Between the Bridge and the River Read online

  She wanted to get away but felt guilty.

  “I really must go now, I have someone waiting,” she said.

  “A lover?”

  Claudette blushed slightly.

  The old man grinned. “I know about lovers, I know about love. I wasn’t always like this, I was young and pretty and I had my Simone. History turned me to this. Fearful slander about me written by frightened sheep—that’s what did this to me. I wasn’t old, I was young, I still had work to do. A woman—a Girondin woman!—killed me and still I got old. My comrades and I, we changed the entire world and were never forgiven for that. The liars made me old and they made me ugly and they made me mad but I was never those things.”

  He was getting animated now and Claudette felt a little alarmed. She looked around for a jogger but there didn’t seem to be any.

  “You know why they do that to me, daughter? You know why they attack me?”

  Claudette shook her head.

  “Because I dared to dream that things could be different. That there was a point in trying to make a change. Nothing is written, daughter, the world is magical and mystical but not in the way they told us. The magic and glory and wonder of the world is for everyone, not just for kings and princes and all those unworthy braggarts. For you and me, Les Sans Culottes. Never accept the status quo! Ask yourself this: If the Duke of Brunswick ever gets here, what have you done that will get you hung? Eh? Eh?”

  He cackled, spittle forming at the side of his mouth.

  Claudette edged away.

  She found his ranting disturbing but didn’t feel particularly threatened, the old man was too frail for that, but she didn’t want a scene or any unpleasantness.

  She had felt so good only a few moments before. She wanted to be back in the warm bed with her Georges.

  The old man rattled on. “I’m not French—by birth, I mean. I’m Swiss. But I was never neutral. A pox on neutrality—cowardice and opportunism. I am French”—he pointed to his sunken chest as if it contained great treasure—”here.”

  She got up to leave.

  The old man put his hand on her arm. His look softened.

  “You have no children?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “You are too full and fresh not to have children. You must have them.”

  She nodded, pulling away.

  “Name one for me,” he croaked.

  “What’s your name?” she asked softly.

  “Jean-Paul,” he said, then closed his eyes.

  Claudette trod briskly to the park entrance. The old revolutionary watched her leave, then walked over the water on the boating pond and back into the lies of imperialist history.

  A NEW TESTAMENT

  IT WAS STILL DARK BUT THE TOP WAS DOWN. He felt the warm wind blowing his hair, his tongue found the dried blood on the side of his mouth. His ribs and legs ached and his head felt like there was a tight band wrapped around it. He felt his heart palpitating as his body shook off the alcohol and he felt the cold stickiness of his urine-soaked trousers. He turned his head and looked at T-Bo, who was driving.

  “Where are we?” he said.

  “A1A. I didn’t wanna take I-95, ’cause you never know who you gonna meet there. Also you look pretty beat up. Cops see me driving down the freeway at night in this ride with a white guy in your condition, they gonna wanna talk to me, ask me some questions.”

  Fraser nodded, felt a stab of pain in his neck, and decided to stay still for a while.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I got a buddy in rehab in one of them treatment centers in Delray Beach, ’bout ten miles up the road here. We gonna see him. I called him on his cell but no joy.”

  “Why are we going there?”

  “I said I would bring him something and, well, I had to split town, some guys are lookin for me. This is kind of their car too.”

  “This is a stolen car?” asked Fraser.

  “Not exactly, I share it with my homies, Silky and Wilson, but they a little mad at me right now. I took the money we got from you and the car and took off. When they get some metal they gonna come after me. I dissed them bad.”

  “I see. I can imagine they are a little irate at being ‘dissed.’

  “T-Bo glanced at Fraser. “You fuckin with me?”

  Fraser smiled without opening his eyes. T-Bo laughed.

  “I can’t believe you, man. You get beat up bad and go through what you went through and you fuckin with me. You got balls, Homes.”

  “Thank you,” said Fraser.

  “I can give you your money back,” said T-Bo.

  “Keep it,” said Fraser. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  “What you talking about? Everybody needs a little money.”

  “Not me. Not anymore. I’m done with it.”

  “You prob’ly still a little groggy. I’ll get back to you on that.”

  Fraser drifted off again for a few moments. When he opened his eyes again he looked at the condo buildings and the palm trees and caught glimpses of the sacred Atlantic through the gaps between the brassy neon of the motels and hotels.

  “It’s beautiful here.”

  T-Bo nodded. “Better in the daytime. You a preacher?” he said. Fraser thought for a moment, went over his recent history in his head.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I am a flawed and beautiful child of God. I walk in His image and His Amazing Grace. I was lost but now I’m found.”

  T-Bo looked at the bloody, beaten drunk next to him. “What was you doin in that gay club? If you a preacher.”

  “I walk among the children of the Universe. I am no longer impeded by the constraints of fear, cowardice, and opportunism. I go where I please.”

  “Yeah, but bein a faggot is wrong. It’s against the Bible.”

  “I don’t read the Bible, I am only interested in the word of God.”

  “Well, the word of God is in the Bible.”

  “Yes, it is but it’s a lot of other places too. The Bible has been through at least half a dozen translations by the time you read it. Plus, when the word of God is infected by the hand of man, that is, written down, it is tainted.”

  “You saying the Bible is infected?”

  “Yes, Praise Jesus. Amen.”

  T-Bo shook his head and drove on in silence for a while. Then he asked, “You a faggot?”

  Fraser painfully turned and looked at him. “If I say yes will you beat me up again?”

  T-Bo looked away, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, man. I did wrong. I’m changing my ways. You’re a Christian. Forgive me.”

  Fraser smiled and closed his eyes. “I forgive you,” he said.

  They drove on in silence for a few moments.

  “What is the true word of God, then?” asked T-Bo softly.

  Fraser didn’t move. T-Bo thought perhaps he had passed out again but after a moment he spoke. “Help ither sodjirs,” he said.

  “Say what?”

  “Help others,” Fraser repeated.

  “That’s it?” said T-Bo.

  “That’s it,” said Fraser.

  Delray Beach is like a little time capsule on the east coast of Florida, wedged between the retirement communities of Boca Raton and beige celebrity hideaways of Palm Beach.

  The beach itself is long and sandy and unspoiled. The coast road is peppered with beautiful homes and surprisingly cheap hotels. The main drag, Atlantic Avenue, is a throwback to the 1950s. Little momand-pop stores and burger joints that don’t have twenty-five hundred branches elsewhere. A railway track runs through the center of town and every half hour or so the crossing bells ring, the barricades come down, and a giant freighter will rumble through.

  Further up the street, toward the ocean, there is a drawbridge over the inland waterway, a pleasure boat canal that runs from Maine all the way down to Miami. When the drawbridge is up and a train is coming through it can take half an hour to travel three hundred yards down this street no matter how pimped out your Chevy Caprice is.


  The town is popular with middle-aged bikers, optometrists on Harley-Davidsons, who roar up and down the road taking full advantage of Florida’s no-helmet law to show off their rebelliousness, their danger, and their male pattern baldness.

  At this time of night, though, the wild motorcycle gangs of Delray were tucked up in their stripy pajamas and the street was deserted. The restaurants and stores were closed. T-Bo made his way along Atlantic Avenue to the ocean. He parked the Caprice at a broken parking meter on the coast road and woke Fraser.

  Fraser rubbed his eyes and looked out at the moonlight throwing white and silver flashes on the blue-black sparkling sea. He remembered Saknussem and shuddered.

  “We gotta get you cleaned up, man, you a little stinky right now. Messing up my ride.”

  Fraser nodded.

  T-Bo helped him out of the car and Fraser limped toward the ocean.

  “Where you going?” asked T-Bo.

  “I have been born again. I must be baptized.”

  “No, there’s a shower here, people use it to clean the sand off themselves when they sunbathing. It’s fresh water. Use that.”

  “No, I have to go to the ocean.”

  “Crap,” said T-Bo. But he followed Fraser over the dark, deserted beach to the shore.

  Fraser started taking off his clothes.

  “You can’t get nekkid here, man, you’ll get arrested.”

  “What will they do? Charge me for having a body?”

  T-Bo looked at Fraser’s white skin, alien in the moonlight. “They’ll charge you for showin it. No offense, but Victoria’s Secret you ain’t.”

  Fraser ignored him and stripped off. He walked into the cold water. The shock of the water had a sobering effect on him but he was changed. Changed forever. He wanted no part of his old self or the Press Bar or his old life in television. He had been through the fire and had been tempered.

  He worked for God now and no one else.

  He opened his eyes underwater and there in his blurred, dark, salty vision was Virgil the poet.

  He smiled at Fraser and said, “Congratulations, Rabbi.”

  Fraser smiled back and then blinked.

  The poet was gone and only the sea remained.

  He returned to the surface.

  A doctor would probably have diagnosed Fraser with having some kind of brain damage, some kind of internal trauma that occurred during the beating, but as far as Fraser was concerned his brain had not been damaged.

  It had been improved.

  He ducked down under the surface and felt the surf cleansing him and massaging his bruised limbs.

  T-Bo looked up and down the shoreline but there was no one around.

  “Fuck it,” he said out loud. Then he stripped naked and dived into the water.

  T-Bo swam across to Fraser, who was floating on his back looking at the moonlight. He touched the beaten man’s face tenderly. Fraser turned and looked at him directly in the eye. T-Bo’s heart pounded and he felt himself get hard.

  He kissed Fraser softly on the lips.

  Fraser smiled at him.

  “I’m not having sex at the moment,” said Fraser gently, “and I have to tell you that if and when I do, it will probably be with someone who has ladies’ equipment.”

  T-Bo was at a loss. Deeply embarrassed and angry, he wanted to hit Fraser again.

  Fraser saw his rage building and spoke to him again. He had a calmness and an authority in his voice. No aggression. He was mildly surprised by the clarity of his tone—he was not yet fully aware of what had happened to him.

  “There is no point in being angry, my friend. I did not make you what you are any more than you did yourself. You are a beautiful child of God and nothing you desire is shameful. You could drown me right here and compound your misery, you could run away and your pain will follow you, or you can let me help you.”

  T-Bo had never broached this subject in his life. This was the source of his shame. All his life he felt he was wrong, a freak, despising himself for what he felt. His moment of grace had arrived. The miracle was that he honored it by asking a question.

  “How can you help me?” he said.

  Fraser grinned. “I’ll find you a nice boyfriend.”

  There was a quiet moment between the two men as they stood in the dark water. The danger of the situation was palpable and Fraser knew that T-Bo was thinking about killing him. T-Bo was thinking about killing Fraser but he couldn’t do it. The crazy Scottish preacher was right.

  T-Bo was, like Saint Paul, that which he always professed to despise. He felt an enormous weight leave him. He felt himself laughing, real, beautiful, hysterical, transcendent laughter.

  Fraser laughed along with him.

  The two men laughing—naughty children on a midnight swim.

  After they had bathed, T-Bo got dressed and ran off to find Fraser something clean to wear. The only thing he could get was a bright orange floral sundress that an overweight lady had left to dry on a low hotel balcony.

  He brought it back to Fraser, who was delighted with it.

  “It’s beautiful. When I was a wee boy, I remember my mother telling me a story about a man who grew nasturtiums on his roof. This is the color of nasturtiums.”

  “What are nasturtiums?” asked T-Bo.

  “They’re flowers. They are bright orange. Like this.”

  T-Bo nodded. He laughed at the sight of the big Scotsman in the sundress but then stopped when he saw that Fraser’s feelings were hurt.

  “Sorry, man,” he said. “It’s just—maybe you would have done better in that nightclub you was in if you had been wearing that.”

  Fraser smiled.

  They sat down on the beach and watched the sun rise over the horizon. Fraser wiggled a broken front tooth loose and spat it from his mouth.

  “Ah, that’s the ticket,” he said.

  “You okay?” asked T-Bo.

  “Never better,” said Fraser, tasting his own blood in his mouth.

  “You need to get back to Miami?” T-Bo said.

  “No,” said Fraser. “I need to go to Alabama. I have been asked to go there to preach the word of God. That’s what I must do else I will end in the belly of the whale again.”

  T-Bo nodded. “Can I take you there?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Fraser.

  Fraser was sleeping on the sand when T-Bo’s cell phone rang. T-Bo answered and had a short conversation with the caller. Then he woke Fraser.

  “Come on,” he said. “You gotta meet Vermont.”

  And so Fraser began to rise.

  THE ROAD TO GOD: SEVEN

  OH LEON! HAD A TOUGH SLOT. It premiered against an established sitcom, Roomies, on one rival network and a new cop show, Ballerina Detective, on another. Roomies was the most popular show on television. It was a youthful, upbeat comedy about a group of six rich white twenty-somethings in Boston who had plenty of cash for disposable goods and air travel but not enough money to find their own apartments, so they had to share. None of them had any friends who weren’t white. The cast were attractive and likable and the scripts were good.

  It was a very unusual show indeed.

  On the other hand, Ballerina Detective was standard TV fare. It was about a woman named Jenny Dakota who was a dancer with the New York City Ballet Company and for some reason also worked undercover for the FBI investigating serial killers. In the first episode she caught a crazed psychotic, danced the lead in Swan Lake, and still had time for a cheeky little joke with her partner, Jack Hardiman, a tough FBI Special Agent who had to pretend to be a ballet dancer in order to maintain their cover—with hilarious results!

  There was an obvious sexual chemistry between the two leads, and although the show tested well in market research, it appealed directly to the same demographic as Roomies, and that audience—women and gay men who love too much—was far too loyal to leave its favorite show.

  This was before the rise of cable TV, so there were only three real players in the TV
ratings game. The three big networks.

  The network that Oh Leon! aired on, ABN—the American Broadcasting Network—was pleased with the initial figures for Leon’s show. Although the total numbers were still well in favor of Roomies, there was a significant audience of males ages eighteen to thirty-five for Leon.

  Then, after only three weeks, Ballerina Detective was axed and replaced with America’s Funniest Accidents, a cheap clip show that consisted mostly of disastrous wedding mishaps caught on home video cameras. ABN moved Oh Leon! to Wednesday nights, where the only competition was a tired old family drama called The Richardsons and a lame high-concept sitcom called Alien Monkey, M.D., starring a cute puppet as a friendly extraterrestrial chimpanzeeish doctor who shared a practice with a grumpy old doctor and a sexy girl doctor.

  Oh Leon! became a hit, first with the target audience of men ages eighteen to thirty-five, who liked Leon’s comedy neighbor Stan, played by roly-poly Midwest comedian Bo Ness. Bo joked about farting and beer, and regular American guys could relate. In time, though, women started watching the show too, because of Leon’s looks and his great voice. Everyone loved the song at the end of each episode; eventually it became a national obsession to catch the closing number on Oh Leon! every week.

  The character of little Petey, Leon’s fictional younger brother, was not well liked and was dropped after twelve episodes. The child actor who played him, Jonathon Daimler-Thomason, went on to star as Pucky the clairvoyant midget in the blockbuster movie Chariots of Magic.

  Over its first season of twenty-four episodes, Oh Leon! evolved into a show about two guys, Leon and Stan, who live next door to each other and are trying to make their way in the tough town of Las Vegas, Nevada, although, of course, the show was shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles, California. Leon’s character was that of a caring man looking (unsuccessfully) for the right girl so that he could settle down and marry.

  Bo Ness’s character was the fat guy in his mid-thirties who liked to drink beer, watch football, and date strippers.

  Do these guys get along?

  No, sir! With hilarious results!