The Incident on the Bridge (27 page)

F
en sat with his uncle in the backyard, moving the dice from Ted's Monopoly game around in his pocket. He dreaded what his uncle was going to say about the flyers, and the cloudy day made him feel worse. If you took a picture of his uncle's dead yard right now, you'd think it was a cold day in North Dakota.

“Grilled cheese?”

“No, thanks.”

“Peanut butter?”

“I'm not hungry.”

They sat facing the spiked fence of the navy base, the pink Victorian gazing ball, the dead tomato vines and their withered fruit. He hoped his uncle wouldn't ask him anything about Thisbe or Ted.

“So…the flyers,” his uncle said.

“Yeah.”

“I understand the impulse.”

“I'm really, really sorry.”

“No, it's okay.” His uncle chewed, swallowed, scratched his knee. They sat in the rusty chairs before the pink gazing ball. The two of them in its surface were shortened and obese. Overhead, a navy jet split the sky with sound.

“Do you think Ted is wrong?” Fen asked. He brought the dice out and rubbed them in one hand.

“Probably. But it's past experience with the situation that makes me say that. People don't believe you when you're still looking for the body. It's normal to hold out hope.”

“Has anyone ever been right? Like they thought someone jumped, and they didn't?”

His uncle stared at the pink globe for a while. “I can't think of a time.”

Alea iacta est,
Fen thought bitterly, but he didn't say it aloud. It wasn't really whether the die was cast but whether you could see what you'd rolled. “Would you always die if you jumped?” Fen asked.

“Yes,” his uncle said, then paused. He shook his head. “No. But the effects are always horrific.”

Fen remembered lying facedown on the surface of the pool at the Isle of Capri. He breathed through the snorkel and studied the plaster through thick layers of chlorine; the slope, three feet to eight feet; the drain at the very bottom. The plaster was chipped and fragile in places, full of holes like popped blisters that hadn't healed. His head was underwater, and yet he breathed. “What should I do?” he asked his uncle. “I mean, with Ted?”

“You don't have to do anything to change her mind. It'll change if circumstances change.”

He decided to ask the question that bothered him the second most. “Will they blame me?”

“No. They shouldn't, anyway. If they do, it's not because you did anything, but because people need someone to blame.”

This didn't help at all. He blamed the people who could have stopped to call an ambulance for his father, and he blamed himself now.

“What should I have done?” he asked. That was the top question, the sharpest needle he used to poke himself.

“What you did.”

His uncle clearly meant it, but Fen was unsatisfied.

“I've got to work this afternoon,” Carl said.

“Okay.”

“What are you going to do to keep busy?”

“I don't know. Watch TV.”

“You brought your skateboard, right? You should go out. Here's money for the skate park. Or something to eat later.”

“Thanks,” Fen said.

After his uncle went inside to put on his uniform, Fen rolled the dice around in a cupped hand. He decided to throw them out into the garden. Just throw the stupid things away. Why had he come here? He would have been just as bad off in Brazil with his mother. He didn't know people in Brazil, either, but at least they would have all been foreigners saying stuff in Portuguese. He threw the dice hard at the grass, the way you would if you were skipping stones in water. They skipped, kind of, then were stuck somewhere in the tangled plants that had been vegetables once. He could hardly make himself stand up afterward.

H
e's been waiting outside for half an hour because he thought the bank opened at 8:30, and then when they finally let him in, the nice teller isn't there. Frank only came into the bank once a month, on the day before his mooring fee was due, to buy a money order, and he timed that for the late afternoon, right before the bank closed. She was a Spanish girl, a lot friendlier than the other people who worked behind the counter, flashing her white teeth and asking if the fish were biting, if he wanted to open a savings account, if he needed anything else. She remembered, every time, that he used to be a commercial fisherman and that he lived on the water, which she seemed to regard as brave and interesting. El Capitán, she called him.

The only teller behind the counter is the skinny kid who drives a BMW, a tall guy with hair pushed up like mown grass, sipping coffee out of a tall paper cup. Black-framed glasses that look like part of a costume, and hands soft as a girl's.

The security guard is watching Frank from his stool beside the door.

“Good morning,” Frank says to the guy with his hair pushed up. Jay, his name is, according to the sign on the counter.

“Good morning! What can I do for you, sir?”

“I've lost my wallet. My bank card. I need a new one.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Would it have been stolen?”

“Maybe. It could have been. I lost it in the park.”

“Then we should check and make sure there's been no illicit activity. Let me—one sec. I'm just gonna ask the manager what all the steps are, okay? I'm new.” The manager is a heavyset woman in an orange skirt and a long gold necklace. She gives Frank a glance and says some things he can't hear. A coffeepot ticks in the corner. He hasn't had breakfast or coffee.

Skinny boy comes back. “I'm Jay Thorne, by the way.”

Frank nods. He can read.

“What we need to do is check activity on your account. Can you print and then sign your name here?”

Frank signs carefully, slowly, so as to make an exact replica of the last way he signed his name in a bank, which would have been five years ago, when his cousin Telma said it was time to sell their grandmother's house and retire, all of them.

The boy's shirt is so tight around his waist and chest that he looks like a Christmas package. When Frank hands him the card, Jay studies a screen Frank can't see while Jay pushes each of the knuckles on his right hand, then each of the knuckles on his left. Whatever's on the screen takes Jay a long while to read, and it doesn't change his expression. “Okay. Just one more sec. I see a Frank Le Stang here. Can you just confirm your address?”

“General delivery, Coronado.”

“What?”

“General delivery, post office, Coronado. I move around. I live on my boat.”

“But I need the address on the account.”

“Maybe it's my cousin's address?”

“I don't know. The one you put down as permanent.”

“Let's see. It's my cousin's. She mails me things that need to be mailed. Telma Cardozo, 314 Stimson Avenue, Pismo Beach.”

As soon as he says it, the number sounds wrong. “Maybe it's 413. It's 413, I think.”

“That's right,” Jay says. “So that's where we should mail the new card?”

“Mail it? Can't you just give it to me?”

“No, sir. I don't think so. I'll check again if you want.”

“I'm right here. I'd like to just take it with me. It's my money, isn't it?”

“I'll check with the manager. One sec.”

The woman is reading something at a desk behind the counter, but she looks up as if she had expected this. They're tiresome interruptions to her, the boy with the toy glasses and Frank with his lost wallet. After a low conversation, Jay Thorne and the manager approach the counter with an air of defensive diplomacy. They expect him to be unhappy with whatever they're about to say, but they're going to pretend they're giving him excellent service, that they have his best interest at heart.

“Mr. Le Stang?” the woman says. “I'm Carol Ambrose, the manager. I'm so sorry for the inconvenience. We have to mail the cards as a security measure. We're required to verify your identity by the Patriot Act.”

“But you just verified my identity.”

“You could get cash today with a counter check. But to issue a new card, that takes two weeks.”

“I don't understand. Where's the Spanish girl?”

“What Spanish girl?”

“The one with dark hair. Works in the afternoons.”

“Elena?”

“That's her. She knows me. I come in every month. I always wait until her line is open.”

“Elena is on maternity leave.”

“She could tell you who I am.”

“Even if Elena could come in, and she can't, that wouldn't be enough for the Patriot Act.”

“This is not right.”

“I know. It's frustrating. There's nothing I can do about it, however. Did you report the wallet stolen to the police department?”

“No. I dropped it, I think. I don't know that it's stolen.”

“If you dropped it outside, you should assume it was stolen. Where did you say you dropped it? The beach?”

“The bay. Tidelands.” Saying this makes his flesh warm. He's blushing. They'll think he's done wrong when it's just that he's aware people don't look kindly on canners, though they all say recycling is tip-top. Okay to sort your own trash but not to sort others'. Thoughts of Julia pass through his head so he looks down.

“Well, it could have been stolen just as quickly at Tidelands. I'm sorry for your trouble, Mr. Le Stang. Do you want to write the counter check now?”

He has to get money for the impeller and for whatever might go wrong along the way. Two weeks. “It's my money,” he says. “All of it. I never should have given it to you people.”

Others have come into the bank now, a middle-aged woman and an old man in a suit, and they give him disapproving looks. The guard is standing now instead of sitting near the door.

“I understand your frustration, but the card will come, and meanwhile you can write a counter check and withdraw up to your limit, which is two hundred dollars.”

“What if I need more than that?”

“Did you also lose credit cards?”

“I don't have any of those. It's a racket.”

“I admire your stance. A lot of people don't have that kind of self-control.”

“Maybe I should just take all my money out of here and put it in another bank. That's what I ought to do.”

“You wouldn't be able to withdraw it all today.”

“You people are robbers, you know that?”

The middle-aged woman and the natty man flinch. They exchange glances and little smiles. He knows what those glances mean.
Crazy old coot.

“I have a lot of money in this bank,” he says to the woman in line.

“I'm sure,” she says, but she isn't. The security guard takes a step forward, but the manager holds up her hand to the guard as if to say,
Stay.

“You should report the wallet as stolen,” the manager says to Frank. “You know where the police station is? Just down the street a block? Not even a whole block.”

“I just need what's mine. The card to get the money that's mine. All of it. I'm going to take it all out of here.”

“You can do that through the proper channels if you want, but you'll need to wait for the clearance anyway.”

“This is robbery,” he says, and he walks out the door.