We were halfway out when the rivets began to pop from the heat. I could
barely make the crossing on the few occasions when I went with him. It
was his job to make the run twice a day. Some days he would look down
and say:
"That is life - terrible and swift." or
"That is life - cool and deep." or
"That is life - thin and running dry." or
"That is life - running over it's banks on both sides".
But the river always looked the same to me, from that height.
He ran that route for nineteen years, and he never missed a day. He
loved the river. No one was surprised when he jumped, not even his wife.
She had the look of a woman who had been obliged to make a meal of too
many roadkills. She drove her Ford pickup very carefully. In her eyes
you could see the reflection of all the little creatures cut down in
traffic. She saw their little whiskers and ears, paws and capped teeth,
soft skin and greasy coveralls. It was hard for her to tell the
difference between the ghosts and the live ones, so she stopped a lot,
for no reason anyone else could see. Sometimes, when the sun was too
bright, her eyes would begin to water so badly she had to pull of to
the side of the road and rest a while.
Often he would come home
and find her sitting in the dark with a wet cloth over her eyes. He
would usually go into the kitchen and fix himself a tuna sandwich, but
other times he would sit and hold her hand as the night walked in
through the windows and covered the walls of their home.
The
day he hit the river she unplugged the refrigerator and cried until the
sun came back the next day. The crickets were delighted - they
accompanied her with their reedy music, and their duet was the only
thread in the fabric of that particular night.
In the morning
she threw all the spoiled food away and never mentioned his name again.
The crickets still play at night. I have listened to them for hours and
emerged, thankfully, with no greater insight that I had at the outset.
Now they have strung power lines by our land. They hum day and night
while the grass underneath them changes slowly, becoming less and less
like grass with each generation. I have seen her listening, perhaps to
the movements of little creatures no on else hears, scuttling through
the grass. Or, perhaps, she just listens to the hum of the high
tension, as the busy electrons march from one horizon to the next.
She also likes to sit on the cliff that overlooks the river. That is
the narrowest part, where the road and the wires and the rail line all
cross together. It is quiet out there, with only the splash of the
river, or the soft hum of electricity, or the distant rush of a passing
car. At night the shimmering noise of a million crickets fills the air,
and all the sounds blend into a fine symphony.
When the trains
come, though, they come with a roar, and it fills the gorge, and climbs
the walls of the cliffs, and reaches all the way up to the sky. It is
hard to hear anything at all, when the trains come.
And the sun is very bright out there on that cliff. It is so bright that sometimes it makes her eyes burn. Even at night.