* * *
Gil looked thoughtfully at his neat display of souvenir bridges as the tourists pulled up in their super cruiser. The display was almost neat, anyway. Each had a slight defect. Kurtz always called them “scars of planning” when he dropped them off for sale. Kurtz bore many scars of planning himself, but Gil rarely commented. Gil tried not to comment about too many things, really. He always thought that if you opened your mouth too wide, someone else’s words would fly out. He had a hard enough time being responsible for his own words. His father used to comment that if an inappropriate comment existed for a given situation, Gil was bound to say it. His father used to comment that, anyway. But that was some time ago and Gil had changed a bit. Bore a few scars of planning himself.
He tried to place the bridges in such a way as to hide their greatest defects. Each bridge was ostensibly identical. Exactly twenty-five inches long and ten inches high, scaled precisely to what Kurtz called “Lord Stansbury’s Abomination.” By that he meant the Lakebridge. Everyone else in Stansbury…everyone in Vermont for that matter called it the Lakebridge. Only covered bridge anyone had ever heard of that spanned a lake. Sure Stansbury Lake wasn’t much of a lake. More of a large pond, really. But by whatever definition they use for these things, it was a lake and Lord Stansbury had thought it prudent to stick a covered bridge over it a few hundred years ago. And not any old crossing, either. Gil had seen a few covered bridges in his wanderings. They all had their peculiarities. Some had lost their coats of paint and no society had come along to maintain them so they were gradually losing themselves to the weather. Others were well built and well kept. He sometimes stopped to admire the craftsmanship that went into their creation. The way the planks had been fitted together, the individual designs that made each one special. But none ever seemed as special as the Lakebridge. For one, it never seemed to lose the luster of its coat of red paint. As each of Kurtz’s replicas duplicated (some a bit blackened from scorching!), the rich red sheen never lost its glow. This was not due to some determined conservationist who spent hour upon hour traversing the countryside looking for small pieces of history to restore to birthing glory. This was not the product of a local councilwoman who held a pageant or a crusade to maintain the former glory of the creator’s dream. For that matter, it was not the result of some deranged local hermit who lived in a forest shack somewhere in the vicinity of the bridge and ate venison when he could find it or his own stockpile of homemade maple syrup created from his great-grandfather’s recipe which allowed for a bit of fermentation giving the syrup a little kick when applied to the buttermilk pancakes he would make from boxes of mix he stored in the shed next to the gallon upon gallon of red paint that he would secret out to the Lakebridge every spring just after the thaw and repaint it and coat it to protect it from the upcoming year’s wear and weather. There was no such hermit as far as Gil knew and Gil knew pretty much everyone in the area, including the odd hermits who lived on syrup and pancakes and the occasional hunk of cheese that Gil would secret to them to check their sheds for the tell-tale paint cans. From what he could gather from local history and old timers and odd hermits, the red glossy bridge over the almost lake had a kind of magic about it that kept it whole and clean and undisturbed by time.
What kind of magic, they would not say, but Kurtz would. He knew it for the blackest as he often said upon delivering a dented facsimile. Gil asked him why he was so obsessed with the bridge but he already knew the answer and knew Kurtz tried not to think to long upon it. It was only a small part of his obsession that built the bridges and yet another that damaged them. Each defect was different, as unique as the original was from its cousins around the area. One was less a bottom where the underpinnings had been removed by some incendiary device. Another had felt the grave blow of some sharp instrument and was barely fit for sale due to its lack of side and top. How it continued to stand amazed Gil and it wasn’t for lack of trying to knock it down on his part. Gil had built a small catapult, really a trebuchet, and used it to wage small wars against the damaged bridges that he would set at different parts of his small store. Sometimes he would use his assortment of small stuffed moose, dressed in red flannel and winter hats, as sentries on the tower he built from the cans of maple syrup that lined his cash register. The moose would signal to him that all was clear to begin his assault. The bridge would be set over a small model lake that Kurtz had provided for him when he learned of Gil’s plan of attack. Kurtz had actually designed the trebuchet, but would only supervise Gil in the building of it. This was an incredibly difficult exercise for Gil as his prosthetic right arm was good for rough work and sometimes holding things in place, but he had not yet become truly proficient with his left arm and had to go through many incarnations of his battle device before he had created one with the proper power to potentially destroy his target. Once the moose’s signal was received, he would let loose his first assault. At first, his ammunition consisted of the small stones he thought sufficient to pulverize his target. But Kurtz was a fine craftsman and his creation withstood most every rock that fell upon it. The moose would simply shake their stuffed heads in shame. What kind of commander was he that he could not take out such a weak and wounded target? To rally his troops, he sought out a better class of ammunition. Kurtz recommended fireballs, but that seemed imprudent inside the store. Kurtz recommended taking the bridge outside and using fireballs, but he did not seem to understand Gil’s intention. After all, it would require some amount of work to move his entire castle of syrup and chocolate outside merely to stage an assault upon a broken down model. Of course, he didn’t tell this to his friend. He simply said that his battlefield was confined to the store grounds and that was where victory must be achieved. Kurtz nodded sagely and handed him a small sack of metal ball bearings of various sizes and materials that he had cast in his workshop. He warned to be careful as some contained mercury and if the aim was off it could do untold damage to the souvenir jars of maple syrup that lined the shelves along with the other bridges. Thus far, Gil had destroyed twenty ten-ounce maple leaf shaped jars of syrup and, much to his surprise, a single one-gallon can that one of Kurtz’s special loads had penetrated with ease. As it bled on his floor, Gil could only laugh at the power of his small device and that the wreck of a bridge had stood up to all of its firepower.
The moose reminded him that it would only take one well-placed shot to take out the bridge as he watched the elderly couple exit their vehicle and approach his front door. He thought of reminding the moose that he was their commanding officer, but he simply removed his plush watchman from his grade-A dark amber battlements and replaced him in his barracks next to the register. There was a time and a place for everything and civilians should never be placed in harm’s way when one misplaced shot would ruin the funding for future fights. He told Shelley about the assaults one time and on his next birthday she gave him a Playstation. She told him that it was bad enough she had to put up with Kurtz but that she would not stand for his delusions of grandeur. He thought of reminding her that they had yet to make a one-handed video game for the Playstation, but gave the machine to Sheriff Tom instead. Sheriff Tom had been through a lot that year, what with being elected sheriff and all, and needed a distraction. Gil’s father did not think much of the new sheriff playing video games while on duty…but whose fault was that?
He saw that the couple was from Florida. Dade County from the license plate. That probably meant Miami. He went to Miami once about two years ago. It was on his way to the Florida Keys. He had seen the shows on TV about it but never quite expected it to be so amazingly hot and humid and really boring. His therapist thought it might do him some good to go down to the beaches and see some pretty girls and maybe even go swimming in the warm Atlantic. But he wasn’t a very good swimmer when he had two arms and he had heard there were lots of evil globulous jellyfish and sinister sharks in the waters near Florida. He preferr
ed to spend his time drinking rum concoctions in a local bar. He got hit on a few times by a few guys and this older lady who might have been a guy for all he knew but he preferred to think she was an older lady because he preferred to think that at least one woman found him attractive enough to hit on. One of the guys thought his prosthetic was a real turn on and wondered if Gil had any special attachments. Gil just started laughing and bought the guy a drink. Florida was fun for about a minute and then he wanted to be somewhere not so humid.
Come to think of it, Gil had worse times than Florida, but he still preferred Vermont. No matter where he went, he preferred Vermont. Something about there being really good food and not so many people on the road that appealed to him. Maybe it was all the trees or the occasional moose. But Vermont was just about the best place he had come across and he could tell just by looking at him that the old Hispanic gentleman who just grumped his way through the door behind what could only be his wife did not share his outlook on the Green Mountain State.
“Bit of a change from Miami, huh?”
The old man nodded. “We have a different type of tree. But I’ll tell you what, we’ve still got you beat for French Canadians.”
“You don’t say?”
“I do say. They seem to skip this place altogether and make their way down to Miami like locusts. They like to fish. They like to fish a lot. I had one sorry snowbird come into my bank reeking of fish and he asked to rent out a safe deposit box. I had him fill out the necessary paperwork and give him the key and show him to the vault and you know what the sorry son of a bitch does?”
Gil smiled. He loved tourists. “I just can’t think of it.”
“He pulls out the ugliest looking catch you’ve ever seen, already starting to turn and tosses the thing into his box like it’s gold. I ask him as nicely as I can why he’s using my establishment as a fish locker and you know what the sorry son of a bitch says?
“I just can’t think of it.”
“He says, get this, ‘Eets da beegest fish I eva dun cought and ee ain’t never getting way from me.’ Then the moron locks up his box and leaves, leaving his dirty fish stink all over my bank. My sister owns a little motel in Hollywood. That’s Hollywood, Florida, mind you where our kind of freak isn’t put on television. She says these dirty Frenchies come down and stay all summer long and use the little coolers she graciously provides in the room to store their fish in. What are they storing it there for? They don’t have kitchens. It’s not like they can cook it there. But they seem to love fish or at least love stinking up other people’s rooms with their fish. I’m on my way to Montreal right now to see if the place stinks of fish as badly as my bank vault does because if it doesn’t, I’m going down to the local store and buying up a bunch of fish and tossing it in their stinking houses.”
Gil tried very hard not to fall down laughing as the man walked off to look at his assortment of souvenir candy and moose paraphernalia. He never thought much of French Canadians really. They came through on their way to somewhere else much like most people. But it did occur to him that they bore a strange fishy smell every now and again. He had never thought too much about it, though.
His thoughts were better spent elsewhere. Like with the man’s wife who was carefully examining his target. It had been placed carefully on its spot and all of his calculations for its ultimate destruction rested with his ability to make adjustments, which he kept a careful log of in a small black leather notebook he had bought for the purpose of writing a diary of his days. He had written about two weeks worth of entries. Each entry seemed less and less interesting than the last and it finally depressed him too much to try to recount the same days over and again. Although, if he were still keeping a journal, he would definitely comment on the old man’s problem with French Canadians. He might also comment upon his relief that the wife seemed interested in looking at the damnable bridge, but not touching it. While he did not have a “look but don’t touch” policy in his store, because those that did were not friendly and his was, if anything, a friendly bric-a-brac store, he hoped people wouldn’t touch that bridge in particular. Quite often he would focus a great amount of his psychic energy on the task. He believed if you thought something hard enough, the thoughts could make a slight impact upon the subject of your thinking. He spent a good few moments focusing hard on the old lady and it seemed to pay off. Once again, he contemplated keeping a journal of the effects of his concentrated focusing, but then he started remembering the total depression that always came with journaling and felt it better to leave that sort of thing to those who enjoyed their depressions.
The woman looked to him with smiling curiosity. “What happened to this one?”
“Every one is made differently.”
“But it looks like this one was made and then intentionally destroyed.”
Gil took some umbrage with that description. “It’s not really destroyed now. Damaged to be sure, but if it were destroyed do you think it could stand there like that?”
The lady thought about his reply for a moment and did not seem wholly satisfied with his response. “I suppose not. Can I ask you the question differently?”
“I would welcome it.”
“Why was this one made and then intentionally damaged?”
Gil had tried to explain to visitors in the past the many reasons why Kurtz took such care to mar his creations. He would often go into lengthy tales of an artist who felt it necessary to achieve total perfection with his bridge making. He would describe Kurtz as a master craftsman who would spend hours and sometimes days working with his models trying to get every last detail of the Lakebridge committed to scale. Gil had a great story about the time Kurtz had spent a month without food or drink living and sleeping on the bridge to absorb the essence of the construction before returning to his shop only to find that he could never make it just right. And with each passing attempt, his anger would grow and he would hurt each of his attempts in such a way to show that it was not the one true model before tossing it out on the fire pile for kindling. It was only because Gil respected the quality of the works that saved them from their fiery fates. But none of this was exactly true.
It always came down to one real reason, which the old Cuban gent was kind enough to get to before Gil had a chance to make it a more complicated issue, “The guy’s loco, Marisol. Crazy-go-nuts making all these little models and then bashing them.” The man picked up the one that bore burnt timbers. “Look at this one. It’s been torched. This guy must hate this bridge something fierce to make all these models and do these things to them.”
“Is that true?” Marisol asked.
“That’s about it, really,” said Gil, amazed by the man’s insight.
“Weird. How much are they?”
“Twenty dollars a piece. But if you buy three, you get ten dollars off.”
The man put down the bridge he had been scowling at. “Why would anyone in their right minds buy three of these things?”
Gil shrugged. No one ever had, but he always practiced the art of the up sell. He had once worked as a telemarketer and the words “UP SELL” were painted in day-glo colors across the wall of the basement where the phone bank was located. He had sold overpriced pens in Phoenix for a few months. He could never figure out which circle of hell Phoenix was, but it certainly seemed somewhere near the bottom. Yet it was a voluntary inferno. They paid to get in. People seemed to move there in ever growing numbers, making the place even more despicable. The desert was unfriendly enough without picking one of the hottest parts of it to build a city. But somehow Phoenix seemed worse than any of the small desert towns he had passed through simply because it was not small. It was sprawl. Massive ugly sprawl that kept on sprawling and one day would sprawl all the way from Tucson to Flagstaff if someone didn’t come along and cauterize the bleeding wound of it. But no one would ever do such a thing because the land was cheap and wh
erever there was cheap land over priced houses could be built and sold to finance the next phase of sprawl. And he had been trapped in that ugly hell for three of the longest months of his life. He was actually in a small suburb of the sprawl called Goodyear that made the rest of Phoenix look beautiful by comparison. Goodyear was the armpit of the armpit. A stanky town that had one weird remnant of something cool and unique. It must have been a racetrack at some point but it was long shut down. It was this futuristic grand stand that remained standing, but slowly eroding from idiot graffiti and sand blown desert decay. Gil would go there after the sun went down and climb the fence that barely encased the place. Some local kids would be smoking pot or huffing gasoline, more likely huffing gasoline as it was just that much cheaper and more idiotic than marijuana. But he would ignore their psychotic death wish activity and focus on the architecture. Some weirdo had plotted this place out and sold his strange idea to people who constructed such things. The place should have been on Mars it was so out there and that was why it probably failed to draw the crowds to whatever race-like activity it was created to host. Either that or the insane heat of the Goodyear sun. Gil bet on the sun which beat into his brain to make enough money to get himself out of that lunatic town. So he sold pens and up sold pens. He was a mad pen selling freak and couldn’t believe it when people would actually listen to his pitch much less buy his product. But after awhile he started to believe his own lies about how the quality of ink in his Bic pens was somehow of a higher grade than that which one might find at the local store. A pen bought among a gross of its companions for a slightly elevated price seemed a reasonable deal when one threw in a free camera. Did the camera work? Gil had never seen one and never knew. What he did know was that anyone who bought a box of pens from him would certainly be interested in knowing about his special deal on printer cartridges. And, strangely enough, he was right. What he really discovered is that most people are insanely lonely and will do just about anything to talk to a friendly voice. People say they hate telemarketers but they really don’t. How many other people just call you out of the blue and tell you anything with a smile in their voice? Most of the time people dreaded picking up the phone because who ever was calling probably wanted something. The telemarketer really didn’t want anything but to talk and maybe share a little information about a good product or service or survey they were conducting. But beyond that, they would listen to you too. They would never hang up on you and always be patient with your stories or concerns because they weren’t selling you pens or bathing suits, they were selling their friendship. At least Gil was. And better yet, he was up selling his friendship at very little extra cost. He never hated the job and would have stayed had it been anywhere that wasn’t Phoenix. But he had never forgotten the day-glo words on that basement wall that gave him all the reason in the world to try to sell three bridges when no one in their right mind needed more than one.
“You wouldn’t be buying the three bridges for yourself.”
“Who am I buying them for?”
“People who’ve never seen the Lakebridge. Like your kids. Wouldn’t you like to share a little bit of your trip with your loved ones?”
“Not especially,” the man gruffly replied. A tough sell. Gil knew his type. He had cracked them all the time when pens were on the line. But he could never quite get them to go for the three bridges. The most he had ever sold to a single person was two and that was to Vermont State Trooper Jennifer Julia Kennisaw. Trooper Kennisaw, she never let him call her Jennifer or Jenny or even Jen and especially not J.J., had a case involving the attempted destruction of the Lakebridge and needed the models for evidentiary proceedings. He was really not paying attention to what she was saying at the time as much as how she was saying it. He loved the way she talked and would have gladly just given her the bridges but she insisted on purchasing them because the state was footing the bill and there was no reason for her to accept them as gifts or for him to wrap them as nicely as he had. She just needed the bridges, thank you, and she was off to whatever she needed to do with them. She was a tough sell, but Gil wasn’t trying to sell her bridges.
He was, however, trying to sell this man a few of them. “Why not?”
“Because they’d rather have the fifty bucks than a few bridges.”
“But you aren’t giving them a bridge. You’re giving them a memory. You’re giving them a piece of something you saw and thought to share and isn’t that worth more than money?” Gil flashed his best salesman smile which he often flashed when he was telemarketing because he always felt that the people you were talking to over the phone could hear the smile in your voice. He also knew this Florida gentleman had never purchased a single thing from a telemarketer in his life and probably wouldn’t even pick up the phone unless he recognized the number. Still and all, Gil tried for the sale because if he didn’t sell bridges and the occasional stuffed moose, he would be living on settlement money alone and he never felt productive if his bills were paid with settlement money. It was a great shame to him that all too often he felt unproductive.
“But I’ve never seen your bridge,” the man said. “I’ve only seen your models.”
“Now I understand why you might hesitate in purchasing one, or many, of these items. If you’ve never seen the Lakebridge, then you can’t share the memory of it with your loved ones back in Miami.”
“Son, please stop trying to sell me your bridges. I know it’s what you do, but I just don’t want to buy one.”
Gil knew when to back off. There were all kinds of people in the world and some would buy what you were selling just because you were selling it and they liked to buy. Those were the people who watched infomercials at 3am and discovered that they could wash their cars with the same compound that was used by NASA to build the International Space Station and wouldn’t it be great to have that kind of protection in a car polish. Their homes were filled with everyday wonders that seemed to clog up drawers and closets and garages (Gil preferred to call them “car holes”) and never quite worked for anything better than taking up space. Gil had made a vow never to buy anything directly from the television. Sure, he would buy things he had seen on television, but never from the people selling them there. It somehow seemed better if he got it in the store or from off of the internet. Somehow the purchase seemed a bit more contemplated. And besides, he avoided the opportunity to be up sold on some other fine product or attachment or warranty. Gil never believed in purchasing a warranty for any item under two hundred dollars. It just wasn’t enough to bother.
Some people would never buy a thing they didn’t need and hadn’t thought about for sometime. Their worlds held no clutter. They researched appliances and did not feel that just because they lived in a modern world they had to have every modern convenience. Nor did they feel the desire to buy things for the sake of buying. It just depended on how people were wired. Heck, some people just don’t like bridges, even the burnt ones.
“Look, Rick,” said Marisol with a smile to Gil, the kind of smile that told him that she was the kind of saint that loved people she just met and would give them the world if it were in her pocketbook. “The sign says if you purchase three of these bridges and a stuffed moose, you get a guided tour of the Lakebridge. That sounds nice.”
“I don’t know,” said a noncommittal but defeated Rick. Gil had seen many a wife turn his defeat into a victory for a single bridge. But none had ever bought the tour package. Gil had never given the tour. Sure, Gil knew all there was to know about the Lakebridge, but he had never actually told anyone about it outside of a few of his friends in town who all seemed to think he was a bit nuts on the bridge. Not so nuts as Kurtz, but a bit crazy about the whole thing just the same. To tell the truth, he would have given the tour for free. He felt almost guilty taking money for it, even if he was selling stuff on the side. Almost guilty, but not quite.
“Would you like to sample a
ny maple syrup or chocolate?” Gil up sold. He felt like he was pushing his luck a bit, but his luck was always begging for a shove and Gil was never one to walk by a playful child who wanted to touch the sky.
“What is it with you people and your syrup?” the old Cuban complained. Gil had heard the complaint before. “It seems like every shop or store or gas station I go into in this state tries to push some syrup on me. Did you know that, if I wanted to, I could go down to my local grocery store in Miami and buy genuine Vermont maple syrup? From what I can tell, it tastes just the same, costs a little bit extra, but doesn’t require that I travel a couple of thousand miles to get some. Sure the variety may be a bit better up here, but if you really want to know the truth of it, I can’t tell the difference between the grades of syrup. Maybe I’ve smoked a few too many cigars or something, but it all just tastes sweet to me. Heck, I didn’t come here for the syrup. I don’t even like syrup.”
“What do you put on your waffles?” Gil honestly wondered.
“Nothing. I don’t eat waffles. I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a waffle. I don’t like the word so I avoid the food.”
It seemed like a good enough reason to Gil. He had heard far stranger excuses for not eating a thing. He was slightly disturbed by the lack of enthusiasm for syrup, however. Some people had a thing for fine wines or cigars. For Gil it was syrup. You give Gil a taste and he could tell you where it was from, when it had been tapped (give or take a decade) and what color and grade it was. He had made a study of it over the years. Shelley had encouraged him to write about it for some local magazine. Shelley still did not understand about the whole arm thing.
He never liked writing much to begin with and now that he could only write with his off hand, he thought even less of the practice. He tried explaining it to her, but she walked over to his computer and asked him if he could type with one hand. It was one of those questions that answered itself that she was always posing to him. She would even come by occasionally and show him some weird prosthetic catalogue that featured some new type of arm that could perform more functions than ever before. Gil often thought that if there was a television channel for amputees, they would have infomercials on for the most modern of devices that acted like an arm and, perhaps, a fishing rod. He often thought that if he were to replace his current arm, it would be with one that doubled for a fishing rod. They had them. It was an interesting notion. But he had never been very good at separating the fish from the hook when he had two hands and thought that with just the one, it might prove somewhat more difficult. He had grown rather fond of his present arm, however, and really didn’t contemplate replacing it. He spent a few hundred hours with a different local artists having it decorated. Some people mistook his decorations for tattooing, and, in their own way, they were right. But unlike tattoos, Gil could replace the skin without any pain. A guy with a tattoo sleeve on his real arm was rather stuck with it. In any case, Gil was not going to get some Swiss Army device installed on his body just to appease someone else’s notion of the amazing things he could accomplish if he would just allow for the future to creep in on his present. Gil had no problem with the future, though. He told Shelley that until he could get a bionic arm that could give him some kind of super strength and dexterity, he would stick with what he had.
His new friend, Marisol, had selected the three bridges that seemed the least damaged and a stuffed moose with a fishing pole. Why the moose was fishing, Gil had no idea…Gil often wondered about the designer of the stuffed moose in the hunting suit…it just didn’t seem right. He carefully packaged each model in its own souvenir box, bagged them up and placed the moose carefully on top. She paid him in cash, which was rare these days but appreciated. Every time he had to do a credit card transaction, the bank made him pay through the teeth for it. It seemed sometimes like they didn’t want him to take credit cards. It was one of the few things he agreed with the bank about as credit cards were a pain in the ass and it seemed some of his less savory tourists had a nasty habit of claiming that he had overcharged them or that they had never shopped at his store at all and, in such cases, the card company always agreed with the customer despite his signature proofs and hysterical protestations. Gil only ever got really hysterical with the credit card company…they were the devil. He asked John Kingsley over at the bank about it once when he was in making a deposit and John told him that processing little credit card transactions was not something the bank liked to do. The bank apparently felt it somewhat insulting to deal in small amounts of money. Gil wondered aloud as to who exactly it was in Stansbury who was transacting in anything over small amounts. John replied that the bank rarely felt anything but insulted these days. Gil said he knew how the bank felt, especially when dealing with the bank.
When Rick looked away, he slipped in a small tin of grade A dark amber syrup that was packaged to look like a small cabin in winter with a spout where the chimney should be and winked at Marisol.
“For pancakes, then.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking the bag from him. “Now how about that tour.”
“Sure. Let me just lock up here and I’ll take you right over.”
The couple exited the store and went over to their Winnebago to put their purchases away. Gil could hear the old man complaining about the thousands of things he’d rather be doing in Miami but the woman had a way about her which suggested that her husband would always capitulate. It was something Gil had come to respect in the older married women who had come through his store. They seemed to have this gift for letting their husbands think that they were in charge, that their opinion really mattered. But the women still always managed to get what they wanted. This woman was no different. She knew her husband and, more than anything, she loved her husband. But she also knew what she wanted to do and that she would get her way and she didn’t need to raise her voice or whine. Her simple, few words and beatific manner would always defeat her husband’s grump and bluster. And somehow, Gil imagined, the old man wouldn’t have it any other way.
As Gil secured away the few valuables that needed securing before he left with the couple, he looked over to his stalwart watch moose who reminded him that the trebuchet was locked and loaded. The moose was right. The machine sat ready, waiting for a simple adjustment in aim to fire off at the standing wreck of a model. The troops were cheering for him to attack. Just one volley, they pleaded. It wouldn’t take too long and victory was, perhaps, finally at hand. He had planned this attack very carefully for some time and finally felt that he had the right combination to win this day. Checking to make sure the couple was a safe distance away, he lined up his shot. It was really about hitting the one small piece of timber that held the whole wreck together. He managed to hit the small expanse of air around the spot, but never a bull’s eye. Gil checked with his lieutenant who gave him a curt nod with his antlers in salute for the glory that would come of the victorious attack. Satisfied that the conditions were optimal, he let his shot fly. He watched as the steel pinball sized load he had fired arced perfectly towards the bridge. Its destruction imminent, he could not help but to give a small cheer. Not loud enough to let all in on his confidence. Only his compatriot had heard him and shook his hoary head in sadness as the shot just barely missed. Gil watched in horror as the ball destroyed his display of maple-horseradish mustard jars which had been carefully stacked in the likeness of a castle keep. He had sent a picture of the display off to the small farm that produced the condiment and they had rewarded him with a t-shirt, a stuffed moose and a bottle of some of their premium grade-A medium amber which, as far as he was concerned, was the optimal flavor for use in his maple-oatmeal cookie recipe. As the jars crashed down around the bridge, most survived the fall. Only one or two were casualties of the attack and, as much as he would have liked to give them a proper burial, reconstruct his display and perhaps make a sandwich, he had customers waiting outside and need
ed to get them to the Lakebridge.
Gil left the scene of battle behind him and stepped outside. It would have been a perfect morning for victory. Even without it, however, it was pretty spectacular. Of the many things about he missed about Vermont in his travels, it was mornings like this early spring one that really made him all misty for his green mountains. He hadn’t been everywhere in his thirty-three years, but he had been enough places to know that there was no spot like this one that was really home.
He locked up the store and went over to the extraordinary recreational vehicle. It was probably the most amazing one he had seen to date. If he wasn’t mistaken, it had a satellite dish. He didn’t even have a satellite dish. Not that he missed having one too much, but it would be nice to think that his house was better equipped than an RV. But this Winnebago was something else. As the couple climbed down to join him, he was able to sneak a peak inside. No doubt about it, his house was running a distant second to the thing.
Gil couldn’t help but to comment, “Nice truck,” with a slight amount of jealousy in his voice.
The old man shrugged. “It gets us from here to there. Bitch to park though and it drinks gas like an Irishman drinks beer.”
Gil smiled as he realized that satisfaction was hard to come by. You could have everything that someone else could ever want but it would never be what you needed. Gil often thought it would all make sense if everyone could simply shift lives with the people directly next door to them. It always seemed like they had a better house or car or boat and if you could only have their house or car or boat you wouldn’t have so many problems of your own. But that just wasn’t true. If you had everything that your neighbor had, you still wouldn’t have everything he wanted and you’d eventually be unhappy unless you shifted another door down. Most of the time, Gil was pretty happy with what he had. But sometimes he wouldn’t mind trying to park a giant RV like this one just to see if it was that much of a bitch.
Gil chuckled a bit and pointed to a small path across the highway. “The Lakebridge is about a ten minute walk down that way. They never did build a good road in.” Gil checked the empty road before leading the couple across.
Rick seemed a bit perplexed and asked, “If there has never been a good road in, why is there a bridge over a lake? For that matter, why is there a bridge over a lake? Couldn’t they have just gone around or something? How big a lake is it, anyway?”
“Well, there’s no real consensus about why the Lakebridge was built except to say that Lord Francis Charles Stansbury was something of an eccentric and was known to do certain things because they had never been done before.” This was Gil’s pat answer to the question of the Lakebridge. It always kind of spilled out of him the way a gumball will come out of the machine when you feed it a quarter. But as he led the couple down the path towards the bridge, he somehow felt obliged to give more than the rote response he would pass along to the look-but-don’t-buy crowd that usually frequented his store. This old guy from Florida needed more than the random theory of the bridge to justify this excursion. As Gil led them along towards the lake, he broke the calm quiet of the morning in the woods, “That’s what most people in Stansbury believe in anyway.”
Marisol took the bait and probed, “And what do you believe?”
“It’s not what I believe so much as what I know to be true. I’ve done quite a bit of research into the Lakebridge and into the history of Stansbury.”
“Why?” Rick huffed out. The walk itself wasn’t strenuous, but it was a distance for people who didn’t see nature very often.
“There isn’t a whole lot to do around here, sir, besides enjoy the scenery and find out things. As much as I enjoy the scenery, and I do very much…it’s really the best this country’s got going for it and I’ve seen most of this country so I know this to be true…but as much as the trees sooth the mind, sometimes you need to do something. Anything, really. For many years my father was the elected sheriff of this town and I used to spend a lot of time going through all of the old records looking at history. Stansbury is a strange town for the area. Most don’t have their own elected sheriff or mayor like we do. I could never find out why this was the case. But I have learned a lot. Just in arrest records you learn a lot about a place. Did you know that it was illegal not to shoot an Indian if you saw one on your property? One man, Kenneth Bixby, absolutely refused to kill an Indian. Apparently, he refused to kill anything, even a moose which was also, apparently, a crime. A noble disagreement with the law, but a law broken is always in need of repair. Mr. Bixby was arrested fifteen times for not killing Indians. It seems his neighbor would watch the natives walk across Bixby’s land and then kill them as they crossed over onto his own. This neighbor was the sheriff at the time and would quickly put Bixby in chains on each occasion.”
“What was the punishment?” asked Rick.
“Mr. Bixby would be covered in maple syrup and buried up to his neck for two days.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Yes. I am,” Gil laughed. “About the punishment anyway.”
“So what was the sentence?”
“It was a five dollar fine, which was a lot at the time. It seems that the constable would receive a five dollar reward for each Indian he killed, but the town did not have the funds to pay him. So he would arrest Bixby, fine him and get his reward.”
“That’s kind of sick if you ask me,” Marisol interjected. “It just doesn’t seem right.”
“History’s not always pretty. Take the bridge, for instance. It was actually the reason that the town of Stansbury was founded to begin with. It was some years before the Revolution. Not the Cuban Revolution, mind you, but the American.”
“Thanks for clarifying that,” laughed Rick.
“No problem. There’ve been so many revolutions and my friends are always accusing me of being too general. Please let me know if you need clarification.”
“We will.”
“Excellent. Anyway, it was some time before the American Revolution when Lord Stansbury came over from England with his wife and daughter, Penelope.”
“What was his wife’s name?” inquired Marisol.
Gil figured that, being a wife and all, she was interested in wives or something. Gil had never been interested in wives. Not that he wasn’t interested in having a wife someday, but the histories of wives just didn’t intrigue him so much as their husbands did. He wondered if this made him a chauvinist. He had always tried to be fair, but he didn’t feel he should be taken to task for not being inclusive in his research. It just didn’t seem important at the time. Stansbury’s wife’s name was not important to the history. If it was, he would probably know it. She must not have done anything other than marry Stansbury and bear his children, specifically Penelope, who was an important woman. Or girl. At least a female, so Gil wasn’t excluding woman. Just unimportant women. Gil didn’t know the name of Stansbury’s slaves either…did that make him a racist?
“Lady Stansbury. I’m fairly sure her name was Lady Stansbury.” Gil watched the couple stare at him incredulously before chuckling. “Anyway, Lord Stansbury and family were traveling through the then colony looking for a place to set up shop. The nobleman had left England under a dark cloud. It was suspected that he was involved in the black arts and rather than risk a hanging from some reactionary Christian group, he packed up his shop and brought it here.”
“Was he a witch?” Marisol asked.
“Aren’t they’re called warlocks.” Rick replied.
“Actually the correct term was sorcerer. He was a sorcerer. If you believe in that kind of thing. Which I do. There are records from England that verify that his former place of residence had been a regular meeting place for strange rituals and sacrifices. Many locals went missing and there are reports that strange creatures would arrive through faerie mounds that shone with an eerie unnatural light.”
Rick did not
seem inclined to believe, “You’re kidding us again, right?”
“Not at all,” Gil replied in his most serious of tones. “Belief is a strange magic. The stronger people have faith in something, the more likely it is to be true…to happen. There is magic in the world. It’s not as great as it once was, but it’s still there. You’ll see when we get to the Lakebridge. Once you know what it is, you can’t help but to recognize it. It’s not a good thing at the bridge, though. It’s an evil thing. Stansbury practiced the dark arts and his creation was born of the blackest he could muster.”
The couple was hooked. “Why did he do that?” asked Marisol. She seemed generally concerned and maybe a bit scared. Gil knew that the people of the Caribbean understood about dark magic. He could tell that Marisol, at least, knew enough to worry.
“When the family arrived in the colonies, it was late in the fall. Not so late that winter had set in, but late enough that the nights were colder than you see in South Florida on the coldest day of the year.”
“That’s about seventy-eight degrees,” Rick said, trying to break the mood which had turned decidedly morose.
“A lot colder than that, Rick. Cold enough, in fact, to freeze over the water in the lake just enough to hold up the fallen leaves. You really ought to come back around to see the leaves change, by the way. It’s about as pretty as nature can get.”
“I’ve always wanted to see the leaves change,” Marisol replied enthusiastically. “Everything in Miami is always the same all the time. I know it’s natural for Miami but it just seems unnatural when you compare it to a place like this.”
Rick seemed annoyed by this. “Miami is consistent. There’s nothing wrong with consistent. At least there you only have to have one set of clothes. How many sets of clothes have you got, fella?”
“I haven’t really thought about it. Not too many, really. I know there’s some that dress for each season. I’m not much for it. I pretty much go in layers. If it gets colder, I add a layer. I guess you could call each layer a set. And if I never get beyond three layers, then I must only have three sets.”
Rick seemed neither pleased nor displeased with Gil’s answer. Gil knew better than to press the issue. He liked these people as much as he liked anyone he had just met and wanted them to think fondly not only of Stansbury, but of himself. A long time ago he really didn’t care much about what people thought of him. He tried to ignore his ego and just be himself, whatever that was. Of course, he later realized that this was just an extension of his ego and he had only wanted people, including himself, to think he didn’t care what they thought of him. Now that he understood that about himself, he made a real effort to ensure that people thought well of him. It wasn’t that he was insecure, it was simply that he enjoyed the process of being thought well of, which always included pleasing people. These people, at least Marisol, were interested in the Lakebridge.
“I can guarantee you that Lord Stansbury and his family were not in possession of too many sets of clothing.”
“Did he have a cloak or robe or something,” asked Rick.
Gil was stumped. “I don’t know. Why would he have a robe?”
“Didn’t you say he was a sorcerer?”
“I did.”
“Sorcerers wear robes, or so I’ve heard,” Rick said, seemingly teasing Gil.
“So they would seem to do. I can’t say for certain whether or not Lord Stansbury was in possession of a robe. He might have been. It would not be outside of the range of possibilities. But I doubt he was wearing a robe when he and his family came to this area of the country. Like I was saying, it was an extremely cold late autumn day.”
“You just said it was cold,” Rick interrupted. “Was it any colder than normal? Because if it’s normally extremely cold or even cold enough that the ponds freeze over, I don’t think I want to come back around for your fancy leaf show.”
“You can see the leaves change in early September sometimes when it’s not so cold as it was for Lord Stansbury and his family who were, I would imagine, not terribly interested in the leaves either. At least not interested enough for there to be record of any kind of foliage worship. What they were interested in was finding a place to settle down away from other colonists. The thing about Vermont, even today, is that if you want to find a spot away from prying eyes, it’s really not that hard to do. It was much easier way back then. The Stansburys were definitely interested in avoiding other people. At least, it would seem Lord Stansbury was. From what I could gather, he had purchased a great many slaves before coming north and very little in the way of farming equipment.”
Rick chuckled. “You’ve really spent a lot of time looking into this guy, haven’t you?”
Gil had actually been accused of being somewhat obsessed with Lord Stansbury. It was really Gil’s nature to be obsessed with things. But even more so, he was a completist. He never had more than three obsessions at any one point in time and would only take on a new one when he had thoroughly exhausted one of the current three. When he was ten, he had been overtaken with a need to collect every baseball card that contained a player who had played for the 1975 Cleveland Indians. It was an arbitrary choice as there was nothing terribly distinguishing about that team. But he went about methodically collecting not only the player roster from that year, but every other year any of those players played in the major leagues. Over the course of ten years, he tracked down every last card and placed it carefully into a binder he always carried with him. When he was confident that the collection was as complete to date as it could possibly be, he placed it on the shelf next to other projects including a diorama detailing the assassination of William McKinley by Leon Czolgosh that included working lights from the Buffalo exposition where the event occurred. If there was one thing that Gil was not obsessed with, it was his past obsessions. Once completed, they held no further value to him.
Gil was currently preoccupied with destroying the damaged bridge model, winning the heart of Vermont State Trooper Jennifer Julia Kennisaw and finding out how the Lakebridge had never suffered a single bit of recorded damage. The way things were going, he probably wasn’t going to move on to another obsession for quite some time.
He had started looking into the history of Lord Stansbury and the Lakebridge around the time of Kurtz’s accident. Until that point, he never gave the bridge much thought. It was the reason that tourists came through town year after year. It was always fun for he and his friends to watch the tourists drive in and ask the friendly locals where the bridge was. Whenever anyone would ask him, he would always break into his local yokel comedy routine, giving nonsensical directions such as telling an old couple from Ohio to turn left where the old church used to be. Sure it wasn’t an original routine, but it was always funny to his friends who had to stifle their laughs nearby. Especially considering there had never been an old church in Stansbury. There had never been a new church, either. People looking for a bit of God had to seek him elsewhere. Sometimes this bothered Gil. But not for too long. During the years Gil had wandered around the country, he never gave much thought to the Lakebridge except when he would find himself asking directions from some local yokel and his snickering friends and then think back fondly to his own imaginary displaced house of worship. But Kurtz’s accident brought him home. He remembered Shelley’s call. Something about the way she described the Lakebridge had triggered his need to know why it was there. Although he left the area since then, he always did so with some degree of apprehension. He was afraid something might happen and he would miss it. He was fairly certain something was going to happen.
“So what happened when they got here?” Marisol interjected, tearing Gil away from his certain feeling something was going to happen.
“Well, for one thing,” Gil replied, “Lord Stansbury found what some others might call a very large pond and named it Stansbury Lake. The English liked coming around here and naming thin
gs. The English are big on naming things.”
“So are Spaniards,” Rick said. “I think they thought if name it, you own it. They always assumed no one else had ever named anything that they were naming before them. When they were informed that their renamed lands had a name, they would just kill the guy who told them that. Most of the time, anyway.”
“The English would just assure the locals that they were quite wrong,” Gil said. “But when it came to this particular lake, there was no one around, no local natives, no moose…well, maybe a few moose, but they weren’t interested in the naming of things…to tell Lord Stansbury that his little lake bore an ancient name. Nor was there anyone around to tell him that he couldn’t settle the land and call it his own. There’s really nothing around here but trees and mountains and unless you’re going to produce syrup or cut wood, there’s not much reason to lay claim to the land. At least there wasn’t back then. Now the land is fairly valuable because it’s just a nicer place to live than anywhere else. At least most of the time.”
“When is it not a nicer place to live?” asked Marisol.
“When it’s 20 below zero and the power lines freeze,” laughed Gil. “Then I think fondly of the Florida Keys. Otherwise, I’m more than happy here. So was Lord Stansbury. He was as happy as an evil sorcerer was going to be. No one bothered him here except the occasional land surveyor who was quickly dissuaded from coming around with either threats or money, both of which Lord Stansbury had in great supply.
“So why did he build a bridge where there wasn’t a road?” Rick asked, seemingly frustrated with his introductory lesson in the history of colonial Vermont.
Gil knew when to hurry things along. Actually, he thought he knew when to hurry things along, but was never very good at it. He tried on this occasion. “Most people build bridges from one side of a place, a body of water or a chasm or some kind, to the other side where it is otherwise inconvenient to cross. It doesn’t take that much longer to get across the Lakebridge than to walk around the lake from one side to the other. The land isn’t treacherous and there’s no logical reason for it to be here. But sometimes logic and magic have nothing to do with one another. And sometimes bridges do more than help you get across a lake or river without a boat.”
“What are you getting at?” the old Cuban demanded.
”Lord Stansbury wasn’t interested in going across the lake,” continued Gil. “When he was forced to leave England, he also had to leave behind his faerie mounds, portals or, if you like, bridges to wherever it was that he spoke with the evil he needed for his conjuring. He needed a way here in the new world to revisit the old world. But it didn’t come without a cost.” Gil paused for a moment here because he had a feeling that something wasn’t quite right in the woods.