BILL COPE

BILL COPE BRIDGE OUT

“What do you suppose they made in there?”

“What who made in where?”

“There. Where else?” They were alone on this road, Gary and Jenna – a narrow lane-and-a-half with swampy grassland crowding the wet pavement on the right so closely that Jenna could have reached out and plucked a handful of the blades as they drove past. On their left, to where she impatiently flipped her hand, was a brick wall, maybe twenty-feet high and a quarter-mile long, reds ranging from dried blood to splotchy rust. Vines clung to much of the face. There were no windows, no architectural features of any sort but for an occasional wooden loading dock, rotting into the weeds that had reclaimed a dirt access road. In places, ragged holes had been slammed through the brick by the fist of age and deterioration. The vines poured into these breaches as though this was exactly what they’d been waiting for.

“How would I know, Jen? Confederate flags? Cotton bales? Hobbles and chains? Whatever it was, they haven’t made it there for a damn long time.”

“It can’t be that old. It’s so big. They didn’t have factories so big in those days, did they? And is that what they call kudzu? It’s everywhere.”

“Jen, this is your part of the country, not mine. Why ask me?”

She turned away, sat forward and fumed in her seat.

“Jesus, Gary! To get you to talk. You haven’t said more than five words since we turned off that other

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road. Even before that. I can’t stand this.”

In an indeterminable distance, the road curved lazily into the woods that pressed against the left berm beyond the disintegrating building. Above them, above the scarred roadbed, above the thick grey scrub and kudzu coverlet by what seemed to be mere inches, an unbroken ceiling of muddy clouds promised to dump another torrent of suffocating rain with each breath, each tense heartbeat from inside the rental car.

“Besides, this isn’t my country anymore than it’s yours. Is it my fault Dad wanted to be buried where he was born? Quit blaming me for being here. You could have skipped out on this”…she hesitated, pulled at the skin of her neck, knowing what she would say next, would peel the scab off a wound that never healed, wishing she could stop, regretting that she was going to say it anyway”…Just like you’ve skipped out on everything else that had to do with my family. Since the beginning.”

“I’m so damn sick of that. And if you’re so done with me, what does it matter? I’m here now, aren’t I?”

For all the time it took to enter deeply into the gloom of the trees, they were silent. Every few hundred yards, another shack or trailer squatted within a littered yard. From under blankets of insatiable plant life peeked gap-toothed grills, broken taillights, rotted tires of abandoned cars and smashed windshields of discarded trucks. These woods still glistened from the last deluge. The two saw not another soul.

Finally, Gary erupted. “How goddamn far is this detour? We should have come out of it, somewhere.”

“We should have stopped and asked somewhere.”

“Like where? The only place that looked like it

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might have a human being inside was that nasty ass bait shop just after the detour sign. And then, there was no reason to think we had to ask anybody about anything, was there?”

For miles through this dim tunnel of trees they couldn’t name, roadside brush they could barely see through, and turbid clouds they had never known the like of at home in their high and dry state, the couple lapsed back into wordless fidgeting. Droplets the size of June bugs spattered on the windshield, not from rain but from the sullen leaves hanging over the road. Gary let the wipers run on a slow delay, not quite fast enough to keep the windshield cleared. Jenna glimpsed what she thought was another warning barricade tipped flat into a tulle sump at the side of the road, but what lettering she saw appeared as nothing but watery distortion.

“So? Are you going to tell them while we’re down here?”

“My family?”

“Yes. Your family. About us? After the funeral, maybe? Before we fly back?”

Jenna again pulled the skin of her throat, grown loose with middle age. For days, she had pictured her mother making this same anxious gesture, something both of them had always done when disturbed, when uncertain, when afraid. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“You shouldn’t. Not now, anyway. If you still give a damn about my opinion anymore, I think you sh...Jeezzus Kur-izzz…”

Gary had topped what he’d misjudged to be an insignificant rise not with his eyes on the road, but on his wife. She saw the steeper drop on the down side

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and the orange-yellow “Bridge Out” barricade before he did, and he reacted to the sudden panic on her face, her desperate grab at the dash, before he even knew what he was about to hit. With both feet on the brake, he avoided slamming into the barrier, but could not avoid running the car off the break where the pavement ended. They heard, they felt in their spines, the oil pan and transmission scrape over slabs of torn asphalt and rocks as big as the skulls of horses.

The car bogged down to a stop twenty feet beyond the barricade and twenty yards from the bank of a roiled and black river, made swollen and swift from heavy rain. A trestle bridge, weak with rust and neglect, had collapsed into the stream on their side, but still dangled from the opposite bank, the submerged end leaving a wake in the turbulence that soon disappeared in the rolling waters.

“Shhhhhit,” Gary hissed. Jenna held onto the dash as though she expected more. The car’s engine had died. Even with the windows up they could hear the gurgle of the river spilling over kudzu-heavy trees that had toppled into the flow.

When enough deep breaths had been taken, Gary open his door and put a foot out into sucking red mud. “What…where are you going?” his wife asked.

“I don’t know. To stand up. I’m about to cramp.” Gary unsnapped his seat belt and uncurled his body from the little car. The door wouldn’t open any wider than half way, and the corner plowed a furrow into the mud getting even that far. Using islands of fragmented asphalt to keep his shoes from further ruination, he stepped like a child jumping hopscotch to the front end of the car. “We’re in it up to the bumper.”

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Jenna put a leg out and stood. “Does your phone work?” She stayed put, with one arm on the roof and the other draped over the open door.

“Somebody moved that detour barrier, Jen. It has to be what happened. That’s why we’re here. Somebody did this to us.”

“What do you mean? Intentionally?” She remembered the other barricade a quarter mile back, half submerged in a brown pool of roadside runoff. “Who would…I mean, why would…”

The rumble of the truck reached them before the sight of it. It came over the rise slowly, this pickup truck as big as such trucks come. The tires alone were as tall as most women. The windows were tinted to impenetrable and the paint was patchy, as though the vehicle was shedding its skin. It stopped well short of the jagged edge of torn pavement, and watched, still growling. Had it topped the rise anywhere near to the speed Gary had, it would have landed on top of them and their little egg of a rental.

But it didn’t top the rise anywhere near to the speed Gary had.

“Jesus, Gary. Does your phone work?” Jenna pinched the skin on her neck without knowing her hand had gone there.

“It’s inside. In there. In there. With the other stuff. Get it.” Jenna could not remember ever seeing her husband seem so impotent. His face would not hold still. His hand trembled as he pointed past the wipers, still sweeping across the glass, into the car. It made her even more afraid. “Get it,” he repeated.

Two men dropped out of the truck and walked with no hurry in their step to the pavement’s end.

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One grinned as though he’d seen all of this before. The other wasn’t grinning. Jenna could hear gravel crunching under their boots.

The grinner said, “Looks like you folks got yourselves a little trouble.”

The face of her father came to her, along with the unwanted advice he had volunteered so many years past. You’re making a mistake, girl. It’s the wrong way to go. Then the burble and purr of the black river blurred the image and washed the words away.

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DEVIATION

Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE