The town I grew up in was surrounded by a river. No matter which road you took leaving town you had to cross it. The ancient, muddy Big Sioux River. Every spring and sometimes in the summer it would rage and flood until it felt like the town was under siege. No one could leave and no one could enter until it subsided.
Coming home from the bar one night, my grandfather missed the bridge. He was going almost one hundred miles an hour when he jumped the river crashing into the opposite bank. He was decapitated. His body impaled by the steering column. They never did find his head.
Strangely enough, some twenty years earlier while fishing in that same river, he reeled in the top part of a human skull. He took it to the Sheriff who sent it off to the lab in the city. They tested it and found that it was over 200 hundred years old and most likely Native American. The lab returned the skull to the Sheriff and he gave it back to my Grandfather.
Grandfather kept the skull in the basement. He’d take it out and show it to you if he had a couple beers in him. I held it in my hands after he died. I wondered if it was somehow his skull and time was a strange circle.
When I was ten I saw my first dead body. It was on the bank of that same river, off a different road. Some guy wrecked his motorcycle in the night. His body lay next to the river under a blue tarp the cops had thrown over him. My dad pulled his truck over on the other side of the bridge and we walked back across to where the cops were. We leaned over the rail of the bridge right over the tarp as one of the cops pulled it off. A heavy set dude lay there, almost like he was asleep. But he was so white it was startling. He was also wearing an Earl Campbell football jersey, the same kind Cristopher Cross wore in a video for his mega 1980 hit “Sailing.”
When I was in college, I woke up one morning after a long night of debauchery and someone had covered me up with a blue tarp. I’d passed out in the back yard. When I first opened my eyes I didn’t know what the hell was going on. The world was on fire in blue. I thought I was dead under a tarp like that guy I’d seen when I was a kid. I swear I could actually hear the words to that Christopher Cross song.
“Well, it’s not far down to paradise, at least it’s not for me
And if the wind is right you can sail away and find tranquility”
When I was 14 my best friend and I drove a couple of girls down to the river and parked maybe a hundred yards from where I’d seen the dead guy in the Earl Campbell jersey. My buddy and one girl took off with a 6-pack to build a fire in a clearing. I just kinda sat there as I hadn’t been alone with a girl since I was a little kid. I couldn’t think of anything to say so I told her about the body I’d seen when I was a kid. She wanted to see where. I chugged the rest of my beer and grabbed a couple fresh ones, pointing out the way.
She laughed and dashed off and I dizzily chased her. She was pretty, far too pretty for me. I caught up with her by the bridge and told her the body had been on the other side. She grabbed a beer from me and cracked it open, accidentally spraying herself. She squealed like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I took off my t-shirt. She wiped her face with it, then ran off under the bridge to the other side.
She stopped where there was a bunch of gardenia plants all abloom. “This is the spot,” I said. “His family must have planted them,” she said, half shocked and half sad. I instinctively reached out to comfort her and she grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me full on the mouth. I almost passed out from the excitement and the beer and the running and the perfume and the gardenias and the death.
Three years later she shot herself in the heart with a 12-gauge shotgun. She was pregnant. It wasn’t mine. I’d broken up with her more than a year before.
It didn’t make any goddamn sense. After I heard about it, I got in my car and drove. I wanted to get the fuck out of that stupid little town. Of course, it had been raining for three days and the river had flooded. So I pulled over and watched it. The water was raging in wild white cap torrents and I wondered if the bridge would hold.
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