Bridge

The bicycle’s rental was more expensive than he expected.  The credit card was maxed-out and so Teabury paid with cash.  The clerk in bike store gave him eight dollars in change.  There was no more money.  

He had the motel room for another 24 hours.  His fuel tank on his car was about half-full.  Teabury didn’t think that would get him back to Santa Fe but he didn’t know for sure.  

What next?

It was about nine miles to the famous bridge over the gorge from the bike rental place in the strip mall.  The morning was clear and the air was cool for the time being, a faint incense-smell of creosote pine in the air.  People were eating in cafes near the intersection downtown and, already, traffic was backed up at the stop light.  Some of the art galleries were already open, glass windows full of pictures of Indians and pueblos and abstract desert landscapes that were the color of salmon and bone.  

Even if you haven’t been on a bike for years, you never forget the skill.  To avoid traffic, he took residential roads toward the edge of town.  The houses were shaped like old adobe dwellings, but the walls and flat roofs were built from concrete.  The lawns were pink gravel studded with cactus.  He saw expensive cars parked in driveways.  Behind him the mountain rose like a blue and green shield, looming over the village so that it seemed to protect the place or, perhaps, threaten it depending upon the configuration of the clouds at its summit.

The plain outside the town was barren and there was no shade.  Cars and trucks passing him on the highway flung pebbles in his direction and bathed him in gusts of hot wind.  Sometimes, the road climbed to plateaus above the plain, stony embankments where ATV tracks had scuffed the patina off the desert surface.  Behind each plateau, the road ramped down into hollow places where ragged-looking trees stood hip-deep in black craters.  

The sun began to torment him half-way to the bridge over the gorge.  Hot rays beat down on him and a cross-wind seemed to nudge Teabury out into the traffic speeding by on the straight highway.

The empty landscape and the wind as if from an oven and the sun blazing overhead turned Teabury inside out.  What was hidden within his body became his surface, exposed to the cruel light.  Purplish dots swam before his eyes.  There was no shade anywhere.  

The road curved down to the metal ramp rising over the desolate terrain to the bridge span.  Trucks zooming by caused Teabury’s bicycle to wobble a bit.  In all directions, blue flints of mountain rose above the horizon, immeasurably distant and featureless like shadows without any object casting them.

It didn’t seem that far down to the jagged-looking terrain below the approach span.  But, then, suddenly, the slot of river gorge came into sight.  Teabury only glanced downward as he labored, pedaling up the incline.  A joint rattled underneath and, then, he was on central span, an arch of girders hanging over the great black fissure where the river ran as a dark ribbon far below. In the midday light, the sun’s rays dropped down into the center of gorge and ran in bright and blinding scales across the river.  From this height, the river seemed entirely motionless, a grim, grey serpent ground to death by the stony vise of the canyon.  

Midway across the gorge, a metal-fenced balcony extended out from side of the bridge, an overlook into the canyon.  Some tourists wearing sunglasses and colorful red and blue baseball caps were making their way from the opposite rim toward the center of the bridge.  The height seemed to appall them and they approached in silence.  Another bicyclist wearing a streamlined purple hat paused at the balcony, dismounted, and, taking a selfie-stick from a backpack, posed for some pictures.  

Teabury put down the kick-stand and looked down into the grey and black gorge.  He was very thirsty.  Wind swept across the bridge, a hot torrent of air that made Teabury’s eyes sting.  The wind deafened him.  If people were speaking, he couldn’t hear their words, swept away by the hot gale.  

Next to the overlook, a sign said that if you were considering suicide, there was hope: there is hope.  Teabury felt his insides were outside.  The sun was roasting him and his mouth was dry.  Implacable mountains many miles away stood sentinel on all horizons.  At one of the corners in the fenced balcony, a silver box was printed with words: There is hope and Crisis? the letters next to a red button.  Call here, it said on the face of the box.

How many people had thrown themselves off this point?  Teabury thought of pregnant girls abandoned by their boyfriends, old men with cancer, junkies.  He had no insides because everything had been turned inside-out.  Therefore, he didn’t know why he had chosen to ride to the gorge.  Whatever thoughts that had impelled him to make this trip, using pretty much all of his remaining cash, were unclear to him.  He felt inaccessible to himself.

After the tourists had gawked for awhile at the depths, muttering about the heat, they turned away and walked over the span toward the access ramp and their cars glinting in the sunshine on a distant ledge.  Some more cars and trucks swept by, hauling behind them dismal plumes of hot dust and tiny, sharp stones.  Teabury felt a little dizzy.  The abyss was calling to him.  Out of an impulse, he pressed the red button on the box labeled Crisis.  If there was any response, Teabury couldn’t hear it – the wind seemed to swirl up out of the depths and spin in a vortex around his head.  He took out his phone to dial the phone number emblazoned on the sign next to the words There is hope.  But, on the ride out to the bridge, he had used his map function a little too much and the cell-phone’s battery was dead.  To get over the fence, which was chest-high, you would have to haul yourself up atop the metal rail and, in this wind, that would be a difficult thing to do and, most likely, you would fall, not jump – it wouldn’t be a clean dive into oblivion, but a tumble down into the gorge, topping end over end like a rag doll.  Teabury thought that would be distasteful, particularly with a small group of tourists approaching, several of them small, and, it seemed, children.

Teabury put up his kick stand and wobbled away from the overlook, the bicycle unsteady under him.  The wind pushed him out onto the highway and a passing SUV honked loudly.

Halfway back to town, Teabury thought that he had never intended to jump off the bridge and that it was merely the heat and thirst that made his head pound and throb and the invitations to suicide posted all over the span that had confused him.  The bike seemed to move on its own, automatically without any effort on his part.  But when he came to the long incline up to the stony plateau overlooking town, he had to dismount and, panting, push the bicycle to the top.  The plateau was completely desolate, knee-high wrinkles of congealed lava twisting away from the highway.  A calligraphy of tread marks scarred the barren top of the plateau.

Then, it was all downhill into town.  He felt faint and nauseous.  Sometimes, he rode with his hands at his side, not touching the handlebars and in the center of the highway, letting the cars roar around him in a blaze of honking horns.  

The houses on the outskirts of town looked like stone barges stranded in the stony wilderness.  Teabury felt that he would perish if he couldn’t find a drink of water.  He saw a bright green hose screwed onto a faucet on the side of a house, let his bike fall into the gravel by the mailbox, and, then, lurched forward toward the hose connection.  He turned the faucet and a tiny spray of water misted the air where the hose was screwed into the pipe.  It took all of his will power not to suck at the hose connection.  Instead, he turned and walked along the course of the hose to where it flowed into a small bed of prickly-looking roses mounted on a wooden trellis.  He put the hose end in his mouth and sucked at it.

A voice sounded: “Can I help you?”

Teabury turned around and saw a middle-aged woman with grey hair and a sun-tanned brown chest covered with freckles under heavy loops of bright turquoise necklace.  The woman was holding a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger by the look of things.

“I got caught out in the sun,” Teabury said.  “I’m real thirsty.”

The woman said: “It’s the high elevation.  You have to stay hydrated.  I have some lemonade, if you’ll wait at the picnic table.”  

She gestured toward the side of the house where there was a paving stone patio and a metal table under a remuda hung with red, tallowy-looking ristras of chili.  

“Thank you so much,” Teabury said.  He put down the hose.  “Please shut off the water,” the woman said.

She went into the house and Teabury twisted the faucet shut.  He sat at the table.  In a hollow cactus, a dozen feet from the patio, Teabury saw a tiny white owl winking at him.

The woman brought a large glass with lemonade and ice.

Later, he returned to bike to the cycle shop, bought some day-old doughnuts for ninety-nine cents at a gas station convenience store, and, then, went back to his motel room.  The motel was old and built with adobe brick and the inside of the room was as cold and moist as a cave.  The walls seemed to be very thick and held the heat outside at distance.  

Next to the bed, a deep niche in the wall sheltered a little painted statue.  A young woman wearing a green dress down to ankles stood in the shadowy alcove.  In her arms, she cradled a book with a gold cover on which a four-leaf clover was embossed.

Teabury took a shower to wash the poison from the sunburn out of his skin.  His neck and arms tingled.  The sheets on the motel bed were fresh and clean and he laid down to take a nap.  He was sure he would feel better after sleeping.