket soft so the pump would work. You didn't wake up ever~' morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up. Or Lowell. When she'd had Lowel.-if she could say she ever had, and she guessed she hadn't, really-but while he'd been there, anyway, he'd been a little like that- 'Chev? That you?'

And there he was. Lowell. Sitting up cross-legged on top of a rusty cooler said SHRIMP across the froit, smoking a cigarette and watching rain run off the shrimp man's awning. She hadn't seen him for three weeks now, and the only thing she could think of was how she really must look like total s.h.i.+t. That skinhead boy they called Codes was sitting up beside him, black hood of a sweats.h.i.+rt pulled up and his hands hidden in the long sleeves. Codes hadn't ever liked her.

But Lowell, he was grinning around the glow of that cigarette. 'Well,' he said, 'you gonna say "hi" 0: what?'

'Hi,' Chevette said.

21 Cognitive dissidents Rydell wasn't too sure about this whole bridge thing, and less sure about what Freddie had had to say about it, in Food Fair and on the way back from North Beach. He kept remembering that doc.u.mentary he'd seen in Knoxville and he was pretty sure there hadn't been anything on that about cannibals or cults. He thought that had to be Freddie wanting him to think that, because he, Rydell, was the one who had to go out there and get this girl, Chevette Was.h.i.+ngton.

And now he was actually out on it, watching people hurry to get their stuff out of the way of the weather, it looked even less like what Freddie had said it was all about. It looked like a carnival, sort of. Or a state fair midway, except it was roofed over, on the upper level, with crazy little shanties, just boxes, and whole house-trailers winched up and glued into the suspension with big gobs of adhesive, like gra.s.shoppers in a spider-web. You could go up and down, between the two original deck levels, through holes they'd cut in the upper deck, all different kinds of stairs patched in under there, plywood and welded steel, and one had an old airline gangway, just sitting there with its tires flat.

Down on the bottom deck, once you got in past a lot of food-wagons, there were mostly bars, the smallest ones Rydell had ever seen, some with only four stools and not even a door, just a big shutter they could pull down and lock.

But none of it done to any plan, not that he could see. Not like a mall, where they plug a business into a slot and wait to r6z

see whether it works or not. This place had just grcwn, it looked like, one thing patched onto the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless ma.s.s of stuff, and io two pieces of it matched. There was a different material anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally been intended for. He pa.s.sed stalls faced with turquoise Formica, fake brick, fragments of broken tile vorked into swirls and sunbursts and flowers. One place, dready shuttered, was covered with green-and-copper skbs of desoldered component-board.

He found himself grinning at it all, and at the peopli, none of them paying him the least attention, cannibaliitic or otherwise. They looked to be as mixed a bunch a; their building materials: all ages, races, colors, and all & them rus.h.i.+ng ahead of the storm that very definitely was coming now, wind stiffening as he threaded his way past carts ~nd old ladies lugging straw suitcases. A little kid, staggering with his arms wrapped around a big red fire-extinguisher, b.u.mped into his legs. Rydell hadn't ever seen a little kid with tattons like that. The boy said something in some other language aid then he was gone.

Rydell stopped and got Warbaby's map out of his jacket pocket. It showed where this girl lived and how to get up there. Right up on the roof of the d.a.m.ned thing, in a little shanty stuck to the top of one of the towers they hing the cables from. Warbaby had beautiful handwriting, really graceful, and he'd drawn this map out in the back of the patriot, and labelled it for Rydell.

Stairs here, then you weni along this walkway, took some kind of elevator.

Finding that first set of stairs was going to be a b.i.t.c.h, though, because, now that he looked around, he saw lots of narrow little stairways snaking up between stalls and shattered micro-bars, and no pattern to it at all. He guessed they all led up into the same rats-nest, hut there was no guarantee they'd all connect up.

163.

Exhaustion hit him, then, and he just wanted to know where and when he was supposed to sleep, and what was all this bulls.h.i.+t about, anyway? What had he let Hernandez get him in for?

Then the rain hit, the wind upping its velocity a couple of notches and the locals diving seriously for cover, leaving Rydell to hunch in the angle between a couple of old-fas.h.i.+oned j.a.panese vending-machines. The overall structure, if you could call it that, was porous enough to let plenty of rain in, but big enough and clumsy enough to tangle seriously with the wind. The whole thing started creaking and popping and sort of groaning. And the lights started going out.

He saw a burst of white sparks and a wire came down, out of that crazy tangle. Somebody yelled, but the words were pulled away into the wind and he couldn't make them out. He looked down and saw water rising around his SWAT shoes. Not good, he thought: puddles, wet shoes, alternating current.

There was a fruitstand next to one of the vending-machines, knocked together from scavenged wood like a kid's fort. But it had a sort of shelf under it, raised up six inches, and it looked dry under there. He hunched himself in, on top of it, with his feet up out of the water. It smelled like overripe tangerines, but it was ninety-percent dry and the vending-machine took most of the wind.

He zipped his jacket as high as it went, balled his fists into the pockets, and thought about a hot bath and a dry bed. He thought about his Futon Mouth futon, down in Mar Vista, and actually felt homesick. Jesus, he thought, be missing those stick-on flowers next.

A canvas awning came down, its wooden braces snapping like toothpicks, spilling maybe twenty gallons of rain. And right then was when he saw her, Chevette Was.h.i.+ngton, right out in plain sight. Just like he was dreaming. Not twenty feet away. Just standing there.

164.

Rydell had sort of had this girlfriend down in Florida, after his father had moved down there and gotten sick. Her name was Claudia Marsalis and she was from Boston and her mother had her RV in the same park as Rydell's father, right near Tampa Bay. Rydell was in his first year at the Academy, but you got a couple of breaks and his father knew ways to get a deal on plane tickets.

So Rydell would go down there on breaks and stay with his father and sometimes at night he'd go out and ride around with Claudia Marsalis in her mother's ~ Lincoln, which Claudia said had been cherry when they brought it down but now the salt was starting to get to it. Evidently up in Boston she'd only ever taken it out on the road in the summer, so the chemicals wouldn't eat it out. It had these blue-and-white Ma.s.s. HERITAGE plates on it because it was a collector's item.

They were the old-fas.h.i.+oned kind, stamped metal, and they didn't light up from inside.

It was kind of rough, around that part of Tampa, with the street signs all chewed up for target practice or the late-night demonstration of the choke on somebody's shotgun. There were plenty of shotguns around to be demonstrated, too; a few in the window-rack of every pick-up and 4X4, and usually a couple of big old dogs. Claudia used to give Rydell a hard time about that, about these Florida boys in gimme hats, riding around with their guns and dogs. Rydell told her it didn't have anything to do with him, he was from Knoxville, and people didn't drive around Knoxville with

their guns showing. Or shoot holes in street signs either, not if the Department could help it.