Shall I? Shall I? Dillydally.
In an average minute, six billion pounds of water passed under this bridge, called the Rainbow Bridge, completed in 1941. It was the fourth bridge to be constructed on this site. The first, a suspension, had collapsed in a windstorm in January 1889. The second, also a suspension, had been taken apart and put back together some miles downriver. The third, a steel arch, was destroyed by Lake Erie ice floes that had tumbled over the falls, crashed into the moorings, and collapsed them at 4:20 p.m. on January 27, 1938. The remains of the two destroyed structures lay on the riverbed even at the present day, 175 feet below the surface, one on top of the other.
Blue, yellow, red American cars, voluptuous and shiny, passed on his right, northwest-bound and southeast-bound, Ontario-bound and New York State-bound, oblivious, unslowing, as they traversed the cartographer’s invisible wall, the bodies of the people inside them cut in two for a split second, half-republic and half-dominion, one legal code and expanse of history constraining one half of the body, another the other.
Why this itch? A surveyor had calculated that rising through this stripe of paint was an invisible plane. Why this belief that the plane existed, that there were two places and not one? The border didn’t demonstrate a separation, it only asserted a separation. He was too old not to know this. He had disembarked from the steamer Natalie of Tunis in New Orleans in 1913 a stupid child, telling himself the same nonsense people had been telling themselves since the beginning of the spoken word: There is another place promised to you and to your children. There is a solution in this other place.
On either side of the paint stripe two Oriental girls of about seven, in identical periwinkle skirts and white sandals, bounced a tennis ball across the border to each other, back and forth against the pavement, deadly serious, aiming the ball and aiming again and throwing very softly lest the wind catch it.
Don’t tell lies to yourself, Rocco. Turn around.
We have in the American language a stouthearted expression, Rocco, that doesn’t mean what you’d think, it doesn’t mean, Enjoy yourself, it means, Tell the truth about what you did.
The tennis ball, having again been aimed very carefully, nevertheless caromed to the north and was exploded under the wheel of a late-model Pontiac.
Face the music, Rocco.
The guard back at the American customhouse demanded his driving papers and inquired after his citizenship.
“U.S.,” Rocco said.
“How long were you in Canada?” the man said, coughing into his documents.
“I didn’t go in Canada.”
“That’s Canada over there where you were, Jack-o.”
“I. . I like to read the signs. I saw there were signs, so I wanted to read them,” he said weakly. He wanted an ice cream. It was hot, and he wasn’t hungry, and he wanted to stick something colorful into his face.
He was so confused.
“It’s a bridge. You can go one way or the other way. You can go to our side or their side. Seeing as you are now here, Jack, the onliest place you’re coming from is there, which is Canada.”
He wanted an ice cream. “I went far enough to read the signs, that’s it. I didn’t cross the border. I wanted to read the signs and learn the history of the place and so. . and so. . and so. .”
He was so confused. He didn’t understand the meanings of things. The feeling of wanting very strongly to be in love could sometimes resemble the feeling of love itself.
The sun, reflected in the windshield of a car veering onto the bridge, flashed momentarily in Rocco’s eyes.
“I’m so confused,” he said to the guard.
Briefly, he was convinced that there was no God after all. The falls weren’t speaking to him anymore; only the bridge and the cars, artifacts of a country married to mathematics and ferroconcrete, were speaking to him, or rather were screeching meaninglessly.
The guard handed him back his moist papers. “Answer me, did you buy anything over there?”
“No, I didn’t.”
The guard let him pass. He retraced his steps along the edge of the gorge, slowly, having lost hold of all the many convictions to which his first few minutes of observing the falls had led him. He didn’t understand the meaning of anything except the stripe painted across the pavement of the bridge. He tramped the crisscrossing sidewalks in the little park abutting the gorge, in search of ice cream. He felt profoundly unhappy and alone. The meaning of the stripe of paint was, You have been behaving as if imaginary things were real.
Certain nights at home, he felt his spirits lift upon hearing the toc, toc of the pilot in the new furnace and the gas catching and making its whoosh. His spirits lifting as a knock on the door would make them lift. He regarded the furnace as company, as a human being. The regularity of the furnace lighting itself, toc-tocking every half hour in the winter nights, was the suggestion of a permanent alleviation of aloneness. He called the furnace Harry, as in, Give ’em hell.
The cigarettes were making his heart slam away at his rib cage, and experience told him the only way to address this was to smoke another.
The ice cream man, once he had been located under the heavy cover of a sugar maple twenty feet from the pre-fall, crashing Niagara, wore a white paper hat in the conventional military shape, the same model Rocco wore when he was on the job; also, a white and blue polka-dotted shirt and a black bow tie. A lipless, unholy grin was frozen to his face. He sat atop the steel cage of a milk crate behind his refrigerated cart, his back against the trunk of the tree. The light all around was splendorous, but the shade afforded beneath this tree was so complete that no patches of sunlight whatsoever fell on the grass.
Such a complicated device just to catch light with. So many thousands of leaves. There was a leaf for every angle of sun coming down. The tree was a cistern for light.
The ice cream man had nothing he was reading, no oddments to fiddle with. Each of his hands rested on the knob of one of the freezer hatches as though he were manning the gate to a passage underground. He stood up with some effort in the strange shadow of the leaves. He was aged significantly. He began speaking before Rocco had completed his approach.
“I have strawberry. I have chocolate. I have pistachio. I have a sugar cone. I have a regular cone. I have no vanilla. One napkin, please.” He cleared his throat. A grasshopper landed on Rocco’s shoulder and the ice cream man leaned smoothly toward him and flicked it off. “I have no sandwiches, drumsticks, or novelties of any kind. I have paper cups and wood spoons. One scoop, twelve cents. Two scoops, nineteen cents. Three scoops, a quarter. I have no nuts. I have no cherries. Sixty feet in that direction one finds a public water fountain. Thirty feet to the left of that is a public latrine. I don’t know what time it is.”
There was a pause while the two men took in each other’s faces. Rocco thought he saw a shiver of recognition pass across the man’s features, and then the man stifle it. There was unquestionably the too-longness of the pause and of the looking at each other before the man set himself to opening the freezer hatches and exposing his wares. The paper hat was cockeyed — a cheerful angle, the way Rocco himself wore his — and liver spots were visible on the exposed portion of the scalp, beneath what remained of the glossy, pallid hair.